Revolutionary Waves: The Crowd in Modern China 0674977165, 9780674977167

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Revolutionary Waves

Harvard East Asian Monographs 409

Revolutionary Waves The Crowd in Modern China

Tie Xiao

Published by the Harvard University Asia Center Distributed by Harvard University Press Cambridge (Mas­sa­chu­setts) and London 2017

© 2017 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca The Harvard University Asia Center publishes a monograph series and, in coordination with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the K ­ orea Institute, the Reischauer Institute of Japa­nese Studies, and other facilities and institutes, administers research proj­ects designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Vietnam, K ­ orea, and other Asian countries. The Center also sponsors proj­ects addressing multidisciplinary and regional issues in Asia. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Xiao, Tie, author. Title: Revolutionary waves : the crowd in modern China / Tie Xiao. Other titles: Harvard East Asian monographs ; 409. Description: Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts : Published by the Harvard University Asia Center, 2017. | Series: Harvard East Asian monographs ; 409 | Includes bibliographical references   and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016056557 | ISBN 9780674977167 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Crowds—­China. | Crowds—­Political aspects—­China. | China—­Intellectual life—1949–­| Crowds in lit­er­a­ture. | China—­Civilization—1949–­ Classification: LCC HM871 .X53 2017 | DDC 302.33—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2016056557 Index by Anne Holmes of EdIndex Printed on acid-­free paper Last figure below indicates year of this printing 26 ​25 ​24 ​23 ​22 ​21 ​20 ​19 ​18 ​17

In Memory of My Grandparents

Where have we been? What savage chaos of ­music Whirls in our dreams? We suddenly rise in darkness, Open our eyes, cry out, and sleep once more. We dream we are numberless sea-­waves, languidly foaming A warm white moonlit shore. —Conrad Aiken, “Multitudes Turn in Darkness” (1919)

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowl­edgments

xi

Abbreviations

xv

Introduction

1

1

The Politics of Psychologizing Qunzhong

25

2 The Lure of the Irrational

59

Fictions of Becoming

91

4 Prob­lems of Solitude

128

3

5

Torrents of Sound

155

Epilogue: The Regime of “We”

186

Notes

199

Selected Bibliography

239

Index

273

Illustrations

1. Zheng Yefu, “August 1, 1933,” 1933. 2. Ke Bu, “Advance,” 1928.

101 116

Acknowl­edgments

For her unwavering guidance and encouragement through all stages of this proj­ect, my first debt of gratitude goes to Paola Iovene. She saw its value when I had doubts. It is thanks to the countless hours she shared with me discussing the nature and direction of my study that this book has come together at all. Prasenjit Duara provided me with thoughtful input throughout the research and writing pro­cess, per­sis­tently reminding me to keep an eye on the broad sociohistorical condition of the “crowding moment” in modern China. For his rigorous questions and stimulating conversations, I am deeply grateful. Wu Hung helped me greatly with my writing, not only by giving me sage advice but also through the example he sets with his own scholarship. At the University of Chicago where this book took early shape as a doctoral dissertation, Michael Bourdaghs, Kyeong-­Hee Choi, Jacob Eyferth, Yuming He, Edward Shaughnessy, Wang Youqin, and Judith Zeitlin, with their breath of knowledge, intellectual integrity, and ­great enthusiasm, helped me become the scholar I aspired to be. At Indiana University, I am exceptionally lucky to be surrounded by supportive colleagues generous with their kindness, understanding, and encouragement. Michael Robinson, Natsuko Tsujimura, and Scott O’Bryan, who are all former and current chairs of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, gave their time and wisdom unstintingly to support my proj­ect and generously arranged research leaves that allowed me to concentrate on writing. My mentors, Edie Sarra and Michiko

xii

Acknowl­edgments

Suzuki, shared with me their successful proposals, made time to read portions of my manuscript, and offered insightful critiques and corrections. They are scrupulous readers and keen thinkers as much as they are inspiring motivators. Yasuko Akiyama, Yingling Bao, Gardner Bovingdon, Yea-­Fen Chen, Bob Eno, Hyo Sang Lee, Chien-­Jer Charles Lin, Manling Luo, Morten Oxenboell, Lynn Struve, Henghuo Su, and Sue Tuohy have been unfailing sources of intellectual stimulation, g­ reat humor, and invaluable help on professional and institutional ­matters big and small. Heather Blair and John Yasuda offered much-­appreciated help during the last stage of manuscript preparation. I am also very grateful for the guidance and trust from Heidi Ross and Sara Friedman, the former and current directors of the East Asian Studies Center, who have supported my research endeavors over the last five years. My cherished colleagues have played an impor­tant role in making this book pos­si­ble. During 2011–12, I was extremely fortunate to receive a postdoctoral fellowship from the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Andrew Jones provided not only intellectual inspiration through his work and animating ideas but also warm support that made me feel at home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our trip together to the Point Reyes National Seashore was a sublime experience that ­will always stay with me. At Berkeley, I also benefited from lively discussion and debate over lunches, dinners, and coffee breaks with Robert Ashmore, Wen Guiliang, Ling Yu, Xiao Liu, Liu Xiaoqin, Sophie Volpp, and Wen-­ hsin Yeh. A generous fellowship from the Institute of Advanced Studies in Nantes in 2015 allowed me to ponder some key issues in my study in a multidisciplinary context and hastened completion of the manuscript. Thanks must go to Samuel Jubé, Alain Supiot, and the administrative team at the Institute for nurturing such a fertile intellectual environment for thinking and writing. Through seminars, discussions, and friendships, my fellow residents at the Institute made my stay a truly rewarding time. In par­tic­u­lar I thank Svante Fischer, Judy Fudge, Patrick Harris, Pierre Musso, and Boris Samuel for their stimulating questions and critical engagement with my work. I also want to express my gratitude for the financial support I received from the College of Arts and Humanities Institute and the East Asian Studies Center, both of Indiana University, and from the Chiang Ching-­ kuo Foundation. Finishing this book would have taken much longer with-



Acknowl­edgments

xiii

out their research and travel grants. The Humanities Division of the University of Chicago provided funding at the dissertation stage of this proj­ect. To t­ hose who wrote letters of support and to the committees that made the decisions on the grants, I am very grateful. Parts of this book ­were presented at conferences, workshops, and colloquiums in vari­ous settings, including Academia Sinica, Chinese National Acad­emy of Arts, Capital Normal University, George Washington University, Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, London School of Economics, Purdue University, Rhodes College, the University of Chicago, and the annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies held in San Diego, Philadelphia, and Seattle. I would like to thank my hosts, fellow presenters, discussants, and audiences for their astute questions and invaluable suggestions. Georges Bê Duc, Roy Chan, Wendy Larson, Jinjia Li, Jason McGrath, Steven Riep, Rune Svarverud, Victor Vuilleumier, and Ji Zhe deserve special thanks for taking the time to read chapters of this manuscript. Their perceptive comments sharpened my thinking. An earlier version of chapter  2 appeared in Modern Chinese Lit­er­a­ture and Culture (Fall 2012). I thank Kirk Denton and two anonymous readers for their useful suggestions and encouragement. I owe a special debt to Terre Fisher. Her sensitivity and intelligence in coping with my text have greatly enhanced its readability. Robert Graham, director of the Harvard University Asia Center Publications Program, responded to all my questions with impressive promptness, efficiency, and clarity. He gracefully guided this proj­ect through the publication pro­cess. David Der-­wei Wang and two anonymous readers for the Harvard University Asia Center read the manuscript with ­great care and keen critical eyes. I am deeply grateful for their enthusiastic support and impor­tant advice. Over the years Max Bohnenkamp, Anup Grewal, Krista Van Fleit Hang, Jeff Keller, Taeju Kim, Yuhang Li, Dong Liang, Mei Mei, Zhange Ni, Nianshen Song, Shi Yifeng, Catherine Stuer, Chun Chun Ting, Hongjian Wang, Shengyu Wang, Peng Xu, Zhang Huiyu, Ling Zhang, and Hai Zhao have sustained me with their intellectual and practical comradeship. Dai Jinghua and Nicole Huang first inspired me to pursue Chinese lit­er­a­ture and intellectual history as a ­career. To them, I am im­mensely indebted.

xiv

Acknowl­edgments

My f­amily has lived with this book through all its incarnations for as long as I did, handled its demands with grace and forgiveness, and contributed to it in ways innumerable. They have given form to who I am and meaning to what I do. Baba, Mama, Li Zheng, Easton, and Jake—­ this is for you.

Abbreviations

CCP Chinese Communist Party GMD Guomin­dang (Chinese Nationalist Party) PRC ­People’s Republic of China

introduction What is it over t­ here—so many, so many . . . ​ Countless feet, countless hands, countless jostling heads . . . ​ At win­dows, upon streets, upon piers, at stations . . . ​ What are they ­doing? thinking? desiring? . . . ​ This is a terrifying miracle: when I now remember I am no longer myself, but a number, Which is slowly undergoing metamorphoses, expanding So large u ­ ntil I am stunned, convulsing. When I am still, my heart is trodden over by countless feet. When I move, my heart is like a bustling crossroad. I sit ­here. On the street are countless ­people. Suddenly, I see myself as a grain of dust rolling among them. —Ai Qing, “Qunzhong”1

A

poet famous for his earthy language and patriotic spirit, Ai Qing 艾青 (1910–96) surprised his readers with his poem “Qunzhong” 羣眾 (The Crowd, 1940). Published during the War of Re­sis­tance against Japan (1937–45), the poem fluctuates between feelings of bewilderment, unease, and expectation. The jostling crowd attracts and disorients the first-­person speaker, causing him to have convulsive spasms, yet it is also his destination. Ai Qing’s poem dramatizes the theme of encountering and merging with the crowd, which has captivated many Chinese intellectuals since the turn of the twentieth c­ entury. As the multi-­headed and multi-­limbed mass swarms across his vision, the “I” realizes he is undergoing a slow yet per­sis­tent transfiguration: He has lost his individual personality and is becoming an ever-­enlarging “number.” The overwhelming magnitude of the formless “number” that he turns into provokes astonishment and convulsions. Do his spasms and feeling of fearfulness betray his instinct of self-­preservation and romantic attachment to individual selfhood? Or do the vibrations of his convulsive body instead reveal the sensations of overcoming the pettiness of a narcissistic self? It is in this moment that the poet is most ambivalent. As the speaker metamorphoses into a vast, selfless

2 Introduction cipher, the crowd seems to enter into him. The meta­phor of the heart as a “bustling crossroad” leaves room for speculation about ­whether the crowd in the next line—­“On the street are countless p ­ eople”—­actually exists inside the speaker. This problematic merger comes to the fore in the culmination of the poem when the speaker sees himself “like a grain of dust rolling among them.” Ai Qing’s “I” fi­nally splits into a perceiving self and a disappearing self as the object of observation. Through a specular pro­cess of self-­distantiation, the poet not only turns the moment of overcoming oneself and becoming one of the many into an aesthetic spectacle but also, as if indulging in a fantasy of exemption from the total dissolution of subjectivity, preserves a self-­conscious “I”-­observer separated from the other self that dwindles to a vanishing point. For more than a c­ entury, the schizophrenic longing for dissolution into the collective, while retaining the reflective capacities of the self, has provoked profound anx­i­eties about the relationship between the individual and the crowd. Ai Qing captured some of the most intriguing and enduring tensions that this book tries to bring into sharp relief: t­ hose generated by treating the crowd as an object of knowledge and approaching it as an object of desire, by the need to keep a critical distance and the urge to establish contact, by simultaneous detachment and identification. The figure of the crowd, Revolutionary Waves seeks to demonstrate, became a vital site where modern Chinese intellectuals came to terms with connections among forms of life, narratives of selfhood, and po­liti­cal horizons. As Ai’s poem exemplifies, writings about the crowd in twentieth-­century China ­were rarely dispassionate, abstract, or impartial. Instead, they almost invariably betrayed the strong emotional investment of their authors. The crowd’s complex po­liti­cal ramifications and aesthetic meanings, therefore, cannot be grasped without a nuanced understanding of the passions and anx­i­eties of intellectuals who placed the crowd at the center of modern China’s revolutionary transformations. The advent of the crowd is one of the most dramatic stories in China’s crisis-­ridden transition from dynastic empire to nation-­state. From the demise of the imperial system to the founding of a communist state, China experienced prolonged periods of po­liti­cal upheaval, social unrest, and war. Equally a cause and an effect of the tumult and transformation, crowds gathered during that time. They gathered on the street, in the square, ­under the pens of writers and scholars, and on the tongues of politicians

Introduction

3

and revolutionaries. Looking back, Haun Saussy argues, “Chinese history from 1900 onward has been, if any era deserved the name, an Age of Crowds, punctuated by explosions of crowd energy.”2 For scholars such as Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, this is another way of saying that Chinese history since the turn of the twentieth ­century has been an age of modernity, b­ ecause “in some deep and essential sense, crowds are modernity. Modern times are crowded times. Modern man is the man of the crowd.”3 ­These con­temporary commentators ­ride on the validation of history. But in 1895, when the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) first made the bold pronouncement that “the age we are about to enter ­will in truth be the ERA OF CROWDS,” it was only one of many predictions about the character of the new c­ entury.4 When the idea of the crowd as an epoch-­defining, historical subject began circulating in China in the early years of the twentieth century—­ ­ partly through translations of and commentaries on Le Bon—­Le Bon’s claim was far from self-­evident or indisputable, let alone readily accepted. As Ai Qing’s poem illustrates, for many who agonized over the fate of their country, the crowd remained for much of the c­ entury more a puzzle to be solved, a meaning to be understood, and an experience to be lived than a self-­executing, self-­explanatory entity. “A tray of loose sand”—­this was the bleak image that prominent Chinese cultural and po­liti­cal figures proposed at the beginning of the twentieth c­ entury to depict the profound threat of disintegration China faced in the wake of the Qing Empire’s (1644–1911) collapse and Western encroachment.5 How to transform an entity fragmented like sand into a cohesive social body continues to be a crucial concern of Chinese intellectuals. At the center of their discussions is the trope of the crowd. If Chinese ­people ­were “a tray of loose sand,” could or­ga­nized crowds be the building blocks of a po­liti­cal body, formed from that material? Was the physical massing of ­people evidence of self-­awakening or mass madness? What did it entail, mentally and bodily, for an individual to become one of the crowd? Although t­ hese questions derived their meaning, import, and emotional punch from the specific context of modern China during this time of radical change, Chinese intellectuals ­were not alone in asking them. Through struggling with t­ hese questions, the imagination of twentieth-­century Chinese intellectuals became a self-­conscious and inalienable part of the modern expression of a crowded global age.

4 Introduction In the first half of the twentieth c­ entury, the crowd became a highly charged object of psychological investigation, aesthetic depiction, and po­ liti­cal investment. The salience of qunzhong (crowd) as a focus of intensive theorization and repre­sen­ta­tion in modern China was tied to the country’s web of interrelated changes, excitement, and expectations, including the shift in the locus of sovereignty and po­liti­cal legitimacy from ruler to the ­people and the advent of nationalism.6 Republicanism ­became entrenched as a po­liti­cal way of life that not only forged and sustained new rules and expectations for politicians and po­liti­cal organ­izations but also generated a repertoire of new forms of collective action and solidarity.7 Pro­cesses of industrialization, urbanization, and mass migration gave rise to new economic, social, and physical conditions of living, working, or sometimes sheltering together. Also impor­tant ­were the sustained expressions of po­liti­c al capacity by Chinese workers in both rural and urban areas, as well as the rise of participatory publics as a new source of morality and authority.8 Writings on the crowd w ­ ere inflected by t­ hese experiences, but at the same time remained neither predicated on nor reducible to them. Theories and stories of the crowd gave meaning to experience and fueled mass movements. They are what Pierre Rosanvallon terms “active” repre­sen­ta­ tions, “orient[ing] action, impos[ing] on the field of possibilities the limits of the thinkable, and demarcat[ing] the ground on which contest and controversy can take place.”9 It is in this sense that the history of the crowd discourse is not only a history of lit­er­a­ture and thought but is itself also a constitutive part in modern Chinese history. This book examines the emergence of the crowd—­particularly the po­liti­cal crowd—as a contested yet generative trope through which Chinese thinkers and writers ruminated on the question of selfhood and advanced competing models of enlightenment and revolution. Ideas and stories of the crowd ­were intrinsically linked to questions of nationhood and modernity. They played a critical role in shaping personal and collective identities and gave rise to new notions of public and private space in modern China. For anxious commentators on both the Left and the Right, crowds became nothing less than a technology of power, a source of legitimation during the turbulent period from the fall of the Qing Empire through de­cades of war and revolution in the Republic of China to the founding of the ­People’s Republic.10 Rather than treating the crowd

Introduction

5

as a sociopo­liti­cal given, I call attention to how writers, phi­los­o­phers, psychologists, and po­liti­cal theorists searched for and often in­ven­ted vocabularies, explanations, and modes of repre­sen­ta­tion that might render the crowd intelligible and practicable. They competed—on scientific, cultural, and ideological grounds—­for authority in representing the conduct of the crowd, prescribing techniques for its management and speaking and acting on its behalf. Parsing this contentious pro­cess takes us on a journey across disciplines, po­liti­cal allegiances, and strains of repre­sen­ta­ tion. Drawing on a wide range of sources from fiction, philosophy, poetry, and psychological studies, I highlight unexplored interactions between emerging social-­scientific forms of knowledge, new aesthetic modes of repre­sen­ta­tion, and changing po­liti­cal imperatives in the first half of the twentieth c­ entury. My study thus challenges the bound­aries that govern genres and disciplines. By d ­ oing so, it highlights the complexities and under­lying logics of the modern Chinese crowd discourse that generated subjectivities and oriented actions, enabled as well as constrained the expression of togetherness, and thus both expanded and limited the horizon of po­liti­cal possibilities in an emerging age of mass politics. Although this book focuses on the first half of the last c­ entury, its under­lying concerns are grounded in pressing con­temporary cultural and po­liti­cal issues. The rise of the market and the law in the post-­Mao reforms has coincided with the disavowal of China’s revolutionary past and the dissolution of collective subjects such as the proletariat and “the ­people” (often reduced to icons of nostalgia), while the enunciation and enactment of the po­liti­cal mass persist in multiple guises and locations. Excavating and categorizing the early twentieth-­century crowd discourse prepare us for a reimagining of community and togetherness in China’s postsocialist pres­ent.

Naming the Nameless As long as t­here has been writing in China, ­there have been references to the nameless “masses” (zhong 眾 or min 民). The Confucian concept of the masses conveys both deprecatory and positive connotations: The zhong or min is characterized by its blindness and passiveness, but is also regarded

6 Introduction as a potential source of humanity. It is both heralded as the ultimate barometer of heaven’s ­will and the foundation of the state and is depicted as an inert object of royal attention and care.11 Confucian thinkers and statesmen, to borrow Tu Wei-­ming’s apt description, establish a transcendent linkage between “the most generalisable social relevance (the sentiments of the ­people) and the most universalisable, ethico-­religious sanction (the mandate of heaven).”12 They declare min as the “root” (ben 本) of the polity, but at the same time exclude the masses from the po­liti­cal sphere. The distinction between the masses and a person with po­liti­cal privilege and responsibility is fundamentally a cultural one in that “edification permits one to move from the indeterminate masses (min) to the expression of one’s particularity (ren 人) and, ultimately, to the expression of one’s authoritative humanity (ren 仁).”13 Such coexistence of the notion of the ­people as the polity’s raison d’être with the thinly veiled disdain for the involvement of the “indeterminate masses” in a­ ctual po­ liti­cal pro­cesses has had a lasting impact on Chinese po­liti­cal discourse. Although mass uprisings had occurred throughout imperial history and the paternalistic theory of governance affords popu­lar rebellion a degree of po­liti­cal legitimacy, the crowd in premodern historical texts, as Saussy has noted, often took on the role of the passive recipient of the ruler’s and the elites’ munificence, “not as an agent but as a medium or material on which agents act.” “An activist crowd,” when it appears, is usually “a sign of something gone badly wrong.”14 The all-­too-­commonplace crowd had surely been ­there all along, but in the first half of the twentieth ­century it became si­mul­ta­neously troubling and meaningful in new ways. What distinguishes modern texts with re­spect to the crowd is not their absolute novelty but rather their degree of cultural salience and forms of intelligibility. The figure of the crowd came to be charged with significance and even lionized within larger narratives of war, revolution, and nation-­building; it was rendered vis­i­ble through fictional realism, utopian visions, and the disciplinary prism of emerging ­human sciences u ­ nder specific cultural and po­liti­cal circumstances. In contrast to the Confucian notion of the “indeterminate masses,” the modern discourse of the crowd centers on the physical pro­ cess of massing and its psychological c­ auses and consequences, which began to be the subject of intense investigation and theorization in China only in the early de­cades of the twentieth ­century when “the ­people of

Introduction

7

the nation” became identified as the history’s protagonist. Heated debates and elaborate theories ­were devoted to ­whether a collective ­mental state would come into existence as a consequence of the physical massing of persons, a question rarely asked before the twentieth ­century. The change in po­liti­cal sovereignty proceeded hand in hand with the saturation of the scientific understanding of the ­human that gave rise to new notions of individual subjectivity separated from traditional social networks of kinship, locality, and religion.15 The notion of the crowd and the shift in its relevant vocabulary in modern China w ­ ere based on and expressed the intrinsic connection among models of modern sovereignty, forms of new identities, and the ascendance of science that replaced “heavenly princi­ples” as a source of legitimacy for social reform. The emerging interest in the physical crowd around the turn of the twentieth c­ entury was both closely tied to and maintained an uneasy contest with the late Qing discourse of qun 羣 (group or aggregate), which called for forging new social bonds. Advocating a “new ideology of association,” late Qing thinkers called on the p ­ eople to relate to each other horizontally and voluntarily to achieve national salvation and the common good. This was in opposition to traditional hierarchical relations, according to which the son obeys the ­father, ­woman obeys man, subject obeys ruler.16 The ability to hequn 合羣 (converge or unite) became a sign of collective force and social cohesion. Influenced by Herbert Spencer’s (1820–1903) evolutionary theory of group se­lection, intellectuals such as Liang Qichao made recourse to the Ming loyalists’ notions of “lineage” and “type” and to the pre-­Qin phi­los­o­pher Xunzi’s 荀子 (ca. 313–238 BCE) idea of “grouping” (qun)—­heralding the ability to converge into a national community, or daqun 大羣 (the g­ reat aggregate), as a quin­tes­ sen­tial feature of modern citizenry.17 For them, the lack of this ability had brought China to the verge of racial extinction in the competition among nation-­states. In contrast to the disintegration of the China described as “a tray of loose sand,” the figure of daqun denotes “an undifferentiated social collectivity as a homogenous [sic] national community.”18 It was a vision that broke with the old sociopo­liti­cal order, making a fragmented ­people into an empowered and unitary organism responsible for its own survival. The construction of daqun, many late Qing authors believed, entailed the transformation of primordial structures such as f­ amily and clan into

8 Introduction a modern unitary polity. In contrast to daqun, viewed as a proper end of po­liti­cal modernity, ­there was also the odd figure of the “contrived aggregate” (renwei qun 人為羣), which occupied at best an ambivalent position in this nation-­building proj­ect. For instance, an entry on the modes of ­human association in a 1903 lexicon of neologisms inserted renwei qun into an other­wise teleological projection in which primal groups pro­gress into modern po­liti­cal communities: ­ ather, m F ­ other and siblings making a living together is called ­family; several families gathering together is called clan; a coalescence formed by ­human power is called contrived aggregate; an aggregate that is based on the natu­ral relationships between f­ amily clans and establishes coherent institutions is called ethnic aggregate or tribe . . . ​A ­great aggregate that unites tribes or cities and has established institutions and commensurable power is called nation-­state.19

The “contrived aggregate” is not as natu­ral as a ­family or clan or as ­grand as the “­great aggregate” of the nation-­state. It is bonded not by blood ties, ­family alliances, or “established institutions,” but is rather “formed by ­human power” ( yi renli jiecheng 以人力結成). It is a volatile ­human conglomeration that is subject to dissolution and reaggregation. It could be a voluntary association of like-­minded scholars, a mobilized group of activists, or other forms of grouping. The ill-­defined notion of a “coalescence formed by ­human power” evokes connotations of both strength and unnaturalness; it designates both a formidable force of strug­gle and an object of action. It is a fugitive body without form, a sociopo­liti­cal presence in its indeterminacy. The invention of this neologism shortly before the collapse of the monarchy and the establishment of the Republic of China marked a moment of curiosity and urgency when the very idea of ­people coming together and forming a ­whole became a locus of real concern for modern Chinese intellectuals. The awkward construction of renwei qun was short-­ lived. Another term, qunzhong (crowd), which did not make an appearance in the aforementioned lexicon, soon appeared and became ubiquitous in Chinese po­liti­cal rhe­toric. Some intellectuals such as Zhong Jianhong 锺健闳 (1893–1964) used it interchangeably with qun to denote “the crowd” as late as 1918.20 ­A fter the 1919 May Fourth Movement, qunzhong replaced

Introduction

9

qun and became the most widely circulated word for marking the physical massing of h ­ uman bodies.21 The coinage and dissemination of the term qunzhong in modern China reflected a change not only in the amount but also in the terms of discussion about the crowd, a shift that distinguished the early twentieth c­ entury from earlier periods. It was as the following questions swirled among the intellectuals that the term qunzhong was introduced and widely circulated. What is the relationship between the massing of bodies and the quest to create a cohesive sociopo­liti­cal body? Does the crowd break up the alleged natu­ral communities of ­family, clan, and tribe and pave the way for a national regrouping? Or is it a tumorous growth in the po­liti­cal body expressing social disor­ga­ni­za­tion and moral deviance? For many, the proj­ect of understanding qunzhong or the crowd was not a ­matter of choice: It thrust itself to the fore, struck the senses, and clamored for attention. Not long a­ fter the May Fourth Movement when students took to the street in Beijing in protest of China’s treatment at the Paris Peace Conference, one commentator wrote that the crowd not only “hits the eyes and stirs the heart (chumu jingxin 觸目驚心), but also raises interest.”22 Almost two de­cades ­later, shortly before the outbreak of the Sino-­Japanese War in 1937, a student studying psy­chol­ogy at Qing­ hua University wrote with a heightened sense of urgency: “Now at this moment of life and death for the Chinese nation, the crowd has expressed its wants—it could be said, more eagerly than did the French revolutionary crowd [of 1789]—­and therefore its characteristics must have been more remarkably displayed. In this unusual time, we cannot afford not to have a deep understanding of the crowd!”23 To a theorist of the Nationalist Party or Guomin­dang (GMD), the crowd was an anomaly (guaiwu 怪物) that must be examined and analyzed according to modern scientific norms rather than by the power of the imagination.24 To another, under­ standing the crowd was a prerequisite to joining it.25 The crowd became an urgent object of anxious scrutiny b­ ecause, we are told, t­ here ­were deeper reasons b­ ehind what “hits the eyes and stirs the heart.” Many believed that the crowd was subject to its own internal laws and pro­cesses. To understand its characteristics required theoretical clarification, aesthetic repre­sen­ta­tion, or other forms of mediation. At the heart of many such endeavors was the idea of “crowd mentality” (qunzhong xinli 羣眾心理), that the crowd has an inner life beneath what it

10 Introduction displays. Not merely a surface to be acted on or a herd to be led, the crowd was understood to have inner desires that could be mobilized or appropriated, raw energy that could be released or repressed, and primitive instincts worthy of praise or fear. What is the nature of this aggregation, be it a radical movement of mass action or a random gathering in the street? Is t­ here an intrinsic difference between the mentality and be­ hav­ior of individuals in a state of isolation and ­those of individuals gathering together? Can p ­ eople in the crowd be self-­willed sociopo­liti­cal agents guided by rational consciousness, or are they irresponsible entities driven by irrational impulses and emotions? Questions like t­ hese mushroomed within a short period and generated a broad spectrum of answers. The rationales and explanatory frameworks from which such questions emerged as legitimate inquiries beg to be recovered, as do the under­lying values and regulatory ideals on which vari­ous accounts of the crowd ­were predicated.

Disciplinary Thinking The emergence of qunzhong as the subject of repre­sen­ta­tion coincided with the institutionalization of psy­chol­ogy as an academic discipline in modern China. Through the circulation and deployment of psychological concepts and claims, modern Chinese intellectuals across the ideological spectrum viewed the crowd as a domain of investigation, for which they established descriptive bound­aries and defined explanatory schemes. Examining t­hese intellectual operations reveals the forms that “disciplinary thinking” took in the course of vari­ous efforts to know the crowd in modern China. I borrow the term “disciplinary thinking” in the sense it was deployed by Jacques Rancière, who used it to mean not only the delineation of bound­aries and methods according to which an object becomes known but also “the very constitution of this object as an object of thought . . . ​It is a way of defining an idea of the thinkable, an idea of what the objects of knowledge themselves can think and know.”26 Hardly a self-­evident analytical or descriptive category, the notion of qunzhong—­ the idea that “the crowd” is itself thinkable as an object as well as the

Introduction

11

forms of its intelligibility—­needs to be placed within the context of its emergence. Psy­chol­ogy, as a par­tic­u ­lar way of thinking about and acting on ­humans, provides us a privileged entry point for examining disciplinary thinking b­ ecause it designates both the content of knowledge and the modality of that knowledge. Building on Michel Foucault’s and Georges Canguilhem’s works on the history of the ­human sciences, scholars have noted that the formation of new knowledge about h ­ uman conduct cannot be reduced to a history of discoveries or a celebratory story of fact triumphing over bias; rather, it is inextricably linked to new ways of making vis­i­ble and intelligible the objects of scientific investigation at par­tic­ u­lar historical moments. Therefore, the eminent historian Kurt Danziger calls for the study of the “biography of psychological objects” by reading psychological theories as historical formations.27 Scientific objects, including psychological ones such as “crowd mentality,” as Lorraine Daston succinctly puts it, “structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards for explanation.”28 Psychological reasoning participated in making qunzhong into an object of thought and action. In the first half of the twentieth c­ entury, the mechanisms of h ­ uman aggregation came to rivet the attention of intellectuals of all stripes. Qunzhong xianxiang 羣眾現象 or “crowd phenomena” ­were, to borrow Nikolas Rose’s useful formulation, “si­mul­ta­neously disciplined, rendered thinkable as docile objects of a rational understanding, and epistemologized, located within a regime for the production, circulation, and adjudication of statements in terms of truth.”29 To trace the development of the notion of crowd mentality in modern China, one needs to examine not only the institutional and intellectual conditions of psy­chol­ogy itself but also Chinese psychologists’ conceptual commitments and methods of inquiry.30 Arguments, such as over ­whether the massing of ­people engenders some mysterious m ­ ental contagion binding individuals together or merely results in a mechanical interplay of mutual stimulation and reaction, proliferated and claimed scientific status of being e­ ither true or false.31 Such statements on the ­mental traits of the crowd ­were disseminated through diverse channels, ranging from specialized journals and academic monographs to general-­interest periodicals. Crowd theories received institutional

12 Introduction support from apparatuses of education and information, including not only newly established departments of psy­chol­ogy in elite universities and leading commercial presses but also the GMD’s military schools and cadre training programs. Postulations of the psychological princi­ples of crowd formation ­were bound up with the explication and design of techniques for controlling the crowd’s conduct, making the psychologization of qunzhong a “disciplinary” proj­ect in both senses of the word. The formation of the figure of the crowd inevitably reflected debates within the discipline of psy­chol­ogy. One such debate centered around Floyd H. Allport’s (1890–1979) behavioristic interpretation of h ­ uman interaction in terms of stimulation and reaction and William McDougall’s (1871–1938) Lamarckian notions of instinct and impulse. It grew contentious in the 1920s and is impor­tant in the history of psy­chol­ogy, ­because what was at stake was nothing less than the very definition of the subject ­matter of social psy­chol­ogy.32 This controversy—­the so­cio­log­i­cal versus the biopsychological—­shaped how Chinese scholars such as Gao Juefu 高覺敷 (1896–1993), a leading academic of the republican period, developed their own theories of collective be­hav­ior and social antagonism. But discipline-­based events alone, such as the advent of new theories or the publication of par­tic­u ­lar translations or textbooks, cannot explain why Gao chose to depict persons in a crowd as delusional clowns or why the GMD scholar Zhang Jiuru 張九如 (1895–1979) advised readers to mea­ sure the depth of a crowd’s supposed “cleft in consciousness.”33 To under­ stand how certain psychological concepts gained or lost explanatory power at par­tic­u ­lar historical moments, we need to take into account other f­ actors (po­liti­cal stances, moral presuppositions, personal experiences, and the like) under­lying the scientific undertaking. The proliferation of claims about crowd mentality also needs to be understood beyond the disciplinary confines of psy­chol­ogy. The construction of the crowd as an object of knowledge and the form that its intelligibility took in modern China ­were closely linked with the rise both of “society” as a focus of po­liti­cal discourse and the new modality of the “person” construed as a corporeally bounded and psychologically motivated individual. Rather than being a natu­ral category of historical investigation, “society” was called into being as a discrete realm of activity and h ­ uman connection through so­cio­log­i­cal surveys, censuses, and other modes of knowledge production; all ­these activities contributed to the

Introduction

13

repre­sen­ta­tion and governance of the new Chinese nation.34 This society-­ and-­nation was to be composed of selves possessing decipherable and inscribable interiorities of memories, desires, and pathologies, around which a cluster of issues including identity, agency, and health could be articulated.35 Chinese intellectuals construed crowd formation as a ­matter of mobilizing emotional, impulsive, or delusional individuals onto the terrain of the social. The psychological discourse around qunzhong arose at the intersection of the modern regime of the individualized, interiorized self and the formation of the social as a territory of thought and real­ity. Understanding the disciplinary claims around qunzhong in this light enables us to place it in an order of knowledge. This epistemological order problematized the crowd as an object to be known and posited dif­fer­ent types of knowing subjects who asserted access to its inner determinations and ascribed meaning to its conduct.36 Earlier studies had linked the crowd with the discourse on guomin xing 國民性 (national character), as embodied in Lu Xun’s depiction of apathetic and cruel onlookers, or with the advance of revolutionary collectivism manifested in left-­wing lit­er­a­ ture ­after the 1920s.37 I do not question the importance of ­those connections. However, the emergence of qunzhong as a focus of repre­sen­ta­tion must also be seen in the context of the new psychological thinking of the era, which claimed to speak the truth about ­people’s “inner life” and helped shape ideas about selfhood and nation. Competing claims about the crowd ­were articulated through a fabric of interdependent ideas of consciousness and unconsciousness, manipulation and spontaneity, rationality and intuition, all of which took on new putatively scientific expression in the early de­c ades of the twentieth ­century. Central to this fabric was the unstable dichotomy of the “normal” versus the “pathological.” For many commentators of the time, the question of ­whether to condemn qunzhong as a mindless swarm or valorize it as a revolutionary force of historical change could be answered only by coming to grips with its perceived vulnerability to the contagion of suggestion, inclination to hallucinate, or susceptibility to hypnosis. It is therefore especially impor­tant to recognize how the intersection of crowd, self, and nation took shape within the dissemination of a scientific mode of conceiving and managing normality and pathology. By tracing the circulation of this psychological language across disciplines and genres, this

14 Introduction book captures certain limited modes of interpretation whose historicity lies in the specific ways they employed categories and concepts, which in turn governed the forms and limits of what became knowable about the crowd in a China undergoing drastic changes.

The Dialectics of Depersonalization “I advance as history strug­gles forward/I, from a singular individual/walk ­toward the crowd”: This line from the poet Tian Lan’s 天藍 (1911–84) 1942 poetry collection Yuyan 預言 (Prophecy) neatly encapsulates the trajectory from the individual to the collective that preoccupied revolution-­ minded writers and thinkers in twentieth-­century China.38 Embedded in the urge to know the crowd was a compelling and often competing desire to identify with it and merge into it. The pervasive notion of the inevitable and irresistible movement of history and a shared sense of urgency to establish linkages between the singular and the plural intertwined in a widespread conviction among modern Chinese intellectuals that they w ­ ere experiencing an epochal transition.39 For many, especially ­a fter the late 1920s, joining the crowd became a moment of self-­ transcendence: that “I am no longer I,” in the words of another young writer Yin Fu 殷夫 (1910–31), became the basis of action and fulfillment.40 This turn away from the individuated self, coinciding with the leftward shift from the May Fourth “literary revolution” to the post–­May Fourth “revolutionary lit­er­a­ture,” has been read as evidence that revolutionary collectivism prevailed over concerns with individual subjectivity.41 This perspective approaches stories of self-­immersion into the crowd in terms of the eclipse of subjectivity or the loss of individual autonomy; it therefore risks overlooking the fact that many twentieth-­century intellectuals understood crowds to be the “breeding grounds for new forms of leadership and individualism.”42 In contrast, I argue that the discovery of the crowd was not only contemporaneous with the valorization of the self but also integral to the transmutation of subjectivity in modern China. Rather than considering the movement away from the individual ego as a case of “loss and incapacitation,” Fredric Jameson frames it an active response to the modern experience of “a momentum that cannot find res-

Introduction

15

olution within the self, but that must be completed by a Utopian and revolutionary transmutation of the world of actuality itself.” Against the ste­reo­typical picture of the modern individual marked by inwardness, autonomy, and detachment, he identifies a longing for “some new existence outside the self, in a world radically transformed and worthy of ecstasy” at the heart of the modern mutation of the self. In his discussion of the sociopo­liti­cal conjunctures that generated modernist momentum, Perry Anderson recognizes the “imaginative proximity of social revolution” as a defining component of the modernist sensibility. Drawing on Anderson, Jameson argues that modern writers’ dawning conviction that the world can be radically transformed, combined with a dissatisfaction with the introspective form of individuality, gave rise to a desire for self-­erasure and for connection with emerging social forces. They sought to lay claim to that which is beyond or beneath the individual mind—­a desire Jameson terms the “longing for depersonalization.”43 He challenges the inherited view of modernity that “presupposes our emergence as individuals from some inchoate pre-­individualistic mass, and our fears of being submerged back into a post-­individualistic ‘multitude.’ ” Depersonalization is, on the contrary, the very condition of individuation.44 Jameson’s approach helps us defy the confines of reading literary modernity solely as “some ‘inward turn.’ ”45 Particularly germane to my study is his emphasis on the affective need of modern writers to merge their minds and bodies with the collective energies of social transformation. A similar yearning motivated many Chinese intellectuals who ­were marginalized to the periphery of society and politics and longed to merge with what they saw as the transformative forces of history.46 Their theoretical and literary narratives testify to a polemic commitment to the transcendence of individual life, a commitment that has been represented in a variety of forms and has had dif­fer­ent consequences across the twentieth c­ entury, both in China and elsewhere.47 But it is also impor­tant to note that, although a longing for “the ecstasy of collectivity” (to borrow Mark Elvin’s term) formed the foundation of their desire to become part of the crowd, it was also inseparable from their fear of self-­dissolution.48 Often at work in the same text is a paradoxical combination of both desire and fear. Variously described as a formidable tide, a pathological aggregate, or an amorphous mass, the crowd evokes both ecstasies of self-­transcendence and fears of losing one’s selfhood.

16 Introduction The tension between Chinese intellectuals’ longing for unmediated collective spontaneity and their desire to claim a role in interpreting, mobilizing, and voicing the crowd animated their vision of a ­people in ­upheaval and their own troubled relation to it. Theoretical and literary repre­sen­ta­tions of the crowd reflect rather than efface this tension. Examining the dialectic between the longing for depersonalization and the per­sis­tence of the self brings into relief the mutually constitutive relationship between self-­realization and self-­disavowal, which is at the heart of how writers and thinkers of the period staged the outburst of collective energies and positioned themselves within ­these forces. Merging oneself with the crowd did not automatically lead to self-­negation. Instead, for many intellectuals, embracing the eruption of collective energy as a transformative experience hinged on w ­ hether one could make oneself both the subject and object of inspection and mastery. How the crowd was experienced had much to do with how one acted on one’s own desires and instincts; the state of being part of a crowd was inseparable from the state of being a self. In this sense, this study is as much about the fictions of selves as it is about the fictions of the crowd. It thereby thinks afresh the conventional paradigm that reads Chinese literary modernity in terms of the dichotomies of interiority versus exteriority and individuality versus collectivity.

The Imperative of Communion The figure of the crowd ultimately brings us to the prob­lem of representing the ­people in modern China. The ­people, “a master at once imperious and impossible to find,” as Pierre Rosanvallon memorably puts it, occupies a central place in the modern “regime of fictionality.” It is at once heralded as the sovereign subject of history, yet remains an enigma that “pres­ents no easily identifiable face.”49 Having no fixed or naturally defined referent, “the p ­ eople” has become the ineffable grounds of po­liti­cal legitimacy and does not exist prior to the pro­cess of its being invoked and sought out through repre­sen­ta­tional acts. Representing—in both its aesthetic and po­liti­cal senses of making legible and standing for—­renmin 人民 or “the p ­ eople” has been a vital yet elusive task at the heart of the

Introduction

17

construction of the nation-­state and the formation of party politics in twentieth-­century China.50 Renmin as a modern po­liti­cal category of universal history has to be made pres­ent through discourses and practices; hence, the “history of presencing” (Ann Anagnost’s term) that defines China’s passage to modernity.51 The discursive figure of the crowd frames both realities and po­liti­cal possibilities. Time and again, the coming together of bodies in public space, or in places animated as public by such appearances, serves as the embodied per­for­mance of a plural “we” that asserts and enacts “the ­people” in its becoming, in its self-­making as a po­liti­cal subject. The crowd gives body to and problematizes the idea of the unitary national subject that fuses other­wise dispersed, isolated selves into one body and consciousness. The exercise of imagining the crowd was at once enabled by and exceeded vari­ous “imperious and impossible” attempts to give a face to the master that is renmin. Chinese intellectuals during the first half of the twentieth c­ entury believed that not only would this collective subject emerge through fusional communion that pressed loose ele­ments into a uniform mass but that its coming-­into-­being would also take the form of a coming-­to-­self. This coalescence was to be effected through the recognition and activation of latent common ingredients, ­whether they be nationalist sentiments, class consciousness, or what appeared to psychologists to be paranoiac delusions that could cause pathological deviation from healthy social bonding. Theories and stories about the crowd ­were therefore embedded in a moralist discourse of communion in modern China, as manifested in the overriding desire among modern Chinese intellectuals for the coming-­ into-­being of the nation-­people as a unified collective subject. It was a longing for—or rather, a fantasy of—­the organic fusion of individuals into one body, one mind, and one leader that incarnates the we. The cultural and po­liti­cal vision of the nation-­people conceived on the basis of, to borrow Jean-­Luc Nancy’s apt description, “the politico-­subjective model of communion in one,” has claimed a significant role in the experience of Chinese modernity.52 Many writers and thinkers envisioned the formation of China as a nation as a pro­cess of self-­effecting in which the ­people produced its own essence as community through fusional communion; hence, “the subjective pro­cess par excellence.”53 The figure of a collectivity in which social differences dissolve into one identity—­what

18 Introduction Nancy calls the “fusional assumption”—­both inspired po­liti­cal passions and reified a common interiority.54 Such solidarity constrained as much as it enabled the expression of togetherness, and it therefore imposed limits on the meaning of community. Writing during a time of g­ reat turmoil and uncertainty, many Chinese intellectuals tried to find answers to a range of impor­tant questions within the par­ameters of this fusional model. ­These questions included how to constitute oneself as both a subject and object of the seemingly restless motion of history and what forms of private and collective life did revolutionary changes require and engender. The discursive formulations of the crowd mediated China’s experience of vio­lence and mobilization, war and revolution.

Globalizing Qunzhong The problematic of qunzhong took form within a global flow of conceptualizations and repre­sen­ta­tions that made the crowd a domain for interpretation and intervention. New understandings of qunzhong arose, circulated, and sometimes secured credibility as Chinese po­liti­cal theorists, academic researchers, writers, and artists developed their own visions in conversation with imported theories and aesthetic depictions of crowds. The emergence of Chinese crowd discourse therefore must be understood as part of a global network of exchanges. Recent studies have shed new light on the modern discursive currents about crowds in Eu­ rope and North Amer­i­ca, but the Chinese side of this story is still missing.55 Examining the specificity and global resonance of a wide array of Chinese texts, both within their immediate intellectual and po­liti­cal contexts and within a transnational network of knowledge and repre­sen­ ta­tions, helps not only fill this gap but also “provincializes” Eu­ro­pean and American stories of the crowd.56 Indeed, for modern Chinese intellectuals, the context for their thinking was self-­consciously global. Leading psychologists of the republican era such as Gao Juefu saw the reported activities of crowds on New York City streets or of Sioux Indian warriors as impor­tant as what happened outside their own win­dows.57 The extensive translation of writings by not only well-­k nown theorists such as Le Bon but also by lesser-­k nown au-

Introduction

19

thors such as Edward Ross (1866–1951) and Everett Dean Martin (1880– 1941), along with the introduction of critical and literary works by such writers as Ernst Toller (1893–1939) and Kobayashi Takiji 小林多喜二 (1903–33), all w ­ ere crucial to how the figure of qunzhong took on discursive shape in China. For example, the Chinese left-­wing writers’ practice of portraying qunzhong as the “main body” (zhuti 主體)58 of fictional narration in the late 1920s and the 1930s must be seen not only as distinct from the allegedly “individualistic” May Fourth lit­er­a­ture but also as part of the formation of an international revolutionary aesthetic across languages and space. ­These authors sought to establish links with writers from around the globe, aspired to situate their literary practices within what Michael Denning has termed the rise of “subaltern modernism,” and thus participated in reshaping the geography of lit­er­a­ture.59 Tracing the modes of inquiry and aesthetic forms that overflowed territorial and linguistic bound­aries enables us to track routes of information, rethink the relevance of transnational canons, and begin to account for the appeal of the notions and figures that seemed to transcend locality and language. This approach cautions against narrating a story of diffusion and absorption of reified “transnational” notions at the cost of neglecting local specificity. As Frederick Cooper argues, to determine “­whether the terms in which certain intellectuals operate is truly ‘universal’ or truly ‘global’ ” is not as impor­tant as “to figure out what intellectuals’ frameworks w ­ ere, with their openings and closures, linkages, and dead ends.”60 The plausibility, purchase, and referential force of many modern abstractions cannot be explained by their rational force or validity, but must be accounted for in terms of their reception and meanings in par­tic­u­lar historical contexts.61 When viewed in this way, “the seamless web of abstract knowledge,” in David Armitage’s words, “turn[s] out to be a brittle mosaic of contingent concerns.”62 Attention to the interaction and resonance between ­human sciences, political-­philosophical visions, and literary imaginations in a global context is crucial to unpacking the layered meanings that run through the varied figures of the crowd. More importantly, the per­sis­tence and density of key tensions—­around theory versus intuition, solitude versus solidarity, the immanent vitality of the collective versus the necessity of leadership—­become more vis­i­ble and contextually meaningful when we trace them through dif­fer­ent figurative veils across genres, disciplinary divides, and geographic borders.

20 Introduction

The Instability of the Crowd In this study, I draw on lit­er­a­ture studies, as well as intellectual history, critical theory, and the history of ­human sciences, in order to grasp the overlapping and diverging strategies and aspirations between lit­er­a­ture and formulations of knowledge. But this approach is not intended to ­reduce knowledge to mere linguistic construction so as to debunk its pretensions to objectivity, nor do I treat fiction as a testing ground for theoretical diagnosis. Rather than merely enacting po­liti­cal ideals or dramatizing theories, literary works can pres­ent collective formation as lived experience in narrative terms that exceed what theoretical exposition or po­liti­cal prescription could allow. While tracing the diverse theoretical and aesthetic threads, I stress the crucial intertwining of dif­fer­ent forms of knowledge and writing, underscoring both their convergences and their distinct meanings and logics. My interest in the transversal connections between knowledge, aesthetics, and politics is indebted to a large body of scholarship that examines the ways in which disparate repre­sen­ta­tional practices “come into relations of mutual resonance and exchange” for reasons “outside of mechanical or biographical notions of influence.”63 This focus brings to the fore the complexity of the intellectual operations that the question of the crowd engendered. On the one hand, I point to diagnostic assumptions in the lit­er­a­ture. For instance, in Ye Shaojun’s 葉紹鈞 (1894–1988) novel Ni Huanzhi 倪煥之 (1928), his depiction of a mass rally as the operating ground for hypnosis ­under which the gathered p ­ eople regressed to an infantile stage of imitation cannot be dissociated from the psychopathological discourse in circulation at the time, a discourse put forward to be recognized as a modern scientific finding. So it is necessary to sort out how authors invoked certain concepts and terminologies that enabled them to weave into fiction, however tacitly or inadvertently, par­tic­u­lar ways of rendering the crowd describable and diagnosable in specific contexts.64 Yet it is also impor­tant to attend to the figurative nature of theoretical formations as they are “enscripted, perforce, by literary means.”65 Descriptions couched in images and analogies, the deployment of narrative devices, styles of prose, choices of persuasive means, and even abnormal grammatical structures all direct our attention to the textuality of

Introduction

21

psychological and other theoretical discourses, revealing them to be at once rhetorical enterprises and forms of power and thus inviting us to confront both their poetics and politics.66 This interdisciplinary and intertextual approach highlights the inherent instability of the crowd, despite claims of certainty about its characteristics and potential in almost all interpretations. The figure of the crowd in modern Chinese culture was not fixed; complexities emerge from its shifts across translations, textbooks, sociopo­liti­cal commentaries, philosophical contemplations, fictional narratives, poetic proclamations, and visual creations. Tracing this shape shifting requires us to come to grips with a cluster of dialectically related antinomies, such as t­ hose between the normal and the pathological, the rational and the affective, and the premeditated and the spontaneous. Multiple strains of crowd repre­sen­ta­ tion sought—­often in the name of historical urgency and with the promise of intellectual sincerity and scientific accuracy—to establish bound­aries between the noises of “childish minds and bestial desires” and the voices of reason,67 between abrupt convulsions and steadfast movement, between bodily instincts and conscious w ­ ill. Such distinctions acquired meanings within specific discursive contexts and lent urgency and legitimacy to vari­ous po­liti­cal programs and aesthetic claims. At the core of ­these distinctions was a distribution of positions that designated who had the authority to see differences and the competence to speak about and act on them. The figure of the crowd, even though bound up with the production and employment of such distinctions, also exceeded the confines of any given repre­sen­ta­tion. The fact that t­ hese distinctions w ­ ere always in the making suggests the crowd’s unremitting instability; the multiplicity of genres through which qunzhong emerged and the diversity of aesthetic and po­liti­cal aspirations invested in it bear witness to its inherent fluidity. The per­sis­tent and competing attempts to stabilize the meaning of the crowd point to the productive “unfixity” that pervaded its disparate figurations, which emerged ­under specific historical conditions.68 The crowd’s malleability is particularly vis­i­ble when a figure of, for example, the affective crowd is mobilized for conflicting purposes, pushing what was theorized as pathological into the category of the normal. Central to the calculations of many po­liti­cal thinkers, party cadres, and psychological theorists alike, the psychological model of the crowd cannot be confined

22 Introduction to a par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal or ideological commitment. It crucially informed nationalism, left-­wing collectivism, and even anarchist nihilism, all of which, with dif­fer­ent inflections, purposes, and degrees of force, called for the coalescence of a mentally homogeneous collective. The psychological crowd was si­mul­ta­neously constructed and contested, fissured by competing urges to diagnose, prescribe, or narrate a China in transformation. Furthermore, what appears to be a consistent theory or story, on closer scrutiny, often turns out to be a site of explanatory impasse, conflicting premises, or narrative incoherence. It is through this unsettled and unsettling pro­cess of meaning-­making that modern Chinese intellectuals negotiated their relationship to larger historical pro­cesses and coped with anx­i­eties about maintaining a subject position in the face of the crowd’s alleged fudong 浮動 (volatility), to use the GMD theorist Zhang Jiuru’s term.69 Ultimately, the elastic figure of the crowd became an unstable site where intellectuals confronted the troubling relationship between the alleged interiority of the p ­ eople (revolutionary instincts for some, perverse pathologies for ­others, inert material for yet ­others) and the necessary form of mediation (be it psychological intervention, ideological indoctrination, or aesthetic vocalization) in the making of modern China. I scrutinize not simply the changing meanings and roles attributed to the crowd, but, more crucially, the uneven relationship between the repre­sen­ta­tional imperative of vari­ous kinds of texts and the unstable figure of the crowd in whose name and, more often than not, in whose voice the authorial agency of intellectuals and writers was manifested, inflected, or threatened. This book looks at the narrative techniques, conceptual presuppositions, and diagnostic pretensions with which intellectuals purportedly made audible and vis­i­ble the au­then­tic collective energies of the Chinese p ­ eople and examines the anx­i­eties of authority that haunted their competing claims to truth before the consolidation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the late 1940s and 1950s. The chapters of this book proceed more or less in chronological order and move between disciplines and genres, but each one centers on a par­tic­u­ lar set of questions that the authors u ­ nder discussion posed and to which they responded. In chapter 1, “The Politics of Psychologizing Qunzhong,” I focus on the translation, circulation, and institutionalization of “crowd

Introduction

23

psy­chol­ogy” in the republican era and highlight the connection between the emergence of qunzhong as an object of repre­sen­ta­tion, the development of psy­chol­ogy as a specialized discipline, and the rise of mass politics in modern China. In chapter 2, “The Lure of the Irrational,” I explore notions of irrationality and instinct in the anarcho-­nihilist philosophy of Zhu Qianzhi 朱謙之 (1899–1972) who, in opposition to most of the commentators studied in chapter 1, emphasized impulsive emotion as the motor of revolution. Therefore, this chapter is as much an attempt to recognize the po­liti­cal and intellectual overdetermination of Zhu’s idea of the crowd as it is an effort to map how repre­sen­ta­tions of the crowd manifest the dialectic of po­liti­c al reason and instinct in the modern Chinese po­liti­cal imagination. Chapter 3, “Fictions of Becoming,” examines how the desire for and anxiety about the dissolution of borders between the self and the collective played out in the lit­er­a­ture of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Focusing on narrative depictions of the encounter between the individual and the po­liti­cal crowd, this chapter brings into focus the mutually constitutive relationship between self-­disavowal and self-­realization, which lies at the heart of how modern Chinese writers presented the outburst of collective energies and positioned themselves within t­ hose forces. Chapter 4, “Prob­lems of Solitude,” focuses on Hu Yepin 胡也頻 (1903–31), a modernist-­turned-­revolutionary writer, and his imaginary journey from solitude to communion in crowds, from perverse isolation to mass uprising. Examining his narratives of erotic and po­liti­cal fulfillment, this chapter underscores the inexorable connection between the exercise of the self and ideals of po­liti­cal belonging, which was central to entrenched mass-­based po­liti­cal culture in China. In the final chapter, “Torrents of Sound,” I take up the questions of transparency and mediation in repre­sen­ta­tions of qunzhong by looking at how the crowd purportedly gains voice through the medium of lit­er­a­ture. Tackling the paradox of giving voice/silencing in the writer’s construction of the crowd, this chapter interrogates the modern fetishization of voice as the vehicle of agency and challenges the impossible grounds of repre­sen­ta­tional authority at the core of vari­ous narratives of modern China. The Epilogue explores the “afterlives” of the authors, themes, and materials on which my main story focuses. In the Maoist era, the modern mass po­liti­cal party not only monopolized the content of po­liti­cal consciousness in which “the ­people” had to be educated but also claimed sole

24 Introduction access to their innermost impulses and au­then­tic emotions. The often impromptu and uncontrolled per­for­mance of collective po­liti­cal expression was ritualized into the Maoist-­style mass campaigns that time and again took command of all aspects of life. During this period, many of the writers and texts analyzed in this study w ­ ere deemed inappropriate and shunted to the margins. The imaginaries of the crowd carry implications beyond their immediate historical and po­liti­cal context. I conclude by exploring their significance in the context of China’s postsocialist transition, which is marked by the changing meaning of history, depoliticized politics, and ongoing aspirations for social change.

chapter 1 The Politics of Psychologizing Qunzhong ­ very psy­chol­ogy is a pedagogy, all decipherment is a therapeuE tics: you cannot know without transforming. —Michel Foucault, “Philosophy and Psy­chol­ogy,” 1965 Are ­human beings rational animals? Please explain. How can the crowd become a situation in which individuals satisfy their desire for superiority? Please compare the differences and similarities between the crowd and patients who have delusions of grandeur? Does the crowd have a mind that exists temporarily? If not, what are the reasons? —Gao Juefu, Qunzhong xinlixue 羣眾心理學 (Crowd Psy­chol­ogy), 1934

I

n 1913 Zhang Xichen 章锡琛 (1889–1969) published an article titled “Qunzhong xinli zhi tezheng” 羣眾心理之特徵 (The Characteristics of Crowd Mentality) in China’s most influential general-­interest journal of the time, Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌 (The Eastern Miscellany). Writing two years ­after the collapse of the Qing Empire, Zhang asserted that “­great religious and po­liti­cal transformations, East and West, past and pres­ent, are all manifestations of the heart/mind of the crowd (qunzhong xinyi 羣眾心意).” According to the article, the physical massing of ­human beings gives rise to a peculiar m ­ ental state that cannot be described without resorting to the theory of hypnotic suggestion. During hypnosis (cuimian 催眠), the subject obeys the suggestions of the hypnotist. Not unlike hypnotized subjects, individuals in a crowd fall ­under the spell of external suggestion. But in a crowd, ­mental influence is not a one-­way

26

The Politics of Psychologizing Qunzhong

affair: “Amidst a crowd, every­one controls o­ thers with suggestions and at the same time is controlled by ­others’ suggestions; thus [all] mutually interact and incite.” Subjected to this contagion of suggestion (anshi chuanran 闇示傳染), individuals, the article asserts, lose their conscious personalities, yield to instincts, and share hallucinations.1 Among the first works to introduce the idea of the “crowd-­mind” to a Chinese readership, Zhang Xichen’s essay attempted to explain the formation and action of qunzhong in psychological terms. Published during the po­liti­cal chaos caused by the power strug­gles between the military strongman Yuan Shikai 袁世凱 (1859–1916) and Sun Yat-­sen’s 孫中山 (1866–1925) Nationalist Party (GMD) shortly before the new republic descended into civil war, the essay concludes with a warning: “If the knowledge [of the crowd-­mind] is used in the right way, ­great success can be achieved, but if not, enormous crimes and ­great evil ­will break forth without any restriction. Can it not be feared?”2 A few years ­later, the famous journalist and prolific essayist Xu Lingxiao 徐凌霄 (1888–1961) echoed Zhang’s disquiet at the elusive nature of social change and the forces unleashed from below.3 As such comments show, the idea that a crowd possessed its own mind provoked mixed feelings of fear and won­ der among intellectuals. To understand the “­great transformations” (dabian 大變) of a world in disorder and travail, Zhang and Xu proposed to study the psychological interiority of the crowd. Many Chinese intellectuals followed a similar trajectory, emphasizing the urgency and vital importance of examining the psychological forces under­lying ­human social be­hav­ior. Theories about the crowd-­mind came to enjoy ­great currency in the late 1910s and the 1920s and continued to acquire resonances throughout the republican era.4 As I show in more detail, what intrigued many Chinese crowd theorists was not so much the social composition of the crowd, but rather questions of motive and action. What kind of mentality does the pro­cess of crowding generate or enable? How does being in a crowd alter individuals’ minds and be­hav­ior? And how and to what extent can mass be­hav­ior resulting from the ­mental and physical interactions of individuals be explained, predicted, and controlled? China in the early de­cades of the twentieth ­century experienced an expansion of the po­liti­cal field when armed rebellions, strikes, meetings, street protests, mass petitions, and other forms of collective action and solidarity swept across the nation. Si­mul­ta­neously a social-­scientific dis-



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27

course of the crowd took hold, one that turned qunzhong into an object of inquiry. In this chapter, I focus on the discursive practices that psychologized the crowd during the republican period. In par­tic­u­lar, I examine the dif­fer­ent ways in which modern Chinese intellectuals linked psychological analyses of the crowd with concerns about the constitution of individuals, the formation of po­liti­cal community, and the possibility of radical transformations. I have no interest in constructing some essential, transhistorical psychological interior of qunzhong hidden beneath the surface of its be­hav­ior; rather, crowd mentality and be­hav­ior are presented as conceptual objects that were themselves produced by and produced a psychological discourse of h ­ uman conduct, which in turn participated in what Nikolas Rose calls the “psychologization of experience in the twentieth ­century.”5 Qunzhong became psychologized in the sense that it was rendered si­mul­ta­neously problematic and intelligible when a kind of “psychological visibility” was accorded to it—­a pro­cess Rose terms “the production of psychological ‘truth effects.’ ”6 Recent critical histories of psy­chol­ogy challenge psychological essentialism, which treats the psyche as a natu­ral given and ignores the historicity of ­mental pro­cesses. They convincingly demonstrate the constitutive relationship between objects of psychological knowledge and psychological discourse itself.7 Joining in their critical perspective, I study the circulation and deployment of vocabularies, ideas, and norms in modern China that not only distinguished p ­ eople “gathering in a crowd” (qunzhong jihe 羣眾集合) from t­ hose in “isolation from the crowd” (liqun duli 離羣獨立)8 but also posited knowing subjects who claimed access to the crowd’s interiority and prescribed techniques to manage it.9 In this chapter I thus historicize modern Chinese intellectuals’ abiding fascination with the crowd and examine the specific forms this fascination took. The psychologization of qunzhong gained explanatory power and became invested with ideological motives at the intersection of the prolonged po­liti­cal turmoil, the ascendancy of the interiorized personhood, and the professionalization and institutionalization of the ­human sciences in the early twentieth c­ entury. Intrinsically bound up with questions about the ends and means of intellectual and po­liti­cal authority during the rise of a party-­state in China, psychological theories of ­human interaction encapsulated an acute sense of unease and alarm among the educated elites t­oward the uncertainties and potential of mass politics.

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Psychologically Speaking The crowd as a heightened state of mutual suggestibility—­a perilous mode of being in which individual consciousness vanishes and unconscious activities prevail—­was not Zhang Xichen’s invention; in fact, his essay is largely a translation of an earlier Japa­nese article published in Tōa no hikari 東亜の光 (Light of East Asia) that, in turn, essentially summarized con­temporary Western theories of crowd mentality.10 Such theories first emerged in Eu­rope in the late nineteenth ­century and circulated globally around the turn of the twentieth ­century. Concepts such as hypnosis, suggestion, and m ­ ental contagion that fill Zhang’s essay belonged to the stock assumptions of a con­temporary psychopathological language that depicted the constitution and working of the h ­ uman mind in general and the crowd-­mind in par­tic­u ­lar. The emergence and proliferation of a qunzhong-­centered discourse in early twentieth-­century China cannot be separated from the transnational flow of theories on crowds, which became both key interpretive tools that Chinese intellectuals ­adopted to analyze “crowd phenomena” and a target of their criticism. The historical pro­cess of how categories and concepts of psychological discourse of the crowd acquired meaning and legitimacy in China does not follow a unifocal linear trajectory; it cannot be understood by tracing the sprouting and export of psychological knowledge from a single seed, thereby reinforcing the existing scheme of center and periphery. Instead, understanding this pro­cess requires a contextualist historiography that underscores the connection between knowledge and its historical sites.11 The power­ful presence of crowds on the modern po­liti­cal and cultural stage gave rise to a “scientific” interest in crowd mentality and be­hav­ior that first developed in Eu­rope. The field of “crowd,” “mass,” or “collective” psy­chol­ogy, as it was variously called, flourished between 1885 and 1895, primarily in Italy and France. Major studies included Scipio Sighele’s (1868–1913) La folla delinquente (The Criminal Crowd, first published in 1891), Gabriel Tarde’s (1843–1904) Essais et mélanges sociologiques (So­cio­ log­i­cal Essays and Miscellanies, 1895), and Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules (The Crowd, 1895). Many of ­these early studies ­were influenced by the era’s medical research on hypnotic suggestibility and imitation, and they treated crowd formation as collective hallucination and crowd be­hav­ior



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29

as madness.12 In the early twentieth ­century, Eu­ro­pean and American sociologists and psychologists further explored the significance of the crowd’s perceived unpredictability for con­temporary po­liti­cal institutions.13 What twentieth-­century thinkers such as Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), and Elias Canetti (1905–94) shared with their nineteenth-­century pre­de­ces­sors was, in Mary Esteve’s words, “the emerging imagination of the crowd as a ubiquitous, culturally saturating phenomenon for the era’s concomitantly evolving po­liti­cal and aesthetic commitments.”14 From the 1910s to the 1930s, writings on crowds and social psy­chol­ogy by Eu­ro­pean, American, and Japa­nese scholars w ­ ere extensively imported 15 into China. The crowd theories of William McDougall, C. A. Ellwood (1873–1946), Graham Wallas (1858–1932), Freud, Floyd H. Allport, and Kuwada Yoshizō 桑田芳藏, just to name a few, ­were all translated into Chinese within a short span of time.16 Other theorists of collective be­ hav­ior—­such as Sighele, Tarde, Boris Sidis (1867–1923), Edward A. Ross, E. D. Martin, and Walter Moede (1888–1958)—­were also introduced to Chinese readers in vari­ous studies written by Chinese authors.17 Among the kaleidoscope of crowd theories made available in Chinese, Le Bon’s The Crowd most heavi­ly influenced Chinese commentators, many of whom referred to his work throughout the republican era not only as a source of authority to follow and expand on but also as a way of thinking to be modified, challenged, or undermined—­especially ­after the mid-1920s when behavioristic and psychoanalytic interpretations of the crowd came into circulation in China. Hardly the sole inventor of crowd psy­chol­ogy, Gustave Le Bon—­who had derived a number of his key concepts from the Italian criminologist Scipio Sighele, the French historian Gabriel Tarde, and the French doctor Henry Fournial (1866–1932)—­was nevertheless its most successful pop­u ­lar­izer.18 The son of a middle-­class bureaucrat, Le Bon arrived in Paris in 1860 to study medicine; t­ here he witnessed the massive and violent strikes between 1869 and 1871, as well as the subsequent violent suppression of the Paris Commune. Alarmed by the collective action that threatened to oust the bourgeois classes from power, Le Bon held that it was essential to develop a scientific knowledge of collective mentality so that politicians could better prepare to lead and control crowds.19 Soon ­after the Paris Commune, Le Bon began to develop his theory of crowd

30

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mentality in a series of writings, starting with La Vie: Physiologie humaine appliquée à l’ hygiène et à la médicine (Life: ­Human Physiology and Its Application to Hygiene and Medicine, 1872) and culminating in Psychologie des foules (The Crowd, 1895).20 The latter, claimed the eminent American psychologist Gordon Allport a half-­century a­ fter its first publication, is “perhaps the most influential book ever written in social psy­chol­ogy.”21 Central to Le Bon’s descriptive phenomenology of the crowd is the idea of deindividualization. According to Le Bon, when individuals join a crowd, they put themselves “in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite dif­fer­ent from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act w ­ ere he 22 in a state of isolation.” Within a crowd, the individual takes on as his chief characteristic “the disappearance of the conscious personality” and becomes an “automaton who has ceased to be guided by his ­will.”23 Regressing to an earlier evolutionary stage, p ­ eople in a crowd exhibit “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments,” and other psychological traits.24 Although Le Bon’s ahistorical, essentializing claims about the crowd have been criticized by many historians, po­liti­cal theorists, and psychologists since he first promulgated them, recent neuroscientific findings challenge notions of the self-­containment of the rational individual; they lend respectability to some of Le Bon’s statements about how being in a compact group engenders the transmission of emotion and triggers mimetic be­hav­ior.25 One point on which most commentators agree is that Le Bon spoke forcefully and persuasively enough to “have made history” instead of being “made by history.”26 Le Bon’s ominous pronouncement that “the age we are about to e­ nter ­will in truth be the ERA OF CROWDS” struck an enduring cho­rd: Friedrich Nietz­sche (1844–1900) and William James (1842–1910) would, respectively, claim to be living in “the ­century of the crowd” and a “crowded age,”27 and a recent study further proclaims that “the ‘era of crowds’ was the definition of modernity.”28 Although the influence of Le Bon’s crowd theory on other Eu­ro­pean and American thinkers and politicians has been well documented, its translation and appropriation outside Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca have not received enough critical attention.29 Only recently have scholars begun to shed light on the circulation in East Asian intellectual circles of Le Bon’s theories of race, revolution, and the



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31

crowd. In the early de­cades of the twentieth ­century, as nationalist ideology acquired power­ful resonances in East Asia in the face of global colonialism, Le Bon’s Les lois psychologiques de l’ évolution des peuples (1894) and Psychologie des foules (1895) enjoyed ­great currency among modern East Asian intellectuals and po­liti­cal leaders, including such seminal Korean authors as Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950) and Taishō politicians such as Motono Ichirō 本野一郎 (1862–1918).30 In Japan, in the eyes of con­ temporary observers, outbursts of urban riots and popu­lar vio­lence from the Hibiya riot of 1905 to the rice riots of 1918 marked the emergence of the urban crowd as a po­liti­cal force.31 Educators and po­liti­cal figures such as Tanimoto Tomeri 谷本富 (1867–1946) and Ōkubo Tomejirou 大久保留次郎 (1887–1966) began to write about “crowd psy­ chol­ ogy” ( gunshū no shinri 群衆の心理).32 And it was during this period that the Japa­nese translations of The Crowd first appeared and circulated among Korean and Chinese intellectuals.33 Le Bon’s menacing prediction of the advent of the crowd was introduced to China via Japan by Zhang Xichen in his 1913 article mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. His translation does not name any Western crowd theorist, but it is essentially a summary of Le Bon’s theory of crowd mentality. Chen Chengze 陳承澤 (1885–1922) would offer a more systematic discussion of Le Bon’s theory two years ­later in Fazheng zazhi 法政雜誌 (Law and Politics), a Shanghai journal devoted to “promoting the government of the ­people” (qunzhi 羣治).34 As a member of a revolutionary party, the Tongmeng hui 同盟會 (United League), Chen participated in the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing Empire. In 1912 he was elected a representative of Fujian in the provisional Republican Senate, but withdrew from politics before the National Assembly was established. Comparing the collapse of China’s last monarchy to the demise of the Qin dynasty in 206 BCE, Chen claimed, at the beginning of his essay, that both fell ­because of their “violation of the mind of the crowd.”35 In 1918 two members of Shangzhi xuehui 尚志學會 (the Esteemed ­Will Acad­emy), Wu Xuchu 吳旭初 and Du Shiye 杜師業 (1879–1929), completed a Chinese translation of Le Bon’s The Psy­chol­ogy of Revolution, which included several chapters on crowd mentality.36 In the same year, the journal Wuwu zazhi 戊午雜誌 (The Steed) published portions of Le Bon’s classic The Crowd translated by Zhong Jianhong.37 Zhong’s complete translation of The Crowd was printed in 1920, the same year in which another

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version by Du and Wu was published by the Commercial Press and included in the Esteemed W ­ ill Acad­emy series.38 When Henri Bergson wrote to Le Bon in 1919 that “you have more admirers and friends than you think,” he was correct.39 Phi­los­o­pher Zhang Dongsun 張東蓀 (1886–1973) claimed that Le Bon was already “a very familiar name for the Chinese ­people” by 1918. Indeed, he had kept an En­glish version of The Crowd as his “pillow secret” ­until that “secret” was published in Chinese.40 By 1928, Du Shiye’s and Wu Xuchu’s translation of The Crowd had gone through six reprints. A ­ fter the Shanghai Commercial Press was bombed by Japan in 1932, its version was reissued in early 1933 and remained in print throughout the republican period. Zhong Jianhong’s translation was also reprinted a few times by Taidong and Daxin Books. Altogether, The Crowd went through more than a dozen reprints in the 1920s and 1930s. Descriptions and critiques of Le Bon’s crowd theory circulated through widely read newspapers and journals, including the translation of Freud’s summary of The Crowd that was published in one of the most influential newspaper supplements, Chenbao fukan 晨報副刊 (Morning Post Supplement).41 In 1941, on the tenth anniversary of Le Bon’s death, the preeminent scientific journal Kexue 科學 (Science) published a note celebrating his achievements in psy­chol­ogy, anthropology, and natu­ral sciences, singling out The Crowd as his representative work.42 It continued to draw critical attention from leading Chinese social scientists u ­ ntil the end of the republican era. For instance, the sociologist Hu Jianmin 胡鑑民 (1896–1966), who obtained his doctoral degree in France, published a critique of The Crowd in 1947.43 For such early commentators as Zhang Xichen and Chen Chengze, interest in Le Bon’s theory cannot be separated from their experience of the momentous po­liti­cal changes of the period. The novel theory that the crowd’s m ­ ental characteristics w ­ ere produced by physical contact, they believed, provided a scientific rationale by which the downfall of the Qing Empire and the po­liti­cal turmoil that marked the early years of the Republic of China could be “mea­sured” (heng 衡) and accounted for.44 For instance, according to this viewpoint, the im­mense popularity of slogans such as “Ousting the Manchus!” among Han Chinese during the last years of the Qing reflected the crowd’s vulnerability to m ­ ental “conta45 gion” rather than the awakening of nationalist sentiment. For ­these commentators, crowd psy­chol­ogy provided a new vocabulary with which to



