Harvard East Asian Monographs, 385. Cambridge, MA; London, UK: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2015. xiv, 379 pp. (B&W photos.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-08839-9.
In 1900, Liang Qichao published his essay “Ode to Young China.” He created the idea of youth as a symbol of young China and called for the nation’s rejuvenation. Since then youth discourse has been a central issue in China’s nation-building. What does it mean to be the youth? How has the discourse of youth evolved? In this well-researched cultural history, Mingwei Song offers a carefully constructed analysis of fictional representations of the ideal youth and youth discourse in novels by Ye Shengtao and Mao Dun in the 1920s, Ba Jin in the 1930s, Lu Ling and Lu Qiao during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), and by Yang Mo and Wang Meng in the 1950s, the Communist era. Using novels as primary sources, Song’s work situates literature in the larger historical transformation of China. He thus reaches a larger audience that includes all those interested in political culture, intellectual history, and youth history from 1900 to 1959.
The novels Song has chosen have undergone previous analysis. Some were condemned by Communist critics. Song’s contribution to the study of China’s twentieth-century history is to present the works as a coherent category by centering his analysis on the discourse of youth, using European philosophical, political, literary, and psychological theories, and in particular the framework of the Bildungsroman: the literature genre that depicts the spiritual development of a youth, rendered as “chengzhang xiaoshuo” or “novel of personal growth” in Chinese (53). The novels chosen are Chinese Bildungsroman. They share a master plot: an individual begins a journey in search of the realization of the inner self by merging with greater historical movements. The Chinese Bildungsroman, in comparison with its European counterpart, is more closely associated with the theme of national rejuvenation, reflecting the age-long Chinese concept of literature as a means of transmitting political ideas. Like China’s own journey, which has been full of struggles and frustrations, the protagonists’ growth connects more with an attempt to change the outside world, and often ends in frustration with no resolution.
After an overview of youth discourse in chapter 1, chapter 2 explains how Liang Qichao has his ideal youth merge Chinese tradition with Western civilization. The ideal youth in Wu Jianren’s The New Story of the Stone is the hero, Jia Baoyu, from the Dream of the Red Chamber, who comes back to life as an “old youth,” deep in Chinese civilization and young with vitality. Chapter 3 argues that the New Culture Movement marked the beginning of the new youth generation trying to break away from tradition. In this context, Ye Shengtao’s novel, Nin Huanzhi (published in 1928) became the first truly Chinese Bildungsroman, although it is a disillusioned Bildungsroman in which the protagonist is caught in a cycle of repeated hope for change and repeated despair. Chapter 4 has Mao Dun’s early works as a focus. In his Eclipse (published in the late 1920s) Mao Dun creates a decadent image of youths filled with psychological anxiety, attempting to escape from reality. His Rainbow makes a Communist turn: the female protagonist’s developing personality leads to her transformation into a Communist. Thus Rainbow is the first Chinese Communist revolutionary Bildungsroman. Ba Jin’s anarchist Bildungsroman series of the 1930s (chapter 5) has a succession of protagonists. Although each novel does not follow the pattern of a Bildungsroman, together the protagonists of the series fit the journey of self-transformation, and develop into the ideal youth, Gao Juehui, in the Family.
In the Second Sino-Japanese War China’s political crisis made nationalism the dominant theme in literature. In chapter 6, Song chooses two novels outside this paradigm of national salvation: Lu Ling’s Children of the Rich and Lu Qiao’s Everlasting Song. Both “penetrate the complexities and ambiguities of individual subjectivity” against “institutional interventions” (239). Lu Ling’s ideal, youth strives for self-determination, refusing to submit to any form of constraint from family and ideology. Lu Qiao “focuses on the self-fashioning of youths” (239). It was the literary and academic dynamics of China’s interior under the control of the Nationalist government that made it possible for both authors to break away from the discourse of revolution. Lu Ling was under the influence of the literary theory of Hu Feng to resist spiritual slavery. Lu Qiao, a student of the National Southwest Associated University, based his novel on his experiences there, the most liberal institution at the time. Their works mark an alternative development of the Chinese Bildungsroman. Chapter 7 moves chronologically to the People’s Republic of China, when communist ideology was dominant, as depicted in Yang Mo’s The Song of Youth. Her socialist Bildungsroman maps a journey in which a female is gradually molded into a qualified communist youth. Yang’s taming of the youth motif, however, is challenged by Wang Meng’s works, which both glorify socialist youth and show resistance to that taming.
Not just an analysis of literature, Song’s work appeals to a wider audience as a contribution to the intellectual history of twentieth-century China. He situates the Chinese Bildungsroman in rich historical contexts, demonstrating how the novels closely reflect China’s efforts at reforming education in Ye Shengtao’s work, anarchist revolution in Ba Jin’s, advancing liberal humanism in Lu Ling and Lu Qiao’s, and Communist revolution in the works of Mao Dun, Yang Mo, and Wang Meng. Song’s book is also a history of youth. The novels are autobiographical, illustrating the journeys of writers themselves as intellectual youths, their own inner search and personal growth.
It would be unsettling if Song’s analysis had ended in 1959, the era of the Maoist youths, who went on to become Red Guards smashing China’s cultural heritage. China’s youth discourse did not end here. So it is good to see that Song has added a short epilogue with a critical review of Liu Cixin’s science fiction (published in 1999). He shows that in the Reform era, youth discourse undertakes another beginning. The Chinese Bildungsroman has become less political, more diverse, creative, and pluralistic, demonstrating youth’s search for individual growth in the new global context of yet another stage of Chinese nation-building.
Yihong Pan
Miami University, Oxford, USA