MCLC: late Qing dreams of modernity

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: late Qing dreams of modernity
***********************************************************

Source: The China Beat (12/5/11):
http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=4016#more-4016&mid=5471186

Late Qing Dreams of Modernity
By Peter Zarrow

I would like to alert China Beat readers to a new film, Datong: The Great
Society [Chinese title: 大同：康有為在瑞典]. This docu-drama tells the story
of 
Kang Youwei (1858-1927) and to a great extent that of his second daughter
Kang Tongbi (aka Kang Tung Pih, 1887-1969).

I found the film a powerful and affecting evocation of a philosopher’s
life, and found myself challenged to consider what we make of the past and
what it makes of us. The film-maker, Evans Chan, calls Datong: The Great
Society a “docu-drama,” since it is based on verifiable records, period
photos, and vintage footage—as well as interviews with scholars—all woven
into a tapestry of theatricalization involving dance and re-enacted scenes
by the Hong Kong actors Liu Kai Chi (as Kang) and Lindzay Chan (as
Tongbi). The film also features the well-known and very-much-living
actress/choreographer Chiang Ching as the narrator who “plays” herself
(more on which below).

The Hong Kong-New York filmmaker Evans Chan 陳耀成 here tackles themes
central to modern China, ranging from reform/revolution to sexuality,
gender and ethnic relations, and he also tells a transnational story with
Kang’s exile in Sweden at the center. Evans Chan is also a cultural
critic, playwright and the translator/editor of three books by Susan
Sontag in Chinese.

Datong: The Great Society, currently playing in the former British colony,
will become the inaugural film to receive the Movie of the Year Award to
be presented by Southern Metropolitan Daily (南方都市報) as part of its
Humane 
Life Awards (生活大獎).

After seeing a preview of The Great Society in Taipei, I asked Evans Chan
if he would answer some of my questions, and this is an edited version of
our email dialogue. The complete version of this interview along with
other information about the film may be found at Evans’ website:
Evanschan.com.

*  *  *

PZ: How did you come to think of working on Kang—and his time in Sweden in
particular?

EC: The immediate—Swedish—angle of this film was a result of my stumbling
upon the newly published Chinese edition of Kang Youwei’s Swedish Journals
in Hong Kong in 2007, eighty years after his death. Annotated and edited
by Goran Malmqvist, Sinologist and member of the Swedish Academy, this
edition came out almost 40 years after its Swedish edition. But it rang a
bell, since I had come across a quirky reference to Kang’s owning a
Swedish isle in Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China (1991).

However, I’d been unwittingly approaching Kang, and aware of a film
project possibility. Before encountering the Swedish Journals, I’d been
researching a book about ethno (Han-centric) nationalism and Chinese
cinema—about what I called Han Chinese cinema’s “trans-ethnic/-racial”
representation of minorities, including Tibetans and Manchus—which led me
to Zhu Shilin’s Sorrows of the Forbidden City(清宮秘史, aka The Secret
History 
of the Qing Court, 1948), the first important film made by a Han Chinese
director about the Qing/Manchu court set during the Hundred Days’ Reform.
Kang was, of course, a key player in that momentous event. However, Zhu
Shilin’s film recasts the conflict as a familial melodrama involving the
Empress Dowager and Emperor Guangxu’s favorite consort, Zhen Fei. In The
Great Society, I’ve excerpted Sorrows extensively, at times having Liu Kai
Chi, who plays Kang, acting against the projected film. You can say it’s
my way of “remaking” Sorrows of the Forbidden City.

I also feel quite strongly that Kang’s historical role deserves a
reconsideration in light of contemporary scholarship and postmodern
politics. Kang isn’t as accessible as other modern figures mainly because
he stood at the tipping point of Chinese modernity. If both Kang and Liang
Qichao are considered the inaugurators of Chinese modernity, Kang was the
last major intellectual of the classical millennia, while Liang was the
first one blazing his way into the vernacular present. Since the shift
turned out to be almost as major a shift as from Latin to the vernacular
in Europe, Liang and the notable figures who followed him are more of a
presence in Chinese modernity than Kang. Liang has been considered a
figure who has “outshone” his master, no doubt partly due to this
significant cultural/linguistic shift, even though Liang, “the ultimate
fox” in your words, once lamented that he was not as an original thinker
as his master.