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33

make sense of history. But such retrospective analyses soon gave way to attempts to address more urgent questions of locating po­liti­cal agency in the pres­ent: Is the crowd autonomous and rational and therefore a responsible po­liti­cal subject, or is the opposite true? Does the emergence of a collective identity entail the loss of individual consciousness or promise transcendence of individual bound­aries into something greater? Although ­these interrelated issues would remain central throughout the twentieth ­century, they w ­ ere first intensively debated a­ fter the 1919 May Fourth Movement, when crowds of ­people took to the streets. Luo Jialun 羅家倫 (1897– 1969), a leader of the May Fourth student demonstrations, articulated the anxiety of Chinese intellectuals with regard to the mentality of the crowd; reflecting on the lessons learned from the movement, he concluded that “launching [a mass movement] without understanding the psy­chol­ogy of the crowd can only lead to failure.”46

Of Microbes and Floating Suggestions: Debating Qunzhong ­after the May Fourth Movement Writing shortly ­after the end of World War I, Le Bon proclaimed, “Psychological forces, in which moral activities are included, do not control the fate of ­battles merely. They rule over all the departments of national life and determine the destinies of p ­ eoples.”47 Despite his characteristic hyperbole, Le Bon captured a strain of thought common at the time to Western and Chinese thinkers alike, who insisted on the place and promise of psy­chol­ogy in understanding and solving social prob­lems. For instance, John Dewey spoke, albeit less dramatically, of “the need for social ends of a more scientific treatment of collective h ­ uman nature, and the impor­tant role of psy­chol­ogy in building up the new social science.”48 On the other side of the Pacific, the pioneering sociologist Tao Menghe 陶孟和 (1887–1960) lectured at Beijing University in 1920 on the necessity and advantages of a psychological understanding of ­human nature and social practices. Invoking an array of sources, including not only the psychological theories of Le Bon, Tarde, and Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), but also psychological studies of politics, history, and public administration by Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915), Walter Lipp­mann (1889–1974), and

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Mary P. Follett (1868–1933), Tao concluded that po­liti­cal, ethical, and economic questions, as well as studies of history, law, and religion, all belonged to the province of psy­chol­ogy.49 Tao’s assertion reflected a strong interest in mentality and spirit that could be traced back to the turn of the twentieth c­ entury when reformist and revolutionary intellectuals attributed China’s seeming inferiority to the West to the ­mental qualities of its p ­ eople. The early republic, as Wendy Larson notes, became “rife with competing ways of thinking about mind.”50 “The psychological” emerged not only as a knowable truth but also, more crucially, as a power­ful cultural category—­entwined with the rise of a new politics that, in Wang Hui’s words, “was not a form of state politics, but of politics for the mind.” This new politics issued calls to reform society through an affective remolding of the hearts and minds of the Chinese ­people.51 This wider cultural context of the psychological s­ haped the par­tic­u­ lar resonance that Le Bon’s idea of “crowd mentality” enjoyed among the Chinese intelligent­sia. This idea quickly gained currency ­after the 1919 May Fourth Movement, when the impact of crowds was powerfully displayed during the massive demonstrations. The term was widely used in such influential journals as Xin qingnian 新青年 (New Youth) and Xin chao 新潮 (New Tide). For May Fourth intellectuals who had witnessed mass politics in action, Le Bon’s double-­edged account of the crowd became an inevitable but problematic reference point. For t­hose who opposed demo­cratic politics and mass mobilization, Le Bon’s denigration of crowd mentality offered a con­ve­nient pretext for keeping qunzhong out of politics. For example, Hu Hanmin 胡漢民 (1879–1936) observed that, during the North-­South peace conference held on February 20, 1919, in Shanghai, attendees proposed to “confer b­ ehind closed doors” so as “not to be influenced by crowd mentality.” But even for left-­wing intellectuals, Le Bon’s theory held an authoritative explanatory value. At the time, it was popu­lar, noted Hu, to deride popu­lar movements as “nothing but unconscious acts of crowd mentality.”52 For instance, Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀 (1879–1942), the dean of humanities at Beijing University who would soon become the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), questioned the patriotic fervor displayed during the May Fourth Movement. In Chen’s view, po­liti­cal upheaval chiefly stemmed from a crowd mentality that was “often in conflict with reason” and could lead to extreme, irrational be­hav­ior.53 Chen warned his readers that, just like



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35

the killing of heretics in medieval Eu­rope, the May Fourth Movement sprang from a “blind crowd mentality.”54 To ­counter ­these imitative voices, Hu Hanmin, Sun Yat-­sen’s chief lieutenant in the Nationalist Party, wrote a long critique of Le Bon. Hu’s essay came out shortly ­after the May Fourth Movement in the first issue of the Nationalist Party’s Shanghai journal Jianshe 建設 (Reconstruction), one of the most influential and authoritative serials of the time, whose circulation was some 13,000 copies per issue.55 Hu’s article was the first in China to consider Le Bon’s crowd theory in depth.56 Whereas Le Bon depicted a crowd controlled by unconscious impulses, Hu, excited by the May Fourth collective, celebrated the crowd as a self-­willed po­liti­cal force. He fundamentally disagreed with Le Bon’s idea of deindividualization and based his critique on Politics and Crowd-­Morality: A Study in the Philosophy of Politics by the Danish Orientalist Arthur Christensen (1875– 1945).57 Instead of emphasizing the disappearance of individual personality, Hu followed Christensen in focusing on the reciprocal influence between the crowd and the individual. The crowd does not wipe out individual consciousness; instead, it is “imprinted ( yinshou 印受) by individual characteristics and reverberates such imprints onto individuals.”58 However, Hu misread Christensen when he rejected Le Bon’s theory of the disappearance of conscious subjectivity in the crowd. An admirer of Le Bon, Christensen, rather than discrediting Le Bon’s depiction of the crowd, averred that the crowd narrowed individual personalities into one single stream. “The crowd-­soul is only the sum of the single souls which make up the crowd,” Christensen emphasized in a paragraph that Hu did not cite, “but inasmuch as ­these single consciousnesses are, through the influence of suggestion, narrowed to the same point, forced in one and the same direction, a kind of common consciousness is called into existence, which is in­de­pen­dent of the w ­ ill of the units.”59 Disagreeing with Le Bon’s theory of the irrational and spontaneous mechanisms of crowd be­hav­ior, Hu Hanmin praised “the noble morality of crowd mentality.”60 He took issue with Le Bon’s emphasis on the “purely destructive nature” of the crowd, which acts like “microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies.”61 Against Le Bon’s meta­ phor, Hu created his own: “In an era of destruction, crowds need to be like the bacteria in dead bodies; in the era of construction, crowds are the bodies’ vital cells.”62 In fact, Le Bon’s evaluation of crowd be­hav­ior

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remains inherently ambiguous. For Le Bon, the crowd could be both criminal and heroic.63 Hu Hanmin accentuated one side of Le Bon’s theory at the expense of the other to construct a noble image of qunzhong. With the May Fourth crowd in mind, Hu was optimistic that the microbial crowd could transform itself into living cells for social regeneration. He resorted to a microbiological model of po­liti­cal community that was also deployed by many leading cultural figures of the time in their visions for China’s rejuvenation. Appropriating immunological theories, they conceived the national community as a social organism and explained sociopo­liti­cal reform as metabolic pro­cesses in which fresh cells battled against rotten ele­ments and microbial invaders.64 Hu’s call for the recognition of the crowd’s place in the making of modern China was therefore predicated on a biomedical understanding of individuals and communities, an understanding to which Le Bon, it is worth noting, had subscribed in the first place. It is impor­tant to note that Hu Hanmin’s critique of Le Bon did not amount to po­liti­cal voluntarism. He stressed the importance of the revolutionary party organ­izing the spontaneous crowd into a po­ liti­cal collective.65 Hu Hanmin’s critique of Le Bon failed to convince Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白 (1899–1935), a young student at the Rus­sian Language Institute of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs who in 1927 would become the acting chairman of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party. He had prob­ably learned of Le Bon’s theory from reading Hu’s article, but did not accept Hu’s reevaluation of the crowd. Having participated in the May Fourth Movement, Qu, along with like-­minded colleagues Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸 (1898–1958) and Geng Jizhi 耿濟之 (1899–1947), created the journal Xin shehui 新社會 (New Society) in Beijing to call for social transformation.66 In a New Society article written a few months ­after the demonstrations, Qu excluded the crowd from his vision of a healthy social movement. Qu began his account by asking who should lead social reform, a question Hu had left unanswered. For Qu, the answer was obvious: Only a few individuals, whom Qu called “martyrs” (xishengzhe 犧牲者), could bring social change to the w ­ hole populace. Yet, ­there ­were two kinds of martyrs: “martyrs of the social movement” and “martyrs of the crowd movement.” Armed with Le Bon’s psychological terms, Qu lamented that in a “crowd movement” (qunzhong yundong 羣眾運動), individuals do not fol-



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low their rational consciousness, but instead are controlled by “crazy, unanchored suggestions” (kuangluan xufu de anshi 狂亂虛浮的暗示) and “extreme sentiments” ( jiduan de ganqing 極端的感情). With the disappearance of individuality, ­people of the crowd become credulous and can be deluded at ­will into martyrdom.67 In contrast to the highly suggestible martyrs of the crowd movement, the martyrs of the social movement, Qu believed, are “without unlimited credulity or excessive sentiments, not unconsciously controlled by suggestions . . . ​[and therefore] can create new beliefs and life-­views and break old customs and systems.”68 Since the turn of the twentieth ­century, Chinese intellectuals had frequently contrasted shehui (society) and qunzhong (crowd), interpreting the former as a cohesive organism and the latter as a random bodily agglomeration. Zhang Zhu 張鑄, for instance, argued that in contrast to qun, which is the “bodily massing” (routi de jihe 肉體的集合) of persons, shehui is structured by what he called the rational “like-­mindedness” [in En­glish in the text] of its members.69 Fu Sinian 傅斯年 (1896–1950), in a similar vein, lamented that “China has crowds but no society”; only by cultivating “adhesiveness between individuals” could qunzhong turn into shehui.70 Qu Qiubai’s critique of what he considered unhealthy collective social action was predicated on his anxiety about the influence of suggestion. The distinction between society and the crowd coincided with the distinction between rational pursuits and unconscious instincts. Such a distinction persisted in Qu’s thinking when he went to Moscow in 1920 as  the Beijing Chenbao’s 晨報 (Morning Post) resident correspondent shortly ­after New Society had been banned by the police in May of that year. He praised Moscow as the “Red Capital on the tidal waves of social revolutions” and contrasted Rus­sian workers’ social mentality with the crowd mentality, which “like an infant only knows to eat when it is hungry.”71 ­Here, Le Bon’s characterization of crowds as “primitive beings ­belonging to inferior forms of evolution: w ­ omen, savages and c­ hildren,” re72 surfaced. In Qu Qiubai’s dichotomy, the individual in the crowd, unlike a po­liti­cally purposeful actor in a social movement, registers a fundamental incompatibility with Qu’s desired po­liti­cal practice. Read side by side, Hu Hanmin and Qu Qiubai represent the intellectual’s ambivalence about the crowd in modern China. Their reflections on the May Fourth Movement pres­ent the crowd mentality ­either as a moral basis for patriotic popu­lar movements and po­liti­cal consciousness

38

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(as Hu argued) or as individuals rendered incapable of po­liti­cal reasoning and therefore an obstacle to be overcome on the path t­oward social improvement (as Qu claimed).73 Their impressions of the crowd and reactions to imported crowd theories led to two opposing visions that would dominate the cultural imagination of po­liti­cal gatherings in republican China: Hu Hanmin’s article predicts a kind of qunzhong that is instinctively moral and revolutionary (a ­matter taken up in the next chapter); Qu Qiubai’s idea of a deeply troublesome qunzhong, in contrast, not only expanded into systematic interpretations in the following two de­cades but was also paralleled by Lu Xun’s haunting depictions of the “muddled” crowd.

The Muddled Crowd From the early 1900s, Lu Xun had developed a line of thought that was sharply opposed to many of his contemporaries’ idealization of a new ­u nitary polity based on a sociopo­liti­c al grouping. He shared with his teacher, the radical late Qing thinker Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (1868–1936), a distrust of any coercive concept of the collective premised on the transcendence of the individual self. Inspired by Yogācāra (consciousness-­only) Buddhism, Zhang dismissed all theories that claimed that the collective possesses subjectivity, or “true being.” He asserted, “The individual is the real; the collective is the illusory.”74 Influenced by Zhang, Lu Xun protested in his early essays against “dissolving [individualities] into one ­great mass”—­which he described as “all colors [being] overlaid with a black murky (huihei 晦黑) film”75—­and averred that the rejuvenation of China should “rely on the individual and exclude the many.”76 Awakening China was a ­matter not of transferring po­liti­cal power from the emperor to the p ­ eople, but rather “for each person to become a subjective agent, antithetical not only to imperial authority but also to ‘mass’ (zhongzhi) democracy.”77 Lu Xun subscribed to Le Bon’s theory of the “racial mind” as “the synthesis of a ­people’s entire past” and believed that the racial mentality, though perhaps latent in individual members of a nation, became manifest when “the crowd gathers to stir t­ hings up.”78 As one of his lifelong



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passions, Lu Xun tirelessly condemned what he considered the latent sadistic mentality that surfaces when the Chinese crowd together. The spectacle-­hungry crowd enjoying the heroic sacrifice of enlightened individuals became a recurring theme that Lu Xun examined in essays, works of fiction, and private communications. In his varied depictions, the Chinese ­people always act as anonymous members of a crowd and seek perverse plea­sure in the public exhibition and execution of victims of society. When watching the suffering of o­ thers as entertainment is not sufficient, the crowd often participates in destroying po­liti­cally awakened individuals. Its members “oppress, squeeze out, entrap, exile and massacre” the loner.79 Even worse, not satisfied with taking cruel action directly against the social victim, the hungry crowd cannot wait to feast on the very one who had come to enlighten them: “One may sacrifice oneself to bring blessings to the masses, but once the deities have been worshipped, then one’s meat is shared by the crowd.”80 The apathetic and cannibalistic crowd figures prominently in Lu Xun’s writings as the antithesis of emancipatory historical forces and became a recurrent image in Chinese lit­er­a­ture throughout the twentieth ­century.81 Lu Xun’s stress on the antagonistic relation between the individual and the crowd has been much studied. Some early critical works focused on the theme of the sadomasochistic crowd sacrificing the exceptional few and trace it to the influence of Western modernists and their disdain of the masses.82 Other scholarship saw the fundamental social configuration of Lu Xun’s stories as a triadic one (of intellectual/narrator, crowd, and victim), focusing on the critical subjectivity of the narrator that made Lu Xun’s critique of the racial mentality pos­si­ble in the first place.83 My emphasis h ­ ere is on the impenetrable presence of the crowd itself in Lu Xun’s narratives, as exemplified in his 1925 short story, “Public Display”—­ its original title “Shizhong” 示眾 literally means “displaying the crowd.”84 The story’s narrative is devoted exclusively to depicting the formation and dispersal of the amorphous crowd. With ­little plot development, it pres­ents boisterous spectators who have gathered to witness the public execution of a criminal. At the end of the story, unable to understand the charges against the man, the crowd shifts its attention to a rickshaw accident that occurred nearby. The narration is characterized by a deliberate messiness. The narrator’s observing eye and listening ear rapidly jump, without apparent order or reason, from the shouting of a sleepy fat

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boy selling steamed buns, to the criminal brought out as a deterrent to the public, and then to vari­ous ­people in the crowd of onlookers. The narrator’s erratic attention mimics the fickle curiosity of the onlookers who rush away when they realize that nothing in­ter­est­ing is ­going to happen. The story describes the surface physical characteristics of the crowd members with ­great care, including such repellent details as the four hairs around a fat man’s nipples and the small pool of sweat that has accumulated between his breasts. Such close-­ups, as Marston Anderson argues, retain the “clinical exteriority of the camera” and compel the readers to feel their complicity in the voy­eur­is­tic vio­lence that they intend to decry.85 Readers’ unwilling identification with the crowd, however, does not lead to an understanding of the crowd. Readers are forced to attend to the surface of the crowd without the aid of narrative clues by which they might penetrate its interiority. This opacity is not a defect of the narrative, but rather its intended effect—­conveying Lu Xun’s loathing of the Chinese ­people’s lack of conscience, sympathy, and sensitivity. In this story Lu Xun uses the muddled surface of repre­sen­ta­tion to foreground the absence of a self-­awareness and consciousness in the Chinese crowd or, in Leo Lee’s words, to reveal their “inner vacuity.”86 The messy contour of the crowd’s surface, obsessively displayed by Lu Xun, becomes the stand-in signifier for its muddled interiority. The concept of “muddledness” (hun 混, hunluan 混亂, or hunzhuo 混濁) occupies a significant place in Lu Xun’s characterization of the Chinese ­people. From the late 1910s to the mid-1920s, he viewed it as a hereditary characteristic that resulted from the slave mentality of the Chinese, which had led to the stagnation of the nation.87 His critique was inherited from the late Qing thinker Liang Qichao (1873–1929) who singled out “muddledness” (hunzhuo) as a ­mental flaw that the Chinese must eliminate to become a modern citizenry.88 In Lu Xun’s view, the Chinese national soul is marked by this latent characteristic, which is most prominently on display in the crowd. To foreground the inner vacuity of the crowd, Lu Xun dwells on its surface rather than trying to rationalize the psychological dynamics of crowd formation. His repre­sen­ta­tion provides us with a context for the vari­ous analyses that endeavored to expose the crowd’s interiority and brought ­under examination the muddle of the crowd-­mind. Crowd theorists saw psy­chol­ogy as providing the scientific language to diagnose the



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pro­cess of crowd formation and shed light on the murky blackness of Lu Xun’s ominous imagery. Sharing Lu Xun’s interest in the persecutory and volatile crowd, many scholars construed qunzhong as an urgent object of psychological and, more often than not, psychopathological examination. The emergence of systematic theories of crowd be­hav­ior and mentality shows that the fascination with and anxiety about the newly emergent po­liti­cal crowds w ­ ere resonant cultural and po­liti­cal preoccupations of the time.

Pathology of Aggregation The interest in the crowd expressed ­after the May Fourth Movement was by no means a transient phenomenon; it turned into a professional pursuit and gave rise to long treatises. In the mid-1920s, ­a fter psy­chol­ogy gained scientific standing and became a disciplinary specialization in elite Chinese academic institutions, commentators such as Li Rong 李溶 from National Beijing University, Zhang Yinian 章頤年 (1904–1960) from the University of Nanking, and Bao Shoumei 包壽眉 (1903–1951) from Nankai University began to speak in a psychological dialect in their discussions of the crowd.89 Psychological “truths” about qunzhong ­were produced and taught in newly established university departments and professional associations and transmitted through dif­fer­ent channels, ranging from translations and sporadic journal articles to popu­lar series, scholarly monographs, and even radio broadcasts. For instance, in 1936, the Shanghai Telegraph Bureau invited a psychologist from Daxia daxue 大 夏大學 (­Great China University) to give a talk on crowd be­hav­ior as part of a series of broadcasts on “everyday psy­chol­ogy.”90 Specialized journals devoted to psy­chol­ogy began to publish annotated biblio­graphies that cata­loged studies by Chinese authors on such areas as child psy­chol­ogy, intelligence testing, and crowd psy­chol­ogy.91 In 1924, the Chinese School of Abnormal Psy­chol­ogy (Zhonghua biantai xinli xuehui 中華變態心理 學會) used a textbook on crowd psy­chol­ogy in its series on “abnormal psy­chol­ogy” that covered topics such as criminal psy­chol­ogy, hypnotism, and abnormal sexual desires.92 Courses on crowd psy­chol­ogy began to be taught not only in colleges such as Qinghua University and National

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Central University but also in military institutes, including the prestigious Whampoa Military Acad­emy; this was about the same time that Le Bon’s crowd theory was made part of the curriculum at the leading military schools in France and the United States, such as the École Supérieure de Guerre, Saint-­Cyr; the U.S. Army War College in Washington, DC; and the Command and General Staff School in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.93 This new knowledge was not only institutionalized through the ­establishment of new academic disciplines but was also widely disseminated through popu­lar publications. For instance, in 1929, Chen Dongyuan 陳東原 (1902–78), who taught crowd psy­chol­ogy at Hebei Party Affair Training Institute (Hebei dangwu xunliansuo 河北黨務訓練所), revised his lectures into an introductory-­level primer titled Qunzhong xinlixue ABC 羣眾心理學 ABC (The ABCs of Crowd Psy­chol­ogy). It was serialized in Heibei minguo ribao fukan 河北民國日報副刊 (Heibei Minguo Daily Supplement) and included in the voluminous popu­lar series, ABC Series by World Books.94 The chief editor of the series wrote in the introduction that the purpose of his series was to “liberate scholarship from the hands of the intellectual class and disseminate it among the w ­ hole populace.” ­Every volume of the ABC Series was intended to be “a must-­ have reference book for students.”95 “I love crowds, but I love truth even more”—­this pronouncement from a commentator named Fu Nian 富年 expressed a sense of commitment and importance shared by many con­ temporary social psychologists and their readers for whom scientific ­advances in understanding “the crowd as object” (qun zhi wei wu 羣之為物) lent respectability to vari­ous opinions about the nature of ­human interaction and social change.96 The circulation of a psychological understanding of collective action was inextricably bound to the institutionalization and popularization of psy­chol­ogy as a modern positive science in China. In both areas, Gao Juefu was instrumental as a prolific writer, translator, and educator or simply as a “specialist of psy.”97 Whereas for commentators like Zhang Xichen, Chen Chengze, and Qu Qiubai, Le Bon’s theory had presented a new language to use to speak of and evaluate mass actions, by the mid1920s, scholars such as Gao Juefu began to take issue with the idea of a collective m ­ ental state that comes into existence as a result of physical aggregation. Instead of postulating a supraindividual crowd-­mind taking



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possession of individual consciousness, Gao treated the physical proximity of individuals as an enabling situation that releases and intensifies individuals’ abnormal mentalities. Born in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, in 1896, Gao studied psy­chol­ ogy in Hong Kong University from 1918 to 1923. In the following de­cades, he taught psy­chol­ogy in dif­fer­ent universities in Shanghai and Sichuan, Canton, and Hunan Provinces.98 In the 1920s and 1930s, Gao grafted a behaviorist conception of interpersonal influences onto the theory of ­abnormal psy­chol­ogy in his account of social antagonism, which drew examples from both his personal observations and imported literary imaginations. His investigations of interpersonal ­mental stimulation and individual motivation brought to the fore the question of ­whether ­people gathered in crowds can be self-­willed sociopo­liti­cal agents guided by rational consciousness or w ­ hether they are bound to become irresponsible entities driven by delusions and impulses. Gao’s study was therefore at once “scientific,” po­liti­cal, and ethical. By blurring the line between collective passions and pathological desires, he called into question the idea of qunzhong as an autonomous po­liti­cal force and made problematic the notion of mass movements. Shortly ­after the mass demonstrations and strikes of the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925—­a series of anti-­foreign strikes, demonstrations, and riots across China that took place a­ fter the murder of a Chinese worker by a Japa­nese foreman at a Shanghai cotton mill on May 30 of that year—­Gao published one of the earliest in-­depth studies of social psy­chol­ogy in China. He begins his three-­installment article with an intriguing juxtaposition of two crowd scenes. The first is set during the May Thirtieth Movement. Noting the mass participation in the patriotic anti-­imperialist movement, Gao won­ders, “They could not all have been brave patriots, could they? But even t­ hose who w ­ ere not brave originally, ­after they saw how courageously the crowd advanced, eventually joined in.” The second scene was that of hundreds of p ­ eople gathered at the Shanghai North Train Station ­after it was occupied by the warlord army from Zhejiang. Gao explains, “The army officer moved one step, and the crowd moved accordingly. While the onlookers standing on boxes ­were enjoying themselves, some suddenly ran away for no reason. At that point, all the o­ thers heedlessly jumped off of boxes and left.” Side by side, t­ hese two images of the crowd seem contradictory: In the motivated May Thirtieth

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crowd, even cowardly individuals are transformed into patriots, whereas the gathering at the North Station behaves like a mindless throng that lacks any conscious subjectivity. Taking the two accounts together, the crowd appears to be both a po­liti­cal agent and an unreflective casual audience at a historical event. Common to both characterizations, however, is Gao’s depiction of the crowd as a transformative condition, one that makes individuals into e­ ither po­liti­cal fighters or controllable automatons, behaving differently than when alone. “How on earth,” Gao asks, “[can we] explain ­these and other similar crowd phenomena (qunzhong xian­ xiang)?”99 A few years l­ ater, Gao was still pondering this question: “Does the crowd have a mind of its own, in­de­pen­dent of individual consciousness? If not, how can we explain the intensity and vio­lence exhibited in mass actions?”100 In the course of finding clues to answer ­these questions, Gao Juefu firmly rejected the notion of a collective m ­ ental state in­de­pen­dent of individual minds. He reasoned that collective consciousness transcending that of individuals could not exist b­ ecause “consciousness is the function of the ner­vous system and the crowd does not have an in­de­pen­dent ner­ vous system.”101 In this Gao was influenced by the American psychologist Floyd Henry Allport. Allport’s stimulus-­response approach to interpersonal influence, as exemplified in his influential 1924 study, Social Psy­ chol­ogy, offered one of the first substantial behaviorist critiques of the biopsychological notions of consciousness and instinct in general and of Le Bon’s theory of the disappearance of personal consciousness in the crowd in par ­t ic­u ­lar.102 Accordingly, Gao sought to account for crowd be­hav­ior entirely in terms of individuals’ observable responses to environmental stimuli and common habits, without recourse to such “hy­po­thet­i­cal constructs” as the crowd-mind or collective consciousness.103 To explain the exaggerated sentiments and other intensified reactions in a crowd, Gao avoided “superficial jargon” such as “fellow feelings, imitation, and suggestion”104 and instead resorted to Allport’s idea of “spatial ­factors and circularity” of mutual influence among physically proximate individuals.105 First, t­ here is a direct stimulation that ­causes individuals in the crowd to react, and then the reactions of each individual stimulate heightened reactions from ­others close by. “Therefore the crowd sentiments tend to be more intense than [­those of the individuals] in isolation. How shallow is Le Bon to assume the existence of a ‘crowd-­mind’!”106



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In Gao’s view, individuals in a crowd receive and respond to stimuli from each other, rather than being dominated by a “crowd-­mind” as Le Bon argued. The fact that a coward can appear courageous in a patriotic crowd does not indicate the predominance of a collective consciousness or an awakening of national spirit. Patriotic popu­lar movements and mindless chaos share the same pattern of m ­ ental interactions, which are mechanical in nature: Both events result from the interplay of stimulation and reaction among individuals in physical proximity. The gathering of ­people does not engender some mysterious contagion or a unitary collective mind hovering above the individual consciousness and binding p ­ eople together; instead, the crowd is a physical environment in which individuals think and act. If Gao thus accounted for interpersonal influences purely in terms of stimulation and reaction, the question of the motivation for crowd formation remained; this was treated in detail in his 1934 book Qunzhong xinlixue 羣眾心理學 (Crowd Psy­chol­ogy). In the early 1930s, Gao Juefu taught social psy­chol­ogy at National Sichuan University, and crowd psy­chol­ogy was part of his course content. Invited to contribute a volume to the Chinese Encyclopedia Series (Zhonghua baike quanshu 中華百科全書), Gao developed his earlier article into a textbook.107 Still resolute in his opposition to the idea of an in­ de­pen­dently existing collective mind, Gao ­adopted the term “crowd mentality” (qunzhong xinli) purely “for the sake of con­ve­nience,” to denote attitudes and thinking shared among individuals.108 By this time, it had become commonplace among Chinese commentators, including the leading psychologist C. W. Luh 陸志韋 (1894–1970) and biologist Tong Dizhou 童第周 (1902–79), to criticize notions of the collective psyche (such as Le Bon’s “crowd-­mind,” McDougall’s “group mind,” or Franklin Giddings’s (1855–1931) “consciousness of kind”) from the behavioristic viewpoint of stimuli and reactions.109 Liu Qu 劉渠 even provocatively called the notion of “crowd-­mind” a “ghost” ( gui 鬼) that must be expelled from psy­chol­ogy.110 Gao’s new work, however, went beyond his earlier attempt to account for the behavioral mechanisms b­ ehind crowd phenomena and endeavored to reveal the common impulses and desires that motivate ­every unit of the crowd. According to his new study, the crowd’s state of mind is nothing short of disturbing. Although moving away from Allport’s mechanical, behavioristic interpretation of interpersonal stimulation, Gao Juefu adheres to Allport’s

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dictum that “it is the individual who is the raison d’ être of the crowd.”111 The formation of the crowd does not entail the negation of individuality; it is rather rooted in and limited by the under­lying psychological constitutions of individuals in the crowd. The individual, for Gao, is neither a passive receptacle of external suggestions swiftly penetrating the mind nor a rational being acting only on beliefs, interests, and moral judgment. Instead, as a con­temporary social psychologist noted, by the time Gao wrote his book, the individual was commonly “heralded as a creature guided by his impulses, instincts, drives, desires, needs, libido . . . ​a dynamic, complex, and frequently unconsciously motivated being.”112 In Gao’s view, individuals who gather in crowds are first and foremost psychologically motivated beings rather than social or economic agents; being in a crowd activates and intensifies the innate impulses and desires that are rooted in their psychopathological complex of frustration and aggression. Gao Juefu labels individuals in a crowd “neurotics” (shenjingbing 神經病) and considers their motivations delusional (huannian 幻念). He stresses that the two crucial impetuses (dongli 動力) that motivate individuals to join a crowd are delusions of grandeur (kuada nian 誇大念) and persecution (pohai kuang 迫害狂), the defining characteristics of paranoia that Gao ­adopted from William McDougall’s and Edmund S. Conklin’s (1884–1942) studies of “abnormal psy­chol­ogy.”113 ­These two delusions are symbiotic. The delusion of being persecuted grows out of an exaggerated feeling of self-­importance; in turn the delusion of greatness is reinforced by the feeling of victimization that occurs when one’s striving for self-­ importance is thwarted.114 For paranoiac individuals, joining the crowd becomes an opportunity to satisfy their distorted “desire of superiority” (chaoren yu 超人欲), a notion Gao borrowed from the Australian psychologist Alfred Adler (1870–1937). “In order to feel like members of a special class,” Gao mocks, “in the crowd, you wear a hat made of paper flowers, he puts on a pair of Chaplinesque shoes, and I am in a ­grand gown that Manchu officials of the Qing dynasty used to wear . . . ​The crowd is a situation satisfying every­one’s desire for power and superiority.”115 Furthermore, the mixed effect of ­these delusions leads to homicidal tendencies: “The desire for superiority is so power­ful and the hatred in ­people’s hearts is so deep that one’s own desire to hurt o­ thers (shanghai taren de ziwo zhiqing 傷害他人的自我之情) ­will sooner or l­ater trigger cruel vengeance. The crowd often fabricates stories as its excuse for retaliation, even



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when it was never cheated or oppressed by other crowds.”116 Rather than a form of solidarity, the crowd, in Gao’s account, is nothing but a pernicious “situation” in which individuals, unified by shared desires and ­delusions, satisfy their hunger for self-­importance and aggression. The formation of the crowd is itself only an expression of neurosis. In likening crowd psy­chol­ogy to ­mental disorders, Gao Juefu was heavi­ly influenced by the American po­liti­cal theorist Everett Dean Martin, director of the Cooper Union Forum of the P ­ eople’s Institute of New York. Martin’s psychoanalytic view of revolutionary crowds as irrational mobs driven by delusions and hostility was first introduced to a Chinese readership in 1926 by Rong Zhaozu 容肇祖 (1897–1994) in the well-­known and well-­read newspaper Jingbao fukan 京報副刊 (Literary Supplement to Beijing News). At the time a philosophy major at Peking University, Rong noted that Martin applied Freudian psychoanalysis to Le Bon’s suggestible crowd and emphasized the unconscious m ­ ental pro­cess in crowd formation, a theory that, Rong believed, was readily applicable to what he called Chinese “mobs” (baomin 暴民).117 In another 1926 essay Zhang Yinian drew on Martin and denied the revolutionary potential of the crowd as po­liti­cal actors.118 A few years ­later, Chen Dongyuan claimed that Martin’s book, as a response to the 1917 Rus­sian Revolution, had replaced Le Bon’s as the day’s most indispensable book on crowds.119 In a similar vein, Gao Juefu put qunzhong on a par with the mob. Echoing Martin, who argued that the mob “lurks u ­ nder the skin” of e­ very crowd, Gao contended that “the crowd is the hy­po­thet­i­cal and potential mob and the mob is crowd in its realization.”120 Gao Juefu’s psychopathological analy­sis of the crowd was by no means purely theoretical; rather it formed the basis for a po­liti­cal and ethical critique that he readily applied to con­temporary sociopo­liti­cal issues: “Workers against cap­i­tal­ists, cap­i­tal­ists against workers, the bourgeoisie against the communist party, the communist party against the bourgeoisie, e­ tc.,” Gao states, “are all already suspicious and hostile t­ owards each other and ready to conspire against and persecute the opposing party on the excuse of the other’s conspiracy and persecution, the same way as the patient suffering the delusion of persecution suspects p­ eople of denigrating him whenever he sees someone talking.” Gao conceded the con­temporary social inequalities and the deteriorating situation of the lower classes. But he hastened to add that the laboring classes joined the communist movement

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only “to satisfy their desire for superiority and delusion of persecution.”121 By labeling the foundational motivation of collective formation as delusional and p ­ eople in revolt as patients suffering from the same neuropathy, Gao Juefu did more than offer a psychological explanation of sociopo­liti­cal strug­gles; his claim to understand the inner mechanisms of crowd formation psychologized his object of study in the sense that po­ liti­cal real­ity, “as it w ­ ere, displayed upon a psychological screen, becomes ordered according to a psychological taxonomy.”122 Gao underlined the primacy of psychological forces in social strug­gle and thereby rejected the leftist theory that economic and po­liti­cal interests determine collective action. The potential challenge to existing social relations presented by qunzhong as a new po­liti­cal force was instead diagnosed as pathological. In his work on the politics of American psy­chol­ogy a­ fter World War II, Richard Harvey Brown points out that by “secularizing, individualizing, and depoliticizing ­human suffering,” psychologists turned po­liti­cal issues into personal trou­bles.123 Although Brown’s study focuses on a dif­fer­ent geo­graph­i­cal and temporal context, his critique could be applied to Gao’s work as well. Prob­ably more noteworthy than the connection Gao made between qunzhong and psychopathology was his matter-­of-­fact manner of making such assertions, no ­matter how far removed his analy­sis was from con­ temporary China’s social realities. Gao did not ground his knowledge of the crowd on objective observations or concrete experiences; nor did he think it was necessary to do so, when he scattered his pages with “evidence” ranging from crowds on the streets of New York City to Sioux Indian warriors. He found a perfect illustration of his notion of the crowd in the four-­act play The Mob (1914) by the Nobel Prize–winning En­glish writer John Galsworthy (1867–1933). Saddened and bewildered by World War I, Galsworthy dramatized a story in which the voice of the antiwar statesman drowns in the madness of a war-­hungry mob that murders the young humanist minister. When The Mob was first translated into Chinese in 1930, the translator Zhu Fu 朱復 used qunzhong as its Chinese title and stressed in his introduction to the play that the murderous qunzhong was the most deadly threat to social pro­gress.124 Drawing on Zhu’s translation, Gao drew less on observation of external real­ity than on the image of the irrational and violent crowd that recurred in a variety of contexts and genres. In a particularly striking nod to Le Bon, Gao quoted



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Galsworthy’s idealist protagonist who declaims to an angry mob: “Brain—­ you have none. Spirit—­not the ghost of it!”125 Firmly stuck in this cycle of repre­sen­ta­tion, Gao’s qunzhong theory thus informs us more about the fears and anx­i­eties of intellectuals than about what was happening on the streets. Gao Juefu incorporated vari­ous strands of con­temporary psychological theory and literary imagination into his elitist view as he emphasized psy­chol­ogy’s interpretive privilege regarding social prob­lems. Whereas most other con­temporary Chinese crowd theorists focused on the psychological characteristics of ­people ­after they had joined a crowd, Gao touched on the more essential po­liti­cal question: What ­causes the aggregation and underwrites the cohesion of the crowd in the first place? For Gao, the unifying motivational f­ actor is neither the class interests nor any rational aim of par­tic­u­lar social groups. Instead it is locatable only in the inner domain of the individuals who form an antagonistic crowd. Crowding as a situation is brought about by neurotic delusions and antisocial illusions that in turn provoke persecutory tendencies. “In the crowd,” Gao argues, “we are like somnambulists,” incapable of being responsible for our own conduct.126 Resorting to Freud, whose A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis Gao translated into Chinese in 1930, he describes the experience of joining a crowd as an outburst of repressed desires and insists that “as a situation, [being in a] crowd is the same as dreaming and [suffering] neuropathy.”127 Gao treats participation in a crowd as both a form of indulgence in which one takes refuge from real­ity and a predicament from which one must escape.

In Search of the “Cleft in Consciousness” In 1934, the same year the China Publishing House published Gao Juefu’s Crowd Psy­chol­ogy, the equally prestigious Shanghai Commercial Press issued GMD official-­cum-­scholar Zhang Jiuru’s monograph on crowd psy­chol­ogy and crowd leadership. Whereas Gao’s work expressed elitist fears that the crowd and its neurosis threatened established patterns of social living, Zhang developed the most systematic statist view, which both hailed qunzhong as the embodiment of po­liti­cal legitimacy and disparaged

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it as a mutable anomaly in need of strict governance. His study makes plain the inseparability of knowledge formation from par­tic­u­lar forms of training and control that the intellectual claims to have the authority to prescribe. That qunzhong becomes an object of psychological investigation is bound up with techniques for its discipline. From 1926 to 1931, Zhang Jiuru observed more than three hundred “crowd gatherings” all over China and read extensively on psy­chol­ogy, the po­liti­cal histories of vari­ous nations, and a wide variety of rec­ords and studies of worker strikes and student upheavals. Beginning in the late 1920s, Zhang taught crowd psy­chol­ogy at Chiang Kai-­shek’s 蔣介石 (1887–1975) military acad­emy in Whampoa to more than four thousand students by his count.128 A preliminary version of his lectures titled Crowd Psy­chol­ogy was published by the Central Military Acad­emy as early as 1929, but enjoyed only limited circulation.129 The final manuscript, which was more than twenty times the length of the lecture notes, was completed in February 1931 when Zhang served as secretary of the Department of Military Affairs. The published version Qunzhong xinli yu qunzhong lingdao 羣眾心理與羣眾領導 (Crowd Mentality and Crowd Leadership) is substantially shorter than the original manuscript, but still amounts to more than five hundred pages.130 An exceptionally well-­read scholar, Zhang Jiuru combined the behaviorist model of psy­chol­ogy with a Le Bonian theory of the crowd-mind in his definition of qunzhong: “­Under special circumstances, vari­ous ­people, consciously or not, gather together; their emotions, thoughts, and actions mutually stimulate and respond to each other and as a result become homogeneous. At this time, the individual’s personality and consciousness suddenly dis­appear and a separate collective mind (jihe de xinyi 集合的心意) arises, which is transient but nevertheless clearly exhibits its special characteristics.”131 This disappearance of conscious personality and the predominance of the collective mind led to opposing views that paradoxically coexist in Zhang’s account: The crowd is a legitimate po­liti­cal subject that gives expression to the w ­ ill of the p ­ eople and is at the same time pathological and degenerate. Its inherent indeterminacy gives rise to its quin­tes­sen­tial characteristic: its volatility, which, Zhang reasons, makes it a necessary object of mastery. Whereas Le Bon treated crowds as “beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution” and con­temporary scholars such as Gao Juefu put the crowd



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on a par with the mob, Zhang Jiuru considered the unified mind of the crowd as a passionate form of public opinion ( gongyi 公意). The only difference between the public and the crowd resides in the dif­fer­ent ways each expresses the collective consciousness ( jihe de yishi 集合的意識). “When the collective consciousness is crystallized and latent,” Zhang reasons, “it becomes public opinion; when it is expressed fervently, it becomes the power of the crowd.”132 The public and the crowd are two sides of the same coin: “The crowd is the ardent and riotous public, while the public is the cool and stabilized crowd.”133 ­Here Zhang Jiuru touches on a key division at the heart of modern po­liti­cal thought—­that between “a utopian vision of the perfect repre­sen­ta­tion of the w ­ ill of the ­people in government and an apocalyptic vision of manipulated mob rule.”134 Central to this division is the differentiation between the public and the crowd.135 Gabriel Tarde, for instance, distinguished the crowd from the public. Unlike the crowd, which stems from ancient forms of h ­ uman association, the public, Tarde argues, is the product of modern means of communication, such as the telegraph, telephone, and radio, and is characterized by the reflective captivity of its members. In contrast to the crowd’s voices, which are unified by ­mental contagion, public opinion is informed by knowledge and awareness of the simultaneous similarity among its members.136 Blaming Tarde for his “bad eyesight,” Zhang Jiuru contends that “he [Tarde] does not know that the coherent public spirit is the origin of the crowd spirit (qunzhong jingshen 羣眾精神).”137 Many Chinese commentators shared a notable distrust of the public expression of the crowd, as this chapter has shown. Although on the surface Zhang seems to reverse their view of the crowd as a dangerous entity swayed by irrational appetites and instincts, he shares with them the vision of a blind and shifting crowd that is incapable of po­liti­cal reasoning. Drawing from a wide variety of examples ranging from the French Revolution of 1789 and the Rus­sian Revolution of 1917, to Sima Qian’s Rec­ords of the ­Grand Historian, and the Ming vernacular novel ­Water Margin, Zhang argues that the crowd, ­because of its emotional nature, is intolerant and dictatorial, cruel and violent, and also susceptible to suggestion.138 He further claims that the senses of the crowd, including not only its vision and hearing but also its senses of taste, smell, and touch, are all impaired. Furthermore, its memory and imagination, as well as its capacity for analy­ sis, comprehension, judgment, and reasoning, are diminished.139

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With exaggerated sentiments and inferior intellect, individuals in a crowd action, Zhang contends, are seized by a state of “ganjue tuoshi 感覺脫失 or anaesthesia [in En­glish in the text],” b ­ ecause “the threshold of consciousness ( yishi yu 意識閾) is at its narrowest and the subconscious is at its most vibrant” when p ­ eople form a crowd.140 Like Gao Juefu, Zhang Jiuru finds crowd formation dangerous ­because it activates and accentuates ­people’s innermost, pathological desires: “When individuals form a crowd, like patients of the same disease sympathizing with each other, the same voices correspond with each other, and the childish minds and bestial desires (tongxin shouyu 童心獸慾) that are suppressed on normal days ­will be released to their full extent.”141 Zhang’s stress on the “bestial desires” that the crowd formation pro­cess helps release resonated with other nationalists who believed in the necessity of centralized po­liti­cal authority. Yu Jiaju 余家菊 (1898–1976) of the Young China Study Society, for instance, held that the manifestation of crowd mentality in a time of revolution was nothing but an “outburst of bestiality.”142 Xu Yi 徐怡, in a study on propaganda and mass movement, also came to a similar conclusion.143 They both took the act of forming a crowd as an explosion of repressed primitivism, letting loose the savage side of h ­ uman nature. The crowd might express the ­people’s w ­ ill in an intensified manner (and therefore be a “worthy” object of po­liti­cal management, Zhang stresses at the beginning of his monograph),144 but in essence, “the crowd is an anomaly ( guaiwu 怪物) whose emotion overpowers its intellect and whose intellect is overshadowed by its emotion”—an anomaly that needs to “be kept on the right track.”145 If Gao’s theory of the crowd as pathological mob reveals an elitist disdain of popu­lar aggregation and left-­wing radical mobilization, Zhang Jiuru’s study seeks to demonstrate the necessity and feasibility of controlling the crowd. The objective of understanding the psychological pro­cesses at work in crowd actions was not contemplative; instead it was to explain “­whether the crowd can accept our mastery (zhiyu 制馭) in terms of their mentality.”146 Unlike Gao, who emphasized the crowd’s persecuting tendency, Zhang stresses its volatility and the need for discipline. By expressing concern about the crowd’s transitory, unstable, and amorphous nature, Zhang Jiuru also differs from crowd apologists such as the GMD radical Hu Hanmin. Where Hu saw crowds of the May Fourth Movement exemplifying a positive po­liti­cal



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entity formed from Chinese society’s “loose sand,” Zhang Jiuru warns that aggregation itself does not endow qunzhong with a per­sis­tent form: “The emotion of the crowd always transforms and shifts with no constancy (bian­ ­yi wuchang 變移無常) . . . ​No ­matter what [crowd] movement, it is always volatile (fudong 浮動).”147 The return to the image of Chinese ­people as “a tray of loose sand” points to the crowd’s incapacity to create a sustained sociopo­liti­cal existence. It cannot itself unify its components into a coherent body, but rather is only raw material awaiting a stable form— an object in need of taming. Characterized by a lack of self-­awareness and no rational ability to direct itself, qunzhong is essentially prone to obey and constitutionally “calls for a leader.”148 Zhang resorts to the language of Confucianism, which the GMD recycled during the New Life Movement in the mid1930s, and claims that the leader of the crowd must embody the personality of the Confucian gentleman: “The wise are never perplexed; the humane, never anxious; the brave, never afraid.”149 But Zhang quickly admits that this emphasis on the dao 道 (way) of leadership would be empty talk without the explication and application of specific shu 術 (techniques or arts) that exert control over the crowd.150 The psychological princi­ples that purported to explain the actions of aggregated individuals undergirded the design of techniques of m ­ ental control over the object of study. Excessively emotional and irrational, the crowd can be more effectively influenced by means other than rational reasoning. For example, in spite of his insistence on the importance of moral self-­cultivation, Zhang argues that one needs to possess certain “surface” (pixiang 皮相) or physical attributes to be a crowd leader—­a view shared by Lin Chuanding 林傳鼎 (1913–96) of Qinghua University—­because “the presence of a big masculine person in front of a crowd . . . ​­will leave the crowd dazzled and awed, its spirit displaced and its breath taken away, completely overwhelmed and incapable of self-­control.”151 Zhang supports his argument with specific data on the optimal height and weight of leaders in vari­ous ranks.152 For “­people with foresight and perspicacity” (xianzhi xianjue zhe 先知先覺者) who want to imbue the crowd-mind with po­liti­cal ideas, the best time to shout out slogans, Zhang claims, is at midnight. He proposes a strangely literal scenario of mass awakening: Enlightened elites cry out s­ imple and clear slogans to the sleeping ­people in the ­middle of a

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­silent moonlit night. This way they “prick” (ci 刺) the heart of the masses with po­liti­cal messages, rather than appealing to ­people’s rationality and convincing them with logic and reason—so that their “hair stands on end and bones tingle, heart-­strings tightened.”153 ­These are only two examples of a wide variety of techniques Zhang proposes in the last 200 pages of his book. He freely mixes them with preaching about Confucian moralism and Sun Yat-­sen’s “Three Princi­ples of the ­People.” Of all ­these tactics, suggestion (anshi) is of par­tic­u­lar importance for its alleged penetrating power, ­because in a crowd ­people’s “threshold of consciousness is at its narrowest” and individuals are prone to act automatically on ideas not their own.154 Zhang subscribed to the American psychologist James Mark Baldwin’s (1861–1934) definition of suggestion as “the abrupt entrance from without into consciousness of an idea or image which becomes a part of the stream of thought and tends to produce the muscular and volitional effects which ordinarily follow upon its presence.” Zhang maintains that, through the use of suggestion in speeches, one can manipulate (caozong 操縱) both spiritual and physiological ­activities of the crowd.155 Capable leaders mea­sure the depth of the “cleft in consciousness” ( yishi de liefeng 意識的裂縫) to determine what types of suggestion should be used in their speeches and with what degree of directness.156 Depending on w ­ hether this cleft is slight or deep and the par­tic­u­lar time and space in which the crowd gathers, leaders, claims Zhang, ­will decide w ­ hether to attack (xiji 襲擊) the crowd with suggestions in full force or stealthily ferry (toudu 偷渡) ideas into p ­ eople’s minds. Zhang’s use of military terms is consistent with his meta­phor of qunzhong as guaiwu, which literally means “monster.”157 David Strand points out the “aggressively vocal nature” of China’s new po­liti­cal culture, where speech making was both a central form of po­liti­cal expression and a novel po­liti­cal technique for constructing one’s authority.158 Zhang’s study not only aims to add to the vocabulary and repertoire of speech-­making strategies, but more importantly, it provides a psychological underpinning for the rationale and techniques of the new po­liti­cal culture. The “cleft in consciousness,” according to Zhang’s reasoning, must first become the object of calculation so that a speech’s po­liti­cal power can be realized. In other words, gauging the crowd’s psychological characteristics and inner pro­cesses cannot be separated from the explication and design of tactics for acting on this new object of



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knowledge. Crowd psy­chol­ogy as a disciplinary proj­ect, to borrow Michel Foucault’s memorable words from Discipline and Punish, has “a double effect: a ‘soul’ to be known and a subjection to be maintained.”159 It is not some abstract theory, but the concrete tactics of power through which not only ­human conduct but also governance of the ­people (qunzhi) become psychologized.160 Zhang Jiuru and other theorists, such as Wu Zhaotang 吴兆棠 (1905– 64) and Xiao Xiaorong 蕭孝嶸 (1897–1963), derived theoretical concepts and practical techniques for crowd management from their psychological studies. By ­doing so they ­were able to propose a psychological mode of po­liti­cal training (xunlian 訓練) whose efficacy rested on their claim of expertise on h ­ uman interiority. The recognition of crowd psy­chol­ogy’s use in po­liti­cal leadership and military affairs can be traced to the early Beiyang government period of the mid-1910s.161 In the 1930s and 1940s crowd theories, as techniques or shu, began to be widely taught at the GMD cadre training schools and military academies not only for the purpose of leading and controlling the p ­ eople in social movements but also for military officers to use on the army itself.162 ­These training programs at both the national and provincial levels w ­ ere central to the GMD’s state-­ building effort. Xunlian in the GMD Party and military was geared to po­liti­cal indoctrination and military training, as well as to “on-­the-­job acquisition of technical skills,” including practical knowledge in areas such as electromagnetics, accounting, and geography.163 Crowd psy­chol­ogy as a technology of government had its rightful place in ­these curricula. Wu Zhaotang, for one, stressed the applicability of crowd psy­chol­ogy to military affairs in his 1943 Qunzhong xinlixue gangyao 羣眾心理學綱要 (A General Introduction to Crowd Psy­chol­ogy). Wu was educated in Waseda University and Berlin University in the late 1920s and 1930s. He wrote his pamphlet near the end of the Sino-­Japanese War when he was teaching leadership courses at the GMD Central Training Corps (Zhongyang xunliantuan 中央訓練團) to both army officers and government bureaucrats. He argues that although commanders must “carefully guard against losing mastery of one’s own mind” in b­ attle situations, combatants should be “kept in the state of crowd mentality” to avoid a “decrease of aggressiveness and military morale due to the development of individual consciousness.”164 The possibility and means of establishing control ­were thus rationalized in language that constitutes individuals in

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a crowd (including troops) as psychological subjects. The GMD’s sense of imperative to claim expertise (and hence legitimacy) in managing the rise of mass politics is captured in the title of a speech that Chiang Kai-­ shek gave on April 22, 1939, to a po­liti­cal training class: “Recognize the Era—­W hat Is the ‘Scientific Era of Crowds’ (kexue de qunzhong shidai 科學的羣眾時代)?”165

Conclusion The emergence of mass politics around the turn of the twentieth ­century, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm points out, went hand in hand with the discovery of “the importance of ‘irrational’ ele­ments in the maintenance of the social fabric and the social order.”166 Studies such as Le Bon’s social psy­chol­ogy and Freud’s work on the fragility of rationality pop­u­lar­ized the idea that what held h ­ uman collectivities together was not the rational calculation of their members, but rather the irrational forces from the deep recesses of the h ­ uman psyche. Responding both to the rise of mass movements in the republican era and what a con­temporary scholar fittingly termed “a deintellectualization of h ­ uman be­hav­ior,”167 Gao Juefu, Zhang Jiuru, and other liked-­minded theorists introduced the interior zone of qunzhong into the play of true and false, ascribed specific perspectives and positions to intellectual observers who claimed the capacity to grasp its nature, and ultimately called into question the crowd’s capacity to function as a self-­determining po­liti­cal agent. The novelty of their discourse did not lie in its negation of the crowd itself (which was, ­after all, a perennial prejudice among the intellectuals), but rather in the way such a negative view was rationalized. To borrow a useful concept from Arnold I. Davidson (via Ian Hacking and Alistair Crombie), its historical novelty resided in its psychological “style of reasoning,” which contained not only new concepts (such as suggestion and hypnosis) and new objects of knowledge (such as the crowd’s spiritual and physiological activities) but also new techniques and institutional supports.168 Psychological postulations about the crowd’s irrational interior not only gave scientific authority to anx­i­eties about mounting social forces from below; they also lent a par­tic­u­lar urgency and legitimacy to discourses and programs that sought



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to channel, circumscribe, or transform unruly passions and instincts allegedly unleashed from beneath or beyond the sphere of consciousness when p ­ eople crowded together. The extent to which the image of the psychological crowd continued to echo throughout the public discourse reflected a palpable sense of alarm and even crisis among the elites, which is con­ve­niently captured in a 1948 essay published in Fa shang luntan 法商論壇 (Forum on Law and Commerce), provocatively titled “Qunzhong xinli bijing shi kepa de” 羣眾心 理畢竟是可怕的 (­A fter All, Crowd Mentality Is to Be Feared). The author claims that the devastating hyperinflation and escalating civil war ­were exacerbating the anger and despair of the masses to the point that they ­were becoming increasingly emotional and susceptible to stimulation and suggestion. The essay concludes with a warning to the GMD government: “­Don’t let the p ­ eople of the w ­ hole nation turn into crowds!”169 In social psychologists’ accounts, the ­people in a crowd are characterized by a lowering of intellectual faculties and the intensification of emotional reactions; crowding together enables individuals to act out their primitive instincts, hidden desires, and even homicidal tendencies that would other­wise be “repressed ( ya 壓) into the unconscious.”170 Their analyses are less rooted in the notion of a supraindividual crowd-­mind, which many Chinese commenters refuted, than in a shared postulation of the ­human mind structured by the dualism of the conscious and the unconscious. In their view, the submersion of the individual into the crowd unleashed the most hidden and private impulses of m ­ ental life, and this provided “the most primal, fundamental motivation for crowd actions.”171 Qunzhong was thus constituted not so much as the antithesis of the individual than as a collective moment of compensation for what is censored by the conscious mind and pushed back into the unconscious self. By construing social strug­gles as symptoms of obsession and paranoia, many crowd psychologists detached their analy­sis from the real­ity of suffering and injustice; the discourse of “crowd mentality” was used as an alternative to that of class in explaining sociopo­liti­cal antagonism. It is useful ­here to recall Raymond Williams’s incisive critique of the use of psy­chol­ogy as “abstraction of determinism” that, by isolating the psychological as an autonomous, controlling category, serves as “a mystification of the specific and always related determinants which are the real social

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pro­cess.”172 In a similar vein, Georges Lefebvre criticized the Le Bonian theory of the crowd for concealing b­ ehind its conception of certain m ­ ental phenomena “the specificity of the crowd in real­ity.”173 In depictions of the crowd as psychopathic patients, sleepwalkers, or simply delusional persons wearing a paper-­flower hat and Chaplinesque shoes, the specificity of social antagonism dis­appears to make room for a psychological conception of h ­ uman interaction. Images like this, along with other descriptions couched in vari­ous analogies and structured by dif­fer­ent narrative devices, direct our attention to the very textuality of psychological discourse and invite us to confront both its rhetorical nature and ideological implications. Despite ideological rivalries and academic divisions, po­liti­cal thinkers, ranging from left-­wing radicals like Chen Duxiu and Qu Qiubai and the academic Gao Juefu, to the GMD scholar Zhang Jiuru, all appealed to the authority of sociopsychological theories. Their psychological interpretations prescribed the autonomy of the masses as the telos of enlightenment and awakening while, paradoxically, defining as pathological the very form of spontaneous collective emergence that the politics of mass mobilization would allegedly enable. Although Chinese crowd theorists had their share of disagreements with Le Bon, they all subscribed to the non-­subjectal features of Le Bonian crowds.174 It is difficult to draw a sharp line between their approaches purely on the basis of their po­liti­cal affiliations. In each of their other­wise varied depictions, the crowd is e­ ither controlled by environmental stimuli or innate drives and instincts released by the experience of being in a mass; crowds are thus devoid of the rationality that undergirds agency and self-­awareness. Given the prevalence of this disqualification, how could anyone imagine a collective subjectivity that is autonomous or self-­determined, never mind revolutionary? Was it even pos­si­ble to celebrate the crowd in the shadow of Le Bon? ­These questions ­were taken up by a young radical phi­los­o­pher in the early 1920s, whose theory of the revolutionary crowd is the focus of the next chapter.

chapter 2 The Lure of the Irrational Let it be known that the time of reason has passed! . . . ​A crazy psychotic is the one who recovers his original self, and therefore is the most vivacious and genuine. —Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue 革命哲學 (Philosophy of Revolution), 1921 Who is engaged in strug­gle on behalf of thought, knowledge, and science? —Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Upheaval, 1969

T

he psychological diagnostics of qunzhong, as the previous chapter has shown, often came down to a denigration of spontaneous energies. The outburst of collective passions was construed as an epiphenomenon of the unconscious operation of impulses and desires that escape the control of one’s ­will and reasoned judgment. For thinkers such as Gao Juefu and Zhang Jiuru, collective solidarity was a product of ­mental disorders and entailed the eruption of morbid delusions. Their disqualification of the crowd as an agent of social transformation was grounded on a prioritization of reason and intellect over emotion and instinct. However, another vision emerged in the early 1920s, one that held the lack of rationality and overflow of extreme sentiments to be the very basis of revolutionary agency. Diametrically opposed to most of the commentators discussed in the previous chapter, the young phi­los­op ­ her Zhu Qianzhi applauded the radical potential of the irrational and the intuitive, in which he grounded his philosophy of the revolutionary crowd. Rather than cautioning against collective delirium as did many of his May Fourth contemporaries, Zhu praised impulsive emotion as the motor force of revolution. Through an

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against-­the-­grain reading of Le Bon’s The Crowd via the theories of Wilhelm Wundt and Henri Bergson, as well as neo-­Confucian notions of self, Zhu, in his 1921 theoretical treatise Geming zhexue 革命哲學 (Philosophy of Revolution), identifies irrational forces as the wellspring of action, participates in the global circulation of discourses of antirationalism and vitalism, and assigns a radical meaning to the figure of the “unconscious” crowd, which lay at the core of left-­wing radicalism in the early twentieth ­century. In this chapter I explore the prob­lems of irrationality and instinct in Zhu Qianzhi’s anarcho-­nihilist philosophy. Whereas crowd psychologists from Le Bon to Zhang Jiuru had focused on explaining crowd be­hav­ior, thereby opening it to po­liti­cal calculation, Zhu’s primary concern was with a mode of collective emergence that was both spontaneous and unbound by externally imposed forms. He promoted a modernity of passionate rebellion in part by appropriating the psycho-­physiological theorizing of emotion that had emerged in Eu­rope in the late nineteenth ­century; building on this theory, he envisioned an instinctual form of po­liti­cal emergence that would violate the precarious distinction between awakening and being awakened in modern China. In the pro­cess of d ­ oing so, Zhu brought to the fore tensions between reason and passion, spontaneity from within and order from without, autonomy and heteronomy. ­These tensions have remained essential to modern po­liti­cal thought to date, as manifested in the recent debates about immanence and mediation around the conceptualization of the “multitude.”1 Ultimately, what is at stake in Zhu’s theory is the very possibility of an autonomous agent of po­liti­cal action, the nature of mobilization, and the ground of collective identification. Although he was deeply suspicious of po­liti­cal indoctrination or tutelage, Zhu’s intuitionalist critique of external authority was not without its own impasse. To bring this into sharper focus I draw attention to overlooked connections between Zhu’s antirationalist vision and both Chiang Kai-­shek’s “philosophy of forceful implementation” and the Chinese Communist revolutionary discourse. Zhu’s preoccupation with the affective dimension of collective formation may appeal to recent affect theorists who, contesting the rationalist neglect of corporeal affective pro­cesses in thinking, emphasize the determining role of autonomic, unconscious, and affective reactions in politics



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and ethics. Theorists such as Brian Massumi emphasize the distinction between affect and emotion: Affect is a visceral force, “irreducibly bodily and autonomic,” in­de­pen­dent of intention or meaning, whereas emotion has a social content, b­ ecause it entails “the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal.”2 For Zhu, qing 情 (a term that has been translated as love, emotion, or feeling) both denotes an affective force prior to and outside rationality and, at the same time, is the emotive basis for sociopo­liti­cal identification. At the heart of Zhu’s 1921 treatise are ideas about consciousness and unconsciousness, rationality and intuition, and manipulation and spontaneity through which his radical claims are articulated. How then are we to recognize the po­liti­cal and intellectual overdetermination of Zhu’s idea of the crowd, and from this recover how repre­sen­ta­tions of the crowd make vis­i­ble the dialectical play of po­liti­cal reason and affective instincts in the modern Chinese po­liti­cal imagination?

“Disastrous Consequences” In the early de­cades of the twentieth c­ entury, the conservative social psychologies of Le Bon and like-­minded theorists posed a serious theoretical challenge to the leftist call for mass movements. For Le Bon and his followers, revolutions in general exemplified moral and evolutionary decline and amounted to social regression. They developed an antisocialist rhe­toric aimed at discrediting the legitimacy of left-­wing popu­lar movements, ranging from parliamentary socialism in the 1890s to Bolshevism.3 Under­lying their crowd theories w ­ ere, in Richard Bellamy’s words, “more general theories of social disor­ga­ni­za­tion, disorientation and anomie” in which “mass be­hav­ior was linked to vari­ous types of moral and social deviance.”4 Indeed, as Stefan Jonsson argues, “With the theory of mass psy­chol­ogy, all grounds for defending collective action w ­ ere cut away from 5 mainstream cultural and po­liti­cal vocabulary.” Given this prevalent disqualification of the crowd, how could one imagine a collective emergence that is autonomous, self-­determined, or even revolutionary? In the early twentieth c­ entury, not only Chinese radical thinkers but also left-­wing

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intellectuals and activists around the globe had to face this question. Eu­ ro­pean socialist circles of the time avoided using the term “crowd,”6 and Le Bon’s theory drew strong rebuttals from left-­wing thinkers such as Karl Kautsky (1854–1938).7 When crowd psy­chol­ogy did circulate widely among the Left, for instance in 1930s Germany, “the ambiguous concept of the masses, and the indiscriminate references to their mood which are commonplace in the German revolutionary press,” as Walter Benjamin (1892– 1940) noted, “have undoubtedly fostered illusions which have had disastrous consequences for the German proletariat.”8 It became crucial for radical thinkers to formulate their own theories of the masses in response to the mobilized crowd’s devaluation into a pathological subject. To grasp the significance and novelty of Zhu’s theory in a global context, consider this note Benjamin made in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version”: Proletarian class consciousness, which is the most enlightened form of class consciousness, fundamentally transforms the structure of the proletarian masses. The class-­conscious proletariat forms a compact mass only from the outside, in the minds of its oppressors. At the moment when it takes up its strug­gle for liberation, this apparently compact mass has actually already begun to loosen. It ceases to be governed by mere reactions; it makes the transition to action. The loosening of the proletarian masses is the work of solidarity. In the solidarity of the proletarian class strug­gle, the dead, undialectical opposition between individual and mass is abolished; for the comrade, it does not exist . . . ​The mass as an impenetrable, compact entity, which Le Bon and ­others have made the subject of their “mass psy­ chol­ogy,” is that of the petty bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeoisie is not a class; it is in fact only a mass . . . ​In this mass the emotional ele­ment described in mass psy­chol­ogy is indeed a determining ­factor. But for that very reason this compact mass forms the antithesis of the proletarian cadre, which obeys a collective ratio.9

In this passage Benjamin sees the solidarity of the proletarian class strug­gle resulting from a decompression of the compact bodies through which the masses turn into a revolutionary force. He resorts to Le Bon’s theory and argues that, for the “compact mass” (Benjamin’s term for the Le Bonian crowd), the “emotional ele­ment” is a determining f­actor. To be-



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come a revolutionary subject—­t hat is, to cease being an impenetrable entity—­the proletarian masses must go through an “internal upheaval which loosens its composition, enabling it to become aware of itself as an association of class-­conscious cadres.” Ultimately, Benjamin contends, the proletariat is “preparing for a society in which neither the objective nor the subjective conditions for the formation of mass ­will exist any longer.”10 This doctrine of elevation through the awakening of class consciousness is commonplace in twentieth-­century Marxism, the echoes of which can be heard in a range of radical thinkers from Lenin to Qu Qiubai. Benjamin’s differentiation of class solidarity from the “compact mass,” therefore, falls prey to the sterile opposition of rationality versus emotion that also characterizes Le Bon’s theory. In contrast to this strain of leftist thought, Zhu Qianzhi reinterpreted the “emotional ele­ment” of the crowd, articulated a vision of po­liti­cal mediation that is not antithetical to mass spontaneity, and challenged Le Bon on his own turf. Le Bon’s thought, as Ernesto Laclau points out, is grounded in two crucial assumptions that dominated much of the early stages of Western crowd psy­chol­ogy: First, “the dividing line between rational forms of social organ­ization and mass phenomena coincides with the frontier separating the normal from the pathological”; and second, “the distinction between rationality and irrationality would largely overlap with the distinction between the individual and the group.”11 In his rethinking of pop­u­ lism, Laclau tackles the Le Bonian denigration of the masses by contending that a p ­ eople emerges as a po­liti­cal subject through, and only through, the enchainment of heterogeneous demands whose fulfillment is permanently deferred. This constitution of the collective subject out of a plurality of heterogeneous claims, however, is not based on any transcendental category or essence, but is instead grounded in the radical affective investment in the pro­cess of repre­sen­ta­tion. For Laclau, the failure of Le Bon’s crowd psy­chol­ogy to understand the fundamental nature of social agency lies in its “inanity of dismissing emotional populist attachments in the name of an uncontaminable rationality.”12 As we see, in Zhu Qianzhi’s theorization of revolution, the stark dichotomies of the normal and the pathological, the rational and the irrational initially played a formative role, but as he thought through them, they would became emphatically blurred or, to use Laclau’s term, “contaminated.”

