Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture by Andrews F. Jones

Abstract

Reviewed by: Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture by Andrews F. Jones Nicole Kwoh (bio) Jones, Andrews F. Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011. 259 pp. $49.95 (cloth). At the 1996 APEC Economic Leaders Meeting, Jiang Zemin concluded his speech on economic development with a quote from Lu Xun: "For actually the earth had no road to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made" (1921). This quote highlights the important role played by the first generation of modern Chinese literature in shaping the current rhetoric of building a road to progress. In Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture, Andrew F. Jones explains the construction of this ubiquitous concept of cultural and historical progress. With a focus on Lu Xun (1881-1936), Jones broadens the influence of evolutionary theory beyond short stories and essays to include narratives of "everyday discourse" (p. 8), and skillfully pieces together widely circulated academic journals, film, print advertisements, and children's literature of the Republican Era. Jones's fresh interdisciplinary approach sheds light on the extent to which artistic and political reverberations of developmental social theory shaped modern Chinese culture, with the crucial help of the contemporary growth of print culture, Western science, and commercial media. The five chapters of the book are organized to show the broadening of developmental theory's impact on literature, politics, and economy. Jones links vernacular developmental narrative forms with Late Victorian "science fiction" (p. 48), in particular that of Edward Bellamy and Jules Verne. Their works, Jones explains, explore evolutionary social theory by questioning the relationship between a "backward" reality and a utopian destination, a narrative that came to be appropriated by Lu Xun and fellow participants in experimental fiction such as Wu Jianren, author of The New Story of the Stone (1908). Jones shows that this narrative structure often also worked as a framing device in which plots and characters come full circle, inevitably ending where they had started despite their efforts. In their journey, the final part of a chain of events is presented both as an avoidable crisis and an inevitable natural process. The opening line from Lu Xun's "The Misanthrope" (1925) illustrates this circularity in its stark declaration: "My acquaintance with Wei Lianshu began with a funeral, and ended with a funeral." Jones keenly argues that the politicization of these developmental narratives was grounded in the tenet that literary creation has the ability to influence the historical path of the nation. Chinese nationalist intellectuals perceived a decline in China's sovereignty in the face of increasing reliance on goods and technology imported from the West, foreign political control, and a fractured central government. China's powerlessness in attaining modern nation-state status in the imperialist world order came to be viewed by Lu Xun and his contemporaries as a consequence of an inherited cultural tradition that appeared inexorable, but from which a rupture was needed if ever China was to overcome a stalled modernity. Jones subscribes to the prevailing view that developmental theories informed nationalist intellectuals, who believed it was their responsibility to take the lead in awakening the nation to action (or, at least, to its predetermined condition) and, consequently, turned to vernacular fiction as an instrument of social change. Significantly, Jones comes to the provocative conclusion that this developmental narrative was understood not merely as a parable to convey tensions emerging from a desire for agency against Western imperialism and from a need to confront an inevitable modernization. It also, in itself, served as an "act" that re-captured historical agency from the steady pace of the evolutionary view of human history. The author's insightful examination of literature, film, and artwork reveals that these narrative acts converged on the recurrent use of the image of a captive animal or child receiving education in his or her formative years, a scene in which the shape of the child's future is reliant on adult intervention. Indeed, posits Jones, the child or beast, as determiner of the nation's future and embodiment of the consequences of both "nature and nurture," becomes the...