Revolution Remains: Literature, Thought, and the Politics of Emotion in Reform China

Abstract

This dissertation explores how the “remains” of communist revolution—as literary practice, mediated memory, and political imaginary—have profoundly shaped China’s cultural and intellectual transformations from the late seventies to the twentieth-first century. It draws attention to a largely neglected feature of contemporary Chinese intellectual dynamics: the emotional excess that underpinned Chinese discussion and memory of the Mao era. China’s capitalist transition did not turn away from revolutionary sentiments. Rather, this period experienced a surge of emotionally charged debates about red legacies, from the anguished denunciations of Maoist violence to the elegiac remembrances of socialist egalitarianism. At the core of my study is a broad assortment of intellectuals—liberal, leftist, conservative and nationalist—who participated in acrimonious struggles about the meaning of the past. Should the Chinese condemn revolutionary violence and “bid farewell to socialism”? Or would the return of revolution foster alternative visions of China’s future path? My research probes the nexus of literature, thought, and memory, bringing to light the dynamic moral sentiments and emotional excess that structured intellectual discussions and literary representations of the Mao era. By analyzing how rival memory projects stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, I argue that the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading for the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia. Instead of isolating literary texts and political ideas from the lived experience of their authors, this dissertation reveals how affect, rather than calm rationality, has strongly influenced contemporary interpretations of the past. Drawing on genres ranging across fiction, poetry, biography, film, and intellectual discourse, I examine the volatile political emotions explicitly manifested or implicitly at work in post-Mao ideological contentions. While persecution and exile have fueled liberal indignation against the “atrocities” of the Cultural Revolution since the 1980s, the growing grievance at market reforms has nourished a lingering melancholy for the unrealized ideals of socialism in the post-Tiananmen era. Meanwhile, the conservative resentment against “modern nihilism” grew into a religious yearning for the return of the Maoist sublime at the turn of the millennium. The fusion of emotion and political vision in these competing discourses resulted in aesthetically and affectively appealing, if at times anachronistic and controversial, appropriations of the past for radically different future visions. The intricate connection between ideals and feelings reveals how the post-Mao generation harked back not only to the May Fourth sentimentalism, but also to the ancient poetics of wen (文) that imbued literature with moral, affective, and emotional connotations.