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Hang Tu, "Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past" (Harvard UP, 2025)
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This Friday. I love him. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. Experience the greatest love story of all time. Why did you leave me? Why did you betray your own heart? A film by Emerald Fennell Keith Cliff, Cathy, Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi Kiss me and let us both be damned. Wuthering Heights Original songs by Charlie XCX Only in theaters Friday. Experience at an IMAX. Rated R. Under 17.
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Welcome to the new Books Network.
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Hello everyone and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Camilla Pham and I'm a host here on the New Books Network. How does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual Debate? In Sentimental Republic? Hang to proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post Mao cultural controversy as it entered a period of market reform, China did not turn away from revolutionary sentiments. Rather, the post Mao period experienced a surge of emotionally charged debates about red legacies, ranging from the anguished denunciations of Maoist violence to the elegiac remembrance of socialist egalitarianism. Sentimental Republic chronicles 40 years, from 1978 to 2018, of bitter cultural wars about the Maoist past. It analyzes how the four major intellectual clusters in contemporary liberals, the left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists debated Mao's revolutionary legacies in light of the post socialist transition. Should the Chinese condemn revolutionary violence and bid farewell to socialism? Or would a return to revolution foster alternative visions of China's future path? Tu probes the nexus of literature, thought, and memory, bringing to light the dynamic moral sentiments and emotional excess at work in these post Mao ideological contentions. By analyzing how rival intellectual camps stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, Tu argues that the polemics surrounding the country's past cannot be properly understood without reading the emotional trajectories of the post Mao intelligentsia. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with the author of Sentimental Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past, Hang Tu. Professor Tu is an assistant professor of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore and the deputy director of the Tianxing Guo Foundation, National University of Singapore, Southeast Asia, center for Chinese Studies. A scholar of Chinese literature and thought, his research focuses on the cultural politics of emotion in modern and contemporary China. His Work has appeared in Critical Inquiry, the Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Intellectual History, MCLC, and prism. Professor Thu, thank you so much for joining me today to talk about your monograph.
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Thank you so much, Camelia, for that very generous introduction and thank you for having me on the show. I mean, it has been a really pleasure to be here, I have to say, particularly because I have been a listener of the New Books Network for many years. So now I have to say that it feels a little bit overwhelmed to be the one answering the questions. Now, needless to say, I'm very happy to be talking about my book Sentimental Republic today. Perhaps not just the book itself, but also the intellectual path that led me to it, and in particularly some of the personal stories and interesting episodes behind the project, if we have time. So this book has been with me for quite a long time, all the way from my undergraduate years many years ago to my PhD training in Boston. So it means a lot to finally be able to share it in this conversation. Thank you, Camelia.
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Thank you so much. Professor Thu, to begin, could you tell us what first drew you to the cultural politics of emotion in public intellectual debate? Debate, particularly the modern and contemporary China.
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So that's actually a very long story. What first drew me to this topic was a very personal experience when I was an undergraduate student at Sun Yixin University, Zhongshan University based in Guangzhou, about 15 years ago. You know, at that moment I was just beginning to explore college life. Surely you have felt that moment when everything feels fresh and new to our college student, right? You go to talks, you sit in on conferences, and you are just curious about every dimension of university level intellectual life, but perhaps also a little bit intimidated because you were also trying to figure out where you would stand in this conversation. And then I remember one day I walked into a conference room and the intellectuals and scholars there, they were kind of debating about the Chinese New Left, the so called right, the Chandi intellectual camp that was just gaining attraction, but also controversy at the time. And I thought that at first I thought that would be a fairly typical academic event. You know, you read your script, you read your presentation, and you use some theoretical jargons and people give comments in a polite and professional way. But then what I saw really surprised me because there were senior scholars and some of them my own teachers, and they were kind of quite upset by this new intellectual faction in China at the moment. So I remember that they were banging on the table, they were raising their voices, and almost at one moment they were shouting at each other. Over questions about the Mu left and not just about this one theoretical academic niche, but also the whole question of the legacy of socialism and Mao's 30 years and political movements, political trials and so on, so forth. And so what really struck me weren't the argumentations at first. It was rather that emotional intensity, that kind of anger, that kind of moral indignation, and especially the sense of political urgency attached to that emotional attitude. Right. It feels deeply personal and emotional. And so that moment stayed with me and made me to wonder why do these discussions about the Maoist past often provoke such powerful reactions? Right. And how do intellectual disagreements so quickly escalated and became moral confrontations? And then gradually I began to realize that if we only read these debates in terms of their literal value, in terms of their ideology, like liberal versus Left or reform versus Revolution, then we are missing something crucial. We are missing this kind of structural feelings or lived experience that animates that kind of debate.
