Introduction

Abstract

At a time of economic woes, the once glowing neon lights and billboards of globalization have all but dimmed across the continents and nations, from Greece to Iceland and to North America, with only a few exceptions. Radiating with vibrancy and resources nowadays are the BRICS, namely, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. In Chinese the acronym is translated as “jin zhuan” (“golden bricks”), evocative of a new mythical constellation replacing the Golden Fleece, a treasure sought by humankind for a millennium, with imaginary ancient Greek origins. There is no metaphorical reference to “gold” intended in the English acronym BRICS, as there is in the Chinese augmentation. However, the irony lies precisely in such an expansion or creative interpretation of the terms and concepts from Greek to Chinese. Torch relays of the Olympic Games, for instance, are a Greek ritual reinvented as a modern congregation of nations and peoples in the name of gaming spirits and festivity. In China, the concept was renamed as “sheng huo” (“sacred fire”). And in the Beijing 2008 Olympics, the “sacred fire” was magically transported into one of the five eternal elements of cosmos, that is, gold, wood, water, fire, and earth, which would bring infinite blessing to the revitalized Central Kingdom. Accordingly, China showcased its strength and pride through the global torch relays from Paris to London, San Francisco, Jakarta, Seoul, and Pyongyang. Although the Olympiad-Beijing sacred fire was more than once blasphemed and disrupted in Paris and London and other cities like them, this very reaction signals the unstoppable global emergence of the new cultural icon of a rising China.In the Western hard-core social sciences and popular media, discussions about the rise of China mainly focus on its effects on the existing world order, established by the West during the industrial revolution and reaffirmed by the two world wars and the end of the cold war. With the fall of the communist Soviet empire, the end of history was declared by American neoconservatives. And yet the rise of China again casts doubts on the euphoria of Western triumphalism. Is China a revisionist state that will inevitably challenge and collide with the status quo states? Will China repeat the pattern of aggressive Western imperialism and colonialism in its global expansion? What happens when China rules the world (Martin Jacques)?1 Will a “Beijing Consensus” (the authoritarian monopoly) replace the Washington Consensus (free market economy) (Joshua Cooper Ramo) as the new world order?2 There is no lack of Chinese nationalist articulations of a “China model” or newer, updated official versions of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” to fuel the hubris of China's superpower status.The fluent Mandarin-speaking Jon Huntsman, former U.S. ambassador to China, has stated that the United States unfortunately has no shared values with the Chinese Communist Party or the government but that it “must deal with China from a position of strength.”3 The last but not the least of these strengths Huntsman lists is “values”: “We have an opportunity to shape outcomes by living up to our ideals and demonstrating we are worthy of the region's admiration and emulation. This approach will not only be consistent with the aspirations of many in China, but it will also leave the door open for a truly strong U.S.-China relationship based on shared values—should leaders in the Communist Party eventually embrace liberal reforms.”Huntsman articulates a deep-seated apprehension about “the lack of shared values” between China and the West. However, as a politician addressing the public, he grossly simplifies the issue by partitioning the Chinese people from the state and demanding explicitly that China embrace Western values. While China's and the United States' soft power in the new round of global competition is being scrutinized from both sides, the mythical, metaphorical, ideological, and, indeed, philosophical roots underlying all the distrust toward, misunderstanding of, and anxiety over China remain yet to be explored. Granted, Sinologists, China specialists, and comparative literature scholars in the West as well as humanists in the East continue to produce a great deal of insightful research on the subject of values and humanistic foundations. Humanists, such as the authors in this special issue of Comparative Literature Studies and contributors to the journal in general, however, would probably feel a bit reluctant to relate their ruminations on symbolism, metaphors, imageries, figures, tropes, poetic and filmic nuances to what political scientists would call the realpolitiks that define soft power and shared values that bilateral or multilateral relationships typically tend to address.In a casual conversation with my Duke colleague Claire Conceison, a specialist in modern Chinese drama, we discussed the problem of values, both universal values and Chinese values. We specifically talked about the problem of exceptionalism. While American exceptionalism is now almost a cliché and oftentimes an accepted norm, outlined by Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic Democracy in America (1835) elaborated on numerous times since by others, Seymour Martin Lipset's account of an emergent modern Chinese exceptionalism, different from the traditional Sino-centrism, has thus far not received serious thinking.4 Philosophically speaking, Conceison suggested brilliantly, both China and the United States consider themselves to be “destined,” but China in addition also regards itself as the “origin.” The Chinese belief that their culture is not only one of the oldest and most enduring civilizations and origins but also an inclusive, all-embracing, most adaptable grid or interface, amalgamating diverse cultures from across the world, is reflected in everything from the traditional notion of tian xia (under the heaven) to the contemporary promotion of the “harmonious society” and he er bu tong (harmony but not sameness) by the current Chinese