Developmental fairy tales: evolutionary thinking and modern Chinese culture 9780674047952, 9780674061033

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DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES

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DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture

ANDREW E. JONES

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England 2011

Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jones, Andrew F. Developmental fairy tales : evolutionary thinking and modern Chinese culture / Andrew F. Jones.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-04795-2 (alk. paper)

1. Chinese literature—History and criticism. 2. Literature and society—China. 3. Fairy tales—China—History and criticism. 4. Modernism (Literature)—China. 5. Lu, Xun, 1881-1936. 6. Eroshenko, Vasilii, 1890-1952. I. Title. PE2Z265.)66> 2011

895.1'09355—dc22 2010045559

CON TEN ES

Chinese Literature 1

Introduction: The Development of Modern

1 The Iron House of Narrative: Lu Xun and the

Late Qing Fiction of Evolutionary Adventure 28

and Narrative Form 63

2 Inherit the Wolf: Lu Xun, Natural History,

3. The Child as History in Republican China:

A Discourse on Development 99

4 Playthings of History 126 5 A Narrow Cage: Lu Xun, Eroshenko, and the

Modern Chinese Fairy Tale 147

Notes oF Appendix: “A Narrow Cage” by Vasilii Eroshenko 175 Glossary of Selected Chinese and Japanese Terms 189

Index 245 Acknowledgments 243

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DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES

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INTRODUCTION The Development of Modern Chinese Literature On April 1, 1933, Lu Xun (1881-1936) wrote a column for Shanghai’s paper of record, the Shun Pao, about the street life of the colonial city in which he spent his last years. Already acclaimed as the most prominent and innovative voice in China’s new literature, Lu Xun had by that time largely forsaken fiction and the short story form in which he had excelled for the realm of journalism and the critical essay, or zawen. And so it was that one of his most adventurous literary distillations of the nature of Chinese modernity appeared under a pseudonym, surrounded on all sides by the routine chatter and quotidian attractions of metropolitan print culture. Lu Xun’s column, which describes an impromptu magic show, transmutes the rough currency of street life into weightier philosophical coin. How, Lu Xun seems to ask, might we read the everyday as history? Is modernity—and its implicit promises of progress—merely a conjuror’s trick, a profit-driven routine masking the dreary inevitability of cruelty and exploitation? Ever since I can remember, and even up to the present day, wherever I have been, wherever there’s an empty space, I’ve seen “conjuring tricks” performed, or what are sometimes called “magic shows.” There seem to be just two kinds of magic shows.

In one kind, a monkey wearing a mask and dressed up in uniform is made to brandish a spear, and rides in circles on the back of a sheep. Then

a bear, barely kept alive on a diet of gruel so that he’s merely skin and bones, does a few tricks as well. After that, everyone is asked for money. In the other kind, a rock is placed in an empty box, and after a handkerchief is waved across the top, a dove emerges from inside; or someone’s mouth is stuffed with paper and lit on fire, so that smoke and flames shoot out from his nose. Then everyone is asked for money. After the money has 1

2 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES been demanded, one of the conjurors will complain that it’s just not enough and will loudly pretend to refuse to do any more tricks, until someone else steps forward to plead with him, importuning the crowd for five more coins. In the end, someone tosses a coin, and then it’s “four more,”

and then “three more”... When there has been sufficient tossing of coins, the magic show starts anew. This time a child is squeezed into a big jug with a narrow opening, so that there’s only a pigtail sticking out of the top. If you want him to come out again, you have to give more money. When enough money has been collected, the adult somehow contrives to stab the child to death with a long knife, and to cover him with a sheet. If you want him to come back to life, you have to give more money. “At home, we depend on family ... but out here in the world, we de-

pend on the kindness of strangers... Huazaa! Huazaa!” The conjuror solemnly and sadly intones as he mimics the tossing of a coin. If other children steal forward to take a closer look, he’ll curse at them; if they don’t listen, he’ll beat them back.

In the end, a lot of people “Huazaa” their coins. When the amount matches expectations, the magicians gather the money and pack up their things, the dead child leaps up from off the ground, and they disappear together. The befuddled spectators disperse as if on cue.

In this empty space, all is quiet for now. In a little while, the show will start once more. The proverb has it that “every magician has his own bag of tricks.” Yet after all these years, it’s still the same show, and there will always be those who watch and those who will “huazaa,” just as long as there’s a few days in between each show. Now I have said all I set out to say, and there’s not much to it—just that after everyone’s finished with the “Huazaa Huazaa,” things quiet down for a few days, until the show starts once more. And it’s only now that I remember that I’ve written the title wrong—it turns out to be something “neither dead nor alive.” !

The title of this piece was “Modern History” and Lu Xun’s pseudonym was He Jiagan, which might be idiomatically translated as “Whodunit?”* The essay’s conclusion is cryptic, suspended as it is between life and death, progress and eternal return, engagement and crippling selfreferentiality. Is Lu Xun’s critical essay itself “neither dead nor alive,” its political spark hopelessly compromised by the periodic Punch and Judy show of a complicit press? Does his pseudonym call into question the identity of the author himself, or of those responsible for the deceptions

Introduction 3 of that most distinctively modern form of magic, capitalism? Is the author nothing more than another “befuddled” spectator, tossing coins across an empty expanse of pavement? Or is he just another circus animal performing tricks for something that can barely be called a living? The genius of the essay is that it broaches all of these questions, only to defer them. Indeed, the conclusion (if a statement so equivocal can be called a conclusion at all) refuses any kind of narrative movement, circling instead back to the title of the piece and the metacritical questions it raises about history and narrative. Can the endless repetition of this theater of cruelty, of plot without development, really be called “history”? Is the “modern” merely a recurrence of the traditional oppression Lu Xun and his generation of Chinese intellectuals dedicated themselves to overcoming? These questions, finally, are closely connected with the problem of narrative form. What kinds of stories might be adequate to capture a political and cultural situation in which radical shape-shifting—the transformation of a monkey into a man, or the resurrection of a child—is merely illusory, an epiphenomenon of an underlying stasis, the eternal return of exploitation? Lu Xun’s essay, in other words, poses a direct (if ultimately unresolved) challenge to what has been a governing faith in modern Chinese life and letters: the discourse of development.

This book is a historical enquiry into the development of this discourse in the Chinese literary and media culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly as refracted through and subject to critique in the work of Lu Xun and many of his contemporaries. “Development,” in the particular and historically inflected sense in which Iam employing it, is not merely tantamount to economic growth, although that has become one of the most common understandings of the term. Nor can it be reduced to the sorts of improvements in health, education, and welfare measured by the United Nations Human Development Index, although it is widely seen as an indispensable path toward those goals. It is, instead, a way of knowing, narrating, and attempting to manage processes of radical historical change. As I will argue throughout this book, however, any attempt to define “development” is quixotic, for the term itself is haunted by its own semantic instability, by the gap between its sense as an intransitive and inevitable historical unfolding, and as a descriptor for the transitive and purposive activity of active historical agents, particularly elite intellectuals and the state. In China, as in many other places we still refer to as the

a DEVELOPMENTAL FATRY TALES developing world, a discourse of development emerged from out of the fraught nineteenth-century encounter between the seemingly inexorable

dominance of a new imperialist world order and local aspirations for national self-determination, wealth, and power.

While this book focuses on the turbulent and formative years in which China began to remake itself as a modern nation, the implications of this discourse are by no means merely historical, nor restricted to the Chinese case. Much has changed since the era of colonial violence, political instability, and global economic crisis of which Lu Xun wrote in

the early 1930s. Yet developmentalism continues to be an extraordinarily powerful and pervasive ideology in China. The triumphalist narrative of socialist modernity enabled by the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949—the “blank sheet of paper” on which Chairman Mao would inscribe the newest and most beautiful pictures—has yielded to a post-Cold War world in which, in the words of the leader of China’s post-Mao economic reform, Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997), “Development is the only hard imperative.”’ This famous slogan, taken from a speech Deng delivered in the “Special Economic Zone” of Shenzhen in the course of his Southern Tour of 1992, not only authorized the break-

neck pursuit of wholesale marketization that ensued, but has since been enshrined as a cardinal principle of state policy in the People’s Republic. Developmentalism, in short, has underwritten the transformation of China from a socialist state to a capitalist market economy, resulted in the creation of enormous new prosperity and new forms of poverty, and validated the massive social and spatial dislocations that have accompanied them. The logic of development has also rationalized— even necessitated—the degradation of China’s natural environment. This book initiates a genealogical critique of developmental thinking by tracing its origins in the translation of evolutionary biology into Chinese let-

ters in the late nineteenth century, tracking its proliferation in the print and media cultures of early twentieth-century China, and suggesting how it gave rise to new narrative forms, lent its structure to the historical imagination, and tragically limited ideological horizons. While this (necessarily incomplete) cultural history of a pervasive and powerful way of seeing and narrating history focuses primarily on China, Chinese writers and intellectuals were not alone in finding in evolutionary models of development a compelling figure for the colonial world order and their

own problematic place within it. In this respect, they were in fact partaking in a global process, one in which evolutionary theory—in

Introduction 5 Lamarckian, Darwinian, Spencerian, or Haeckelian iterations—was translated and assimilated to local discourse throughout East Asia and a host of other locales.* Precisely because developmental thinking was often appropriated as narrative form, fiction played a privileged role in its dissemination. In-

deed, I argue here that developmental thinking has been crucial to the inception of modern Chinese literature as a linguistic, formal, and epistemological project. As a result, the sometimes excruciating gap between development in its transitive and intransitive senses—between agency

and abjection, will and contingency, developers and those in need of development—has been a constitutive tension in much modern Chinese writing, not least in the work of Lu Xun. In Lu Xun’s vision of “Modern History” as a form of developmental arrest, that tension is figured most powerfully in the paired figures of the child and the beast. Captives of the profit motive, suspended between life and death, they make a deliberate mockery of our sense of the natural order of things. The monkey is a mimic, the bear has been reduced to beggary, and the child is murdered by the man. What I will show throughout is that Lu Xun’s fascination

with these figures is symptomatic of a literary and cultural milieu in which the beast and the child came to stand in for the antinomies of (national) development. Evolutionary theory, of course, scandalized the nineteenth century by dissolving the boundaries between beast and man. And the child, whose ascent into adulthood was understood as recapitulating the descent of man from the apes and savages, stood at the very threshold between progress and atavism. In the China of the early twentieth century, the child became an object of sustained investment and intense anxiety, a beacon for developmental aspirations shadowed by the brutality of a colonial world order in which heredity seemed tantamount to destiny. This book tracks the diffusion of evolutionary thinking through the thickets of the vernacular culture of the early twentieth century by following the intertwined figures of the child and the beast. The itinerary it traces—from efforts to define and mold the modern child by newly introduced disciplines such as child studies and new forms of pedagogical print culture, to representations of children in literary writing and the popular media—offers readers an unsystematic introduction to the cultural history of the child in modern China.° These texts demonstrate not only the indispensability of the child in the development of modern Chinese narrative, but also that children’s literature—and particularly the

6 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES fairy tale—illuminates the formal contradictions at the core of its enter-

prise. If development is understood as a form of pedagogy through which the enlightened are entrusted with the elevation of the as-yet undeveloped, modern Chinese literature may well be best understood as a form of children’s literature. This claim is by no means intended to belittle the pedagogical project that animated Lu Xun’s generation of intellectuals. What I hope to foreground instead is the way in which vernacular materials such as textbooks, children’s primers, and fairy tales, usually

seen as ancillary to modern Chinese literary development, engage with the dilemmas of colonial modernity in ways that are just as complex and significant as realist fiction. To overlook the almost obsessive frequency with which modern Chinese texts—and particularly those of Lu Xun— constitute themselves around pedagogical scenes would be to impoverish our understanding of the canon. Indeed, it is precisely at those moments when these texts attempt to work through the contradictions at the heart of their own developmental project that they become most formally innovative, self-conscious, and inalienably modern.

Evolutionary Imperatives It is of course no accident that Chinese intellectuals first began to view their own situation in Darwinian terms just as the age of imperialism reached its apogee. Karl Marx—whose own exposition of a developmentalist stage theory would profoundly shape Chinese historiography in the years after the Communist revolution of 1949—was quick to read in Charles Darwin’s recently published On the Origin of Species a parable of capitalist modernity. In a letter to Engels written on June 18, 1862, he comments: It is remarkable how Darwin has discerned anew among beasts and plants his English society, with its division of labor, competition, elucidation of new markets, “inventions,” and the Malthusian “struggle for existence.” It is Hobbes’ bellum omnia contra omnes, and it reminds me of Hegel’s Phenomenology, wherein bourgeois society figures as a “spiritual animal kingdom,” while in Darwin the animal kingdom figures as bourgeois society.°

The Qing (1644-1911) empire experienced capitalist modernity as an external threat and saw the Hobbesian dictum not merely as a figure for economic competition but as a diplomatic and military fact. Darwin’s

Introduction 7 Origin was first published in November 1859, just as Great Britain prepared for a joint Anglo-French expedition that would lead to the occupation of Beijing and the burning of the Yuanmingyuan summer palace northwest of the city. Indeed, the very same 1860 issue of the Westminster Review in which Herbert Spencer published his influential treatise “Progress: Its Law and Cause” also features a survey of “China and the Chinese” pursuant to the preparations of “Her Majesty’s naval forces in Canton” to prosecute the war. Some three decades later, as the Victorian

era began to wane, a young Fujianese naval officer named Yan Fu (1854-1921), sent by the Qing government to the Naval Academy in Greenwich to learn from the British the secret of their superiority, became one of the first and most important conduits for the entry of Darwinism into the Chinese discursive realm.’ The story Yan Fu brought back from England, most effectively popularized in the form of his translation and exposition of T. H. Huxley’s 1893 Romanes lecture, Evolution and Ethics, transposed the vocabulary and the organicist assumptions of Victorian science into idiomatic literary Chinese.® A self-styled disciple of Spencer and monist philosophy, Yan Fu, in his On Evolution (Tianyan lun), reframed national history in terms of natural history, casting China as an actor in the unfolding of a vast and tumultuous world-historical drama, one in which species, races,

and nations alike were caught up in a relentless struggle for survival.’ He also shared with Spencer a sense that “progress consists in a change from the homogenous to the heterogenous ...[and from] the simple into the complex.”!° Yan Fu offered Chinese readers and writers not only new terminology, but a new narrative mode, a way of telling stories about the growth and progress of nations and national subjects in their relation to other nations and the natural world. Lu Xun’s own revelatory encounter as a young man with the developmentalist epistemology laid out in Yan Fu’s work—to which I return in Chapter 1—set the terms for the rest of his writing life, perhaps never so acutely and creatively as when he ran up against the constraints of evo-

lutionary thinking.''! I focus to a significant extent on Lu Xun in these pages because this aspect of his work is symptomatic of a phenomenon widely diffused throughout the culture of the period. That Lu Xun, in the essay on “Modern History” with which I began this introduction, chose to brush against the Spencerian grain in the eminently vernacular forum of the newspaper points not only to the vibrancy of the Chinese print culture that thrived in the interwar years. It also indicates that he

§ DEVELOPMENTAL FALTRY TALES was trying to take on the developmentalist faith on its own terms and in

its own territory. For while the early introduction of evolutionary thought into China was a fairly elite affair, conducted among a cadre of reformist and revolutionary intellectuals, many of whom had been educated abroad, the nearly universal purchase of evolutionary ideas by the early 1930s—and thus their hegemonic status—was a product of their

vernacularization across a wide variety of popular media, from print culture to cartoons and the cinema, as well as of their penetration into a variety of practices and social spheres. For this reason, the purview of this book is not so much intellectual history—an account of the dissemination of evolutionary theory in China and its application by Chinese intellectuals to their own modern predicament—as an attempt to track the movement of a narrative mode as it suffuses a range of different disciplines, crosses between divergent media and forms of cultural production, and puts its stamp on a wide variety of genres. Although fiction and the literary essay—precisely because of their self-conscious experimentation with narrative form—remain a privileged case, I demonstrate throughout that developmental thinking is the elephant in the exhibition hall of modern Chinese cultural production, whether one chooses to examine scientific texts, school primers, newspapers, magazine covers, fairy tales, or film scripts. This study is not an exhaustive or chronological history of evolutionary thought in China. Nor does it attempt to replicate the extremely rich scholarship on late Qing intellectual history and the dissemination of scientific knowledge in modern China. Benjamin Schwartz’s groundbreaking In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West and Joseph Need-

ham’s Science and Civilization in China have given us a broad sense of the circumstances under which evolutionary thought was introduced and deployed in modern China, and many scholars in historical and literary studies have continued to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms and consequences of this transmission.!? And yet precisely because of the sheer ubiquity of evolutionary thinking, histories of Chinese science sometimes overlook the vernacular (and quite often scientifically imprecise or inaccurate) circulation of evolutionary thinking and biological knowledge in the popular media and everyday discourse. Intellectual biographies intent on probing the thought of major figures like Yan Fu, Lu Xun, Liang Qichao (1873-1929), or Mao Zedong (1893-1976), for each of whom an encounter with one variety of Darwinian thought or another proved

Introduction 9 formative, can miss the ways in which these singular figures were formed by and embedded within a larger culture, one pervaded by the application of evolutionary narratives to questions of historical, literary, social, and economic import.!° This is, of course, no secret. In fact, it is such an obvious and persistent fact that it is rarely singled out for further exploration. In the literary realm, we take it more or less for granted that the theoretical armature for the New Culture movement’s promotion of a new modern Chinese vernacular in the years after World War One was explicitly evolutionary in nature, from the calls by Hu Shi (1891-1962) for the adoption of a “living” idiom over the evolutionarily stagnant written language, to the care with which Lu Xun’s younger brother Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967) insisted

on a properly biological conception of the human as one among other species as the basis for a “humane” literature.'* In perusing the larger textual record of early twentieth-century China, we find that these sorts of appeals to the logic of evolutionary biology are well-nigh inescapable, making their presence felt in newly established academic disciplines as diverse as economics, history, musicology, political philosophy, psychology, and sociology, as well as in the wider worlds of journalism and the arts. This colonization of the realm of knowledge, moreover, was not merely a matter of manifest content, of terminology.!’ Evolutionary theory circulated most effectively as a narrative structure, a historiographic template that could account as easily for literary history, political institutions, or military technologies. History, beginning in the late Qing and culminating in the years after 1949, became “developmental history” (fazhan shi), and the story it told was, all too often, numbingly invariant in the inevitability of its narrative movement from backward to forward, savagery to civilization, stagnation to revitalization, tradition to modernity, East to West. Yet it is not enough to simply take note of the elephant in the room. We must also ask why developmental thinking became a privileged way of knowing and narrating the world and its history, and how the stories

it spawned went on to animate literary language and media culture. | have already suggested one kind of answer to this question. Evolutionary narrative (or what Gillian Beer has termed in another context “Darwin’s plots”) became an indispensable means of representing the predicament of national development in a colonial world order.'* Evolutionary theory—particularly of the social Darwinian sort so effectively brokered by Yan Fu’s translations of the thought of Herbert Spencer—became

10 DEVELOPMENTAL FALRY TALES necessary because it so aptly figured the global divisions of labor characteristic of colonial modernity, the (in Marx’s memorable phrase) “battering down of all Chinese walls” effected by the global circulation of commodities and cultures, and the relentless “struggle for existence” into which China as a nation had been cast by its violent insertion into the racialized hierarchy of the modern interstate system.!”

To accept this account of world history as biological law, however, was also to run the risk of relegating oneself to the evolutionary scrap heap. For evolutionary advances cannot, strictly speaking, be effected by dint of sheer will alone. Darwinian natural selection—as opposed to the Lamarckian theory of development that was its immediate antecedent— allows for neither the inheritance of acquired characteristics or learned behaviors, nor the admission of teleological movement toward a predetermined end, nor human agency in the unfolding of these developmental processes. Darwin’s “new reading of the Book of Nature,” argues Margot Norris, inaugurated a crisis of authorship, in which nature is “transformed from a mimetic text, a representation of divine thought, to a self-referential and self-reflexive text, disclosing only its own origin in unconscious, involuntary, mathematical processes.” !® The importation and diffusion of evolutionary biology in China precipitates a different sort of crisis of authorship. As I detail in Chapter 1,

the enterprise of modern Chinese letters, from its inception in the last decade of the nineteenth century, was predicated on evolutionary thinking. Its practitioners were dedicated to the proposition that literature is inextricably entwined with the imperatives of national development, that writing is socially transitive, and that authors must not only register but also remake history. The author, in other words, also assumes the difficult mission of pushing the developmental process forward, of enlightening the nation so as to enable its movement up the evolutionary ladder of a “civilization” (wenming) exemplified by the imperial powers of the West. Many of the narratives of national development that I discuss in this bbok—from the 1905 novel The New Story of the Stone by

Wu Jianren (1866-1910) to the 1933 cinematic melodrama Playthings (Xiao wanyi)—inevitably betray their own narrative logic, collapsing under the weight of these conflicting demands. And in the fiction of Lu Xun, this contradiction between the science of evolutionary contingency and the desire for historical agency arguably becomes the primary object of literary representation, one that manifests itself in the self-reflexive

narrative structures of stories like “Diary of a Madman” (“Kuangren

Introduction it riji,” 1918), “The Misanthrope” (“Guduzhe,” 1925), as well as his 1921

translation from Japanese of the blind Russian anarchist Vasilii Eroshenko’s fairy tale “A Narrow Cage” (“Xia de long”). Indeed, as we will

see in Chapter 5, Eroshenko’s unlikely sojourn in China in 1921 after his expulsion from his adopted home in Japan under suspicion of political sedition should be understood as a crucial event in the invention of a new Chinese fiction. Eroshenko’s compelling persona and his disturbing Aesopian fables—in which the evolutionary imagination of an H. G. Wells is bent into nearly unrecognizable shapes by the dark gravity of a Kafkaesque sensibility—sparked not only Lu Xun’s creativity as a translator and author, but also a crucial debate as to the nature and meaning of the fairy tale as a literary genre. “A Narrow Cage,” which along with its author became a kind of cause célébre among May Fourth intellectuals in the early 1920s, tells the tale of a caged Bengal tiger whose dream of liberating others similarly afflicted ends only with the entrapment of the reader within a modernist mise en abyme. With this and similar gestures, I suggest throughout the book, Lu Xun simultaneously reproduces and critiques the logic of developmental history.

Parables of (Under)development This critique manifests itself most palpably in the realm of narrative form. Each of these texts—like “Modern History”—places the reader in a temporal trap, one in which the end has arrived before the beginning, and there is little or no recourse for further narrative development. These stories, in other words, exist in a state of suspended animation, “neither dead nor alive,” caught fast in the gap between the urgency of their historical moment and the meshes of evolutionary time. This state of suspended animation is one that Lu Xun himself repeatedly allegorized, not only in his stories, but also in several brief, almost hallucinatory, parables of captivity that have come to be nearly synonymous with his literary legacy. [he parable of the “iron house” at the core of the quasi-autobiographical

essay that introduces his first collection of short stories, “Preface to The Outcry” (“Nahan zixu”), is doubtless the best known. Here Lu Xun confronts us directly with an impossible question about necessity and agency: if you were imprisoned in a hermetically sealed cell, and painfully aware of the suffocation you are about to suffer, would you rouse the sound sleepers who will inevitably perish alongside you? In Chapter 1, I argue

that the form of Lu Xun’s parable shares some surprisingly concrete

il DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES parallels with Chinese translations of Victorian novels of evolutionary adventure by Jules Verne and Edward Bellamy, which were of vital importance in the dissemination of evolutionary thinking in the late Qing period. Indeed, this particular sort of suspended animation—in which the desire of the narrator to drive history forward can be neither effected nor extinguished—replicates itself throughout his work, irrespective of genre. It is a signal characteristic of many of the prose poems that make up Lu Xun’s 1926 collection Wild Grass (Yecao), resulting in circular narratives in which two equal and opposing forces are so precisely calibrated as to bring all narrative movement to a standstill. “Dead Fire” (“Si huo,” 1925) is a particularly salient example, as it presents in condensed and telegraphic form the story of a dialogue between the narrator and a flame entombed within an icy crevasse.!” The flame will slowly be snuffed out by the cold, but to rescue it from its captivity will only hasten its own self-immolation. Wild Grass has long been celebrated as a modernist departure from the resolutely representational critical realism of Lu Xun’s fiction.*? My intention here is not so much to recategorize or redeem the modernism of Lu Xun’s fiction as it is to point out that these recursive structures appear throughout his work, and register on a formal level a crisis of agency, one precipitated in part by the conflation of natural and national history in developmentalist thought. As we have seen in the case of “Modern History”—and will continue to see in the course of reading several related pieces that he contributed to the popular press in the early 1930s—Lu Xun increasingly found in brief, parabolic forms a particularly effective means of telling stories about the impossibility of telling stories. Lu Xun’s affinity for the parable was closely related to his lifelong interest in and advocacy for children’s literature, as well as his brief yet intensely productive encounter with the modernist fairy tales of Vasilii Eroshenko, an encounter that coincided with the halcyon days of the literary revolution of the May Fourth era, as well as the first flush of Lu Xun’s career as a creative writer.

Lu Xun’s late style, on the other hand, as represented by his almost daily contributions to the “Free Talk” (Ziyou tan) section of the Shun Pao and other periodicals starting from 1930, has often been seen not just as evidence of a turn away from the craft of fiction toward a polemical, even querulous, political engagement, but also as a sign of his “creative barrenness.”*! This sort of critical judgment is sometimes

Introduction i shadowed by a corollary query: How is it that modern China’s greatest writer failed to produce an example of the genre that is the presumptive endpoint of most histories of the development of vernacular fiction in the West? (This particular presumption, which became a defining feature of the May Fourth rewriting of Chinese literary history, is itself part of the history I trace here.) To account for Lu Xun’s lack of a novel—or, indeed, the long trail of aborted and incomplete novels left behind by his peers from the late Qing onward, each of which attempted to capture history in the making, from Liang Qichao’s Record of the Future of the New China (Xin Zhongguo weilai ji) to Mao Dun’s Midnight (Ziye)— would be beyond the scope of this study. Nor will I relate in any detail the parallel emergence of serialized genre fiction (such as episodic martial arts and romance novels)—works that, despite their commercial and aesthetic successes, were sometimes dismissed as marginal, even vestigial, diversions from a properly realist course of literary development.’ I do, however, want to suggest that Lu Xun’s marked preference for short forms can and should be understood historically, both in terms of the day-to-day economics of providing copy to the print industry, and perhaps the difficulties of producing a sustained narrative effort in an era of ever-increasing temporal fragmentation and political crisis. In an urban environment such as Shanghai, subject to the vagaries of global markets, political emergency, and imperialist violence, in other words, the long arc of history might well be overwhelmed by quotidian shock, and extensive plot development yield to the immediate contingency of more mobile forms. In this sense, Lu Xun’s zawen not only partake in the same parabolic critical project as his earlier fiction, but also may well represent a fitting adaptation to the urban environment of interwar Shanghai.” In taking up the material life and mass-mediated temporality of the colonial city, moreover, Lu Xun’s zawen might well be seen as providing us with a “novel” in aggregate, an account of modern history measured out in days and column inches rather than chapters.

Development contra Modernity? Just as closer attention to these parables may help us rewrite Chinese literary histories in which the realist novel remains the preferred destination of a developmental itinerary, tracing the genealogy of developmentalism itself should also supplement ongoing efforts to understand the nature of Chinese “modernity.” Over the past two decades—partly

14 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES in response to the currency of postcolonial theory in the humanities and

perhaps also as a result of the lingering allure of modernization theory—“the modern” and “modernity” have emerged as axiomatic terms in modern Chinese literary and cultural studies, adapted to a great many uses and subject to a dizzying variety of adjectival modifications. Recent scholarship in English has analyzed the dialectic of heroic and quotidian discourse characterizing the “Chinese modern” (Xiaobing Tang), excavated the polyglot material and cultural life of the “Shanghai modern”

(Leo Ou-fan Lee), investigated the “lure of the modern” for modern Chinese writers (Shu-mei Shih), and argued for the signal importance of linguistic mediation in the formation of a “translated modernity” (Lydia Liu).** The late Qing period has been mined for its rich vein of indigenous “repressed modernities” nipped in the bud and neglected by the hegemonic and Westernizing tendencies of the New Culture movement (David Wang).*? There has also been increasing recognition of the plurality of the modern experience as refracted through the lens of ethnic or sexual minorities (“other modernities”), marginalized locales, and nonelite actors (“everyday modernity” ).*° Cultural historians have also emphasized the way in which China’s experience must be read in terms of

a larger “East Asian modern” or “colonial modernity,” one in which imperial networks of commerce and culture come to constitute the colonizer as much as the colonized.*’ Others have studied the histories of distinct discursive and institutional sites in terms of their involvement in more general, and sometimes global, processes of modernization, yielding studies of “visual,” “hygienic,” “economic,” and judicial modernities, among others.*° The characterization of a China “in search of” a “belated,” “unfinished,” “failed,” or “incomplete” modernity, finally, remains common in much social-scientific and historiographic work.??

As a collective enterprise, these studies have not only helped to reframe China in terms of world-historical processes, but also initiated a rethinking of global modernity in terms of local specificity. In the course of these efforts, however, we run the risk of reifying modernity as an ontological category, a state of being or teleological destination that, depending on the assessment of the individual commentator, has or has not yet been reached. It is in this respect that a sustained and self-reflexive consideration of the central place of developmental thinking in modern and contemporary China may become particularly helpful, not least because our own conceptions of modernity are so often shaped by way of a reflex-

Introduction 15 ive recourse to the narrative modes and ideological assumptions of developmental history. How, in other words, might we begin to disentangle “development”—in

its transitive sense as purposive activity—from an intransitive “modernity” that is all too often assumed as the endpoint, rather than the genesis, of developmental aspirations? This is, of course, not an easy task, nor the bailiwick of any single study. One of the characteristics of developmental thought is its entwinement with a wide spectrum of modern disciplines and discourses introduced into China, from evolutionary biology to economics, from May Fourth literary historiography to nationalism, from child psychology and pedagogy to zoology. The overlapping of the senses in which “development” has been understood in these various fields is by no means merely coincidental, because development has been and remains a “keyword,” in the specific sense proposed by Raymond Williams, that is, a hegemonic “way of seeing culture and society” whose “binding” power can be opened up to question only through an investigation of the term’s history and use.°° For this reason, it may prove useful as a preliminary step to trace the coinage and circulation of terms such as “development” and “modernity” in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese. Sometimes a false sense of the continuity of a word or a term misleads us into simplifying the semantic specificity of an earlier historical moment. “Modernity” is one such term, in that its application to this unsettled and unsettling epoch tends to obscure the complex ways in which Chinese writers were attempting to name their own historical experience. Significantly, the Chinese term for development (fazhan) and its several semantic cognates—including “growth” (fada), “evolution” (tianyan or

jinhua), and “progress” (jinbu)—figure far more prominently in the writings of key figures such as Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, and Lu Xun than do terms literally denoting “modernity” as such. The surprising paucity in texts from the first two decades of the twentieth century of terms we

now take for granted, such as “the modern” (xiandai), “modernity” (xtandai xing), and “modernization” (xiandai hua) may well indicate that our reliance upon them as analytical categories is somewhat anachronistic.*! It is, of course, often difficult or impossible to pinpoint exactly when a particular loanword or neologism entered the language or began to take precedence over a range of cognates. Both the Japanese

loanwords jindai and shidai, for instance, were commonly and even

16 DEVELOPMENTAL FALRY TALES interchangeably used to denote the “modern” or the “contemporary” until the 1930s, until their respective semantic ranges stabilized, so that jindai has now taken its place in a historiographical troika as an early “modern” moment (1839-1911) that came before the properly modern xiandai (1911-1949), which in turn gives way to the “contemporary” dangdai (1949-). Each of these periods is now thought of in the abstract as shidai, a word now reserved for marking the idea of an era or historical epoch.*? Xiandai, itself a loanword from the Japanese gendai (originally signifying the “contemporary,” rather than the modern per se), does not even make an appearance in a comprehensive guide to Chinese New Terms and Expressions published in Shanghai in 1913. It is only a dozen years later, in an expanded edition of the lexicon meant to reflect new coinages in the interim (and aptly entitled New New Terms), that xiandai enters the linguistic lists, glossed as “the present age.” *” The etymology of “development” is quite different. Rendered as fada or fazhan, the term first appears around the turn of the twentieth cen-

tury in journalistic writings by nationalist reformers such as Liang Qichao, as well as in serialized late Qing fiction.** These episodic narratives, as many scholars have pointed out, sat cheek by jowl on the pages of the same newspapers and journals with which Liang and his contem-

poraries hoped to forge a new nationalist consciousness, and shared their concerns and, to a large degree, linguistic repertoire. From the very start, then, “development” was closely tied to the vernacular circulation

of evolutionary theory and its Spencerian application to questions of China’s plight vis-a-vis the imperial West. In the 1913 edition of Chinese New Terms, for instance, fazhan is glossed as “to extend,” and fazhan shuo (literally, the theory or doctrine of fazhan) as “evolutionism.” Al-

though this particular sense did not survive the 1926 revision of the handbook, in which fazhan has become “development” and “evolution” is translated by the now-standard jinbua and the since-outmoded yanhua, the semantic debt to Spencerian thought remains unambiguous to this day, if often unacknowledged. The Hanyu da cidian, for instance,

widely considered the most authoritative contemporary dictionary of modern Chinese, defines fazhan in terms (and even with syntax) that directly echoes Spencer’s classic formulation of the law of progress: “change from the small to the large, from the simple to the complex, from the elementary to the advanced.”*°

The historical continuity seems almost natural to us now, given the continued sway of discourses conflating development with economic

Introduction 17 and social progress. What is perhaps less apparent is the way another keyword, wenming (conventionally defined as “civilized” or “civilization”), also straddled the semantic line between words like “development” and “modernity” that by the time of the May Fourth movement had grown apart. What is interesting about the use of this third term, in fact, is how its usage pointed to precisely the tension between modernity as a colonial imposition (in which China was the direct object) and development as a transitive process (in which Chinese intellectuals retained a measure of subjectivity). By the late Qing, wenming came to serve as an emblem of all that was advanced, standing as a synecdoche for the power and prestige of the West, and marking the geographical and historical rupture between here and there, old and new. It signified, for all intents and purposes, the modern, insofar as that modernity was inescapably inscribed within a colonial relation to the West. It was, in this sense, a deictic term, one that pointed not only to a thing in itself, but to the relation between self and other. Its frequent use as a modifier reveals this relational quality. The experimental drama of the period, for instance, a hybrid form that fused European stagecraft, costumes and props, and extensive political commentary on current events with older operatic forms, was labeled as wenming xi, or “modern opera.” That wen-

ming xi was later scorned by May Fourth literary reformers as scandalously scattershot in its appropriation of Western realism does not obviate the point. Indeed, it was precisely their acknowledgment of the universality of Western models—which they felt China had not yet or only incompletely attained—that ultimately made the word wenming appear hopelessly parochial and outdated. The difference between the two terms—

and thus the rationale for the triumph of xiandai by the late 1930s—is subtle but significant. Wenming, understood as the inescapable reality of a new world order, necessitated development; xiandai came to be understood as the yet-to-be (or only incompletely) attained culmination of that process. Equally importantly, wenming also denoted a pedagogical process, a “civilization” to be effected by dint of active historical agency. This is one reason why Wu Jianren’s 1905S science fiction novel, New Story of the Stone (Xin shitou ji), is such a crucial document of an ongoing pro-

cess of accommodation to the historical crisis with which China was confronted in those years. Written in the immediate wake of the allied suppression of the Boxer rebellion, the novel appropriates Jia Baoyu, protagonist of Cao Xueqin’s 1754 masterpiece, The Story of the Stone

18 DEVELOPMENTAL FALTRY TALES (also known as the Dream of the Red Chamber), as the hero of a colonial bildungsroman. Bao-yu is forcibly evicted from the settled aristocratic precincts of the Prospect Garden (Daguanyuan) in which the original text is set, and gamely embarks on a crash course in modern society and technology against the unsettling backdrop of the International Settlement of Shanghai. This autodidactic process of civilization, however, ultimately runs up against the constraints of colonial violence and local corruption, and Bao-yu, in his capacity as an aspiring nationalist reformer, comes to a devastating realization of his own helplessness in the face of history—an awakening that reflects as if in a cracked mirror the allegory

of Buddhist enlightenment of the source text. As I discuss in detail in Chapter 1, at the very moment of his disillusionment, the novel lurches into utopian mode, transporting Bao-yu into a kind of compensatory mirror world: a “Realm of Civilization” (Wenming jingjie) in which colonial

hierarchies have been overturned, and Chinese particularities have attained the status of a universal developmental model. The novel’s final leap forward into a science fictional alternate history— one that bears the unmistakable imprint of the nineteenth-century novel

of evolutionary adventure—ultimately proves formally and ideologically unsustainable, but the premises on which it constructs this fictional “civilization” are telling. Wenming—which had been used in a far more restricted sense in the classical language as a laudatory term for literary élan—entered the modern Chinese lexicon on the wings of one of the key slogans of the epochal Meiji reforms begun in the 1860s in Japan: wenming kaihua (Japanese: bunmei kaika), or “civilization and enlightenment.” Kaihua/kaika, usually rendered as “enlightenment,” carries the literal sense of an “opening” of minds, of an educational transformation (hua) to be effected by an elite class of social engineers. As such, wenming also came to be associated with an intentional process of development—a historical movement from savagery to civilization, youth to maturity, and poverty to wealth.°° And crucially, that process was predicated, in Meiji texts no less than the New Story of the Stone, on pedagogy, on a tutorial in the tech-

nologies, social as well as mechanical, that had allowed the West to achieve “civilization.” Wenming thus signifies both an intransitive state and the transitive process required to attain that state: a process of development that implicitly posits the divide between those who are already developed, those who develop, and those who still in need of development.

What the intertwinement of these terms, and their usage in the texts from which they derive, may suggest is that, for Chinese intellectuals

Introduction 19 of the early twentieth century, modernity had not yet taken on its present-

day sense of a universal endpoint for which China was compelled to search. Modernity—understood as China’s humiliating and unequal participation in the globalized historical time of the modern interstate system—had already arrived, and its logic of struggle and survival was undeniable. Development, on the other hand, was understood as a means of managing the consequences of modernity, one that necessarily invoked wenming as a pedagogical process. Herein lies the significance of Yan Fu’s On Evolution. In translating T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics

into Chinese, Yan Fu provided Chinese intellectuals with an all-tooconvincing theoretical framework with which to understand the modern world system as, quite literally, a fait accompli, unfolding according to aset of universally applicable laws. For Yan Fu, colonization—and even the extermination of native peoples—is understood as the playing out of the logic of nature itself, and justified by way of examples from

the animal and botanical worlds.°’ If imported European grasses have overwhelmed native plants in South America, Yan Fu asks his readers, is it any wonder that “the red people of the Americas, the black races of Australasia,” and the indigenous peoples of the Bering Sea are facing imminent eviction from their respective ecological niches? Indeed, as Benjamin Schwartz astutely notes, Yan Fu’s argument by analogy renders it “impossible for him to stand in moral judgment on the imperialist powers of the West. China’s weakness in the struggle for existence stems from its own unfitness. It is entirely inevitable that those states which are fit should struggle among themselves for predominance.”*® Yet the popularity and utility of Yan Fu’s text also lay in the fact that it provided a way out of this evolutionary impasse by positing the nation as a form of historical agency. Yan Fu’s appropriation of evolutionary theory, as Benjamin Schwartz notes, was marked by a “preoccupation with the wealth and power of the state.”*’? This is why Yan Fu’s translation of Huxley’s Romanes lecture of 1893—originally a sustained argument against Spencerian thought and its relentless conflation of natural and social law—is punctuated by a series of lengthy interjections in which Yan Fu refutes Huxley’s ethical position and reasserts the monism of the thinker he terms “my mentor” (wu shi) at every opportunity.*”? Monism—

the notion that all phenomena, human or otherwise, can be subsumed by a singular evolutionary law—allows Spencer (and thus Yan Fu) to posit,

in the evocative phrase of another influential interpreter of Darwinian theory, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), that the body is a “cellular state,”

20 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES and the state an organism composed of individual cells.*! This analogy, in turn, performs a great deal of ideological work, allowing Spencer to sketch out a global theory in which primitive life-forms are likened to “primitive tribes,” and the complex global division of labor characterizing nineteenth-century capitalism is naturalized as the inevitable product of biological development: In the individual organism, as it advances to a high structure, no matter of what class, there arises an elaborate system of channels through which the

common stock of nutritive matters (here added to by absorption, there changed by secretion, in this place purified by excretion, and in another modified by exchange of gases) is distributed throughout the body for the feeding of the various parts, severally occupied in their special actions; while in the social organism as it advances to a high structure, no matter of what political type, there develops an extensive and complicated trading organization for the distribution of commodities, which, sending out its heterogeneous currents throughout the kingdom by channels that end in retailers’ shops, brings within the reach of each citizen the necessaries and luxuries that have been produced by others, while he has been producing his commodity or small part of a commodity, or performing some other function or small part of a function, beneficial to the rest.*?

Needless to say, differentiation of this sort necessitates the elevation of a managerial class—“the nervous system” or “directive centre” —to a position of prominence within the social organism.*’ Spencer, true to laissezfaire form, disavows the notion that specific policies or interventions on the part of this class might lead to the modification of the social organism, but his organicism has already let the possibility of self-conscious amelioration in through the backdoor of evolutionary theory. This was a door into which Yan Fu and those who followed him were

only too eager to enter, for it seemed the only portal leading from the inexorability of a naturalized imperial order, with Europe at its “directive centre,” to the possibility of national sovereignty. Yan Fu, in other words, was determined to marshal a discourse of “development” as a means of kick-starting an evolutionary process that would result in an amelioration of China’s low status in the global order. Yet this project involved a number of difficult contradictions between word and deed, necessity and agency, developer and developed. If development was inexorable, why did it need to be kick-started in the first place? Who would do the kicking and who the starting? In an illuminating study of developmental doctrines

Introduction 21 in modern Europe, M. P. Cowen and R. W. Shenton contend that development in this transitive sense came to be understood by the mid-nineteenth

century as a form of “intentional, constructive” activity aimed not so much at propelling history forward as reefing the sails and weathering the storm, so as to mitigate the dislocations and depredations of the “immanent process of capitalist growth.”** (Transitive) development, in other words, was a means of managing (intransitive) development. This formulation, of course, inevitably raises the question of who serves as the subject,

and who the object, in the syntax of historical process. As Cowen and Shenton note, “The nineteenth-century resolution of the development problem was to invoke trusteeship. Those who took themselves to be developed could act to determine the process of development for those who were deemed to be less-developed.”*? The conviction that development must be implemented by an elite on behalf of those whose lives have been rendered unmanageable by modernity, Cowen and Shenton point out, finds ample expression in the work of John Stuart Mill, whose advocacy for the colonial enterprise derived from his experience as an admin-

istrator (following in the footsteps of his father, Thomas Malthus, and Jeremy Bentham) in the employ of the East India Company.*° While trusteeship rings in twentieth-century ears as an apology for imperialism, for figures like Yan Fu (who translated Mill’s On Liberty into Chinese in 1902) it promised a form of agency for local elites and would-be modernizers

caught between the rock of an imperialist order and the hard place of their own “underdevelopment.” Development, in short, represented the possibility, however chimerical and remote, of turning this excruciating historical double bind to one’s

own account, if only by dint of sheer Promethean will. Development served as a trope for the task of reclaiming autonomy, for the possibility of making history on one’s own terms, rather than suffering passively as a mere plaything of history. The burden of this historical mission, as is well known, was one that reformers and revolutionaries like Liang Qichao

and Lu Xun arrogated to themselves as the enlightened trustees of a national community. As Marston Anderson has shown, the volatile tensions occasioned by this particular form of trusteeship are deeply inscribed within modern Chinese literary realist writing, in the form of an uneasy contest between the narrator and the narrated, the literate and the illiterate, the outspoken revolutionary and the voiceless masses who are the object of his ethical and political concern.*’ The problem of representation (as political relation and as mimetic realism) becomes especially acute,

22 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES and acutely self-conscious, in the fiction of Lu Xun. Through a series of close readings of texts dating from the late Qing onward, I suggest that this contest between trustees and their nominal beneficiaries, state and subjects, liberators and those they would liberate, educators and those they would educate, is endemic to narratives of national development in modern China.

The Child and the Beast Almost exactly six months after writing “Modern History” for the Shun Pao, Lu Xun published a reprise in the same forum, but under a different pen name. Called “Watching Magic Shows,” this short piece borrows both the subject matter and the self-reflexive structure of the previous essay. Here, however, Lu Xun pushes his parable to an even crueler conclusion, not only denying the possibility of historical development but laying bare the bankruptcy of those to whom the future has been entrusted. I like watching magic shows.

These shows roam all across the country, so the tricks are the same wherever they go. They need just two things to collect their money: a black bear and a child.

The black bear is kept hungry to the point of emaciation, so that he seems almost to lack the energy to move. Naturally, he couldn’t be allowed to be strong; a strong bear cannot be tamed. Now, he’s half-dead and halfalive, but he’s still got an iron ring through his nose, and he’s made to do tricks tethered to a leash. Sometimes he’s given a little something to eat—a crust of wheat bun soaked in water—but the spoon is held above his head, so that he has to stand on his hind legs and stretch his neck and open his mouth wide, and only after all this work does he get a bite, an act for which the magic show collects a few more coins. No one in China talks about where these bears come from. According to

a study done by some Westerners, they are captured in the mountains when they are still small. Grown bears are no good, because once they’re big, their nature can no longer be changed. But even the cubs need to be “trained,” and this “training” takes two forms: beatings and hunger. Later they die of mistreatment and abuse. I imagine that what the study says is perfectly true. We can see well enough that even though they’re still alive and performing tricks, they’re wretched to the point where they hardly even resemble bears anymore. In some places, they go so far as to call them “cur-bears” |gouxiong], so great is their contempt for them.

Introduction a3 The child in these scenes also suffers, as grown-ups stand on his belly or twist his arms behind his back, until he pulls a face to show his pain and begs the spectators to save him. Six, five, four more, and three ... and the magician has once again collected a handful of coins. Naturally, the child has also been trained, and the pain is feigned, just a plot cooked up in collusion with the grown-ups, and anyway, it never hurts to earn some more money. They bang a gong to get the show started in the afternoon, and continue until the evening. When it’s over, the spectators disperse, and while some of them have spent some money, others have not. At the end of each show, I think to myself as I walk away: there are two kinds of moneymakers. One kind is abused to death until another is found as a replacement. The other kind will grow up to acquire a little child and a bear cub, and go on performing the same old tricks. It’s really very simple, and even seems a bit tedious when you think about it. Yet I go on watching these shows. What else would you have me look at, dear readers?*®

Lu Xun wrote this essay in October 1933 amidst a wave of intense anxiety and interest in the question of Chinese children. In academic journals and popular media alike, the figure of the child became a ubiquitous emblem of the nation and its developmental hopes. Nor was this equation lost on the ruling Nationalist Party (KMT), which had the previous year instituted for the first time a national “Children’s Day” and had already begun to promote 1934 as “The Year of the Child.” Newspapers and illustrated magazines such as the best-selling weekly Young Companion (Liangyou huabao) had since the late 1920s regularly featured the activities of a nascent scouting movement, a “Children’s Army” (tongzi jun) typically pictured as projecting a military prowess in miniature that the KMT, having suffered the loss of Manchuria to Japanese military encroachment in 1931, sorely lacked.*” Parents were encouraged to send in photographs of their charges, to be judged competitively on the strength of their vigor and vitality. The slogan for one such competition, sponsored by an American baby formula brand, Momilk—“lIf you want to strengthen the nation, you must first strengthen the children”—dquite neatly summed up the conflation of the child and the nation in the context of the emergence of a vibrant and ageressively commercialized urban media culture.>°

This discovery of the child as an object of ideological and financial investment was predicated in part on the efforts of Lu Xun, his brother Zhou Zuoren, and their May Fourth-era contemporaries more than a

24 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES decade earlier. As I detail in Chapter 3, since the late 1910s the Zhou brothers had been on the forefront of advocacy for a modern Chinese children’s literature. Their motives were complex and multifaceted. For Zhou Zuoren, steeped in the recapitulationist rhetoric of late Victorian and Edwardian natural history, the child became a flashpoint in a larger effort to make a clean epistemological break with the Chinese past. The traditional child, he argued, had been seen (and not heard) as a miniature grown-up, rather than an autonomous individual whose trajectory along a developmental path from infancy to maturity modeled the evolutionary progress of civilization itself. Zhou’s humanist insistence on the autonomy of the child paradoxically also mandated redoubled attention and pedagogical intervention in the lives of children, precisely because they had come to represent—as tabula rasa on which a modern subjectivity might be inscribed—one of the only forms of historical agency available to Chinese intellectuals. This contradiction, as I discuss in Chapter 5, also troubled Zhou’s advocacy for the fairy tale, a genre he imagined both as the primitive wellspring of a revitalized vernacular literature and as an

instrument for the initiation of untutored children into a developmental order.

Just as Zhou Zuoren and others were theorizing a modern Chinese children’s literature, China’s publishing industry began to devote itself to serving the developmental needs (and developing the considerable market potential) of the child. The print culture these efforts produced— encompassing textbooks, primers, children’s stories, monthly magazines, and multivolume “treasuries” for school libraries—served as one of the most important conduits for the vernacularization of biological knowledge and, along with it, the evolutionary episteme Ernst Haeckel had called the “world-system” of the nineteenth century.°! In the vast new literature dedicated to the initiation of these “masters of the future” into this order, children are often portrayed alongside animals or invited to

enter into parabolic worlds animated by anthropomorphized beasts. The rich and multivalent use of animal tropes in Euro-American children’s literature stretches back at least to the eighteenth century, of course, but was a relatively new innovation in modern China, spurred on in part by the financial dependence of Chinese print capitalists on the juvenile market. This proliferation of animal imagery was inextricably tied to devel-

opmentalist thinking, for it provided a new picture of the natural world in which children might see themselves as trustees of a taxonomized natural order rendered intelligible and tractable by scientific reason. But as |

Introduction BS) argue in Chapter 2, the animal kingdom sometimes takes on a darker hue in these texts, figuring not so much evolutionary progress but a fear of atavism, and the perils of China’s struggle for existence in a brutal world order. Lu Xun’s work, from his first short story “Diary of a Madman” to late essays like “Watching Magic Shows,” is similarly shadowed by the prospect of evolutionary degeneration, of historical process running awry. In Chapter 3 I analyze the recursive structure of the former (and in the narrative of modern Chinese literary development, foundational) text as an

immanent critique of the developmentalist faith that the child might serve as a slate upon which a new and better history might be inscribed. The allegorical thrust of the latter piece deliberately disturbs the taxo-

nomic schema of a biological world picture in ways that run directly counter to the official culture of the era. The leashed bear is so little like a bear that his very name (“cur-bear” or gouxiong) makes a mockery of species-being while linguistically compounding the contempt in which he is held. The real secret he discloses, of course, is how much—as he stands on two legs to beg for his bread—he resembles a man. The child with whom he is paired is perhaps not as disposable as the bear, for in his secret complicity with the taskmasters who exploit his make-believe pain, he resembles less a trained circus animal than an adult, destined to perpetuate the exploitative spectacle by which he himself has been enslaved. Lu Xun is not content to merely to make a travesty of evolutionary faith, but also implicates his own writing (as well as his readership) in this ongoing cycle of exploitation. His narrator cannot help but watch such shows again and again, despite full knowledge of their inevitable tedium.°* In the direct second-person address of the last line of the essay, moreover, Lu Xun signals both the immediacy of his ethical concerns and the way in which his essay is itself embedded in a mass-mediated mode of spectatorship and consumption. As I explore in Chapter 4, the commodification of the child was central to that culture and its politics. The new theories of child development championed by May Fourth in-

tellectuals not only resulted in a textbook publishing boom but also stimulated the consumption of new toys and tonics, marketed, like Momilk, as patriotic products. This consumer culture positioned parents (and especially mothers), educators, and the state itself as investors in children and trustees of the better tomorrow they had come to represent. Children,

in turn, were transformed into “domestic products” (guohuo) whose

26 DEVELOPMENTAL FATRY TALES quality would decide China’s fate in the competitive global market of the modern interstate system. Released just days after Lu Xun published “Watching Magic Shows” in the Shun Pao, the director Sun Yu’s 1933 mo-

tion picture Playthings (Xiao wanyi) was itself a product of this cultural logic and participated in a larger movement for the promotion of domestic products. A classic of the Shanghai leftist cinema, the film plays the story of a plucky local toy maker as a parable of China’s struggle to resist eco-

nomic imperialism. Yet this seemingly triumphal narrative of local economic development, in which local handicrafts must inevitably yield to industrial manufacture, is countered by a dialectical movement in which the price of producing domestic goods (be they toys or children) is not only alienation in the classical Marxian sense but also the remorseless dispossession of its heroine of her livelihood, her children, and her senses. Indeed, the film, in a manner reminiscent of Lu Xun’s essay, compels its customers to watch as her descent into madness becomes just another spectacle in the streets of Shanghai. What is ultimately so bleak about these visions, of course, is that in pointing out the inconsistency at the center of developmentalist faith, they also posit history as a narrow cage from which there is no possibility of egress. The scenario Lu Xun sketches out in “Watching Magic Shows”—

in which the child will inexorably replicate the exploitation he himself has suffered—is a negative formulation of a question that dogged him throughout his writing life. As I elaborate in Chapter 2, it was also a ques-

tion that lay at the center of debates in China between those who advocated a scientific Darwinism (in which evolutionary timescales and the laws of heredity render our historical agency moot) and those who adopted a Lamarckian model in which “soft inheritance” (the inheritance of learned characteristics) offered some hope of intentional evolutionary amelioration. Lu Xun’s “The Misanthrope,” I argue, is a powerful and profoundly moving intervention into this debate. A story that begins with a funeral and ends with a funeral, “The Misanthrope” traces the demise of a would-be revolutionary and pedagogue, Wei Lianshu. Wei’s disillusion unfolds with the seeming inevitability of a dirge as he is forced to disavow

the certainty of his faith in the innocence of the child and acknowledge the crushing inevitability of their inheritance of the irredeemably corrupt and exploitative culture of their elders. Inheritance is revealed as not only a biological question, but also a social and cultural matter, as a means for the powerful to prey on the powerless and the dispossessed. Lu Xun ultimately leaves unresolved the question of whether or not this

Introduction 27 pitiless perpetuation of oppression finds its basis in natural-historical law. Instead of certainty, he gives us only the text, in whose very form is suggested another answer to the question of inheritance. For this is a story that also begins and ends with a transformation of a man into a wolf, in an act of mourning so profound that the mourner is transformed into the one who is mourned; and a reading of another’s life so close that the reader

breaks free of the taxonomic boundaries that bind him, and becomes another being. It is in this show of sympathetic magic, perhaps, that Lu Xun finds some measure of historical redemption.

