Hesitant Empathy: Sun Baoxuan's Diary and Approaches to Reading Fiction in Late Qing China

Abstract

ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH OF 1903, SUN BAOXUAN—A SCHOLAR-OFFICIAL IN LATE QING DYNASTY CHINA—documented in his diary that he had acquired a copy of the periodical 新小說(Xin xiaoshuo;“he New Novel”), founded by Liang Qichao in 1902 to propagate translated fiction and new Chinese fiction. Immediately drawn to the stories and novels it carried, Sun soon concluded that Western fiction had the unique strength of imparting knowledge and expanding rational capacity: 「觀西人政治 小說，可以悟政治原理；觀科學小說，可以通種種格物原理；觀包 探小說，可以覘西國人情土俗及其居心之險詐詭變，有非我國所 能及者」 (“Political novels teach us principles of politics; scientific novels teach us theories of things; detective novels show us Western customs and treachery, which often surpass ours”; 690). Immersed in a culture where vernacular novels had been suppressed by official censorship and prejudice among the elites, Sun ardently embraced translated fiction. By contrast, vernacular Chinese novels, with few exceptions, seemed to him routinely 「陳腐」 (“decadent”), providing no more than 「排遣」 (“diversion and entertainment”; 677, 690) The perceived rationality of Western fiction gave him a sudden license to seriously engage with a genre that the literary culture in China continued to exclude well into the twentieth century. Sun's encounter with foreign fiction marked the early stage of a somewhat bumpy adventure. In later sections of the diary, Sun documents reading sentimental strains of translated fiction and the more ambiguous responses they incited in him.