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Thank you, Professor Tu. This is truly a phenomenal project. The book offers a 40 year forensic account of post Mao China's sentimental aftershocks from the late 1970s through the early 21st century and engages with many of the most influential Chinese intellectuals, literary figures and writers across the the political spectrum, liberals, leftists, conservatives and nationalists alike. Given that your training is in literature rather than political science or archival and historical studies, could you tell us about your research process? How did you identify and assemble this impressive range of intellectual figures? And what does a literary or literary critical background, in your view, bring to the study of modern Chinese intellectual life?
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I'm glad that you brought that up. I mean, first I must confess that this is not a comprehensive survey of emotional politics or intellectual history in the post Mao period. Well, plenty of scholars have done that and have done it admirably, especially people trained in political science. And I don't think that I can do better. So instead I focus on what I call distinct vinegars. You know, those self styled, maverick, interesting, exceptional, extraordinary intellectual figures like Li Zehou, this kind of syncretic philosopher who somehow manages to fuse his Kant with Marx. And also you have these truly amazing ideological converts like Liu Xiaofeng, who travels all the way from being a cultural Christian in the 1980s and then moved away from being a cultural Christian and then towards Straussian conservatism. And eventually he began. Some of ideological converts believed in Maoism. And also I discussed some truly unexpected encounters like Wang Anyi, the Shanghai based woman writer, and also Chen Ying Zheng, coming from the tradition of Taiwanese Marxism and especially their dialogue across the Taiwan Strait about Mao's revolution. So my hope is that by drawing on these truly exceptional individual cases, they might as well serve as reference points, a kind of barometer for collective aspirations, for us to understand the collective aspirations, aspirations and anxieties in the contemporary Chinese and the Sinophone intellectual world. So, as a literary scholar, I'm really drawn to the tradition of this, what I call critical biography. Basically, the question brings up by a literary scholar is that how do you enter the life of the mind, right? How can we reconstruct their life world? And I know that this might sound perhaps a little bit against the current, as we now live in the age of digital humanities, where everyone wants to possess massive examples and cases to draw on. But then for me personally, I would say that the urge to understand ideas as lived, what I mean is as practiced and embodied by particular individuals, has only grown stronger than ever in our post human age. And this is also why I take inspiration from the Chinese historian Cheng Ying Ke's method of empathetic understanding, or what he calls Liaojie Chi Tongqing. Basically, when you are trying to study certain intellectual figure in history, you are trying to stand in the same realm as thinkers of the past and use our literary imagination, and sometimes historical imagination to reconstruct the world, to see the world through their eyes.
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To start us off, could you give our listeners a general overview of Sentimental Republic, the central questions that drive the books, its overall structure, and what you are ultimately hoping to achieve?
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My book is guided by two broad sets of questions, one methodological, the other one historical and contextual. So the first is about the matter of approach or method. I mean, how does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual debate? When we think about intellectual history, the discipline of intellectual history, or the history of ideas in general, we often imagine a story of abstract concepts, right? All these kind of abstract philosophies and ideological worldviews guided by reason and rational deliberation. But then I want to ask in this book, is that is there such place for emotion or broadly speaking, for affect, for feeling, and for moral sentiments in intellectual thinking? And can emotions influence the way ideas are formed, circulated and contested? So this is my methodological concern. And this methodological concern naturally leads to my second set of questions which explore the relationship between emotion and memory, or emotion and ideas in the post Mao intellectual context. So specifically, I want to pose a series of inquiries like why were Chinese intellectual debates about the Maoist past, as I have mentioned, as it might personal encounter? Why would intellectual debates about Maoist past so polarized during the reform period, often fueled by strong emotions and moral convictions. And how have certain feelings, those distinct specific feelings like guilt, like shame, like melancholy, like anger and resentment. So how have certain feelings shaped the different perceptions of the revolutionary memory? And then by bringing these two sets of questions together, my book aims to show that intellectual history, or hopes to show that intellectual history is not a just a history of ideas, but also a history of feelings. Especially a history that considers how emotions influence public debate and shape political memory in a Chinese context as well as in a more general context.
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Thank you. In your introduction, you advocate for what you call, and I'm quoting here, a balanced approach to the study of post mal cultural and intellectual dynamics. One that mediates the reason emotion. Next, in three ways. First, by highlighting the close parallelism between moral sentiments and ethical reasoning in Chinese memory debate. Second, by exploring how a range of feelings shape political convictions and animate personal visions across ideological spectra. And third, by showing how a particular affects are mobilized by different actors to give political ideas emotional appeal and moral authority. With this effective turn in mind, how do you define emotion politics in your book? And when you examine how Chinese grapple with a world in which the truth itself appears saturated with emotional excess, what do you see as your contribution both to the study of contemporary China and more theoretically to affect studies?
