The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre by Catherine Vance Yeh (review)

The political novel in China has come and gone. It was a global genre that began in Europe during the 1830s, reached China by the late 1890s, and disappeared during the early 1900s after it had performed its mission. It is a particularly advantageous genre to study in a cross-cultural light because of its shared traits and conditions of creation. Readers will recognize what Catherine Yeh is talking about from their knowledge of late Qing literature, but Yeh has gone further than anyone else in placing these novels in a truly inclusive global context, as her discussions of the political novel in England, Italy, the United States, the Philippines, Korea, Japan, and elsewhere show. As a world genre, it played a fundamental role in the “general process of transcultural interaction” (p. 6). Here, Yeh refers to the fact that the space of these works was the entire world, not just a single country. The novels merged heroes from all lands and held key terms and concepts in common, such as globe, compatriot, comrade, public enemy, development, science, and humanity, to name only a few (p. 128).

It is exciting to be able to combine two such fruitful lines of inquiry: identifying both the shared traits and the features specific to a cultural context. A primary shared trait is the genre’s focus on political and social crisis and its “projection of a way out” (p. 162). The Chinese version of the genre mainly appeared during the decade of reform that was proclaimed in 1901 after the Boxer Uprising. When the Qing court announced the need for institutional reform, it was seen as inviting a discussion. Writers of political novels, being part of “a newly forming class of urban intellectuals” (p. 173), responded. Having a vibrant urban-centered public sphere was crucial. In China, the most prominent site of this public sphere was the Shanghai International Settlement, where most of the novels were written and published. Numbers are difficult to calculate, but Yeh counts as political novels 48 of 202 novels published in the year 1907. The three issues receiving the most attention in China, and in varying degrees elsewhere, were (1) what the state and society could do, that is, the agency of the nation and its citizens; (2) the quality of a nation’s citizens in terms of their ability to establish and adhere to a constitution; and (3) the emancipation of women. In China and elsewhere, the political novel was essentially conservative in that it advocated reform, not rebellion and overthrow, although there are characters who promoted the latter. Another shared belief among authors and other promoters of these novels was that the political novel could generate thoroughgoing transformation. The status quo was anathema. Furthermore, reform should proceed in rational and progressive fashion. Authors debated and spelled out methods, within a novel and in response to other novels, to newspaper editorials and other such platforms, and to court politics.

The political novel gained cachet in China because it appeared in similar settings elsewhere, particularly in neighboring Japan, and presented arguments that were seen as having objective validity and not as simply imported from outside. The credibility and popularity of the genre, both in translation and when written originally in Chinese, helped catapult novels in general into a new phase in Chinese history. Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) used the word xin 新 (“new” or “reformed”) to refer to the novels because they made a clean break from those he dismissed as the traditional novel, a form that he proceeded to characterize and critique. Even the giant Story of the Stone (Honglou meng 紅樓夢) came under fire. Liang and others shunned the sentimental novels that wrote of scholars and beauties, now characterized as weak men and shackled women who wallowed in romantic attachments. The new hero, whether male or female, avoided such self-absorbed relationships and instead embodied intellectual acuity, political commitment, and superior moral fiber...