Harvard East Asian Monographs, 360. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2013. xiii, 359 pp. US$39.95, cloth . ISBN 978-0-674-72672-7.
Wang Xiaojue presents six chapters in this book, each devoted to a modern writer in Chinese whose life illustrates the various courses that vocation brought during the Cold War. They are Shen Congwen (1902–1988), who gave up literature for museum work after political denunciation, and died in Beijing before he could receive the widely expected Nobel Prize; Ding Ling (1904–1986), the electrifying feminist writer of the pre-1949 period and then winner of the second Stalin Prize for literature in 1951, after which she suffered brutal torture at the hands of the Communist authorities, being rehabilitated, a shadow of her former self, only in 1978; Wu Zhuoliu (1900–1976), a leading Taiwanese novelist, in particular of the period of Japanese rule; Feng Zhi (1905–1993), greatly influenced by German literature, on which he was an expert, who navigated the political tides of his times with considerable success; and finally Eileen Chang (1920–1965), a great writer but also a tragic expatriate, who spent her life after 1949 dividing her time between Hong Kong and the United States.
The essays are largely successful and informative, though unlike much writing on the subject, they say little about the role of official compulsion in the careers of the three who lived their lives in China. The book’s subtitle, “Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide,” however, suggests greater ambition than simply a well-chosen set of biographical vignettes. By attempting to de-emphasize the Cold War, Wang seeks to unify her subjects under a national rubric that somehow transcends ideology. Neither her introduction nor conclusion, which present her larger arguments pointing to “a De-Cold War Criticism,” quite achieve the evidently hoped-for purpose of making the book more than the sum of its parts.
For one thing, the Cold War has effectively been over since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—twelve years before the publication of the book. Since then the strange confrontation has not so much been re-evaluated as disappeared: a visit to Moscow discloses few symbolic traces of the Communist past, while even in China, vestiges of the period of Maoism (1949–1976) are increasingly difficult to find. It is as if the very different waters of pre-Communist and now effectively post-Communist (but still authoritarian) China are closing over the 24 years of Mao’s rule which, it turns out, did not so much transform the nation’s development as delay it until the great man was dead. Furthermore, like it or not, while it lasted the Cold War did split the Chinese-language world into fragments, some of which communicated a bit, others not at all. So the whole premise of the book seems a bit archaic: that we must somehow wrestle with a once-real “divide” now largely forgotten and well on the way to closing.
A never-resolved ambiguity about the actual history of the period plagues the book. Thus, an ordinary observer might think that Ding Ling, having been a daring and untrammeled author until Communism, subsequently encountered (after a brief celebrity) exile, mental torture, and so forth that effectively broke her spirit. She was, after all, an emotionally delicate woman of literary genius, but so traumatized that at the end of her life, visiting America, she had scarcely anything of interest to say. We know, after all, from a plethora of sources, how brutal were the Chinese Communist authorities, how many great talents were killed or died or broke down. Like Ding Ling they had no choice: they could not opt out of the then pervasive and coercive politicization of art and all else in China. It was obligatory and forcibly imposed.
We also know that the whole process of harnessing art to political goals began with Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” (1942) which had the full support of the new (since 1935) secret police of Kang Sheng, trained by the KGB in the USSR. Only in a footnote does Wang acknowledge that “Mao’s notion of spiritual and physical hygiene was implemented during various political campaigns targeted at intellectuals, of which the 1942 rectification campaign was only the beginning” (118, note 20). Yet rather than exploring what Mao said (and did) to Ding Ling, Wang devotes effectively all of her attention to a putative “self-transformation” by which Ding Ling attempted to change herself into a new kind of writer, as indeed she may have, before perhaps crumbling.
Likewise striking is the ease with which Wang slides over the terrible tragedy of Shen Congwen’s turn away from literary brilliance to museum curatorship. Even her lack of curiosity about Feng Zhi’s passage into Communism “without a strenuous process of assimilation” (242) is puzzling. Perhaps his ability to write in 1958, no less, that only under socialism would “freedom and law, the individual and the collective” be realized, suggests something about his gift for overlooking the obvious oppression in China (243)? As for Wu and Chang, they would fit only if the topic and structure of the book were more intellectually rigorous and better articulated.
One simply cannot erase at will divisions within a world of writing which, in China, saw the final manuscript of Ding Ling’s Sun Shines Over the Sangan River (1948) delayed a year until approved by Mao himself (114), while in contemporaneous Taiwan creative writing was certainly restricted, though Chiang Kai-shek, a far less ambitious dictator than Mao, had little desire to transform human souls, and finally the free world of Hong Kong and beyond. Instead of attempting the impossible by placing the Chinese police state in the background while seeking to rub away hard boundaries, Wang’s deep scholarship might have been better used confronting the indubitable realities of the rapidly receding world of which she writes.
Arthur Waldron
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA