By Shuk Man Leung
Reviewed by Hang Tu
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2024)
Shuk Man Leung, Utopian Fiction in China: Genre, Print Culture and Knowledge Formation, 1902-1912 Leiden: Brill, 2023, Xiii + 306 pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-68038-8 (Hardcover).
May 1, 2024 was a strange day to reflect on the theme of utopianism. On university campuses across America, anger and frustration was rife among participants of protests and counter-protests. The violence of the Middle East crisis spilled over into the American public, sharpening partisan divisions in an already polarized country. In such an atmosphere of mutual recriminations and accusations of political crimes, many would dismiss any utopian vision as naïvely, if not recklessly, pedantic, a pale intellectual legacy discussed in seminar rooms. Indeed, throughout the post-pandemic world, regional wars, power rivalries, and the law of the jungle have been taking over. East and West, dystopian sentiment was ascendant—the shared affect of those confronting various failed utopian projects with bitter resignation and cynicism. A second decade into the twenty-first century, to borrow from Enzo Traverso’s apt phrase, we find ourselves in an era that suffers the “eclipse of utopia,” one without visible, thinkable, or imaginable alternatives. Hence, isn’t it simply anachronistic to still be speaking about utopia today?
In Utopian Fiction in China: Genre, Print Culture and Knowledge Formation, 1902-1912, Shuk Man Leung, a scholar of Chinese literature at the University of Hong Kong, takes readers back to the turn of the twentieth century when utopianism still held significance for Chinese intellectuals, fiction writers, and the general public. Based on sources in Chinese, English, and Japanese, Utopian Fiction in China wanders through the late Qing utopian imagination as depicted in various aesthetic, literary, and political texts. Leung’s point of departure is Liang Qichao’s 梁啟超 (1873-1929) publication of The Future of New China (新中國未來記) in 1902, a political novel that declared the birth of modern utopian fiction in China. After the failed Hundred Days Reform (1898), much of the Confucian revivalist ambition to restore the ancient rule of the “three golden ages” had already faded away. But unlike his teacher Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858-1927), who never abandoned his antiquarian nostalgia, in his The Future of New China Liang Qichao announced a New Fiction project (新小說), introducing a brand-new literary device, a translated genre, and a new knowledge formation at the forefront of Western evolutionary thinking. Notwithstanding the abundant utopian imaginaries contained in the Confucian legacy, Leung argues that the traditional Chinese vision of paradise (樂園) was not “modern” in the sense that it advocated a retreat into the past. By contrast, Liang’s utopian fiction projected a futuristic and prospective view of China—a distant future not yet realized but that could potentially be achieved through conscientious socio-political reforms. More specifically, the exiled scholar drew inspiration from the 1888 American novel Looking Backward and the 1886 Japanese political fiction Plum Blossoms in the Snow (雪中梅). In Liang’s vision, China by 1962 would emerge as a rising world power—a prosperous and unified Confucian nation-state with a constitutional monarchy. Liang’s deployment of what David Der-wei Wang names “future perfect tense,” as Leung suggests, “exemplified the thematic and structural features of the new generic system and endorsed the utopian imagination as a new mode of writing” (34). In conjunction with his meditation on fiction and “politics” (群治, which Leung glosses as “Government of the People”), Liang hoped that utopian fiction could reformulate people’s minds through four key effects it could have on the reader: “‘incense-burning’ (xun 薰 [censing/thurification]), ‘immersion’ ( jin 浸), ‘stimulation’ (ci 刺), and ‘elevation’ (ti 提)” (53).
Echoing Foucault’s epistemology of ruptures. Leung highlights the radical novelty of utopian fiction and its distinct difference from traditional xiaoshuo 小說. In ancient China, the genre was associated with “‘miscellaneous events’ (zashi 雜事)” and “‘insignificant remarks’ (suoyu 瑣語),” as well as “‘unusual hearsay’ (yiwen 異聞)” and “‘the gossip of the street’ (jietan xiangyu daoting tushuo 街談巷語道聽途說)” (43-44). All these derogatory classificatory categories indicate that xiaoshuo was on the margins of the Confucian “order of things”—the canonical bibliographical categories of “‘classics’ (jing 經), ‘historical records’ (shi 史), ‘philosophical writings’ (zi 子), and ‘belles-lettres’ (ji 集)” (34). Yet in contrast to xiaoshuo as flawed historical records, the generic system of New Fiction constructed by Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei was “an epistemic discourse derived from Western scientific knowledge” (41). As a new instrument of knowledge production, fiction was no longer a peripheral genre but rather became critical to political reform and scientific education.
