Nostalgia for Republican China: The Year in China

Given the numbers of life writing works on people who lived in Republican China¹ published over the last two years, we can probably say that a nostalgia for pre-1949 Republican China is still a trend in China’s life writing publications nowadays. According to the data from main bookstores online and in stores last year,² biographies on Lin Huiyin, Hu Shi, Zhang Ailing, Chiang Kai-shek, Xiao Hong, Song Meiling, and many other cultural icons active in China during the period from 1911 to 1949 have been best-sellers for months. There are also a remarkable number of newly published life writing works on people active in Republican China, including biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, and other texts on Lin Fengmian, Lu Xiaoman, Lu Xun, Duan Qirui, Zhang Xueliang, and many others in the fields of culture, politics, the military, science, and so on. In addition, some biographies that had gained great reputations previously, such as Jay Taylor’s The Generalissimo’s Son, and the memoirs of Hu Zongnan’s wife, Ye Xiazhai, were republished last year.

The popular interest in life writing about people who lived in Republican China began in the late 1990s and has lasted for decades. At first, the fever for Republican China was felt among scholars who did research on intellectuals such as Chen Yinque, Wang Guowei, Hu Shi, and so on. Such scholars wrote biographies and compiled diaries, letters, and other archives of these intellectuals as a way to look into their academic work through their personal life. Lately, more and more common readers have become interested in figures from Republican China, and the subjects of life writing have come from a wider range of areas of significance: women, politicians, scientists, socialists, and even ordinary people. Recently, with the one-hundredth anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution in 2011 and the seventieth anniversary of the ending of the anti-Fascist War in 2015, publications on people in pre-1949 Republican China have come to a peak.

The most direct reason for the abundance of publication of life writing on such people is the discovery of new materials. In the past twenty years, many libraries overseas, such as the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University, the Chinese Collections in the Harvard-Yenching Library, and Academia Historica in Taiwan, where biographies, investigation records, testimonies, and many other rare materials and archives of modern Chinese people are preserved, have been increasingly opening their collections to the public. Other holdings on pre-1949 Republican China, including Nationalist government documents and Chinese Communist Party materials, are also becoming very helpful for us as we develop a more thorough understanding, and reconstruct our stereotyped views of the historical figures.

Prominent examples are the lives of Chiang Kai-shek and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo. Archives of Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan were opened to the public in the mid-1990s. Some manuscripts at the Hoover Institution were opened in 2006. Because these materials became available, research on Chiang Kai-shek increased dramatically from 2010 to 2015 (Yang 104). As these newly uncovered materials started informing life writing, brand new images of these figures emerged. For example, Jay Taylor’s The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China was the first biography of Chiang Kai-shek to use a newly published diary, which gave us a way to look into Chiang’s mysterious inner world. Chiang always reminded himself to make moral reflections. He also recorded his straightforward dissatisfaction with other men in his diary. Previous biographies focused mostly on Chiang’s political life.³ Taylor’s thorough analysis of Chiang’s dairy now shows us that he was a man with a complicated personality who exercised self-control and undertook moral inquiries. Taylor also presented many detailed habits of Chiang to make his personality more vivid, and more like an ordinary person than a tough and cold-blooded leader.

The republished biography of Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, in 2016 was also a biography that revised our previous judgments about this person. In biographies like the one...