Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture 9780674061033

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D EV E L OPME NTAL FAI RY TALES

D E VELO P M ENTA L FAIRY TALES Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture

A NDR EW F. J O N E S

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. PL2265.J66 2011 895.1'09355—dc22 2010045559

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Development of Modern Chinese Literature

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1 The Iron House of Narrative: Lu Xun and the Late Qing Fiction of Evolutionary Adventure

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2 Inherit the Wolf: Lu Xun, Natural History, and Narrative Form

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3 The Child as History in Republican China: A Discourse on Development

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4 Playthings of History

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5 A Narrow Cage: Lu Xun, Eroshenko, and the Modern Chinese Fairy Tale

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Appendix: “A Narrow Cage” by Vasilii Eroshenko

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Glossary of Selected Chinese and Japanese Terms

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Notes

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Acknowledgments

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Index

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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

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D E V E L O P M E N TA L F A I RY TA L E S 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 depend 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.”1

The title of this piece was “Modern History” and Lu Xun’s pseudonym was He Jiagan, which might be idiomatically translated as “Whodunit?”2 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

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 I am 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

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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.”3 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 breakneck 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 letters 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

Lamarckian, Darwinian, Spencerian, or Haeckelian iterations—was translated and assimilated to local discourse throughout East Asia and a host of other locales.4 Precisely because developmental thinking was often appropriated as narrative form, fiction played a privileged role in its dissemination. Indeed, 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.5 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

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fairy tale—illuminates the formal contradictions at the core of its enterprise. 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.6

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

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.7 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.8 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.9 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.”10 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 evolutionary thinking.11 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

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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 Needham’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.12 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

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.13 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.14 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.15 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. I 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.16 Evolutionary theory—particularly of the social Darwinian sort so effectively brokered by Yan Fu’s translations of the thought of Herbert Spencer—became

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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.17 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.”18 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 book—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

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 célèbre 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. The 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

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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.19 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.20 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.”21 This sort of critical judgment is sometimes

Introduction

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.22 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.23 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

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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).24 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).25 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”).26 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.27 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.28 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.29 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

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.30 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” (xiandai xing), and “modernization” (xiandai hua) may well indicate that our reliance upon them as analytical categories is somewhat anachronistic.31 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

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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.32 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.”33 The etymology of “development” is quite different. Rendered as fada or fazhan, the term first appears around the turn of the twentieth century in journalistic writings by nationalist reformers such as Liang Qichao, as well as in serialized late Qing fiction.34 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 contemporaries 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-à-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.” Although 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 jinhua 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.”35 The historical continuity seems almost natural to us now, given the continued sway of discourses conflating development with economic

Introduction

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 wenming 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 1905 science fiction novel, New Story of the Stone (Xin shitou ji), is such a crucial document of an ongoing process 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

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(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.36 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 technologies, 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

of the early twentieth century, modernity had not yet taken on its presentday 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 a set 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.37 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.”38 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.”39 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.40 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,”

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and the state an organism composed of individual cells.41 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.42

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.43 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

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.”44 (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.”45 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 administrator (following in the footsteps of his father, Thomas Malthus, and Jeremy Bentham) in the employ of the East India Company.46 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.47 The problem of representation (as political relation and as mimetic realism) becomes especially acute,

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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 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?48

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.49 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—“If you want to strengthen the nation, you must first strengthen the children”—quite neatly summed up the conflation of the child and the nation in the context of the emergence of a vibrant and aggressively commercialized urban media culture.50 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

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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.51 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 developmentalist 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 I

Introduction

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 taxonomic 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.52 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 intellectuals 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

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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 motion 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 economic 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 question 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

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.

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1 T H E I RO N H O U S E O F N A R R AT I V E

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 Welträthsel (1900)1

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

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.2 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 kokutai) was produced in part by the ubiquity of evolutionary discourse in the print culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 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

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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-

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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.4 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: 2000–1887.5 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

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vast distances to kill, collect, and taxonomize rare specimens of marine and avian life on behalf of the national museum of the Realm.6 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.7 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.8 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 struggle 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 unsustainable, not only in a strictly ecological sense, but also in a formal and ideological sense. Structured around the central antimonies of evolutionary thinking, most notably the simultaneously spatial and temporal

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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 contradictions of its own narrative logic.9 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.10 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?11

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

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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 qingnian, or La Jeunesse).12 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.13 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

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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.14 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.15 Less often remarked are the political 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

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fictionalized Qian Xuantong, “Do you really believe that you could face them [ni dao yiwei dui de qi tamen ma]?”16 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.17 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:18 “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.”19

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

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work, have characterized the iron house as a figure for the author’s own psychic isolation.20 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 tiewu, 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.21 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.22 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

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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: 2000– 1887 and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Significantly, 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 inevitably 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

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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.23 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—West 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 miraculously 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

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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.25 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.26 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”).27 Richard’s translation, entitled Bainian yijiao (Awakening 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 produced 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).28 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 1913.29 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

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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.30 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.”31 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.”32 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.”33 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.34 (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

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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.35) 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.36 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 fiction advocating scientific education and the elimination foot-binding and opium use.37 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 significance 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.38 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.”39 Knowledge texts included encyclopedias and compendia, all manner of handbooks and guides, as well as primers, didactic texts, and illustrated books for children.

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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).40 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.41 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.

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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.42

Such is West’s mental agitation, however, that these expedients prove insufficient, and West resorts to the services of a “Doctor of Animal Magnetism” to induce in himself a profound hypnotic trance. West’s house

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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.”43 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.44 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 perceived 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

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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 fiancé—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.46 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.47

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

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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.48 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.49 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.50 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 lüxing) 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 lüxing) followed just months later, serialized in the émigré student journal Zhejiang Tide (Zhejiang chao).51 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.

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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 lüxing (Journey at the bottom of the sea), a work that was misattributed to “Jules of England” (Yingguo Xiaolushi).52 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.53 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).54 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

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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”).55 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.56 Ou Lushi watches his companions drop off into “dreamy oblivion” 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.57

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

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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.58 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.59 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” (meipi) 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.”60 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.61 That he became unidentifiable (even to the point of having invented his

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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.62 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 intimidate me with the characters for ‘civilization.’ I long ago abandoned the world. The laws of the human world were mere fetters for me.”63

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.”64 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 paradise65

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 prosecution 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

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invert the values of its Chinese source text, replacing Cao Xueqin’s dreamlike evocation of the ephemeral quality of human existence with a developmental 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 readers would have recognized immediately, harks back to Liang Qichao’s then-recent call for an evolutionarily progressive “young China” (shaonian 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 them through, the more ingenious they become, unknown as they are even in this extremely civilized, extremely evolved twentieth century.66

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 undercurrent of Civilization, the old Stone was romantic fiction and domestic fiction, while the new Stone is science fiction and educational fiction.67

In the novel itself, however, this rupture between past and present comes at a cost. Jia Bao-yu—a sentient stone left unused by Nüwa, the mender of the Heaven in Chinese cosmological lore—ended the old Stone by disentangling 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 epistemological 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.68 Perplexed, Bao-yu sends his page to market to buy a copy. Discovering that it is, in fact, the story of his

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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.”69 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.70 These critiques, of course, speak to various aspects 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-

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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.71

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).72 And it is here—precisely at the point at which the pressure of current events and the insolubility of the China’s predicament 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

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China through Japan, where it had come into broad use in the wake of the Meiji reforms of 1868.73 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.”74 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.’ ”75 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.76 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 qi, 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

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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” [Jingwo 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.77 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 li 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

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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.”79 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

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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 Zhuangzi) 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.80 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 contradictions might be characterized as the unsustainability of the novel’s adventure in colonial critique. In transforming Bao-yu into a hunter and

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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.81 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 (“Oriental 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

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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 reminiscent 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.82 Beijing has become a global entrepôt, 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.83

As Huters cogently argues, Bao-yu’s vertiginous return to the Realm heralds a “stunning collapse of narrative perspective.”84 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.85 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

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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.86 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.

2 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.1 “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 friendship 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” (yilei) 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

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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.2 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 “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?”3

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 evolutionary 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

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on familiar (and often ideologically suspect) narrative and rhetorical structures for its persuasive force.4 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.”5 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 radically different discursive traditions (neo-Confucian scholasticism and Victorian science) while navigating the rapidly shifting shoals of late Qing and early Republican politics.6 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.7 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

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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.8 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, I am 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.”9 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.”10 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.11 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.12 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 vernacularized 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.13 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-à-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

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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” [ouhua] 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-à-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.14 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.15

“Soft Inheritance” and Zoological Philosophy There were, of course, many vectors in the introduction, institutionalization, and vernacularization of natural-historical knowledge in China. Indeed, that process was protracted, uneven, and subject to a high de-

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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.16 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.

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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.17

Two years later, Lu Xun, already a medical student in Japan, encountered the work of another fierce advocate of evolutionary theory, the German embyrologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919).18 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.19 He may also have read Haeckel’s global best-seller Die Welträthsel (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 Welträthsel and is sufficiently idiosyncratic (especially in its ready inclusion of Goethe) to indicate Lu Xun’s reliance on it.20 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

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published this essay in 1907, he was at the forefront of contemporary knowledge on the topic in China.21 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 Welträthsel 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.22 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.23 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.”24 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.25 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.26 Fa-ti Fan has traced

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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.27 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.”28 This emphasis came partly at the behest of the powerful philanthropists (such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s China Medical Board, and the Boxer indemnityfunded 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 “vernacular” 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.29 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

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and early 1930s.30 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 Welträthsel a “world-system”: an epistemology capable of comprehending the world in natural-historical terms.31 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.32 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” practice 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.”33 The Commercial Press, Meng Yue argues, was the epicenter of an intensive effort to both replicate and indigenize the epistemological

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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).34 These texts served lateimperial Chinese children as an initiation or “awakening” (qimeng) 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).35 Another government-approved textbook from 1906, the New Mandarin 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,

Figure 1: “Ao.” From It’s Easy to Learn Characters with Pictures (Huitu shizi shizai yi), 1905.

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and the lin (a mythological beast akin to a unicorn) beside the deer (lu).36 Its gloss for the character “wolf” (lang) is equally striking for its grounding in lexicographic logic: “The wolf has a sharp head and a sharp mouth, and is greedy by nature. Whenever it comes out, it is accompanied by a bei. The bei’s forelegs are short and the wolves’ back legs are long, so they can ride on one another when they move about. That is why the ancients had the saying: ‘wolves and bei lean on one another’ [langbei xiangyi].” Here zoology becomes a pretext for an exercise in folk etymology, as the source of an idiomatic phrase (langbei, meaning to be trapped in an awkward or untenable position) is explained by way of the inseparability of the wolf and its apocryphal hanger-on, the bei (see Figure 2).37 In Du Yaquan’s comprehensive zoological dictionary of 1922, the wolf has been relieved of the bei on its back, and given a new pedigree in Latin (canis lupus), English, and Japanese. Certainly the characterization of the wolf here still owes a great deal to folklore. Its eyes have a “fierce gleam” (xiongguang), its howl is “mournful” (qiqie), and its nature “cruel” (canren). The wolf tends to prowl at the village’s edge on snowy nights, preys on travelers in the woods, and can be fended off only by a torch, for it fears the light. Yet the entry also clearly signals its assimilation into the canons of scientific knowledge through the inclusion of standardized terminology, dense anatomical description, and the invocation of evidence from the fossil record to explain the evolutionary trajectory of the species.38 As is made clear in the preface to the dictionary by the scholar and Nationalist official Li Yuying (1882–1972), the thousands of similarly formatted entries that make up this monumental knowledge text (compiled over the course of a decade of editorial work) are part of a larger developmental project.39 Zoology, Li argues, is a foundational discipline: The first principles of recent scholarship have mostly been discovered through zoological reasoning [philosophie zoologique]; the articulation of evolutionary biology has taken place by way of zoology; the ethics of [Kropotkin’s] mutual assistance have been interpreted by way of zoology; the bringing to bear of the laws of environment and its effect on progress, degeneration, and selection in relation to educational principles are based on zoology; those who study the problem of human life use anthropology, and anthropology is also founded on zoology.40

Figure 2: “Wolf.” From the New Mandarin Reading Primer (Zuixin guanhua shizi jiaokeshu), 1906.

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This discussion of the kinship of zoology with social evolutionary theory leads Li Yuying irresistibly on to a discussion of the split between Lamarckian and Darwinian schools: Recent scholars have been too extreme and one-sided in their tendencies, favoring the theory of competition and neglecting the importance of mutual assistance, thus coming to the mistaken conclusion that human nature is evil. They have emphasized inheritance while taking too lightly the role of environment, to the point of asserting that quality is determined entirely by genetics, thus arriving at the mistaken conclusion that a race cannot be improved. And so it is that the theories of the French Lamarckians are unsung, while the English and German theories of Darwinian and neoDarwinian scholars have become too popular.41

What is interesting here is how quickly, thoroughly, and unselfconsciously zoology is assimilated to sociology, and the taxonomizing logic of class, phylum, and species subsumed by a discourse of race and national character. These sorts of conflations, in turn, are the very stuff of the secondorder vernacularization of what Li Yuying calls (echoing Lamarck), a “philosophie zoologique” (dongwu xue zheli) in the print culture of the same period. And that particular form of reasoning—whether articulated in narrative terms as parables in children’s books or presented by way of the images of animals adorning textbooks and periodicals—remains shadowed by debates between Darwin and Lamarck, between hard genetic inheritance and soft developmental agency. Take for an example an illustrated children’s book called Two Fighting Wolves (Liang zhi zhengdou de lang), published by the Commercial Press in 1936 as part of their ambitious 350-volume Literary Treasury for Small Children (Youtong wenku).42 The Treasury, like the Universal Compendium the Commercial Press had published just one year earlier, aims for a certain encyclopedic fullness in its very design, offering children (and perhaps more important, parents and educators) a colorful and comprehensive introduction to the natural world and humanity’s place within it. The first four volumes are an illustrated tour of “The Zoo” (Dongwuyuan) and its denizens, subsequent volumes introduce useful plants and minerals, and the series culminates in a string of volumes on the human activities that harness this knowledge and work in the world—agriculture, building, mining, and the like.43 This se-

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ries was quickly parroted by Chunghwa Books, which released a multivolume Little Friends Treasury (Xiao pengyou wenku) in 1936. There is very little (besides the full-color illustrations) to distinguish much of the material in these series from dictionary entries, and indeed, the wolves seen prowling at the margin of a snowy village in Chunghwa’s first volume, Beasts (Shou), for instance, resemble their counterparts in Du Yaquan’s zoological opus in nearly every respect: “fierce” and “afraid of fire.”44 Two Wolves Fighting, however, is situated in the “Story Section” (gushi lei) of Commercial’s Treasury and serves a different purpose within its division of pedagogical labor. Its narrative (as is often the case in children’s literature) functions as a means of mediating between the natural and the human worlds on display elsewhere in the Treasury, establishing thereby a properly hierarchical relation between them. The text differs from a dictionary entry, in short, by virtue of the way it functions as a parable. The story begins with an impasse—a “yellow wolf” and a “black wolf” face each other, standing on either side of a bridge across a narrow ravine (see Figure 3). Neither wolf is able to vanquish the other, so they join forces to attack and kill a goat, but the appearance of a hunting dog stymies them. This domesticated beast, oddly enough, is able to hold the wolves at bay until the arrival of its master, a gun-toting hunter, who dispatches them and claims the goat as his due spoils. Though it takes very little imagination to derive a rudimentary lesson from this cautionary tale about a dog-eat-dog world, we should take care to read it not only in the light of the conflation of natural and historical terms so characteristic of vernacular evolutionary thinking, but also in terms of the geopolitics of the period. Certainly it would be hard to miss the way this story seems to spin out a parable about colonial hierarchies, implicitly colored by racial categories, and complete with a comprador, or “running dog,” as well as a (white) hunter whose authority is both emblematized and finalized by the gun. Technology trumps nature, and a domesticated servant of civilization trumps the solidarity of the two savage beasts. The ruthless quality of the tale lies in its entrapment within a world in which species is destiny: a wolf is a wolf, a dog is a dog, and a man with a gun is a man with a gun. This is a story, in other words, that offers neither possibility of parole nor transformative action, for in emphasizing man’s inheritance as species-being, it also forecloses on the possibility of “mutual assistance” as a means of further development.45

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Figure 3: An illustration from Two Wolves Fighting (Liangzhi zhengdou de lang), 1936. Courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library.

Beasts in Houses Yet the sort of pedagogical literature of which this story is an example was dedicated nonetheless to the task of childhood development, a task that was seen as necessary component of national development. Indeed, both Treasuries represented the continuation of a decade-long effort to capitalize on a burgeoning market for children’s literature, while at the same time investing in the nation’s future. As early as 1921 the Commercial Press and Chunghwa Books had each established a magazine to serve as the flagship for their efforts to capture the youth market. Commercial’s Children’s World (Ertong shijie), which began life in 1922, was edited by the May Fourth luminary Zheng Zhenduo (1898–1958) and featured within its pages fables by Xu Dishan (1894–1941), the literary critic Zhao Jingshen (1902–1985), and Ye Shaojun (1891–1967), whose

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work for the magazine was later compiled into a volume, The Scarecrow (Daocao ren), that remains one of the classics of modern Chinese children’s literature.46 Chunghwa, for its part, began publishing Little Friend (Xiao pengyou) in the same year, edited by the Mandarin pedagogue and composer of children’s music Li Jinhui (1891–1967), and featuring frequent contributions by educators Lü Boyou and Wang Renlu. Both magazines fairly teem with animal life, wild and domestic, displayed in printed galleries of natural history, coming to life as characters in Aesopian fables, hunted in the wild by intrepid young boys, or prized as household pets. Animal imagery in children’s literature is so ubiquitous as to seem a self-evident, even natural characteristic of the genre. This prevalence may reflect (as biologists and developmental psychologists have argued) adaptive phenomena such as neoteny (in which domesticated animals such as dogs retain juvenile features and forms of behavior lacking in their grown-up lupine counterparts) and biophilia (through which our attraction to and interest in tending to living creatures and living systems confers the evolutionary benefit of being able to profit by them).47 Yet the particular discursive and pictorial forms through which this kinship between animals and children is represented in the pedagogical literature of the Republican period also reflects the direct imprint of not only late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children’s books from Europe, the United States, and Japan, but also the developmental narratives that undergirded them.48 This is not merely a matter of the widespread equation drawn in Victorian and Edwardian ethnology between the beast, the savage, and the child, in which the child functions as a liminal figure at the discursive threshold dividing species as well as races.49 It is also crucially linked to neo-Lamarckian narratives about the role of inheritance and heredity in childhood development. As Claudia Castaneda reminds us, even Darwin himself was not immune to the temptation of this sort of thinking. Writing in the then-popular genre of the “baby biography”—a diaristic account of an individual child’s development intended as a closely observed instantiation of a more general developmental process—Darwin relates a trip to the London Zoological Gardens with his two-year-old son Doddy.50 Puzzled by Doddy’s seemingly unaccountable alarm at what he afterward refers repeatedly to as the “beasts in houses,” Darwin wonders if the “very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times?”51

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We may well wonder if Darwin has fully plumbed the suggestive ambiguities 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.”52 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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each other and who are, to the untrained eye, difficult to distinguish from one another (see Figure 4). The sly self-reflexivity of this reference to Shan’er’s clever answer 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

Figure 4: Cover of Little Friend (Xiao pengyou), no. 130 (1924). Courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library.

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World, inset with an opening through which a captive wolf is visible. A child stands enthralled by the wolf at the threshold, just before he opens the book to enter the “world” within (see Figure 5).53 The image simultaneously stages the child’s encounter with a perilous atavism, while tempting the reader with the pleasures of the Aesopian realm behind the

Figure 5: “Peeping” (Toukan). Cover of Children’s World (Ertong shijie) 1, no. 6 (April 1923). Courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library.

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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.54 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.55 The recursive logic mirrors 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.56 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

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Figure 6: Cover art for Little Friend (Xiao pengyou), no. 395 (1930). Courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library.

children themselves (maryjanes, knee socks, and blazers) would not be out of place in an Edwardian print. Standing to one side, a sporty fox terrier looks on bemusedly, a mute witness to the children’s development as bourgeois subjects. Similar images abound in Children’s World, often involving a whimsical reversal of roles. In “A First Piano Lesson,” a little girl gives pointers

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on reading sheet music to a baby elephant dressed in a polka dot dress, sitting on a stool perched atop a stack of books (see Figure 7).57 In a 1923 cover image by Wu Zhaoming, a monkey in a gaudy printed jumper pirouettes to the piano music played by a little girl as her brother, clad in a blue uniform and a red cap, looks on (see Figure 8).58

Figure 7: “A First Piano Lesson.” Children’s World (Ertong shijie) 10, no. 12 (1924). Courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library.

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Figure 8: Cover of Children’s World (Ertong shijie) 6, no. 11 (1923). Courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library.

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

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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!”59 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

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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.61

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

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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 studied 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.62

Oddly enough, the first of these apparent incongruities—Wei’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.63 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.64 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.65 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

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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 Beijing 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 focusing 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.66 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?”67 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 environmentally induced mutation, thus breaching the firewall of August Weissman’s genetic theory of heredity.68 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.69 Confronted by the neo-Darwinian consensus that these adaptations cannot in all likelihood be assimilated

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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.”70 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

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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.72

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.73 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 “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 I’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. “I’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.”74

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.75

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

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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.76 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 unable 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 finding 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 gold braid . . . In his awkward garb, he lay quietly with his eyes closed and his mouth closed, a cold and ironic smile seeming to play at the corner of his mouth, mocking this ridiculous corpse.77

The mordant irony of this scene seems to have been directed by Lianshu himself from beyond the grave. His emergence from the cocoon in the bright plumage of the warlord official makes a mockery of both social

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hierarchies and natural-historical processes. Lianshu’s transformation into everything he hates takes on all the inevitability of a developmental imperative, and yet in mocking his own zoological metamorphosis, he is able to retain a semblance of authorship over his own history. In the wake of the wake, a second and even more startling metamorphosis takes place: When they began to hammer in the nails, the wailing started afresh. I could not stand it for very long, so I withdrew to the courtyard; then, somehow, I was out of the gate. The damp road glistened, and I looked up at the sky where the cloud banks had scattered and a full moon hung, shedding a cold light. I walked with quickened steps, as if eager to break out from under a heavy weight, but finding it impossible. Something in my ears was struggling, and, after a long, long time, burst out. It was like a long howl, the howl of a wounded wolf crying in the wilderness in the deep of night, pain mingled with anger and sorrow. My heart grew lighter, and I walked calmly on the damp cobbled road under the moonlight.78

Here, the inexorable logic of the narrative, a logic that has dogged Shenfei throughout the story, comes to its uncanny conclusion, with the moon mirrored on the reflective surface of the cobblestones. Shenfei’s exit from the funeral is involuntary, and even the howl itself seems to have emerged beyond his conscious agency, its sound a “something” that is not his own. It is tempting to read this moment, then, as one of catharsis, Shenfei’s exorcism of Lianshu’s spirit, an expiation for his own failure to hear his story or come to his aid. Yet such a conclusion seems too facile, accounting for neither the recursive structure of the story nor its ambivalent appropriation of evolutionary thinking. There is more here than mere resignation to Lianshu’s fate and to the predatory social practices by which it was sealed. For this is also a moment of shape-shifting, a disruption of taxonomic and social category, a bursting forth from the confinement of a cocoon, shattering boundaries between people and animals, predators and victims, and unleashing a form of sympathetic magic which operates at the boundaries of language. In his unwitting transformation into a howling wolf, Shenfei not only becomes Wei Lianshu, but also takes his place in a lineage, inheriting his consciousness of the inevitability of human suffering as Lianshu inherited

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the loneliness of his grandmother before him. In becoming other, in participating in a community of mourners linked not by bloodlines but by historical contingency, then, Shenfei refuses the imperatives of naturalhistorical narrative. The final irony, of course, is that history has left him no choice, and his refusal was, from the very start, foreordained.