Leung demonstrates her point by delving into the generic system of New Fiction, “treating it as a new genre in the late Qing period” (37). Thus, chapter 2 explores the utopian imagination in various sub-genres, such as political fiction, science fiction, and idealistic fiction. In both Liang’s The Future of New China and Bao Tianxiao’s (包天笑 1876-1973) “The Future History of Air Warfare” (空中戰爭未來記), the authors deployed an alternative, hypothetical historical narrative to project a utopian future. Meanwhile, the utopian dimension of New Fiction was also manifested in its political relevance. Chapter 3 discusses the political function of the late Qing fictional universe. Drawing inspiration from Rudolf Wagner’s notion of the Chinese public sphere, Leung describes how a flourishing fiction industry was created by a multitude of political actors, including fiction writers, commercial publishers, and seasoned politicians. All of them saw fictionalized narratives as a valuable channel to criticize the Qing regime and spread societal enlightenment among readers of lower social status. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 continue to explore the intertwining of utopian fiction with various political ideals. While Liang’s The Future of New China developed out of his consistent dialogue with evolutionary thinking, Cai Yuanpei’s (蔡元培 1868-1940) “A New Year’s Dream” speaks of an anarchistic utopia and other writers’ discussion of colonization represented a desire to establish an ideal, borderless Chinese nation. Together, these cases illustrate how fiction served as a powerful medium for engaging with utopian political visions in the late Qing era.
Overall, Leung’s book is an important addition to the scholarly exploration of the late Qing utopian imagination. Eminent intellectual historians such as Wang Fan-sen, Peter Zarrow, and Chang Hao have forcefully argued that there was a powerful utopian strain in modern Chinese intellectual thinking, with significant political implications: Peter Zarrow delves into “the utopian impulse” among May Fourth radicals; Chang Hao uncovers the perilous connections between perfectionist thinking and totalitarianism; and Wang Fan-sen explores the affective torrent of “boredom” (煩悶) behind utopian visions. Meanwhile, a number of literary scholars have explored how fiction rose to become a powerful genre to reflect on and intervene in utopian political thinking during the late Qing era. Whereas David Der-wei Wang takes note of the “repressed modernities” of late Qing fiction, Cheng Pingyuan delves into the “narratological evolution” of modern Chinese fiction, and Catherine Yeh traces the transnational migration of the political novel from West to East. Together, their analyses shed light on why and how fiction ascended to become the predominant genre of the twentieth century. Above all, this rich scholarship demonstrates the interconnectedness of literary experimentation and intellectual reflection in the modern Chinese context.
Meanwhile, the absence of a utopian imaginary in our contemporary political landscape begs the question: What lessons can we glean from the extensive history of utopian thought in modern times? Since Sir Thomas More coined the term “utopia” in his 1516 pamphlet, it has consistently evoked notions of hope, progress, and dreams of a perfect world in Western intellectual thinking. For generations of social reformers and political activists, the idea of utopia helped inspire the Enlightenment optimism of Henri de Saint-Simon, and the revolutionary momentum eulogized by Karl Marx as “the poetry of the future.” Yet in today’s discordant and divisive political discourses, (what passes for) the harmony and prosperity integral to a utopian imaginary seem to rest on the repression of diversity, the curtailment of privacy, and the ruthless suppression of others. In this regard, would-be utopian thinkers find themselves increasingly overshadowed by a rising discourse of dystopia, or a critical evaluation of the failed utopian experiments of the twentieth century, from communism to fascism. Similarly, when we turn to the contemporary Chinese literary context, one finds, in contrast to the robust utopian visions of late Qing thinkers, that dystopian fiction has become predominant and few works can be properly categorized as “utopian.” The eclipse of utopia neither vindicates the dystopian vision nor condemns the political naïveté of utopian thinkers. But it points toward a paradoxical incongruity rooted in the etymological origin of “utopia”: Thomas More’s imaginary island oscillates between utopia (“no place,” from the Greek οὐ “not” and τόπος “place”) and eutopia (“good place,” from the Greek εὖ “good” and τόπος). For the contemporary reader who can find no place to project a positive futuristic imagination, Shuk Man Leung’s Utopian Fiction in China: Genre, Print Culture and Knowledge Formation, 1902-1912 serves as a nostalgic paean to the utopian origin of Chinese modernity.
Hang Tu
National University of Singapore