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“The Order of Au­then­tic Emotion” Zhu Qianzhi was born into an elite ­family in Fuzhou. He moved to Beijing in 1917 and studied at Beijing University, first as a pre-­law student and then majoring in philosophy. While working for the anarchist-­ oriented Beijing daxue xuesheng zhoukan 北京大學學生週刊 (Beijing University Students’ Weekly), he called on students to refuse to take exams and wrote to the acting chancellor, urging him to stop granting degrees, which, in Zhu’s view, turned knowledge into “stolen goods.” He was an active participant in the May Fourth Movement. On October 9, 1920, when a friend of his was arrested for carry­ing an anarchist manifesto Zhu had written, Zhu turned himself in at the police station to secure his friend’s release. Zhu was then imprisoned for more than three months. Much of his Philosophy of Revolution was developed shortly before and during his imprisonment.13 Although the authorities in the British concession banned it within a month of its publication in 1921 and the publisher was fined 500 yuan for printing it, Zhu’s treatise nevertheless went through four reprints.14 In the 1920s, leading intellectuals such as Wu Zhihui 吳稚暉 (1865–1953) regarded Zhu as one of the four representatives of con­temporary Chinese thought—­the other three being ­Liang Qichao 梁啓超 (1873–1929), Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962), and Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893–1988).15 Zhu longed for authenticity in life and celebrated primal emotion and irrational intuition as transformative forces. His Philosophy of Revolution represents an impor­tant critique of rationalism and utilitarianism, which had been pop­u­lar­ized partly by the lecture tours of John Dewey (May 1919 to July 1921) and Bertrand Russell (October 1920 to October 1921) in China.16 For Le Bon and his Chinese followers, the crowd was a psychopathological entity, characterized by a lowering of its participants’ intellectual faculties and the intensification of their emotional reactions. It therefore lacked the ground of rationality deemed essential for autonomy and self-­ awareness. If this characterization w ­ ere valid, w ­ hether an excessively emotional crowd acting by irrational instinct would be capable of “revolutionary” agency would depend largely on how revolution is defined. Thus, Zhu Qianzhi’s tactical reevaluation of qunzhong does not start with a new



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depiction of the crowd, but rather with a redefinition of geming 革命 (revolution) itself. Since the late Qing dynasty, Chinese intellectuals’ engagement with geming has generated a wide range of historical meanings and practices. Its connotations, ­shaped through a Sino-­Japanese-­European cycle of translation and transvaluation, came not only to incorporate the classical view of violent dynastic overthrow into a syntax of modern revolution but also linked such ideas to Social Darwinian evolutionism and modern historical consciousness.17 In par­tic­u­lar, the idea of revolution became integrated into the idea of historical pro­gress governed by Social Darwinian princi­ples of natu­ral se­lection and competition. Revolution became an imperative for racial and national survival. Many late Qing thinkers and republican intellectuals embraced the evolutionary model of development as an overarching ethical and metaphysical worldview; it was a way to understand China’s position in modern world history.18 Against this mainstream evolutionist model of linear history, Zhu Qianzhi proposed a circular model of nihilistic evolutionism. Zhu Qianzhi identified geming with jinhua 進化 (evolution), but his notion of evolution did not imply a linear progression ­toward perfection. ­Counter to the popu­lar developmental view, he advanced what he called the “eternal flowing ( yongyuan de liuxing 永遠的流行) ‘from nonexistence to existence’ and ‘from existence to nonexistence.’ ” “Since the pres­ent is [at the stage of ] existence, evolution must be heading ­towards ‘nonexistence.’ ” But the difference between the evolutionary thinking Zhu disdained and his nihilistic evolution goes beyond the seemingly opposite trajectories of social progression versus the “back-­to-­‘nonexistence’ ” flow. Around the turn of the twentieth c­ entury, ideas opposing natu­ral se­lection theory—or any version of adaptive evolution that reflected mechanistic pro­cesses of nature—­began to emerge in the West.19 Zhu shared with con­ temporary Eu­ro­pean thinkers a distrust of the primacy of natu­ral se­lection and chance variation as well as its materialist implications. He conceived of evolution/revolution not as an influence of, or adaptation to the external environment, but rather in terms of the working/nonworking of the au­then­tic interiority of h ­ uman beings. That is, his nihilistic evolution/ revolution ­toward nonexistence was not a pursuit of the void, but rather a return to an internal drive that Zhu declared is qing: “Emotion (qing)

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is the ‘original substance’ (benti 本體).”20 For him, the evolution from nonexistence to existence, which goes from the original substance of qing to every­thing in the universe, was a pragmatic pro­cess, a “rationalization of qing” that gradually reduces the world to a lifeless object and eclipses true h ­ uman essence.21 Only the destructive power of revolution can propel this evolution of “annihilating ‘Now’ (xiaomie xianzai 消滅現在).”22 Zhu despised the inauthenticity and utilitarianism of modern life and longed to recover an au­then­tic self.23 To counteract the rational eclipse of qing, he called for a revolution that would clear all the blockages that obscure emotion, which is the “real substance of individual autonomy” (gexing zicun de shiti 個性自存的實體).24 Referring to the pioneering German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt’s theory of emotion, Zhu advanced his theory of revolution: “Oppose intellect, recover emotion” (fanzhi fuqing 反知復情).25 Wilhelm Wundt saw ­humans first and foremost as emotional beings, whose actions and mentalities originate in primal emotional states; a purely rational choice had no place in his theoretical system, and the affective pro­cess provides a sufficient basis for the development of voluntary action. The phenomenon of the unity of consciousness is explained by the affective-­motivational pro­cess. As Kurt Danziger points out, for Wundt, “only the affective states have the pervasive quality that is necessary for consciousness to display its characteristic unity.”26 Emotion precedes cognition, and therefore, rational thought pro­cesses are merely “the fragile veneer overlying more fundamental emotional-­motivational mechanisms,” as Arthur Blumenthal puts it.27 Zhu Qianzhi appropriated from Wundt two ideas: first, the primacy of the affective component in the development of volitional activity, and second, the priority of emotion over cognition and intellect. Both ideas would play impor­tant roles in his reevaluation of the crowd.28 In contrast to many of his contemporaries who saw emotion as a disruption of the rational machinery, Zhu contended, “Since the occurrence of emotion precedes ‘intellect,’ intellect is a secondary appendage of emotion”; it is a “sluggish derivative.”29 In the late nineteenth c­ entury, Wundt led his Leipzig laboratory in the study of the connection between emotion and willful action by analyzing the pulse rates of his subjects as they reacted to suggestions or experiences that provoked emotional responses. Wundt viewed all m ­ ental states as variations of the shifting fields of emotional qualities; he saw the



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volitional state as a strengthened form of emotion.30 Zhu acknowledged that revolutionary acts depend on volition that mixes emotion with intellect.31 Expanding on Wundt’s idea, Zhu claimed that when volition is gathered or intensified, it “clings to emotion . . . ​[and] is awakened and liberated.” By contrast, when volition “slows down,” it “approaches ‘knowledge’ . . . ​[and] becomes non-­evolutionary, dead, confused, upside-­ down, and lacking any freedom.” Volition is inferior to emotion b­ ecause “it is not completely cleared of its intellectual ­factors.”32 Intellect is not “an ele­ment of a revolutionary heart; in fact, it is ‘the ­enemy of revolution.’ ” “The advantage of revolution,” Zhu continued, “lies in its application of true emotion to evoke action.”33 “Let it be known,” he declares, “that the time of reason has passed!”34 Zhu’s formula for recovering the primal affectivity obscured by the pro­cess of ratiocination includes four stages of revolution: po­liti­cal revolution (bourgeoisie vs. aristocracy), social revolution (proletariat vs. bourgeoisie), anarchist revolution (anarchist vs. all po­liti­cal institutions), and fi­nally nihilist revolution. Bourgeois and proletarian revolutions are insufficient, and the anarchist revolution is but a transitional phase. In fact, Zhu held that the first three stages of revolution had already passed; he was blowing the bugle for the final stage: a nihilist-­cosmic revolution. “Our ultimate adventure,” Zhu poeticized, is to “destroy sunlight, moonlight, all light of the world, and the world itself.”35 This belief reduces much of his discussion to metaphysics. To recover the original body of au­then­tic emotion, he stressed, anarchist associations of ­free individuals and ultimately all life and substantial real­ity have to be annihilated.36 Zhu referred to the neo-­Confucianism of the Song and Ming dynasties and asserted that the cosmic princi­ple taiji arises from wu 無 (nonexistence).37 But in Philosophy of Revolution, he also found support for his theory of annihilation in a recent translation of Le Bon’s article, “The Evolution of ­Matter,” in which Le Bon claimed that all ­matter ­will eventually dis­appear into the ether.38 Borrowing William Butler Yeats’s words, Zhu proclaimed that the final destination of his revolution is a place where “­there is nothing that is anything and nobody that is anybody.”39 In this sense, Zhu’s thought fit well with Nietz­sche’s definition that “a nihilist is a man who says of the world as it is, that it ­ought not to exist, and of the world as it ­ought to be, that it does not exist.”40 As if following Dostoevsky’s suggestion that “every­one who desires supreme freedom must dare to kill

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himself,” Zhu’s ultimate solution includes collective suicide and, counter­ intuitively, ­free love, the practice of which, according to him, would result in no offspring.41 Although Zhu’s proposal seemed outrageously unrealistic, radical, and disturbing, his idea of a nihilist revolution echoed what Zhang Taiyan had called for more than a de­cade before. Denying that evolution meant meaningful pro­gress and believing that evil was part of ­human nature, Zhang advanced his theory of “Five Negations”: no state, no group, no self, no sentient being, and no world. This was the only progression he believed in.42 As Viren Murthy points out, Zhang believed that history is “produced by blind karma, rather than as the triumphant march of rational spirit”; only through the five negations can we return to the “world’s original emptiness.”43 For Zhang, total negation was nirvana, an idea not unlike Zhu’s hymn of complete annihilation. They both longed for total revolution and advanced a vision for the positive obliteration of Now. Zhu Qianzhi’s destructive nihilism never passed from the conceptual into actuality. However, he believed that carry­ing out a revolution would require a revolutionary heart rather than quiet reasoning and analy­ sis. “The constituent of revolutionary mentality, in which intellect has no place, is nothing but emotion”; “revolutionary action is but the flowing of emotion.”44 Against the rationalist criticism of collective fervor as irrational and abnormal, a view prominently expressed by thinkers like Chen Duxiu, Zhu retorts: A crazy psychotic is the one who recovers his original self and therefore is the most vivacious and genuine. On the contrary, t­hose who immerse themselves in reason and intellect are always hesitant and therefore always in contradiction with the natu­ral state of the heart . . . ​Thereby it is known that rationality is the abnormal mentality (biantai xinli 變態心理) and revolutionaries who indulge in emotion are not abnormal.45

In another paragraph, as if to challenge t­ hose who urged p ­ eople to hold on to rational skepticism, Zhu writes, “I am driven by internal, natu­ral impulses, so I am much stronger than t­ hose slaves of knowledge. My blood is seething! I am already screaming and ready to destroy! How about you? You ­don’t have any blood? You d ­ on’t have true emotion?”46



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Zhu’s statement corresponds vividly with the four prefatory poems written for Philosophy of Revolution. In one of them, Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892–1978) fantasizes, “I cross the Yellow Sea where blood waves roar/ you [Yellow River and Yangtze River] pour all your blood, reddening the sea . . . ​Quick! Add some blood to the Blood River and Blood Sea!/Let the roaring Yellow Sea of blood waves dye all the seawater of the world red!” Zheng Boqi 鄭伯奇 (1895–1979), Guo’s fellow member in the Creation Society (Chuangzao she 創造社), continues with the motif of the Yellow Sea in his writings: “We are prepared to use our blood to clean the dirty Yellow Sea!/We hold bombs that look like flaming wheels to welcome the bright sun!” The other two prefatory poems w ­ ere written by Zheng Zhenduo and Yuan Jiahua 袁家驊 (1903–80). Zheng’s poem reads, “The blood of the youth seethes/Sacred tears flow/Burn Satan’s throne/Bleach Satan’s throne!” Yuan’s poem proclaims, “Clang! Clang! Clang!/Blood bells ring! Blood bells ring!/Surging! Surging! Surging!/Blood tides rise! Blood tides rise!/Bells of light!/Tides of light!”47 ­These shared, unbridled, and almost fanatical declarations demonstrate ­these writers’ highly charged belief in vio­lence and redemptive affectivity. They anticipate Zhu Ziqing’s 朱自清 (1898–1948) poignant, but more restrained, lines of questioning in his 1925 poem, “The Song of Blood.” Written in reaction to the May Thirtieth Incident of 1925, Zhu Ziqing shouts, “Our heads are still on our necks! Our hearts remain in our chests!/But our blood? What of our blood? It is seething!’ ” In her insightful reading of this poem, Vera Schwarcz comments that Zhu Ziqing showed the “temptation to abandon faith in critical reason” in order to come to terms with the “bloodiness of revolution.”48 In 1921, Zhu Qianzhi, along with his energized poet friends, had already willingly fallen prey to such a temptation. Revolution for them meant to follow the “order of au­then­tic emotion” (zhenqing de mingling 真情的命令).49 Studies by Eugenia Lean and Haiyan Lee have investigated the historical significance of emotion in the conceptualization and construction of the modern Chinese subject and sociopo­liti­cal order.50 Zhu Qianzhi’s longing for “au­then­tic emotion,” as well as the emerging interest in and anxiety about the “crowd mentality” in general, cannot be separated from the introduction of an unpre­ce­dented model of emotive personhood and interiority that came to prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “This newly in­ven­ted interior space,” Lee points out, “is

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designated as the seat of the individual truth and the fountainhead of one’s desire and action”; “love,” conjoined with individual freedom, becomes “a hypergood that demands total faith and supreme sacrifices.”51 Zhu’s faith in the “order of au­then­tic emotion” also resonated with certain ideas that w ­ ere already pres­ent in the long lineage of the late imperial cult of qing, which made spontaneous sentimental feeling the foundational basis of subjectivity and moral authority.52 The network of semantic relationships in which Zhu positioned his philosophy and from which his notion of qing derived its meaning, however, extended beyond the cult of qing and the neo-­Confucian metaphysics on which Zhu Qianzhi based his cosmic theory of revolution. This network included the psycho-­physiological language of the mind that emerged in Eu­rope in the nineteenth ­century and circulated globally around the turn of the twentieth c­ entury. Zhu’s use of physical terms to describe the workings of emotion/­ volition/intellect—­for example, he writes that emotion becomes stagnant intellect when it “slows down,” and volition “clings to” emotion when it is “intensified” and therefore “expands and contracts”53—­needs to be under­ stood in the context of mind as a psycho-­physiological category as put forward by psychologists like Wundt and Alexander Bain (1810–77). In their writings, ­mental states are “defined as dependent on specific physiological events. Emotion is as much physical as it is ­mental.”54 This physicalist theory of emotion, distanced from such psychological categories as passions that bear religious connotations, stemmed from the secularization of psy­chol­ogy. This shift occurred in the nineteenth ­century when physiological and physical approaches replaced theological anthropology as the dominant methodology in works on emotion. Wundt’s laboratory of psychophysics, along with works by Bain, Herbert Spencer, and Charles Darwin (1809–1882), played a crucial role in this secularizing pro­cess.55 In other words, both the historicity and the novelty of Zhu Qianzhi’s notion of emotion stood at the very intersection of the late imperial cult of qing, the new invention of interior space as the basis of subjectivity in modern China, and secularized psychological theorizing of the mind circulating globally at the time. Zhu applied this new epistemological order to a radical po­liti­cal philosophy, although this would certainly have surprised Wundt whose language he borrowed. The historical particularity of Zhu’s theory lies in its overarching notion of an



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affectivity that precedes cognition and is more primal than the romantic feelings and moral sentiments that dominated cultural production and public discourse in the republican period; his theory’s moment can also be detected from its scheme of emotion/volition/intellect (qing/yi/zhi 情/意/知), which replaced the older threefold division of emotion/desire/ ritual (qing/yu/li 情/慾/禮), the very heart of Confucian discourse around qing and xing 性 (­human nature). Zhu’s scheme, which complicated the topography of emotions in early twentieth-­century China, was intimately tied to the tripartite structure of the mind that had gained currency in nineteenth-­century Eu­ro­pean psy­chol­ogy. This structure defined the ­mental power of emotion (as opposed to the other two categories—­will and intellect) as “its capacity to energize, to move,”56 an idea that, as we see, is crucial to Zhu’s theory of mass mobilization. His notion of “the order of au­then­tic emotion” referred to an emotive pro­cess that has less to do with sharing private feelings than with mobilizing affective potential—­ which is at once individual and collective—to act and connect. As a self-­proclaimed “emotivist” (weiqingzhuyizhe 唯情主義者, literally, one who only endorses emotion), Zhu opposed emotion to rationality.57 Instead of being regulated by rational ritualism and social morality, the flow of qing destroys all moral, economic, and sociopo­liti­cal institutions. If the ultimate goal of revolution is to recover the original substance of qing that has been obscured by rationality, what impels revolutionary action?

“The Irrational Attitude” To answer the basic question of what propels revolutionary action, Zhu Qianzhi arrived at a conclusion that is startlingly dif­fer­ent from what many of his contemporaries proposed. The motivation for revolution, a­ ccording to Zhu, derives not from rational reasoning or intellectual awakening, but rather from the instinctive impulse. Zhu’s theory has to be understood within the context of what T. S. Eliot called an early twentieth-­century global epidemic of Bergsonism.58 Henri Bergson came to “hold the center of attention of both Chinese phi­los­o­phers and Chinese politicians for nearly a quarter of a ­century;

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his influence far outstripped that of Dewey and Russell and was more comparable to that of Darwin and Marx,” as Jerome Ch’en observed de­ cades ago.59 In the 1910s, Bergson’s vitalism was introduced into China and praised by Qian Zhixiu 錢智修 (1883–1947) as a “­great medicine for the imprisonment of material culture.”60 It would find f­ avor with a number of prominent intellectuals, including Li Dazhao 李大釗 (1888–1927), Liang Shuming, and Zhang Dongsun. By the early 1930s, all Bergson’s major works, along with many studies of Bergson by con­temporary scholars, had been translated into Chinese.61 In the early twentieth c­ entury, the reach of Bergson’s influence was felt in the Chinese interior in places such as Hankow.62 Shu-­mei Shih has studied the May Fourth use of Bergson, which she argues “was explic­itly in the ser­vice of the rationalist paradigm of scientific pro­gress” and therefore “exactly what Bergson wrote against.” Phi­los­o­phers Fang Xun 方珣 (1899–1977) and Feng Youlan 馮友蘭 (1895–1990), for instance, both reinterpreted Bergson’s theory of ­instinct and intuition as a necessary part of scientific pro­gress. Their rationalistic misinterpretations of Bergson’s anti-­intellectualism w ­ ere more akin to the early modern Western cele­bration of technology and science and had ­little in common with the high modernist disenchantment with reason.63 In contrast to ­these misreadings, Zhu Qianzhi’s incorporation of Bergson’s ideas into his own theory of revolution pushed Bergson’s anti-­ intellectual notions of creative impulse and intuition to their furthest limit and arrived at a radical theory of the mechanism of revolutionary action. Dissatisfied with Darwinian natu­ral se­lection, Bergson had advanced his own theory of creative evolution, which he conceived around the élan vital—­an under­lying purposeful drive, by means of which life fights the restrictions of inert m ­ atter. Against the mechanistic theory of progression through the se­lection of the better adapted, Bergson aimed to prove that evolutionary pro­cess is an organic, continuous phenomenon and is actually the work of an internal drive.64 Zhu Qianzhi quoted Bergson throughout his work; however, he distanced himself from the idea of progressive growth via evolution. Instead, he connected Bergson’s notion of the creative impulse with the brute force of re­sis­tance, a connection that Bergson touched upon only sporadically.65 Zhu thus absorbed vitalism into his own theoretical framework and reconceived the creative impulse as the original drive for revolutionary destruction. This creativity is a fun-



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damental, innate energy that wrestles with restrictions that block the full manifestation of qing. “Revolution,” declares Zhu, “is a creative impulse (chuangzao chongdong 創造衝動) . . . ​which cannot be eradicated or constrained by any force, and instead should be set ­free.”66 Zhu Qianzhi also referred to, if only to challenge, issues put forth by Bertrand Russell. The creative impulse of revolution, Zhu maintained, had to be differentiated from the “possessive impulse” that Russell discussed in his Po­liti­cal Ideals (1917). Russell proposed establishing the kind of social and po­liti­cal institutions that control the possessive impulses that “aim at acquiring or retaining private goods that cannot be shared” and allow the development of “creative or constructive impulses” that “aim at bringing into the world or making available for use the kind of goods in which t­ here is no privacy and no possession.”67 Zhu agreed with Russell’s call to undo the dominance of the desire for property. But from his anarcho-­nihilist standpoint, he firmly opposed any form of authoritative institution, including the ideals Russell described. What further distinguishes Zhu from Russell is his conception of the nature of impulse. Russell’s work was never intended to be a cele­bration of the instinctual or “natu­ral” manifestation of the “creative impulse.”68 In fact, Russell would ­later replace the term “creative impulse” with the idea of “scientific temper” as the basis of Western civilization. Zhu, in contrast, saw the true impulse as instinctual, not intellectual, b­ ecause “it is inborn, not something acquired through learning, devoid of any quality of hesitation brought by over-­thinking.”69 According to Zhu Qianzhi, revolutionary action is motivated by instinctual impetus, and revolutionary w ­ ill builds up from internal drives. Bergson’s key ideas around instinct anchor this theory. To wit, the true flow of life could neither be divided up nor be held still for analy­sis. An analytical, rational approach can only place us in the world of “the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead” and thus is “characterized by a natu­ral inability to comprehend life.” To see through the veneer of the distorted world of natu­ral science and arrive at an unmediated apprehension of real­ity, one must use intuition, which, “molded on the very form of life,” leads to an unmediated apprehension of real­ity.70 Through intuition and instinct, “one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible.”71 Working Bergson’s idea of intuition into his philosophy of revolution, Zhu argued

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that the true value of the intuitive approach for revolutionary thought is that it “empathically verifies the original body (qinzheng benti 親證本 體) . . . ​[which] a scientific approach can do nothing about.” His plea for intuition is by no means solely concerned with the metaphysical pursuit of absolute knowledge. Th ­ ose who advocate scientific intelligence, Zhu critiques, “can only conjecture about laborers by observing from the sidelines and are incapable of understanding the meaning of their hearts.” In contrast, true revolutionaries carry themselves intuitively into the interior of their objects and “coincide with” them. “On the surface, an intuitive approach,” Zhu admits, “may appear thoughtless, without intelligence, as if suffering from hysteria. [But] this kind of ‘thought-­free’ primary knowledge is in fact more reliable than what is inferred from ratiocination.”72 Moving against the scientism and rationalism of the late 1910s and 1920s, Zhu advocated what he called the “irrational attitude.” He argued that rational thinking and the scientific approach manipulate real­ity for utilitarian considerations and profit. They are “promoted by government-­ serving college professors and cap­i­tal­ists” and are, therefore, “aristocratic.” True revolutionary thought, by contrast, “is rooted in affective intuition (qinggande zhijue 情感的直覺), inborn, acquired without learning, available to every­one, and therefore plebeian.”73 In a Bergsonian way, Zhu asserted that intuition does what rationality never can: It brings us to the unmediated truth. Intuition is not an instrument, but rather a speculative faculty. Only by forgoing the bourgeoisie’s utilitarian rationality can one achieve absolute freedom and attain what Zhu called an “immediate understanding of the truth.”74 Zhu’s writing foregrounds the tension between reason and emotion/ intuition in May Fourth thought.75 Unlike many con­temporary intellectuals and activists who urged readers to hold on to rational skepticism instead of indulging in their emotions, Zhu Qianzhi reintroduced emotion and intuition into the discourse around politics, arguing that they ­were not disruptions of conscious volition and reasoning capacity but w ­ ere actually the essential components of revolutionary mentality and action. Only through their intuition could revolutionaries become resolute. “Revolution is acting by instinct . . . ​­Those who look ahead and ­behind and boast of being ‘cautious’ are in fact cowards.”76 ­Here we might hear echoes of what Jules Michelet has elegantly written in his praise of the uncor-



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rupted, primitive “­people”: “Reflective thought reaches action only ­after passing through the pro­cess of deliberation and discussion; it has to pass so many t­ hings that frequently it never arrives. On the contrary, instinctive thought touches the act and is almost the act itself; it is almost at the same moment both thought and action.”77 But if rational thinkers w ­ ere cowards, who w ­ ere the true revolutionaries? Armed with his affective, antirational philosophy of revolution, Zhu Qianzhi came to champion the inherent revolutionary potential of the crowd.

“The Anti-­Intellectual Crowd” If cognition and voluntary action are derived from an emotional-­ instinctual mechanism as Zhu argues, then the internal emotional forces experienced by the crowd allow him to explain revolutionary action from a diametrically dif­fer­ent perspective from that of rationalism. Rather than challenging the connection between emotion and determined po­liti­cal action, Zhu Qianzhi extols the affective ­factors in the volitional pro­cess. Chiding Le Bon as “a conservative who spares no effort in rejecting the theory of mysterious emotion,” Zhu proclaims that “in fact, the theory of mysterious emotion is gospel for revolution.”78 He writes, “Freed from the bondage of reason and intellect, it [the crowd] has nothing but true emotions. True emotions! True emotions! Look—­which unstoppable revolution is not launched by true emotions?” This conviction about deep and au­then­tic interiority, which is extolled over the factitious rationality, leads Zhu to reprimand Le Bon and his followers: “The crowd’s be­hav­ior transcends rationality. How can they find the true value of the crowd mentality when they approach it with a scientific attitude?”79 Revisiting the chief characterization of crowd mentality first formulated by Le Bon, then introduced into China by Zhang Xichen, and echoed by Qu Qiu­ bai and many o­ thers, Zhu acknowledged that individuals in the crowd are characterized by their excessive sentiments and incapacity to reason. In Zhu’s opinion, however, this depiction is not only insufficient for rejecting crowd mentality, but on the contrary, proves that “all the crowd has is true emotions and not the least bit of cold calm lifeless rationality.”80 Le Bon

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errs in his idea of personality that overemphasizes self-­control and rational capacity. In fact, “the advantage of the crowd movement,” contests Zhu, “lies in its ability to enable the ‘emotional’ personality—­that is, the unconscious personality and therefore, the au­then­tic personality—to bloom to its fullest extent and replace the skin-­deep personality (pixiang de gexing 皮相 的個性)—­the conscious personality.”81 Zhu Qianzhi envisioned an instinctual form of mass awakening: “Crowd movement is the general self-­awakening of society. This self-­ awakening is instinctual, not rational. The highest universal ‘intelligence’ is this kind of ‘thought-­free’ ‘knowledge,’ and not what Le Bon considers intelligence, which is nothing but artificial discontinuous intellect.”82 Against ­those who denounced radicals as “being thoughtless and unconscious, suffering from neuroticism,” Zhu retorts: “A revolutionary uses the intuitive method to look at real­ity . . . ​Therefore, on the surface, it seems that thinking is wiped out, but in fact, the meta-­k nowledge gained from this kind of ‘unthinking’ thinking is more genuine and reliable than that obtained by ratiocination.”83 The irrational, emotional, and instinctual crowd members are, therefore, natu­ral revolutionaries. Crowd thinking is true revolutionary thought. Zhu Qianzhi did not question the characterization of the crowd as irrational and instinctual; he simply disagreed with the Le Bonian evaluation of it. It is precisely ­because the crowd is irrational, instinct-­driven, and excessively emotional that it is inherently revolutionary. Zhu’s antirationalistic revision of Le Bon’s crowd theory took up its disparaging depiction of the crowd and tweaked it into a romanticized kind of unthinking “intelligence” that moves the crowd before analytical thought runs its course. This irrational and intuitive emotion, rather than the “positive suspicion” Qu Qiubai had advocated84 or any other type of rational reasoning, galvanizes the crowd into revolutionary action. In other words, Zhu Qianzhi championed a criterion of po­liti­cal be­hav­ior that sharply opposed the mainstream praise of critical reasoning in the 1920s. In contrast to warnings by writers like Qu Qiubai and Chen Duxiu, Zhu exalted the value of unreflecting awareness that springs intuitively from the unconscious affectivity of what he called the “anti-­intellectual crowd” (fanzhi de qunzhong 反知的羣眾).85 Zhu Qianzhi’s antirationalistic view of revolution led him to reject the economic determinism of vulgar Marxism. From the turn of the twen-



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tieth ­century, the contradiction between mechanical determinist interpretations of history and voluntary activism had been one of the central issues that Japa­nese and Chinese Marxists sought to tackle. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, Japa­nese Marxists such as Kawakami Hajime 川上肇 (1879–1946) developed a dualistic view that accepted economic determinism as an explanation for the pro­gress of society, but maintained the existence of an unchanging morality crucial to h ­ uman volition.86 Such ideas ­were shared by other prominent Marxists such as Yamakawa Hitoshi 山川均 (1880–1958), who emphasized the activist ele­ment of Marxism necessary for a revolutionary proletariat and class strug­gle, while at the same time acknowledging the role of economic ­factors.87 Influenced by t­ hese Japa­nese Marxists, early Chinese Marxists, such as Li Dazhao 李大釗 (1888–1927) and Qu Qiubai, sought a balance between voluntarism and determinism and reserved a limited historical role for ­human ­will in their depiction of historical development governed by economic laws.88 Chinese Marxists of the 1920s attempted to reconcile the conflict between economic determinism and their own activist inclinations to justify self-­willed ­human action within a deterministic philosophy. Zhu Qianzhi, however, completely rejected economic determinism, replacing it with emotion as the motive force of revolution. Accusing Marx of “neglecting the function of psy­chol­ogy,” Zhu argued that history is not so much a chronicle of class warfare centered on the means of production as an endless “strug­gle between two opposing thoughts: one dominated by emotion and the other governed by reason . . . ​[Emotion and reason] represent two opposing desires—­the desire for creation and the desire for possession.”89 Zhu deplored the idea that the environment had an automatic effect and that social changes ­were merely consequences of the necessities of production. He believed that intuitive emotion and irrational impulses fueled voluntary ­human actions, and he scorned vulgarized Marxism for “seeing idea as nothing but the shadow of the material.”90 In the Marxist theory of history, “the idea that the autonomous action of the masses can constitute the central ele­ment of the socialist revolution,” Cornelius Castoriadis argues, “remain[s] of secondary importance.” Castoriadis’s observation is closely tied to his critique of the “overvalued status of the Party,” which alone claims knowledge of the “rationality” of history.91 This critique is especially applicable to Leninism, which Zhu Qianzhi also criticized in his Philosophy of Revolution. Against the materialist conception

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of history, Zhu’s critique should be viewed as an attempt to assert the “anti-­intellectual crowd” as an autonomous and creative historical actor.

“I Am the Crowd; the Crowd Is I” Central to Zhu’s articulation of a theory of collective emergence is his rejection of Le Bon’s theory of crowd manipulation. Zhu not only reinvented the irrational crowd as a revolutionary subject, he also envisioned a dialectic between vitality and po­liti­cal mediation that is at once intrinsic and extrinsic to the p ­ eople’s immanent creativity. Zhu Qianzhi was acutely aware of the problematic connotations and ideological ramifications of Le Bon’s crowd theory. Central to Le Bon’s depiction is a manipulative master who pushes the crowd to follow him blindly, yielding to all suggestions. The fusion of individuals into a common mind resembles “the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser.”92 In a similar way, Gabriel Tarde considered contagious “imitation” to be essential to crowd formation: “A slow contagion from mind to mind, a tranquil and ­silent imitation, has always preceded and paved the way for t­ hese rapid contagions, ­these noisy and captivating imitations that characterize popu­ lar movement.”93 Common to both theorists’ pictures is the collapse of volition in the highly suggestible throng that is characterized by extreme credulity and lack of autonomy. Suggestion (anshi in Chinese) was a key concept in psychological theories around the turn of the twentieth ­century and had critical importance in theories on crowd mentality. According to Sigmund Freud, it is a special kind of psychic influence or pro­cess of induction through which “an idea is aroused in another person’s brain which is not examined in regard to its origin but is accepted just as though it had arisen spontaneously in that brain.”94 From the very introduction of Western crowd psy­ chol­ogy into China, the translatability of the concept of “suggestion” had concerned Chinese commentators. To make the concept intelligible to Chinese readers, Zhang Xichen put “to be lured” (beiyou 被誘) in parentheses ­after his characterization of crowds as “inclined to be affected by suggestion” ( yiwei anshi suogan 易為暗示所感).95 Qu Qiubai’s critique of



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“unhealthy” collective social action was predicated on his anxiety about the role of suggestion. Qu argued that the martyr of the crowd movement “is suggested” (bei anshi 被暗示)” to sacrifice himself, rather than choosing to do so.96 The view that the crowd lends itself to being manipulated was most vividly voiced by one student leader of the May Fourth Movement, Luo Jialun, who claimed that activist intellectuals should “raise the crowd” ( yangcheng qunzhong 養成羣眾) as if they ­were “raising monkeys.” “A monkey raiser,” Luo explains, “must transform himself into a monkey . . . ​blanketing himself in monkey skin. Only ­after that ­will the monkeys believe him.”97 This statement might be the most flagrant dehumanization of the crowd in the early republican period. It is against this kind of crowd discourse—­against that suggestible monkey-­like figure—­t hat Zhu Qianzhi formulated his own theory of mass mobilization. He retained the necessity of an initiator, an “idealist” (lixiang jia 理想家), whose role was to spur on the crowd. However, his idealist is diametrically opposed to the Le Bonian master who “pushes the crowd to follow him blindly.”98 Zhu asserts, To say that “the crowd often submits to the commands of its conductor” is not as accurate as to say that the crowd simply follows the ­orders of their own au­then­tic emotions. Gentlemen! What kind of ­thing is a conductor? How can he ever instigate the crowd? It must be understood that the only ­thing that can instigate the crowd is that bit of emotion harbored in every­ one’s hearts, which is the original driving force of revolution.99

An agitator can stir up a revolutionary movement not ­because he is more radical, enlightened, or manipulative, but b­ ecause he shares with the crowd a common affectivity that, rather than a higher consciousness or knowledge of a hidden truth, is the sole source of revolutionary agency. Crowd formation, therefore, is a pro­cess of self-­realization rather than a pro­cess of losing self-­control or mutual contagion ­under some hypnotic spell. Zhu Qianzhi criticized Tarde’s imitation theory and argued that instead of blindly imitating each other or following a charismatic demagogue, the crowd is moved ( gandong 感動) by a “sole au­then­tic emotion” that “a few idealists draw from their own depositories and show to the crowd.”100 Revolutionary ideas, which can never be indoctrinated from above, spring from a shared primal affectivity that might be obscured for

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the moment, but could be spontaneously apprehended by the crowd once they get a glimpse of it. He also keenly refuted Le Bon’s theory of suggestibility: Le Bon claims that the crowd is hypnotized ­under suggestion, but in fact, [the crowd] is extremely self-­aware (zijue 自覺). When an idealist suggests, he never instills anything into the heads of the crowd. The crowd, even though it is encouraged by suggestions, never receives anything [that it has not already known] . . . ​For ­those who form a crowd, the unity of every­ one’s feelings and thoughts is nothing but the spontaneous accord (ziran yizhi 自然一致) of “au­then­tic emotion,” an unexpected “consonance” ( gongming 共鳴) [that happens] by chance.101

Where Le Bon contended that the m ­ ental unity of crowds resulted from the disappearance of conscious personality and a lowering of intellectual facilities, Zhu reinterpreted that ­mental unity as the spontaneous harmonization of each self-­aware individual, which he romanticized as a kind of resonating chord of affectivity. The revolutionary crowd is a community of passion, in which the individual’s capacity for self-­control is not compromised by some contamination or manipulation by a dominant leader. Instead, in the moment of crowding together, every­one’s au­then­tic emotion becomes manifest si­mul­ ta­neously through a profound affective connection. The p ­ eople of the crowd do not obey, yield, submit, or become subjugated; rather they become reacquainted with and revived by their own latent yet au­then­tic passions. And it is only through this recuperation of every­one’s deepest subjective self that collective solidarity can be achieved. Such solidarity is not an imposed form or an agreement by persuasion, but rather an automatic harmony, an experience of spontaneous unity. The novelty of Zhu Qianzhi’s theory of popu­lar uprising has to be examined not only in the context of Western crowd psy­chol­ogy but also in the general context of modern Chinese intellectuals’ century-­long ­obsession with what John Fitzgerald has called “the politics of mass awakening.” In the republican period, the idea of mass awakening was inseparable from the idea of being awakened by cultural and po­liti­cal vanguards. It presumed what Fitzgerald calls the “romantic posture,” privi-



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leging the few “first awakened” who, from their elevated perspective, felt authorized to impart their vision to the unconscious crowd and ­were responsible for having the masses awaken to their instruction.102 The relationship between ­those “first awakened” and the crowd is usually ­either manipulative, as Luo Jialun’s monkey analogy implies, or tutelary. Zhu Qianzhi’s philosophy of revolution belonged to this politics of awakening in the sense that he believed an ideal form of collectivity would come into being when it became aware of itself as a community. Zhu retained the tropes of the awakened few and the unconscious masses, but he projected a theory of the crowd’s relationship with its “idealist”—­ revolutionary intellectuals, elite cadres of a representative state, or the po­liti­cal vanguard, as it would be called in dif­fer­ent contexts—­dif­fer­ent from the one that unreservedly privileged the awakened knower over the unknowing masses. For Zhu, the crowd is neither a target of sociopo­liti­ cal manipulation nor a pedagogical object that needs to be remade through disciplinary proj­ects to constitute a popu­lar sovereignty. Rather, Zhu’s crowd has a latent, inherently revolutionary interiority that needs to be activated for it to become a performative subject. The stirring up of the crowd is not a pro­cess of enlightenment that purges it of backward thoughts and indoctrinates it with modern thinking. “When [the idealist] disseminates revolutionary thoughts, it seems as if the crowd was dominated by such thoughts.” But the idealist, Zhu maintains, “does not bestow some outlandish ideals to the masses.” Instead, the idealist only reveals the opinions and beliefs that are “latent in the hearts of the many.103 Self-­awareness (zijue) is one of the pivotal characteristics that Zhu Qianzhi ascribed to the crowd. The crowd movement, he maintained, is “the sum of every­ one’s self-­ aware, self-­ willed action.”104 This self-­ determined movement, paradoxically, requires an idealist to bring it into being, but the crowd-­rouser in Zhu’s theory does not spread contagious suggestions that the crowd succumbs to or illumination that transforms and elevates each individual. “Without an idealist,” Zhu cunningly remarked, “to zijue him” (zijue ta 自覺他)—­“ta” (he) ­here refers to the individual in the crowd—­“­there ­won’t be any true crowd movement (qunzhong yundong 羣眾運動).”105 Zijue as a noun means self-­consciousness or self-­knowledge. It can also function as an intransitive verb, meaning to become self-­aware or, literally, to awaken of one’s own accord. To use it as

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a transitive verb is ungrammatical. Such a grammatical irregularity precisely communicates the tricky prob­lem of maintaining the subjecthood of the crowd while at the same time acknowledging the necessity of mediation. Using the intransitive verb zijue as a transitive one is Zhu Qianzhi’s own invention. Not only is it grammatically abnormal but it is also an intriguing oddity in the transformation of the idea of po­liti­cal awakening from the intransitive to the transitive, “from an inchoate aspiration into a distinctive style of disciplined mass politics ­under the supervision of a highly disciplined, pedagogical state.”106 It violates the contradiction between the intransitivity and transitivity of po­liti­cal awakening; the mass awakening is, according to Zhu, both brought into being and genuinely spontaneous. The crowd needs an initiatory arousal, but the resultant action is a “self-­willed” one rather than something imitative or passive. In other words, Zhu’s mediated mass movement is paradoxically conceived as a self-­generating phenomenon devoid of hierarchical domination: “Every­body attains awareness of the au­then­tic emotion that he or she originally has and as a result follows his or her instinctual impulse (benneng chongdong 本能衝動)—­this is revolution!” Zhu proclaimed.107 The heart of the crowd is not to be assaulted, as Sun Yat-­sen had advised,108 but rather to be recovered. Zhu’s vision of the genesis of mass emergence is exceptional, if not self-­contradictory: The formation of the ideal community is both induced from the outside and at the same time organically grown from the crowd itself; it is an “unexpected consonance” of the innate potentiality of collective vitality and po­liti­cal intervention. Scholars have drawn attention to the authoritarian implications of the enlightenment trope as symptomatic of a more general failure in the republican period to think critically about the nature of po­liti­cal authority.109 Zhu Qianzhi is an exception in the sense that he criticized the manipulative nature of the Le Bonian leader. Indeed, Zhu raised this question: What qualifies the conscious few to represent (daibiao 代表) the unconscious many, if consciousness and rationality are the very enemies of revolution? Instead of marking the distinction between the idealist and the crowd—­t he gap in consciousness, ethical awareness, sociopo­liti­cal knowledge, or the ability to understand the trajectory of the historical movement—­Zhu Qianzhi insisted on a consanguineous relationship between the two:



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As the representative of the crowd, an idealist represents the au­then­tic emotion of the crowd, rather than the “rationality” of each person’s psyche. Rationality is individually distinctive, therefore not representable; emotion, on the other hand, is naturally unan­i­mous. Therefore, the idealist’s au­then­tic emotion is also the crowd’s. An idealist is not only able to recognize the au­then­tic emotion of his own, but also at the same time understands that “I am equipped with the au­then­tic emotion of the crowd in its entirety.”110

Zhu’s idealist represents the crowd not out of sympathy with them, nor ­because she or he possesses a higher consciousness, an idea to which both the nationalists and Marxists subscribed.111 The idealist is justified in “conducting” the crowd, ­because she or he shares with it the pre-­personal nonrational forces of emotive identification. Resorting to Le Bon’s law of the ­mental unity of crowds, Zhu spoke in the voice of the crowd agitator: “Each and e­ very move of mine is in accord with the crowd,” therefore, “ ‘I am the crowd; the crowd is I!’ ”112 The crowd-­rousing idealist is as affective, hot-­blooded, impulsive, and instinctual as the crowd itself; the crowd and the idealist are indeed one. This yearning for the transcendence of individual life, I have argued elsewhere, is intimately captured in Zhu’s early autobiography Huiyi 回憶 (Reminiscences, 1928), which paradoxically combines a heightened sense of personal singularity with his belief in the inherent consonance between the individual and the collective.113 Some of Zhu’s contemporaries shared his discontent with the dichotomous scheme of self versus crowd. Zhang Zhu, for instance, in a 1920 article on the crowd and the individual, challenged René Descartes’ (1596–1650) proposition “Cogito ergo sum” and questioned the notion of the inward-­ oriented self. Opposed to the introspective individualists who “only know ‘I’ but not ‘we,’ ” Zhang claims “the ‘I’ of mine is but the ‘I’ in the crowd.”114 The novelty of Zhu Qianzhi’s philosophy of revolution, it is crucial to note, lies in how his appropriations of Western philosophical and psychological discourses w ­ ere grafted onto traditional conceptions of mind and self. He admired Wundt and Bergson as much as he did Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529) and Tan Sitong 譚嗣同 (1865–1898).115 Zhu’s notion of the spontaneous consonance between the “idealist” and the masses resonated with the Confucian intellectual’s self-­proclaimed “internal resonance with the basic feelings of the p ­ eople.”116 His Bergsonian cele­bration

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of instinct and intuition was continuous with what Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 (1909–95) has called the neo-­Confucian conception of “the transcendental, substantial, and ontological intellectual feeling which is able to form an inward moral decision by itself.”117 Moreover, Zhu’s assertion of the self in u ­ nion with the collective was also anchored in a central cosmological concern of Confucianism: the “proj­ect of bonding [of the individual with the immanent cosmos] by achieving a quality of integration in the world which dissolves the distinction between part and w ­ hole.”118 As Kirk A. Denton points out in his authoritative study of the problematic of self in modern Chinese lit­er­a­ture, beneath the May Fourth iconoclastic imaginary of an isolated, autonomous self lay a “psychologically and culturally painful” anxiety about “cutting the self off from the transformational promise” of the linkage between self and the outer world, a bond inherent in the traditional notion of selfhood. The modern self was “torn between equally power­ful desires for self-­assertion and autonomy and reintegration with some power­ful cosmological other now designated Nation, Revolution, the Masses, or History.”119 It was caught between radical egoism and the overpowering forces of history conceived as an inexorable cosmic movement in­de­pen­dent of individual ­will.120 The I/collective dialectic that emerged from Zhu Qianzhi’s reading of Le Bon’s crowd psy­ chol­ogy was both a product of and a reaction to this tormented view of selfhood. Zhu’s stress on the identity between the idealistic “I” and collective emergence was an effort to maintain the role of the self as the motivating force of revolutionary transformation, to forge a link between individual interiority and the masses, and to transcend the stark antithesis between po­liti­cal mediation and spontaneous emergence. According to Zhu, the true revolutionary crowd is immediate and mediated at the same time. Zhu’s theory touches on fundamental questions about what psychological mechanisms best bind p ­ eople together. He emphasizes the priority of affective pro­cesses, which occur prior to conscious awareness, over reason and rationality in po­liti­cal life. But, as Stefan Jonsson poignantly asks in his critique of Serge Moscovici’s theory of the societal bond as the movement of the passions (a theory that resonates with Zhu’s), if an insurgent collectivity is founded not on common interests or a shared culture, but instead is “just crystallizations of a more fundamental social real­ity consisting of ‘the passions that flow through our lives,’ how then



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to define this real­ity? How can the passions take on a po­liti­cal shape or voice?”121 Furthermore, how can Zhu be confident that the autonomic harmony between the revolutionary vanguard and the crowd is not subject to demagogic manipulation or that the idealist whom the p ­ eople believe in is not someone who is merely putting together a revolution by passing off personal desires and interests as the au­then­tic passions of the masses—­a danger, Reinhart Koselleck cautions us, that is inherent in the modern notion of revolution?122 The young phi­los­op ­ her Zhu Qianzhi, recently released from prison where he had attempted suicide, was less concerned with ­these questions than with his prophesy of a nihilistic revolution propelled by uncurbed au­then­tic emotion. Throughout his treatise, Zhu’s theory, hypothesizing revolution as some mysterious, cosmic end in itself, remains at an abstract and metaphysical level and lacks a tactical dimension that offers specific discussions of the ­actual form/­ content of revolutionary action. This lack was a logical product of the inner rationale of Zhu’s radical philosophy: If the roots of ­human actions lie in instincts and revolution is but an emotional explosion of some mysterious interiority, changing social relationships and economic structures remains far from the heart of the gospel that Zhu preaches.

Conclusion: The Romanticism of Spontaneity and Its Impasse Zhu Qianzhi’s fantasy of an innate rapport between self and the crowd manifests his longing to lay claim to that which is beyond the individual self and to channel collective energies. His Philosophy of Revolution was not only a response to his immediate intellectual and po­liti­cal context but was also part of a larger global revolt against positivism and rationalism. At the end of the nineteenth c­ entury, “the rationalist and ‘mechanistic’ explanation of the world that had been dominant in Eu­ro­pean thought from the sixteenth c­ entury onward,” as Zeev Sternhell points out, “gave way to an ‘organic’ explanation” that was deeply affected by “a resurgence of irrational values, by a cult of instinct and sentiments, and by an affirmation of the supremacy of the forces of life and the affections.”123 Taking inspiration from antirationalist, antideterminist doctrines, Zhu

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Qianzhi opposed strains of thought gaining momentum in China in the 1910s and 1920s.124 Rather than cautioning against collective delirium as did many of his May Fourth contemporaries, Zhu championed the nonrationality of collective bond. He agreed with Le Bon on the unconscious and irrational nature of the crowd, but only a­ fter engaging in a total transvaluation of Le Bon’s views. The crowd consists of crazy psychotics, but psychotics alone, Zhu contended, are the “most vivacious and genuine.”125 Rather than an obedient po­liti­cal material, the crowd is an affective community not bounded by stable forms of po­liti­cal association. The reciprocal attachment among members of the revolutionary crowd is rooted in their potential to act and automatically connect. Zhu Qianzhi’s philosophy of revolution caught a burning issue in modern po­liti­cal thought once raised by Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937): “Can modern theory be in opposition to the ‘spontaneous’ feelings of the masses?”126 Echoing Gramsci’s question, Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) asked, “Who is engaged in strug­gle on behalf of thought, knowledge, and science?” As Lefebvre pointed out in his passionate defense of popu­lar spontaneity in connection with the 1968 student riots in France, it has been common in modern times to wage a “campaign against spontaneity . . . ​in the name of science, in the name of insurrection viewed as a technique, and in the name of organ­ization.”127 Lenin, for instance, assigned to the party (the “conscious ele­ments”) the role of imposing proletarian consciousness on the spontaneous masses.128 By contrast, Mao Zedong believed that true revolutionary knowledge and creativity ultimately emanated from the masses themselves, thus affirming the subject position of the masses as masters of revolution; yet despite all his populist inclinations against the professionalization and bureaucratization of the party, Mao’s notion of the “mass line,” which encouraged party cadres to listen to ­those below them, in the end parallels Leninist elitism. The “mass line” requires one to “take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain ­these ideas ­until the masses embrace them as their own.”129 The unintended consciousness of the class in itself (“the scattered and unsystematic ideas”) has to be elevated to the consciousness of the class for itself (“concentrated and systematic ideas”). Only through pedagogical guidance can the popu­lar masses embrace such ideas as their own and become a histori-



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cal subject in itself and for itself. Mao insisted “both on a mea­sure of initiative and involvement from below, and on firm centralized guidance from above.”130 He criticized the notion that revolution can spring spontaneously from the p ­ eople without direction by the leadership of the party. His notion of the “mass line,” to a certain extent, is cognate with Gramsci’s idea of the unity between spontaneity and leadership, which “gave the masses a ‘theoretical’ consciousness of being creators of historical and institutional value.”131 Zhu Qianzhi, therefore, faced a prob­lem that beset many con­ temporary thinkers around the globe, namely the roles of consciousness and spontaneity in history. Can history be made by a controlling group of “conscious,” disciplined revolutionaries, or does it occur through the working out of the “spontaneous” forces of the masses?132 Like many of his radical peers, Zhu Qianzhi defined qunzhong as a revolutionary subject in its becoming, in an initiated self-­realization of its latent revolutionary potential. We can also detect in Zhu’s philosophy and other revolutionary doctrines (such as Mao’s) a similar belief in mobilizing the crowd by resonating with the hearts of the masses, rather than following the wishes of po­liti­cal vanguards.133 And yet, Zhu’s philosophy differs from radicals like Mao, who focused on po­liti­cal parties as the new mass po­ liti­cal organ­izations. Indeed, Zhu cautioned against the transformation of consciousness, which was central to t­ hose organ­izations. According to Zhu, ­because “concentrated and systematic ideas” are inferior to irrational affectivity in terms of activating the masses, the very distinction between the crowd and its “conductor” becomes obsolete. Once initiated by a shared au­then­tic emotion—­that is, once the masses are moved to embrace their own original selves—­the popu­lar movement explodes like a festival of mass spontaneity. Zhu’s concept of qing therefore points to what con­temporary thinkers such as Antonio Negri call affect—­“a power to act that is singular and at the same time universal . . . ​[a power to] construct a commonality among subjects.” This commonality, as Zhu would agree, is “not the commonality of a constriction or a coercion but of a desire.”134 But this should not blind us to the ways in which Zhu’s cele­bration of the masses’ spontaneity and affectivity could easily be appropriated by po­liti­cal elites and incorporated into a disciplinary machine. ­A fter the publication of his Philosophy of Revolution in 1921 and a short teaching stint in Xiamen University, Zhu moved to Hangzhou with his lover and

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led a hermetic life ­until 1927. He then moved to Guangzhou and became a po­liti­cal instructor at Whampoa Military Acad­emy—in his own words, “serving the revolution with utmost loyalty.” In 1928 Zhu moved to Shanghai and became a close friend of Hu Yepin, Ding Ling, and Shen Congwen before ­going to Japan to study on a government scholarship. In 1932, he returned to Guangzhou and chaired the History Department at the ­National Sun Yat-­sen University for more than a de­cade.135 In the late 1930s, Zhu became a ­great admirer of Chiang Kai-­shek’s “philosophy of forceful implementation” (lixing zhexue 厲行哲學). Although his interest had shifted from crowd theory to Western philosophies of history and culture, ­there is perhaps only a fine line between his call in 1921 for “acting by instinct” and his ­later approving quote of Chiang’s words—­“We should not be bogged down in seeking knowledge. Now we need to act.”136 The affinities between the cult of collective unconsciousness and affectivity and the doctrine of dictatorial management should not be overlooked. Zhu’s anti-­authoritarian impulse contained its own impasse: The spontaneous accord between the crowd and the mobilizer that Zhu envisioned is predicated on the crowd’s self-­recognition in the mobilizer, and, therefore, is prey to the danger that the revolutionary crowd may fetishize its own creativity as a power residing with the po­liti­cal vanguard.137 His theory of po­liti­cal identification, grounded in Le Bon’s ­mental unity of the crowd, aims at validating spontaneous energies, but such energies must first find their expression in the depositories of the revolutionary vanguard that not only activates, but, as Zhu would say, is that collective potentiality. In other words, if the po­liti­cal elite is “equipped with the au­then­tic emotion of the crowd in its entirety,”138 then the innate energy of the ­people can be au­then­tic and therefore revolutionary only when it is recognizable in and in accordance with the conductor of the p ­ eople. Zhu’s intuitionalist critique of external authority is hence limited by its own authoritarian implications. H ­ ere lies the ground of the paradox between Zhu’s vitalist hymn to the revolutionary instinct of the crowd and his endorsement of Chiang Kai-­shek, whose mass mobilization campaign in the 1930s was, as Arif Dirlik has aptly described it, “a mass po­liti­cal movement that rejected popu­lar po­liti­cal initiative,” demanding disciplined compliance with the existing po­liti­cal structure and leadership.139 Zhu Qianzhi’s philosophy of revolution, though acclaimed by such prominent figures as Guo Moruo and Zheng Zhenduo in the early 1920s,



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had already fallen by the wayside by the 1930s. By the end of the second Sino-­Japanese War, he had become what he once so vehemently denounced—­a resolute nationalist who did not hesitate to broadcast edicts from above. And he took pride in this transformation.140 He still appealed to passion and solidarity, now not for the sake of recovering one’s au­then­ tic self but for what he called a new ethics (xin lunli 新倫理) that demanded total allegiance to the nation and loyalty to the leader, an idea he once detested.141 Zhu remained in mainland China a­ fter 1949. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was made to write countless self-­criticisms of his “irrational attitude.” The suppression of his cele­bration of the irrational crowd in the Maoist era suggests that the ele­ments he associated with the idea of the crowd—­ extreme emotion, intuition, irrationality, spontaneity—­could not easily be incorporated into the ­grand narratives of national and class revolution. And yet emotion, intuition, and irrationality themselves could not dis­ appear. In fact, t­ hese ele­ments, one may argue, lay at the very heart of the Chinese Communist Party’s revolutionary discourse and practice from the 1940s onward. Recent studies have explored the emotional roots of the communist regime’s po­liti­cal power.142 For instance, the public venting of injured feelings in front of a crowd, known as “speaking bitterness,” became the essential moment when the listeners recognized their place in an antagonistic structure of class in­equality and w ­ ere called by that shared emotion to become class-­conscious subjects. The carefully rehearsed, publicly expressed, and collectively reverberating emotion that Ann Anagnost has called “an authorized structure of feeling” became “the means of making individual experience socially available for the launching of revolutionary subjects defined by class.”143 As a work team leader from Hebei summed it up, being able to emotionally move (gandong) the peasants was key. According to another cadre of the 1940s land reform movement from Shandong, “reasoning without tears” w ­ ill not work b­ ecause “poor p ­ eople reason while crying.”144 Almost two de­cades ­later, Mao Zedong told André Malraux, “Revolution is a drama of passion; we did not win the ­people by appealing to reason.”145 This paradigm of emotion as an effective mobilization mechanism was first voiced not by early communist theoreticians such as Qu Qiubai but rather by thinkers such as the anarcho-­nihilist phi­los­o­pher Zhu Qianzhi.

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Zhu Qianzhi, however, did not envision the eruption of revolutionary energy as coming from the carefully planned and implemented “emotion work,” which, as Elizabeth Perry argues, was crucial to the CCP’s success. To more effectively move an audience emotionally, a cadre from Heibei recalls, the po­liti­cal theater of speaking bitterness should be staged somewhere remote and desolate and be dimly lit; it should ideally be “a scene set that resembles a theater.”146 Zhu’s Wundt-­influenced philosophy of affectivity foretells the CCP’s investment in emotions for mass mobilization, but the orchestration of emotion work in the land reform movement also suggests in hindsight how vulnerable Zhu’s gospel of popu­lar spontaneity could be to calculated maneuvers of emotion. In the party’s hands, “the spontaneous accord of ‘au­then­tic emotion’ ” that Zhu championed arose a­ fter scrupulous rehearsal; “the unexpected ‘consonance’ ” was elicited by skillful actors. Zhu Qianzhi might have foreseen “conductors” g­ oing into the countryside to rouse the emotions of the masses, but the location scouting, lighting, set design, and other aspects of directing ­were refinements that he could not have predicted. Zhu’s theory of collective emergence was one of recovering authenticity; it was about the primal subjective linkage between p ­ eople, rather than po­liti­cal divisions to be overcome. As such it was a romantic extension of his belief in the po­liti­cal productivity of a shared affective layer of interiority. This confidence in the consanguinity between self and the crowd would soon be replaced by an anxiety-­ridden desire among many writers for the loss of self in pursuit of becoming one of the “we.” How this desire played out in the lit­er­a­ture of the next de­cade is the focus of chapter 3.

chapter 3 Fictions of Becoming I love light, I love sea, I love the gentle love in life, I love the intense and mighty passion unifying thousands and tens of thousands of hearts of the crowd. —Zong Baihua 宗白華, “Wo he shi” 我和詩 (I and Poetry), 1923

I

n a poem written ­after the May Day riot of 1929, the young writer Yin Fu describes the excitement of joining the crowd in the street: I suddenly enter the crowd, shouting: “We . . . ​We . . . ​We” White, red, and five-­color pamphlets Fly like flocks of pigeons in the morning light. Ah, echoes, echoes, echoes, The ­whole street is filled by our outcry!

At the end of the poem, the poet proclaims his joy ecstatically: “I am no longer I; my heart is aflame with the ­great crowd (daqun 大羣).” This is both a moment of self-­transcendence and the prediction of an emerging collectivity that absorbs the individual self, a “we” to whom “the ­future of the world belongs.”1 To become part of the “­great crowd” and partake in the collective presence—to feel, think, and say “we”—­requires disavowal of one’s old self. Being “no longer I” is the poet’s salvation. In the poet’s blissful merger with the crowd, self-­loss is presented as a natu­ral step ­toward self-­inflation.

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Yin Fu’s poem encapsulates the trajectory from “I” to “we” that preoccupied many revolution-­minded writers in the late 1920s and 1930s, when the high tide of mass movements of the mid-1920s had passed and the promise of national unity brought about by the success of the Northern Expedition was crushed by the GMD’s violent coup against suspected communist sympathizers in April 1927. At that nadir of the leftist revolutionary movement in China, many writers, as Charles A. Laughlin points out, began to imagine the power of the collective “in the most extravagant terms u ­ nder conditions of unity, often dramatized as the physical joining of bodies.”2 According to the young critic Chen Zhengdao 陳正道, intellectuals had to stop “fantasizing (huanxiang 幻想) from their precious pavilion rooms.” His blood still seething from a May Day demonstration he had participated in, Chen urged writers to “ditch the goddamn pen, rush out of [their] prison-­like l­ittle apartment[s],” and merge their isolated bodies with the “intense crowd excitement” in the streets.3 If, for the many psychologists discussed earlier, immersing the individual self into the crowd led to ­mental incapacitation, Chen and like-­minded writers saw such immersion as the basis for action and fulfillment.4 Focusing on depictions of the individual’s encounter with the insurgent crowd, in this chapter I examine how both the desire for and anxiety about the dissolution of borders between self and collective played out in the lit­er­a­ture of the late 1920s and early 1930s. During that time, the notion that historical movement was inevitable and merciless, an emerging faith in the “masses” as a forceful agent of revolutionary strug­gle, and the figure of the raging crowd became increasingly grafted onto each other in the widespread belief among intellectuals that an epochal transformation was underway. The encounter between the individual and the po­ liti­cal crowd became a recurrent literary theme when the physical massing of bodies in public spaces was perceived as a novel form of po­liti­cal action in China. Narratives of such encounters responded both to the call for surrendering the private self to a shared experience of history and to the increased critical interest in the psycho-­physiological dynamics of crowding documented in the previous chapters. ­These narratives asked readers to view the pro­cess of joining a crowd less as an abstract po­liti­cal mandate than as a concrete lived experience of ­mental flux and bodily compression, thereby transforming the discursive field in which the “intellectual,” “self,” and “youth” ­were given meaning.



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Although scholars have commented on the collectivist orientation of Chinese intellectuals in the post–­May Fourth era,5 and a pioneering study by Marston Anderson has examined the “eruption of the crowd” (to borrow his memorable phrase) in left-­w ing lit­er­a­ture of the 1930s,6 the encounter between the individual and the po­liti­cal crowd has not been rigorously explored. Stepping out of their everyday routines onto the crossroads of po­liti­cal mutation, young intellectual protagonists face not only the crowds themselves but also the critical moment when they are on the verge of becoming something other than their former selves. That moment in narrative does not merely stage the enactment of po­liti­cal ideals or supply dramatizations of theoretical expositions. Rather, it pres­ents vari­ous scenarios of collective formation more complex than what the radical, romantic vision of thinkers such as Zhu Qianzhi could allow. Even in Yin Fu’s unabashed cele­bration of utopian collectivism, one senses the irresolvable tensions that appear in many other depictions: The louder the poetic “I” shouts “we,” the less spontaneous the fusion is, one suspects; the fact that the poet has to “suddenly enter” (turu 突入) the crowd points not only to the separateness of the two but also his belated arrival at the scene of collective formation. Furthermore, how can one distinguish a self-­announced merger with the crowd from a masquerade, where the concealed private interests are passed off as shared ones? Ultimately, how does an individual feel mentally and physically when he or she is squeezed and carried along amid a dense crowd or witnesses its mighty eruption from a distance? While narrating the immersion of the self into the insurgent crowd, writers grappled with the tension between leftist denunciations of in­ dividuality and the per­sis­tence of the individual as the aesthetic beholder through whom the crowd becomes vis­i­ble and sensible. To dramatize the pro­cess of self-­transformation and their fascination with the crowd, ­these writers had to stay within the bounds of individual experience and perception they intended to overcome. In the fascinating scenes ­under discussion h ­ ere, the anticipated moment of self-­transformation becomes inseparable from prolonged moments of observation, hesitation, and digression. The protagonists are often caught between the “crowd excitements” on the street and their own intense psychological and physical experience, lingering on the threshold of self-­transcendence. Examining this tension, therefore, brings into focus the mutually constitutive relation

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between self-­realization and self-­disavowal, which lies at the heart of how modern Chinese writers understood ­these outbursts of collective energy and positioned themselves within ­those forces. But before zeroing in on fictional scenes of self-­immersion in the crowd, I first sketch the connection between a new mode of experiencing history and the emergence of a collectivist literary proj­ect in the late 1920s and early 1930s. For many writers, a fantasy of self-­dissolution was bound up with their conviction that radical changes ­were in the offing.

The Coming of the Masses Noting that most mass movements of the past two de­cades in China had occurred in May, a certain Jue Ren 瑴人 claimed in a 1928 article titled “Re yu jiyue xing” 熱與激越性 (Heat and Radicalism) that the “collective spirit” of po­liti­cal activism was brought out by the hot weather: “When the fall wind starts to blow and ­people need to start wearing sweaters,” revolutions and ­union strikes “naturally cool off in the same way as the weather does.”7 But for many other commentators, the circular mode of time had been replaced by the progressive unfolding of history; the “summer” of the insurgent crowd could now take place in any season. According to an article published that same year in the leftist journal Jixing 畸形 (Abnormality), “the time of the individual” ( geren de shijian 個人的時間) had passed and “the time of the masses” (dazhong de shijian 大眾的時間) had come.8 “The time has changed,” announced ­another leftist critic, Huang Yaomian 黃藥眠 (1903–87). “The g­ reat power of the crowd stirs up emotional waves during the g­ reat progression of destruction,” he went on to proclaim; artists and writers must “firmly embrace the repressed masses [to] experience its collective spirit.”9 In the first de­cades of the twentieth c­ entury dazhong 大眾, a premodern Buddhist term for assemblies of the faithful, took on the modern meaning of “the masses” and became associated with industrialization, mass politics, and a new historical consciousness.10 In left-­wing circles, faith in the advent of dazhong was inexorably linked with the emerging notion of historical movement. If “the wheel of an historical epoch,” as Mao Dun 茅盾 (1896–1981) once famously said, “ground down the spine-



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less without mercy,” for many writers on the Left the subject forcefully thrusting the wheel of history forward was dazhong, the “Masses-­cum-­ History.”11 As an emerging leftist cultural movement took major cities by storm in the late 1920s, many writers publicly announced their “conversion” to Marxism and conceived the proletarian masses as an empirical community formed by the hierarchies of exploitation but destined to emerge as a self-­conscious collective subject liberating itself from such hierarchies.12 “The masses,” a critic with the pen name Bao Luo 保羅 believed, “are the toiling and suffering crowd, who not only understand the necessity to bring down imperialism, but also understand that their own class is the iron army for this serious task.”13 They are “not only the forces fighting against the class of oppressors,” according to the communist writer 蔣光慈 (1901–31) of the Sun Society (Taiyang she 太陽社), “but also the masters that create a new society.”14 The masses ­were the motive force ­behind the steamroller of modern history—­such an exalted view of the oppressed, as Kirk Denton cogently argues, was a product of the synthesis of Marxist and traditional indigenous repre­sen­ta­tions of the p ­ eople. It can be traced to the May Fourth Movement of the late 1910s when such leading cultural figures as Li Dazhao described the masses as a power­ful material force of historical movement. “The leftist apotheosization of the masses” (Denton’s term) was l­ater taken to utopian heights in the Maoist discourse of revolutionary collectivism in the early de­cades of the PRC.15 Integral to the valorization of the masses was intellectuals’ increasingly urgent sense that their own existence was historically conditioned by the upwelling of collective energies and it was only through contact with t­ hese transformative forces that they could come to terms with the concrete significance of the time and place they lived in and thereby gave expression to. The crux of my argument ­here is not w ­ hether ­there actually existed a po­liti­cally charged collective force, but instead the “imaginative proximity of social revolution,” in which many intellectuals of the time believed.16 This conviction that dazhong ­were advancing into history can be seen as an urgent desire for a sociopo­liti­cal subject whose underprivileged position becomes the condition of possibility for its self-­realization. The toiling masses w ­ ere ­imagined to be both an underprivileged populace and a collective moral body. They move freely between a “historical subject (subject in history and constituted by it)” and “the subject of history (the

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constituting subject of which history would be the pro­cess of realization),” the two categories central to the transformation of po­liti­cal theory into a philosophy of history.17 In other words, the left-­wing critics’ notion of dazhong involved more than the social dichotomization of the oppressed and their oppressors (both domestic and international); ­these radicals did not envision the relationship between the toiling masses and the propertied classes as simply antagonistic. Rather, they saw the proletarian “we” as “We”: The exploited w ­ ere the only legitimate community. At work h ­ ere was a logic akin to what Ernesto Laclau defines as the “populist reason”: a plebs claiming to be a populus or, in other words, a par­tic­u­lar social group that “assumes the repre­sen­ta­tion of an incommensurable totality.” The proletariat masses, for left-­wing radicals, ­were not just one “component part” of the social, but rather a “component part . . . ​conceived as the only legitimate totality.”18 As such, dazhong demanded both the emotional identification and physical integration of intellectuals, who now modestly referred to themselves as mere “knowledgeable ele­ments” (zhishi fenzi 知識份子) in a larger body politic.19 Dazhong became “first of all one of the ­things at stake in the strug­ gle between intellectuals” whose stances ­toward the masses often reflected the dif­fer­ent positions they occupied in the cultural field.20 For young radicals of the Creation and Sun Socie­t ies, for instance, claiming the authority to speak about or speak for the masses constituted in itself a force in the contestations within the literary field. Their exaltation of dazhong expressed not only a break from the Lu Xunesque depiction of the muddled crowd but also a desire to carve out their own place in the field of cultural production. Siding with dazhong meant swimming with the tide of history. To do so, critics such as Cheng Fangwu 成仿吾 (1897–1984) and Qian Xingcun 錢杏邨 (1900–77) insisted, writers had to “butcher the monster of individualism” and develop an anti-­individualist lit­er­a­ture.21 Chinese intellectuals had been questioning the autonomy of the individual since the 1910s; from the mid-1920s through the early 1930s the injection of the Marxist evolutionary view of history and the strong sectarian politics of the cultural field further intensified critiques of subjectivism and individualism as bourgeois ideology.22 According to Huang Yaomian, the egocentric lit­er­a­ture based on the self-­expression of petit bourgeois intellectuals can only “satisfy the illusion of a wounded heart.”



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As society becomes a total entity, no one can afford to remain a “loose ele­ment.” Self and individuality are false idols; in fact, “examining the social ­whole by cutting it up into one individual ­after another” is pathological (bingtai 病態). Revolutionary writers w ­ ere to encompass the totality of the social by capturing the power of the masses as its synecdochic substitution, rather than cutting it up.23 Modes of first-­person psycho-­ narration, lengthy interior monologues, and other narrative strategies associated with the individual subject position w ­ ere, therefore, to be rejected in lit­er­a­ture that aimed to produce an understanding of the social totality (or its potential).24 Dismissing “the middle-­class, bourgeois romantic repre­sen­ta­tion of the self,” another leftist critic called for a lit­er­a­ture that only writes about “the We,” the “marrow of proletarian art.”25 The questioning of individual autonomy and the growing interest in representing the social w ­ hole gave rise to fiction in the post–­May Fourth period that tackled the ethical questions of self-­examination within concrete sociopo­liti­ cal circumstances.26 It is impor­tant to bear in mind that Chinese left-­wing intellectuals ­were not alone in confronting the crisis of individualism, nor was the dismantling of the individual merely a leftist affair. Many modernist writers and artists of the early twentieth ­century, ranging from T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and Ernst Toller (1893–1939) to Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935), engaged with the rise of mass politics and w ­ ere marked by their antipathy to individualism. A consistent desire to act “as e­ ither agents or symptom of supraindividual forces [and] give form to some variety of group being” fueled their social imagination.27 For instance, commenting on the emergence of a postindividual subject in the German lit­er­a­ture of the Weimar Republic, Russell Berman points out that “the radical reshaping of po­liti­cal categories in terms of the exhortation to popu­lar participation  .  .  . ​provides lit­er­a­ture with the demos—­the p ­ eople, the masses, the class—as a new interlocutor around which new literary strategies can crystallize . . . ​The crisis of individuality,” he continues, “sets the stage for new literary proj­ects or­ga­nized around collective, that is to say, public and po­liti­cal categories.”28 In a similar way and partially influenced by the development of leftist modernism in Germany and other countries, Chinese intellectuals’ calls for a collectivist literary proj­ect coincided with the emergence of the dazhong discourse that not only provided lit­er­a­ture with a new subject but also demanded new narrative strategies.

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For many intellectuals of the time, the physical massing of p ­ eople in public spaces gave embodiment to the idea of “Masses-­cum-­History” and thus should take center stage in literary repre­sen­ta­tion. According to Qian Xingcun, one of the most active literary critics of the leftist circle, the crowd itself, rather than its individual members, had to become the main body (zhuti 主體) of fictional narration.29 This demand manifests in Qian’s comparison of Ding Ling’s 丁玲 (1904–86) novella Shui 水 (­Water) and Tian Han’s 田漢 (1898–1968) play Hongshui 洪水 (Flood). Although both works are inspired by the disastrous floods of 1931 that inundated much of sixteen provinces in central China, Tian Han’s 1931 play, Qian laments, focuses on the lives of one f­ amily in the third act and therefore can only “imply the totality of the suffering masses.” Published the same year, Ding’s narrative of how the flooded peasants are transformed into an unstoppable revolutionary tide relies on disparate anonymous voices. The peasants in Ding’s ­Water exist not as individualized characters, Qian emphasizes, but rather as “a big aggregate (da de yiqun 大的一羣).” The story stresses the strong affective attachment among the peasants, which becomes “a new power of the crowd that grows stronger as the crowd multiplies.”30 Critics from Feng Xuefeng 馮雪峰 (1903–76) to Jaroslav Průšek, Vibeke Bördahl, and Marston Anderson have noted the historical novelty of Ding’s novella: The crowd is neither viewed through the eyes of a single protagonist, nor is it part of the anonymous social background against which individual psy­chol­ogy is mea­sured. Instead, the story depicts the collective psychological development of the peasants and portrays the crowd as “an entity in itself,” with which the reader must directly identify.31 It is worth noting, however, that earlier writers such as Gong Binglu 龔冰廬 (1908–55), Dai Wanye 戴平萬 (1903–45), and Meng Chao 孟超 (1902–76) had already experimented with featuring an undifferentiated crowd as the “main body” of their stories.32 Gong’s 1928 story “Hong–­bai” 红—­ 白 (Red-­W hite), for instance, depicts a crowd in solemn pro­cession marching t­oward an industrial sector in the foreign concession. This symbolic story of the strug­gles between the “red” energy of the crowd and the “white” force of local police and foreign marines is structured by a narrative progression from silence to sound. Starting as “a coherent aggregate (zhengge de yiqun 整個的一羣), without any trepidation or hesitation, quietly counting steps that are neither too fast nor two slow,” by



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story’s end this ­silent aggregate has become a raging “crowd [that] cries out in one voice, roaring amidst the chaos of gunshots and dense smoke from the white powder.”33 Focusing on the collective as a ­whole, Gong’s story emphasizes the spontaneity of the collective consciousness, which is the starting point of the narrative. Throughout the story, the narrator reminds us that the crowd receives no direct order to revolt: “The launch signal never arrives . . . ​Driven by their own reason and conscience, they express the spirit of the ­people as best they can and create a red terror.”34 Giving no explanation as to where this “coherent aggregate” comes from, how it is or­ga­nized, or what exact plans it has, Gong Binglu’s “Red—­ White” dwells on what Lynn Hunt calls “a mythic pres­ent” in her study of the rhe­toric of revolution, in which the suspended moment of collective excitement is “the instant of creation of the new community.”35 The entire plot highlights, in a crude schematic way, the spontaneous nature of the crowd’s action absent any instructions from without. This self-­ authorizing, self-­enacting crowd is what intellectual protagonists in the stories to be discussed l­ater w ­ ill encounter. For many Chinese leftist writers, the crowd (qunzhong) became not only the principal form for imagining dazhong as a driving force of historical transformation but also an exhilarating figure that anchored their utopian vision of global solidarity. They welcomed the coming of an inter­ national revolutionary culture that aimed to, in Rus­sian Marxist revolutionary Anatoly Lunacharsky’s (1875–1933) words, “reflect the majesty of the collectivistic pan-­psychic ideal . . . ​by shifting the center of gravity from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ ”36 Many embraced Kurahara Korehito 蔵原惟人 (1902–91), a leading Japa­nese Marxist theoretician who contrasted the “synthetic, collective form” of revolutionary proletarian lit­er­a­ture and art to the “isolated, individualist form” of petit bourgeois lit­er­a­ture and art.37 Turning their attention to crowd depictions in foreign lit­er­a­ture, Chinese critics self-­consciously sought links across languages and space. Mao Dun, for example, lauded the left-­wing Expressionist dramatist Ernst Toller for not choosing the “patriotic individualist” as the hero of his masterpiece, Masse Mensch (Masses–­Man, 1920). Instead, “the main focus of the play is on the mentality of the crowd and the true protagonist is the qunzhong.”38 Qian Xingcun singled out Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), Jack London (1876–1916), Yuri Libedinsky (1898–1959), Vsevolod Ivanov (1895– 1963), and Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946) as masters at depicting the

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crowd.39 Japa­nese left-­wing playwright Fujita Mitsuo 藤田満雄 was praised for “exerting himself to express the power of the crowd” in his dramatic adaptation of the 1905 rebellion on the Rus­sian battleship Potemkin.40 Xia Yan 夏衍 (1900–95) applauded Aleksandr Fadeev’s (1901–56) The Rout for its portrayal of “the true masses” without resorting to “a single hero or heroine”41 and Kobayashi Takiji’s landmark novel Kani Kōsen 蟹工船 (Crab-­Cannery Ship) for its “depiction of a group rather than . . . ​a par­tic­u­lar protagonist with distinguishable characteristics.”42 American communist author Michael Gold’s (1893–1967) writings ­were also extensively translated and praised for their anti-­individualism and creation of “a real mass” through forms of group art such as mass recitation (qunzhong langsong ju 羣眾朗誦劇).43 In Gold’s work, his Chinese translator Zhou Yang 周揚 (1907–89) enthuses, “The crowd is power; the crowd is light and courage.”44 Chinese left-­wing writers’ high-­strung advocacy of an anti-­individualist lit­er­a­ture and their literary practices responded to the con­temporary global current in literary radicalism as much as they constituted it. Writers such as Mao Dun, Xia Yan, and Qian Xingcun joined in a collective chorus with their Japa­nese, Eu­ro­pean, and American left-­wing colleagues. Progressive writers around the world, from Kobayashi Takiji and Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) to Granville Hicks (1901–82), called for a new protagonist in the revolutionary crowd, which would become a key component in an internationalist aesthetic ideology.45 In this light it comes as no surprise to find that Zheng Yefu’s 鄭野夫 (1909–73) 1933 woodcut image commemorating Barbusse’s visit to the Shanghai Anti-­ War Congress features not the famed writer but an erupting crowd (fig. 1).46 Literary experimentation with featuring the crowd as the “main body,” however, was short-­lived. Critics from the con­temporary Han Shiheng 韓侍桁 (1908–87) to the more recent C. T. Hsia have criticized the “collective, depersonalized uniformity” ( jituan zhi wugexing de yibanhua 集團之無個性的一般化) of the characters in this type of story.47 As Haiyan Lee astutely notes, writers of proletarian lit­er­a­ture “find themselves straining, often with ­little success, to stretch a mode of writing accustomed to plumbing psychic depths for the task of representing an externalized and physically imposing entity.”48 Michael Denning has also examined similar challenges faced by early twentieth-­century writers,

figure 1. ​Zheng Yefu 鄭野夫, “Yijiusansan nian de bayi” 1933 年的 “八一” (August 1, 1933). In Shanghai Lu Xun jinian guan 上海魯迅紀念館, ed., Banhua jicheng: Lu Xun cang Zhongguo xiandai muke quanji 版畫纪程: 魯迅藏中國現代木刻全集 (Woodcut’s Pro­gress: The Complete Modern Woodcut Collection of Lu Xun), 1605, 5 vols. (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1991). Courtesy of Shanghai Lu Xun Museum.