3 T H E C H I L D A S H I S T O RY IN REPUBLICAN CHINA

A Discourse on Development Something of the predicament faced by scholars engaged in the work of vernacularizing modern scientific knowledge in Republican China is suggested by a 1937 preface to a book called The Psychology of Children’s Drawings. From the very start, the author, a pioneering child psychologist named Huang Yi (1903–1944), cannot help but acknowledge to his readers that “the characteristics and principles of children’s drawing described here are based on the research of Euro-American scholars.”1 His exposition of these theories, he continues, is supplemented by a series of drawings he has collected from Chinese children, drawings which prove that “the developmental process of Chinese children’s drawing is the same as that of European and American children.”2 Huang’s research, in other words, is by his own admission a derivative discourse, redeemed only by the capacity of native data to confirm “universally” valid developmental models. Upon closer examination, however, what is most striking about the children’s drawings collected in Huang’s book is not so much how they conform to universal principles of child development, but rather the precision and specificity with which they record the historical moment in which they were produced. Collected from students of the Henghe Elementary School in Hangzhou by members of the Department of Education of Zhejiang University in the winter of 1936, these pictures present us with a composite view of Republican-era material culture (flags, fashions, furniture, domestic architecture with tiled roofs, potted plants, and pets) and a gallery of social types (schoolchildren, workers, businessmen, housewives, athletes, dancers, Nationalist soldiers). What is even more striking is the sensitivity with which some of these drawings register 99

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exactly those semicolonial and patriarchal “distortions” of the social fabric so vehemently decried by the progressive intellectuals of the period. Consider, for example, drawings of two social types that by 1934 had already come to symbolize—in the works of leftist authors such as Lu Xun as much as in the products of an increasingly politicized media culture industry—the cultural and economic dislocations of semicoloniality. The first image depicts the sort of “modern girl” through whom both the pleasures (new forms of urban leisure, liberated sexualities, and unprecedented mobility and economic opportunity for women) and pitfalls (the commodification of human relations, prostitution, and the exploitation of women workers) of the modern city were persistently figured throughout the 1920s and 1930s (see Figure 9). A second image portrays the kind of “coolie” who represented the immiseration and subalternity of migrant laborers in the colonial treaty ports (to which they had fled from economic shocks and natural disasters in the countryside) for Chinese intellectuals and policymakers and Western observers of China alike (see Figure 10).

Figure 9: A drawing by a seven-year-old girl. From Huang Yi, The Psychology of Children’s Drawings (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1937), fig. 18. Courtesy of the East Asia Library, University of Washington, Seattle.

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Figure 10: “Developmental order”: A drawing by an eleven-year-old girl. From Huang Yi, The Psychology of Children’s Drawings (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1937), fig. 26. Courtesy of the East Asia Library, University of Washington, Seattle.

For Huang, however, these drawings are merely exhibits, windows not on a world but on a “developmental order” (fazhan de chengxu) through which children’s drawings evolve. This process, he informs us, is divided into four stages. An initial “scribbling period” (tuya qi), during which children experiment with producing different sorts of shapes and lines, is superseded by a “symbolic period” (xiangzheng qi) in which these abstract scribbles begin to be interpreted by the child as representations of the outside world. This in turn yields to a “schematic period” (dingxing qi)

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through which the child’s drawings gradually begin to reflect the outside world in a more recognizably representational manner. The endpoint of this teleological narrative is a “realist period” (xieshi qi), whose advent is signaled by the child’s awakening to matters of artistic technique— instead of drawing as she likes, the child begins to strive for proportionality, proper perspective, and depth of field. Within this framework, the picture of the modern woman clad in a fashionable qipao, drawn by a seven-year-old girl, serves for Huang Yi only as an example of the child’s burgeoning ability to attend to detail and differentiate between disparate social types. The “terrifying length” of the coolie’s arms, in turn, is explained in terms of the inability of children still languishing in the “schematic period” to draw bodies in motion.3 The pictures are analyzed solely in terms of their progress toward an already established goal, that of realistic representation.4 Significantly, Huang addresses neither the content nor the historicity nor the affective power of the drawings he discusses. Yet it is precisely these qualities that make these drawings so interesting to us now. The modern woman hovers alone in the middle of a road, situated by the setting and the style of her hair and dress between a number of possible and invariably subservient social roles: street walker, taxi dancer, mistress, office girl. This ambiguity is offset by the precision with which her dress dates her: the impossibly high collar of her qipao and the way it is edged all along its length with multiple butterfly clasps reliably places her in the forefront of Chinese women’s fashions circa the summer of 1935. The coolie is perhaps less easily situated—his carrying poles, round hat, and shapeless garments mark him not in terms of the commodity-time of modern cities such as Shanghai and Hangzhou, but rather by social class. This is not the sort of person who could afford to send his children to a school like Henghe. There is, I think, a disturbing quality to these two images, an excess of meaning that threatens to spill over the neat psychological frames with which Huang Yi has contained them. That power to disturb is political in nature, and it derives from these children’s failure to attain to the ideals of realist representation. For it is precisely their technical “distortions” of line and proportion and perspective that register the socioeconomic distortions of colonial modernity with stunning clarity. The woman’s disproportionately tiny arms, seemingly tacked on as an afterthought, only accentuate how the rectangular sheath of her qipao seems to imprison her body within its “modern” packaging. Does her palpable discomfort

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unwittingly suggest the advent of a modernity in which the female body must shape itself to the contours of the commodity form? Can we read the strangely elongated and misplaced arms of the coolie as an index of his alienation from the fruits of his labor? Of his dislocation from an impoverished countryside to the destitution of the city? Is it possible to see anguish, fear, or despair in the irregularity of the line, the asymmetry of the composition, the crooked teeth, the disarming boldness of his gaze? As cultural historians of modern China, what do we make of the way in which these images seem to belie the neat developmental framework with which Huang Yi has supplied them? How might our reading of these pictures help us brush against the grain of Republican-era cultural history? “To articulate the past historically,” the German Jewish cultural critic Walter Benjamin writes in his celebrated 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” “does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ ” Instead, Benjamin asserts, the cultural historian must recognize that “history decomposes into images, not into narratives,” that “the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”5 To grasp that image is the task of a materialist history, one that engages in “an immanent critique of the concept of progress” by rescuing the past from the mystifications of developmental narrative.6 In this light, I think, these images, read against the textual amber in which they are embedded, become a particularly useful starting point for reconsidering Republican-era conceptions of the figure of the child, of developmental history, and of the charged dialectical relation between the two. For Huang Yi’s work is just one example of a remarkable (if understudied) aspect of modern Chinese cultural history. The period between the advent of the New Culture movement in 1917 and the outbreak of full-scale war with Japan in 1937 witnessed an unprecedented explosion of discourse for and about children, childhood, and child development. This immense wave of scientific activity encompassed the establishment of new academic disciplines (child psychology and educational psychology) and the wide circulation of scientific and practical knowledge about the nature of children and childhood development to the reading public.7 The figure of the child also permeates the cultural criticism and literary discourse of the period, as exemplified by a story like “The Misanthrope.” Many of the major figures in the Republican literary establishment—not

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merely Lu Xun and his brother Zhou Zuoren, but also luminaries such as Mao Dun, Ye Shaojun, Zhang Tianyi (1906–1985), Bing Xin (1900–1999), Y. R. Chao (1892–1982), and Feng Zikai (1898–1975)—were actively involved in writing for and about children throughout their careers. For many intellectuals of the May Fourth era, the collection of children’s folk songs played a central role in theoretical and practical efforts to develop a new vernacular literature.8 The creation of a modern children’s literature, whether by way of translations into Chinese of European classics like the Grimm’s Fairy Tales (undertaken by Zhou Zuoren) or Alice in Wonderland (completed in 1922 by Y. R. Chao) or the creation of original literary and musical works for Chinese children, such as the children’s operas of Li Jinhui and Ye Shaojun’s collection of fables, The Scarecrow, also became a central focus of their work throughout this period. The ubiquity of the child extended into the popular culture of the era, from the massmarket magazines such as Children’s World and Little Friend we looked at in Chapter 2, to cartoons (Feng Zikai’s whimsical drawings of children, Zhang Leping’s syndicated adventures of San Mao, a Shanghai street urchin), and child film stars (Hu Rongrong, billed in the 1930s as “China’s Shirley Temple”).9 This explosion of discourse enabled not just a publishing boom, but also the creation of a new segment of the burgeoning Shanghai culture industry dedicated to educating, representing, and profiting from the child. As I will discuss in some detail in the second half of this chapter, the importance of this particular market for the economic viability of those publishing firms most intimately connected with the new literature and its nation-building enterprise, such as the Commercial Press—not incidentally, the publisher of Huang Yi’s text on children’s drawings—and Chunghwa Books, was nothing short of decisive. The Chinese “business of enlightenment” rested squarely on sales of textbooks and other educational materials to schools, parents, and children.10 The child, it seems, was as indispensable financially as it was discursively and ideologically, not only to a new world of vernacular knowledge, but also to the rise of a literature in the vernacular. And these worlds, in turn, deeply informed the popular media culture of the period, as I will explore in more detail in Chapter 4. What united these seemingly disparate realms were the “hard imperatives” (to invoke once again Deng Xiaoping’s slogan) of development and developmentalism, imperatives central to the ideology of nation-building in Republican and post-1949 China alike. Semantically, “development” straddles the domains of nation-building, political economy, pedagogy,

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and literary history. These overlapping senses are by no means accidental or unrelated. The discourse of development, in its restricted sense as a national path to economic wealth and political power, has emerged with particular potency in the rush to marketization and globalization of the postsocialist era. It has become, indeed, perhaps the central pillar of state orthodoxy in the People’s Republic, and a profoundly important discursive horizon for social and economic practice. Yet developmentalism in its contemporary form must be traced back to discourses of development in the Republican era, and understood in part as a way of seeing children as figures for national history. This is a line of argument that perhaps risks evoking a corollary, but far less easily resolved, conundrum: How might it be possible to see history through the eyes of children?

“Save the Children” How do we account for this massive investment in the figure of the child in the Republican era? How do pedagogy and publishing come to figure so prominently throughout this period? I argue in this chapter that these developments were underwritten by a particular sort of ideological mirage. This mirage, which is expressed in its purest and consequently most paradoxical form in Lu Xun’s epochal 1918 short story “Diary of a Madman,” hinges on what I will call an immaculate conception of history, a conception in which the child is figured as an agent of national redemption. How? I have already discussed some of the ways in which the thought of May Fourth intellectuals such as Lu Xun came to be saturated by the imperialist logic of social Darwinism, initially via Yan Fu’s late nineteenthcentury translation of T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics into classical Chinese.11 We have also seen how, by the early years of the Republic, the routine application of an evolutionary template to questions of national culture had become almost de rigeur: China’s humiliation at the hands of the imperial powers, and its consequent failure to attain to wealth and power in the new world order taking shape in the wake of the Great War came to be seen as a direct result of an irredeemably backward cultural legacy, of a civilization that was not only stagnant but also evolutionarily stunted. The New Culture movement that coalesced around Beijing University in 1917 was an effort to remove the shackles of that traditional culture by enacting a radical rupture with the Chinese past. And one of the most important aspects of this project was to dispense with the classical language, as well as much of the cultural baggage with which it was

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associated, in order to institute a modern and more adequately transparent representational regime, one predicated on the creation of a new national vernacular. This story has been told many times and in many ways. What I want to emphasize here is that this ambitious project necessarily problematizes the transmission of culture from one generation to another, and in so doing, places the figure of the child and the practice of pedagogy squarely at the center of questions of national history. It is hardly surprising, then, that Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji), first published in the flagship journal of the New Culture movement, New Youth, and celebrated ever since as a herald of Chinese literary modernity, is preoccupied with precisely these concerns, and presents its readers with a sustained discourse on the intertwinement of youth, pedagogy, and culture. As has often been remarked, the text spectacularly enacts its own rupture with the past by way of an ingenious framing device. A preface constructed of the characteristic circumlocutions of classical Chinese informs us of the provenance of the diary we are about to read and the circumstances under which the narrator encountered it and came to copy it down. What follows is a shockingly direct, first-person, vernacular text that, in detailing the persecution complex of a man who suspects that those who surround him are secretly conspiring to kill and eat him, functions as an allegorical denunciation of what the text identifies as the “cannibalism” of Confucian culture and society. What is less often noted is that this lunacy is represented as a process of pedagogy in reverse, of unlearning the lessons of the Confucian canon. Early on in the text, the madman begins to question the circumstances under which he himself has been brought into the Confucian textual order: I can still remember how it was when Elder Brother was teaching me composition. No matter how good a man was, if I could find a few things wrong with him he would approvingly underline my words; on the other hand, if I made a few allowances for a bad man, he’d say I was “an extraordinary student, an absolute genius.”12

It is the ethically dubious nature of these lessons, in turn, that prompts the madman’s decomposition of that same order: You have to really research something before you can understand it. I seemed to dimly remember that from ancient times on, people have eaten

The Child as History in Republican China people, so I began to read through a history book to find such instances. There were no dates in the history, but scrawled this way and that across every page were the words BENEVOLENCE, RIGHTEOUSNESS, and MORALITY. Since I couldn’t fall asleep anyway, I read that history very carefully for most of the night, and finally I began to make out what was written between the lines; the whole volume was filled with a single phrase: Eat people!13

This initial revelation is followed by a series of more explicit citations derived from the Confucian classics. Having come to the conclusion that his own older brother is in league with the cannibalistic cabal that has encircled him, the madman marshals several mentions of cannibalism from a third-century text, the Zuozhuan, itself an exegetical commentary on a historical text, Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu), which was traditionally said to have been compiled by Confucius himself: When [my elder brother] used to instruct me in the classics, he himself said that it was all right to “exchange children and eat them.” And another time, as he was chastising an evil man, he said not only that the man should be killed, but also that “his flesh should be eaten” and “his skin used as a sleeping mat” as well . . . If it’s permissible to exchange children and eat them, then anyone can be exchanged, anyone can be eaten. Back then I understood what he said merely as an exegesis of the classics and let it go at that, but now I realize that as he was teaching me, the grease of human flesh was smeared all over his lips, and that his mind was full of plans for further cannibalism.14

This subversive moment of unlearning is shot through with irony. Its allegorical power rests on a childish refusal to read in an allegorical manner: the madman renders classical figure as fact. The madman’s disavowal of textual cannibalism, moreover, hinges on Lu Xun’s own cannibalistic relation to Confucian textuality. And in a characteristically paradoxical manner, enlightenment of this sort cannot be sustained: Lu Xun has ended the story before it has even begun, in the classical preface in which we are informed that the madman has already been cured of his affliction and is expecting to receive a sinecure in the government bureaucracy. This modernist mise en abyme, in placing the reader into an interpretative quandary from which there is no exit, tends to undercut readings of the story as a call to civilizational progress. Instead it serves

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to focus attention on a more important, if less often noted, aspect of the story’s narrative structure: the madman’s gradual realization of his own complicity in this cannibalistic cultural regime. The action of the story, in other words, consists of the constriction of the circle of complicity from the community at large, to the madman’s family, including his brother, and eventually to himself. Soon after discovering his brother’s involvement, he confronts him with a request framed in terms drawn directly from the vernacular thinking about evolutionary processes that was beginning to percolate through the print culture of the time: Elder Brother, way back in the beginning, it’s probably the case that primitive peoples all ate some human flesh. But later on, because their ways of thinking changed, some gave up the practice and tried to improve themselves; they kept on changing until they became human beings, real human beings. But the others didn’t; they just kept on eating people and remained at a primitive level. You have the same sort of thing with evolution in the animal world. Some reptiles, for instance, changed into fish, and then they evolved into birds, then into apes, and then into human beings. But the others didn’t want to improve themselves and just kept right on being reptiles down to this very day.15

This passage posits what should by now be a familiar evolutionary model, in which volition (as opposed to the authorless forces of natural selection posited by Darwin himself) retains a key role. Progress, Lu Xun seems to suggest here, is achievable if only one possesses the sheer will necessary to effect a rupture with the past.16 But as is common throughout Lu Xun’s work, this thesis is haunted by a particularly disturbing antithesis. With mounting horror, the madman begins to realize that, without his knowledge or consent, his brother has been slipping human flesh (including that of his own deceased little sister) into their family meals. As such, he is already complicit with the culture of cannibalism he has come to abhor: “Although I wasn’t aware of it in the beginning, now I know that I am someone with four thousand years of cannibalism behind me, that I cannot look a real human being in the eye.”17 What Lu Xun is getting at here, of course, is the terrifying and tainted inevitability of cultural inheritance. Pedagogy trumps pedagogy in reverse; a seemingly mechanistic process of cultural reproduction triumphs over the will to change. He concludes the tale with one of the most famous phrases in

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the modern Chinese literary canon: “Might there still be someone who hasn’t eaten human flesh? Save the children.”18 The phrase has more often than not been read as a call to arms. Jiang Feng’s 1961 account of Lu Xun’s intellectual and political involvement with children and children’s literature, for instance, begins with a familiar litany of encomiums: As the “leader of the Chinese cultural revolution,” and the “most heroic standard bearer of the army of the new cultural army,” Mr. Lu Xun was not only the founder of modern Chinese literature, but also the founder of modern Chinese children’s literature. In his magnificent life of struggle, he made great contributions to children’s literature . . . In those years of darkness and reactionary rule . . . he linked the fate of the children to that of the nation, and for this reason, by the time he wrote “The Diary of a Madman,” he had already issued his rallying cry of “save the children.”19

Anglophone scholars have treated the passage in a similar (if less overtly doctrinaire) manner. C. T. Hsia and William Lyell discuss the conclusion of the story in terms of Lu Xun’s sentimentalization and “idealization of youth.”20 Mary Ann Farquhar, in her study of children’s literature in China, sees it as a “cry of hope” for the emancipation of children from “mindless bondage.”21 But to read this statement as an unambiguous injunction that China must invest its hopes for a better cultural future solely in the figure of the child—and by extension in a particular vision of developmental history—is also to smooth over the knotty contours of the text and ignore the deliberate narrative duplicity with which it has been crafted. What is interesting about this story is the way in which it questions that injunction even before it appears. Just as the classical frame with which the story starts (and also diegetically comes to a close, by assuring readers of the madman’s return to “normalcy”) thoroughly undermines overly sanguine assessments of the madman’s capacity to do battle with the cannibals who surround him, “Diary of the Madman” also includes an immanent critique of the ideological mirage with which it concludes. Early in the text the madman reflects on the hostility of the populace of his provincial town to his newfound “lunacy”: I kept right on walking. There was a group of children up ahead and they were talking about me too. The expressions in their eyes were just like Old Master Zhao’s, and their faces were greenish gray. I wondered what grudge

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D E V E L O P M E N TA L F A I RY TA L E S the children had against me that they were also acting that way. I couldn’t contain myself any longer and I shouted toward them: “Tell me! Tell me!” They just ran away. Now what grudge could there be between me and Old Master Zhao, or the people on the street, for that matter? The only thing I remember is that twenty years ago I trampled on the account books kept by Mr. Archaic . . . But the children? Back then they had not even been born. Why should they have looked at me that way today? It seemed as though they were afraid of me, and at the same time wanted to do me harm. It frightens and surprises me, and it pains me as well. I understand now. Their parents have taught them to be that way.22

The point is further underscored in the middle of the story, in which the madman is visited by a twenty-year-old man who may or not be a figment of his overheated imagination. Just as the madman confronts him with the truth of the village’s cannibalistic practices: The fellow was nowhere to be seen. He was far younger than my elder brother, and yet he was actually one of them as well. It must be because his parents taught him to be that way. No wonder even the children give me murderous looks.23

Clearly these passages pose the question of cultural transmission in different, and altogether more problematic, terms. In posing these questions, Lu Xun has placed us within a second, and structurally parallel, moment of mise en abyme. How can the children be saved by adults who have yet to be (and indeed cannot be) redeemed from the taint of cannibalism? Does the child merely figure the impossibility of redemption for adults? Who is saved? And who is consumed? This profoundly ambivalent narrative structure inevitably generates a number of questions relating to practical pedagogy and social organization. To save the children, do we need to remove them from the cultural contamination embodied by their parents? At which point in their development do children enter into culture? Is revolutionary pedagogical intervention possible? How, in other words, can children be “liberated” from the yoke of tradition and the tyranny of adults (as Lu Xun himself advocated in a January 1919 article published in New Youth entitled “How Are We to Be Fathers Now?”) and simultaneously harnessed to the task of driving forward national history?24 These questions were earnestly pursued by several authors in the pages of New Youth throughout

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the high tide of the New Culture movement, often framed as proposals for radical social reorganization and educational reform. One author, writing in 1919 but echoing ideas already promoted by the reformist intellectual Kang Youwei a generation earlier in his Book of Great Unity (Datong shu), advocates the establishment of communal child-rearing facilities, staffed not by parents but by carefully selected professionals, and served by a network of “Institutes for the Study of Children,” and a corps of “childhood experts,” child biologists, and children’s psychologists.25 These measures are posited as the only means of resolving what are portrayed as inextricably interlinked problems: China’s lack of parity with the West, its “women’s question,” and its lack of social democracy.26 What Lu Xun’s earlier fictional text seems to be adumbrating, however, is the inevitable failure of such utopian schemes and the impossibility of a decisive historical break with a tainted culture. Children, he implies, cannot serve as blank slates, primed for a redemptive rewriting of the national story, for culture is always already inscribed upon them, in the very process of biological and social reproduction.

