Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Camilla Pham
Guest: Hang Tu, Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore
Book Discussed: Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past (Harvard UP, 2025)
Release Date: February 11, 2026

This episode features a rich conversation about Hang Tu’s new book, Sentimental Republic. The work offers a pioneering exploration of how emotions have shaped Chinese intellectual debate and cultural memory concerning the Maoist era (1978–2018). Tu chronicles how intellectuals of varying political stripes—liberals, the left, conservatives, and nationalists—engaged in emotionally charged public debates about the revolutionary past, revealing that feelings such as guilt, nostalgia, mourning, melancholy, and resentment are central to understanding both the period's ideological divisions and its ongoing legacies.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Personal and Academic Genesis of the Project

[04:57] Hang Tu describes his inspiration for the project as stemming from a visceral undergraduate experience:

• Witnessed professors in fierce, emotionally charged debate about the New Left's rise in China.
• Surprised by “the emotional intensity, that kind of anger, that kind of moral indignation, and especially the sense of political urgency attached to that emotional attitude.”
• Realization: “If we only read these debates in terms of their literal value...then we are missing something crucial. We are missing this kind of structural feelings or lived experience that animates that kind of debate.” ([07:07])

2. Methodology: Literary Criticism and Critical Biography

[08:47] Hang Tu positions his approach against traditional political science or solely archival methods:

• Focuses on “distinct vinegars”—maverick, exceptional thinkers (e.g., Li Zehou, Liu Xiaofeng, Wang Anyi, Chen Yingzhen).
• Applies the tradition of "critical biography" and Chen Yinke's concept of empathetic understanding (liaojie che tongqing—了解者同情), seeking to reconstruct intellectual life-worlds from inside.

3. Central Questions and Book Structure

[12:02] Hang Tu outlines two guiding questions:

• Methodological: How does emotion shape intellectual history? Can feelings influence the formation, circulation, and contestation of ideas?
• Historical/Contextual: Why are post-Mao debates about the Maoist legacy so emotionally charged and polarized? How have specific emotions (guilt, shame, melancholy, anger) shaped rival visions of the revolutionary memory?
• The aim: To situate intellectual history as “not just a history of ideas, but also a history of feelings.” ([13:54])

4. Defining Emotional Politics and Theoretical Contribution

[15:37] Hang Tu introduces the notion of "affective ideas":

• Political ideologies (leftism, liberalism, conservatism, nationalism) are inseparable from memories and feelings.
• Example: Liberals’ push to “bid farewell to revolution” is saturated with memories of trauma and persecution—not just rational calculation.
• Various intellectual factions are grounded in lived emotional experiences, which impart “emotional weight” to their political judgments.

5. Four Intellectual-Emotional Clusters and Their Affective Cores

[17:52] Camilla Pham highlights the book’s framework.
[18:46] Hang Tu elaborates:

• Draws on both Anglophone "affect theory" and Chinese lyrical tradition (the qíng-lǐ zhī biàn—情理之辨) to stress the intersection of feeling and rationality.
• Liberal mourning (guilt, shame)
• Leftist melancholy (nostalgia)
• Conservative piety (awe, reverence)
• Nationalist resentment (anger, humiliation, desire for revenge)
• “My job is to carefully delineate ... the ways in which qíng [emotion] and lǐ [reason] intersect on a case-by-case basis.” ([23:28])

Main Case Studies and Thematic Chapters

The Protagonists: The "Red Guard" Generation

[23:48] Hang Tu:

• Focuses on intellectuals born after 1949, educated in Maoist ideals, who experienced the Cultural Revolution and rural "sent-down" campaigns firsthand.
• Their lives straddled revolutionary fervor and the abrupt transition to post-Mao reform, forming the core of China’s diverse intellectual vanguards.

Chapter 2: Liberal Mourning and the Politics of Commemoration

Chen Yinke as Liberal Martyr

• [26:46] Camilla Pham: Asks about the transformation of historian Chen Yinke into a political symbol.
• [27:28] Hang Tu: Traces how post-Tiananmen liberals, traumatized by state violence and seeking to mourn unsuccessful quests for liberty, invested in the tragic figure of Chen Yinke, who died during the Cultural Revolution for refusing Marxist orthodoxy.
• Liberal intellectuals constructed a “melodramatic imagination” around Chen’s pathos, using his life and death to “channel grief into a kind of moral critique of Maoist politics.” ([31:52])
• Memorable quote:

  “Chen Yinke fever, and by extension Min Guo Ru... wasn’t just about the nostalgia for bygone era, but it was also about a politics of mourning and especially how to channel grief into a kind of moral critique of Maoist politics.” — Hang Tu [32:38]