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principally their strug­gle to “represent a collective subject in a form built ­ ere is not on the around the interior life of the individual.”49 My focus h formal limitations of such experimentation. Instead I stress the connections between the call to feature the crowd and the formation of an international revolutionary culture, which, in my view, have not been sufficiently addressed. Furthermore, unlike literary experiments using the crowd as an entity in itself, which would be replaced in the mid-1930s by heated debates about the typicality of representative characters, the prob­ lem of how to narrate the merging of the individual and the collective proved a more enduring and alluring challenge for Chinese writers in the years to come.50

“Tear Apart Your Negligible Self !” The “era of crowds” that Le Bon had warned against, it seems, was fi­ nally about to explode onto the stage of repre­sen­ta­tion. Marxist critics such as Fredric Jameson argue that the imaginative proximity of collective energies and dissatisfaction with the introspective form of individuality gave rise to the modern intellectuals’ “longing for depersonalization.” Rather than understanding the movement away from the individual self as loss and debilitation, Jameson considers it an active response to the “situation of modernity,” which “is not some mere sense of change as such . . . ​[but] rather the radical transformation of the world itself” by new social forces.51 Expanding on Jameson’s thesis, Joel Nickels points out modern intellectuals’ fantasy of themselves as “an autonomous force immersed in the multitude . . . ​stepping into the street, the arcade, the park, or some other public place in order to establish contact with the multitude and symbolically elaborate its potentialities.”52 The demand for losing the “I” in the “we,” therefore, is part of, rather than a rejection of, the key modern fantasy of the artist. Mark Elvin identifies a similar longing in modern Chinese thought. As he insightfully observes, again and again modern Chinese thinkers, in the search for self-­liberation, “end with the desire for the extinction of the self: for its absorption into a collective consciousness, the homogenization of its individuality, its perpetuation as a fragment of a greater So-



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cial Self, or its assimilation into the flow of a progressing ­human history.”53 Luo Hanchao also singles out the “collectivization of the self” 自我羣體化 (ziwo quntihua) as one of the main themes of modern Chinese lyricism.54 The call to forgo one’s own ego and become an integral presence in the collective often sounds not just pressing but irresistible. “No ­matter how much you search within yourself,” wrote Wang Duqing 王獨清 (1898– 1940), a modernist turned advocate of revolutionary lit­er­a­ture, “you ­will never be able to grasp the ­whole ­actual world from within . . . ​. Tear apart your negligible self (miaoxiao de ziji 渺小的自己)! Open your eyes and see clearly the bloody epoch rolling in front of you!”55 In this new “bloody epoch,” sealed private spaces, including one’s own self, can no longer be justified. It is hard not to hear in this imaginative act of self-­ annihilation both the dawning conviction of, to borrow from Jameson, “a momentum that cannot find resolution within the self, but that must be completed by a Utopian and revolutionary transmutation of the world of actuality itself,” and the longing for “some new existence outside the self, in a world radically transformed and worthy of ecstasy.”56 For anyone lacking the strength to “tear apart [the] negligible self” and merge with the collective, according to the young poet Yang Sao 楊騷 (1900–57), a tragic end awaits: The shining light of the sun knocks on his skull, Saying: cast off last year’s blankets, Sit inside the red firelight, Stand at the front of the masses, howling, And one more ­thing, crush your sickened heart! He jumps up, kicking off the blankets that he has been used to sleeping in, But staring at that red firelight, he hesitates. Looking at the masses roaring like the sea, [he] ­trembles, Gripping his own heart, daring not exert his strength, Ah, he cannot at last, at last! He cries to the sky, Forever gone are the blankets of the past In darkness, in the chilly wind, Searching, wincing, standing alone, Slowly, slowly petrifying!57

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Emphatically titled “Disan rencheng de beiju” 第三人稱的悲劇 (The Tragedy of the Third-­Person Pronoun), this 1933 poem dramatizes not only the fateful encounter between “he” and the roaring masses but also the downfall of a mode of narration that cannot let go of the sickened heart of the individual. The “he” who likes to dream, write poetry, and sing fails to carry out the divine order of the sun. His hesitation to throw himself into the purifying flame, his shivering body before the tidal fury of the crowd, and his eventual petrification in his own stagnant temporality together mark him as an outcast of history. B ­ ehind the striking image of a fossilized individual, destined for oblivion u ­ nder layers of time, lies the anxiety awaiting the trial of history, of which the masses are the motive force. As Yang Sao’s poem suggests, one of the most power­ful imageries for the masses is the crowd that surges in waves. The application of this oceanic trope to the po­liti­cal crowd—­ranging from “the collective of the revolutionary, tidal crowd” ( geming de langchao de qunzhong de jiti 革命 的浪潮的羣眾的集體), a clumsy phrase coined by Qian Xingcun,58 to the condensed image of “collective waves” (qunbo 羣波 or quntao 羣濤)59—­ began to proliferate in the literary and po­liti­cal imagination from the 1920s on. Indeed, in China and elsewhere, the oceanic crowd, associated with “moments of collective fusion within the framework of the po­liti­cal sublime,” as Jeffrey T. Schnapp points out, emerged as a dominant mode for “imag(in)ing the formation of the body politic” in modern times.60 The modern association of the crowd with fluidity has served dif­fer­ent ideological functions. Whereas in the Eu­ro­pean context, this codification of the crowd often invoked “a negative corporeality,” with its watery consistency embodying the menace of social disintegration brought by urbanization and industrialization,61 Chinese left-­ w ing writers such as Ding Ling used the image to symbolize the binding force of aggregation.62 For narrative writers, staging the collective formation of this body politic and the individual’s encounter with it took not only po­liti­cal awareness and ideological conviction but also, more crucially, plotting—or as Schnapp puts it, imag(in)ing. To join the oceanic crowd, many young leftists asserted, requires self-­expurgation: “ditch the goddamn pen,” “tear apart your negligible self,” “crush your sickened heart,” and “cast off last year’s blankets” as if sloughing off dead skin. In Hong Lingfei’s 洪靈菲



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(1902–34) ambitious, unfinished novella “Xin de jituan” 新的集團 (The New Collective), turning oneself into a “collectivist” ( jituan zhuyi zhe 集團主義者) appears as effortless as child’s play. Even a “­little devil” (xiao guitou 小鬼頭) can do it: The kid knows how to talk—­“ ‘We’ should do this, ‘We’ should do that, ‘We’ . . . ​He is quickly becoming a collectivist!”63 But for many intellectuals, the idea of direct contact with the masses on the streets was both attractive and agonizing. Submerging oneself in the oceanic crowd, as the hesitant and trembling narrator in Yang Sao’s poem reminds us, entails psychological and physical reactions much more complex and nuanced than that of a schematic “sudden entry” (turu) or intuitive knowledge of the right language (“We . . . ​We . . . ​We”). Writers such as Ye Shaojun and Mao Dun, to whom I now turn, dramatized the encounter between a self-­abnegating individual and the insurgent crowd in such a way that the latter emerges not simply as an idealized locus of meaning and belonging but also an aesthetic object to behold; a physical source of energy, force, and awe; or a target of mass hypnosis. In the end, losing the “I” in a surging crowd is not as easy as kicking off ones’ old blankets.

“The Sea That Is ‘Them’ ” The transformation of the intellectual self provides the main narrative structure for Ye Shaojun’s novel Ni Huanzhi, first serialized in 1928 in ­Jiaoyu zazhi 教育雜誌 ( Journal of Education).64 The most intriguing aspect of the novel is the way in which it intimately captures the tension between the urge to surrender the private self to the mighty force of the crowd and the desire to observe that source of attraction from a vantage point. It moves between the formidable presence of the collective and the gaze of its beholder, between identification and detachment. In this novel the raging crowd not only comes into view as a po­liti­cal presence with which the intellectual feels compelled to merge; it also elicits an intriguing aesthetic response from the protagonist. Not unlike what Yin Fu and like-­ minded writers prescribed, the intellectual protagonist rushes out of his prison-­like “pavilion rooms” and steps into the surging

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crowd. Yet Ye Shaojun dramatizes the individual’s merging as a moment of penetration and immersion only to interrogate it. The protagonist’s attempt to access the collective energy does not deliver blissful self-­ transcendence, but rather returns him to the poignant question of self-­identity. Disappointed in both his professional and domestic life, and propelled by his delirious belief that he is a “prophet” for the masses, a young teacher named Ni Huanzhi leaves his backwater village, seeking direct involvement with the po­liti­cal drama unfolding in Shanghai. The May Thirtieth Incident of 1925, when police of the International Settlement in Shanghai fired into an unarmed crowd of protesters, triggered waves of anti-­imperialist strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations not only in Shanghai but also across the nation. The day ­after the bloodshed, Ni, now a teacher at a girls’ school in Shanghai, goes out in the streets and witnesses a scene “that he has expected but which nevertheless seems impossible.” What follows is one of the first depictions of the physiognomy of the May Thirtieth crowd as an autonomous entity: Knots of young men and ­women together with workers in their short blue jackets stand clustered on the pavement on ­either side of the street . . . ​This crowd is by no means a stationary one, but is constantly breaking up and re-forming into groups again; the effect of dispersal is caused by a draining away of part of the crowd into the nearest shops but the gaps they leave are at once filled by further additions to the crowd that appear as if from nowhere.65

The anti-­imperialist crowd seems to Ni Huanzhi like a living body: determined, inexhaustible, and undefeatable. If Yang Sao’s “third-­person pronoun” fails to howl at the front of the crowd, Ni, “with the single-­ mindedness of one possessed,” does not shy away from speech making.66 “We are together!” is the main message of his preaching. Ni’s assertion that intellectuals and proletarian masses together constitute a unitary “we” is no more than an illusory hope. His plea­sure at his ­imagined influence over the masses by his “prophesy delivery” is soon shattered by a verbal stab from a working-­class passerby, who reminds him that the “we” he speaks of is mere fiction. “ ‘You are right!’ Ni inclines his head respectfully t­oward the man and thinks to himself as if making a s­ ilent prayer



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to the gods.”67 This subtly reverses the usual direction of enlightenment. Although Ni Huanzhi has fervently attempted to insert himself into the movement by assuming a self-­assigned pedagogical role, he ends up a student in need of education. Starting like a “fighter moving into b­ attle” at noon, Ni Huanzhi gradually becomes an attentive spectator over the course of the after­noon: At a mass gathering outside the Chamber of Commerce, calling for the closure of shops and markets in support of the general strike, Ni briefly states his views, but spends more time “scrutinizing one tense, determined face ­after another.” He sees how “spasm ­after spasm of fierce clamor wells up like huge waves, each taller than the last, a clamor that would make even the stoutest heart quail”; the p ­ eople’s shouts become the “white foam that floats up between ­these huge waves.”68 The protagonist’s mission of “howling” at the head of the masses has been replaced by a program of seeing; the intellectual’s single-­minded speech making gives way to his aestheticizing gaze ­under which individual ­faces dissolve and go fluid and the ­people’s voice transmutes into visual surfaces. ­These images appear at the very moment when Ni Huanzhi begins to realize the limits of his role as an intellectual in the face of the revolutionary crowd. Aestheticizing the po­liti­cal crowd and representing it as an entity in itself, as Ye’s novel intriguingly demonstrates, produce profound self-­doubt on the part of the observer who “snorts in unconscious derision at his own unworthiness and feels as if his body has suddenly shrunk and gathered in on itself.”69 Frequent visits to vari­ous industrial quarters of the city and reflections on the peasants in the countryside lead him to conclude that he cannot teach the proletarian masses anything, ­because “all I have to say is something they know already and hence superfluous.”70 If Ni Huanzhi realizes what Zhu Qianzhi had already argued in 1921—­that revolutionary consciousness cannot be instilled from above ­because “its motive force is in life itself”71—­there is also a crucial difference between them. Unlike Zhu, who privileges affectivity over knowledge, Ni prioritizes ideas over sincerity of feeling: “Mere sincere enthusiasm is not enough—no, it is me who must learn from them [the workers and peasants].” To gain access to their life, seeing becomes as impor­tant or even more impor­tant than d ­ oing: He tells himself that “seeing the world through their eyes . . . ​should do me good.”72 The awareness of his superfluity, rather than disheartening him, affords

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Ni a degree of playfulness. During the citywide strike, Ni, we are told, walks along the city’s tram rails with “a frame of mind that in its abstractedness resembles that of a carefree stroller.”73 From afar, he sees an assembly of workers, whose hands “shot up together, giving the impression from a distance that a ­great golden stone has been hoisted into the air”74 —­a counter-­image to the “tray of loose sand” that had haunted Chinese intellectuals since the turn of the twentieth ­century. Ye’s narrative, therefore, merits attention as much for its aesthetic depiction of the po­liti­cal crowd as for its examination of the conditions ­under which the crowd becomes vis­i­ble to its intellectual beholder. When Ni Huanzhi first encounters a tempestuous throng, he feels like a courageous warrior taking the battlefield. As his po­liti­cal commitment is further confirmed and “his emotions are aroused to such a particularly high pitch,”75 Ni, however, assumes the more ambiguous position of a perambulating spectator, who is attentive, passionate, and yet detached. Through Ni’s watchful eyes, Ye Shaojun creates some of the first idealized repre­ sen­ta­tions of the masses in modern Chinese lit­er­a­ture—as a living organism, as a g­ reat golden stone hoisted into the air, as the fearful tide, and so on—­variants of which w ­ ill continue to constitute the phraseology and iconography of the revolutionary qunzhong. Watching the revolution unfold, Ni approaches the crowd as one might admire a sublime presence: Watching “a crowd of seemingly mad citizens” swarming the street, “all he does is look . . . ​with awe and devoutness, as if in the presence of something sacred.”76 Ni’s recognition of the limitations of the intellectual’s role, Ye’s text indicates, grants him the aesthetic distance necessary to behold the revolutionary crowd, often from afar, as a mighty raw force. Although “looking at someone,” as Benjamin once said, “carries the implicit expectation that our look ­will be returned,” Ni Huanzhi’s gaze is a one-­way affair.77 The implicit expectation that he ­w ill overcome the distance between the gazing subject and the object of his admiring examination remains unfulfilled. Having lost the innocent certainty that allowed the child in Hong Lingfei’s story to speak the language of “we,” Ni confronts the excruciating question of identity: “Of what account am I, anyway?”78 Being a carefree stroller in the time of revolution is clearly not the correct answer. As the po­liti­cally humbled protagonist feels that “his body has suddenly shrunk and gathered in on itself,” he begins to apply the oceanic trope to his imagination of the masses: “He imagines



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himself a fish, submerged in the sea that is ‘them.’ ”79 Such is how the intellectual character in this popu­lar 1928 novel explains his dawning awareness of the irresistible tide of the “Masses-­cum-­History” into which the private self is about to merge. Ye’s novel, in this sense, engages with what Schnapp has identified as a quin­tes­sen­tial modern po­liti­cal desire: the alienated individual’s “longing for ‘oceanic’ experiences, ­whether of nature or h ­ uman multitudes,” at the heart of which is “the modern self[’s] dream of . . . ​a momentary mystical communion with the (sociopo­liti­cal) universe represented by modern crowds.”80 The crowd turns into a magnetic presence that lures the young loner; it is an idealized totality that responds to his emotional need: “He begins to run, making straight for them; a wandering son who has been long away from home w ­ ill often run like this when he catches sight of the familiar shape of his own h ­ ouse in the distance.”81 However, when the wave of revolution swells and the fury of the crowd strikes awe and terror, can Ni Huanzhi ­really immerse himself in the masses like a fish swimming in the sea? He confesses that the sight of the masses gives him a feeling “far beyond delight.”82 As soon as he realizes the uselessness of his preaching style and reveals his desire to plunge into the crowd, the text conjures up an image that is more threatening than delightful: The crowd begins to take on the scale and power of the mighty, rebellious force that is a troubled ocean. The “sea that is ‘them’ ” reminds Ni and his radical friend Wang Leshan of the tide at Haining: It flows peacefully at first, but suddenly the gentle sound “changes into a terrific roar; it seems to envelop the universe, spluttering with rage.” This roar is “ready to unsettle every­thing with the force of its impact.” In the end, the two friends’ encounter with the revolutionary crowd leaves them with “a mysterious feeling of extreme tension.”83 For the intellectual characters, the incomprehensible or even inhuman power of the oceanic crowd provokes an aesthetic experience that combines attraction and repulsion, awe and fear. Mary Esteve has termed this experience “sublime absorption.” In The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Lit­er­a­ture, Esteve points out that “the aesthetic relation elicited by the crowd begins in the realm of sense and then, provoking absorption . . . ​is more akin to the sublime than the beautiful in that the crowd takes on qualities of startlingly power­ ful nature, through its inanimacy, impersonality, and size.”84 The oceanic

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crowd, into which Ni attempts to insert himself, appears not only un­ approachable but also menacing. Its mesmerizing intensity allures and unsettles him. To mobilize such an overpowering force appears unnecessary, even superfluous. To appropriate or channel the spontaneous energy of the masses seems not only impossible but also reactionary. Immersing oneself in it requires what Esteve calls the desire for “self-­erasure through total mimetic identification.”85 Knowing that “the curtain is about to rise on a living drama as mighty as the Qiantang’s tide,” Ni Huanzhi wants to be “both the actor and a part of the audience.”86 But he himself is aware that this is an impossible expectation. Instead of simply dismissing Ni’s wish as self-­contradictory, it might be more productive to see the second part of his schizophrenic vision as a therapeutic response to the psychological tension that the first part arouses. As if threatened by the dissolution or collectivization of the self that he envisioned in the first image, Ni devises another self to be kept safe from the surge of the revolutionary tide. This psychological attempt at self-­rescue underscores his anxiety over the loss of self. ­L ater, in the early de­cades of the PRC, the Maoist discourse of history would press the sublime into the ser­vice of representing the revolution, its collective subject—­the gigantic figure of the ­People—­and the party’s role in mass mobilization.87 In contrast, Ye’s depiction of the revolutionary crowd as a sublime presence centers on the unresolved tension between a bittersweet longing to belong and a mysterious feeling of awe and exclusion.

“­You’re All Mine Now!” Commenting on the depiction of “movements of the masses” by British leftist writers of the 1930s, the literary historian Valentine Cunningham asserts that crowds “possess only im­mense potentiality. . . . ​Their meanings await instructors, interpreters, readers . . . ​The beauty of crowds certainly lay in the eye of the beholder.”88 ­Under Ni Huanzhi’s gaze, the revolutionary masses flesh out Zhu Qianzhi’s vision of the rebellious crowd: emotional, determined, even verging on madness, but certainly not willing to be lectured to, let alone manipulated. But in the eye of another beholder, the crowd might pres­ent a docile object for po­liti­cal ma-



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nipulation. Ye Shaojun’s narrator tells us more than just what Ni sees, and it is this disparity that profoundly distinguishes Ye’s novel from other narrative works from this period that also deal with the May Thirtieth Movement. The final chapters of the novel recount the abrupt change brought about by Chiang Kai-­shek’s coup against the GMD Left and the communists in 1927. As a con­temporary reader noted, Ni Huanzhi becomes “disillusioned, sorrow-­stricken, and indignant. Typhus ends his life’s journey.”89 Between Ni’s energized admiration of the revolutionary crowd in Shanghai and his final decline, Ye Shaojun inserts two rather long chapters that seem to have no direct connection to the main plot: Back in the village, ­after Ni has left for Shanghai, the school headmaster Jiang Bing­ ­ru continues his program of educational reform, but Tiger Jiang, a local bully, hijacks the revolutionary wave for his own profit and urges the villa­ gers to attack the educator. Whereas the radical crowd that Ni observes appears to be an autonomous presence, the crowd at the mass rally in the village turns out to be an easy mark for a devious hypnotist. When a group of Ni’s former students tries to start a revolution in the village, Tiger Jiang—­whose exceptional oratorical gifts produce “the magical effects of a hypnotist” (cuimian jia 催眠家)90 —­persuades the young revolutionaries to change their plan from putting down local bullies and bad landowners to persecuting the school headmaster. When the young revolutionaries or­ga­nize a mass rally at the center of the village and draw a large crowd, Tiger Jiang’s message engages the w ­ hole village. Several young orators, who are nothing but Tiger Jiang’s puppets, seem to produce similar “magical effects.” Tagging along ­behind the slogan-­shouting radicals, the crowd, “becoming infected ( ganran 感染) by the shouting,” starts to shout uncontrollably (bu zizhu di 不自主地) as well. But all they say is “just sound without words, mostly ‘Ah! . . . ​A h! . . . ​A h!,’ ” as if they had been hypnotized (shou cuimian 受催眠).91 Standing on a wooden box beneath a fluttering flag, Tiger Jiang, the victorious Le Bonian crowd master, “raises his eyes and scans the f­ aces of the crowd, pale and wan in the weak morning sunlight; the joy of success pours over his heart like a mouthful of sweet sauce, and he thinks, ‘­You’re all mine now!’ ”92 Ideas of m ­ ental contagion and loss of self-­control, as shown in the preceding chapters, fascinated a wide range of Chinese thinkers, and they are emphatically invoked ­here. The crowd

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succumbs to contagion and regresses into an infantile stage of imitation, lacking self-­will and subject to manipulation and deceit. In contrast to the self-­determining crowd that Zhu Qianzhi envisioned and Ni Huanzhi believes that he had witnessed in the city, Ye Shaojun portrays a suggestible and credulous crowd—­the very crowd that Qu Qiubai warned against.93 Argument about the urban crowd (rational) versus the rural crowd (irrational) would miss the point, b­ ecause Ye Shaojun explains that the crowd that Tiger Jiang manipulates consists of students, workers, and other commoners, just like the urban masses Ni Huanzhi admires.94 Ye does not classify dif­fer­ent types of crowds, but rather makes plain the Janus-­faced nature inherent to the crowd, which is marked by its plasticity. The complexity of his novel resides in the fact that it plays two crowd discourses off against one another. If, through Ni’s eyes, the crowd appears to be the motor force of history as left-­wing radical thinkers anticipated, Ye’s narrator shows a deceitful simulacrum of the organic crowd and reveals its downside. The presence of words such as “hypnosis” and “infection” would seem out of place if we did not take into account the rich translations of Western crowd theories and the diverse publications on the crowd phenomena by Chinese commentators. The figure of the hypnotized crowd is commonplace in the discourse of crowd psy­chol­ogy that emphasizes the crowd’s servility in the face of a strong authority: Le Bon speaks of “the instinctive need” of the crowd to obey a hypnotist-­ leader, and Gabriel Tarde describes the individual joining a crowd in formation as a pro­cess in which “the magnetized subject imitates the magnetizer.”95 In Ni Huanzhi, the vision of a self-­willed crowd as power­ ful and formidable as the g­ reat tide at Qiantang parallels the vision of a mesmerized crowd as a receptacle for the “magic” of a master hypnotist. The juxtaposition of the two versions of crowds reveals Ye’s ambivalent appraisal of mass movements in the late 1920s. Self-­consciously or not, the final chapters of Ni Huanzhi echo what Gabriel Tarde proclaimed three de­cades before: “Without an age of authority . . . ​an age of comparative fraternity would never have existed.”96 But my point ­here is not just to identify a site where the psychopathological discourse merged with the literary imagination. More impor­tant than noting the novelist’s appropriation of psychopathological terminology (by no means adventitious) is exploring how he worked this discourse



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into structuring the plot. Ye Shaojun subscribes to the theory of hypnotic suggestibility in his fictional scene of the mass rally, and by ­doing so he not only lays bare the po­liti­cal frauds practiced on the ­people by self-­ serving opportunists but also draws attention to the murky distinction between po­liti­cal deceit and self-­a nnounced u ­ nion with the masses, which, in the flux of historical experience, the crowd itself is unable to recognize. Ye’s Ni Huanzhi thus exposes the threat that demagogues like Tiger Jiang pose to revolution and at the same time offers an implicit yet poignant critique of the left-­wing romantic fiction of self-­erasure. Stepping into the crowd, Tiger Jiang and his disciples of po­liti­cal hypnosis speak the language of “we.” They claim they are vessels of the masses in a manner not unlike the aspiring collectivist that Hong Lingfei and like-­ minded writers have described or, in fact, not unlike Ni Huanzhi when he first attempts to establish contact with the crowd in the street. Depicting the po­liti­cal interaction between the agitators and the crowd as a hypnotic act, Ye Shaojun reveals the danger hidden b­ ehind the veneer of identification with the masses—an authoritarian mode of populist pretension that passes off private interests as the expression of collective desire. Now comes the pressing question of who has the means and authority to distinguish the spontaneous eruption of the crowd from the effect of collective hypnosis, to separate the thunderous roar of the many from the moronic sound of “Ah! . . . ​A h! . . . ​A h!,” and to tell apart true revolutionaries from masqueraders. If radical thinkers such as Zhu Qianzhi defend the “unexpected ‘consonance’ ” between the revolutionary and the crowd, and left-­wing poets romanticize their self-­announced merger with the masses, Ye’s text reminds readers that pernicious forms of mass demagoguery are predicated on a similar mode of agency, just as the art of manipulation is marked by its self-­valorizing sincerity.

Body to Body Not unlike his fictional character Ni Huanzhi, ­after the May Thirtieth Incident Ye Shaojun found himself reduced to the position of a spectator who arrived regrettably late to the scene. Ye stepped into the street ­after the crowd had already gone. The material presence of the collective was

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registered by the materiality of its residue—­the martyrs’ blood. Ye’s desire to be part of that presence fed an urge to “lick up all traces of blood with my tongue and swallow them into my stomach.” Although the bloodstain on the road’s surface had been washed away, it must still have seeped deep into the ground, Ye thought. He wrote, “I gazed at this ground, gazing with all my mind, without seeing anything ­else, as if my ­whole body had melted into it.”97 In both Ye’s fiction and confessional prose, the intellectual’s u ­ nion with the masses takes the form of this intense spectatorial and introspective experience, rather than of physical immersion. For many critics, as I have shown, experiencing the force of the collective required more than cognitive attention, emotional attachment, and imagination; instead, to become part of the “we” required throwing one’s own body into the physical mass of the throng on the street. Ye’s and his fictional alter ego’s fantasy of the self being absorbed into the crowd, however, is curiously marked by its lack of bodily engagement with the crowd. The physical nature of crowd excitement—­the “shoulder-­to-­shoulder relation,” as one Chinese commentator termed it—­had received increasing attention in China since the 1920s.98 For many psychologists and other commentators, the crowd was not an abstract form of assemblage and bonding but rather the massing of bodies: “the dense crowd,” as Elias Canetti ­later terms it, “in which body is pressed to body.” This body-­to-­ body connection is of analytic importance ­because it effects an equally dense psychical constitution of the crowd in which an individual “no longer notices who it is that presses against him—­suddenly it is as though every­thing w ­ ere happening in one and the same body.”99 Such compression, according to social psychologists such as William McDougall, whose work was widely read by his Chinese admirers, could be “an intensely pleas­ur­able experience” for individuals: “Carried out of themselves, they feel themselves caught up in a g­ reat wave of emotion, and cease to be aware of their individuality and all its limitations.”100 The idea of the crowd’s homogeneity—­that is, its psychological-­bodily unity—­has conflicting ideological ramifications. For some cautious commentators McDougall’s diagnostic description conjures up the figure of a monstrous being that devoured individual consciousness, but for others it seems to resonate with the ecstatic moment of self-­transcendence for which many left-­wing romantics longed.



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But identifying the disciplinary precinct from which the fantasy of self-­immersion might have derived is not what is at stake ­here. More impor­tant is the prevalence of a shared image of the masses, not so much an aggregate with internal differences as a corporeal unity, an integral body in which individuals, “carried out of themselves,” merge into a larger ­whole. This collective that incorporates, as if growing out of, many “lesser” parts is visualized by Ke Bu 柯布 in his 1928 illustration for the left-­wing journal Taiyang yuekan 太陽月刊 (The Sun Monthly). His “Qianjin” 前進 (Advance) (fig.  2) features a striding g­ iant rising above a teeming swarm of small, illegible figures, giving form to the formless. The unity and vitality of the “masses” are predicated on the subsumable and malleable aspects of its individual parts. It thus comes as no surprise that the formation of its psychological unity is often described as a physical pro­cess of pressing loose ele­ments into a uniform mass, a pro­cess of “knead[ing] (nie 捏) ­these millions of hearts into one huge heart,” as Miss Mei, the female protagonist of Mao Dun’s 1929 novel Hong 虹 (Rainbow), describes it.101 Symbolically titled Rainbow, “a bridge, by which Proserpine (the Goddess of Spring) returns to this world from the underworld,”102 Mao Dun’s novel delineates modern Chinese history through the life story of Mei, a young ­woman from Sichuan who fights for her selfhood. Mei, awakened by the May Fourth Movement’s anti-­traditionalism, divorces the husband her ­father had chosen for her and leaves home. Supporting herself by working as a schoolteacher and tutoring a local warlord in another town, Mei is soon disillusioned by the pettiness and corruption found in educational and government circles. She comes to Shanghai, seeking a higher meaning in the collective movement of revolution, and falls in love with a cool-­headed communist leader named Liang Gangfu. Embedding Mei’s transformation within a larger vision of national rejuvenation, Mao Dun pres­ents her personal growth—­from a lone fighter against feudal patriarchy to a revolutionary activist—­“as a forward step in the historical progression from the age of enlightenment to the epoch of social revolution.”103 Mei’s pilgrimage ­toward romantic fulfillment and spiritual transcendence culminates in a dramatic scene in which the heroine marches ­toward the anti-­imperialist mass demonstration on Nanjing Road on May 30, 1925. Unlike Ni Huanzhi who admires the revolutionary crowd at a distance, Mei immerses herself into a “dense crowd” (miji de qunzhong

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figure 2. ​Ke Bu 柯布, “Qianjin” 前進 (Advance), Taiyang yuekan 太陽月刊 (The Sun Monthly) 7 (July 1928): unpaged.

密集的羣眾) and feels her body tightly pressed against other bodies.104 In-

stead of hastening to its presumed psychological endpoint, Rainbow takes a prolonged look at the physical pro­cess of body-­to-­body contact. Following Mei’s mobile, energized, yet vulnerable body as it moves through the compressed and congested crowd, Mao Dun’s narrative stands less as a dramatization of some ideal integration through bodily immersion than as a reminder of its limits. Amidst the raging crowd, Mei, aching and exhausted, has yet to be “carried out of” herself. And that collective body, in which millions of hearts fuse into one and the boundedness of individuality is overcome, is shown to be something of a fiction. Mei’s final metamorphosis is predicated on her repression of bodily instincts and private desires.105 We are told that in the last few years Mei’s



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“only goal had been to rein in her strong feminine nature and her even stronger maternal instincts.” “I am prepared,” declares Mei before walking into the surging crowd, “to give my body to a third lover—an ‘ism’!”106 Madeleine Zelin’s En­glish translation of “my body” as “myself” makes clear the inferable relation between the physical body and the individual self at work h ­ ere.107 The organic language Mao uses suggests the logic of what Wai Chee Dimock calls the “metonymic” materialism through which the idea of the person becomes “equated with the physical fact of the person, making the bodily subject virtually coextensive with the self as an epistemological category.”108 Mei’s stated new romance with her “ism” denotes the formation of a po­liti­cal subject by converting private passions and bodily instincts into revolutionary sentiments, a conversion that is predicated on the materialist notion of the self as a bodily subject. However, the movement of Mei’s body through the mass demonstration reveals not a seamless blending of the private and the po­liti­cal, of the body natu­ral and the body politic. To give one’s “body” to an “ism” involves more than a reversal of positions or a reform of consciousness. A closer look at Mei’s bodily feeling in the final scenes of Rainbow brings into relief an intriguing tension between the somatic and the body politic of revolutionary collectivism. In spite of, or perhaps ­because of, Mei’s declared determination to channel her sexual energies and bodily instincts for revolutionary purposes, Mao Dun’s depiction of her involvement in the communal campaign is problematic ­because of his attachment to Mei’s body. Mei’s spiritual transformation is paralleled with and, more often than not, interrupted by her corporal experience. By depicting Mei’s immediate lived experience in a surging crowd, Mao Dun gives body to a central intellectual preoccupation of his time: joining the masses. Instead of a smooth incorporation of the individual into the purposeful march of history, Mao Dun portrays a gendered body that is unable to enjoy the “intensely pleas­ur­able experience” of losing oneself in the oceanic crowd without first feeling some motion sickness. Like Ni Huanzhi, Mei arrives at the historical scene when the streets already appear as “a dense, oscillating mass of heads.” She “squeezed forward with all her might,” handing out leaflets and pasting up posters. When a foreign cop grabs an agitator, Mei “quickly penetrated the mass of ­people in front of her,” fills the vacant spot, and begins roaring, “Citizens of China unite!” It is a moment of both collective and personal salvation:

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“This was their destination! The destination t­ oward which every­one was converging!”109 The individual awakening, the spontaneous impulse of the masses, and the teleological movement of time crash together in this moment of epiphany that, as David Der-­wei Wang observes, constitutes “a transitory stage, an overture, for the final presence of history in the form of revolution.”110 The fleeting, yet seemingly eternal, moment of collective emergence is more than a spiritual experience of convergence and self-­transcendence in which an intellectual self merges with an abstract greater self. It is also a corporal experience for a sensing body in movement, with its romantic pathos and physical vulnerabilities. While embracing the roaring crowd, Mei sees Liang standing on the balcony of a tea­house diagonally opposite her. Fantasizing herself shouting slogans by Liang’s side, Mei uses all her energy to push her way through the angry, shouting throng. However, the masses of p ­ eople in the street screamed and drew back like a retreating tide. Mei realized that she would not be able to fulfill her plan to cross Zhejiang Road . . . ​The crowd stirred and withdrew with an undulating motion in the direction of Zhejiang Road. Mei was swept and pushed along for several steps; then suddenly her ­whole body felt cold, as though she had fallen into a pool of w ­ ater. She unconsciously jerked her head to one side, and a spray of w ­ ater hit her right in the chest, soaking her through to her underwear. The police w ­ ere using ­water hoses to disperse the crowd.111

When another stream of ­water hits her in the face, she blacks out instantly. The retreating crowd carries her before she can stand: “Mei sighed and began to walk aimlessly . . . ​Suddenly, she felt a chill. Her legs trembled uncontrollably, and she realized for the first time that her clothes ­were completely soaked. For some unknown reason, only her shoes remained dry. She was struck with a splitting headache and her legs felt as heavy as lead.”112 In the m ­ iddle of this dramatic scene of romantic longing and po­liti­cal strug­gle is a feeling body in shock, a body overpowered by the surging and retreating throng and battered by the police’s ­water cannons. Mao Dun’s depiction of Mei’s soaked body is marked by a voyeurism that exposes the eroticization of the female body beneath the author’s



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feminist stance.113 This obsessive attachment also calls attention to another axis of oppositions: one between the individual and the collective that the story purports to solve. The body that Mei’s drenched clothes make “all the more beautiful” ­under the narrator’s voy­eur­is­tic scrutiny, the body that Mei wants to devote to her “ism,” is also the very body that feels extremely cold and exhausted. Mao Dun’s narrative brings into focus both an individual body that feels the toll of the physical compression of the crowd and police brutality, and the prob­lem that such a body pres­ents to the revolutionary rhe­toric of collective emergence. The significance of Mei’s body can be seen not only in terms of its membership in the gallery of sensuous female bodies that appear in Mao Dun’s writings but also in relation to his theory of po­liti­c al thermo-­ dynamics, which involves cold w ­ ater, body heat, and the collective blood. The ending of Rainbow is written “on top of ” a prior text.114 Mao Dun, while working for the Commercial Press, played an active role in the May Thirtieth demonstrations. His journalistic sketch of the event, written shortly ­after the incident, starts by discussing an in­ter­est­ing question that a group of participants had to answer before marching into the historical scene: Should they wear raincoats? Figuring that they are not likely to “eat bullets,” one member of the group, simply marked as “S,” suggests that they should prepare themselves for police w ­ ater hoses: “Drenched clothes ­will diffuse the heat in the blood vessels, so we should wear raincoats.” But the group immediately rejects S’s recommendation, and without raincoats or umbrellas, they set off for Nanjing Road like “brave warriors taking the battlefield.” Handing out leaflets and haranguing p ­ eople in the street, they join the roaring crowd. “­Water shoots at the gathering crowd! But what use can it have?”—­“Cold force cannot extinguish the crowd’s seething hot blood!”115 The inextinguishable fire of the collective blood defies the energy limits of the physical body. Mao’s sketch of the May Thirtieth events seems to suggest that the raincoats could have protected them from cold ­water and from losing bodily energy, but would have also isolated them from the hot energies of the masses. Without protective insulation, the individual bodies that appear at the beginning of his sketch merge into the collective body of the crowd that in its meta­phorical potency is imperishable. The “exhilarating joy” ( yongyue de xiqi 踴躍的喜氣) and the thunderous roar of the crowd remind us of McDougall’s depiction of the “intensely pleas­ur­able experience” of the

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individuals in a crowd who “cease to be aware of their individuality and all its limitations.”116 In the ­middle of this meta­phoric body of revolutionary collectivism, we find the sensing body of Mei. W ­ ater rains down in Rainbow, too. “Like a shower of oil, it only served to intensify the flames of anger in the hearts of the gathering crowd”—­the crowd that would “defy death.”117 The collective body invigorates Mei, but she also experiences the crowd corporally. Her body, unlike the bodies in Mao’s sketch, remains a material one. The physical density of the crowd, rather than being obscured by a meta­phorical veneer, is highlighted ­here by a set of seemingly interchangeable phrases that refer to its sheer mass and compactness—­rencong 人叢, miji de rendui 密集的人堆, and heiyaya de yipian 黑壓壓的一片. ­These phrases are dispersed throughout the last chapter of the novel.118 The dense crowd seems to be perpetually undulating between Mei and her beloved Liang Gangfu. The overpowering mobility and materiality of the crowd stand in painful opposition to Mei’s inability to proceed ­toward Liang and her vulnerability. Carried by the tidal crowd, Mei’s “­whole body felt cold, as though she had fallen into a pool of ­water,” before she realizes that a spray of ­water has hit her. Given the profusion of watery images of the crowd as tide and waves, we might well won­der w ­ hether Mei, in this ambiguous yet suggestive moment, can distinguish the chilling liquidity of the crowd flow from the ­water of the police hoses that douse her. Mei’s feeling body is caught between the imperishable body politic to which she wants to give her body and the “dark mass of the crowd” (heicongcong de qunzhong 黑叢叢的羣眾) that sweeps ( juan 捲) her along.119 A brief comparison with the climax of Yang Mo’s 楊沫 (1914–95) Qing­ chun zhige 青春之歌 (The Song of Youth, 1958) might bring into sharper relief the material weight of Mao Dun’s crowd. Considered a classic of socialist realism, Yang’s im­mensely popu­lar novel, published almost three de­cades ­after Rainbow, follows the maturation of its female protagonist, Lin Daojing, from a romantic ­woman pursuing individual freedom to a revolutionary participating in the collective strug­gle of the masses. The story culminates in an account of the 1935 patriotic protest against the government policy of appeasement in the face of Japa­nese encroachment. During the mass demonstration, Lin “merges into many other selves, forming a gigantic collective . . . ​[that] seems to enable her to exercise to the full her energy and to fulfill her desire.”120 This is an unambiguous



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example of an individual who finds her own realization rather than loss in the revolutionary crowd. The depiction of the physicality of the crowd gives way to the symbolic repre­sen­ta­tion of the crowd as the source of collective ­will and force. Instead of being a “black mass,” we read of its “ranks strong as iron,” its stance “steady as a mountain,” and its gesture of marching in what amounts to the per­for­mance of a symbolic act of territorial conquest.121 The novel ends with the image of an endless pro­ cession, an image that clearly belongs to the modern graphic vernacular for depicting po­liti­cal multitudes.122 The text emphasizes less the surges and retreats of a physical crowd than a collective readiness to consolidate into solid forms; it stresses less the volatility of a spontaneous mass than the centripetal tendency of or­ga­nized ranks. With help from movement organizers, “the scattered marchers,” we are told, “­were soon proceeding in orderly fashion.”123 In contrast to the clean array of Yang Mo’s “ranks,” the crowd in Mao’s Rainbow is characterized by the shapelessness of a dark mass. The bildungsroman of Mei, like the story of Ni Huanzhi, belongs to what Mikhail Bakhtin categorized as the novel of historical emergence, in which the protagonist “emerges along with the world and reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other.”124 In this story about China’s epochal transition from “the time of the individual” to “the time of the masses,” Mei’s experience of the historical transformation is as spiritual as it is corporal; she remains within the confines of her own body. Despite her declared intention to give her body to the revolutionary cause, her experience of the collective campaign is an inalienably bodied one. The conclusion of Mao Dun’s Rainbow is marked by a delayed or suspended transformation of private somatic domains into symbolic time and space. Amid the dense crowd, Mei emerges as much an individual ele­ment whose meaning depends on its blissful incorporation into the collective as a qualification to that “plot,” which, like the novel itself, is left unfinished. In contrast, in Yang Mo’s novel, Lin Daojing’s self-­transformation culminates in a complete merger with the revolutionary crowd, as her body dissolves into the collective. Mei is last seen pushing ahead to look at a small banner with red characters spelling out “Storm the Chamber of Commerce.” The time on the street clock across the way is a few minutes past three, a time that w ­ ill be

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remembered as the beginning of the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925. The linear temporality that structures her six-­year strug­gle for selfhood and salvation concludes with a moment of anticipation. A foreign cop, in a bad Shanghai dialect, points out the direction of historical progression—­ “Walk to the left!”—in such a way that it reminds us of Mike Gold’s exhortation in his famous 1929 editorial for New Masses: “Go Left, Young Writers!”125 “Now, listening to the shouts of the crowd,” we are told, “her zeal was once again ignited.” The exhausted Mei is rejuvenated, ready to join the movement of history, in new dry undergarments, stockings, and a lined qipao, assembled for her by a lecherous admirer who, not unlike S in Mao Dun’s earlier sketch, understands that “if you keep wearing ­those wet clothes, you are bound to get sick.”126

The Crowd between Parentheses ­ fter reading works of “revolutionary lit­er­a­ture,” Zhang Kebiao 章克標 A (1900–2007), a Shanghai modernist writer, asks a poignant question: Are the masses, not unlike the individual that utopian collectivism purports to transcend, just another idealized being (lixiang de cunzai 理想的存在) conjured up in one’s mind?127 If Zhang’s hint at the fictitiousness of the masses would have enraged writers of revolutionary lit­er­a­ture and their sympathizers, it would also come as a painful revelation to Pan Heling, a fictional writer in Mu Shiying’s 穆时英 (1912–40) story titled (in French) “Pierrot” (1934). Unlike Mao Dun’s crowd that fills the streets with its “black mass” of bodies or Ye Shaojun’s crowd whose formidable might is viewed with awe by his protagonist, qunzhong in Mu’s story is marked by its elusiveness: It occupies only the transient space between quotation marks and parentheses and never materializes onto the diegetic level of the narrative. I conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of “Pierrot” in which the very fantasy of the intellectual’s becoming one of the crowd is opened up and spoiled and thus remains just that: an illusory fiction. An innovative writer of the neo-­sensationalist school, Mu Shiying was first praised by left-­wing critics for his groundbreaking stories on the lumpenproletariat and then ridiculed as “a peeled radish” for his de­cadent obsession with the exotic and the erotic.128 Recent studies have shed new



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light on Mu’s contribution to the development of literary modernism in China, with “Pierrot” singled out for its meticulous documentation of ­urban material culture and its portrayal of the alienating effect that the accelerating encroachment of metropolitan modernity could have on intellectuals.129 However, the protagonist’s encounter with qunzhong in lewd conversations and in his own wishful imagination, a crucial narrative thread in “Pierrot,” has largely gone unnoticed. First serialized in two installments in the influential literary journal Xiandai 現代 or Les Contemporains, “Pierrot” is a story about deception and futility. It begins with its protagonist Pan Heling ambling in the city like a solitary sleepwalker. Among the spaces of urban intoxication Pan patronizes is a literary salon where he and his neurotic friends exchange opinions on a series of seemingly random topics, ranging from the October Revolution, Mayakovsky’s venereal disease, and the pre-­R aphaelites to sandals, Charlie Chaplin’s sadness, and the shapes of American ­women’s thighs. As the conversation goes on, Greta Garbo’s husky voice attracts every­one’s attention, which, according to a modernist writer in the story, suggests her excessive sexual desire. And is this not why, he hastens to add, “Garbo is worshipped by the broad qunzhong?” “Qunzhong has dormant primitive instincts,” a pointy-­faced Freudian jumps in to explain, and “the savages worship reproductive organs.”130 It is not difficult to recognize in their conversation a Le Bonian crowd—­the crowd dominated by an “atavistic residuum of the instincts of the primitive man”131—­ charged with the vulgarized Freudian theory of sexual impulses. But more than merely recycling a translated figure of the instinctual crowd, Mu Shiying also exposes the setting in which it is placed and circulated. Afloat in a room “furnished with a bust of Tolstoy, a small transistor radio playing ‘Spring River Flowery Moon Eve­ning,’ Pu’er tea, banana peels, cigarettes and cigarette smoke, laughter, materialism, American culture, an eight-­inch-­high full-­body photo of Greta Garbo, walls of books, modernism, a sofa, and the patrons of the Chinese literary scene,” the primitive qunzhong is just another modern construct. Its newly discovered interiority—­that is, its savage mind—­like the bust of Tolstoy or rumors about Garbo’s uterine disease participates in the ornamentation of a modern interior space. The crowd’s alleged primitive obsession has become the raw material through which modern neurotics flaunt their intellectual prowess.

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But just as Pan’s learned friends distort his original intention in their readings of his writings, their supposedly novel theory about the crowd is untrustworthy. To escape from the pretentiousness and moral hy­poc­ risy of his fash­ion­able friends, Pan resorts to an exotic love as his spiritual hope. But Pan’s confidence in the loyalty of his Japa­nese mistress is crushed by his discovery of her affair with a Filipino musician.132 Unsettled by his experience of cultural cosmopolitanism, commodity culture, and exoticism, Pan has to leave the city. ­A fter a short, disappointing stay with his parents in the countryside, Pan Heling returns to Shanghai and becomes involved in the workers’ movement. On his way to a mass demonstration, the de­cadent writer-­ turned-­revolutionary, while rubbing the sleep from his eyes in the back of a trolley, fantasizes: He imagines himself commanding a massive crowd ( guangda de qunzhong 廣大的羣眾); he imagines himself enjoying the love and esteem of tens of thousands of p ­ eople who have humanity. Even his toes are joyful. (Many, many factories open their big mouths, with smoke spewing out of their chimneys and huge trembling machines inside their stomachs swallowing tens of thousands of ­people e­ very morning . . . ​ I say, “Shut down the machines!” Tens of thousands of p ­ eople all shut down their machines. I say, “Run out of the factories!” Tens of thousands of p ­ eople hurry outside. So factories for miles around all perish . . . ​.)133

The ­imagined “massive crowd” that emerges between parentheses becomes the counterpart of the forever-­faithful Japa­nese Madame Butterfly he had fantasized about earlier, and like her, the heroic factory-­destroying qunzhong disappoints—it does not materialize. Out of the trolley, Pan walks into a dirty alley and goes through a door hung with cloth diapers. ­There he witnesses a confrontation between hooligans and workers on the picket line, supported by a cast of “young wives picking up bamboo brooms, old ladies carry­ing fire tongs, young ­people holding high door latches, a bunch of kids r­ unning with big rocks in their hands, and an old man charging forward ­behind a copper tobacco pipe.” The confrontation is nothing epic, but is notably characterized as “messy.”134



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Four days l­ater, Pan is arrested. On the way to his prison cell, while offended by the two policemen who do not think he is dangerous enough to be put in handcuffs, Pan conjures up in his mind an invigorating image, marked for the reader again by a set of parentheses: “(Thirty-­five thousand ­people’s hearts ­will shed tears for my arrest. When I come out of jail, thirty-­five thousand ­people’s hearts ­will shed tears for my release. They w ­ ill set off firecrackers to take me home . . . ​Only the qunzhong is loyal! Never falter.).”135 The crying hearts of the qunzhong prove only as loyal as his Japa­nese mistress. ­A fter a half-­year of imprisonment, Pan, now crippled by police torture and denounced as a traitor by his old comrades, returns to the same diaper-­covered alley. The street scene looks as “messy” as before, but ­there are no firecrackers or tears. Not one person recognizes him. A young wife, who is holding her baby upside down and wiping away his urine, asks him who he is looking for. But what Pan is looking for does not exist outside the parentheses of his imagination. Starting as a sleepwalker, Pan remains caught between states of dreaming and waking, between his instinctive urge to go on dreaming to avoid disillusionment and his inevitable disgrace. In the early part of the story, Mu Shiying, restricting the circulation of the sexual, instinctual crowd between quotation marks, pokes fun at the interpretive authority of modern psychological theory and the contributions of Chinese intellectuals to its diffusion. In the second half of the story, the spontaneous bond between the writer-­turned-­revolutionary and the rebellious crowd—­a bond extant only within the confines of parentheses—­turns out to be but a tantalizing illusion. The theatrical exaggeration with which Pan’s fantasy of his commanding voice and presence in the mass strike is described produces a comic effect. In the figure of Pan Heling, not only do Shanghai writers as a w ­ hole become an object of mockery 136 but the very narrative of rising above one’s private worries by merging with the crowd has also become a text to be parodied. Between parentheses Pan fashions himself as a charismatic genius channeling the collective energies of the crowd, which, in turn, is reduced to a quantitative aggregate, to an arbitrary number (thirty-­five thousand). But the idealized being of the numbered rebelling crowd emerges from the modern writer’s private emotional instability, which has less to do with sociopo­liti­cal pressures, ideological convictions, or general anxiety at lagging ­behind the historical flow than with the psychological vacuum left

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by his disillusionment with exoticism and urban materialism. Pan’s fantasies about an accord between his words and the crowd’s action, not unlike the passionate romance with his mistress, gratify him only as long as his imagination is kept alive. Mu’s “Pierrot” caricatures what Joel Nickels views as “one of the most central po­liti­cal fictions of modernity—­that of the socially disconnected, ‘unlocatable’ spokesperson, who makes a ­great show of merging with the multitude.”137 But the comic side of the story cannot erase the pain, confusion, and delicacy of its protagonist. At the end of his imaginary migration from fancy cafés and salons to the life of the proletarian masses, Pan finds himself a solitary wanderer again, just as he was at the story’s beginning. H ­ ere the short-­story writer Mu Shiying, despite the mocking tone that permeates his narrative, leans ­toward tragedy and reveals the degree of intimacy that many writers, most likely including himself, once had with the captivating fiction of becoming one with the masses. In bracketing the ­union between the intellectual and the crowd as a self-­ consoling fantasy, Mu Shiying evades rather than confronts the prob­lem that preoccupied writers like Ye Shaojun and Mao Dun: How can the imag(in)ing of the intellectual’s absorption into the upwelling of collective energies be played out at the level of literary repre­sen­ta­tion? In their narratives, an individual character’s self-­identification as one of the masses takes dif­fer­ent forms: Whereas Ye dwells on the spectatorial schizophrenic experience of the sublime force of “the sea that is ‘them,’ ” Mao emphasizes the corporal experience of the crowd’s body-­to-­body composition. Unlike socialist realist novels such as Yang Mo’s The Song of Youth—­ written when the Communist Party had ritualized the repertoires of mass politics and domesticated demonstrations as Maoist campaigns—­Ye’s Ni Huanzhi (1928) and Mao’s Rainbow (1929) w ­ ere embedded in a historical moment when the massing of bodies in public spaces, both stage managed and spontaneous, was still perceived as a new form of po­liti­cal theater.138 It is not difficult to detect a sense of excitement, urgency, and uneasiness in their attempts to capture the formidable force, restless movement, and bodily density of the crowd as a novel po­liti­cal force. ­Under their pens, the aggregated mass cannot be reduced to an abstract figure of the collective.



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It is impor­tant to note that in neither of their imaginary scenarios—­ plunging into the raging sea or being swept away by the black mass of a dense crowd—is the prospect of losing the “I” into the “we” particularly inviting. However, for many young writers on the Left, joining the po­ liti­cal crowd was conceived as a communal experience where the gratification of po­liti­cal passions and private longings converged. In the next chapter I explore the ways in which the po­liti­cal vision of mass eruption and the articulation of intimate desires intertwined in communist lit­er­a­ture. The idea of collective formation as an exhilarating communal experience, as I show, proved to have enduring appeal over the next de­cades.

chapter 4 Prob­lems of Solitude Only recently has the crowd become a living being that grows and multiplies like a forest . . . ​every­thing the individual has lost is stored in it, ­great heroism and ecstatic enthusiasm. —Stefan Zweig, Émile Verhaeren, 1910

A

s we have seen in the many narrative imaginings considered h ­ ere, fusion with the collective is predicated, to varying degrees, on the prohibition or displacement of private passions. But the sustained appeal of collective identification for modern Chinese intellectuals cannot be explained merely in terms of negation or discipline. Nor can the attraction of the insurgent crowd for the individual be reduced to po­liti­cal exigency, ideological indoctrination, or historical necessity. As a range of recent studies on the affective dimension of social and revolutionary movements have reminded us, a willingness for self-­sacrifice alone cannot account for the prevalence of modern mass politics; instead, the role of enjoyment and fulfillment in the formation of collective identification has to be taken into account. Rather than fixate on recovering an au­then­tic individuality repressed by collectivist ideology, we need to analyze the production of individual interiorities within such an ideology.1 For many left-­leaning intellectuals around the early 1930s, joining the revolutionary crowd did not crush individual subjectivity (as Yang Sao claimed),2 but rather entailed producing selves who actively scrutinized, evaluated, and reformed themselves in search of meaning and self-­realization. To understand the grip of the imaginary figure of the revolutionary crowd on a young generation of writers, I turn to the communist writer Hu Yepin 胡也頻 (1903–31) and his 1930 novella, Guangming zai ­women de qianmian 光明在我們的前面 (The Light Is Ahead of Us), a story about the



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May Thirtieth anti-­imperialist movement as it unfolded in Beijing. Rather than focusing on the physical density of qunzhong as Mao Dun does in Rainbow, Hu’s novella pres­ents the crowd as a trancelike state of mass excitement that ultimately becomes a spectacle of collective enjoyment. If Hu’s story is still of significance, it is not so much for the heroic figure of the revolutionary masses that commands its narrative space, as for the way the novella lays bare the connection between the experience of collective exuberance and the constitution of individuals capable of self-­k nowledge and self-­mastery. The seemingly private questions of how one should think, feel, and behave (especially when no one is looking); how one construes and addresses oneself as the subject of emotions and desires; and how one opens oneself to inspection, judgment, and rectification are all locked into this story of the emergence of a nationalist crowd. ­Here the crux of the ­matter is less about the intrusion into and domination of individual interiority by the collectivist ideology than about conducting one’s relation to oneself through what Foucault terms technologies of the self, “which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of o­ thers a number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality.”3 Joining the revolutionary crowd does not eclipse the sense of the self, but rather prompts it; becoming one of the many intensifies one’s relation with oneself. To underscore this dynamic requires what Ban Wang calls a positive approach that examines the psychic formation of the self, rather than its loss, in the revolutionary experience of modern China’s mass movements.4 As Wendy Larson importantly reminds us, this is not to assume that “the mind is universal and, no ­matter where or when, works in basically the same way.” Instead, it is to “take a close look at the way in which mentalities are described, enacted, and professed in revolutionary times.”5 Along this line of thinking, I argue that the way one relates to the crowd is ultimately and intimately linked to how one relates to the self. At the core of Hu’s literary imagining of a festive collective emergence, the pro­cesses of evaluation, regulation, and indulgence of the self all serve as key objectives of and conditions for revolutionary transformation.

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The Light Is Ahead of Us stages collective emergence as a moment of feeling po­liti­cal together. The bright light of the passionate crowd in which its protagonists bask, however, cannot be dissociated from the identity crisis that Hu’s early work reveals. Before Hu Yepin became a determined writer of revolutionary realism and joined the CCP underground in Shanghai, he experimented with romantic sentimentalism and modernist de­cadence. A glance at his modernist phase not only surprises us with a field of corpses in the wilderness and the putrefying odor of an autopsy room, but introduces us to his fascination with necrophilic desires. Hu was not alone in his transition from modernism to Marxism-­Leninism, from romantic individualism to revolutionary collectivism; this trajectory reflected a growing trend in intellectual circles of the time.6 This crucial phenomenon—­“a general drift t­ oward the left” in the literary field, as Leo Lee rightly puts it7—­could not be accounted for merely in terms of ideological conversion or a sharpened social and po­liti­cal conscience among intellectuals. For Hu and many like-­minded writers, the leftward drift was a distinctly emotional affair. Collectivist conviction did not suppress their romantic selves; instead, a romantic revolutionary subject emerged in tandem with the development of a passionate attachment to the figure of the revolutionary masses. To understand Hu’s depiction of the crowd as something more than the dull figure of propaganda and to fully grasp the affective investment it represented, we must first take a detour through the early days of Hu’s writing ­career. Seeing Hu’s novella of collective emergence through the lens of his earlier tale of erotic perversion ­will afford us a more intimate understanding of the relationship between self and the crowd, and between solitude and solidarity, which is at the root of the entrenchment of mass-­based po­liti­cal culture in modern China.

The Limits of Perversion Before embracing the revolutionary crowd, Hu Yepin’s literary imagination often lingered in shady places filled with ghosts and the smell of putrefying flesh. His early characters are troubled by a romantic urge ­toward self-­discovery and a morbid fascination with decaying bodies. ­These themes receive intensive treatment in Hu’s 1927 short story “Jiang-



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hai” 殭骸 (Cadaver). Hu’s quest for corpses at the beginning of his writing c­ areer grew out of the young writer’s encounters with mortality and his own erotic desire. By studying his de­cadent aesthetic before his leftward turn, we can discover a crisis of selfhood in his early writings. This concern with selfhood is a thread tying together his narratives of individual plea­sure and po­liti­cal fulfillment, perversion and revolution, which in turn reveals how the author’s narration of the self informs his imagining of the revolutionary crowd. “Cadaver” was written during an experimental and ideologically unsettled phase of Hu’s life, when he unapologetically indulged in romantic passions and his fascination with corpses. Hu’s emphasis on somatic passions is intimately captured in the more than two hundred love poems he wrote for Ding Ling from 1925 to 1928.8 Hu Yepin had met Ding Ling, a fellow aspiring writer, when he was roaming Beijing as a young vagabond. The two soon fell in love and began to live together. In a poem dedicated to her, Hu Yepin lingers over the scent of h ­ uman flesh that is more “bewildering and intoxicating” than brandy. In language reminiscent of Zhu Qianzhi’s writing, Hu avers that “love, when reaching the moment of fevered passion, even though the smile and gaze might express sanctity, cannot escape the impulses of instinct.” “Why does the soul,” the poet asks at the end of his musing, “no ­matter how beautiful, clean, and bright, always carry the scent of flesh?”9 Hu Yepin emerges from t­hese poems as a romantic who savors the sensual vibrancy of h ­ uman experience, but b­ ehind the poetic persona as a passionate lover lies his secret search for corpses. In a series of poems composed in the spring and summer of 1926, Hu repeatedly explores imaginary encounters with the dead. The earliest attempt describes the speaker’s desperate search for the remains of his ­brother, killed during the conflict between warlords. Subsequent versions shift the emphasis from the ­human cost of war to the meaning of the self in a time of terror. ­These poems depict the speaker’s ghastly journey in the endless darkness of a wasteland in search of “a corpse that has not gone stiff.” When he reaches a graveyard, an old smiling ghost from the tomb, with its face smeared with dirt, frightens him into a pit lined with gravel. It is ­there that Hu’s poetic alter ego finds what he has been looking for: “Fumbling about, I touch the ice-­cold bosom of the dead . . . ​The darkness opens its mouth wide, gobbling up my soberness.”10 Over the course of this poetic journey,

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the original theme of looking for the remains of war dead gradually takes on a surreal cast and a more radical meaning. It shifts from a po­ liti­cal outcry over military atrocities to a suspenseful and yet meditative dramatization of the poetic self’s encounter with death.11 Romantic passions for the sensual and gothic obsessions with mortality, which mark Hu Yepin’s early writing, are not antagonistic or unrelated. Instead, they illuminate Hu’s search for au­then­tic selfhood and fulfillment. A unifying thread between the intoxicating scent of living flesh and the coldness of dead bodies links erotic attraction with morbid repulsion. This link between eros and thanatos is nowhere more tightly woven together than in “Cadaver,” in which a doctor falls in love with the ­human corpse he is supposed to dismember. “Cadaver” was published in two installments in the well-­known journal Xiandai pinglun 現代評論 (Con­temporary Review). The first installment introduces Meng Su, an established pathologist, who is left alone with the blanket-­covered body in a room equipped with surgical knives of all sizes and all sorts of medical liquids. Lit by the cold light of three electric lamps on the wall, “the defenseless object of experiment, like a piece of marble without consciousness,” arouses a strong desire in Meng: “­Here, I ­will make a new discovery.” His discovery, as it turns out, is far more carnal than anatomical. As Meng slowly lifts up the blanket, instead of the corpse of a middle-­aged person promised to him by the director of the hospital, he discovers the “naked beauty” of a young girl. Overwhelmed, he cannot see her as the anatomical object that he has been trained to dissect. Instead, he divides the girl’s “sculptural body” with his amorous gaze into fetishized parts—­“small, plump feet, round and slim waist, ample bosom, and full closed lips.” He kneels down by the dissection t­ able and kisses his goddess from her fingertips to her shoulder, feeling “almost deranged but overjoyed.” He has become a necrophilic worshipper.12 Hu Yepin dwells on this suspended moment in the dissection room. The young girl’s aestheticized and erotized marble-­like body seems to defy the corruption of time. If the first installment of the story moves ­towards this arrested motion, the second installment forges forward with a fatalistic rhythm, marking the passage of time with the slow yet irreversible decay of a ­human corpse. In Meng Su’s meticulous, obses-



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sive, yet futile attempts to come to terms with the physicality of a body that is predisposed to putrefy, we witness his own demise. At dawn, Meng carries the stiff body to his home. He gives her long kisses, washes her with superb perfume, and pats fragrant powder all over her u ­ ntil “his w ­ hole body is feverish and quivering.” His servant, noticing that his young master has deviated from his normal routine, interrupts him occasionally to worriedly remind Meng of his duty to get married and carry on the f­amily line. Meng, however, keeps his bedroom door closed ­until “the odor from the corpse’s decomposition overpowers the smell of fragrance and powder.”13 The smell of death brings him back to the realty that he has ignored in his “frenzy of love”: The timeless immaculate body he has laid on his bed is but a corpse—as the title of the story has bluntly insisted all along. Rather than repressing his erotic desire, this realization intensifies it. The desiring subject in “Cadaver” is inalienably modern in terms not only of his medical profession but also of the legibility of his aberrant be­ hav­ior from a modern scientific viewpoint. Hu’s story emerged from the explosion of medical, psychoanalytical, and pedagogical discourses on sexuality in the early twentieth c­ entury. Central to the proliferation of sexological writings was a preoccupation with distinguishing normal be­hav­iors from perversions, thereby establishing “a natu­ral order of disorder” by mapping what was “not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction.”14 At the outer limits of this order of disorder was necrophilia: The necrophile was considered a sexual species of extreme deviancy.15 Western sexological and medico-­psychoanalytical theories about sexual norms and pathological perversions began to receive attention in China in the beginning of the republican era. Although most Chinese sexologists of the time “reduced all sexual practices to the expression of one ‘natu­ral’ desire for heterogenitality,” their efforts to establish the par­ameters for what is sexually “natu­ral” in effect brought into circulation psychiatrized notions of sexual anomalies and perversions.16 In “Cadaver,” the protagonist is keenly aware of the psycho-­ pathologization of non-­normative sexualities. Thus, in his suicide note Meng Su pleads to the director of the hospital, and by extension to the readers, not to think of his be­hav­iors as shenjing biantai 神經變態, a medical neologism for “psychoneurotic perversion.”17 Rather than being concerned with the

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l­egal or moral implications of his desires, Meng is wary of being diagnosed as pathological in the modern perversion discourse. He does not want to be imprisoned in the taxonomic iron ­house of psychological disorders. Ironically, though, this very demand invites readers to medicalize his desires and to subject his case to a medico-­psychological assessment. In other words, by concluding “Cadaver” with this appeal, Hu Yepin not only brings closure to this dissection-­gone-­awry story but also prescribes the interpretive bound­aries within which the story should be read. Hu Yepin, when creating Meng Su the anatomist/necrophile, engages with the medico-­psychological conception of sexual perversions; on aesthetic grounds his story is more akin to the fin-­de-­siècle de­cadent imagination that began circulating globally around the turn of the twentieth ­century. In par­tic­u­lar, it reflects Baudelaire’s taste for morbidity, decay, and death. One of the first poems from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal to appear in Chinese happened to be “Une Charogne” (A Carcass, 1856).18 It describes a rotting corpse with flies buzzing around its belly and maggots devouring its decomposing flesh. In this decay the necrophilic poet sees the image of his beloved. The corpse is likened to a lustful prostitute in a provocative position and is eroticized perversely. Baudelaire rejects the “beautiful death,” a fairy-­tale-­like sleeping beauty preserved in a glass coffin, in ­favor of a mass of putrefying flesh as the eroticized object of identification. A poem about erotic sublimation, “Une Charogne” blends the perverse eroticization of the corpse with the aesthetics of decay and an excess of disgust.19 ­There are striking parallels between Baudelaire’s “Une Charogne” and Hu Yepin’s “Cadaver.” The anatomist’s experience of the female body in Hu’s story is marked by a de­cadent turn—­from identifying her with marble-­like permanence and perfection in the first installment to attaching to her as an eroticized Baudelairean corpse in the second when the scent of flesh becomes the stench of carrion. ­A fter failed attempts to sanitize the physical signs of mortality with beauty powder and perfume, Hu’s protagonist is both horrified and at the same time fascinated by the undeniable physicality of the cadaver: “Her round eyes gradually sink deep in their sockets, the skin of her belly changes colors, and an offensive odor comes out her mouth.” The story reaches a pitch of perversity when Meng Su “cups her blurry face in his hands and licks with the tip



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of his tongue the yellow liquid flowing from her collapsed nose.”20 Between the discharge from the collapsed nose in “Cadaver” and the corporeal excretions in “Une Charogne” lies a shared penchant for perversity that subverts ste­reo­t ypical romantic femininity. The aesthetic/erotic illusion of the female body carved in eternal marble is shattered, yet that body is only eroticized further by the morbid effects of somatic corruption. The putrefying female body oozing fluids in Hu Yepin’s “Cadaver” evokes Baudelaire’s image of the carcass as a lascivious ­woman “sweating poisons.” Meng Su’s deviant sexual appetite echoes the erotized pro­cess of decomposition that Baudelaire describes in “Une Charogne” whereby the ­woman’s dead body is devoured by the “kisses” of worms.21 “Cadaver” represents arguably the most extreme and nauseating literary approach to the libidinal cathexis of excretions and h ­ uman remains in modern China. It is deliberately perverse and crudely physical. Its male protagonist does not fall in love with a pleasing feminine body that happens to be dead, but rather with a corpse in its natu­ral pro­cess of decomposition. Indeed, one cannot separate Meng Su’s deviant sexual appetite from the poisonous stench and the oozing excretions of the rotting body. Hu Yepin, therefore, engages with the sexological discourse of perversions, on the one hand, and the de­cadent modernist eroticization of the female corpse, on the other, to challenge established social and moral norms. In d ­ oing so, he also takes a poke at the anatomist trope with which many modern Chinese intellectuals self-­identified. For many of them, the cutting apart and traversing the body in anatomical dissection, as a methodological procedure of observation, provided a power­ful meta­phor for the task of writing. The scientific trope of dissection proj­ects both an operating subject and a material object for anatomic-­pathological mapping. It turns the analytical gaze inward to dissect the pathological mind of the nation as well as one’s own self, while at the same time forcing writers to engage with the physical body to make it legible for analy­sis.22 The objectified interiority, the anatomically legible body, and the “clinical” gaze all constitute the same discursive formation of literary modernity, at the center of which stands the anatomist/writer looking, penetrating, and triumphing over his material as a privileged arbiter of meaning and knowledge. In “Cadaver,” Hu Yepin spins an ironic and erotic twist on the homology between the clinical and the literary. When Meng Su gazes at

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the naked corpse lying on the dissection ­table, he realizes that the clinical detachment that turns the body into an object of scientific mastery is in fact a sanctioned form of cruelty and violation. Beneath the anatomic pretension, he says to himself, is a morbid desire that can only be “satisfied by ruining many h ­ uman bodies.”23 Hu turns the anatomical encounter with the body into a macabre tale of fetishistic attachment to the corpse, necrophilic obsession with ­human remains, and anxiety over bodily dissolution. In his story the clinical gaze and analytic detachment that influenced the diagnostic impulses of modern Chinese lit­er­a­ture are replaced by the male protagonist’s possessive gaze, amorous caresses, and fatalistic identification with the female corpse. Within the emerging nexus of medicine, pathology, and lit­er­a­ture, Hu Yepin perverts the established authority of dissector over dissected by fixating on the physical body as a source of desire, pain, and knowledge production about the self. With its plea to the reader not to stigmatize the necrophilic protagonist as psychologically perverse, Hu’s story construes dissection as the real perversity, thus directly challenging the trope of the modern Chinese intellectual as an anatomist who analyzes the national body. Making his protagonist an anatomist who refuses to dissect, Hu exposes a crisis of selfhood for a modern male intellectual whose discovery and fulfillment of his true self lead only to self-­destruction. In Hu Yepin’s “Cadaver,” Meng Su comes to terms with this crisis through a fetishizing, if not sadistic, manipulation of the female body. H ­ ere the dialectic of self-­realization/self-­annihilation is mediated through the male anatomist’s desire for the deanimated female body that he steals from the dissection ­table.24 Just as his desire requires a dead body, Meng Su’s soliloquy of self-­realization is conditioned by the surrounding silence. His pursuit of a new au­then­tic self, an identity other than that of a ruthless tool of science, which he has come to detest, is based on the effacement and deanimation of the feminine. In the end, his awakening to a new desiring selfhood, as perverse as it is, is self-­destructive and nihilistic. The liberation of the sexual and therefore “au­then­tic” self from traditional moral constraints and sexological norms ends only in self-­decomposition. The decaying body is not only an object of erotic desire but, more crucially, an object of identification. In his suicide note Meng Su confesses, “I have fallen in love with the ­woman I was given to dissect . . . ​But she has decayed b­ ecause of what



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I did! Decay (fulan 腐爛), what a la­men­ta­ble word! Nevertheless, now, I want to decay as well!”25 “Cadaver” is as much about searching for self-­realization through sexual perversion as it is about its impasse. To escape his own death-­bound obsessions, Hu Yepin, as we s­hall see, w ­ ill turn away from the intoxicating “scent of flesh” and the dim-­lit room of isolation to the spectacular image of a po­liti­cal crowd emerging into the bright light of the open air. But if “the soul,” as Hu maintains, cannot escape the “impulses of instinct,” ­will the repressed longings and desires not resurface?