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Well, now that you have read that particular passage, it feels a little bit wordy to me. Perhaps I should make my writing more clear. So basically what I'm trying to propose is this notion of affective ideas, namely ways in which the formation of political ideas, you know, all those kind of isms, the so called Zhu Yi, from leftism to liberalism to conservatism and nationalism. So the formation of these kind of political ideologies in the post Mao era are bound up with quirky memories, are bound up with volatile emotions and are interconnected with moral sentiments. So for example, for those liberal intellectuals who suffered physically and also mentally from persecution and exile throughout the Mao era, I study ways in which they are called to bid farewell to revolution. Their enthusiasm for a political agenda called how this call, how this liberal calling to break away from the revolutionary past was intermingled or was saturated with personal trials and personal memories. So as I have observed, so speaking of the Cultural Revolution, many survivors, many liberal survivors would immediately think through the anguished memories of persecution, for example, the horrors of the Red Guard violence, mass trial and political exile. So that's one side of the picture. And then by contrast, for some of the writers who have spent their formative years in the heat of Mao's revolution, they feel very nostalgic about the good old days of the socialism and they tend to romanticize Maoist past in their literary narrations. So my point is that these memories, these debates weren't merely ideological, they were effective. They were grounded in lived experiences that carried emotional weight. And most importantly, I'm particularly attentive to how they form the ground of political judgment and moral judgment and pushed individuals to go right or turn left in a post Mao ideological space.
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C
I can see that one of the most compelling aspects of the book is how you organize its protagonists into four major intellectual emotional clusters. These groups are united neither by ideology nor by any shared sentiment consensus about Mao's fractured revolutionary legacy. Like liberal mourning structure around guilt and shame. Leftist melancholy marked by nostalgia. Conservative piety grounded in awe and reverence, in nationalist resentment driven by humiliation, anger and desires for revenge. Could you elaborate on your selection of these topics and discoveries? What did this framework allow you to see that earlier studies, especially those centered on rational discourse, might have missed?
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Yeah, sure. So I think that for this theoretical framework, I have been constantly influenced by affect studies in the Anglophone scholarship as well as the so called lyrical tradition in the Chinese and the Sinophone speaking world. And I think that I would like to talk more about how I engage with the so called affect theory through this theoretical framework. I mean, when humanities scholars think about affect theory today, the term affect is often associated with this postmodern, this Deleuzian idea of affect as preconscious, right? This bodily intensity, especially the impersonal autonomous force that circulates before it can be named or captured. And if you read closely, you will notice that there is a political dimension to this Deleuzian notion of affect, especially the Deleuzian idea that we don't fully know what we are thinking or what we are doing, that reason doesn't necessarily dominate our action. But I have to say that's not the direction I'm trying to take in my book. Because I'm not looking to reduce thinking to just a set of bodily sensations or a bunch of reflexes. And then you don't want to argue, you don't want to suggest that Chinese intellectuals argue against each other. They debate with each other because they are so emotional and so much so that they aren't really thinking, right? And then on the other hand, what I'm trying to explore is how feeling and thinking are deeply intertwined. You know, in Chinese literary history there is a long standing tradition about the question of reason. Emotion nexus, or what has been called as Qin Li Qi Bian, the dialogic of reason and emotion, which goes all the way back to the Neo Confucianism of the Song dynasty. And then you have this whole scholarship about the cult of Qin, the cult of feelings in Ning Qing literature. And I think that the lesson or the point coming from the Chinese lyrical tradition, the Chinese tradition of Qin Li Zhi Bian, is not to determine which one overpowers the other, whether it's emotion dictating thinking or whether thinking is governing emotion. Rather, Chinese literary scholars are particularly attentive to how Qin and Li, how reason and emotion intersect, how they work together, and how that intersection shapes intellectual discourse. So these are the Chinese and Anglophone theoretical methods that influence my framework. Well, let me just give you an example. Perhaps in some of the cases that I explore, emotion is treated as part of ethical reasoning. For example, in chapter one, I talked about this big debate in the 1980s about the burden of guilt, the so called should everyone be accountable, be held accountable for the crimes of the Red Guards or the crimes conducted during the Cultural Revolution when China was thrown into a kind of lawless state? Right here, when intellectuals like Liu Zai, Fu Ji Xianlin Bajing are proposing what they call guilty conscience, guilt isn't just a feeling or a bodily reaction, right? Guilt is seen as essential part of liberal reasoning for these intellectuals who survive the Red Guard violence. They argue that in order to come to terms with the past, a guilty conscience or a sentimental education is necessary for moral and ethical renewal in the post Mao period. But then in other cases, like I talked about nationalism in my last chapter, and then I talked about how these negative affects, such as anger, such as resentment, how they were the result of conscious ideological manipulation. So in the case of nationalism, it's not just about emotion tied into moral judgment, but how emotions are manufactured, are mobilized, are deployed for purposes of political persuasion. So as you can see here, it's not a one way street where emotion determines reason or the other way around. And I think that my job is to carefully delineate, carefully describe the ways in which Qin emotion and Li reason intersect on a case by case basis.