THE IRON HOUSE OF NARRATIVE Lu Xun and the Late Qing Fiction of Evolutionary Adventure The science of evolution [is] a child of the nineteenth century ... this theory has now become the sure foundation of our whole world-system. Ernst Haeckel, Die Weltrathsel (1900)!

In popular and academic circles alike, what has come to be referred to as “social Darwinism” has long since been dismissed as a dead letter. Of course, we can only welcome the demise of the politics of unfettered capitalist oligarchy, scientific racism, and imperial expansion with which the monism of figures such as Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel has been associated, if often in a grossly simplified manner. Yet to dismiss the lingering hold of such discourses on the globalizing neoliberal “consensus” of the past three decades would be premature. And while the role and ramifications of social Darwinism in the intellectual and cultural history of the metropolitan West have been studied extensively, the world-historical dimension of the colonial diffusion of evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries has been neglected. We take it for granted that social Darwinism was an important ideological buttress of the “new imperialism” of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, in other words, yet there are very few concrete studies of the variegated channels through which it was disseminated and of the disparate uses to which it was put by “native” intellectuals in the colonies and semicolonies. Part of the problem is the term “social Darwinism” itself. Freighted with the burden of its posthumous disrepute, yet historically anachro28

The Iron House of Narrative 29 nistic (neither Haeckel nor Spencer would have characterized their own social and scientific thought in these terms), it gestures toward a coherent entity (intellectual, political, or otherwise) that never existed on the ground. It is, in short, an insufficiently supple term for the uneven, complex, but nearly capillary infiltration of what I will call “evolutionary thinking” into a stunning variety of social-scientific disciplines and popular discourses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At a fundamental level, evolutionary thinking involves understanding and narrating the social and cultural realms in terms derived from evolutionary biology. Crucial to this sort of thinking is a reliance on developmental narratives in which human history is figured in terms of natural history, and individuals as much as nations are assumed to move along a continuum from the “savage” to the “civilized.” This is a narrative mode, moreover, constructed around tropes that are characteristically monist in their insistence on the organicist notion that societies and bodies are best understood in terms of one another.’ An adequately global history of the career of evolutionary thinking has yet to be attempted and is obviously beyond the scope of this study. Such a history would need to consider the diverse pathways along which evolutionary thinking traveled, including missionary publications, journalism, textbooks and children’s literature, translations of scientific works, and new genres of popular fiction such as the utopian novel and science fiction. Evolutionary thinking, in short, was disseminated by way of the distinctly modern print cultures that sprang up in urban centers and “treaty ports” at the peripheries of the nineteenth-century world system, such as Shanghai, Calcutta, Seoul, and Tokyo. Benedict Anderson has famously linked the emergence of nationalism to the “imagined communities” of readers constituted by the popular press. For anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the political and intellectual history of East Asia, it should be equally clear that the sense of participation in a national body (what is rendered quite literally in Japanese as Rokutai) was produced in part by the ubiquity of evolutionary discourse in the print culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.’ Anderson tends to emphasize the simultaneity of readership enabled by the newspaper’s quotidian frame, but it is equally important to note the way in which the prevalence of evolutionary thinking situated the daily news into a larger developmental history, one simultaneously national and global in dimension. Yet the widespread acceptance of the terms and temporality of evolutionary thinking in the context of a colonial or semicolonial situation

30 DEVELOPMENTAL FATRY TALES created an excruciating dilemma for “native” intellectuals. All too often, evolutionary accounts of civilizational progress worked to reify modernity as a form of natural history, and rendered the racialized hierarchies of the interstate system a kind of ideological “second nature.” The force of this identification between the scientific epistemology Ernst Haeckel calls a “world-system” and the imperialist order was felt most keenly by the very class of people deeply involved in retailing evolutionary ideas in their local contexts: political elites, translators, academics, journalists, and novelists. Perhaps inevitably, then, the application of evolutionary theory to questions of social, cultural, and geopolitical import resulted in an intense and productive anxiety about their own historical agency as intellectuals entrusted with the task of building a modern nation. This dilemma is revealed in its most paradigmatic and pathological form in novels that attempt to imagine a future beyond the depredations of colonial modernity. In this chapter, I tell a tangled tale about one such novel, Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone, with a view to illuminating the formative role of this anxiety in the making of what we now refer to as modern Chinese literature. Wu Jianren was one of the major figures associated with the emergence of a new print culture in Shanghai in the decade before the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911. In a manner characteristic of an era that saw the translation of Western novels into China on a heretofore unprecedented scale, he is known for his prolific and chimerical experimentation with transplanted fictional genres, ranging from detective fiction and romance to social exposé and science fiction. His work, produced in response to the exigencies of an emergent capitalist book market, was also animated by the political passions of his career as an activist and orator in a number of patriotic and anti-imperialist causes. New Story of the Stone, which began serialization in 1905 and was completed in 1908, is an imaginative rewriting of the single most consecrated work in the premodern Chinese vernacular tradition, Cao Xueqin’s 1754 novel The Story of the Stone (also known as the Dream of the Red Chamber) as a work of utopian speculative fiction. I argue here that Wu Jianren’s text can be read just as profitably in terms of the late Victorian period as the late Qing. In effecting such a shift of our historiographical frame of reference, I want to emphasize the extent to which Wu Jianren’s sequel engages with the overwhelming material and discursive power of late Victorian civilization. The novel

transports Jia Bao-yu, the protagonist of the 1754 text, from the ele-

The Iron House of Narrative oul gant precincts of his home in the Prospect Garden (Daguanyuan) to the savage and degraded world of semicolonial Shanghai in the aftermath of the Boxer uprising. This displacement from a space that is perhaps the single most celebrated crystallization of the glories of Chinese literary and material culture is, of course, a pointed textual enactment of the historical rupture China suffered as a result of its encounter with Western “civilization” (wenming). In Shanghai, Bao-yu assiduously studies the new world and China’s place within it, and gamely dedicates himself to the task of becoming a would-be reformer. His utter disillusionment with the venality and chaos of the world as it is, however, eventually drives him into the world as it should be: a futuristic Confucian state called the Realm of Civilization (Wenming jingjie), in which the colonial world order has been overturned and developmental processes have triumphantly reordered not only the human but also the natural world. As with several other works by the leading reformist intellectuals of the day, including Kang Youwei’s utopian manifesto The Book of Great Unity (Datong shu, 1908) and Liang Qichao’s (symptomatically) unfinished novel A Record of the Future of the New China (Xin Zhongguo weilai ji, 1902), Wu Jianren’s utopian vision is captivated by the technological attainments of Victorian industrial culture: steamships and subways, newspapers and electric clocks, optical instruments and artillery.* His conceptualization of the Realm of Civilization, moreover, simultaneously cites and contests Spencerian social theory. Even more interesting, perhaps, is the text’s close engagement with late Victorian science fiction, especially Edward Bellamy’s globally influential socialist utopia, Looking Backward: 2000-1887. In Bellamy’s best-seller, an affluent Bostonian sleeps for a hundred years, only to awaken to a new century so ideal that the social inequities and distortions of his own era are revealed to the reader with nightmarish intensity. Wu Jianren ingeniously fuses Bellamy’s narrative conceit with the dialectics of dream and reality central to the formal and philosophical architecture of Cao Xueqin’s masterwork. Even more startling is his appropriation and reworking of several episodes from the fiction of Jules Verne, most extensively and significantly the submarine adventures of Professor Arronax and Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (first published in France in 1870). In the Realm of Civilization, Bao-yu (in a manner pointedly out of his original character as an exquisitely eccentric aesthete) becomes an avid hunter and amateur natural historian, voyaging

a2 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES vast distances to kill, collect, and taxonomize rare specimens of marine and avian life on behalf of the national museum of the Realm.° While it would be easy to dismiss these episodes as the work of an imitator or a hack, capitalizing on the contemporary popularity of Jules Verne’s work in Chinese translation, I suggest here that Jia Bao-yu’s newfound interest in animal life is in fact a vital aspect of Wu Jianren’s narrative evocation of what Haeckel called a “world-system,” that is, a heuristic order through which the world can be reimagined. What allows this Chinese “Realm of Civilization” to surpass the West, Wu Jianren proposes, is an epistemological and optical mastery that enables the development of new technologies as yet undreamt of in the West. So powerful are these new ways of seeing that the Realm and its scientists have “outdone heaven and earth” (yu tiandi zhenggong), remaking the earth in the form of an abstract cartographic representation of the Realm’s Confucian

ideology, and subjugating time and the four seasons to direct human control.’ Yet the Realm of Civilization does not merely reflect the importation of positivist epistemology from the West, or a fictionalized proposal that newly sinified forms of instrumental reason ought to be harnessed in service of a modernizing state. Nor should it be read one-dimensionally as presenting a reverse mirror image or mimicry of the scientific prowess of the Western colonial order. For if, as I argued in the Introduction, development must be seen simultaneously as a form of purposive activity and as a trope for the task of rescuing historical agency from the

maw of natural-historical contingency, then we can understand the Realm of Civilization as the textual construction of a “second nature” (a process named by the text itself in the person of an inventor called the

“Remaker of Heaven” [Zaizao Tian]), a man-made world whose autonomy and authorship can no longer be contested.* In an intellectual context consumed by a painful awareness of the laws of evolution (initially translated into Chinese by Yan Fu in 1898 as “the unfolding of heaven,” or tianyan), and their consequences for China in a global strug-

gle for survival through natural selection (rendered in Chinese as “the disposition of heaven in the competition between things” [tianze wujing]), the wording is apposite indeed. Yet this attempt to leapfrog developmental processes in the creation of a “second nature” ultimately proves unsus-

tainable, not only in a strictly ecological sense, but also in a formal and ideological sense. Structured around the central antimonies of evolution-

ary thinking, most notably the simultaneously spatial and temporal

The Iron House of Narrative a3 dualism between the civilized (wenming) and the savage (yeman) nations, Wu Jianren’s text attempts to dream a future outside the iron laws of historical necessity, only to be rudely awakened by the formal contra-

dictions of its own narrative logic.” Ultimately, Bao-yu’s adventures remain captive to the very colonial violence and frustrated geopolitical agency that made it necessary for him to imagine that another world was possible.

The Iron House Revisited In pointing to the narrative unsustainability of Wu Jianren’s utopian novel, I am interested not only in the particular contours of this text, but also in tracing the late Victorian genealogy of the more self-consciously modern literature that emerged in China in the wake of the May 4, 1919, protests in Beijing against the Treaty of Versailles’ arrogation of formerly German colonial territories on the Shandong peninsula to Japanese control. We tend not to associate the work of the May Fourth movement’s greatest literary exponent, Lu Xun, with late Victorian adventure novels— and as scholars like David Wang have made clear, the very modernity of the May Fourth movement was constituted around a performative disavowal of its late Qing predecessors.!” Be that as it may, I argue here that Lu Xun’s writing not only shares a common ancestry in the hybridized print culture of late Qing Shanghai, but also remains captive to some of the same formal and ideological predicaments that afflict Wu Jianren. These commonalities are not merely figurative or thematic; they are surprisingly concrete, evident even in what is perhaps one of the most frequently cited moments in the modern Chinese literary canon: Imagine an iron house, without any windows at all and nearly indestructible. Inside are many sound sleepers, on the verge of suffocation, yet they are entering oblivion insensibly, without feeling the sorrow of their impending death. Now if you begin to shout aloud, waking those few who are relatively alert, and thereby causing this unfortunate minority to suffer the torment of an inescapable and inevitable demise, do you really believe that you could face them?!!

This is a story about captivity, a narrative that seems to go nowhere as it narrows to an inevitable dead-end. As recounted in his preface to his

first collection of short stories, The Outcry (Nahan, 1923), Lu Xun

34 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES offered the parable as a conversational rejoinder to the entreaties of his friend and colleague Qian Xuantong (1887-1939) that he participate actively in the epochal New Culture movement by writing for its flagship journal, New Youth (Xin qgingnian, or La Jeunesse).'* This by now old tale has been retold many times: against his own profound misgivings, Lu Xun acceded to Qian’s demands by writing a scathing (if curiously ambiguous and recursive) critique of the “cannibalism” of traditional Chinese culture, “Diary of a Madman,” thus inaugurating not only his own career as a public figure, but also the new literature as well.!° As with any good parable, the enduring vitality of the passage lies in its ability to present ethical, philosophical, and political questions in narrative form, materializing in a confined textual space complex and often mutually contradictory ideas, desires, and anxieties. Among the most salient of the questions Lu Xun grapples with here are those of historical necessity versus historical agency. Are we merely captives of history, doomed to a foreordained demise, our efforts to forestall fate all in vain? Is it possible to escape the structures that imprison us through purposive activity? Will a revolutionary awakening to new ideas lead

to emancipation, or merely a heightened consciousness of our own powerlessness? These particular questions emerged from a wrenching sense of China’s military, political, economic, and cultural subordination within the modern interstate system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And perhaps the most important index of this relegation to the disenfranchised fringes of the modern world was the pervasive sense that China’s linguistic and cultural heritage was simply unfit for survival in a new global order of racialized competition and predatory imperialism.

For Lu Xun and his generation, late Victorian evolutionary and social theory (and its transposition of a rhetoric of survival, selection, struggle, and extermination into the realm of geopolitics) continued to exercise enormous explanatory value. Indeed, in the wake of Yan Fu’s watershed 1898 translation of T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics into Chinese, evolutionary thinking had become an axiomatic and necessary prism through which Chinese intellectuals sought to understand their own history, geopolitical position, and developmental prospects. And for this reason crucial debates within European evolutionary theory about the role of human agency were replayed in China, with very different local ramifications. Could evolutionary change be effected by human agency, as the Lamarckian notion of the inheritability of acquired characteristics seemed

The Iron House of Narrative oi) to argue? Could evolution function as an engine of social progress, manufacturing a greater degree of fitness to modern circumstances, as seemed to be implied by the work of the British social theorist Herbert Spencer? Or was historical development so contingent, so glacially slow, and so unresponsive to any sort of human endeavor, as was strongly implied by the work of Darwin and T. H. Huxley, that hope itself would be rendered a mirage? Lu Xun’s parable seems to propose a particularly grim rejoinder to this question about agency. And though the parable has sometimes been read

in terms of the existential entrapment of an individual, Lu Xun is not alone in the iron room, and the problem with which he struggles is inherently political. How do you enlighten the benighted, start a movement, initiate a historical process, jump-start development? Is it possible or even ethical to “develop” a people as yet unaware of their own need to be developed? Is “development” a transitive act (as opposed to an intransitive unfolding), and if so, what kinds of assumptions, risks, and responsibilities does it entail?

Here, we return to M. P. Cowen and R. W. Shenton’s notion of the “trusteeship” of governing and colonial elites on behalf of those they administer—a notion they argue has been endemic to the logic of development since the nineteenth century.'* Development, as a form of historical agency directed toward the amelioration of the consequences and structural inequities of colonial modernity, requires both a subject (one who deems himself developed, a “reformer,” or enlightenment intellectual) and an object (those who are understood to be undeveloped, the unenlightened masses). The problem of trusteeship becomes particularly acute, of course, in a semicolonial context characterized by a high degree of polarization between literary, administrative, and comprador elites (be they foreign or native or an admixture of both) and the bulk of the population. This divide is presented in paradigmatic form in Lu Xun’s parable (and, as I will show later, in a far more convoluted, if equally troubling, manner in Wu Jianren’s novel). Commentators have rightly pointed out the Nietzschean predicament of Lu Xun’s awakened intellectual, doomed like Zarathustra to suffer the crushing isolation of having evolved beyond the ken of the as-yet dormant masses.!° Less often remarked are the po-

litical implications of the relationship—a relationship of direct ethical accountability rendered even clearer in the original Chinese: the narrator of the parable questions his own position of power when he asks the

36 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES fictionalized Qian Xuantong, “Do you really believe that you could face them [i dao yiwei dui de gi tamen ma|?”'® The question becomes particularly wrenching and self-referential when we realize that it is the exclusive domain of the narrator (at least within the confines of the text itself) to represent the others, both politically and textually.'” The persona in the parable, in other words, is responsible for both the development of the masses and the direction in which the narrative itself develops (or catastrophically fails to develop). And this is where, of course, we begin to see that the questions of agency, authority, and trusteeship posed by the parable are hopelessly entangled. Any further development of the story will ultimately depend on whether the vanguard intellectual is ultimately just as powerless as those who sleep. Is the end of the parable foretold from the beginning, the story itself suffocated by the iron law of necessity?

Characteristically, in the concluding lines of the parable Lu Xun refuses both fresh air and foreclosure, opting instead for narrative suspension, or what we might call—echoing the glacial imagery of Lu Xun’s own prose-poem “Dead Fire”—a frozen dialectic:!° “But if a few people awoke, you couldn’t say that there is absolutely no hope that they could destroy this iron house.” To be sure, although I had my own convictions, one could not in speaking of hope completely negate it, because hope is in the future, and my proof of the necessity of its nonexistence could not refute his assertion that it might come into being. And thus I finally agreed to write something for him, which was my first piece, “The Diary of a Madman.”!’

The exquisite indecision of this passage—maintained by way of the painstakingly calibrated circumlocutions of Lu Xun’s syntax—has not prevented generations of critics from endeavoring to dismantle the allegory into its constituent parts and ascribe to each a fixed denotation. I have already relied in the foregoing analysis on the tradition that identifies the sleepers as the masses and the awakened narrator as a vanguard intellectual. Others have identified the lighter sleepers as modern students, intellectuals as a whole, or for critics of a more vulgarly Marxist bent, the urban petit-bourgeoisie. The “iron house,” in turn, has consistently been identified as China itself, or with a somewhat greater degree of precision, the suffocating strictures of traditional Chinese culture. Other critics, interested in providing psychoanalytic readings of Lu Xun’s

The Iron House of Narrative oF work, have characterized the iron house as a figure for the author’s own psychic isolation.” What has seldom been considered, however, is the question of how Lu Xun came to employ this specific metaphor. How, in other words, can we account for the materiality of the metaphor, its vehicle as well as its tenor? By materiality, I mean both the material specificity of the referent, and the specific material and historical context (in this case, late Qing print culture and its distinctive practices of translation and textual production) from which Lu Xun’s work emerged. I ask these questions in part because “iron house,” or tiewzu, is a historically determinate, and potentially quite revealing, phrase. It is also semantically ambiguous, in that it could also plausibly be translated as an “iron room,” an “iron chamber,” or even a “cell.” Indeed, I would argue that each of these translations may be preferable, given that iron houses as such were neither a common nor practicable type of residential building in the China of the early twentieth century (or anywhere else, for that matter). Nor is it an image that evokes or retains an organic connection to what we think of as “traditional China” or premodern Chinese culture. On the contrary, what it suggests, particularly in its airtight, metallic seamlessness, are the purposebuilt spaces of modern industrial and disciplinary institutions sharing a common Victorian provenance: not only the prison cell and the lunatic asylum now so closely associated with Michel Foucault’s work on the formation of modern subjectivity, but also the factory workshop, the engine room, the bunker, even the cages in a zoo. In Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, as is well known, the architectural space of the cell is inextricably tied up with an account of the emergence of a new and uniquely modern psychological interiority, a “modern soul” produced by the disciplinary power of the state.7! And it is certainly true, as Leo Ou-fan Lee argues, that Lu Xun’s

image seems to stand in for the “shadowy abode of a disturbed inner psyche.” Interestingly, the darkness and immobility of the iron chamber also register, if only covertly, a particular somatic state: sleeping. The

parable, then, may well hinge on a dialectic of dreaming and waking that is at once figural (in terms of its allegorical valance) and visceral in its suffocating somatic intensity.7* The irony is that awakening is figured

here as little more than a painfully lucid dream, a coming into consciousness of the inevitability of an ongoing nightmare.

If an important process effecting the sort of literary “dreamwork” that yields Lu Xun’s parable is condensation—that is, the juxtaposition

38 DEVELOPMENTAL FATRY TALES and transformation of diverse material and impressions from other sources into a new and displaced configuration—we do well to ask from whence the figure of the “iron house” derives, and how that derivation might help to illuminate our understanding of the questions the parable presents. I suggest here that the parable may plausibly be linked to two episodes from the very same late Victorian novels from which Wu Jianren also drew so liberally: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 20001887 and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Signifcantly, both novels were materially implicated in the colonial diffusion

of new forms of natural-historical knowledge and new institutional vectors for knowledge production. As such, they offer panoramic windows onto new worlds of progress and possibility, yet the visions thus afforded are systematically shadowed by the wrenching temporal and spatial dislocations of their respective narrative arcs. In all three texts, finally, scenes of a sleeping figure in a cell with an iron door serve as an

antechamber to some sort of utopian realm, yet it remains unclear whether liberty is vouchsafed only to those who are captive to a dream.

History and Insomnia Recasting evolutionary thinking in the form of speculative fiction inevi-

tably involves a particular narrative dilemma. The vast gulfs of time implied by the gradual processes of natural selection must be overcome, a ‘wrinkle in time’ effected, allowing the reader to traverse the divide between evolutionary epochs. It is no accident that a welter of such narrative devices—and with them, a fictional genre that we might call the evolutionary adventure—begins to emerge in Great Britain and the United States at precisely the time when popularizers of evolutionary thought such as T. H. Huxley and Ernst Haeckel had reached the apogee of their careers. H. G. Wells (who had attended Huxley’s lectures at the Royal College of Science in London) published his first speculative fiction, “A Tale of the Twentieth Century,” in 1887, and went on to create the ultimate instrument for piercing the veils of deep time in 1895 with the publication of The Time Machine, in which he famously hypothesizes that class difference, maintained indefinitely, could result in the evolution of two separate human races, the Morlocks and the Eloi. H. Rider Haggard’s She—which posited the existence of an evolutionarily degenerate African civilization and its immortal queen isolated in a remote mountain valley and lost to

The Iron House of Narrative Sy, historical time—was also published in 1887. (This device is famously recycled in a paleozoological register by Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World.)

All of these authors were among the most profusely translated into Chinese in the late Qing and early Republican periods, but perhaps none were so influential to the development of the “new novel” in China as Edward Bellamy, whose Looking Backward, 2000-1887 was also published in 1887. Indeed, Bellamy’s tale of the transformation of the United States into a “Nationalist” utopia characterized by the end of capitalist competition and the rational mobilization of labor by the state, enjoyed a global vogue and even inspired the creation of a short-lived “Nationalist” movement modeled upon the novel’s socioeconomic prescriptions.*° The time travel of its bourgeois protagonist, Julian West, is effected by

way of a century-long hypnotically induced slumber, one that allows him to elide the actual process of social “struggle” assumed by most developmental narratives as the motive force of history. The resultant rift in historical time (one that is the occasion for acute existential and ethical anxiety for West) can only be mended through an oddly incestuous romance—Wéest is “naturalized” as a citizen of this classless future by way

of his marriage to the daughter of his mentor in the brave new world of twentieth-century Boston, Dr. Leete. His wife, Edith Leete, in turn mi-

raculously proves to be none other than the granddaughter of Edith Bartlett, the fiancé West had left behind in 1887. Bellamy’s novel is nonetheless predicated on explicitly evolutionary thinking about the nature of historical change. The “Author’s Preface” —

which reflexively purports to have been written in the year 2000— acknowledges the problem of historical change while at the same time wryly asserting its progressivist creed: No historical fact is, however, better established than that till nearly the end of the nineteenth century it was the general belief that the ancient industrial system, with all its shocking social consequences, was destined to last... to the end of time. How strange and well-nigh incredible does it seem that so prodigious a moral and material transformation as has taken place since then could have been accomplished in so brief an interval! ... The almost universal theme of the writers and orators who have celebrated this bimillennial epoch has been the future rather than the past, not the advance that has been made but the progress that shall be made, ever onward and upward, till the race shall achieve its ineffable

40 DEVELOPMENTAL FPALRY “TALES destiny. This is well, wholly well, but it seems to me that nowhere can we find more solid ground for daring anticipations of human development during the next one thousand years, than by “Looking Backward” upon the progress of the last one hundred.**

Elsewhere Bellamy is careful to justify his utopian vision in evolutionary terms. When West, remembering the brutalities of his own day, opines that historical processes already in motion in his own time ought to have resulted in “charred ruins” rather than the orderly glories of the socialist Boston that surrounds him, Leete lays rest his doubts concerning this “contradiction of natural sequence” by discoursing on a “logical evolution” from “corporate tyranny” to state socialism, a logic ultimately predicated on the rationalization and concentration of capital.*> What Bellamy elsewhere characterized in an 1894 speech as “the next great step in human evolution” extends into domestic and social life under Nationalism, wherein “for the first time in human history the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation,” because mates are no longer chosen under merely economic compulsion.*° Ironically enough, given this explicitly Darwinian and eugenicist discourse, Bellamy’s novel was first rendered into Chinese by a prominent Baptist missionary from Ffaldybrenin, Wales, named Timothy Richard (1845-1919), and published serially between 1891 and 1892 in the Review of the Times, or Wanguo Gongbao, the magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge (abbreviated as the SDK and known in Chinese as the Guangxue hui or “Society for Widening Learning”).7’ Richard’s translation, entitled Bainian yijiao (Awaken-

ing after one hundred years), was first printed in book form in 1894, also by the offices of the SDK in Shanghai. Ten years later it was serialized in Illustrated Fiction (Xiuxiang xiaoshuo), a popular journal pro-

duced by China’s largest modern publishing house, the Commercial Press, as Huitou kan (Looking backward) and attributed to its fictional narrator, Julian West, referred to only as Meiguo Weishi (West the American).*® This version—identical to Richard’s original, although erroneously attributed to the Translation Department of the Commercial Press

(Shangwu yinshuguan bianyi suo)—was finally reprinted as a monograph by the Commercial Press in 1913.7” Richard’s original title for the translation was perhaps quite apposite, in that Richard saw his own forty-five year mission in China as an effort

The Iron House of Narrative 41 to awaken the Chinese people, not only to the Christian faith, but also to the “miracles” of modern scientific knowledge: steam, electricity, optics, medicine, and so on.’? Known in Chinese as Li Timotai, Richard began his sojourn in China as a famine relief worker, but he went on to become a leading missionary and a confidant of reformist officials at the very highest levels of the Qing government. His activities as scientific

lecturer and showman, translator, and editor from the 1880s onward were primarily directed at Chinese “officials and scholars,” in whom he hoped to awaken a desire to “utilize the forces of God in nature for the benefit of their fellow-countrymen ... [influencing] them to build railways, to open mines, to avert recurrences of famine, and save the people from grinding poverty.”*! In terms oddly reminiscent of Lu Xun’s parable, he describes one of these officials, the eminent Qing statesman and

modernizer Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909), as the “only official at that time who seemed awake and in earnest. The rest were still asleep, or proud and indifferent to the sufferings of the people.”** Richard appointed himself, in short, as a trustee of the Chinese people, engaged in an enterprise

not so much of proselytization as development, mitigating the poverty and unrest attendant upon China’s incorporation into the modern world system through the dissemination, not merely of technological knowhow, but also its attendant epistemological armature. He notes this shift in the nature of missionary work (for which he had argued strenuously among his contemporaries in the Baptist Missionary Society) in his memoirs: “Formerly the stress had been laid upon saving the heathen from the sufferings of hell in the next world, now foreign missions existed also to save the heathen from the hell of suffering in this world.”*° By the late 1880s the SDK had become Richard’s primary vehicle in this enlightenment enterprise—an enterprise that had profound consequences for modern Chinese print culture and the importation and developmental vocation of the “new novel” as a narrative form. In this sense, Richard was much like his colleague and contemporary John Fryer (1839-

1928), known for his work as the head of the translation bureau of the Qing government’s most successful institutional engine for modernization, the Jiangnan Arsenal (Jiangnan zhizao ju), a workshop for the introduction of modern manufacturing and the translation of the social and scientific theory by which these industrial processes were undergirded.** (Significantly, Wu Jianren himself worked as a copyist in the Arsenal for more than a decade before going on to a career in journalism, and his fictional Bao-yu pays a visit there in the first half of the New Story of the

42 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES Stone, purchasing a huge stack of books selected from the many volumes Fryer had a hand in translating and publishing, in hopes of educating himself in the ways of the modern world.°*°) Fryer’s publishing program sought in aggregate to provide Chinese officials and scholars with an encyclopedic knowledge of the natural and applied sciences, as well as to afford them a glimpse of Western philosophy and the humanities.°°

Fryer was also the founder of China’s first journal of popular science, The Chinese Scientific Magazine (Gezhi huibian), and the general editor of a school and textbook series committee. And as Patrick Hanan notes, Fryer became an early and influential promoter of the novel as an instrument of social reform by sponsoring contests in the composition of fic-

tion advocating scientific education and the elimination foot-binding and opium use.°” In a study of the city of Shanghai as a zone of mediation between the Qing empire and Western imperialism, Meng Yue argues that the signifcance of an institution such as the Jiangnan Arsenal cannot be reduced

to the mere imposition of Western science upon native traditions of natural-historical research and scholarly disputation. Instead, she argues that the Arsenal (and later, the Commercial Press, founded in 1897) became key sites in which local traditions of evidential research, or gezhi, were uneasily fused with “Western learning” (xixue) in the process of translation. She shows, for instance, how the editors of a massive reference work on botanical nomenclature, commissioned by the Commercial Press, were able to mediate between the ostensibly universal Linnaean and Andersonian classifications, and the evidentiary, clinical, and philological traditions embodied by Li Shizhen’s (1518-1593) Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu), thus rescuing local forms of “minor knowledge, minor practices in the use of plants, and the minor cultural history of plants” from the hegemony of an institutionalized Western science.°*® As I will discuss later, a similarly redemptive project may be in play in Wu Jianren’s portrayal of Jia Bao-yu’s natural historical exploits in the Realm of Civilization. Yet all of these ventures—including Richard’s work with the SDK—also share a common provenance in the nineteenthcentury development of what Alan Rauch has termed the “knowledge industry” and the proliferation in Great Britain and beyond of “knowledge texts” dedicated to the taxonomical proposition that “life could be indexed... by a clear set of organizing principles.”*? Knowledge texts included encyclopedias and compendia, all manner of handbooks and guides, as well as primers, didactic texts, and illustrated books for children.

The Iron House of Narrative 43 This industrial venture was symbiotically supported, moreover, by the concurrent establishment of institutions such as lending libraries, museums, botanical and zoological gardens. The kinship of Richard’s Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge with this sort of taxonomic imagination is clearly inscribed in the name of its organization, for as Rauch shows, the “flagship” institution of the knowledge industry in early Victorian England was the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK).*? Founded in 1828 by Lord Henry Brougham (who was also instrumental in the establishment of the University of London), the SDUK devoted itself to promoting the educational development and amelioration of the working and middle classes through the publication of four encyclopedic book series, or “Libraries,” comprising over seventy volumes, as well as the popular Penny magazine. Although the SDUK itself had folded by 1846, it is not difficult to see in the SDK (and its adoption of similar publishing formats) a transposition of the class-bound logic of the original organization onto the semicolonial context of China. More interesting still is that the Jiangnan Arsenal and, on a much larger and more systematic scale, the Commercial Press, went to on build their respective modernizing missions around the production of massive, multivolume “Libraries” dedicated to the taxonomized transmission of a world of scientific, philosophical, and literary knowledge.*!

In Victorian Britain and late Qing China alike, the novel was an important adjunct to the knowledge industry (and also a textual space in which some of its ideological injunctions came to be contested). As a product of the SDK, Richard’s translation of Looking Backward clearly followed a similar trajectory, and thus it throws interesting light on the genealogy and development of late Qing fiction. Initially published as a sort of “knowledge text,” one that Richard must have assumed would contribute the SDK’s enlightenment mission by providing an impetus for reform, it was subsequently taken up by the editors of the Commercial Press, who had become increasingly committed to the notion—advocated by leading turn-of-the-century intellectuals such as Liang Qichao—that the novel had a vital role to play in the forging of what Meng Yue has called “semiotic modernity.” The reprinting of the novel as a monograph and its continued circulation in the years just preceding the May Fourth movement, moreover, mark the growth and expansion of a print culture increasingly geared toward the commodified consumption of fiction as an adjunct to urban leisure.

4. DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES What kinds of historical “knowledge” did Richard’s translation of Bellamy’s novel impart or participate in constructing? That Looking Backward served as the basis for a subsequent spate of utopian novels, including those of Liang Qichao and Wu Jianren, should indicate that Bellamy provided a narrative mode through which “history” might become an object of self-conscious fictional representation. In rendering the future narratable, China’s developmental prospects could be brought into legibility (if not necessarily intelligibility). At a concrete level, this involved the appropriation by aspiring Chinese writers of several of Bellamy’s formal procedures, such as the use of extended pedagogical dialogue between a wide-eyed outsider (West) and an elite and enlightened insider (the aptly named Dr. Leete) as a central organizing device, draftily discursive descriptions of social arrangements and economic conditions, the defamiliarization of familiar objects and scenes, and even the use of the newspaper to evince and instantiate a metahistorical temporality within a novelistic frame. But perhaps the primary (and most problematic) formal borrowing takes place on the level of narrative structure, and represents an attempt to solve the aforementioned question of how you get from one historical moment to the other without accounting for the evolutionary time-lapse in between. Bellamy’s solution (if it is indeed a solution) is symptomatic— quite literally. For Julian West is an insomniac, and his neurasthenic unease is an index of the bourgeois social ills Bellamy intends to diagnose. Underneath the foundations of his family’s “ancient, wooden mansion” (now surrounded by the blight of a new industrial economy) he has constructed a secret subterranean sleeping chamber, isolated from the clamor of the city above: When I had entered it and closed the door, I was surrounded by the silence of the tomb... the walls had been laid in hydraulic cement and were very

thick ...In order that the room might serve also as a vault equally proof against violence and flames, for the storage of valuables, I had roofed it with stone slabs hermetically sealed, and the outer door was of iron with a thick coating of asbestos.*?

Such is West’s mental agitation, however, that these expedients prove insufficient, and West resorts to the services of a “Doctor of Animal Mag-

netism” to induce in himself a profound hypnotic trance. West’s house

The Iron House of Narrative 45 catches fire one night as he lies in a state of suspended animation, and he

lies entombed and presumed dead for one hundred and thirteen years below the ruins, until he is stumbled upon by Doctor Leete as he builds the foundations for a new laboratory in his backyard. As West himself acknowledges, this “improbable” separation from his own historical moment has devastating consequences on his psyche. He wakes on his second morning in the year 2000 to a nightmarish bewilderment, in which “all had broken loose, habits of feeling, associations of thought, ideas of persons and things, all had dissolved and lost coherence and were seething together in apparently irretrievable chaos.” Fearing the onset of schizophrenia, West wanders the streets of Boston in a daze, his mental images of the old and the new city “blurred .. . like the faces of a composite photograph” until he is forced to cover his “burning eyeballs” from the “horror of strangeness.”*? West’s sensation of “absolute intellectual arrest” also serves as an index of the historical aporia generated by the story, and by extension the unsustainability of utopian narrative itself. Although West’s ensuing romance with Edith serves to restore West temporarily to sanity, he wakes on the morning after his engagement to his old subterranean chamber, unhappily restored to nineteenth-century “reality.” The utopian vision was merely a dream, one that served to utterly relativize and defamiliarize his quotidian experience of the world.

When West is handed that morning’s paper—‘“one day’s chronicle of worldwide bloodshed, greed, and tyranny”—it can only be read in terms of paradise lost, and as such it serves as a synecdochal “indictment” of the world system as a whole.** Echoing West’s earlier experience of historical double vision, his ensuing odyssey through the streets of Boston presents an extraordinarily detailed and sustained portrait of the cruelty

and waste of the capitalist city, culminating in a nightmarish vision of the slums: The festering mass of human wretchedness about me offended not now my senses merely, but pierced my heart like a knife, so that I could not repress

sighs and groans. I not only saw but felt in my body all that I saw. Presently, too, as I observed the wretched beings about me more closely, I per-

ceived that they were all quite dead. Their bodies were so many living sepulchers. On each brutal brow was plainly written the hic jacet of a soul dead within. As I looked, horror struck, from one death’s head to another,

I was affected by a singular hallucination. Like a wavering translucent

46 DEVELOPMENTAL FATRY TALES spirit face superimposed upon each of these brutish masks I saw the ideal, the possible face that would have been the actual if mind and soul had lived.*

Riven by remorse for his bourgeois complicity in these social evils, West returns to the scene of the crime—an elegant dinner party at the home of his nineteenth-century flancé—and attempts through a lengthy and passionate exposition of progressive principles to convince the diners of the necessity of a new world, only to be rebuffed.*° Interestingly, not only this scenario, but the impasse West describes—that of a visionary misunderstood by the objects of his messianic concern—is strikingly reminiscent of a series of motifs that run throughout Lu Xun’s work, including “Diary of a Madman” and the aforementioned prose poem “Dead Fire”: But when I had expected now surely the faces around me to light up with emotions akin to mine, they grew ever more dark, angry, and scornful. Instead of enthusiasm, the ladies showed only aversion and dread, while the

men interrupted me with shouts of reprobation and contempt. “Madman!” “Pestilent fellow!” “Fanatic!” “Enemy of society!” were some of their cries... “Put the fellow out!” exclaimed the father of my betrothed, and at the signal the men sprang from their chairs and advanced upon me. It seemed to me that my heart would burst with the anguish of finding that what was to me so plain and so all important was to them meaningless, and that I was powerless to make it other. So hot had been my heart that I had thought to melt an iceberg with its glow, only to find at last the overmastering chill seizing my own vitals. It was not enmity that I felt toward them as they thronged me, but pity only, for them and for the world. Although despairing, I could not give over. Still I strove with them. Tears poured from my eyes. In my vehemence I became inarticulate. I panted, I sobbed, I groaned, and immediately afterward found myself sitting in bed in my room in Dr. Leete’s house, and the morning sun shining through the

open window into my eyes...I realized that my return to the nineteenth century had been the dream and my presence in the twentieth was the reality.*’

This shuttling between centuries, and the uncanny temporal doubling that it enables, does very little to solve the problem with which West (and behind him, Bellamy) is confronted. His guilty sense of complicity in the oppressive bourgeois order of the nineteenth century (which it is strongly implied, occasions this “evil dream” and shadows his newly sunlit existence) cannot be assuaged (save by the deus ex machina of

The Iron House of Narrative 47 Edith’s love), and his evolutionary exhortations at the dinner party are powerless to effect historical change. Ultimately we are left with West suspended between a dream and a nightmare and unable to awake fully to either, captive to a frozen dialectic as history dreams its own unfolding from within an airtight chamber.

Yellow Submarine It is through the iron door of another sort of airtight chamber that Professor Arronax and his sidekicks Conseil and the harpooner, Ned Land, enter into the “utopian epistemology” exemplified by Captain Nemo’s submarine in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.** The Nautilus is at once a taxonomizing machine that surveys a world beneath the ocean waves and a stateless kingdom unto itself, quite literally evading taxonomization within the world system.*”? Arronax, a marine biologist and curator, has embarked on a quest to identify a strange beast sighted, improbably, from craft plying shipping lanes in all quarters of the navigable world. When the American frigate that Arronax and his companions are aboard is rammed by what turns out to be Captain Nemo’s unprecedented iron-hulled and electric-powered submarine, they are taken prisoner by sailors of no particular nation, who speak an unidentifiable language and seal them inside an iron cell. The ensuing episode is one with which both Wu Jianren and Lu Xun would surely have been familiar, for it was published in the very first issue of the nationalist intellectual Liang Qichao’s pioneering journal, New Fiction (Xin xiaoshuo), sandwiched between Liang’s manifesto on the power of fiction to renovate the consciousness of the citizenry, “On the Relation between Fiction and Popular Governance” (“Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi”) and his own attempt to forge a utopian narrative modeled on Bellamy’s Looking Backward, A Record of the Future of the New China.° Lu Xun, perhaps influenced by this first translation, went on to adapt two more of Verne’s novels into Chinese just one year later in Japan, publishing the first, De la terre a la lune (Yuejie liixing) in October 1903, with a Chinese nationalist press called the Evolution Society (Jinhua she). A rendition of Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (Didi liixing) followed just months later, serialized in the émigré student journal Zhejiang Tide (Zhejiang chao).°' Wu Jianren’s novel, in turn, is a transparent attempt to rework Verne in an anticolonial setting congenial to an emergent sense of Chinese nationalism.

48 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES We can only speculate as to whether Lu Xun first encountered Verne

through translations into Japanese by Inoue Tsutomu, or through the collaborative effort by Lu Jidong and Hong Xisheng to render Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea into Chinese as Haidi liixing (Journey

at the bottom of the sea), a work that was misattributed to “Jules of England” (Yingguo Xiaolushi).°? We do have a sense, however, of what might have attracted the young Lu Xun to Verne’s work, and to science fiction as a genre. He begins his introductory remarks to his own adaptation of Verne’s De la terre a la lune (whose author he identifies as an American called “Chalisi Peilun”) with a grand evocation of the progress of civilization toward the annihilation of natural constraints: Before the men of old had attained knowledge, Heaven had complete dominion over the earth, and the mountain ranges and expanses of waves were obstacles in the way of movement. Gradually, the art of splitting logs and carving planks came into being, and means of transport were invented; with oars and sails, these tools grew ever more advanced. Yet gazing out to the vastness of the ocean, where water meets sky on the horizon, the spirit shrank in fear, and made its excuses. Then came the forging of iron and the use of steam, and carriages and boats ran like the wind. Human dominion expanded daily, while the rule of heaven receded; the five continents became like a single house, civilizations intermingled, and thus the world of today took its present form.

Lu Xun goes on to laud the “warlike spirit” of Verne’s fiction, which takes the next imaginative leap in positing the conquest of outer space.°? Science fiction, Lu Xun argues, is a necessary component of a larger project of promoting “knowledge, breaking down lingering superstitions, reforming thought, and aiding civilization”—tasks achieved by way of the novel’s ability to narrativize the leap into a progressive future in human terms. The urgency of this task is, in turn, underscored by ironic reference to the relative backwardness of the Chinese people, referred to here in a formulation that might be understood alternately as the “profound” or “benighted lineage of the Yellow emperor” (mingming huangzu).>* The pedagogical function of science fiction—its utility as a knowledge text through which Chinese readers might come to know (and perhaps question) the world order—is underscored by the Chinese translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The ideological instability of this “knowledge function,” in turn, is aptly emblematized by the way in

The Iron House of Narrative 49 which Professor Arronax’s name is translated: on account of the syntactic flexibility of the Chinese, Arronax as “Ou Lushi” can be rendered back into English as either “The World as Revealed by Europe” or “Europe Exposed to the World.” And Nemo—a stateless scientist who claims singular dominion over the oceans and their vast resources in the name of those “oppressed” by a civilization (wenming) he scorns—is ultimately revealed in his Chinese guise as Li Meng (a reverse homophone for “in a dream”).°° Before Ou Lushi can be shown Li Meng’s mobile museum of marine biology, he is held captive along with his companions in a “windowless” and “incomparably solid” (jianshi wubi) iron cell, and denied knowledge of the nature of the Nautilus or the identity of their enigmatic captors..°° Ou Lushi watches his companions drop off into “dreamy obliv-

ion” inside this mysterious chamber, and finally falls into a troubled dream of his own: Suddenly the air in the room began to thin. His breathing gradually became more labored. Ou Lushi woke from his dream and gazed around him. There was a dim electric light and the four walls were silent. He could

only hear the sound of Li and Gao [Land and Conseil] sleeping, their breath like bellows. He felt at this moment an intense loneliness tinged with grief. His heart was stifled with anguish.°’

It would be difficult to ignore the parallels between this scene and Lu Xun’s parable. Ou Lushi’s suffocation seems as much emotional as physical, seemingly stemming from his isolation and inability to come to the aid of the men in his charge. When they do stir from sleep, disturbed by the lack of air, Ou Lushi provides them (and by extension, the knowledgestarved reader) with a lengthy lecture on the science of respiration—which

strikes us as something of a waste of breath. Ultimately it is Li Meng who clears the air by replenishing the submarine’s supply of oxygen and freeing him from the cell. Li Meng also initiates Ou Lushi into the dreamlike wonders of the Nautilus: its technological inventions, its well-stocked

library and gallery of fine paintings and objets d’art, its vast archive of marine specimens, gems, and minerals, and the plate-glass windows that provide a panoramic view of the ever-changing natural-historical spectacle of Li Meng’s aqueous empire.

What happens when Verne’s technological marvels and naturalhistorical spectacles are appropriated through translation by those at the

50 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES colonial fringes? On a linguistic level, Verne’s lengthy enumerations of technical specifications and litany-like invocations of the scientific names of minerals, fish, and other submarine species tax the resources of the Chinese translators, who must rely on either neologism, condensation, or adjectival approximation to convey the nominal plenitude of the original.°® This classificatory function is complex: at the same time that it positions

the novel as a nonfictional “knowledge text,” it also serves to name and thus claim the world as Nemo’s territory.°’ In a very real sense, however, this linguistic sovereignty eludes Chinese readers in translation, in that Verne’s taxonomic terminology (cobbled together from Latin nomenclature, scientific jargon, maritime lore, and so on) simply could not be reproduced in a language to which they were still alien, and in which lexically equivalent terms had yet to be established through scientific translation. The anxious sense of falling short provoked by this linguistic and epistemological gap is indirectly addressed within the apparatus of the Chinese text itself: when Nemo/Li Meng affects an inability to understand any of the major languages of the “first-class civilized nations” (diyi deng wenming guo), the supralineal or “eyebrow commentary” (mezpi) printed above

the main text (a format customary in the fiction of the Ming and Qing dynasties) editorializes, “If you don’t understand foreign languages and writing systems, you can’t even hold your own against a thief—it’s not easy

to get along in the world of Civilization.”°? The very task of translation, then, cannot help but emphasize the degree to which China and Chinese as a linguistic entity remained outside of the Haeckelian world-system. And yet, what must also have been compelling about this particular text is the way in which Nemo and the Nautilus itself exercise a kind of negative sovereignty, eluding the grasp of both the modern epistemological order and the system of interstate diplomacy and commerce. Arronax’s hunt for the Nautilus begins precisely because it is an unidentified floating object threatening global shipping lanes. Yet Arronax the hunter is ultimately held captive, and the stateless renegade is able to claim (in part by planting a flag with his own device on the South Pole) dominion over the world, in a gesture that echoes, but also serves to parody, the territorial claims of the new imperialism. Interestingly, Verne originally intended for Nemo to be identified as a Polish nationalist, claiming a place for his vanished nation in the world system through vengeful acts of real and epistemological sabotage against the great powers.°! That he became unidentifiable (even to the point of having invented his

The Iron House of Narrative ball own onboard language) at the behest of Verne’s publisher, who feared that the Russian government would take offense, may have rendered him even more flexible as a figure of sovereignty lost and found. It is precisely Li Meng’s insubordination and intransigence to “civilization” that is emphasized in the Chinese texts. When Ou Lushi speaks of what separates the conduct of the civilized from the savage: Li Meng’s eyebrows prickled like swords and his eyes widened angrily like a tiger, as he sharply expostulated, “Ou Lushi, it’s no use trying to intimi-

date me with the characters for ‘civilization. I long ago abandoned the world. The laws of the human world were mere fetters for me.”°°

This feral outburst provokes a soliloquy in which Ou Lushi confesses not only his fear, but also his “love” for Li Meng’s obdurate independence, which is echoed in turn by the eyebrow commentary: “I too have come to respect and love him.”®* A subsequent chapter heading, cast in a poetic idiom characteristic of late imperial vernacular fiction, implies a degree of camaraderie between the two men lacking in the original text, and emphasizes the utopian promise of this realm beyond civilization: With mutual affection between host and guest as consolation [they roam beyond] the ends of the earth Broad are the borders of the empire of the sea Startling is the first sight of paradise®

Wandering in a Garden, Waking from a Dream In Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone this utopian vision is taken up and inverted. Whereas the Nautilus moved outside the sanction of the interstate system and represented an epistemological challenge to its legitimacy, the whale-shaped submarine aiding Jia Bao-yu in the prosecu-

tion of his own predatory expeditions is owned and operated by the Realm of Civilization. Where Li Meng traveled outside the borders of the world system, in an oceanic no-man’s-land, Bao-yu’s worldwide travels by flying machine and submarine seem to indicate that such boundaries no longer exist, largely because the Realm occupies a position of unquestioned global hegemony. The narrative logic and ideological premises of Wu Jianren’s text rest on a series of such inversions. From the very start, Wu Jianren sets out to

a2 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES invert the values of its Chinese source text, replacing Cao Xueqin’s dreamlike evocation of the ephemeral quality of human existence with a devel-

opmental narrative that assumes that literary practice must be engaged with the historical unfolding of the nation-state. In endeavoring to make sense of the predicament of semicoloniality, moreover, the novel comes to rely on a different sort of inversion, whereby the wrongs of its first twenty chapters—portraying Bao-yu’s painfully picaresque efforts to navigate the intolerably topsy-turvy exigencies of Wu Jianren’s own historical moment—are systematically righted in the imaginary precincts of the

Realm of Civilization. With inversion, however, comes instability and the threat of further inversion or reversion, as is clear from Julian West’s oneiric return to the ghastly realities of the nineteenth century. And as it turns out, the narrative logic of Bellamy’s text as well is echoed and overturned in New Story of the Stone, but to devastating effect, undermining the developmental premises of its fictional realm.

