Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide by Xiaojue Wang (review)

The political division at the middle of the twentieth century has long obstructed the comprehensive study of modern and contemporary Chinese culture. The establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the concurrent removal of the Nationalist government to the island of Taiwan in 1949 made it no longer possible to treat modern Chinese literature as a "national literature" (although there had already been many earlier complications). This political rupture also tore apart countless lives, including those of many important cultural figures. It has often been noted that many Chinese authors who had already made literary history by the 1930s—Lao She 老舍, Mao Dun 茅盾, Ba Jin 巴金, Shen Congwen 沈從文, and others—all put an end to their creative writing careers after they decided to remain in the PRC. Since the field of modern Chinese literature studies itself emerged in the midst of the Cold War, generations of scholars were inevitably entangled in its ideology, sometimes without being aware of it. For decades, American courses on modern Chinese literature shifted at midcentury from Republican-era writers to Taiwan-based writers, attending only briefly if at all to the socialist literature of the PRC, and usually presenting it as tragically crippled by ideology. Then, after the waves of new literature appeared in the PRC during the period of Reform and Opening, beginning in 1978, historians and teachers increasingly began to present contemporary Chinese literature from the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere either as simultaneous but independent strands or as a global phenomenon that transcends national boundaries. But midcentury literature, particularly that of the PRC, has been largely left behind—difficult or impossible to reconcile into a coherent narrative of modern Chinese literary development.

Looking at the title and table of contents, Xiaojue Wang's book appears to be a study of midcentury Chinese-language writers in different national and political settings, whose works are held together by the rubric of a "Cold War discourse" (p. 7) that they have in common but that also obscures many important aspects of the meanings of these works. In fact, however, on reading through the chapters we find it is a trenchant critique of Cold War discourse. As the author points out more than once, this discourse did not come to an end with the Cold War in 1989, and it has continued to hinder a nuanced and lucid understanding of all modern Chinese literature. Her cases—Shen Congwen, Ding Ling 丁玲, Wu Zhuoliu 吳濁流, Feng Zhi 馮至, and Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing 張愛玲)—are raised, not merely to illuminate their work from the 1940s to the 1960s, but also to show how each of them represents a facet of the historical ruptures, exclusions, and forms of incommensurability brought about by the Cold War.

Modernity with a Cold War Face is a bold and ambitious study. By appealing to the concept of Cold War, as yet little used in modern Chinese cultural studies, Wang raises the discussion of writers in the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to a level of global perspective. Although she does not explicitly explore it, Wang compares the relations across these three territories to the divisions of Germany and Korea. She begins by drawing attention to the problem of how literary history deals with the cessation of literary writing after 1949 among the older generation of writers in the PRC. Wang asserts that Cold War discourse has generated two kinds of critical dismissal of these writers' silence in the form of two kinds of "ethical sentimentalism"—both of which are based on a logic of "if only" (pp. 7–8). The first kind attributes writers' creative silence to ideological repression, assuming that "if only" these writers had known what was in store for them after the establishment of the PRC, they would not have chosen to stay. The second kind, illustrated by the...