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C
Turning to the substance of the book, could you say a bit more about its main protagonist to give our listeners a clear sense of the material?
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Sure. So at the heart of my narrative are the intellectuals of the post male generation, or what sociologist Yang Guobin calls the Red God generation, Hong Weibin Yidai. They were the first cohort born after the founding of the PRC in 1949. And I chose to focus on this political generation because I believe that they are especially unique in the sense that they lived through one of the most turbulent or chaotic decade in PRC history. First, they were born and educated in an atmosphere of revolutionary idealism, some might even say Maoist romanticism. And then they came of age during the 10 years of cultural revolution, when, you know, for 10 years, formal schooling was largely disrupted or even abolished. And so many of these educated youths found themselves either witnessing or actively participating in the Red Guard movement. But then by the late 60s and early 70s, as the initial Maoist political fever began to wane, most of these students were sent down to the countryside as the so called educated youth, or so quickly the harsh reality of rural life. You know, many of these educated youths, most of these educated youths were born and raised in the cities. So after they confronted Chinese villagers, the harsh reality of rural life, you must think about back breaking labor, right? Empty stomachs, and especially this kind of big gap between revolutionary dreams and simply the mud on their shoes. So all these kind of disparities left many disillusioned with Maoism. As a result, with Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up in the late 1970s and early 80s, this generation seized the opportunities to return to the college, to go back to the cities and resume their formal education. And then by the 1980s, many had emerged as the cultural vanguard of the 1980s, of the champion New Enlightenment, and especially this kind of political liberalization under the reformist leadership. So I think that what's really striking about this generation is that they lived through two complete, completely different political eras. You know, first they grew up in the heat of Mao's revolution, where their worldview is defined by class struggle, bipoletary internationalism, high socialism, all that good and grandiose stuff. And then almost overnight, the world was turned upside down. And when Deng Xiaoping took the stage and suddenly it was all about pragmatic rationality, about economic development, about globalization, and you have the coming of market mentality and so on, so forth.
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C
Coming into the book. In chapter two, you trace how post Tiananmen liberals mobilize what you describe as the politics of mourning around the figure Chen Ying ke. Through practices of identification and commemoration, Chen is transformed from a largely apolitical scholar into a cultural loyalist and ultimately into a liberal martyr matter. What drew Chinese liberals so powerfully to Chen Yingke at this particular moment? And how did mourning, his tragic fate become a way for them to reflect on the meaning of liberty in China's? 20th century.
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So this chapter has something to do with the so called Min Guo Shi, which refers to this public enthusiasm or nostalgia for the republican era that emerged in post Mao intellectual life. There are many examples that we can think of, but one powerful example, I think one of the most powerful examples is the legacy of Professor Chen Yingke from Zhongshan University. And Professor Chen Ying KE was widely regarded as one of the most erudite stray town historians in 20th century China. And what was particularly controversial or striking was that Chen died a really tragic death during the Cultural Revolution, partly due to his refusal to conform to Marxist historiography. And according to various personal accounts, at the height of the Red Guard movement in Guangzhou, student radicals allegedly set up a loudspeaker outside his house and broadcasted revolutionary messages, Maoist slogans, day by day, day and night, and eventually driving poor Professor Chen to the brink of collapse. And this is just one of many, many tragic tales, tear jerking tales about how liberal intellectuals or even apolitical scholars like Chen Ying KE was treated and suffered during Mao's mass campaigns. So in this chapter I focus on this kind of pathos. You know, the grief, the sadness and sometimes the hidden anger and moral indignation conjured up by Chen Yingke's death. And particularly I focus on how liberal minded intellectuals and historians, how they try to dramatize Chen King, they tried to retell the story, Chen Yingke's death in a melodramatic manner in order to express their moral indignation against ultra leftist politics. So for example, we have Professor Yu Yingshi, who was a Princeton based historian, and Professor Yunshu spent many years trying to argue that Chen Yingke's heroic defiance was an extraordinary outcry of what he calls cultural loyalism at its most intense. You know that the phenomenon of loyalism can be dated back to the loyalist movement during the Ming Qing transition. When you have a whole generation of Jiangnan literati, from Liu Lushi to Chen Zirong, was trying to show their political loyalty to the Baigong Ming dynasty. So that was Professor Yu Ying Si's take here. And apart from that elite discourse, we also have a series of public discourse, media debate in the 1990s, all of which was trying to eulogize, trying to mythologize Professor Cheng Yingke as the so called the last intellectual, the master of national learning, and especially the one to whom Chinese culture has entrusted its fate. Zhong Bo Wen Hua Tuo Ning Zhi Ren.