leadership.It is arguable that the achievements of China's gaike kaifang (reform and opening up) over the last three decades owe much more to the kaifang (opening up) than to the demands for gaige (reform) from within. China not only opened its market and economy; it also once again opened its mind and heart to the world, after about a three-decade-long interregnum of forced closing off. Modern China's birth during the Opium War of 1840 was a rather traumatic process of humiliation and forced opening up—a series of treaties turned China into a semicolony, with Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau colonized and Shanghai, Guangzhou (Canton), and Tianjin partitioned into “concessions” or virtual Western colonies and the Chinese-ruled zones. The entire history of modern China, or its passage to modernity, is in a nutshell a struggle between a proud empire or ancient civilization and the external pressures called the maelstrom of modernity. The scenario is not exceptional to China, though, as India, Egypt, and other ancient civilizations fell prey one after another to the formidable maelstrom by which all that is solid melts into air.The literary metaphors and figures that Marshall Berman invokes in All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1983) to expose the self-destructive process of modernity are Goethe's Faust, Marx's political writings, Baudelaire's poetry, and Dostoevsky's novels, among others. By Berman's account, the spiritual journey of Western modernity started with insatiable Faustian desires and greed and then was followed by the desperation and angst derived from the premonition of the inevitable destiny of fall, shared among the modernist thinkers and writers that Berman cites. The most striking metaphor for modern China's modernity, on the other hand, is perhaps Lu Xun's “iron house,” which he develops in the preface to his short story collection Call to Arms (1922). In Lu Xun's view, China is “an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation.”5 Lu Xun then poses the quintessential modernist dilemma: “But you know since they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you cry aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good turn?”6It seems that much of modern and contemporary Chinese literature try to respond to Lu Xun's overarching anxiety about wrestling with the destiny of China. What good will we do by forcing open the iron house? By what means can we open it? After we open it, where shall the people go? Lu Xun's skepticism does not stop at the uncertainty over whether or not revolution itself (forcing open the iron house) will do any good; he asks over and again what to do in the wake of liberation (see, for example, the 1923 “After Nora Walks Out, What Then?”). After liberation, will women and men be better off? “The most painful thing in life is to wake up from a dream and have nowhere to go. People who dream are in bliss. So unless you can see a way out for these dreamers, it is important not to wake them up.” And “Artsybashev once used his novel to question those idealists who dreamt of building a golden world of opportunity, who encouraged others to suffer in the pursuit of this cause. So I believe that if there is no way out, then what we need is a dream—not a dream of the future, but a dream in the present.” He concludes with a bitter sarcasm: “Dreams are fine; otherwise money is essential.”7For Lu Xun at least, opening up China does not fulfill its destiny or ensure a golden world. Nor does it resolve the question of origin. Lu Xun was brought up at the time of China's painful transition from a traditional empire to a modern nation-state, and his generation of Chinese intellectuals turned out to be the most radical iconoclastic critics of traditional Chinese values. Their mindset parallels their Western modernist counterparts in terms of pessimism and skepticism over destiny and origin, despite the fact that Chinese intellectuals from the late nineteenth century on by and large opted for the more progressive kind of Western Enlightenment that idealizes reason, science and democracy. Nearly a hundred years have passed, and now Lu Xun's sometimes enigmatic, tongue-in-cheek aphorisms like “otherwise money is essential” have proven to be quite prophetic. Inasmuch as China's sudden upsurge in self-confidence and the accompanying anxiety are derived largely from China's phenomenal economic growth and its newly gained status as the second largest economy in the world, the philosophical problem of destiny and origin, and ultimately the question of values, can be postponed and substituted by pragmatic interests, either political or economic.However, the emergent Chinese exceptionalism will have to grapple with the philosophical problem of destiny, origin, and values. For American exceptionalism, the origin is Western civilization from Greek antiquity to the modern European Enlightenment, along with the modern ideas of republicanism, freedom, and individualism. Its deep Puritan roots, or what Max Weber terms the “protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism,” played no small role in shaping the American sense of manifest destiny, as first described by John L. O'Sullivan in 1845 during the period of rapid American expansion. In the popular realm, American exceptionalism has several versions: first, America is a melting pot, a conglomeration of all cultures and human inventions. In the more updated version, American values are based on a cultural diversity that constantly creates synergy among the best of all human imaginations.When it comes to China, however, the passage to modernity first means the disruption, if not total destruction, of its age-old civilization and its proud sense of both its origins and destiny, the mandate of heaven or the harmony of nature and humankind. If destiny in China is more synonymous to “destination” or a terminal place, a hub, or interface where all cultures congregate and integrate, as the current Chinese leadership clearly proposes, then it simply skips the real question of on what ground all