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Introduction Whitman East and West ed folsom  When I was in Beijing for the first time, in October 1997, my taxi went by a kind of graveyard for Mao statues. There, in a vast field, were stacks of dismembered statues of the former chairman, decapitated heads lying in a long row and concrete torsos piled up like logs. I had heard of monument cemeteries all through Eastern Europe and had seen news reports about the wholesale dismantling of Lenin statues in the former Soviet Union. But China was still very much under the control of the Communist Party, and Mao Zedong remained very much a presence in Beijing, with his preserved body still on display in the very heart of the capital city. His giant portrait still towered over Tiananmen Square, looking down from the wall of the gate leading into the Forbidden City. It was clear, however, that a significant change was under way, not as sudden as in Russia and Eastern Europe but every bit as inexorable: fewer and fewer statues, a gradually decreasing presence of the Maoist past. Now, throughout Beijing, there were new statues, life-sized sculptures of Colonel Sanders — looking suspiciously Mao-like, almost as if they might have been recycled from the statue cemetery — in front of each of the numerous Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets that now dotted the Chinese urban landscape. When I saw these multiple Colonel Sanders standing there with one arm raised as if to inspire the masses, I knew for certain that this vast nation was undergoing another of its periodic great changes. One of my cab drivers told me he had counted fifty-two McDonalds restaurants in Beijing. When I asked my Chinese hosts how they felt about the invasion of corporate America in the form of fast-food chains, many of them countered my derision by insisting that they loved McDonalds — safe and clean “foreign” food (no hepatitis there, one person told me) served in a com- fortable environment and arranged according to Western notions of space (you could claim your own booth!). As I lectured on Walt Whitman and American poetry at three universities in Beijing, I realized that, like Mao, Whitman, too, was being deconstructed and reconstructed in China. The world’s most populous nation was in the process of inventing a new Whitman for a new era, an era of American fast food and English-language billboards and visits by Bill Clinton and Colin Powell, the era of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, an event that no doubt will further accelerate the already frenzied remaking of that huge city into an urbanscape that will seem more familiar, less foreign, to Western visitors when they arrive there for the summer games. Walt Whitman is already part of the blended cultural landscape in China. The American poet has had a Chinese existence for nearly a century, and during that time he has been variously cast as a force of modernism, an innovative influence in Chinese literature, a Western socialist poet, a celebrator of the laboring class, and, most recently, a conduit to contemporary American culture and democratic reform. Many Americans recall what appeared to be a model of the Statue of Liberty that Chinese students constructed during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989: there was a lot of debate then about whether that statue was actually inspired by America’s symbol of freedom or whether it grew out of Chinese traditions and only looked like the Statue of Liberty to American eyes. What is less well known is that a new mass-market edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, translated into Chinese by Peking University professor Zhao Luorui, was due to be released just as the student demonstrations got under way; the Chinese government intervened and delayed publication because someone in the party leadership deemed it unwise to make the American poet of democracy suddenly available in a new translation just when prodemocracy student demonstrations were threatening to get out of hand. Whitman at that moment seemed like dangerous fuel on the fires of democratic reform. When Zhao Luorui’s masterful translation finally appeared in 1991, Whitman’s entire Leaves of Grass became available for the first time in a unified version by a single translator, and, as China began a decade of opening itself to Western investment and of absorbing a kind of controlled capitalism into its socialist machinery, Whitman became a safe, amenable, and instructive foreign author for Chinese consumption. It...

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