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C
In that, by tracing the effective afterlife of Chen Yingke you suggest that post Mao Chinese liberalism cannot be understood apart from from the emotional energies that animate it. What do these divergent historical imaginaries of Chen Yike reveal about the role of political emotion in shaping liberal thought in contemporary China?
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So here, this is where I find the debate quite interesting. It is important to note that Chen Yingke himself, Chen Ying as a historian, Chen Ying as a cultural loyalist himself, was by no means a theorist of liberalism. So if you look at Cheng Yinke's writing, if you look at his education, if you look at his training, well, you will come to the conclusion that Chen Yinke was a traditionalist, if not a culture conservative. Here in this chapter, I try to ask, we need to ask or we need to ask why liberal scholars in the post Mao era, they actively participated in constructing or marketing or even trying to brand Chengying KE as one of their own kind, especially trying to mythologize Chen as a defined icon of freedom or liberalism. Even if Chink was by no means a scholar or a theorist of liberalism, I mean, is this a kind of misreading, misunderstanding, or what we call Wu Hui here? Right, so this is where I think literary narrative or imagined theatrical narrative matters. When I was doing research for this chapter, I found a lot of huge amount of emotional narratives. You have biographies, you have memoirs, you have diaries, you have personal letters, and so on, so forth. And all these narratives are trying to construct all kinds of tear jerking stories, real or imagined historical and literary narratives about Chen Yingke's life and death in his last 20 years of life. And I want to argue that it was particularly this kind of melodramatic imagination that enchanted Chinese liberalism, that enchanted post maliberalism with emotional energy and moral appeal. So through this case, we can see that Chen Yingke fever, and by extension Min Guo Ruo in general, the nostalgia for the Republican era or for the Republican era intellectuals, the entire 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. So that was my point here.
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C
Thank you. In chapter three, you move from liberal mourning to what you describe as leftist melancholy. Focusing on a cross strait dialogue between the Taiwan based writer Chen Yingzhen and the Shanghai born Wang Anjin Yi. Writing from opposite sides of the Taiwan Strait, you show how melancholy and remembrance become ways of confronting the unrealized promise of socialist utopia without abandoning the revolutionary horizon altogether. What distinguishes this leftist melancholy from the liberal culture of apology you analyzed earlier in the book. And why does does melancholy emerge as a meaningful way of engaging the ruins of that utopian project?
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That's a very sharp question, I think, for the liberals that we have discussed. So there are many liberal narrative, but at the heart of this of the argument is that Mao's revolution must be understood largely as a series of moral catastrophes. But then apart from that dominant liberal narrative that began to emerge in the 1980s, there are also other narratives, right? Because for the children of Mao or the Red Guard generation, or the generation of the educated youth, the crash of socialism, the crash of Mao's utopia was the crash for them, was the crash of something, I would say, very personal, very innocent and full of hope, hope, something that was intertwined or something that marked their own childhood and youthful idealism. So how could you completely negate your own past? Right, so this is the complex emotion that I'm trying to capture here, the so called left wing melancholia and the awareness of the collapse of political utopia that engendered a poignant feeling, you know, namely that socialism was aged and burdened with its own past and therefore overwhelmed with sadness, overwhelmed with grief and melancholia. And so in this particular chapter, I examined two figures. The first is Taiwanese Marxist writer Chen Yingzhen, the most famous or perhaps notorious radical thinker rooted in the tradition of Taiwanese leftism. And the second, we have this Shanghai based woman writer, Wang Anyi, coming from the San Diego generation. And the time was 1983 when both Chang and Yi were invited to America. So they were invited to the University of Iowa to participate in Iowa's International Writers Program. And during that time I talk about how they became entangled into a series of debate about Mao's Cultural Revolution, because as a Marxist, Chen Ying Zheng at that point had never been to mainland China, so he was 4 or 5. These beautiful ideas or romanticized imaginations about Mao's Cultural Revolution. But then Wang Yi, you can imagine that she had suffered from the Sandam generation, this rustication of the youth, right? So there's lot of going back and forth debate between Wang Yi and Chang and on the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. And I talked about how this intellectual exchange became a source of inspiration so they both learn something from each other and how this intellectual exchange across the Taiwan Strait became a source of inspiration for both to rekindle a sense of possibility for the left wing cause. And I think the main point is that I want to focus on their literary imagination and use their literature to argue that we cannot simply bid farewell to evolution because there's always an ambiguous and emotion or affective attachment to the lived experience of socialism that denies a kind of categorical negation.