The Discovery of the Child By now it should be clear that the figure of the child is integral to both Lu Xun’s articulation of a project of national transformation and his immanent critique of that project’s reliance on a particular sort of historiography that, in excoriating an irredeemable past, also demands an immaculate conception of the future. This particular form of developmentalism is founded (and also founders) upon the “discovery of childhood” as an epistemological, ideological, institutional, and even commercial category in Republican China. This frequently invoked phrase is borrowed from Philippe Ariès’s groundbreaking and oft-cited 1960 study of the emergence of the bourgeois family in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History.27 Ariès, noting that children were understood essentially as adults on “a smaller scale” and duly incorporated into all aspects of collective life during the Middle Ages, argues that childhood, as an idea and as a focal point for familial structure and educational institutions, is a relatively modern development. He traces the ways in which children are gradually “removed from adult society” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and delivered into the hands of new institutions (schools, colleges, the nuclear family) catering to their only recently recognized educational

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and disciplinary needs.28 This new regime, in his account, is both compulsory and fetishizing: the birth of the boarding school coincides with the Romantic emphasis on the primitive innocence of the child exemplified in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s vastly influential treatise on childhood and pedagogical practice, Émile (which, not incidentally, had been translated into Chinese and published by the Commercial Press by the mid1920s).29 The child as an object of knowledge, imagination, discipline, and investment ultimately forms the basis of a new class-stratified order characterized by the “secession” of the bourgeois family from the “promiscuity” of medieval social life to the discrete interiority of the nineteenthcentury home. The discovery of the child, in other words, is an index of the economic as well as psychological privatization that typifies bourgeois modernity.30 A similarly expansive and closely observed cultural history of modern Chinese childhood has yet to be written, and I believe we need to be extremely leery of extrapolating from the French to Chinese cases in the absence of such a work.31 It should also be noted that more recent scholars have taken issue with Ariès’s account of medieval childhood.32 Nonetheless, in alerting us to the historical contingency of the ways in which childhood is imagined and deployed as a functional social and ideological category, Centuries of Childhood does provide us with useful ways to think through the preoccupation with children that characterizes much of the intellectual discourse of the May Fourth moment. And taking that preoccupation seriously, I believe, will also help us revise our understanding of the “development” of modern Chinese cultural history. Specifically, I want to argue that the centrality of children in May Fourth nationalist discourse both underwrites and is underwritten by a new culture industry that depends on the children’s market as a major source of revenue. Interwar publishers, in other words, simultaneously “eat” children for a living and mold them into bourgeois consumers of culture. How these financial and ideological interests begin to converge becomes clearer when we turn to what is perhaps the most seminal text in the emergence of not only modern Chinese children’s literature but also a new conception of modern childhood in China, Zhou Zuoren’s 1920 essay, “A Children’s Literature” (“Ertong de wenxue”). Zhou begins his discourse (which was originally delivered as a lecture to a group of educators at the Kongde Elementary School in Beijing and subsequently published in New Youth) with a bold claim:

The Child as History in Republican China People in the past for the most part were completely unable to understand children. If they didn’t see them as adults in miniature, and try to force as many of the “classics of the sages and annals of the worthies” down their throats as possible, then they saw them as incomplete little people, said they couldn’t understand anything anyway, dismissed them with a stroke of a pen, and ignored them. It’s only now that we have come to realize that biologically and psychologically, although they differ from adults to a certain extent, they are still complete individuals, possessed of their own inner and outer lives.33

Less important than the truth value of this far-reaching assertion about traditional Chinese attitudes toward children is the way (in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Lu Xun’s juxtaposition of a classical preface with a vernacular text in “Diary of a Madman”) Zhou simultaneously argues for and textually enacts a prototypically modernist rupture with a strategically imagined past.34 He cannot discover the child, in other words, without having assured his audience that he is mapping what has heretofore been terra incognita.35 Part of the thrust of Zhou’s argument in this essay is that children should not be forced to read politically and morally didactic materials by zealous adults interested in shaping their consciousness as future citizens of the republic. Instead, children should be allowed to read fanciful or supernatural fairy tales appropriate to their level of psychological development. This seemingly innocuous (and eminently humanist) approach became the crux of a series of heated debates about the nature and function of children’s literature, debates that continued to rage throughout the interwar period and beyond. Cultural conservatives argued that such fairy tales were unnecessary at best, and subversive at worst, while leftists were worried by their power to infuse their young and impressionable readers with feudal conceptions of nature and society. These arguments intensified by the early 1930s, as an unapologetically politicized and instrumentalist rhetoric superseded Zhou Zuoren’s nuanced appreciation of the necessity of inutility and play for proper development. As Bi Yun, a passionate advocate for children’s issues who worked on the staff of the Commercial Press’s flagship journal, the Eastern Miscellany, asserts in 1935: It’s very difficult to find and select appropriate reading materials for children. If we take a look at already published items for children, we find that nine out of ten are corrupt supernatural tales of fantastical and ghostly

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Zhou Zuoren’s advocacy of such fairy tales was framed in very different terms, and relied in part on the work of Andrew Lang (1844–1912), a pioneering Scottish anthropologist, folklorist, and classicist, and the compiler of twelve immensely popular collections of fairy tales from around the globe, published between 1889 and 1910 and collectively referred to as the “Color Fairy Books” because of their titles (The Blue Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, and so forth), brightly hued covers, and varicolored illustrative plates.37 Lang’s description of the provenance of these tales in his preface to the Violet Fairy Book of 1901 is worth quoting at length, if only because its suppositions came to inform all further debates on children’s literature in modern China: The stories in this Violet Fairy Book, as in all the others of the series, have been translated out of the popular traditional tales in a number of different languages. These stories are as old as anything that men have invented. They are narrated by naked savage women to naked savage children. They have been inherited by our earliest civilised ancestors, who really believed that beasts and trees and stones could talk if they chose, and behave kindly or unkindly . . . As people grew more civilized and had kings and queens, princes and princesses, these exalted persons generally were chosen as heroes and heroines . . . When the nobles and other people became rich and educated, they forgot the old stories, but the country people did not, and handed them down . . . from generation to generation. Then learned men collected and printed the country people’s stories, and these we have translated, to amuse children. Their tastes remain like the tastes of their naked ancestors, thousands of years ago, and they seem to like fairy tales better than history, poetry, geography, or arithmetic, just as grown-up people like novels better than anything else.38

Lang’s ethnographic idiom, predicated on an implicitly racialized binary between an infantilized, ancestral “other” and the civilized European

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self, proved very useful for Zhou Zuoren’s own understanding of not only children’s literature but also developmental child psychology. As Chang-tai Hung has pointed out, Zhou’s writings on children’s literature bear the unmistakable mark of Lang’s conspicuously evolutionary formulation of the nature and function of children’s literature.39 Zhou echoes Lang’s claim that the emergence of children’s literature can only be understood “with reference to the literature of primitive societies”: According to evolutionary thought, the stages of individual development replicate those of the social system as a whole: in the embryonic stage, babies undergo a process of biological evolution, and when they are children they undergo a process of evolution toward the development of civilization. This is why many aspects of the study of children [paedologie] can be explained by way of the study of humanity [anthropologie]. The origins of literature lie in the terror and curiosity with which primitive people confront nature, and use imagination in order to shape their thoughts and feelings into language . . . The spiritual life of children is similar to that of savages . . . [and children’s literature] is similar to theirs not only in terms of form and content, but also in that it retains many residual aspects of primitive society, and often contains savage or absurd ways of thinking.40

Elsewhere in the essay, Zhou is quick to assert the autonomy and intrinsic value of each stage of childhood development. But it is precisely this discourse of development that, in establishing a patently paternalistic parallel between anthropologist and savage, adult observer and child, tends to undermine the ethical force of his claim. If the telos of childhood play is civilization, why linger lovingly over the “savage” or the “absurd”? Zhou’s supposition that ontogeny (individual development) recapitulates phylogeny (the development of the group as a whole), moreover, serves to bind the individual child ever more tightly to a discourse of national history. Nor should we neglect to mention that this particular notion of national history inevitably operates within a Victorian discursive field shaped by the logic of Euro-American imperialism. The very notion of an inevitable homology between ontogeny and phylogeny emerged from the work of Ernst Haeckel in the field of embryology.41 His experimental observations of the process of cellular and prenatal development slotted quite naturally into the nineteenth-century “science” of racial classification. Haeckel, for instance, argued that just as different individuals might exemplify different degrees of evolutionary fitness, so divergent races also

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had developed to “different degrees of perfection.”42 The racial superiority and greater degree of evolutionary adaptation of the “Mediterranean species, and within it the Indo-Germanic,” in turn, was tautologically confirmed by their “net of domination over the whole globe.”43 Ironically, then, Zhou’s humanist insistence on the functional autonomy of childhood not only serves to yoke childhood development to discourses of national development but may also implicitly, if unwittingly, insist on the Chineseness of the child at the very moment in which recourse is made to universal models of development.44 This fraught encounter between child and nation also serves to place the child within an incipient discourse of bourgeois family life and to authorize an intensification of the ways in which childhood becomes a matter of adult concern and regularized institutional intervention. For in separating the child from the adult population as a distinct category, Zhou also facilitates recognition of the child as a proper subject of adult observation, description, instruction, and discipline. Only when that which separates the child from the adult has been fully understood, Zhou argues, is the adult able to appreciate the intellectual and emotional needs characteristic of each stage of childhood development. (That we now take such assertions as a self-evident should reveal the extent to which Zhou’s essay signaled the advent of a genuinely new way of looking at the child in China). The second half of Zhou’s essay is thus devoted to a delineation of four stages of childhood development, as well as the sorts of reading materials appropriate to each. It should come as no surprise that Zhou’s pedagogical program shares several points in common with Huang Yi’s later account of the stages whereby children learn to draw. For Zhou, children move from an infantile stage (one to three years old), through “early” and “late” childhood (from three to ten years of age), into adolescence (from 10 to 15 years old), and finally become full-fledged youths between ages fifteen to twenty. Infants and young children are to be given a steady stream of fairy tales, allegorical tales, and rhymes. Stress is to be laid on sound over sense and the free exercise of imagination over didactic content. By “late” childhood, the child should also be exposed to slightly more sophisticated narrative fare (Hans Christian Anderson, for instance), as well as stories that satisfy the child’s curiosity about the natural world. The adolescent, finally, is to be plied with drama, historical legends, and most importantly, “realistic stories”: “not modern realist fiction, but works with realistic elements, such as European novels like Robinson Crusoe

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and Don Quixote.”45 Zhou also endorses the late Qing “social novel” (shehui xiaoshuo), as exemplified by The Travels of Lao Can (Lao Can youji), as appropriate fare for this age group. These recommendations are significant in several respects. First, it is difficult to miss the fact that, in positing the adventure story as the apex of children’s literature, Zhou posits a notion of childhood that is implicitly gendered male, thus belying the seeming universality of the child as a discursive category. His selection of Robinson Crusoe further reflects the influence of Rousseau, who, despite his aversion to book learning, advocated Defoe’s classic of colonial adventure as a model text and the enterprising Crusoe himself as an object of emulation.46 This approbation stemmed not only from what Rousseau perceived to be Crusoe’s productive engagement with the real—the business of making a living and establishing a colony from scratch—but also the text’s claim to scientific verisimilitude. Crusoe, in other words, is supposed to give children a transparent sense of the world and how to work it. Zhou, in borrowing these recommendations, privileges realism (as an aesthetic mode and as an analytical procedure for apprehending and representing the outside world) as the teleological endpoint of childhood development. This move is fundamentally of a piece with Huang Yi’s characterization of childhood development. And strangely enough, Zhou’s account of the development of the individual reader from childhood to adolescence also recapitulates literary historical narratives of the rise of vernacular fiction in Europe and late Qing and early Republican China, at least insofar as that trajectory was commonly understood by Chinese intellectuals during the May Fourth period as an inexorable march toward an ever-increasing realism in fictional representation.47

Children, Folklore Studies, and a New National Vernacular The homology between these two sorts of development in Zhou’s essay was by no means accidental. While the development of a stimulating and humanistic literature for children of all ages that might help to challenge traditional pedagogy and arrest the transmission of Confucian orthodoxy was clearly an essential (if often overlooked) aspect of the May Fourth nation-building agenda, literature by children, usually in the form of nursery rhymes and folk songs, became equally important throughout the 1920s as a stockpile of raw material for the conceptual as well as linguistic articulation of a new national vernacular. And Zhou Zuoren’s

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work most aptly emblematizes this double movement between rescuing children and being redeemed by them, between saving the children and consuming them as grist for the new literary mill. Zhou, as is well known, was a pivotal figure in the emergence of folklore studies in China. His interest in the field dated back to the early years of the century, when, as a student in Japan, he had encountered not only the work of Andrew Lang but also that of the prominent Japanese nationalist and folklorist Yanagita Kunio.48 Inspired by Yanagita’s methodologies for the collection of folk materials, Zhou began to collect children’s songs from around his home province of Zhejiang upon his return to China in the wake of the 1911 revolution. By 1920, Zhou had become the president of a newly constituted Folksong Research Society (Geyao yanjiu hui) at Beijing University, as well as the editor of and a frequent contributor to the influential journal Folksong Weekly (Geyao zhoukan). The discursive field through which these activities were mediated was extremely heterogeneous: cobbled together from cultural Darwinism (via Lang and other Victorian ethnologists), Japanese appropriations of German nationalist thought (Herder and Fichte via Yanagita), as well as indigenous discourses on the vernacular dating back to iconoclastic thinkers like Li Zhi (1527–1602) and Feng Menglong (1574–1626) of the late Ming. In this indigenous lineage—one that became increasingly important to Zhou’s self-definition as a literary stylist and public intellectual as the 1930s wore on—the “child-heart” (tongxin) is privileged as a figure for the “authenticity” (as opposed to stale Confucian orthodoxy) of vernacular song and storytelling.49 Through this confluence of discourses, folksong seemed to offer access to the primitive voice of the Volk, a voice still untainted by the stagnant and constricting grip of elite literary production. For Zhou Zuoren’s colleague Hu Shi, the work and thought of Baron Guido Amedeo Vitale (1872–1918), an Italian folklorist who had compiled two collections of Chinese nursery rhymes and children’s stories around the turn of the century, were exemplary.50 As early as 1896, Vitale had framed his project in the introduction to a collection of children’s songs and games called Pekinese Rhymes in terms that adumbrated the literary enterprise in which Zhou and Hu were so deeply engaged: Composed as they are by illiterate people who have no notion of written language, they show a system of versification analogous to that of many European countries, and almost completely agreeing with the rules of the

The Child as History in Republican China Italian poetry. A new national poetry could perhaps spring up based on these rhythms and on the true feelings of the people.51

In serving as a basis for the vernacular, in other words, the artistic creativity of children would be pressed into service as a means to both enact and confirm the validity of “universal” developmental models— models that would also expedite the unfolding of a new literary history.

Consuming Children This indebtedness to the figure of the child in the making of the modern vernacular cannot be understood on a merely discursive level, for there is a very real sense in which the May Fourth “business of enlightenment”— by which I indicate, following Leo Ou-Fan Lee, the major publishing houses such as the Commercial Press and Chunghwa Books that were integral to the articulation of the new cultural and political alternatives, and the introduction of new knowledge (both literary and scientific) into China throughout the early twentieth century—were dependent on children’s business for their very existence. The early history of the Commercial Press is a case in point. The unquestioned commercial dominance of the company, founded in the waning years of the Qing dynasty, was predicated on its monopoly of the national textbook market, a monopoly established in 1904 with the publication of a ten-volume curriculum stipulated for use in new-style public schools and entitled Updated Chinese Textbooks (Zuixin guowen jiaokeshu).52 In the estimation of Wang Yunwu (1888–1979), chief editor and manager of the company from 1921 to 1937, the spectacular growth of the press throughout those years was a direct result of steadily increasing primary school enrollments, for only textbooks could consistently reach “such a large, and regulated readership.”53 So bountiful was the market for government-approved textbooks that in 1912, at the cusp of the new Republican era, Chunghwa Books was established precisely in order to wrest what ultimately became one-third of the national textbook market away from the Commercial Press. Even those presses usually associated most closely with the publication of serious fiction and modern literature were financially dependent on the children’s trade. Beixin (Beixin shuju), publisher of the collection of short stories in which Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” appeared, its close ideological and business ally, the Kaiming Bookstore (Kaiming

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shudian), and Modern Books (Xiandai shuju), known in the 1930s primarily for its leading-edge literary journal Les Contemporains (Xiandai), all maintained extensive lists of children’s literature and textbooks. Beixin and Modern Books also published periodicals aimed at the juvenile market—Little Student (Xiao xuesheng) and Modern Child (Xiandai ertong) respectively—in order to counter the extremely successful ventures discussed in the previous chapter: Children’s World (Commercial Press) and Little Friend (Chunghwa), each of which boasted biweekly circulations of over twenty thousand copies.54 In these battles for a share of the juvenile market, the pedagogical issues over which Zhou Zuoren and critics such as Bi Yun wrangled in the 1920s and 1930s became important selling points, and patriotic discourse came into productive collusion with the commerce of culture. A January 1934 issue of Les Contemporains, for instance, features a prominent advertisement for Modern Child, offering readers a one-year membership in a children’s book club (for the not inconsequential sum of twenty yuan) and trumpeting the virtues of the magazine itself in the following terms: The spirit of Modern Child is the most youthful. Modern Child wants to turn the youth of the entire nation into little soldiers, little workers, and little peasants. So here you will find no meaningless rhymes full of flowers and moons and dogs and cats, no degraded tales full of princes and princesses. All of our pieces and pictures focus on SOCIETY (with systematic discussions of current events and social knowledge), NATURE (covered scientifically, sociologically, and engagingly), and LITERARY ART (with social and scientific content).55

This fusion of niche marketing and social-scientific discourse was, of course, predicated on the production and circulation of “expert” knowledge about childhood development—the very sort of knowledge enabled in part by Zhou Zuoren’s discovery of the child as an epistemological category. As such, it is symptomatic of the sort of slippage between economic development, childhood development, and nationalist historiography so characteristic of this dynamic field of activity. It should not be surprising, then, that the same sort of graduated categories suggested by Zhou Zuoren for young readers become the organizational principle with which firms like the Commercial Press marketed their astonishingly large backlist of books for children. A series of 1937 advertisements from

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the pages of Children’s World is representative.56 Targeted at elementary schools as well as concerned parents and their children, these ads offer their clientele a “complete and comprehensive set of reading materials for children” subdivided into seven categories. The range and sheer volume of these offerings is nothing short of astonishing. There is the Literary Treasury for Young Children, made up of 350 volumes, with a stated emphasis on “pictures” and text that place the “life of the child at the center” (yi ertong shenghuo wei zhongxin). There is a Literary Treasury for Elementary School Students (Xiao xuesheng wenku), co-edited by Wang Yunwu himself and composed of 500 volumes divided over fortysix fields of knowledge. There is a series of Yearly Supplemental Readers for Elementary Students (Xiao xuesheng nianfen buchong duben) consisting of an additional 600 volumes, on topics such as sports, society, nature, labor, and music. A second advertisement caters to slightly older children, offering “A Historical and Geographical Compendium for Children” (Ertong shidi congshu) comprising twenty-six volumes, a relatively modest four-volume set of “Literature for Children” (Ertong wenxue congshu), and another matching set of books on “World Children’s Literature” (Shijie ertong wenxue congshu) presenting, in a manner reminiscent of Lang’s Color Fairy Books, collections of Brazilian fairy tales and “Red Indian legends,” alongside translations of The Swiss Family Robinson and Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince. The final series also echoes Zhou Zuoren’s classificatory scheme, for it aims to provide older children with realistic narratives and historical knowledge by way of a “Compendium for Youth” (Shaonian congshu) through which children will be introduced to famous “Chinese and foreign authors” such as Tao Yuanming, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ban Zhao, and Charles Darwin.57 Completed on the eve of the outbreak of hostilities with Japan, this vast project, numbering over 1,500 volumes, might be said to represent the apex of the development of children’s publishing in the interwar period, and offers ample evidence of the extent to which print culture had been nourished by the children’s market.

Obstinate Mirrors Books, however, were not the only means by which this particular segment of China’s interwar culture industry sought to imagine and refigure children as citizens and consumers of cultural commodities. Toys, in their capacity as educational tools and aids to proper childhood development,

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also became objects of adult concern, debate, and enterprise. As early as 1918 (on the eve of the May Fourth movement), the Commercial Press ventured into the toy business, manufacturing and marketing their own line of more than 100 items for the amusement of its youthful consumers. The advertising copy (published in the best-selling general-interest journal Eastern Miscellany) is revealing of the collusion between the development of a new consumer economy, organized around the educational aspirations of the bourgeois family, and May Fourth discourses on child development and developmental history. Much like Huang Yi’s text, the advertisement posits these processes through an explicit claim of commensurability with the West. The advertisement takes pains to enumerate the various kinds of toys featured by type (“construction,” “traffic,” “military,” “English,” “mathematics,” “sport” and “handicrafts” are all represented), but its primary thrust is temporal, for in purchasing these toys, the copy implies, the consumer will be able to participate in both the new commodity-time of the colonial treaty port (by which seasonal change is linked with consumption) and contribute to the unfolding of a utopian future of strength, health, scientific knowledge, and enlightenment: The Chinese and Western New Years are the best times to give children toys. Our press has manufactured its own assorted toys, which are in accord with childhood psychology, based on educational principles, carefully crafted in bright colors, durable, interesting enough to hold their interest. All of the toys impart basic principles of knowledge, and as your children play, their minds will be enlightened, their bodies will grow strong and healthy. In the customs of both the East and the West, the holidays are the time for giving children toys, which will surely be welcomed.58

The anxious desire for national development that informs these claims resurfaces in a zawen piece on “Toys” that Lu Xun wrote under the pen name Mi Zizhang for the Shun Pao on the occasion of the Year of the Child in 1934.59 Lu Xun’s article, written in the wake of the SinoJapanese military conflict that leveled the Zhabei district of Shanghai in 1932, is a lament for the lack of locally produced toys that cannot help but locate toys within national boundaries, at the same time dryly deflating the pretensions of knee-jerk nationalism: The labels on the playthings hanging in the foreign-goods shop by the side of the road say that they are imported from France, but I saw the same

The Child as History in Republican China items in a Japanese toy store, only selling much more cheaply. Peddlers with carrying poles and street stalls sell rubber balloons printed with the characters “Entirely National Product” that grow bigger and bigger as you blow them up. This makes it perfectly clear that they must have been made here in China. But the balloons that the Japanese children play with have the same mark, so those must have been made by them too.60

What is more killing than lack of local product is a lack of imagination, a deficiency that is brought into sharp and humiliating focus primarily through contrast with foreign children: In the park, foreign children pile sand into little mounds, stick a couple of tree branches into it parallel to the ground, thus creating what is clearly an armored vehicle. But the pallid Chinese children, with gaunt faces, hide timidly behind their parents, watching with astonished eyes, dressed in their gentlemanly and effete long gowns.61

Who, we might ask, is watching whom here? While Lu Xun does go on to excoriate Chinese adults for their surfeit of toys—mistresses, opium, mah-jong, popular song—and their consequent disregard of children, his own gaze is clearly trained on Chinese children themselves, even as they are represented as meekly attempting to evade what Lu Xun characterizes elsewhere in the essay as the “supercilious and pitying” gaze of the foreigners.62 As Ann Anagnost has astutely commented in relation to yet another Lu Xun zawen, written for the Shun Pao Monthly in September 1933 and entitled “Shanghai Children,” this sort of writing (and that of Huang Yi and Zhou Zuoren as well) stages an “intense absorption with the act of looking at the child . . . in which the object of that gaze becomes the repository for a displaced desire, in this case, for national transcendence of China’s semicolonial status.”63 This kind of visual “fetishism” is also a signal characteristic of the Commercial Press advertisement published fifteen years earlier. As we have seen, the copy conflates toys (and commerce in toys) with national development. And like the Lu Xun essay, it also invites potential buyers to look closely at an image of a child at play (see Figure 11). The image by which the advertisement is crowned depicts a plump boy in swaddling clothes, enclosed within a triangular frame, foregrounded against a dark backdrop, the visual rhetoric of which serves to emphasize the singularity of the figure and of the attention meant to be devoted to it.

