Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. ix, 215 pp. (B&W photos.) US$26.00, paper. ISBN 9781478010845.
In this study of Chinese culture and politics, Stanford literature scholar Ban Wang considers the classical Chinese vision of tianxia (all under heaven) as it has been expressed by Chinese intellectuals and political actors since the late nineteenth century. From this vantage point he proposes an understanding of how the modern Chinese state has been constructed in both national and international frames of reference distinct from those found in European traditions. For the national, he draws upon Wang Hui’s approach to the transition from empire to national state that can be sampled in Wang Hui’s The Politics of Imagining Asia (Harvard University Press, 2011) and The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (Harvard University Press, 2023). For the international, he posits two very different twentieth-century formulations of international relations and geopolitical order, “liberal cosmopolitanism” and “socialist internationalism.” He associates the former with the legacy of colonialism and imperialism that shaped the late twentieth-century neoliberal order and presents the latter through its connections to class emancipation and national liberation. The first four chapters of this eight-chapter book consider different ways in which national and international concerns play out, first in Kang Youwei’s vision of world community through “utopian imagination, moral vision, and aesthetic sensibility” (22) and secondly in Liang Qichao’s drawing on classical motifs involving equality and redistribution to interpret broader understandings of socialist and democratic ideas of his own era that connect issues of national independence and internationalism spanned by a “datong (great unity) humanism” that “slides to socialist equalitarianism” (57). Chapter 3 looks at novelist Zhou Libo’s world literature seminar, which expressed “a new configuration of humanism, nationalism, and internationalism” (16) ending with “[t]he way to internationalism was a new nation-state capable of reaching out to other nations constituted by working people” (79). Chapter 4 considers how a 1964 Korean War film, Heroic Sons and Daughters, combined art and propaganda to popularize heroism and moral character, traits that would be invoked shortly thereafter in the Cultural Revolution. Where the first four chapters straddle national and international issues, the remaining four chapters pursue different subjects. In chapter 5, Wang focuses on Five Golden Flowers (1959), a well-received film celebrating socialist construction that exemplifies the ways in which diverse ethnic groups construct the Chinese nation. Chapter 6 shifts from a domestic focus to “Third World Internationalism” and ends with commentary on French Marxists drawing on Mao’s China for a model of revolution and social change. This move to consider Western intellectuals’ reactions to Mao-era China moves in chapter 7 to the United States, where the author criticizes “a new cosmopolitanism premised on possessive individualism and neoliberalism” (18) that he argues depoliticized the study of Chinese culture in American classrooms. Chapter 8 closes the book by affirming several propositions. Wang sees ethnic diversity leading to transethnic unity and a vision of universalism that separates an imperialist agenda from the principles needed for a cosmopolitan order based upon inter-cultural learning. He makes a strong claim that “[c]ultural politics places value above history, culture above politics, and spirit over machine, stamping myriad episodes and events with symbolic aura and significance under the aegis of ‘cultural revolution.’ It may not be an exaggeration to claim that the impulse for cultural change has been regarded as a crucial driving force for modern China’s social and economic development” (180–181). He closes this book with a provocative observation on the oft-expressed worries about Western (especially American) competition with China leading to conflict. Wang suggests that China could continue to follow Deng Xiaoping’s path of development and in his view rule the world or return to Mao’s support for poor countries tied to a “legacy of tianxia and socialist internationalism” (185) that would bring harmony to the world.
The arguments and analyses in this book range over large and complex subjects that have been addressed in both related and different ways by other researchers. Befitting a literary scholar, the author’s main focus is on ideas and beliefs expressed in texts, including visual texts, which help the reader imagine how historical actors chose to act and, implicitly if not explicitly, how their actions led to larger outcomes for China and the country’s relationships with others. Other scholars consider the norms, rules, organizations, and institutions that both enable certain kinds of action and limit others as part of their accounts for large-scale processes of historical change such as the transformation of an empire into a nation-state; the same is true for tracking the evolution of the international geopolitical order and the possibilities of economic development and the persistence of poverty within countries and across the globe. Between historians and political scientists, there has developed a considerable literature on state formation/transformation and approaches to international geopolitical order from the early modern era forward; some studies of China are now part of those literatures. Such scholarship rests on methods and materials that only sometimes overlap with those the author uses. Each discipline has its range of preferred methods for selecting what is most important to study and scholars, whether consciously or not, simplify the large subjects they seek to address which makes it easier to criticize the kinds of research others make according to different metrics of evaluation. These traits apply to this book, both in terms of what the author criticizes and how others could also criticize his work in settings other than the one provided by the short book review format.
R. Bin Wong
University of California, Los Angeles