The Shanghai Intellectual Community, 1927 – 1937: A Research Note

PAGE 17 lurnes; and various recent publications. The Institute has an old file of journal article titles, which was useful in locating two titles on my list· misidentified as monographs. (38) The Shanghai Library is said to be the second largest in China, with some seven million volumes. It has now absorbed the former Shanghai Newspaper and Periodical library, as well as the Shanghai Library of Histori·cal Documents. The Shanghai system now directs 20 county and municipal libraries in the area. See Stephen R. McKinnon, "Researching Agnes Smedley in China," !hg f.hin~ Q!!arterly,· no. 77 (March lSI79), p. 124 and 'I'homas C. Kuo, "The State of Current Library Operation in China," CeQ!_g_£ _f.Q£ fhin~se _Bes~~h Ma.t_~_ial§. !'!_ew§.lette_;:, no. 20 (April 1976), p. 2. (39) One example, I was told, is that the 1934 £hiQ~ X~~rboo~ is catalogued under "yi" for ~ijiusansi or 1934! (40) They came up with issues of ~~deng and ~ianzhggg ~inzh1· (41) As reported earlier in Wakeman, ed., ~1ng an£ ging ~istorical ~tudi~, PP· 69-70. !_he Shanghai Intellectutl Com!!!_!!ni!,y.L !_127=.12.121... f) B~search No_!~ Sun Lung-kee. Stanford University. I recently spent ten months in China researching a dissertation on the League of Chinese Left-Wing Writers (LCLWW) and the League of Chinese Social Scientists (LCSC). The main purpose of the study, which fucuses on intell~ctual ferment in Shanghai, is to clarify the process whereby leftist ideas became "sinified" during the 1930s. In addition, by tracing the vicissitudes of these CCP-sponsored organizations, and by using them to provide a frame of reference, I hope to shed light upon the activities of other intellectual groupings in 1930s Shanghai including the Trotskyites, the Shen-zhou clique, the Third Party, the Left KMT and the KMT literati. A wide divergence of views on the significance of the intellectual turmoil of the 1930s has not to date stimulated much in the way of in-depth scholarship. Scholars sympathetic to the KMT have tended to characterize the leftist literati in Shanghai as creatures of Soviet Communism . According to the official CCP version of events, on the other hand, the LCLWW helped smash the KMT's "cultural campaign of encirclement and extermination " in the city while the Red Army struggled against military encirclement and extermination in the countryside. In the PRC in recent years, especially prior to the fall of the "Gang of Four," the intellectual history of the thirties has been a "banned area." Ding Ji ngtang of the Academy of Spc ial Sciences in Shanghai is at present the only scholar of note who has studied the LCLWW. Clearly, it is time to take a fresh look at the position of Shanghai literati in the political and intellectual struggles of the 1930s. , "-... While not denying the fact that the consciousness of the Chinese urban intellectual stratum was undergoing a process of deepening revolutionization and politicization in the 1930s, the decade can also be seen as a period when Marxism as a framew~k for revolutionary thought and action was gradually domesticated . As is well known, this process of sinification took place in the Soviet base areas with the emergence of Maoism. Less well known is the fact that the same process also emerged independently among intellectuals in Shanghai. Sinification in the 1930s was preceded by both the westernized outlook of the May Fourth Movement and the l-larxist rejection of the r-1ay Fourth liberal PAGE 1~ ideals of democracy, individualism and personal development. That is to say, the transition between May Fourth westernization and the emergence of a more "nativized" outlook in the thirties was carried out under the aegis of foreign ideas. The reason liberal May Fourth ideals began to lose ground in the early 1920s is clear enough. In the throes of national crisis, China was stony ground for the cultivation of these seeds. Even during the May Fourth Movement, mass movements occurred in tandem with the propagation of individualism. Once the "masses" had come to be regarded as the measure of all things, it was well nigh impossible for Ibsenian or Nietzchean concepts like the "correctness...