Introduction

Symposium Beyond Habermas: Text and ·Performance in the Making of·the "Public" in Late Qing and Republican China* Introduction* by Michael Tsin The term "public," or gong, has a venerable history in the Chinese political lexicon. From its origins in the classical texts, it has always carried the connotation of representing, in opposition to the realm of the personal (si), the interests of the collective. Just what exactly comprisedthecollectivewas,·.of course, subject to variations in context and changes in time and place. Prior to the latter part of the Qing, it was usually segments of the .literati elites who arrogated to themselves the role as the articulated voice of this elusive public. As with most aspects of everyday life in the late Qing, however, this traditional elite claim to be the arbiter of "public opinion" (gonglun) was confronted with significant challenges by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The quest for new forms of political and social organization was accompanied by an intensive process of reconfiguring the notion of the "public" in China; it is a shared interest in exploring the histories of that important process that has resulted in this symposium. Unlike earlier scholars who examined the issue through the prism of the development ofa civil·society or JiirgenHabermas' s concept of a "public sphere" of reason and rationality, the three authors here address the reconfiguration of the "public" withinthe context of the transformations in print and media technology, the forging of new avenues for the enhanced circulation -and consumption-of written texts and visual images, and the ways in which the process of reconfiguration mediated between the.(re)-articulation of social/moral norms and values and the logic of an expanding consumer economy. Their findings and arguments have important implications for our understanding of twentieth-century Chinese history and beyond. * The papers in this symposium were originally presented in a panel entitled "Politics and Culture of the 'Public' in Late Imperial and Republican China," held on 18 January 2003 at the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies held at Jekyll Island, Georgia. Twentieth-Century China, Vol. 29, No.2 (April, 2004): 1-5 2 Twentieth-Century China Paize Keulemans' s study of the popularization of martial arts novels in the late Qing sets the stage for this process of reconfiguring the public. From their earlier incarnation as a form of art and entertainment that presupposed close and intimate interaction between the lone storyteller and the audience, these martial arts stories appeared increasingly in printed form by the latter part of the nineteenth century to cater to the need of a growing "middlebrow" Beijing audience . From there the marketing of these tales of knights-errant, moral integrity, and heroism spread to other parts of the empire, appropriated, as it were, by bannermen and Jiangnan literati alike for their own purposes. But it was the use of new printing technologies-lithography and metal type-that truly transformed the reach of these novels by the early twentieth century, enlarging the circulation and creating a new "reading public" in the process. By then the figure of the storyteller had been all but forgotten, yet the central motifs of these stories -heroic struggles and moral righteousness-were to endure as an integral part of the cultural repertoire of the newly reconfigured public, symbolized by the ever increasing number of urban consumers of these novels, in twentiethcentury China. Both Jan Kiely's article on the Communist hunger strikers and Eugenia Lean's essay on the fascinating case of the avenging assassin Shi Jianqiao demonstrate clearly the significance of these cultural motifs both in imagining and in the imagination of the new public. In their performance for the imagined public, both the Communist partisans and Shi Jianqiao made astute use of moral norms and values-justice, loyalty, integrity-to anchor their narratives and images for delivery to their potential audience. Just as Sheryl Kroen finds in her work on restoration France in the nineteenth century, these two articles together well illustrate the twin phenomena of "politics as theater" and "theater as politics"-to use Kroen's terms-in Republican China. 1 In his discussion of the resistance of Communist prisoners as a...