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C
As you also noted in your book, some critiques dismiss this form of leftist melancholy as either reactionary or even pathological. How does your reading of Chen Yingzhen and Wang Anyi push back against that dismissal?
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So that's a really complicated question. I mean, my whole point is to de pathologize melancholy as a political syndrome of the left. So there is a long story behind that, because in both Western and Chinese left wing intellectual discourse there has been this constant urge to dismiss melancholy as a pathology, as a kind of political problem of the left beat into defeat and paralysis. And we have many scholars like Enzo Traversio from Cornell University, who has beautifully written on it, and his scholarship remains a source of inspiration for this chapter. So the whole syndrome, the whole left wing melancholy stuff can be traced back to Walter Benjamin, who coined the term in the early 1930s to criticize what he saw. The passivity of the German left, of the Weimar left in the wake of the Nazi uprising, and then in the 1960s in the moment of global revolution, global left wing uprising. You have George Lukasz, you know, the Hungarian Marxist critic, taking a swing at Theodore o' Donnell's so called melancholy dialectic with that now infamous or notorious phrase accusing the Frankov school of being stuck in the, what Garrett Lukash calls Grand Hotel abyss, right? Basically thinking too much. Adorno is thinking too much. Where do enough while watching the world burns. And that's their Western genealogy, that's the genealogy of Western Marxism. And apart from that, you see the same impulse in Chinese literary history. I can think of Mao's Yan' an talks, right? Mao Yang talks in 1942, where he argued that bourgeois sentimentalism, or what he calls had to be stamped out in favor of revolutionary action. And as you can see here, at the heart of all these accusations, of all these kind of political critiques is the same logic, namely that revolutionaries must act, we must act, actively transform the world around us through revolution, right? But on the other hand, I want to show that Chinese and Sinophone literature provides another way to, to think about the syndrome of left wing melancholy not simply as a political defeat, but also a subtle, ambiguous, paradoxical stance. Or we can see a kind of tension between thinking and acting, or what Hannah Arendt calls beta activa and beta contemplativa. For example, the case of the Taiwanese Marxist Chang Yin Zhen that I wrote about here I would say that throughout his life he was actually very conscious of the problem of his own melancholy syndrome, which was why he even coined the term called small town intellectuals Shi Zhen, Xiao Zhi, Shi Feng to describe that kind of ecstatic withdrawal, that kind of pessimism or political passivity as the result of his own left wing melancholy. So here's where you find the story increasingly interesting and complex because Chen in Zhen turns out to be a melancholic left who wants to get rid of his own melancholia because throughout his life you know that he is an orthodox Marxist who really trying to learn from Chairman Mao, trying to turn literature into action and turn into his melancholy piece into a calling for Taiwanese intellectuals, especially left winging, left leaning intellectuals during the age of the Cold War. So what you have as a result is a paradoxical mixture of sentimentalism and militancy, which is why I think that these left wing writers, especially their literary narrations are more complicated than their own political stance on the question of revolution or left wing activists.
- [42:12]
C
Turning to chapter five, you argue that resentment has been a key emotional matter behind the rise of popular nationalism since the 1990s, especially in debates surrounding the nationalist pamphlet China can say no. What do you mean by resentment in this context? And how does reading grassroots nationalism through the psychology of resentment complicate liberal accounts that frame nationalism into post Cold war China simply as irrational excess or propaganda driven manipulation?
