Gu Hongming's Eccentric Chinese Odyssey by Chunmei Du (review)

Chunmei Du's Gu Hongming's Eccentric Chinese Odyssey is pleasant to read. As the first English-language book that studies the controversial late Qing scholar Gu Hongming's (1857-1928) life, his intellectual and psychological journey of identity building, this book is a great contribution to Gu Hongming scholarship. Instead of adopting a typical biographical account of the eccentric historical figure, the book focuses on the transcultural context and the psychological impact of colonialism on Gu Hongming as a Chinese diaspora during World War I era.

World War I era was the time that the West was experiencing modern, industrial movements, and ongoing colonialism; and the East, particularly China, was struggling with modernization, traditional trends, and revolutionary events. This opened the stage for the "trickster-sage" (p. 21) who was a historical symbol of the interactions between "Easterners" and "Westerners" to perform. Gu's performing of "Chinese authenticity" was examined by the author through the lens of his intellectual and psychological worlds.

The first part of the book, Gu Hongming's "Intellectual Journey," centered around his well-known work The Spirit of the Chinese People (1915). In the book, Gu opposed the Western worldview of civilization that was based on material progress. His search for an alternative worldview to remedy the Western illness was China and the Chinese people. As "a conscious cultural messenger" (p. 25), Gu praised China as a superior counterpart to the materialist modern West. The author made an insightful argument about how Gu provoked a rethinking of civilization through his trickster's performance that reversed "the colonial rhetoric of the civilized West" (p. 34): Gu understood that the dominant belief of (material) progress within Western civilization was the very basis for Western domination over China. He manipulated language for attention—his interpretation of the spirit of the Chinese people was shockingly conservative to Western readers. He took advantage of his knowledge of the West and battled from "within"—he borrowed from Western romanticism to criticize modern Western society. In that way, Gu's effort of "spreading Chinese culture" (p. 31) was not "simply a Romantic nostalgia or Confucian utopianism" (p. 32). It "must also be seen in an anticolonial context as an ideological statement of a Chinese 'self-representation' countering what he considered Westerner's biased portraits" (p. 32).

Gu's contribution to rethinking of the conception of civilization could be seen from three aspects: first, breaking down the dividing line of East and West (p. 34); second, advocating "humanity as the new universalist basis of civilization" (p. 34); and third, promoting "Confucian moral universalism" (p. 41). The author calls this civilization reevaluation process or strategy a "double Othering process" (p. 44). Gu created an ideal (not necessarily real) China as the counterpart of the modern West, and consequently, celebrating Chinese civilization and demeaning the Western civilization become a dual construction process—it defines both—"East and West are imagined together" (p. 45).

I find the concept "double Othering process" very inspiring, especially for the discussion of transcultural dialogue. It certainly was very meaningful for challenging Western hegemonic discourses on civilization, hence, colonialism (Western imperialist extension) at that critical moment in world history. I believe it is still meaningful for today's discussion on civilizations. I will come back to this topic later.

The above discussion outlines the first part of the book—how Gu Hongming's intellectual journey, his performance as a spokesman of China, contributed to transcultural dialogue. The second part of the book—"Psychological Passage"—focuses on unveiling the cultural amphibian's deep/dark motivation for his public performance.

Gu Hongming's identity transformation path from "an imitation Western man" as a young colonial elite to "a Chinaman again" as a disillusioned adult is carefully examined, and it seems that this path fits pretty well with certain psychological analysis agenda. The author believes that as a Chinese diaspora who lived between cultures, "Chinese identity was...