Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China 1890s-1930s by Jun Lei

Jun Lei's Mastery of Words and Swords draws on a range of literary and visual sources to analyze the complex construction of masculine identities by China's intellectual and cultural elites during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her study is divided into two parts, the first of which contains a pair of chapters that establish disciplinary and theoretical frameworks for the four chapter-long case studies in the second.

Chapter 1, "Performing Chinese Masculinities on the World Stage: An Introduction," acknowledges Kam Louie's pioneering role in extending the study of gender in Chinese literature and culture from its original focus on women to include the consideration of masculinities as well, and draws on Louie's influential model of traditional Chinese masculinity as constructed through the negotiation of the categories of wen (civil, literary) and wu (military, martial). The premodern prioritization of wen qualities in the masculine ideal—both for the educated elite and for most of the society whose apex they occupied—was challenged during China's encounters with global modernity in the form of Western imperialism. Racialized colonial discourse characterized scholarly models of masculinity as effeminate and associated them with the allegedly congenital weakness of the "sick man of Asia." Internalization of this discourse by Chinese intellectuals led to a crisis in masculinity and calls for a more militant manhood. By opening her review of this familiar story with Lu Xun's critique of female impersonator Mei Lanfang, Lei skillfully highlights the imbrication of what she sees as some of its most significant elements: the performativity of masculinity, the concern for the gaze of a global audience, and the national stakes in gender identity. She proposes that her own contributions will be threefold. Empirically, she will offer the first systematic study Chinese masculinities during the crucial transitional periods of the late Qing and the early Republic. Methodologically, she will venture beyond canonical literary texts to examine a wider archive of literary, print, and visual culture. And theoretically, she will develop a new set of models and categories that will facilitate a response to a key question: "Can we locate agency, or any form of counter-orientalist discourse in reconstructing Chinese masculinities in spite of the power imbalance in the semicolonial settings?" (p. 9).

The second introductory chapter, "Violence and Its Antidotes: Theorizing Modern Chinese Masculinities," casts a wide net in gathering the materials from which Lei will construct her own theoretical apparatus. Lei duly notes the need to attend both to cultural difference and to cross-cultural commonalities in "drawing on strands of scholarship within and outside of China studies, more specifically, poststructuralist theories of gender and masculinities, scholarship on cosmopolitanism, and relevant postcolonial theories of uneven transcultural exchange between the East and the West" (p. 27). Balancing Judith Butler's ideas about subjugated performativity against Erving Goffman's more agent-driven notion of performance, she argues that the masculinities of this period were characterized by a heightened degree of performativity and staged with reference to both the "elsewhen" of the Chinese past and the "elsewhere" of the West and Japan. She then outlines two strands that will inform the remainder of the study. The first is the "brutalization of scholars," that is, the alignment of a new scholarly identity with hypermasculine traits, including violence, both physical and discursive. This "brutalization" both emulates and serves as a form of resistance to the hegemonic militaristic masculinity of nineteenth-century Western colonialism. The second is a complementary occupation or appropriation of what she calls "feminine space," a discursive terrain accommodating qualities, emotions, and desires disallowed by the dominant constructions of masculinity. While this "feminine space" might seem to echo or recuperate some of the qualities of premodern wen masculinity, it differs from its predecessor in being shaped by the demands and limitations of the brutalized scholar-warrior model.

In chapter 3, "The Sick, the Weak, and the Perilous: Colonial Stereotypes and Martialized Intellectual Masculinity in Late Qing and Early Republican China," Lei brings her analytical model to bear on the promotion of martial qualities and physical prowess in the last decades of the Qing. Reading Western authors such as Adam Smith and Jack London against Chinese writers including Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, and Liu Shipei, she demonstrates that advocacy for a martial version of masculinity arose from engagement with imperialist and colonialist notions of race and nation as well as of gender, and more specifically from attempts to negotiate three mutually incompatible Western stereotypes: that of the effeminate Chinese scholar, that of the "sick man of Asia," and that of a violent and sexually menacing "Yellow peril." Through complex strategies of negation and affirmation, Chinese intellectuals simultaneously acceded to elements of these stereotypes and worked to repurpose them, building explicitly racialized and gender-normative models of a Chinese masculinity defined by toughness and the capacity for violence. Currents that fed the creation of Fu Manchu in the West led in China to the reinvention of the Yellow Emperor as the founding father of a conquering yellow (and, as occasion demanded, specifically Han) race. As Lei points out, the most dramatic concrete manifestation of the promotion of martial and military qualities—General Yuan Shikai's accession to the presidency of the new Republic of China in 1912—served in the end to deepen rather than bridge social and political tensions between China's military and its intellectual elite. In the discursive realm, however, the late Qing promotion of martiality enjoyed a long afterlife in the valorization of physical fitness, the polarization of gender norms, and the validation of violence as not only a form of resistance but a mode of exercising power as well.