Chapter 3: Leftist Melancholy and Cross-Strait Dialogue

Wang Anyi and Chen Yingzhen

• [33:29] Camilla Pham: Asks about leftist melancholy and the ongoing allure of socialism’s “unrealized promise.”
• [34:20] Hang Tu: Contrasts “the liberal argument that Mao’s revolution must be understood... as a series of moral catastrophes” with the left’s sense of loss—not just political, but deeply personal and intertwined with vanished youthful hopes.
• Wang Anyi (Shanghai) and Chen Yingzhen (Taiwan) represent different but intersecting threads of leftist melancholy. Their Iowa Writers’ Program encounter (1983) led to rich exchanges about the personal and ideological aftermath of the socialist experiment.
• Leftist passions aren’t just a “pathology of defeat,” but also ambiguity, possibility, and a refusal to totally repudiate the past.
• Memorable quote:

  “We cannot simply bid farewell to revolution because there’s always an ambiguous and emotion or affective attachment to the lived experience of socialism that denies a kind of categorical negation.” — Hang Tu [36:53]

On Critiques of Leftist Melancholia

• [37:54] Hang Tu: Pushes back against the dismissal of left melancholy as political paralysis, drawing on both Western (Walter Benjamin, Lukács, Adorno) and Chinese (Mao’s Yan’an talks) genealogies.
• For writers like Chen Yingzhen: “...a paradoxical mixture of sentimentalism and militancy... their literary narrations are more complicated than their own political stance.” ([41:46])

Chapter 5: Nationalist Resentment and Populist Swagger

Grassroots Nationalism and ‘China Can Say No’

• [42:49] Hang Tu: Explores the explosion of nationalist resentment in 1990s China, exemplified by the runaway bestseller China Can Say No, written by five “angry young men.”
• Argues that their theatrical anger was both staged and deeply felt—a blend of genuine frustration and performative swagger, reflecting the post-Cold War tumult and a widespread desire among “losers” to find purpose through nationalistic passion.
• China Can Say No provided a template for emotional politics, moving away from elite gravitas toward accessible, populist bombast.
• Memorable moment:

  “I was a loser in my life. I could not find a job, I cannot pay my bills...but loving the nation and cursing the enemy gave me something bigger to believe in. So it was, I would say, almost touching in a tragic kind of way.” — Hang Tu recounting a passage from the book [46:35]

Addressing Criticism and Broader Stakes

On the Elite Focus and Popular Voices

[47:39] Camilla Pham and 48:05 Hang Tu:

• Tu acknowledges the limits of focusing on elite intellectuals, expressing a wish to include more about mingjian (popular/grassroots intellectual networks), such as the informal literary groups and factory-worker reading circles of the early reform era.
• Suggests that much emotional ferment also circulated in these “autonomous spaces” of ordinary people.

On the “Depoliticizing” Critique

[52:52] Hang Tu:

• “Rather than depoliticizing the revolution, I would say that this book shows how Mao's revolution remains politically alive precisely through these emotional forms.”
• Warns against viewing emotion as apolitical; rather, emotional forms are potent vehicles and mechanisms of political power and memory.

Memorable Quotes

On Method and Motivation:

• “When I was doing research for this chapter, I found a lot of... emotional narratives... all these narratives are trying to construct all kinds of tear jerking stories, real or imagined... and I want to argue that it was particularly this kind of melodramatic imagination that enchanted post Mao liberalism with emotional energy and moral appeal.” — Hang Tu [31:48]

On the Book's Core Contribution:

• “Intellectual history is not just a history of ideas, but also a history of feelings.” — Hang Tu [13:54]

On Nationalist Populism:

• “They have that swagger, they have that cynical realism, this over the top confidence, this tongue in cheek Persona. And sometimes they're just downright clownish, which makes them popular and real...” — Hang Tu (on the “China Can Say No” authors) [45:39]

Thematic Timestamps

• Personal genesis and first encounters: [04:57–07:53]
• Methodology and research process: [08:47–11:47]
• Book overview and theoretical intervention: [12:02–17:52]
• Affective clusters and theoretical sources: [17:52–23:38]
• Generation and main intellectual figures: [23:48–26:46]
• Chen Yinke, liberal mourning: [26:46–33:29]
• Leftist melancholy, cross-strait dialogue: [33:29–41:46]
• Nationalist resentment and popular nationalism: [42:11–47:39]
• Critique: focus on elites, depoliticization: [47:39–55:43]
• Next project: Cynicism in Chinese literature: [55:59–58:52]

What’s Next for Hang Tu

[55:59] Tu’s next book will examine the history and meanings of cynicism in modern Chinese literature (“How to Be a Cynic: Satire and the Art of Writing in 20th Century China”), tracing forms of skepticism, micro-resistance, and satire from Lu Xun to Wang Xiaobo.

Concluding Thought

Sentimental Republic fundamentally recasts Chinese intellectual history as a battleground of the heart as much as the mind, mapping how guilt, nostalgia, resentment, and melancholy—far from being symptoms of irrationality—are central to the creation, maintenance, and contestation of contemporary China’s moral and political landscape.

Recommended for: Scholars, students, and anyone interested in modern Chinese culture, emotional politics, and intellectual history.