Those premises are laid out in quite revealing terms in a 1907 introduction to the novel that appeared on the occasion of its continuing serialization in the All-Story Monthly (Yueyue xiaoshuo), a short-lived journal with which Wu Jianren was closely associated. Written by a self-styled

“Newspaper Freak” (Baopi), who is almost certainly either Wu Jianren himself or one of his close associates, the article reflects on the difficulties inherent in producing a sequel to one of China’s literary monuments, and congratulates the author for usurping Bao-yu’s place at the center of the original narrative with a Dr. Leete-like mentor, Lao Shaonian (Old Youth) in the Realm of Civilization. Lao Shaonian’s name, as contemporary read-

ers would have recognized immediately, harks back to Liang Qichao’s then-recent call for an evolutionarily progressive “young China” (shaonan Zhongguo), but also seems to hint at the difficulties involved in the application of such thinking to what was widely perceived to be an ancient, hence developmentally arrested, empire. Lao Shaonian becomes an oracular figure, leading Bao-yu and the uninitiated reader forward into an as yet unimaginable future: The Lao Shaonian in the book is an incarnation of the author. And the new principles he has invented, endlessly strange and inventive, always presenting a fresh and innovative aspect, are almost all intimately related to reality, conforming to the general rules of evolution [tianyan]|. The more you research these principles, the more advanced they seem; the more you think

The Iron House of Narrative a them through, the more ingenious they become, unknown as they are even in this extremely civilized, extremely evolved twentieth century.

As “Newspaper Freak” continues somewhat immodestly, the new novel is superior to the old precisely on this account: Where the Stone was gorgeous, the New Stone is solemn; the old Stone was leisured, while the new Stone gets to work; the old Stone was fraught with private sentiment, while the New Stone advocates public principles; the old Stone wrote of corrupt phenomena, while the New Stone hails the under-

current of Civilization, the old Stone was romantic fiction and domestic fiction, while the new Stone is science fiction and educational fiction.°”

In the novel itself, however, this rupture between past and present comes at a cost. Jia Bao-yu—a sentient stone left unused by Niwa, the mender of the Heaven in Chinese cosmological lore—ended the old Stone by dis-

entangling himself from the samsaric and romantic attachments of his mortal existence in the bosom of the aristocratic Jia (a homophone for “false” or “fictional”) family to return to the “Land of Illusion” (Taixu huanjing). In the sequel, he awakes from this Buddhist enlightenment determined to return to the mortal world once more to fulfill an as yet unaccomplished injunction—“mending heaven.” As David Wang points out, Wu Jianren’s use of the phrase represents a highly significant semantic shift whereby “heaven” (tian) is resignified in terms of the newly prevalent

discourse on evolution (tianyan) and linked thereby to the imperatives of China’s nation-building project. Bao-yu’s ensuing journey into Wu Jianren’s own time mirrors the epis-

temological and historical rupture of colonial modernity itself. This rupture is felt most keenly, and enacted by way of texts. One of Bao-yu’s

first encounters in the “present” is with a puzzling sheet of paper covered with small print (including the date in the unfamiliar Gregorian calendar), which contains a digest of something called the “news.” That he cannot go home again from this new textual and temporal order is made even clearer when he and his trusty servant Beiming ask directions to the elegant compounds of his old home and are ridiculed for having

lost their grip on reality due to an excessive absorption in the fictive world Dream of the Red Chamber.®* Perplexed, Bao-yu sends his page to market to buy a copy. Discovering that it is, in fact, the story of his

54 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES own life, he falls into a nearly catatonic state, refusing food and drink for several days. With Bao-yu’s traumatic encounter with his own textual mirror image, Wu Jianren makes clear the extent to which the collective past has become not only a distant fiction but also a commodity in an emergent book market. Yet it is also a mark of the complexity of Wu Jianren’s novel that this scene doesn’t merely stage a rupture with its

predecessor. Instead, drawing on its Buddhist rhetoric of the illusory nature of things, Wu Jianren opens up the historical real to dialectical question: as Bao-yu reflects on the book, the new century to which he has been transported comes to seem more and more “like a dream.” °’

In the ensuing chapters, Bao-yu travels to Shanghai by steamboat. This journey and his subsequent efforts to educate himself to modern ways represent an awakening to the power of modern technologies, the outrageous inequities of the colonial order, and the absurdities of Western civilization. Wu Jianren depicts Bao-yu in Shanghai as a Candide-like figure and an instinctive nationalist, whose unjaundiced eye defamiliarizes the nature of the contemporary scene. He is delighted by steamships, but scandalized by the fact that, for insurance reasons, Chinese are not allowed to pilot even the launches operated by one of the few local capitalist ventures, the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company. He takes an instant dislike to a fawning Chinese comprador named Bo Yaolian (a close homophone for “Shameless”), fulminates against the frivolousness of the Chinese craze for the Edison phonograph, and rails against restrictions imposed by the Shanghai Municipal Council on selling wild game at market, for these statutes effectively ban hunting in the hinterlands that supply the city.’”? These critiques, of course, speak to various as-

pects of the semicolonial condition: spiritual abjection, dependency on manufactured foreign goods, and the effective political control exercised by foreigners on everyday life even beyond the boundaries of the treaty port concessions. When Bao-yu, who is guided toward the path of reformist politics by his mentor, Wu Bohui (a homophone meaning “nothing of which he’s not capable,” and clearly an authorial persona and mirror image of Lao Shaonian in the second half of the book), ventures outside Shanghai and into the Chinese interior, he is confronted by an even more intolerable reality. He experiences firsthand the turmoil and violence of the Boxer rebellion and its brutal suppression by Allied forces in 1901. Soon after, he travels with Wu Bohui to the Yangzi port city of Hankou (where Wu Jianren himself briefly served as the editor of an American-owned news-

The Iron House of Narrative 55 paper before resigning in protest against congressional renewal in 1902 of the Chinese Exclusion Act). As Wu Bohui busies himself in trying to release a friend who has been falsely imprisoned, Bao-yu discusses national

politics with local students. Overheard implicitly criticizing the educational policies of local government officials, Bao-yu himself is clapped in irons. In a terrifying sequence that is once again oddly reminiscent of Lu Xun’s parable, would-be political assassins creep into his darkened prison cell and attempt to suffocate him in his sleep by covering his face with a heavy sack of rice and immobilizing his limbs: He thought to himself, “So, this is how they kill you.” He resolved to wait patiently for death, suffering the pain of not being able to draw a breath, as the air in his stomach gradually rushed toward his head and his eyes felt as if they were popping from their sockets ... Bao-yu, crushed to the point of suffocation, fell into faint, feeling only that his body was floating, beginning to fly, and what disturbed him the most was that he could neither hear nor see and could not tell anymore if he was alive or dead. From within this daze, he suddenly heard from afar the sound of a voice calling his name, and though he wanted to reply by asking who it was, he could not make a sound, as if mute. The voice calling to him grew louder and closer, and still he felt the bitterness of being unable to respond.”!

The voice that brings him out of the darkness is that of his Shanghai mentor, Wu Bohui, but Bao-yu emerges from this scene at the midpoint of the novel convinced of the utter futility of his quest to “mend heaven” in what he now realizes is a “Savage Country” (yeman zhi guo) and a “dark world” (hei’an shijie).’/* And it is here—precisely at the point at which the pressure of current events and the insolubility of the China’s pre-

dicament become most painfully apparent—that the novel stages an improbable allegorical lurch into an alternate and compensatory mirror world.

On the way to a haven of freethinkers and renegades from society called Freedom Village, Bao-yu passes through Confucius’s hometown, Qufu. The place is a shambles, and to add insult to injury, Bao-yu is nearly killed by thieves who creep through a hole in the wall of his room at the inn. He is accosted as he flees, and finally is forced, without conscious agency, through the gates of the “Realm of Civilization.” It is important to note here that the name of Wu Jianren’s utopian state

is itself embedded in the history of the importation and acculturation of evolutionary discourse in East Asia. The term “civilization” reached

56 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES China through Japan, where it had come into broad use in the wake of the Meiji reforms of 1868.” Paired with “enlightenment” into a single incantatory phrase—bunmei kaika (Chinese: wenming kaihua)—the slogan

came to represent both the advanced state of evolutionary progress of the West and the developmental aspirations of Japan. By the 1880s the phrase (and its attendant ideological program) had become so ubiquitous as to seem a naturalized part of the discursive landscape, migrating, as Carol Gluck has it, “from the main to the dependent clause of ideological speech.” ”* By the late 1890s, largely through the journalistic intervention of Chinese intellectuals such as Liang Qichao, the phrase—and the developmental trajectory from savagery to civilization it necessarily implied—had come into common use among nation-building elites in China as well. Wu Jianren, in fact, playfully questions the self-evidence of its assumptions just at the moment when we enter the “Realm of Civilization” by asking the reader point blank if such a supernatural narrative shift might not seem “absurd” in “this era of ‘civilization and enlightenment. ””» This discursive ambivalence is compounded by his choice of “Realm,”

or jingjie, to demarcate the utopian polity Bao-yu is about to enter. Jingjie has a remarkable—and remarkably subtle—range of denotation, stretching from the territorial border between two states, to the quality of an aesthetic or philosophical perception, or mental landscape, as captured in a poem, painting, or piece of writing.’° It is a phrase, in other words quite uniquely suited to bridging the divide between a “state” in a political sense and a “state of mind,” between actuality and desire. As we shall see in a moment, that semantic instability proves crucial.

We quickly learn from Lao Shaonian that the Realm exemplifies a kind of technological and even epistemological one-upmanship of the West, a “Civilization” that purports to be far more civilized than the savagery of the nineteenth-century. At the border, Bao-yu is subjected to

an optical device that will ascertain whether or not his ethereal “essence” is suitably civilized to enter. Soon we realize that the Realm has invented a whole host of new ways of seeing—‘“thousand mile telescopes,”

scopes that allow one to see beneath the surface of the oceans, even sensors that help Chinese doctors visually track the flow of gi, vital energy within the body. Indeed, as Lao Shaonian is wont to advertise, a central

characteristic of the Realm is its incorporation of traditional Chinese modes of knowing and systematizing the world into its technological devices and social organization. Recalling Meng Yue’s account of the

The Iron House of Narrative 57 way in which Chinese intellectuals attempted in these years to salvage “minor” traditions and cultural practices even as they busied themselves in translating a hegemonic deluge of the Western scientific discourse into Chinese, we might assert here that Wu Jianren attempts to go one step further, positing a realm in which these traditions, through a kind of narrative sleight of hand, are once again the primary constituents of the culture. Taking his cues from the central structural and thematic motif of the mirror in Cao Xueqin’s source text, Wu Jianren is also careful to reflect the first half of the novel against the second. Wu Bohui (a fictional alter ego who, the author suggests at one point, is also “Mr. Mirror Me” [Jizgwo xiansheng]|) is superseded by Lao Shaonian, who becomes Bao-yu’s new

trustee and teacher. Each of the inequities, injustices, and immoralities of the “Primitive Country” are inverted and superseded, as if in a reverse mirror image. The Edison cylinders that so offended Bao-yu in the first

half of the book are in the Realm of Civilization put to much better use—rather than allowing for the playback of music by way of a needle “scratching” across a wax cylinder, the engineers of the Realm have created a system of flexible lunglike tubes exactly reproducing the human

voice.’’ The steamships of the nineteenth century are surpassed by graceful flying machines and an efficient and silent subway system that glides above its rails. All of these innovations have been designed, moreover, according to specifications suggested by ancient Chinese texts. Yet the apogee of the Realm’s technological mastery is its imposition of near-total control over space and time. This involves, again, a process of inversion. Whereas Bao-yu was perplexed by the Gregorian calendar and Western timekeeping, the Realm has developed new chronometers that use traditional Chinese metrics to measure out the days, months, and years. The very topography of the Realm is inscribed with the language of its Confucian-inflected ideology: Our humble realm has two hundred thousand districts, each one hundred square /i in area, divided into five sections—East, West, North, South, and Central—each divided into forty thousand districts, with each group of ten thousand districts designated by a single character. The characters, starting from the center are Rites, Music, Culture, Pattern, with Benevolence, Righteousness, Decorum, and Wisdom in the East, Amity, Compassion, Respect, and Trust in the South, Fortitude, Strength, Courage, and Spirit in

58 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES the West, and Duty, Filial Piety, Modesty, and Chastity in the North. Right now, we’re in Strength Section, District 100.”

Within each of these districts, Lao Shaonian explains, the government has built four climate-controlled gardens, one for each season, allowing the people to enjoy each of the seasons all year round and never lack for food or produce. This Edenic technology is given a telling genealogy. One hundred years ago, Lao Shaonian informs us (perhaps echoing Bellamy’s chronological scheme), the Realm was afflicted by poverty and its science still in its “early stages.”’”? Moved by the catastrophic failure of the cotton harvest as a result of an early freeze, a certain Hua Bizhen (“China must rise”) invented new techniques of cloud seeding and chemical climate control in order to free the Realm from the caprices of nature. He, in turn, is honored in each garden by a statue proclaiming him “The Remaker of Heaven,” or Zaizao Tian. This almost Fourier-like fantasy of self-sufficient production is clearly generated from, and attempts to compensate for, the vagaries of dependence on the world market portrayed in the first half of the novel. As the novel continues, it becomes clear that what is at stake in Wu Jianren’s evocation of the Realm is nothing less than the creation of a second nature, and with it, a narrative about natural history that will in fact supersede that of the West. It is significant in this regard that of the eighteen chapters Bao-yu spends inside the Realm, nearly nine are devoted to the elaboration of his expeditions, by air and by submarine, to capture, kill, and collect natural historical specimens. This uncharacteristic emphasis on muscular exploits may represent in part a desire to invert and reform the explicitly feminized persona of the original Baoyu, so as to play against geopolitical type. Bao-yu’s hunting also harks directly back to the episode in which he complains about the wider territorial implications of a seasonal ban on wild game by the colonial authorities in Shanghai. In the Realm, not only is he able to hunt freely, but his soaring flights across an Africa emptied of all natives in search of prey and plunder also signal the impunity with which he is able to cross borders and assert his control over a domain that extends beyond the quadrants of the Realm. But more than a simple expression of colonial ressentiment, Bao-yu’s expeditions serve to map distinctly Chinese textual traditions onto global ecological space. Bao-yu’s aerial safari in Africa, for instance, takes place

in hot pursuit of the mythical Peng bird—a stupendously large creature

The Iron House of Narrative 59 famously featured in the opening chapter of the third-century BCE Daoist text the Zhuangzi. In his submarine voyage beneath the South Pole (an itinerary that mimics that of Captain Nemo), he tracks the magnificent Kun fish (also prominently mentioned in the Zuangzi) and encounters, captures, and documents a host of creatures from another third-century BCE text: the bestiary and geographical handbook known as the Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai jing). There is no small irony in the fact that the Peng and the Kun are, in the Zhuangzi, figures for the vast, ancient, untamed, and ultimately ineffable, for temporal and spatial scales that dwarf and relativize all human knowledge. When Lao Shaonian and Bao-yu have finally overcome the Peng over the savannahs of Africa, they devise an ingenious system of ropes and pulleys to haul its gigantic corpse back to the Realm’s Museum, where it is measured at fifty-two feet long, embalmed, and hung in a hall displaying various avian specimens. The hunters, moreover, are decorated for their service to the State, and given a tour of the national museum and archives, in which an entire world of natural historical artifacts and book learning is archived, Bao-yu notes admiringly, “according to category and type” (fenmen bielei). It is, in effect, a total museum, one that houses not only the literature of “the ten thousand nations and five continents,” but also a miraculously reconstituted collection of the

Chinese textual heritage in its entirety, including the very books that were said to have been lost in the notorious bibliocaust perpetrated by the First Emperor of the Qin dynasty.*°°

This heady vision of historical wholeness and epistemological plenitude is both a pastiche and seemingly unintentional parody of Nemo and Arronax’s monomaniacal pursuit of natural historical data. It is also an effort to build, if only textually, a sinified analogue to the great archival institutions of imperial knowledge so characteristic of the Victorian era—one that may ultimately be better read as an allegory of the inevitable museumification of a premodern culture confronted by the predicament of a postcolonial epistemic regime. What might it mean to deploy the most advanced flying machines to slaughter a singular and sublime figure of the Dao, and transform it into an natural historical exhibit in a museum? It is difficult not to conclude that Wu Jianren’s project ultimately founders on such formal and ideological contradictions. The first of these con-

tradictions might be characterized as the unsustainability of the novel’s adventure in colonial critique. In transforming Bao-yu into a hunter and

60 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES ecological vandal, Wu Jianren has no doubt inverted the colonial order. Yet, as becomes sadly manifest in a scene that takes place during his submarine voyage to the South Pole, this inversion is neither innocent nor bloodless. Encountering a rocky island crowned by a grove of translucent, shining coral trees of a variety never before discovered by science (though anticipated, Lao Shaonian assures us, in the textual traditions of premodern Chinese scholarship), Bao-yu and company stop to harvest samples for the museum. In so doing, Bao-yu stumbles upon another new species—a school of “adorable” ice-minks that live and frolic among the icebergs in the polar sea.*! A long and somewhat harrowing hunt ensues, in which the ice-minks are shot with rifles, flushed out from their burrows within the crevasses inside the ice, and finally netted alive for sport by Bao-yu and his men, who hover above the water in flying machines. Captured, the ice-minks are locked in the watertight hold of the submarine, along with the other ecological booty the submarine has collected along its oceanic path. All but a few of the ice-minks immediately expire of heat exhaustion—it turns out that their fur is so thick that they cannot withstand anything warmer than glacial temperatures—and their corpses are found heaped in the hold upon arrival in the Realm of Civilization. The few that survive, it turns out, have been kept cool by the intense chill radiating from by the translucent coral sharing the iron belly of the submarine, but they will clearly be unable to survive their release from the hold. Oddly enough, the text lingers on the image of the dead ice-minks, explaining the reasons for their demise not once but twice, and allowing first Bao-yu, then Lao Shaonian, to stroke their dead, frozen bodies, all the while enjoying the intense warmth of their fur. It is a minor moment, perhaps, in a

text overstuffed with natural historical and technological detail, and yet its ambiguous movement between pathos and pleasure—the icemink’s dead fire—seems to suggest that Bao-yu’s triumphal progress remains entrapped by an untenable logic, undermined by the very colonial violence he seeks to negate. An even more spectacular sort of unsustainability stems directly from the way in which Wu Jianren has borrowed from Bellamy’s oneiric narrative structure. In the final chapter of the novel, Bao-yu falls asleep in the guest room of the leader of the Realm, Dongfang Wenming (“Orien-

tal Civilization”), who has invited him to confer with the elite class of technocrats and administrators who have engineered the Realm’s ascent to wealth and power. In the ensuing dream, he is called back to Shanghai

The Iron House of Narrative 61 by telegram, and vouchsafed a vision of what a new China might look like were it allowed to develop freely under the enlightened rule of a constitutional monarchy. As Theodore Huters has pointed out in his authoritative study of late Qing fiction, that vision is in some respects eerily remi-

niscent of China in the year 2000 in all its environmental degradation: as Bao-yu steams along the Yangzi River, he realizes that, almost overnight, hundreds of miles of factories lining the river from Hankou to Shanghai have transformed the nation into an industrial powerhouse.** Beying has become a global entrepot, where the Chinese emperor (who, we are told, uncannily resembles Dongfang Wenming) triumphantly presides over a massive “Conference on International Peace.” Bao-yu, an enthusiastic spectator of these Olympian developments, applauds the emperor’s speech to the assembled delegates. But just as the emperor hails a new era of global harmony in which the racialized struggle for survival of the nineteenth century will have become a thing of the past, the bottom quite literally drops out of his vision: Bao-yu was clapping his hands, and wanted also to stamp his feet. Who could have known that as he stamped, his feet would find only an abyss beneath, into which he tumbled for thousands of yards, his eyes staring into

the darkness, as the terror of the fall made him break into a cold sweat. When he could finally force his eyes open, he found himself still lying on the bed in Dongfang Wenming’s house—it was all a dream.*°

As Huters cogently argues, Bao-yu’s vertiginous return to the Realm heralds a “stunning collapse of narrative perspective.”** For Bao-yu’s return to Shanghai “represents the only actual meeting between the ‘real’ China of the late Qing” and the fantasy of the Realm, and thus this revelation of the patent fictionality of the former can only heighten our sense of the illusory nature of the latter.°° Bao-yu, in other words, has tumbled right into the aporia at the center of utopian narrative, for what is revealed here is the impossibility of accounting in historical terms for the developmental process posited by the narrative. What is worse is that, unlike Julian West, Bao-yu has a nasty surprise waiting for him when he wakes up once again in a Realm unbound by the historical real. Catching sight of the putative ruler of the Realm in whose house he has been sleeping, he suddenly recognizes in him his own staidly Confucian doppelganger from the old Story of the Stone, Zhen (the “Real”

as opposed to the “Fake” or Jia) Baoyu. With the reappearance of this

62 DEVELOPMENTAL FALRY “CALES nemesis, we are suddenly reminded that, all protestations to the contrary, the New Story of the Stone is unable to resist the gravitational pull of its own origins. And with a single cruel stroke, Wu Jianren not only implies that the entire novel may have been the dream of an solitary and isolated

individual (as Huters argues), but also wrests from Jia Bao-yu his last hope of serving as a trustee in the developmental enterprise.*° Haunted by the past, a belated bystander to a history that has yet to unfold, Bao-yu is

ultimately denied even the consolation of agency and consigned to the scrap heap of evolutionary history.

INHERIT THE WOLF Lu Xun, Natural History, and Narrative Form “My acquaintance with Wei Lianshu,” writes the narrator of Lu Xun’s 1925 story “The Misanthrope,” “began with a funeral, and ended with a funeral.” Although sometimes overlooked by Lu Xun critics, this complex and affecting text (the title of which can also be translated as “The Loner”)

has much to teach us about how early twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals came to imagine and narrativize their own developmental impasse in natural-historical terms.' “The Misanthrope” tells a story about would-be reformers and progressive intellectuals, “light sleepers” in the iron

cell of a stifling provincial town, whose every effort to effect historical change is forestalled before it has even begun. It is a story, in other words, that seems to enact the futility of the aspirations of Chinese intellectuals in the very inevitability of its narrative movement. An account of the friend-

ship between the narrator, Shenfei, and Wei Lianshu, a fellow teacher whose modern eccentricities of thought and manner have earned him only derision as “another species” (yilez) in his hometown, the text chronicles a death foretold, as Lianshu is driven by a hostile society into joblessness, despair, apostasy of his progressive ideals, and a tubercular demise. Lianshu’s entrapment within the exigencies of tradition, invidious social taxonomies, and his own skin is devastating, not only to the reader but also for the narrator. The story’s final and uncanny suggestion that Shenfei himself has inherited Lianshu’s misanthropic mantle (just as Lianshu inherited his own sorrow from the grandmother whose funeral sets the narrative into

motion) not only seems to reconfirm the crushing gravitational pull of historical predetermination but also implies that Lianshu’s only bequest to the future is his consciousness of that fact. 63

64 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES The notion of inheritability—in its social, cultural, as well as explicitly biological sense as heredity—is central to the story’s conflicted discourse on questions of development, agency, and ethics. This concern, of course, is already prefigured by the narrative structure of the story, inasmuch as a

funeral marks not merely an ending or a ritual of memorial, but also a mechanism for the redistribution of property rights and social roles. In “The Misanthrope,” this process of redistribution provides the sort of pointed critique of the venality and hypocrisy of “traditional” Chinese kinship structures that we often associate with the critical realism of the May Fourth era. Inheritance is theft by any other name, a form of “exchange” that feeds on class and gender inequity, while at the same time figuring the alienated nature of social relations as a whole in an era of uneven development. At the same time, however, the recursive structure of the narrative—in which Lianshu’s account of his grandmother’s profound social isolation is embedded within Shenfei’s account of Lianshu’s loneliness and the way in which he is himself haunted and transformed by it—gestures toward a different conception of kinship and exchange, one in which biology is not destiny and stories about suffering can also be passed on as a profoundly ambivalent legacy.

For this is a story that also begins and ends with a howl, as both Lianshu and Shenfei are uncannily transformed into “wounded” wolves (shoushang de lang), mourning the inevitability of human suffering in the “inarticulate language” (wuci de yanyu) of the beast.* In the howl of the wolf, Lu Xun finds a figure not only for the dilemmas of “natural history” but also for the formal problem of representing that impasse in literary terms. And in tracing the mixed heredity of this lupine figure, we as readers can also learn a great deal about the characteristic complexity of Lu Xun’s own evolutionary thinking and its relation to the vernacular circulation of biological knowledge and natural-historical narratives in the print culture of the Republican period. The question of heredity is, finally, the focus of a singular and selfreflexive debate between Lianshu and Shenfei that sits smack in the middle of the story, the outcome of which seems to seal Lianshu’s fate. For Lianshu, who dotes on the unkempt and unruly grandchildren of his landlady, the figure of the child is the best—and perhaps the only—figure for the possibility of progress in a world that is otherwise irredeemable: “Children are always good. They are completely innocent .. .” He seemed to sense my impatience, so one day he took the opportunity to tell me.

Inherit the Wolf 65 “Not entirely,” I replied without giving the matter much thought.

“No. Children have none of the bad temper of adults. The evil that comes later, the kind of evil you’re always attacking, that kind of evil is learned from the environment. They’re not at all bad in the beginning, they’re innocent... I think therein lies the only hope for China.” “No. If there was nothing wrong with children at root, how could they grow up to produce bad fruit? It’s like a seed that only produces stems and branches and fruits and flowers because those things are there in embryo from the beginning. How could these things come into being for no reason?”°

This debate between tragic inevitability and developmental agency,

nature and nurture, is central not only to this text, but to Lu Xun’s oeuvre as a whole and to the larger discursive milieu in which he was embedded. While there is certainly a case to be made that the terms of this particular exchange resonate with questions about human nature and the transmission of culture already present in pre-Qin philosophical discourse (and particularly the work of Mengzi and Xunzi), as well as in Buddhist philosophical disputation about the workings of karmic inheritance (as the narrator himself acknowledges later in this passage), the crucial discursive determination here is the vernacular circulation of biological knowledge in the wake of the translation of Darwinian evo-

lutionary theory into Chinese. That knowledge, in part because of the specific pathways along which it moved through the print culture of this period, particularly pedagogical literature and “knowledge texts” such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and primers, often came in the form of geopolitical parables constructed around images of the child and the beast.

Vernacular Ideas At this point, it may be useful to step back for a moment to consider the relation between intellectual history and literary texts. How do ideas move from one realm to the other? Is the movement unidirectional? How are seemingly discrete ideas transformed by their immersion in literary solvent? Can powerful explanatory frameworks such as “natural selection” “evolutionary development,” or “inheritance” be expressed in the absence of narrative or other expressive media? There has a been a great deal of thought and critical analysis given over in recent years to the ways in which the ostensible objectivity of scientific discourse is, in fact, reliant

66 DEVELOPMENTAL FATRY TALES on familiar (and often ideologically suspect) narrative and rhetorical structures for its persuasive force.* My interest here, however, is not in exposing the historically determinate ways in which science sometimes tells the stories that societies want to hear. Marx, for one, with his keen appreciation of the implications of evolutionary biology, deftly historicized the facility with which the “animal kingdom figures as bourgeois society” in Darwin’s accounts of natural selection. My quarry is much more specific: how did evolutionary thinking come to permeate the discursive climate and animate literary production in the Republican era? What might the local appropriation of a narrative originally couched in the “universal languages” of the North Atlantic metropole and its institutions for knowledge production tell us about the vernacularization of these stories in colonial contexts? These are questions that conventional intellectual histories can certainly help us to answer, but only in part. Benjamin Schwartz’s compelling book In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West is a case in point. This study not only attempts to understand the creativity of Yan Fu’s translation and appropriation of Spencerian social theory in the context of late nineteenth-century China, but also shows the way in which his iterations, shaped as they were by both indigenous traditions of elite discourse and the exigencies of national crisis, unwittingly expose certain fatal flaws in the individualist architecture of Spencer’s own “synthetic philosophy.”° By trade and by his own admission, Schwartz focuses exclusively on parsing the internal logic of Yan Fu’s “thought” (insofar as it can be plumbed through his own writings as well as ancillary texts and biographical data). While this approach pays real dividends, it limits our sense of the larger discursive horizons against which Yan Fu’s writings

were situated. It also assumes an underlying internal consistency that, for Yan Fu, might have been impossible to maintain and also beside the point, given the complex challenges of code-switching between two radi-

cally different discursive traditions (neo-Confucian scholasticism and Victorian science) while navigating the rapidly shifting shoals of late Qing

and early Republican politics.° In Schwartz’s account, in other words, Yan Fu becomes less a historical actor than a fictionalized fulcrum around

whom the “response to the West” of the late Qing intellectual elite can be effectively narrativized.’ I am not suggesting that we can or should dispense with figures such as Yan Fu—indeed, his work as a mediator between worlds helps us trace, not only the geopolitical fractures along which his thought was

Inherit the Wolf 67 compelled to move, but also the richness and continuing relevance of the intellectual resources he marshaled to this task, as testified to by recent

work by Ted Huters and Wang Hui.® Instead, I am proposing that in order to more effectively map the circulation of these ideas—and understand the promiscuity with which they move between and across widely divergent disciplines, discursive registers, literary genres, and media—we need to examine the vernacular context in which they came to be reproduced, recycled, and refashioned. In invoking the notion of the vernacular, Iam inspired by Miriam Hansen’s efforts to reinterpret the global diffusion and local deployment of the cinema in terms of “vernacular modernism”: an industrially produced “aesthetic and public horizon” that responds “in complex ways to the set of technological, economic, social, and perceptual transformations associated with the term modernity,” yet circulates in a realm of everyday use that is “asymmetrically related to modernist practices in the traditional arts.”? The notion of asymmetry is essential here—and integral to the traditional sense of the vernacular as

a set of linguistic practices that, in Hansen’s words, “turn away from, around, and against an official, imperial, or ‘high’ cosmopolitan language.” !°

At the same time, however, the tension-ridden relation between the vernacular and the cosmopolitan is one of mutual constitution, in which each

appropriates from the other, if only covertly and on unequal terms.!! Finally, the architectural sense of the vernacular—as a local or idiomatic adaptation of a structural type to specific topographical, climatic, or cultural conditions—may also help suggest the ways in which vernacular cultural production is always situated within a particular social landscape.'*

The notion of the vernacular, in short, may help us approach from a fresh angle the question of how new epistemologies and new kinds of knowledge were appropriated and disseminated in this period. Yan Fu’s 1898 translation and commentary on T. H. Huxley’s 1893 lecture on Evolution and Ethics is a case in point. Seeing Yan Fu’s text as a vernacular-

ized revision of Huxley’s work (with all the attendant implications of asymmetrical dependence, contention, appropriation, and adaptation to local exigencies) obviates the stale yet startlingly persistent debate as to the syntactic and semantic accuracy of his rendition.!? It also, perhaps rather counterintuitively, reveals the way in which even Yan Fu’s famously

classical register is already participating in a process of the vernacularization of the Chinese language vis-a-vis the cosmopolitan national vernaculars of the West—a process that culminates in the triumph of the vernacular (baihua) movement led by Hu Shi, Lu Xun, and other May

68 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES Fourth intellectuals in the wake of the Great War. In other words, it may be possible to understand baihua and the vibrant print culture constructed around it not so much in terms of its vernacularization of classical Chinese, but as a vernacular in relation to the languages of the imperial powers (as the critic Qu Qiubai implied in the late 1920s in assailing the “Europeanization” |ou/ua] of Chinese syntax). Second, it can help us understand the ways in which Yan Fu’s own work, directed originally toward a relatively limited audience of literate administrative elites, is subject to a “second-order” vernacularization as it enters into mass circulation. The wholesale translation of late Victorian science effected by Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, and less well known but perhaps equally pivotal retailers of new ideas, such as Ma Junwu (1881-

1940), were vernacular in the sense that they maintained a tense and sometimes tenuous relation with “proper,” experimentally derived or “universal” forms of scientific or social-scientific knowledge as arbitrated by academic institutions and publishers in the metropoles, a relation that was itself contingent on the asymmetry of China’s geopolitical position vis-a-vis the West. The popularization of these ideas coincided with (and was in fact a direct and in some cases premeditated effect of) the explosive growth of a new commercial print culture, centered in Shanghai and spearheaded by modern publishing houses such as the Commercial Press

and its successful competitor, Chunghwa Books (Zhonghua shuju). By the late 1920s, these conglomerates had been joined by, and actively participated in the constitution of, a larger nexus of media culture, forged through the interactivity of print (including newspapers, mass-market periodicals, and textbooks), cinema, radio, and gramophone records.!* And it was within this nexus that vernacular ideas about evolutionary biology (such as “development,” “natural selection,” and “inheritance” ) circulated most widely, not as “faithful” or internally consistent discourses, but as narrative frames and images that were localized, fragmentary, easily assimilable across different media, and generative of new forms of social and political and cultural practice.!°

“Soft Inheritance” and Zoological Philosophy There were, of course, many vectors in the introduction, institutionaliza-

tion, and vernacularization of natural-historical knowledge in China. Indeed, that process was protracted, uneven, and subject to a high de-

Inherit the Wolf 69 gree of ideological and stylistic variation across different contexts and divergent genres of cultural production. Different people appropriated different kinds of evolutionary biology for different purposes. Perhaps the most significant divide in these various vernacular revisions hinged around the problem of necessity versus agency in the unfolding of evolutionary history. This, as I have already hinted, is precisely the debate

that is played out by Wei Lianshu and the narrator in “The Misanthrope.” It is also a debate that, in the realm of nineteenth-century and (to a lesser extent) early twentieth-century scientific polemic, was conducted between what has come to be termed the neo-Darwinian camp and those who traced their lineage back to the work of Jean-Baptiste

Lamarck (1744-1829), whose Philosophie Zoologique (1809) was one of the first texts to propound a theory of evolutionary adaptation driven by inheritance. Where Lamarck differs from Darwin most profoundly is in his insistence on animal agency as the mechanism of evolutionary change. Lamarck, that is, believed that altered behavior in response to environmental factors would lead to alterations in bodily structures (the classic, if now discredited, example being that of the habitually outstretched neck yielding a giraffe). These alterations, in turn, could be passed down to one’s descendants. The inheritability of acquired characteristics (sometimes referred to as “soft inheritance”), moreover, involved a radically foreshortened evolutionary timescale: adaptive measures might manifest themselves within one or two generations.

The contingent, authorless accretion of adaptive changes in Darwin, by contrast, was not only glacially slow but entirely unresponsive to conscious modification. !° These divergent positions—and the variegated research programs and intellectual lineages they represented—were by no means transparent to

Chinese intellectuals in the late nineteenth century, in part because of the necessarily fragmentary and foreshortened view of natural-historical inquiry in the West provided by the text through which many were first introduced to these ideas, Yan Fu’s Tianyan lun. Lu Xun’s own revelatory encounter with Yan Fu as a twenty-one-year-old student was a watershed moment in his intellectual development, as well as that of his entire generation of reformist and revolutionary intellectuals. In his oftquoted account of his first reading of Yan Fu’s text, it becomes clear that he is being initiated not only into a new imaginative universe, but also into the political, visual, and tactile pleasures of an emergent print culture.

70 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES Indeed, this vernacular scene of reading is rhetorically inscribed within Yan Fu’s own text, precisely by way of his oft-noted replacement of Huxley’s first-person voice with a distinctly fictional third-person persona: Reading “new” books became all the rage, and that is how I came to know that China had a book called Tianyan lun. On Sunday, I ran to the south of the city to buy it in a thick lithographed edition printed on white paper, for exactly five hundred wen. I opened it to read—the writing was really very good—and it began: “Huxley sat alone in his home in the south of England, the mountains behind him and the plains to the fore, surveying these distant prospects as if they were arrayed before him at his desk. And thus his thoughts turned toward the time two thousand years ago, before the advent of the great Roman Caesar. What would have been before him at that time? Only the wild grass, sown by nature itself...” Ah! So there was in this world after all a Huxley, sitting in contemplation in his study, and whose contemplations were so very fresh. As I read the book in a single breath, out came “the struggle for survival” and “natural selection,” as well as Socrates, Plato, and the cynics ... Whenever I had a moment to myself, I would eat fried cakes, peanuts, and hot peppers, and read Tianyan lun.'’

Two years later, Lu Xun, already a medical student in Japan, encoun-

tered the work of another fierce advocate of evolutionary theory, the German embyrologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919).'® One product of that encounter was his 1903 essay “The History of Mankind” (Ren zhi lishi), the title of which may be a reference to Haeckel’s own treatise Anthropogeny, or the Development of Man.'? He may also have read Haeckel’s global best-seller Die Weltrathsel (The riddle of the universe),

either in the original German or in Japanese translation. Certainly the triumphant lineage of the march of nineteenth-century natural-historical knowledge provided in Lu Xun’s essay—from the taxonomic and comparative anatomy of Linnaeus and Cuvier, to the natural philosophy of Goethe, and finally on to Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique, St. Hilaire, Darwin, and Haeckel himself—almost perfectly echoes that of Haeckel’s own account in Die Weltrathsel and 1s sufficiently idiosyncratic (especially in its ready inclusion of Goethe) to indicate Lu Xun’s reliance on it.*° Regardless of Lu Xun’s sources, it is important to remember not only that his engagement with evolutionary thinking was sustained throughout his writing life (as many critics have documented), but that when he

Inherit the Wolf 71 published this essay in 1907, he was at the forefront of contemporary knowledge on the topic in China.*! For biology as a scientific discipline was not institutionalized in China until the 1920s, and knowledge of evolutionary theory was disseminated in an unsystematic and piecemeal fashion. Neither Haeckel’s Die Weltrathsel nor Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, to which Lu Xun refers in his 1907 essay, were translated into Chinese until 1920, when both books appeared on the Shanghai book market in editions by the pioneering scientific author Ma Junwu.”*

Indeed, it was not until the 1920s that knowledge about advances in evolutionary theory and Mendelian genetics (that is, the neo-Darwinian synthesis that had already begun to render theorists such as Haeckel and Spencer outdated) became widely available to students and the general public. An effort to institutionalize biology as an academic discipline, bankrolled by American foundations, guided by modernizing scholars at the National Central University (Guoli zhongyang daxue) in Nanjing and other universities, and carried out in collaboration with scientific editors at the Commercial Press and Chunghwa Books, began to take shape in the early 1920s.*° The first academic department devoted to the study of biology was established in China in 1921 at National Central University; Peking University and Tsinghua followed suit in 1925 and

1926, respectively, just around the time Lu Xun wrote “The Misanthrope.”** This program of institutionalization was further facilitated by the publication in 1924 of the Columbia-educated scholar Chen Zhen’s standard textbook, Basic Biology (Putong shengwuxue), nearly a third of which was devoted to questions of evolution and heredity.?> As Laurence Schneider has argued, figures like the zoologist Bing Zhi

(1886-1965) and botanist and conservative commentator Hu Xiansu (1894-1968)—who between them initiated the Science Society of China (Zhongguo kexue she) in 1914 while still studying in the United States, established the first Department of Biology at National Central, ran the private Fan Memorial Research Institute in Beijing, and went on to become founding members of the Academia Sinica—both inherited and worked to upend a century-long legacy of imperialist science in China. That legacy was deeply bound up with the natural-historical efforts of British and other European colonial administrators, commercial functionaries, and missionaries to forge an “empire of information” founded

on the collection, classification, and stockpiling of potentially useful botanical, zoological, and geological knowledge.*® Fa-ti Fan has traced

Fe DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES the social networks through which British consular officers posted in China, such as Henry Fletcher Hance (1827-1886) and Robert Swinhoe (1836-1877), collected natural-historical specimens from across the Qing empire, slotted them into the binomial syntax of botanical and zoological taxonomy, and provided samples for the Kew Botanical Gardens and other natural-historical collections in the metropoles.”’ To a certain extent, the modern biological establishment established by Bing Zhi and Hu Xiansu replicated this global division of scientific labor by focusing their research efforts on “the collection and classification of botanical and zoological specimens,” to the exclusion of “experimental, reductionist sciences like physiology or genetics.”** This emphasis

came partly at the behest of the powerful philanthropists (such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s China Medical Board, and the Boxer indemnity-

funded China Foundation), who saw benefits in basing Chinese scientific work on local conditions, while at the same pushing forward global knowledge. In the case of another backer, Boston’s Arnold Arboretum, the motivation for encouraging taxonomic work was even clearer, for it gave the arboretum an opportunity to augment its own botanical collections. At the same time, as Schneider notes, some Chinese scientists, inspired by the nationalist rhetoric of the May Fourth movement, came to emphasize the development of a useful “local science” based on indigenous conditions, rather than on “universal science[s]” such as physics. This “ver-

nacular” knowledge—informed by and inserted into the cosmopolitan lingua franca of taxonomy and biological knowledge—would then be yoked to the service of national construction.*” The teaching curricula that these scholars adopted, reflecting their own training in the United States, adhered very closely to the dominant neo-Darwinian orthodoxy that had coalesced around the pioneering geneticist T. H. Morgan (whose work Chen Zhen had studied at Columbia). Morgan’s experimental work with fruit flies had established the role of the chromosome in heredity,

and thus helped drive a stake through the heart of Lamarckian “soft inheritance.” This first generation of Chinese biologists took pains to criticize Lamarckian “soft inheritance,” but the vernacular press had no such scruples. This is partly because the dissemination of evolutionary thinking in

China predated the emergence of neo-Darwinian consensus by almost twenty years. Even in advanced biological circles in the West, this debate

was by no means a dead letter, as pitched battles between Mendelian neo-Darwinists and neo-Lamarckians continued throughout the 1920s

Inherit the Wolf 7s, and early 1930s.°° More to the point, in modern print culture and the textbook industry that underwrote it, these ideas were put in service of the construction of what Haeckel calls in Die Weltrathsel a ““world-system”: an epistemology capable of comprehending the world in natural-historical

terms.°! This epistemological shift involved both new ways of taxonomizing the natural world and new ways of narrating human history in terms of evolutionary schema. In periodicals, primers, and textbooks, humans became a species among other species, and China a nation among other nations. The characteristics of nations, as with species, were understood as being the result of evolutionary adaptation (or worse, regression). And it was precisely because of this conflation of natural with national history, of Haeckel’s world-system with the imperial order of the modern interstate system, that soft inheritance became an inescapable precondition for evolutionary thinking in China. To dispense with Lamarck (or to refuse, in the wake of Mendel, to allow soft inheritance in through the backdoor of Spencerian social theory or eugenics) was to acknowledge that the geopolitical game had already been fixed in the mists of geological time. Little wonder, then, that the interests of one of the most important architects of this “world-system” in China, the science editor and publisher Du Yaquan, gravitated toward research at the cusp of natural-historical, evolutionary, psychological, and social theory. Born in 1873 in Zhejiang, Du Yaquan had in 1900 already founded one China’s first journals of popular science, the eponymous Yaquan Gazette (Yaquan zazhi), before being hired as a managing editor and textbook author by the Commercial Press. His impact there was pivotal and plural: not only did he go on to take the editorial helm at what emerged under his leadership as China’s most widely influential general interest journal, The Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), but he also wrote upward of several hundred articles for the journal, while at the same time presiding over the production and publication of a staggering variety of textbooks, manuals, scientific

dictionaries, and compendia.’* Many of these knowledge texts are still viewed as monuments in the larger enterprise of effecting in China what Meng Yue has termed “semiotic modernity,” or an “anti-hegemonic” prac-

tice of translating scientific nomenclature (and its attendant conceptual frameworks and systems of classification) into Chinese, while at the same time preserving “semiotic and textual diversity ...in the face of universal modernity.”*? The Commercial Press, Meng Yue argues, was the epicenter of an intensive effort to both replicate and indigenize the epistemological

74 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES imperialism exemplified by a figure like Swinhoe. Projects such as the Dictionary of Zoology (Dongwu xue da cidian), the Dictionary of Botany,

and the Elementary Student’s Dictionary of Natural History stand as testaments to Du Yaquan’s taxonomic imagination; just as impressive, perhaps, are multivolume series, such as The Little Compendium of Natural Science (Ziran kexue xiao congshu), in which the kingdom of scientific enquiry itself is subdivided into disciplinary classes and topical

phyla. This work, in turn, was only one of the many such compendia combined in 1934 in the Commercial Press’s most ambitious attempt to systematize all human knowledge and, in doing so, corner the school library market, by way of a Universal Compendium (Wanyou wenku) in a projected one thousand volumes. It is important to reiterate that this attempt to incorporate knowledge into a Linnaean systema naturae represented a significant epistemological and practical shift from premodern pedagogical methods, which were based around character primers such as the Three-Character Classic (Sanzi jing), the Thousand Character Primer (Qianzi wen), and the One Hundred Surnames (Baijia xing).°* These texts served lateimperial Chinese children as an initiation or “awakening” (gimeng) into an ethical, social, and cosmological order. The child’s point of entry to these worlds, however, was insistently linguistic, for these texts are characterized by a rigid formalism of syntax—be it the rhymed string of prosimetric three-character phrases that make up the ThreeCharacter Classic, or the four-character lines composing the Thousand Character Primer, over the course of which not a single character is repeated. Even in late Qing textbooks, zoological information is introduced not so much by way of Linnaean order, but by stroke order, as individual animals are arranged according to the immanent linguistic logic of shared radicals in the characters by which they are represented. This linguistic order often trumps or supersedes scientific knowledge. In one such text from 1905, the mythological ao (a prodigious sea serpent) appears next to actually existing creatures such as the alligator, the whale, and the tortoise, by virtue of a shared radical (and the cultural logic inscribed within that graphic contiguity) (see Figure 1).°° Another government-approved textbook from 1906, the New Manda-

rin Reading Primer (Zuixin guanhua shizi jiaokeshu), introduces a wide variety of geological, botanical, and technological information, but uses a similarly non-Linnaean logic in placing the dragon (long) and the jiao (a four-legged serpent) beside the whale and the alligator,

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82 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES We may well wonder if Darwin has fully plumbed the suggestive ambi-

guities of Doddy’s phrase—or whether what alarmed the child was not so much the beasts themselves as their captivity in iron “houses.” What seems to captivate Darwin (and what makes Doddy’s choice of words so inspired) is its staging of an encounter between categories usually held apart (man and beast, bourgeois domestic space and the wilderness, modern man and his savage ancestors), an encounter that takes place only through the mediation of the figure of the child. At the same time, the child,

in its eventual sloughing off of its atavistic inheritance through the processes of growth and education, comes to represent a bulwark against these “dangers,” embodying not only the necessity of adult agency and intervention in the life of the child, but also the very possibility of an evolutionary “ascent” from the savagery of our beastly origins. The striking frequency with which “beasts in houses” appear in the pages and on the covers of Chinese children’s magazines is indicative of the vernacularization of evolutionary narrative in this period. At a time when China had only one poorly funded and underpopulated zoological garden (The Garden of Ten Thousand Beasts [ Wanshouyuan] in Beijing, a former imperial retreat that doubled as an agricultural research station), the zoo becomes a remarkable persistent means of framing and narrativizing natural-historical material in these journals. Given the complicity of institutions like the London Zoo in colonial regimes of knowledge, one also wonders whether in fact these printed zoos serve a compensatory or counterhegemonic role in a manner analogous to Du Yaquan’s dictionaries, in that they bring these institutions home, rendering the kinds of knowledge they represent into Chinese, if only on the printed page. Beginning with its inaugural issue in 1922, Children’s World featured an animal on the inside cover of every issue, under the telling heading

“World Zoo” (Shijie dongwuyuan). Stories built around visits to the zoo were also a staple: Lu Boyou’s humorous cover story for Little Friend called “A Clever Answer,” for instance, tells the tale of a boastful boy named Shan’er whose father tests his knowledge by asking him to distinguish between a caged fox and a caged wolf. Shan’er’s answer is

clever indeed, because it playfully undermines the binary structure of his father’s classificatory scheme: “That’s easy ...the one next to the fox is the wolf, and the one next to the wolf is a fox.”°* The cover of the issue, in turn, is an ink drawing of the same scene by the illustrator Yan

Gefan in which the father’s and the boy’s backs are turned to the viewer. We gaze along with them at the two caged beasts, who gaze at

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Inherit the Wolf 83

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becomes full-blown meta-commentary in an early cover image from Children’s World, in which the cage is itself a volume of Children’s

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Inherit the Wolf 85 door. The credit inside the cover of the actual magazine tells us that the illustration is titled “Peeping” (Toukan, literally, “stealing a glance”), and having entered those dangerous precincts for ourselves, we are reassured (as parents and educators) that the dalliance with the wolf is only temporary, and that the bars of the cage remain firmly in place, cemented perhaps by the voyeuristic thrill of recognizing in another species something of oneself.>*

Both title and image refer, of course, to the act of reading, and the implicit promise (one central to the commercial appeal and marketing strategy of such publications) that reading itself was the best means of humanizing the child and stimulating his or her development. This promise is figured by the cover art of the very first issue of Little Friend, in which two boys and a dog are pictured reading a copy of Little Friend, the cover of which depicts two boys and a dog reading the same issue of Little Friend, the cover of which doubtless depicts two boys and a dog reading an issue of Little Friend ad infinitum.’ The recursive logic mir-

rors the self-referential form of address built into the magazine’s title, for Little Friend(s) in Chinese refers to the children who read the magazine, to the publication’s pocket-sized format, and to its intimate participation in the imaginative lives of its readers. But what of the dog? As often as these magazines featured visits to the zoo, the “beasts in houses” that appear with the most regularity are of the domestic variety: not canis lupus but canis familiaris, as well as other species tamed either in reality or by the anthropomorphic imagination. Interestingly enough, these animals are more often than not enlisted to accompany or serve as spectators to precisely the sorts of mimetic activities meant to make these children

most human: reading, writing, playing games, listening to music, and learning to make music. A survey of the art created for Little Friend by the gifted illustrator Zhao Lantian, who seems to have taken over primary responsibility for the magazine’s art direction in 1926, reveals instance after instance of this sort of primal pedagogical scene.°° A 1930 cover features a trio of children learning to play a song called “I Love You” from sheet music: as one boy plays at conducting, his sister bangs a drum, and another brother mimics playing a violin with a dustpan and a poker (see Figure 6). The setting is inescapably marked by the accoutrements of the sort of comfortable bourgeois domesticity that would have been relatively rare outside a metropolis like Shanghai (waxed wood floors, patterned wallpaper, lace curtains, an embroidered ottoman), and the garments of the

86 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES

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These images, in the very unlikelihood of their reversals, seem to emphasize the absolute divide separating the human realm (and its characteristically mimetic attainments) and the animal world. And yet in their reciprocal formal logic, in which children mimic adults by teaching their own lessons to animals, and animals mimic the developmental processes

Inherit the Wolf 89 through which children are initiated into culture, these images also posit a world in which bourgeois identity is not exclusively a result of inheritance, but might also become—given the right sort of domestic environment and adequate parental investment in pedagogy—a learned trait. And it is in this sense that these images of animals disclose the secret of their self-reflexive allure. For they not only promise to inoculate Chinese children from the threat of atavism, but also offer the possibility of educating them for upward mobility in the colonial world order.