Chapter 4, "New Men of Feelings: 'Freedom of Love', Modern Ethics, and Neo-romantic Masculinity of the May Fourth Generation," addresses what Leo Ou-fan Lee christened the "romantic generation of modern Chinese writers." "Unlike their late Qing predecessors, who resorted to both words and swords to assert masculinity, the May Fourth males mostly used words as swords to advance their enlightenment agendas, including reshaping femininities and masculinities" (p. 88). While constructing alternatives to the late Qing's "brutalized scholar," this generation sought at the same time to differentiate itself from both premodern wen models of manhood and the perceived afterlives of those models in contemporary "Mandarin Duck and Butterfly" culture. Differentiation was achieved through explicit appeal to Western models of romantic individualism on the one hand and (somewhat paradoxically) scientific rationalism on the other. And writers who found it difficult to realize the newly articulated ideals in their own personal lives sought satisfaction in the role of mentor—in particular, in portraits of New Women stimulated to romantic agency and rebellion against the patriarchy through the influence of enlightened males. Lei surveys the institutional, affective, and epistemological dimensions of early Republican changes in gender performativity, and the neologisms that reflected and encouraged these changes. She presents Hu Shi's The Greatest Event and Guo Moruo's Zhuo Wenjun as illustrations of the "love rescue" trope, and builds on previous scholarship in reading Lu Xun's "Regret for the Past" as a devastating deconstruction of its assumptions and limitations. Lei integrates May Fourth romanticism into her own chronological and interpretive framework by arguing that its focus on individual subjectivity, emotional experience, freedom of marriage, and "the woman question" were prompted by a loss of faith in the imperialist militaristic manhood that had inspired a previous generation. While the argument is plausible, it seems to reference the scholar-warrior of the author's thesis only through that figure's absence. It might be illuminating to elaborate the analysis by examining some of these writers' writings that specifically engage questions of the martial and the military.

While the martial and the military as such are likewise absent from the fifth chapter, the question of violence and its connection with gender constructions does reappear, albeit in a guise different from that which it assumed during the Late Qing. "Consuming the Modern Girl: Middlebrow Literary Masculinity and Surrogate Violence in Shanghai New Sensationalism" examines works by Liu Naou and Mu Shiying. Building on previous scholarship that addresses these authors' aspirational cosmopolitanism, modernist literary techniques, and thematic explorations of the modern city and the Modern Girl, Lei focuses on the violence in their works. In her reading, this violence expresses the fear of emasculation felt by "middlebrow" intellectuals under the pressures of the cosmopolis' racial and social hierarchies. By imagining violence against an unobtainable object of desire as carried out by a foreign or lower class surrogate for a feckless middle-class character, key texts such as My Shiying's "Our World" dramatize a radical ambivalence toward physical violence as a constituent element of masculinity. Like the previous chapter, this one is successful in shedding light on a well-studied group of writers and writings by integrating them into the author's broader interpretive framework. At the same time, the scope of that framework seems to shift here. Earlier chapters traced what implicitly represented a cultural and literary mainstream, or at least the mainstream of elite intellectual thought. The discussion in this chapter begins by positioning the New Sensationalists against the violence of their times and increasing calls for political violence from the left, but chooses not to make those calls themselves a central concern. The examination of masculinity and violence, in other words, seems to be moving its focus toward selected phenomena from within a larger, varied cultural landscape.

The final chapter, "Optical Scientism: Editorial Authority, Male Subjectivity, and Policing 'Female Monstrosity' in Shanghai Print Media," "continues to address native male cultural producers' fear and desire of transgressive modern women and their tactics of mitigating such fear and desire" (p. 146). It also continues the shift in focus noted above. Instead of literary texts, it takes as its archive the commercial print media of the 1930s, especially its rich visual culture. And in addressing this archive, it embraces a broader, more diverse range of cultural producers (and audiences) than those highlighted in the earlier chapters—a shift that is arguably a valid reflection of the era's own shift in the locus of cultural authority. Lei examines how male cultural producers in this period sought to regulate gender norms by exposing three types of transgressive femininity or "female monstrosity": the sexually promiscuous Modern Girl, the masculinized feminist, and the neurasthenic beauty. She argues that their critiques sought authority through appeals to the modern sciences, including psychology, biology, and even entomology; and that commercial publishing's increasing reliance on visual and graphic material, facilitated by advances in print technology, worked hand in hand with references to optical scientism and the evocation of "penetrating visual devices" (p. 147) such as the camera, the microscope, and the X-ray. The violence here is primarily discursive. In tracing the thread of male cultural producer's interventions into gender construction and performance of masculinity, the argument has largely left behind its self-announced starting-point, "the role physical aggression and martial valor played in constructing modern cerebral masculinities in China" (p. 20). It has also abandoned explicit engagement with the models of "brutalization" and "feminine space" that the author was at pains to lay out earlier in the study. While the resultant itinerary possesses its own demonstrable logic, it leaves unaddressed the still important question of the cultural valence of martial and military identities as China and Chinese males entered a violent century's most violent decades.

A brief conclusion makes a point of addressing some of these concerns. Lei frames her final overview with reference to the "dialectical tensions between soft and hard elements" (thus "brutalization" and "feminine space") in the construction of modern Chinese intellectual masculinities. She presents the psychically disturbed protagonists of key texts by Lu Xun and Yu Dafu as examples of a deviant neo-Romanticism that constitutes perhaps the most representative and influential model of manhood for this period and social sphere, then sketches some alternatives that her monograph has not explored: the image of the beheaded warrior; the leftist revolutionary hero; the romantic revolutionary; and a further subtype, the revolutionary torn by the conflict between collective responsibility and individual passion. These models could serve as tentative starting points for scholars wishing to extend Lei's analysis into subsequent periods of China's modern history. The importance of such analysis is clear; as Lei points out at the opening of her study, the promotion of "Wolf Warrior" masculinity and attacks on "effeminacy" that have accompanied twenty-first-century China's economic and political ascent suggest "a perennial desire to toughen the Chinese male gender when national and world orders, then and now, are in a heightened state of flux" (p. 5).