The Fantasy of Enjoyment In the spring of 1928 Hu Yepin and his partner Ding Ling bid farewell to the north and moved to Shanghai. ­There they joined the League of Leftist Writers. Hu Yepin was drawn to Marxist ideas and was a g­ reat admirer of Rus­sian Marxist revolutionaries Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918) and Anatoly Lunacharsky, having encountered their work through the writings and translations of Lu Xun and the communist critic Feng Xuefeng. He joined the CCP underground in Shanghai and became increasingly po­liti­ cally active as the chairman of the Committee on Worker-­Peasant-­Soldier Lit­er­a­ture. In the summer of 1930, b­ ecause of his po­liti­cal work, Hu Yepin was seldom at home, where the pregnant Ding Ling worked on her novella Yijiu sanling nian chun Shanghai 1930 年春上海(Shanghai, Spring 1930). On November 7, Ding Ling went into ­labor and was hospitalized. Hu came to visit her the next day ­after staying up all night writing. “He was ­really excited to tell me,” writes Ding, “The Light Is Ahead of Us is done. ­Isn’t the light ahead of us?” At noon, I gave birth to a boy. He cried. He rarely cried. Did he cry b­ ecause he felt sympathy for me or ­because of happiness? I did not ask . . . ​He ­didn’t have time to keep us com­pany and left for a meeting. In the eve­ning he did not tell me anything. But the next day he told me that at the general meeting of the Left League he was selected to attend the First Soviet Congress [at Jiangxi], and he was applying to join the Party. This time, I cried. I saw how he had strug­gled and searched for a way of life in all ­those years of darkness to no avail. But now he found it. He was so confident. Yes, the

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light is ahead of us; the light is already u ­ nder our feet; the light is already ­here.26

Ding’s recollections reveal how intrinsically connected life and work w ­ ere for the ­couple and vividly show the affective investment the novellas carried for ­these two “untimely” writers in a trying moment. Their situation was financially precarious, with Hu Yepin often frequenting pawnshops to make ends meet; in addition, the literary Left with which they identified, according to their close friend Shen Congwen 沈從文 (1902–88), was already viewed by many as passé.27 Turning away from the attachment to corpses and the obsession with somatic corruption explored in “Cadaver,” Hu Yepin expresses an un­ wavering enthusiasm for collective energy and spontaneity in his new work, The Light Is Ahead of Us. For Hu—­the nomadic and restless young writer—­and his male protagonist, embracing the crowd as a locus of belonging and source of energy enables romantic indulgence and de­cadent isolation to be overcome. And yet the immersion of the self into the masses does not mandate a liquidation of hidden longings and sexual energies, as many leftists of the time proclaimed. Instead, Hu tells a story of longing and gratification where the line between the private and the po­liti­cal is continuously blurred. The fulfillment of collective passions and private longings ultimately converges in a fantasy of what I call revolutionary intimacy. By exploring the crowd as a figure of fantasy in Hu’s narrative of desire and po­liti­cal excitement, we can see how revolutionary realism depicts the fulfillment of erotic-­political desires and, more importantly, how the crowd provides imaginary scenarios through which one learns how to desire and reform oneself as a revolutionary subject. Po­liti­cal consciousness is at first positioned against superfluous sexual energies, and revolutionary subjectivity is set against romantic interiority. In the end, however, Hu’s text rejects t­hose polarities to show the intrinsic linkage between individual fulfillment and the collective experience of revolutionary upheaval. Furthermore, as erotic desire takes on po­liti­cal meaning, the crowd assumes an increasingly phantasmic appearance. What makes this other­wise insipid story of ideological conviction in­ ter­est­ing is the waywardness of its male protagonist, Liu Xijian, who seems unable to keep himself from veering away from the preordained



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narrative trajectory t­ oward the climactic eruption of collective energy. On the way to the story’s po­liti­cal climax, Xijian finds himself struggling with and indulging in the wants and desires that often lead him astray. Before Xijian can bear witness to the insurgence of the po­liti­cal crowd and complete his historical task of joining the revolution, he must first subject his own self to the “ideological gaze” and internalize the rules about what one is permitted to see and feel.28 In the private, nonrevolutionary moments of this primarily po­liti­cal story, we see the lingering traces of Hu’s old literary persona marked by its sexual energies and obsession with the female body. Similarly to “Cadaver,” The Light Is Ahead of Us makes the inner domain of the self the focus of attention. Despite their radically dif­fer­ent subject ­matter, both stories locate the secret and truth of the self in desires, fantasies, and guilt. Furthermore, both depict men in terms of how they understand and act on their desires in relation to certain notions of normality. Where in “Cadaver” Meng Su pleads against the normalizing judgment of modern medical discourse, in The Light Is Ahead of Us the protagonist embraces the normative gaze channeled from the authoritative figure of revolutionary collectivism. In this story, self-­inspection and self-­regulation, rather than merely constraining the self, become indispensable ele­ments in the protagonist’s search for self-­fulfillment that is ultimately achieved in the midst of the revolutionary crowd. The story opens with a conversation between Xijian, a poorly dressed twenty-­six-­year-­old underground communist, and a young poetess who believes in the motto “art for art’s sake.” An advocate of proletarian lit­er­ a­ture, Xijian believes that, to maintain its relevance, lit­er­a­ture has “to be like an iron hammer,” replacing the romanticism of dreams and kisses with hard-­core realism.29 ­Here, Xijian, as if commenting on the author’s own transformation, rehearses the much-­trumpeted call for a leap from the “literary revolution” of the romantic generation to a “revolutionary lit­er­a­ture” of the young radical Left, a lit­er­a­ture that turns away from preoccupations with the self. His view reminds us of Qian Xingcun’s theory of “lit­er­a­ture of force” (li de wenxue 力的文學) proposed shortly before the publication of Hu Yepin’s novel.30 In this context the poetess seems a “lingering vestige of a gilded and irresponsible world of the past.”31 In contrast, Xijian pres­ents himself in a dif­fer­ent frame of language: “Recently I have turned into a machine;” “I am ­really too mechanical;” “my brain is almost nothing but an iron wheel.” The mechanical trope, in line with

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his theory of lit­er­a­ture as an iron hammer of destruction and change, indicates a new kind of subjectivity no longer in thrall to sentimental pathos and romantic dreams, but rather following a mechanized ethic. A philosophy of automatons replaces the discovery of individual personality, on which the literary revolution of the May Fourth Movement was predicated. “I cannot move of my own ­will,” the man of the machine proudly declares.32 However, although Hu Yepin’s story is premised on a new type of po­liti­cal subjectivity and writing, the relationship of his own narrative to his theory of revolutionary lit­er­a­ture as a forceful historical instrument is ambiguous at best. The male protagonist Liu Xijian may claim to be a machine lacking a w ­ ill of his own, but he is still a desiring machine, attracted by and attentive to the feminine body. Hu’s prose builds from a “pro­cess of detail production” that in the end undermines or cuts up his grander narrative of collective emergence.33 The novella revels in images that are sensuous and appealing, but are nonetheless, according to Xi­ jian’s own logic, distracting and superfluous to the larger historical forces in the ser­vice of which both Hu and Xijian see themselves engaged. During his conversation with the poetess, Xijian cannot help being distracted by “her curves” u ­ nder a fash­ion­able silken qipao that “tightly clings to her body.”34 The return of the poetess’s roommate Bai Hua, the anarchist heroine of the story, shifts the conversation from lit­er­a­ture to anarchist utopianism. But Xijian’s eyes “cling to her [Bai’s] body” as Bai browses through an ­a lbum of woodcut portraits of Kropotkin. “All he wants,” we are told, “is an opportunity to express his love to her in a materialistic manner,” meaning “to lower his lips onto her tender white delicate fin­gers to do some crazy t­hings.” Xijian is convinced that the only barrier between them is her anarchist thought. To remove that barrier he must shift her faith from Kropotkin to Marx and Lenin. But the thought of revolutionary reeducation is only fleeting: Bai Hua’s body has a stronger pull. Xijian indulges in his own aestheticizing impulses: “It suddenly comes to his mind that she is virtually a piece of charcoal drawing, b­ ecause she is wearing all black, black jacket, black skirt, black socks, black shoes.” This realization gives rise to erotic fantasies: “He does not realize that he is offending her as he takes plea­sure in imagination: he sees her plump and white flesh; he sees her curvy figure; he sees her ample silhouette; he undresses her completely.”35 The power of his imagination surprises him;



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he feels “a fluid t­ hing moving around his body, making him very uncomfortable.”36 The discomfort brings Xijian’s erotic fantasies to a halt. One might consider Hu Yepin’s depiction of the protagonist’s erotic daydreaming as residual romanticism in an author who began his ­career as a romantic poet before embracing revolutionary lit­er­a­ture. But the disruption caused by physical attraction and desire, as Hu’s text suggests, also functions as a necessary condition for the formation of a revolutionary subjectivity. Indeed, the discovery of Bai Hua’s alluring bodyscape is an inversion of Xijian’s “iron wheel” mind. At the very moment of transgression we hear a vigilant voice from that mind, this time in a playful manner as if catching himself off guard: “Hey, Xijian, what are you fantasizing about?”37 One may give this passage a Freudian interpretation: “One part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it ­were, takes it as its object.”38 ­Here, the self-­observing self (superego) acts as an agency of internal surveillance and, with a fatherly voice, monitors the desiring self, which is acting on the libidinal drive for gratification. But t­ here is something at stake h ­ ere that is even more insidious than the internalization of an external regulatory gaze. In this scene Hu’s story goes beyond the mere denigration of romantic interiority by pointing to what Judith Butler calls the “psychic life of power.” The revolutionary subjectivity emerges through “a turning back upon oneself.” “A subject turned against itself (its desire),” Butler suggests, appears “to be a condition of the per­sis­tence of the subject.”39 A ­wholehearted commitment to the po­liti­cal requires subjecting ­e very private, nonrevolutionary moment to self-­ surveillance, thus constantly objectifying one’s own consciousness for analy­sis. Xijian’s staunch comrade Wang Zhenwu warns him that ­these moments are “minor . . . ​but they have every­thing to do with ‘consciousness.’ ”40 Subjecting oneself to such a consciousness cannot, as Butler shows, “be conceptualized as a self-­restriction . . . ​a turning back upon itself performed by a ready-­made subject. Instead, it designates a kind of turning back—­a reflexivity—­which constitutes the condition of possibility for the subject to form.”41 The willingness and ability to perform self-­examination are crucial to the production of a revolutionary subjectivity. The splitting of the self, with one part set against the other, becomes the precondition for its emergence. The act of voluntarily self-­policing, therefore, si­mul­ta­neously subordinates and forms the subject—­a double valence of subjection. This

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pro­cess of subjection results in a constant engagement with what one should not feel and think. Such a mechanism of regulation and production, in Butler’s words, presses the subject into “a permanent posture of negative narcissism.”42 Embracing revolutionary subjectivity means that Xijian needs to always turn back to himself to stay “sober and alert” (qingxing er jing jue 清醒而警覺).43 This is especially impor­tant in private moments when no one but Xijian’s own conscience is watching. Right before he joins the revolutionary masses, the true subject of the story to which my reading soon turns, Xijian enjoys a relaxing night stroll ­under a starry summer sky. It is so quiet that he can hear the sound his shoes make on the paved ground. “But this,” he analyzes to himself, “is a plea­sure of leisure that only the petit bourgeoisie could have.”44 Xijian’s internal monologue shows that he has become both the object of ideological scrutiny and its agent. His nighttime stroll brings to mind another famous solitary rambler, the narcissistic first-­person hero in the story “Chunfeng chenzui de wanshang” 春風沉醉的晚上 (One Intoxicating Eve­ning of Spring Breeze) by Yu Dafu 郁達夫 (1896–1945), the arch-­romantic of the May Fourth generation. Jobless, sick, and poor, Yu’s protagonist stays at a shabby Shanghai inn. Translating foreign poems and stories for a living, he spends w ­ hole days inside his “birdcage,” only leaving in the darkness of the night: “Strolling along, u ­ nder the narrow strip of deep blue sky, I gazed at the stars, while I entertained boundless, fantastic ideas . . . ​I often roamed u ­ ntil it was nearly dawn before I went back.”45 Yu’s nighttime stroller conjures up the quin­tes­sen­ tial romantic version of self, poignantly described by Leo Ou-­fan Lee as “a frail and lonely genius, frequently ill and melancholic, dissipating his life and talent in a society which alienates him.”46 To avoid sinking into an abyss of self-­pity, melancholy, and remorse, Yu’s hero resorts to wandering in the darkness for a few hours of solitude, ­free from reminders of his social alienation and exclusion. In contrast, Hu Yepin’s protagonist must remain vigilant to guard against the intoxications of physical and spiritual relaxation. Even small pleasures lose their innocence when the imperative of “taking the revolution inside” puts individual consciousness ­under constant scrutiny. This conscious ideological judgment about everyday life, Xijian’s “homework,” is central to the po­liti­cal proj­ect of creating revolutionary subjects.47



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Xijian’s ideologization of mundane pleasures stands both in closer relation with, and in contrast to, the descriptions of aesthetic relaxation in Ding Ling’s Shanghai, Spring 1930. For one ­thing, both authors expose the po­liti­cal activist’s vulnerability to physical plea­sure. The first segment of Ding’s novella contains an early morning scene in which Ruoquan, a mentor figure who brings the heroine to her po­liti­cal awakening, “unbuttoned his suit jacket, inhaled deeply, and felt refreshed” by a “verdant carpet of grass” in Shanghai’s lush Zhaofeng Park.48 Xiaobing Tang suggests that Ding Ling includes this instance of enjoyment and plea­sure to capture “a private moment before [Ruoquan] assumes his po­liti­cal identity and activity.”49 This scene stands in stark contrast to Hu’s novella, where moments of private solitude need to be watched and judged so that ­there is no spatiotemporal exterior to the command of revolution. Ding Ling’s character forgets—as Wang Zhenwu would say—­that not every­ one has eyes for a nice lawn of grass. The possibility of aesthetic relaxation itself has to be subjected to self-­reflective analy­sis. When asked by Zhenwu what he was d ­ oing standing in front of Central Park, Xijian, trying to hide the fact that he just had a romantic date with Bai Hua, answers, “Taking in the scenery (kan feng jing 看風景).” “What a refined plea­sure, indeed,” replies Zhenwu. “For me, e­ very day I only know to move my hands and mouth. I have never used my eyes for scenery.”50 Zhenwu, nicknamed “Printer” for his inexhaustible passion for revolutionary propaganda work, seems to suggest that the visibility of feng jing (landscape or scenery) to Xijian indicates an issue more serious than managing one’s time and energy or turning personal indulgence into socially meaningful work. Printer, the unassuming theoretician, agrees with Karatani Kōjin’s insight that “it is only within the ‘inner man,’ who appears to be indifferent to his external surroundings, that landscape is discovered.”51 In other words, the visibility of feng jing is predicated on the introjection of an introverted and solitary self, which is problematic considering the protagonist’s po­liti­cal aspirations. Hu’s text suggests that both the ideologization of the everyday and internalized surveillance prepare Xijian for a new sense of self. As the ­bearer of a “historical mission,” he “must hasten the pro­cession of history” and become “a member of the construction crew for the new era in which he is destined to live.”52 Xijian’s self-­assertion echoes Mao

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Dun’s earlier call for intellectuals to hasten the realization of “historical inevitability.”53 He also invokes, not unlike Mei in Mao Dun’s Rainbow, the centrality of subjection to the formation of po­liti­cal subjectivity: Hu’s protagonist wants to “give every­thing to his ‘belief’ the same way a saintly virgin from Eu­rope gives every­thing to the Virgin Mary.”54 Xi­ jian’s self-­denial may reference an stark purity, but his pledge of austerity, as we see, cannot escape being disrupted by his own desiring mind. The reconciliation of self-­fulfillment and po­liti­cal commitment requires a new mode of intimacy. It is telling that the crowd emerges as a m ­ ental image only a­ fter Xijian’s consecration to the revolutionary ideal of the self. ­A fter contemplating the historical task ahead of him, Xijian begins to daydream. Noises outside recede into silence and give way to the thundering cry of the ­people: The crowd charges to the front. . . . ​The space is rioting. Villages are rioting. Forests and fields are rioting too. . . . ​Every­thing on earth collapses. The w ­ hole world spins rapidly like a windmill.

This moment of apocalypse, however, is also one of beginning: “A new era quickly unfolds, like a beautiful summer sun beaming with glorious colors from the distant horizon, its sharp light shining upon the w ­ hole world, shining upon the colonies, shining upon the fighting crowd, shining in front of Liu Xijian’s eyes.”55 In the midst of the agitated crowd, he sees Bai Hua ­running ­toward him. He shakes Bai’s hands and says to her, “We are comrades.”56 As Xijian confers this symbolic identity on Bai Hua and himself, he hears words echoing his own. He cannot tell w ­ hether they are from Bai Hua or are a reverberation of his own proclamation ­until he opens his eyes and realizes that he has been talking with Zhenwu instead. Having intruded on this dream, Zhenwu steps between Xijian and the object of his desire. The mistaken conferring of the symbolic title “comrade” by the fantasizing Xijian on an imaginary Bai Hua and the appearance of the ever-­ vigilant Zhenwu produce more than just a comic effect. This scene depicts



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an ideological fantasy through which Xijian learns how to desire. His daydreaming thinly shrouds his heteroerotic desires in communist comradeship. The timely appearance of Zhenwu, which both ends and inadvertently blesses Xijian’s daydreaming, tempts us to read the scene as more than an imaginary scenario in which his inner desire is realized u ­ nder a cloak of disguise. ­After a series of inner re­orientations, Xijian has learned how to desire as Zhenwu. The dreamscape “provides the co-­ordinates” of his desire and “constructs the frame enabling” him to desire.57 Xijian watches Bai Hua come forward with the surging crowd—­twin objects of his erotic-­ political fantasy—­and run ­toward him. Through this mise-­en-­scène of desire where she becomes part of the revolutionary crowd, Bai Hua assumes a legitimate form of desirability.58 This form of desirability that is permeated mutually by erotic and po­ liti­cal passions is the central theme of the second half of The Light Is Ahead of Us. Hu Yepin turns his narrative attention from the private life and longings of his protagonist to the chronotope of historical change. The crowd takes center stage both inside and outside Xijian’s imagination. If Hu’s once-­celebrated story is still of interest to us, it is not ­because of its formulaic depiction of the revolutionary crowd, but b­ ecause it exposes, prob­ably contrary to Hu’s own intention, the illusoriness of this ideologically charged figure and its inseparability from a desire-­ridden self that beholds it. The roaring crowd that Xijian encounters becomes indistinguishable from his own m ­ ental image of it and therefore increasingly takes on a spectral form. As we saw in the previous chapter, Ni Huanzhi expresses surprise at discovering the May Thirtieth crowd on Shanghai’s streets in Ye Shaojun’s novel. Unlike Huanzhi, Xijian has rehearsed the revolutionary tide many times in his fantasies or in what Hu Yepin terms his “thought waves” (sixiang de bolang 思想的波浪). In his imaginings the ­people of Shanghai and Beijing riot like a fierce gale and roar like a lion: “­These splashes spatter more and more and fi­nally penetrate his brain cells as if they had turned into vari­ous keen microbes.”59 Then Xijian’s dream becomes real­ity. The w ­ hole city is rioting. Crowds occupy ­every open space, “converging and massing in turmoil, as if a hysterical epidemic has broken out on earth, infecting every­one who is usually quiet.”60 At the heart of Hu Yepin’s depiction are the psychopathological tropes of hysteria (diankuang 癲狂), infection (chuanran 傳染), and

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epidemic (liuxing bing 流行病). With language that reminds us of Zhu Qianzhi’s theorization of p ­ eople in the revolutionary crowd as radical psychotics, Hu indulges in the story of an all-­encompassing “revolutionary madness” that dissolves the distinction between self and other and transmogrifies individuals into one agitated body. At the final mass rally, hundreds of thousands of p ­ eople gather in Tian­anmen Square to protest the May Thirtieth massacre: “Every­one explodes with madness and is at the same time agitated by the w ­ hole madness, whirling in this mad storm. They sing, cry, and riot. All of their bodies melt together, turning into one man-­eating beast.”61 Xijian participates in and fuels this collective madness and is also the beholder of the hysterical spectacle. In protest against the imperialistic vio­lence perpetrated by British police and Japa­nese guards, p ­ eople, as if seized by “a red hysteria” (hongse de diankuang 紅色的癲狂), shed their clothes made of foreign materials and throw them into a big fire.62 Xijian stands in this “red zone,” surrounded by “layers and layers of crowds redder than fire”: The passion of the masses, like the glow of fire, illuminates him in an imposing manner . . . ​Liu Xijian’s mind has been completely taken over by the madness of the crowd. He cannot think of anything that can analyze this red aggregate. How can the climax of the crowd be mea­sured? Words fail in the face of all t­ hese frenzied actions. He has been ­under the power of this red craze all along.63

Xijian “becomes uncontrollably excited” in the vehement crowd. Where Ni Huanzhi’s self-­debasement provides him the aesthetic distance necessary to behold the revolutionary crowd as an overwhelming force, Xijian, in the ­middle of the crowd, has given himself up to it and been completely overtaken by its madness. For Huanzhi the self-­doubting intellectual, the erupting crowd embodies a new kind of knowledge that he is anxious to learn, whereas for Xijian the red aggregate is beyond analy­sis. The inability to analyze the crowd is a startling departure for a character who has been especially keen to reflect on and monitor his own consciousness, his desires, and anarchism. Where Huanzhi’s attempt to approach the crowd as an object of comprehension creates the very barrier between the intel-



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lectual and the masses that he wants to eliminate, Xijian finds his own mind collectivized. In this climactic scene, Hu Yepin pres­ents the crowd as an overwhelming field of contagious influences to which no one is immune, a situation that puts the intellectual in a new relationship to the pro­cess of collective emergence. The intellectual finds himself in the m ­ iddle of the “red zone,” not able to exercise his rational and reflective faculties, but only to surrender to the “red craze.” Just as the male protagonist in “Cadaver” turns out to be an anatomist unable to dissect a corpse, ­here Xijian becomes an intellectual who cannot analyze or mea­sure what he experiences. The hem of Bai Hua’s white skirt flutters in suspended moments of the revolutionary eruption. The movement of her body in the swelling crowd does not elude Xijian’s attention. Bai Hua, who is no longer an anarchist, tells Xijian that she is now only “one of the crowd.”64 “Once again, Liu Xijian caresses her with his eyes—­her hair, face, neck, and breasts, her w ­ hole body. This caress still gives him a rich sumptuous feeling, a sensuous satisfaction as if he had enjoyed a huge feast.”65 With such words as “once again” and “still,” Hu’s text refers to the earlier moment of transgression when Xijian had fantasized about Bai Hua’s naked body. Xijian’s per­sis­tent voyeurism seems to suggest that he is unable to escape the snare of romanticism that he, along with Hu Yepin’s generation of writers, attempts to transcend. The revisiting of Bai Hua’s feminine details and Xijian’s focus on her as an ele­ment of the uprising masses carry a risk for the overall rationale of Hu Yepin’s narrative. It threatens to cut up the collective body in which Xijian has so enthusiastically immersed himself and thus disrupt the ideological containment of private desires that a ­wholehearted commitment to the po­liti­cal requires. Xijian’s momentary lapse into fantasy at the very moment of collective emergence, therefore, may suggest that his self-­transformation is incomplete, highlighting a stubborn incongruity between personal passions and revolutionary zeal. But it would be unfair to say that Hu Yepin was unaware of this risk. In a self-­consciously blunt fashion, Hu turns the narration inward to forge congruity between the self and the revolutionary crowd. He lets his male character take plea­sure “once again” in his eroticizing imagination—­this time in the very ­middle of the crowd. What was previously described as

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an unsettling experience—­a transgression via private desire—­now results in a sense of fulfillment. The conception that posits romance as the rival of po­liti­cal commitment was a mainstay in “love plus revolution” stories of the time.66 Hu’s The Light Is Ahead of Us, while working within this binary, is less fixated on disciplining the individual’s amorous tendencies than on imagining a way to legitimize the conflation of romantic sensation and po­liti­cal excitement. This becomes especially obvious when we compare The Light Is Ahead of Us with works of other left-­wing writers. Take Ding Ling’s Shanghai, Spring 1930 for example. That story dramatizes the training of the male body mandated by a commitment to revolution.67 The young revolutionaries appear impervious to the charms of the female protagonist, suggesting a po­liti­cal subjectivity that does not locate personal/collective truth in amorous interiority or dyadic sexuality.68 In sharp contrast, Xijian remains defined by his amorous self. Wittingly or not, Hu’s The Light Is Ahead of Us affirms the centrality of the individual self to the pro­cess of collective po­liti­cal bonding. A longing for intimacy and self-­fulfillment motivates Hu’s writing. It suggests that the tension between desire and revolution, between individual interiority and collective exteriority can be solved through a new mode of intimacy that becomes pos­si­ble only through the mediation of the revolutionary crowd. Xijian and Bai Hua take part in the “red hysteria” of the crowd together. The “revolutionary passion that can only be seen in the crowd” has completely transformed Bai Hua from an anarchist pipe dreamer into a communist warrior.69 It is in this context that Hu can pres­ent Xijian’s voy­eur­is­tic consumption of Bai Hua’s body as a moment of fulfillment rather than transgression, thereby resolving the antagonism between the desire for love and the desire for revolutionary politics around which the story is constructed. For the communist writer Hu Yepin, the ecstatic moment of collective hysteria is opposed to the amorous indulgence and private relaxation that one learns to guard against through techniques of self-­inspection. To be overtaken by the energy of the collective, however, does not equate with self-­denial. Surrendering to collective passion does not abolish the private self, but rather is a key moment in the self-­forming pro­cess whereby one transforms into a revolutionary subject. Hu is at his most ideologically fanciful not when he constructs the distinction between the individual and the collective, between po­liti­cal commitment and hidden desires, but



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rather when he brazenly traverses a boundary that he has painstakingly drawn to allow his protagonist to indulge in his desire right in the ­middle of the red zone. Hu pres­ents Liu Xijian as a bundle of erotic and po­liti­cal desires. He plots the moves of his ambitious protagonist not simply in a succession of dif­fer­ent scenarios, but rather portrays his pursuit of ­those desires as a sense-­making pro­cess that results in self-­realization. Hu emphasizes the importance of internalized self-­surveillance in the formation of revolutionary subjectivity, which ­frees Xijian’s mind for the po­liti­cal tasks at hand—­writing manifestos, attending secret meetings, and giving agitation speeches. Only in the very moment of po­liti­cal denouement, as Xijian is absorbed into the crowd, do his desires become legitimate. In the midst of a burst of energy the revolutionary protagonist is afire with enthusiasm for both a “white female body” and the collective body of the masses. The coexistence of Xijian’s amorous mind with the heroic form of the erupting crowd in this text lays bare the inexorable relation between Hu’s vision of the po­liti­cal and the economy of desire. The affinity of eros and polis works not only as a narrative theme but also as the narrative motor that moves Hu Yepin’s novella t­oward its moment of revolutionary fulfillment. Despite his depiction of the male protagonist’s dream work and his emphasis on the erotic-­political relationship between individuals in mass uprisings, Hu Yepin’s imagining of the crowd does not follow Freudian theory.70 According to Freud, individuals of a group are welded together through their common love for the leader as the shared object of identification in place of their ego ideals.71 But none of the characters in Hu’s story serves as a point of libidinal-­political bonding that gives unity to the collective. No one individual incarnates the crowd. Instead, the members of the crowd of their own inclination melt together into the “man-­ eating beast.” The Light Is Ahead of Us puts individual passions at the center of collective emergence, but it does so, in contrast to ­later socialist realist works, without resorting to a leadership figure t­ oward which a hetero-­or homoerotic desire is directed. It is thus a story not about the primacy of the leader or the genesis of authority, but rather the excitement and gratification of communal convergence. Pained by the internal combustion of his instinctive urges, Xijian experiences the eruption of the crowd as a force of g­ reat heat and explosive

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vapor that sweeps him along to the erotic imagination that he had self-­ corrected for earlier. Mediated by the pulsating energy and movement of the collective body, the emotional connection between him and Bai Hua becomes unobstructed and seems intrinsically linked to the revolutionary upheaval itself. ­A fter the crowd disperses, they take a pleasant walk ­under a starry summer sky that closely mirrors the “petit bourgeois” nighttime stroll Xijian had enjoyed earlier. But no longer solitary individuals, they are now comrade revolutionaries: “They could hear each other’s footsteps; they could hear the sound of each other’s breathing and the movement in each other’s body in the deep, s­ilent night . . . ​They talk quietly, but they could hear that the ­whole universe was filled with the sound of their conversation, as if the night ­were a clean and clear sea filled with their free-­ swimming thoughts.”72 Their new intimacy seems to directly extend from the revolutionary moment. Their thoughts, “like two mighty currents,” mingle together just as the crowd converged “like unbroken rivers flowing into the same ocean.”73 In this novella, Hu Yepin fantasizes an unmediated solidarity of the crowd, in which ­people share a passionate madness as if they ­were infected with the same hysteria. The quiet moment that Xijian and Bai Hua enjoy is not the opposite of the collective craze, but rather a continuation of the revolutionary pro­cess of opening up and melting together private, individual selves. ­Here we reach the heart of Hu Yepin’s vision of collective formation: enjoyment. As we saw earlier in Mao Dun’s Rainbow and Ye Shaojun’s Ni Huanzhi, the crowd has an intensely physical presence. In The Light Is Ahead of Us, in contrast, the crowd explodes with an effervescent and infectious energy, as Hu Yepin puts it, like as “an ancient Spanish dance party.”74 ­There is prob­ably no better imagistic description of the revolutionary upheaval than this image that not only fantasizes the seductive power of the crowd but also fixates on its festive surface. The crowd is marked not by a hidden depth, but rather by its lack of an introverted interiority. For Hu Yepin and his characters the crowd has to be more than a point of ideological identification or an object of po­liti­cal interpellation—it must be, to borrow from Slavoj Žižek, nothing less than “Enjoyment incarnated.” Žižek refutes the deconstructionist understanding of po­liti­c al bonding as “a contingent discursive construction, an overdetermined result of textual practices.” He argues that such a view overlooks the “real, nondiscursive kernel of enjoyment”—­not analyzable by words, as Xijian would say—­for a po­liti­cal entity such as the nation to



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“achieve its ontological constituency.”75 It is the shared connection through this enjoyment that privileges individuals to undergo a collective experience of the real. What holds together the individuals in a crowd cannot be reduced to shared beliefs or outrage; nor does the “red aggregate” simply emerge as a result of ideological indoctrination or textual persuasion. The narrative leap from nationalist shame and indignation to the joyful spectacle of a mass dance reveals enjoyment as the kernel of group feeling. Through a mechanism more enthralling than indoctrination or persuasion, the new self is absorbed into the upsurge of optimism and fellow feeling by the physical vibration of the collective body that he experiences. This is the crucial difference between the communist writer Hu ­Yepin and such realist writers as Ye Shengtao and Mao Dun whom I discussed in the previous chapter. Hu’s imagining of the collective emergence as a festival gathering anticipates the depiction of the “formation of the community as a pleas­ur­able ­whole” that became, as Ban Wang has convincingly demonstrated, a staple feature of communist culture in the 1950s.76 ­Little won­der that Hu Yepin’s “red aggregate,” rather than Ye Shengtao’s fearful figure of the tidal crowd or Mao Dun’s “dense black mass,” came to resonate with the official discourse in the Mao era. As Jason McGrath points out, during the Mao era enjoyment became “a superego imperative,” and the message “Communists have more fun!” was the central tenet of mass cultural productions.77 In 1958, The Light Is Ahead of Us was reprinted as part of a literary series that sought to fire up “every­ one’s passion for building a socialist new life.”78 The alignment of Hu’s fantasy of plea­sure with the official discourse of enjoyment explains why the erotic parts of Hu’s novella, deemed inappropriate and thus deleted from a 1998 edition of the postrevolutionary era, escaped censorship during the ­Great Leap Forward in the 1958 reprint.79

Conclusion The spectacular image of the erupting crowd brings to a climax both Hu Yepin’s The Light Is Ahead of Us and his writing ­career, which was cut tragically short by the GMD secret police. Hu, along with Yin Fu and three other young communist writers—­together known as “Five martyrs

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of the Left League”—­were executed at Longhua Prison in Shanghai on February 7, 1931. Produced not in the high tide of revolution but rather during its low ebb, Hu’s triumphant, optimistic narrative of revolutionary zeal has been ridiculed for its “revolutionary infantilism.”80 Its naïve disregard of real po­liti­cal obstacles, however, brings to the fore the intense desire for po­liti­cal engagement that animates the narrative movement of Hu’s ideological fantasy. Rather than dismissing the novella as an exercise in communist idealism or a testament to Hu Yepin’s po­liti­cal naïvety, this chapter has attended to the complexities of the story and its relation to Hu’s early work to underscore the complicated relationship between the exercise of the self and the ideals of po­liti­cal belonging that lie at the core of mass po­liti­cal culture in modern China. Hu’s imaginary journey from perverse isolation to mass uprising vividly demonstrates a pro­cess of subject formation in which one’s experience of the revolutionary crowd is inextricably bound up with how one understands, judges, and conducts oneself. Hu Yepin insisted on a f­ uture for the revolution when the a­ ctual revolution was suffering setbacks. The crowd arose energetically on paper while it was notably absent in the street. The “red craze,” as Tsi-an Hsia remarked, existed in Hu’s “heated brain rather than in real­ity.”81 The absence of the p ­ eople Hu i­ magined returns us to one of the central modern prob­lems faced by artists on the Left: the invention of “a p ­ eople to come.”82 A critique of Hu’s work based solely on its lack of referential validity would miss how much the very belief of the connection between lit­er­a­ture and revolution ­shaped his and o­ thers’ work. The young generation of left-­wing writers created and engaged with what Marián Gálik has termed a “modern mythopoeia”: “Its goal is new lit­er­a­ture, and a new life as its logical sequence.”83 Theodore Huters further points out that the realist imperative of making pres­ent what is absent through lit­er­a­ture is intrinsically linked to the rise of modern mass politics: realist lit­er­a­ture and revolutionary practice shared “an ideal of the powers of repre­sen­ta­tion to bring ­imagined worlds into existence.”84 Hu Yepin was convinced that lit­er­a­ ture is an impor­tant medium for activating a revolutionary experience rather than merely documenting real­ity. For Hu and other revolutionary writers, the realist effect did not hinge on “an impossible fidelity to a sociohistorical referent but [rather upon] a successful activation of the pro­cess by which sociohistorical collectivities make language appear ref-



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erential.”85 It is in this sense that Hu’s novella is a per­for­mance of history that articulates the presence of a fervent revolutionary crowd despite its absence. Hu’s depiction of the infectious excitement of the passionate crowd captures the enduring desire among many intellectuals to embrace collective emergence as transformative experience. During the period of the War of Re­sis­tance against Japan (1937–45), that desire took on more urgency and emotional weight, as illustrated by Ai Qing’s poem, “Xiang taiyang” 向太陽 (­Toward the Sun). Written in 1938, “­Toward the Sun” was inspired by Ai Qing’s experience of the patriotic mass rallies in Wuhan, the de facto capital of China at the time (­after the fall of Nanjing in December 1937), during the re­sis­tance to Japa­nese attacks. Awakened by the first rays of sunlight, a “drowsy . . . ​injured beast” that is Ai Qing’s poetic persona rushes outside and becomes animated by the excitement of the crowd in the street, Bewitched by this newborn day I relish the distant bugle call from beyond the city in the early morning I relish the push and shove of the busy crowd I relish the sound of gongs and drums that pass along the street I relish the spectacle of the circus troupe And when I see t­ hose primeval, crude, but ­wholesome turns I begin to relish them deeply —­Just as deeply as I relish the sun

Transformed by this “magical encounter” (qiyu 奇遇) with the crowd, Ai Qing’s “I” is no longer a solitary traveler “locked in the prison of [his] mind,” but rather a bewitched ( guhuo 蠱惑) observer of a public spectacle.86 In this moment of collective enjoyment, the poetic self is captivated as much by the sound of gongs and drums accompanying the marching songs and collective chanting as by the intensity of the crowd. Ai Qing’s likening of the crowd’s movement to the “primeval, crude, but ­wholesome turns” ( yuanshi de, cubao de, jiankang de yundong 原始的, 粗暴的, 健康的 運動) of circus acrobats resonates with Hu Yepin’s depiction of the surging crowd as “an ancient Spanish dance party.” Encountering the crowd, as both Ai and Hu suggest, is an exhilarating experience of sonic and

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bodily intensity; the raw vitality of communal excitement f­ rees the intellectual self from the prison of one’s own mind. The unfettered presence of the throbbing crowd, with its strength, motion, and noises, appears to the poet more invigorating and no less absorbing than what it represents.87 “­Toward the Sun” captures more than what the historian Stephen Mackinnon has called the “romantic atmosphere of the Wuhan moment,” an atmosphere charged with heroism and desperate hopes in the midst of a national crisis.88 It also responds directly to the proliferation of mass-­ singing per­for­mances in the public spaces of Wuhan and many major cities as a means of mass mobilization during the war­time years.89 Central to this work of passionate lyricism is “the sound of the crowd singing” (qunzhong de gesheng 羣眾的歌聲) trope and its relation to the poet’s own voice. The next chapter examines writers’ i­ magined relationship with the voice of the crowd, which anchored how they claimed the authority to tell the story of China in revolution.

chapter 5 Torrents of Sound The sleeping insects turning underground The crowd talking loudly in the squares —A i Qing, “Guangchang” 廣場 (The Square), 1937

­T

here was no escaping the thunder of the crowd. Its cries became a clichéd trope for collective agency and identity almost as soon as the insurgent crowd began circulating as a dominant image for the modern body politic in the first de­cades of twentieth-­century China. As we saw in previous chapters, its roar is dramatically conveyed in the works of Ye Shaojun, Mao Dun, and Hu Yepin. In Yin Fu’s poem a g­ reat mass (daqun) of demonstrators rush forth like “torrents of sound” (shengyin de hongliu 声音的洪流).1 The loss of the ability to speak reflects a loss of in­de­pen­dent ­will. Thus, in Ni Huanzhi, when the hypnotized crowd regresses to an infantile stage of imitation, its voice is reduced to senseless sounds—­“Ah! . . . ​A h! . . . ​A h!” Such vocal noises, like “the gush of the open gullet,” observes Steven Connor in his remarkable study of vocalizations beyond words, seem only to “mimic the orb of the mouth.”2 The meaningful voice, in contrast, provides the source of an utterance “with acoustic per­sis­tence,” making it “a vocal agent, as a producer of signs and sounds.”3 The association of voice with agency and interiority is central to the modern conception of subjectivity. In twentieth-­century China, the voice as a master meta­phor for consciousness and vitality per­sis­tently informed vari­ous cultural and po­liti­cal movements that aimed to recover and rejuvenate both the individual and collective subjectivity.4 Therefore it is hardly surprising that, in the literary texts we have studied,

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for qunzhong to be a source of agency and meaning, it must have an audible and distinct voice. But its emergence as an enunciating subject hinges on repre­sen­ta­tional techniques that capture and authenticate its voice. The popu­lar voices that reach us are always hybrids and mediations.5 The booming roar of the crowd comes to us not only from a ­great historical distance but also through the screen of the repre­sen­ta­tional machinery put in place by ­those who claim themselves to be listeners, transcribers, or even just ­humble recorders. They insist on their role in relaying the voice of the ­people. To hear the crowd, one has to read their reports. Ventriloquism as a form of making voices was at the core of modern Chinese intellectuals’ self-­authorization as cultural and po­liti­c al vanguards who not only speak about and to the crowd but also speak for it, in its place and in its name.6 In this chapter I study modern Chinese writers’ imaginings of the popu­lar voice and tackle the paradox of voicing/silencing that lurks at the heart of their constructions. Their invocation of the crowd belongs to what Michel de Certeau has called “quotations of voices,” scriptural operations that attempt to “write the voice.” This type of hermeneutics of speech includes more than crowd psy­chol­ogy that, as discussed earlier, identifies the unconscious qunzhong “with a speech that ‘does not know’ what it says” and therefore calls for interpretation and treatment. It also includes the left-­wing invocation of the voice of the oppressed, which aims to introduce into authorized language speech that has been muted.7 As de Certeau points out, common to both forms of textual practice is a trick: The crowd psychologists and writers claim that, rather than imposing a voice on the crowd, it is the crowd’s voice, inaudible without their quotation or scholarly exegesis, that makes them write. “It is the inaccessibility of [their] ‘object’ that makes [them] produce.”8 If inaccessibility necessitates operations through which intellectuals allegedly make audible the au­then­tic voice of the crowd, then on what grounds could they claim special access to that voice? Whereas crowd psychologists resorted to the specialized language of modern h ­ uman sciences, left-­wing cultural workers came to justify their versions by identifying with the object of repre­sen­ta­tion and, more crucially, by presenting themselves as a transparent channel through which sounds of the crowd not only become



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audible but also can be returned back to the crowd with intelligible meaning. By writing the popu­lar voice into their texts, Chinese writers embraced the internationalist aesthetic ideology of leftist modernism, the goal of which was, in Russell A. Berman’s words, “a vocalization of the collective.” Early twentieth-­century leftist intellectuals, across continents, conceived of lit­er­a­ture as a medium through which the oppressed and hitherto muted could come to have voice.9 The voicing of the crowd also emerged as part of what Ann Anagnost has termed the “history of presencing” in modern China: The collective subject of the nation destined to realize its agency and yet “not immediately pres­ent to experience” has to be made pres­ent through cultural production and revolutionary practice. The speaking out of the crowd, in discourses and practices, stands in a metonymic relationship with the coming-­to-­voice, and therefore coming-­to-­consciousness, of larger transcendental entities, such as society, class, and “the ­people.”10 Rather than trying to locate or reconstruct a spontaneous, au­then­tic voice of the crowd, I examine the i­magined scenarios and conceptual pretexts by which intellectuals allegedly made such a voice audible. I do not focus on the referential content of the reported voice, nor do I privilege it as an expression of preexisting identities or a reflection of specific socio­ po­liti­cal conditions. Instead, in this chapter I explore a series of moments when the voicing of the crowd comes into question in the first place or takes on dif­fer­ent forms. This exploration w ­ ill bring us to the heart of the questions surrounding the crowd and its spokespersons, its voice and repre­sen­ta­tion, and language and power. The heard crowd as a recurrent literary theme hinges on the meta­phorization of voice as the ground of subjectivity, and on the vari­ous scriptural operations that constitute—­ rather than merely hearing and citing—­the vox populi. The legitimacy of the written came from the voice that it referred to, whereas its condition of possibility was marked by the alleged inarticulateness of that voice. By laying out how the ­imagined voice of the crowd authorized writers’ repre­sen­ ta­tions, as that voice came into being in the act of their writing, this chapter is as interested in interrogating the modern fetishization of voice as a vehicle of agency as it is in challenging the impossible grounds of repre­sen­ta­ tional authority at the core of vari­ous narratives of modern China.11

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Voicing the Crowd A 1928 poem published in the left-­wing radical journal Taiyang yuekan 太陽月刊 (Sun Monthly) attempts to bring the roar of the crowd into the frontiers of the text. In d ­ oing so, the poem reveals the ambiguity between vocal appropriation and voicing “the real t­ hing”: We are the God of Destruction! We are the Master of Creation! We are the f­ ather of the God! The rebellious specter gives a thunderous cry, And thousands of millions of p ­ eople echo. . . . . . . ​ A star stands out from the inky sky, Shining on the rebellious specter; With sickle and sharp ax hanging at his waist, A torch and a flag in his hands, He stands in front of all crowds, Trumpeting their cry.

The specter roams the country, “filling the fields and factories with coarse furious shouts”; the deafening reverberations of the crowd make “the rich ­tremble on their collapsing thrones.” From the phantom voice of the specter rises the thunder of the resounding crowd: “We are the mobs rising against this bourgeois regime/We are the executioners destroying this deviant society!”12 The poem is as much an unabashed call for class strug­gle as a drama of voice. It proclaims an i­magined authority to give voice to the masses, an authority grounded in the scenario of continual reiteration. The poet Xunlei 迅雷 starts with the rebellious spirit’s elicitation of the crowd’s vocal imitations and ends with it “shouting out their cry.” The circular form of the poem makes the collective voice seem au­then­tic as much as it attests to its indeterminable origin and thus exposes, wittingly or unwittingly, its spectral nature. Xunlei’s poem pres­ents a kind of ontology of the crowd’s voice—he dramatizes the generation of that voice by establishing a vocal tie between qunzhong and the rebellious specter, a fig-



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ure of the po­liti­cal vanguard. One voice gives rise to another, and we know in whose name the circulated voice speaks. But who exactly is speaking? Or more importantly, who is authorizing whom to speak? Xunlei’s poem captures the widespread desire among left-­wing writers to overcome the gap between the intellectual self and its social other through an imaginary projection of the ­people’s voice, the ­people’s ­will. Furthermore, it reveals how authenticity and meditation are implicated in such vocal projection: An i­magined au­then­tic popu­lar voice becomes audible and enters into textual circulation only through the ventriloquism of a vanguard figure. The voice of the crowd emerges as such through mediation; that is, through the specter that, as the crowd’s mouthpiece, reproduces its voice. The tension in this situation can be resolved only when the specter is not the source of a subjective utterance, but rather is a transparent channel. In her critique of leftist intellectuals’ “unquestioned valorization of the oppressed as subject,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak characterizes the pro­cess of giving voice to the oppressed as a “relay race” in which the ­intellectuals “become transparent . . . ​for they merely report on the nonrepresented Subject.” Indeed, as she points out, “The ventriloquism of the speaking subaltern is the left intellectual’s stock-­in-­trade.”13 The Chinese intellectual’s desire for self-­effacement as a transparent medium was articulated in the trope of the phonograph, first invoked by Guo Moruo in 1928 and then ­adopted by many writers in the 1930s to pres­ent themselves as mechanical recorders of the age. Around the same time that Xunlei had his specter reproducing the cry of the crowd, Guo asked writers to become phonographs that “listen to the most fierce thundering in the depths of the earth, Gonnon—­Gonnon—­Gonnon and Baudon—­ Baudon—­Baudon,” and play it back loud.14 ­B ehind his injunction to become a device that stores data and transmits the sound of class strug­ gles lay a romantic desire for objectivity and self-­transcendence. “The sound emitted by a phonograph,” Guo explains, “comes from the objective world. If such a sound exists in the objective world, the phonograph stands by it, and then emits the same sound. It can only respond in this manner b­ ecause of its objectivity.”15 For Guo, to achieve this objectivity is more than a technological m ­ atter of recording and pro­cessing acoustic data. Taking inspiration from the phi­los­o­pher Zhuangzi’s idea of “losing the self ” (sangwo 丧我) and Arthur Schopenhauer’s notion of

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“pure objectivity,” Guo believed that to enter a purely aesthetic state, one needs to transcend individuality and attain a purely objective perception of the world. “The aestheticization of life” (sheng­huo de yishuhua 生活的 艺术化) requires transcending petit bourgeois subjectivism and grasping the external world objectively through a total negation of individuality and ­will.16 Guo Moruo cast his repudiation of subjective expression and call for the objective transcription of the sound of the ­people in the figures of the trumpet and phonograph, respectively: “­Don’t just blow your broken trumpets (bourgeois ideology). Become phonographs for a while!”17 By invoking the phonograph in his call for a new lit­er­a­ture, Guo, as Andrew Jones has noted, reformulates revolutionary writing as “a mechanical pro­ cess from which the ‘taint’ of the cultural producer’s bourgeois subjectivity is magically removed.”18 Guo’s distrust of the “trumpet” as a means of communication was shared by other prominent cultural figures of the time. In his 1929 short story “Nining” 泥濘 (Mud), Mao Dun, for instance, describes the disconnect between elites and commoners in a scene in which a young agitator for the peasant movement barks through a metal bullhorn to a cautious crowd of villa­gers; however, “the bullhorn blurted out sounds which w ­ ere like fantasy language; the p ­ eople with the sallow ­faces did not understand.”19 Qu Qiubai also used the technology of recording and transmitting as a meta­phor for artistic creation. In a 1932 essay, Qu claims that “lit­er­a­ture serves always as po­liti­cal ‘phonograph’ . . . ​The stake is which class is the phonograph made for, and ­whether it is well made or not.”20 Whereas amplifiers such as trumpets or bullhorns could only make a certain “fantasy language” louder in the open air, the phonograph was viewed as a neutral technology that captures and transposes auditory data, rather than merely amplifying the speaker’s own subjective voice.21 But the invocation of a device that objectively reproduces the thunder from below was caught in the very paradox of mediation it aspired to overcome: The trumping of subjective repre­sen­ta­tion was only pos­si­ble with the imposition of another layer of mediation. This objectivist aesthetic conceived the intellectual self as a medium in an age of emerging optical and acoustic media technologies. To become a phonograph was to become what Connor calls “the modern auditory I,” “a self imaged not as a point, but as a membrane . . . ​as a



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channel through which voices, noises and ­musics travel.”22 This auditory subject emerged at a time when “delay, storage, and dissemination that had previously been reserved for less ephemeral modes of communication” had become pos­si­ble for speech and other ­human utterances.23 The phonographic capture of voice both as a technology of sound reproduction and as a trope for artistic production became central to what is audible in modern arts. Many modern writers and artists in the first half of the twentieth ­century, sound historian Douglas Kahn notes, exhibited an inclination to “internalize the attributes of phonography.”24 For ­those who saw themselves as the organic spokespersons of the time, the phonograph provided a con­ve­nient trope with which they could efface, yet at the same time magnify, their limited role by presenting themselves as transparent—­hence the produced transparency of the intellectuals, as Spivak calls it.25 During the War of Re­sis­tance against Japan, many Chinese writers shared an eagerness to become a faithful recorder of the time; they insisted on relaying the voice of the ­people in order to arouse rage, hope, and patriotism in their readers. Poet Ren Jun 任鈞 (1909–2003), for instance, resorted to the figure of the “I-­phonograph” when he claimed that his voice represented the masses’ own utterances. In the verse preface to his war­time poems, Ren Jun asserts, “I sing—­/I am a phonograph!/I anger, I rejoice,/But this is not me,/but the masses themselves!”26 Only by being a “phonograph for the masses” could the poet be their “spokesperson” (daiyanren 代言人) and “defender” (bianhushi 辯護士).27 The poet sings so that the masses could be heard. But the poet does so not as someone who lends a voice to the inarticulate masses; rather, b­ ecause the bard-­ phonograph is merely a sound storage and transmission medium, the masses are the true enunciating subjects of his singing. According to this logic, the poet’s first-­person voice is but an acoustic effect of the voice of the p ­ eople, which comes to us through a mechanical and nonsubjective pro­cess. The under­lying fantasy is what Zhu Qianzhi has termed the spontaneous “consonance” between the intellectual and the crowd united by a vocal tie. But as Kahn points out, “phonography did not simply produce sounds or ideas about sounds but produced audibility.”28 The ­I-­phonograph does not simply rec­ord, broadcast, or amplify the voice of the masses. It makes the masses audible in the first place, which in return justifies that mediation. As Ren Jun’s poem illustrates, the valorization

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of the masses as a speaking subject ultimately accords the intellectuals themselves a necessary and legitimate place in the creation of a vocal modern China. Poets like Ren Jun and Guo Moruo appointed themselves as necessary mouthpieces of the masses and engaged in the paradox of producing an i­magined collective voice through their first-­person voices while si­mul­ta­neously positioning themselves as listeners, as intermediaries. If the poetic voice does not belong to the poet but rather passes through him, and if this act of voicing does not make the poet the vocal agent but rather confirms his function as an open channel through which the sonorous sound of the masses travels, what happens to the poet’s speaking self when he hears this voice? Ai Qing, an acclaimed and highly popu­ lar poet during the War of Re­sis­tance period, is one of the few modern Chinese writers who tackled this question self-­reflexively. In his poem “Qunzhong” 羣眾 (The Crowd, 1940), Ai Qing’s imagination dwells on a poetic self that is astounded by the voices rushing out from his own vocal apparatus. He at once resorts to and poignantly questions the intellectual fantasy of speaking in the ­people’s voice. His journey during the years of the War of Re­sis­tance against Japan w ­ ill lead us from the Nationalist-­controlled hinterland to Yan’an, the communist base area in the northwest where the Communist Party began to monopolize access to the voice of the ­people.

The Poet Who Gasps Ai Qing was the son of a landlord. He studied painting in Paris from 1929 to 1932, returning to Shanghai, where he joined the League of Left-­Wing Artists in May 1932. In the late 1930s, Ai Qing’s “earthy and earthbound” poems, to borrow one commentator’s words, firmly established the young poet as one of the “most sincere and guileless” poets of modern China.29 The combination of his ­simple direct language, his attention to concrete physical details that eschew abstraction, and his tragic sense of pain and dignity compelled one early foreign complier of modern Chinese poetry to “ponder the brutality, power and honesty of the new poetry” produced in the interwar years.30 What distinguishes Ai Qing from his fellow left-



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ist poets, as David Der-­wei Wang points out in a recent study, is how his poetry oscillates between the pulls of revolutionary commitment and lyrical sensibility.31 Ai Qing’s early poems chronicle the transformation of his poetic persona from a compassionate documenter of the misery of northern Chinese peasants to a fascinated observer of the mobilized masses in the street. His first two collections, Dayanhe 大堰河 (Big Dike River, 1936) and Beifang 北方 (The North, 1939), reveal him to be an attentive listener who could hear the p ­ eople’s sorrow in the piercing squeal of the solitary wheel of a wheelbarrow, in the howling gale that sweeps over desolate hinterlands, and in the restless waves of the Yellow River turbulent with grief.32 But in the late 1930s, inspired by his experiences of war­time mass mobilizations, he took on a new voice, joining the victorious chorus of the anti-­imperialist masses. In such widely read and recited poems as “­Toward the Sun” (1938)—­which I cited in the previous chapter—­and “Huoba” 火把 (The Torch, 1940), Ai Qing’s poetic persona listens to the spirited crowds amassing in open spaces and singing in unison. But more significantly, he joins this vocal outpouring and fuses his own voice with that of the emerging collective subject—­“Look at us!/We are/Laughing like the sun!”33 In so ­doing he finds a new voice not only through quotation but also through speaking for national unity and rejuvenation in terms of an invigorated “we.” The famed May Fourth veteran Zhu Ziqing thought ­these poems represent a key achievement of Chinese war­time lit­er­a­ture: the “discovery of the masses” (dazhong de faxian 大眾的發現).34 It is worth noting that Ai Qing describes his own progression as a poet in terms of the dif­fer­ent sounds his poetic persona hears: Whereas in his early writing “­there has not been a day that I have not listened with stupefied ears to the unremitting groans of agony on this land,” by the late 1930s he entered a new phase by following “the sound of the crowd singing.”35 From the mournful cries of sorrow to the triumphant songs of collective energy, distinct sounds stood as sources of meaning that the poet attempted to capture at dif­fer­ent moments of his writing life. If the groans had made him a sympathetic witness to the ­people’s suffering, the mass singing called the poet to serve as both auditor and recorder. Like Ren Jun and many other cultural workers in war­time leftist circles, Ai Qing frequently relied on what Andrew Jones has termed “po­liti­cal ventriloquism” to capture the voice of a national collectivity.36 In a series

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of aphorisms written in 1939 on the spirit of poetry and the duties of the poet, Ai Qing asserts that the poet often served as “spokesperson for the crowd” (renqun de daiyanren 人羣的代言人), a conviction shared by many writers of the time.37 In a l­ater work, he expresses this idea in more concrete (anatomical) terms: “My windpipe (houguan 喉管) is not mine alone/ My windpipe belongs to the ­people.”38 Hence Hu Feng’s 胡風 (1902–85) comment: Ai Qing’s poems are always the “song of the self” singing what is “latent in the masses.”39 That a multitude of voices strives to rush out from the poet’s mouth and ­every voice calls for a hearing points to the intellectual’s self-­imaging as the p ­ eople’s medium. While most of Ai Qing’s leftist contemporaries ­were preoccupied with producing literary works as a means of po­liti­cal mobilization and discovering how best the voices in their writings might reach the masses, Ai Qing was fascinated with a dif­fer­ent prob­lem: that of the multivoiced self that hears itself speaking. His seminal work, “The Crowd,” stages a poet’s confrontation with a thunderous sound bursting from his own vocal organs. It brings into question the conflation of the “song of the self” and the voice of the masses. For the poet, this confrontation produces a liminal experience—an intensified awareness of the distinction between voicing and hearing and also the poet’s own radical transformation. “The Crowd” stands out not only in Ai Qing’s oeuvre but also in modern Chinese poetry generally. He found inspiration in the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren’s “La foule” (1899), which Ai Qing translated into Chinese in 1937. He was a faithful adherent of Verhaeren’s belief: “Put your strength in accord with the destinies that the crowd, without knowing, promulgates, in this night of illuminated anguish.”40 In his own verses, Ai turns Verhaeren’s fervent praise of the urban multitudes as “the synthesis of individual forces, the most prolific accumulation of passion” (Stefan Zweig’s words) into a remarkable dramatization of the vocal and physiological relation between the poet and the crowd.41 The poem begins with an explosion of sound: Electric waves whistle on the wires, in the quiet sky, Like two hands pressing upon ten or twenty piano keys. In my heart, too, are often dumbfounding sounds Vying to rush out and whistle across the sky.



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A drop of w ­ ater often makes me start and stare at it. Before me suddenly appears a boundless river. I have to merely open my mouth to find myself gasping, As if a million ­people are breathing through this small hole. When I feel with my fin­gers my own pulse, My heart is pounded by surging tides of blood. Their pains and desires are so intertwined with mine—­ When did their blood start to flow into my veins? 42

Ai Qing’s “I” reminds us of the mouthpiece figures discussed earlier. If Xunlei’s “rebellious specter” and Guo Moruo’s selfless “phonograph” captured the intellectuals’ radical self-­image as a medium between the ­people and itself, Ai Qing’s “I” reveals a similar desire to overcome the subjective distance between the self and the masses. The “small hole” of his mouth, likened to a drop of w ­ ater that suddenly and inexplicably turns into a mighty river, becomes the respiratory tube through which “a million ­people” breathe. This image also resonates with his earlier claim for the poet as “spokesperson for the crowd.” Yet, in contrast to Xunlei’s “specter” and Guo Moruo’s “phonograph” giving expression to the popu­lar voice (­either through its own enunciation or through a mechanical, nonsubjective pro­cessing), the lyric self in “The Crowd” is both captivated and dumbfounded by the forceful eruption of voices surging from the inside. Unlike Xunlei who assumes the rightful invocation of the popu­lar voice or Guo Moruo who advocates self-negation to enable objective transmission, Ai Qing dramatizes the strangeness of a poet’s hearing the crowd in whose voice he supposedly speaks. The crowd, breathing inside Ai Qing’s “I,” is no inarticulate subject waiting to be given voice by its intellectual other. Instead, the crowd’s auditory eruption is so forceful that it c­ auses the poet respiratory distress. Particularly shocking, beyond the disorienting and deafening effect of the voice that is like two hands si­mul­ta­neously “pressing upon ten or twenty piano keys,” is the degree of its immediacy and intensity: “I have to merely open my mouth to find myself gasping,” as if the roar of the inner crowd has taken his breath away. In this poem, the crowd is not mediated by the voice of an intellectual or captured by a sound reproduction device. Instead, it pulses forth

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to pres­ent itself through the intellectual body. The dissolved bodily bound­ aries between the intellectual and his social o­ thers create an intensified sense of intimacy. Rather than echoing a vanguard figure who speaks in its voice—as in Xunlei’s poem—­the crowd h ­ ere is i­ magined to usurp the poet’s own voice. Ai Qing’s “I” achieves, not without a sense of astonishment and disbelief, the yearned-­for transparency between self and the crowd: “Their pains and desires are so intertwined with mine” that “when I feel with my fin­gers my own pulse, my heart is pounded by surging tides of blood.” This incorporation of the crowd is so intimate that the poet cannot help but ask, “When did their blood start to flow into my veins?” No longer merely a sympathetic witness or a “bewitched” spectator (as in “­Toward the Sun”), Ai Qing’s “I” incorporates “them” into his very being, but is caught off guard by his own sudden awareness of a self that is multivoiced and pulses with the blood of the many. To understand the historical specificity and significance of Ai Qing’s striking image of a crowd within the poetic self, we need to go beyond the local backdrop of collective re­sis­tance to the invading Japa­nese. This poem should be examined in relation to the much broader radical imagination of entanglement between the popu­lar voice and the first-­person voice—­a subject that engrossed revolutionary poets across continents. Ai Qing identified with what he called the “demo­cratic” poets from the West, but not to the point of relaxing his critical sensibilities. Indeed, “The Crowd,” like other key texts examined in this book, came about at the conjuncture of dif­fer­ent contexts. Ai Qing maintained that, in addition to Verhaeren, his artistic creation was also inspired by Walt Whitman (1819–92) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930). He deeply admired both poets; in the same year in which he wrote “Qunzhong,” he also wrote a short poem that celebrates Mayakovsky as the “forever matchless spokesman of the new h ­ uman.”43 And in “­Toward the Sun,” Ai Qing praises Whitman: “With a breadth of mind as vast as the sea, he wrote poems as vast as the sea.”44 Ai Qing’s “Qunzhong” invites comparison with Whitman’s poetic depiction of the multitudinous self. Not only does Ai Qing’s “inner crowd” remind us of Whitman’s famous line, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” from “Song of Myself” but the “dumbfounding sounds” that rush out of Ai Qing’s “I” also resonate with the “thousand warbling echoes” that Whitman claims in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” to “have started to life within me.”45 In his



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study of Whitman’s poetic invocation of the masses, Jason Frank points out that the ­great poet of democracy denies any division between the popu­lar voice and his own. Whitman claims to “capture the sublimely polyphonic voice of the p ­ eople” through his own and to “sing the multitudinous diversity of the vox populi back to the ­people themselves.” His “I” is therefore “irreducibly populated with a vast multitudes of competing voices.” Speaking to and from within the crowd, Whitman fashions himself as an aesthetic mediator and locates the vox populi within the multitudinous self.46 That “a million ­people are breathing” through the mouth of Ai Qing’s “I” leads us to another Whitman admirer, Vladimir Mayakovsky. In the opening lines of the long poem “150,000,000” (1919–20), Mayakovsky declares, in his hyperbolic fashion: “Of this/my poem/no one is the author”: “150,000,000 is the name of the creator of this poem . . . ​ /150,000,000 speak with my lips.”47 Mayakovsky’s poem illustrates the collectivist ideal of solidarity that flourished in the emerging Soviet culture ­after October 1917.48 His flirtation with the “joyful effacement of individual authorship,” as Svetlana Boym points out in her study of this Rus­sian poet’s self-­fashioning, is predicated on the “unproblematized equation . . . ​between the voice of the first person and that of the 150,000,000.”49 Such an equation allows Mayakovsky to claim access to what his con­temporary Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) called “the pure action of verbal masses, bypassing the author’s personality.”50 Not unlike Whitman, Mayakovsky moves between the voice of an anonymous mass and the poet’s singular voice when he claims the ­people to be the author of his poem. Both poets boast of the multivoiced constitution of the radical poetic self. Whitman had influenced many Chinese poets since the May Fourth era, and translations of his poems w ­ ere enthusiastically welcomed by leftist writers in the late 1930s and 1940s.51 Mayakovsky, along with his image of 150,000,000 ­people speaking through his lips, was introduced to Chinese readers as early as 1930. The Rus­sian revolutionary poet committed suicide that year, and a commemorative essay published in the American weekly New Masses was translated into Chinese very soon ­after his death.52 My purpose h ­ ere is not to suggest a direct textual connection between Ai Qing’s “The Crowd” and the works of the two poets,53 but the conceptual resonance between them is striking. All three poets,

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along with other Chinese writers such as Xunlei, Guo Moruo, and Ren Jun, ­were preoccupied with the desire to overcome the limits of the individual self and speak for the larger community. In her study of the relation between the lyric self and the public in modern poetry, Clare Cavanagh has fittingly called this desire the dream of “writing en masse.”54 Ai Qing’s poetic imagination, like that of Whitman and Mayakovsky, was animated by the idea of a collective voice contained and expressed by an individual one. And yet, rather than stressing the unison between the ­people and its spokesperson, Ai Qing contrasted the striking image of a breathing crowd with that of the gasping poet astounded by what came out of his own mouth. He pondered the tension inherent in equating the intellectual’s voice with the popu­lar voice, an equation that writers like Mayakovsky ­were happy to proclaim. Whereas Whitman and Mayakovsky aspired to serve as an aesthetic mediator for the ­people, Ai Qing was fascinated by the idea of a power­ful mass voice uttered from the poet’s throat; at the same time he accentuated the tension between the collective utterance’s au­then­tic immediacy and the role of mediator that the poet assumes. The thunderous cry of the ­people is not to be “pro­cessed” as if by a phonograph, nor is it given aesthetic expression through the poet’s verbalization. Instead, the “dumbfounding sounds” of the crowd transgress any repre­sen­ta­tional constraints, “vying to rush out and whistle in the sky.” This voice is so vital and expressive that it leaves the poet panting for air. Unlike in Mayakovsky’s work, the effacement of individual authorship in “The Crowd” is done less as a disguise for self-­glorification than in response to the shocking revelation of the forceful arrival of a new era of collectivity and anonymity. This image of the poet laboring for breath stands in sharp and vexing contrast to the cosmic figure of the poet that emerges from Ai Qing’s theoretical writings. In Shi lun 詩論 (On Poetry), published shortly before he left Chongqing for Yan’an, Ai Qing conjures up a romantic image of the poet as hero and legislator. Believing that “­today’s poetry should be a bold thrust of the demo­cratic spirit,” he creates a heroic figure of the poet who gives voice to the p ­ eople—­“Prometheus stole fire and gave it to man; the poet stole the sort of language that outrages Zeus.” He makes the extravagant claim: “The creator fashioned mankind in his own image; the poet then in his own image fashioned the creator.”55 Ai Qing’s proposition about the relation of the poet to the masses is at its most cun-



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ning when he claims that, although often misunderstood, offered “the cold shoulder and the sneer,” or “targeted with stones” by the ­people (stock images of how an intellectual genius is an alienated loner persecuted by the insensible mob),56 the poet becomes a “spokesperson” b­ ecause the masses “keep believing in the god he creates for them.”57 Not only is the affinity between the poet and the p ­ eople marked by difference to be obliterated through the transaction of poetry but the very language of the popu­lar voice is also a poetic invention: The true poet is “a genius who intuitively observes the fundamental t­hings,” “converting the hopes, wants, and demands of the ­people into language.”58 Following a circular logic, the “demo­cratic” poet is able to report the “hopes, wants, and demands of the ­people” back to the p ­ eople b­ ecause he speaks in a voice of his creation, which the p ­ eople in turn take as their own. Written shortly a­ fter t­ hese theoretical reflections, “The Crowd” depicts the poet not as a triumphant “singer of self-­will” who steals language for the p ­ eople, but rather as someone losing self-­control. If in the first half of the poem, he feels out of breath and his windpipe is overwhelmed by the ­great multitude of voices tumbling from inside him, in the second half he becomes a spectator of his own metamorphosis, which throws him into an involuntary convulsion.

“A Terrifying Miracle” ­ fter being awed by the inner crowd, Ai Qing’s “I” looks outward and A gazes, with a similar sense of bewilderment, at crowds swarming everywhere. As if the inner crowd has suddenly erupted out of his body and flooded onto the street, Ai Qing’s “I” stares at a mass of ­people that both attracts and overwhelms him. The poet revisits the scenarios of encountering the crowd at the center of “­Toward the Sun.” As I showed in the previous chapter, in the earlier work, the intellectual self “sunbathes” amidst the crowd’s surges, relishing its “primeval, crude, but ­wholesome” physical presence and joining in the shouts and chants. ­Here, however, the self is separated from the crowd by a theatrical distance. In sharp contrast, the “I” now is confused not only about the crowd—­“What are they d ­ oing? thinking? desiring?”—­but also about his own identity.

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This sudden sense of estrangement leads to an epiphany: Ai Qing’s “I” realizes that he is undergoing “a terrifying miracle.” “I am no longer myself, but a number,/Which is slowly undergoing metamorphoses, expanding/So large u ­ ntil I am stunned, convulsing.”59 ­Here we might recall Le Bon’s nightmarish diagnosis of crowd formation in which the individual personality of its members dis­appears and “the heterogeneous is swamped by the homogeneous.” But ­there is a subtle yet radical difference. In a crowd, according to Le Bon, “the conscious personality has entirely vanished,” and the individual is nothing but a “slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord.”60 Unlike the Le Bonian crowd member, who by definition is incapable of being conscious of his or her own loss of individuality, Ai Qing’s “I” is the sole self-­conscious witness of this disappearance. Unlike Le Bon’s slaves who are unaware of their selfhood being swallowed by the collective mind, the “I” in “The Crowd” watches his own self-­othering as an entranced spectator. Confronting the slow yet per­sis­tent transfiguration of the self into an overwhelming “other,” Ai Qing’s “I” is stunned and seized by convulsions. Deliberately pairing a classical expression, eran 愕然 (stunned), with a physiopathological neologism, jingluan 痙攣 (convulsion), the poet emphasizes the intensification of feeling and bodily sensation that such a self-­transformation engenders. Rather than associating jingluan with pain and suffering as he often does in his earlier poems,61 ­here Ai Qing brings to mind Edmund Burke’s (1729–97) description of the experience of the sublime. As Aris Sarafianos observes, Burke “deployed a maximalist vocabulary of raw pain, of vio­lence and strain, of convulsions and spasms to describe the bodily effects specific to the sublime.”62 According to Burke, the positive plea­sure of the beautiful ties individual passions to society, whereas the painful delight of the sublime is linked to solitude and the survival instinct and therefore is “asocial (or even antisocial).”63 Following this line of thought, one might be not too far afield to ask ­whether the intense twitching of the body that the narrator experiences at the moment he realizes “I am no longer myself” reveals an attachment to the self that the revolutionary writer expects to transcend. Throughout the poem Ai Qing ingeniously explores and dramatizes the themes of boundary transgression and intimacy, challenging the static notion of the self and the crowd. The final scene further blurs the border between inside and outside. The opening lines of the last stanza—­“When



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I am still, my heart is trodden over by countless feet/When I move, my heart is like a bustling crossroad”—­echo a line from the third stanza—­ “When I feel with my fin­gers my own pulse/My heart is pounded by surging tides of blood.” All t­ hese lines hint at the inner crowd whose urge for life has left the narrator gasping for air. The poem thereby leaves ambiguous the relationship between the inner crowd and the crowd on the street in which the narrator is about to merge—­“I sit h ­ ere. On the street are countless ­people./Suddenly, I see myself as a grain of dust rolling among them.” This line reminds us of Verhaeren’s “La foule” in which the poet seems to have “fled out of himself/Towards the wild call of unan­ i­mous forces.”64 But if Verhaeren, in his verses, “surrenders joyfully and quite voluntarily . . . ​to the soul of the collectivity,” Ai Qing turns the idea of merging with the masses into a theatrical moment in which the melting of the individual into the crowd becomes perceivable to the “I” through an act of self-­detachment.65 In this act, the poet’s “I” splits into a perceiving self (the specular observer) and a vanishing self (an object of observation). Norbert Elias, in his effort to undo the conceptual trap of prizing the individual as a self-­contained ego, has argued that the act of self-­detachment/self-­distantiation enables one to “experience oneself not as an ‘ego’ confronting all other ­people and ­things, but as a being among ­others.”66 Ai Qing’s theatrical self-­detachment not only marks his ­imagined identity “as a being among ­others” but also turns self-­loss into an aesthetic spectacle for which the spectator-­“I” has a front-­row seat. This splitting up of the self recalls Du Heng’s 杜衡 (1907–64) theory of the “Two Ai Qings”: one a committed revolutionary and one a self-­ indulgent aesthete.67 In “The Crowd,” Ai Qing contemplates the prob­lem of merging with the masses, a prob­lem that, as this book has shown, captivated many Chinese intellectuals in the first half of twentieth ­century and was manifested in dif­fer­ent strains of repre­sen­ta­tion. War­time writers working with the novel form such as Lu Ling 路翎 (1923–94), Ai Qing’s fellow member of the “July School” (Qiyue pai 七月派), w ­ ere also preoccupied with the theme of self-­transformation through merging with the collective—­only by d ­ oing so could one achieve what Lu Ling calls “personal liberation with a mass character” (qunzhongxing de gexing jiefang 群眾性的個性解放).68 But it is impor­tant to note that Ai Qing pres­ents this metamorphosis as resulting from the intellectual’s hearing the voice of the ­people coming

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from his own mouth, a voice so forceful that it not only takes his breath away but also urges him to search for its source. Whereas Guo Moruo and Ren Jun invoke the thunderous voice of the masses to consolidate their self-­assigned role as the p ­ eople’s spokespersons, the popu­lar voice in “The Crowd” seems to remain unbound by writing and destabilizes the poet’s sense of identity. The ending, compared with the rest of the poem that is full of deafening noises, intensified emotions, and agitated motions, appears so calm and placid that it has a disconcerting air of ­detachment. The phantom presence of the “I” as observer of his vanishing self, along with the image of a gasping and trembling poet in earlier parts of the poem, creates a sense of fatefulness and finality. If the desire to “dissolve the subject to a selfless cipher, thus allowing it to melt compassionately into o­ thers,” in the words of Terry Ea­gleton, is rooted in the Freudian death drive, then has Ai Qing written an epitaph for a self that no longer is? Or is he indulging in a fantasy of immortality through this theater of self-­erasure?69 Yet if the death longing lurks only implicitly in “The Crowd,” it comes to the fore in a poem written shortly ­after the poet’s relocation from the GMD southwest to the CCP-­held areas in the northwest.