Inherit the Wolf The debate about inheritance between Wei Lianshu and Shenfei that occupies the center of “The Misanthrope” also centers on children, and in many ways ironically echoes the discourse on pedagogy that we see in these children’s magazines. Early in the story we learn that despite his disaffection, Wei Lianshu dotes on his widowed landlady’s grandchildren. Their first noisy and anarchic appearance in Wei Lianshu’s quarters elicits something like contempt in the narrator, who describes them as the very antithesis of the sort of bourgeois children who populated magazines such as Children’s World and Little Friend: “Their hands and faces and clothes were filthy, and ugly as could be.” Wei Lianshu’s pedagogical efforts, in turn, are completely lost on the children— having bought each of them a harmonica in an effort to civilize the savage beast within through music, he ends up having to restrain them from bickering with each other instead: “One for each of you; they’re all the

same!”°’? His affectionate solicitude for the children (who are named Daliang and Erliang [“Big Good” and “Little Good” |, as if to mock Lianshu’s faith in childhood innocence), is met not only with casual contempt, but also with a very adult sort of snobbery. When Lianshu later

reaches his social nadir as a result of persecution and unemployment, the children even refuse his gift of a handful of peanuts borrowed from Shenfei. Worse still, when Lianshu willfully abandons his ideals and becomes a cosseted consultant to a corrupt warlord, the children change their tune as well. “!Lianshu] used to be more afraid of kids than kids are afraid of their fathers, speaking to them in hushed tones. But later on all that changed, and he learned how to crack a joke. Our Daliang loved to play around with him, and would hang around his rooms every chance he got. He would

90 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES play all kinds of jokes, like if they wanted him to buy them something, he would make the kids bark like dogs, or kowtow to him.”°

The moment is crushing, not only because it is approvingly revealed to Shenfei by the children’s grandmother at Wei Lianshu’s wake, and not only

because it represents Lianshu’s capitulation to Shenfei’s contention that evil will implacably be passed down from generation to generation, regardless of any attempts to remake China’s social and cultural environment, educate the young, and remake the future. What is perhaps most biting about the satire, finally, is that the would-be pedagogue turns the mimetic tables on his erstwhile pupil, rendering the child a willing accomplice in his own abasement as a domesticated beast and docile subject. For contemporary readers, Wei Lianshu’s failure and apostasy was read as symptomatic of the alienation of a transitional generation. In the words of Xiang Peiliang (1905-1959), a fellow practitioner of the new literature: About ten or twenty years ago or so, there gradually seemed to have emerged an enlightenment movement [liming yundong] in our national affairs. There were those, particularly among the young, who frequently felt stifled, felt deathly lonely, and who stood up, became active, struggled, resisted; yet these people were for the most part seen by society as an alien species, thought of as “completely unlike the rest of us.” These people came up against a wall wherever they went, were sent reeling back into a dusty, grey life, covered with the wounds they had collected, and were finally sent by everyone into exile. And yet, because they were on the one hand unwilling to capitulate, and on the other had already spun themselves inside a cocoon, they could no longer fit in with their surroundings, and could only continue on in this way, taking action, struggling, attacking, and hoping to survive—this seems to be the fate of all reformers.°!

Written just a year after the story was published, Xiang’s critique is quick to assimilate Wei Lianshu to social and historical type, and ultimately consigns him to the dustbin of history, arguing that the new generation will

not capitulate so readily to intimidation. Yet one cannot help but feel that Xiang’s account slights the palpable strangeness of the story, and neglects the extent to which its resolute refusal of taxonomizing category is not only immanent to its narrative form but also central to its ethical and political concerns. Wei Lianshu’s beastly “joke” is relatively easy to

Inherit the Wolf a decipher as a parodic reversal of the developmental aspirations of his generation and its vernacular culture. And yet his own metamorphosis (and with him, that of the narrator, Shenfei) from man to wolf is far more enigmatic. From the very first page of the text, Wei Lianshu is wrapped in a “cocoon” of contradictions that leaves him opaque, not only to the reader, but also to the narrator, Shenfei: I was at that time in S-town, and I would occasionally hear his name mentioned, and all who spoke of him said he was a strange fellow: he had stud-

ied zoology, but ended up teaching history at a middle school; he was standoffish with other people, but liked to involve himself in their affairs, he often spoke out for the abolition of the family; but as soon as he drew his pay, he would remit it to his grandmother without delay.

Oddly enough, the first of these apparent incongruities—Wet’s zoological training—is almost never flagged by critics. This may be in part a function of the fact that the story has often been read as a thinly veiled autobiographical portrait of Lu Xun himself. Critics consistently note the physical as well as temperamental similarities between Wei Lianshu and Lu Xun—his disheveled hair, fiercely gleaming eyes, thick eyebrows, as well as his fondness for children, and the darkness of his sensibilities.°°? Indeed, this biographical approach has the imprimatur of no less an authority than Lu Xun’s second brother, Zhou Zuoren, who affirms that its account of the circumstances of his grandmother’s life and funeral are indeed “true to life,” even if Wei Lianshu is not necessarily a fictional double for Lu Xun himself.® Lu Xun, of course, was not himself a zoologist. But his youngest brother Zhou Jianren (1888-1984), with whom Lu Xun enjoyed close relations until his death in 1936, was not only a zoologist by training and avocation, but also one of the most prolific advocates of natural-historical education, evolutionary theory, and eugenics in the Republican period and beyond.® In pointing out this sometimes overlooked fact, I have no interest in advancing an argument that Wei Lianshu is a persona for Zhou Jianren. What this significant detail does help us unlock is the secret of the text’s strangely recursive narrative form, a form that makes manifest the antimonies between hard and soft inheritance, zoology and sociology, animal “nature” and human history, and in doing so, both appropriates and

D2 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES overturns much of the vernacular thinking about evolutionary theory that suffused the print culture of the era. Zhou Jianren was a central figure in that process of vernacularization. Having studied biology in Japan, he returned to teach elementary school

in the brothers’ native Shaoxing (“S-town”) from 1909 to 1919, and followed Lu Xun to Beying in 1921, where he audited classes in the natural sciences at Peking University. By 1923 he had secured employment as a science editor and journalist under Du Yaquan at the Commercial Press in Shanghai. In the same year he began lecturing on evolutionary theory at Shanghai University, while continuing to pen a series of articles for the Eastern Miscellany tocusing on the question of heredity. Drawing on material cribbed from the Cambridge biologist Leonard Doncaster’s Heredity in the Light of Recent Research, a work that explicitly dismissed Lamarckian soft inheritance as “open to grave doubt,” Zhou’s 1921 article “Evolutionary Thought after Darwin” (Da’erwen yihou de jinhua sixiang) is organized around the question of agency in evolutionary process. If, as Darwin argues, nature exercises “no conscious will |yizhi] in natural selection,” Zhou asks, what is the mechanism through which “organisms change, and those characteristics may be passed on through heredity?”°’ This question naturally leads him to the research of figures like Paul Kammerer (1880-1926) and John Merle Coulter (a University of Chicago botanist, born in 1851 to missionary parents in Ningbo, not far from the Zhou brothers’ ancestral home in Shaoxing), whose experiments suggested the possibility of environmen-

tally induced mutation, thus breaching the firewall of August Weissman’s genetic theory of heredity.* A second article from 1923, “Inheritance and Environment” (Yichuan yu huanjing), recapitulates these arguments and contextualizes them in terms of the all-important question of national development in a colonial world order. Citing the work of the Stanford zoologist and entomologist Vernon Kellogg (1867-1937), Zhou comes to the equivocal conclusion that genetic inheritance is decisive (as evidenced by the ostensible failure of “Africans” to thrive, even when offered educational opportunities),

and that the providence of a beneficial environment is also a crucial precondition for development along the continuum from savagery to civilization, as instantiated by the rapid assimilation of New Zealand’s Maoris to European cultural norms. Confronted by the neo-Darwinian consensus that these adaptations cannot in all likelihood be assimilated

Inherit the Wolf o3 into the genetic code, Zhou stresses that those who would develop the nation must focus on “environmental reform” (gaizao huanjing), by which

he means a combination of pedagogical and eugenic measures for the improvement of the race. And, perhaps symptomatically, Zhou ends the piece by falling back into Lamarckian heresy, warning that through sloth—or worse, disuse of their vital organs—certain species may stagnate or even regress, and eventually be eliminated in the struggle for existence. As if the cautionary parallel were not clear enough, Zhou cites the Mogreb as an Arab nation that “took the wrong evolutionary path,” failed to adapt to changing conditions, and was colonized as a result. The essay ends, however, with an affirmation: through eugenics and the creation of a social environment conducive to development, humankind may “rebel” against its natural inheritance and find its own path along the “great road of evolution.” Indeed, for Zhou such evolutionary agency is the “only hope for the salvation of the nation.” ”°

The connections between Zhou Jianren’s work and the debate between Wei Lianshu and Shen Fei could hardly be clearer. Both are built

on the same antinomy (hereditary inheritance versus environmental determinism), and both, in a manner completely characteristic of the vernacular thinking of the era, conflate evolutionary theory with questions of national development. The question of inheritance runs like a red thread through “The Misanthrope,” but in ways that may do more to unsettle Zhou Jianren’s easy conflation of biology and national destiny than confirm them. In fact, Wei Lianshu’s story works consistently to historicize inheritance as a form of exploitation, while at the same

time disaggregating the notion of heredity from its association with bloodlines.

The funeral that opens the story is that of Lianshu’s grandmother, who lives in a remote village where Shenfei also happens to be staying. Lianshu arrives home too late to see his grandmother before she passes, and the villagers, fearful that he will deviate from time-honored custom on account of his iconoclasm, are at first relieved by his adherence to

ceremonial order, which in retrospect comes to seem a foreordained omen of the implacability of Lianshu’s own death and the irresistible and moribund momentum of the narrative itself: Next came the prostrations, and next the wailing, accompanied by all the women chanting sutras. Next came the placement in the coffin, and next

94 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES more prostrations, and next more wailing, until the lid of the coffin was finally hammered shut.’!

Throughout the ceremony, Wei Lianshu himself remains strangely silent, until the disappointed crowd begins to disperse: Suddenly, tears fell from his eyes, then he began to sob, and his sob became a howl, like a wounded wolf in the wilderness in the deep of night, his pain mingled with anger and sorrow. This sort of thing was not part of the protocol and could hardly have been expected, and so everyone was left at a loss.”

It is only later that we learn, along with Shenfei, what is at stake, materially and spiritually, in this extraordinary scene. Wei is the sole heir to a

small house in the village, which his cousin had already tried to wrest from him upon the death of his father years earlier. He allows his grandmother’s maidservant to stay in the house in honor of her service. Unhappy that the house should be taken on by someone who is not a blood relation, Lianshu’s cousin and nephew follow him to town after the funeral, proposing to solve the problem through the establishment of a fictive blood relation: Lianshu could adopt the nephew as his own, so that the property will be passed down to his “son.” Lianshu, disgusted by their venality, is forced into an ironic admission of Shenfei’s assertion

from their earlier debate: “the son is like the father” and neither “resemble human beings” (buxiang ren); what is passed down through a bloodline is not only material, but also (im)moral. When the narrator presses Lianshu on whether or not he himself plans to marry, he is met only with awkward silence, and we are left unsure if his refusal to become a father constitutes a form of resistance to the reproduction of an oppressive system, or an admission of his voluntary exclusion from the hereditary chain of species-being. Worse still, his legacy as an intellectual and a teacher is increasingly jeopardized by the conservative blackballing he faces from the S-town establishment as a result of his advocacy of reformist causes. At a point in the story where he’s been all but ostracized by local society and his landlady’s children (like “a park in winter,” no one is inclined to pay him a visit), Shenfei chides him for what he sees as his self-imposed isolation.’? Wei Lianshu’s reply signals a tear in the fabric of the story, for it discloses not only the “truth” about his grandmother, but also the recursive structure of the narrative itself:

Inherit the Wolf 95 “You really have woven yourself a cocoon |dutoujian| and wrapped yourself inside it. You really should learn to see the world in a better light,” I sighed.

“Perhaps that’s so. But, tell me: where did the silk thread come from? Naturally, there will always be people like that in this world. Take my grandmother, for instance. Although I don’t share her bloodline, I may well

have inherited her fate. Not that it’s important. That’s something [ve already foreseen and that I’ve already mourned .. .” I immediately recalled the scene at his grandmother’s funeral, as if it were before my eyes. “T’ve never understood why you cried the way you did,” I asked abruptly. “You mean at my grandmother’s funeral? Yes, you don’t understand.” He lit the lamp and continued coldly, “Your visiting with me, I think, has

everything to do with my crying that time. What you don’t know is that my grandmother was my father’s stepmother. His real mother died when I was three.””

What, then, is the nature of Wei Lianshu’s inheritance from his grandmother? As Wei Lianshu relates her story—a stoic life, passed largely in silence as she took in needlework to provide for her stepson—we realize that his narrative is not so much about her, but about his own failure to comprehend her suffering, both as a woman relegated to the margins of an extended family, and as a individual whose own silence (like the silence of so many women who have come before her) renders her story unknown and ultimately unassimilable to narrative. As Wei Lianshu speaks of his own impatience and incomprehension of her silence, we come to comprehend the self-consciousness with which he signals Shenfei’s incomprehension of his own story, and thus the way in which narration itself is the very stuff of which cocoons are concocted: Your opinion of me now is the precisely what I thought of her before. But what I thought about her was actually all wrong, and as soon as I came to

know a little something about the world, I gradually grew distant from her.”

There is a real moral delicacy in Wei Lianshu’s reticence to speak on behalf of others who can no longer speak for themselves. This reticence— and the way the relation between Lianshu and his grandmother is replicated in the relation between Shenfei and Lianshu—is entirely characteristic of Lu Xun’s fiction, in which narrative embedding often functions

96 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES as a formal solution to an ideological and ethical problem: the tendency of critical realism to replicate the very structures of power (between the

narrator and the narrated, the literate and illiterate, the reformer and those he seeks to reform) that it sets out to criticize.’° This particular instance of narrative mise en abyme, however, also serves to drive home an uncanny sense of eternal return, of history as an inheritance that cannot be avoided or denied. After this particular discussion, Shenfei takes a job at a school in another town. Haunted by Lianshu’s request that he help find him a position to stave off poverty, Shenfei is nonetheless un-

able to help. In the meantime, Lianshu, already dying of tuberculosis, takes a job with the local warlord and is feted by the very elite circles that had formerly made his life a misery. Shenfei, relieved of the burden of find-

ing him a job, in another uncanny repetition “gradually grows distant from him” and later returns home to S-town only to find that he (like Lianshu before him) has arrived too late. Lianshu’s wake is fraught with ironies. Honored in death as he was not in life, the very nephew who sought to become his fictive heir as a way to steal his legacy has been pressed into ritual service as a surrogate son, and the landlady’s children form a filial honor guard outside the door. Unable to cry, Shenfei listens to the landlady’s tales of Lianshu’s extraordinary transformation into a social butterfly in the months before his death, and witnesses his final lying in state: The curtain was raised. His inner garments had already been changed, and a layer of outerwear put on the corpse. The sight took me by surprise. A pair of earth brown khaki army pants edged with broad red stripes, and

a military jacket with glittering gold epaulets on the shoulders, but I could not tell what rank he was supposed to be, or how he might have acquired a rank. When the body was placed in the coffin, Lianshu lay there awkwardly, a pair of brown leather shoes at his feet, a paper sword at his waist, and next to his gaunt and ashen face, a military hat with sold braid ; ofaE AS i> St h ges eae = erate ve we ” gue 7X a7 RR ee Oe | |

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The Child as History in Republican China 125 The boy is encircled by an assortment of toys—most of which are almost certainly meant to be read as miniaturized emblems of bourgeois domesticity. There is a toy house with a steeply pitched roof, a toy motor car, a toy dog, and a what appears to be a toy songbird. The boy represents, in short, precisely the level of consumption to which the majority

of Chinese people, even in an urban treaty port such as Shanghai or a prosperous provincial city like Hangzhou, could have aspired to but never attained. He is a figure of futurity created by and for the adult world,

an emblem of progress toward parity with the developed nations, and ultimately an image whose significance as immanent critique emerges only in historical conjunction with children’s drawings of the adult world collected by Huang Yi, with which I began the chapter. Those images stood

in dialectical tension with the text in which they were embedded, a text that, despite its pretensions to scientific objectivity, encoded a set of utopian desires particular to the semicolonial time-space of interwar China: for children who attain to the “universality” of bourgeois selfhood, for rationalized educational procedures that result in a society rendered transparent by a new regime of realist representation, within which children evolve in regular stages toward citizenship in a national community. But just as Lu Xun’s rallying cry is belied by the internal illogic of an immaculate conception of history, these aspirations are undermined by the sheer historicity of the images themselves, by the fact that they are less tabula rasa for a future that is now past than obstinate mirrors of the distortions and oppressions of the time that surrounds them, and of the now in which they continue to speak to us.

Pile TL eUDINGsS: OB. FATS PO Rey.

How could toys be worth more than the children in whose image they are created? This is the disturbing question posed by a pair of photomontages printed in Modern Sketch (Shidai manhua), a magazine of

political humor and social commentary popular in Shanghai in the 1930s.! The first image, published in July 1936 and titled “Our Lovable Little Angels,” juxtaposes a photograph of toy dolls lining a department

store shelf with an image of a young peasant girl tending to an even smaller infant, pasted in front of a large crowd of clearly emaciated Chinese children.” While the dolls, backed by a battalion of miniature girl

scouts bearing drums and pennants, stare obliquely into the distance off-screen, the eyes of the rural children gaze directly at the viewer, in a

direct ethical and political appeal. The nature of that appeal, and its grounding in the colonial inequities of the period, is voiced by captions set to each side of the montage, which rather laconically remind us that “foreign dolls in the metropolis cost at least two dollars,” while “a sixyear-old girl in the aftermath of the disaster in Shangcheng, south Henan province, sells for two pecks of white rice” (see Figure 12). The second photomontage was printed less than a year later, in June 1937. Here an array of clay figurines (of little boys, bridesmaids, and buddhas) is matched by a news photograph of several ragged columns of emaciated boys.’ This time, the title of the photomontage not only

aims to expose false sentimentalism, but also pokes mordant fun at a renowned Mencian dictum: “Real life manifestations of the “Treat your

children as children, so that the children of others shall be similarly treated’ mentality.”* The smaller caption beneath the photograph of the figurines reads, “These little playthings derive their popularity from catering especially to this mentality,” and concludes at the bottom of the 126

Playthings of History 127

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144 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES sister, who remains until the end an organic part of the community of poor folks for whom she invents her playthings. He, on the other hand, is molded in the image of Yuan Pu and produced thereby as a bourgeois subject.?° Yet this production remains, if not incomplete, then certainly shadowed by the secret of his origins, by the bad faith to which Mrs. Chen alludes in the very next shot, when she admits to Yuan Pu, “He’s so cute that even if his parents were alive today, I wouldn’t give him back.”

This saga of a shanghaied son seems to echo, however distantly, a particular narrative about how capitalist economies develop, one with which Sun Yu, as a committed leftist filmmaker and avowed partisan of the downtrodden classes, would surely have been familiar.*’ I have in mind what Marx calls the story of “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation.”°° Where, Marx asks, does capital come from? And how does the bourgeois class come to control it? In the “childish” myth that the bourgeoisie tells itself, Marx opines, the origins of surplus capital (its “primitive accumulation”) lie in the hard work of a talented elite and the lazy dissipation of the rest of mankind. “From this original sin,” he continues, “dates the poverty of the majority who, despite all their labor, have up to now nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of

the few that increases constantly, though they have long ceased to work.” The “secret,” of course, turns out be that the money was not earned, but stolen, through a “historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” This process, finally, hinges on the violent ex-

propriation of peasants from their fields, skilled craftspeople from their guilds, and their subsequent transformation into an “unprotected” urban proletariat.*! Now, it should be lost on no one that this is precisely the fate suffered by Sister Ye and her toymaking guild—one that seemed to contemporary commentators to foreshadow that of the Chinese countryside as a whole. Worse yet, Sister Ye and her “family” face a situation in which even the “normal” development of the national bourgeoisie is stunted by foreign imports and Japanese aggression. In this rather grim light we can return to the final scene of the film, in which we find Sister

Ye, wrapped in a scrap of burlap to fend off the winter cold, selling what remains of her stock of toys. Interestingly, the written scenario tells us the Sister Ye’s madness is triggered by the sound of firecrackers. But in the film itself, the precipitating cause is quite clearly a brief yet

Playthings of History 145 pivotal incident that precedes it. As Sister Ye sits dejectedly on a busy sidewalk, a young boy emerging from a café across the street catches sight of her, asks his mother for permission to buy a toy, and is escorted to her side by his chauffeur. We spectators recognize him immediately, although Sister Ye herself could not possibly know that the boy is, in fact, her son.

This melodramatic moment of nonrecognition is followed by an emotionally and ideologically freighted nontransaction. The boy, properly schooled in the tenets of patriotic consumerism, asks Sister Ye if her toys are all “national products.” Sister Ye nods, smiles, and asks about his Boy Scout uniform.°’* The boy’s reply makes clear the extent to which these clothes “package” him as a representative of the nation: “This is a Boy Scouts uniform. When I grow up, I’m going to save China.”

Mingled joy and sadness register on Sister Ye’s face, and in a remarkable ratcheting up of the emotional pathos of the scene, she asks: “Little Mister, do you have a mother? Where is she?” He gestures toward the street, and we are given a reverse shot of an anxious Mrs. Chen, framed behind the imposing window of a massive, late-model automobile, materially manifesting the barriers of class that divide them. The boy selects a toy plane and some paper soldiers. The camera focuses in on two silver dollars sliding back and forth across his palm. Sister Ye pushes the

money away: “Planes and soldiers... we ought give them for free to someone who’s going to save China.” The child regales her with a threefingered scout salute, but before she can return the gesture, he is hurried back to the waiting automobile by the chauffeur.°* Sister Ye dissolves in

tears as this particular “Master of the Future” is driven away into the distance. It is difficult to register in writing the exquisite intensity with which

the emotions prompted by this encounter play across Ruan Lingyu’s face. What is painfully obvious is that this departure represents a loss so utterly wrenching as to precipitate her complete collapse. For whether or not she recognizes the child, her own dispossession has been rendered starkly apparent by the encounter. Her refusal to enter into relations of exchange with the boy is, in this sense, a final sacrifice, and also an ironic

sort of indignity. For even the totem of a better future to whom she sacrifices—and that she herself produced—belongs not to her, but to the national bourgeoisie. The future, in other words, is stolen goods, and unlike Lu Xun’s visionary madman, she is not an avatar but merely the

146 DEVELOPMENTAL FATRY “TALES evolutionary remnant of a triumphal history that has yet to unfold. The spectacle of her insanity, in the end, is meant to serve as a cautionary tale, a national wake-up call. But might it also reflect an awakening to the fact that she and her family have been toyed with, that they are merely playthings of history?

A NARROW CAGE Lu Xun, Eroshenko, and the Modern Chinese Fairy Tale The premiere of the film Playthings on October 10, 1933, competed for attention with a very different kind of spectacle: the arrival in Shanghai of the Carl Hagenbeck Circus in a specially outfitted steamship, hailed in the local press as a “modern Noah’s Ark.” Captained by Lorenz Hagenbeck—

scion of the famed Hamburg trader in exotic animals and inventor of the modern cage-free zoo, Carl Hagenbeck—this floating circus came to China from a successful run in Japan, pitching its tent on the former site of the Majestic Hotel on Jing’an Temple Road in the International Settlement.! Hagenbeck was impressed by the unruliness of the “yellow flood”

that surged under the big top to see his menagerie perform its tricks, and the “confused” multinational character of the audience. In a city still rattled by the Japanese military assault of the previous year, and resounding with ever more vehement cries to resist economic imperialism, however, Hagenbeck’s trained animals seemed to local commentators a kind of symbolic pageant of the inequities of the colonial world order. One contributor to the Shun Pao likened Hagenbeck’s performing Indian elephants, deceived into exchanging their native haunts for the privilege of wearing ersatz crowns, to the Chinese people: “very large, very tractable” and led into captivity by traitors in their own midst (see Figure 18). Lu Xun takes a more ambivalent tack in a subsequent Shun Pao piece entitled “How to Train Wild Animals,” seeing in the circus a parable of the intractable complexity of the colonial predicament.’ Reporting on a

lecture by Hagenbeck’s chief trainer, Lu Xun undercuts the “legitimacy” of colonial rule, but at the same time also skewers the traditionalist rhetoric of the ruling Nationalist Party. The article is worth quoting in full: 147

148 DEVELOPMENTAL FALRY TALES

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There was another extremely beneficial lecture recently, delivered to us by Sawade, manager of the Hagenbeck Circus, on the third floor of the China Society for the Arts, on “How to Train Wild Animals.”* What a shame that

I was unable to audit, and merely saw some notes transcribed from the event in the newspaper. But that was already enough to give us pause: “Some may think that wild animals can be handled by force or by the fist, but to oppress them 1s a mistake, for this is the way in which primitives used to do things, and today’s training methods are altogether different. The method we use now is the power of love, with which we can gain their trust in humans, for only the power of love and a gentle disposition

will move them...” Although these words came from the mouth of a German, they are in fact completely in accord with the ancient teachings of our own sages. Handling by way of force or the fist is what they termed “tyranny.” And “those who are convinced by force, are not convinced in their hearts.”°

A Narrow Cage 149 Which is why civilized peoples must adopt the “kingly way” in order to gain “trust”: “if the people lack trust, the kingdom cannot stand.”° Once there is “trust,” the wild animals will perform tricks: “When the trainers have gained their trust, they can begin to undertake the training. The first step is to teach them to distinguish between a sitting posture and a standing posture; next they can be taught to jump through hoops or stand on their hind legs... .” The way of training wild animals is much like the shepherding of the people, which is why our ancients referred to great men as “herders.”’ And

yet animals such as cattle and sheep who allow themselves to be herded are more fearful than wild animals, which is why the ancients weren’t always able to depend on “trust” alone, and had to resort to the fist as well, or what is also known more grandly as “legitimacy.” Animals governed by “legitimacy” cannot expect simply to “jump through hoops or stand on their hind legs,” and must also contribute their pelts and horns and flesh and blood, or at the very least allow themselves to be milked each day, as with cows or sheep and the like.

Yet all of this was the way of old, and I don’t imagine that it has any bearing on modern times. After Sawade’s lecture, there were apparently further excitements, such as “Oriental Music” and “Playing Shuttlecock,” neither of which is elaborated upon in the newspaper, so there’s no way to know the details, which would also, I am afraid, be of the greatest significance.

Lu Xun’s essay lays bare the way in which fine-sounding rhetoric— whether Sawade’s bromides or quotations from Confucian texts—can serve as an alibi for systematic brutality. Lu Xun’s deadpan, and thus all the more devastating, use of citation is a signal characteristic of this essay, as well as his late style in general. Yet Lu Xun is after bigger quarry here than mere hypocrisy. It is likewise difficult to read this piece as an unambiguous refusal to be tamed. This brief yet carefully constructed article is too formally self-reflexive for that. Its concluding irony comes at the very beginning: because the author did not himself attend the lecture, he cedes authority to what has already been reported, and thus his faux-naif punditry is revealed as just another trivial “excitement,” a cita-

tion that can only parrot and perpetuate the journalistic rhetoric of which it is part and parcel. Lu Xun, in other words, has been trained before he ever had a chance to roar, and knows it. The essay thus engages the thorny question of development. Animal

training stands in for the process by which the backward are made

150 DEVELOPMENTAL FATRY TALES “forward,” benighted nations are enlightened, and colonial subjects are trained for modern life. What particularly troubles Lu Xun about this

sort of colonial pedagogy is that he—playing the untutored native given pause by Sawade’s modern gospel—cannot help but agree with the German animal trainer. For the very language of modern civilization, of “love” mastering savagery and enlightenment triumphing over tradition, is itself the basis of his own impassioned critique of both foreign colonialism and local authoritarianism. What, then, is the nature of the relationship between the developer and those in need of development? What happens when the language the beast needs for his own liberation already belongs to the oppressor, and his only developmental path lies in entrusting himself to his tutelage? If one animal learns to speak like a human, what does it mean for him to insist that other beasts follow in his footsteps? And if the others were to refuse to listen or to be liberated, what kind of story might that talking beast tell about the impasse?® For Lu Xun, neither this predicament nor the use of parable as a literary form were new. [Twelve years earlier, at the height of the New Cul-

ture movement and in the first flush of his career as a writer and public intellectual, he had translated and published in the movement’s flagship journal New Youth a fairy tale haunted by these same questions about development, agency, and abjection. Entitled “A Narrow Cage,” the story was originally written in Japanese by a blind Russian anarchist and Esperanto advocate, Vasilii Eroshenko (1890-1952), and tells an evocative tale of a captive Bengal tiger who dreams of liberating not only himself but all those who are similarly imprisoned.’ And like its author, who had been expelled from India, Burma, and Japan on suspicion of sedition before taking refuge in Lu Xun’s home in Beijing in 1922, the text became something of a cause célébre for youthful intellectuals and revolutionaries. Eroshenko’s sojourn in China—during which he lectured on Russian literature and Esperanto at Peking University and was a regular contributor to and presence in the local press—coincided and was intimately bound

up with intense efforts on the part of Chinese intellectuals to develop a modern children’s literature. This effort—led by Lu Xun, his brother Zhou Zuoren, as well as a coterie of like-minded intellectuals including Zhao Jingshen, Chen Bochui, and Hu Yuzhi—was itself predicated on the evolutionary premise that China’s development as a nation could be effected only by way of the development of Chinese children. Children’s literature, then, was

A Narrow Cage iS | understood not merely as an aesthetic or theoretical question. Instead, it was increasingly seen as one of the most important forms of evolutionary agency left to intellectuals beleaguered by what was seen as China’s backwardness vis-a-vis the imperial powers. In the early 1920s these intellectuals embarked on a crash course in children’s literature, scouring

Victorian and Edwardian-era texts on childhood development, ethnology, comparative philology, and literary history for theoretical and practical guidelines. Their discussions, carried out in the pages of newspapers like Beijing’s Chenbao and in a flurry of book-length studies of children’s literature, increasingly gravitated around what they saw as the most compelling, if also most difficult to define, genre of children’s fiction: tonghua, or the fairy tale. The fairy tale seemed to occupy a unique and ambiguous position in the literary division of labor. Viewed as the “childhood of fiction,” the origin of storytelling as such, and associated with all that was naive, primitive, and beastly, the fairy tale exemplified the wellsprings of developmental history. And yet the fairy tale was also as the most important means by which educators might effect the civilization (wenming kaihua) of children, and with them, the nation. This is a heavy, if not completely insupportable, cross for any genre, author, or individual to bear. For Lu Xun and his contemporaries, however, Eroshenko and his fairy tales seemed to offer a compelling model for a new genre of children’s literature. Indeed, Eroshenko became the object of a kind of cult of personality in the months after his expulsion from Japan in May 1921. Much of the impetus for his lionization, at least initially, was political in nature. Eroshenko first came to Lu Xun’s

attention in the spring of 1921 by way of a newspaper article in the Japanese Yomiuri Daily about his beating by the police and expulsion from Japan, where he had lived and studied for several years, in between stints in India, Thailand, and Burma, where he had taught at a school for the blind.!° As Lu Xun recalled in 1925, “I came to know of [Eroshenko]

only after he had been expelled ... Then I translated his fairy tales and his play Peach-colored Clouds (Taose de yun). In truth, my motivation at that point was to transmit the cry of pain of one who had been abused, so as to elicit disgust and rage against those in power, rather than picking some exotic bloom from the garden of foreign literature and transplanting it to our native artistic soil.”!!

In speaking on behalf of Eroshenko, I argue in this chapter, Lu Xun was himself spoken for in unforeseen ways. Eroshenko shared with Lu Xun an abiding concern with evolutionary theory and the developmental

52 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES aspirations it underwrote, but also a deep suspicion that such hopes were merely illusory. In Lu Xun’s rendering of Eroshenko’s fairy tales, and particularly in “A Narrow Cage,” we can discern the marks of their common commitment to children’s literature, as well as a deep ambivalence about the efficacy of a revolutionary pedagogy. The text also regis-

ters the contradictory demands placed on the fairy tale as a genre, charged as it was with translating between children and adults, beasts and men, savagery and the imperatives of a civilizing mission. “A Narrow Cage,” finally, poses important questions about authorship and agency, political representation and misprision—quandaries contained not only by its parable of an aspiring anticolonial revolutionary whose voice is usurped by another, but also in the complex relation between Eroshenko’s text and its translator.

Eroshenko as Fairy Tale In the months after Eroshenko’s move to China, he became so closely identified with the fairy tale that he himself was often portrayed as a living exemplar of childhood innocence. His exotic past and political travails were retailed over and over again by Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Hu Yuzhi and others in the pages of Chenbao, which also ran a special supplement on his life and work.!* The picture that emerged from this barrage of coverage was of a gifted musician and poet, an anarchist clad in Russian blouse, European and yet peripheral in relation to its centers of imperial power, possessed of an unfeigned revolutionary romanticism, aglow in the reflected glory of the Bolshevik revolution without having actually participated in it, dedicated to internationalism and the promotion of Esperanto, yet oddly childlike in the unworldliness of his idealism, his blindness, and his consequent vulnerability to victimization by the political authorities.

Eroshenko himself contributed to the emergence of this narrative, publishing in November 1921 a riveting account (translated from the Esperanto by Hu Yuzhi) of his own loss of vision to measles at the age of four, and his subsequent naturalization as “a citizen of the realm of the black of night.”!% His blindness, attributed to the malfeasance of a priest of the Orthodox Church in whose care he had been placed by his pious grandmother, led to his being transferred from the provincial southern town of Obukhovka (near the border with Ukraine) to the Moscow School for the Blind. It was at this institution, by way of an

A Narrow Cage 153 odd coincidence, that his own anti-imperialist and internationalist sympathies began to take shape. Having been educated in a racialist catechism that relegated nonwhite peoples to the status of the merely savage, Eroshenko writes of having been profoundly impressed by the visit to the school of a representative of the “yellow race.” Unable to divine any difference between the soft and gentle hands he reaches out to hold and those of a “civilized” white man, Eroshenko begins to question all that he has been told by his teachers.!* It turns out—no doubt to the amazement of his Chinese readers—that the figure through whose agency he has learned this lifelong lesson in color-blindness was none other than the eminent late Qing statesman and diplomat Li Hongzhang (1823-1901), who had stopped by the school on a whim after a meeting with the manager of Russia’s largest tea merchant, who happened to live down the street.*°

This childhood incident is narrated as foreshadowing Eroshenko’s later entrance into a transnational circuit of radical intellectuals.'® Eroshenko traveled to London in 1909 by third-class coach to study education at the Royal Normal College for the Blind under the auspices of the World Esperanto Association (Universala Esperanto-Asocio). Five years later Eroshenko journeyed to Japan, again with the sponsorship of the UEA, after a two-year stint as a musician in a Moscow restaurant. There Eroshenko fell in with a circle of Esperantists, artists, and activists, and lectured at Tokyo University on Russian literature (with a focus on the works of Leonid Andreev) and women’s emancipation. By 1916 he had begun to write the first of the fairy tales that would be collected and published in two volumes five years later.'’ In 1916 Eroshenko traveled to

Burma to take up a position directing a school for the blind, and immersed himself in the study of Buddhism and local folklore. In the wake of the October revolution of 1917, however, he fell under suspicion of collusion with Bolshevism, leading to his expulsion by the British colo-

nial authorities from both Burma and Calcutta, to which he had traveled in hopes of returning to his native land. He was finally allowed to return to Tokyo in 1919, where he began to write in earnest. He also involved himself with a left-wing journal called The Sower (Tanemaku hito) and with members of the Socialist League—associations that eventually caused him to be detained, beaten, and expelled from the country in May

ie 8

One could hardly, in short, have invented a figure more appealing to the political and literary sensibilities of May Fourth intellectuals.'® The

154 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES print culture of the period was awash in proposals for the development of a new vernacular literature, the discovery of the child, and newly imported political philosophies from anarchism to anti-imperialism. Eroshenko seemed to embody each of these trends. Along with literary figures

like Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Rabindranath Tagore, and George Bernard Shaw—each of whom visited China in the 1920s—Eroshenko was embraced as an emblem of intellectual adventure and new political possibilities. With the help of a network of Japanese colleagues (such as Eguchi Kiyoshi and Nakane Hiyoshi) and Chinese intellectuals (including Hu Yuzhi and Mao Dun), Eroshenko made his way from Japan to Vladivostok, and then onward to Harbin, Tianjin, and Shanghai.!’ The publication of Lu Xun’s translation of “A Narrow Cage” preceded (and no doubt helped to publicize) his arrival in China, and after an autumn spent writing a new collection of sketches and prose poems in Shanghai, Eroshenko arrived in Beijing in February 1922, as a guest of Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren at their courtyard house at Badaowan.?" A sense of the excitement occasioned by his visit is readily apparent in Lu Xun’s introduction to “A Narrow Cage,” in which he somewhat uncharacteristically gushes: “[Eroshenko] is uninterested in politics and economics, and [his work] does not conceal any seditious thinking; he has only a childish yet pure and beautiful heart, and the boundaries of this human world cannot limit his dreams .. . upon reading him, I am grateful that there could still be a person and a work who has yet to lose his childlike heart [bu shi chizi zhi xin].”*!

These tropes recur in Lu Xun’s introduction to the first collected volume of Eroshenko’s fairy tales published in Chinese, nine of twelve of which he had translated himself. The introduction underscores the romance of Lu Xun’s encounter with Eroshenko, while also providing a sense of the place of the fairy tale in the new literary division of labor taking shape in the early 1920s: I think what [Eroshenko] wants to proclaim to this world is love for all beings and the sorrow of not receiving that love, and what I want to reveal in him are [his] dreams: innocently childlike, beautiful, and yet actually existing in reality. Perhaps these dreams are merely a veil for his sorrow? I have

also dreamed of too many dreams [wo ye guoyu meng meng le|, so ’m willing to allow him not only to refuse to leave his childish and beautiful dreams behind, but also to beckon others into them, for if we catch sight of a real rainbow, we will not merely be sleep-walkers |somnambulists].**

A Narrow Cage £55 Here, it is the fairy tale—understood as a form that lends writers and readers alike license to dream—that may transcend the sorrow of the real. To rewrite reality by way of dreaming (thus waking us from our somnambulism), the adult Lu Xun needs to borrow Eroshenko’s childish dreams. The movement of possessive pronouns in the passage—from “his” to “mine” to “ours”—is thus symptomatic, assimilating Eroshenko’s dreams to those of Lu Xun’s own past, and finally to the future of a larger, if unspecified, collective.

Lu Xun’s appropriation of Eroshenko’s voice (and his youth) may ring strangely familiar to those for whom Lu Xun’s later preface to The Outcry is iconic of his authorial persona. In that text, written ten months after the Chinese publication of Eroshenko’s book in January 1922, Lu

Xun famously begins by stating, “When I was young, I too dreamed many dreams, most of which I have forgotten, and this is not something I regret.”*° As a question of literary history, one may well wonder about the extent to which this translator’s preface dreamed the later “Preface to The Outcry” into being, and if there may be other previously unno-

ticed parallels, thematic or otherwise, between the two collections of stories as a whole. Even more interesting for our purposes is that the passage, in its blurring of the boundaries between author and translator, the storyteller’s sorrow and collective aspirations, childish dreams and adult artifice, reality and illusion, awakening and sleepwalking, limns the very antinomies haunting not only the fairy tale as a genre in general, but also the story with which Eroshenko’s collection begins, “A Narrow Cage.”

The Childhood of Fiction What, then, was the appeal of the fairy tale for a generation of intellectu-

als most famously known for their allegiance to critical realism??* A phrase Zhou Zuoren repeatedly borrowed from the title of a book by the Edwardian folklorist J. A. MacCulloch (1868-1950), The Childhood of Fiction, sums up the role the fairy tale was expected to play in China’s literary renaissance.*? For MacCulloch, folktales must be understood as the “the attempts of primitive men and of savage races to clothe their impressions of the universe . . . in the form of a story.”*° The earliest folktales (and those of the “backward” peoples MacCulloch relegates to the status of “modern savages”) abound in “magic, shape-shifting, tabu, talking beasts and inanimate objects” because their creators believed in these

156 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES things. Later folktales, however, preserve these savage survivals in “fossil” form, interleaved with textual deposits left by later eras, from the traces of “barbaric civilization” to the ethical emendations of established religions such as Christianity and Buddhism, and on to modern embellishments. MacCulloch, following the work of James A. Farrar and Andrew Lang, thus frames the folktale in terms drawn from geology and evolutionary theory.*” The romance of the tale lies in the mystery of the “primitive manners” (in Farrar’s phrase) and magical thinking we moderns can no longer comprehend, while the task of the folklorist is to unearth the various historical “strata” buried within the text. Zhou Zuoren’s use of MacCulloch’s memorable phrase largely foregoes such argumentative niceties and conflates the tonghua (fairy tale or, more literally, “children’s story”) with MacCulloch’s more capacious notion of the “folktale.” For Zhou, “the childhood of fiction” serves primarily as compelling rhetorical shorthand for the way in which the fairy tale itself recapitulates developmental history. Originating in the “stories of primitive societies,” he argues, the fairy tale can be self-consciously

appropriated by modern writers as a way to revitalize the vernacular and educate modern children—those as-yet untutored savages among us.*® The fairy tale, in other words, is as indispensable to literary history as it is to childhood development.

Between January and April 1922, when Eroshenko was living with the Zhou family in their courtyard house in Beying, Zhou Zuoren publicly aired these still somewhat inchoate ideas about the fairy tale by way of an epistolary exchange published in the literary supplement to the Chenbao. His interlocutor was the literary critic and advocate of children’s literature Zhao Jingshen.*? At stake was the definition of the tonghua, and how the genre might contribute not only to the development of a vital new vernacular literature but also to the aesthetic education of the modern child.°? The early stages of the dialogue are taken up with a discussion of terminology and the extent to which the Chinese term tonghua—itself borrowed from a Japanese term Zhou incorrectly attributes to the noted eighteenth-century humorist and raconteur Santo Kyoden (1761-1816)—maps onto terms like the English fairy tale, the wonder-tale, or the German Marchen and Kindermarchen, and how it 1s to be distinguished from myth, saga, and epic poetry. For Zhou, what makes the tonghua different is its focus on pure diegesis, as opposed to the chronicling of specific historical events, the exaltation of heroic characters, or the worship of gods.’! It is this secular emphasis on story-

A Narrow Cage 157 telling for its own sake that positions the genre as a kind of primitive fountainhead of fiction (see Figure 19). What troubles the two correspondents, however, is a certain aporia in this seamless story of literary development—for if tonghua represents the savage dawn of narrative, how does one account for the civilizing function of pedagogical literature? What, moreover, does one make of

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158 DEVELOPMENTAL FATRY TALES the emergence of self-consciously literary fairy tales, from the elegantly crafted tales of Hans Christian Andersen to the sophisticated stylization of Oscar Wilde?** Zhou Zuoren is quick to assert that there is a place for the “educational tonghua” (which he translates as “Kindermarchen”), in which primitive materials are judiciously adopted to achieve educational ends, by “eliminating elements unfit for the physical and mental development of children or harmful to human morality.”** In a subsequent exchange Zhou also affirms the artistic value of what he terms the

“literary fairy tale” (wenxue de tonghua), but questions the extent to which these texts serve younger readers: “The significance of the literary fairy tale is in the message, in suasion or satire, but for the child its value lies elsewhere, because children often ‘purchase the packaging and return the pearls’ (maidu er huanzhu); this is the fate of most literary fairy tales.”°* Characteristically, Zhou is inclined here to make a case for the

aesthetic and formal claims of the fairy tale on the imagination of the child, and his or her ability to carve out a space for creative autonomy over and against a more adult sense of the instrumentality of the text. In this, he is unique among his contemporaries, most of whom adhered to a narrower view of the relation between literature and nation-building. Zhou remains troubled, however, by the possibility of a gap between adult authors and child readers, for whom authorial intent is beside the point, and the charm of the medium trumps the message and perhaps also the pedagogical value of the text. Perhaps in an effort to think through this antinomy, Zhou grappled just two weeks later with the difference between “folk fairy tales” and “literary fairy tales” in a review of Mu Mutian’s (1900-1971) translation of the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde: Folk fairy tales [injian de tonghua| are indeed literature, but they diverge from what we would call “literary fairy tales”: the former are collective, passed down through generations, organic, while the latter are individualized, creative, artificial. The former are the “childhood of fiction” while the latter is fiction in another guise [xiaoshuo de huashen], in which the lyric and the narrative are combined.*°

Here the relation between the modern authors of literary fairy tales— be they the Brothers Grimm, Andersen, or Wilde—and anonymous folk sources is left ambiguous. What is clear is that Zhou tacitly assumes that fiction must progress from its infancy in collective authorship to

A Narrow Cage 159 maturity in the form of the emergence of modern masters. Whether we like it or not, in other words, the fairy tale has grown up, advancing from simplicity to sophistication, just as grown-up fiction assimilates the fairy tale into its repertoire. The only worry is that children will be left behind. Zhao Jingshen’s response to Zhou’s essay on Wilde, published as the fourth installment in their epistolary exchange, attempts to resolve this problem once and for all: The literary fairy tale as such has changed very markedly. After Andersen [Antusheng| came Wilde [Wang Erde], and after Wilde came Eroshenko [Adluoxianke], so that through the eyes of literature, art is gradually progressing and thought is gradually progressing! And yet through the eyes of a child, each is worse than what came before! Perhaps we should use just such a progression—from An to Wang to Ai—to lead children forward as they gradually mature, from infancy to adolescence.*°

Here ontogenetic childhood development is not only mirrored but also actualized by phylogenetic literary history, as children are inevitably— though not without a measure of regret!—led upward and onward from their natural state of primitivism. Developmental logic reasserts itself in the form of a neat pedagogical division of labor: age-specific books for specific ages. And this logic itself recapitulates Hu Shi’s famous rallying cry for the new literature itself: “Every age must have its own literature” (yi shidai you yi shidai de wenxue). Perhaps more striking than Zhao’s garden-variety recapitulationist rhetoric is the implicit assumption that Eroshenko himself represents the apex of this literary evolution. During his sojourn in China—and in the years after his return to the Soviet Union in 1923, where he taught in relative obscurity at a school for the blind—he was inevitably invoked in the same breath as the Brothers Grimm, Andersen, and Wilde. Eroshenko’s elevation to such empyrean heights may seem puzzling to those who have never read or even heard of him, while the claim for the pedagogical value of his work may surprise those who have. In fact, Eroshenko’s literary fairy tale about a captive tiger (as well as his work as a whole) seems to belie these developmental and pedagogical imperatives at every turn. And rather than resembling the work of a naif or a childlike dreamer, “A Narrow Cage” bears an uncanny resemblance to Lu Xun’s own work, not only in its portrayal of a would-be revolutionary

160 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES struggling to awaken the unenlightened, but in its recursive and ultimately unsustainable narrative structure, in which awakening is merely a dream, and the dream an awakening to disenchantment or death. If, for activist intellectuals like Zhao Jingshen, the fairy tale loomed large as a form of developmental agency, a form in which the relationship between (adult) author and (child) reader is at heart pedagogical, and reading is premised as a process of becoming-human, “A Narrow Cage” may well be most accurately characterized as a modernist fairy tale, one

in which the very premises of the genre are subject to self-reflexive critique.

Eroshenko and Lu Xun Part of what makes “A Narrow Cage” such a strange and compelling story is that it turns on a paradox. Not unlike Lu Xun’s report on the Hagenbeck Circus, the tiger at the center of the tale is unable to speak of his own freedom, save in the language of another. That the Chinese text is a translation—one in which Lu Xun borrows both Eroshenko’s childlike persona and the fairy tale form—only adds another level of formal complexity, especially when we remember that Eroshenko’s own

work was written not in his native Russian, but in Japanese. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to disentangle Eroshenko’s legacy from that of his

translator. Eroshenko remains celebrated in China (and noted in Japan)—if not commonly read—largely by virtue of their association (see Figure 20). He is, by contrast, little more than a historical footnote in his native Russia. One of the earliest Russian scholars of Eroshenko’s work, R. Belousov, was himself a sinologist and encountered Eroshenko’s name only in the course of reading Lu Xun’s October 1922 story, “Comedy of the Ducks” (“Ya de xiju”). Included in Lu Xun’s first collection of fiction, The Outcry, “The Comedy of the Ducks” is a brief sketch for which Eroshenko (in the guise of “the blind Russian poet Ailuoxianke”) serves as a melancholy protagonist.*’ The story begins with Eroshenko lamenting his “desertlike” loneliness in Beijing and contrasting its deadening silence to the rich aural tapestry of the subtropi-

cal Burmese night.*° Hoping to fill the evening with pleasant sounds, Eroshenko raises a passel of polliwogs in Zhou Zuoren’s residential court-

yard. Just as the polliwogs begin to grow into frogs, though, a vendor selling a nest of ducklings comes to the house. Unable to resist their downy

charms, Eroshenko buys them and installs them in the courtyard as

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well. The ducklings promptly devour Eroshenko’s polliwogs, and when

Eroshenko decides soon thereafter to return to his “Mother Russia,” all that is left behind to remind the family of him is the sound of their quacking. A minor piece, no doubt, in which Lu Xun provides us a bittersweet parable about the survival of the fittest in a duck-eat-duck world, as well

as a playfully parodic tribute to Eroshenko’s preferred literary mode. What is often overlooked is that Lu Xun’s story is a direct response to what the text itself calls “the only story Eroshenko wrote while he was in Beijing,” “The Tragedy of the Little Chick” (“Xiaoji de beiju”).°? Eroshenko’s original tells the story of the drowning of a sickly chick who

162 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES prefers to consort with a duck rather than with his own kind, and like many fairy tales hinges on the disjunction between a real world in which animals cannot speak for themselves and a fictional realm in which talking beasts are every bit as human as we are. The housewife in the story (ap-

parently modeled on Zhou Zuoren’s wife) is perplexed by the bowed head and drooping wings of her little charge, but we are privy to his inner life. Much of the piece is taken up with dialogue between the chick and the rather obtuse duck who is the object of his affections. What ails the chick is spiritual—he’s lonely and afflicted by a misplaced desire to understand and be understood by a bird of a different feather. “When you sleep, do you ever dream chicken dreams?” the chicken asks. “No, but I dreamed of a fish. A really big one. Bigger than the loach the missus gives us,” the duck replies. Trapped in his own skin and by the duck’s incomprehension, the chick’s death by drowning is a suicidal attempt to swim across that communicative gap, to translate between Chicken and

Duck, and become another kind of being. The joke Lu Xun has played on the original “tragedy” (and perhaps on himself) should now be clear: Eroshenko’s voice has been replaced by the quacking of a duck. Despite this irony, there is a tenderness in Lu Xun’s comedic gesture as well, for it points not only to the substitution and silencing that can often take place in the act of translation, but also to the formal kinship between text and paratext, author and translator, and the possibility of communication across the divide. That kinship between the two authors is apparent not only in this exchange, but in many of the Eroshenko fairy tales Lu Xun translated in the months between August of 1921 and September 1922. Over and over again, these stories feature themes, motifs, and the recursive formal structures we tend to associate with his translator. Eroshenko’s characters shuttle between hope and despair, agency and abjection, and their struggle against oppressive traditions is figured as a movement toward the uncertain, even illusory, promise of evolutionary progress. Not only the vocabulary, but also the experimental procedures of nineteenth-century biological and anatomical science figure prominently throughout. Lu Xun,

drawing no doubt on his own experience as a medical student in Japan, famously likened his pen to a scalpel, dissecting not only his enemies but himself as well. In Eroshenko, the scalpel is quite literally wielded against talking beasts and humans alike, whose only recourse seems to be to defy

the taxonomic boundaries of species-being that hold them in thrall. Yet

A Narrow Cage 163 these characters, even if they manage to escape persecution, often fall victim to their enigmatic longings for deliverance. Many meet grisly ends,

and their foregone conclusions and foreclosed fates offer little sense of solace or possibility for the future. In “By the Pond” (“Chibian”), for instance, two butterflies born at dusk insist, despite the warnings of their elders, on embarking on a quixotic journey to fly across the ocean and to the ends of the earth to bring back the sun. Their dead and battered bodles are discovered by a group of uncomprehending schoolchildren at the first light of dawn. Eroshenko’s works abound in such dark tonalities and paradoxical structures, often turning the protocols of pedagogical literature and popular scientific knowledge texts inside out. “The Sorrow of a Fish” (“Yu de bei’ai”), for instance, is a story for scientifically inclined boys that places the legitimacy of both biological knowledge and boyhood itself under an ethical microscope. The story begins not in the human realm, but under winter ice, as Little Carp complains of hunger during a freeze. He is placated by his parents with talk of a paradise called “That Country” (nage guotu). The catch, of course, is that you can only get there after death—a concept Little Carp is unable to understand. When spring comes, Little Carp regales the other animals who make up the idyllic pastoral community around the pond with tales of “That Country.” At the same time, he hears about the powerful and mysterious beings called humans who live nearby, and longs to meet a boy who is rumored by the local dogs to be just as bright and well-behaved as Little Carp himself. As the season advances, however, his friends around the pond begin one by one to disappear. Two butterflies on a reconnaissance mission to the local church eaves-

drop on the humans and are thunderstruck to hear that animals have no souls and thus no license to cross over to “That Country.” In order to learn more of the fate of his friends, Little Carp casts himself into the boy’s net as he fishes by the side of the pool, and is taken to his room. The gruesome final scene of the story is almost gothic in its intensity: On the walls [of the boy’s room] hung Mr. Oriole’s skin and Monk Rabbit’s hide, and their bones were scattered across the table. In a glass case, a row of his dear butterflies were threaded together by a needle piercing their hearts. On the dissecting table, the Frog Poet who just last night had been captured while enjoying the moonglow was being cut apart, his heart still quivering with the regret of his demise.

