Doing Emotions History

Chapter 3. The Skein of Chinese Emotions History

CHaPtEr 3 tHE skEin of CHinEsE Emotions History n o r m a n kutC H Er It would be impossible to begin a chapter on the history of emotions in China without at least making glancing reference to the stereotype of “the emotionless Chinese.” This shibboleth is of uncomfortably long lineage. It began, most likely,withthecomingofnineteenth-centuryProtestantmissionariestoChina, men and women who, shocked at the seeming impassivity of the Chinese they encountered,attributedtheirlackofaffecttoakindofracialimpermeabilityto pain and suffering. For these missionaries, it was not much of a leap to argue thatonceChineseembracedChrist,amongthemostpreciousgiftstheywould receivewasthegiftofemotion.Christ’slovewouldrescuetheChinesenotjust from paganism but also from unfeeling itself. This was the view of the biblical educator James Hastings, who in 1911 described missionaries who had been privileged to see the “hard, emotionless Chinese face as it has glowed with the joy that illumines him who knows that Christ is his Saviour.”1 The perceptions of missionaries became part of the larger cultural view of China. Parishioners who, in their Sunday morning services heard stories of impassive Chinese, easily fell prey to popular depictions of them as cold and cruel. The Chinese villains in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americanfictionwerecalculatingmenwhoshowednoemotionswhentheytortured their innocent enemies. As Harold Isaacs demonstrated, these perceptions of cruelChinesewhowereimpervioustopainwentdirectlyfrompopularculture into the perceptions of cultural difference people used to understand histori- 58 n o r m a n KU tCH Er cal events. By the early 1950s, when China was already “lost” to communism, the image of the cold and unfeeling Chinese was used to explain the human wave assaults of the Korean War.2 When Chinese in massive numbers surged acrosstheYalu,withpoor-qualityclothinginthecoldclimateandvastlyinferior weapons, it was indifference in the face of death that made them formidable, if barely human, opponents. Such was the power of this particular Western view of China that it somehow persuaded not only Westerners but also Chinese themselves that lack of emotionhadbeenatleastpartiallyresponsibleforChina’sunhappyfate.When the novelist Ba Jin wrote his masterpiece Family (Jia), it was in no small part to rail against the perceived emotional bankruptcy and hypocrisy of the traditional family. And when the generation of May Fourth thinkers began their project to reform Chinese culture, one of their major sources of inspiration was Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The moment in that play in which Nora, refusing to bear the hypocrisy of the loveless marriage, angrily slammed the door and left home became the rallying moment for those who sought to inject what they perceived to be real emotion into Chinese culture.3 This Western-inspired project to change Chinese emotions made its way into the reform agendas of the two major contenders for leadership in modern China: the Communists (CCP) and the Nationalists (GMD). Both sought to find a means of generating feelings among their supporters. When they called forpatriotism,theyusedtheterm aiguo,toloveone’scountry.Insodoing,they weredeployingatermofdeepestemotion.4 SoldiersintheCulturalRevolution, who were being viewed in the West as mindless automatons, at the same time were being told in China that they should ri ai Mao Zedong: warmly love Mao Zedong. Among Nationalists, perhaps no one went as far as Zhang Ji, who in 1927 wrote: “Our hope is to . . . go into the midst of the people, into this emotionless Chinese society . . . taking these unemotional bones, injecting some emotional joy.”5 Perhaps because the issue of emotion has been so prominent in Chinese history, the study of it, particularly in recent years, has advanced considerably. Scholars such as Paolo Santangelo, Haiyan Lee, and Dorothy Ko (to mention justafewnames)havewrittenfascinatingandimportantstudiesthathavemade sense of a once elusive topic. Add to these works others that have been done on the history of emotions in Chinese literature, and one has an astonishingly impressive array of scholarship at one’s disposal. My purpose here is not to survey this literature. Instead, I would like to draw out some common threads that run through it. For while the literature on emotion in Chinese history stretches over very wide time periods and very 59 the skein of Chinese Emotions History widesubjects,thesethreethreadsrecur.Byteasingthemout,Ihopenotonlyto provide a perspective on past scholarship but also to suggest some directions for future research.6 Eachofthesethreadsseemsatfirstratherself-evident—andindeednomore relevant to China than to the rest of the world. It is only as we examine these threads more carefully that we find qualities of emotions history that are distinctively Chinese. At this stage, however, we begin with a straightforward description of each. The first of these threads is orthodoxy. Specific Chinese traditions—and...