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Figure 11: “Educational Toys” from the Commercial Press. From Eastern Miscellany 15, no. 12 (December 1918)

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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.

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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.1 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.2 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.3 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.”4 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

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Figure 12: “Our Lovable Angels.” From Modern Sketch (Shidai manhua), July 1936.

layout, “and yet these calamity-stricken children are viewed with indifference by city folks!” The rhetoric of seeing employed here could hardly be more apposite or self-reflexive: urbanites view playthings as children (and children as playthings), while overlooking the children of poor rural “others” (see Figure 13).

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Figure 13: “Real-life manifestations of the ‘Treat your children as children, so that the children of others shall be similarly treated’ mentality.’ ” Modern Sketch, June 1937.

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These are dialectical images, “match shots” that (in a manner reminiscent of much Shanghai leftist cinema of the same era) rely on a rhetoric of mismatched contiguity—rural peripheries and the modern metropolis, utter destitution and leisured consumption, flesh-and-blood children with the lifeless things that represent them, needy subjects alongside desirable objects—to convey the topsy-turvy quality of a world gone awry. The power of these juxtapositions is heightened by the care with which they have been constructed. Each half of the montage is a visual analogue of the other: serried ranks of the children echo the columns of toys, miniatures are enlarged to mirror the scale of their models, so that the real and the represented enter into relations of unequal exchange. At the same time, the visual pleasure we take in the photographic display of these products (framed as if by a shop window display or a page in a mail-order catalog) is insistently undermined by the gaze of their counterparts in the frame below. These images disclose, in no uncertain terms, the secret of their own commodity fetishism. They are also products of a historically determinate and pervasive cultural logic in which children and commodities were consistently linked together as part of a larger narrative of national development in Republican China. Indeed, these photomontages may well represent a sophisticated send-up of the visual and narrative logic of a film produced just a few years earlier, Sun Yu’s Playthings.5 Often lauded as a classic of Shanghai cinema, Sun Yu’s film narrates China’s national salvation by way of a seemingly unlikely figure: toys. Released on National Day in 1933 and promoted in the popular press as a call to arms, this particular “toy story”— which focuses on a Chinese toy maker’s struggle for survival in the face of imperialist economic encroachment and Japanese military invasion— ingeniously plays on the metonymic relation between toys and the things they represent in order to treat two sociopolitical questions persistently and passionately debated in the popular culture and public discourse of the 1930s: the education of modernized Chinese children, and the preservation of domestic Chinese industry.6 The fixation on the figure of the child made manifest in the film is, as we have seen in Chapter 3, characteristic of Chinese literary and popular culture in the wake of the May Fourth movement. In the works of literary figures such as Lu Xun as much as in the cinema and the popular press, children become a compelling, if often problematic, figure for national salvation. Viewed as “blank slates” on which a new national history could be inscribed, the child was emblematic of a future in which China would

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be liberated from both the crushing burden of its own ostensibly “backward” traditions and the imperial domination of the “advanced” nations. The development of a strong and prosperous nation was increasingly linked to the imperative of implementing modern, Western child-rearing and educational practices. Much of this thinking about the centrality of the child, finally, was undergirded by an abiding faith in the Spencerian notion of the nation as an organic entity, locked in a Darwinian struggle for survival with other such entities.7 In order to survive, China must not only reproduce itself as a society through its progeny, but also “add value” to the raw materials of its biological inheritance by way of education, so as to create a product fit to compete in a global marketplace. This new discursive economy thrived alongside new kinds of cultural production (childhood studies, child-rearing handbooks, and children’s literature) and new industrial enterprises (textbooks, medicinal tonics) dedicated to serving the developmental needs (and developing the considerable market potential) of the modern child.8 Among these new industries, as Susan Fernsebner has insightfully argued, toys took theoretical pride of place. Inspired by the object-oriented developmental psychology of the German pioneer of the kindergarten movement, Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852), Republican-period educators had come to “invest the toy with a salvational power”—the power “of an object to create its subject.”9 Toys—conceptualized following Fröbel as “gifts” (enwu)—were seen as determining a child’s developmental trajectory, and as such needed to be chosen with care so as to effect a proper outcome. A major work, Toys and Education (Wanju yu jiaoyu), published by the Commercial Press just one month before the release of Playthings, attested that toys not only function to mold young minds, but also serve as indices of the developmental stage of nations and cultures.10 The author, Chen Jiyun, starts from what should by now be a familiar recapitulationist standpoint, asserting that the continuum from simple to complex toys parallels the development of mankind as a whole. In fact, Chen asserts, even “before the evolutionary maturation of humankind, [animals] had toys . . . [and] since the advent of history, toys have not only not been rendered evolutionarily obsolete, but have continued to evolve along with the evolution of humankind, and develop along with [its] development.”11 Almost inevitably, the logic of Chen’s arguments leads him to a discussion of the varying qualities of primitive peoples (including Ainu and Taiwanese aboriginals) and civilized toys. The book culmi-

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nates in a chapter discussing how the toys of nations like Germany, the United States, Japan, and China both reflect and perpetuate their various national characteristics, and suggests the ways in which different toys might be utilized to engineer a better child, and thus a more optimal national future.12 This twining together of child and nation was, of course, nothing new. But Chen’s formulation (one affirmed by much of the popular discourse in the period) seemed to hinge on a second conflation: between the production of Chinese children and the production of “national products” (guohuo). This peculiar connection between kids and commodities was by no means inevitable. Much of the impetus for the dissemination of this particular trope derived from the sustained efforts of merchants, student activists, politicians, and officials to promote the production and consumption of “national products” as a way to resist the economic hegemony of the colonial powers. The movement began in the wake of the 1911 revolution and reached its crescendo in the 1930s, actively promoting the cause of Chinese industry by way of organized boycotts, agitation for the imposition of tariffs on imported goods, the promulgation of sumptuary laws, the creation of a chain of “national products” retailers, the organization of “national products exhibitions,” and the dissemination of books, pamphlets, and articles throughout the popular press. In practice, these efforts could not stem the tide of foreign imports or bolster local industries disrupted by Japanese military aggression. Japanese exports of finished goods to China only increased throughout the 1930s, from a valuation of 108,253,000 yen in 1933 to 148,788,000 yen in 1935. Roughly 0.5 percent of this total trade was in toys, effectively swamping the Chinese market.13 Imports of Japanese toys, especially items fashioned of metal, celluloid, and rubber, also mushroomed by 70 percent in these same years, from 453,296 yen in 1933 to 647,073 yen in 1935.14 Where the national products movement did pay dividends was in the ideological realm. As Karl Gerth argues in his illuminating study of the movement, China Made, one of its most significant achievements was the creation of a new discourse of “product nationality,” and with it the very notion that the world of goods must be mapped in terms of national boundaries.15 This way of seeing commodities, interestingly, is simply not at issue in most classical economic theory. For Karl Marx, famously, the provenance of a particular commodity matters very little, if at all. What is important

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is its participation in a system of global exchange. The commodity, declares the Communist Manifesto, is “the heavy artillery with which [the bourgeoisie] batters down all Chinese walls,” remaking the world “after its own image,” and inaugurating an era of “universal inter-dependence of nations.”16 That the national products movement (which was largely bankrolled by China’s emergent national bourgeoisie, as Gerth makes clear) should endeavor to rebuild those “Chinese walls” is hardly surprising (and ought to point the way toward postcolonial reconsiderations of Marx’s characterization of the commodity form).17 Product nationality was also a double-edged sword, in that one’s very nationality or degree of patriotic commitment could also come to be defined in terms of one’s choice of products. At the height of the national products movement, the pages of publications like Shanghai’s leading daily, the Shun Pao, were regularly festooned with advertisements for “national products” as well as breathless reports about the progress of domestic industry. (These reports, it must be noted, still shared space with promotional banners for a panoply of foreign products, from Contax cameras, Cutex nail polish, and Quaker oats to Veramon headache tablets and Voigtlander photographic equipment.) An interesting parable about product nationality appeared on the “Free Talk” editorial pages of the Shun Pao the day before the release of Playthings, and bears the same title as the film.18 Written under the name Qingnong, it presents a slice of Shanghai life. Under “leaden grey skies,” the more or less penniless narrator, moved by the whirlwind of commercial activity on the streets of the International Settlement, buys the only thing he can afford at a street-side stall: a little toy dog. Yet as soon as he boards a tram to go home, he is met by the contemptuous stares of blue-clad workers, who expostulate, “A Japanese!” The narrator defends himself in Shanghai dialect, but even this gambit fails to establish his bona fides, because he is clutching what turns out to be a foreign-made toy: “Foreign goods? With a start I began to inspect the little molded rubber dog and much to my dismay, its leg was emblazoned in English with the words ‘MADE IN JAPAN’ and a logo. Before they could even reprimand me, my face began to burn, and my heart raced.”19 The immediacy of the narrator’s somatic reaction is symptomatic of the extent to which product nationality had become both a physical fact and an issue of burning concern in the wake of Japanese military aggression the preceding year. And yet the piece ends with a slight twist— the narrator is rewarded for his pains when the child to whom the toy

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dog is presented as a gift proves blissfully oblivious to issues of national provenance.20 Educators were also keenly aware of this sort of deficit of national consciousness on the part of their charges. The Commercial Press, among others, actively proselytized the cause of domestically made goods in language primers and other knowledge texts for children. One example of this promotional campaign, taken from a May 1932 textbook, rather unsubtly illustrates the way in which this promotional campaign was in the business of manufacturing not only demand for domestic goods but also domesticated subjects for whom consuming locally would be tantamount to being local (see Figure 14). In a series of rhymed couplets pitched to elementary school students, the lesson reads: “Toys are good, lots of toys/My toys are Chinese goods/Little whistle, made of bamboo/ Spotted horse, made of wood/Little white rabbit, made of clay/Little mouse, made of paper/I am Chinese/I buy Chinese goods.”21 The visual rhetoric of the layout only emphasizes this sense of a community of consumers. Above the text, each of these individual items is pictured, as if in a toy catalogue. Below, a group of older children display all of the toys on a large table, at the edges of which two even younger children (one of them clutching a doll and a toy horse) are being brought into the fold. The lesson also foregrounds an interesting (and at this time, newly emergent) collusion between pedagogical interests, economic policy, and commercial imperatives. For, as we saw in Chapter 3, the Commercial Press had long since been engaged in retailing its own line of domestically manufactured “educational toys.” The Press went on to publish a series of handbooks for children on how to craft their own toys from the sorts of readily available materials (paper, wood, bamboo, clay) mentioned in the lesson.22 Sun Yu’s Playthings emerged from the same cultural moment and confluence of concerns, but also asks its viewers to confront disturbing questions about the relation between children and commodities. What happens when the child itself becomes a fetishized emblem of product nationality, a representative of “Chineseness” whose relative lack of value in a global system of exchange becomes an index of China’s own colonial subordination? The photomontages with which I began attempt to take stock of just such a phenomenon by asking how a foreign-made doll could be worth as much (or could even be denominated in the same terms) as a Chinese girl. In yet another photomontage, this time from 1935, we find the editors

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Figure 14: “Toys Are Good.” Renaissance Mandarin Textbook (Fuxing guoyu jiaokeshu), 1932. Courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library.

of Modern Sketch relying directly on the notion of product-nationality to effect a savage satire of China’s “backwardness” (see Figure 15). This layout mocks the frequent public exhibits of domestic goods promoted by Chinese industrialists throughout the Republican period by arraying a series of captioned photographs under a banner reading, with a deliberately

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redundant flourish, “Real Genuine National Products Exhibition.” Among other distinctly “Chinese” goods on display are an opium pipe (“Our New Military Hardware”), old-fashioned perforated Chinese coins (“Our telescopes”), and a bird in a cage (“Our modern women”). At the bottom of the page is an even more grotesque image, which seems to figure the inseparability of the child and Chineseness in deliberately provocative terms: below a photograph of Siamese twins joined at the hip is a caption rehearsing what had recently become a standard invocation for China’s children: “Our ‘Masters of the Future’ ” (Women weilai de zhuren weng).23

Toy Stories Playthings represents a far less cynical, if perhaps equally unsettling, vision of China’s national future. And although the film situates itself squarely in a moment of national crisis (the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1932) and tells a circuitous and emotionally wrenching story that begins a decade earlier, its narrative nonetheless points insistently, even mercilessly, toward a better future, one that is figured, as I will discuss in a moment, in terms of one particular child: the son of the protagonist, Sister Ye (Ye Dasao). It is a film, in other words, that demands that we “read for the plot,” a film whose narrative developments must be understood within the context of a larger tale about the nature of economic and national development itself.24 But as we eventually learn, the “Master of the Future” around whom this national narrative pivots is purchased at much too high a price: the insanity of its protagonist, Sister Ye. This is because the conception of history that structures the story is profoundly shaped by evolutionary thinking, and particularly the social Darwinist notion of the struggle for survival. It posits a future for China that can be realized only through the “sacrifice” of its most vulnerable citizens to the iron law of natural selection. And yet in grounding its appeals for a better national future in precisely the people who are being eliminated by way of this process, the film ultimately seems to call into question, and perhaps even critique, the very logic that drives it forward. How, then, does the story unfold? Sister Ye (played by the foremost silent screen actress of the day, Ruan Lingyu) is a gifted toy maker whose boundless invention and feminine pluck sustain not only her own family but an entire village community, one in which play and production are fused in a joyful, seamless, and seemingly classless whole. Of

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Figure 15: “Real Genuine National Products Exhibition.” Modern Sketch, February 1935.

course, this rural idyll—deftly portrayed by Sun Yu in a series of characteristically charming cinematic vignettes—cannot last, as Sister Ye herself somberly warns us early on in the film: “Do you know? If our playthings aren’t as good as the foreign ones, we’re going to starve to death. Our playthings are handmade, slowly crafted, and people look down on

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Figure 15 (Continued)

folks like us . . . I hear these toys from abroad are machined in great big factories, quickly, and that rich children in the city all play with these battleships and airplanes.”25 Another intimation of the community’s eventual fate comes when Yuan Pu, a wealthy college graduate from Shanghai vacationing in the

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village, declares his love for Sister Ye and asks her to elope with him to Europe. Sister Ye, out of loyalty to her short, ugly, yet kindhearted husband, her two small children, and the livelihood of the community she single-handedly sustains, not only sacrifices this opportunity but also urges Yuan Pu to use his bourgeois privilege and book learning in service of a loftier goal than romantic love—finding a way “save us poor folks.” Yuan Pu accepts this charge by going abroad to study the toy industry in Germany and eventually bringing these new techniques home so as to establish a “Great China Toy Factory” that (in an irony elided by the film for reasons I will take up later) may well quash local crafts just as effectively as foreign imports will. What ensues is a merciless chain of events leading to the utter dissolution and disenchantment of Sister Ye’s family and community, one directly linked to the brutal contingencies of China’s semicolonial history. First the village is ravaged by warlord armies. Sister Ye then leads her displaced people to the slums of Shanghai, where they establish a new shantytown toymaking collective. Here, Sister Ye’s daughter, Zhu’er (played by Li Lili), asserts herself as an energetic heir to Sister Ye’s legacy of invention and begins to dream of mass-producing toy armies in order to instill a spirit of national resistance in China’s children. All too soon, however, the community is confronted by the Japanese attack on Shanghai of January 1932. Sister Ye, Zhu’er, and their close associates enlist in the war effort, with disastrous consequences. Zhu’er’s boyfriend dies on the front lines, Tang Langgan (literally “Mantis Jerky,” a toy vendor played by China’s premier comic actor of the period, Han Langen) is left crippled by an artillery shell, and Zhu’er herself is killed in an air raid by a Japanese bomber—metonymically linked by way of a match shot to the toy planes she herself will no longer be able to produce. Driven to despair and destitution, Sister Ye becomes an itinerant toy seller on the streets of Shanghai. In the film’s final sequence—surely one of the most powerful in the history of Chinese cinema—a shell-shocked Sister Ye, frightened by the firecrackers set off by revelers the following lunar New Year and convinced that “the enemy” has renewed its offensive, bursts into an almost unbearably visceral frenzy of madness and terror. Her hysterical shouts and warnings spread contagiously into a neighboring dance hall, and she is soon surrounded by panicked New Year’s revelers, bemused spectators, and curious passersby (including Langgan and the industrialist Yuan Pu, who attempts to drag her

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away). Her mental disorientation—we are shown a pair of subjective shots in which real armored columns and fighting men are juxtaposed with toy tanks and toy soldiers—builds to a kind of ecstasy of exhortation. Thrusting the paper bayonets of the paper soldiers invented by her daughter toward the audience, she angrily denounces the apathy of the crowd (and through the cinematic apparatus, that of contemporary theatergoers as well). Cars and rickshaws continue to rush by; some of the people in the crowd begin to applaud; and we are given a final close-up of Sister Ye’s face, contorted in madness, over which is superimposed “The END!”

A New Year’s Sacrifice Sister Ye’s impassioned address seems irresistibly to evoke an earlier text: Lu Xun’s “The Diary of a Madman.” As with Lu Xun’s seer—whose insight into the cannibalism that permeates Chinese society earns him the enmity of those who are either unwilling or too hopelessly implicated in this ongoing violence to really see it—Sister Ye’s hallucinations are meant to reveal the true horror of the battle that has just passed, and the war that will inevitably follow. Her nightmares have the clarity of waking life, and the waking life of the masses around her is merely a dream state. Interestingly, the advertising campaign that accompanied the release of the film echoed the narrative and ideological rhetoric of this final scene, addressing its mass audience directly and emphatically. On October 9, 1933, for instance, the entire front page of the Shun Pao was occupied by an advertisement for the film whose bold characters and emphatic exclamation points serve as an orthographic analogue to Sister Ye’s state of emergency26 (see Figure 16).

PLAYTHINGS TELLS YOU: JUST HOW CRUEL AND FEROCIOUS IMPERIALISM AND CIVIL WAR REALLY ARE! INSTRUCTS YOU: THAT ONLY THROUGH UNITY AND STRUGGLE

CAN WE HOPE TO LIVE AND SURVIVE!

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D E V E L O P M E N TA L F A I RY TA L E S IMPERIALISM IS STEPPING UP ITS ATTACKS, MERCILESS BRUTAL ACTS, SLAUGHTER, INVASION THREATEN OUR ENTIRE NATION! WAKE UP, FRIEND! NO MORE DREAMING! THE ENEMY ARTILLERY IS AIMING AT US RISE UP, FRIEND! GET UP YOUR COURAGE! RAISE YOUR SPIRITS!

PLAYTHINGS INSTRUCTS YOU: IF A GREAT NATION DOES NOT WISH TO BE EXTERMINATED THERE IS ONLY UNITY, RESISTANCE, STRUGGLE, SACRIFICE!

What, then, is the nature of the sacrifice demanded of the characters within the film? On one level, it is sacrifice of a rather traditional sort: dying on the field of battle for one’s country. This is a fate shared—and explicitly marked as sacrificial by the intertitles—by a number of the principal characters, including Zhu’er. There is, however, another crucial subplot in the film that I have refrained from detailing thus far, one that helps us see how this emphasis on sacrifice is integral to the developmental logic of the film. Interestingly enough, it is also a plot that involves—quite literally this time—the commodification of a child. Early on in the film, Sister Ye’s husband suffers a fatal heart attack in the village square. In the ensuing confusion, Sister Ye’s infant son is kidnapped, surreptitiously transported to Shanghai, and sold to a wealthy but childless woman in the city called Mrs. Chen, who is all too willing to believe the comforting but transparently fraudulent tale told by the trafficker—that the child is an orphan, and her purchase a work of merit. The child’s status as stolen goods—as a commodity forcibly expropriated from one social class to another—is brought home to us even more forcefully in a sequence set a decade later in Yuan Pu’s newly established Great China Toy Factory. The name of the factory is, in fact, a direct allusion to one of the first and most famous domestic manufacturers of toys in China, Jiang Junyan, who established the Great China

Figure 16: Full-page advertisement for Playthings, Shun Pao, October 9, 1933

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Factory (Da Zhonghua gongchang) in 1911 to make ping-pong balls and other celluloid toys. By 1931 Jiang’s factory was just one of some forty-three domestic toy companies in and around Shanghai, with a workforce of about 1,000 people. Many of these businesses were started by businessmen and technicians who, much like the fictional Yuan Pu, had learned their trade as students abroad.27 As if to instantiate the claim that the leftist cinema is a medium whose mission is to critically transgress the boundary between mass-mediated representation and social reality, our first view of the fictional Great China Toy Factory is filmed on location in the real factory, by way of a modernist montage that strives for the effect of actuality. We are brought onto the factory floor through a series of sustained medium and close-up shots portraying the mass production of various toys. These shots both parallel and powerfully contrast with earlier sequences in which we see an inspired Zhu’er invent, and proceed to shape, a number of ingenious and delightful playthings from clay, wood, straw plaiting, and other organic materials. In the factory, however, the romance of craft has given way to the allure of machine-age efficiency. We see close-ups of obliquely framed chimneys belching smoke, of spinning fan belts and chugging pistons. A worker pours, cools, and extrudes identical plastic figures from a die mold. In the very next shot, we see another worker sorting through a hopper full of the yet to be assembled torsos and disembodied heads of precisely the sort of “foreign dolls” we saw in the Modern Sketch photomontage with which the chapter began (see Figure 17). In the context of a film that plays repeatedly and self-consciously with the metonymic relation between toys and things (through contiguous shots of toy tanks and real tanks, toy planes and real planes, toy soldiers and real soldiers), it comes as a shock to realize in a subsequent shot that this striking and rather grotesque image is being focalized through the eyes of none other than Sister Ye’s abducted son. Now a grown boy dressed in an English schoolboy’s uniform (short pants, knee socks, Western blazer, and a tie), he and Mrs. Chen are taking a tour of the factory, led by none other than the mustachioed Yuan Pu, whose spotless white flannels and dandified engineer’s cap only emphasize his bourgeois status, in contrast to the coarse overalls of his workers. As the two adults look on, the boy obediently plays with the “educational toys” we’ve just seen being produced. What is being emphasized here is the transaction that has taken him from a family that makes toys to a family that can afford to consume them. This is what differentiates him from his long-lost

Figure 17: “A Domestic Toy-Manufacturing Plant” from a special issue on children in Meishu Shenghuo (Arts and life) 6 (September 1934).

