Abstract
Most Chinese writers and intellectuals in the first five and final two decades of the twentieth century yearned for Chinese modernity, but saw a China that was “feudal” in an era of accelerating world progress. There were also traditionalists, early on, who rejected mainstream versions of modernity that embraced Westernization and nation building.1 Their contestations of “modernity” found echoes in the 1990s talk of “alternative modernities” and “modernity with Chinese characteristics.”
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Notes
Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
Li Shiyu, Xiandai Huabei mimi zongjiao (Chengdu: Academia Sinica, 1948);
Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976);
Daniel L. Overmeyer, Folk Buddhist Religion: Dissenting Sects in Late Traditional China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976);
Zhou Yumin and Shao Yong, Zhongguo banghui shi (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1993);
David Ownby, “Chinese millenarian traditions: the formative age”, American Historical Review 104:5 (December 1999), 1513–1530.
Paul A. Cohen, “Time, culture, and Christian eschatology: the year 2000 in the West and the world”, American Historical Review 104:5 (December 1999), 1615–1628.
Deng Zhaoming, “Recent millennial movements in mainland China: three cases”, Japanese Religions 23:1–2 (January 1998), 99–109. Ownby, “Chinese millenarian traditions”, p. 1513.
Bao Mi (pseud, of Wang Lixiong), Huang huo (Taibei: Fengyun shidai, June 1991), 3 vols.
Lu Tianming, Cangtian zai shang (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1995). Zhang Ping, Jueze (Beijing: Qunzhong chubanshe, 1997).
Mo Yan, Jiu guo (Taibei: Hongfan shudian, 1992). The Republic of Wine, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York: Arcade, 2000). Jiu 3 guo 2 (lit., “liquor nation” or “liquoring up the nation”) puns on “national salvation”, jiu 4 guo 2.
Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Stephen R. Bokenkamp, “Time after time: Taoist apocalyptic history and the founding of the T’ang dynasty”, Asia Major 3rd ser. 7:1 (1994), 64.
N[athan] Sivin, “On the limits of empirical knowledge in the traditional Chinese sciences”, Time, Science, and Society in China and the West, ed. J.T. Fraser, N. Lawrence, and F.C. Haber (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), p. 152. Cf. Wall Street’s “triple witching hour”; or the simultaneous ending of a business cycle, a Kondratieff long wave (20 years), and a post-dependency-theory 300-year really long wave; André
Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Anna K. Seidel, “The image of the perfect ruler in early Taoist messianism: Lao-tzu and Li Hung”, History of Religions 9:2/3 (November 1969 and February 1970), 216–247.
B.J. ter Haar, Ritual and Mythology of the Chinese Triads: Creating an Identity (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998), and The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992). See also Li Shiyu, Xiandai Huabei mimi zongjiao; Overmeyer, Folk Buddhist Religion.
Lu Tonglin, Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics: Contemporary Chinese Experimental Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), argues that avant-garde novelists, including Mo Yan, are misogynist, perhaps from opposition to the larger system of communism, which upheld feminist discourse. Some millenarian sects of North China, such as those called “White Lotus”, had a female savior—the Eternal Unborn Mother (see Li Shiyu, Xiandai Huabei mimi zongjaro, Overmeyer, Folk Buddhist Religion).
Mo Yan, Red Sorghum, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York: Viking, 1993), pp. 207–220.
Like the banned 1987 TV series that pitted an ingrown “Yellow” civilization of the North China Plain against a littoral and ocean-going “Blue” civilization of modernity. Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang, Deathsong of the River: A Reader’s Guide to the Chinese TV Series HESHANG (Ithaca: Cornell University East Asia Program, 1991).
Ke Yunlu, Xin xing (New star), Dangdai suppl. 3 (August 1984).
Mo Yan, Tiantang suan tai zhi ge (Taibei: Hongfan, 1989); The Garlic Ballads, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York: Penguin, 1995). This novel seems prophetic of the 1992–1993 tax protest by 15,000 peasants who burned down the county offices in Renshou, Sichuan, but Mo Yan says the plot is based on a real 1987 revolt of garlic farmers in his native Shandong. Personal interview, March 26, 2000.
For the record, Mo Yan says he dislikes Borges, who is too difficult; it is other Chinese writers of his generation who idolize Borges. Jeffrey C. Kinkley, “A talk with Chinese novelist Mo Yan”, Persimmon 1:2 (summer 2000), 64.
Xiaobin Yang, “The Republic of Wine: An extravaganza of decline”, positions: east asia cultures critique 6:1 (spring 1998), 12.
Jing Wang, High Culture Rever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 38.
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© 2005 Charles A. Laughlin
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Kinkley, J.C. (2005). Modernity and Apocalypse in Chinese Novels from the End of the Twentieth Century. In: Laughlin, C.A. (eds) Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981332_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981332_7
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