Hang Tu. Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past. Harvard East Asian Monograph Series. Harvard University Press, 2025. 326 pp. Hardcover $52.95
In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu reframes the complex intellectual and political landscape of the post-Mao decades, shifting emphasis away from what he describes as “ideological” positions and focusing instead on the role of emotions. He asks, “How does emotion—as a constellation of affective intensities, moral sentiments, and political judgments—factor in the post-Mao political debates about China’s revolutionary past?” (3) Tu argues that, “By analyzing how rival memory projects stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading for the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia.” (8)
The book attempts to answer why “emotion” is a good entry into this material. Each of the five chapters is devoted to a set of intellectual/literary figures of the post-Mao era as well as a corresponding set of emotional attachments and sentimental approaches to the Maoist past. Tu moves from Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu’s differing conceptions of enlightened emotions, one based on pleasure the other on guilt (Chapter 1), to the elevation of the scholar Chen Yinke into a liberal martyr and a symbol of scholarship against politics (Chapter 2). Leftist melancholia is the topic of chapter 3, examined through the connection between Taiwanese writer Chen Yingzhen and Shanghai novelist Wang Anyi. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to the “right” of the political spectrum and focus on conservative thinker Liu Xiaofeng and the neo-nationalists of the China Can Say No phenomenon.
Tu starts by postulating that previous scholarship has viewed the intellectual and political articulations of the post-1978 era as produced solely by “rational deliberation” or logically embraced political ideologies. That, in turn, has produced an artificial separation between the rational and the emotional, and reduced the debates of the 1980s and 1990s to “stark polarities: liberty versus equality, modern versus anti-modern, and forgetting versus remembering.” (13) Against this backdrop of hyper-rationality, Tu proposes instead to analyze those various -isms not solely as the product of rational deliberation, “but also as sensorial, affective, and emotive utterances deeply informed by personal desires, shared feelings, and moral sentiments,” (15) in particular the feelings connected to the legacy and the memory of the Maoist revolutionary past.
This emotional-rational dichotomy is largely a straw man. Few scholars frame political positions as simply the result of “rational deliberation” or the appeal of political ideology simply in terms of logical choice. Even less is this true for the post-Mao period, where the emotional legacy of the past has loomed very large and of course has contributed to the political choices actors make. So why does Tu need this false dichotomy? Postulating a fake dichotomy between reason and emotion, ideology and feelings, Tu successfully removes politics – as collective practice, shared experience, and communal ideation – from the post 1978 debates. He thus successfully depoliticizes not only the post-Mao era but the Maoist revolution itself. If mass politics is the site of irrational passion, depoliticizing allows historical actors to be rationally emotional without being political. And in that, Tu’s re-proposition of the emotion-rational dichotomy reprises its long and fraught history in Cold War orientalism, when it was deployed to separate the logical, democratic, appropriately thoughtful West and the irrational, emotional, and unruly East.
As Tu states, throughout the book, “Mao’s revolution” serves as “a generic term to designate a constellation of sociopolitical events, values, and memories” (4). Maoism is described as a quasi-religion, as brainwashing, as trauma, and Tu also repeatedly mentions something called the “Maoist sublime,” without ever explaining what that might have been. This is a way to erase the complex historical experience of the Chinese revolution and to empty that experience of any political significance. This is most evident in the first chapter on Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, who famously and explicitly bid “farewell to revolution.” Tu uncritically espouses Li’s concept of “the double bind of enlightenment and national salvation” (30) and accepts the completely ahistorical view that connects May Fourth iconoclasts to the children of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, who “both sought a ‘cultural-intellectualistic approach’ to political ills, fueled by ‘obsession with youth’ and “destruction of the past.” (47-48). The decades-long Chinese revolution is flattened by erasing any historical difference (1919 becomes 1966) and by reducing politics to irrational youthful emotions and destructive feelings.
Tu actively embraces Li’s politics of depoliticization, even when he cites the Chinese New Left’s criticism of Li and Liu’s thesis “as a thinly disguised neoliberal schema to ‘depoliticize’ radical thinking and legitimatize ‘end-of-history’ liberal triumphalism.” (47) Interestingly for a book about the debates of the post-Mao era, the New Left is left to haunt the books as a specter, appearing here and there, usually as a critical voice, only to be dismissed and banished to oblivion. Indeed, any direct engagement with the Chinese New Left would require taking the politics of the Maoist revolution seriously as politics, and not only as memory, trauma, or emotional attachments.
Does Hang Tu consciously adopt the politics of depoliticization and Sentimental Republic? I cannot say. But with the excuse of recovering an emotional dimension to post-Mao China that nobody actually has ever denied, Tu effectively flattens historical complexities into a story about the passions of a few individuals. To be clear, there is nothing wrong in an approach that centers affects and emotions, and there are excellent histories of emotions; here however, this approach serves mainly to produce a simplified and depoliticized depiction and to reduce profound political and intellectual differences to emotive responses. It’s all about the vibes.
In addition to the flaws in the main argument and analysis, I also want to highlight a glaring omission: Tu does analyze the work of one female writer, Wang Anyi, but he does so only through her relationship with Chen Yingzhen. That relationship developed after their participation in the 1983 Iowa writing program. Curiously, nowhere in the book does Tu mention that Wang went to Iowa with her mother, Ru Zhijuan, an important writer and editor in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s; nor does he mention that Wang and Ru wrote a memoir together about that trip. In a book ostensibly about the political memory of the Mao period, this critically relevant source is never mentioned. Instead, Wang Anyi’s approach to the revolutionary past is refracted through her relationship with the (male) Taiwanese leftist, Chen Yingzhen.[1] To be sure, this was a crucially influential relationship, but Wang and Ru’s own words, which are available, are absent. The silence about Wang and Ru is quite significant, especially in what is already a male-centered book.[2]
This review was originally commissioned by Twentieth-Century China, but it was rejected (in a slightly different version) as too harsh and straining “the bounds of collegiality.”
Notes
[1] Carlos Rojas, “Mothers and Daughters: Orphanage as Method,” Chinese Literature Today, Volume 6 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2017.1375283
[2] Tu’s evident neglect of gender issues is on display again, for example, on p. 3, where he labels the speech of the famously emotional Chai Ling on the eve of the June Fourth massacre as “hysterical.”
5 Replies to “Fabio Lanza reviews Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past”
Fascinating on many fronts. (1). Lanza is not more zealous in his criticism of Tu’s formula than other colleagues and comrades have been, particularly as regards Li and Liu; (2) it is widely accepted that depoliticization is central to the eighties so Tu not remarking on it and peripheralizing the New Left is noteworth; (3) the “Maoist sublime” may be a reference to Wang Ban’s actual book (which I interpreted as an autobiography in great part), so why is that not explained in the book; and (4) this review brings out so many fires buring right in front of our faces.
This is a rightfully critical review of a book that deserves to be critiqued. As Tani highlights in her comment, there are many arenas that Tu appears to willfully turn a blind eye to. The crappy gender politics of the book — when will male intellectuals stop marginalizing women who think? — really is telling. And the fact that 20th-century China journal refused to publish the review is so symptomatic of established venues providing protective cover for questionable scholarship.
Thanks Fabio Lanza for this incisive review. I have also been struck from this book and other sectors of opinion that there is a revival under way around Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu – on the one hand in Anglophone scholarship, where they are recast as the foremost modern Chinese philosophers (hence their frequent appearance in journals of comparative philosophy etc, the translation and canonization of their texts), but on the other, and ultimately more importantly, in the ideological and theoretical register of the Chinese state itself. A quick look or search will reveal that Li has, over the past decade, and even preceding his death, basically been elevated into a kind of state philosopher as part of the broader trend of New Confucian revival – in particular, his aesthetic terminology (sedimentation, the humanization of nature, etc) has been re-cast as an aesthetic sensibility that is both humanist in its notion of a forward development through time (which is also the temporality of the reform period, one that permits no revolutionary ruptures) and authentically “Chinese” in the sense of being an expression of an indigenous native aesthetic sensibility that is literally sedimented in a quasi-biological fashion. His vision of the aesthetic subject is male, Han-centric, and the repository of a reactionary Chinese cultural essentialism. What could be more fitting for the current direction of the Chinese state?