PZ: Chinese and Western historians primarily recognize Kang for his role
in the political reforms of 1898—which failed—and do not pay much
attention to his utopianism and certainliy don’t respect his scholarship.
As long as we cannot get away from some kind of “narrative of
revolution”—and I’m not saying we should—it is hard to fit both Kang’s
radicalism and his antipathy to revolution into the plot.

EC: I agree with you that Kang doesn’t fit readily into the revolutionary
narrative of Chinese historiography. But even if he is mainly remembered
for the Hundred Days, he has cast a long shadow over modern China.
Recently, the Hundred Days was evoked by ”Charter 08” as a shattering
event for an abortive Chinese modernity, owing to which I’d argue that the
Hundred Days was the original, archetypal event of a fierce intellectual
contest and a bloody conflict preceding Tian’anmen 89—a traumatic
experience for Liu Xiaobo’s generation.

Memories of the crushed Hundred Days have survived in Hong Kong mostly
through Li Han-hisang’s series of films on Empress Dowager Cixi. And I
remember a placard on Tian’anmen Square during the 1989 democratic
uprising (I was there in late May during my very first trip to China!)
that showed a cartoon depicting Deng Xiaoping as Cixi “ruling behind the
curtain.” The lineage of this struggle for Chinese modernity dawned on me
as I encountered some revisionist history in the PRC, including the
mini-series Approaching the Republic (走向共和). Specifically, Cixi, who put
a 
price on Kang’s head, is depicted as having a more progressive vision than
Kang. But she crushed Kang’s reform only because her good sense told her
that China should only “move forward in economic, but not political,
terms.”

Hasn’t Cixi been fused with Deng!? If my film has shown a perspective in
which the boundary between reform and revolution has been blurred, it’s
because the perspective of dissidence has come to the fore through the
filter of time. The question has become—how to effect political change?
And as an insider or an outsider?

PZ: The film emphasizes Kang’s utopian longings and his utopian
scheme,Datongshu. As your film points out, Kang did not think the world
was ready for his Datong. At the same time, I don’t doubt Kang’s impact on
Mao Zedong, though I also take Mao’s Marxism seriously, which is to say
Mao somehow blended Kang’s Datong vision with Marxism.

EC: Kang’s legacy is complex. If his reform efforts failed during the 1911
Revolution, but have survived as an illusory path not taken by “China,”
his speculative utopian program was realized to a fault in revolutionary
China during the Great Leap Forward. Mao’s relationship with Kang, fraught
with respect and rivalry, was one of the most astonishing things I
uncovered during my research. Apparently, Mao found his initial calling
after reading Kang’s Datongshu in 1917, when he was 24. He wrote to a
friend stating Datong to be his political goal, while citing the Confucian
evolutionist paradigm developed by Kang. Understandably, that has been
suppressed throughout his career, probably because of his insistence on
his originality, but apparently also due to an urge to hide his original
calling’s Confucian underpinning in the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary rat
race, in both his theoretical one-upman-ship within the party, and later
in his state-building rivalry with the Soviet Union. But Kang cannot be
blamed for the Great Leap Forward’s barbarous atrocities by design or
ignorance, because of his own leeriness of a forcible utopianism.

PZ: Not blaming Kang, but Datong seems offer a kind of critique of
revolution, and especially the chaos of the Maoist years—and for that
matter today’s cruel urban renewal. Were you joining those who want to say
goodbye to revolution?