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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.28 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.29 I have in mind what Marx calls the story of “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation.”30 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 expropriation of peasants from their fields, skilled craftspeople from their guilds, and their subsequent transformation into an “unprotected” urban proletariat.31 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

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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.32 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.33 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

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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?

5 A N A R ROW C AG E

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.1 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).2 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.3 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

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Figure 18: Carl Hagenbeck’s Circus in Shanghai. Shun Pao, October 10, 1933.

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.”4 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 is 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.”5

A Narrow Cage Which is why civilized peoples must adopt the “kingly way” in order to gain “trust”: “if the people lack trust, the kingdom cannot stand.”6 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.”7 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-naïf punditry is revealed as just another trivial “excitement,” a citation 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

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“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?8 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 Culture 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.9 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 célèbre 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

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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-à-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 naïve, 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.10 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.”11 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

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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 registers 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.12 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.”13 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

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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.14 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.15 This childhood incident is narrated as foreshadowing Eroshenko’s later entrance into a transnational circuit of radical intellectuals.16 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.17 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 colonial 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 1921. One could hardly, in short, have invented a figure more appealing to the political and literary sensibilities of May Fourth intellectuals.18 The

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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.19 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.20 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].”21 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 I’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].22

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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.”23 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 unnoticed 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 intellectuals most famously known for their allegiance to critical realism?24 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.25 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.”26 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

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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.27 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.28 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 Beijing, 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.29 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.30 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 is 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.31 It is this secular emphasis on story-

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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

Figure 19: Eroshenko at home with Zhou Zuoren, Beijing, April 1922. Reprinted from Eroshenko zenshu (Complete works of Eroshenko), vol. 3 (Tokyo: Misuzu shobo, 1959). Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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the emergence of self-consciously literary fairy tales, from the elegantly crafted tales of Hans Christian Andersen to the sophisticated stylization of Oscar Wilde?32 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.”33 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.”34 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 [minjian 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.35

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

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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 [Ailuoxianke], 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.36

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 naïf 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

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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.37 The story begins with Eroshenko lamenting his “desertlike” loneliness in Beijing and contrasting its deadening silence to the rich aural tapestry of the subtropical Burmese night.38 Hoping to fill the evening with pleasant sounds, Eroshenko raises a passel of polliwogs in Zhou Zuoren’s residential courtyard. 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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Figure 20: Eroshenko and Lu Xun. Reprinted from Eroshenko zenshu (Complete works of Eroshenko), vol. 3 (Tokyo: Misuzu shobo, 1959). Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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”).39 Eroshenko’s original tells the story of the drowning of a sickly chick who

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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 (apparently 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

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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 bodies 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 eavesdrop 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.

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D E V E L O P M E N TA L F A I RY TA L E S 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.40

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.41 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 narrator 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 unfortunate creature.42 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

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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.”43 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 madman 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 . . . tick tock . . . tick tock. . . .

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D E V E L O P M E N TA L F A I RY TA L E S “People will grow no smarter. There is no possibility of that. Tick tock. “Idiots rear idiots. The idiot will raise an even more idiotic idiot. Tick tock . . . tick tock. This is how the human race develops.”44

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.45 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.”46 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 Nüwa molds men from clay, only to watch them run amok.47 How, then, can

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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 naïvete 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.48 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.49 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.50 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” writing, 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.51 That network was itself a product

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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 arrangements by which the rebellious youth of the era felt themselves afflicted.52 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’! . . . I want to get out. And get out I must.”53 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 zoological 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 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.54

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.55 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.”56 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:

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D E V E L O P M E N TA L F A I RY TA L E S “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 fiery rage. “Slaves of humankind! Lowly slaves. You don’t want your freedom? You can’t part with your narrow cage? Inferior creatures.”57

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 “terrifying 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.58 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

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.59 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.60 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 naïve 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.”61 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 exceptionalism 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

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D E V E L O P M E N TA L F A I RY TA L E S 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.62

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 of slaves that sparkled mysteriously like rubies. He no longer had the courage to open his eyes.63

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 Vasilii 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?” 175

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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 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 ground, 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 fiery rage.

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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.

3 The tiger passed by the magnificent palace retreat of the Rajah.1 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 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. “I 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.

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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 “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. “I’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. I’ll take you to the broad and magnificent waters of the Ganges. There’s much cleaner water there for you. I’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

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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, I’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?”2 He trembled as he spoke.

Appendix “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 Deva3 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.

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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. “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 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 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 behind 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. “I’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.

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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 like . . .” 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 real after all . . .” 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. “O 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 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.

187

GLOSSARY OF SELECTED CHINESE AND JAPA NESE TERMS

Ailuoxianke Antusheng An Wang Ai ao

愛羅先珂 安徒生 安王愛 鼇

Badaowan baihua Baijia xing Bainian yijiao Baopi bei Beixin shuju Bencao gangmu Bing Xin Bing Zhi Bo Yaolian “bu shi chizi zhi xin” bu xiang ren

八道灣 白話 百家姓 百年一覺 報癖 狽 北新書局 本草綱目 冰心 秉志 柏耀廉 不失赤子之心 不像人

canren Chalisi Peilun Chenbao Chen Bochui Chen Zhen “Chibian”

殘忍 查理斯培侖 晨報 陳伯吹 陳楨 池邊

Daguanyuan Daliang Datong shu Da Zhonghua gongchang

大觀園 大良 大同書 大中華工場 189

190

Glossary Daocao ren dangdai Deng Xiaoping Didi lüxing di yi deng wenming guo dingxing qi Dongfang Wenming Dongfang zazhi Dongwuxue da cidian dongwuxue zheli dongwuyuan dutoujian Du Yaquan

稻草人 當代 鄧小平 地底旅行 第一等文明國 定形期 東方文明 東方雜誌 動物學大辭典 動物學哲理 動物園 獨頭繭 杜亞泉

Eguchi Kiyoshi enwu Erliang “Ertong de wenxue” Ertong shidi congshu Ertong shijie Ertong wenxue congshu

江口渙 恩物 二良 兒童的文學 兒童史地叢書 兒童世界 兒童文學叢書

fada fazhan fazhan de chengxu fazhan shi fazhan shuo fenmen bielei Feng Zikai

發達 發展 發展的程序 發展史 發展說 分門別類 豐子愷

gaizao huanjing Geyao yanjiu hui Geyao zhoukan gezhi Gezhi huibian gouxiong “Guduzhe” gushi lei Guangxue hui guohuo Guoli zhongyang daxue

改造環境 歌謠研究會 歌謠週刊 格致 格致彙編 狗熊 孤獨者 故事類 廣學會 國貨 國立中央大學

Haidi lüxing Han Langen Hanyu da cidian

海底旅行 韓蘭根 漢語大詞典

Glossary He Jiagan hei’an shijie Hong Xisheng Hu Rongrong Hu Shi Hu Xiansu Hu Yuzhi hua Hua Bizhen Huang Yi Huitou kan

何家幹 黑暗世界 紅溪生 胡蓉蓉 胡適 胡先驌 胡愈之 化 華必振 黃翼 回頭看

Inoue Tsutomu

井上進

Jia Baoyu jianshi wubi Jiang Junyan Jiangnan zhizao ju jiao jinbu jindai (Japanese: kindai) jinhua Jinhua she jingjie Jingwo xiansheng Juehui

賈寶玉 堅實無比 姜俊彥 江南製造局 蛟 進步 近代 進化 進化社 境界 鏡我先生 覺慧

kaihua (Japanese: kaika) Kaiming shudian “Kan bianxifa” kokutai “Kuangren riji” Kun

開化 開明書店 看變戲法 國體 狂人日記 鯤

lang langbei langbei xiangyi Lao Can youji Lao Shaonian Li Jinhui liming yundong Li Hongzhang Li Meng Li Shizhen Li Timotai

狼 狼狽 狼狽相依 老殘遊記 老少年 黎錦暉 黎明運動 李鴻章 李夢 李時珍 李提摩太

191

192

Glossary Li Yuying Liang Qichao Liangyou huabao Liang zhi zhengdou de lang lin long lu Lü Boyou Lu Jidong Lu Xun “Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi”

李煜瀛 梁啟超 良友畫報 兩隻爭鬥的狼 麟 龍 鹿 呂伯攸 盧藉東 魯迅 論小說與群治之關係

Ma Junwu maidu er huanzhu Mao Dun Mao Zedong Meiguo Weishi meipi minjian de tonghua mingming huangzu Mu Mutian

馬君武 買櫝而還珠 茅盾 毛澤東 美國威士 眉批 民間的童話 冥冥黃族 穆木天

nage guotu Nahan “Nahan zixu” Nakane Hiyoshi “ni dao yiwei dui de qi tamen ma?” Nüwa

那個國土 吶喊 吶喊自序 中根弘 你倒以為對得起他們麼

ouhua Ou Lushi

歐化 歐露世

Peng Putong shengwuxue

鵬 普通生物學

qimeng qipao qiqie Qian Xuantong Qianzi wen Qingnong

啟蒙 旗袍 悽切 錢玄同 千字文 青農

“Ren zhi lishi”

人之歷史

女媧

Glossary San Mao Sanzi jing Santo Kyoden Shan’er Shanhai jing Shangwu yinshuguan bianyi suo Shaonian congshu shaonian Zhongguo shehui xiaoshuo Shenfei shidai (Japanese: jidai) Shidai manhua “Shiguang laoren” “Shijie dongwuyuan” Shijie ertong wenxue congshu Shou shoushang de lang Shun Pao “Si huo”

三毛 三字經 山東京伝 珊兒 山海經 商務印書館編譯所

Taixu huanjing Tanemaku hito Tang Langgan Taose de yun tian tianyan Tianyan lun tianze wujing tiewu tonghua tongxin “Toukan” tuya qi

太虛幻境 種蒔く人 螳螂乾 桃色的雲 天 天演 天演論 天擇物競 鐵屋 童話 童心 偷看 塗鴉期

Wanguo Gongbao Wanju yu jiaoyu Wanshouyuan Wanyou wenku Wang Erde Wang Renlu Wang Yunwu

萬國公報 玩具與教育 萬獸園 萬有文庫 王爾德 王人路 王雲五

少年叢書 少年中國 社會小說 申飛 時代 時代漫畫 時光老人 世界動物園 世界兒童文學叢書 獸 受傷的狼 申報 死火

193

194

Glossary Wei Lianshu wenming wenming kaihua (Japanese: bunmei kaika) wenming jingjie wenming xi wenxue de tonghua “Women weilai de zhuren weng” wo ye guoyu meng meng le Wu Bohui Wu Jianren Wu Zhaoming wuci de yanyu wu shi

魏連殳 文明 文明開化

xixue “Xia de long” xiandai (Japanese: gendai) Xiandai ertong xiandai hua “Xiandai shi” Xiandai shuju xiandai xing Xiang Peiliang xiangzheng qi “Xiaoji de beiju” Xiao pengyou Xiao pengyou wenku xiaoshuo de huashen “Xiao wanyi” Xiao xuesheng Xiao xuesheng nianfen buchong duben Xiao xuesheng wenku xieshi qi Xin qingnian Xin shitou ji Xin xiaoshuo Xin Zhongguo weilai ji xiongguang

西學 狹的籠 現代 現代兒童 現代化 現代史 現代書局 現代性 向培良 象徵期 小雞的悲劇 小朋友 小朋友文庫 小說的化身 小玩意 小學生 小學生年份補充讀本

文明境界 文明戲 文學的童話 我們未來的主人翁 我也過於夢夢了 吳伯惠 吳趼人 吳兆名 無詞的言語 吾師

小學生文庫 寫實期 新青年 新石頭記 新小說 新中國未來記 兇光

Glossary Xiuxiang xiaoshuo Xu Dishan Xu Zhimo

繡像小說 許地山 徐志摩

“Ya de xiju” Yaquan zazhi Yan Gefan Yanagita Kunio yanhua Yecao yeman yeman zhi guo Ye Dasao Ye Shaojun “Yichuan yu huanjing” yi ertong shenghuo wei zhongxin yilei yi shidai you yi shidai de wenxue yizhi Yingguo Xiaolushi Youtong wenku “Yu de bei’ai” yu tiandi zhenggong Yuanmingyuan Yuan Pu Yuejie lüxing Yueyue xiaoshuo

鴨的喜劇 亞泉雜誌 嚴箇凡 柳田國男 演化 野草 野蠻 野蠻之國 葉大嫂 葉紹鈞 遺傳與環境 以兒童生活為中心

zawen Zaizao Tian Zhang Leping Zhang Tianyi Zhang Zhidong Zhao Jingshen Zhao Lantian Zhao Yuanren (Y. R. Chao) Zhejiang chao Zheng Zhenduo Zhongguo kexue she Zhonghua shuju

雜文 再造天 張樂平 張天翼 張之洞 趙景深 趙藍天 趙元任 浙江潮 鄭振鐸 中國科學社 中華書局

異類 一時代有一時代的文學 意志 英國蕭魯士 幼童文庫 魚的悲哀 與天地爭功 圓明園 袁璞 月界旅行 月月小說

195

196

Glossary Zhou Jianren Zhou Shuren Zhou Zuoren Zhuangzi Zhu’er Ziran kexue xiao congshu Ziye ziyou tan Zuixin guanhua shizi jiaokeshu Zuixin guowen jiaokeshu Zuozhuan

周健人 周樹人 周作人 莊子 珠兒 自然科學小叢書 子夜 自由談 最新官話識字教課書 最新國文教課書 左傳

NOTES

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

1. See Lu Xun 魯迅 [He Jiagan 何家幹], “Xiandai shi” 現代史 [Modern history], in Lu Xun quanji 魯迅全集 [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 周樹人 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 發展才是硬道理, as opposed to the official rendering, “Development is the absolute principle.” See Deng Xiaoping 鄧小平, “Zai Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shanghai dengdi de tanhua yaodian” 在武昌、深 圳、珠海、上海等地的谈话要点 [Excerpts from talks given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shanghai and other locales], in Deng Xiaoping wenxuan 鄧小平 文選 [Selected writings of Deng Xiaoping], vol. 3 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1994), 377. 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 蔣風 and Han Jin 韓進, Zhongguo ertong wenxue shi 中國兒童文學史 [History of children’s literature in China] (Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998). Mary Ann Farquhar’s Children’s 197

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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 嚴復, Tianyan lun 天演論 [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” 有生之物始於同終於異. 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, 1977), 112–113. 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” 瑣記 [Jottings], in the autobiographical collection Zhaohua xishi 朝花夕拾 [Dawn blossoms picked at dusk], in LXQJ 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: Harvard 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 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 Modern 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” 文學改良芻議 [Modest suggestions for literary reform] and Zhou Zuoren’s “Ren de wenxue” 人的文學. 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 趙家璧, ed., Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi 中國新文學大系 [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” 中國新文學的源 流, 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, Zhongguo xin wenxue de yuanliu 中國新文學的源流 [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 淘汰, 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. See LXQJ 2:195–197. 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

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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 Semi-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), 51–52. 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 shilüe 中國小說史略 [A brief history of Chinese fiction] in LXQJ, vol. 9, and A Ying 阿英 [Qian Xingcun 錢杏村], Wanqing xiaoshuo shi 晚清小說 史 [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 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 郝慶軍, Shixue yu zhengzhi: Lu Xun wanqi zawen yanjiu 1933–1936 詩學與政治：魯迅晚期雜文研究 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, 1900– 1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 25. See David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 26. On gender and modernity, see Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: 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).

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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 近代, and shidai 時代, both of which came to Chinese as compounds from the Japanese. By the 1910s and 1920s the adjectival and relational use of “new” (xin 新) and “modern” (modeng 摩登) 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 高明開 and Liu Zhengtan 劉正埮, Xiandai hanyu wailai ci yanjiu 現代漢語外來詞研 究 [Research on loanwards in modern Chinese] (Beijing: Wenzi gaige chubanshe, 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 Knowledge and Lexical China in Late Imperial China (Leiden: Brill, 2001); and Lydia H. Liu , Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated 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 qu 時代曲), while an avant-garde film magazine edited by modernist writer Liu Na’ou, Shidai Dianying 時代電影, 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 近代 is glossed as “modernists.” See also Evan Morgan, New New Terms (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1926), 143. The authoritative Hanyu da cidian 漢語大詞典[Dictionary of Chinese] (Beijing: Hanyu da cidian chubanshe, 1991) cites a 1921 essay by Lu Xun, “Wo zhi jielie guan” 我之節烈觀 [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 曾 樸 1904 novel of diplomatic and sexual intrigue, Flowers in a Sea of Sin 孽海花. Fada also appears with a good deal of frequency in Liang Qichao’s work. 35. See Hanyu da cidian 漢語大詞典, 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 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 naïve, 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 natural 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-à-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 游光, “Kan bianxifa” 看變戲法 [Watching magic shows], in Shun Pao, October 4, 1933. See also LXQJ 5:317–318. 49. See, for just one example of many, “Ertong nian yu funu guohuo nian zhi erchong zou” 兒童年與婦女國貨年之二重奏 [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.

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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” 兒童俱樂部 that encouraged parents to share photographs of exemplary children. 51. 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 Žižek has termed “ideological fantasy.” Žižek 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 Žižek, 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 Welträthsel, 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 5. Kang Youwei’s 康有為 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 serially in the first three numbers of his own journal Xin xiaoshuo 新小說 [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 夏曉虹, Jueshi yu zhuanshi—Liang Qichao de wenxue daolu 覺世與傳世﹣梁啟超的文學道路 [Awakening and transmission: Liang Qichao’s literary path] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1991), 53–57. 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 吳趼人全集 [Complete works of Wu Jianren], ed. Wei Shaochang 魏紹昌 and Hai Feng 海風 (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 Lukács 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 Lukács, 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

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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-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 11. Lu Xun 魯迅, “Nahan zixu” 吶喊自序 [Preface to The Outcry], in Lu Xun quanji 魯迅全集 [The complete works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1998) (hereafter LXQJ), 1:419. 12. Ibid. 13. To see the story in its original context, see Lu Xun, “Kuangren riji” 狂人 日記 [Diary of a madman], Xin qingnian 新青年 [La Jeunesse] 4, no. 5 (May 1918). The publication of this story marked Zhou Shuren’s 周樹人 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. Indeed, 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 新潮 [New tide], see LXQJ 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 汪暉, Fankang juewang: Lu Xun jiqi wenxue shijie 反抗絕望：魯迅及其文學世界 [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 鄒元寶, ed., Nicai zai Zhongguo 尼采在中國 [Nietzsche in China] (Shanghai: Sanlian shudian, 2000). 16. LXQJ 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 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 野草 [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. “I 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 disappeared 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. I’d be happy to take you along so that you’ll never freeze and you’ll always continue to burn.” “Oh! In that case, I’d burn out.” “I would feel regret should you burn out. I’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. “I 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 時代的巨輪) 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 LXQJ 2:194–195. 19. LXQJ 1:419.

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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. I 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), xxvi. 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” 抗美援朝知識叢書. See Ding Zeliang 丁則良, Li Timotai: Yige dianxing de wei diguo zhuyi fuwu de chuanjiao shi 李提摩太：一個典型的為帝 國主義服務的傳教士[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 美國威士, Huitou kan 回頭看 [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 30. See Richard, Forty-Five Years in China, 160. 31. Ibid., 158. 32. Ibid., 173. Richard also met on a number of occasions, and even presented policy recommendations to, the general and diplomat Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 (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 新石頭記 [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 Qing 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 魏紹昌, ed., Wu Jianren yanjiu ziliao 吳趼人研究資料 [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 Jinzhu黃錦珠 and Yuan Jin 袁進. 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), 124–143. 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

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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.” 51. See LXQJ 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” 祝中俄文字之交 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 時務報 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 林紓, 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 LXQJ 4:459. 53. Lu Xun, introduction to Journey to the Moon月界旅行辨言, LXQJ 10:151. 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 紅溪生 et al., Haidi lüxing 海底旅行 (Journey at the bottom of the sea), Xin Xiaoshuo 1, no. 2 (1902): 36. 56. Ibid., 23. 57. Ibid., 28–29. 58. 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 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., Haidi Lüxing, 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 lüxing, 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-à-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 lüxing, 36. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 28–29. The term used here for utopia, Fudi 福地, 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” 新石頭記, 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

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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 Jianren quanji 6:158. 72. Ibid., 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. 75. Wu Jianren 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 王國維 (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 quanji 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 薛毅 and Qian Liqun 錢理群, “ ‘Guduzhe’ xidu” 孤獨者細讀 [A close reading of “The Misanthrope”], Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan 7 (1994): 23–29. 2. See Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji魯迅全集 [The complete works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1998) (hereafter LXQJ), 2:98, 107. The

Notes to Pages 65–67 notion of the wolf’s howl as “inarticulate language” appears in a 1925 prose-poem from Wild Grass 野草 entitled “Tremors of Degradation” 退敗線的顫慄 with important intertextual relations with “The Misanthrope.” See LXQJ 2:205–206. 3. LXQJ 2:91. 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 Qing 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 仁) 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 論費厄潑賴應該緩行) 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 陳西瀅, and the prominent literary figure Lin Yutang 林語堂. 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.”