164 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES Seeing such things, Little Carp’s own heart felt stopped up. He wanted to speak but could not say anything at all, and instead his tail slapped against the surface of the table. A moment later, the boy dissected him as well, but when he got to his heart, it was already shattered.*°

Little Carp’s fervent wish to gain entrance to “That Country” seems to have been granted at the cost of disillusionment and death. The little boy “grows up to be a famous anatomist,” and the vibrant world around the pond empties of animal and botanical life until no one is left to listen to the sound of church bells at dusk.*! The darkness of Eroshenko’s fairy tale world is rarely, if ever, redeemed, in part because his convoluted narrative structures work to undermine or complicate unequivocal conclusions. Some of his stories read less like Andersen or Wilde, and more like some savage offspring of H. G. Wells and Franz Kafka. In fact, many of his tales share with Lu

Xun a debt to the evolutionary adventures of late Victorian and Edwardian fiction. In “For the Sake of Humanity” (“Wei renlei”), the nar-

rator is the son of a scientist who relays to us the rumors swirling around an ambitious biologist named K., one of his father’s colleagues. K.’s efforts to achieve a scientific breakthrough are quickly revealed as

sadistic in nature, for like the title character of Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), he spends his days in the laboratory vivisecting animals. Their constant cries of pain and terror, in turn, drive his own son to the brink of a breakdown. The boy’s sensitivity earns him the contempt of his father, who sees him as an “idiot” and an “evolutionary degenerate.” When his father attempts to experiment on the boy’s beloved pet dog, the son and his mother force their way into the lab to rescue the unfor-

tunate creature.’ At this point the initially realistic rhetoric of the story veers toward violence, fantasy, and a distinctly unscientific uncertainty. K. becomes convinced that in order to save mankind, he will need to vivisect a human being, and thus he puts his own wife and child under the knife. Unbeknownst to K., however, his son has already defied the rule of natural law by quite literally stepping down the evolutionary ladder. In the deep of night (and perhaps in a dream), he has traded places with his dog. This procedure, magically accomplished by unpeeling and slipping into each other’s skin, spares his own life but sacrifices that of the dog. This moment of sympathetic magic—which in many fairy tales might

A Narrow Cage 165 provide a measure of absolution—serves as an inverse image of vivisection, and effects a reversal of roles. The boy/dog attempts to maul his father in a frenzy of parricidal revenge, but K. is later found cradling the dog with uncharacteristic tenderness.

The final disorienting twist comes in a coda. The narrator visits a famous vivisectionist who defends K.’s work: “In today’s society, no one says a thing about those who slaughter untold numbers of worthy young people for the sake of land or commerce, political or military ambitions. But you’re not allowed to kill a single idiot in the course of serious scientific research for the sake of humanity, for the sake of the greater good. This is our so-called modern morality. This is the twentieth-century civilization of which we are so proud.”*? Stirred by this speech, the narrator offers to sacrifice himself to the cause, but the scientist spares him and Says it was only a joke. When the narrator returns home to ask his own father, also a scientist, if there is any proof that the story about his colleague K. is true, we realize with a shock that his father may not be his

real father, and that the distancing device around which the story was structured is merely an artifact of the narrator’s own ignorance of his real identity as K’s “idiot” son. His offer to go under K’s knife, then, may have represented his unwitting submission to the authority of the mad-

man from whose custody he was removed as a boy. In surviving, the “degenerate” boy has also absolved his father of murder. Worse still, this revelation casts the reader into a mise en abyme in which every aspect of the foregoing narrative is reopened to question, setting into motion a formal circularity that undoes not only the evolutionary discourse of scientific progress embodied by the father but any hope for posterity at all. “Old Man Time” (“Shiguang laoren”) presents a similarly pyrrhic parable. Written in Beijing and first published in the Chenbao, this is also a

story within a story—framed by an autobiographical portrait of Eroshenko’s own loneliness and despondency on an autumnal Beijing evening.

As he contemplates the prospects for human progress, Eroshenko falls into a trancelike state in which he is taunted by the voice of Old Man Time, who lays waste his developmental dreams for the next generation with metronomic efficiency:

“People are idiots. Tick tock... tick tock ...And not just now, they have always been... whether in the past or the present or the future... HOCK 10CK ws TlCK 1OCKy «4!

166 DEVELOPMENTAL FATRY TALES “People will grow no smarter. There is no possibility of that. Tick tock. “Tdiots rear idiots. The idiot will raise an even more idiotic idiot. Tick tock ... tick tock. This is how the human race develops.”**

The developmental dilemma presented here, of course, seems to echo that of Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman”: in the absence of a clean historical slate, how is revolutionary change possible? If Old Man Time does not allow for the possibility of soft inheritance, what kind of historical agency might be possible? As in Lu Xun’s earlier story, children are (or ought to be) the key to this evolutionary riddle. Eroshenko listens with tears in his eyes as Old Man Time offers another parable. Imagine, he says, an “unimaginably large and unfathomably ancient” temple, sealed to prevent the ingress of sunlight or fresh air, and dedicated to the perpetuation of sacrificial rituals to propitiate the gods with the hearts and minds of the young.*? Within the temple, an ancient legend holds that should light or air ever penetrate the sanctum, all those within will perish. Suffocating in the increasingly bad air, and inspired by spring weather

so glorious it can be sensed even inside the temple walls, a group of young people defy their elders and open a window. But the prophecy turns out to be true, and the stone idols around the altar dissolve and topple in the breeze, crushing all the rebels beneath them. The elders quickly rebuild the sanctum and propitiate the gods by sacrificing more children—children who are blissfully unaware of the valiant act of selfsacrifice intended to deliver them from evil. This unlikely fairy tale ends much as it begins, as a disconsolate Eroshenko wakes from his dream and walks outside into the chill air of a silent courtyard of a “November night in Peking.”*° The spectral voice of Old Man Time was his own, punctuated by the ticking of a clock, and now he has no one left to talk to. Worse still, his flight from the claustrophobia of this particular “iron house” (ironically Lu Xun’s own guestroom) affords no relief from his sense of entrapment. The dialogic relation between Eroshenko’s fairy tales and Lu Xun’s ambiguous allegories was bolstered by their appearance in direct contiguity with one another in the print culture of the early 1920s. “Old Man Time,” for instance, appeared on the same day and one page away in the Chenbao literary supplement from Lu Xun’s own celebrated and darkly satirical rewriting of Chinese creation myth through the cracked lens of evolutionary theory, “Mending Heaven,” in which the goddess Nitwa molds men from clay, only to watch them run amok.*’ How, then, can

A Narrow Cage 167 we account for both the similarities, as well as their simultaneous concern with questions of developmental agency, questions framed in terms

of often paradoxical parables? Did a world-weary Lu Xun infiltrate Eroshenko’s childish stories in the act of translating them, distorting the naivete of the original material? Certainly the prose is in some respects reminiscent of Lu Xun’s own, and bears the syntactic and lexical stamp of an era in which the vernacular language was in the process of transformation.*® But even the most casual comparison between the originals and Lu Xun’s translations reveals that he went about his work with scrupulous attention to accuracy, even mirroring Eroshenko’s phrasing and word order whenever possible.* Perhaps then the influence goes the other way, and we can hear traces of Eroshenko’s voice in Lu Xun’s literary work? This is, as we have just seen, quite literally true of at least one story, “The Comedy of the Ducks.” As a question of literary historical methodology, moreover, it is important to be cautious about extrapolating backward across time, and imposing thereby our fully formed and teleological conceptions of the canonical Lu Xun on an author who, in 1922, had yet to publish his first collection of short stories.°° It may well be the case that Eroshenko’s work—and the fairy tale as a form—played some role in Lu Xun’s formation as a writer in these years. Yet such questions of influence must remain speculative. I raise these issues as a reminder that the author “Lu Xun” is not a singular figure, but instead a composite voice constructed through myriad processes of creative citation, even in his “own” writ-

ing, and that translations from Japanese and European and Russian literature make up a substantial portion of his work. Nor were all of his writings originally composed under the sign of a stable authorial identity. In the case of the newspaper article with which this chapter begins, written under one of his many pen names (of which “Lu Xun” itself is merely the most consistently used), Lu Xun not only goes incognito, but affects another voice altogether, as he feigns his approval of the quotations from Sawade and the Confucian classics. Lu Xun, in other words, simultaneously authors and is authored by Eroshenko in the act of translating him. The affinities between these two authors, finally, may not be so much a question of influence (to the doubtful extent to which such influence could be apportioned) as instead their common participation in what we might term, following Friedrich Kittler, a newly emergent and increasingly globalized discourse network.°! That network was itself a product

168 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES of translation, and the consequent vernacularization of scientific knowledge and evolutionary thinking in the print culture of the period, including the sorts of late Victorian novels of evolutionary adventure that were the subject of Chapter 1, as well as the “knowledge texts” discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. Both authors, like many of their contemporaries, were galvanized by the developmental aspirations figured by these texts. These hopes served as indispensable guides to the profound political, historical, and spiritual questions with which they were confronted, yet also struck them as ultimately unsatisfactory fictions. Even as Eroshenko and Lu Xun make common cause, beckoning children into the dream world of the fairy tale, their shared ambivalence about its pedagogical project is registered on the level of narrative form.

“A Narrow Cage” Upon its initial publication in the pages of New Youth, “A Narrow Cage,” not unlike Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman,” became an instant sensation. What seems to have struck contemporary readers most viscerally was its title, for the phrase “a narrow cage” quickly entered into wide circulation as a figure for the stifling traditional culture and oppressive familial ar-

rangements by which the rebellious youth of the era felt themselves afflicted.°* It became, in short, a buzzword or slogan. In Ba Jin’s popular 1931 novel of May Fourth intellectuals freeing themselves from the stultifying confines of a provincial gentry family, Family, for instance, Eroshenko’s title becomes a kenning and a key for the thematic thrust of the novel as a whole. Early in the action we find the protagonist Juehui, grounded

for his objection to an arranged marriage, pacing back and forth in his quarters as he proclaims, “Family, what family? More like ‘a narrow cage’! ... 1] want to get out. And get out I must.”°° Yet Eroshenko’s story itself defies such easy categorization and offers

little hope of edification or escape. Its opening lines place us in one of the most popular settings of modern pedagogical literature: the zoologi-

cal garden. This zoo, however, is a synecdoche less for the naturalhistorical order of imperial knowledge into which the child is to be inducted, as for a prison world: The tiger was tired... Day after day, always more of the same...

A Narrow Cage 169 A narrow cage and the narrow strip of sky that could be seen from inside the cage, and beyond the cage more narrow cages as far as the eye

could see... This row of cages, one after another, seemed to pass beyond the walls of the zoological garden, to extend to the very ends of the earth. Oh, oh, the tiger was tired ... the tiger was so very tired.°*

It is also a world of misprision, one in which the tiger’s own figural language—the rich and unmistakably human thought-world revealed to the reader in this passage by way of free indirect discourse—is opaque to the humans who come to see him, yet remain utterly unable to fathom his misery or learn the lesson he embodies. As we will see, this failure to communicate reoccurs throughout the text and lies at the heart of its ethical and political concerns. Misprision here is a problem of translation, the result of the incommensurability between different languages or codes.

The tiger’s thought-world is relayed to us by way of reported interior monologue, though it is unclear if these words are translated from Tiger, or represent his mastery of one of the human languages. The tiger thinks (and later, speaks to the other animals he encounters) in what seems to be Chinese (translated, of course, from Eroshenko’s original Japanese). But

his vocalizations, be they sighs, exhortations, roars of rage, or sobs of pain, seem to be uttered only in Tiger, for they invariably fall on deaf and unsympathetic ears.°° Yet the tiger’s descent into captivity, we soon learn, resulted from his

ability to listen and feel empathy for human suffering. Having eavesdropped on the men and women who come to offer their prayers to a stone spirit altar in his native forests, the tiger is consumed by a desire to taste the tears they have left behind. It to this same unnamed deity that

the tiger, disgusted by “the dull-witted howls of laughter” of the zoogoers, cries for deliverance. “As if in a dream,” the tiger suddenly awakes to find himself at liberty, in a forest realm in which the only sound is the “clear, fresh trill of a running stream” and comes to the realization that the “narrow cages” and “dull-witted faces” were themselves but a “terrible dream.”°® And with this new and terrible consciousness of the nature of captivity, he leaps into the task of liberating those who still suffer.

Happening upon a herd of sheep, he batters down the fences of their enclosure, only to find that they prefer to stay within the confines of their own mind-forged manacles:

170 DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES “You, sheep! Dear brothers and sisters. Go out to a world of freedom. Come out of your cage,” he roared like thunder as he continued his demolition of the fence. But the sheep, scared out of their wits, could merely cower together motionlessly in one corner of their pen, dumbly trembling. The tiger could only assume that to the sheep, nothing was more terrifying than freedom, and flew into a fery rage. “Slaves of humankind! Lowly slaves. You don’t want your freedom? You can’t part with your narrow cage? Inferior creatures.”>’

What the tiger fails to realize is that his discourse on freedom has sounded

in the ears of the sheep only as an unintelligible roar. And for the tiger, what he hears as the “piteous” and “slavish” sobbing of the sheep is a “ter-

rifying sound,” perhaps because it figures not so much their abjection, but their mutual incomprehension, and their consequent resistance to his civilizing mission.

After this initial disappointment, the tiger passes by the palace of a Rajah, and recognizes in the human world another kind of subjection, another “narrow cage.” He has arrived in time to witness the marriage procession of a princess newly inducted into the Rajah’s harem. Determined to rescue her as well, he leaps across the palace moat and into the shady and luxurious halls of what he instinctually perceives as only another of a series of cages. Here he is confronted first by a canary, whom he entreats to “fly to a world a freedom” as it shrinks from his presence.°> The tiger, frustrated that his lesson in liberty falls on deaf ears, smashes its cage, and in one fell swoop the canary is killed. The motif repeats once more when, entreating a goldfish to abandon its bubble world for the broad water of the Ganges, the tiger shatters its tank. The tiger, in short, is an ineffectual teacher, whose magnanimity is perceived only as a threat, and whose instructions could not possibly be comprehended by their intended audience. Enraged by what sees as “slaves of humankind”—those beasts who are not susceptible to the claims of language and its lessons—the tiger mauls the Rajah but, in a fitting twist of the knife, is himself wounded, perhaps fatally, in the skirmish. Secreting himself once again the forest, the stricken tiger is presented

with one more opportunity to further his revolutionary mission when the Rajah’s new wife is led by a group of “Brahmins” to a funeral pyre. As Lu Xun informs his readers in a translator’s note, she is to be burned along with her dead husband, in what he impugns as the “evil custom” of sati, or widow burning: “This is an old custom in India. After India

A Narrow Cage 171 came under the domination of England, the English banned this evil practice, but they have stubbornly continued to practice it in secret, even to this day.” The substance of Lu Xun’s forcible intrusion into the text is as historically questionable as it is telling..°? As Lata Mani reminds us, Sati was “an exceptional and caste-specific practice” which became a “potent signifier of the oppression of all Indian women, and thereby of the degradation of India as a whole.” As such, the discourse about sati served not only as an “alibi for the colonial civilizing mission” but also an occasion for “indigenous autocritique” within India itself.°? Why, then, is Lu Xun using the occasion provided by Eroshenko’s text to parrot British colonial discourse and, in doing so, seemingly replicate the very sorts of invidious comparison to which China was itself subject, particularly with reference to social practices such as foot-binding and

infanticide? Part of the answer is to be found in his postscript to the piece, in which he proclaims that he far prefers the naive sincerity of Eroshenko’s attack on the customs of another country to the defense of such customs made by “the Nobel Prize-winning sage poet of India, Tagore.”°! Lu Xun’s intervention is eminently strategic and inescapably local: he seems to be using Eroshenko as a mouthpiece with which to lash out at adversaries such as Xu Zhimo and Hu Shi who had championed Tagore’s work, and whose sponsorship eventually led to his controversial lecture tour in China in 1923. His attack—irrespective of the dubious accuracy of his characterization of Tagore’s position on sati— raises the question of the relation of anticolonial nationalism to the ostensibly universal enlightenment values on which liberation struggles are predicated. In condemning what he sees as the relativizing exceptional-

ism of cultural nationalism, Lu Xun implies that one’s own national character is as much a “narrow cage” as colonialism itself. Where, then, does this leave the would-be revolutionary shepherd of his people? The text, if not the translator’s note, provides a devastating answer. The tiger, strangely drawn to the “deerlike eyes” of the woman

from the moment he watched her being led into the palace as a new bride, prepares to spring to her rescue. And it is in this heroic impulse that his own abjection is made devastatingly clear: The tiger had already forgotten himself, and was ready to throw himself into the crowd of humans. But at that very instant, the Redcoats whom no one had noticed before, came flying like arrows from all four sides into the clearing where the funeral was taking place. The faces of the Brahmins and

Ne DEVELOPMENTAL FAIRY TALES their followers were filled with terror by these Indian troops, and they stood rooted to their places. And the deerlike woman’s jubilant shout seemed as if it could have been heard even in the distant Himalayas. “It wasn’t me. She was waiting for the white man.”

He wrapped his paws around his chest so that it wouldn’t split open with pain... he buried his paws in his chest so as not to let out a sigh of hurt and sorrow. The white man waved a strange slip of paper in the air, issued some sort of order, escorted the deerlike woman down from the pyre, and folded her into an embrace.”

The Bengal tiger has been bested at his own liberatory game by the very colonial forces who dominate the slaves he had hoped to redeem. The tiger’s words go unheard, and real power seems to rest in the colonial writ, that “strange slip of paper” brandished in the air. Perhaps even more damning is that the tiger’s sorrow exposes his revolutionary zeal as a desire, on par with that of the white man, to possess those he purports to set free. It is difficult not to read this tale as a kind of postcolonial allegory in which the developmental agency of the native intellectual is usurped by the “universality” of enlightenment values. One might even see in its ambivalent discourse on the consequences of awakening those who would rather be left to sleep a prefiguring of Lu Xun’s parable, included in his

preface to The Outcry, about another sort of cage. Yet perhaps the deeper and more disturbing drama here has to do with literary form. For rather than providing any further development of the plot, Eroshenko’s fairy tale ends where it began, in prison and misprision. The tiger retreats to the stone altar to lick its wounds. After witnessing the death of the

woman by her own hand—she sacrifices herself to the stone spirit in penance for having betrayed her country—he kneels to taste a drop of her blood. And awakes to find himself curled up in the confines of his cage. His inarticulate roars of disappointed rage only elicit the excitement and laughter of the crowd at the zoo. In a final act of resistance, he batters his head against the bars of the cage, until the sound of dull-witted laughter gradually faded into the distance, to be replaced by the murmur of an Indian summer night. The stink of the human crowd gradually became the scent of a primeval Indian forest. And yet the tiger did not open his eyes to see the meadow he so loved, the stone spirit, the trees untold thousands of years old, the blood

A Narrow Cage 173 of slaves that sparkled mysteriously like rubies. He no longer had the courage to open his eyes.°

Does this moment signify the tiger’s final deliverance, one purchased at the price of his will to be delivered? What use is insight when it leads only to blindness, defeat, and the incomprehension of those to whom language is only a beastly sound? Yet if the prison world at the beginning of the story was prophecy, and death the tiger’s only release, how do we account for the story’s dialectical movement between dreams and despair, between being animal and becoming human? In the end, Eroshenko’s fairy tale imprisons the reader in the very impasse with which it began, history comes to a standstill, and narrative itself becomes a narrow cage. It remains to be seen whether or not the cage may serve as a portal to historical insight.

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APPENDIX “A Narrow Cage” by Vasili1i Eroshenko

Note: The following text is my translation into English of Lu Xun’s rendering of Eroshenko’s original Japanese fairy tale into Chinese. The translator’s notes were appended to the text by Lu Xun.

1

The tiger was tired... Day after day, always more of the same... A narrow cage and the narrow strip of sky that could be seen from inside the cage, and beyond the cage more narrow cages as far as the eye could see... This row of cages, one after another, seemed to pass beyond the walls of the zoological garden, to extend to the very ends of the earth. Oh, oh, the tiger was tired ... the tiger was so very tired. Day after day, always more of the same. The dull-witted faces that came to look, the dull-witted sounds of laughter,

that nauseating stench... “Oh, oh. If only I didn’t have to see those dull-witted, vulgar faces. If only I didn’t have to hear that dull-witted, annoying laughter . . .” Yet the dull-witted line of people stretched as far as the eye could see, one after another, without end, past the walls of the zoological garden, to the very ends of the earth; it seemed that the uncouth laughter would never quiet so long as the universe still existed. Oh, oh, the tiger was tired ... the tiger was so very tired. And so the tiger curled up like a cat, burying his head beneath his paws, his body trembling with loathing, and thought to himself: “Oh, oh. Could it be that the life of a tiger lies only in looking at those dullwitted faces? Could this so-called life consist only of hearing those dull-witted howls of laughter?”

LS

176 Appendix A deep, painful sigh welled up in his chest. “Hey, the great big beast is crying,” the spectators said as they rushed over to the tiger’s cage to look. The tiger’s whole body shook with rage and revulsion, and his tail beat unconsciously on the floor of his cage. He thought back to the time he was still living freely among the trees, in the depths of the deep forest, under great trees untold thousands of years old, when the stone spirit appeared, garlanded with flowers. The people came from distant villages, forgetting even that he was nearby, and hastened to kneel in front of the stone spirit, losing themselves in prayer. Sometimes sighs would escape from their mouths, and sometimes tears would splash the flowers, mingling with the dew, inexplicably shining like phosphorescent stones. The drops would frolic freely on the flower petals, or sit in solemn

reverie on the tips of the leaves. He grew fond of playing at trying to tell the people’s tears from the drops of dew. One night, he stretched out his tongue to lick those tears, shining so mysteriously like gems, shed by humankind. He did not yet understand that among the

offerings left in front of the spirit, nothing, not even precious gems, could be more valuable than tears. And so he touched his tongue to the tears once, and only once, for he was captured that very night. He believed that this was the punishment of the stone spirit. And now as he recalled the past, his chest swelled again with pain, and it hurt so much he wanted to cry. He made as if to copy the people who came before the stone spirit, kneeling as they did in earnest entreaty, calling out in prayer.

“Oh Spirit, if only I couldn’t see those dull-witted faces. If only I couldn’t hear that dull-witted laughter .. .” After some time the dull-witted laughter somehow began to fade into the distance, and as it receded, as if in a lovely dream, there came the serenity of a deep quiet. The tiger cocked his ear to one side, listening to the clear, fresh trickling sound of a running stream. The nauseating stench of humankind had disappeared as well, and all around him the rich scent of flowers hung in the air. The tiger opened his eyes in astonishment, and gazed all around him. Who could imagine his delight? The straitened confines of the cage and the dull shadows of human beings—all of these were no more to be seen. He slept by the stone spirit garlanded with flowers under a canopy of trees untold thousands of years old. The tears shed by the people still sparkled mysteriously in the moonlight. Only now did he realize that just as he had thought to lick the tears, he had fallen into slumber. “Ah! Wonderful. It was all a dream. Ah! I’m so happy.”

Appendix 177 The tiger leapt into the air, and with his tail beating time, began to prance in the moonlight, his chest swelling with freedom, his body exuding strength from its every fiber, majesty in his every movement. “Ah! Happiness. I had thought that only narrow cages and the dull-wittedness of humanity were real, but it was all a terrible dream after all. No matter if it was a dream or if it was real, there could never be anything more terrible than a cage” “This truth and this truth only, I shall never forget as long as I live.” And as he spoke, the tiger walked without any destination through the trees. 2 With great leaps and loping strides, the tiger bounded across the meadows like a leather ball, his passage taking him for miles unawares, until he finally reached the very edge of the forest. Here he caught a whiff of a strange odor, and coming to a sudden halt, his great nose twitched in the air as he tried to make out its source. “Ah. It’s sheep. There must be sheep nearby ... yet it seems like such a long time since I’ve seen them.”

With this, he began to pace forward with muted footfalls, and taking the scent of the sheep as his target, crept forward through the bush. Soon he saw before him a tall fence, and gradually the oblivious bleating of the sheep could be heard from within the enclosure. The tiger had seen such fences hundreds of times. And he had leapt over fences like this hundreds of times to capture the little lambs and calves inside. But on this evening, the sight of the enclosure made his heart swell with the flames of an unutterable rage.

“Cage, a narrow cage...” And with that he pounced forward as fast as an arrow. His roar was more frightening than thunder. And with a lightning-like momentum, he threw himself against the fence. Like a great storm determined to destroy all that lies in its

path, he lashed out, and the fence, built of big posts firmly anchored in the sround, began to sway like a spider’s web in the wind. In another moment, the sturdy posts began to topple one by one, like a house made of children’s blocks. Within a couple of moments, a gap had opened in the fence wide enough to drive a horse cart through. “You, sheep! Dear brothers and sisters. Go out to a world of freedom. Come out of your cage,” he roared like thunder as he continued his demolition of the fence. But the sheep, scared out of their wits, could merely cower together motionlessly in one corner of their pen, dumbly trembling. The tiger could only assume that to the sheep, nothing was more terrifying than freedom, and flew into a flery rage.

178 Appendix “Slaves of humankind! Lowly slaves. You don’t want your freedom? You can’t part with your narrow cage? Inferior creatures.” As he spoke, he advanced on the herd of sheep, and moving from one end of the pen to the other, lifted the sheep one by one with his great paws, and cast them outside the enclosure. Yet the sheep outside the fence merely broke into piteous sobs, mewling as if their innards had been gouged with a dull knife, and escaped back to their place inside the pen. The shepherds and the sheepdogs, paralyzed at first by fright, had stood and wrung their hands in astonishment. But now they recovered their wits, and determined to force the tiger to retreat, began to advance toward him. Two or three bullets pierced the tiger’s body, and the dogs howled menacingly as they stood poised and at the ready for any opportunity to attack. “Sheep! It is you who are the lowly slaves, you who are unspeakable beasts. You are even lower than the dogs. It’s you who are beyond salvation.” The tiger spat out these words like mouthfuls of blood, and with five or six bounds, flew back to the forest. The scene of the sheep was no longer before him. He knelt in front of the stone spirit, licking his wounds, and weeping. “Oh. Oh. If only I hadn’t heard that piteous sound .. .” He covered his ears and prayed to the stone spirit. “If only I couldn’t hear that terrifying sound ... that piteous sound of slaves that echoes to the ends of the earth... .” He wept. 5

The tiger passed by the magnificent palace retreat of the Rajah.' As he set out on a long journey toward the precipitous peaks of the Himalaya mountains, he often sped back and forth through the dark, verdant Bengali forests, forests as yet untouched by the blade of an axe. In these wanderings in the wilderness, he had already encountered the palace a number of times, casting only a contemptuous glance at its high stone walls and deep encircling moat. Yet this time, as soon as he approached, he stopped short at the edge of the moat, as if possessed by an evil spirit. His pulse raced and he seemed to choke on the air around him. “A cage, another narrow cage...” Inside this palatial residence dwelt two hundred perfumed flowers of the Rajah’s harem, living a life of luxury. Who knows how much the people of the village who passed by the palace envied the lives of the women inside it? Young girls on their way home from the fields would stand under the shadows of the trees lining the moat. And with straw baskets on their backs, they would wonder what it would be like to carry that luxurious and indulgent life home to their poor thatched huts. And what of

Appendix 179 that life? The tiger now felt sure that he could hear the sighs of the women within, longing for freedom. He gnashed his teeth. In front of him he saw the lofty eaves of the palace behind its stone walls, the sun glinting from the roof like shimmering gold; and encircling the walls like a chain several yards across were the depths of the moat. The tiger had disliked humankind from the time he was very small. Even from the time he had suckled at his mother’s breast, and yet despite that, in a manner he himself could not explain, when he thought of those women surrounded by high stone walls, his heart would pound uncontrollably, and his breath would choke within him. He circled a few times around the palace, surveying the grounds, and when he had just reached the long drawbridge that crossed from the great iron gates to the other side of the moat, he suddenly heard the sound of men approaching along the highway. The tiger leapt into the surrounding bush and flattened his body to the ground, awaiting their arrival. After a moment, a magnificent procession surrounded by

a phalanx of attendants passed through the trees. In the center of the procession, he saw two beautiful gilded palanquins being carried on the shoulders of the slaves. The first palanquin belonged to the Rajah. The second palanquin transported the young girl who had just become the two hundred and first bride of the Rajah. Oblivious to the tiger crouching in the shadows, the procession passed quietly by. The tiger saw the face of the Rajah glowing with feelings of joy and jubilance, and he saw the figure of the two hundred and first bride of the Rajah, wrapped from head to toe in precious jewels and figured silks. Of her veil he saw nothing, for he had eyes only for her lovely and gentle eyes, their spring-like and liquid azure, flashing prettily in the light. Catching sight of these eyes, the tiger was transfixed. “T seem to have seen those eyes before, haven’t I? Those exquisite, mournful eyes, flashing with fear...” “Yes, I think I have it. Yes, I think so...” The tiger laughed mournfully. The eyes were much the same as the eyes of the deer he had hunted so many times before. The tiger gave a desolate laugh. As he pondered these matters, the rajah’s ranks had already arrived at the palace. The drawbridge was lowered slowly down, and the great iron gates opened. The two hundred wives who had been concealed behind the veil of the gates greeted the two palanquins with smiles. And then the bridge was drawn up, and the iron gates shut so that the loud click of the lock rang in the tiger’s ears for a long, long time after. The sun crossed the mountains to the west, and was lost from view. The

howls of hounds and jackals announced the arrival of a summer evening.

180 Appendix Through the trees, the rooftop of the palace seemed to melt into the haze of dusk, and the tiger stood mutely by the moat, as if he had been struck dumb by the stone walls. There are some things even a tiger cannot do. Who could possibly leap several yards across the moat and over such high walls? The tiger sighed. “Oh, oh. There are some things even a tiger can’t do.” Some sounds came from directly across from him. Someone was running, and someone else chasing behind. The tiger stared over toward the stone wall. Atop the ramparts appeared the veiled face of the young girl with beautiful eyes. She was still clad in wedding finery, standing with bare feet on the wall. Her graceful figure trembled with fear in the hazy dusk; the tiger understood, for this was much the same as with the deer he himself had captured. She intended to leap into the water below, but just as she prepared to do so, her eyes suddenly encountered the strangely shining eyes looking fixedly at her from across the moat. She instinctively recoiled a step backward, and in that very instant, the Rajah hastened forward to grab hold of her. Like a tiger capturing a deer, he held her fast and led her away. All that remained in the tiger’s ears was her almost inaudible cry of despair. And having heard it, the tiger forgot all else. His body burned like fire, and trembled violently; he mustered all of his strength to make the leap into the moat. In a moment, he had reached the wall and begun to scale it like a gigantic cat. Soon after, he appeared atop the wall, where he stood for a moment before disappearing into the precincts of the Rajah’s palace. Everything was already quiet within. There was only the cool sound of water trickling from a fountain. Only the murmur of the flowers... the tiger’s heart gradually settled into stillness as well. He halted for a moment, as if to trace a scent, his nose twitching back and forth in the air. The night was laden with the scent of flowers, moving in tangled currents through the air, diffusing the stench of humankind. The tiger took a few great draughts of this air before he was able to identify the scent he was after. Moving in complete silence, he glided along a broad veranda, and past a velvet canopy

into the palace. There was no one to be seen inside the ornate and spacious room he had entered, so he advanced further to take a look around. It was an expansive hall, glowing eerily with the light given off by the magnificent accoutrements and precious gems within. Next to the veranda, on a marble platform stood a large glass tank, inside of which goldfish were sporting with the moonbeams slanting through the water. In another corner of the hall, a canary slept quietly on its perch inside an ornate cage. As soon as he saw this, the tiger forgot all else and began to roar. “A cage, yet another narrow cage... there are cages everywhere.” With a leap, the tiger alighted by the side of the birdcage.

Appendix 181 “Oh canary, leave now. Go outside, fly to a world of freedom. There are lovely forests bathed in moonlight awaiting you there.” As he spoke, the tiger softly landed a blow with his paw on the side of the cage, breaking open half of the cage. The startled canary’s body shook, and it sought refuge at the far end of the cage, its wings beating the air. “’'m giving you your freedom. Quick! Fly from this narrow cage. Fly to a world of freedom.” Yet it seemed that for the canary, there was nothing so frightening as freedom, and nothing quite so terribly unsettling as a world of freedom. “Lowly slave of humankind. Inferior thing. You don’t want your freedom?” The tiger reached with his paw inside the cage to grab hold of the flapping wings of the canary and drag it out from inside. By the time it had reached the outside, however, the canary had breathed its last. The tiger held the little dead body of the bird on his palm, and gazed blankly at it in the moonlight. “A slave you were, yet so lovable and so beautiful too .. .” As if remembering some unfinished business, the tiger placed the dead, cold body of the canary in the brightest spot at the center of the hall, and softly alighted next to the fish tank, where he gazed by the light of the moon at the goldfish. The goldfish opened its mouth wide, making again and again as if to swallow the moon reflected in the water, turning somersaults in the water that revealed its white belly, playing with the moonbeams. The tiger’s eyes filled with a look of compassion.

“Oh, poor, poor little goldfish. Pll take you to the broad and magnificent waters of the Ganges. There’s much cleaner water there for you. [ll take you to the wide open freedom of the boundless ocean .. . there you’ll find an even more beautiful moon. Come with me to that beautiful world of freedom .. .” But the goldfish was so frightened it sank deeper into the tank. It seemed that for the goldfish, there was nothing scarier than the beauty of the Ganges, nothing more unsettling than the wide open freedom of the ocean. “A slave. Another slave of humankind. Everywhere there are slaves.” The tiger reached with his right front paw into the water to catch the fish, but the goldfish, as if to mock him, merely floated effortlessly beyond his reach. The tiger went into a rage. Sitting on his hindquarters, he reached both of his forelegs into the water, and in an effort to catch the fish, began to beat furiously at the water with his paws. But the goldfish shot forward like an arrow, sliding beyond the tiger’s grasp. “Beast, slave of humankind!”

The tiger, further enraged, beat only more violently on the water, and his blows upset the balance of the tank, which fell to the floor with a shattering crash. Startled by the sound, the tiger instinctively ran to the door. After a few moments, in the depths of the hall, another curtain opened, and the rajah, clad only in a robe, burst into the room with a pistol in his right hand. The enraged

182 Appendix eyes of the rajah rushing forward and the piercing eyes of the tiger, shaking with infuriation, met for a moment and one moment only ... The sharp report of the pistol, and a roar that seemed to shake the very foundations of the palace. The last moans of human attachment to life. And then the unfathomable silence of the Indian night. Only the cool sound of water trickling from a fountain, only the murmur of the flowers ... and in the magnificent palace, a goldfish flaps madly across the floor, while the two hundred and one wives of the Rajah do not draw so much as a breath for fear of disturbing the silence.

4 The tiger slept in front of the stone spirit deep in the forest, licking the wounds on his chest. His breast, his paws, his whole body throbbed with pain, but he was no longer willing to cry, and the only outward sign of how it hurt was a long sigh. Nor did he pray to the spirit to heal his wounds. Instead, his face was cast in melancholy as he lay deep in thought. He was no longer willing to act as humans did, praying to the stone spirit for salvation. The Indian night grew deeper, quietly throwing its mantle of darkness across everything. The cries of the jackals and hounds in the distance announced their arrival; the tiger would have liked to sleep, but he heard the unsettled chirping of birds coming from afar. In this uneasy nocturnal hush, the tiger could not settle into quiescent slumber. He raised his head, cocked his ear, and looked straight ahead. “What’s that? It must be humans .. .” “Ah, perhaps someone is coming again to pray ... ah, not just one.

How many? One and two and three and four... Ah, I can’t get to the end, there are so many.”

With a troubled air, he tried to distinguish their scents, his nose twitching back and forth. “Ah, there’s a scent I recognize among them. Who could it be? It’s not the hunter Kamal. It’s not the wood gatherer, Anand. Nor is it the alms-gathering monk Ram. Ah, yes. Could it be the woman who’s like a deer? Oh! And there’s also the scent of the Rajah... Don’t be silly, ’ve already broken his head into four pieces... I’m sure it was four pieces. And there are Brahmins among them. One and one more ... what is really happening here? Ah, is it that a secret society is burning a woman along with a coffin again? Could it be that the woman like a deer is being burned along with the coffin of the Rajah?”? He trembled as he spoke.

Appendix 183 “That can’t be. Yet the woman like a deer is among them.” He concealed himself in the shadows of the bush to scout out any activity. A slight breeze came from the opposite direction, carrying a new scent through the trees and into the tiger’s nose. “What could that be?” His great nose twitched as he concentrated on identifying the scent. “Here too the smell of gunpowder. Indian soldiers?” “But whites as well. They must be government officials .. .” “Dangerous. They seem to be surrounding this area, but without letting on that they are here. What exactly are they up to? It seems as if they’re going trap something... Yet they don’t seem to be hunting. There are too many of them... There may be more than a hundred of them.” The magnificent funeral procession of scores of people, led by the Brahmins, came to a halt before the stone spirit, in whose presence the Brahmins and those who followed them seemed more scrupulous, even fearful, carefully maintaining a hushed silence, their faces reflecting a kind of terror as they looked apprehensively around them. The woman who resembled a deer also added her worried gaze to those of the rest as she looked at the trees which surrounded them. For the tiger, he could only feel that she was waiting for someone, someone who could arrive in time to rescue her from the clutches of the Brahmins. “Just wait for me. No one knows that I’m here... call me out of the woods.” The tiger’s heart was happy ... the tiger laughed in delight. The slaves set to work, and in less than ten minutes, they had built a mountain made of kindling in the midst of the beauty of the forest. But the woman like a deer was still praying to the spirit, a sorrowful prayer seemingly without end. The Brahmins and the others had begun to grow restless. “Hurry! Hurry! The Fire God awaits you. Queen Deva’ awaits the arrival of your soul, your pure soul.” The slaves quietly placed the Rajah’s ornately gilded coffin atop the pyre. But still the deer-like woman continued to pray, unhurriedly. With her despairing eyes, she seemed to call for someone across the Indian summer night. The tiger laughed with delight. The eyes of the Brahmins gleamed sharply in their bony faces like knives. “Hurry, hurry, hurry. The Mahadeva awaits the ultimate purity of your sacrifice, awaits the fulfillment of your duty to your husband.” The slaves brandished torches which burned with tongues of flame, awaiting the order of the Brahmins to set the mountain of kindling afire. The deer-like woman cast her last glance toward the forest, and seemed to be forced to the top of the pyre by the two Brahmins. The tiger could see that her face was even more pallid than the veil which fluttered in the breeze.

184 Appendix The Brahmins took up a curious prayer; the slaves set fire to each of the four corners of the pyre. Wisps of smoke rose into the void of the night like the sighs of a final farewell. The tiger had already forgotten himself, and was ready to throw himself into the crowd of humans. But at that very instant, the Redcoats whom no one had

noticed before, came flying like arrows from all four sides into the clearing where the funeral was taking place. The faces of the Brahmins and their followers were filled with terror by these Indian troops, and they stood rooted to their places. And the deer-like woman’s jubilant shout seemed as if it could have been heard even in the distant Himalayas. “Tt wasn’t me. She was waiting for the white man.”

He wrapped his paws around his chest so that it wouldn’t split open with pain ...he buried his paws in his chest so as not to let out a sigh of hurt and sorrow. [he white man waved a strange slip of paper in the air, issued some sort of order, escorted the deer-like woman down from the pyre, and folded her into an embrace. The Brahmins’ eyes flashed like lightning when they saw this, and the tiger felt his heart ache as if it was being torn in two. Whether from rage or terror, the Brahmins began to tremble. “Indian gods, Indian Gods who have protected the land of India from time immemorial! Today we curse with the limitless sufferings of hell this woman who has blasphemed against the Gods!” The followers obediently repeated after them, “Curse this woman!” “Curse this woman who loves an enemy of India, who loves an enemy of the

Indian people. Curse this woman who has blasphemed against the gods and goddesses.”

The followers cried out, “Curse this woman!” As she listened to these imprecations, the deer-like woman shook with spasms,

but the more he listened, the tighter the white man clasped the trembling woman to his breast. The white man, aglow with his own victory, brought his face even closer to that of the deer-like woman, and the tiger felt sure he heard words of love. The Rajah’s coffin was carried away by the slaves, the Brahmins and their followers were led away by the troops, and the deer-like woman borne away in the arms of the white man. What seemed to have been a summer’s night dream faded away without a trace. All that remained was a wisp of smoke, dancing in the empty air like a final sigh. 5

The tiger jumped to his feet. The pain in his chest was unbearable. His chest

was burning with a pain that he had never felt before. He did not make a

Appendix 185 sound, nor was he seen by the stone spirit or noticed by any other people. He crept quietly through the bush in pursuit of the traces of the people who had disappeared into that dream-like summer night. The Indian night gradually deepened. Untold millions of leaves, soaked in moonlight like rain, sank into deep slumber. Suddenly the stillness of the night was pierced by someone’s sharp cries, followed by two or three gunshots, and the sound of some sort of turmoil. A dark shadow flew through the shadows of the trees like a storm wind. And then the unfathomable loneliness of the night stitched itself back together. The tiger surreptitiously crossed into the plain. There were traces of blood, still warm, on the road. He glanced back toward the stone spirit’s visage.

“It doesn’t matter. I know nothing, and even if I were to know, it wouldn’t concern me. It’s one less white man, and that is all.”

With this, he concealed himself once again in the shadows of the bush; yet even he no longer had the courage to sleep on the flowers in front of the stone spirit. The black mantle of the Indian summer night covered everything, and all was quiet. The cries of the jackals and hounds came from afar, informing him that midnight had arrived. Suddenly, tearing through the black mantle, the deer-like woman came out of the forest into the clearing by the stone spirit, her snow white veil trailing be-

hind her, long hair billowing around her pallid, bloodless face. Those limpid eyes were like a symbol of disenchantment, and a sharp silver gilt dagger flashed in her slender fingers. She knelt in front of the stone spirit to pray, and yet she could no longer remember the words to all her prayers. The stone spirit could hardly forget that moonlit face belonging to a woman with eyes like a deer who had forgotten all her prayers. If only she could remember, but when she tried to recall the words, she found she had forgotten every line. “T’ve been cursed by the gods of our country, for I defied the will of the Great Brahman. I loved an enemy of India, an enemy of the gods of India. All that remains for me is to descend down the road to Hell.” The silver dagger in her hands flashed in front of her breast.

The tiger began to cry out as if his own chest had been pierced by a sharp blade. He shot out from the bush, using one paw to lift the head of the fallen woman with eyes like a deer. He pulled the dagger out from her chest to look. The stone spirit stood just as before. The woman’s blood trickled out from her breast onto the flowers, as a final offering. The tiger watched the woman gradually grow serene, and pondered. For the first time he could clearly see that humankind is imprisoned by an invisible cage, one that even the strongest men could not break open. And as soon as he thought of cages, he once again grew angry.

186 Appendix “People are truly the lowliest slaves. People are the real beasts. But who is it that puts humans in cages and treats them the same as slaves and beasts?” He glanced to his side at the visage of the stone spirit.

“No, no. It’s not that thing. What that thing is I don’t know...and so, who could it be?” The drops of blood on the flowers, mixed with dew, shone in the moonlight with an unthinkable brilliance, like gems.

“The blood of slaves is brilliant, like rubies. I want to taste what it’s LG sete cee”

He took another sidelong glance at the visage of the stone spirit. “It’s no matter. I don’t know. Just one drop—just one drop.” He quietly bent to lick that shining ruby-like drop of the blood of a slave.

But at that moment, the blood that sparkled like gems, the stone, and the stone spirit all faded into the distance. The clear, fresh trill of a running stream and the murmurs of trees untold thousands of years old gradually had become the hubbub of human voices. The fragrance of flowers to melt the heart had somehow yielded to nauseating stink of crowds of human beings. The tiger opened his eyes wide to look around him. He had been sleeping curled up in a narrow cage. He looked toward the back of the cage, and toward the front of the cage, and toward the sides of the cage, and all that met his eyes was a narrow cage, and a dark mass of dull-witted faces. Beyond these, there was nothing. The tiger began to roar with disappointment. “It’s only the narrow cage and the dull-witted faces of humankind that are realatter All ors. The spectators grew excited and began to cheer: “The big beast is roaring! The great big beast is standing up!”

The tiger reared back and rushed with all his strength against the front of the cage, but his limbs already lacked the strength to break through the bars.

He gave out another frightening moan, reared back, and battered his head against the bars until, bleeding, he sank to the floor. The crowd, who had fled from the cage in their terror, now returned, squeezing against the bars to look, and breaking into nervous laughter. “Oh, oh. Those dull-witted faces. That dull-witted and vulgar laughter .. .” The tiger closed his eyes. And called to mind once again the image of the stone spirit. “QO Stone Spirit, I give this blood to you, as a final offering. If only I couldn’t see those dull-witted faces. If only I couldn’t hear that dullwitted and vulgar laughter .. .” This was the final prayer of an Indian tiger to an Indian spirit of stone.

At that moment, the sound of dull-witted laughter gradually faded into the distance, to be replaced by the murmur of an Indian summer night.

Appendix 187 The stink of the human crowd gradually became the scent of a primeval Indian forest. And yet the tiger did not open his eyes to see the meadow he so loved, the stone spirit, the trees untold thousands of years old, the blood of slaves that sparkled mysteriously like rubies. He no longer had the courage to open his eyes.

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GLOSSARY OF SELECTED

CHINESE AND JAPANESE TERMS

Ailuoxianke BSS Ae Sic Eh]

ao a6 baihua Hit Baopi beiPhCH A

Antusheng EEE An Wang Ai pian s

Badaowan J TE Baila xing 1 Aut

Bainian yijiao oa we Beixin shuju ACTS a Bencao gangmu ANE Att] A

Bing Xin VK Bing Zhi AR is

Bo Yaolian ATE A “bu shi chizi zhi xin” DB RIRF LI bu xiang ren MEK

canren Wes AI Chalisi Peilun Pr By Be te Chenbao ire YK Chen Bochui a Chen Zhen SRA

“Chibian” thas

Daguanyuan Ae bal

Daliang Kk Datong shu AWS

Da Zhonghua gongchang KH aE ay 189

190 Glossary

Daocao ren (iste

dangdai Bt\ Deng Xiaoping GB) e

Didi liixing J IR Ie AT di yi deng wenming guo Be Se CAH dingxing qi rE IB HY Dongfang Wenming RT SCA Dongfang zazhi OTE ts Dongwuxue da cidian BK fae HL dongwuxue zheli a Pi Bl! dongwuyuan Hi) dutoujian Hey GH Ail

Du Yaquan Lng

enwu EY) Erliang ave

Eguchi Kiyoshi iLO “Ertong de wenxue” Gate [PY SC

Ertong shidi congshu Re PShsS

Ertong shijie Via a lea

fada PE fazhan ae Fe

Ertong wenxue congshu SUE MC ae

fazhan de chengxu Oe REIN BEY

fazhan shi Oe HEE fazhan shuo Pe EM

fenmen bielei aS Feng Zikai eet te

gaizao huanjing PM ie Eis Bh Geyao yanjiu hui HK ia OE Oe, OF

Geyao zhoukan WK ieg dled [1]

gezhi Ke BL Gezhi huibian Ket UE Ai gsouxiong Ai] HE “Guduzhe” HM Ae

gushi lei leeiE se Guangxue hui ee

suohuo wl ER Guoli zhongyang daxue ey NH RK Haidi liixing HEE STIR AT Han Langen tilt [oad ANS Hanyu da cidian eae A ni] BL

Glossary 19]

He Jiagan fin] BREE hei’an shijie mere TE Hong Xisheng ALR AE

Hu Rongrong HALAS

Hu Shi MEPL Hu Xiansu BH a

hua Mt Hua Bizhen EW the Hu Yuzhi mH RZ

Huang Yi oe Huitou kan A] SAG Inoue Tsutomu FP até

Jia Baoyu =62 60

jianshi wubi EX Et fe CL,

Jiang Junyan ZENE

jiao jinbuKe saa

Jiangnan zhizao ju LL pel 28 act Fay

jindai (Japanese: kindai) Wa

jinhua HEH, Jinhua she ME (Lt

jingjie ely

Juehui mm

Jingwo xiansheng Be Bw AE kaihua (Japanese: kaika) ba Kaiming shudian bel FO eS Ja

“Kan bianxifa” Ay EE

kokutai pd Hi “Kuangren riji” AEA. A iit

Kun fie lang A

langbei ALAA langbei xiangyi AR ARAL

Lao Can youji 56 ETE IL

Lao Shaonian 36, AFLi Jinhui Ae Sen liming yundong 3x WE)

Li Hongzhang Py

Li Meng EY Li Shizhen PRE

Li Timotai 2 te PEK

192 Glossary

Li Yuying APT WA Liang Qichao ANGER

lin Be long HE lu Jee Lu Boyou rH

Liangyou huabao Le AC ee Liang zhi zhengdou de lang phy PA A

Lu Jidong litewN

Lu Xun wh IH

“Lun xiaoshuo yu iin 7] ioe LAE TAZ bal qunzhi zhi guanxi”

Ma Junwu Sy amie’

maidu er huanzhu AT we DK

Mao Dun A NE

Mao Zedong Ee WK

meipi Jatt

Meiguo Weishi [we aT: minjian de tonghua BS Fey FS tinh

mingming huangzu BEBE oa Ie

Mu Mutian FEAR

nage guotu Als fel el 1 Nahan LP Hg “Nahan zixu” LY Wide Nakane Hiyoshi HHA Gd,

“ni dao yiwei dui de MR ABI LA Zeyh Fp TU AY

Nuwa vel ouhua lax 1h, Ou Lushi lik jie TE Peng My qi tamen ma?”

Putong shengwuxue PRAM AE yy

qimeng hi Be

qipao ea qiqie tz)

Qian Xuantong Be ZX [Al

Qianzi wenASor Qingnong

“Ren zhi lishi” ALIS

Glossary 193

San Mao = 5 Sanzi jing =F RE

Santo Kydden Ly RR Shan’er Sit ye, Shanhai jing LL yaa Shangwu yinshuguan Fa 4 Cl) SE AE Sa ae ST bianyi suo

Shaonian congshu > AF ae FS

shaonian Zhongguo 2 FH

shehui xiaoshuo AL 7) ht

Shenfei HH Fre

shidai (Japanese: jidai) RAR

Shidai manhua HE “Shiguang laoren” GEA

“Shijie dongwuyuan” TAY

Shijie ertong wenxue ThA LM Sa SB

Shou BK congshu

shoushang de lang SOA YAS

Shun Pao FH AK

“Si hilo” BE IK

Taixu huanjing AR hk AJ Soh

Tanemaku hito Aa < A Tang Langgan Hee HAZ,

tian KR tlanyan Aik

Taose de yun HELIN Se

Tianyan lun FRY if

tianze wujing REED ist tiewu BN Jae tonghua BE ah tongxin BED) “Toukan” (al tuya qi OR Aly

Wanguo Gongbao 1 EY ZK Wanju yu jiaoyu Su Bl At A

Wanshouyuan By AK be

Wanyou wenku Fe Ay MC ii

Wang Erde fa Wang Renlu FATA

Wang Yunwu Een

194 Glossary

Wei Lianshu BRU A

wenming StH wenming kaihua SCH BAG (Japanese: bunmei kaika)

wenming jingjie SHBG FH

wenming x1 SCAR IEX

wenxue de tonghua SCSI tinh

“Women weilai de Be AM ARR EA Si zhuren weng”

wo ye guoyu meng meng le FR (HEY IPS ss

Wu Bohui RAAB Wu Jianren ROTA

Wu Zhaoming RIEA wuci de yanyu AE a I a

wu shi eri

x1xue py “Xia de long” BRIN FE xiandai (Japanese: gendai) TAR

Xiandai ertong PN GU et

xiandai hua PACH,

“Xiandai shi” PA Se Xiandai shuju Pr NS J

xiandai xing PATE Xiang Peiliang pay 5 bk xiangzheng qi Bay

“Xiaoji de beiju” 7) SEY ABB

Xiao pengyou WHA

Xiao pengyou wenku IN IYI AC SC fifi

xiaoshuo de huashen at A “Xiao wanyi” /\\ St isk Xiao xuesheng 1) ERE Xiao xuesheng nianfen 1) ERE EM FU a AS buchong duben

Xiao xuesheng wenku 1\\ 5 EC fii

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196 Glossary

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NOTES

Introduction Note: throughout the book, unless otherwise noted, all translations from Chinese are my own.