EC: More recently Li Zehou 李泽厚 hailed Kang as the greatest modern Chinese
philosopher. And he made a strong case for rehabilitating Kang politically
in his bookGoodbye to Revolution (告別革命, 1995) by maintaining that Kang’s
might have been a better option for China. A number of viewers seem to
feel that that is my film’s position. I can only say that to imagine there
was a choice between “reform” and “revolution,” as though there was a
rational decision similar to taking a national referendum, is simply
delusional. In contemporary China, we have a Han nationalist subject
projecting itself back to an immemorial origin such as the mythical Yellow
Emperor. But its “unchangingness” is illusory, since there was a
disruption and gigantic schism in 1911, which it has consciously or
unconsciously overlooked. Simply put, the pre-1911 national subject wasn’t
a Han subject, but a Manchu subject confronting its destiny. Qing China
was different from China as such—and Kang was accused by the court of
trying merely to save “China,” but not the ”Qing/Manchu China.” Hence,
revolution was as much indirectly a short-circuiting of the Han reform
efforts, as directly the consequence of Manchu China’s failure to reform
itself to meet the racial/ethnic challenge posed by the new-fangled Han
subject. Kang’s endeavours simply exposed the Manchu government’s
resistance to and insincerity about sharing power with the Han majority,
i.e., adapting itself to a polity increasingly charged by ethnic
awareness. The Qing government’s anti-reform drive to recentralize power
through setting up its notorious Royal Chamber in 1909 definitely hastened
the revolution. I want to emphasize the above because my film wasn’t the
best platform to discuss in details my view on the 1911 Revolution.

PZ: Indeed, simple condemnation of historical revolutions would be
fatuous. Nonetheless, The Great Society seems to contrast the desperate
chaos of modern China with Sweden’s pastoral beauty and stately
architecture. Was that your intention?

EC: My depiction of Sweden wasn’t meant to condemn or put down China at
any stage. But if it contrasts so starkly with what you described as
contemporary China’s “cruel urban renewal,” it is not without reason.
Goran Malmqvist believes that Sweden’s burgeoning welfare state in 1904
appeared to Kang as a microcosm of the Datong society he envisioned; and
Malmqvist is probably right.

My one modest hope in reviving Kang is to revive, not his political
program, but the idea of the Confucian utopia, which, we now learn, had
been dressed up by Mao with Marxist trappings for China’s revolutionary
modernity. Yet this traumatic revolutionary modernity has now been undone
by an unsettling restorationist modernity—a phenomenon experienced by the
toiling masses as the building of the great Firewall and Economic Wall of
China, meant to inhibit dissent from within, and interference from without
by any Western nation that subscribes to a universal concept of human
rights. And the building of this economic Great Wall was cheered on by
xiaokang 小康, Deng’s slogan for the economic opening of China in the
1980′s. In Kang’s scheme, xiaokang, meaning small peace/wealth, was a
characteristic of the Age of Rising Peace, before the world reaches
Datong, the Age of Great Peace. But the present Chinese nation seems stuck
in the purgatory of a polarizing xiaokang, which manifests mostly as
wealth accumulated within a small elite class. It is time for the return
of Datong, the Great Commonwealth, as the native dream for China’s
(post)modernity.

PZ: In the film, another presence is that of Chiang Ching, who serves and
narrator and…what? I wasn’t sure what she was doing in the film, though I
could see she represents emancipation in some sense.

EC: Chiang Ching is the contemporary piece in the film’s tripartite (Kang,
Tongbi, and Chiang Ching) narrative structure that attempts to chart the
China experience over a century—diaspora, homelessness and the uncertain
advancement or setback of women’s and minority rights. As a Sweden-based
pioneering Chinese modern dance exponent, Chiang Ching is a significant
beneficiary of Kang’s unbound feet movement. Chiang Ching is—and she
herself is aware of being—a spiritual daughter of Kang’s. But this was a
bit too much for her to say in the film without sounding pretentious. What
also unites her and Kang is their love of Sweden, and their being the
master/mistress of their respective Swedish isles, i.e., the joy and
pathos of finding one’s paradise and still having to confront
losses—losses ineluctably caused by our ephemeral life, and the impersonal
forces of history.