- [42:49]
A
I have to say that this is one of my favorite chapters. So in this last chapter I dive into popular nationalism by taking a closer look at this book called China can say no or Zhong Guo Kui Shou Bu. This was a national bestseller, perhaps the bestseller back in 90, written by five angry young men, or if you prefer populist intellectuals in the early 1990s. And we have to remember that the timing of its release was just crucial because the book was released at the height of the third Taiwan trade crisis, when China and the US were on the verge of war over Taiwan's pro independence president Lee Dun Hui. And I have to say that the book as a whole was essentially, I would say, a sort of manifesto on China's foreign policy toward the us. And bear in mind that it was also written in an extremely angry and emotional and morally indignant tone. So much so that the argument sounded very simple, if not simple minded. So basically they were simply trying to react, reiterate their point that China must resolutely say no to the unjust demands posed by those so called foreign devils. Right and then that's just it. That's simply their argument. Say no, right? Just pull out your anger. No reason, no nuance, no art of the negotiation. Just a kind of chunk style, knee jerky, no or undisguised hatred to anything that we don't like. So that's the politics of emotion, that's the politics of resentment that I'm speaking here. And yet what's truly surprising, if not depressing, was that the book sold over 2 million copies and even led to a surge of copycats, sequels such as, you know, this goes forever, right? How China can say no, why China can say no and China can still say no, and unhappy China, and so on and so forth. Which is why I think we really need to ask ourselves why this amateurish book became such a sensational hit and created a say no farce in the public media. And if we look at nationalism in Chinese media nowadays, I think a lot of similar strategies can be traced back to that moment, that moment of say no fast in 1996. And I would say that the most striking thing about their emotional politics is that kind of theatricality, because their anger isn't just a feeling. It was a deliberate, it was a staged performance. I mean, when I was writing my book, I have this strange feeling that all the other figures, all the other scholars and intellectuals in my previous chapters, they were way too serious, right? Li Zihou, Liu Zaifu, Liu Xiaofeng, Wang Anyi, Chen, Yin Zhen, they're all talking about, they're all writing about grand narratives of revolution and enlightenment. And they are so polite, they are so well mannered, like Canadians, you know. But then when I read the writings of those grassroots intellectuals in chapter five, the Naysayers, you have to admit that 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, especially for the Chinese readers at the moment. And I have to say that when I was doing research on this part, I was almost moved, not moved, I was almost bemused by the level of sincerity in their writings. You know, what I remember deeply is that there's this biographical section in the book, China can say non, where each author are required to explain why they devoted themselves to this anti American, to this nationalist cause. And one of them was his narrative was simply brutally honest. Like, I was a loser in my life. I could not find a job, I cannot pay my bills, I cannot find a job. 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. And then we like to dismiss nationalism as an emotional swamp or a boxer mentality unworthy of attention. But it is important to understand their mindset, especially in our current political moment of populist resurgence.
- [47:40]
C
Now that the book has been published and is circulating widely, I would love to hear how you respond to some of the questions that have come up, particularly the concern that Sentimental Republic focuses on the emotional politics of elite writers, scholars, intellectuals, rather than on the experiences of the people. How do you think about that distinction and how would you respond to that line of critique?
- [48:05]
A
Thank you very much, Kamila. I think that's an important question and only speaking that's the question. I have been thinking a lot since the book came out. In some ways, I would say that this is where I wish I have done more. There is always, I think, a kind of original thing when one focuses on elite academic intellectual discourse. You cannot help but ask yourself throughout your writing, where are the workers, right? Where are the peasants? Where are the everyday voices that are often left out of elite focused intellectual history? And on the one hand, I would say that many of these intellectual figures I discussed were profoundly concerned, concerned with the question of how to represent or how to speak for the people that question, that dilemma, who speaks for them and with what moral agency or with what moral or political authority runs through many writers that I examined, left leaning writers like Chen Ying Zhen particularly. But at the same time, they were also aware of the limits of their representation because, you know, however sincere, however genuine their investment, that doesn't mean they succeeded in truly representing the people beyond their own discursive circles, beyond their own training, beyond their own experience in academia. By the end of the day, you have to acknowledge that intention does not equate to voice. So if I could write a longer version of the book, I would really want to spend more time on what some call scholars called the so called Ming jian Si Xiang Chen Luo. I think ming jian is a particularly tricky term to translate. So maybe we can call it popular intellectual villages that began to emerge in the late 70s and early 1980s. We have Professor Qian Liqu from Peking University who has written and researched extensively about these spontaneous groups, you know, literary salons, Marxist studies circles that were blooming everywhere, that were blooming across the country during the early reform era and even in the late mid or late 1970s. So these groups were often informal, they were self organized reading groups or spaces of discussion that included not only send down youths, but factory workers and all kinds of ordinary people as well. So in terms of historical recollection, we have a lot of intellectual memoirs or historical archival materials that touches on the so called popular intellectual villages in the early reform period. So for example, Zhu Xueqin, another leading liberal scholar in China, has this wonderful recollection of his time as a Sandang youth and working in a few factory, local factory in the early 1980s. So in Zhu Xuexin's narration, he described how ordinary workers, after a full day of physical labor, would gather in the evenings for serious reading groups. So they were debating big philosophical and trendy philosophical questions of the day, like Marxist humanism, like the question of alienation, and even the future of socialization. And I think that it would be more fascinating to examine those salons more closely and look at all these kind of literary associations or political networks that makes the new Enlightenment possible, and especially to ask to what extent they really represented people's voices and how emotion, how all kinds of distinct emotions circulated within those autonomous spaces.