1. See Lu Xun #30 [He Jiagan {4] A #f], “Xiandai shi” FlfK 2 [Modern history], in Lu Xun quanji ®ith4-42 [The complete works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1998) (hereafter LXQJ), 5:89-90. Lu Xun’s idiosyncratically onomatopoetic term “Huazaa” appears in Roman letters in the original text. 2. “Lu Xun” is itself a pen name, one that Zhou Shuren JAJA. used more or less consistently throughout his career as a writer and public figure. 3. “Development is the only hard imperative” is a rather literal translation of the original Chinese term #2/& 77 (HIE FL, as opposed to the official rendering, “Development is the absolute principle.” See Deng Xiaoping &h/)\-+, “Zai

Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shanghai dengdi de tanhua yaodian” Fut. YR

Dil, BBE. EES GZ nt [Excerpts from talks given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shanghai and other locales], in Deng Xiaoping wenxuan 3h’) ME [Selected writings of Deng Xiaoping], vol. 3 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, L994) S77, 4, Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse’s edited volume Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) is an interesting attempt to survey local divergences in the reception of Darwinian theory, but its ambitious agenda remains hobbled by a near-total inattention to non-English-speaking locales. 5. Readers interested in more comprehensive coverage of the history of Chinese children’s literature should refer to Jiang Feng 4% J&l and Han Jin "AXE, Zhongguo ertong wenxue shi PM Skt C4? & [History of children’s literature in China] (Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998). Mary Ann Farquhar’s Children’s

17

198 Notes to Pages 6-8 Literature in China: From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999) is also an extremely helpful and pioneering study of the history of children’s literature in English. 6. Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Marx-Engels: Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 120. 7. Benjamin Schwartz’s magisterial study is an indispensable reference for Yan Fu’s life and thought. See Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).

8. Yan Fu ja, Tianyan lun Kit [On evolution] (Shanghai: Commercial Press; 1930): 9. James Reeve Pusey, in his Lu Xun and Evolution (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), uses a similar formulation in his characterization of how and why evolutionary theory appealed to Chinese intellectuals across a

wide ideological spectrum: “Chinese paid attention to the theory of evolution because it seemed to make frightening sense out of China’s predicament. It seemed to give dread warning that imperialism, the White Peril, was perfectly natural, a force against which it did no good to rail. History was natural history” (x). My focus here is on the quite specific ways in which this conflation plays out in literary and other forms of narrative. 10. Yan Fu’s rendering of the phrase is rather elegant. In summarizing evolutionary arguments in one of the extensive translator’s notes with which the text is interlarded, he states that “living things begin in sameness and end in difference” 47 EZ Waals ARI Fe. See Yan Fu, Tianyan lun, 3. Also see Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” Westminster Review, April 1857, 446. Spencer’s original formulation, in turn, was essentially cribbed from the work of Karl Ernst Von Baer (1792-1876), as Stephen Jay Gould makes clear in his Ontogeny and Philogeny (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,

197 tie

11. I will return to Lu Xun’s account of his stirring encounter with Yan Fu’s On Evolution in Chapter 1. See, for instance, Lu Xun, “Suoji” FHjic [Jottings], in the autobiographical collection Zhaohua xishi \i4e 4 4g [Dawn blossoms picked at dusk], in LXOJ 2:295-296. 12. See Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power, and Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954). More recent studies of the history of science in nineteenth-century China include Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1500-1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), and Elman, A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). James Reeve Pusey has contributed two foundational volumes on the reception of evolutionary theory in China, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, MA: Har-

vard University Press, 1983) and the aforementioned Lu Xun and Evolution. Studies of Yan Fu, Lu Xun, and modern Chinese intellectual history are legion.

Notes to Pages 9-12 199 A notable example in English is Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005). 13. See, for instance, Joseph Levenson, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Moaern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), and Fredric Wakeman, History and Will: Philosophic Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 14. See Hu Shi’s “Wenxue gailiang chuyi” "UX Ke 24 i [Modest suggestions for literary reform] and Zhou Zuoren’s “Ren de wenxue” A Il ¢“. Both essays were recognized from very early on as foundational contributions to the theorization of the “new literature.” They are both anthologized in Zhao Jiabi #8 3“,

ed., Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi ‘Bt Ce: KA [Compendium of the new Chinese literature] (Shanghai: Liangyou tushu, 1936), vol. 1. For translations of both pieces, see Kirk Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings

on Literature, 1893-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). In a 1932 essay titled “The Sources of the New Chinese Literature” +} bdr C4: MU ii, Zhou Zuoren goes on to make an even more unequivocal claim for the primacy of biology, arguing that what distinguishes modern Chinese intellectuals from earlier generations is that “they understand evolution, have studied biology, and have been trained in science.” In the same essay, he urges aspiring writers to study biology, “because biology explains how living creatures live, and people are also creatures, so the fundamental principles of human life can be derived from it. Literature and biology are alike in taking human life as their object, and as such they are intimately related to one another. Those who study literature quite naturally ought to also learn biology.” See Zhou Zuoren, Zhong-

guo xin wenxue de yuanliu ‘Pa CNV [The sources of the new Chinese literature] (Shijiazhuang: Hebei Jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001), 59 and 12. 15. Which is not to say that such terminology is not important. The continued currency of the language of natural selection is instantiated by the common use of what was originally a technical term—taotai YA, or “evolutionary elimination”—in everyday Chinese.

16. See Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 17. For Marx’s Chinese metaphor, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1973), 38.

18. Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 26;

19 Seed XO 25195-197; 20. The argument for Wild Grass as a modernist masterpiece has most notably been made by Leo Ou-fan Lee in Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu

200 Notes to Pages 12-13 Xun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Recent critics have rightly begun to challenge the extent to which Lu Xun’s fiction—with its restless formal experimentation and tendency toward self-reflexivity—can be subsumed under the realist tag. In the Anglophone academy, this process was initiated by Marston Anderson in The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Anderson contended that Lu Xun’s fiction self-reflexively disclosed its own discomfort with the realist mode and its implicit relations of power (between the speaker and those who are spoken for, between the literate observer and the illiterate other, and so on) by way of complex structures of narrative mediation. Xiaobing Tang makes a compelling case for seeing Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” as inaugurating a modernist temporality by way of its linguistic self-consciousness. See his essay “Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman’ and a Chinese Modernism,” PMLA 107 (1992): 1222-1234. The essay appears in revised form in his monograph Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semti-colonial China, 1917-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), finally, affirms the experimental quality of Lu Xun’s work, but also claims that in the course of attempting to integrate “evolutionism, Nietzschean individualism, and humanism,” his experiments are effectively subsumed by their social and philosophic message, thus “instrumentalizing the modernist form.” Modernism in Lu Xun, she argues, is merely a “marker” of modernity and a “tool” with which Lu Xun strives to “bring about social modernity through [modernism’s] effective embodiment of socially critical content” (90-91). I would take issue with this last argument to the extent that it posits modernism in its ideal form as being somehow divorced from the realm of politics as such. It is my hope to show the ways in which modernist form in Lu Xun’s writing is not so much a technique that lends itself to critical content as a necessary product of, and formal analogue for, the developmental dilemmas in which he and his generation were entangled. 21. I quote here from the work of the eminent literary historian C. T. Hsia, for whom Lu Xun’s “capitulation” to the left in the late 1920s ultimately leads to “a spiritual and intellectual shallowness in his roles as polemic journalist, plodding translator, and amateur connoisseur of art.” See C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction: 1917-1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1961):5155). 22. Two of the most influential (if not necessarily complete, let alone sympathetic) accounts of “old-style” episodic fiction can be found in Lu Xun’s Zhongguo xiaoshuo shiliie 1 BY /)\iit HS [A brief history of Chinese fiction] in LXOJ, vol. 9, and A Ying b] 4 [Qian Xingcun #8774], Wanging xiaoshuo shi Weir iit ' [History of the fiction of the Late Qing] (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1973). See also Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

Notes to Pages 13-14 201 23. Hao Qingjun’s recent work provides an imaginative look at the aesthetics of Lu Xun’s zawen in relation to the politics and the urban political economy of the era. See Hao Qingjun 7 SH, Shixue yu zhengzhi: Lu Xun wangi zawen yan-

jiu 1933-1936 iE BOA: FAVE CHIt 1933-1936 [Poetics and politics: Research on Lu Xun’s late-period zawen, 1933-1936] (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2007).

24. See Tang, Chinese Modern; Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Shih, The Lure of the Modern; and Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity—China, 19001937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 25. See David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siécle Splendor: Repressed Moderni-

ties of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, LOOP)

26. On gender and modernity, see Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Moder-

nity: The Politics of Reading between East and West (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), and Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). See also Charles A. Laughlin, ed., Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein, eds., Everyday Modernity in China (Seattle: University of Washington, 2006). 27. See Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), and my own Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 28. See, for example, Laikwan Pang, The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: The Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty Port China (Berkeley: University of California, 2004); Margherita Zanasi, Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Xiaoqun Xu, Trial of Modernity: Judicial Reform in Early Twentieth Century, 1901-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 29. The title of Jonathan Spence’s magisterial textbook of modern Chinese history is a salient example. See Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). Other examples are legion, and might include titles such as He Ping, China’s Search for Modernity: Cultural Discourse in the Late 20th Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Min Lin and Maria Galikowski, The Search for Modernity: Chinese Intellectuals and Cultural Discourse in the Post-Mao Period (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); and Ian Mabbett, Modern China: The Mirage of Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1985).

202 Notes to Pages 15-18 30. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 15. 31. This is, of course, a complicated linguistic and historical issue, and my

assertions here remain tentative. Clearly there are several temporal markers for “modernity” in this period, such as jindai UE{X, and shidai IFF{X, both of which came to Chinese as compounds from the Japanese. By the 1910s and 1920s the adjectival and relational use of “new” (xin #t) and “modern” (modeng

PE) also came into service as fashionably ubiquitous modifiers for all things modish and up-to-date. My sense remains, however, that xiandai did not definitively replace these terms until the 1950s, and that xiandai xing is of even more recent vintage. For some of the most helpful works on the entrance of loanwords and neologisms into modern Chinese, see Gao Mingkai jay HH fH and Liu Zhengtan 4! 1-3, Xiandai hanyu wailai ci yanjiu Tie ah Ob Rial Of 4%, [Research on loanwards in modern Chinese] (Beijing: Wenzi gaige chuban-

she, 1958); Federico Masini, The Formation of the Modern Chinese Lexicon

and Its Evolution toward a National Language: The Period from 1840 to 1898 (Berkeley: Project on Linguistic Analysis, 1993); Michael Lackner, Iwo Amelung, and Joachim Kurtz, eds., New Terms for New Ideas: Western KnowIl-

edge and Lexical China in Late Imperial China (Leiden: Brill, 2001); and Lydia H. Liu , Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Trans-

lated Modernity—China, 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1994), 32. The use of shidai as a marker of modernity was common throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Contemporary popular records, for instance, were labeled as “modern songs” (shidai gu tke HH), while an avant-garde film magazine edited by modernist writer Liu Na’ou, Shidai Dianying IF {Vi , was known as Modern Screen in English. 33. See Evan Morgan, Chinese New Terms and Expressions (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1913). In this edition the term jindai VEX is glossed as “modernists.” See also Evan Morgan, New New Terms (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1926),

143. The authoritative Hanyu da cidian tah Kil #[Dictionary of Chinese] (Bejing: Hanyu da cidian chubanshe, 1991) cites a 1921 essay by Lu Xun, “Wo zhi jielie guan” 4&2 BYU [My views on chastity], as one of the earliest appearances of the term. 34. The Hanyu da cidian cites an early occurrence of fazhan in Zeng Pu’s Ke 1904 novel of diplomatic and sexual intrigue, Flowers in a Sea of Sin #EUE4¢. Fada also appears with a good deal of frequency in Liang Qichao’s work. 35. See Hanyu da cidian }R ik Kiel HL, 8:558.

36. For a discussion of this transitive sense of kaika in its original Meiji context, see D. R. Howland’s Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002),

42-43.

Notes to Pages 19-23 203 37. In this discussion Yan Fu refers also to the work of Malthus, and draws on a discourse of extermination that was prevalent in the period, a discourse that simultaneously eulogizes and accepts the inevitability of such losses. See Yan Fu, Tianyan lun, 10-11. Patrick Brantlinger provides an illuminating history of the circulation of such ideas in the West in his Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 38. Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power, 89. 39. See ibid., 101. Yan Fu is by no means naive, or alone, in this preoccupation with the nation. As Edgar Youmans, Spencer’s most vocal (and most generous) patron, confidently proclaims in his introduction to the American edition of The Study of Sociology, “The thing it really concerns us to know is, the natu-

ral history of society. We want all the facts which help us understand how a nation has grown and organized itself.” See “Preface to the American Edition,” in Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (New York: D. Appleton, 1874). 40. For Huxley’s original text, see T. H. Huxley, Evolution & Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Schwartz provides a compelling analysis of Yan Fu’s positioning vis-a-vis Spencer and Huxley. 41. See Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe (New York: Harper and Bros., 1900). Haeckel’s work was a globally best-selling exposition of the first principles of monist philosophy. 42. Spencer, The Study of Sociology, 334. 43. Ibid. 44, M. P. Cowen and R. W. Shenton, Doctrines of Development (New York: Routledge, 1996), 116. 45. Ibid., 4. 46. Ibid., 39-40. Yan Fu translated Mill’s On Liberty into Chinese in 1902. 47. See Anderson, The Limits of Realism. 48. The piece was originally published under the penname You Guang Wf, “Kan bianxifa” @ ##/&ki2 [Watching magic shows], in Shun Pao, October 4, 1933. See also LXQO] 5:317-318. 49. See, for just one example of many, “Ertong nian yu funu guohuo nian zhi

erchong zou” [i74F blGe & ARE Zs (1934, the “Children’s Year” and the “Women’s Native Goods” year], Liangyou huabao 85 (March 1934). In this photo spread, two little boys are posed brandishing toy guns in soldierly poses, while a caption reads, “In the year of the Child, the child will save the nation. Everyone practices military drills, preparing to kill the formidable enemy at the borders.” 50. For the Momilk contest, see Liangyou huabao 10 (November 15, 1926). Susan Fernsebner provides a close analysis of the circumstances and visual rhetoric of the contest; see Fernsebner, “A People’s Playthings: Toys, Childhood, and Chinese Identity, 1909-1933,” Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 3 (2003): 280-282.

204 Notes to Pages 24-31 This contest, which ran between 1926 and 1927 and featured hundreds of baby pictures, was a relatively spectacular instance of this sort of glorification of the child, but it was by no means isolated. Throughout the late 1920s and the 1930s, Liangyou also ran a regular feature called “The Youngsters Club” Site {h4eeh that encouraged parents to share photographs of exemplary children. $1. Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, 239. Recent work by Limin Bai has explored the roots of this new conceptualization of children, and the print culture with which it was associated, in the late imperial and late Qing periods. See Limin Bai, “Children as the Youthful Hope of an Old Empire: Race, Nationalism, and Elementary Education in China, 1895-1915,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 2 (2008): 211-231, and Limin Bai, Shaping the Ideal Child: Children and Their Primers in Later Imperial China (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press of Hong Kong, 2005). 52. In this sense, Lu Xun’s concluding query attempts to open to scrutiny something very like what Slavoj Zizek has termed “ideological fantasy.” Zizek argues that, counter to the traditional Marxian notion of false consciousness in which “we do not know what we are really doing,” ideological fantasy thrives on the fact that we “know very well how things really are” but still act as if we do not. Ideology, in other words, is a matter not merely of ideas but of practical necessity, of the realm in which we cannot help but to do what we do. See Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 29-30.

1. The Iron House of Narrative 1. Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe (New York: Harper and Bros., 1900), 239. 2. This is a central assertion of Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (Die Weltrathsel, 1900), a work that was deeply inspirational for both Lu Xun and

Mao Zedong. Haeckel begins his exposition of monist philosophy by proclaiming, “We can only arrive at a correct knowledge of the structure and life of the social body, the state, through a scientific knowledge of the structure and life of the individuals who compose it, and the cells of which they are in turn composed” (8). 3. See, for instance, Carol Gluck’s discussion of the emergence of Japanese nationalism in Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 143-146. 4. For an excellent study of this aspect of the novel, see Feng-ying Ming, “Baoyu in Wonderland: Technological Utopia in the Early Modern Chinese Science Fiction Novel,” in Yingjin Zhang, ed., China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 152-172.

Notes to Pages 31-33 205 5. Kang Youwei’s #47 2) work was completed in 1902 in Darjeeling, India, but published as a monograph only in 1911. For a translation and study, see Laurence G. Thompson, ed., Ta T’ung Shu: The One- World Philosophy of K’ang Yu- Wei (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958). Liang’s novel appeared seri-

ally in the first three numbers of his own journal Xin xiaoshuo #ft/) iit [New fiction]. For a detailed exposition of the influence of Bellamy’s novel on Liang Qichao, which included the adoption of a dialogical format in which the nature of the future is conveyed to readers through conversation between two

characters, see Xia Xiaohong |B", Jueshi yu zhuanshi—Liang Oichao de wenxue daolu ith be eT - Be iGke Ih Catia 4 [Awakening and transmission: Liang Qichao’s literary path] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin wenxue chubanshe,

LON 3357: 6. The state archive in the Realm of Civilization seems to function as a modernized analogue or mirror image of the Prospect Garden, in that it serves as a massive storehouse of the Chinese heritage, at the same time as it aims to surpass institutions such as the British Museum and the imperial epistemological projects they represent and play a crucial role in enacting. 7. Wu Jianren, Wu Jianren quanji 'R-| K4-48 [Complete works of Wu Jianren], ed. Wei Shaochang ##44/4 and Hai Feng j&)&l (Harbin: Beifang wenyi chubanshe, 1998), 6:179.

8. My use of the term “second nature” is not meant to invoke the precise sense associated with the Western Marxist tradition, and particularly the Lukacs of History and Class Consciousness, in which he employs the term to signify a constructed social reality so reified by “the universality of the commodity form” that it appears to take on the same inexorable necessity as nature itself. Instead, my contention is that Wu Jianren’s “second nature” is an effort to transcend, by narrative means, the inexorable necessity of “natural history,” as construed by social Darwinism. As we shall see, however, this second nature, in its absolute reliance on the deus ex machina of technological innovation, does indeed elide the question of labor in the process of its own construction, and thus presents

readers with a reified sense of social relations. We have, then, to paraphrase Hegel, a negation of a reification that cannot help but reify that which it negates. See Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 86. 9. Part of the dilemma I am getting at here is endemic to all utopian texts, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out, in that these narratives tend to be afflicted by problems of historical causality. How can one posit a future when “the break that ... secures the radical difference of the new Utopian society [also] makes it impossible to imagine”? How, in other words, is it possible to portray a historical transition that defies, or at the very least sets aside, the developmental laws and processes assumed to govern historical transition? This logical aporia often results in narratives that are incomplete or interrupted, or that simply implode

206 Notes to Pages 33-36 because they are ultimately unable to sustain their own formal and ideological trajectories. See Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 86. 10. See, for example, David Wang, Fin-de-Siécle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 11. Lu Xun #itl, “Nabhan zixu” WWW Gy [Preface to The Outcry], in Lu Xun quanyi 424k |The complete works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1998) (hereafter LXO/), 1:419. 12.1 bid:

13. To see the story in its original context, see Lu Xun, “Kuangren riji” JE A

Hii [Diary of a madman], Xin gingnian #4 [La Jeunesse] 4, no. 5 (May 1918). The publication of this story marked Zhou Shuren’s JJ} A first use of the pen name that would later come to subsume both his public and private identities. 14. See M. P. Cowen and R. W. Shenton, Doctrines of Development (London: Routledge, 1996), 4. 15. Lu Xun’s interest in and indebtedness to Nietzsche is well-documented. In-

deed, in the same year that he wrote “Diary of a Madman,” he also began, but never finished or published, a classical Chinese translation of the prologue to Also Sprach Zarathustra. For Lu Xun’s comments on the vernacular translation of the prologue he published two years later in the September 1920 issue of the journal

Xinchao ris] [New tide], see LXO] 10:439-441. For a brief discussion of the influence of this work on Lu Xun, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 55-57. As Lee and many others have pointed out, it was in part the manifestly Darwinian logic and pervasively bestial imagery of Zarathustra that may have been so readily assimilable to Lu Xun’s own project of cultural critique. One early example of this sort of perspective is J. D. Chinnery, “The Influence of Western Literature on

Lu Hsun’s ‘Diary of a Madman,” Bulletin of Oriental and African Studies 23 (1959): 319. Wang Hui also discusses the connection in his landmark contribution to the vast literature on Lu Xun. See Wang Hui 7tHlift, Fankang juewang: Lu

Xun jigi wenxue shijie VHtAiti: PMWM Ce TF [Against despair: Lu Xun and his literary world] (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1999). For a rich collection providing an overview of the reception of Nietzsche in China beginning

from 1902, see Zou Yuanbao #h7c#, ed., Nicai zai Zhongguo JERE By [Nietzsche in China] (Shanghai: Sanlian shudian, 2000). 16. LXOJ 1:419.

17. I draw here on Gayatri Spivak’s well-known discussion of the slippage between “proxy” and “portrait,” vertretung and darstellung, in the process of representation. See her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago:

Notes to Page 36 207 University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313. Marston Anderson has insightfully argued that an analogous tension—between speaking on behalf of others and usurping their voices in the very act of representation—is a vital aspect of Lu Xun’s fiction in particular, and the project of early twentieth-century realist writing in China in general. See his “The Morality of Form: Lu Xun and the Modern Chinese Short Story,” in Leo Ou-fan Lee, ed., Lu Xun and His Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 32-53. 18. “Dead Fire,” one of the more compelling allegorical prose-poems in Lu Xun’s 1926 collection, Yecao !'f4 [Wild grass], presents a terrible philosophical paradox couched within an oneiric narrative. The dreaming narrator, in wandering across a glacier, falls into an icy crevasse, where he encounters a “dead fire” imprisoned beneath the ice: “Hey, friend! Your warmth has startled me from sleep,” he said. I hastily offered my greetings and asked his name. “T was originally abandoned to this icy crevasse by someone,” he said without answering my question. “The one who left me here long ago died and disap-

peared without a trace. And I have also been frozen nearly to death. If you hadn’t given me your warmth and rekindled my flame, I would certainly have perished straight away.” “Your awakening makes me happy. I’ve just been pondering how to get out of this crevasse. ’d be happy to take you along so that you’ll never freeze and you'll always continue to burn.”

“Oh! In that case, ’d burn out.” “T would feel regret should you burn out. [ll leave you here then, so that you may remain.” “Oh! Then I shall turn to ice.” “Then what is to be done?” “And what about you? What are you going to do?” He questioned me. “T already told you: I want to leave this icy crevasse.” “Then I might as well burn myself out.” He suddenly leaped forward, like a red comet, and I had also emerged from the mouth of the crevasse in the ice. A great stone carriage suddenly drove up,

and I was crushed dead beneath its wheels, but I had enough time before the end to see the carriage tumble into the crevasse. “Ha ha! You’ll never meet the dead fire again!” I smiled triumphantly, as if I was willing that it should be so. Here, the structural and thematic parallels with the parable of the iron house could hardly be clearer. Given the currency of the phrase “the great wheel of the times” (shidai de julun FFAKIN FH) in popular and intellectual discourse of the time, the final image could well signify the way in which we are blindsided by historical forces. See LX OJ 2:194-195. 19. LXOJ 1:419.

208 Notes to Pages 37—40 20. This is the tack taken by Leo Ou-fan Lee in his Voices from the Iron House, 87.

21. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 22.1 owe this insight to conversations in seminar with Roy Bing Chan, whose 2009 Ph.D. dissertation, “The Edge of Knowing: Dreams and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature,” examines the discourse of dreams as a constitutive element in the Chinese realism of the early twentieth century. 23. For a study of the scope of his international diffusion, see Sylvia E. Bowman et al., Edward Bellamy Abroad: An American Prophet’s Influence (New York: Twayne, 1962).

24. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (New York: Modern Library; 1951), xxvii.

25. Ibid., 37-41. 26. See “How I Wrote Looking Backward,” in Edward Bellamy, Edward Bellamy Speaks Again! Articles—Public Addresses—Lectures (Kansas City: Peerage Press, 1937), 227; Bellamy, Looking Backward, 218. On Bellamy’s appropriation of evolutionary thought, see Matthew Hartman, “Utopian Evolution: The Sentimental Critique of Social Darwinism in Bellamy and Peirce,” Utopian Studies 10, no. 1 (1999): 26-41. 27. For a fascinating autobiographical account of Richard’s work in China and its far-reaching implications, see his autobiographical account, Forty-Five Years in China: Reminiscences by Timothy Richard, D.D., Litt.D. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1916). An interesting, if politically shrill, history of his career was also produced in the wake of the ascension to power of the Chinese Communist Party as part of a larger program of ideological decolonization, and published in the Kaiming Bookstore’s “Resist America, Support Korea Library

of Knowledge” ft ie) Mitkas Se. See Ding Zeliang J Fl), Li Timotai: Yige dianxing de wei diguo zhuyi fuwu de chuanjiao shi $e lFEA: ——-(hl ROI Ayre bi FE Fs HK WY RAC [Timothy Richard: A typical missionary in service of imperialism]| (Beijing: Kaiming shudian, 1951). For a survey of the global diffusion of Bellamy’s work, see Bowman et al., Edward Bellamy Abroad. 28. See the journal Xiuxiang xiaoshuo, vols. 25-26 (1904).

29. See Meiguo Weishi i ek-l:, Huitou kan |F|ShA [Looking backward] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1913). Fredric Jameson claims that Bellamy’s novel was published in “six different translations” in China, but fails to cite any sources. It is much more likely that Richard’s translation came out in six different editions,

including two subsequent reprints of the 1913 Commercial Press edition. See Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 144. For a compelling analysis of the role of the Commercial Press and its translation activities in the formation of a Chinese “semiotic modernity,” see Meng Yue, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 31-61.

Notes to Pages 41-47 209 30. See Richard, Forty-Five Years in China, 160.

os [bids 158, 32. Ibid., 173. Richard also met on a number of occasions, and even presented policy recommendations to, the general and diplomat Li Hongzhang 7 WE (1823-1901). 33. Richard argued for this position at the Baptist Missionary Society’s annual meeting in London in 1885, and seems to have carried the day. Richard, Forty-Five Years in China, 197. 34. For an account of Fryer’s life and work, see Adrian Arthur Bennett, John Fryer: The Introduction of Western Science and Technology into NineteenthCentury China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Research Center, 1967). 35. Wu Jianren, Xin shitou ji #4 BAiit. [New story of the stone], in Wu Jianren quanji, vol. 6; this episode is in chapters 10-11. Ted Huters discusses Wu Jianren’s assessment of the Arsenal; see Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating

the West in Late Oing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 125-126. For biographical information and memoirs relating to the life and activities of Wu Jianren, see Wei Shaochang ##44 4, ed., Wu Jianren yanjiu ziliao 'RBt AMHtItAF [Research materials on Wu Jianren| (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980). 36. See Meng Yue, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires, 4-30. 37. Hanan’s article follows up on earlier work by the Taiwanese scholar Huang Jinzhuss gif and Yuan Jin 7iH£. See Patrick Hanan, “The New Novel before the New Novel—John Fryer’s Fiction Contest,” in Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 124-145. 38. Meng Yue, Shanghai, 59-60. 39. See Alan Rauch, Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 2, 35. 40. Ibid., 46. 41. As I will discuss in subsequent chapters, a core component of this publishing program lay in the production of textbooks and children’s literature. 42. Bellamy, Looking Backward, 14-15. For Richard’s translation of the passage, see the 1913 Commercial Press edition of Huitou kan, 8. 43. Bellamy, Looking Backward, 23, 60, 61. 44, Ibid., 253-255 45. Ibid., 266 46. Ibid., 270. 47. Ibid., 271 48. See Thomas Richard’s stimulating discussion in The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 121. 49. Indeed, the question of how to classify this “mysterious being” —discussed

throughout the civilized world—occupies the first page of the novel, and later

210 Notes to Pages 47—50 becomes the subject of speculation in an article published by Professor Arronax in the American newspapers. 50. See the journal Xin Xiaoshuo, vol. 1 (1902). The title of Liang Qichao’s essay, of course, is ambiguous in that it could also be rendered “On the Relation of Fiction to the Governance of Society.” $1. See LX QO] 11:9-119, 121-183. 52. For an in-depth look at the history and practice of this and other translations of Verne’s work, see David E. Pollard, “Jules Verne, Science Fiction, and Related Matters,” in Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840-1918 (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1999), 177-207. Pollard implies that even if Lu Xun did read Hong Xisheng’s translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, there is no guarantee that he knew that it was by the same author he was adapting, given the differences in attribution. (There is reason to believe that “Chalisi Peilun” is in fact a passable transliteration of “Jules Verne” in Wu dialect.) A passage in a 1930 essay

“Celebrating Literary Exchange between China and Russia” #l'F fR CF 2 seems to indicate that he did indeed know that the texts were produced by the same person, and also provides an interesting sense of the late Qing literary landscape: “We had seen in the pages of Liang Qichao’s Current Affairs Ri 44 yx the many guises of The Detective Cases of Sherlock Holmes, and again in New Fiction the marvels of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea written in an idiom called ‘science fiction’ by Jules Verne. Later Lin Qinnan [Lin Shu #4¥, 1852-1924] did a great deal of translation of the novels of H. Rider Haggard, and we were able to read about the romantic attachments of London maidens and the eccentricities of African savages.” See LX QO] 4:459.

53. Lu Xun, introduction to Journey to the Moon)) #iik{r#iA, LXOJ LOPES.

54. Ibid., 152, 151. It must be said that Lu Xun’s vision here is characteristically dark, even in this early piece, for he takes note of the fact that the expansion of Western civilization to the moon can only result in colonial rivalry and warfare. 55. Hong Xisheng ATIRE et al., Haidi liixing Ee Iety (Journey at the bottom of the sea), Xin Xiaoshuo 1, no. 2 (1902): 36. 56; 1bides.23:

57. Ibid., 28-29. $8. Timothy Unwin has shrewdly pointed out that in Verne, “narrative form and textual order are constantly threatened by both the self-perpetuating munificence of the natural world and by the cornucopian richness of the dictionary or the encyclopedia. As words multiply (almost endlessly, it might seem) ... the descriptive function that is so powerfully implied by the presence of technical, botanical, zoological, or geographical phenomena is undermined by an excess of detail and precision .. . language takes on its own momentum, reversing the

Notes to Pages 50-54 a | scientific and linguistic confidence upon which it was premised.” See Unwin, Jules Verne: Journeys in Writing (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 24.

For an example of the ways in which Hong Xisheng handles Verne’s prolixity, one might compare Verne’s description of the Nautilus’s collections of zoophytes (which is far too elaborate to quote here) with that of the Chinese text, in which it is considerably abbreviated, in part because the Chinese language had yet to develop an adequately elaborate taxonomic lexicon. See Hong Xisheng et al., Hadi Liixing, 48.

59. For a discussion of these “naming and claiming rituals” throughout Verne’s corpus of writings, see Unwin, Jules Verne, 90-92. 60. Hong Xisheng et al., Haidi liixing, 36.

61. See William Butcher, “Hidden Treasures: The Manuscripts of Twenty Thousand Leagues,” Science Fiction Studies 32 (March 2005): 45-47. 62. Although Nemo’s Polish origins would have been obscure to contemporary Chinese readers, it is interesting to note that Chinese nationalists at the turn of the twentieth century frequently invoked Poland as a cautionary figure for the threat of national extermination in a global contest for survival. For a provocative study of how Chinese intellectuals positioned themselves globally vis-a-vis their knowledge of the plight of colonized nations such as Poland and the Philippines in this period, see Rebecca Karl’s study of the intertwinement of nationalism and anti-imperialist internationalism in the late Qing and early Republic, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 63. Hong Xisheng et al., Haidi liixing, 36. 64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., 28-29. The term used here for utopia, Fudi #i Hh, is also invoked by Lu Xun in his introduction to De la Terre a la Lune, with specific reference to the “Happy Valley” of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and the Eden of Milton’s Paradise Lost. 66. Baopi, “The New Story of the Stone” it A FAiit, Yueyue xiaoshuo 6 (February 1907). Reprinted in Wei Shaochang, Wu Jianren yanjiu ziliao, 118.

67. Ibid., 118-119. 68. Wu Jianren, Xin shitou ji, 17-18. 69. Ibid. 19. 70. Bao-yu, introduced to a Edison wax cylinder phonograph in chapter 5 by Xue Pan, is utterly dismissive of its ability to reproduce music. When Xue Pan mentions that Westerners also use the apparatus to record their last will and testament or finalize contracts, Bao-yu is appalled that the Chinese have transformed a useful object into a mere novelty. Ironically, Bao-yu is, despite himself, very much in tune with Edison himself, who originally imagined his invention as a repository for the preservation of speech, and not primarily as a mass medium for music. This brief scene, finally, is typical of the strategy of the novel as

212 Notes to Pages 55-64 a whole, in that Bao-yu’s dismissal of the technology is belied by the meticulous attention paid to describing the phonograph’s shape, how it is constructed, and how it is used. See Wu Jianren quanji 6:42. For Bao-yu’s discourse on hunting, see Wu Jianren quanji 6:67. 71. Wu fianren quanji 6:158. 7a wtoides 162.

73. For a treatment of the history of the dissemination and deployment of Spencerian thought in Japan in this period, see Yamashita Shigekazu, “Herbert Spencer and Meiji Japan,” in Hilary Conroy, Sandra T. W. Davis, and Wayne Patterson, eds., Japan in Transition (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1984), 77-95. 74. Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 254. 7S. Wu fianren quanji 6:174. 76. For an etymological survey, see the Hanyu da cidian. In modern times, of course, the term is closely linked to the work of a contemporary of Wu Jianren, the aesthetic theorist and literary critic Wang Guowei F¥-|#d—E (1877-1927). 77. Wu Jianren quanji 6:178. 78. Ibid., 179. 79. Ibid., 178. 80. Ibid., 224, 219. 81. Ibid., 247-248. 82. Huters, Bringing the World Home, 169. 83. Wu Jianren quant 6:322. 84. Huters, Bringing the World Home, 170. 85. Ibid., 169. 86. Ibid.

2. Inherit the Wolf 1. A necessarily incomplete search of the vast critical literature on Lu Xun clearly reveals that far less attention has been paid to this text than to perennial favorites such as “Diary of a Madman,” “The True Story of Ah Q,” and “A New Year’s Sacrifice.” In the English-language scholarship, for instance, Leo Ou-Fan Lee acknowledges its centrality to Lu Xun’s intellectual (as well as personal) engagements, but also somewhat inexplicably dismisses the story on account of unspecified “artistic flaws.” See Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 83. An illuminating exception to this critical neglect is Xue Yi /#%< and Qian Liqun #€ FTF, “*Guduzhe’ xidu” Ji\Fy4 Alas [A close reading of “The Misanthrope”], Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan 7 (1994): 23-29. 2. See Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji®it4-4e [The complete works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1998) (hereafter LXO/), 2:98, 107. The

Notes to Pages 65-67 213 notion of the wolf’s howl as “inarticulate language” appears in a 1925 prose-poem from Wild Grass !!f 5" entitled “Tremors of Degradation” iB AYARIN EATER with important intertextual relations with “The Misanthrope.” See LXQ] 2:205-206.

se X Ol 29 |. 4. One early touchstone here is, of course, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Later sociologists of knowledge such as Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour have also made signal contributions to this line of inquiry, as has the philosopher and anthropologist Donna Haraway. 5. See Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 6. As Ted Huters has pointed out, James Reeve Pusey goes to the other extreme in dismissing Yan Fu’s lack of rigor and intellectual “confusion,” while accepting in the breach the narrative convention that an individual’s thought ought finally to be reducible to an internally consistent logic. For Pusey on Yan Fu, see his China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 56. For Huters’s rejoinder to Pusey, see Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Oing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 69; for his finely grained assessment of Yan Fu’s engagement with “Western ideas,” see 43-73. The same problem makes an appearance in Pusey’s otherwise quite helpful study, Lu Xun and Evolution (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). Here Lu Xun’s patent (and, I would argue, strategic) lack of consistency with respect to questions of evolutionary biology is duly noted, and yet we are ultimately reassured that an underlying unity in Lu Xun’s theory of human nature may still be salvaged, in the unlikeliest of places: a “Confucian” advocacy of benevolence (ren {—) that Lu Xun himself never mentions nor endorses (88, 99). Pusey’s failure to take into account the immediate and urgent contingency of some of Lu Xun’s intellectual positions is also worrisome. He considers Lu Xun’s 1925 essay “For the Gradual Adoption of Fair Play” (Lun fei’e polai yinggai huanxing iid Et LT HEE RAAT) as a philosophical statement on human nature, for instance, without a single mention of the crucial fact that it was just one salvo in a series of polemical pieces being exchanged between the author, his nemesis, Professor Chen Xiying [RK /U}4, and the prominent literary figure Lin Yutang Path. See Pusey, Lu Xun and Evolution, 84. 7. Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power, 5-6. 8. Huters argues that the tension between valorizing indigenous discursive traditions while at the same time brokering scientific claims to universality produces characteristic fault lines in Yan Fu’s arguments. Yan Fu’s efforts to ground social Darwinism in local terms, moreover, almost ensured his own consignment to the scrap heap of history, as later Chinese intellectuals (particularly in

the wake of the May Fourth triumph of the vernacular in the 1920s) could simply embrace Western ideas in “purer, more consciously cosmopolitan form.”

214 Notes to Pages 67-68 See Huters, Bringing the World Home, 71. For Wang Hu1’s reassessment of the

ways in which Yan Fu’s work reinvents the intellectual resources of neoConfucianism, see “Yan Fu de sange shijie” fic 72 = (il tt FE [The three worlds of Yan Ful, Xueren 12 (October 1993): 29-130. 9. See Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Vernacular Modernism: Tracking Cinema on a Global Scale,” in Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen Newman, eds., World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2007), 295. This article is one of a series of essays in which Hansen has articulated the scope and heuristic consequences of “vernacular modernism.” See, for instance, Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 59-77. More recently, Hansen has also turned her attention to Shanghai cinema as a compelling example of a vernacular modernism at the periphery of the “worldwide hegemony” of the Hollywood studio model. See Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism,” Film Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2000): 10-22. Zhang Zhen’s groundbreaking study of Shanghai cinema also draws a great deal of methodological inspiration from Hansen’s work. See Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 10. Hansen, “Vernacular Modernism,” p. 296. 11. Hansen draws here on Sheldon Pollock’s generative work on the relation between the vernacular and the cosmopolitan in Sanskrit literature. See Pollock, “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (February 1998), and Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Public Culture 12.n0«3:42000). 12. Hansen herself is justifiably suspicious of this metaphor, given her interest in the circulation, interaction, and creative appropriation of different vernaculars enabled by modern media and forms of mobility. See Hansen, “Vernacular Modernism,” 298-299. 13. For work on Yan Fu’s work as a translator, see Mau-sang Ng, “Reading Yan Fu’s Tianyan lun,” in Roger T. Ames, Chan Sin-wai, and Ng Mau-sang, eds., Interpreting Culture through Translation (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1991); Elizabeth Sinn, “Yan Fu as Translator: A Textual Criticism of the Tianyan lun,” in Liu Ching-chih, ed., Fanyi xinlun ji f§ieasr ime [New essays on translation] (Hong Kong: The Commercial Press, 1991); Han Jianghong WiYLVE, Yan Fu huayu xitong yu jindai Zhongguo wenhua zhuanxing hits

et Ae BL FH kd SY [Yan Fu’s discursive system and China’s modern cultural turn] (Shanghai: Yiwen chubanshe, 2006). An earlier and influential assessment is He Lin #1 fit, “Yan Fu de fanyi” je 7 (8x [Yan Fu’s translations], in Dongfang zazhi |Eastern miscellany] 22, no. 21 (1925): 75-87.

14. There has been a great deal of recent work on the Commercial Press and its role in the forging of this new print culture in both English and Chinese.

Notes to Pages 68-70 val Bo) Yang Yang’s tm recent history provides an excellent introduction to the Press. See his Shangwu yinshuguan: Minjian chubanye de xingshuaifis ENR: Petal HH hi Se) LE [The Commercial Press and the rise and fall of private publishing] (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 2000). Significantly, the Press saw itself as something of a media and educational conglomerate, dabbling in both film production as well as the design and manufacture of toys and educational products. 15. Although I hesitate to use the term meme, given its rather suspect grounding in Richard Dawkins’s transposition of Darwinian selection to the world of ideas, beliefs, and cultural images, the image it evokes—of highly mobile, rapidly mutating ideas and images—is not altogether inappropriate for what I am trying to get at here. 16. As James Reeve Pusey reminds us, even Darwin’s On the Origin of Species contains “vestigial Lamarckian passages.” These ambiguities in the text— and more importantly, the unanswered question of exactly what mechanism produces variation in the first place—are then seized upon by Chinese interpreters like Liang Qichao in order to reinstate human agency into the evolutionary process. See Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, 300-301. In his Lu Xun and Evolution, Pusey also discusses what he calls Liang Qichao’s “leap to Lamarckian conclusions,” arguing that in translating Darwin, he overlooks the “world of difference between transitive and intransitive verbs,” thus rendering natural selection as “selection by man” (10).

17. See LXQJ 2:296. Yan Fu’s translation of Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology (1874) in 1898 proved to be an equally decisive moment in the importation of Darwinian-inflected social theory into the context of late Qing debates as to the nature of the world system with which they were confronted. As with the Tianyan lun itself, it was read in an instrumentalist context. Yan Fu’s distinctly Spencerian iteration of Darwinism—in which a place for Lamarckian agency was tacitly preserved—was both intellectually and

emotively wrapped up with the developmental aspirations of a generation of reformers. Yan Fu published portions of his translations as early as 1897, but it was not until 1903 that the complete translation, Ounxue yiyan TE et A, was released by the Shanghai Wenming bianyi shuju _[-i8: SC WH 4m Fe Jay. For a help-

ful study of its publication history, see Deng Xiquan Sh7r2R, “‘Qunxue yiyan’

de fabiao he chuban shijian ji yingwen yuanzhu bianxi” #4! & AN FE A Hep fe Az ee Ce RAT [Analysis of the publication and dating of The Study of Sociology and its original in English], Shehui 4 (2003): 23-25. For Benjamin Schwartz’s account of Yan Fu’s initial impressions of Spencer’s text, see Schwartz,

In Search of Wealth and Power, 33-37. 18. Haeckel, a remarkable figure by any standard, was not only a prolific researcher and natural-historical philosopher, responsible for coining many terms we now take for granted, such as ecology and phyla, but also a gifted artist and

216 Notes to Pages 70-71 illustrator. He is now primarily associated with the thoroughly discredited doctrine that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” that is, that the development of each individual recapitulates that of its species as a whole. For a beautifully illustrated introduction to Haeckel’s life and art, see Olaf Breidback, Visions of Nature: The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel (Munich: Prestel, 2006). For a fascinating critique of Haeckel’s recapitulationism and its often reactionary social and political implications, see Stephen Jay Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). 19. See LX QJ 1:8-25. Pusey provides a chapter of analysis of Lu Xun’s essay and of what he characterizes as Lu Xun’s uncritical acceptance of Haeckel’s Lamarckian proclivities, as well as his conflation of evolution with “progress.” See Pusey, Lu Xun and Evolution, 67-78. Although this early text does indeed follow Haeckelian contours, I argue in this chapter that Lu Xun’s fiction, most of which was penned nearly twenty years later, not only reveals a deep discomfort with Haeckelian ideas but in fact seems to be predicated on a critique of its Lamarckian assumptions. 20. See LXOJ 1:9-11. For Haeckel’s genealogy of evolutionary science (and in a larger sense, the monism he felt was its necessary intellectual precondition), see Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe (New York: Harper and Bros., 1900); 3.

21. For an early (and now somewhat dated) account of the importance of natural history in Lu Xun’s work, see Liu Zaifu #! F712, Jin Qiupeng + -4killy,

and Wang Zichun yt-#%, eds., Lu Xun he ziran kexue SiWAl AAEM [Lu Xun and the natural sciences] (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1976). 22. For a compendium of Ma Junwu’s own writings on biological science, natural philosophy, and science education, see Ma Junwu, Ma Junwu wenxuan Hyg ut C38 [Selected writings of Ma Junwu] (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2000). Ma’s earliest publication on Darwin was published in May 1902 in Liang Qichao’s famed reformist journal, the Xinmin congbao i Kix ¥k [The new citizen]. See Xinmin congbao 8:9-18. A pamphlet containing excerpts from chapters 3 and 4 of Darwin’s original work appeared one year later from Chunghwa Books '# 4£34 Ja). The complete translation of On the Origin of Species was issued by the Commercial Press in 1920 in four volumes as Da’erwen wuzhong yuanshi 326A CYA 4A [Darwin’s Origin of Species], and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex tollowed in 1930 in nine volumes. Ma Junwu’s translation of Haeckel’s Die Weltrdthsel was entitled Heke’er yiyuan zhexue ii bt B70 PE [Haeckel’s monist philosophy]. See also R. B. Freeman, “Darwin in Chinese,” Archives of Natural History 13 (1986): 19-24. 23. For a history in English of the institutionalization of biology as a scientific discipline in modern China, see Laurence Schneider’s valuable study Biology and Revolution in Twentieth-Century China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Schneider devotes an entire chapter to the efforts of Bing Zhi

Notes to Pages 71-72 oa Wd a (1886-1965) and the noted cultural conservative Hu Xiansu #764 (1894-1968) to establish an academic infrastructure for biological research in Nanjing. 24. For a historical survey of the early development of modern biological science in China, see Zhang Zhijie 5-2 {#, “Minguo shiyi nian dao shiba nian de

shengwu xue” [uh AF #)-+ / 4E IN ES [Biology in the Republican period from 1922 to 1939], Kexue yuekan #/ )J |] [Science monthly] 134 (February L931; 25. See Chen Zhen, Putong shengwuxue iE [Basic biology] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1924). The book was still in wide circulation as of 1935, when it was listed in Ping Xin */-Ly, ed., Shenghuo quanguo zongmu “EVGA AME [A classified catalogue of current Chinese books] (Shanghai: Shenghuo shudian, 1935), 329. Schneider provides a helpful description of the text and its contents at 40-41. For a recent study of the relations between academia and the business of modern publishing in this period, see Theodore Huters, “The Advent of the Modern as Business Venture: The Case of the Commercial Press,” unpublished ms.

26. See Fa-Ti Fan, “Victorian Naturalists in China: Science and Informal Empire,” British Journal for the History of Science 36, no. 1 (March 2003): 25. See also Fan’s book-length study, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Fan’s work builds upon a recent spate of books exploring the ways in which botanical collecting and natural-historical endeavor were closely bound up with the imperial project. See, for instance, Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), and Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 27. Swinhoe’s zoological and ornithological exploits stand as a particularly interesting example of this sort of ecological and epistemological imperialism. Born in India to a family of colonial civil servants, Swinhoe was himself dispatched to China in 1854. Stationed in Amoy (modern Xiamen), he undertook

a daring solo journey to the island of Formosa in 1856, circumnavigated the island in 1858, and later became the first British consul to be stationed there. He is famed for his “discovery” of the abundance of fauna and avian life on what had hitherto been a natural-historical “terra incognita.” Swinhoe’s 120 publications include ornithological and zoological writings, ethnological reports on the aboriginals of Taiwan and other regions, as well as an account of the 1860 Anglo-

French military campaign that resulted in the burning of the Yuanmingyuan summer palace in Beijing, and his duties included projects of direct commercial and military significance, such as an expedition charting the navigability of the upper reaches of the Yangzi River undertaken in 1869. By the time of his death,

218 Notes to Pages 72-73 he had sent a number of live animals to the London Zoo (including a rare Pere David’s Deer) and accumulated a collection of 3,700 specimens, which is currently housed at the Liverpool Museum. It is interesting to note, finally, that Swinhoe

corresponded with no less a figure than Charles Darwin and was part of the global network of informants, knit together by the Victorian postal service, upon which the eminent scholar relied in the formulation of his theories. See Fan, “Victorian Naturalists in China,” 7 and 14. For a review of Swinhoe’s life and career, see Philip B. Hall, “Robert Swinhoe (1836-1877), FRS, FZS, FRGS: A Victorian Naturalist in Treaty Port China,” Geographical Journal 153, no. 1 (March 1987): 37-47. Another pioneering zoologist of the period was the French missionary Pierre-Marie Heude (1836-1902). For biographical information, see Li Shuqiang 47> Ami 5, “Han Bolu jiqi dongwu biaoben shuzang” f{H @k Ac LB) ER AS WiC ik

[Heude and his collections of animal specimens], Shengwu xue tongbao 39, no. 3 (2004): 61. For the signal importance of the postal system in Darwin’s life and work, see the second volume of Janet Browne’s excellent biography Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). 28. Schneider, Biology and Revolution, 37. 29. These efforts to construct a local scientific vernacular resonate in interesting ways with Sheldon Pollock’s assertion that “as the cosmopolitan is constituted through cultural flows from the vernacular, so the vernacular constructs itself by appropriation” by “unwittingly relocalizing what the cosmopolitan borrowed from it in the first place.” As cited in Hansen, “Vernacular Modern-

ish. 12 30. In one particularly notorious and interesting case, the debate claimed the life of the eminent Viennese biologist Paul Kammerer, who shot himself in 1926 after having been accused of faking experimental evidence suggesting that soft inheritance was indeed a theoretical possibility. Arthur Koestler’s riveting account of Kammerer’s life and the controversy that claimed his life also provides ample evidence of pro-Lamarckian “spin” and eugenicist enthusiasm in the print culture of the period. See Arthur Koestler, The Case of the Midwife Toad (New York: Vintage Books, 1971). 31. invoke the phrase “world-system” in its late nineteenth-century sense—a structured means of knowing and apprehending the world. See Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, 239. 32. Du Yaquan’s voluminous work as a cultural commentator and theorist was also extremely influential and sometimes quite controversial. As Joyce Chi-

Hui Liu points out, his apprehension and advocacy of new work and social theory at the cusp of social psychology and evolutionary theory had a deep impact on the discourse of the day. Du’s work, Liu argues, was characterized by its

abiding organicism (the notion that the society can be best understood as a body), as well as a commitment to Lamarckian and neo-Lamarckian means of ameliorating social pathologies. His influences in this regard included the revi-

Notes to Pages 73-76 219 sionist theory of Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) that mutual assistance (as opposed to competition) is the primary mechanism of evolutionary progress; the recapitulationist work of American social psychologist James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934) linking childhood development to racial development; and the anti-Spencerian promotion of a vigorous program of “social engineering” by the midwestern sociologist Lester FE. Ward’s (1841-1913). For a very helpful discussion of the intertwinement of these discourses in Du Yaquan’s work, see Joyce Chi-Hui Liu #40 #8, “Governing the ‘Psyche’ and the Biologized Subject: The Case of Du Yaquan and Dongfang Magazine, 1911-1923” " obimNyaA#lo Bil AS fing EL EW - DA OR abs PER OZ IR AGP, Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiu jikan PB CPP ATEE TY, no. 29 (September 2006): 85-121. 33. See Meng Yue, Shanghai at the Edges of Empires (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 33. 34. At least one of these texts, the Three-Character Classic, dates back to the Southern Song. For a cultural historical account of the presence of these texts in late imperial Chinese childhoods, see Ping-Chen Hsiung, A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 17, 103-127. See also Limin Bai, Shaping the Ideal Child: Children and Their Primers in Later Imperial China (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press of Hong Kong, 2005). For an illuminating inroduction to the world of Chinese children’s books in the modern period, see Don J. Cohn, Virtue by Design: Illustrated Chinese Children’s Books from the Cotsen Children’s Library (Los Angeles: Cotsen Occasional Press, 2000). 35. See Shi Chong’en Witis2 A, ed., Huitu shizi shizai yi i halitk + FED [It’s easy to learn characters with pictures] (Shanghai: Biaomeng shushi, Guangxu 31 [1905]), vol. 6. Shi Chong’en’s publishing venture, the Biaomeng shushi JZ?

