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Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945–1965

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 79; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00267929-7103488

1527-1943

Richard King,

Japanese History and Culture

Chinese cosmopolitanism has been the topic of two recent collections of essays. Mingliu Hu and Joan Everskog’s Cosmopolitanism in China, 1600–1950 (2016) presents the efforts of thinkers from the Qing Dynasty and the Republican period to understand their nation and its culture in a regional context; Christopher Rea’s China’s Literary Cosmopolitans (2015) focuses on two outstanding Western-educated scholar-authors, Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu, a wife-and-husband team variously lionized and ostracized in the turbulence of the twentieth century. There were, of course, multiple Chinese cosmopolitanisms, complementing and competing by turns; the aging Qing elite felt allied to the largely Confucian world of their East Asian neighbors, while the post–World War I modernists of the May Fourth movement rejected that tradition and more often found inspiration in a world centered on London, Paris, or New York. While both groups might fit with the definition of being at home in the world, the worlds involved were very different.Nicolai Volland’s Socialist Cosmopolitanism adds a later cosmopolitanism, this one led from Moscow and, initially at least, “personified by the towering figure of Stalin” (22), adhering to a Cold War hostility to European colonialism and US hegemony and assiduously managed by member states as a component of foreign policy. Much as many of the May Fourth generation tried to adapt to the new government’s inclination toward Moscow, their long-standing cosmopolitanism did not always fit comfortably in the new regime and in fact later became untenable.Preeminent in China only between the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 and the Sino-Soviet estrangement in the late 1950s, socialist cosmopolitanism nevertheless molded Chinese culture in its day and still influences the arts and the media. Volland addresses the socialist “literary universe” (15) of both original and translated Chinese texts in their transnational context.Six chapters explore different aspects of this literary universe: the organization of culture and the establishment of official channels for the circulation of literary celebrities and translated texts (chap. 1); the integration of the Chinese fiction of rural land reform (chap. 2) and industrial development (chap. 3) into the wider socialist imaginary; the reception and indigenization of Soviet science fiction (chap. 4) and youth fiction (chap. 5); and the dissemination of world literature to Chinese readers (chap. 6). Each of the first four chapters features a Chinese contributor to the genre in question: Feng Zhi, globe-trotting poet, translator, and cultural ambassador; Zhou Libo, translator of Mikhail Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned and author of The Hurricane, an account of the land reform campaign in northeastern China that won the Stalin Prize for 1951; Cao Ming, who aestheticized industry and glamorized the working class in her factory novels; and the astronomer turned science fiction writer Zheng Wenguang, whose young heroes visit and then colonize Mars. The fifth chapter looks at the translations into Chinese of the best-selling Soviet young adult novel, Lyubov Kosmodemianskaia’s Story of Zoya and Shura, and the changed emphasis for the new target audience. The sixth chapter reads the journal Translation, later World Literature, the most broadly cosmopolitan project under consideration here, which introduced Chinese readers to writers from the Soviet Union, other socialist nations, and countries of the Third World, as well as works from approved progressive writers in the First World.The grand project of socialist culture was the production of citizens inspired by the rise of their nation to emulate the sacrifices of the communist liberation and exert themselves in the arduous task of realizing the bright future in store. Those whose reading matter extended beyond national boundaries could see the same developments in other socialist states: readers of The Hurricane could find other accounts of peasants taking control of their land in works from the Soviet Union and North Korea and thereby see China as an integral part of the march of progress. These novels, Volland writes, “form a canon, a layering of voices that merge into a larger whole” (42); the task of Chinese writers was to be distinctly Chinese voices in this polyphony, their familiarity with the big picture enhanced for readers, wherever they might be, by the authenticity of their participation in land reform.As part of its effort to nurture the next generation of socialist subjects, the government paid particular attention to science. Hundreds of Soviet works on science were translated in the early 1950s to help educate children in a modern and rational way of thinking. Two chapters examine associated literary production: science fiction and tales of heroic young people. Science fiction contributed by imagining “a technologically empowered future fueled by a superior morality and ideology” (98). Like his Soviet exemplars, Zheng Wenguang’s science fiction used less political rhetoric than other genres, the popularization of scientific knowledge providing sufficient ideological grounds to ensure the legitimacy of his work. As for tales of heroism, the most interesting case is the most popular work of Soviet children’s fiction in its day (more popular even than Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered), The Story of Zoya and Shura, a tale of Soviet youth who sacrifice themselves to defend their nation from German invasion in World War II. The Chinese versions eliminate the happy childhood under the loving eye of the mother (the narrator of the original novel after her children’s deaths) and downplay the impetuous Shura in favor of his disciplined elder sister: what remains for Chinese youth is the story of Zoya, her exemplary character “no longer the product of parental care, but rather a creation of the party and the socialist system” (148). In China it was to be the great family of the state, not the biological family, that raised citizens.This book is a valuable addition to Western studies of the culture of the early years of the People’s Republic, a list that includes Chang-tai Hung’s Mao’s New World (2011) and Krista van Fleit Hang’s Literature the People Love (2013). Volland’s contribution demonstrates the international dimension of Chinese culture, in particular the profound influence of the Soviet Union, in this pivotal period.