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Notes to Pages 67–68 See Huters, Bringing the World Home, 71. For Wang Hui’s reassessment of the ways in which Yan Fu’s work reinvents the intellectual resources of neoConfucianism, see “Yan Fu de sange shijie” 嚴復的三個世界 [The three worlds of Yan Fu], 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, no. 3 (2000). 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 翻譯新論集 [New essays on translation] (Hong Kong: The Commercial Press, 1991); Han Jianghong 韓江洪, Yan Fu huayu xitong yu jindai Zhongguo wenhua zhuanxing 嚴復 話語系統與近代中國文化轉型 [Yan Fu’s discursive system and China’s modern cultural turn] (Shanghai: Yiwen chubanshe, 2006). An earlier and influential assessment is He Lin 賀麟, “Yan Fu de fanyi” 嚴復的翻譯 [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 Yang Yang’s 楊揚 recent history provides an excellent introduction to the Press. See his Shangwu yinshuguan: Minjian chubanye de xingshuai商務印書館：民間 出版業的興衰 [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, Qunxue yiyan 群學肄言, was released by the Shanghai Wenming bianyi shuju 上海文明編譯書局. For a helpful study of its publication history, see Deng Xiquan 鄧希泉, “ ‘Qunxue yiyan’ de fabiao he chuban shijian ji yingwen yuanzhu bianxi” 群學肄言的發表和出版 時間及英文原著辯析 [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

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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 LXQJ 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 LXQJ 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), 5. 21. For an early (and now somewhat dated) account of the importance of natural history in Lu Xun’s work, see Liu Zaifu 劉再復, Jin Qiupeng 金秋鵬, and Wang Zichun 汪子春, eds., Lu Xun he ziran kexue 魯迅和自然科學 [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 馬君武文選 [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 新民叢報 [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 中華書局. 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 達爾文物種原始 [Darwin’s Origin of Species], and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex followed in 1930 in nine volumes. Ma Junwu’s translation of Haeckel’s Die Welträthsel was entitled Heke’er yiyuan zhexue 赫克爾一元哲學 [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 秉志 (1886–1965) and the noted cultural conservative Hu Xiansu 胡先驌 (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 張之傑, “Minguo shiyi nian dao shiba nian de shengwu xue” 民國十一年到十八年的生物學 [Biology in the Republican period from 1922 to 1939], Kexue yuekan 科學月刊 [Science monthly] 134 (February 1981). 25. See Chen Zhen, Putong shengwuxue 普通生物學 [Basic biology] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1924). The book was still in wide circulation as of 1935, when it was listed in Ping Xin 平心, ed., Shenghuo quanguo zongmu 生活全國 總目 [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 AngloFrench 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,

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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 李樞強, “Han Bolu jiqi dongwu biaoben shuzang” 韓伯祿及其動物標本收藏 [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 Modernism,” 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. I 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 ChiHui 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 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 F. 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 劉紀蕙, “Governing the ‘Psyche’ and the Biologized Subject: The Case of Du Yaquan and Dongfang Magazine, 1911–1923” ┌心的治理 ┘ 與生理化倫理主體﹣以【東方雜誌】杜亞泉之論述為例, Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiu jikan 中國文哲研究集刊, 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 施崇恩, ed., Huitu shizi shizai yi 繪圖識字實在易 [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 彪蒙 書室, 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 蔡元培, Shou Xiaotian 壽孝天, and Shou Qianlu 壽潛盧, eds., Zuixin guanhua shizi jiaokeshu 最新官話識字教課書 [New Mandarin reading primer] (Shanghai: Huiwen xueshe, Guangxu 32 [1906]), vol. 2, lesson 46. 37. Ibid., vol. 5, lesson 155. 38. Du Yaquan 杜亞泉 et al., eds., Dongwuxue da cidian 動物學大辭典 [Dictionary of zoology] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1922), 1043. 39. Li Yuying (also known by his style, Shizeng 石曾), eldest son of the prominent late Qing official Li Hongzao 李鴻藻 (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.

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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 陸謨克學院 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 楊晉毫, ed., Two Fighting Wolves 兩隻爭鬥的狼 (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936). 43. See Guo Chunyuan 郭春園, ed., Dongwuyuan 動物園 [The Zoo], 4 vols. (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936). 44. See Wang Renlu 王人路, ed., Shou 獸 [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” 新事物, and a volume on “Building Homes” 造房子. 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 兒童畫報 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” 驕傲的狼 [The conceited wolf], Ertong huabao 29 (December 1923): 12. 46. See Ye Shaojun 葉紹鈞, Daocao ren 稻草人 [The scarecrow] (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1933).

Notes to Pages 81–87 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 伯攸, “Jiaohua de huida” 狡猾的回答 [A crafty answer], Xiao pengyou 130 (1924): 4. 53. See Ertong shijie 兒童世界 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” 鋼琴第一課 (The first piano lesson), Ertong shijie 10, no. 12 (June 21, 1924).

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Notes to Pages 87–92 58. See Ertong shijie 6, no. 11 (June 1923). 59. LXQJ 2:90. 60. Ibid., 106. 61. See Xiang Peiliang 向培良, “Lun Guduzhe” 論【孤獨者】 [On “The Misanthrope”], Kuangbiao 狂飆 5 (November 17, 1926). Reprinted in Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan wenxue yanjiusuo Lu Xun yanjiu shi 中國社會科學院文 學研究所魯迅研究室, eds., Lu Xun yanjiu xueshu lunzhu ziliao huibian 魯迅研 究學術論著資料彙編 [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 jiqi wenxue shijie 反抗絕望：魯迅及其文學世界 [Resisting despair: Lu Xun and his literary world], also emphasizes the roots of Wei Lianshu’s dilemma in his status as a “transitional figure” 中間物. See Wang Hui, Fankang juewang (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001), 120–121. 62. LXQJ 2:86. 63. For a particularly egregious example of this kind of reading of the story as roman à clef, see Zou Fanping 鄒范平, “ ‘Wo shengli le’: Guduzhe fenxi” 我勝 利了：【孤獨者】分析 [“I have won”: An analysis of “The Misanthrope”], in Xin faxian de Lu Xun: Du ji ben Lu Xun zhuzuo de zhaji 新發現的魯迅：讀幾本魯 迅著作的札記 [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 魯迅小說裡的人物 [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 范愛農. 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 朝花夕拾 [Dawn blossoms gathered at dusk], in LXQJ 2:310–320. 65. Zhou Jianren’s 周健人 published work on zoology includes a standard textbook, Dongwuxue 動物學 [Zoology], originally published as a two-volume set by Kaiming shudian 開明書店, 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 洞卡斯忒, Yichuan lun 遺傳論 [On heredity], trans. Zhou Jianren (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1926). 67. See Zhou Jianren, “Da’erwen yihou de jinhua sixiang” 達爾文以後的進化 思想 [Evolutionary thought after Darwin], Dongfang zazhi 18, no. 23 (December 10, 1921): 43.

Notes to Pages 92–103 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” 遺傳與環境 [Inheritance and environment], Dongfang zazhi 20, no. 4 (February 25, 1923): 82. 70. Ibid., 84, 85. 71. LXQJ 2:88. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 95. 74. Ibid., 96. 75. Ibid., 98. 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. 77. LXQJ 2:107. 78. Ibid., 108.

3. The Child as History in Republican China 1. Huang Yi, Ertong huihua zhi xinli 兒童繪畫之心理 [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 兒童心理學 [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 Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255. See also Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 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

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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). I am 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 楊揚, Shangwu yinshuguan: Minjian chubanye de xingshuai商務印書館：民間出版業的興衰 [The Commercial Press and the rise and fall of private publishing] (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 2000). 11. See Yan Fu, Tianyan lun 天演論 [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, 1983). 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. 15. Ibid., 38. 16. This notion, as well as the genealogical deconstruction of Confucian values 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), 55–56. 17. Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, 41. 18. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 109–112 19. Jiang Feng, Lu Xun lun ertong jiaoyu he ertong wenxue 魯迅論兒童教育 和兒童文學 [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. Ibid., 16. 24. See Lu Xun, “Women xianzai zenyang zuo fuqin” 我們現在怎樣做父親 [How are we to be fathers now?], in Lu Xun quanji 魯迅全集 [The complete works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1998) (hereafter LXQJ), 5:117. Originally published in Xin qingnian [La jeunesse] 6, no. 6 (January 1919): 555–557. 25. Shen Jianshi 沉兼士, “Ertong gongyu” 兒童公育 [Communal child-rearing], Xin qingnian 6, no. 6 (1919): 635. For a brief resumé of the discourse on communal child-rearing in China, see Xu Fengshuang 許風霜, “Jindai Zhongguo ‘ertong gongyu’ sixiang de fazhan yu yingxiang” 近代中國兒童公育思想的發展育 影響 [The development and influence of thought on communal child-rearing in modern China], You’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 Ariès, 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” 盧梭和胃口 [Rousseau and appetite]. See LXQJ, 3:552–557. 30. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 414–415.

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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, 1990). 32. See, most prominently, Nicholas Orme’s magisterial history, Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 33. Zhou Zuoren, “Ertong de wenxue” 兒童的文學 [A children’s literature], Xin qingnian 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 兒童學概論 [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 凌冰, Ertong xue gailun 兒童學概論 [On the study of the child] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1921), 8–9. 36. Bi Yun 碧雲, “Ertong duwu wenti de shangque” 兒童讀物的商榷 [A discussion of the problem of children’s reading materials], Dongfang zazhi 32, no. 13 (1935): 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), vii–viii. 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 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 studies.” 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, 1893– 1945 (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 周作人代表作 [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). 51. Vitale, Pekinese Rhymes, ix–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 陳伯吹, “Muge shengsheng yixian qian” 牧歌聲聲一線牽 [Led by the strains of the shepherd’s song], in Wo yu Kaiming, 1926–1985 我與開明 [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 市薪, “Tantan ertong zazhi” 談談兒童雜誌 [Discussing children’s magazines], Kaiming Zhongxuesheng 1, no. 8 (1930): 443–445. Shi Xin lists

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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” 玩具 [Toys], Shun Pao, June 14, 1934. See also LXQJ 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 小玩意 [Playthings], starring Ruan Lingyu, as discussed in Chapter 4. 60. Lu Xun, “Wanju,” 496. 61. Ibid., 496. 62. Ibid., 497. 63. For Lu Xun’s “Shanghai Children” 上海兒童, see LXQJ 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 邵洵美, which also included Modern Cinema [Shidai dianying 時代電影] and Modern Pictorial [Shidai huabao 時代畫報]. 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 章克標, “Haishang caizi gao chuban—ji Shao Xunmei” 海上才子搞出版﹣記邵洵美 [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 安琪兒] and ran in a special issue of the journal devoted to “social problems” [shehui wenti zhuan hao 社會問題專號]. See An Qi’er 安琪兒, “Women ke’ai de xiao tianshi” 我們可愛的小天使 [Our lovable little angels], Shidai manhua [Modern sketch] 3, no. 28 (July 1936). 3. The layout is credited to “Ning xin’er” 寍馨兒 [Darling]. See Ningxin’er, “ ‘You wo you yiji ren zhi you’ de xinli jiqi shishi biaoxian” 幼我幼以及人之幼

Notes to Pages 126–131 的心理及其實事表現 [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: 老吾老以及人之老，幼吾幼以及 人之幼，天下可運於掌 [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 陳播, ed., Zhongguo zuoyi dianying yundong 中國左翼電影運動 [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, 1909– 1933,” 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 Herbert Spencer [Sibinsai 斯賓賽], Qunxue yiyan 群學肄言 [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 Fröbel’s work, see Friedrich Froebel [Fröbel], The Education of Man (New York: Lovell, 1886). 10. See Chen Jiyun 陳濟芸, Wanju yu jiaoyu 玩具與教育 [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 日本外國貿易年表 [Annual return of foreign trade of Japan] (Tokyo: Department of Finance, 1934–1935). 14. See ibid. (1934), 47; (1935), 61.

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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 青農, “Xiao Wanyi” 小玩意 [Plaything], Shun Pao, October 9, 1933, 17. 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 達伍, “Shuo shangpin zhi lei” 說商品之類 [On kinds of commodities], Shun Pao, April 5, 1933, 17. 21. See Shen Baiying 沈百英, ed., Fuxing guoyu jiaoke shu: Chuxiao diyi ce 復興國語教課書：初小第一冊 [Renaissance mandarin textbook: Elementary level, vol. 1] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1932), 49. 22. See Zhou Jishi 周吉士, ed., Wode wanju 我的玩具 [My toys] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1935), and Xu Jingyan 許敬言, ed., Youqu de wanju 有趣的 玩具 [Fun toys] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936). 23. Yiliu zhai zhuren 易流齋主人 [Master of the Easy Flow Studio] is listed as the “instigator” of the layout. See “Zhenzheng daodi guohuo zhanlan hui” 真正道地國貨展覽會 [Real Genuine National Products Exhibition], Shidai manhua [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 郭義泉, ed., Wanju zhizuo fa 玩具製作法 [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 徐文遠, Xiao pengyou wanju 小朋友玩具 [Children’s toys] (Shanghai: Beixin

Notes to Pages 139–145 shuju, 1932). See also Pan Danming 潘淡明, ed., Wanju xiao gongchang 玩具小 工場 [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 科學畫報編輯部 [Editorial Department of Science Pictorial], ed., Wanju zhizao 玩具製造 [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 qingshaonian yanjiu zhongxin 中國青少年研究中心, ed., Bainian Zhongguo ertong 百年中國兒童 [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 孫瑜, Yinhai fanzhou: Huiyi wode yisheng 銀海泛舟: 回憶我 的一生 [A skiff floating on a silver sea: Memoirs of my life] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi 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). 31. Ibid., 873, 875, 876. 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 童子軍, 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 中國童子軍協會 [National Committee of Chinese Boy Scouts], ed., Tongzi jun chubu 童子軍初步 [First steps in scouting] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1918). 33. For an explanation of the meaning and protocol of this salute, see Cheng Jizhang 程季杖, ed., Tongzi jun zuzhi fa 童子軍組織法 [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”

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Notes to Page 147 (zhi ren yong 智仁勇). By the early 1930s scouting had been institutionalized with the full support and active collaboration of the Nationalist KMT government. Liangyou 良友畫報 [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” 全國童子軍檢閱 [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 舒少南 of three bugle-wielding scouts, captioned with bold characters: “Calls for Resistance.” See “Dikang de husheng” 抵抗的呼 聲, 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 葉永蓁, “Guan Haijingbo maxituan conggan” 觀海京伯 馬戲團叢感 [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 3. See Lu Xun 魯迅, “Yeshou xunlian fa” 野獸訓練法 [How to train wild animals], in Lu Xun quanji 魯迅全集 [Complete works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1998) (hereafter LXQJ), 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 余銘 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 公孫丑 chapter of the Mencius 孟子. For complete annotations, see LXQJ 5:366. 6. The reference is to the “Yanyuan” 顏淵 chapter of the Confucian Analects. 7. The reference here is to the “Quli” 曲禮 chapter of the Liji 禮記 [Record of ritual]. 8. Interestingly, Hagenbeck’s menagerie, in which animals were often trained to act like humans (with chimpanzees drinking tea from fine china cups, for instance) 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” 狹的籠 [A narrow cage], trans. Lu Xun, Xin qingnian 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 エロシェンコ全集 [Complete works of Eroshenko], ed. Takasugi Ichiro 高杉一郎 (Tokyo: Misuzu

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Notes to Pages 151–153 shobo みすず書房, 1959). See also Fujii Shozo 藤井省三, Eroshenko no toshi monogatari: 1920-nendai Tokyo, Shanhai, Pekinエロシェンコの都市物語: 1920年代東京·上海·北京 [Eroshenko’s urban story: Tokyo, Shanghai, and Peking in the 1920s] (Tokyo: Misuzu shobo, 1989). In Chinese, one of the first accounts of Eroshenko’s relationship with Lu Xun was penned by Ge Baoquan 戈寶權, “Lu Xun yu Ailuoxianke” 魯迅與愛羅先珂 [Lu Xun and Eroshenko], Guangming ribao, 18 October, 1961, 3. 11. See Lu Xun, “Zayi” 雜憶 [Remembrances], in LXQJ, 1:223–224. A volume containing nine of Lu Xun’s translations of Eroshenko’s fairy tales was published in September 1922. The collection is rounded out by three pieces translated by Hu Yuzhi and Wang Fuquan 汪馥泉 (1899–1959). See Vasilii Eroshenko, Ailuoxianke tonghua ji 愛羅先珂童話集 [The fairy tales of Eroshenko] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1922). Lu Xun’s translation of PeachColored Clouds was released as a monograph in 1923 in Beijing by Xinchao she 新潮社, reprinted in 1926 by Beixin 北新書局, and published in yet another edition in 1934 by the Shenghuo shudian 生活書店 in Shanghai. A second collection of Eroshenko’s fairy tales, Xingfu de chuan 幸福的船 [The happy boat], edited by Ba Jin 巴金, was published in March 1931 by Kaiming shudian 開明書店. The Commercial Press, finally, released a collection of translations entitled Shijie de huozai 世界的火災 [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” 我底學校 生活底一片段 [An episode from my school life], trans. Hu Yuzhi 胡愈之, Chenbao fukan, November 21, 1921. Zhou Zuoren also offered an account of Eroshenko’s life in an article titled “Ailuoxianke jun de shiming” 愛羅先珂君的失明 [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 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, Ganbatte: 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 夜明 け前の歌 [Song before midnight] (Tokyo: Sobunkaku, 1922), and Saigo no tameiki 最後の溜息 [The last sigh] (Tokyo: Sobunkaku, 1922). 18. The pages of Xin qingnian [La Jeunesse], for instance, feature numerous articles and exchanges on Esperanto in these years. See Qian Xuantong 錢玄同, “Esperanto,” Xin qingnian 4, no. 2 (1918): 173–177, and Sun Guozhang 孫國 璋 et al., “Lun Esperanto” 論 Esperanto [On Esperanto], Xin Qingnian 4, no. 4 (1918): 357–366. A Chinese journal devoted to the language and its acquisition, La Verdo Luma (Luguang 綠光), 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” 介紹盲詩人愛羅先珂 [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 jiqita 枯葉雜記及其它 [Sketches of a withered leaf] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1923). 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.

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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 愛羅君 (probably from the Japanese Ero-kun) or “E君” (Mr. E or E-kun). See, for instance, Zhou Zuoren, “Zai song Ailuoxianke jun” 再送愛羅先珂君 [Seeing off Eroshenko once again], Chenbao fukan, April 21, 1923. 22. Lu Xun, “Xu” 序 [Preface], in Vasilii Eroshenko, Ailuoxianke tonghua ji 愛羅先珂童話集 [Collected fairy tales of Eroshenko] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1922). Reprinted in the 1948 edition of LXQJ 12:290. 23. See LXQJ 1:415. 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 趙景深, Tonghua gaiyao 童話概要 [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

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” 童話與神異的故事 [The fairy tale and the fantastic story], in Hu Yuzhi wenji 胡愈之文集 [Collected writings of Hu Yuzhi] (Beijing: Sanlian, 1996), 217. 29. Zhao Jingshen 趙景深 went on to publish two influential volumes of criticism on the fairy tale form in 1927. See Zhao Jingshen, Tonghua gaiyao 童話概 要 [Introduction to the fairy tale] (Shanghai: Beixin, 1927) and Tonghua lunji 童 話論集 [Collected essays on the fairy tale] (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1927). For his memoirs of the period, see Zhao Jingshen, Wo yu wentan 我與文壇 [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” 童話的討論 [A discussion of fairy tales] and unfolds over the course of four installments. See Chenbao fukan晨報副刊, January 25, February 12, March 29, and April 9, 1922. 31. See Zhou Zuoren and Zhao Jingshen, “Tonghua de taolun” 童話的討論 [A discussion of fairy tales], Chenbao fukan, January 25, 1922. 32. Zhou Zuoren addresses this question in his short essay “Wang Erde tonghua” 王爾德童話 [Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales], in Ziji de yuandi 自己的園地 [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 中華小說界. By 1918, Chunghwa Books had published a collection of six of his stories in translation. 33. See “Tonghua de taolun” 童話的討論 [A discussion of fairy tales], Chenbao fukan, January 25, 1922. 34. See “Tonghua de taolun san” 童話的討論三 [A discussion of fairy tales, part three], Chenbao fukan, March 29, 1922. 35. See Wang Erde 王爾德 [Oscar Wilde], Wang Erde tonghua 王爾德童話 [Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales), trans. Mu Mutian 穆木天 (Shanghai: Taidong, 1922). See Zhou Zuoren, “Wang Erde tonghua” 王爾德童話 [Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales],

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Notes to Pages 159–166 in Ziji de yuandi 自己的園地 [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 兒童故事研 究 [Research on children’s stories], for instance, constitutes itself around a story whereby the “naturally occurring” myths (shenhua 神話) of primitive peoples develop over time into fairy tales (tonghua 童話), 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 兒童故事研究 (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 Znamia, July 1958, 212– 216. See LXQJ 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” 時光老人 [Old Man Time], Chenbao fukan, December 1, 1922. This is a special edition of the supplement celebrating its fourth year of publication. 39. See LXQJ 1:557. 40. LXQJ (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 小約翰 in 1926. For Lu Xun’s preface to his translation, see LXQJ 14:5–14. 43. LXQJ (1948), 12:417. 44. See Vasilii Eroshenko, “Shiguang laoren” 時光老人 [Old Man Time], Chenbao fukan, December 1, 1922. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. See Lu Xun, “Buzhou shan” 不周山 [Mt. Buzhou], Chenbao fukan, December 1, 1922. The piece was later revised and renamed “Butian” 補天 [Mend-

Notes to Pages 167–168 ing heaven] for inclusion as the first story in his collection Gushi xinbian 故事 新編 [Old tales retold]. See LXQJ 2:345–356. The scenario of Lu Xun’s revision of the Nüwa 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” 造人術 [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 伊 as a third-person pronoun designating “she,” instead of the now-standard ta 她. 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 信) was in fact characteristic of Lu Xun’s modus operandi as a translator. See Zhao Jingshen, “Lu Xun jianying” 鲁迅剪影 [Silhouette of Lu Xun], in Wo yu wentan 我 與文壇 [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 齊天授, “Du Ailuoxianke de tonghua” 讀愛羅先珂的童話 [Reading Eroshenko’s fairy tales], Chenbao fukan, December 14 and 15, 1922. 53. Ba Jin 巴金, Jia 家 [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 recounts 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 readers in a note at the end of the piece that he has been assured that Eroshenko

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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” 序 [Preface], in Vasilii Eroshenko, Xingfu de chuan 幸福的船 [The happy boat] (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1931), i–vii. 54. See Eroshenko, “Xia de long,” 517–518. The original Japanese version, entitled “Semai ori” せまい 檻, can be found in Eroshenko, Eroshenko zenshu, ed. Takasugi Ichiro 高杉一郎, 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 “I 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” 愛羅先珂君的失明 [Eroshenko’s blindness], Chenbao fukan, January 17, 1923. 56. Eroshenko, “Xia de long,” 518, 519. 57. Ibid., 520. 58. Ibid., 523. 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 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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AC KNOW LEDG MENTS

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. I’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 Anderson, Benedict, 29 Anderson, Marston, 199n20 Animal(s): in children’s magazines, 81, 82–83, 83f, 84f, 85, 86f, 87f, 88f, 89; imagery in children’s literature, 81; and child kinship in pedagogical literature, 81–82, 221n48; children’s magazines, childhood development and domestic, 85, 86f, 87f, 88f, 89, 221n56; kinship between man and, 85, 221n54; childhood development, animal imagery and, 221n47. See also Beast(s); Wolf Animal(s) becoming human, 160, 172; as allegory, 150, 233n8; Carl Hagenbeck Circus, humans becoming animals and, 150, 233n8 Animal training, 233n4; colonialism and, 147–150; Lu Xun on, 147–150 Ao (mythological sea serpent), 74, 75f Ariès, Philippe, 111–112 Authorship crisis, China, evolutionary biology and, 10 Ba Jin, 168, 239n53 Beast(s): evolutionary theory’s nineteenth-century scandal of boundary dissolving between man and, 5; in “The Misanthrope,” 64, 89, 90, 91; pedagogical literature and,