7 8, was established in Hangzhou, but later set up an office in the International Settlement of Shanghai. This textbook was one of a series approved for distribution and use in public schools by the Qing government.

36. See Cai Yuanpei “7047, Shou Xiaotian #72, and Shou Qianlu wl, eds., Zuixin guanhua shizi jiaokeshu hom Gini fF PUKE [New Mandarin reading primer] (Shanghai: Huiwen xueshe, Guangxu 32 [1906]), vol. 2, lesson 46. 37. Ibid., vol. 5, lesson 155.

38. Du Yaquan #LuUX et al., eds., Dongwuxue da cidian By" Katt [Dictionary of zoology] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1922), 1043.

39. Li Yuying (also known by his style, Shizeng 4 ''), eldest son of the prominent late Qing official Li Hongzao 4275 (d. 1897), was an early Chinese adherent of Kropotkin, collaborated with Cai Yuanpei in the establishment of the Academia Sinica, was the first director of the Palace Museum, and served as the president of Beijing Normal University, in addition to holding an impressive variety of posts in the Nationalist Party apparatus after its removal to Taiwan.

220 Notes to Pages 76-81 40. See Li Yuying, preface to the Dongwuxue da cidian, 1-2. As mentioned in an earlier note, Du Yaquan was also an advocate of Kropotkin’s theory of evolution by mutual assistance. James Reeve Pusey provides an extremely detailed and helpful survey of the impact of Anarchist thought in general, and Kropotkin’s work in particular, on the diffusion of evolutionary theory in China. See Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, 370-433. 41. Li Yuying, preface, 2. Li continues by asserting the evenhandedness of the editorial choices made in the compilation of the dictionary. Interestingly, he concludes the preface by writing: “by Li Yuying (Shizeng) on June 30th in the eleventh year of the Republic, at the Lamarck Institute iid 5¢5¢/5st in the western district of the Capitol.” Ibid., 2. I have not yet been able to learn anything further about the Lamarck Institute or Li Yuying’s involvement in it.

42. See Yang Jinhao te, ed., Two Fighting Wolves phy FMI (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936).

43. See Guo Chunyuan 384 lal, ed., Dongwuyuan tll [The Zoo], 4 vols. (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936).

44. See Wang Renlu +.Ar#, ed., Shou #K [Beasts] (Shanghai: Chunghwa, 1936), 1:14-15. The first ten volumes of the Little Friends Treasury contain three volumes on beasts, a volume on fruits and vegetables, two volumes on tools and utensils, three volumes covering “New Things” #44, and a volume on “Building Homes” i )7;-F. 45. Nor is this the only such story that one finds in the children’s periodicals of the era. Another variant on this theme, entitled “The Conceited Wolf,” that ran in the Commercial Press’s Children’s Pictorial 5448 ¥#& in 1923 is strikingly

similar. Its full text reads: “There was a wolf who was terribly conceited and often said: ‘I am the smartest creature in the world. A fox who looked down upon him said, “The smartest thing in the world is man, and you could never compare. The wolf said, ‘I don’t believe you! Find me a man. So the fox took him to find a man. At first, they came across an elementary school student walking along with a book bag. The wolf asked, ‘Is this a man?’ The fox said, ‘This is a little boy, so he doesn’t count.’ A little while later, an old man with a walking

stick appeared. The wolf asked, ‘Is this a man?’ The fox said, “This is an old man, so he doesn’t count either. After a little while longer, a soldier carrying a gun walked by. The fox said, “There’s a man!’ and so saying, quickly ran away.

The wolf was not the slightest bit afraid, and charged forward from behind a thatch fence, throwing itself at the man. The soldier hastily fired his gun, and the bullet hit the wolf’s head. Blood spurted out, and although the wolf wanted

to run away, he could no longer move, and fell dead to the ground!” See “Jiao’ao de lang” BAIA [The conceited wolf], Ertong huabao 29 (December L925) 12, 46. See Ye Shaojun #£44%, Daocao ren fii. [The scarecrow] (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1933).

Notes to Pages 81-87 221 47. The articulation of theories of neoteny extends back to the nineteenth century, while the biophilia hypothesis has been most forcefully argued by Erich Fromm and E. O. Wilson. For a discussion of both ideas and their relevance to the role of animals and animal imagery in childhood development, see Gail F. Nelson, Why the Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of Children (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 48. John Berger, in his justly famous essay “Why Look at Animals?” argues that the profusion of commercialized animal imagery that has come to characterize childhood in industrialized countries since the nineteenth century is symptomatic of a systemic “disappearance” of animals from our lives. See Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 24. 49. One of the purest and most influential statements of this equation can be seen in the work of the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924). See Hall’s two-volume magnum opus, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904). 50. See Claudia Castaneda, Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 20. 51. As cited in ibid., 12. Darwin’s text was originally published as “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” Mind 2, no. 7 (July 1877): 285-294. 52. See Boyou {H1M, “Jiaohua de huida” WHT FIZ [A crafty answer], Xiao pengyou 130 (1924): 4. 53. See Ertong shijie SLs tt F 1, no. 6 (April 1923).

54. In John Berger’s account of the politics of looking at animals, our premodern relation to animals were suffused by a healthy “existential dualism,” a sense that in its very distinctness, animal life ran parallel to our own. “If the first metaphor was animal,” Berger writes, “it was because the essential relation between man and animal was metaphoric. Within that relation what the two terms— man and animal—shared in common revealed what differentiated them. And vice versa.” In the modern zoo, Berger continues, animals are no longer allowed to look back at us, and we are no longer able to see anything but an alienated display—“each cage is an animal with a frame round the animal inside”—reduced by its very visibility to the status of a “token.” See Berger, “Why Look at Animals,”

21-22. 55. See Xiao pengyou 1, no. 1 (April 1922). 56. See Xiao pengyou 395 (January 1930). A similar situation is depicted on the cover of issue 450 (January 1932), this time involving a terrier rearing up on

its hind legs to listen along with his “little friends” to a gramophone record. Here, the image seems to play into the global iconography of the gramophone industry by mimicking Nipper, the iconic dog in the His Master’s Voice logo.

57. See “Gangqin diyi ke” #578 “ik (The first piano lesson), Ertong shijie 10, no. 12 (June 21, 1924).

222 Notes to Pages 87-92 58. See Ertong shijie 6, no. 11 (June 1923). S92EXOF] 2290.

60. Ibid., 106.

61. See Xiang Peiliang h} RFK, “Lun Guduzhe” jij [f}997] [On “The Misanthrope” |, Kuangbiao 4£# 5 (November 17, 1926). Reprinted in Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan wenxue yanjiusuo Lu Xun yanjiu shi '# EY 4h PbS oe PTD AE A et UH 90 48, eds., Lu Xun yanjiu xueshu lunzhu ziliao huibian Wy FPA imi A Pe Si [Collected scholarly writings on Lu Xun research] (Beijing: Zhongguo welian chubanshe, 1985), 1:196. Wang Hui, writing almost seventy years later in his influential study Fankang juewang: Lu Xun jigi wenxue shijie Sepiaeee: BANA A WATE HE [Resisting despair: Lu Xun and his literary world],

also emphasizes the roots of Wei Lianshu’s dilemma in his status as a “transitional figure” 7 [H]4W. See Wang Hui, Fankang juewang (Shijiazhuang: Hebei ji-

aoyu chubanshe, 2001), 120-121. 62. LXQJ 2:86. 63. For a particularly egregious example of this kind of reading of the story as roman a clef, see Zou Fanping 4S y°/, “‘Wo shengli le’: Guduzhe fenxi” Fe)

Alf: Cyr) apt [“T have won”: An analysis of “The Misanthrope” ], in Xin faxian de Lu Xun: Du ji ben Lu Xun zhuzuo de zhaji # PETA Si: FARE ASS IWS EIN ALC [A newly discovered Lu Xun: Annotations on some of Lu Xun’s works] (Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 2005), 326-333. 64. See Zhou Zuoren, Lu Xun xiaoshuo li de renwu iW) iret AWW [The characters in Lu Xun’s fiction] (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001), 225-228. Zhou Zuoren also denies that Wei Lianshu is a stand-in for Lu Xun’s deceased friend and fellow provincial Fan Ainong 72 }2. For Lu Xun’s own memoir of Fan Ainong’s life and death by drowning, see “Fan Ainong,” one of the essays in his collected reminiscences of his childhood and early youth, Zhaohua xishi 4.4 44 [Dawn blossoms gathered at dusk], in LXO/] 2:310-320. 65. Zhou Jianren’s Jel A. published work on zoology includes a standard textbook, Dongwuxue #4 |Zoology], originally published as a two-volume set by Kaiming shudian [i 4] 4),4, and reprinted as late as 1941 by the Commercial Press, as well as numerous introductory texts and children’s picture books, published from the 1920s to the 1950s, on arthropods, invertebrates, and fish, among other classes of creatures. 66. See Leonard Doncaster, Heredity in the Light of Recent Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 136. Zhou Jianren went on to publish a translation of Doncaster’s work in 1926, one year after the appearance of “The Misanthrope.” See Dongkasite {HB $ret, Yichuan lun ii {iii [On heredity], trans. Zhou Jianren (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1926). 67. See Zhou Jianren, “Da’erwen yihou de jinhua sixiang” 1 fy SLAF IN HE TL, JUAW [Evolutionary thought after Darwin], Dongfang zazhi 18, no. 23 (December 10, 1921): 43.

Notes to Pages 92-103 223 68. Kammerer’s work on inheritance of acquired characteristics is the subject of Koestler’s The Case of the Midwife Toad; his nemesis in Britain, Professor William Bateson, also happens to have been Doncaster’s contemporary and England’s foremost advocate for an aggressive Mendelian refutation of Lamarck. 69. Zhou Jianren, “Yichuan yu huanjing” ti({ bd F255 [Inheritance and environment], Dongfang zazhi 20, no. 4 (February 25, 1923): 82. 70. bids, 84,35, Tie XO] 2588; 72. Ibid. 7o-ADICs 25.

74. Ibid., 96.

7S ABI: 9S. 76. See Marston Anderson, “The Morality of Form,” in Leo Ou-Fan Lee, ed., Lu Xun and His Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 32-53. PI eleX Of 2107, 78. Ibid., 108.

3. The Child as History in Republican China 1. Huang Yi, Ertong huihua zhi xinli Sit49 eZ YE! [The psychology of children’s drawings] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1937), 3. Huang was educated at Tsinghua and Stanford University before receiving his doctorate in psychology at Yale. He returned to China in 1930, where he taught at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, primarily on questions of child development and cognition. See also Huang Yi, Ertong Xinlixue Situ FS? [Child psychology] (Taipei: Zhongzheng, 1952). 2. Huang Yi, Ertong huihua zhi xinli, 3. 3. Ibid., 99-100, 27. 4. Huang is almost certainly drawing here on the influential work of James Sully, whose Studies of Childhood famously likens the “embryonic art” of children’s drawings to the work of “modern savages,” while laying out in exhaustive detail the process whereby “young draughtsmen” gradually develop a greater realism in their representations of human figures. See Sully, Studies of Childhood (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 331-398. 5. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in [//uminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255. See also Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA:

Mi Press. 199 1)-220. 6. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 220. 7. Huang Yi’s work, of course, is representative of both these trends—his academic research was based in the Department of Education at Zhejiang University

224 Notes to Pages 104-109 and was published in paperback by the Commercial Press, the progressive publishing powerhouse headquartered in nearby Shanghai. 8. For a detailed account, see Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1985), 107-134. 9. For an extremely insightful analysis of Feng Zikai’s drawings and their relation to larger Republican-era discourses surrounding children and childhood, see Ann Anagnost, “Children and National Transcendence in China,” in Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Shuen-Fu Lin, and Ernest P. Young, eds., Constructing China: The Interaction of Culture and Economics (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, 1997), 201-212. 10. The phrase derives from Robert Darnton’s work on the cultural history of the French revolution. See Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the French Encyclopedie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). 1am following Leo Ou-fan Lee in applying the term to the treaty port print culture so integral to the dissemination of self-consciously modern literary, philosophical, political, and scientific discourses throughout the period in question. See Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New

Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 47. Lee provides an interesting survey of the involvement of the Commercial Press in the making of modern Chinese nationalism. For a recent history of the Press, see Yang Yang ta, Shangwu yinshuguan: Minjian chubanye de xingshuaifi SCN FH: EST HAASE) 3 [The Commercial Press and the rise and fall of private publishing] (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 2000). 11. See Yan Fu, Tianyan lun Kisii [Theory of evolution] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1931). For a study of Darwinism in China, see also James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, LOSS):

12. I have used slightly modified versions of William Lyell’s translation of the text throughout this chapter. See Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 32. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 34-35. LS lbidg 36: 16. This notion, as well as the genealogical deconstruction of Confucian val-

ues undertaken throughout the text, reflects to some extent Lu Xun’s early absorption in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. See Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), SS—S6.

17. Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, 41. 18. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 109-112 225 19. Jiang Feng, Lu Xun lun ertong jiaoyu he ertong wenxue iin SLI ALA AU ee es [Lu Xun on children’s education and children’s literature] (Beijing: Shaonian wenxue chubanshe, 1961), 1. 20. See William Lyell, Lu Hsun’s Vision of Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 305. See also C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 52-53. Hsia is worried by what he sees as the “insidious sentimentality” of the phrase. As cited in Mary Ann Farquhar’s useful study, Children’s Literature in China from Lu Xun to Mao Zedong (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 56. 21. Ibid.

22. Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, 30. 23. Wida-16.

24. See Lu Xun, “Women xianzai zenyang zuo fuqin” $k!" FUER EME [How are we to be fathers now?], in Lu Xun quanji i424 [The complete works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1998) (hereafter LXQOJ), 5:117. Originally published in Xin gingnian [La jeunesse] 6, no. 6 (January 1919): SSS—S57.

25. Shen Jianshi (UF, “Ertong gongyu” 542 A [Communal child-rearing], Xin gingnian 6, no. 6 (1919): 635. For a brief resumé of the discourse on communal child-rearing in China, see Xu Fengshuang ict Jél4a, “Jindai Zhongguo ‘er-

tong gongyu’ sixiang de fazhan yu yingxiang” Ue7GF ee ue A AI SE 302 [The development and influence of thought on communal child-rearing in modern China], Yow’er jiaoyu 7, no. 8 (2007): 90-93. 26. Shen Jianshi, “Ertong gongyu,” 636. Indeed, the close attention conferred

upon the figure of the child in this era is closely linked with May Fourth discourse that tied the emancipation of women with the success of the nationbuilding project. There is a large and growing body of scholarship on the complexities of this connection; representative examples include Tani Barlow, ed., Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between East and West (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); and Lydia Liu, “The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: Manchuria in Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death,” in Angela Zito and T. Barlow, eds., Body, Subject and Power in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 157-177. 27. See Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962). 28. Ibid., 10, 413. 29. Ibid., 281. Lu Xun writes approvingly of Rousseau’s enlightenment views

on education in a 1927 essay entitled “Lusuo he weikou” J t@4# SO [Rousseau and appetite]. See LX OJ, 3:552-557. 30. Aries, Centuries of Childhood, 414-415.

226 Notes to Pages 112-115 31. For an important account of late imperial Chinese childhood, see Ping-Chen Hsiung, A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 2005). See also Anne Behnke Kinney, ed., Chinese Views of Childhood (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), and Jon L. Saari, Legacies of Childhood: Growing Up Chinese in a Time of Crisis, 1890-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, LOO),

32. See, most prominently, Nicholas Orme’s magisterial history, Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

33. Zhou Zuoren, “Ertong de wenxue” Ji Ait 3c [A children’s literature], Xin gingnian 8, no. 4 (1920): 2. 34. For a collection that does explore the nature of premodern Chinese childhood, see Anne Behnke Kinney, ed., Chinese Views of Childhood (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995). 35. A similar rhetorical strategy is at work in Ling Bing’s Ertong xue gailun Sites: Mam [On the study of the child], published in 1921 by the Commercial

Press and edited by the leading May Fourth intellectual and advocate of the vernacular language, Hu Shi. Ling Bing argues that the scientific recognition of the child as a distinct epistemological entity entails nothing short of a “Copernican Revolution” in the study of childhood psychology and education. Indeed, for Ling the discovery of the child is a quite recent event: “Everyone who

researches education knows now that the child ought to be placed in the center. They know that adults should treasure children, protect children, and give children an opportunity for equality treatment in society, because they are the mainstay of society’s future. But what we need to realize is that this has only been the case in the last decade or so.” See Ling Bing #évk, Ertong xue gailun Shoe" Mim [On the study of the child] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1921), 8-9. 36. Bi Yun 4222, “Ertong duwu wenti de shangque” [Lata Wit) hati [A discussion of the problem of children’s reading materials], Dongfang zazhi 32, no.

L393 Se 297. 37. For an informative study of Lang’s life and astonishingly varied career as a public intellectual and literary figure, see Eleanor De Selms Langstaff, Andrew Lang (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978). 38. Andrew Lang, ed., The Violet Fairy Book (London: Longmans, 1901), V1I-VIl.

39. See Chang-Tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1985), 42-43. 40. Zhou Zuoren, “Ertong de wenxue,” 3.

41. For a scathing critique of Haeckel and social Darwinism, see Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin (New York: Norton, 1979). For an account of

Notes to Pages 116-120 127 Haeckel’s influence on Lu Xun’s intellectual development, see James Reeve Pusey, Lu Xun and Evolution (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). 42. As cited in Pusey, Lu Xun and Evolution, 61. 43. Ibid., 65. 44, This is a concern that saturates Ling Bing’s 1921 treatise on “child stud-

ies.” Indeed, on the second page of this introductory volume, the author ventures into a lengthy discussion of the respective roles of nature (genetic inheritance) versus nurture (environmental factors) in setting Chinese children apart from their foreign counterparts. See Ling Bing, Ertong xue gailun, 2-3. 45. Zhou Zuoren, “Ertong de wenxue,” 5—6. Interestingly, Zhou insists that the legends used at this stage should not produce within the child “inappropriate hero worship or patriotic feelings” that would prejudice the child’s ability to have sympathy for all humanity. To this end he suggests supplying children with stories and legends from a host of different cultures. 46. Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Literature (London: MacMillan, 1984), 50. 47. For several canonical examples of this mode of literary history, see Kirk Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 18931945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 48. For an account of Zhou’s intellectual involvement with Yanagita Kunio’s work, see Hung, Going to the People, 44-45.

49. Zhou acknowledged both Li Zhi and Feng Menglong as primary influences in his literary trajectory. See Zhou Zuoren, “Guanyu jindai de sanwen” [On the modern essay], in Zhou Zuoren daibiao zuo Jil fF AfKAEVE [Representative works of Zhou Zuoren] (Taibei: Lanting shudian, 1983), 201-205. 50. Hung, Going to the People, 59-60. See also Guido Amedeo Vitale, Pekinese Rhymes (Peking: Pei-t’ang Press, 1896), and Vitale, Chinese Merry Tales (Peking: Pei-t’ang Press, 1901). $1. Vitale, Pekinese Rhymes, 1x—x.

52. For a detailed account of the company and the industry at large, see Christopher Alexander Reed, “Gutenberg in Shanghai: Mechanized Printing, Modern Publishing, and Their Effects on the City, 1876-1937” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996), 304. 53. See ibid. 54. For more information on children’s publishing at Kaiming and Beixin, see

Chen Bochui [RH MK, “Muge shengsheng yixian qian” Woe AR FE [Led by the strains of the shepherd’s song], in Wo yu Kaiming, 1926-1985 fe ba bA Hy) [Memoirs of the Kaiming Bookstore, 1926-1985] (Shanghai: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1985), 13-15. For a survey of children’s magazine publishing, see Shi Xin Ti, “Tantan ertong zazhi” prea 5Lst Mii [Discussing children’s magazines], Kaiming Zhongxuesheng 1, no. 8 (1930): 443-445. Shi Xin lists

228 Notes to Pages 120-126 quite a few other publications directed at this particular market niche; I have touched on only a few of them here. 55. See Les Contemporains |Xiandai] 4, no. 3 (January 1934). 56. See Ertong shijie 6, no. 38 (March 1937). 57. See Ertong shijie 3, no. 38 (February 1937). 58. See Dongfang zazhi 15, no. 12 (December 1918). 59. See Mi Zizhang [Lu Xun], “Wanju” St. [Toys], Shun Pao, June 14, 1934. See also LXQOJ 5:496-497. The struggle of domestically produced toys against imported “soldiers and airplanes and battleships” (both miniature and literal) is the narrative premise of Sun Yu’s acclaimed 1933 Lianhua production Xiao wanyi ’|\Itisk [Playthings], starring Ruan Lingyu, as discussed in Chapter 4. 60. Lu Xun, “Wanyju,” 496. 61. Ibid., 496. 62. Ibid., 497.

63. For Lu Xun’s “Shanghai Children” [iff i 5%, see LXO] 4:565-566. See also Anagnost, “Children and National Transcendence,” 204.

4, Playthings of History 1. Modern Sketch was one of a trio of periodicals masterminded by the

Shanghai poet and bon vivant Shao Xunmei fbi], which also included Modern Cinema |Shidai dianying \RrAQ x2) and Modern Pictorial [Shidai huabao !rf{\ ae ¥]. All three journals were famous for the quality of their production values and the graphic art (including cartoons, photomontage, and other forms) adorning their pages. For an account of Shao Xunmei’s career

in publishing, see Zhang Kebiao Ute, “Haishang caizi gao chuban—ji Shao Xunmei” yak 7 FF hk - ACABIHJD [A litterateur of Shanghai goes into publishing—Remembering Shao Xunmei], Shanghai wenshi [Shanghai literary history] 2 (1989): 4-10. For accounts of a fictionalized Shao Xunmei written by his erstwhile American lover and New Yorker correspondent, see Emily Hahn, Mr. Pan (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1942). See also the brief introduction to the history of Chinese cartoons in Wendy Siuyi Wong, Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 11-16. According to Wong, there were some seventeen cartoon magazines established in Shanghai in the mid- to late 1930s. 2. The layout is attributed to an obviously pseudonymous correspondent “Angel” [An Qi’er 2H 5] and ran in a special issue of the journal devoted to “social problems” [shehui wenti zhuan hao 41.49 (ile HAGE]. See An Q’er ELL, “Women ke’ai de xiao tianshi” 4k" FJ BAN) ATE [Our lovable little angels], Shidai manhua |Modern sketch] 3, no. 28 (July 1936). 3. The layout is credited to “Ning xin’er” #{4851 [Darling]. See Ningxin’er, “*You wo you yiji ren zhi you’ de xinli jiqi shishi biaoxian” 4JFRKAUAR AZ SY

Notes to Pages 126-131 229 APC FLAG A Bt Ae Tht [Real-life manifestations of the “Treat your children as

children, so that the children of others shall be similarly treated” mentality], Shidai manhua {Modern sketch] 4, no. 39 (June 1937).

4. The dictum derives from Mencius 1.7: GREURAZE, WAAWK NZ, KE Ae = [Treat your elders as elders, so that the elders of others shall be similarly treated; treat your children as children so that the children of others shall be similarly treated; and the world will spin upon your palm]. 5. For a synopsis of the film and a compilation of reviews from the popular press of the period, see Chen Bo [K#f, ed., Zhongguo zuoyi dianying yundong HE [aN] A at a 1 H)) [The Chinese leftist film movement] (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1993), 258, 516-521. 6. Susan R. Fernsebner, in an excellent article treating the Republican Chinese discourse on toys and childhood education, provides insight into the intellectual and historical roots of this tendency. Republican-period educators not only came to believe in the power of objects (toys) to shape subjects (children), but also persistently discussed toys in terms of “a metonymic affiliation of work and play, adult and child, which served to organize a self-reproducing citizenry (of laborers, managers, mothers, soldiers, etc.) in the name of a modern Chinese Republic.” See Fernsebner, “A People’s Playthings: Toys, Childhood, and Chinese Identity, 19091933,” Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 3 (2003): 271. 7. For Spencer’s enormously influential disquisition on this notion, see Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), 437-450. For Yan Fu’s translation of Spencer’s sociological ideas into Chinese, see Her-

bert Spencer [Sibinsai !§f77 #8], Ounxue yiyan #4! tA [The study of sociology], trans. Yan Fu (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1931).

8. For an in-depth discussion of the discourse surrounding the domestic production of toys, see Fernsebner, “A People’s Playthings,” 271-278. For a discussion of the commercialization of baby formula and its link to new conceptions of the family, see Susan Glosser, “The Business of Family: You Huaiguo and the Commercialization of a May Fourth Ideal,” Republican China 21 (April 1995): 80-115. 9. See Fernsebner, “A People’s Playthings,” 270-271. For Frébel’s work, see Friedrich Froebel [Frobel], The Education of Man (New York: Lovell, 1886). 10. See Chen Jiyun R#S2, Wanju yu jiaoyu St HEagZr Ff [Toys and education] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1933). See also Fernsebner, “A People’s Playthings,” 276; 11. Chen Jiyun, Wanju yu jiaoyu, 1-2. 12. Ibid., 141-148.

13. See Nihon Gaikoku Boeki Nenpyo HASH 374F 4 [Annual return of foreign trade of Japan] (Tokyo: Department of Finance, 1934-1935). 14. See ibid. (1934), 47; (1935), 61.

230 Notes to Pages 131-137 15. See Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 4. 16. See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1973), 37-38.

17. Gerth, for one, argues that product-nationality, and particularly the “commodity-spectacles” through which it was promoted, “turned the technologies of imperialism against itself... naturaliz[ing] the notion of consumption based on nationalism and anti-imperialism rather than “exchange-value” (market value).” See Gerth, China Made, 206. 18. See Qingnong FF Je, “Xiao Wanyi” /) Sts [Plaything], Shun Pao, October 9,

LOS i7, 19, Ibid. 20. Ibid. Interestingly, “Free Talk” also features a number of articles mocking

the use of the “National Goods” tag as a mere marketing device. See, for instance, Da Wu 2{h, “Shuo shangpin zhi lei” jit d-Z 4H [On kinds of commodities], Shun Pao, April 5, 1933, 17.

21. See Shen Baiying WT, ed., Fuxing guoyu jiaoke shu: Chuxiao diyi ce

(gL RE AGAR: «W/o fF [Renaissance mandarin textbook: Elementary level, vol. 1] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1932), 49. 22. See Zhou Jishi Ja) ti-b:, ed., Wode wanju i IWitH [My toys] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1935), and Xu Jingyan #Ftil a, ed., Yougu de wanju 77 ERIN)

tt. [Fun toys] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936). 23. Yiliu zhai zhuren 2 Win7F EA [Master of the Easy Flow Studio] is listed as the “instigator” of the layout. See “Zhenzheng daodi guohuo zhanlan hui” AL Ete dH bh] & fe = [Real Genuine National Products Exhibition], Shidai man-

hua |Modern sketch] 3, no. 26 (February 1936). Such exhibitions, as Gerth discusses in revealing detail, were an integral aspect of the national products movement, and were geared toward nationalizing both the commodities and the consciousness of the consumers who came to see them. See Gerth, China Made, 205-281. 24. The phrase is taken from the title of Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 25. It is no accident that these same years also saw a slew of publications dedicated to teaching the Chinese people not only the meaning and educational value of toys, but also how to craft them with relatively inexpensive materials. A representative example of this genre is Guo Yiquan $ #¢2x, ed., Wanju zhizuo

fa tH VEY [How to make toys] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1920). These works were quite well received. By 1931 Guo’s handbook had gone through at least eight printings. A similar how-to guide entitled Children’s Toys was first published in January 1931 and reprinted in September 1932. See Xu Wenyuan

(RE Cie, Xiao pengyou wanju /)}\i Kt. [Children’s toys] (Shanghai: Beixin

Notes to Pages 139-145 6 | shuju, 1932). See also Pan Danming }# YR, ed., Wanju xiao gongchang Et.) ‘3% [A little workshop for toys] (Shanghai: Chunghwa, 1936). Even during the war, techniques for the manufacture of toys remained a concern. A quite detailed handbook on industrial processes for the production of toy soldiers, dolls, animals, and other playthings was published in Shanghai in 1942 and reprinted in 1947. See Kexue huabao bianji bu #}4¢ 2 yam) [Editorial Department of Science Pictorial], ed., Wanju zhizao Ht A#8i%% [The manufacture of toys] (Shanghai: Zhongguo kexue tushu, 1947). For a more in-depth discussion of these handbooks, see Fernsebner, “A People’s Playthings,” 274-277, 287-290. 26. See Shun Pao, October 9, 1933, 1. 27. See Zhongguo gingshaonian yanjiu zhongxin PEM FF />4EWFITHUD, ed., Bainian Zhongguo ertong (1 4F Fd 5b 5 [Chinese children in the twentieth century] (Guangzhou: Xin shiji chubanshe, 2000): 488. 28. The fact that the boy loses his father at the very moment of his abduction, and is delivered into the hands of Mrs. Chen, who is by all appearances a single mother, only emphasizes his fictive kinship with the industrialist. Mrs. Chen, in a further irony, seems to view the boy as a mere plaything. 29. For an autobiographical account of Sun Yu’s education and filmmaking career, see Sun Yu fA, Yinhai fanzhou: Hutyi wode yisheng $Rikkiz Ht: [ATR AK yy -4E [A skiff floating on a silver sea: Memoirs of my life] (Shanghai: Shanghai weny1 chubanshe, 1987). 30. The story is told in chapter 26 of Marx’s account of capitalist development, Das Kapital. See Karl Marx, Capital (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990);

a wid. 873; 875,58 76. 32. For a fascinating account of the invention and global spread of the scouting phenomenon in the early twentieth century, see Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts and the Imperatives of Empire (New York: Pantheon, 1986). The first scout troop in China, by all accounts, was organized in the wake of the Republican revolution in 1912. The local incarnation of the international organization was tellingly translated as the tongzi jun 12-44, or “children’s army.” By the end of the same decade, the Commercial Press was active in publishing scouting guides, such as a Chinese translation

of First Steps in Scouting. See Zhongguo tongzi jun xiehui ‘PMP Hie [National Committee of Chinese Boy Scouts], ed., Tongzi jun chubu tf ih a [First steps in scouting] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1918). 33. For an explanation of the meaning and protocol of this salute, see Cheng

Jizhang Fr, ed., Tongzi jun zuzhi fa tH ANAK [How to organize a boy scout troop] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1922), 68. In Baden-Powell’s initial formulation, the salute was held to signify honoring God and king, helping others,

and obedience to scouting rules. In China this trinity was later overlaid by the approximately Confucian rhetoric of “wisdom,” “benevolence,” and “bravery”

232 Notes to Page 147 (zhi ren yong #1443). By the early 1930s scouting had been institutionalized with the full support and active collaboration of the Nationalist KMT government. Liangyou Xx a ¥k |The young companion], China’s premier pictorial of the era, for instance, features a photo spread of the visit of President Chiang Kai-shek and other KMT luminaries to a National Boy Scouts Rally held at Nanjing in early 1930. See “Quanguo tongzijun jianyue” 4= la Hi fai fe] [National scouts rally], Liangyou huabao 47 (February 1930): 4-5. By July 1932, in the wake of the Battle of Shanghai, the image of the Boy Scout had been thoroughly

militarized and assimilated to the cause of national salvation, as attested to by a half-page photo by Sze Shao-nan iif7> Fy of three bugle-wielding scouts, captioned

with bold characters: “Calls for Resistance.” See “Dikang de husheng” FH tlh I # Liangyou 77 (July 1932).

5. A Narrow Cage 1. The arrival of the Carl Hagenbeck Circus was announced with a half-page spread in Shun Pao on October 1, 1933. The advertisement featured a drawing of Hagenbeck’s specially outfitted steamship, the SS Duisberg, its decks teeming with circus animals. With a stylized urban waterfront as a backdrop, an elephant with a megaphone trumpets in Chinese, “We’re almost in Shanghai,” while a monkey adds, “I can see Shanghai!” See Shun Pao, October 1, 1933, 14. There is a growing scholarly literature on the crucial contributions of the Hagenbeck family to the development of the modern zoological garden, in which the cage is replaced by moated enclosures to allow for better sightlines as well as the illusion of a “natural” habitat. Historians have also analyzed the intertwinement of the Hagenbeck concern’s trade in both animals and exhibitions of exoticized natives with colonial regimes of knowledge. See Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and Eric Ames, Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009). For a brief summary of the history of Lorenz Hagenbeck’s creation of the traveling Hagenbeck circus, see Edward P. Alexander, Museum Masters: Their Museums and Influence (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983), 322-323. The fullest account of the circus and its Asian tour is provided by Lorenz Hagenbeck, Animals Are My Life (London: Bodley Head, 1956). 2. See Ye Yongzhen #2 7k 4, “Guan Haijingbo maxituan conggan” @Wifk st {H

Halak sees [Reactions to watching the Hagenberg Circus], Shenbao, October 6, 1933, 15. Ye wrote a series of three pieces on the circus on consecutive days, each using a different animal (the elephant, the horse, and lions and tigers, respectively) to convey an allegorical lesson or parable about contemporary Chinese life.

Notes to Pages 147-151 233 3. See Lu Xun #il, “Yeshou xunlian fa” FY #hilleYA [How to train wild animals], in Lu Xun quanji ®it4=42 [Complete works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1998) (hereafter LXQ/J), 5:365-366. The piece, which purports to report on a lecture given by Hagenbeck’s manager, Richard Sawade, originally appeared under the pen name Yu Ming 42%/ in the October 30, 1933, edition of Shenbao.

4. The reference here is to Richard Sawade (1869-1947), Lorenz Hagenbeck’s general manager and “right-hand man.” Descriptions of Sawade’s remarkable skills as an animal trainer and businessman can be found throughout Hagenbeck’s memoirs. His notoriety as an animal trainer was also widespread. An entertainment report from the New York Times from September 6, 1894, titled “Sawade, with His Pets, Again” reads: A big crowd was attracted to Madison Avenue and Twenty Sixth Street last night by the spectacle of Richard Sawade engaged in taming his lions, that are on exhibition with Hagenbeck’s animals, in the Madison Square Garden. The Lion tamer was badly torn by Big Tom, one of his lions, at Manhattan Beach some weeks ago, and for a time his life was despaired of. He has fully recovered, however, and will give his exhibitions every afternoon and evening, before the performances in the amphitheater.

5. The reference here is to the Gongsun Chou 7 f%H. chapter of the Mencius thf. For complete annotations, see LXOJ 5:366. 6. The reference is to the “Yanyuan” #yjil chapter of the Confucian Analects. 7. The reference here is to the “Quli” HH#@ chapter of the Liji iid [Record of rituall. 8. Interestingly, Hagenbeck’s menagerie, in which animals were often trained to act like humans (with chimpanzees drinking tea from fine china cups, for in-

stance) and certain “savages” from the colonial territories were put on display like animals, inspired not only Lu Xun, but also Franz Kafka, to write an allegorical account of this process of “civilization.” Kafka’s “A Report to the Academy” was written and published in 1917, and presents the monologue of a talking gorilla in the Hagenbeck menagerie on his own development from beast to mimic-man. 9. See Vasilii Eroshenko, “Xia de long” #KIM fz [A narrow cage], trans. Lu Xun, Xin gingnian 9, no. 4 (August 1921). The story was reprinted in the Chenbao in November 1921. 10. The primary source in Russian for biographical data on Eroshenko’s life and work is R. Belousov, introduction to Vasilii Eroshenko, Izbrannoe [Selected

works] (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 5-43. In Japanese, his works were compiled and published in 1959 in a three-volume set, after having been banned throughout the war years. See Vasilii Eroshenko, Eroshenko zenshu * 2 ¥ + ~ 3 424R [Complete works of Eroshenko], ed. Takasugi Ichiro 4% ~PS (Tokyo: Misuzu

234 Notes to Pages 151-153 shobo # + ¥4n\N)i [The happy boat], edited by Ba Jin E!4, was published in March 1931 by Kaiming shudian [#] HH 44). The Commercial Press, finally, released a collection of trans-

lations entitled Shijie de huozai thi [The world on fire and other tales] in December 1934. 12. The special issue appeared on October 22, 1921. For a discussion of Eroshenko and his promotion by Chenbao, see Xiaoqun Xu, “Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Transnational Networks: The Chenbao Fujuan, 1921-1928,” China Review, 4, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 154-161. 13. See Vasilii Eroshenko, “Wode xuexiao shenghuo de yi pianduan” FR )/iC“2 4%

EVIE -) Be [An episode from my school life], trans. Hu Yuzhi #4432, Chenbao fukan, November 21, 1921. Zhou Zuoren also offered an account of Eroshenko’s life in an article titled “Ailuoxianke jun de shiming” ® #764 MY AA [Eroshenko’s blindness], Chenbao fukan, January 17, 1923. 14. Eroshenko, “Wode xuexiao shenghuo de yi pianduan.” 15. If true, the incident must have taken place in June 1896, when Li Hongzhang visited Russia as part of longer tour of the United States and Europe. When in Russia, Li Hongzhang signed a mutual defense treaty between China and Russia—the

so-called “Li-Lobanov” treaty—that allowed for the construction of the China Eastern Railway and set the stage for further conflicts between Russia and Japan in China’s northeast. Eroshenko would have been six years old at the time.

16. One member of this circle was Karl Yoneda (1906-1999), a Japanese American revolutionary from Glendale, California, who helped found the International Longshore Worker’s Union. Born Yoneda Goso, Yoneda changed his name to Karl after having read the works of Marx and Eroshenko in Japanese. In 1922 he worked his way from Japan to Pusan and on to Mukden and Peking

Notes to Pages 153-154 235 in order to find Eroshenko, whose fairy tales had “deeply fascinated” him. Yoneda reports of his stay in Peking, as a sixteen-year-old: “[I] stayed with Eroshenko for a productive two months. He dictated fairy tales to me and paid me for the work, enabling me to pay for my fare back to Japan.” Yoneda’s memoirs include a photograph of Eroshenko flanked by Yoneda and “young Chinese and Formosan revolutionaries in Peking, China, 1923.” See Karl G. Yoneda, Gan-

batte: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, 1983), 9. 17. The two collections in Japanese were published as Yoake mai no uta (L4H) iF Hi © uk [Song before midnight] (Tokyo: Sobunkaku, 1922), and Saigo no tameiki Hite © VA [The last sigh] (Tokyo: Sobunkaku, 1922). 18. The pages of Xin gingnian [La Jeunesse], tor instance, feature numerous articles and exchanges on Esperanto in these years. See Qian Xuantong #* % [A],

“Esperanto,” Xin gingnian 4, no. 2 (1918): 173-177, and Sun Guozhang fA tm et al., “Lun Esperanto” jij Esperanto [On Esperanto], Xin Oingnian 4, no. 4 (1918): 357-366. A Chinese journal devoted to the language and its acquisition, La Verdo Luma (Luguang *k)\;), began publication in the fall of 1922, with the goal of serving as an “international magazine published in China .. . dedicated to disseminating Esperanto, opposing militarism, and promoting the mutual understanding of humankind.” Advertisements for the magazine ran regularly in Chenbao fukan. See the July 16, 1922, issue for an example. 19. From Vladivostok, Eroshenko apparently attempted to return to Russia but was denied entry on the basis of his lack of affiliation with the Communist Party. Hu Yuzhi reports him saying upon arrival in Shanghai, “When I was in

Japan and India, I was not allowed to stay on account of being a Communist. But when I wanted to return to Russia, I wasn’t allowed to return because I’m not a Communist. I don’t know what they would have me do!” See Hu Yuzhi, “Jieshao mang shiren Ailuoxianke” J} 44 4 int A 2 Ae FC E4) [Introducing the blind

poet Eroshenko], Minguo ribao, October 14, 1921. In Shanghai, Eroshenko worked briefly as a masseur to support himself. 20. The collection, which allegorically critiques both the modern capitalist city and what Eroshenko perceived as the lingering traditionalism of Chinese culture, was published in 1923. See Vasilii Eroshenko, Kuye zaji jigita AE MERC AIL E [Sketches of a withered leaf] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, L923) 21. See Lu Xun, introduction to Eroshenko, “Xia de long,” 530. According to Eroshenko scholar R. Belousov, Lu Xun’s claim here that Eroshenko’s work lacks any seditious tendencies was made purely in order to deflect KMT censors. See Belousov, introduction to Eroshenko, Izbrannoe, 31. My thanks to Roy Bing Chan for his invaluable assistance in summarizing and translating Belousov’s

work from the Russian. The emotionality of Lu Xun’s reaction seems to be shared by many of Eroshenko’s friends and associates in both China and Japan.

236 Notes to Pages 154-156 Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren’s affection for Eroshenko is made manifest in diary entries and letters, in which they habitually refer to him by the diminutive Ailuo

jun ‘84 (probably from the Japanese Ero-kun) or “EH” (Mr. E or E-kun). See, for instance, Zhou Zuoren, “Zai song Ailuoxianke jun” fRis ae FES A [Seeing off Eroshenko once again], Chenbao fukan, April 21, 1923. 22. Lu Xun, “Xu” J} [Preface], in Vasilii Eroshenko, Ailuoxianke tonghua ji

S AEE Su ASE [Collected fairy tales of Eroshenko] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1922). Reprinted in the 1948 edition of LXOJ 12:290. 25,066 LXOJ T4153: 24. Mary Ann Farquhar discusses Zhou Zuoren’s connection with the history

of the fairy tale in China, as well as some of the debates and contention that swirled around the term in the 1920s and into the post-1949 years, in her Children’s Literature in China from Lu Xun to Mao Zedong (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 126-129. 25. John Arnott MacCulloch was a prolific scholar of Celtic mythology, medieval folklore, and religion, and remains known for his foundational works in the field, including The Religion of the Ancient Celts (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1911) and Medieval Faith and Fable (London: Harrap Company, 1932). MacCulloch was an early adherent of what he called an “anthropological” approach

to the study of folklore. See J. A. MacCulloch, The Childhood of Fiction: A Study of Folk Tales and Primitive Thought (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1905), 15. 26. See MacCulloch, The Childhood of Fiction, 1. 27. Ibid., 7, 9, 14. MacCulloch cites Farrar, Lang, Edwin Sydney Hartland, George Lawrence Gomme, and James George Frazer as the innovators of this

new approach to the study of folklore, one that supersedes earlier efforts by Max Muller and others to identify their origins solely in Aryan mythology. See James A. Farrar, Primitive Customs and Manners (London: Chatto and Windus, 1879); Edwin Sydney Hartland, The Science of Fairy Tales: An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology (London: Walter Scott, 1891); George Lawrence Gomme, Ethnology in Folklore (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1892); and James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1900).

28. This view is expressed throughout the relevant literature of the period. Here I quote from Zhao Jingshen i a7, Tonghua gaiyao ih WZ [Introduction to the fairy tale] (Shanghai: Beixin, 1927), 8. Another example of the widespread sense among intellectuals of the time of the centrality of the “fairy tale” is provided by a brief polemic by Hu Yuzhi from June of 1921, entitled “The Fairy Tale and the Fantastic Story”: For the future of culture, on balance, it’s the production of children’s literature that seems more crucial than anything else. Among adults like us, there are perhaps more than a few who have already fell into the pit of traditional thinking, and will never

Notes to Pages 156-158 237 be able to see the light from outside. But our children—children who have yet to be poisoned—should not be allowed to sink along with us. How can we nourish the “flowering of their souls,” how might we set alight the “flame of their lives,” allowing them to fulfill their potential and take on the task of shouldering the culture of the future? Is this not an important responsibility of the artist? Why shouldn’t writers try their hand at children’s literature? The position occupied by the fairy tale and the fantastic story in modern literature is far from narrow. Aside from the famous authors of fairy tales, every major poet and novelist has also produced a few fairy tales or stories of the fantastic. Today’s progressive writers are endowed with imagination and an abundance of feeling— why not use these qualities to write fairy tales which will lay a foundation for our children’s literature? This is the challenge I am posing to those who are earnestly engaged in creating our new literature.

Hu Yuzhi, “Shenhua yu shenyi de gushi” Mii BL sh Fe ee [The fairy tale and the fantastic story], in Hu Yuzhi wenji ti} 83-2 4 [Collected writings of Hu Yuzhi] (Beiying: Sanlian, 1996), 217. 29. Zhao Jingshen i 54748 went on to publish two influential volumes of criticism on the fairy tale form in 1927. See Zhao Jingshen, Tonghua gaiyao MH iM

[Introduction to the fairy tale] (Shanghai: Beixin, 1927) and Tonghua lunji ¥ imme [Collected essays on the fairy tale] (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1927). For his memoirs of the period, see Zhao Jingshen, Wo yu wentan fx bl CIS [My recollections of literary circles] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1999). 30. The epistolary exchange between Zhou Zuoren and Zhao Jingshen is entitled “Tonghua de taolun” tii (Navi [A discussion of fairy tales] and unfolds over the course of four installments. See Chenbao fukaniz Kil 11], January 25, February 12, March 29, and April 9, 1922.

31. See Zhou Zuoren and Zhao Jingshen, “Tonghua de taolun” ih ay if [A discussion of fairy tales], Chenbao fukan, January 25, 1922. 32. Zhou Zuoren addresses this question in his short essay “Wang Erde ton-

chua” +. fi aii [Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales], in Ziji de yuandi AM balsa [A garden of one’s own] (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2003), 63-66. Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” had first been introduced in Chinese by Liu Bannong in a 1914 issue of Zhonghua xiaoshuo jie PAE) iit Ft. By 1918, Chunghwa Books had published a collection of six of his stories in translation. 33. See “Tonghua de taolun” Sti (aviia [A discussion of fairy tales], Chenbao fukan, January 25, 1922.

34. See “Tonghua de taolun san” “iil avi [A discussion of fairy tales, part three], Chenbao fukan, March 29, 1922.

35. See Wang Erde +. ## [Oscar Wilde], Wang Erde tonghua +f ik [Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales), trans. Mu Mutian #3/4.X% (Shanghai: Taidong, 1922). See Zhou Zuoren, “Wang Erde tonghua” +. #9 f@ 5tii [Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales],

238 Notes to Pages 159-166 in Ziji de yuandi 4 MN feu [One’s own garden| (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002), 63. 36. See Zhao Jingshen, “Tonghua de taolun si” [A discussion of fairy tales, part four], Chenbao fukan, April 9, 1922. This progressivist narrative is taken up in almost all subsequent discussions of the genre in China, in one form or another. Chen Bochui’s influential 1932 study, Ertong gushi yanjiu Site Wh ot 4%, [Research on children’s stories], for instance, constitutes itself around a story

whereby the “naturally occurring” myths (shenhua fii) of primitive peoples develop over time into fairy tales (tonghua tii), which “belong to children, and to literature, being literary stories based on the thought and customs of primitive peoples.” See Chen Bochui, Ertong gushi yanjiu SLI2 BCH WIT (Beijing:

Beixin shuju, 1932), 151-152. 37. See R. Belousov, “Drug Li Sinia” [Lu Xun’s friend], Literaturnaia gazeta, September 26, 1961. The identity of Eroshenko had actually been established three years earlier by another Soviet sinologist, Vladimir Rogov. See Rogov, “Russki drug Lu Sinia” [Lu Xun’s Russian friend], in Znamuia, July 1958, 212216. See LX OJ 1:555-558. 38. Eroshenko’s lament here—“Loneliness, loneliness, the loneliness of being in a desert”—-seems in fact to allude one of his writings from this period, “Old Man Time.” See Ailuoxianke, “Shiguang laoren” HFRIG4A [Old Man Time], Chenbao fukan, December 1, 1922. This is a special edition of the supplement celebrating its fourth year of publication.

J OCeL XO) 1557: 40. LXOJ (1948), 12:328-329. 41. Ibid. 42. The plotting of the piece up to this point—as well as its suspicion of the ideals of the scientific mission—seems in part to be lifted from an earlier work of fiction, the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden’s 1905 De Kleine Johannes [Little Johannes], in which the eponymous hero’s mentor in medical science dissects his beloved rabbit and even the corpse of Johannes’s father, leading to his ultimate disillusionment. It is unclear whether Eroshenko’s story is a pastiche of this work by van Eeden or a kind of homage to it. Appropriately enough, van Eeden’s fairy tale was to become a favorite of Lu Xun, who translated it into Chinese as Xiao Yuehan ’\\Z)%9 in 1926. For Lu Xun’s preface to his translation, see LXOJ 14:5-14. 43. LXOJ (1948), 12:417. 44. See Vasilii Eroshenko, “Shiguang laoren” IReIG A [Old Man Time], Chenbao fukan, December 1, 1922. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. See Lu Xun, “Buzhou shan” 4\}AJ i] [Mt. Buzhou], Chenbao fukan, December 1, 1922. The piece was later revised and renamed “Butian” #4 [Mend-

Notes to Pages 167-168 239 ing heaven] for inclusion as the first story in his collection Gushi xinbian WU} tm [Old tales retold]. See LX OJ] 2:345-356. The scenario of Lu Xun’s revision of the Niwa story seems to owe quite a bit to the kind of novel of evolutionary adventure I discussed in the Introduction, including texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). More directly apropos was Lu Xun’s own translation, via a rendering in Japanese, of Louise B. Strong’s “An Unscientific Story” as “Zaoren shu” iti At} [The technique for

creating humans]. For a full account of the text and its implications for Lu Xun’s thought and realist literary practice, see Lydia H. Liu, “Life as Form: How Biomimesis Encountered Buddhism in Lu Xun,” Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 1 (February 2009): 21-54. 48. Lu Xun often uses—to give just one example of many—the dialect term yi f}t as a third-person pronoun designating “she,” instead of the now-standard ta ith. This was also his practice in the short stories he produced around the same time. 49, As Zhao Jingshen recalls, this attention to strict fidelity (xin 1) was in fact characteristic of Lu Xun’s modus operandi as a translator. See Zhao Jingshen, “Lu Xun jianying” i 8Y 5% [Silhouette of Lu Xun], in Wo yu wentan FK Bal WT [My recollections of literary circles] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1999), $50. On Lu Xun’s early career, and the surprising lack of attention paid to his work in the early 1920s by contemporary critics, see Eva Hung, “Learning to Read Lu Xun, 1918-1923: The Emergence of a Readership,” China Quarterly 172 (December 2002): 1042-1064. 51. See Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 52. In a four-part, serialized review of Eroshenko’s work published in Chenbao fukan by critic Qi Tianshou, almost constant reference is made to the phrase. A typically histrionic example comes at the very beginning, in reference to Eroshenko’s own struggles: “Today’s world is a world of violence and money! The proletarian intelligentsia is imprisoned in the ‘narrow cage’ of violence and money, lacking even the freedom to speak out.” Qi Tianshou goes on to laud Eroshenko’s work as a literature of tears, in which sorrow takes on a revolutionary potential.

See Qi Tianshou 7#AF¢, “Du Ailuoxianke de tonghua” aH a4e scsi [Reading Eroshenko’s fairy tales], Chenbao fukan, December 14 and 15, 1922. 53. Ba Jin EX4e, Jia 2% [Family] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1996), 66. Ba Jin edited an edition of Eroshenko’s fairy tales in March 1931, the year Jia was released. His preface is a fascinating and quite personal account of the affection he and his circle of friends felt for Eroshenko and his works, and re-

counts a number of interesting anecdotes, such as a visit with Eroshenko to Shanghai’s Great World Amusement Center. Ba Jin even speculates on the veracity of a rumor that Eroshenko had already passed away, only to reassure his read-

ers in a note at the end of the piece that he has been assured that Eroshenko

240 Notes to Pages 169-178 is alive and well and teaching at a school for the blind on the remote northern tundra of his native land. See Ba Jin, “Xu” }} [Preface], in Vasilii Eroshenko, Xingfu de chuan 4 Whit [The happy boat] (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1931), I-V1l.