“Hooves” of History In 1941, shortly ­after the Southern Anhui Incident,70 Ai Qing deci­ded to leave the war­time capital Chongqing for the CCP base areas in Shaanxi. Disguised as a high-­level GMD official and accompanied by painter Zhang Ting 張汀 (1917–2010) and three other travelers, Ai Qing passed more than forty GMD checkpoints and made it to Yan’an on March 8. He was welcomed by such CCP leaders as Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai 周恩來 (1898–1976), and Zhang Wentian 張聞天 (1900–76); was made a member of the Shaan-­Gan-­Ning Border Region Advisory Council; and became a teacher at the Lu Xun Acad­emy of Art. In Yan’an he joined a large number of writers and artists who had flocked to the CCP-­controlled border regions in the northwest in the late 1930s and early 1940s where they engaged in a range of cultural activities, especially poetry writing and recitation. Ai Qing became editor-­in-­chief of the newly founded jour-



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nal Shi kan 詩刊 (Poetry) in November 1941 and started the Yan’an Poetry Club that December.71 If the figure of the gasping self in “The Crowd” crystallized Ai Qing’s sense of the tension between the poet’s voice and his professed role as aesthetic mediator for the ­imagined mass voice, this tension only intensified during his Yan’an years. In the com­pany of a mass-­mobilizing Chinese Communist Party whose legitimacy was grounded on its claim to represent the ­will and interests of the proletarian masses, Ai Qing, along with many other petit bourgeois intellectuals (in the party’s language of class analy­sis), would soon find themselves in a highly politicized culture that demanded not only their loyalty but also their self-­transformation through revolutionary practice. As Mao said, in the eyes of the CCP, “It does not necessarily follow that, having coming to the base areas, they have already integrated themselves completely with the masses of the ­people ­here.” Ai Qing’s old idea of the poet-­as-­legislator for the masses who “keep believing in the god he creates for them”72 was one of the prob­lems that kept intellectuals from “integrating” ( jiehe 結合) with the ­people and made them unable to “fit well into the revolutionary machine.”73 To adopt the class stand of the proletariat—­which, according Mao, meant “keeping to the stand of the Party”—­intellectuals had to first realize their own inadequacy.74 A humbled sense of self combines with a heightened sense of the irreversible unfolding of the revolution in Ai Qing’s short poem “Shidai” 時代 (Epoch, 1941), composed shortly a­ fter his arrival in Yan’an. In this poem, the poet looks at the barren plain of northern China as if he w ­ ere standing on the threshold of a new era that is charging ­toward him. Ai Qing’s “I” sees a blazing circle grinding ( gunnian 滾碾) ­toward him and then hears “the crushing sound of a ­giant wheel jolting along a rough road from the other side of a snowy mountain covered by dark clouds.” The sense of the unstoppable motion of time is heightened by the contrast between the motionless poet who crouches ­under the low eaves of his cave ­house and the ­giant wheel jolting from darkness to light. This dramatic moment is charged with terrifying expectations: Even if I knew that it would bring me Neither the merriment of a festival day Nor the gay laughter from a playground

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But a sight more bloody than a thousand slaughter­houses, I should still have rushed into its arms, With all the fervor that life can possess.75

The phrases “merriment of a festival day” and “gay laughter from a playground” remind us of Ai Qing’s earlier depiction of the jubilant crowd in “­Toward the Sun.” His now resolute disavowal of such festiveness conveys a conception of historical motion that is formidable, spasmodic, or even apocalyptic. The imminent f­ uture whose arms Ai Qing’s “I” rushes into is not something that he can randomly walk into and relish. Instead, he recognizes it to be a bloody punitive spectacle that must take place in the slaughter­house of revolution where harsh justice prevails. Embracing this image, Ai Qing grafts onto the revolutionary scheme of time a macabre vision populated with mutilated bodies. The inevitable motion of history is consummated in a purgatorial moment of spectacular vio­lence that is as awe inspiring as it is fiendishly menacing. As this enthralling f­ uture grinds down t­oward him with irresistible force, the “I” is also determined to rush ­toward it “with all the fervor that life can possess,” abbreviating the duration of the threshold moment. Time accelerates through this abbreviation. Ai Qing’s imagination of the formidable advance of time also invokes eschatological expectation, and this combination, as Reinhart Koselleck and Igal Halfin point out, characterizes the modern conception of historical time and revolution.76 The approaching end fires up Ai Qing’s desire to “rise from the abyss of time,” as if the pres­ent w ­ ere but a dark cleft from which he longs to escape. Whereas in “The Crowd” the poet gazes at the slow motion of the pres­ent before the self dissolves into the crowd and rolls away into collective anonymity, h ­ ere the very experience of the pres­ent is robbed of its constancy by the unstoppable movement of the “­giant wheel” that carries apocalyptic promise. The poet’s fixation on the end of historical time is marked by an intense urge to escape the “abyss” of the pres­ent and yield his body for final judgment. Hastening ­toward the slaughtering ground of the revolutionary ­future, the “I” finds the expression of self-­will in a masochistic desire for subjugation to the impersonal dictates of the epoch: “Before it I ­will so ­humble myself/As to lie supine on the ground,/And let it, like a h ­ orse’s hooves, trample on my chest.”77 A poem about the poet’s inauguration



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of historical consciousness ends with a depiction of the sensations of self-­ annihilation: Ai Qing’s poem is as much about the meta­phor of historical pro­gress as about the enunciation/renunciation of self. The poet’s self-­ formation as a revolutionary subject becomes inseparable from his faith in the advent of historical time, but the “I” strives t­ oward the light from the darkness of the temporal abyss only to be trampled by history. The striking image of time as a raging h ­ orse crushing the humbled individual lying on the ground crystallizes the author’s intense desire for self-­expression through a fantasy of self-­willed subjugation. In this revolutionary moment, Ai Qing writes, “I keep silence, ­because I do not have words brilliant enough/To express my emotions, my passionate entreaties.”78 The figure of the mute self reminds us of the gasping poet in “The Crowd,” where the sonorous crowd arising from within leaves the poet trembling. Now the grinding of the epoch has rendered him speechless. But the poet did not keep s­ilent. In fact, as Merle Goldman points out, silence was not an option in Yan’an: “The party did not demand merely passive acquiescence [from writers like Ai Qing], but insisted upon positive conversion to its beliefs.”79 In early 1942, while writing descriptive poems of nature with no apparent po­liti­cal connotation, Ai Qing joined a group of colleagues including Ding Ling and Wang Shiwei 王實味 (1906–47), who had openly voiced criticisms about prob­lems in Yan’an, such as gender in­equality, party privilege, and the lack of democracy. In an article published on March 11 in Jiefang ribao 解放日報 (Liberation Daily), the party’s official organ, Ai proclaimed that a writer is not “a singer who sings solely to please ­others,” but rather the “recorder of emotions, the nerve or the eye of wisdom of a nation, i.e., in the sphere of emotions, impression, thoughts, and m ­ ental action.”80 He protested party interference in creative activities and pled for greater tolerance of critical opinions and the freedom for artists and writers to expose abuses. In response to this outpouring of criticism from intellectuals, Mao Zedong delivered talks on May 2 and 23, 1942—­later published as “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Lit­er­a­ture and Art”—as a direct rebuttal. In his speeches, Mao denied the in­de­pen­dence and autonomy of lit­er­a­ture and art from politics. He demanded that writers embrace the class stand of the laboring masses: “To be one with the masses,” Mao said, “you must make up your mind to undergo a long and even painful pro­cess of tempering.”81 And he insisted on cultural workers’ ac­cep­tance of the authority

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of the party. Mao’s talks ­were part of what is known as the Yan’an Rectification Campaign, an intense campaign of thought reform launched by the party to discipline and remold the thinking and action of intellectuals and party cadres. In Tani E Barlow’s words, it was “a po­liti­cal per­ for­mance of differences and the reconciliation of differences among the revolutionary elite.”82 Ai Qing was a key member of the audience invited to attend Mao’s talks. Like many other dissenting writers, he succumbed to the party’s relentless pressure and recanted his criticisms soon a­ fter listening to ­those speeches. He, along with Ding Ling, participated in the orchestrated condemnation of Wang Shiwei, who refused to renounce his critical views and was ­later expelled from the party, imprisoned, and eventually executed in 1947.83 ­Under Mao’s direct order, Ai Qing stayed in Yan’an where he studied Marxism-­Leninism in the Central Party School and played the role of bourgeois-­intellectual-­in-­transformation. In early 1943, he wrote a long narrative poem on a l­abor hero of the Shaan-­Gan-­Ning Border Region named Wu Manyou 吳滿有 (1893–1959) who transformed himself from a self-­centered farmer into a model peasant leading villa­ gers to cultivate new lands and deliver food to the government. Ai Qing’s poem was not only published in Liberation Daily but was also—­“without pre­ce­dent,” according to Ai himself—­sent to all communist base areas via a Xin­hua News Agency tele­gram. It became a key text of the party’s propaganda campaign for the G ­ reat Production Movement of 1943, which called on all peasants in the communist-­controlled regions to carry out “the Wu Manyou Way” to strengthen local economic self-­reliance and increase the party-­state’s revenue.84 As Goldman has observed, “Ai Qing loudly proclaimed his allegiance to party doctrine.”85 In fact, Ai authored one of the earliest eulogies of Mao Zedong by an established writer, which contributed to building a Mao cult in the early 1940s. In the poem “Mao Zedong” written during the Assembly of Representatives of the Shaan-­Gan-­Ning Border Region on November 6, 1941, Ai announced, “Wherever Mao Zedong appears/Thunderous applause fills the air.”86 Despite his repeated declarations of allegiance to the CCP, Ai Qing would be charged with and convicted of the crime of opposing the party in the late 1950s, partly ­because of what he had written during the Yan’an period. He spent sixteen years living and working in a production and



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construction corps in remote Xinjiang ­until the end of the ­Great Pro­ letarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76). His prediction that the ­giant wheel of history would bring a terrifying “sight more bloody than a thousand slaughter­houses” certainly brought the poet no merriment or laughter. Yao Wenyuan 姚文元 (1931–2005)—­the literary mountebank of the socialist period as he is remembered now—­vilified this line as an unmitigated attack on Yan’an, and the short poem “Epoch” became one of Ai Qing’s literary crimes that led to his persecution and banishment during the Anti-­Rightist Campaign (1957–8) and the Cultural Revolution.87 In hindsight, Ai Qing showed acute foresight in predicting the combination of cruelty and senselessness that unfortunately became recurrent ele­ments in the Chinese Communist revolution, with its incessant rectification campaigns and strug­gle sessions from the 1940s onward. His image of the revolution’s bloody fulfillment also prefigured the violent scenes of mass strug­gle in land reform novels of the 1940s and 1950s, such as Ding Ling’s Taiyang zhaozai Sanggan heshang 太陽照在桑干河上 (The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River). In this landmark work of socialist realism, the laboring masses come to voice by recognizing their own suffering and subject position in the new narrative of class antagonism. But the explosive voices of the ­people are released only to be contained. Ding Ling portrays how the party cadres, replacing intellectuals, tapped into the innermost feelings of the ­people and channeled the spontaneous shouting and singing of the crowd into an ordered public per­for­mance.

Liberating China: “What Revelry!” The Yan’an Rectification Movement of 1942–4 was a watershed in modern Chinese intellectual and po­liti­cal history. In the following years, a pivotal transformation occurred in which a large number of writers and artists became what the anthropologist Ellen Judd calls the “ideological intelligent­sia.” ­These cultural elites would go on to shape the dominant lines of a new Maoist revolutionary culture.88 To cross class bound­aries and write in the interest of the laboring masses required changes not only in the content and form of literary and artistic creation but also, more

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fundamentally, in the conditions of artistic production. Ding Ling, who came into conflict with the party during the rectification movement, wrote ­after Mao’s first talk, You absolutely must live with [the masses] if you want to understand their feelings and thoughts and write about the proletariat. You must change yourself, and rid yourself of the old feelings and consciousness. You must absolutely spend a long-­time tempering yourself in the struggling life of the masses. Only by dissolving your own emotions into the emotions of the broad masses ­will you be able to intuit and represent [reflect] the emotions of the ­great masses.89

Therefore, to acquire the proper class stance, intellectuals, as Tani Barlow comments in her reading of this paragraph, must strive for “establishing a new proximity to class-­mediated life experience.”90 For Ding Ling and many o­ thers, the land reform movement of the late 1940s provided such a class-­mediated experience, which they could not afford to miss.91 A vital moment in the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power, the land reform movement did not simply bring into sharp focus conflicting social and economic interests, nor was it simply a phase in the communist-­ led agrarian revolution.92 Instead it was aimed at providing the means by which ­people would be able to realize their interests and positions. More centrally, it instituted a revolutionary po­liti­cal culture of shared language, symbols, and rituals, as well as the po­liti­cal praxis of class strug­gle. Key to this culture was the figure of the muted crowd “turning over” (fanshen 翻身) and speaking out. Ding Ling participated in the land reform movement in the Jin-­Cha-­Ji base area in 1946 and attended conferences and read documents on the subject.93 Her 1948 novel The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River focuses on the pro­cess of land reform in the village of Nuanshui in northwestern China. A classic of socialist realism and winner of the Stalin Second Prize for Lit­er­a­ture in 1951, Ding’s ambitious novel depicts a radical po­liti­cal pro­cess that “contained the formula for revolution in a nutshell: the activation of mass strug­gle.”94 Land reform, Ding Ling shows, was not a mere m ­ atter of cracking down on local landlord tyrants and redistributing the land; it was also a pro­cess of trans-



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forming ­people’s self-­perceptions, calling into existence new po­liti­cal subjects and creating new social and po­liti­cal divisions defined by class rather than kinship. In short, Ding’s novel of the party-­led land reform movement brings to the fore what Cai Xiang calls the “mobilization structure” that placed the masses, cadres, and intellectuals in a complex relationship of sociocultural transformation. This mobilization structure enabled po­liti­ cal subjectivities, helped the party gain support among the peasant masses, and gave form to socialist literary imaginaries of what is commonly called China’s liberation.95 Crucial to the peasants’ “turning over” and acquiring class consciousness was their coming to voice and speaking as a class subject. But ­because they are ­either so intimidated by their oppressors or so incapacitated by a fatalistic attitude, the hesitant peasants in The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River cannot let out their true emotions or speak up without outside help. In Ding’s stinging portrait, Wen Cai, the leader of the land reform work team, cannot even make himself understood by the villa­ gers, let alone serve as their spokesperson. Instead of identifying with them, he lectures the peasants for six hours about China’s po­liti­cal situation, putting them right to sleep.96 Wen Cai’s arrogant approach is corrected by the district propaganda commissioner, a po­liti­cal cadre of peasant origins who helps the villa­gers identify the local landlord Qian Wengui as the “object of strug­g le.” With Qian assigned the role of the “local despot,” the peasants soon begin to identify with a narrative of suffering and overcoming it through which they emerge as revolutionary subjects of class strug­gle. At the climax of the novel, in the chapter titled “The Final Combat,” the emotional villa­gers speak up about their exploitation and recall the injuries Qian had inflicted on them: “­A fter this one another went up, and ­after each had spoken the crowd gave a g­ reat roar.”97 ­Here Ding Ling depicts the oral per­for­mance of venting known as suku 訴苦, speaking bitterness. Both a po­liti­cal praxis and a narrative form, suku, as Ann Anagnost has persuasively argued, enables “the reworking of consciousness in which the speaker comes to recognize himself or herself as a victim of an immoral system rather than a ­bearer of bad fate or personal shortcomings . . . ​[and thereby] recognize one’s conditions of existence in terms of class antagonism.”98 Therefore, suku is more than a collective venting

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of grievances and resentments; it is also a lesson or, more precisely, a form of vocal training: “We peasants must unite! We must wipe out feudal forces from the face of the earth!” Freckles Li [Party propaganda officer in the village] rushed to the front of the stage. The crowd shouted a­ fter him . . . ​ “All peasants are b­ rothers!” “Support Chairman Mao!” “Follow Chairman Mao to the end!” Shouts sounded from the stage and from the crowd.99

This scene of shouting and echoing reminds us of Xunlei’s depiction of a similar vocal exchange between a spokesperson and the crowd. But ­here the po­liti­cal agent, who shouts slogans for the crowd to imitate, is no longer a lonely vanguard, but a mouthpiece of a po­liti­cal organ­ization that claims special access to the voice of the masses. The crowd makes itself audible as a revolutionary subject by acquiring po­liti­cal speech made up of a mixture of vernacular expressions and po­liti­cal neologisms such as tuanjie 團結 (unite) and feng jian shili 封建勢力 (feudal forces) that w ­ ere at once vague, yet flexible and effective in polarizing rural society, setting the laboring masses apart from the traditional elite, and classifying individuals into opposing po­liti­cal categories. The desire for vengeance released as a result of the villa­gers’ speaking bitterness against Qian is soon translated into an explosion of vio­ lence. The logic of class strug­gle is grafted onto the figure of the crowd through the trope of spontaneous vio­lence when the latent masses come to consciousness and “speak” in action. Brought up onto the stage, Qian Wengui, the villain in this po­liti­cal theater, is paraded, humiliated, and almost clawed to death by the angry crowd. Critics have noted that modern Chinese left-­wing lit­er­a­ture often starts out as “a lit­er­a­ture against vio­lence” that turns into a “vio­lence of lit­er­a­ture.” Revolution is represented as a justifiable form of vio­lence out of which a desired f­uture is born.100 Ding’s repre­sen­ta­tion of the insurgent peasants links their pursuit of justice with collective vio­lence, but the communist narrative of vio­lence in popu­lar spontaneity is often as invested in unleashing the primitive instincts of the masses as in containing and channeling the crowd. The bloody festivity is endorsed and then reined in. The furious crowd has to be kept back by the secretary of the Nuanshui Party Branch who, while shielding Qian with his own body, persuades the crowd to let



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the county court carry out his execution legally. The crowd reluctantly stops, leaving Qian lying on the stage panting like a d ­ ying animal. So a festival of collective vio­lence is curbed by a party cadre’s call to order. The brutality and primitive instincts of the crowd, which Qu Qiu­ bai and Chen Duxiu warned against and Gao Juefu and Zhang Jiuru theorized, are depicted to show the raw energy of the revolutionary masses, but are also immediately disciplined. Ding Ling’s portrayal of this public trial highlights a dialectic of violent release and imposed forbearance. Although the violent instincts of the p ­ eople are elicited and let loose to prove that only the communist cadres can tap into the innermost impulses and au­then­tic emotions of the p ­ eople, ­those impulses and emotions are subjected to their elicitor’s restraint. The combination of ­these two legitimates the party’s authority. The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River ends on the moonlit eve­ning of the mid-­autumn festival. With the evil landlords overthrown, the confiscated ­house­hold belongings redistributed, and the land carefully mea­ sured, the newly empowered peasants receive their land allotments and celebrate their victory wildly: Gongs and drums are beaten frenziedly, whistles are blown, and old r­ ifles are fired one a­ fter another, with the p ­ eople shouting all the while. Then the school­children sing again. Nobody can quite make out what they are singing, but all the grown-­ups seem to have become c­ hildren again, enjoying this tumult of noise. Their extreme happiness and meaningful emotion impel them into an almost unconscious (wu yishi 無意識) rejoicing. What revelry (kuanghuan 狂歡)!101

Many commentators, as previous chapters have shown, linked the momentary dominance of unconsciousness in a crowd with the disappearance of rational consciousness and the paralysis of self-­will; the collective revelry entails the unleashing of irrational impulses and primitive passions. Ding Ling’s likening the peasant crowd to c­ hildren also calls to mind Le Bon’s caution of the atavistic regression to c­ hildren and savages that crowding c­ auses. Such anx­i­eties, however, evaporate in this moment of rejoicing. Instead, the display of the childish and the unconscious is meant to designate, to borrow Zhu Qianzhi’s words, “a moment of returning to original authenticity.”102 Ding’s text suggests that the newly

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achieved class consciousness, awakened through the emotion-­charged pro­cess of speaking bitterness, has become so internalized that it passes into the domain of the unconscious. This revelry for the unconscious does not celebrate its momentary triumph, but rather its being conquered. As Ding’s novel indicates, the art of mass mobilization lies not so much in arousing consciousness as in making such an arousal involuntary and instinctual. This auditory explosion of the crowd is, in fact, as much spontaneous as carefully staged: Acting as set designers, the work team cadres set up a bright archway decorated with red paper flowers and hang banners and slips of paper with po­liti­cal slogans. Schoolchildren sing “From the red east rises the sun, ­there appears in China Mao Zedong” in a corner, while militiamen b­ elt out the “Eighth Route Army March.” A newly painted portrait of Mao is pasted on a door plank and displayed on the stage ­toward which the peasants are asked to bow three times to “express their hearts.”103 The sound of gongs and drums reminds us of similar passages in Yin Fu’s poem and Ai Qing’s “­Toward the Sun.” But the “tumult of noise” ­here is not a public spectacle for the intellectual to relish; instead, the voice of the crowd is part of a larger po­liti­cal ritual performed not only for the peasants themselves but also for the party and their common class enemies, all of which takes place u ­ nder the watchful gaze of Mao.104 Just as the villa­gers’ violent instincts are released only to be restrained, the boisterous crowd is soon silenced: Young Cheng called out again from the stage, and a number of cadres shouted with him: “Stop talking please! Be quiet! ­Don’t sing!” The noise still continued for a moment, but presently the crowd quieted down, and they heard the order: “Start the demonstration!” The red banner on the stage was mounted on two bamboo poles and lifted down to be carried at the head of the pro­cession. Immediately b­ ehind it came the band, next the militiamen, then all the villa­gers, the men in front, then the ­women, and last the schoolchildren. They proceeded from the main street to the lanes, from the lanes to outside the village, forming a long pro­cession, and a few p ­ eople left at home stood in the street to watch them go by. Whenever they passed a landlord’s h ­ ouse they shouted: “Down with the feudalistic landlords!” with voices like thunder. The gates of the landlords’ h ­ ouses w ­ ere wide open, but nobody came out. Only a few fami-



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lies had one or two standing by the door to stare round-­eyed at the roaring crowd (nuhou de qunzhong 怒吼的羣眾).105

The villa­gers’ “unconscious rejoicing” becomes a display of discipline, its chaotic shouting becomes an authorized incantation, and the tumultuous crowd forms into a hierarchically structured pro­cession. This symptomatic moment captures not only the spontaneous energy of the crowd but also its channeling. Or to borrow from Mladen Dolar’s discussion of the politics of the authoritarian voice, Ding Ling’s model novel concludes with a “codification of the voice and its public pre­sen­ta­tion.”106 Only through such codification and public pre­sen­ta­tion does the voice of the crowd become the voice of authority, the voice of “liberated masters” ( fanshen daye 翻身大爺). The crowd does not simply express its class hatred and po­liti­cal loyalty. Rather, it becomes an expression of the po­liti­cal rupture that China was undergoing, and therefore it functions rhetorically. The voicing of the peasant crowd in Ding Ling’s novel captures the impasse of revolutionary subjectivity: The revolutionary ­people (renmin) are the subjects of the exercise—­fanshen (turning over) and nuhou (roaring)—to which they are subjected. If the idea of revolution, as Balibar puts it, is “above all a theory of the active self-­construction of the subject,” the poor peasants turn over and constitute themselves as “liberated masters” through releasing their raw energy and voice—­and yet, the self-­constructed revolutionary subjects are also subjected to the very pro­cess of liberation.107

A Game Called “Obey the Crowd” In Ding Ling’s novel, the peasants’ vocal expression serves as a privileged figure for the making of a new subject of the nation. Their outburst stands in sharp contrast to the suffocation of “­silent China,” which Lu Xun had lamented in a 1927 public talk.108 As David Der-­wei Wang points out, the search for a “vocal China” can be traced to the eve of the Opium War (1839–42) when the literatus Gong Zizhen 龔自珍 (1792–1841) “deplored the silence of his time and yearned for a thunderous voice.” The reverberating sounds of the crowd came to be a crucial ele­ment of what Wang calls the “sonic motif” that became a striking feature of modern Chinese

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discourse.109 For writers like Ding Ling, the slogan-­chanting crowd manifests the realization of a historical subject that has fi­nally “turned over” and obtained a collective consciousness and identity. The mass strug­gles she described would emerge as a principal means of state building, government control, and social mobilization; the “voice of the crowd” would become a byword for the po­liti­cal culture of the Mao era.110 What is at stake h ­ ere, beyond the charged linkage between the formation of po­liti­cal subjectivity and the practice of voice, is the question of voice as authority and the grounds of authority by which one can claim exclusive access to that voice.111 This chapter has laid out how the salience of the voice of the crowd became a po­liti­cally invested theme in impor­tant literary texts from the 1920s to the late 1940s. It examined the changing imaginary scenarios in which the voice of the crowd was heard, circulated, or produced in relation to the intellectual’s own voice. Writers like Guo Moruo and Ren Jun arrogated to themselves the role of the bard-­ phonograph through which the voice of the p ­ eople was said to travel, but their claims that transparency was a key to this mediation ­were soon appropriated by the socialist repre­sen­ta­tional order where no pole of authority apart from the party could monopolize knowledge of the march of history. A game (xiaoyouxi 小遊戲) called “Obey the Crowd” (fucong qunzhong 服從羣眾) clearly illustrates how po­liti­cal leaders speak in the name of the p ­ eople, thereby encapsulating both the promise and peril of mass politics. Designed a few months before Mao Zedong stood atop Tian­ anmen and proclaimed the founding the P ­ eople’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, the game and its instructions ­were published in an education bulletin of the communist-­held areas of the Shaan-­Gan-­Ning basin. A variant of the “Simon Says” game, it requires a group of twenty to thirty ­people to sit around the leader of the game, who is in the ­middle and gives instructions for the p ­ eople around the circle. But only o­ rders that start with “the crowd says” (qunzhong shuo 羣眾說) are to be carried out. ­Those who act when the leader does not say “the crowd says” are eliminated from the game, and the last one standing wins.112 The designer of the game, Ke Li 柯犂, did not hide its pedagogical intention. To obey the crowd is to obey the voice that is in the position of speaking in its name and place and stands capable of imposing constraints on the collective. As Pierre Bourdieu points out in his analy­sis of this kind of sym-



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bolic imposition, at work is “a limiting form of performativity”: The delegate appropriates the authority of the crowd in order to exercise restraint (which is, Bourdieu maintains, a form of symbolic vio­lence) over them and thereby create a una­nim­i­ty in whose name and place he speaks.113 Ke Li did not bother to conceal the fictionality of qunzhong that the leader of this game appropriates. Instead, the efficacy of the game lies in the fictionality of the performative utterance that the participants are trained to disregard.

epilogue The Regime of “We”

A

t the dawn of new China, Nie Gannu 聂绀弩 (1903–86), a communist veteran, declared,

The lowly slaves of yesterday Are ­today’s masters of all! In China, ­There is only us (­women 我們), No one e­ lse (bieren 別人)!1

Written in Hong Kong shortly before his trip northward to attend the founding ceremony of the ­People’s Republic of China (PRC), Nie’s poem captures the victorious exuberance of t­ hose who believed that the nation’s quest for dignity and unity had reached its moment of victory and ­were confident of their own inclusion in the “We-­masters” in the emancipated pres­ent that has no pre­ce­dent. This collective subject, for Nie and many o­ thers, took on substance in the form of a gigantic ­human aggregate in Tian­anmen Square on October 1, 1949. In Nie’s words, a “sea of humanity” surged ­under the gaze of Mao Zedong waving from the rostrum atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace; it is a “red dream” that is “all real and the same time all ideal.”2 ­After rousing speeches by Mao Zedong, Ye Jianying 葉劍英 (1897– 1986), and other po­liti­cal figures and a spectacular display of troops,



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tanks, and airplanes, the carefully orchestrated qunzhong youxing 羣眾 遊行 (the ­people’s parade) brought this ­great mass rally to a climax.

Similar mass parades took place in other major cities around this time. A few days ­later in Shanghai, for instance, more than one million ­people from all walks of life marched from early morning u ­ ntil 4:00 a.m. the next morning: Some danced yangge, ­others masqueraded as heroes from traditional tales or the goddess of peace, and all enjoyed the splendid fireworks ­a fter dark.3 If in the eyes of some overwhelmed observers and local residents, such citywide merrymaking was “a ­great renao 熱鬧 (hot and noisy excitement) that happened only once in one thousand years,”4 state-­controlled photojournalism immediately seized the symbol of qunzhong for po­liti­cal use. For instance, the first volume of the widely circulated series Xin Zhongguo huaku 新中國畫庫 (New China’s Pictorial Repositories), titled Kaiguo dadian 開國大典 (The Founding Ceremony of the Nation, 1950), turns the dense, celebratory crowd in Tian­ anmen Square—­captured in Xiong Zhixing’s 熊知行 photo—­into graphic ele­ments of a master narrative about the standing up of “the p ­ eople,” which became a central authorizing notion for the new regime.5 In the following years, qunzhong youxing became a routine ritual that staged the p ­ eople as the creator of history in the pro­cess of self-­making and self-­designation. In National Day cele­brations, May Day parades, and other forms of mass pageantry, elaborately programmed pro­cessions of cheerful civilians—­often holding portraits of Mao and other national leaders, dressed in costumes, and dancing to the beat of their waist drums—­ took place on the street, in the square, and in factories and schools, reconfiguring the space of politics. In such amassing of bodies, the crowd became, as Wu Hung argued, “an or­ga­nized body of signs”: Participants “­were no longer scattered individuals but had become part of an im­mense body of ‘friends and comrades,’ a body that had Mao as its head and brain.”6 The figure of the crowd, appropriated by the state for its own legitimization, became an indispensable component of the symbolic language of revolutionary politics that trumpeted the harmonious transfer of power between the leader and the p ­ eople and affirmed the new regime’s authority. In the po­liti­cal culture of the early ­People’s Republic, participation, voluntary or forced, in ­these symbols and rituals was a means by which p ­ eople expressed or became aware of their positions in the new sociopo­liti­cal order.

188 Epilogue Feeling himself summoned to the threshold of a new beginning, Nie Gannu presented a triumphant, almost narcissistic, image of a homogeneous collective body without internal division or exteriority. But membership in the “We” expanded and contracted in accordance with the shifting contours of revolutionary citizenship. The designation of “We” (­women) worked through demarcating who was included and who was not; its cohesion depended on excluding the constitutive “Other” (bieren), which had to be continually fabricated, as testified to by vari­ous po­liti­cal campaigns among the rural and urban populace in the following de­ cades. In the 1950s and 1960s, mass mobilization became “a hallmark of state-­society relations.”7 ­Those mass campaigns—­the principal means of mobilizing the public and asserting government control—­assigned the role of “the p ­ eople’s enemies” to a g­ reat number of individuals, often as a form of “social prophylaxis” expelling the supposed impure and waste ele­ments so that the integrity of the “We-­as-­one” could be maintained.8 In fact, Nie Gannu himself would be labeled a “rightist” in the Anti-­ Rightist Campaign in 1957, expelled from the party, and sent to a ­labor camp in Heilongjiang. During the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76, Nie was indicted as an “acting counterrevolutionary” and sentenced to life in prison. Many of the authors studied h ­ ere ­were ostracized in the early years of the PRC, and their depictions or theories of the crowd ­were forcefully suppressed. Ye Shengtao’s thirty-­chapter novel Ni Huanzhi, for instance, went through thirteen reprints before 1949. But his anx­i­eties about po­liti­cal mediation as a form of contamination and the volatility of fluctuating crowd emotions became untimely in the early years of the PRC. Before Ni Huanzhi was to be reissued in 1953, Ye was advised to delete chapter 20 and let the narrative end at chapter 23.9 Among the eight missing chapters is material on Tiger Jiang’s manipulation of the hypnotized crowd (in chapter 27). The 1953 edition, instead of ending with the death of a disillusioned and sorrow-­stricken protagonist ­after Chiang Kai-­shek’s 1927 purge of communists and ­labor activists, concludes with the ecstatic Huanzhi at the climax of the May Thirtieth Movement. If a left-­wing writer as established as Ye had to rectify his brief digression on the crowd’s suggestibility and credulity, then it is hardly surprising that Le Bonian denigrations of the crowd or modernist Mu Shiying’s mockery of the intellectual’s fantasy of the revolutionary crowd would have to be “cleansed.”



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Many intellectuals who remained in mainland China discovered that crowd theories had become a problematic legacy in the 1950s and 1960s. Take, for example, the prominent scholars Zhu Qianzhi and Gao Juefu. In the early de­c ades of the PRC, Zhu was made to write countless self-­criticisms of his antirational philosophy of the revolutionary crowd. In a 1968 self-­criticism—­which was not published ­until the early 1980s—­ Zhu regretted belittling Marx and Engels during his anarchist youth, but eagerly pointed out to his readers that he was one of the first Chinese intellectuals to champion the revolutionary potential of crowds at a time when the early communists themselves ­were suspicious of the “crowd-­ mind.”10 Zhu did not mention in this self-­criticism that the nihilist revolution he had called for went far beyond the scope of class strug­gle; his ideas about the instinctual and irrational crowd would have enraged his po­liti­cal overseers. Having stayed on at the Nanjing Normal University a­ fter 1949, Gao Juefu continued to teach psy­chol­ogy u ­ ntil 1957, when he was classified as a rightist. “The obliteration of psy­chol­ogy,” Gao ­later realized, was already underway. “Gang of Four” member Yao Wenyuan attacked psy­chol­ogy as “90 ­percent useless, 10 ­percent perverse.”11 In the 1950s and 1960s, influenced by the Soviet concept of consciousness, Chinese psychologists viewed mentality in Marxist terms as the recognition and reflection of the material foundations of one’s social existence. Consequently, arguments that proletarians form the revolutionary masses out of instinct or delusion ­were utterly unthinkable.12 Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules was singled out as an example of “modern bourgeois social psy­chol­ogy” in a 1965 article in Xinli xuebao 心理學報 (Acta Psychologica Sinica). It was criticized for “ignoring the w ­ hole idea of class strug­gle [and seeing] an individual’s instincts, ­will, nature and personality as the motivating forces on which the very existence of society depends.” Alongside Le Bon, Edward Ross, William McDougall, Floyd H. Allport, and E. D. Martin w ­ ere also condemned for “view[ing] the masses with extreme antipathy” and “see[ing] nothing but the destructiveness of the ‘mob.’ ” The article concluded that “in their view, social psy­chol­ogy has the function of neutralizing mass movements; thus they win approval, and thrive in imperialist and cap­i­tal­ist countries, and in colonial and semi-­colonial states.”13 Although Gao’s Crowd Psy­chol­ogy—­along with similar works such as Zhang Jiuru’s study—­was reprinted more than a few times in Taiwan ­after 1949,

190 Epilogue it was never reissued in mainland China. Gao turned his attention to the history of Chinese psy­chol­ogy and never again examined the topic of the crowd mentality. The subfield of crowd psy­chol­ogy that flourished in the early twentieth c­ entury completely dis­appeared in the early PRC, even though for con­temporary observers its analy­sis might have seemed right on target: In the eyes of many Chinese writers and thinkers who reflected on the be­hav­iors of the crowd during the socialist era, the revolutionary masses in Communist China abundantly displayed “irrational tendencies and intensely affective orientation.”14 ­These would have devastating consequences during the Cultural Revolution—­the tragic peak of mass mobilization in twentieth-­century Chinese politics. In the early morning of August 18, 1966, close to a million ­people gathered in Tian­anmen Square for a Mass Meeting Celebrating the Cultural Revolution; this was the first of a series of ­giant Red Guard rallies. Reading the Red Guards’ memoirs of the crowd in action at the height of Maoist mass mobilization, we see that their personal experiences center on the lived tension between the urge to merge with the collective and the sense of detachment, a recurrent theme in this study; they also, not surprisingly, recycle some of the republican-­era language describing the crowd. For instance, one young participant in the August 18 rally resorts to the oceanic trope to describe her si­mul­ta­neously exhilarating and alienating experience that mixed excitement at depersonalization with fears of self-­dissolution. She recalls that a­ fter seeing Mao Zedong waving to the crowd from the top of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, “my blood was boiling inside me. I jumped and shouted and cried in u ­ nion with a million ­people in the square. At that moment, I forgot myself; all barriers that existed between me and ­others broke down. I felt like a drop of ­water that fi­nally joined the mighty raging ocean.”15 But in one of her dreams, the jubilant ocean turned nightmarish. She became the person the frenzied revolutionary crowd strug­gled against: “I was a tiny boat sinking in a vast raging ocean.”16 Accounts like this remind us that ­people’s experience of mass rallies in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, or how they remember and make sense of their experience, cannot be separated from more than a half-­century of cultural engagement in mass politics in modern China; such accounts thus highlight the uncertain boundary



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between the history of the “crowd” and the history of knowledge, perception, and imagination. Our examination of the texts about the crowd and the conceptual space surrounding them in the first half of the twentieth c­ entury was not meant to romanticize the period before the purge as a more lively, more tolerant time; ­doing so would only harden the pre-­and post-1949 divide between the Nationalist regime, often portrayed as weak and fragmented, and the effective control of PRC rule. Nor did I intend to suggest a teleological movement in the history of thought and imagery on the crowd that inevitably culminated in the co-­optation of the rhe­toric and symbol of qunzhong by an authoritarian regime. Instead, in this book I followed the nuances and historical specificities of a spectrum of discourses in order to grasp not only shifts and contradictions but also affiliations or complicities in repre­sen­ta­tion across time and place. Nie Gannu’s enthusiasm expressed a per­sis­tent yearning among all stripes of modern Chinese intellectuals and po­liti­cal actors for the coming-­into-­ being of a nation-­people that stood as a unified subject through the praxis of revolution. Their preoccupation with qunzhong makes plain pressing and enduring concerns about the means and ends of po­liti­cal subjectivization; that is, the pro­cess of collective becoming that produces its own subject. Against a palpable sense of personal crisis and national peril, they longed for—or rather, fantasized—an organic merging of individuals into one body, one mind, or around one leader. This longing has had an ineluctable hold on them, stitching together significant layers of modern Chinese culture, including its theory of lit­er­a­ture and art, its vision of history, its fascination with the mind, and its ideological contestations. We can find this longing not only in texts like Hu Yepin’s The Light Is Ahead of Us and Ding Ling’s The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, works that became incorporated into the socialist realism canon, but even more tellingly, in many crowd depictions that ­were deemed poisonous during the first de­cades of the PRC. The case of the anarcho-­nihilist phi­los­o­pher Zhu Qianzhi is emblematic. As a radical combination of the neo-­Confucian conception of a transcendental self, Wilhelm Wundt’s theory of emotion, Henri Bergson’s cele­bration of intuition and instinct, and Le Bon’s theory of the ­mental

192 Epilogue unity of crowds, Zhu’s philosophy of revolution represents an unbridled revolt against rationalism and an affirmation of the p ­ eople’s latent vitality. And yet his appeal to irrational forces as a source of revolutionary action, as shown h ­ ere, would be used as a pretext for the necessity of po­liti­cal mediation. Despite his anti-­authoritarian impulse, Zhu’s fervent validation of the po­liti­cal crowd’s spontaneous energies winds up as a rationale for and a legitimation of the intellectual-­political vanguard. Ultimately, his philosophy comes down to an assertion of identification between the self-­proclaimed representative (the “idealist,” in Zhu’s language) and the crowd that constitutes itself as a collective by recognizing its identity and unity in the “idealist.” Still, Zhu Qianzhi’s philosophy of revolution should not be reduced to a self-­serving form of po­liti­cal reasoning that merely justifies the intellectual’s mediation and thereby legitimizes that subject position. Nor should we see it simply as an eccentric aberration from the mainstream currents of thought, which included Social Darwinism, nationalism, and scientific Marxism, all of which Zhu rejected. Instead, this study has demonstrated that Zhu’s tortuous theory, despite its idiosyncrasies and radicalism, crystallizes key prob­lems of spontaneity and repre­sen­ta­tion with which many other modern Chinese intellectuals also strug­gled. The paradoxical equation we find in Zhu’s theorization of revolutionary emergence—­“I am the crowd; the crowd is I!”17—­gave expression to the widely held ideal that ­there should be no exteriority or opacity between the self-­ identified representative and the collective. In his anarcho-­nihilist phase, Zhu opposed nation and class as externally imposed forms that restrain the au­then­tic vigor and creativity of the p ­ eople. But not unlike the nationalists and Marxists whom he rebelled against, Zhu conceived the creation of the revolutionary crowd as work—­effortless, but work nonetheless—­ through which the p ­ eople produce themselves as a collective. The fusion of the many into a collective depends on a first arousal of the ­people’s latent, inherently revolutionary interiority. This interiority is the source substance of common being, but it achieves recognizable expression only when the “idealists draw [it] from their own depositories and show [it] to the crowd.” The ­people are mobilized into movement insofar as—­and only insofar as—­they become aware of their own innate potentiality for collective vitality that is locatable in a single agent: “I am equipped with the au­then­tic emotion of the crowd in its entirety,” or so



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Zhu claimed.18 In this sense, Zhu’s “I” is not so dif­fer­ent from the Leninist party-­states, GMD and CCP alike, which claim no existence outside the ­people they represent while at the same claiming themselves to be guides. The vanguard figure—be it Zhu’s idealist, Guo Moruo’s bard-­ phonograph, or the po­liti­cal cadres in both Zhang Jiuru’s crowd psy­ chol­ogy and Ding Ling’s land reform novel—­claims to be the transparent medium through which the p ­ eople relate to themselves and converge into one body and consciousness. By examining the centrality of the crowd in the Chinese cultural and po­liti­cal imaginary during the first half of the twentieth ­century, this book has brought to the fore the obsession with communion and its entanglement with representative politics in modern China. That the crowd—­the massing of individuals in public spaces—­became a focus of intensive theorization and aesthetic repre­sen­ta­tion in the aftermath of the Qing Empire’s collapse was linked to the prevalence of the idea that China produces itself as a collective subject by fusing individual selves into a higher “We” struggling against imperialist encroachments and internal fragmentation. The notion of the nation-­people conceived on the basis of this “politico-­subjective model of communion in one” claims a significant role in China’s transformation from an empire into a modern nation-­ state.19 The crowd gives body to as much as it problematizes this idea of a national subject in formation. The notion of the communal “we,” as embodied in the figure of the revolutionary crowd, enabled subjectivities and inspired po­liti­cal passions, but also limited, in many cases tragically, the field of possibilities for collective life in the twentieth ­century. Indeed, the insurgent crowd, as Alain Badiou observes, became one of the last c­ entury’s “dominant forms of collective materiality,” signifying at once “the pluralization of the ‘I’ and the singularization of the ‘we.’ ” Nie Gannu’s line, “­There is only us/No one e­ lse,” and Zhu Qianzhi’s assertion, “I am the crowd; the crowd is I!” both celebrate “a ‘we’ that has the ‘I’ as its ideal and for which t­ here is no other alterity than that of the adversary.”20 The tortuous history of modern revolutions has abundantly proved that the proj­ect of po­liti­cal fusion asserted its integrity by incessantly producing and eliminating its enemies. Among con­temporary thinkers, in the wake of the disasters created by vari­ous modern mass-­utopian proj­ects, notions of collective belonging based on any regulative essentialism cannot escape the specter of totalitarian forced identification and other catastrophic forms of

194 Epilogue modern po­liti­cal terror.21 Jean-­Luc Nancy thus urges us to conceptualize a being together without the “hypostasis of togetherness or the common”; that is, a form of collective solidarity that he calls “co-­appearing” irreducible to fusional communion.22 In a similar vein, Badiou asks for a “we” that “would not be prey to the ideal of the fusional, quasi-­military ‘I’ that dominated the c­ entury’s adventure; a ‘we’ that would freely convey its own immanent disparity without thereby dissolving itself.”23 Raising similar concerns, Chinese discourse around the crowd captures both the promise and peril of community as communion. In the last few de­cades, despite lingering memories of the revolutionary past and the occasional taste of the power of collective action, China as a ­whole, as novelist Yu Hua 余華 notes, has embraced a “passion for getting rich.” Buttressed by the dominance of the new marketplace logic, this economic passion has replaced ­people’s po­liti­cal passions. Reminiscing about the warmth he experienced at a mass rally on the edges of Tian­ anmen Square in 1989, Yu Hua writes, “Packed together, they gave off a blast of heat, as though ­every one of them was a blazing torch.”24 His recollection is motivated by an acute awareness that the collective subject in the form of a physical crowd was an already faded concept. Yu’s past-­tense description points to a disavowal of the po­liti­cal, which characterizes China’s postsocialist modernity. As the revolutionary ­century becomes a ­thing of the past and the meaning of “the ­people” as a po­liti­cal category dissipates, the nation undergoes a pro­cess of what Wang Hui calls “depoliticization” that bids farewell to the Maoist era and shifts the ground of po­liti­cal legitimation from mass movements and utopian ideology to the imperative of growth and the logic of the market and the law. This pro­cess has not only accompanied and been sustained by the privatization of po­liti­cal and economic power and the commodification of ­labor but has also negated the Chinese revolutionary experience. It has abstracted the production pro­cess and naturalized new social inequalities, suspended ideological debates and emphasized the establishment of consensus as a procedure of negotiating interests and distributing profits, and reduced the party-­state to an administrative agent with no specific po­liti­cal values. In short, if twentieth-­century China was ­shaped by the creative pro­cess of cultural and po­liti­cal movements that set in motion new subjectivities and generated po­liti­cal energies, the ongoing pro­cess



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of depoliticization has foreclosed the po­liti­cal as a “subjectivist and activist” sphere of transformation.25 “The new epoch is h ­ ere, no one is making trou­ble anymore”; “the ideals you used to have are now your tools”—­Beijing rocker Cui Jian 崔健 grunts.26 One telling sign of this depoliticization of Chinese society by neoliberal ­f ree market princi­ples is the changed meaning of the term guangchang 廣場 from a politicized public space to a commercial one, which conveys this message: “No more mass movements and po­liti­cal rallies (­either for the government or against it).”27 The title of Li Zehou 李澤厚 and Liu Zaifu’s 劉再復 widely read book Gaobie geming 告別革命 (Farewell to Revolution) similarly captures the widespread desire in the political-­intellectual field since the 1980s to move beyond the interpretive straitjacket of mass revolution in approaching China’s recent past.28 Notwithstanding the current PRC’s promotion of its revolutionary legacy and deployment of Maoist mobilization symbolism and tactics in coping with con­temporary challenges, the revolutionary narrative of history has been by and large overturned by a reformist narrative that emerged full-­blown in the 1990s and often challenges the sacredness of pivotal events in the revolutionary narrative.29 Many of the once-­heralded collective aspirations are discredited as dehumanizing abstractions that rationalize exploitation and oppression. Coincident with the changing meanings of history and revolution is the dismantling of the crowd image during China’s postsocialist transition: On the big screens, for instance, the po­liti­cal crowd—­the heroic agent of history in socialist films from the early PRC—is abstracted into geometrical patterns in the Fifth Generation films, whereas it is missing in recent “main melody” historical films.30 Enshrined for much of the twentieth c­ entury in po­liti­cal and cultural discourses as the motor force of revolution and the master of history, the appellation qunzhong, sociologist Ching Kwan Lee observes, is now often used interchangeably with ruoshi qunti 弱勢群體 (weak groups). The new label became popu­lar in the 1990s and is currently used by the government, the media, intellectuals, and activists to refer to social groups that are rendered eco­nom­ically and po­liti­cally disadvantaged and vulnerable by China’s market reforms.31 This postsocialist transformation has its historical roots in the demobilization of mass po­liti­cal activism and restoration of the party-­state

196 Epilogue system in the early years of the tumultuous Cultural Revolution, when theoretical debates about po­liti­cal values and popu­lar transgressions against the bureaucratization of the party ­were quickly suppressed or displaced. “Quashing the restless rebels as early as late 1967, Maoist politics,” in Yiching Wu’s words, “cannibalized its own ­children and exhausted its once explosive energy.”32 The post-­Mao negation of revolution, therefore, is an organic part of a continuing “de-­revolutionary pro­cess,” the origin of which could be traced to the high Mao era.33 Furthermore, depoliticized politics, along with the withering away of the g­ rand twentieth-­century revolutionary narrative, also unfolds beyond the confines of China itself and needs to be understood within a globalized, neoliberal order that professionalizes the ruling elite, separates the majority of the ­people from po­ liti­cal life, and readily associates twentieth-­century revolutionary experience with vio­lence and manipulation. Pierre Rosanvallon describes the attrition of the po­liti­cal in a way akin to Wang Hui’s conception: “We live through the ordeal of an apparent dissolution or erasure: the feeling of a decline of sovereignty, the perception of a dissolution of the ­will, along with a parallel rise in the power of the law and the market.”34 In the context of the con­temporary disavowal of the po­liti­cal, po­liti­cal expression and action based on the physical massing of bodies in public spaces seem to take place only in the past tense. Both in China and elsewhere, po­liti­cal crowds as physical assemblies seem to belong to the dustbin of history in this postsocialist, postpo­liti­cal age of bodily dispersion, virtual encounters, and consumer identification.35 As a result of this shift and other trends that have challenged the linkage between the crowd and contemporaneity, the physical crowd has become “an icon [that tends] to appear u ­ nder an ever-­deepening patina of otherness and anachronism.”36 Yet, mass demonstrations continue to be held, and new configurations of collective energy are emerging in what journalist Paul Mason describes as an era of “new global revolutions.”37 In recent years, large po­liti­cal movements calling for regime change, ethnic and economic-­based riots, and grassroots l­abor movements have occurred in many places around the world, including China, and have gained some mea­sure of visibility across the media spectrum.38 In response to the dominance and crisis of global capitalism, recently phi­los­o­phers and po­liti­cal theorists have been reflecting anew on the meaning of community, examining the modes of physical assembly in ­today’s social and po­liti­cal movements, and rethink-



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ing the possibility of nonauthoritarian forms of solidarity that arise from the pro­cess of globalization.39 Against both the old models of the self-­ contained individual and the unitary figure of collectivities in which social differences dissolve into one identity, con­temporary thinkers such as Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Leela Gandhi, and Judith Butler have reformulated the nature and possibility of a politics of community that is based on the ethics of being-­in-­common of non-­identical singularities and on the reconfiguration of po­liti­cal space.40 This book has examined modern Chinese discourse of the crowd with the benefit of such critical hindsight and in light of the rekindled utopian longing that rides on the radical potential of the multitude. It seeks to situate our pres­ent moment and understand current trends and aspirations in a broader context. Front and center in the drama that animated the golden age of po­liti­cal crowds, China remains central to their current state of dis/ appearance u ­ nder the new conditions of global economic integration, environmental degradation, and po­liti­cal reconfiguration.41 The imagining of the crowd in multiple forms of repre­sen­ta­tion has played a generative role in the “subjectivist and activist” revolutionary culture of modern China. Examining the possibilities and limits of what became imaginable about crowds in the first half of the twentieth ­century enables us to better appreciate how they may be re­imagined in this postcommunist, postindustrial age, which is in desperate need of a “we” of togetherness.

Notes

Introduction 1. The En­glish translation is adapted from Yip, Lyr­ics from Shelters, 85. The epigraph is the second half of the poem. In chapter 5, I discuss Ai Qing’s “Qunzhong” as a ­whole in more detail. 2. Saussy, “Crowds, Number, and Mass,” 256. 3. Schnapp and Tiews, “Introduction: A Book of Crowds,” in Crowds, x, emphasis in original. 4. Le Bon, Crowd, 14. Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules (The Crowd, 1895) was first translated into En­glish in 1986. 5. The meta­phor was first proposed by Liang Qichao 梁啓超 (1873–1929) in 1901 and was ­later echoed by such prominent cultural and po­liti­cal figures as Sun Yat-­sen 孫中山 (1866–1925), Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936), and Mao Zedong 毛澤東 (1893–1976). See Fogel and Zarrow, Imagining the P ­ eople, 215, 274. 6. See, for example, Fogel and Zarrow, Imagining the ­People; Duara, The Global and Regional, 19–76; Zarrow, ­After Empire. 7. Strand, Unfinished Republic. See also Esherick and Wasserstrom, “Acting out Democracy;” Henrietta Harrison, Making of the Republican Citizen. On the hybrid form of modern Chinese protest that draws on both Western and indigenous traditions, see Hung, Protests with Chinese Characteristics, 190–­201. For a recent study of the emergence of mass-­party politics in China, see Rahav, Rise of Po­liti­cal Intellectuals. 8. See, for instance, Lean, Public Passions; Strand, Rickshaw Beijing; Perry, Shanghai on Strike; S. A. Smith, Like ­Cattle and Horses. 9. Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and F ­ uture, 45–46. 10. On the development of the ­human sciences and other formations of h ­ uman knowledge as a “technology of power,” see Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 11. Pines, Envisioning Eternal Empire, 187–218; Pines, Everlasting Empire, 135–40. On the “people-­oriented” thought in premodern Chinese po­liti­cal culture, see also Zhang Fentian, Minben sixiang.

200

Notes to Pages 6–11

12. Tu Wei-­ming, Way, Learning, and Politics, 20. 13. Hall and Ames, Thinking through Confucius, 143, 146. 14. Saussy, “Crowds, Number, and Mass in China,” 251, 252. On the importance of mass protests to po­liti­cal legitimacy in Confucian po­liti­cal discourse and its modern legacy, see Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven, ix–­x xxi; Pines, Everlasting Empire, 141–61, 175–80. 15. Wang Hui, End of the Revolution, 139–70. 16. Wakeman, Telling Chinese History, 163. Chen Jianhua traces the origin of “crowd discourse” in modern China to the late Qing discussion of qun. See Chen Jianhua, “Bainian xingshi zhimeng.” For the late Qing thinkers, the call for qun was to forge new social bonds that not only overcame the tyranny of clan restrictions and territorial relatedness but also liberated p ­ eople from blind servitude to authority. However, the late Qing discourse of qun is not just a liberating one. As Michael Tsin points out, for reformers like Liang Qichao, the call for voluntary and unitary qun of autonomous p ­ eople invariably entailed new disciplinary techniques of governmental intervention. The proj­ect to construct a cohesive qun was “perforce at once emancipatory and disciplinary.” Tsin, Nation, Governance, and Modernity, 14. 17. Dikötter, Discourse of Race, 61–78. 18. Anagnost, National Past-­Times, 21. 19. Wang Rongbao and Ye Lan, Xin Erya, 65, emphasis in original. 20. Le Bon, “Yuan qun.” 21. In the late 1920s, another term, dazhong 大眾 (masses or ­great masses), which originally appeared in premodern Chinese Buddhist texts and was imported back from Japan by left-­wing radicals, entered the discursive milieu and animated new narratives of “the oppressed and exploited.” For a brief study of the etymology of zhong and the Buddhist origin of the term dazhong, see Yau, “ ‘Zhong’: Chinese.” I discuss in detail the relationship between the figure of the crowd and the left-­w ing notion of dazhong in chapter 3. On how the language of ­human aggregates is invested with ideological values, see Asa Briggs’s pioneering studies, “The Language of ‘Mass’ and ‘Masses’ in Nineteenth-­Century ­England” and “The ­Human Aggregate,” in Collected Essays of Asa Briggs, 1:34–85. 22. Xie Chengxun, “Luoshi de qunzhong xinli,” 55. 23. Lin Chuanding, “Qunzhong xinli yu lingdao,” 57, emphasis mine. 24. Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli, 9. 25. For examples, see chapter 3. 26. Rancière, “The Aesthetic Dimension,” 16–17. 27. Danziger, “Where History, Theory, and Philosophy Meet,” 19–33. On the study of psy­chol­ogy as a historical inquiry, see also Rose, Psychological Complex; Hacking, Rewriting the Soul; Graumann and Gergen, Historical Dimensions of Psychological Discourse; Danziger, Naming the Mind. 28. Daston, “Historical Epistemology,” 282. 29. Rose, Inventing Our Selves, 120, emphasis in original. 30. For the translation, dissemination, and institutionalization of psy­chol­ogy in modern China, see Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng. For recent studies on the cultural history



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of psychiatric care and the medicalization of the mind in China, see, for example, Chiang, Psychiatry and Chinese History. 31. On the condition for certain statements’ status of being e­ ither true or false within a historically limited conceptual space, see Hacking, Historical Ontology, 159–77; Davidson, Emergence of Sexuality, 125–41. 32. Graumann, “Individualization of the Social”; Greenwood, Disappearance of the Social. 33. Gao Juefu, Qunzhong xinlixue, 36; Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli, 406–407. I discuss their ideas in detail in chapter 1. 34. Tsin, “Imagining ‘Society,’ ” 212–31; Lam, Passion for Facts. 35. On narrative repre­sen­ta­tions of modern selves in China, see Leo Ou-­fan Lee, ­Romantic Generation; Denton, Problematic of Self; Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart. 36. As Tani Barlow points out, one aspect of modernity in China has been the production of a chain of enabling “subject positions (social subjectivities elaborated and empowered in modernist discourses).” One of t­hese is zhishifenzi or the intellectual who “constructs and justifies itself on the basis of a claimed ability to appropriate and mediate imported signs” from modernist discourses such as the h ­ uman sciences and Marxism. Barlow, “Zhishifenzi [Chinese Intellectuals] and Power,” 211, 217. On the historical formation of intellectuals in modern china, see also Schwarcz, Chinese Enlightenment. 37. See, for example, Leo Ou-­fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House, 69–88; Marston Anderson, Limits of Realism, 180–202; Laughlin, Chinese Reportage, 75–113. 38. Tian Lan, Yuyan, 6. Tian Lan is a pseudonym of Wang Mingheng 王名衡. 39. As Lydia Liu and Kirk Denton point out, a variety of modern Chinese intellectuals portrayed the relationship between the individuated self and a coherent social body in hierarchical terms and claimed the unmediated continuum of the individual and the nation-­state: The individual was liberated from traditional bonds to be reclaimed by the collective need for social mobilization and transformation. See Denton, Problematic of Self; Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice, 128–49. On the changing conceptions of selfhood and sociality in modern China, see also Chang, “Chongfang Wusi,” 14–16; Yü Ying-­ shih, “Zhongguo xiandai geren guannian”; Xu Jilin, “Dawo de xiaojie”; Wang Qisheng, “Geren, shehui, qunzhong, dang.” 40. Bai Mang, “Yijiuerjiu nian,” 146–48. The poem was written on May 5, 1929. Bai Mang is a pseudonym of Xu Bai 徐白, who is more generally known as Yin Fu. 41. For a power­f ul critique of the limits of the extant paradigm of interpreting Chinese modernity in terms of the dichotomy of enlightenment versus revolution, see David Der-­wei Wang, Lyrical in Epic Time. 42. Schnapp, “Mob Porn,” 3. 43. Jameson, Singular Modernity, 135–36; Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” 325. 44. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 431. Jameson arrives at his critique ­here via reading Virno, Grammar of the Multitude. 45. Jameson, Singular Modernity, 135. 46. On the social and po­liti­cal marginalization of the Chinese intellectual and its relation to the development of radicalism in modern China, see Ying-­shih Yü’s seminal

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study, “Radicalization of China.” On the shift from the traditional shi (scholar) to the modern zhishi fenzi (intellectual), see also Wang Fan-­sen, Zhongguo jindai sixiang, 275–302. 47. On Eu­ro­pean and American modernist writers’ antipathy to individualism and its relationship with the rise of mass politics, see, for instance, Berman, Rise of the Modern German Novel, 232–60; Cunningham, British Writers, 211–420; Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics; Nickels, Poetry of the Pos­si­ble. 48. Elvin, Changing Stories, 174. 49. Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and ­Future, 37, 42, and 84. For recent revalorization of “the p ­ eople” as an emancipatory po­liti­cal category, see, for example, Badiou et al., What Is a P ­ eople?; Laclau, On Populist Reason; Rancière, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization”; Rancière, Dissensus, 84–90. Theorists such as Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and Slavoj Žižek, on the other hand, have criticized the populist, identitarian concept of “the p ­ eople.” See Virno, Grammar of the Multitude; Hardt and Negri, Multitude; Žižek, “Against the Populist Temptation,” 551–74. 50. As Prasenjit Duara puts it, “The p ­ eople would have to be created to serve as the ­people.” Duara, Rescuing History, 32. See also Fogel and Zarrow, Imagining the ­People; Fitzgerald, Awakening China. On the centrality of the notion of “the ­people” in the formation of Chinese party politics and how this new form of party politics differs from the parliamentary party politics, see Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth C ­ entury, 27–40, 151–78. For recent impor­tant studies on the figure of “the ­people” in China’s socialist cultural imagination of social-­cultural transformation, see Luo Gang, Renmin zhishang; Cai Xiang, Revolution and Its Narratives. 51. Anagnost, National Past-­Times, 20. 52. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 38. 53. Lacoue-­Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, 70. Drawing on Nancy, Lacoue-­ Labarthe identifies this conception of “self-­formation and self-­production” as the essence of what he terms “national aestheticism.” 54. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 14. 55. See, for example, Nye, Origins; Schor, Zola’s Crowds; Barrows, Distorting Mirrors; Mills, Crowd in American Lit­er­a­ture; Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2:3–142; Cunningham, British Writers; McPhail, Myth of the Madding Crowd; Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses; Foley, Radical Repre­sen­ta­tions, 398–445; Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 13–26; Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics; Plotz, Crowd; Poggi, “Mass, Pack, and Mob”; Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 35–64; Esteve, Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd; Ginneken, Crowds, Psy­chol­ogy, and Politics; Ginneken, Mass Movements; Frezza, Leader and the Crowd; Jonsson, Brief History of the Masses; Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy; Borch, Politics of Crowds. As Daniel Pick observes, studies in the last few de­cades manifest a “shift from the social history of the h ­ uman aggregate to the history of thought and imagery on the crowd . . . ​[to] the textuality of the crowd.” Pick, “Freud’s ‘Group Psy­chol­ogy’ and the History of the Crowd,” 56 56. I borrow the term “provincialize” from Chakrabarty, Provincializing Eu­rope. 57. See chapter 1 of this book. 58. I use the phrase of a major literary critic in the republican era. See Qian Xingcun, “Guanyu ‘Ping Duanku Dang,’ ” 5.



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59. Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 65–67. 60. Cooper, “How Global Do We Want Our Intellectual History to Be?” 291. 61. See Lyida Liu, Translingual Practice; Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity; Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales. 62. Armitage, “International Turn,” 240. 63. In the field of Chinese studies, see, for example, Ban Wang, Sublime Figure of History; Heinrich, Afterlife of Images; Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales; Rojas, Homesickness. Quotations are from Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 9. Crary cites Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 125, for the first part of what I quoted. 64. On novel as a texture woven out of dif­fer­ent discourses, see, for example, Rothfield, Vital Signs. 65. Richard Brown, T ­ oward a Demo­cratic Science, 63. On the interpretive work of the ­human sciences as “figurate thought and expression,” see White, “The Real, the True, and the Figurative,” 15–17. 66. Sigmund Freud wrote in the 1920s that “in psy­chol­ogy, we can only describe t­ hings by the help of analogies.” Quoted in Leary, Meta­phors in the History of Psy­chol­ogy, 18. On the rhetorical nature of psychological discourses, see also Carlston, “Turning Psy­ chol­ogy on Itself ”; Billig, “Rhe­toric of Social Psy­chol­ogy”; Richard Brown, ­Toward a Demo­cratic Science, 153–73. 67. The term “childish minds and bestial desires” was used in Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli, 248. 68. To move beyond the Le Bon-­style, ahistorical accounts of the crowd, the literary critic John Plotz, in his compelling work on the influence of new forms of public assembly on the development of the early nineteenth-­century British lit­er­a­ture, has urged readers to examine the “inherent unfixity” in literary repre­sen­ta­tions of the crowd. Plotz, Crowd, 7. 69. Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli, 150.

Chapter 1. The Politics of Psychologizing Qunzhong 1. Zhang Xichen, “Qunzhong xinli zhi tezheng.” Zhang’s essay describes anshi or suggestion as a psychical pro­cess of “induction.” Through this pro­cess, “an idea, external to one’s own ­mental appearance, slips into consciousness and becomes part of one’s thought.” His article was l­ater reprinted in a volume titled Xinlixue luncong 心理學論叢 (Psychological Essays) in the popu­lar series Dongfang wenku 東方文庫 (The Eastern Repositories). Dongfang wenku (1923–34) collected major articles printed in Dongfang zazhi and totaled more than 120 volumes. 2. Ibid., 7. 3. Xu Binbin, “Geren xinli,” 39. Xu Lingxiao’s original name is Renjin 仁錦. Binbin is one of his pen names. 4. Explanatory entries on such new terms as qunzhong xinli (crowd mentality) and qunzhong xinlixue (crowd psy­chol­ogy) often appeared in general-­interest journals a­ fter the 1920s. See, for example, “Qunzhong xinli”; “Qunzhong xinlixue.” 5. Rose, “Assembling the Modern Self,” 232.

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6. Rose, Inventing Our Selves, 60. 7. See, for instance, Danziger, Naming the Mind; Graumann and Gergen, Historical Dimensions; Richards, “Psy­chol­ogy of Psy­chol­ogy”; Borch-­Jacobsen, Making Minds. As Richards puts it succinctly, psy­chol­ogy as a discipline “is produced by, produces, and instantiates its own subject ­matter” (8). 8. Zhang Xichen used the terms qunzhong jihe and liqun duli in his article. 9. As Kurt Danziger reminds us, although the conceptual categories of psy­chol­ogy “usually pres­ent themselves as quasi objects that seem to reflect an under­lying real­ity in­de­pen­dent of any subjects, one cannot ignore the relationship of t­ hese objects to the subjects for whom they are objects.” Danziger, “Where History, Theory, and Philosophy Meet,” 26. 10. Zhang was founding editor of Funü zazhi 婦女雜誌 (The Lady’s Journal) and Xin nüxing 新女性 (The New W ­ oman). His interest in psy­chol­ogy also s­ haped his theory of ­women’s emancipation. In the 1920s, Zhang emphasized the importance of the “­mental revolution” among ­women in the feminist movement in China. See Ma, “Male Feminism”; Wang Zheng, ­Women in the Chinese Enlightenment, 108–109. 11. For more on this approach in the history of modern psy­chol­ogy, see Danziger, “Universalism and Indigenization.” 12. For a history of crowd psy­chol­ogy and major scholars’ theories, see Ginneken, Crowds, Psy­chol­ogy, and Politics and Nye, Origins of the Crowd Psy­chol­ogy. 13. Bramson, Po­liti­cal Context of Sociology, 47–72; McPhail, Myth of the Madding Crowd; Leach, “­Mental Epidemics”; Frezza, Leader and the Crowd. 14. Esteve, Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd, 2. 15. The social psy­chol­ogy of the early twentieth ­century, developed in response to Le Bon and like-­minded crowd scholars of the late nineteenth c­ entury, continued the academic inquiry into the psychological mechanism involved in crowd phenomena. On the general history of social psy­chol­ogy and the issue of the crowd in social psy­chol­ogy, see Gordon Allport, “Historical Background of Social Psy­chol­ogy.” 16. See F. H. Allport, Shehui Xinlixue; Ellwood, Shehui xinlixue; Freud, Qunzhong xinli yu ziwo de fenxi; Kuwada Yoshizō, “Qunzhong xinlixue”; McDougall, Shehui xinlixue xulun; Wallas, Shehui xinli zhi fenxi; Liang Qixun introduced Le Bon’s theory of national psy­chol­ogy in 1903. See Liang Qixun, “Guomin xinlixue.” 17. For example, Gao Juefu in his Crowd Psy­chol­ogy introduced E. D. Martin’s The Be­hav­iors of Crowds and Gault’s Social Psy­chol­ogy, among ­others. Xie Chengxun 謝承訓 introduced Ross in his article, “Luoshi de qunzhong xinli.” Zhang Jiuru introduced Tarde’s differentiation between the public and the crowd in his Qunzhong xinli, 1–5. German scholar Walter Moede’s experimental crowd psy­chol­ogy was introduced in Song Shan, “Qunzhong de xingwei.” 18. For the relationship between Le Bon and other earlier authors of crowd psy­chol­ ogy, see Ginneken, “The 1895 Debate.” 19. Scholars have claimed that the notion of crowd mentality developed in reaction to the power acquired by the lower classes in France a­ fter the mid-­nineteenth ­century. However, as Erika Apfelbaum and Gregory R. McGuire note, Le Bon never explic­itly mentions the period and events of the Commune; instead, the 1789 French Revolution is the primary reference point in his writings. They interpret this lack of direct reference



Notes to Pages 30–31

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as ­either a “­simple repression” or as “an attempt to convey a dispassionate analy­sis” when the recent mass revolt was the obsession of the day. Apfelbaum and McGuire, “Models of Suggestive Influence,” 27–50. 20. Jonsson, “Invention of the Masses,” 72; Barrows, Distorting Mirrors, 163. 21. Cited in Widener, Gustave Le Bon, 15. 22. Le Bon, Crowd, 27. 23. Ibid., 32. 24. Ibid., 35–36. 25. For critiques of Le Bon’s crowd theory, see, for example, Freud, Group Psy­chol­ ogy; Georges Lefebvre, “Revolutionary Crowds;” Rudé, Crowd in History; Mark Harrison, Crowds and History; Plotz, Crowd. For recent research on neurons in the brain and how it might relate to Le Bonian crowd psy­chol­ogy, see, for instance, Damasio, Looking for Spinoza. 26. Moscovici, Age of the Crowd, 4, emphasis in original. 27. Quoted in Esteve, Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd, 2. 28. Schnapp, “Mob Porn,” 3. 29. Timothy Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt is a notable exception. In this study, Mitchell examines the influence of Le Bon’s social theories on the po­liti­cal thought of Egypt’s emergent bourgeoisie in the 1900s. 30. Choi, “Yi Kwangsu”; Sunyoung Park, Proletarian Wave, 116–17; Gordon, ­Labor and Imperial Democracy, 38. Although Le Bon’s theory of racial psy­chol­ogy captured the attention of late Qing po­liti­cal thinkers, his crowd theory was not seriously studied ­until the republican era. On the circulation of Le Bon’s racial psy­chol­ogy in the late Qing, see Lung-­Kee Sun, Chinese National Character, 37–79. 31. On urban riots and the culture of popu­lar vio­lence in Taishō Japan, see Gordon, ­Labor and Imperial Democracy, 26–62; Fujino Yūko, Toshi to bōdō no minshūshi. ­A fter the ­great earthquake of 1923, as Gennifer Weisenfeld points out, in Japan’s media and visual culture images of oceanic crowd became the embodiment of collective terror and victimhood. See Weisenfeld, Imaging Disaster, chap. 3. 32. Tanimoto Tomeri, Gunshū shinri; Ōkubo Tomejirou, Gunshū no shinri. 33. Le Bon, Gunshū shinri (1910, 1914). 34. Chen Chengze, “Qunzhong xinli lun.” On the objectives of the journal, see “Fazheng zazhi jianzhang.” 35. Chen Chengze, “Qunzhong xinli lun,” 1. 36. Le Bon, Geming xinli, 104–16. The Esteemed ­Will Acad­emy was founded by Fan Yuanlian 范源濂 (1876–1927) in 1909 in Beijing together with some friends, including Liang Qichao and Zhang Dongsun. It offered ­free classes and issued diplomas. The Acad­ emy was closely tied to the Research Clique, a po­liti­cal group also known as the Constitutional Research Society led by Liang Qichao, which promoted constitutionalism in the early 1910s. For a brief introduction of the Acad­emy and a list of its publications, see Li Wenqi, Beiping xueshu jiguan zhinan, 33–39. 37. Le Bon, “Yuan qun.” Wuwu zazhi published Zhong’s translation of the four chapters of Book One and the first chapter of Book Two of The Crowd. This translation was titled “Yuan qun” (literally, “explicating the crowd”). When his full translation was published in 1920 by the Taidong Book Com­pany, the main publishing h ­ ouse

206

Notes to Pages 32–35

of the early Creation Society, Zhong changed the title from “Yuan qun” to Qunzhong. 38. Le Bon, Qunzhong xinli. In addition to the En­glish translation, Du and Wu prob­ ably also consulted the Japa­nese translations of The Crowd. See Le Bon, Gunshū shinri (1910, 1914). 39. Quoted in Nye, Origins, 155. Bergson was implying that Le Bon has more admirers than he thought in the French Acad­emy of Sciences. 40. Zhang Dongsun, “Geming xinli xu,” 1. 41. Freud, “Lübang lun qunzhong xinli.” It is a Chinese translation of the second chapter of Freud’s Massenpsychologie und Ich-­Analyse (1921). 42. Xun, “Gustave Le Bon.” 43. Hu Jianmin, “Lipeng zhu Qunzhong xinlixue.” 44. Zhang Xichen, “Qunzhong xinli zhi tezheng,” 5. 45. Chen Chengze, “Qunzhong xinli lun,” 12. 46. Luo Jialun, “Yinianlai w ­ omen xuesheng yundong.” 47. Le Bon, World in Revolt, 9. 48. Dewey, “Need for Social Psy­chol­ogy,” 266. 49. Tao Menghe, “Shehui xinlixue xu.” 50. Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng, 81. 51. Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth C ­ entury, 102. See also Fitzgerald, Awakening China; Messner, “Transforming Chinese Heart,” 231–49. On the invention of the psychological as a modern cultural category, see Pfister and Schnog, Inventing the Psychological. 52. Hu Hanmin, “Lübang de ‘Qunzhong xinli,’ ” 555. 53. Chen Duxiu, “­Women jiujing ying bu yinggai aiguo?” 我們究竟應不應該愛國? (Should We Be Patriotic a­ fter All?), in Duxiu wenchun, 647–48. Originally published in 1919. 54. Chen Duxiu and Ou Shengbai, “Taolun wuzhengfuzhuyi.” 55. Outraged by the fact that the so-­called North-­South peace conference was nothing but a melon-­cutting meeting of warlords from the north and south to claim their own interests, Hu Hanmin resigned from the conference in July 1919 and established the GMD’s main journal Jianshe in Shanghai in August. Hu was appointed by Sun Yat-­ sen as its editor-­in-­chief and main writer. For the historical background of Hu’s activity around this time and the creation of the journal Jianshe, see Jiang Yongjing, Hu Hanmin xiansheng nianpu, 230–42. 56. Hu did not specify which versions of Le Bon’s works he consulted. By the time he wrote this article, the Japan-­educated Hu Hanmin very likely had read Zhang Xichen’s article, Du’s and Wu’s translation of The Psy­chol­ogy of Revolution that Hu also quoted from, and the Japa­nese translations of The Crowd that came out in the early 1910s. 57. Christensen’s work had not been translated into Chinese. Hu prob­ably read the Japa­nese translation that had just become available in 1916. 58. Hu Hanmin, “Lübang de ‘Qunzhong xinli,’ ” 557. 59. Christensen, Politics and Crowd-­Morality, 10, 25. 60. Hu Hanmin, “Lübang de ‘Qunzhong xinli.’ ” 559. 61. Le Bon, Crowd, 18. 62. Hu Hanmin, “Lübang de ‘Qunzhong xinli,’ ” 563.