65; in children’s magazines, 81, 82–83, 83f, 84f, 85, 86f, 87f, 88f, 89; in iron houses, 82. See also Animal(s); Child and beast; Wolf “Beasts in houses,” 80, 81; zoos and, 81–83, 83f, 85; in children’s magazines, 82, 85; in children’s magazines and evolutionary narratives, 82 Bellamy, Edward: Looking Backward of, 31, 38, 39–41, 43–47, 205n5, 208n29; “new novel” and, 39; evolutionary adventure genre and, 39–40; evolutionary thinking, historical change and, 39–40, 47; utopian fiction and, 39–40, 44–47. See also Looking Backward (Bellamy) Benjamin, Walter, 103 Bing Zhi, 71, 72 Biology: China and academic institutionalization of, 71–72, 217n27. See also Evolutionary biology Biophilia, 81, 221n47 Book of Great Unity, The (Kang Youwei), 31, 205n5 Boy Scout(s): in China, 145, 231nn32–33; salute, 145, 231n33 “Business of enlightenment,” 224n10; textbooks and, 104; children’s market and, 119; Chinese publishing houses and, 119; May Fourth movement and, 119 245

246

Index

Cao Xueqin: The Story of the Stone and, 17–18, 30–31, 51–53, 57, 61–62; Dream of the Red Chamber of, 18, 30, 53 Capitalist economies: Marx on, 144; Playthings and, 144 Capitalist modernity: Darwin and, 6; Qing empire and, 6 Carl Hagenbeck Circus, 233n4; Shanghai arrival of, 147; Shun Pao advertisement for, 147, 148f, 232n1; colonialism and, 147–150, 232n1; Lu Xun on, 147–150; Shun Pao writings about, 147–150, 232n2; humanizing animals, animalizing man in, 150, 233n8 Centuries of Childhood (Ariès), 111–112 Chen Jiyun, 130–131 Child/children: ascent into adulthood as ape-to-man evolution recapitulation, 5; as emblem of Chinese development, 5, 23; as emblem of Chinese nation, 5, 203nn49–50; modern China’s cultural history of, 5; in modern Chinese literature development, 5, 22–27; pedagogical literature and, 5, 6, 65, 74, 79, 80; Lu Xun and, 22–24, 109–111, 122–123, 225n29; Zhou Zuoren and, 23, 24, 112–118, 120, 227n45; China’s publishing industry and, 24, 104, 204n51; as domestic product, 25–26; in “The Misanthrope,” 64–65, 89–90; knowledge texts and, 74; and animal kinship in pedagogical literature, 81–82, 221n48; Republican literature and, 103–104; Republican Chinese culture and, 104; “Diary of a Madman” and, 109–111, 166; cultural transmission, ”Diary of a Madman” and, 110–111; May Fourth movement and, 112; modern Chinese culture and, 112; fairy tales and, 113–114, 151, 156, 158, 159, 236n28, 238n36; songs of, 118; child as history in Republican China and

consuming, 119–121; playthings as, 127; China’s national future and, 129–130; Ling Bing on, 226n35, 227n44. See also Figure of the child Child and beast: as antinomies of national development, 5; in modern Chinese culture, 5; modern Chinese literature development and, 22, 24–27; in Lu Xun’s fiction, 22–23, 25, 26–27; China’s publishing industry and, 24; print culture and, 65; childhood development, inheritance and equation of, 81, 89; in children’s magazines, 83f, 84f, 85, 86f, 87f, 88f, 89 Child as history in Republican China: children’s drawings and, 99–103; discourse on development, 99–105; childhood development and, 103, 223n7; childhood and, 111–117; folklore studies and, 117–119; consuming children and, 119–121; toys and, 121–125 Childhood: Ariès and discovery of, 111–112; child as history in Republican China and, 111–117; Republican Chinese developmental history and, 111–117 Childhood development: China’s publishing industry and, 24, 25; national development and, 80, 116; pedagogical literature and, 80; childbeast equation, inheritance and, 81, 89; children’s magazines, domestic animals and, 85, 86f, 87f, 88f, 89, 221n56; children’s drawings and, 99, 101–102, 103, 223n4; Huang Yi and, 99, 101–102, 103, 116, 117, 223n4, 223n7; child as history in Republican China and, 103, 223n7; Republican Chinese developmental history and, 103, 223n7; Zhou Zuoren and, 113, 114–115, 116–117, 120, 227n45; fairy tales and, 113–114, 151, 156, 158, 159, 236n28, 238n36; Zhou Zuoren’s pedagogical program for

Index

children’s literature and, 116–117, 120, 121, 227n45; children’s market and, 120–121, 130; toys and, 121–122, 130–131; toys, evolutionary thinking and, 130; modern Chinese children’s literature, Chinese development and, 150–151; animals and animal imagery in, 221n47. See also Children’s education Childhood of Fiction, The (MacCulloch), 155, 156 Children as commodities: children’s images, toys’ worth and, 126, 127f, 128f, 129, 228nn2–3; Modern Sketch photomontages and, 126, 127f, 128f, 129, 133, 228n2, 229n4; national development and, 129; in Republican Chinese developmental history, 129; national products and, 131, 133; Playthings and, 133, 140. See also Toy(s) Children’s Army, 23, 203n49 Children’s drawings: childhood development and, 99, 101–102, 103, 223n4; Republican Chinese material culture and, 99, 100f, 101f, 102–103; child as history in Republican China and, 99–103; Huang Yi and, 99–103, 116 Children’s education: toys and, 129, 130–131, 229n6; fairy tales and, 156, 158, 236n28. See also Childhood development Children’s literature: modern Chinese literature as form of, 6; Lu Xun and, 12, 24, 109; burgeoning market for, 80; animal imagery in, 81; fairy tales and, 113–114, 151, 236n28; Lang and, 114–115; Zhou Zuoren, childhood development, evolutionary thinking and, 114–115; Zhou Zuoren’s pedagogical program for childhood development and, 116–117, 120, 121, 227n45; by children, folklore studies and new national vernacular, 117–119; Chinese publishing houses and,

119–121; Commercial Press and, 120–121; Chinese intellectuals and, 150–151. See also Fairy tale(s); Illustrated children’s book(s); Modern Chinese children’s literature “Children’s Literature, A” (Zhou Zuoren): modern Chinese children’s literature and, 112–117; excerpts from, 113 Children’s magazines, 80; animals and beasts in, 81, 82–83, 83f, 84f, 85, 86f, 87f, 88f, 89; “beasts in houses” in, 82, 85; evolutionary narratives and “beasts in houses” in, 82; zoos and, 82–83, 83f, 85; child and beast in, 83f, 84f, 85, 86f, 87f, 88f, 89; wolf in, 84f, 85; childhood development and domestic animals in, 85, 86f, 87f, 88f, 89, 221n56; reading and, 85. See also Children’s World; Little Friend Children’s market: Chinese literature and, 104; Chinese publishing houses and, 104, 119–121; modern Chinese culture and, 112; “business of enlightenment” and, 119; childhood development and, 120–121, 130; Commercial Press and, 120–121; toys and, 121–125, 131. See also Toy(s) Children’s World (magazine), 80–81, 82, 83–85, 84f, 86, 87f, 88f, 89, 120 China: Marx and, 6; evolutionary theory and, 6–7, 8, 198nn9–10; evolutionary theory, imperialism and, 6–7, 10, 19, 198nn9–10; evolutionary thinking and, 8–9, 26, 69, 72, 73; evolutionary biology, authorship crisis and, 10; iron house parable and subordination of, 34; Western science and, 41–43; importation of civilization terminology, 55–56; Wu Jianren’s Realm of Civilization and, 55–57; natural-historical knowledge and, 68–69, 71–72, 217n27; academic institutionalization of biology in, 71–72, 217n27; soft inheritance and evolutionary thinking in, 73;

247

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Index

China (continued) knowledge texts in, 73–74; science knowledge texts in, 73–74; Boy Scouts in, 145, 231nn32–33. See also Republican China China Made (Gerth), 131 China’s national future: children and, 129–130; toys and, 131; Playthings and, 135, 145 Chinese culture: production and developmental thinking, 8. See also Modern Chinese culture; Republican Chinese culture Chinese development: Chinese socialism to capitalist market economy transformation and, 4; child as emblem of, 5, 23; trusteeship and narratives of, 22; figure of the child and, 23; figure of the child, Lu Xun and, 111; figure of the child, women’s emancipation and, 111, 225n26; modern Chinese children’s literature, childhood development and, 150–151. See also Chinese discourse of development; Development; Modern Chinese literature Chinese developmentalism: ideology of, 4, 197n3; genealogy and nature of Chinese modernity, 13 Chinese discourse of development: development in Chinese literarymedia culture, 3; Lu Xun challenge to, 3; emergence of, 4 Chinese drawings, figure of the child and, 103 Chinese industry, national products and, 131, 132. See also National products Chinese intellectuals: evolutionary theory and, 6–7, 8, 198n9; evolutionary theory, imperialism and, 6–7, 198n9; evolutionary thinking, narrative and, 8, 9, 199nn14–15; terminology of modernity and, 18–19; “The Misanthrope” and, 63; natural-historical knowledge and, 69; children’s literature and, 150–151;

modern Chinese children’s literature and, 150–151; fairy tales and, 151, 155; Eroshenko and, 153–154 Chinese literature, children’s market and, 104. See also Modern Chinese literature Chinese modernity: Lu Xun literary distillation of nature of, 1–3, 5; Chinese developmentalism genealogy and nature of, 13; Chinese literarycultural studies of, 14–15; developmental thinking and, 15 Chinese nation, child as emblem of, 5, 203nn49–50 Chinese national salvation: toys and, 129, 130; figure of the child and, 129–130 Chinese newspapers. See Chinese publication(s) Chinese publication(s), 228n1; national products and, 132–133, 230n20; toy production photomontage in, 143f; toy production and, 230n25. See also Print culture; specific magazines, newspapers, and publications Chinese publishing houses: children’s market and, 104, 119–121; “business of enlightenment” and, 119; children’s literature and, 119–121; national products and, 133. See also Chunghwa Books; Commercial Press Chinese publishing industry: child and, 24, 104, 204n51; child and beast in, 24; childhood development and, 24, 25 Chunghwa Books, 68, 79, 80, 104; textbooks and, 119. See also Chinese publishing houses; Little Friend Cinema, vernacular modernism and, 67, 214n9. See also Shanghai cinema Civilization: Chinese importation of terminology of, 55–56; China, Wu Jianren’s Realm of Civilization and, 55–57 Colonialism: New Story of the Stone and, 18, 31, 32–33, 53, 54, 58, 59–60, 205n9; evolutionary theory and, 28;

Index

evolutionary thinking, native intellectuals and, 29–30; modern Chinese literature and, 30; national products and, 131; animal training and, 147–150; Carl Hagenbeck Circus and, 147–150, 232n1; Lu Xun on, 147–150, 233n8; “A Narrow Cage” and, 171, 172. See also Imperialism “Comedy of the Ducks” (Lu Xun), 160–162, 167, 238nn37–38 Commercial Press, 40, 42, 43, 68, 73, 74, 78, 80, 104, 214n14, 220n45; early history of, 119; textbooks and, 119; children’s literature and, 120–121; children’s market and, 120–121; toys and, 122, 123, 124f, 133; national products and, 133. See also Children’s World; Chinese publishing houses Commodities: Marx and, 131–132; national products and, 131–132, 230n17. See also Children as commodities; Domestic product; National products Confucianism, and “Diary of a Madman,” 106–107, 224n16 Cosmopolitan, and vernacular, 67, 72, 214n11, 218n29 Cowen, M. P., 21 Cultural production: developmental thinking and Chinese, 8; social landscapes and vernacular, 67, 214n12 Cultural transmission: Republican Chinese developmental history and, 106; and inheritance in “Diary of a Madman,” 106–109, 110, 224n16; “Diary of a Madman,” children and, 110–111 Culture. See Chinese culture; Print culture Darwin, Charles, 81–82, 92; capitalist modernity and, 6; On the Origin of Species of, 6–7, 71, 216n22; Lamarck versus, 69, 72–73, 78, 215nn16–17, 218n30

Darwinian natural selection, 10 Darwinism. See Social Darwinism “Dead Fire” (Lu Xun), 12; iron house parable and, 36, 207n18 Deng Xiaoping, 4, 197n3 Development: quixotic attempts at defining, 3; use of term, 3; as way of knowing, narrating, and managing radical historical change processes, 3; evolutionary models, 4; modern Chinese literature and transitive/ intransitive senses gap in, 5; evolutionary narrative and colonial national, 9–10; modernity contra, 13–22; as reclaiming autonomy, 21; elite trusteeship and, 35; iron house parable and, 35–36; domains of, 104–105; Lu Xun on, 111, 149–150, 233n8. See also Chinese development; Discourse of development; National development Development, terminology of: Chinese coinage and circulation of, 15, 16, 202n34; evolutionary theory and, 16; and wenming, 17, 18; modernity, wenming and, 19 Developmental narratives: trusteeship and, 22; evolutionary thinking, monism and, 29 Developmental thinking: genealogical critique, 4; appropriation as narrative form and fiction, 5; modern Chinese literature and, 5; Chinese cultural production and, 8; narrative and, 9–10; Chinese modernity and, 15; of modern Europe, 20–21 “Diary of a Madman” (Lu Xun), 25, 166, 199n20; excerpts from, 106, 107, 108, 109–110; pedagogy and, 106, 108, 110; Confucianism and, 106–107, 224n16; cultural transmission and inheritance in, 106–109, 110, 224n16; children and, 109–111, 166; cultural transmission, children and, 110–111; Playthings and, 139 Die Welträthsel (Haeckel), 28, 70, 71, 73, 216n22

249

250

Index

Discourse of development: implications of, 4; Yan Fu, 20; child as history in Republican China, 99–105. See also Chinese discourse of development Domestic product: child as, 25–26; promotion and Playthings, 26. See also Commodities; National products Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao Xueqin), 18, 30, 53. See also The Story of the Stone Du Yaquan, 73, 74, 76, 218n32, 220n40 Environmental determinism: “The Misanthrope” and, 92–93; Zhou Jianren and, 92–93; hereditary inheritance versus, 93 Eroshenko, Vasilii, 12, 233n10, 235n20; fairy tales and, 11, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154–155, 159–160, 161–173, 234n11, 234n16, 238n42, 239n53; “A Narrow Cage” of, 11, 150, 152, 154, 155, 159–160, 168–173, 175–187; Lu Xun and, 150, 151–152, 154, 155, 159, 161f, 161–163, 164, 166–168, 170–171, 172, 234n11, 235n21, 238nn37–38, 239n49; modern Chinese children’s literature and, 150; blindness of, 152–153, 234n15, 240n55; biography of, 152–154, 234n15, 235n19; Chinese intellectuals and, 153–154; Zhou Zuoren and, 156, 157f, 240n55; “The Tragedy of the Little Chick” of, 161–162; “The Sorrow of a Fish” of, 163–164; evolutionary adventure genre and, 164–165; “For the Sake of Humanity” of, 164–165, 238n42; “Old Man Time” of, 165–166; zoos and, 168–169, 240n55 Esperanto, 153, 235n18 Evolution and Ethics (Huxley), 67 Evolutionary adaptation: soft inheritance and, 69, 73; nation-species characteristics and, 73 Evolutionary adventure genre: Lu Xun and, 28, 238n47; Wells and, 38, 164, 238n47; speculative fiction, 38–39;

Bellamy and, 39–40; Eroshenko and, 164–165. See also Science fiction; Speculative fiction; Utopian fiction Evolutionary biology: developmental thinking, genealogical critique via translation of, 4; China, authorship crisis and, 10; evolutionary thinking and, 29 Evolutionary narratives: colonial national development and, 9–10; “beasts in houses” in children’s magazines and, 82 Evolutionary theory: translations and assimilations to various locales, 4–5, 197n4; nineteenth-century scandal of beast and man boundary dissolving in, 5; China and, 6–7, 8, 198nn9–10; China, imperialism and, 6–7, 10, 19, 198nn9–10; Chinese intellectuals and, 6–7, 8, 198n9; Chinese intellectuals, imperialism and, 6–7, 198n9; narrative, national development and, 7; and terminology of development, 16; national development and, 19–20, 151–152; colonialism and, 28; human agency and, 34–35, 215n16; zoology and social, 76, 78; Zhou Jianren and, 92–93; “The Misanthrope” and, 93. See also Darwin, Charles; Haeckel, Ernst; Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Evolutionary thinking: twentiethcentury vernacular culture and, 5, 8, 9, 64, 65, 67, 68, 215n15; Lu Xun and, 7–8, 70–71; narrative, Chinese intellectuals and, 8, 9, 199nn14–15; China and, 8–9, 26, 69, 72, 73; modern Chinese literature, national development and, 10; developmental narratives, monism and, 29, 204n2; evolutionary biology and, 29; nationalism, print culture and, 29; print culture in history of, 29; social Darwinism and, 29; colonialism, native intellectuals and, 29–30; speculative fiction and, 38; historical change, Bellamy and, 39–40, 47;

Index

Republican China, literary production and, 66; soft inheritance, China and, 73; Zhou Zuoren, children’s literature, childhood development and, 114–115; toys, childhood development and, 130; Playthings and, 135 Fairy tale(s), 237n29; Eroshenko and, 11, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154–155, 159–160, 161–173, 234n11, 234n16, 238n42, 239n53; vernacular literature and, 24, 156; Zhou Zuoren and, 24, 113, 114, 155, 156–158, 236n24, 237n30, 237n32; childhood development and, 113–114, 151, 156, 158, 159, 236n28, 238n36; children and, 113–114, 151, 156, 158, 159, 236n28, 238n36; children’s literature and, 113–114, 151, 236n28; Lang and, 114; Chinese intellectuals and, 151, 155; Lu Xun and, 151, 160–163, 164, 166–168, 238n42, 238n47; national development and, 151; folktales and, 155, 156, 161–162; children’s education and, 156, 158, 236n28; tonghua and, 156–158, 237n30, 237n32; folk, 158; literary, 158, 159. See also “Narrow Cage, A” Family (Ba Jin), 168 Farrar, James A., 156, 236n27 Feng Menglong, 118, 227n49 Fernsebner, Susan R., 229n6 Fiction: developmental thinking, appropriation as narrative form and, 5; invention of new Chinese, 11; print culture and, 43. See also Fairy tale(s); Late Qing fiction; Late Victorian fiction; Literature; Lu Xun fiction; “New novel”; Science fiction; Speculative fiction; Utopian fiction Figure of the child: Chinese development and, 23; Chinese drawings and, 103; in Republican Chinese developmental history, 103, 105–106; Republican literature and, 103–104; Chinese development, women’s emancipation and, 111, 225n26; Lu

Xun, Chinese developmental transformation and, 111; modern national vernacular and, 119; Chinese national salvation and, 129–130. See also Child/children Folklore studies: child as history in Republican China and, 117–119; literature by children, new national vernacular and, 117–119; children’s songs and, 118; Zhou Zuoren and, 118, 227n49; MacCulloch and, 155–156, 236n25, 236n27 Folktales: fairy tales and, 155, 156; MacCulloch and, 155–156 “For the Sake of Humanity” (Eroshenko), 164–165, 238n42 “Free Talk.” See Shun Pao Gerth, Karl, 131, 132, 230n17, 230n23 Haeckel, Ernst, 28, 30, 215n18; Die Welträthsel of, 28, 70, 71, 73, 216n22; Lu Xun and, 70, 216n19; “world-system” of, 73; racial classification and, 115–116; The Riddle of the Universe of, 204n2 Hagenbeck, Carl: as cage-free zoo inventor, 147, 232n1. See also Carl Hagenbeck Circus Hagenbeck, Lorenz, 147 Hansen, Miriam, 67, 213n9, 213nn11–12 He Jiagan, 2. See also Lu Xun History: evolutionary thinking, Bellamy and, 39–40, 47; literary texts and intellectual, 65–66, 213n4. See also Natural-historical knowledge; Republican Chinese developmental history “How to Train Wild Animals” (Lu Xun), 147–150 Huang Yi, 99, 223n1; childhood development and, 99, 101–102, 103, 116, 117, 223n4, 223n7; The Psychology of Children’s Drawings of, 99, 100f, 101f, 102; children’s drawings and, 99–103, 116

251

252

Index

Human agency: evolutionary theory and, 34–35, 215n16; iron house parable and, 35 Human nature, Lu Xun and, 64, 213n6 Hu Shi, 9, 118 Hu Xiansu, 71, 72 Huxley, T. H., 67, 70 Hu Yuzhi, 150, 152, 236n28 Ideological fantasy, 25, 204n52 Illustrated children’s book(s): wolf in, 78, 79, 80f, 220n45; zoology and, 78–79, 80f, 220n44; parables, 79, 220n45 Imperialism: China, evolutionary theory and, 6–7, 10, 19, 198nn9–10; Chinese intellectuals, evolutionary theory and, 6–7, 198n9; trusteeship and, 21; social Darwinism and, 28. See also Colonialism Inheritance: themes in “The Misanthrope,” 64, 89, 92–93, 94–95, 96; child-beast equation, childhood development and, 81, 89; Zhou Jianren and hereditary, 92–93; environmental determinism versus hereditary, 93. See also Soft inheritance In Search of Wealth and Power (Schwartz), 66 Intellectual(s): evolutionary thinking, colonialism and native, 29–30; iron house parable, dormant masses and awakened, 35, 36; history and literary texts, 65–66, 213n4. See also Chinese intellectuals Iron house (tiewu): of narrative, 28; revisited, 33; metaphor, 37–38; beasts in, 82 Iron house parable (Lu Xun), 33–34; excerpts from, 33, 36; Chinese subordination and, 34; awakened intellectual, dormant masses and, 35, 36; human agency and, 35; development and, 35–36; “Dead Fire” and, 36, 207n18; narrator representation

of others in, 36, 206n17; critics’ analyses of, 36–37; iron house metaphor and understanding of, 37–38. See also Iron house Japanese attack on Shanghai (1932), 122; Playthings and, 135, 138, 139–140 Kafka, Franz, 233n8 Kammerer, Paul, 92, 218n30, 223n68 Kang Youwei, 31, 205n5 KMT. See Nationalist Party Knowledge text(s), 42; science fiction as, 48, 50; print culture and, 65, 73; China and, 73–74; China and science, 73–74; children and, 74; textbooks, 74, 75f, 76, 77f; zoological dictionary, 76 Kropotkin, Peter, 218n32, 220n40 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 216n19; Darwin versus, 69, 72–73, 78, 215nn16–17, 218n30; Philosophie Zoologique of, 69, 70; soft inheritance of, 69, 72, 73 Lang, Andrew, 156, 236n27; fairy tales and, 114; children’s literature and, 114–115; Zhou Zuoren and, 114–115, 118 Late Qing fiction: of evolutionary adventure and Lu Xun, 28; Looking Backward, Chinese translation and, 43 Late Qing period: evolutionary adventure genre and Lu Xun, 28; textbooks, 74, 75f, 76, 219n35 Late Victorian civilization: New Story of the Stone and, 30–31; modern Chinese literature and, 33 Late Victorian fiction: New Story of the Stone and, 31–32; Lu Xun and, 33, 38 Liang Qichao, 16, 47, 215n16; A Record of the Future of the New China of, 31, 205n5 “Libraries” (encyclopedias), 43, 209n41