54. See Eroshenko, “Xia de long,” 517-518. The original Japanese version, entitled “Semai ori” ¢ ¥ & #4, can be found in Eroshenko, Eroshenko zenshu,

ed. Takasugi Ichiro 42D, 160-179. 55.In the course of a fascinating short essay on Eroshenko’s blindness, Zhou Zuoren seems to echo these themes of perceptual misprision and linguistic incommensurability. Uncannily enough, the passage refers to Eroshenko’s having gone to visit the tigers at the “Experimental Agricultural Station” (the former imperial garden and menagerie that became the Beijing Zoo): “[Eroshenko] is blind, but he’s not blind at heart. Although his eyes cannot see, he can read and write, think and converse, just like everyone else. Often when we chatted with him, we could not help but observe little taboos about mentioning things like painting, colors, and lines, landscape, beautiful women, and the cinema. We tried to steer clear of such topics, not only to spare his feelings, but to spare our own. But in his own speech he was not as calculated as we were, and not only did he have a kind of passion for the light that he would never see, but also an interest and a special feeling for colors, such that when he would have new clothes tailored, he would choose the color of the fabric, saying that dark green was fine, but red and blue were not. And he would often use the terrible verb “to see,” as in “I went to see the tiger at the Experimental Agricultural Station,” or “T went to see a play.” And although it was he himself who had used the word, I would end up feeling an indefinable melancholy and uneasiness.” See Zhou Zuoren, “Ailuoxianke jun de shiming” #28 56S) 4 M24) [Eroshenko’s blindness], Chenbao fukan, January 17, 1923. 56. Eroshenko, “Xia de long,” 518, 519. 57. Ibids,.520. 58. LD1dss-525.

59. Ibid., 525. Lata Mani provides an authoritative critical study of the politics of sati and its proscription in her Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 60. See ibid., 2. 61. Eroshenko, “Xia de long,” 531.

62. Ibid., 526-527. 63. Ibid., 529-530.

Appendix 1. Rajah: a local prince in eastern India, what used to be transliterated as “Heluozhe.”

Notes to Pages 182-183 241 2. This is what is known as “sati,” in which after the death of a male, the widow and the deceased are burned together. This is an old custom in India. After India came under the domination of England, the English banned this evil practice, but some Indians have stubbornly continued to practice it in secret, even to this day. 3. This translates as “Queen of Heaven.” Elsewhere in the text there is also a “Mahadeva” or “Great Heaven.”

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to many friends and colleagues in the making of this book—too many and too deeply to properly acknowledge all of their contributions. The inkling of the idea that became the book struck me as I browsed the stacks of the East Asian Library at the University of Washington in Seattle and came face to face with the evocative children’s drawings that are a centerpiece of Chapter 3. The intellectual itinerary of the book coincides with the discoveries allowed me by libraries and archives on three continents, including the Shanghai Municipal Library and the Beijing Municipal Archives, the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and the Harvard-Yenching Library. I owe particular debts of gratitude to Annalee Pauwels and Don J. Cohn at the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University, as well as to the staff of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Jianye He, in particular, has been enormously helpful in unearthing and bringing to my attention amazing caches of yet to be catalogued early twentieth-century children’s books and primers. Portions of Chapter 3 are based on “The Child as History in Republican China: A Discourse on Development,” in positions: east asian cultures critique 10, no. 3 (Winter 2002).

The Townsend Center for the Humanities provided me time to write and invaluable intellectual sustenance in the form of an Initiative Fellowship in 2007. ?'m grateful for the close readings, critiques, and generous encouragement of many Berkeley colleagues, including Robert Ashmore, Ian Duncan, William Schaefer, Alan Tansman, and Paula Varsano. Farther from home, Weihong Bao, Miriam Hansen, Guo-Juin Hong, Ted Huters, and Wang Hui have offered commentary, advice, and inspiration throughout the process of writing this book. I’ve also benefited enormously from the opportunities I have had to present work-in-progress 243

244 Acknowledgments to colleagues at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Duke University, Princeton University, the Academia Sinica in Taipei, and the National University

of Singapore. Lindsay Waters and Hannah Wong at Harvard University Press have been unstinting in their support for the project and its realization. My students here at Berkeley have been instrumental to the book in ways great and small. Many of the ideas presented here were developed in seminar and honed in the course of their sharp questioning and energetic conversation. I would also like to acknowledge the wonderfully resourceful research assistance of Roy Chan, Xiao Liu, Dun Wang, and Michael Zhai. Lanchih has served as my sounding board for more than a decade now, and her voice and her wisdom echo throughout these pages. This book, finally, is dedicated to Milou, who saw it through to the end.

INDEX

Note: page numbers followed by f indicate figures.

Andersen, Hans Christian, 158, 237n32 65; in children’s magazines, 81,

Anderson, Benedict, 29 82-83, 83f, 84f, 85, 86f, 87f, 88f, 89;

Anderson, Marston, 199n20 in iron houses, 82. See also Animal(s); Animal(s): in children’s magazines, 81, Child and beast; Wolf 82-83, 83f, 84f, 85, 86f, 87f, 88f, 89; “Beasts in houses,” 80, 81; zoos and, imagery in children’s literature, 81; 81-83, 837, 85; in children’s maga-

and child kinship in pedagogical zines, 82, 85; in children’s magazines literature, 81-82, 221n48; children’s and evolutionary narratives, 82 magazines, childhood development Bellamy, Edward: Looking Backward of,

and domestic, 85, 86f, 87f, 88f, 89, 31, 38, 39-41, 43-47, 205n5, 221n56; kinship between man and, 208n29; “new novel” and, 39; 85, 221n54; childhood development, evolutionary adventure genre and, animal imagery and, 221n47. See also 39-40; evolutionary thinking,

Beast(s); Wolf historical change and, 39-40, 47;

Animal(s) becoming human, 160, utopian fiction and, 39-40, 44-47. 172s as-allecory; 150,25 5ne# Garl See also Looking Backward (Bellamy) Hagenbeck Circus, humans becoming Benjamin, Walter, 103

animals and, 150, 233n8 Bie Zhi Fils 72

Animal training, 233n4; colonialism Biology: China and academic instituand, 147-150; Lu Xun on, 147-150 tionalization of, 71-72, 217n27. See Ao (mythological sea serpent), 74, 75f also Evolutionary biology

Aries, Philippe, 111-112 Biophilia, 81, 221n47

Authorship crisis, China, evolutionary Book of Great Unity, The (Kang

biology and, 10 Youwei), 31, 205n5

Boy Scout(s): in China, 145,

Ba Jin, 168, 239n53 231nn32-33; salute, 145, 231n33 Beast(s): evolutionary theory’s “Business of enlightenment,” 224n10; nineteenth-century scandal of textbooks and, 104; children’s market boundary dissolving between man and, 119; Chinese publishing houses and, 5; in “The Misanthrope,” 64, 89, and, 119; May Fourth movement

90, 91; pedagogical literature and, and, 119 245

246 Index Cao Xueqin: The Story of the Stone consuming, 119-121; playthings as,

and, 17-18, 30-31, 51-53, 57, 127; China’s national future and, 61-62; Dream of the Red Chamber 129-130; Ling Bing on, 226n35,

Of, 18.30.53 227n44. See also Figure of the

Capitalist economies: Marx on, 144; child

Playthings and, 144 Child and beast: as antinomies of

Capitalist modernity: Darwin and, 6; national development, 5; in modern

Qing empire and, 6 Chinese culture, 5; modern Chinese

Carl Hagenbeck Circus, 233n4; literature development and, 22, Shanghai arrival of, 147; Shun Pao 24-27; in Lu Xun’s fiction, 22-23, advertisement for, 147, 148f, 232n1; 25, 26-27; China’s publishing colonialism and, 147-150, 232n1; Lu industry and, 24; print culture and, Xun on, 147-150; Shun Pao writings 65; childhood development, inheriabout, 147-150, 232n2; humanizing tance and equation of, 81, 89; in animals, animalizing man in, 150, children’s magazines, 83f, 84f, 85,

25908 86f, 87f, 88f, 89

Centuries of Childhood (Ariés), Child as history in Republican China:

111-112 children’s drawings and, 99-103;

Chen Jiyun, 130-131 discourse on development, 99-105; Child/children: ascent into adulthood as childhood development and, 103, ape-to-man evolution recapitulation, 223n7; childhood and, 111-117;

5; as emblem of Chinese develop- folklore studies and, 117-119; ment, 5, 23; as emblem of Chinese consuming children and, 119-121;

nation, 5, 203nn49-50; modern toys and, 121-125 China’s cultural history of, 5; in Childhood: Ariés and discovery of, modern Chinese literature develop- 111-112; child as history in Republiment, 5, 22-27; pedagogical litera- can China and, 111-117; Republican ture and, 5, 6, 65, 74, 79, 80; Lu Xun Chinese developmental history and,

and, 22-24, 109-111, 122-123, 111-117

225n29; Zhou Zuoren and, 23, 24, Childhood development: China’s

112-118, 120, 227n45; China’s publishing industry and, 24, 25; publishing industry and, 24, 104, national development and, 80, 116; 204n51; as domestic product, 25-26; pedagogical literature and, 80; childin “The Misanthrope,” 64-65, 89-90; beast equation, inheritance and, 81, knowledge texts and, 74; and animal 89; children’s magazines, domestic

kinship in pedagogical literature, animals and, 85, 86f, 87f, 88f, 89, 81-82, 221n48; Republican literature 221n56; children’s drawings and, 99, and, 103-104; Republican Chinese 101-102, 103, 223n4; Huang Yi and, culture and, 104; “Diary of a Mad- 99, 101-102, 103, 116, 117, 223n4,

man” and, 109-111, 166; cultural 223n7; child as history in Republican transmission, ”Diary of a Madman” China and, 103, 223n7; Republican and, 110-111; May Fourth move- Chinese developmental history and,

ment and, 112; modern Chinese 103, 223n7; Zhou Zuoren and, 113, culturé-and, 112: fairy tales and, 114-115, 116-117, 120, 227n45; 113-114, 151, 156, 158, 159, fairy tales and, 113-114, 151, 156, 236n28, 238n36; songs of, 118; child 158, 159, 236n28, 238n36; Zhou as history in Republican China and Zuoren’s pedagogical program for

Index 247 children’s literature and, 116-117, 119-121; Commercial Press and, 120, 121, 227n45; children’s market 120-121; Chinese intellectuals and,

and, 120-121, 130; toys and, 150-151. See also Fairy tale(s); 121-122, 130-131; toys, evolution- Illustrated children’s book(s);

ary thinking and, 130; modern Modern Chinese children’s literature Chinese children’s literature, Chinese “Children’s Literature, A” (Zhou

development and, 150-151; animals Zuoren): modern Chinese children’s and animal imagery in, 221n47. See literature and, 112-117; excerpts

also Children’s education from, 113

Childhood of Fiction, The (MacCulloch), Children’s magazines, 80; animals and

1555156 beasts in, 81, 82-83, 83f, 847, 85,

Children as commodities: children’s 86f, 87f, 887, 89; “beasts in houses” images, toys’ worth and, 126, 127f, in, 82, 85; evolutionary narratives and 1287, 129, 228nn2-3; Modern Sketch “beasts in houses” in, 82; zoos and, photomontages and, 126, 127f, 128f, 82-83, 83f, 85; child and beast in, 129, 133, 228n2, 229n4; national 83h, 84f, 85, 86f, 87f, 88f, 89; wolf development and, 129; in Republican in, 84f, 85; childhood development Chinese developmental history, 129; and domestic animals in, 85, 86f, national products and, 131, 133; 87f, 887, 89, 221n56; reading and, Playthings and, 133, 140. See also 85. See also Children’s World; Little

Toy(s) Friend

Children’s Army, 23, 203n49 Children’s market: Chinese literature Children’s drawings: childhood and, 104; Chinese publishing houses development and, 99, 101-102, 103, and, 104, 119-121; modern Chinese 223n4; Republican Chinese material culture and, 112; “business of enlightculture and, 99, 100f, 1017, 102-103; enment” and, 119; childhood child as history in Republican China development and, 120-121, 130; and, 99-103; Huang Yi and, 99-103, Commercial Press and, 120-121; toys

116 and, 121-125, 131. See also Toy(s)

Children’s education: toys and, 129, Children’s World (magazine), 80-81, 130-131, 229n6; fairy tales and, 156, 82, 83-85, 847, 86, 87f, 88f, 89, 120 158, 236n28. See also Childhood China: Marx and, 6; evolutionary

development theory and, 6-7, 8, 198nn9-10;

Children’s literature: modern Chinese evolutionary theory, imperialism and, literature as form of, 6; Lu Xun and, 6-7, 10, 19, 198nn9-10; evolutionary 12, 24, 109; burgeoning market for, thinking and, 8-9, 26, 69, 72, 73;

80; animal imagery in, 81; fairy evolutionary biology, authorship tales and, 113-114, 151, 236n28; crisis and, 10; iron house parable and Lang and, 114-115; Zhou Zuoren, subordination of, 34; Western science childhood development, evolution- and, 41-43; importation of civilizaary thinking and, 114-115; Zhou tion terminology, 55-56; Wu Zuoren’s pedagogical program for Jianren’s Realm of Civilization and,

childhood development and, 55-57; natural-historical knowledge 116-117, 120, 121, 227n45; by and, 68-69, 71-72, 217n27; acachildren, folklore studies and new demic institutionalization of biology

national vernacular, 117-119; in, 71-72, 217n27; soft inheritance Chinese publishing houses and, and evolutionary thinking in, 73;

248 Index China (continued) modern Chinese children’s literature knowledge texts in, 73-74; science and, 150-151; fairy tales and, 151,

knowledge texts in, 73-74; Boy 155; Eroshenko and, 153-154 Scouts in, 145, 231nn32-33. See also — Chinese literature, children’s market

Republican China and, 104. See also Modern Chinese

China Made (Gerth), 131 literature

China’s national future: children and, Chinese modernity: Lu Xun literary 129-130; toys and, 131; Playthings distillation of nature of, 1-3, 5;

and, 135, 145 Chinese developmentalism genealogy

Chinese culture: production and develop- and nature of, 13; Chinese literarymental thinking, 8. See also Modern cultural studies of, 14-15; developChinese culture; Republican Chinese mental thinking and, 15

culture Chinese nation, child as emblem of, 5,

Chinese development: Chinese socialism 203nn49-50 to capitalist market economy transfor- Chinese national salvation: toys and, mation and, 4; child as emblem of, 5, 129, 130; figure of the child and,

23; trusteeship and narratives of, 22; 129-130 figure of the child and, 23; figure of Chinese newspapers. See Chinese

the child, Lu Xun and, 111; figure publication(s) of the child, women’s emancipation Chinese publication(s), 228n1; national

and, 111, 225n26; modern Chinese products and, 132-133, 230n20; toy

children’s literature, childhood production photomontage in, 143f; development and, 150-151. See also toy production and, 230n25. See also Chinese discourse of development; Print culture; specific magazines,

Development; Modern Chinese newspapers, and publications

literature Chinese publishing houses: children’s Chinese developmentalism: ideology of, market and, 104, 119-121; “business

4,197n3; genealogy and nature of of enlightenment” and, 119; chil-

Chinese modernity, 13 dren’s literature and, 119-121;

Chinese discourse of development: national products and, 133. See also development in Chinese literary- Chunghwa Books; Commercial Press media culture, 3; Lu Xun challenge Chinese publishing industry: child and,

to, 3; emergence of, 4 24, 104, 204n51; child and beast in,

and, 103 24, 25

Chinese drawings, figure of the child 24; childhood development and, Chinese industry, national products Chunghwa Books, 68, 79, 80, 104; and, 131, 132. See also National textbooks and, 119. See also Chinese

products publishing houses; Little Friend

Chinese intellectuals: evolutionary Cinema, vernacular modernism and, 67, theory and, 6-7, 8, 198n9; evolution- 214n9. See also Shanghai cinema ary theory, imperialism and, 6-7, Civilization: Chinese importation of

198n9; evolutionary thinking, terminology of, 55-56; China, Wu narrative and, 8, 9, 199nn14-15; Jianren’s Realm of Civilization and,

terminology of modernity and, $§5-57 18-19; “The Misanthrope” and, 63; Colonialism: New Story of the Stone natural-historical knowledge and, 69; and, 18, 31, 32-33, 53, 54, 58, 59-60, children’s literature and, 150-151; 205n9; evolutionary theory and, 28;

Index 249 evolutionary thinking, native intellec- | Darwinian natural selection, 10

tuals and, 29-30; modern Chinese Darwinism. See Social Darwinism literature and, 30; national products “Dead Fire” (Lu Xun), 12; iron house

and, 131; animal training and, parable and, 36, 207n18 147-150; Carl Hagenbeck Circus Deng Xiaoping, 4, 197n3 and, 147-150, 232n1; Lu Xun on, Development: quixotic attempts at 147-150, 233n8; “A Narrow Cage” defining, 3; use of term, 3; as way of and, 171, 172. See also Imperialism knowing, narrating, and managing “Comedy of the Ducks” (Lu Xun), radical historical change processes, 3;

160-162, 167, 238nn37-38 evolutionary models, 4; modern Commercial Press, 40, 42, 43, 68, 73, Chinese literature and transitive/ 74, 78, 80, 104, 214n14, 220n45S; intransitive senses gap in, 5; evoluearly history of, 119; textbooks and, tionary narrative and colonial

119; children’s literature and, national, 9-10; modernity contra, 120-121; children’s market and, 13-22; as reclaiming autonomy, 21; 120-121; toys and, 122, 123, 124f, elite trusteeship and, 35; iron house 133; national products and, 133. See parable and, 35-36; domains of,

also Children’s World; Chinese 104-105; Lu Xun on, 111, 149-150,

publishing houses 233n8. See also Chinese developCommodities: Marx and, 131-132; ment; Discourse of development;

national products and, 131-132, National development 230n17. See also Children as com- Development, terminology of: Chinese modities; Domestic product; National coinage and circulation of, 15, 16,

products 202n34; evolutionary theory and, 16;

Confucianism, and “Diary of a Mad- and wenming, 17, 18; modernity,

man,” 106-107, 224n16 wenming and, 19

Cosmopolitan, and vernacular, 67, 72, Developmental narratives: trusteeship

214n11, 218n29 and, 22; evolutionary thinking,

Cowen, M. P., 21 monism and, 29

Cultural production: developmental Developmental thinking: genealogical

thinking and Chinese, 8; social critique, 4; appropriation as narrative landscapes and vernacular, 67, form and fiction, 5; modern Chinese

214n12 literature and, 5; Chinese cultural

Cultural transmission: Republican production and, 8; narrative and,

Chinese developmental history and, 9-10; Chinese modernity and, 15; of 106; and inheritance in “Diary of a modern Europe, 20-21 Madman,” 106-109, 110, 224n16; “Diary of a Madman” (Lu Xun), 25, “Diary of a Madman,” children and, 166, 199n20; excerpts from, 106,

110-111 107, 108, 109-110; pedagogy and, culture 106-107, 224n16; cultural transmis-

Culture. See Chinese culture; Print 106, 108, 110; Confucianism and,

sion and inheritance in, 106-109,

Darwin, Charles, 81-82, 92; capitalist 110, 224n16; children and, 109-111, modernity and, 6; Ox the Origin of 166; cultural transmission, children Species of, 6-7, 71, 216n22; Lamarck and, 110-111; Playthings and, 139 versus, 69, 72-73, 78, 215nn16-17, Die Weltrathsel (Haeckel), 28, 70, 71,

218n30 Toay2on22

250 Index Discourse of development: implications Bellamy and, 39-40; Eroshenko and, of, 4; Yan Fu, 20; child as history in 164-165. See also Science fiction; Republican China, 99-105. See also Speculative fiction; Utopian fiction Chinese discourse of development Evolutionary biology: developmental

Domestic product: child as, 25-26; thinking, genealogical critique via promotion and Playthings, 26. See translation of, 4; China, authorship also Commodities; National products crisis and, 10; evolutionary thinking

Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao and. 29 Xueqin), 18, 30, 53. See also The Evolutionary narratives: colonial

Story of the Stone national development and, 9-10; Du Yaquan, 73, 74, 76, 218n32, 220n40 “beasts in houses” in children’s magazines and, 82

Environmental determinism: “The Evolutionary theory: translations and Misanthrope” and, 92-93; Zhou assimilations to various locales, 4—S,

Jianren and, 92-93; hereditary 197n4; nineteenth-century scandal of

inheritance versus, 93 beast and man boundary dissolving

Eroshenko, Vasilii, 12, 233n10, 235n20; in, 5; China and, 6-7, 8, 198nn9-10;

fairy tales:and, 1150, 15 1.152. China, imperialism and, 6-7, 10, 19, 153, 154-155, 159-160, 161-173, 198nn9-10; Chinese intellectuals 234n11, 234n16, 238n42, 239n53; and, 6-7, 8, 198n9; Chinese intellec“A Narrow Gace” of, ts 150,152, tuals, imperialism and, 6-7, 198n9;

154, 155, 159-160, 168-173, narrative, national development and, 175-187; Lu Xun and, 150, 151-152, 7; and terminology of development, 154, 155, 159, 1617, 161-163, 164, 16; national development and,

166-168, 170-171, 172, 234n11, 19-20, 151-152; colonialism and, 235n21, 238nn37-38, 239n49; 28; human agency and, 34-35, modern Chinese children’s literature 215n16; zoology and social, 76, 78;

and, 150; blindness of, 152-153, Zhou Jianren and, 92-93; “The 234n15, 240n55; biography of, Misanthrope” and, 93. See also 152-154, 234n15, 235n19; Chinese Darwin, Charles; Haeckel, Ernst;

intellectuals and, 153-154; Zhou Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Zuoren and, 156, 157f, 240n55;“The Evolutionary thinking: twentieth-

Tragedy of the Little Chick” of, century vernacular culture and, 5, 8, 161-162; “The Sorrow of a Fish” of, 9, 64, 65, 67, 68, 215n15; Lu Xun

163-164; evolutionary adventure and, 7-8, 70-71; narrative, Chinese genre and, 164-165; “For the Sake of intellectuals and, 8, 9, 199nn14-15;

Humanity” of, 164-165, 238n42; China and, 8-9, 26, 69, 72, 73; “Old Man Time” of, 165-166; zoos modern Chinese literature, national

and, 168-169, 240n55 development and, 10; developmental Esperanto, 153, 235n18 narratives, monism and, 29, 204n2; Evolution and Ethics (Huxley), 67 evolutionary biology and, 29; Evolutionary adaptation: soft inheri- nationalism, print culture and, 29; tance and, 69, 73; nation-species print culture in history of, 29; social

characteristics and, 73 Darwinism and, 29; colonialism,

Evolutionary adventure genre: Lu Xun native intellectuals and, 29-30; and, 28, 238n47; Wells and, 38, 164, speculative fiction and, 38; historical 238n47; speculative fiction, 38-39; change, Bellamy and, 39-40, 47;

Index 251 Republican China, literary production Xun, Chinese developmental and, 66; soft inheritance, China and, transformation and, 111; modern 73; Zhou Zuoren, children’s litera- national vernacular and, 119; ture, childhood development and, Chinese national salvation and, 114-115; toys, childhood develop- 129-130. See also Child/children ment and, 130; Playthings and, 135 Folklore studies: child as history in Republican China and, 117-119;

Fairy tale(s), 237n29; Eroshenko and, literature by children, new national

Ts 150, 1515-152, 193, 154-155, vernacular and, 117-119; children’s 159-160, 161-173, 234n11, 234n16, songs and, 118; Zhou Zuoren and, 238n42, 239n53; vernacular litera- 118, 227n49; MacCulloch and, ture and, 24, 156; Zhou Zuoren and, 155-156, 236n25, 236n27 24, 113, 114, 155, 156-158, 236n24, Folktales: fairy tales and, 155, 156; 237n30, 237n32; childhood develop- MacCulloch and, 155-156

ment and, 113-114, 151, 156, “For the Sake of Humanity” (Erosh158, 159, 236n28, 238n36; children enko), 164-165, 238n42 and, 113-114, 151, 156, 158, 159, “Free Talk.” See Shun Pao 236n28, 238n36; children’s literature

and, 113-114, 151, 236n28; Lang Gerth; Karl, 131,732, 230n017-230n23 and, 114; Chinese intellectuals and,

151, 155; Lu Xun and, 151, 160-163, Haeckel, Ernst, 28, 30, 215n18; Die

164, 166-168, 238n42, 238n47; Weltrathsel of, 28, 70, 71, 73, national development and, 151; 716n2 2) bi Xun and, 70; 2 onl 9: folktales and, 155, 156, 161-162; “world-system” of, 73; racial children’s education and, 156, 158, classification and, 115-116; The 236n28; tonghua and, 156-158, Riddle of the Universe of, 204n2 237030,237n032: tolky 158% literary, Hagenbeck, Carl: as cage-free zoo 158, 159. See also “Narrow Cage, A” inventor, 147, 232n1. See also Carl

Family (Ba Jin), 168 Hagenbeck Circus

Farrar, James As, 156, 236n27 Hagenbeck, Lorenz, 147 Feng Menglong, 118, 227n49 Hansen, Miriam, 67, 213n9,

Fernsebner, Susan R., 229n6 213nn11-12

Fiction: developmental thinking, He Jiagan, 2. See also Lu Xun appropriation as narrative form and, History: evolutionary thinking, Bellamy

5; invention of new Chinese, 11; and, 39-40, 47; literary texts and print culture and, 43. See also Fairy intellectual, 65-66, 213n4. See also

tale(s); Late Qing fiction; Late Natural-historical knowledge; Victorian fiction; Literature; Lu Xun Republican Chinese developmental fiction; “New novel”; Science fiction; history Speculative fiction; Utopian fiction “How to Train Wild Animals” (Lu Xun),

Figure of the child: Chinese develop- 147-150 ment and, 23; Chinese drawings and, Huang Yi, 99, 223n1; childhood 103; in Republican Chinese develop- development and, 99, 101-102, 103,

mental history, 103, 105-106; 116, 117, 223n4, 223n7; The Republican literature and, 103-104; Psychology of Children’s Drawings

Chinese development, women’s of, 99: 100, 1017, 102children’s emancipation and, 111, 225n26; Lu drawings and, 99-103, 116

252 Index Human agency: evolutionary theory of others in, 36, 206n17; critics’

and, 34-35, 215n16; iron house analyses of, 36-37; iron house

parable and, 35 metaphor and understanding of, Human nature, Lu Xun and, 64, 213n6 37-38. See also Iron house Hu Shi, 9, 118

Hu Xiansu, 71, 72 Japanese attack on Shanghai (1932),

Ehixley, Vk 6 7,70 122; Playthings and, 135, 138, Hu Yuzhi, 150, 152, 236n28 139-140

Ideological fantasy, 25, 204n52 Kafka, Franz, 233n8 Illustrated children’s book(s): wolf in, Kammerer, Paul, 92, 218n30, 223n68 78, 79, 80f, 220n45; zoology and, Kang Youwei, 31, 205n5

78-79, 80f, 220n44; parables, 79, KMT. See Nationalist Party

220n45 Knowledge text(s), 42; science fiction Imperialism: China, evolutionary theory as, 48, 50; print culture and, 65, 73;

and, 6-7, 10, 19, 198nn9-10; China and, 73-74; China and science, Chinese intellectuals, evolutionary 73-74; children and, 74; textbooks, theory and, 6-7, 198n9; trusteeship 74, 75f, 76, 77f; zoological diction-

and, 21; social Darwinism and, 28. ary, 76

See also Colonialism Kropotkin, Peter, 218n32, 220n40 Inheritance: themes in “The Misan-

thrope,” 64, 89, 92-93, 94-95, 96; Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 216n19;

child-beast equation, childhood Darwin versus, 69, 72-73, 78, development and, 81, 89; Zhou 215nn16-17, 218n30; Philosophie Jianren and hereditary, 92-93; Zoologique of, 69, 70; soft inherienvironmental determinism versus tarice Of, 69; 72.73 hereditary, 93. See also Soft Lang, Andrew, 156, 236n27; fairy tales

inheritance and, 114; children’s literature and,

In Search of Wealth and Power 114-115; Zhou Zuoren and,

(Schwartz), 66 114-115, 118

Intellectual(s): evolutionary thinking, Late Qing fiction: of evolutionary colonialism and native, 29-30; iron adventure and Lu Xun, 28; Looking house parable, dormant masses and Backward, Chinese translation awakened, 35, 36; history and literary and, 43 texts, 65-66, 213n4. See also Chinese Late Qing period: evolutionary adven-

intellectuals ture genre and Lu Xun, 28; text-

Iron house (tiewu): of narrative, 28; books, 74, 75f, 76, 219n35 revisited, 33; metaphor, 37-38; beasts Late Victorian civilization: New Story

in, 82 of the Stone and, 30-31; modern

Iron house parable (Lu Xun), 33-34; Chinese literature and, 33 excerpts from, 33, 36; Chinese Late Victorian fiction: New Story of the subordination and, 34; awakened Stone and, 31-32; Lu Xun and, 33, 38 intellectual, dormant masses and,35, Liang Qichao, 16, 47, 215n16; A 36; human agency and, 35; develop- Record of the Future of the New

ment and, 35-36; “Dead Fire” and, China of, 31, 205n5 36, 207n18; narrator representation “Libraries” (encyclopedias), 43, 209n41

Index 253 Li Hongzhang, 153, 234n15 150: *Diaty or a.Viadman’ ot, 2), Ling Bing, 226n35, 227n44 106-111, 139, 166, 199n20, 224n16; Literary production, Republican China, “The Misanthrope” of, 26-27,

evolutionary thinking and, 66 63-65, 89-98, 212nn1-2; evolutionLiterary texts, and intellectual history, ary adventure genre and, 28, 238n47;

65-66, 213n4 late Victorian fiction and, 33, 38; TPOETISOOL Nietzsche and, 35, 206n15; Verne

Literary Treasury for Small Children, May Fourth movement and, 33;

Literature, by children, folklore studies and, 47, 48, 49; science fiction and, and new national vernacular, 117-119. 48, 210n54; human nature and, 64, See also Children’s literature; Chinese 213n6; Haeckel and, 70, 216n19;

literature; Fiction; Pedagogical natural-historical knowledge and, 70; literature; Vernacular literature on development, 111, 149-150, Little Friend (magazine), 81, 82, 83f, 233n8; figure of the child, Chinese

85, 86f, 89, 120 developmental transformation and,

Little Friends Treasury, 79, 80, 111; on toys, 122-123; on animal

220n44 training, 147-150; on Carl Hagen-

Li Yuying, 76, 78, 219n39, 220n41 beck Circus, 147-150; on colonial-

Li Zhi, 118, 227n49 ism, 147-150, 233n8; “How to Train Looking Backward (Bellamy), 31, 38, Wild Animals” of, 147-150; Erosh39-40, 205n5; utopian fiction and, enko and, 150, 151-152, 154, 155, 39-40, 44-47; Chinese translations 159, 161f, 161-163, 164, 166-168, of, 40-41, 43-45, 208n29; Chinese 170-171, 172, 234n11, 235n21, translation and late Qing fiction, 43; 238nn37—-38, 239n49; “A Narrow

Chinese translation and historical Cace and. 150215 22154. 155, knowledge, 44-46; excerpts from, 159-160, 170-171, 172; fairy 45-46. See also Bellamy, Edward tales and, 151, 160-163, 164, Lu Xun: literary distillation of nature of 166-168, 238n42, 238n47; “ComChinese modernity, 1-3, 5; “Modern edy of the Ducks” of, 160-162, 167, History” of, 1-3, 5, 12, 22; challenge 238nn37-38; “Mending Heaven” of, to Chinese development discourse, 3; 166, 238n47; vernacular language of,

evolutionary thinking and, 7-8, 167, 239n48; as Zhou Shuren, 197n2. 70-71, 151-152; developmental See also specific Lu Xun writings history logic and, 11; “Preface to The Lu Xun fiction, 10-11; modernism of, Outcry” of, 11, 33-34, 155; narrative 12, 199n20; child and beast in, 22—23, form of, 11-13, 91-92, 110, 199n20; 25, 26-27; ideological fantasy and, children’s literature and, 12, 24, 109; 25, 204n52; realism of, 199n20. See “Dead Fire” of, 12, 36, 207n18; Wild also Lu Xun; specific Lu Xun fiction

Grass of, 12, 199n20; critics and Lu Xun parable(s), 11-12, 150. See also

criticism of, 12-13, 199nn20-21; Iron house parable fiction and, 12-13; late style of,

12-13, 200n21; zawen of, 13; MacCulloch, John Arnott: The Child“Watching Magic Shows” of, 22-23, hood of Fiction of, 155, 156; Zhou

25, 26; children and, 22-24, 109- Zuoren and, 155, 156; folklore 111, 122-123, 225n29; modern studies and, 155-156, 236n25, Chinese children’s literature and, 24, 236n27; folktales and, 155-156

254 Index Magazines. See Children’s magazines; children and, 112; children’s market

Chinese publication(s); specific and, 112. See also Republican

magazines Chinese culture

Ma Junwu, 71, 216n22 Modern Chinese literature: developMan: evolutionary theory’s nineteenth- mental thinking and, 5; gap between

century scandal of boundary development’s transitive and intransidissolving between beast and, 5; tive senses in, 5; as form of children’s kinship between animal and, 85, literature, 6; evolutionary thinking,

221n54 national development and, 10;

Marx, Karl: China and, 6; commodities colonialism and, 30; Victorian and, 131-132; on capitalist econo- civilization and, 33. See also Modern

mies, 144 Chinese children’s literature; “New

Masses, iron house parable, awakened novel”; Republican literature intellectual and dormant, 35, 36 Modern Chinese literature development: May Fourth movement: Lu Xun and, overview, 1-6; child in, 5, 22-27; 33; children and, 112; “business of evolutionary imperatives, 6-11;

enlightenment” and, 119 parables of (under)development, “Mending Heaven” (Lu Xun), 166, 11-13; development contra modernity,

238n47 13-22; child and beast in, 22, 24-27

“Misanthrope, The” (Lu Xun), 26-27, Modern Cinema (magazine), 228n1 212n1; Chinese intellectuals and, 63; “Modern History” (Lu Xun), 1-3, 5,

beast in, 64, 89, 90, 91; inheritance Ie? themes in, 64, 89, 92-93, 94-95, 96; Modernism: of Lu Xun fiction, 12, wolf in, 64, 91, 94, 97, 212n2; child 199n20; cinema and vernacular, 67,

in, 64-65, 89-90; excerpts from, 214n9 64-65, 89-90, 93-94, 95,97; Lu Modernity: development contra, 13-22; Xun autobiographical aspects of, 91; terminology of development, wemZhou Jianren and, 91, 93; zoology ming and 19. See also Capitalist

and, 91, 97; narrative form of, modernity; Chinese modernity 91-92, 94, 95-96, 97; evolutionary Modernity, terminology of: Chinese theory, national development and, 93; coinage and circulation of, 15-16, hereditary inheritance versus environ- 202nn31-32; and wemming, 17;

mental determinism and, 93; Chinese intellectuals and, 18-19 metamorphosis in, 96-98 Modern Pictorial (magazine), 228n1 Modern Child (periodical), 120 Modern Sketch (magazine), 228n1 Modern children’s literature. See Modern Sketch photomontage(s): Modern Chinese children’s literature children as commodities and, 126, Modern Chinese children’s literature, 6; 127 f, 1287,.129, 133,228n2,229n4: Lu Xun and, 24, 150; Zhou Zuoren “Our Lovable Little Angels,” 126,

and, 24, 112-117, 150; creation of, 1277, 29,2262; * lteat yout 104, 150; “A Children’s Literature” children” dictum, 126-127, 128f and, 112-117; Eroshenko and, 150; 129, 229n4; Playthings and, 129, Chinese development, childhood 142; national products and, 133-135, development and, 150-151; Chinese 136f, 230n23; “Real Genuine National

intellectuals and, 150-151 Products Exhibition,” 133-135, 136f, Modern Chinese culture: child and 23023

beast in, 5; history of child, 5; Morea; 1b 72

Index Ge) Narrative(s): evolutionary theory, Sketch photomontages, 133-135, national development and, 8; 136f, 230n23; Playthings and, evolutionary thinking, Chinese 136-137, 145. See also Commodities; intellectuals and, 8, 9, 199nn14-15; Domestic product developmental thinking and, 9-10; National vernacular: Republican

iron house of, 28; of Playthings, Chinese developmental history and 135-139. See also Developmental creation of new, 105-106, 117-119; narratives; Evolutionary narratives; literature by children, folklore studies

Fiction; Literature and new, 117-119; figure of the child

Narrative form: of Lu Xun, 11-13, and modern, 119

91-92, 110, 199n20; “new novel” as, = Natural-historical knowledge:

41; of “The Misanthrope,” 91-92, China and, 68-69, 71-72, 217n27;

94, 95-96, 97 Chinese intellectuals and, 69; Lu

“Narrow Cage, A” (Eroshenko), 11, Xun and, 70 154; Lu Xun and, 150, 152, 154, Neoteny, 81, 221n47 155, 159-160, 170-171, 172; “New novel”: Bellamy and, 39; as

narrative of, 150; questions of, 152; narrative form, 41 themesor, 152.2168; 169, 170-174, Newspapers. See Chinese publications

172, 173; popular and critical New Story of the Stone (Wu Jianren), response to, 168, 239n52; excerpts 41-42, 205n6; science fiction and, 17, from, 168-169, 170, 171-173; zoos 31-32; The Story of the Stone and, and, 168-169; colonialism and, 171, 17-18, 30, 51-54, 57, 61-62;

172; text of, 175-187 colonialism and, 18, 31, 32-33, 53,

National development: child and beast 54, 58, 59-60, 205n9; Realm of as antinomies of, 5; evolutionary Civilization in, 18, 31, 32, 42, 51, 52,

theory, narrative and, 8; modern 55-61, 212n76; late Victorian Chinese literature, evolutionary civilization and, 30-31; as utopian thinking and, 10; evolutionary theory fiction, 31, 32-33, 51-62, 205n9,

and, 19-20, 151-152; trusteeship 212n76; late Victorian fiction and, and, 22; childhood development and, 31-32; technology in, 54, 56, 57-58, 80, 116; “The Misanthrope” and, 93; 60, 211n70; excerpts from, 55. See Zhou Jianren and, 93; toys and, 122, also Wu Jianren 123, 125; children as commodities Nietzsche, Friedrich, 35, 206n15 and, 129; Playthings and, 135; fairy

tales and, 151 “Old Man Time” (Eroshenko),

Nationalism, evolutionary thinking, 165-166

print culture and, 29 On Evolution (Yan Fu), 19, 203n37

Nationalist Party (KMT), 23 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 6-7, National products: children as com- 7,2 lon22 modities and, 131, 133; Chinese “Our Lovable Little Angels” photomonindustry and, 131, 132; colonialism tase, 126, 127), 129, 228n2 and, 131; commodities and, 131-132,

230n17; Chinese publications and, Parable(s): of (under)development in 132-133, 230n20; toys and, 132-133; modern Chinese literature developChinese publishing houses and, 133; ment, 11-13; illustrated children’s

Commercial Press and, 133; toys, book, 79, 220n45. See also Fairy textbooks and, 133, 134/; Modern tale(s); Lu Xun parable(s)

256 Index Pedagogical literature: children and, nationalism and, 29; fiction and, 43; 5, 6, 65, 74, 79, 80; science fiction as, child and beast and, 65; knowledge

48; beasts and, 65; childhood texts and, 65, 73; zoological philosodevelopment and, 80; animal-child phy in, 78. See also Fiction; Illus-

kinship in, 81-82, 221n48 trated children’s book(s); Knowledge Pedagogy: Republican Chinese develop- text(s); Literature; Textbook(s); mental history and, 105, 106; “Diary specific books and stories of a Madman” and, 106, 108, 110; Product nationality, 131, 132, 230n17.

program of Zhou Zuoren for See also National products children’s literature and childhood Psychology of Children’s Drawings, The

development, 116-117, 120, 121, (Huang Yi), 99, 100f, 1017, 102

227n45 Publications. See Chinese publications Philosophie Zoologique (Lamarck), 69, Publishing, Republican Chinese

70 developmental history and, 105. See

Photomontage, toy production, 143f. also Chinese publishing houses;

See also Modern Sketch Chinese publishing industry photomontage(s)

Playthings: children as, 127; in Play- Qian Xuantong, 34 things, 136-137, 142, 144, 146, Qing empire, capitalist modernity and,

231n28. See also Toy(s) 6. See also Late Qing period

Playthings (Sun Yu), 26, 147; Modern Qing fiction. See Late Qing fiction Sketch photomontages and, 129, 142; toys and, 129,135, 136-137,-138; Racial classification: Haeckel and,

140, 142, 144, 145; children as 115-116; Zhou Zuoren and, 116 commodities and, 133, 140; China’s Reading, and children’s magazines, 85

national future and, 135, 145; “Real Genuine National Products evolutionary thinking and, 135; Exhibition” photomontage, 133-135, Japanese attack on Shanghai and, 1367, 230n23 135, 138, 139-140; national develop- Realm of Civilization, Wu Jianren’s: in ment and, 135; sacrifice in, 135, 140, New Story of the Stone, 18, 31, 32, 145; narrative of, 135-139, 140, 142, 42,51, 52, 55-61, 212n76; utopian

144-146, 231n28; playthings of fiction and, 18,31, 32.42.5152. history and, 135-146; national 55-61, 212n76; China, civilization products and, 136-137, 145; play- and, 55-57 things in, 136-137, 142, 144, 146, Record of the Future of the New China,

231n28; toy production and, A. (lading Oichao);3 1, 20515 136-137, 138, 140, 142, 144; “Diary | Republican China: evolutionary

of a Madman” and, 139; Shun Pao thinking, literary production and, 66; advertisement for, 139-140, 141f; vernacularization of science in, 99.

capitalist economies and, 144 See also Child as history in Republi-

Playthings of history, 126-135; can China

Playthings and, 135-145 Republican Chinese culture: children’s “Preface to The Outcry” (Lu Xun), 11, drawings and, 99, 100f, 1017,

33-34, 155. See also Iron house 102-103; child and, 104. See also

parable Modern Chinese culture

Print culture: in evolutionary thinking Republican Chinese developmental

history, 29; evolutionary thinking, history, 104; childhood development

Index SF and, 103, 223n7; pedagogy and, 10S, writings about Carl Hagenbeck

106; publishing and, 105; new Circus, 147-150, 232n2 national vernacular creation in, Sister Ye. See Playthings 105-106, 117-119; cultural trans- Social Darwinism: demise of, 28; mission and, 106; childhood and, imperialism and, 28; terminology 111-117; children as commodities in, problem of, 28-29; evolutionary

129. See also Child as history in thinking and, 29

Republican China Society for the Diffusion of Christian Republican literature: children and, and General Knowledge (SDK), 40,

103-104; figure of the child and, 41, 42, 43 103-104; major figures of, 103-104. — Soft inheritance: zoological philosophy

See also Modern Chinese literature and, 68, 78; evolutionary adaptation

Richard, Timothy, 40-42, 43, 44, and, 69,73: of Lamarck, 69,72, 73:

209nn32-33 China, evolutionary thinking and, 73

204n2 163-164 225029 211n62

Riddle of the Universe, The (Haeckel), “Sorrow of a Fish, The” (Eroshenko),

Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 116, 117 Sovereignty, and Twenty Thousand

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 112, 117, Leagues under the Sea, 50-51, Speculative fiction: evolutionary thinking

Sawade, Richard, 148, 149, 150, 233n4 and, 38; of Wells, 38; evolutionary

Schneider, Laurence, 71, 72 adventure genre, 38-39. See also

Schwartz, Benjamin, 66 Evolutionary adventure genre;

Science: China and Western, 41-43; Science fiction; Utopian fiction;

Chinese vernacular of local, 72, Wells, H. G. 218n29; knowledge texts in China, Spencer, Herbert, 7, 19-20, 28; Yan Fu 73-74; vernacularization in Republi- translation of, 66, 215n17

can China, 99 Story of the Stone, The (Cao Xueqin), Science fiction: New Story of the Stone 31; New Story of the Stone and,

and, 17, 31-32; Chinese readers of, 17-18, 30, 51-54, 57, 61-62 48; as knowledge texts, 48, 50; Lu Sun Yu, Playthings of, 26, 129, 133, Xun and, 48, 210n54; as pedagogical 135-147, 231n28. See also

literature, 48. See also Speculative Playthings

fiction; Utopian fiction Swinhoe, Robert, 72, 217n27 SDK. See Society for the Diffusion of

Christian and General Knowledge Tang, Xiaobing, 199n20

“Second nature,” 32; 205n8 Technology, and New Story of the Shanghai cinema, 26, 129; vernacular Stone, 54, 56, 57-58, 60, 211n70 modernism and, 214n9. See also Textbook(s): knowledge text, 74, 75f,

Playthings 16, 77): late Oise. 745-7 5); 76.

Shao Xunmei, 228n1 219n35; zoology, 74; “business of Shenton, R. W., 21 enlightenment” and, 104; Chunghwa Shun Pao (newspaper), 1; “Free Talk” Books and, 119; Commercial Press editorial pages, 132, 230n20; adver- and, 119; national products, toys tisement for Playthings, 139-140, and, 133, 134f. See also Illustrated 141f; advertisement for Carl Hagen- children’s book(s) beck Circus, 147, 148f, 232n1; Tianyan lun (Yan Fu), 69-70, 215n17

256 Index Time Machine, The (Wells), 38 Utopian fiction: Wu Jianren’s Realm of Tonghua (fairy tale or children’s story), Civilization and, 18, 31, 32, 42, 51, 156-158, 237n30, 237n32. See also §2, 55-61, 212n76; New Story of the

Fairy tale(s) Stone as, 31, 32-33, 51-62, 205Sn9,

Toy(s): childhood development and, 212n76; of Wu Jianren, 31, 32-33, 121-122, 130-131; child as history 51-62, 205n9, 212n76; dilemmas of, in Republican China and, 121-125; 32-33, 205n9; Bellamy and, 39-40, children’s market and, 121-125, 131; 44-47; Looking Backward and, Commercial Press and, 122, 123, 39-40, 44-47; Twenty Thousand 124f, 133; national development and, Leagues under the Sea and, 47, 51,

122 3s 12S wan on 17213: 211n65; Verne and, 47, 51, 211n6S. children as commodities, children’s See also Evolutionary adventure images and worth of, 126, 127f, genre; Science fiction; Speculative

1287, 129, 228nn2-3; “Treat your fiction children” dictum and, 126-127, 1287, 129, 229n4; children’s education and, Van Eeden, Frederik, 238n42

129, 130-131, 229n6; Chinese Vernacular: culture and evolutionary national salvation and, 129, 130; thinking, 5, 8, 9, 64, 65, 67, 68, Playthings and, 129, 135, 136-137, 215n15; ideas, 65-68; cosmopolitan 138, 140, 142, 144, 145; childhood and, 67, 72, 214n11, 218n29; cultural development, evolutionary thinking production and social landscapes, 67, and, 130; China’s national future 214n12; modernism and cinema, 67,

and, 131; national products and, 214n9; context of Yan Fu ideas, 132-133; national products, text- 67-68; movement, 67-68; Chinese books and, 133, 134f. See also local science, 72, 218n29; language

Playthings of Lu Xun, 167, 239n48. See also

Toy production: Playthings and, National vernacular

136-137, 138, 140, 142, 144; Vernacular literature, 13; fairy tales photomontage, 143/; Chinese and, 24, 156; premodern Chinese, 30 publications and, 230n25 Verne, Jules: Tiwenty Thousand Leagues Toys and Education (Chen Jiyun), under the Sea of, 31, 38, 47-51,

130-131 209n4 9, 210n52,210n58,2 1162,

“Tragedy of the Little Chick, The” 211n65; Wu Jianren and, 31-32, 47,

(Eroshenko), 161-162 51; Lu Xun and, 47, 48, 49; utopian

“Treat your children” dictum, 229n4; fiction and, 47, 51, 211n65. See also photomontage, 126-127, 128f 129 Twenty Thousand Leagues under

Trusteeship: imperialism and, 21; the Sea developmental narratives and, 22; Victorian civilization. See Late Victorian

development and elite, 35 civilization

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Victorian fiction. See Late Victorian

Sea (Verne), 31, 38, 209n49; utopian fiction fiction and, 47, 51, 211n65; Chinese Vitale, Baron Guido Amedeo, 118-119 translations of, 47—51, 210n52,

210n58, 211n62; sovereignty and, Wang Yunwu, 119 50-51, 211n62. See also Verne, “Watching Magic Shows” (Lu Xun),

Jules 22-23, 25, 26

“Two Wolves Fighting,” 78, 79, 80f Wei Lianshu, 26

Index 259 Wells, H. G.: evolutionary adventure 92-93; hereditary inheritance versus genre and, 38, 164, 238n47; specula- environmental determinism and, tive fiction of, 38; The Time Machine 92-93; national development and, 93

of, 38 Zhou Shuren, 197n2. See also Lu Xun

Wemming (civilized or civilization): Zhou Zuoren, 9, 91, 199n14; children terminology of, 17, 18; terminology and, 23, 24, 112-118, 120, 227n45; of development and, 17, 18; terminol- fairy tales and, 24, 113, 114, 155, ogy of modernity and, 17; terminology 156-158, 236n24, 237n30, 237n32; of development, modernity and, 19 modern Chinese children’s literature

Wilde, Oscar, 158, 159 and, 24, 112-117, 150; “A Children’s Wild Grass (Lu Xun), 12, 199n20 Literature” of, 112-117; childhood Wolf: in “The Misanthrope,” 64, 91, 94, development and, 113, 114-115, 97, 2 42n25 in textbook, 76,5 77/210 116-117, 120, 227n45; Lang and,

zoological dictionary, 76; in illus- 114, 118; children’s literature, trated children’s book, 78, 79, 80f, childhood development, evolution220n45; in children’s magazines, ary thinking and, 114-115; racial

847, 85 classification and, 116; children’s

Women’s emancipation, Chinese literature, childhood development, development, figure of the child and, pedagogical program of, 116-117,

Pt 225126 120, 121, 227n45; folklore studies

“World-system,” 218n31; of Haeckel, 73 and, 118, 227n49; The Childhood of Wu Jianren, 205n6; New Story of the Fiction and, 155, 156; MacCulloch Stone of, 17-18, 30-32, 41-42, 51-62, and, 155, 156; Eroshenko and, 156, 205n6, 205n9, 212n76; utopian fiction 157f, 240n55; Zhao Jingshen and, of, 31, 32-33, 51-62, 205n9, 212n76; 156-157, 159, 237n30, 238n36;

Verne and, 31-32, 47, 51; “second tonghua and, 156-158, 237n30, nature” of, 32, 205n8. See also New 23 7032

Story of the Stone Zoo0(s): “beasts in houses” and,

81-83, 83f, 85; children’s maga-

Xiang Peiliang, 90 zines and, 82-83, 83f, 85; Carl Hagenbeck as inventor of cage-free, Yanagita Kunio, 118 147, 232n1; Eroshenko and, Yan Fue 7; 193n10; 203n39:O7n 168-169, 240n55; “A Narrow

Evolution of, 19, 203n37; discourse Cage” and, 168-169 of development, 20; translation of Zoological philosophy (philosophie Spencer, 66, 215n17; ideas of, 66-67, zoologique), 69, 70; “soft inheri213n8; translation of Huxley, 67, 70; tance” and, 68, 78; in print vernacular context of ideas of, 67-68; culture, 78. See also Philosophie

Tianyan lun of, 69-70, 215n17 Zoologique Yoneda, Karl, 234n16 Zoology, 71, 72; dictionary, 74, 76, 220n41; textbooks, 74; as foundaZawen (critical essay), 1; of Lu Xun, 13 tional discipline, 76; social evolution-

Zhao Jingshen, 156-157, 159, 160, ary theory and, 76; illustrated

237nn29—-30, 238n36 children’s books and, 78-79, 80f,

Zhou Jianren: “The Misanthrope” and, 220n44; “The Misanthrope” and,

91, 93; evolutionary theory and, ee eg

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