Notes to Pages 36–39

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63. Hayes, ­People and the Mob, 70–78. 64. Rojas, Homesickness, 106–16. 65. See Hu Hanmin, Hu Hanmin zizhuan, 105. 66. For related information, see Fu Guoyong, “Xin shehui zhi meng,” 18–22. 67. Qu Qiubai, “Shehui yundong de xishengzhe.” Rudolf G. Wagner shows that the term qunzhong yundong was first used by the student leaders of the May Fourth Movement to define their demonstrations. See Wagner, “Canonization of May Fourth,” 69–82. 68. Qu Qiubai, “Shehui yundong de xishengzhe,” 647. 69. Zhang Zhu, “Shenme shi shehui?” 70. Fu Sinian, “Shehui—­qunzhong,” 346; Fu Sinian, “Qingnian de liangjian shiye.” For more on Fu Sinian’s notion of society, see Wang Fan-­sen, “Fu Sinian zaoqing de ‘zao shehui’ lun”; Wang Fan-­sen, “Evolving Prescriptions for Social Life.” 71. Qu Qiubai, “Exiang jicheng” 餓鄉紀程 (Journey to the Land of Hunger), in Qu Qiubai wenji, 1:99. Originally published in 1921. Focusing on Qu’s last work Duoyu de hua 多餘的話 (Superfluous Words), Andy Rodekohr has examined Qu’s notion of the superfluous in relation to the issue of the crowd. See Rodekohr, “Summoning Masses.” 72. Le Bon, Crowd, 36. 73. This is not to lose sight of the fact that Hu Hanmin also harbored a cautious distrust of the crowd. A tension persists between his usages of qunzhong (crowd) and minzhong 民眾 (­people). Hu chided Le Bon for his opposition to democracy, socialism, and ­women’s rights. He believed that democracy is superior to authoritarian politics, identifying minzhong as the agent rather than qunzhong when proposing his po­liti­cal ideal. The second half of Hu’s article shows how education could transform and improve crowd mentality and national character, which for Hu are two sides of one coin. It is implied that as noble and moral as the crowd could be, ­there is still a distance between qunzhong and minzhong. For Hu, minzhong embodies a higher form of po­liti­cal authority and agency. 74. Quoted in Wang Hui, “Zhang Taiyan’s Concept of the Individual,” 238. 75. Lu Xun, “­Toward a Refutation of Malevolent Voices,” 46. 76. Lu Xun, Fen, 39. 77. Wang Hui, “The Voices of Good and Evil,” 93–94. 78. See Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji, 1:327–28. En­glish translations are adapted from Denton, “Impromptu Reflections No. 38,” 90. On the influence of Le Bon’s theory of the “racial mind” on Lu Xun’s self-­hatred and antipathy ­toward the crowd, see Lung-­Kee Sun, “Dialogue between Two Revolutions,” 9–10. 79. Lu Xun, “Cuntie” 寸铁 (An Inch of Iron), in Lu Xun quanji, 8:111. 80. Letter to Xu Guanping, dated May 18, 1925. See Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji, 11:76. 81. Zhao Yuan, Di zhi zi, 89–101. 82. See, for instance, Leo Ou-­fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House, 69–88; Lung-­Kee Sun, Chinese National Character, 117–44. 83. See, for instance, Marston Anderson, Limits of Realism, 76–92; Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice, 69–76. For recent study of the relationship between the intellectual and the crowd in Lu Xun’s fiction, see Rodekohr, “Summoning Masses,” chap. 1. 84. Lu Xun, “Shizhong.”

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Notes to Pages 40–44

85. Marston Anderson, Limits of Realism, 80. On Lu Xun’s “cinematic” technique of narration, see also Hanan, “Technique of Lu Hsun’s Fiction,” 89. 86. Leo Ou-­fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House, 78. 87. Foster, Ah Q Archaeology, 109–111. See also Leo Ou-­fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House, 91. 88. Foster, Ah Q Archaeology, 109. 89. Li Rong, “Qunzhong xinli de putong xianxiang”; Zhang Yinian, “Qunzhong xinli zhi tezheng”; Bao Shoumei, “Tantan qunzhong xinli.” Zhang Yinian was studying psy­chol­ogy in the University of Nanking (known in Chinese as Jinling daxue 金陵大學) when he wrote the essay on the crowd. He ­later obtained a master’s degree in psy­chol­ ogy from the University of Michigan and became in the 1930s a major advocate for the “­mental hygiene movement” in China. For information on his ­career, see Shu Yueyu, “Zhang Yinian.” 90. See Hu Yanfeng, Liuxuesheng yu Zhongguo xinlixue, 162. 91. For instance, Zhang Yaoxiang, “Zhongguo xuezhe xinlixue zhi yanjiu”; Zhang Yaoxiang, “Zhongguo xuezhe xinlixue zhi yanjiu (di’erji).” 92. Zhonghua biantai xinli xuehui, Qunzhong xinli jiangyi. 93. Crowd psy­chol­ogy was taught in the Department of Psy­chol­ogy at Qinghua University in the 1930s. See Lin Chuanding, “Qinghua daxue xinlixi gaikuang.” Chen Jianxiao 陳劍翛 and Xiao Xiaorong 蕭孝嶸 taught abnormal psy­chol­ogy at the GMD-­controlled National Central University in the 1930s and crowd psy­chol­ogy was part of their research. See “Zhongyang daxue xinlixuexi linian kechengbiao”; Chen Jianxiao, “Qunzhong xinli zhong qingxu de yunyong wenti”; Xiao Xiaorong, Qunzhong xinli. Zhang Jiuru taught crowd psy­chol­ogy at several GMD military academies. See Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli yu qunzhong lingdao, 1–10. For information on the entrance of Le Bon’s study into the con­ temporary field of military psy­chol­ogy in Eu­rope and the United States, see Metraux, “French Crowd Psy­chol­ogy,” 281; Bendersky, “ ‘Panic,’ ” 257–83. For more on the institutionalization of psy­chol­ogy in modern China, see Yang Xinhui and Zhao Liru, Zhongguo jinxiandai xinlixue shi; Blowers, “Origins of Scientific Psy­chol­ogy in China,” 94–111. 94. Published between June 1928 and May 1935, the ABC Series totals 152 volumes. For more information on this series, see Ji Shaofu, Zhongguo chuban jianshi, 329. 95. See Chen’s “Introductory Remarks” and Xu’s “The Objectives of the ABC Series” in Chen Dongyuan, Qunzhong xinlixue ABC, first four pages (unpaged). 96. Fu Nian, “Qunzhong xinli yu shehui lingxiu,” 10, 14. 97. I borrow the term from Rose, “Assembling the Modern Self,” 224. On Gao Juefu’s role in the introduction of Western psychological thinking, especially Freudian sexual theories, in the republican era, see Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng, 49–54. 98. For biographical information, see Ye Haosheng, Laoji fenti; Blowers, “Gao Juefu,” 107–21. 99. Gao Juefu [Gao Zhuo], “Shehui xinlixue gaishuo,” 1. 100. Gao Juefu, “Preface,” in Qunzhong xinlixue, 2. 101. Gao Juefu [Gao Zhuo], “Shehui xinlixue gaishuo,” 5. 102. McPhail, Myth of the Madding Crowd, 25–26; Greenwood, Disappearance of the Social, chap. 5. 103. Gao Juefu [Gao Zhuo], “Shehui xinlixue gaishuo (III),” 9–10.



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104. Gao Juefu [Gao Zhuo], “Shehui xinlixue gaishuo (II),” 13. 105. In the section on “Spatial F ­ actors and Circularity in Crowds,” Allport argues that “in a crowd, however, the irregular grouping of persons makes it pos­si­ble for each to be affected from all sides, and to receive stimuli . . . ​from a large number of individuals.” He continues, “This fact, a purely mechanical one, must be recognized in explaining the heightened reactions of the individual in the crowd. Not only is the strength of s­ocial facilitation multiplied many fold by this arrangement; but each person is overwhelmed with greater submissiveness in the observed presence of large numbers.” See Floyd Henry Allport, Social Psy­chol­ogy, 301. Allport’s book was translated into Chinese by Zhao Yan 赵演 and published by the Commercial Press in 1935. 106. Gao Juefu [Gao Zhuo], “Shehui xinlixue gaishuo (III),” 10. In a 1936 article, the writer Xu Xu 許訏 criticized this type of behavioristic interpretation of crowd phenomena as “too mechanical.” See Xu Xu, “Xingweizhuyi (Behaviorism) lun.” 107. Chapters 7 and 8 of Qunzhong xinlixue mainly repeat his early article “A General Study of Social Psy­chol­ogy.” For information on Gao’s teaching experience in Si­ chuan and the creation of Crowd Psy­chol­ogy, see Gao’s preface to Qunzhong xinlixue, 1–2. Supposedly targeted at ­middle school students, the Chinese Encyclopedia Series comprises 100 volumes divided over ten fields of knowledge, such as philosophy, natu­ral science, art, geography, and lit­er­a­ture. 108. Gao Juefu, Qunzhong xinlixue, 45. 109. Luh, Shehui xinlixue xinlun, 39–41, 119–36; Tong Dizhou, “Geren yu qunzhong.” For similar views, see Chen Dongyuan, Qunzhong xinlixue ABC, 6–16; Cheng Shi, “Wei yanju qunzhong xinli zhe jieshao yibufen zhishi”; Zhao Yan, “Qunzhong zhi shehui xinli guan.” For a summary of how most Chinese social scientists of the 1930s and 1940s viewed crowd be­hav­ior, see Sun Liyin, “Qunzhong xingwei de texing.” 110. Liu Qu, “Qunzhong xingwei,” 36. 111. Allport, Social Psy­chol­ogy, 296, quoted in McPhail, Myth of the Madding Crowd, 26. On Allport’s reduction of social phenomena to the be­hav­ior of individuals, see Danziger, Naming the Mind, 140–6. 112. Doob, Propaganda, 18, emphasis in original. 113. Gao Juefu, Qunzhong xinlixue, chap. 3; McDougall, Outline of Abnormal Psy­ chol­ogy, 333–40; Conklin, Princi­ples of Abnormal Psy­chol­ogy. 114. Gao Juefu, Qunzhong xinlixue, 40. 115. Ibid., 36. 116. Ibid., 46. Although Gao does not cite Lu Xun, his characterization of the dual ­mental impulses b­ ehind crowd psy­chol­ogy—­the intermeshed delusions of grandeur and the desire to persecute—­resonates with an earlier observation made by Lu Xun. In one of his “impromptu reflections,” Lu Xun, offering a perspective strikingly similar to Gao’s, contends that “the self-­aggrandizement of crowding” results in persecuting whoever is dif­ fer­ent. For Lu Xun, joining a crowd transforms individuals into a mob that “declares war against a minority of geniuses.” While one is part of a crowd, both Lu and Gao argue, the feelings of self-­esteem always combine with a need to victimize ­others. Lu Xun mockingly describes the ­people in the crowd as “crouching in the shadows of their own image, eyes wide and tongues wagging. They constitute the largest majority and win merely by making use of the ‘mob’ skill of sound and fury.” It is worth noting that

210

Notes to Pages 47–50

Lu Xun leaves “mob” untranslated, thus leaving his readers to draw the connection ­between the “mob” and qun, the central subject of his “random thoughts.” Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji, 1:327–8. 117. Rong Zhaozu, “Maerding Qunzhong de xingwei yishu de jieshao yu piping.” 118. Zhang Yinian, “Qunzhong xinli zhi tezheng,” 45–47. 119. Chen Dongyuan, Qunzhong xinlixue ABC, 53. 120. Gao Juefu, Qunzhong xinlixue, 4; Martin, Be­hav­ior of Crowds, 165. In fact, Gao, quoting Gardner Murphy, maintains that the En­glish translation of Le Bon’s “les foules” should be “mob” rather than “crowd.” Gao, Qunzhong xinlixue, 5. Gao referred to Murphy, Historical Introduction to Modern Psy­chol­ogy, 291. 121. Gao Juefu, Qunzhong xinlixue, 44, 48, emphasis mine. 122. Rose, Inventing Our Selves, 60. 123. Richard Brown, ­Toward a Demo­cratic Science, 171. 124. Galsworthy, Qunzhong, 6. 125. Galsworthy, Mob, 74; Galsworthy, Qunzhong, 110; Gao Juefu, Qunzhong xinlixue, 23. 126. Gao Juefu, Qunzhong xinlixue, 146. 127. Ibid., 146. Gao Juefu was one of the most prolific Chinese commentators on Freud and his sexual theories. For this side of Gao’s c­ areer, see Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng, 49–59. As Larson points out, Freudian theory was not widely accepted by Chinese intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth ­century. Gao himself criticized Freud’s notion of the unconscious. My study shows that Freud’s crowd theory was much less influential than Le Bon’s in modern China. 128. Zhang taught crowd psy­chol­ogy at Whampoa during dif­fer­ent stages of its transformation, from the GMD Central Infantry Officer Acad­emy (Zhongyang lujun junguan xuexiao 中央陸軍軍官學校) and the Central Military and Po­l iti­c al Acad­emy (Zhongyang junshi zhengzhi xuexiao 中央軍事政治學校) to the Whampoa Military Acad­emy (Huangpu junxiao 黃埔軍校). 129. Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli. 130. The publication of Zhang’s monograph was nothing short of dramatic. Zhang sent the manuscript to the Shanghai Commercial Press and signed a publishing contract a few days before the Mukden Incident (September 18, 1931) when the Japa­nese Imperial Army invaded Manchuria. His book was scheduled to come out in June of the following year. In early 1932, the January 28 Incident (January 28–­March 3, 1932) occurred when Japa­nese troops, backed by aerial and naval bombardment, attacked Shanghai and set commercial and residential districts afire. The Shanghai Ceasefire Agreement was reached on May 5. On June 7 when his book was originally planned for publication, Zhang, who at the time was on the battlefront in Jiangsu, received a letter from the Commercial Press, which read as follows: “Your script Crowd Psy­chol­ogy and Crowd Leadership was being typeset when the ­Battle of Shanghai broke out. The workshop of our ­humble ­house was completely burnt down. So destroyed was your work, having its share of this national calamity. Please accept our deepest sadness and regret.” According to Zhang, the chapters on the c­ auses of the Eu­ro­pean crowd insurrections ­a fter the French Revolution, the origins of All Fools’ Day, and the value of the Eu­ro­ pean and American mass movements ­a fter the French Revolution w ­ ere all included in



Notes to Pages 50–55

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the original manuscript he sent to the publisher and ­were lost in the war. Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli yu qunzhong lingdao, 1–10. 131. Ibid., 2. 132. Ibid., 3. 133. Ibid., 5. 134. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 259. Hardt and Negri list Le Bon’s crowd theory as an example of the “apocalyptic vision of manipulated mob rule.” 135. For a detailed study of the conceptual differentiation between the crowd and the public and the application of the crowd theory in social management, see Ewen, PR!, 60–81. Also see Robert Park, Crowd and the Public. 136. Tarde, “The Public and the Crowd.” 137. Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli yu qunzhong lingdao, 5. 138. Ibid., 103–141. 139. Ibid., 170–224. 140. Ibid., 246. 141. Ibid., 248. 142. Yu Jiaju, “Shenme shi geming de zuihao fangfa?” 37, quoted in Lung-­Kee Sun, “Dialogue between Two Revolutions,” 13. 143. Xu Yi, Xuanchuanshu yu qunzhong yundong, 39. 144. Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli yu qunzhong lingdao, 6–9. 145. Ibid., 9. 146. Ibid., 10. 147. Ibid., 150. 148. Ibid., 299–308. 149. Watson, Analects of Confucius, 64; Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli yu qunzhong lingdao, 315–39. 150. Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli yu qunzhong lingdao, 359 151. Ibid., 309; Lin Chuanding, “Qunzhong xinli yu lingdao.” 152. Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli yu qunzhong lingdao, 312–14. 153. Ibid., 381. 154. Ibid., 246. 155. Ibid., 406; Baldwin, Handbook of Psy­chol­ogy, 297. 156. Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli yu qunzhong lingdao, 406–407. Zhang borrowed the concept of “cleft in consciousness” from Enoch Burton Gowin. Gowin’s 1915 The Executive and His Control of Men was translated into Chinese in 1927 by Zhong Jianhong, who, as mentioned earlier, also translated Le Bon’s The Crowd. According to Gowin, ­people are most suggestible when “the higher controlling phase of mind [is] separated from the lower brain centers. In abnormal suggestibility, this cleft is deep, a gash so serious that the subwaking self lies unprotected before the incoming idea or image.” Gowin, Executive and His Control of Men, 143. 157. Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli yu qunzhong lingdao, 409. Zhang’s choice of the word “attack” reminds us of Sun Yat-­sen, who defined the po­liti­cal mission of GMD as to “assault the heart.” See Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 206. 158. Strand, An Unfinished Republic, 78. 159. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 295.

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Notes to Pages 55–61

160. It is worth noting that, in the 1930s, studies of crowd mentality often unfolded within discussions of the psy­chol­ogy of leadership. In addition to Zhang’s and Lin’s studies that ­were already cited, see also, for example, Xiao Xianfang, “Lingxiu de xinli.” 161. For example, Jin Zhensheng, “Tongshuai xinlixue.” 162. Xiao Xiaorong obtained his Ph.D. in psy­chol­ogy from the University of California in 1930. His pamphlet Qunzhong xinli was published by the Central Military Commission’s Cadre Training Corps (Zhongyang junshi weiyuanhui ganxuntuan 中央 軍事委員會幹訓團) in 1945. 163. On the meanings and forms of xunlian during the government expansion of this period, see Strauss, “The Evolution of Republican Government,” 91. See also Strauss, “Strategies of Guomin­dang Institution Building.” 164. Wu Zhaotang, Qunzhong xinlixue gangyao, 58–59. 165. Guomin zhengfu junshiweiyuanhui zhengzhibu, Lingxiu zuijin xunci qizhong, 83–110. 166. Hobsbawm, “Mass-­Producing Traditions,” 268. 167. Doob, Propaganda, 18. 168. Davidson, Emergence of Sexuality, 180. 169. Zhu Yinqing, “Qunzhong xinli bijing shi kepa de.” 170. Zhang Jiuru, Qunzhong xinli yu qunzhong lingdao, 247. 171. Ibid., 249. 172. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Lit­er­a­ture, 87–88. 173. Georges Lefebvre, “Revolutionary Crowds,” 173. For a critique of the Le Bonian abstraction of the crowd from a historian’s perspective, see George Rudé’s classic study, Crowd in History. 174. I borrow the idea of the lack of “subjectal” ground from Mikkel Borch-­ Jacobsen’s analy­sis of Le Bon’s crowd theory: “The paradox of crowd is such that its homogenization is based not on a common ground but on the absence of any ‘subjectal’ ground.” Mutable and controlled by excessive emotions and instinct without any self-­ awareness, the Le Bonian crowd, he continues to argue, is defined through “their total lack of specificity” or their “non-­c haracteristics.” Borch-­Jacobsen, Freudian Subject, 138–39.

Chapter 2. The Lure of the Irrational 1. On the concept of the multitude as a spontaneous aggregation of singular social subjects whose unity is based on immanent potentials rather than on external authority, see Hardt and Negri, Empire; Hardt and Negri, Multitude. For critiques of their idea of immanence as the ground for social antagonism, see Rancière, Dissensus, 84–90; Laclau, On Populist Reason, 239–43. 2. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 28. For an account and critique of the recent “turn to affect” in a wide range of fields, including po­liti­cal theory and cultural studies, see Leys, “The Turn to Affect.” 3. Nye, Origins of the Crowd Psy­chol­ogy, 172. 4. Bellamy, “Advent of the Masses,” 71. 5. Jonsson, “Invention of the Masses,” 74.



Notes to Pages 62–66

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6. Apfelbaum and McGuire, “Models of Suggestive Influence,” 32. 7. Borch, Politics of Crowds, 92–93. 8. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 3: 1935–1938, 129, fn 24. 9. Ibid., emphasis in original. Written between late December 1935 and early February 1936, this is a revision and expansion of the first version of the essay. The essay, popularly known as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” exists in four versions. 10. Ibid. Benjamin’s view of the masses is more complicated than presented in this long note. For a comprehensive study of the Benjamin’s theory of the masses, see Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy, 190–209. 11. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 29. 12. Ibid., 111. 13. For biographical information on Zhu’s early life, see his autobiography Huiyi, 13– 33. Early versions of the chapters in Geming zhexue, such as the ones on “the personality and spirit of revolutionaries” and “the goals and methods of revolution,” ­were published in 1920 in the anarchist journal Fendou 奮鬥 (Strug­gle) nos. 2–4 (1920). 14. See Zhu Qianzhi, “Shijie guan de zhuanbian,” 122. 15. Wu Zhihui, Wu Zhihui xueshu lunzhu, 24. 16. Michel Hockx has challenged the validity of using the term “May Fourth” as a category to cover the variety of literary products of the 1910s and 1920s. May Fourth could be a useful tool, as Hockx argues, only if we do not use it as a restrictive label to construct “mainstreams.” Hockx, “Is ­There a May Fourth?” 40–52. The ­later marginalized, if not completely forgotten, philosophy of Zhu Qianzhi not only demonstrates an impor­tant “current” of antirationalism that emerged in the early 1920s but also reveals its contestation with other currents of thought circulating in China during the time. 17. Chen Jianhua, “Chinese ‘Revolution’ in the Syntax of World Revolution,” 355–74. 18. As Prasenjit Duara points out, Social Darwinian evolutionism was so central that in the hands of modern Chinese intellectuals it “began to produce the very categories through which the world could be seen and acted upon in its terms: race, nation and history.” See Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 48. Darwin himself did not propose the idea of a deterministic pro­gress ­toward perfection, as James Pusey argues, but it was part of Chinese intellectuals’ understanding of Social Darwinism. See Pusey, Lu Xun and Evolution. Zhu said, “It is a pity that nowadays a group of p ­ eople only talk nonsense about ­things like ‘natu­ral se­lection,’ ‘survival of the fittest,’ or ‘cooperation of organisms,’ as if beyond ­these t­ here ­were no other theory of evolution.” Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 17–18. For a stimulating study of the diffusion and critique of evolutionary thinking in modern China, see Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales. 19. Bowler, Eclipse of Darwinism. 20. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 54. 21. Zhu’s theory of qing anticipated the con­temporary Chinese phi­los­o­pher Li Zehou’s 李澤厚 notion of qing benti 情本體 or the original substance of feeling. Both of them opposed qing to li 理 (rationality) and conceived of qing as the generative foundation of humanity. But whereas Li developed the Confucian notion of qing as the origin of ethical relationships, Zhu believed that a recovery of the original substance of qing

214

Notes to Pages 66–68

­ ill ultimately lead to total annihilation. On Li’s theory of qing benti, see David Der-­ w wei Wang, Lyrical in Epic Time, 358–9. 22. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 24, 28. 23. Zhu Qianzhi, “Xin sheng­huo de yiyi.” 24. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 54. 25. Ibid., 220. 26. Danziger, “Wundt and the Temptations of Psy­chol­ogy,” 80. 27. Blumenthal, “A Wundt Primer,” 135. 28. Zhu Qianzhi acknowledged Wundt’s influence without specifying its source. Wundt’s An Introduction to Psy­chol­ogy was not translated into Chinese ­until 1923, but two lengthy essays on Wundt came out around the time when Zhu wrote his Philosophy of Revolution. Yet neither of them detail Wundt’s idea of emotion, with which Zhu engaged deeply. See Gu Shusen, “Wende shi zhi xin xinlixue”; Kang Fu, “Fengde zhi shengping jiqi xueshuo.” 29. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 45. 30. David Robinson, “Reaction-­Time Experiments in Wundt’s Institute and Beyond”; Danziger, “Wundt’s Theory of Be­hav­ior and Volition”; Wassmann, “Physiological Optics, Cognition, and Emotion.” 31. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 46. 32. Ibid., 46. 33. Ibid., 43. 34. Ibid., 53. 35. Ibid., 208. 36. Zhu was dissatisfied with Peter Kropotkin’s anarchist communism, which was influential in China during the time b­ ecause of its advocacy by prominent anarchists such as Shifu. For Shifu’s anarchist communism, see Krebs, Shifu. For Zhu’s critique of anarchist communism, see also Zhu Qianzhi, Xiandai sichao piping. 37. As Lung-­Kee Sun points out, Zhu first developed his theory of “nonexistence” in his “Taiji xin tushuo” 太極新圖說 (The new Taiji diagram, 1919). Lung-­Kee Sun, “Mystical Aspects of May Fourth Thinking.” 38. Le Bon, “Wuzhi shengmie lun.” A Chinese translation of Le Bon’s article was ­included in a volume titled Yuzhou yu wuzhi 宇宙與物質 (Universe and ­Matter) of the highly popu­lar series The Eastern Repositories. Le Bon’s article attracted not only Zhu’s attention but also that of other leading intellectuals of the time such as Wu Zhihui. 39. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 221–25. Yeats’s line is seen in Yeats, Where Th ­ ere Is Nothing (New York: Macmillan Com­pany, 1903), 65. 40. Nietz­sche, ­Will to Power, 90. 41. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 229. The quotation is from a dialogue between Kirilov the nihilist and narrator “I” in F. M. Dostoevsky’s Dev­ils (1871) (New York: Words­worth Editions, 2000), 112. Zhu Qianzhi differentiates himself from Rus­sian nihilists who, he thought, ­were not thorough enough in that they “condemned real­ity but dared not to overturn the world.” Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 208. 42. For a discussion of Zhang’s “Five Negations” theory as his critique of Darwinian evolutionism, see Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, 413–19. Zhu Qianzhi did not cite Zhang in Philosophy of Revolution, but he ­later admitted that he shared with Zhang a



Notes to Pages 68–72

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similar anarchist idea of total negation. See Zhu Qianzhi, “Wuzhengfu zhuyi pipan,” 273. 43. Murthy, Po­liti­cal Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan, 164. 44. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 52, 57. 45. Ibid., 59. Two intense and often amusing letters between Zhu and Chen are printed in Xin qingnian, in which Zhu curses Chen as “a ­f uture despotic Prince of the Dev­ils,” and Chen retorts, chiding Zhu as being infantile. See Zhu Qianzhi and Duxiu, “Kaiming zhuanzhi.” 46. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 53. 47. See Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 7–22. Zhu’s Philosophy of Revolution was the second book published in the Creation Society Series. The first title in the series was Guo Moruo’s Nüshen 女神 (Goddesses) and the third was Yu Dafu’s 郁達夫 Chenlun 沈淪 (Sinking). 48. Schwarcz, Chinese Enlightenment, 145–9. 49. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 122. 50. Lean, Public Passions; Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart. 51. Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 11, 137. 52. The late imperial cult of qing came to contest and complement the institutionalized Confucian code of social be­hav­ior and propriety. As Wai-­yee Li points out, despite its emphasis on the “expansiveness and transformative power” of qing, it required qing to be “reintegrated into schemes of order.” Wai-­yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment, 93. Zhu, in contrast, celebrated the disruptive power of qing. 53. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 46. 54. Danziger, Naming the Mind, 64. “The separation of physical and mentalistic language,” Danziger maintains, “was a modern development, and in the nineteenth c­ entury it was far from complete” (52). 55. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 135–79, 206–30. Dixon points out that the creation of an overarching category of emotions in opposition to reason, intellect, and ­will is a recent invention. 56. Danziger, Naming the Mind, 64. Danziger argues that, in Eu­rope, this threefold scheme had originated in late eighteenth-­century Romanticism and was reinterpreted in quasi-­physical terms in the nineteenth ­century. 57. Zhu Qianzhi, Yige weiqing zhuyi zhe de yuzhouguan ji renshengguan. 58. Eliot, “A Commentary.” 59. Ch’en, China and the West, 186. On how Bergson’s key notions such as affection took on historically and po­liti­cally specific meanings in modern China, especially in modern Chinese visual culture, see Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema. 60. Qian Zhixiu, “Bugesen zhexue shuo zhi piping,” 4. Qian’s biography of Bergson introduces the key ideas of Bergson’s irrationalism, many of which Zhu Qianzhi would appropriate in his own thinking. See Qian Zhixiu, “Faguo da zhexuejia Bugexun.” 61. Bergson’s Creative Evolution, for instance, was translated into Chinese by Zhang Dongsun in 1919, who, as mentioned in the previous chapter, was also an admirer of Le Bon. On the early introduction of Bergson in China, see Wu Hanquan, “Lun Bogesen zhexue zai Zhongguo de chuanru.” 62. Wang Fan-­hsi, Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary, 5–9.

216

Notes to Pages 72–77

63. Shu-­mei Shih, Lure of the Modern, 61–63. 64. Bergson, Creative Evolution. On Bergson’s rejection of Darwinian evolutionism, see Bowler, Eclipse of Darwinism, 56–57, 116–17; Kolakowski, Bergson, 53–70. 65. For instance, Bergson mentions that ­under certain circumstances, the “creative impulse” can be a “tremendous push” with “explosive force,” “able to beat down ­every re­sis­tance and clear the most formidable obstacles.” See Bergson, Creative Evolution, 98, 271. 66. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 35. 67. Russell, Po­liti­cal Ideals, 8. Po­liti­cal ideals was promptly translated into Chinese by Wu Weiren 吴蔚人 and Liu Hengru 刘衡如 during Russell’s tour in China in 1920. Their rendition was very popu­lar and went through many reprints in the 1920s and 1930s. For Russell’s dualism of impulses in his thought and the discursive context for Po­liti­cal Ideals, see Ironside, Social and Po­liti­cal Thought of Bertrand Russell, 97–80, 126–45. 68. Ibid., 159. 69. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 43. 70. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 165. As Leszek Kolakowski notes, rational analy­sis, according to Bergson, is distortion. Analytical intellect and reasoning “decompose the world into ele­ments relative to ­human needs; in cognitive terms they provide us with shadows instead of a body . . . ​The unrepeatable, the unique, and thus the real, is beyond the reach of analy­sis and of symbolic repre­sen­ta­tions.” Kolakowski, Bergson, 25. 71. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, 7. 72. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 82–83. 73. Ibid., 102–3, emphasis mine. 74. Ibid., 104. 75. This tension, for instance, was highlighted by Guo Moruo. In a confession of the contradictions in the minds of “young ­people” like himself, Guo took a more moderate stand: “We want to seek out truth and develop our reason; but we also . . . ​find it hard to abandon our intuition . . . ​In my opinion, we should make ­every effort to develop our reason wherever reason should be developed, and fully use our intuition wherever intuition should be used.” Guo Moruo, Zong Baihua, and Tian Han, Sanyeji, 44–45. Translation with modifications quoted from Chen Xiaoming, From the May Fourth Movement to Communist Revolution, 96. See chapter 1 for more on the ways in which many Chinese commentators saw emotion and instinct as pathological ele­ments that disrupt the pro­cess of rational thought. 76. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 84. 77. Michelet, ­People, 113. 78. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 175. 79. Ibid., 127. 80. Ibid., 127–8. 81. Ibid., 126–7. 82. Ibid., 124. 83. Ibid., 175. 84. Qu Qiubai, “Shehui yundong de xishengzhe,” 647. 85. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 131. 86. Bern­stein, Japa­nese Marxist, 103–30.



Notes to Pages 77–83

217

87. Their works w ­ ere translated into Chinese by Kawakami’s student Li Da 李達 (1890–1966). See Knight, Li Da and Marxist Philosophy in China, 51–53. 88. Meisner, Li Ta-­Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism; Knight, Marxist Philosophy in China, 29–70. 89. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 153–4. 90. Ibid., 133. 91. Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution of Society, 31, 59. 92. Le Bon, Crowd, 31. 93. Quoted in Forth, “Moral Contagion and the W ­ ill,” 67. 94. Freud (1888), “Preface” to the translation of Bernheim’s Suggestion, quoted in Moscovici, Age of the Crowd, 14. 95. Zhang Xichen, “Qunzhong xinli zhi tezheng,” 5. 96. Qu Qiubai, “Shehui yundong de xishengzhe,” 647. 97. Luo Jialun, “Yinianlai w ­ omen xuesheng yundong,” 683–4. 98. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 119. 99. Ibid., 122. 100. Ibid., 122. 101. Ibid., 125, emphasis in original. 102. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 335. 103. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 120. 104. Ibid., 121. 105. Ibid. 106. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 3. 107. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 122. 108. It might be in­ter­est­ing to revisit Sun’s statement about mass propaganda within the con­temporary discussions of suggestion and crowd mentality that this chapter explores. Sun defined mass propaganda as “assaulting the heart . . . ​in order to entice the hearts of China’s four hundred million p ­ eople into favoring our party” (quoted in Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 206, emphasis added). 109. Helen Siu, Furrows, 10; Fitzgerald Awakening China, 337–8. In contrast, Lu Xun remained profoundly ambiguous t­oward the trope of awakening. Marston Anderson and Andrew Jones have observed that the prob­lem of repre­sen­ta­tion (as po­liti­cal relation and as mimetic realism) becomes self-­conscious in the fiction of Lu Xun; the tension between the liberators and ­those they would liberate, between the “­people of foreknowledge and fore-­awakening” and the voiceless masses who the awakened few represent, is inscribed in the form of the contest between the narrator and the narrated. See Marston Anderson, Limits of Realism; Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales. 110. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 121. 111. Zhu argues that au­then­tic emotion is nondiscriminatory and therefore superior to sympathy, which is often “confined by circumstances such as national boundary or anthropological prejudice.” Ibid., 132. Fitzgerald convincingly demonstrates two models of po­liti­ cal repre­sen­ta­tion that w ­ ere dominant during the nationalist revolution: “representation-­ by-­sympathy” and “representation-­by-­consciousness.” The idea of a conscious vanguard representing an unconscious constituency was influenced by Leninism. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 323–32. Zhu was in dialogue with both models of po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tion.

218

Notes to Pages 83–86

112. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 121, emphasis in original. 113. Xiao Tie, “Yige weiqingzhuyizhe de faming.” 114. Zhang Zhu, “Qunzhong xinli yu geren xinli,” 7. 115. Zhu Qianzhi, Huiyi, 31–32. 116. Tu Wei-­ming, Way, Learning, and Politics, 19. 117. Mou Zongsan, Xinti yu xingti, 3:254. 118. Hall and Ames, Thinking through Confucius, 243. 119. Denton, Problematic of Self, 263. 120. Lung-­Kee Sun, “Chinese Intellectuals’ Notion of ‘Epoch’ ”; Denton, Problematic of Self, chap. 1. 121. Moscovici argues, “Our primal links between one another, much more than a blend of interests and thoughts, are the movement of the passions. Th ­ ese are what cause ­people to participate in that phenomenon, which in the end remains a mystery, called a collectivity.” Quoted in Jonsson, Brief History of the Masses, 137. 122. Koselleck, ­Futures Past, 55. 123. Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left, 33. Le Bon and Bergson, Sternhell argues, belonged to the antirationlist generation who saw man as “an essentially irrational being, confined by historical and biological limitations and motivated by sentiments, associations, and images, never by ideas” (36). Irving Horo­witz terms such an extraordinary rise in antirationalist doctrines in Eu­rope at the turn of the twentieth c­ entury as the “revolt against reason.” Horo­witz, Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason. See also Berlin, Against the Current, 1–­2 4; Berlin, Magus of the North. 124. It is worth pointing out that the famous debate on “science and metaphysics,” sparked by Bergson’s follower Carsun Chang, did not start ­until 1923, two years ­after the publication of Zhu’s Philosophy of Revolution. In the debates, metaphysicians challenged the Social Darwinian evolutionism and positivistic theories of knowledge. For a useful survey of this debate, see Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought; also see Yu-­sheng Lin, “Origins and Implications of Modern Chinese Scientism in Early Republican China.” 125. Zhu, Geming zhexue, 59. 126. Gramsci, Se­lections from the Prison Notebooks, 198. Cautioning against the tendency to bureaucratize the po­liti­cal apparatus, Gramsci recommends “a continual adaptation of the organ­ization to the real movement, a matching of thrusts from below with o­ rders from above, a continuous insertion of ele­ments thrown up from the depths of the rank and file into the solid framework of the leadership apparatus” (188–9). 127. Henri Lefebvre, Explosion, 52, 69. Lefebvre writes, “Spontaneity needs an orientation. It requires a kind of thought which can understand it, which can guide it without stifling it. And yet, who is engaged in strug­gle in behalf of thought, knowledge and science? Theoreticians have more than once committed the error of not answering this question” (52). Zhu Qianzhi, as I have shown, engaged with a similar problematic of instinct and spontaneity versus rationality and science. 128. Lenin contended that “all worship of the spontaneity of the working-­class movement, all belittling of the role of the ‘conscious ele­ment,’ of the role of social democracy, means, quite in­de­pen­dently of w ­ hether the belittler desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers.” See Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 105, emphasis in original.



Notes to Pages 86–90

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129. Mao Zedong, “On the Mass Line,” in Schram, The Po­liti­cal Thought of Mao Tse-­ tung, 316–17. My discussion h ­ ere compares Zhu Qianzhi’s philosophy of revolution with Mao’s “mass line.” For an illuminating discussion of the similarities and differences between Zhu’s historical and po­liti­cal thought and that of Mao in his pre-­Marxist stage, see Wang Yuanyi, “Yuzhou geming lun.” 130. Schram, “Mao Tse-­tung’s Thought to 1949,” 341. On the difference and similarities between Maoism and Leninism, see also Hammond, “Marxism and the Mass Line”; Meisner, Marxism, Maoism, and Utopianism, chap. 3; Meisner, Mao’s China and ­After, 43–45; Cai Xiang, Revolution and Its Narratives, 85–103. For interpretations of Mao’s “mass line” that emphasize its anti-­elitist thrust against the Leninist doctrine on centralization and top-­down policy making, see, for example, Selden, Yenan Way, 274–76; Chun, Transformation of Chinese Socialism, 143–8; Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth ­Century, 169–71. 131. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 198, emphasis in the text. 132. See, for instance, Lukács, “Spontaneity of the Masses, Activity of the Party” (1921), in Tactics and Ethics, 95–105. For a classic discussion of the consciousness/spontaneity dialectic in Marxist-­L eninist doctrine, see Katerina Clark, Soviet Novel. 133. In 1918 and 1920, when Mao Zedong worked as an assistant librarian at Beijing University, Zhu Qianzhi was a college student t­ here, and they might have known each other. In interviews, Mao told Edgar Snow that t­ here was an anarchist “Chu Hsun-­Pei,” who visited him often while he was in Beijing. See Snow, Red Star over China, 152. Chinese translators have thought Chu Hsun-­pei to be Zhu Qianzhi since the first Chinese version of Snow’s book appeared in China, but a recent study argues that it is actually a misspelling of Ou Shengbai, who was close with Mao at the time. See Wu Guoyi, “Mao Zedong yu wuzhengfu zhuyi.” 134. Negri, “Value and Affect,” 85, emphasis in original. 135. For biographical information, see Zhu Qianzhi, Fendou niannian. 136. Quoted in Lung-­Kee Sun, “Mystical Aspects of May Fourth Thinking,” 57. 137. My critique h ­ ere is inspired by William Mazzarella’s stimulating reading of Gabriel Tarde’s theory of society as imitation. Mazzarella, “Myth of the Multitude.” 138. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 121. 139. Dirlik, “Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement,” 975. 140. Zhu Qianzhi, Fendou niannian, 85. 141. Zhu Qianzhi, “Xin lunli.” 142. See, for instance, Apter and Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic, 5; Perry, “Chongfang Zhongguo geming”; Perry, “Moving the Masses.” On the relationship between “emotion work” and social mobilization, see also Aminzade and McAdam, “Emotions and Contentious Politics.” 143. Anagnost, National Past-­Times, 32–33. 144. Quoted in Li Lifeng, “Tugai zhong de suku.” 145. Quoted in Jean Robinson, “Institutionalizing Charisma,” 188. 146. Quoted in Li Lifeng, “Tugai zhong de suku,” 105. For more on the meticulously stage-­managed mass meetings in the communist revolution, see Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution, 121–222, esp. 172–87.

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Notes to Pages 91–96

Chapter 3. Fictions of Becoming 1. Bai Mang [Yin Fu], “Yijiuerjiu nian,” 146–8. 2. Laughlin, Chinese Reportage, 95. 3. Chen Zhengdao, “Wuyi yu wenyi,” 5. 4. See, for example, Wei Dongming, “Qunzhong yu geren,” 8. In this essay, Wei Dongming 魏東明 (1915–82) rec­ords his conversation with critic Li Changzhi 李長之 (1910–78) about “­whether the crowd is good or bad.” Against Li’s ambivalence t­oward qunzhong, Wei recalls his experience of mass demonstrations and maintains that only through merging with a well-­organized crowd can an individual transcend self-­ centeredness. 5. For example, Denton, Problematic of Self, 27–72; Laughlin, “Narrative Subjectivity,” 26–47; Jianmei Liu, Revolution Plus Love; Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 255–97. 6. Marston Anderson, Limits of Realism, 180–202. For an in-­depth study of the depiction of public demonstrations in left-­wing reportage lit­er­a­ture, see Laughlin, Chinese Reportage, 75–113. 7. Jue Ren, “Re yu jiyue xing.” 8. Ruo Wei, “Wuyue yu wenyi,” 40. 9. Huang Yaomian, “Fei gerenzhuyi de wenxue,” 21–26. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, Hong Ruizhao 洪瑞釗 (1906–96), a GMD propagandist, refuted modern individualists’ “delusions of grandeur” and called for the full-­blown development of a “collective spirit” (qunxing 羣性). Quoted in Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 258, 262. 10. Li Jinxi, “ ‘Dazhong yu’ zhenquan.” On the changing meanings of dazhong in the 1920s and 1930s and its relation with such terms as pingmin 平民 and minzhong 民眾, see Wu Xiaoli, “Zuowei guanjianci de ‘dazhong.’ ” 11. Mao Dun is quoted in Denton, Problematic of Self, 48. I borrow the term “Masses-­ cum-­History” from Denton, Problematic of Self, 60. On the post–­May Fourth notion of “epoch” as a “suprapersonal historical agency,” see Lung-­Kee Sun, “Chinese Intellectuals’ Notion of ‘Epoch.’ ” 12. For an authoritative study of this movement, see Tang, Origins of the Chinese Avant-­Garde. 13. Bao Luo, “Wenyi dazhonghua.” 14. Jiang Guangci, “Guanyu geming wenxue” 關於革命文學 (On Revolutionary Lit­ er­a­ture), in Jiang Guangci wenji, 4:172. 15. Denton, Problematic of Self, 59–65. 16. I borrow this useful term from Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” 325. 17. Balibar, “What Makes a ­People,” 105. 18. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 81. 19. Schwarcz, Chinese Enlightenment, 149. 20. Bourdieu, “The Uses of the P ­ eople,” 150. 21. Cheng Fangwu, “Wenxue jia yu gerenzhuyi”; Qian Xingcun, “Piping de jianshe”; He Wei, “Gerenzhuyi yishu.” The details of He Wei’s article are discussed in Denton



Notes to Pages 96–100

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and Hockx, Literary Socie­ties of Republican China, 121. For con­temporary critique of left-­ wing anti-­individualism, see, for instance, Shiheng, “Gerenzhuyi de wenxue.” 22. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice, 77–99. 23. Huang Yaomian, “Fei gerenzhuyi de wenxue,” 22. 24. The most telling example is Mu Mutian’s 穆木天 (1900–71) denial of the applicability of first-­person narration in proletarian lit­er­a­ture. See Mu Mutian, “Tan xieshi de xiaoshuo”; Mu, “Zaitan”; Mu, “Zuihou de dabian.” 25. Zhu Ming, “Wuchan jieji wenyi,” 1. 26. Sabina Knight, Heart of Time, 104–30. 27. Stimson and Sholette, “Introduction: Periodizing Collectivism,” 5. See also Berman, Rise of the Modern German Novel, 232–60; Cunningham, British Writers, 211–420; Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics. 28. Berman, Rise of the Modern German Novel, 232–3. 29. Qian Xingcun, “Guanyu ‘Ping Duanku Dang,’ ” 5. 30. Qian Xingcun, Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue lun, 64, 62, emphasis in original. 31. Dan Ren (Feng Xuefeng’s pen name), “Guanyu xin de xiaoshuo”; Průšek, The Lyrical and the Epic, 228; Marston Anderson, Limits of Realism, 185; See also Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction, 66–68; Bördahl, “Ding Ling, Shui,” 69. For an insightful study of the figure of the crowd as the protagonist in 1930s fiction by left-­wing writers who resorted to the use of common natu­ral meta­phors, such as fire, ­water, and insect swarms, to convey the crowd’s restlessness and destructiveness, see Marston Anderson, Limits of Realism, 180–202. 32. Dai Wanye (Dai Pingwan’s pen name), “Jinu”; Dai, “Shanzhong” 山中 (In the Mountains), written in December 1928, collected in Dushi zhiye, 97–116; Meng Chao, “Tanziwan de gushi.” 33. Gong Binglu, “Hong—­bai,” 54. 34. Ibid., 51. 35. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 27. 36. Lunacharsky, “Proletarian Culture,” 62. 37. Kurahara Korehito, “Puluoliedaliya yishu,” 7. On the influence of Kurahara Korehito in China, see Ai Xiaoming, Zhongguo zuoyi wenxue, 102–39. 38. Mao Dun [Shen Yanbing], “Deguo jinkuang,” 266. For the Chinese translation of Toller’s play, see Toller, “Qunzhong=ren,” 93–112. 39. Qian Xingcun, “Guanyu ‘Ping Duanku Dang,’ ” 5. 40. Qian Xingcun, “Bozhiwengjin dabulichesiji,” 2. 41. Ruo Qin (Xia Yan’s pen name), “­Women de wenyi.” “Hero” and “heroine” are in En­glish in the original. Lu Xun translated Fadeev’s novel from Japa­nese renditions; it was first serialized in the journal Mengya and published as a book in 1931. 42. Ruo Qin, “Guangyu ‘Xiegong ­chuan,’ ” 5, 6. Xia’s reading of the story fits well with Kobayashi Takiji’s: “­There are no heroes in this work—no leading characters or persons such as you would find in works dealing with the lives of individuals,” he wrote. Quoted in Denning, Culture in the Age, 66. Kani Kōsen was translated into Chinese by Pan Nianzhi 潘念之 (1902–88) in 1929. 43. Gold, “Bagong,” 50.

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Notes to Pages 100–104

44. Gold, Guoerde duanpian, 2. 45. Denning argues that the experimental narrative of the collective not only is a common literary form that emerged in the global proletarian culture of the 1920s and 1930s but also deserves to be understood as a form of “subaltern modernism,” as writers “abandoned established ­family plots and the individual Bildungsroman” to create a “collective hero.” Denning, Culture in the Age, 65–66. See also Foley, Radical Repre­sen­ta­tions; Suggs, “Marching! Marching!” On the emergence of collective-­oriented literary works in colonial ­Korea and their relationship to international leftist culture, see Sunyoung Park, Proletarian Wave, 143–56. 46. In the republican era, Chinese artists depicted “the p ­ eople” (often through the figure of the crowd) as the new protagonists of modern public life and visualized the abstract notion of the popu­lar ­will in concrete graphic terms. Their works emerged from the transnational flow of visual forms and images to which Chinese artists responded enthusiastically and creatively. For more, see Xiao Tie, “Masereel, Lu, and the Development of the Woodcut Picture Book.” 47. Shiheng, “Wentan shang de xinren,” 971, quoted in C. T. Hsia, History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 268. See also Hsia’s critique of Ding Ling’s “­Water” in ibid., 268–72. 48. Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 297. 49. Denning, Culture in the Age, 59–60. 50. As the eminent Chinese literary historian Hong Zicheng notes, the merger of the intellectual into the crowd was “a major prob­lem during the 1950s and 1960s,” as exemplified in the debates surrounding The Song of Youth. See Hong Zicheng, History of Con­temporary Chinese Lit­er­a­ture, 135–9. For an informed study of the development of proletarian heroic types in Chinese literary debate, see King, “Typical P ­ eople,” 185–204. 51. Jameson, Singular Modernity, 133–7. 52. Nickels, Poetry of the Pos­si­ble, 21, 143. 53. Elvin, Self-­Liberation, 1. Drawing on Elvin, Denton further argues that the Chinese literary modernity is marked by “a paradoxical tendency to both exalt the self and allow the self to succumb to such larger totalities as History, Nation, Epoch, or the Masses.” Denton, Problematic of Self, 68. Such a desire for self-­liberation through self-­ extinction was significant not just in modern Chinese thought but also in early twentieth-­ century Eu­ro­pean left-­wing ideology, particularly in the Rus­sian socialist collectivism of the 1900s. See Robert C. Williams, “Collective Immortality,” 389–402. 54. Luo Hanchao, Xinshi zhuchao lun, 128–31, 210–19; Luo Hanchao, “Yin Fu lun” 殷夫論 (On Yin Fu), in Luo Hanchao and Wang Jialiang, Bainian Yin Fu, 15–17. 55. Duqing, “Zhidao ni de shidai!” 56. Jameson, Singular Modernity, 136. 57. Yang Sao, “Disan rencheng de beiju,” 4. 58. Qian Xingcun, “Piping de jianshe,” 18. 59. Xu Xu, “Zheng ziyou de bolang.” 60. Schnapp, “Mob Porn,” xvii, also 1–46. 61. Wiedenmann, “The Body of the Crowd,” 202. On the figure of the oceanic crowd in modern Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture and art and its ideological functions, see also Canetti, Crowds and Power, 80–81; Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2:1–4, 187–214. 62. See Marston Anderson, Limits of Realism, 185–86.



Notes to Pages 105–109

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63. Hong Lingfei, “Xin de jituan,” 17. 64. First serialized in Jiaoyu zazhi 20, no. 1 (January 20, 1928) and continuing to vol. 20, no. 12, December 20, 1928), the novel was l­ater published as a book by Kaiming Bookstore in 1929, with an introduction by Xia Mianzun 夏丏尊 (1886–1946) and a postscript by Mao Dun. It is considered one of the first Chinese novels in the con­temporary colloquial language. Widely regarded as a classic of modern Chinese lit­er­a­t ure, it was the subject of heated debates in the late 1920s. Critics such as Qian Xingcun blamed Ye for his pessimism. Mao Dun, in contrast, praised its depiction of the protagonist’s transition from being a schoolteacher to making speeches to a mass movement. For the debates between Qian and Mao, see Qian Xingcun, “Guanyu Nihuanzhi wenti” 關於《倪煥之》問題 (On the Prob­lem of Ni Huanzhi), in Liu Zengren and Feng Guanglian, Ye Shengtao yanjiu ziliao, 397–9; Mao Dun, “On Reading Ni Huanzhi.” For readings inspired by Mao’s comments, see, for instance, Shang Jinlin, Ye Shengtao zhuanlun, 450–92. 65. Ye Shaojun, Schoolmaster Ni Huanzhi, 279–82. A. C. Barnes’s translation includes twenty-­nine chapters and only omits chapter 20. The quotations are modifications of the Barnes version. 66. Ibid., 280–3. 67. Ibid., 281. As Anderson notes, “his largely proletarian audience immediately realizes [that] the young intellectual’s rhetorical assertion of unity does not conceal his difference from them.” Marston Anderson, Limits of Realism, 113. 68. Ye, Schoolmaster Ni Huanzhi, 285–6. 69. Ibid., 300. Ye’s portrayal of Ni Huanzhi’s awakening conveys, as Vera Schwarcz points out, a “more limited, more contingent view” of the contribution of intellectuals to social change in the 1920s as they discovered mass action as the source of liberation and themselves as “mere intellectuals.” Schwarcz, Chinese Enlightenment, 170–83. My emphasis ­here, however, is on the relation between this sense of debility and the presence of the crowd as a visual phenomenon. 70. Ye, Schoolmaster Ni Huanzhi, 300. 71. Ibid., 299. Zhu Qianzhi argues that “when an idealist suggests, he never beats anything into the heads of the crowd. The crowd, even though it is encouraged by suggestions, never adds anything.” Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 125. 72. Ye, Schoolmaster Ni Huanzhi, 301. 73. Ibid., 294. A. C. Barnes’s translation ­here is rather ­free, but conveys the meaning of the original line: Ni has “a frame of mind that is carefree and playful, without self-­ awareness” (buzi yishi de youxi xinqing 不自意識的遊戲心情). 74. Ibid., 303. 75. Ibid., 302. 76. Ibid., 329, emphasis mine. 77. Benjamin, Illuminations, 184. 78. Ye, Schoolmaster Ni Huanzhi, 300. 79. Ibid., 302; Ye Shaojun, “Ni Huanzhi (jiuxu)” 倪煥之(九續), Jiaoyu zazhi 20, no. 10 (1928): 10. In a recent reading of Ni Huanzhi, Xinmin Liu comments, “Unlike other May Fourth iconoclasts who empathize with [the] underclass by abstract association, Ni is quite enamored by ‘them’ b­ ecause they have displayed valor, honesty and simplicity in

224

Notes to Pages 109–115

their rough-­a nd-­tumble strife against a repressive po­liti­cal authority . . . ​his view verges on a self-­denying submission to this colossal but nondescript crowd.” Xinmin Liu, Signposts of Self-­Realization, 185–6, emphasis in original. 80. Schnapp, “Mob Porn,” 7. 81. Ye, Schoolmaster Ni Huanzhi, 303. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., 320–1. 84. Esteve, Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd, 16–17. On literary and visual depictions of the crowd as a figure of the sublime, see also Denning, Cultural Front, 194–8; Schnapp, “Mob Porn,” 3–30. 85. Esteve, Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd, 197. 86. Ye, Schoolmaster Ni Huanzhi, 325, emphasis mine. 87. Ban Wang, Sublime Figure of History, chap. 5. 88. Cunningham, British Writers, 266, 267. 89. Mao Dun, “On Reading Ni Huanzhi,” 397. 90. Ye, Schoolmaster Ni Huanzhi, 337, emphasis added; Ye Shaojun, “Ni Huanzhi (shixu)” 倪煥之(十續), Jiaoyu zazhi 20, no. 11 (1928): 10. 91. Ye, Schoolmaster Ni Huanzhi, 347, 349; Ye, “Ni Huanzhi (shixu),” 14, 15. 92. Ye, Schoolmaster Ni Huanzhi, 351. 93. See chapter 1 for Qu’s view of qunzhong. 94. Ye, Schoolmaster Ni Huanzhi, 346–7. 95. Le Bon, Crowd, 117; Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 79. 96. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 79. 97. Ye Shaojun [Ye Shengtao], “Wuyue sayiri jiyu zhong.” Ye’s essay might have inspired the following detail in Mao Dun’s novel Rainbow: “To Nanjing Road. ­We’ll rush in like a swarm of flies and suck up the blood we spilled t­ here!” Mao Dun, Rainbow, 222. For the intellectuals’ fixation on student martyrdom in 1925, see Wasserstrom, Student Protests, 110–14. On the proliferation of blood-­related imaginary in the publications ­a fter the May Thirtieth Incident, see Schwarcz, Chinese Enlightenment, 155. Daniel Fried points out “a nearly pathological fascination with the lost moment of massacre” in the leftist lit­er­a­t ure published in the immediate aftermath of the incident. Fried, “A Bloody Absence,” 38. 98. Zhao Yan, “Qunzhong zhi shehui xinli guan,” 72. The body-­to-­body aspect of the crowd received increasing attention ­a fter the behavioristic interpretation of ­human interaction, especially Floyd Henry Allport’s theory of social psy­chol­ogy, gained currency among Chinese psychologists in the late 1920s and 1930s. For instance, Allport’s Chinese translator, Zhao Yan 趙演, in his own essay on crowd be­hav­ior, emphasized the psychological impact of physical compression—­what he called “shoulder-­to-­shoulder relation”— on the crowd. For more, see chapter 1. 99. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 15–16. 100. McDougall, Group Mind, 35. See chapter 1 for the translation and reception of McDougall in early twentieth-­century China. 101. Mao Dun, Rainbow, 225. Mao Dun, Hong, 263. 102. Quoted in Ng, Rus­sian Hero, 153. 103. Mingwei Song, Young China, 182.



Notes to Pages 116–122

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104. Mao Dun, Rainbow, 229; Mao Dun, Hong, 267. 105. David Der-­wei Wang, Fictional Realism, 85. 106. Mao Dun, Hong, 255, emphasis mine. 107. Mao Dun, Rainbow, 219. 108. Dimock, Residues of Justice, 61. This metonymic making of “the bodily subject” as a founding unit, Dimock argues, is central to modern materialism and particularly Marxist thought. 109. Mao Dun, Rainbow, 226–8. 110. David Der-­wei Wang, Fictional Realism, 32. 111. Mao Dun, Rainbow, 229. 112. Ibid., 230. 113. Rey Chow, ­Woman and Chinese Modernity, 106–107. Scholars have also noted that Mao’s narratives of alluring female bodies in public spaces could be viewed as part of a utopian imagination of revolutionary radicalism, with their pointed breasts symbolizing liberated sexuality. See Jianmei Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 81; Chow, ­Woman and Chinese Modernity, 106. 114. As Pierre Macherey said, “One writes on the written, that is, on top of it.” If “­every book contains in itself the labyrinth of a library,” in Rainbow’s “library” one can find not only Mao Dun’s earlier essay but also Ye Shaojun’s novel Ni Huanzhi and essay, “In the Midst of the May 31st Downpour.” Macherey, In a Materialist Way, 49. 115. Mao Dun [Sheng Yanbing], “Baofengyu,” 66. 116. McDougall, Group Mind, 35. 117. Mao Dun, Rainbow, 227–8. 118. Mao Dun, Hong, 262, 265, 264, 267. 119. Ibid., 267. On the trope of the crowd as a dark mass in turn-­of-­the-­century Eu­ ro­pean culture, see Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2:3–141; Thomson, Troubled Republic, 79–115. 120. Ban Wang, Sublime Figure of History, 130. 121. Yang Mo, Song of Youth, 591–9. 122. In this “graphic vernacular,” symbolic marches become “the mark of the collective’s power, expressing clarity of intention and una­nim­i­t y of w ­ ill.” See Schnapp, Revolutionary Tides, 26. 123. Yang Mo, Song of Youth, 596. 124. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 23, emphasis in original. 125. For more on Mike Gold’s 1929 editorial, see Denning, Cultural Front, 203–205. New Masses was influential among Chinese leftists at the time. 126. Mao Dun, Rainbow, 231. 127. Qi Fan (Zhang Kebiao’s pen name), “Du geming wenxue lun,” 632. Zhang questioned the very possibility of a revolutionary lit­er­a­ture as envisioned by left-­wing radicals. Whereas ­these critics claimed that petit bourgeois writers could “acquire” proletarian consciousness and therefore produce proletarian lit­er­a­ture, Zhang challenged their claim by arguing that “nothing can be taken as class consciousness except class consciousness itself, and sympathy t­owards the proletarians is not a proletarian class consciousness” (632). The long-­lived journal I-­Pan was edited by Xia Mianzun, Ye Shao­ jun, and Zhang Kebiao.

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Notes to Pages 122–132

128. Mu Shiying, “Preface to Public Cemetery,” 388. 129. See Leo Ou-­fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, 230–1; Shih, Lure of the Modern, 262; Jianmei Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 152. 130. Mu Shiying, “Pierrot,” 713. 131. Le Bon, Crowd, 51. 132. As Jianmei Liu notes, one of the technical innovations in “Pierrot” is Mu’s use of “parentheses to indicate the inner voice of the protagonist” so that “the dialogue between the outer and inner worlds” becomes visually marked. See Jianmei Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 149. 133. Mu Shiying, “Pierrot” (second half ), 829. 134. Ibid., 830. 135. Ibid., 831. 136. Leo Ou-­fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, 231. 137. Nickels, Poetry of the Pos­si­ble, 31. 138. On the changing form of mass po­liti­cal per­for­mance, see Esherick and Wasserstrom, “Acting out Democracy.”

Chapter 4. Problems of Solitude 1. See, for instance, Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative; Kharkhaordin, Collective and the Individual; Mouffe, On the Po­liti­cal; Kiaer and Naiman, Everyday Life; Stavrakakis, Lacanian Left. 2. Yang Sao, “Disan rencheng de beiju,” 4. 3. Foucault, Essential Works, 1:225. 4. Ban Wang, “Psycho Analysis and Modern Chinese Literature: Positive Sublimation,” 119. 5. Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng, 94–95. Larson suggests that we recognize and take seriously the role of spirit in the making of revolutionary subjectivity. 6. Members of the Creation Society, such as Guo Moruo, are among the most noted examples. On the transformation of the Creationists from romanticism to Marxism-­L eninism, see Leo Ou-­fan Lee, Romantic Generation, 177–200; Zhiguang Yin, Politics of Art. 7. Leo Ou-­fan Lee, Romantic Generation, 178 8. Ding Ling ­later selected twenty-­t wo romantic poems for the publication of Yepin shixuan 也頻詩選 (Selected Poems of Yepin, 1929), the first book of their short-­lived publishing venture, the Honghei Congshu 红黑丛书 (Red and Black Series). 9. Hu Yepin, “Rou de qixi.” 10. Hu Yepin, Hu Yepin juan, 15–18. 11. Hu Yepin’s “Kuangye” 曠野 (The Wilderness) in this series could be read as in sequence Lu Xun’s famed prose poem “Mujie wen” 墓碣文 (Epitaph), published the previous year. “Epitaph” describes a dream encounter between the narrator and the disemboweled corpse of a serpent-­monster that plucks out his own heart and eats it to learn its “true taste.” Not only are the setting and narrative of “Wilderness” reminiscent of Lu Xun’s earlier poem but the dirt-­covered smile of the old ghost in Hu’s poem also seems to explic­itly refer to the serpent-­monster’s parting remark to Lu Xun’s narrator at the



Notes to Pages 132–139

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end of “Epitaph”: “When I have turned into dust, you ­will see my smile.” Unlike Lu Xun’s “I” who remains outside the open grave—­peering at, examining, and reading the remains of both the ravaged body underground and the eroded text on the tombstone—­ Hu’s narrator, crawling from the bottom of the pit, has a more bodily experience with the dead. An En­glish translation of “Epitaph” can be found in Lu Xun, Wild Grass, 44–45. 12. Hu Yepin, “Jianghai (weiwan).” 13. Hu Yepin, “Jianghai (xu).” 14. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 53, 36. 15. On necrophilia as “the most extreme” perversion in the sexological discourse around the turn of the twentieth c­ entury, see Weller, “Decomposition.” The desire for the dead held a complicated place in nineteenth-­century works on sexology by Richard von Krafft-­Ebing and his contemporaries. As Lisa Downing points out, their treatment of necrophilia is marked by a strong tension between “fascination and desire on one side, and the urge to ‘tidy up,’ categorize and morally condemn on the other.” Downing, Desiring the Dead, 32. 16. Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity, 145. For the introduction and dissemination of the sexual sciences, see also Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 189–90; Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng, 31–73. 17. Hu Yepin, “Jianghai (xu),” 19. 18. In 1924 and 1925, three Chinese translations of “Une Charogne” ­were published in leading literary journals. One of the translators is the famed poet Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 (1897–1931). Although the Chinese versions are often gentler than the original in their sentimentalized renditions, they nevertheless capture the harrowing sensibilities of the necrophilic imagination. See Leo Ou-­fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, 236–7; Bien, Baudelaire in China, 43–44. 19. On the necrophilic theme in “Une Charogne,” see also Downing, Desiring the Dead, 74–76; Weir, De­cadence, xi; Menninghaus, Disgust, 135–6. 20. Hu Yepin, “Jianghai (xu),” 19. In Meng Su’s perverse plea­sure one can recognize what Baudelaire calls the “delight in ugliness” that proceeds from “the thirst for the unknown and the taste for the horrible.” Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, 121. 21. Baudelaire, Selected Poems, 45–48. 22. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice, 128. Larissa Heinrich argues that the diagnostic impulses oblige modern Chinese writers “to take on the task of describing a substantial, more ‘material’ body . . . ​through the clinical, literal capacity of a trained dissecting eye.” Heinrich, Afterlife of Images, 138–9. For an innovative study of the transformation of ideas and practices about dead bodies in modern China, see Asen, Death in Beijing. 23. Hu Yepin, “Jianghai (weiwan),” 13. 24. I borrow this provocative term from Elisabeth Bronfen. On the “deanimation” of the feminine body, see Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body. 25. Hu Yepin, “Jianghai (xu),” 19. 26. Ding Ling, “Yige zhenshi ren de yisheng—­Ji Hu Yepin,” 22. 27. Shen Congwen, Shen Congwen quanji, 13:36–47. Shen was a close friend of Ding Ling and Hu Yepin. For their friendship, see Kinkley, Odyssey of Shen Congwen, chap. 3. 28. ­Here I am referring to T. J. Clark’s succinct definition of ideology as “a set of permitted modes of seeing and saying.” T. J. Clark, Painting of Modern Life, 8.

228

Notes to Pages 139–148

29. Hu Yepin, Guangming, 7. 30. For a discussion of Qian Xingcun’s literary theory, see Gálik, Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism, 182–90. 31. Leo Ou-­fan Lee, Romantic Generation, 272. 32. Hu Yepin, Guangming, 3, 8. 33. On voyeurism in modern Chinese lit­er­a­ture that produces feminine details and its conflict with larger po­liti­cal master plots such as nation-­building and revolution, see Rey Chow, ­Woman and Chinese Modernity, 84–96. 34. Hu Yepin, Guangming, 2. 35. Ibid., 16, 17. 36. Ibid., 30. 37. Ibid., 30. 38. Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psychoanalysis, 436. 39. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 3, 9. 40. Hu Yepin, Guangming, 60, 61. 41. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 114–15. 42. Ibid., 82. 43. Hu Yepin, Guangming, 65. 44. Ibid., 66. 45. Yu Dafu, “One Intoxicating Eve­ning,” 283. 46. Leo Ou-­fan Lee, Romantic Generation, 119. 47. On the “ideological homework” of subjecting everyday life to po­liti­cal scrutiny in the formation of a Soviet subject, see Kiaer and Naiman, Everyday Life, 13. 48. Ding Ling, I Myself Am a ­Woman, 134. 49. Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern, 110, emphasis mine. 50. Hu Yepin, Guangming, 54. 51. Karatani, Origins of Modern Japa­nese Lit­er­a­ture, 23. 52. Hu Yepin, Guangming, 78. 53. Mao Dun, “On Reading Ni Huanzhi,” 300. 54. Hu Yepin, Guangming, 78. 55. Ibid., 80. 56. Ibid., 81. 57. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 118. 58. In The Language of Psychoanalysis, Laplanche and Pontalis define “the primary function of phantasy” as “the mise-­en-­scène of desire—­a mise-­en-­scène in which what is prohibited is always pres­ent in the a­ ctual formation of the wish” (318). 59. Hu Yepin, Guangming, 132, 133. 60. Ibid., 172. 61. Ibid., 212. 62. Ibid., 193. 63. Ibid., 195–6. 64. Ibid., 197. 65. Ibid., 179. 66. Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 255–97; Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern, 97– 130; Jianmei Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 72–103.



Notes to Pages 148–152

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67. Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern, 109, 68. Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 297. 69. Hu Yepin, Guangming, 197. 70. As Larson argues, the Chinese left-­wing discourse of revolutionary spirit “set up a mentality that differed radically from that of the Freudian subject, with its deeply sexualized unconscious.” Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng, 78. 71. Freud argues, “The mutual tie between members of a group is based upon an impor­tant emotional common quality; and we may suspect that this common quality lies in the nature of the tie with the leader.” Freud, Group Psy­chol­ogy, 66. 72. Hu Yepin, Guangming, 200. 73. Ibid., 200, 212 74. Ibid., 194. 75. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 201, 202. 76. Ban Wang, Sublime Figure of History, 137. 77. McGrath, “Communists Have More Fun!” 78. See the opposite side of the half-­title page of Hu’s 1958 reprint. 79. See Hu Yepin, Puluo xiaoshuo, 1–127. 80. W. J. F. Jenner comments that Hu’s “po­liti­cal message is curiously naïve in that it disregards the obstacles to national regeneration despite having been written a­ fter the upheavals of 1927.” See Jenner’s entry on Hu’s novella in Doleželová-­Velingerová, Selective Guide, 93. Tsi-an Hsia comments on Hu’s tendentiousness and immaturity. Hu lacks the ability, writes Hsia, to “see t­ hings from more than one side, to weigh ideals against experience, and to recognize h ­ uman weakness even in the midst of the noblest deed.” Tsi-an Hsia, Gate of Darkness, 180. Richard W. Rigby compares Hu’s description with Lu Xun’s account of Beijing during the movement and comes to the conclusion that Hu’s novel “contains a good deal of exaggeration.” See Rigby, May 30 Movement, 258. 81. Tsi-an Hsia, Gate of Darkness, 181. 82. Gilles Deleuze, for instance, considers the invention of “a ­people to come” central to ethics and aesthetics: “To catch someone in the act of telling tales is to catch the movement of constitution of a p ­ eople. A p ­ eople ­isn’t something already t­ here. A ­people, in a way, is what is missing.” Deleuze, Negotiations, 125–6. For more on Deleuze’s notion of “a ­people to come” and his emphasis on the importance of telling tales, see Mengue, “­People and Fabulation,” 218–39. 83. Gálik, Modern Chinese Literary Criticism, 189. As Anderson points out, revolutionary writers of the 1920s and 1930s aimed to achieve a mea­sure of “transitivity” in their pursuit of the “social efficacy” of lit­er­a­ture. See Marston Anderson, Limits of Realism, 200. 84. Huters, “Mirages of Repre­sen­ta­tion: May Fourth and the Anxiety of the Real,” in Huters and Tang, Chinese Lit­er­a­ture and the West, 18. On the realist conception of repre­sen­ta­tion in modern Chinese lit­er­a­ture and politics, see also John Fitzgerald’s perceptive discussion in Awakening China, 332–8. Drawing on Huters and Anderson, Ann Anagnost notes the repre­sen­ta­tional logic of “prolepsis” in Chinese realist lit­er­a­ture and revolutionary practice, both of which engaged with “the repre­sen­t a­t ion of a t­ hing as ­a lready existing, as if the pro­cess of pre­sen­ta­tion itself could magically effect its emergence in real­ity.” Anagnost, National Past-­Times, 8.

230

Notes to Pages 153–157

85. I am citing Sandy Petrey’s illuminating study of the connection between verbal expression and group dynamics during the French Revolution, Realism and Revolution, 49. 86. Ai Qing, “Xiang taiyang,” 43. The En­glish translation is from Ai Qing, Selected Poems, 65–66. 87. Ai Qing’s depiction reminds us of Elias Canetti’s description of the “throbbing crowd.” During this kind of communal excitement, “every­thing ­here depends on movement . . . ​by the skillful enactment of density and equality, a crowd feeling is engendered.” Canetti, Crowds and Power, 30–31. Being in such a dense crowd also engenders a feeling of identification for Ai Qing’s poetic persona: “I watch each one passing me by/I no longer feel/They are strangers.” Ai Qing, Selected Poems, 60. 88. Mackinnon, Wuhan 1938, xiii. 89. See Andrew Jones’s discussion of the development and politics of mass m ­ usic in Yellow ­Music, 105–36. In fact, Ai Qing’s poem itself was set to ­music in 1942. See Jin Song, “Xiang taiyang.”

Chapter 5. Torrents of Sound 1. Bai Mang, “Yijiuerjiu nian,” 147. 2. Connor, Beyond Words, 74. 3. Connor, Dumbstruck, 3. 4. Xiaobing Tang, Origins of the Chinese Avant-­Garde, 213–27; Xiaobing Tang, “Buxi de zhenchan”; Crespi, Voices in Revolution; Strand, Unfinished Republic, 52–96. 5. Middleton, Voicing the Popu­lar. 6. François Cooren has made an impor­tant argument that the logic of ventriloquism is indispensable for understanding the mode of action and being of collectives. See Cooren, Action and Agency. On ventriloquial practices in art, see Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism. 7. Michel de Certeau argues that such scriptural operations seek to render audible the voice from the madman, the child, the unconsciousness, or the p ­ eople “as what ‘escapes’ from the domination of a sociocultural economy, from the organ­i zation of reason, from the grasp of education, from the power of an elite and, fi­nally, from the control of the enlightened consciousness.” De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 158–60, emphasis in original. 8. Ibid., 161, 162. 9. Commenting on German leftist modernism, Russell A. Berman writes, “The politicization of aesthetics is tied to the goal of a vocalization of the collective . . . ​The leftist work of art is intended as a medium through which the postindividual subject can come to speech.” Berman, Rise of the Modern German Novel, 234. On American left-­ wing writers’ concerns with recording the speech of laboring masses in the 1930s, see Staub, Voices of Persuasion. 10. Anagnost, National Past-­Times, 1–44. 11. For an interrogation of the ideological under­pinnings of the postcolonial proj­ect of giving voice to the subaltern, see, for instance, Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 198–311. Amanda J. Weidman, on the other hand, challenges the very notion of subjectivity based on the meta­phorizaton of voice. See Weidman, Singing the Classical.