All of this is to say that Li Zehou is not and cannot be rescued as a daring humanist, but is rather a state ideologue – and, I would argue, his thought has always lent itself to this position. I mention this also because one of the most striking and unfortunate elements of Tu’s book, apart from those mentioned, is a certain mode of “free indirect style” – and by this I mean the fact that, even when he is not directly quoting or even paraphrasing Li, his entire vocabulary and even “style,” which is to say his own voice as a writer, is so dependent on Li’s theoretical edifice. So of course the book cannot admit any feminist voices – they are excluded from the book at the outset, because they quite literally cannot be reconciled with the voice that determines the whole ideological register of the book.
Thanks to Comrade Fabio Lanza for igniting the fire! This is justice from the left! And yet, the book fails to acknowledge how Black Lives Matter, Pacific Islanders, and diverse minority intellectuals have fundamentally reshaped the trajectory of Chinese thought. Down with Sino-centrism—rise up, comrades of the left!
As a graduate student working on both modern Chinese literature and gender/sexuality studies, I appreciate the intervention of senior China historians like Prof. Lanza, Prof. Barlow and Prof. Karl in the scholarly reception of Hang Tu’s book, as well as in the broader field of Anglophone modern Chinese literary studies. Tu’s questionable book is, to some extent, symptomatic and representative of some scholarship that has been produced in our field. I would like to share a relevant case of Mingwei Song here, who came from the same scholarly genealogy as Hang Tu:
In his book “Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction” (Columbia University Press, 2023), Mingwei Song endorses Liu Cixin’s sci-fi trilogy “The Three-Body Problem” as a queer “nonbinary” text, even when feminist and queer communities in and out of China have widely criticized Liu Cixin for his numerous misogynist and gender-essentialist views within and beyond his sci-fi texts: Song writes that “Being a male author does not necessarily mean being androcentric, not even for the ‘manliest man,’ Liu Cixin, adored by SF fans.” (p.290) In fact, no feminist or queer scholar has ever argued that being a male author necessarily means being androcentric: androcentrism is a political position, not a biological identity. Moreover, like Tu’s misreading of theorists of “affect” (the so-called “affect turn”, in fact, has been led by feminist and queer theorists), Song’s book wildly appropriates the socialist-feminist scholar Donna Haraway’s theorization of the “cyborg”— a figure which transcends the gender binary — to support his untenable claim regarding Liu’s purportedly non-androcentric “non-binariness”. Song’s misreading of “A Cyborg Manifesto” drains it of its anti-capitalist and feminist concerns, vulgarizing Haraway’s vision of a post-gender, post-human utopia into a purely technological fantasy, one that’s utterly unrelated to gendered power relations or activist social transformation. This amounts to a double misreading and double distortion of both Liu and Haraway.
Apart from its problematic gender politics, Song’s book is also similar to Tu’s in its attempt to rescue 1980s humanism. Song claims that the posthuman imaginaries in Liu Cixin (and other contemporary Chinese sci-fi) are actually perfectly compatible with 1980s humanism: “one could even say that Liu’s SF is heir to the cultural spirit of the 1980s” (p.127); “Singer’s love song [in ‘Three-Body’] represents the enormous unknown beyond human apprehension, but it is also very human, like a popular love song” (p.289); “the democracy in ‘China 2185’ not only is based on the humanist ideals of the 1980s but also evokes the trans-anthropocentric posthumanism of the twenty-first century” (p.33). Song even dictates that feminist, postcolonial, and posthumanist critics of humanism should not “discard” humanism: “although liberal humanism has been undermined by the posthuman turn as well as dismantled by feminism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism, if there is a certain posthumanism, it should be envisioned as an inclusive, nonbinary, and democratic version that neither discards nor surrenders to humanism.”(p.273) To borrow from “Spring”’s comment regarding Tu’s treatment of Li Zehou, Song valorizes Liu Cixin as a daring humanist despite the fact that Liu is an outspoken state ideologue perfectly in line with China’s patriarchal capitalism today.
In a troubling time when gender/sexuality studies as a field and as an approach is under the attack of state power in both the PRC and the US, it is unfortunate that male-centered scholarship like Tu’s and Song’s can remain largely uncontested in Anglophone China studies. And I’m more than happy to see that the academic community is beginning to address this issue, starting with Prof. Lanza’s review.