- [52:08]
C
Wow, thank you so much for that. As a Vietnamese scholar working on also like, kind of like grassroots movement of literature, whatnot, the question of min Tian, as in, in Vietnamese. Yes. It's also very hard to translate into English in a way that, should we call it popular, should we call it folk, like folk songs, folk music, whatnot? So I think it's also an important question to, to ask here, but also in the same wavelength. How do you respond to critiques of your method, Specifically the concern that focusing on emotion risk depolitizing the Chinese revolution or even produces a politics of depoliticization?
- [52:53]
A
Well, that's a really important critique, and I have heard different versions of it many times. And I have to say that to be honest, I've always felt a bit uneasy, if not nervous, about the term depoliticization. It's such a tongue twister here. Not because I don't get what people are trying to say, but because I feel that this kind of term very quickly turns into a rhetorical loop. I mean, you say that I'm depoliticizing the revolution, and then I can say that you are trying to repoliticizing it in the wrong way. And we can just keep going like that forever without reaching any productive result. But then on the other hand, at certain point it really comes down to what we mean by the political. So very often the worry, the concern is that once we start paying attention to those categories, like culture, like emotion, like identity, then the concern is that we are moving away from more classical political concerns or political terminologies like climate, like institution, power, the state, or political economy. But that's not my intention at all. I'm not trying to dilute politics or sidestep it, if anything, but rather, what I think that I'm trying to do is to complicate how we think about political culture in postmodern China, in particularly so for me, emotion throughout this book, emotion is not outside politics is a kind of subtle yet critical mechanism of political power. I mean, surely if you have read these people's works, these intellectuals work, you know, terms like left wing melancholy or nationalist resentment, or liberal nostalgia, they aren't apolitical feelings, right? I have talked about how these diverse feelings, different emotional responses to Mao's revolution, how they shape political alliances, right? How they energize intellectual debate and how they inform different moral and ethical judgments. So rather than depoliticizing the revolution, I would say that this book shows how Mao's revolution remains politically alive precisely through these emotional forms, right? If we ignore those effective dimensions, we risk missing why these debates are still intense and why the Mao era refuses to go away. And I mean, if we just look around us, right, look at the rise of populism across the world, and especially at scholarships like Hawk's Child, who is trying to analyze the emotional politics of the right wing populism, it is clear that this kind of scholarship is not about depoliticizing American politics, but about understanding the psychic life of political power.
- [55:43]
C
Thank you so much for this. Sadly, we're running out of time. But before we conclude and hopefully inspire our listeners to rush out and read your book, may I ask what comes next for you after Sentimental Republic and what are you working on now?
- [56:00]
A
Well, so my second project will be about cynicism, or in Chinese translation, it's called In Modern Chinese History. It is tentatively titled. I mean, I change my titles all the time, but for now, until yesterday, it is tentatively titled as how to Be a Sin, Cynic, Satire and the Art of writing in 20th century China. We know that there are many definitions of cynicism, and I try to define cynicism in this project as a kind of suspicious, as a kind of skeptical mindset. As a cynic, you are always trying to question grand ideals while moving along the world with cruel detachment and sometimes even a sense of irony or a satirical attitude toward the authority. I have been increasingly drawn to the topic because I have this strange feeling, ever since the pandemic that we are living in a cynical age, an era where lofty ideals from left to right are met last with inspiration than with raised eyebrows. So real question for me is we must ask ourselves, is cynicism purely negative? Right. How does it actually work and what can it promise? Why different people, different intellectuals and politics. Politicians are drawn to this suspicious mindset throughout modern 20th century. So in this new book project, I try to think about cynicism not simply as a conformist mentality or as a kind of political theory or passive resignation, but as something more subtle and fluid, something like, I can think of micro resistance, think about the theory of the art of not being governed, or even a form of cheeky insubordination in dark times. So basically, the key question that drives me is that is it possible to think about resistance through all kinds of cynical forms? And I'm approaching this project through the lens of literature, especially the lens of satirical literature, by trying to look at the different literary forms and figures to trace a genealogy of the racism in modern modern China all the way from Luxun. My hope is that I can choose a distinct literary genealogy of cynicism all the way from Lu Xun to Wang Xiaobo, because I'm especially interested in what we can learn from the 20th century trajectory of modern Chinese literature, the lens of satirical literature, by looking at how these satirical voices might help us think through our present moment, our current political crisis, and this broader sense of disillusionment or loss of faith. So that's my plan for now.
- [58:53]
C
Thank you so much. That sounds so exciting. Thank you so much for joining me today. I've been speaking with Hang Tu about his first monograph, Sentimental Chinese Intellectuals in the Maoist Past. A truly wonderful resource for students, scholars, scholars, and anyone interested in modern Chinese culture and intellectual history. The book was published by the Harvard University asia Center in 2025. Thank you all for listening.
- [59:23]
A
Thank you.
- [59:37]
D
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- [60:04]
A
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