Notes to Pages 158–161

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12. Xunlei, “Panluan de youling.” Mainly an illustrator for the Sun Monthly, Xunlei [Xu Xunlei 徐迅雷] joined the communist-­led l­abor ­union in Shanghai and was l­ater imprisoned and executed by the GMD in the 1930s. Xiaobing Tang argues that Xunlei was part of the new poets who w ­ ere inspired by the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925 and the North Expedition of 1926. Tang, “Buxi de zhenchan,” 30. 13. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 265, 255. 14. Guo Moruo [­under the pseudonym of Mai Ke Ang], “Yingxiong shu,” 3. Guo used the romanizations, “Gonnon” and “Baudon,” in the original, meaning gongnong 工農 (workers and peasants) and baodong 暴動 (revolt). 15. Guo Moruo [Mai Ke Ang], “Liushengjiqi de huiyin,” 1, quoted in Jones, Yellow ­Music, 108. 16. Guo Moruo, “Sheng­huo de yishuhua” 生活的艺术化 (The Aestheticization of Life), Shishi xinbao 时事新报 (The China Times), May 12, 1928, collected in Guo Moruo quanji, 15:211. Arthur Schopenhauer states, “We can consider an ­actual object . . . ​purely objectively, the way of genius grasping the Idea of the object” and “when . . . ​an external cause or inward disposition suddenly raises us out of the endless stream of willing, and snatches knowledge from the thralldom of the ­will, the attention is now no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends ­things ­free from their relation to the ­will. Thus it considers ­things without interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively.” Schopenhauer, World as W ­ ill, 1:187, 196. 17. Guo Moruo, “Yingxiong shu,” 3, quoted in Jones, Yellow ­Music, 109. 18. Jones, Yellow ­Music, 109. As David Wang comments, for left-­wing radicals, the phonograph symbolizes a “per­sis­tent sound capable of drowning out the cacophony of individual revolutionary buglers.” David Der-­wei Wang, Monster that Is History, 86. 19. Mao Dun, “Mud,” 34. “The bullhorn soon went s­ ilent,” Mao continues, “and the men in the gray uniforms dispersed; the ­people of the village with their sallow ­faces returned to their thatched huts puzzling.” 20. Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白, “Wenyi de ziyou he wenxuejia de buziyou” 文藝的自由和文學 家的不自由 (The Freedom of Art and the Lack of Freedom of Literati), Xiandai, 1, no. 6 (1932): 789, quoted in David Der-­wei Wang, Lyrical in Epic Time, 60, 397 n82. 21. To serve as an objective recorder of life, a young poet wishes to become a phonograph and a camera. See Gao Gedong, “Wo yuan.” 22. Connor, “Modern Auditory I,” 207 23. Kahn, Noise, W ­ ater, Meat, 9. 24. Kahn, “Art and Sound,” 39. 25. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 257. ­Here lies what Dick Pels has called the “universal danger that resides in the very logic of speaking for o­ thers: which is to disregard the inevitable hiatus between representers and represented, or the specific so­ cio­log­i­cal ‘strangeness’ which separate spokespersons from the subjects or objects which they claim to speak for.” Pels, Intellectual as Stranger, x. 26. Lu Yinghui, Ren Jun zuopin xuan, 178. 27. Ren Jun, Xinshihua, 7. Before the War of Resistence, Ren Jun was a member of the China Poetry Society (Zhongguo shige hui 中國詩歌會), a branch of the League of Left-­Wing Writers (Zuoyi zuojia lianmeng 左翼作家聯盟). The League was disbanded in 1936. Many of his fellow left-­wing writers shared Ren Jun’s view. See Deng Xiaocheng,

232

Notes to Pages 161–168

Xiandaixing, 150–65. During the war, Ren Jun stressed the agitational power of the poetic voice and advocated poetry recitation. He and other like-­minded poets, as John Crespi points out, “locate the ‘poetic’ beyond the poem and in the i­ magined emotional real­ity of a national interiority, an interiority transmitted through a speaking subject by the emotive voice.” Crespi, Voices in Revolution, 60. 28. Kahn, Noise, W ­ ater, Meat, 9. 29. See Tao Tao Liu Sanders’ entry on Ai Qing, in Haft, Selective Guide, 31. 30. Quoted in ibid., 34. 31. David Der-­wei Wang, Lyrical in Epic Time, 62–64. 32. See, for example, Ai Qing, Selected Poems, 44–51. 33. Ai Qing, “Xiang taiyang,” 40; Ai Qing, Selected Poems, 59. As Eva Huang has noted, “­Toward the Sun,” in contrast to his melancholic poems on the northern countryside, “shows how responsive Ai Qing is to city crowds.” See Haft, Selective Guide, 35. 34. The other achievement, according to Zhu, is the “discovery of the interior regions” of China. Zhu Ziqing, “Kangzhan yu shi” 抗戰與詩 (War of Re­sis­tance and Poetry, 1941), in Zhu Ziqing xuanji, 2:283–5. 35. Ai Qing, Selected Poems, 54–55. 36. Jones, Yellow ­Music, 122–3. 37. Ai Qing, Shilun, 105. 38. Ai Qing, Selected Poems, 188. 39. Hu Feng, “Chui luding the shiren” 吹蘆笛的詩人 (The Poet Who Plays a Reed Pipe, 1936), in Hai Tao and Jin Han, Ai Qing zhuanji, 422. 40. Verhaeren, Les Visages de la vie, 33; Verhaeren, “Qunzhong.” 41. Zweig, Verhaeren, 110. Another early commentator on “La foule,” Charles Baudouin remarks, “The poet is intoxicated by the crowd, whose fever works like a ferment in the towns.” Baudouin, Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics, 179, emphasis in original. 42. Ai Qing, “Qunzhong”; En­glish translations adapted from Yip, Lyr­ics from Shelters, 84–85. 43. Ai Qing, “Mayekefusiji.” 44. Ai Qing, Selected Poems, 58. 45. Quoted in Frank, Constituent Moments, 199. 46. Ibid., 183, 197. 47. Quoted in Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination, 104. The figure 150,000,000 was the population of the Soviet Republic at the time. 48. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination, 103–106. 49. Boym, Death in Quotation Marks, 127, 132–3. 50. Quoted in Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry, 35. 51. Whitman was first introduced to Chinese readers as the “poet of the common ­people” by Tian Han in 1919. On the reception of Whitman in China, see Xilao Li, “Walt Whitman in China”; Guiyou Huang, Whitmanism, Imagism, and Modernism, 37–91. 52. Du Heng, “Mayekuofusiji.” 53. In fact, Ai Qing once claimed that the only poem of Mayakovsky that he liked was “A Cloud in Trousers.” See Ai Qing, Ai Qing quanji, 3:132. 54. Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry, 35.



Notes to Pages 168–174

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55. Ai Qing, Shilun, 6, 93; translations from Nieh, Lit­er­a­ture of the Hundred Flowers, 2:63–65. 56. As Michelle Mi-­Hsi Yeh has noted, modern Chinese poets tend to perceive themselves “as somewhat alienated from, misunderstood by, or even persecuted by the insensitive world for his unwavering dedication to a higher cause.” Yeh, Modern Chinese Poetry, 35. 57. Ai Qing, Shilun, 93; translations from Nieh, Lit­er­a­ture of the Hundred Flowers, 2:65. 58. Ai Qing, Shilun, 107, 6; translations from Nieh, Lit­er­a­ture of the Hundred Flowers, 2:69, 63. 59. Ai Qing, “Qunzhong”; Yip, Lyr­ics from Shelters, 85. ­Here Ai Qing is inspired by Verhaeren’s verses on the “brusque metamorphoses of men and objects” that take place during the surging of the urban masses. Verhaeren also links this transformation with tightened muscles and vibrating nerves. See Verhaeren, Les Visages de la vie, 29–34. 60. Le Bon, Crowd, 31. 61. In “Wheelbarrow” (1938), for instance, “In the territory where the Yellow River once flowed/in the numberless dried-up riverbeds/the wheelbarrow/with its single wheel/ lets out a squeal that throws the lugubrious sky into convulsion.” In “Street” (1939), Ai Qing depicts the war-­trodden city as follows: “One day, the skies above this ­little town ­were blotted out with black wings/One bombing run sent cataclysms through this ­little town.” Ai Qing, Selected Poems, 47, 70, with modifications. 62. Sarafianos, “Pain, L ­ abour, and the Sublime,” 60. 63. Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime, 8. 64. Verhaeren, Les Visages de la vie, 30. 65. Norrish, Drama of the Group, 43. 66. Elias, “Homo Clausus,” 290. 67. Du Heng, “Du ‘Dayanhe,’ ” 423–6. 68. Quoted in Denton, Problematic of Self, 189. For an authoritative study of Lu Ling’s war­time fiction and his concern with fusion with the p ­ eople, see Denton, Problematic of Self, 191–255. 69. Ea­gleton, Trou­ble with Strangers, 158–9. 70. In the Southern Anhui Incident of January 1941 (also known as the New Fourth Army Incident), the communist-­led New Fourth Army was ambushed by Chiang Kai-­ shek’s Nationalist government troops. This armed conflict in effect ended the United Front between the GMD and CCP during the Sino-­Japanese War. 71. For an excellent introduction to the literary and artistic activities in Yan’an before Mao’s 1942 talks, see Judd, “Prelude.” On Ai Qing’s trip to Yan’an, see Yang Kuanghan and Yang Kuangmang, Ai Qing zhuanlun, 145–9. 72. Ai Qing, Shilun, 93; translations from Nieh, Lit­er­a­ture of the Hundred Flowers, 2:65. 73. Mao Zedong, “Talks,” 459. 74. Ibid., 459. 75. Ai Qing, “Shidai,” 57; Ai Qing, Selected Poems, 18. The poem was written on December 16, 1941.

234

Notes to Pages 174–179

76. Reinhart Koselleck’s study of the semantics of modern temporality is particularly helpful for understanding Ai Qing’s notion of historical time and his position on what he viewed as the formidable advance of the “epoch.” Koselleck, ­Futures Past, 9–57. Examining the modern po­liti­cal consciousness of time, Koselleck points out that the modern notion of revolution is an intrinsically temporal one, “presented as a metahistorical category” that defines sociopo­liti­cal occurrences “in terms of a self-­accelerating pro­cess.” He detects in the modern notion of historical time an “unconscious secularization of eschatological expectation” (50). The Marxist notion of revolution exemplifies this mode of historical time. According to Igal Halfin, Marxism conceptualizes revolution as a “question of the eschatological timetable,” “imbuing time with a historical teleology.” Halfin, From Darkness to Light, 15, 40. 77. Ai Qing, “Shidai,” 57; Ai Qing, Selected Poems, 19. 78. Ai Qing, “Shidai,” 57, Ai Qing, Selected Poems, 19. As Xiaobing Tang points out in his reading of this poem, the poet’s anxiety is caused by his awareness of the “discrepancy between the individual voice and speech of the epoch.” Xiaobing Tang, “Buxi de zhenchan,” 29. 79. Goldman, Literary Dissent, 20. 80. Quoted in Benton and Hunter, Wild Lily, 9. 81. Mao Zedong, “Talks,” 462. 82. Barlow, Question of ­Women, 191. 83. For Ai Qing’s attack on Wang, see Dai Qing, Wang Shiwei, 110 84. Luo Hanchao and Luo Man, Shidai de chuihaozhe, 158–60. On the CCP’s promotion of Wu as a model worker, see Fangchun Li, “Class, Power and the Contradictions,” 98–106. 85. Goldman, Literary Dissent, 45 86. Ai Qing, Selected Poems, 125. 87. See Ai Qing, Selected Poems, 18–21. In a lengthy critique published in Wenxue yanjiu 文學研究 (Literary Researches) in 1958, the famed poet Feng Zhi 馮至 (1905–93) argued that “Epoch” illustrated “the self-­inflated rhe­toric of an individualist . . . ​In addition to not incorporating the emotions of the ­people, it displays a strong feeling of re­sis­tance to his surroundings.” Feng Zhi, “On the Poetry of Ai Ch’ing,” 93. 88. Judd, “Prelude,” 377–408. 89. Ding Ling, Ding Ling quanji, 7:68, quoted in Barlow, Question of ­Women, 215. 90. Barlow, Question of ­Women, 215. 91. On Chinese intellectuals’ experience of the land reform movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s, see DeMare, “Casting (off ) Their Stinking Airs,” 109–30. 92. Confiscation and re­distribution of land ­were soon followed by a more radical reor­ ga­ni­za­tion of rural society, such as the creation of cooperatives and communes, from the 1950s through the 1970s. 93. Ding Ling, Ding Ling quanji, 7:415–18; Zhou Liangpei, Ding Ling zhuan, 456– 69; Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction, 137–8. 94. Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction, 136. 95. Cai Xiang, Revolution and Its Narratives, 85–144. 96. Like many young intellectuals in the 1940s, Wen Cai traveled to communist base areas to join the revolution. He lived in Yan’an for a year, studying Marxism-­L eninism and engaging in self-­criticism. But book learning and self-­reflection would not truly



Notes to Pages 179–185

235

transform him; he acquired a proletarian stance only through active participation in revolutionary practice. So land reform is a transformative experience not only for peasants to fanshen or turn over but also for intellectuals to side with the masses. In Ding Ling’s narrative, however, even ­a fter Wen participates in land reform in the village of Nuan­ shui, he “still could not lose the stinky airs of an intellectual.” Brian James DeMare argues that Wen’s experience is “typical for Yan’an Party intellectuals” and that Ding’s portrait of Wen reveals the CCP’s negative view of the educated elite during the land reform movement. DeMare, “Casting (off ) Their Stinking Airs,” 125–26. 97. Ding, Sanggan River, 283. 98. Anagnost, National Past-­Times, 29. 99. Ding Ling, Ding Ling quanji, 2:269. En­glish translation adapted from Ding Ling, Sanggan River, 288. 100. Liu Zaifu, Fangzhu zhushen, 133–4, 140. Anagnost, commenting on the circulation of vio­lence in the narratives of class strug­gle, points out that “the symbolic order was often cruelly written on the bodies of class enemies as a physical enactment of a new regime of truth . . . ​through spectacularizing the body in pain.” Anagnost, National Past-­Times, 18. In his insightful study of the dialectic of justice and vio­lence in modern Chinese lit­er­a­ture, David Wang agues that Ding Ling’s model communist novel “celebrates the mixture of rites of torture and rites of cannibalism” and “the cruel ­human capacity to humiliate and persecute is enthusiastically endorsed.” David Der-­wei Wang, Monster that Is History, 73. On the idea of justice, the theater of vio­lence, and the figure of the crowd in socialist fiction, see Tang Xiaobing, “Baoli de bianzhengfa”; Rodekohr, “Summoning Masses,” chap. 3. 101. Ding Ling, Ding Ling quanji, 2:307, emphasis mine. En­glish translation adapted from Ding Ling, Sanggan River, 357–8. It is worth noting that the Yangs translated wu yishi as “wildly” and omitted the kuanghuan part. Ding Ling’s The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River went through three major revisions. The parts that have been quoted h ­ ere remain unchanged. For a detailed comparison of Ding’s dif­fer­ent revisions, see Gong Mingde, “ ‘Taiyan zhaozai sanggan heshang.’ ” 102. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 126. 103. Ding Ling, Ding Ling quanji, 2:304–307; Ding Ling, Sanggan River, 327–30. 104. On literary depictions of mass strug­gles as revolutionary rituals during land reform and other collective moments, see Tang Xiaobing, “Baoli de bianzhengfa,” 111– 27; Li Yueli, Geming yu wenxue, 106–20. 105. Ding Ling, Ding Ling quanji, 2:307; Ding Ling, Sanggan River, 331. 106. Dolar, Voice and Nothing More, 113 107. Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas, xv. 108. Lu Xun, ­Silent China, 328–33. 109. Wang, Lyrical in Epic Time, 195, 196. 110. On mass campaigns in the Mao era, see Bennett, Yundong; Cell, Revolution at Work; Strauss, “Morality, Coercion and State Building.” 111. On this issue, see also Tie Xiao, “Shuochu jitixing.” 112. Ke Li, “Xiaoyouxi.” This game’s instructions w ­ ere also published in other periodicals including Zhongguo qiannian 中國青年 (Chinese Youth) 3 (1949): 17 and Qingnian wenhua 青年文化 (Youth Culture) 7 (1949): 1. 113. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 212.

236

Notes to Pages 186–193

Epilogue: The Regime of “We” 1. Nie Gannu, Nie Gannu quanji, 5:327. 2. Ibid., 4:447, 448. 3. For an early firsthand account of the parade in Shanghai from October 8–9, 1949, see Ouyang Wenbin, “Shanghai zai kuanghuan zhong.” 4. Ibid., 10. 5. Chenguang chubanshe, Kaiguo dadian. 6. Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing, 85, 99. On the history and symbolic language of parades and other state spectacles in Communist China, see ibid., 85–130; Chang-­t ai Hung, Mao’s New World, 92–108. 7. Perry, “Study Chinese Politics,” 17. On the shifting contours of revolutionary citizenship in modern China, see, for instance, Perry, Patrolling the Revolution; Aminda M. Smith, Thought Reform. On the concepts of the masses, the mass line, and mass movement as the foundations of state-­building in the Mao years, see Tang Tsou, Cultural Revolution and Post-­Mao Reform, 259–334. 8. On po­liti­cal strug­gles as “social prophylaxis,” see Lefort, Po­liti­cal Forms, 287. Lefort further develops his idea on the relationship between the fabrication of the ­people’s enemies and the communist ideal of a society without divisions in Lefort, Complications. 9. Ye Shaojun, Ye Shengtao wenji, 3:1. Ni Huanzhi went through four editions. For historical background and a comparison of the editions, see Gong Mingde, “Ye Shengtao ‘Ni Huanzhi’ ”; Jin Hongyu, “Ni Huanzhi de banben.” 10. Zhu Qianzhi, “Shijie guan de zhuanbian,” 112–82. 11. Gao Juefu, Zhongguo xinlixue shi, 390–1. 12. As Robert Chin and Ai-li S. Chin point out, during the Mao years, Chinese psychologists, influenced by Soviet psy­chol­ogy, centered the notion of subjectivity on the concept of consciousness: “No unconsciousness or subconsciousness is accorded theoretical status.” Chin and Chin, Psychological Research, 13. 13. Chen Yuanhui, “Jindai zichanjieji de shehui xinlixue,” 108, 113; translation with modification from L. B. Brown, Psy­chol­ogy in Con­temporary China, 53, 56. 14. Ban Wang, Sublime Figure of History, 201. Drawing on accounts of the Red Guards’ experience during the Cultural Revolution and Freud’s and Adorno’s psychoanalytical interpretation of mass be­hav­ior, Ban Wang examines the psychic pattern of the masses in po­liti­cal movements. He argues, “In the frenzy of passion, the individual, spellbound and propelled by ­others’ faculty dwindles to nothing, his ego consumed by the forces of the collective unconscious. A widespread uniformity of thought and feeling and a fixation of psychic energy in single direction mark the group mind” (201). Many share Wang’s view. For an impor­tant new study of the Cultural Revolution that does not follow this form of psychological reasoning, see Yiching Wu, Cultural Revolution. 15. Rae Yang, Spider Eaters, 123. 16. Ibid., 22. 17. Zhu Qianzhi, Geming zhexue, 121, emphasis in original. 18. Ibid., 121–2. 19. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 38. 20. Badiou, ­Century, 106, 91, 96.



Notes to Pages 194–196

237

21. The relation is perhaps best captured by the title of Susan Buck-­Morss’s book, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). See also Lefort, Complications. In his study of Nazi culture, the eminent historian George Lachmann Mosse examines the emergence of a new politics of “­people worshipping themselves” through vari­ous symbols and rites in early twentieth-­century Eu­rope. Mosse links this new politics with modern forms of po­liti­cal manipulation and terror. See Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses. 22. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 59. For Nancy’s notion of co-­appearing and his critique of collective hypostasis, see also Nancy, Inoperative Community. 23. Badiou, ­Century, 97. 24. Yu Hua, China in Ten Words, 14, 6. 25. Wang Hui, End of Revolution, 3–18, quotations from page 11. Wang argues that the “short twentieth c­ entury” from the 1911 revolution to the end of the Cultural Revolution is characterized by the emergence of politics as a subjective and creative realm, a pro­cess of politicization driven by new po­liti­cal subjects in formation. See Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth C ­ entury, 1–152. 26. Cui Jian, “Hunzi” 混子 (Slackers), from the ­a lbum Wuneng de liliang 無能的力量 (The Power of the Powerless, 1998). 27. Dai Jinhua, Cinema and Desire, 221. On the changing meanings of guangchang in modern China, see also Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing. 28. See Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Yidi Wu, “You Say You Want a Revolution,” 231–50. For an overview of the eclipse of Maoist discourse during China’s recent liberalization, see Vukovich, “From Charting the Revolution,” 95–116. For recent efforts to rethink Chinese revolutionary experience through words and discourse, see Ban Wang, Words and Their Stories. 29. As Prasenjit Duara has noted, one example of the recent rewriting of key events of the national narrative is historian Feng Xiaocai’s reinterpretation of the May Fourth Movement. Rather than seeing it as a sacred manifestation of nationalist spirit, Feng argues that the popu­lar movement in Shanghai was a riot caused by rumors and panic. Duara, Global and Regional, 65. On the PRC’s adaptation of Maoist rhe­toric and tactics in recent campaigns, such as ­those against Falun Gong and SARS, see Perry, “Study Chinese Politics,” 10–16. 30. On the changing images of the crowd in Chinese cinema, see Andy Rodekoher, “Conjuring the Masses.” On the Fifth Generation filmmaker Chen Kaige’s abstraction of massed bodies in The Big Parade (1984), see Eugene Wang, “Film and Con­temporary Chinese Art.” On the erasure of the po­liti­cal crowd in con­temporary mainstream historical films, see Hongmei Yu, “Visual Spectacular.” 31. Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law, 28. 32. Yiching Wu, Cultural Revolution, xvii. 33. Wang Hui, End of the Revolution, 3. 34. Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and ­Future, 52. 35. Slavoj Žižek argues that global “postmodern post politics” is marked by “the reduction of the State to a mere police-­agent servicing the (consensually established) needs of market forces and multiculturalist tolerant humanitarianism.” Žižek, Ticklish Subject, 199. On “post-­politics” as the predominant po­liti­cal mode of ­today’s global cap­i­tal­ist

238

Notes to Pages 196–197

regime and dif­fer­ent critiques of this disavowal of the po­liti­cal, see also Mouffe, On the Po­liti­cal; Rancière, Dis-­Agreement; Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and F ­ uture. 36. Schnapp and Tiews, “Introduction,” in Crowds, xi. 37. Mason, Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere. 38. ­A fter the Arab Spring and the “Occupy” movements, the World Economic Forum listed in its 2012 World Risk Report two dominant concerns that emerged from the worldwide waves of civil discontent: “the growing frustration among citizens with the po­liti­cal and economic establishment, and the rapid public mobilization enabled by greater technological connectivity.” The solution it proposed—­“to improve the management of global economic and demographic transformations”—­presupposes the consensual mode of governance and is therefore an example of the postpo­liti­cal mode of thinking. The report is available at www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalRisks_Report_2012. pdf. In China, as Chaohua Wang points out, despite the depoliticization of Chinese society by neoliberal f­ ree market princi­ples, “the masses have been constantly mobilized into po­liti­cal action by the daily transformation in their lives.” Chaohua Wang, “Is Po­liti­cal Dissent Pos­si­ble?” 39. See, for instance, Hardt and Negri, Multitude. 40. See Nancy, Inoperative Community; Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 56–73; Agamben, Coming Community; Esposito, Communitas; Gandhi, Affective Communities; Butler, Performative Theory of Assembly. For a fascinating story about the reconfiguration of po­liti­cal space in the conservation of colonial-­era piers in Hong Kong, see Chun Chun Ting, “The Star and the Queen.” 41. On the disappearance and new appearance of the crowd in con­temporary China, see Grewal and Xiao, “Did Someone Say ‘Crowd’?,” 4.

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Index

ABC Series (World Books), 42 Adler, Alfred, 46 Adorno, Theodor, 236n14 aesthetic, the: of the crowd, 2, 4, 9, 16, 22, 29, 107–10, 193; of Hu Yepin, 131, 132, 134–35; and the individual, 93, 105, 107, 146, 160, 171; international, 18, 19, 100, 157; poets as mediators of, 167, 168, 173; and politics, 2, 5, 20, 21, 230n9; of relaxation, 143; ­women as, 132, 140 Aesthetic and Politics of the Crowd in American Lit­er­a­ture (Esteve), 109 Agamben, Giorgio, 197 Ai Qing, 1–2, 3, 153–54, 162–77, 182, 233n61; and voice of the crowd, 162–69; in Yan’an, 172–77 Aiken, Conrad, vi Allport, Floyd H., 12, 29, 44, 45–46, 189, 209n105, 224n98 Allport, Gordon, 30 Anagnost, Ann, 17, 89, 157, 179, 229n84, 235n100 anarchism: and communism, 214n36; in Hu Yepin, 140, 146, 147, 148; and nihilism, 22, 60, 66–71; of Zhu Qianzhi, 64, 67, 189 Anderson, Marston, 40, 93, 98, 217n109, 223n67, 229n83

Anderson, Perry, 15, 220n16 antirationalism, 59–90; global discourses on, 60, 85, 218n123; of Zhu Qianzhi, 64–65, 71–75, 82, 86, 192, 213n16. See also rationality Anti-­R ightist Campaign (1957–8), 177, 188 Armitage, David, 19 Badiou, Alain, 193, 194 Bai Mang. See Yin Fu Bain, Alexander, 70 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 121 Baldwin, James Mark, 54 Balibar, Etienne, 183 Ban Wang, 129, 151, 236n14 Bao Luo, 95 Bao Shoumei, 41 Barbusse, Henri, 100 Barlow, Tani E., 176, 178, 201n36 Baudelaire, Charles, 134–35, 227n20 Baudouin, Charles, 232n41 behaviorism, 12, 29, 43–45, 50, 209n106, 224n98 Beifang (The North; Ai Qing), 163 Beijing daxue xuesheng zhoukan (Beijing University Students’ Weekly), 64 Bellamy, Richard, 61 Benjamin, Walter, 62–63, 108

274 Index Bergson, Henri, 32, 215nn60–61, 216n70; and Zhu Qianzhi, 60, 71–75, 83, 191 Berman, Russell A., 97, 157, 230n9 Blumenthal, Arthur, 66 body, physical: and class strug­gle, 235n100; and the crowd, 7–8, 32, 42, 43, 45, 126, 129, 150, 154, 224n98; and emotion, 70, 114; female, 113–22, 134–35, 139, 140–41, 149, 225n113; and individual, 113–22, 201n39; and intellectuals, 113–14, 135–36; of the leader, 53; in lit­er­a­ture, 113–22; and materialism, 117, 225n108; and necrophilia, 133, 134–35, 227n22; and politics, 196; vs. rationality, 60–61; and the self, 113–22, 136–37, 201n39; and voice of the crowd, 166, 169 Borch-­Jacobsen, Mikkel, 212n174 Bördahl, Vibeke, 98 Bourdieu, Pierre, 184–85 Boym, Svetlana, 167 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 227n24 Brown, Richard Harvey, 48 Buddhism, 38, 94, 200n21, 220n21 Burke, Edmund, 170 Butler, Judith, 141, 142, 197 “Cadaver” (“Jianghai”; Hu Yepin), 130–37, 138, 139, 147 Cai Xiang, 179 Canetti, Elias, 29, 114, 230n87 Canguilhem, Georges, 11 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 77 Cavanagh, Clare, 168 Chang, Carsun, 218n124 “Charogne, Une” (A Carcass; ­Baudelaire), 134–35, 227n18 Chen Chengze, 31, 32, 42 Chen Dongyuan, 42, 47 Chen Duxiu, 34–35, 58, 68, 76, 181, 215n45 Chen Jianhua, 200n16 Chen Jianxiao, 208n93 Chen Zhengdao, 92 Ch’en, Jerome, 72

Chenbao (Morning Post), 37 Chenbao fukan (Morning Post Supplement), 32 Cheng Fangwu, 96 Chiang Kai-­shek, 50, 56, 60, 88, 111, 233n70 China Poetry Society (Zhongguo shige hui), 231n27 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 34, 36, 60, 126, 193; and Ai Qing, 172–77; and economic growth, 194; and emotion, 89–90; and GMD, 92, 111, 191, 233n70; and land reform movement, 178–83; and leadership, 86–87; and voice of the crowd, 162, 184–85 Chinese Encyclopedia Series (Zhonghua baike quanshu), 25, 209n107 Christensen, Arthur, 35 “Chunfeng chenzui de wanshang” (One Intoxicating Eve­ning of Spring Breeze; Yu Dafu), 142 class consciousness: and emotion, 89–90, 182; and leadership, 86–87; proletarian, 62–63, 225n127; vs. psy­chol­ogy, 17, 57–58; in Yan’an, 173, 178 class strug­gle: and economic determinism, 77; and emotion, 62–63; and intellectuals, 173, 175–76, 178; in land reform, 179, 180; and vio­lence, 235n100; and voice of the crowd, 158, 159, 160; in Yan’an, 177–78; and Zhu Qianzhi, 74, 189, 192 collectivism: Confucianism on, 84; and consciousness, 44, 45, 50, 51, 99, 184; and crowd theories, 7, 19, 22, 61, 88; and emotion, 71, 128–30; and identity, 17–18, 33, 84, 106, 108, 155, 169, 171–72, 184, 192, 197; vs. individual, 16, 33, 50, 83, 91–127; and intellectuals, 92–93; and lit­er­a­ture, 23, 94; and Maoism, 95, 110; and May Fourth Movement, 84; in post-­Mao era, 196–97; revolutionary, 13, 60, 110, 120, 139, 188; vs. selfhood, 14–17, 23, 27, 84, 128–30; socialist, 222n53; spirit (qunxing) of, 220n9; and subjectivity, 2, 7, 14–16, 58, 63

Index 275 colonialism, 31, 189 communism, 47–48, 214n36. See also Chinese Communist Party community, 5, 17–18; vs. the crowd, 7–8, 9, 36; in post-­Mao era, 196–97 Confucianism, 5–6, 53, 54, 71, 200n14, 215n52; and Zhu Qianzhi, 60, 83–84, 191 Conklin, Edmund S., 46 Connor, Steven, 155, 160 consciousness: cleft in, 49–56, 54, 211n156; collective, 44, 45, 50, 51, 99, 184; of the crowd, 57, 218n128; and emotion, 66, 89–90, 182; and emotion vs. affect, 60–61; historical, 65, 94, 175; individual, 28, 33, 35, 43, 44, 45, 50, 55, 114, 142; and leadership, 83, 86–87, 107; in Soviet psy­chol­ogy, 189, 236n12; surveillance of, 141–42, 143, 149; threshold of (yishi yu), 52, 54; transformation of, 179–80; vs. unconscious, 57, 60, 61; of vanguard, 217n111; and voice of the crowd, 155, 170, 230n7. See also class consciousness Cooper, Frederick, 19 Cooren, François, 230n6 Creation Society (Chuangzao she), 69, 96, 226n6 Crespi, John, 232n27 Crombie, Alistair, 56 Crowd, The (Psychologie des foules; Le Bon), 28–32, 60, 189 crowd, the (qunzhong): biomedical meta­phor for, 35–36; contrived (renwei qun), 8; definitions of, 50; discourses of, 4–5; era of, 3, 30, 56, 102; excitement of, 153–54; global theories on, 18–19, 28–31, 62–63; instability of, 20–22, 50–51, 52; merging with, 1, 15–17, 22, 113–22, 138, 171, 190, 220n4; muddledness (hunzhuo) of, 38, 40, 96; oceanic, 104, 105–10, 112, 120, 126, 127, 190; physicality of, 7–8, 52, 123, 126, 129; vs. the public, 51; terms for, 5, 7–10, 91, 155; urban, 31. See also masses,

the; psy­chol­ogy, crowd; voice of the crowd “Crowd, The” (“Qunzhong”; Ai Qing), 1–2, 3, 162–75 crowd control, 12, 110–13, 200n16; Ding Ling on, 180–85; by elites, 50, 52, 56, 87–88; and legitimacy, 56–57; as manipulation, 78–79, 81, 110–11; and revolution, 36–37; and speech making, 54–55; Zhu Qianzhi on, 79–85. See also leadership crowd formation, 12–13, 79–85; motivation for, 26, 43, 45, 49 crowd mentality (qunzhong xinli), 9–12, 207n73, 212n160, 217n108; anti-­ intellectual, 75–76; and emotion, 69–70; fear of, 34, 57; and French Revolution, 204n19; and individual, 38, 42–49, 55; and physical contact, 7–8, 32, 42, 43, 45, 126, 129; rationality vs. irrationality of, 34–49; and revolution, 36–38; theories of, 25–33; and vio­lence, 34–35, 38–39, 48; Western theories of, 28–33; Zhu Qianzhi on, 78–79 Crowd Mentality and Crowd Leadership (Qunzhong xinli yu qunzhong lingdao; Zhang Jiuru), 50, 210n130 crowd phenomena (qunzhong xianxiang), 11, 28, 44 Crowd Psy­chol­ogy (lectures; Zhang Jiuru), 50 Crowd Psy­chol­ogy (Qunzhong xinlixue; Gao Juefu), 45, 49, 189 Cui Jian, 195 Cultural Revolution (1966–76), 177, 188, 190, 196, 236n14 Cunningham, Valentine, 110 Dai Wanye (Dai Pingwan), 98, 221n32 Danziger, Kurt, 11, 66, 204n9, 215n54, 215n56 daqun (­great aggregate), 7–8, 91, 155 Darwin, Charles, 70, 72 Daston, Lorraine, 11

276 Index Davidson, Arnold I., 56 Dayanhe (Big Dike River; Ai Qing), 163 de Certeau, Michel, 156, 230n7 Deleuze, Gilles, 229n82 DeMare, Brian James, 235n96 democracy, 34, 38, 167, 175, 207n73, 218n128 demonstrations, 9, 34, 86, 106; and abnormal psy­chol­ogy, 43; and intellectuals, 124–25; merging of self in, 115–22; in post-­Mao era, 196; in Tian­a nmen Square, 186, 190, 194. See also May Fourth Movement; May Thirtieth Movement Denning, Michael, 19, 100, 222n45 Denton, Kirk, 84, 95, 201n39, 220n11, 222n53 depersonalization, 14–16, 100, 102, 190 Descartes, René, 83 Dewey, John, 33, 64, 72 Dimock, Wai Chee, 117 Ding Ling, 88, 104, 175–84, 235n96, 235n100; and Hu Yepin, 131, 137–38, 226n8; and voice of the crowd, 177, 178–83, 184; works by, 98, 137, 143, 148, 177, 178–83, 191, 235n101; and Zhu Qianzhi, 193 Dirlik, Arif, 88 “Disan rencheng de beiju” (poem; Tragedy of the Third-­Person Pronoun; Yang Sao), 103–4 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 55 Dixon, Thomas, 215n55 Dolar, Mladen, 183 Dongfang wenku (The Eastern Repositories), 203n1 Dongfang zashi (Eastern Miscellany), 25 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 67, 214n41 Dowing, Lisa, 227n15 Du Shiye, 31, 32 Duara, Prasenjit, 202n50, 213n18, 237n29 Ea­gleton, Terry, 172 economic issues, 5, 77, 194, 238n38

educational institutions, 34, 47, 64, 111, 176, 205n36, 209n107; psy­chol­ogy in, 9, 12, 33, 41–42, 43, 45, 47, 50, 53, 55, 189, 208n89, 208n93, 212n162; and Zhu Qianzhi, 87–88, 219n133 Elias, Norbert, 171 Eliot, T. S., 71, 97 Ellwood, C. A., 29 Elvin, Mark, 15, 102 emotion (qing), 60–78, 212n174, 215n55; vs. affect, 60–61; and CCP, 89–90, 188; and class, 62–63, 89–90, 178, 182; and collectivism, 71, 128–30; and Confucianism, 215n52; and consciousness, 60–61, 66, 89–90, 182; and creativity, 72–73; and crowd formation, 79–85; and crowd mentality, 69–70; and GMD, 82, 211n157, 217n108; and individual, 66, 67, 70, 71, 75; in land reform, 89–90; and physical body, 70, 114; vs. rationality, 64, 67, 68, 71, 72, 74, 75–78, 84, 213n21; and revolution, 23, 64–71; vs. sympathy, 217n111; and voice of the crowd, 170, 175, 181, 182; Zhu Qianzhi on, 64–71, 84–85, 87, 191, 192 Engels, Friedrich, 189 Esposito, Roberto, 197 Essais et mélanges sociologiques (So­cio­log­i­ cal Essays and Miscellanies; Tarde), 28 Esteve, Mary, 29, 109–10 evolution (jinhua), 65, 72–73, 213n18, 218n124 “Evolution of M ­ atter” (Le Bon), 67 Explosion, The: Marxism and the French Upheaval (Lefebvre), 59 Fadeev, Aleksandr, 100, 221n41 Fan Yuanlian, 205n36 Fang Xun, 72 Fa shang luntan (journal; Forum on Law and Commerce), 57 Fazheng zazhi (Law and Politics; journal), 31 Feng Xiaocai, 237n29

Index 277 Feng Xuefeng (Dan Ren), 98, 137, 221n31 Feng Youlan, 72 Feng Zhi, 234n87 film, Chinese, 195, 237n30 Fitzgerald, John, 80 Five Negations (Zhang Taiyan), 68 fleurs du mal, Les (Baudelaire), 134 folla delinquente, La (The Criminal Crowd; Sighele), 28 Follett, Mary P., 34 forceful implementation, philosophy of (lixing zhexue), 60, 88 Foucault, Michel, 11, 25, 55, 129 “foule, La” (Verhaeren), 171 Fournial, Henry, 29 France, 28, 42, 86 Frank, Jason, 167 French Revolution (1789), 51, 204n19, 210n130 Freud, Sigmund, 56, 78, 172, 203n66; on the crowd, 29, 32, 47, 49, 229n71, 236n14; and Hu Yepin, 141, 149; on sexuality, 123, 208n97, 210n127, 229n70 Fried, Daniel, 224n97 Fu Nian, 42 Fu Sinian, 37 Fujita Mitsuo, 100 Gálik, Márian, 152 Galsworthy, John, 48–49 Gao Juefu, 12, 18, 25, 42–52, 56, 58, 59; and CCP, 181, 189–90; and Lu Xun, 209n116 Gaobie geming (Farewell to Revolution; Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu), 195 Garbo, Greta, 123 Gault, Robert H., 204n17 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Freud), 49 Geng Jizhi, 36 Germany, 62, 97, 230n9 Giddings, Franklin, 45 global discourses: on aesthetics, 18, 19, 100, 157; on antirationalism, 60, 85,

218n123; on crowd theories, 18–19, 28–33, 62–63; revolutionary, 99, 102, 222n45; on visual art, 222n46. See also West, the; par­tic­u­lar countries globalization, 196, 197 Gold, Michael, 100, 122 Goldman, Merle, 175, 176 Gong Binglu, 98–99 Gong Zizhen, 183 Gorky, Maxim, 99 Gowin, Enoch Burton, 211n156 Gramsci, Antonio, 86, 87, 218n126 ­Great Leap Forward, 151 guangchang (square, public space), 195 “Guangchang” (The Square; Ai Qing), 155 Guo Moruo, 69, 88, 215n47, 216n75; and phonography, 159–62, 165, 168, 184, 193, 231n18, 231n21; and voice of the crowd, 159–60, 162, 168, 172, 184 Guomin­dang (GMD), 9, 26, 151, 172, 193; and CCP, 92, 111, 191, 233n70; and crowd psy­chol­ogy, 12, 55–56, 57; and emotion, 82, 211n157, 217n108; and New Life Movement, 53 Hacking, Ian, 56 Halfin, Igal, 174, 234n76 Han Shiheng, 100 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 99 Heibei minguo ribao fukan (Heibei Minguo Daily Supplement), 42 Heinrich, Larissa, 227n22 Hibiya riot (Japan; 1905), 31 Hicks, Granville, 100 historical time, 174–75, 234n76 history: forces of, 173–75; in Maoist era, 187; and the masses, 94–103, 98, 109; and revolution, 118, 153, 174, 195 Hobsbawm, Eric, 56 Hockx, Michel, 213n16 Hong. See Rainbow Hong Lingfei, 104–5, 108, 113 Hong Ruizhao, 220n9 Hong Zicheng, 222n50

278 Index “Hong–­bai” (Red-White; Gong Binglu), 98–99 Honghei Congshu (Red and Black Series), 226n8 Hongshui (Flood; play; Tian Han), 98 Horo­witz, Irving, 218n123 Hsia, C. T., 100 Hsia, Tsi-an, 152, 229n80 Hu Feng, 164 Hu Hanmin, 34–37, 52–53, 206n55, 207n73 Hu Jianmin, 32 Hu Shi, 64 Hu Yepin, 23, 88, 128–54, 155, 191; and Ding Ling, 131, 137–38, 226n8; and necrophilia, 130–37, 227n15; on sexuality, 138–54 Huang, Eva, 232n33 Huang Yaomian, 96 Huiyi (Reminiscences; Zhu Qianzhi), 83 Hunt, Lynn, 99 “Huoba” (The Torch; Ai Qing), 163 Huters, Theodore, 152 hypnosis (cuimian), 25, 28, 41, 56, 105, 111–13 identity: and collectivism, 17–18, 33, 84, 106, 108, 155, 169, 171–72, 184, 192, 197; in Hu Yepin, 130, 136; and nationhood, 13. See also self, the individual, the: and the aesthetic, 93, 105, 107, 146, 160, 171; and bodily self, 113–22, 201n39; vs. collectivism, 16, 33, 50, 83, 91–127; consciousness of, 28, 33, 35, 43–45, 50, 55, 114, 142; and the crowd, 2, 3, 14–16, 35, 37, 38–39, 42–48, 54, 57, 91–127, 209n105, 236n14; and crowd mentality, 38, 42–49, 55; vs. deindividualization, 30, 35; and emotion, 66, 67, 70, 71, 75; Hu Yepin on, 128–54; and the masses, 6, 62, 63, 89, 94–102; merging of, 1, 15–17, 22, 93, 113–22, 138, 171, 190, 220n4; and objectivity, 159–60; in PRC, 193, 197; vs. society, 12–13, 201n39; subjectivity

of, 2, 7, 14–16, 58, 63; Zhu Qianzhi on, 62, 63, 66–67, 70–71, 75, 78, 80–81, 83–84, 85, 89 individualism, 16, 33, 130; and modernity, 15; opposition to, 96–99, 100, 202n47, 234n87 industrialization, 4, 94, 104 intellectuals (zhishifenzi): and anti-­ intellectual crowd, 75–78; and class strug­gle, 173, 175–76, 178; collective emergence of, 147, 149–50, 151, 153; crowd control by, 50, 52, 56, 87–88; and global crowd theories, 18–19; and land reform, 235n96; marginalization of, 201n46; and the masses, 81, 92, 95–102, 106–10, 128–30, 161–62; and mass politics, 92–94; mediation of, 9, 16, 22, 23, 60, 63, 78, 82, 84, 148, 156, 159–61, 165, 173, 184, 188, 192, 201n36; merging of, 1, 15–16, 17, 22, 102–5, 114, 117, 118, 122–26, 191; and modernity, 123, 126; as phonographs, 159–62, 165, 168, 184, 193, 231n18, 231n21; and physical body, 113–14, 135–36; in PRC, 188–91, 195; and psy­chol­ogy of the crowd, 2–3, 7–11, 13, 18, 26–31, 33, 37, 42, 49, 50, 56; and revolution, 191, 192, 195; and the self, 169–72; and self-­transcendence, 14, 16; and voice of the crowd, 16, 22, 155–62, 164, 184–85; in Yan’an, 177–78 I-­Pan (journal), 225n127 Ivanov, Vsevolod, 99 James, William, 30 Jameson, Fredric, 14, 15, 102, 103 January 28 Incident (1932), 210n130 Japan, 9, 28, 29, 31, 77, 100. See also War of Re­sis­tance against Japan Jenner, W.J.F., 229n80 “Jianghai.” See “Cadaver” Jianshe (Reconstruction; journal), 35, 206n55 Jiaoyu zazhi ( Journal of Education), 105 Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily), 175, 176

Index 279 Jingbao fukan (Literary Supplement to Beijing News), 47 Jixing (Abnormality; journal), 94 Jones, Andrew, 160, 163, 217n109 Jonsson, Stefan, 61, 84 Judd, Ellen, 177 Jue Ren, 94 July School (Qiyue pai), 171 Kahn, Douglas, 161 Kaiguo dadian (Founding Ceremony of the Nation), 187 Kani Kōsen (Crab-­Cannery Ship; Kobayashi Takiji), 100 Karatani Kōjin, 143 Kautsky, Karl, 62 Kawakami Hajime, 77 Ke Bu, 115 Ke Li, 184–85 Kexue (Science; periodical), 32 Kobayashi Takiji, 19, 100, 221n42 Kolakowski, Leszek, 216n70 ­Korea, 31, 222n45 Korehito Kurahara, 99 Koselleck, Reinhart, 85, 174, 234n76 Krafft-­Ebing, Richard von, 227n15 Kropotkin, Peter, 140, 214n36 “Kuangye” (The Wilderness; Hu Yepin), 226n11 Kuwada Yoshizō, 29 Laclau, Ernesto, 63, 96 Lacoue-­L abarthe, Philippe, 202n53 Lamprecht, Karl, 33 land reform, 89–90, 177, 178–83, 193, 235n96 Larson, Wendy, 34, 129, 229n70 Laughlin, Charles A., 92 leadership, crowd, 49–56, 212n160; and CCP, 86–87; and consciousness, 83, 86–87, 107; Freud on, 149, 229n71; by idealist (lixiang jia), 79–85, 192, 223n71; in lit­er­a­ture, 107–10; physical characteristics of, 53; and revolution, 36–37; techniques for, 54–55, 56, 112;

of the vanguard, 80–81, 85, 87, 88, 156, 159, 166, 180, 192, 193, 217n111; as the voice of the crowd, 184–85 League of Left-­Wing Artists, 162 League of Left-­Wing Writers (Zuoyi zuojia lianmeng), 137, 231n25 Lean, Eugenia, 69 Le Bon, Gustave, 18, 28–34, 58, 204n15; critiques of, 35, 36, 44–45, 47, 62, 63; on era of crowds, 3, 30, 56, 102; and Gao Juefu, 42, 44–45, 48; and Hu Hanmin, 207n73; on leadership, 111, 112; and Lu Xun, 38; in PRC, 188, 189; on race, 30, 205n30, 207n78; translations of, 214n38; and voice of the crowd, 170, 181; and Zhang Jiuru, 50; and Zhu Qianzhi, 60, 61, 64, 67, 75–80, 82–84, 86, 88, 191 Lee, Ching Kwan, 195 Lee, Haiyan, 69, 100 Lee, Leo Ou-­fan, 40, 130, 142 Lefebvre, Georges, 58 Lefebvre, Henri, 59, 86, 218n127 legitimacy: in Confucianism, 6, 200n14; and crowd control, 56–57; of crowds, 4, 21, 49–50; and economy, 194; of intellectuals, 192; of the p ­ eople, 16, 96; po­liti­cal, 56, 173, 181, 187; in psy­chol­ ogy, 28, 61; of science, 7, 28; and voice of the crowd, 157, 162 Lenin, V. I., 63, 86, 140, 217n111, 218n128 Leninism, 77, 219n130 Li Changzhi, 220n4 Li Da, 217n87 Li Dazhao, 72, 77, 95, 217n87 Li Rong, 41 Li, Wai-­yee, 215n52 Li Zehou, 195, 213n21 Liang Qichao, 7, 40, 64, 199n5, 200n16, 205n36 Liang Shuming, 64, 72 Libedinsky, Yuri, 99 Light Is Ahead of Us, The (Guangming zai ­women de qianmian; Hu Yepin), 128–30, 137–54, 191

280 Index Lin Chuanding, 53 Lin Daojing (Qingchun zhige), 120–22 Lipp­mann, Walter, 33 lit­er­a­ture: anti-­individualist, 98–99, 100; and collectivism, 23, 94; of the crowd, 19, 20; of historical emergence, 121; leadership in, 107–10; main body (zhuti) of, 19, 98; the masses in, 94–102, 105–10; materialism in, 123, 126; of May Fourth Movement, 14, 213n16; physical body in, 113–22; proletarian, 97, 100, 139, 221n24, 225n127; and psy­chol­ogy, 20–21, 112, 145–46; realist, 6, 120, 126, 152–53, 178, 191, 229n84; and revolution, 152, 175–76. See also par­tic­u­lar authors and titles Liu Hengru, 216n67 Liu, Jianmei, 226n132 Liu, Lydia, 201n39 Liu Qu, 45 Liu Xijian (The Light Is Ahead of Us), 138–54 Liu, Xinmin, 223n79 Liu Zaifu, 195 lois psychologiques de l’ évolution des peuples, Les (Le Bon), 31 London, Jack, 99 Lu Ling, 171 Lu Xun, 137, 183, 199n5, 221n41, 229n80; on crowds, 13, 96, 217n109; and Gao Juefu, 209n116; on subjectivity, 38–39 Luh, C. W., 45 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 99, 137 Luo Hanchao, 103 Luo Jialun, 33, 79, 81 Macherey, Pierre, 225n114 Mackinnon, Stephen, 154 Malevich, Kazimir, 97 Malraux, André, 89 Mandelstam, Osip, 167 Mao Dun, 94–95, 223n64, 224n97, 225n114; and collectivism, 99, 100, 105; and Hu Yepin, 143–44, 150–51; and

voice of the crowd, 155, 160. See also Rainbow Mao Zedong, 186, 187, 190, 199n5; and Ai Qing, 172, 173, 176; and land reform, 182; mass line of, 86–87, 219nn129–30; on role of art, 175–76; and Zhu Qianzhi, 89, 219n133 “Mao Zedong” (poem; Ai Qing), 176 Maoism, 95, 110, 126, 177, 190, 196, 219n130 Maoist era, 23–24, 89, 151, 184, 194 Martin, Everett Dean, 19, 29, 47, 189, 204n17 martyrs (xishengzhe), crowd movement vs. social movement, 36–37 Marx, Karl, 72, 77, 140, 189 Marxism, 63, 83, 137, 189, 192, 234n76; and the masses, 95, 96; and Zhu Qianzhi, 76–77 Marxism-­L eninism, 130, 176, 234n96 Mason, Paul, 196 Masse Mensch (Masses—­Man; play; Toller), 99 masses, the (dazhong; zhong; min), 5–6, 200n21, 220n10; discovery of, 163; fantasy of, 122–26; and history, 94–103, 98, 109; and the individual, 6, 62, 63, 89, 94–102; and intellectuals, 81, 92, 95–102, 106–10, 128–30, 161–62; in lit­er­a­ture, 94–102, 105–10; and Marxism, 95, 96; merging with, 113–22, 138, 171; and poets, 162–69; in public space, 98, 126; subjectivity of, 86, 95–96; voice of, 161–62; in the West, 39; in Yan’an, 173 Massumi, Brian, 61 materialism, 65, 77–78, 117, 123, 126, 225n108 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 166, 167, 168, 232n53 May Fourth Movement (1919), 95, 140, 207n67, 237n29; and crowd theories, 8–9, 33–38, 52–53, 79; and lit­er­a­ture, 14, 213n16; rationality vs. emotion in, 64, 72, 74, 84; and ­women, 115

Index 281 May Thirtieth Movement (1925): and Gao Juefu, 43–44; and Mao Dun, 119, 224n97; and poets, 69, 231n12; and Ye Shaojun, 106, 111, 113, 188. See also Light Is Ahead of Us, The Mazzarella, William, 219n137 McDougall, William, 12, 29, 45, 46, 114, 119, 189 McGrath, Jason, 151 Mei (Hong), 115–22, 144 Meng Chao, 98 Michelet, Jules, 74–75 Mitchell, Timothy, 205n29 mob, the, 211n134; vs. the crowd, 209n116, 210n120 Mob, The (play; Galsworthy), 48–49 modernity, 4, 7, 8, 17; as era of crowds, 3, 30, 56, 102; and intellectuals, 123, 126; literary, 15, 16, 135–36, 222n53; postsocialist, 194; and revolution, 60, 201n41; and the self, 102, 109; and subjectivity, 201n36 Moede, Walter, 29, 204n17 morality, 4, 77; and collectivism, 17, 84; of crowds, 9, 35, 37, 53, 61; and emotion, 70, 71 Moscovici, Serge, 84, 218n121 Mosse, George Lachmann, 237n21 Motono Ichirō, 31 Mou Zongsan, 84 Mu Mutian, 221n24 Mu Shiying, 122–26, 188 “Mujie wen” (Epitaph; Lu Xun), 226n11 Mukden Incident (1931), 210n130 Murphy, Gardner, 210n120 Murthy, Viren, 68 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 17, 18, 194, 197 national character (guomin xing), 13 nationalism, 4, 17, 22, 31, 129, 151; Zhu Qianzhi on, 89, 192 nationhood, 4, 7, 8, 13, 17 necrophilia, 130–37, 227n15 Negri, Antonio, 87

neo-­Confucianism, 60, 67, 70, 84, 191 New Life Movement, 53 New Masses, 225n125 Nickels, Joel, 102, 126 Nie Gannu, 186, 188, 191, 193 Nietz­sche, Friedrich, 30, 67 nihilism, 22; of Zhu Qianzhi, 66–71, 85, 89, 136, 189, 191, 192, 214n41 Ni Huanzhi (Ye Shaojun), 20, 105–13, 115, 117, 121, 126, 155; and Hu Yepin, 145, 146, 150; in PRC, 188 “Nining” (Mud; Mao Dun), 160 Northern Expedition, 92 “Obey the Crowd” (fucong qunzhong; game), 184–85 objectivism, 160 Ōkubo Tomejirou, 31 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 29 Ou Shengbai, 219n133 “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (Whitman), 166 Pan Nianzhi, 221n42 parades, mass (qunzhong youxing), 187 Paris Commune (1871), 29, 204n19 Pels, Dick, 231n25 ­people, the (renmin), 5, 22, 202n50, 207n73, 222n46; fusion with, 16–18; in Maoist era, 23–24; terms for, 220n10. See also masses, the ­People’s Republic of China (PRC), 110, 186–91; founding of, 4, 184, 187 Perry, Elizabeth, 90 Philosophy of Revolution (Geming zhexue; Zhu Qianzhi), 59, 60, 64, 67, 69, 77, 85, 87 phonograph, 159–62, 165, 168, 184, 193, 231n18, 231n21 Pick, Daniel, 202n55 “Pierrot” (Mu Shiying), 122–26 Plekhanov, Georgi, 137 Plotz, John, 203n68 Po­liti­cal Ideals (Russell), 73

282 Index politics: and the aesthetic, 2, 5, 20, 21, 230n9; of awakening, 80–82; of community, 197; of the crowd, 2, 3, 4, 41, 187–91; and crowd theories, 21–22, 29, 47–49, 62; depoliticized, 24, 195, 196; emotion in, 71, 128–30; and individual vs. collective, 97, 127; and intellectuals, 92–94; and irrationality, 33–38; and legitimacy, 56, 173, 181, 187; and lit­er­a­ture, 94, 152–53; in Maoist era, 186–91; mass, 6, 23, 26–27, 33, 34, 43, 56, 58, 88, 97, 126; and ­music, 230n89; new, 34; participatory, 4, 43, 97, 187; party, 17, 202n50; and physical body, 196; postpo­liti­cal, 196, 237n35, 238n38; and psy­chol­ogy, 25–58, 61–62; rituals of, 24, 71, 126, 178, 182, 187, 235n104; and self, 144–45, 152; and sexuality, 138–54; and subjectivity, 237n25; and the sublime, 104, 108, 109–10; and technology of power, 4, 55, 199n10; ventriloquism in, 156, 159, 163, 230n6 Politics and Crowd-­Morality: A Study in the Philosophy of Politics ­(Christensen), 35 pop­u­lism, 63, 86, 96, 113 positivism, 85, 218n124 post-­Mao period, 5, 24, 195–97 proletariat, 5, 62–63, 77, 222n45; lit­er­a­ture for, 97, 100, 139, 221n24, 225n127 Průšek, Jaroslav, 98 psychoanalysis, 29, 47. See also Freud, Sigmund psy­chol­ogy: abnormal, 43, 46, 112; and anatomy, 135–36; vs. class, 17, 57–58, 62; Freud on, 203n66; institutionalization of, 41–42; in lit­er­a­ture, 20–21, 112, 125, 145–46; and neuroscience, 30; physiological, 12, 60, 70; popu­lar, 41, 42; racial, 205n30; secularization of, 70; social, 12, 33, 42, 204n15; Soviet, 189, 236n12; stimulus-­response in, 44–45; Western, 28–33, 42, 133–34

psy­chol­ogy, crowd, 2–14, 22–23, 25–58; courses in, 41, 42, 50, 55; global theories of, 18–19, 28–31, 62–63; and GMD, 12, 55–56, 57; and intellectuals, 2–3, 7–11, 13, 18, 26–31, 33, 37, 42, 49, 50, 56; and irrationality, 59–64, 66, 68; in military academies, 42, 50, 55; on pathology, 13, 17, 20–21, 28, 40, 41–49, 52, 58–64, 92, 133–34, 145–46; in PRC, 189, 190; and voice, 156 Psy­chol­ogy of Revolution (Le Bon), 31 “Public Display” (“Shizhong”; Lu Xun), 39–40 public space, 4, 17, 98, 126, 193, 195 Qian Xingcun, 96, 98, 99, 100, 104, 139, 223n64 Qian Zhixiu, 72 “Qianjin” (illustration; Ke Bu), 115, 116 Qingchun zhige (The Song of Youth; Yang Mo), 120–22, 126 Qing dynasty, 200n16; fall of, 3, 4, 31, 32 Qu Qiubai, 36–37, 42, 58, 112, 160, 181; and Zhu Qianzhi, 63, 75–79, 89 “Qunzhong.” See “Crowd, The” “Qunzhong xinli bijing shi kepa de” (­A fter All, Crowd Mentality Is to Be Feared), 57 Qunzhong xinlixue ABC (ABCs of Crowd Psy­chol­ogy; Chen Dongyuan), 42 Qunzhong xinlixue gangyao (A General Introduction to Crowd Psy­chol­ogy; Wu Zhaotang), 55 Qunzhong xinli zhi tezheng (The Characteristics of Crowd Mentaliy; Zhang Xichen), 25 race, 30, 38–39, 205n30 Rainbow (Hong; Mao Dun), 115–22, 126, 129, 144, 150, 224n97 Rancière, Jacques, 10 rationality: abnormality of, 68; Bergson on, 215n60, 216n70; vs. bodily affect, 60–61; and crowd mentality, 34–49; vs. crowds, 53, 56, 57–58; vs. emotion,

Index 283 64, 67, 68, 71, 72, 74, 75–78, 84, 213n21; Gao Juefu on, 46, 49; vs. instinct, 71–75, 76, 216n75, 218n127; vs. irrationality, 21, 23, 33–38, 52, 63; and the Party, 77; in PRC, 189, 190; and revolution, 59–90, 181. See also antirationalism realism, 6, 152–53, 229n84 “Recognize the Era—­W hat Is the ‘Scientific Era of Crowds’ ” (speech; Chiang Kai-­shek), 56 Rec­ords of the G ­ rand Historian (Sima Qian): Zhang Jiuru on, 51 Ren Jun, 161–62, 163, 168, 172, 184, 231n25 Republican period, 2–3, 6–7 Republic of China, 4, 8 Research Clique (Constitutional Research Society), 205n36 revolution (geming): and art, 175–76; and collectivism, 13, 60, 110, 120, 139, 188; and the crowd, 4, 36–38, 47, 58, 59, 75, 77–78, 147, 148–49, 152; and crowd mentality, 36–38, 204n19; and emotion, 23, 64–71; and enjoyment, 137–51; global discourses on, 99, 102, 222n45; and historical time, 173–75, 234n76; and history, 118, 153, 174, 195; and instinct, 71–75; and intellectuals, 191, 192, 195; and irrationality, 59–90, 181; leadership of, 36–37; Le Bon on, 30; and lit­er­a­ture, 152, 175–76; and masses, 95–96; and modernity, 60, 201n41; in post-­Mao era, 5, 196; and rationality, 59–90, 181; spirit of, 213n13, 226n5, 229n70; stages of, 67; and subjectivity, 140, 141, 142, 180, 183, 191, 226n5; Zhu Qianzhi on, 191–92 “Re yu jiyue xing” (Heat and Radicalism; Jue Ren), 94 rice riots (Japan; 1918), 31 Richards, Graham, 204n7 Rigby, Richard W., 229n80 romanticism, 139, 141, 147, 215n56, 226n6 Rong Zhaozu, 47 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 4, 16, 196

Rose, Nikolas, 11, 27 Ross, Edward, 19, 29, 189, 204n17 Rout, The (Fadeev), 100 Russell, Bertrand, 64, 72, 73, 216n67 Rus­sia, 37, 167, 222n53 Rus­sian Revolution (1917), 47, 51 Sarafianos, Aris, 170 Saussy, Haun, 3, 6 Schnapp, Jeffrey T., 3, 104, 109 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 159–60, 231n16 Schwarcz, Vera, 69, 223n69 science, 7, 28, 72, 73. See also psy­chol­ogy; social science self, the: and collectivism, 14–17, 23, 27, 84, 128–30; in the crowd, 146, 147, 148–49, 152; destruction of, 102–5, 113, 172, 175, 190, 222n53; and emotion, 128–30; and enjoyment, 131, 138–54; and intellectuals, 169–72; merging of, 115–22, 138, 171; and modernity, 102, 109; vs. other, 159, 170; and physical body, 113–22, 136–37, 201n39; and politics, 144–45, 152; and society, 12–13; surrender of, 105–10; technologies of, 129; transcendence of, 14–15, 33, 38, 44, 83, 91, 93, 106, 114, 115, 118, 122, 159; and voice of the crowd, 159, 162, 164–69; Zhu Qianzhi on, 84, 85 self-­awareness (zijue), 81–82 sexuality: Freud on, 123, 208n97, 210n127, 229n70; Hu Yepin on, 138–54; and Mu Shiying, 122–23, 125; and necrophilia, 130–37; and politics, 138–54; and revolution, 68, 147–48, 229n70; and ­women’s bodies, 118–19, 225n113 Shanghai North Train Station demonstrations, 43–44 Shanghai, Spring 1930 (Yijiu sanling nian chun Shanghai 1930; Ding Ling), 137, 143, 148 Shen Congwen, 88, 138, 227n27 “Shidai” (Epoch; Ai Qing), 173–74, 177 Shih, Shu-­mei, 72 Shi kan (Poetry; journal), 173

284 Index Shi lun (On Poetry; Ai Qing), 168–69 “Shui” (­Water; Ding Ling), 98 Sidis, Boris, 29 Sighele, Scipio, 28, 29 Sima Qian, 51 Snow, Edgar, 219n133 Social Darwinism, 65, 192, 213n18, 218n124 socialism, 77, 151, 184, 190, 195, 207n73; vs. crowd psy­chol­ogy, 61, 62; in lit­er­a­ture, 120, 126, 178, 191 Social Psy­chol­ogy (F. Allport), 44 social science, 5, 6, 7, 26–27, 28, 33, 42 society (shehui), 12–13, 37, 201n39 “Song of Blood” (poem; Zhu Ziqing), 69 “Song of Myself ” (Whitman), 166 sound technology, 159–62 Southern Anhui Incident (New Fourth Army Incident; 1941), 172, 233n70 Soviet Union (USSR), 167, 189, 236n12 “speaking bitterness” (suku), 89, 90, 179, 180, 182 Spencer, Herbert, 7, 70 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 159, 161 spontaneity, 13, 21, 118, 138; Ding Ling on, 177, 180, 182, 183; Hu Hanmin on, 35, 36; and intellectuals, 16, 58, 93, 99, 121, 125, 126; Ye Shaojun on, 110, 113; Zhu Qianzhi on, 59, 60–61, 63, 70, 78, 80, 82–90, 161, 192 Sternhell, Zeev, 85, 218n123 Strand, David, 54 “Street” (Ai Qing), 233n61 subjectivity: bourgeois, 160; of the crowd, 5, 35, 44, 87; and emotion, 70; individual vs. collective, 2, 7, 14–16, 58, 63; Lu Xun on, 38–39; of the masses, 86, 95–96; and modernity, 201n36; and politics, 237n25; revolutionary, 140, 141, 142, 180, 183, 191, 226n5; in Soviet psy­chol­ogy, 236n12; and voice of the crowd, 155–57, 184 sublime, the, 104, 108, 109–10, 126, 167, 170

suggestion (anshi), 13, 56, 111–13, 203n1, 211n156, 217n108; Gao Juefu on, 44, 45, 46; Le Bon on, 28, 35, 47; as m ­ ental contagion, 32, 45, 51, 78, 79, 111–12; in PRC, 188; Qu Qiubai on, 37; Zhang Jiuru on, 51, 54; Zhang Xichen on, 25–26, 28; Zhu Qianzhi on, 78–79, 80 Sun Yat-­sen, 26, 35, 54, 82, 199n5, 206n55, 211n157, 217n108 Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, The (Taiyang zhaozai Sanggan heshang; Ding Ling), 177, 178–83, 191, 235n101 Sun Society (Taiyang she), 95 Taiwan, 189 Taiyang yuekan (The Sun Monthly), 115, 158 Taiyang zhaozai Sanggan heshang. See Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, The “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Lit­er­a­ture and Art” (Mao Zedong), 175–76 Tan Sitong, 83 Tang, Xiaobing, 143, 231n12, 234n78 Tanimoto Tomeri, 31 Tao Menghe, 33–34 Tarde, Gabriel, 28, 29, 33, 51, 79, 112, 204n17 Three Princi­ples of the ­People, 54 Tian Han, 98, 232n51 Tian Lan, 14 Tian­a nmen Square, 184, 186, 187, 190, 194 Tiews, Matthew, 3 Tōa no hikari (Light of East Asia; periodical), 28 Toller, Ernst, 19, 97, 99 Tong Dizhou, 45 Tongmeng hui (United League), 31 “­Toward the Sun” (“Xiang taiyang”; Ai Qing), 153–54, 163, 166, 169, 174, 182 Tsin, Michael, 200n16 Tu Wei-­ming, 6 United States (U.S.), 18–19, 42, 100 urbanization, 4, 104, 123 utilitarianism, 64, 66

Index 285 ventriloquism, po­liti­cal, 156, 159, 163, 230n6 Verhaeren, Émile, 164, 166, 171, 233n59 Vie, La: Physiologie humaine appliquée à la médicine (Life: H ­ uman Physiology and Its Application to Hygiene and Medicine; Le Bon), 30 vio­lence, collective, 29, 31, 40, 44, 69, 235n100; and crowd mentality, 34–35, 48; and land reform, 180–82 vitalism, 60, 72, 88 voice of the crowd, 154, 155–85; Ai Qing on, 162–69; Ding Ling on, 177, 178–83, 184; and intellectuals, 16, 22, 155–62, 164, 184; and land reform movement, 179–83; and phonography, 159–62, 165, 168, 184, 193, 231n18, 231n21; and the self, 159, 162, 164–69

­women: bodies of, 113–22, 134–35, 139, 140–41, 149, 225n113; Le Bon on, 207n73; Mao Dun on, 115–20; and voyeurism, 118, 147, 228n33; in Yan’an, 175; and Zhang Xichen, 204n10 “Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, The” ­(Benjamin), 62–63 Wu Hung, 187 Wu Manyou, 176 Wu Weiren, 216n67 Wu Xuchu, 31, 32 Wu, Yiching, 196 Wu Zhaotang, 55 Wu Zhihui, 64, 214n38 Wundt, Wilhelm, 33, 60, 66–67, 70, 83, 90, 191, 214n28 Wuwu zazhi (The Steed; journal), 31

Wallas, Graham, 29 Wang, Chaohua, 238n38 Wang, David Der-­wei, 118, 163, 183, 231n18 Wang Duqing, 103 Wang Hui, 34, 194, 196, 237n25 Wang Shiwei, 175, 176 Wang Yangming, 83 War of Re­sis­tance against Japan (1937–45), 153, 161, 162 ­Water Margin, 51 Wei Dongming, 220n4 Weisenfeld, Gennifer, 205n31 Wen Cai, 234n96 West, the, 3, 34, 202n47; crowd theories in, 18–19, 28–33, 38, 39, 78, 80, 83–84, 104, 112; left-­wing radicalism in, 62, 65, 100, 222n53; poetry of, 166–67; psy­chol­ogy in, 28–33, 42, 70, 71, 133–34; science in, 73; and Zhu Qianzhi, 78, 80, 83–84. See also par­tic­u­lar countries Whampoa Military Acad­emy, 42, 50, 88 “Wheelbarrow” (Ai Qing), 233n61 Whitman, Walt, 166–67, 168 Williams, Raymond, 57

Xia Mianzun, 223n64, 225n127 Xia Yan, 100 Xiandai (Les Contemporains; journal), 123 Xiandai pinglun (Con­temporary Review), 132 “Xiang taiyang.” See “­Toward the Sun” Xiao Xiaorong, 55, 208n93, 212n162 Xie Chengxun, 204n17 Xin chao (New Tide; journal), 34 “Xin de jituan” (The New Collective; Hong Lingfei), 105 Xinli xuebao (Acta Psychologica Sinica), 189 Xinlixue luncong (Psychological Essays), 203n1 Xin qingnian (New Youth; journal), 34 Xin shehui (New Society; journal), 36, 37 Xin Zhongguo huaku (New China’s Pictorial Repositories), 187 Xiong Zhixing, 187 Xu Lingxiao (Binbin, Renjin), 26, 203n3 Xu Xu, 209n106 Xu Yi, 52 Xu Zhimo, 227n18 Xunlei (Xu Xunlei), 158–59, 165, 166, 168, 180, 231n12 Xunzi, 7

286 Index Yamakawa Hitoshi, 77 Yan’an, 162, 172–78, 234n96; Rectification Campaign in (1942–4), 176, 177–78 Yang Mo, 120–22, 126 Yang Sao, 103–4, 105, 106, 128 Yao Wenyuan, 177, 189 Ye Jianying, 186 Ye Shaojun (Ye Shengtao), 105–15, 122, 151, 224n97, 225n114, 225n127. See also Ni Huanzhi Yeats, William Butler, 67 Yeh, Michelle Mi-­Hsi, 233n56 Yepin shixuan (Selected Poems of Yepin), 226n8 Yi Kwangsu, 31 Yin Fu (Bai Mang, Xu Bai), 14, 91–93, 105, 151, 155, 182, 201n40 Yu Dafu, 142, 215n47 Yu Hua, 194 Yu Jiaju, 52 Yuan Jiahua, 69 Yuan Shikai, 26 Yuyan (Prophecy; Tian Lan), 14 Zelin, Madeleine, 117 Zhang Dongsun, 32, 72, 205n36, 215n61 Zhang Jiuru, 12, 22, 49–56, 58, 181, 203n67, 204n17; and Gao Juefu, 50–51, 52; publications of, 50, 189, 210n130; and Zhu Qianzhi, 59, 60, 193 Zhang Kebiao (Qi Fan), 122, 225n127

Zhang Taiyan, 38, 68 Zhang Ting, 172 Zhang Wentian, 172 Zhang Xichen, 31, 32, 42, 206n56; on suggestion, 25–26, 28; and w ­ omen, 204n10; and Zhu Qianzhi, 75, 78 Zhang Yinian, 41, 47, 208n89 Zhang Zhu, 37, 83 Zhao Yan, 224n98 Zheng Boqi, 69 Zheng Yefu, 100, 101 Zheng Zhenduo, 36, 69, 88 Zhong Jianhong, 8, 31, 32, 211n156 Zhou Enlai, 172 Zhu Fu, 48 Zhu Qianzhi, 23, 59–90, 93, 181, 191–93, 215n45; on anti-­intellectual crowd, 75–78; antirationalism of, 64–65, 71–75, 82, 86, 192, 213n16; and Bergson, 60, 71–75, 83, 191; on emotion, 64–71, 107; and Hu Yepin, 131, 146; on idealist as leader, 79–85, 192, 223n71; on intellectuals, 161; l­ater ­career of, 87–88, 89, 189; and Mao, 89, 219n133; nihilism of, 66–71, 85, 89, 136, 189, 191, 192, 214n41; on revolution, 191–92; vs. Ye Shaojun, 110, 112, 113 Zhu Ziqing, 69, 163 Zhuangzi, 159 Žižek, Slavoj, 150, 237n35 Zong Baihua, 91 Zweig, Stefan, 128, 164

Harvard East Asian Monographs Harvard East Asian Monographs (most recent titles) (*out-of-print)

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