Index

Li Hongzhang, 153, 234n15 Ling Bing, 226n35, 227n44 Literary production, Republican China, evolutionary thinking and, 66 Literary texts, and intellectual history, 65–66, 213n4 Literary Treasury for Small Children, 78, 79, 80f Literature, by children, folklore studies and new national vernacular, 117–119. See also Children’s literature; Chinese literature; Fiction; Pedagogical literature; Vernacular literature Little Friend (magazine), 81, 82, 83f, 85, 86f, 89, 120 Little Friends Treasury, 79, 80, 220n44 Li Yuying, 76, 78, 219n39, 220n41 Li Zhi, 118, 227n49 Looking Backward (Bellamy), 31, 38, 39–40, 205n5; utopian fiction and, 39–40, 44–47; Chinese translations of, 40–41, 43–45, 208n29; Chinese translation and late Qing fiction, 43; Chinese translation and historical knowledge, 44–46; excerpts from, 45–46. See also Bellamy, Edward Lu Xun: literary distillation of nature of Chinese modernity, 1–3, 5; “Modern History” of, 1–3, 5, 12, 22; challenge to Chinese development discourse, 3; evolutionary thinking and, 7–8, 70–71, 151–152; developmental history logic and, 11; “Preface to The Outcry” of, 11, 33–34, 155; narrative form of, 11–13, 91–92, 110, 199n20; children’s literature and, 12, 24, 109; “Dead Fire” of, 12, 36, 207n18; Wild Grass of, 12, 199n20; critics and criticism of, 12–13, 199nn20–21; fiction and, 12–13; late style of, 12–13, 200n21; zawen of, 13; “Watching Magic Shows” of, 22–23, 25, 26; children and, 22–24, 109– 111, 122–123, 225n29; modern Chinese children’s literature and, 24,

150; “Diary of a Madman” of, 25, 106–111, 139, 166, 199n20, 224n16; “The Misanthrope” of, 26–27, 63–65, 89–98, 212nn1–2; evolutionary adventure genre and, 28, 238n47; late Victorian fiction and, 33, 38; May Fourth movement and, 33; Nietzsche and, 35, 206n15; Verne and, 47, 48, 49; science fiction and, 48, 210n54; human nature and, 64, 213n6; Haeckel and, 70, 216n19; natural-historical knowledge and, 70; on development, 111, 149–150, 233n8; figure of the child, Chinese developmental transformation and, 111; on toys, 122–123; on animal training, 147–150; on Carl Hagenbeck Circus, 147–150; on colonialism, 147–150, 233n8; “How to Train Wild Animals” of, 147–150; Eroshenko and, 150, 151–152, 154, 155, 159, 161f, 161–163, 164, 166–168, 170–171, 172, 234n11, 235n21, 238nn37–38, 239n49; “A Narrow Cage” and, 150, 152, 154, 155, 159–160, 170–171, 172; fairy tales and, 151, 160–163, 164, 166–168, 238n42, 238n47; “Comedy of the Ducks” of, 160–162, 167, 238nn37–38; “Mending Heaven” of, 166, 238n47; vernacular language of, 167, 239n48; as Zhou Shuren, 197n2. See also specific Lu Xun writings Lu Xun fiction, 10–11; modernism of, 12, 199n20; child and beast in, 22–23, 25, 26–27; ideological fantasy and, 25, 204n52; realism of, 199n20. See also Lu Xun; specific Lu Xun fiction Lu Xun parable(s), 11–12, 150. See also Iron house parable MacCulloch, John Arnott: The Childhood of Fiction of, 155, 156; Zhou Zuoren and, 155, 156; folklore studies and, 155–156, 236n25, 236n27; folktales and, 155–156

253

254

Index

Magazines. See Children’s magazines; Chinese publication(s); specific magazines Ma Junwu, 71, 216n22 Man: evolutionary theory’s nineteenthcentury scandal of boundary dissolving between beast and, 5; kinship between animal and, 85, 221n54 Marx, Karl: China and, 6; commodities and, 131–132; on capitalist economies, 144 Masses, iron house parable, awakened intellectual and dormant, 35, 36 May Fourth movement: Lu Xun and, 33; children and, 112; “business of enlightenment” and, 119 “Mending Heaven” (Lu Xun), 166, 238n47 “Misanthrope, The” (Lu Xun), 26–27, 212n1; Chinese intellectuals and, 63; beast in, 64, 89, 90, 91; inheritance themes in, 64, 89, 92–93, 94–95, 96; wolf in, 64, 91, 94, 97, 212n2; child in, 64–65, 89–90; excerpts from, 64–65, 89–90, 93–94, 95, 97; Lu Xun autobiographical aspects of, 91; Zhou Jianren and, 91, 93; zoology and, 91, 97; narrative form of, 91–92, 94, 95–96, 97; evolutionary theory, national development and, 93; hereditary inheritance versus environmental determinism and, 93; metamorphosis in, 96–98 Modern Child (periodical), 120 Modern children’s literature. See Modern Chinese children’s literature Modern Chinese children’s literature, 6; Lu Xun and, 24, 150; Zhou Zuoren and, 24, 112–117, 150; creation of, 104, 150; “A Children’s Literature” and, 112–117; Eroshenko and, 150; Chinese development, childhood development and, 150–151; Chinese intellectuals and, 150–151 Modern Chinese culture: child and beast in, 5; history of child, 5;

children and, 112; children’s market and, 112. See also Republican Chinese culture Modern Chinese literature: developmental thinking and, 5; gap between development’s transitive and intransitive senses in, 5; as form of children’s literature, 6; evolutionary thinking, national development and, 10; colonialism and, 30; Victorian civilization and, 33. See also Modern Chinese children’s literature; “New novel”; Republican literature Modern Chinese literature development: overview, 1–6; child in, 5, 22–27; evolutionary imperatives, 6–11; parables of (under)development, 11–13; development contra modernity, 13–22; child and beast in, 22, 24–27 Modern Cinema (magazine), 228n1 “Modern History” (Lu Xun), 1–3, 5, 12, 22 Modernism: of Lu Xun fiction, 12, 199n20; cinema and vernacular, 67, 214n9 Modernity: development contra, 13–22; terminology of development, wemming and 19. See also Capitalist modernity; Chinese modernity Modernity, terminology of: Chinese coinage and circulation of, 15–16, 202nn31–32; and wemming, 17; Chinese intellectuals and, 18–19 Modern Pictorial (magazine), 228n1 Modern Sketch (magazine), 228n1 Modern Sketch photomontage(s): children as commodities and, 126, 127f, 128f, 129, 133, 228n2, 229n4; “Our Lovable Little Angels,” 126, 127f, 129, 228n2; “Treat your children” dictum, 126–127, 128f, 129, 229n4; Playthings and, 129, 142; national products and, 133–135, 136f, 230n23; “Real Genuine National Products Exhibition,” 133–135, 136f, 230n23 Morgan, T. H., 72

Index

Narrative(s): evolutionary theory, national development and, 8; evolutionary thinking, Chinese intellectuals and, 8, 9, 199nn14–15; developmental thinking and, 9–10; iron house of, 28; of Playthings, 135–139. See also Developmental narratives; Evolutionary narratives; Fiction; Literature Narrative form: of Lu Xun, 11–13, 91–92, 110, 199n20; “new novel” as, 41; of “The Misanthrope,” 91–92, 94, 95–96, 97 “Narrow Cage, A” (Eroshenko), 11, 154; Lu Xun and, 150, 152, 154, 155, 159–160, 170–171, 172; narrative of, 150; questions of, 152; themes of, 152, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173; popular and critical response to, 168, 239n52; excerpts from, 168–169, 170, 171–173; zoos and, 168–169; colonialism and, 171, 172; text of, 175–187 National development: child and beast as antinomies of, 5; evolutionary theory, narrative and, 8; modern Chinese literature, evolutionary thinking and, 10; evolutionary theory and, 19–20, 151–152; trusteeship and, 22; childhood development and, 80, 116; “The Misanthrope” and, 93; Zhou Jianren and, 93; toys and, 122, 123, 125; children as commodities and, 129; Playthings and, 135; fairy tales and, 151 Nationalism, evolutionary thinking, print culture and, 29 Nationalist Party (KMT), 23 National products: children as commodities and, 131, 133; Chinese industry and, 131, 132; colonialism and, 131; commodities and, 131–132, 230n17; Chinese publications and, 132–133, 230n20; toys and, 132–133; Chinese publishing houses and, 133; Commercial Press and, 133; toys, textbooks and, 133, 134f; Modern

Sketch photomontages, 133–135, 136f, 230n23; Playthings and, 136–137, 145. See also Commodities; Domestic product National vernacular: Republican Chinese developmental history and creation of new, 105–106, 117–119; literature by children, folklore studies and new, 117–119; figure of the child and modern, 119 Natural-historical knowledge: China and, 68–69, 71–72, 217n27; Chinese intellectuals and, 69; Lu Xun and, 70 Neoteny, 81, 221n47 “New novel”: Bellamy and, 39; as narrative form, 41 Newspapers. See Chinese publications New Story of the Stone (Wu Jianren), 41–42, 205n6; science fiction and, 17, 31–32; The Story of the Stone and, 17–18, 30, 51–54, 57, 61–62; colonialism and, 18, 31, 32–33, 53, 54, 58, 59–60, 205n9; Realm of Civilization in, 18, 31, 32, 42, 51, 52, 55–61, 212n76; late Victorian civilization and, 30–31; as utopian fiction, 31, 32–33, 51–62, 205n9, 212n76; late Victorian fiction and, 31–32; technology in, 54, 56, 57–58, 60, 211n70; excerpts from, 55. See also Wu Jianren Nietzsche, Friedrich, 35, 206n15 “Old Man Time” (Eroshenko), 165–166 On Evolution (Yan Fu), 19, 203n37 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 6–7, 71, 216n22 “Our Lovable Little Angels” photomontage, 126, 127f, 129, 228n2 Parable(s): of (under)development in modern Chinese literature development, 11–13; illustrated children’s book, 79, 220n45. See also Fairy tale(s); Lu Xun parable(s)

255

256

Index

Pedagogical literature: children and, 5, 6, 65, 74, 79, 80; science fiction as, 48; beasts and, 65; childhood development and, 80; animal-child kinship in, 81–82, 221n48 Pedagogy: Republican Chinese developmental history and, 105, 106; “Diary of a Madman” and, 106, 108, 110; program of Zhou Zuoren for children’s literature and childhood development, 116–117, 120, 121, 227n45 Philosophie Zoologique (Lamarck), 69, 70 Photomontage, toy production, 143f. See also Modern Sketch photomontage(s) Playthings: children as, 127; in Playthings, 136–137, 142, 144, 146, 231n28. See also Toy(s) Playthings (Sun Yu), 26, 147; Modern Sketch photomontages and, 129, 142; toys and, 129, 135, 136–137, 138, 140, 142, 144, 145; children as commodities and, 133, 140; China’s national future and, 135, 145; evolutionary thinking and, 135; Japanese attack on Shanghai and, 135, 138, 139–140; national development and, 135; sacrifice in, 135, 140, 145; narrative of, 135–139, 140, 142, 144–146, 231n28; playthings of history and, 135–146; national products and, 136–137, 145; playthings in, 136–137, 142, 144, 146, 231n28; toy production and, 136–137, 138, 140, 142, 144; “Diary of a Madman” and, 139; Shun Pao advertisement for, 139–140, 141f; capitalist economies and, 144 Playthings of history, 126–135; Playthings and, 135–145 “Preface to The Outcry” (Lu Xun), 11, 33–34, 155. See also Iron house parable Print culture: in evolutionary thinking history, 29; evolutionary thinking,

nationalism and, 29; fiction and, 43; child and beast and, 65; knowledge texts and, 65, 73; zoological philosophy in, 78. See also Fiction; Illustrated children’s book(s); Knowledge text(s); Literature; Textbook(s); specific books and stories Product nationality, 131, 132, 230n17. See also National products Psychology of Children’s Drawings, The (Huang Yi), 99, 100f, 101f, 102 Publications. See Chinese publications Publishing, Republican Chinese developmental history and, 105. See also Chinese publishing houses; Chinese publishing industry Qian Xuantong, 34 Qing empire, capitalist modernity and, 6. See also Late Qing period Qing fiction. See Late Qing fiction Racial classification: Haeckel and, 115–116; Zhou Zuoren and, 116 Reading, and children’s magazines, 85 “Real Genuine National Products Exhibition” photomontage, 133–135, 136f, 230n23 Realm of Civilization, Wu Jianren’s: in New Story of the Stone, 18, 31, 32, 42, 51, 52, 55–61, 212n76; utopian fiction and, 18, 31, 32, 42, 51, 52, 55–61, 212n76; China, civilization and, 55–57 Record of the Future of the New China, A (Liang Qichao), 31, 205n5 Republican China: evolutionary thinking, literary production and, 66; vernacularization of science in, 99. See also Child as history in Republican China Republican Chinese culture: children’s drawings and, 99, 100f, 101f, 102–103; child and, 104. See also Modern Chinese culture Republican Chinese developmental history, 104; childhood development

Index

and, 103, 223n7; pedagogy and, 105, 106; publishing and, 105; new national vernacular creation in, 105–106, 117–119; cultural transmission and, 106; childhood and, 111–117; children as commodities in, 129. See also Child as history in Republican China Republican literature: children and, 103–104; figure of the child and, 103–104; major figures of, 103–104. See also Modern Chinese literature Richard, Timothy, 40–42, 43, 44, 209nn32–33 Riddle of the Universe, The (Haeckel), 204n2 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 116, 117 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 112, 117, 225n29 Sawade, Richard, 148, 149, 150, 233n4 Schneider, Laurence, 71, 72 Schwartz, Benjamin, 66 Science: China and Western, 41–43; Chinese vernacular of local, 72, 218n29; knowledge texts in China, 73–74; vernacularization in Republican China, 99 Science fiction: New Story of the Stone and, 17, 31–32; Chinese readers of, 48; as knowledge texts, 48, 50; Lu Xun and, 48, 210n54; as pedagogical literature, 48. See also Speculative fiction; Utopian fiction SDK. See Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge “Second nature,” 32, 205n8 Shanghai cinema, 26, 129; vernacular modernism and, 214n9. See also Playthings Shao Xunmei, 228n1 Shenton, R. W., 21 Shun Pao (newspaper), 1; “Free Talk” editorial pages, 132, 230n20; advertisement for Playthings, 139–140, 141f; advertisement for Carl Hagenbeck Circus, 147, 148f, 232n1;

writings about Carl Hagenbeck Circus, 147–150, 232n2 Sister Ye. See Playthings Social Darwinism: demise of, 28; imperialism and, 28; terminology problem of, 28–29; evolutionary thinking and, 29 Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge (SDK), 40, 41, 42, 43 Soft inheritance: zoological philosophy and, 68, 78; evolutionary adaptation and, 69, 73; of Lamarck, 69, 72, 73; China, evolutionary thinking and, 73 “Sorrow of a Fish, The” (Eroshenko), 163–164 Sovereignty, and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, 50–51, 211n62 Speculative fiction: evolutionary thinking and, 38; of Wells, 38; evolutionary adventure genre, 38–39. See also Evolutionary adventure genre; Science fiction; Utopian fiction; Wells, H. G. Spencer, Herbert, 7, 19–20, 28; Yan Fu translation of, 66, 215n17 Story of the Stone, The (Cao Xueqin), 31; New Story of the Stone and, 17–18, 30, 51–54, 57, 61–62 Sun Yu, Playthings of, 26, 129, 133, 135–147, 231n28. See also Playthings Swinhoe, Robert, 72, 217n27 Tang, Xiaobing, 199n20 Technology, and New Story of the Stone, 54, 56, 57–58, 60, 211n70 Textbook(s): knowledge text, 74, 75f, 76, 77f; late Qing, 74, 75f, 76, 219n35; zoology, 74; “business of enlightenment” and, 104; Chunghwa Books and, 119; Commercial Press and, 119; national products, toys and, 133, 134f. See also Illustrated children’s book(s) Tianyan lun (Yan Fu), 69–70, 215n17

257

258

Index

Time Machine, The (Wells), 38 Tonghua (fairy tale or children’s story), 156–158, 237n30, 237n32. See also Fairy tale(s) Toy(s): childhood development and, 121–122, 130–131; child as history in Republican China and, 121–125; children’s market and, 121–125, 131; Commercial Press and, 122, 123, 124f, 133; national development and, 122, 123, 125; Lu Xun on, 122–123; children as commodities, children’s images and worth of, 126, 127f, 128f, 129, 228nn2–3; “Treat your children” dictum and, 126–127, 128f, 129, 229n4; children’s education and, 129, 130–131, 229n6; Chinese national salvation and, 129, 130; Playthings and, 129, 135, 136–137, 138, 140, 142, 144, 145; childhood development, evolutionary thinking and, 130; China’s national future and, 131; national products and, 132–133; national products, textbooks and, 133, 134f. See also Playthings Toy production: Playthings and, 136–137, 138, 140, 142, 144; photomontage, 143f; Chinese publications and, 230n25 Toys and Education (Chen Jiyun), 130–131 “Tragedy of the Little Chick, The” (Eroshenko), 161–162 “Treat your children” dictum, 229n4; photomontage, 126–127, 128f, 129 Trusteeship: imperialism and, 21; developmental narratives and, 22; development and elite, 35 Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (Verne), 31, 38, 209n49; utopian fiction and, 47, 51, 211n65; Chinese translations of, 47–51, 210n52, 210n58, 211n62; sovereignty and, 50–51, 211n62. See also Verne, Jules “Two Wolves Fighting,” 78, 79, 80f

Utopian fiction: Wu Jianren’s Realm of Civilization and, 18, 31, 32, 42, 51, 52, 55–61, 212n76; New Story of the Stone as, 31, 32–33, 51–62, 205n9, 212n76; of Wu Jianren, 31, 32–33, 51–62, 205n9, 212n76; dilemmas of, 32–33, 205n9; Bellamy and, 39–40, 44–47; Looking Backward and, 39–40, 44–47; Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and, 47, 51, 211n65; Verne and, 47, 51, 211n65. See also Evolutionary adventure genre; Science fiction; Speculative fiction Van Eeden, Frederik, 238n42 Vernacular: culture and evolutionary thinking, 5, 8, 9, 64, 65, 67, 68, 215n15; ideas, 65–68; cosmopolitan and, 67, 72, 214n11, 218n29; cultural production and social landscapes, 67, 214n12; modernism and cinema, 67, 214n9; context of Yan Fu ideas, 67–68; movement, 67–68; Chinese local science, 72, 218n29; language of Lu Xun, 167, 239n48. See also National vernacular Vernacular literature, 13; fairy tales and, 24, 156; premodern Chinese, 30 Verne, Jules: Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea of, 31, 38, 47–51, 209n49, 210n52, 210n58, 211n62, 211n65; Wu Jianren and, 31–32, 47, 51; Lu Xun and, 47, 48, 49; utopian fiction and, 47, 51, 211n65. See also Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea Victorian civilization. See Late Victorian civilization Victorian fiction. See Late Victorian fiction Vitale, Baron Guido Amedeo, 118–119 Wang Yunwu, 119 “Watching Magic Shows” (Lu Xun), 22–23, 25, 26 Wei Lianshu, 26

Index

Wells, H. G.: evolutionary adventure genre and, 38, 164, 238n47; speculative fiction of, 38; The Time Machine of, 38 Wemming (civilized or civilization): terminology of, 17, 18; terminology of development and, 17, 18; terminology of modernity and, 17; terminology of development, modernity and, 19 Wilde, Oscar, 158, 159 Wild Grass (Lu Xun), 12, 199n20 Wolf: in “The Misanthrope,” 64, 91, 94, 97, 212n2; in textbook, 76, 77f; in zoological dictionary, 76; in illustrated children’s book, 78, 79, 80f, 220n45; in children’s magazines, 84f, 85 Women’s emancipation, Chinese development, figure of the child and, 111, 225n26 “World-system,” 218n31; of Haeckel, 73 Wu Jianren, 205n6; New Story of the Stone of, 17–18, 30–32, 41–42, 51–62, 205n6, 205n9, 212n76; utopian fiction of, 31, 32–33, 51–62, 205n9, 212n76; Verne and, 31–32, 47, 51; “second nature” of, 32, 205n8. See also New Story of the Stone Xiang Peiliang, 90 Yanagita Kunio, 118 Yan Fu, 7, 198n10, 203n39; On Evolution of, 19, 203n37; discourse of development, 20; translation of Spencer, 66, 215n17; ideas of, 66–67, 213n8; translation of Huxley, 67, 70; vernacular context of ideas of, 67–68; Tianyan lun of, 69–70, 215n17 Yoneda, Karl, 234n16 Zawen (critical essay), 1; of Lu Xun, 13 Zhao Jingshen, 156–157, 159, 160, 237nn29–30, 238n36 Zhou Jianren: “The Misanthrope” and, 91, 93; evolutionary theory and,

92–93; hereditary inheritance versus environmental determinism and, 92–93; national development and, 93 Zhou Shuren, 197n2. See also Lu Xun Zhou Zuoren, 9, 91, 199n14; children and, 23, 24, 112–118, 120, 227n45; fairy tales and, 24, 113, 114, 155, 156–158, 236n24, 237n30, 237n32; modern Chinese children’s literature and, 24, 112–117, 150; “A Children’s Literature” of, 112–117; childhood development and, 113, 114–115, 116–117, 120, 227n45; Lang and, 114, 118; children’s literature, childhood development, evolutionary thinking and, 114–115; racial classification and, 116; children’s literature, childhood development, pedagogical program of, 116–117, 120, 121, 227n45; folklore studies and, 118, 227n49; The Childhood of Fiction and, 155, 156; MacCulloch and, 155, 156; Eroshenko and, 156, 157f, 240n55; Zhao Jingshen and, 156–157, 159, 237n30, 238n36; tonghua and, 156–158, 237n30, 237n32 Zoo(s): “beasts in houses” and, 81–83, 83f, 85; children’s magazines and, 82–83, 83f, 85; Carl Hagenbeck as inventor of cage-free, 147, 232n1; Eroshenko and, 168–169, 240n55; “A Narrow Cage” and, 168–169 Zoological philosophy (philosophie zoologique), 69, 70; “soft inheritance” and, 68, 78; in print culture, 78. See also Philosophie Zoologique Zoology, 71, 72; dictionary, 74, 76, 220n41; textbooks, 74; as foundational discipline, 76; social evolutionary theory and, 76; illustrated children’s books and, 78–79, 80f, 220n44; “The Misanthrope” and, 91, 97

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