PZ: I particularly liked learning more about Kang Tongbi (Tung-pih) and
her relationship with her father. She is strangely neglected in studies of
the Chinese women’s movement.

EC: The current revival of Kang Tongbi could have been inaugurated by
Zhang Yihe 章詒和’s moving and beautifully written memoir of the
Anti-Rightist Campaign 反右派運動, The Past Didn’t Go Up In Smoke 往事並不如
煙 
(2004), which is still banned in China. What stayed with me was Tongbi’s
self-mythologizing in her poem about her trip with Kang to India’s
Buddhist holy sites: As a woman who journeyed west, I am the first
Chinese. Tongbi is the character in The Great Society that I fictionalize
most. To begin with, she was not known to have appeared in August
Strindberg’s magnificent A Dream Play, as she does in my film. Yet, she
was in fact a student at Barnard/Columbia and probalby studied Sanskrit.
Strindberg’s A Dream Play is, interestingly enough, his “Journey to the
East,” in which he imagined the Hindi/Buddhist God Indra’s daughter
descending into the human world to understand the cause of human
suffering, or grievances. At one point, Strindberg said that “the Indian
religion showed me the meaning of my Dream Play.” I also learnt that
Strindberg taught himself Chinese in order to help catalogue the Chinese
books at the Royal Library in Stockholm. To bring Kang and Tongbi into A
Dream Play is my attempt to chart the connection between world
(East-meets-West) cultures, which is very much Kang’s undertaking in his
Datongshu, which I translated as The Great Society for the English title
of the film.

Tongbi may well be China’s first female suffragist and political
organizer. When she arrived in the US in 1903, she quickly founded and
headed Baohuanghui‘s women’s chapters in various parts of the U.S. and
Canada. Though not quite an intellectual force as Kang or Liang, Tongbi’s
human stature is to me unquestionable. She was a dauntless conserver of
culture and an indomitable moral force. The two lines from Tongbi’s own
poem As a woman who journeyed west, I am the first Chinese, which Mao
would recite to her one day, seemed actually a declaration by her of being
the first modern Chinese woman.

PZ: If I have a historian’s objection to The Great Society, it is not
about this or that detail, but your portrait of Kang as such a nice guy.
I’ve always pictured him as stern and commanding. I suspect that Kang’s
charisma—attracting the devotion of young men like Liang Qichao—was based
on a kind of megalomania.

EC: Constrained by the length of the film, I can only develop the
narrative based on what I consider to be most worth redeeming from Kang’s
life and thoughts. These are attributes that tend to make one “nice.” How
can one object to Kang’s position on women’s rights, gay rights, minority
rights, and even Asian American rights? There are stories of him throwing
a book at Liang, or asking Dr. Sun to become his student before he’d talk
to him. He had to be arrogant and spunky. But that kind of approach may
only be possible in a full-fledged narrative feature, or a mini-series. I
could only indicate the problems of his personality in comments here and
there. Certainly calling himself Kang-cius is a telling hint. Nietzsche in
Ecce Homo asked “Why Am I So Wise?” and ”Why I Write Such Good Books?” One
can easily imagine Kang asking such questions. They were megalomaniacs.
However, Liang Qichao asserted that without that megalomania, Kang
couldn’t have accomplished what he did.

I do want to point out one premise of this project. No straightforward
documentary can be made about Kang, simply because of the dearth of
contemporaneous visual material. Or I’d have to make a docu chock-full of
talking heads. Then, even talking heads were not that easy to find. I was
lucky to have rounded up those I was able to interview at the time. Quite
a few Chinese Kang experts—I won’t name names here—shied away from being
interviewed. Some said Yes, then disappeared. Some gave implausible
excuses to get out of their initial promise. Obviously, Kang is still an
unsafe topic almost a century after his death.

Peter Zarrow is research fellow and vice-director of the Institute of
Modern History, Academia Sincia. He is the author of China in War and
Revolution, 1895-1949(Routledge, 2005) and the forthcoming After Empire:
The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924 (Stanford,
2012).