the cultures can merge and harmonize. To put it differently, the question is what the values are by which harmony of all cultures can be achieved. If these are not universal values, then what are the Chinese values? A series of questions arise. How can such Chinese values be reconciled with, if not altogether made congruent to, the so-called universalism or universal values and principles, as spelled out in such documents as the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Bill of Rights (as the core of the U.S. Constitution), and so forth, and become as widely recognized and accepted in most parts of the world now? Specifically, how do Chinese values, the very core of the Chinese soft power, respond to the multiparty electoral democracy as the preferred political system, the free market economy, individualism and the middle class as social foundation, and cultural diversity and pluralism, the fundamentals of modern world? Will Marxism and socialism, let alone communism, still be a viable alternative in the eyes of the Chinese to this Western-dominated, modern system of global capitalism? In what sense is the “Chinese model,” if there is such a thing, different from the existing or nonexistent systems or models in the modern world, from Western democracy to East Asian autocracy and other kinds of capitalism?Of course, we cannot find answers to these complex questions in the literary works that this special issue tries to analyze. However, literary and cultural texts and their interpretations tend to address issues of human sensibilities, lifestyles, aspirations, and dreams, and we can thus look for clues and insights into the philosophical problems of origin, destiny, and values. We name this special issue “Modern China and the World: Literary Constructions.” We certainly do not mean that modern China and the world are merely “literary constructions,” but we do emphasize that the constructedness of the ideas and concepts of “modern China” and the “modern world” are inseparable and indispensable parts of the history and reality of China and the world. The articles in this issue address a wide variety of issues concerning modern and contemporary Chinese literature from comparative perspectives, situating them in the global context that Wang Ning's “Chinese Literary and Cultural Trends in a Postrevolutionary Era” spells out eloquently. He discusses the theoretical frameworks of postmodernity, postmodernism, postcolonialism, globalization, glocalization, and translation of Chinese literature as various ways of coming to terms with China's current cultural conditions and its orientation, mostly drawing on concepts and ideas from the West. These concepts and ideas apparently testify to the degree of kaifang or openness that China allows, thus making the nation an interface for the spread of ideas and cultures, whether they are theoretical or pragmatic. In the end, he raises the issue of Chinese scholars speaking on international forums and contributing to international humanities and social sciences, voicing a strong hope for the future so long as more translations are produced and given our ability to appeal to a shared language (English) of communication, if not quite shared values.Tonglin Lu's essay zeros in on the story of a translator, Zhu Shenghao, who dedicated his life to translating Shakespeare's plays during one of China's most tumultuous periods. The translation itself by Tonglin's account makes Zhu himself a Shakespearean tragic hero in wartime China, a living embodiment and, indeed, a cultural martyr for taking on the task of translating and disseminating the humanistic values from Shakespeare's plays to the war-stricken Chinese people. Tonglin's poetic and romantic eulogy to Zhu Shenghao as a “brilliant shining star” illuminating the sky of world literature in China shows translation as empowering shared humanity and shared values. In her essay on internet literature in China, Jing Chen highlights how new communication technologies popularize world literature and make translation and communication easier. As a result, China is now more connected than ever to world cultures, particularly popular culture.Despite the translation and popularization of world literature and cultures, the serious question of China's own sense of origin and destiny remains. In light of this, Chengzhou He's essay tries to tackle the issue of “Chineseness” through an analysis of Puccini's opera Turandot and its “homecoming” trip to China as an exemplary case of complex cultural transaction and translation. His reading of Chinese adaptations of Puccini's opera about Chinese lovers finds that Chineseness is actually “situated in the global-local nexus.” Xiaoping Wang picks up the work of legendary writer Eileen Chang, examining her “cross-cultural writing and rewriting (or appropriation)” of Eugene O'Neill's (1888–1953) imagery of the Magna Mater in Love in a Fallen City. Wang argues that the theme of the novella reveals a profound matrimonial anxiety in a besieged city and shows how individualism as a modern Western value clashes with Chinese social reality. When Eileen Chang wrote the novella in 1943's Japanese-occupied Shanghai, she could not have had any idea of the extravagant wedding of Western and Chinese cultures in the “global-local nexus” that Puccini's opera would come to enjoy in China (and of course Eileen Chang's own works began receiving the most honor they'd ever received starting in the 1990s). It's not surprising that nihilism and pessimism thus pervaded Eileen Chang's cross-cultural writings.In “A Voice Silenced and Heard: Negotiations and Transactions Across Boundaries in Ling Shuhua's English Memoirs,” Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang analyzes Lin Shuhua's literary writings from the 1920s and 1930s, particularly her memoirs written in English, Ancient Melodies. Zhang's reading reveals the author's feminine self-consciousness and cosmopolitanism, nurtured in a Western cultural context. Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai looks at cross-cultural writing from another angle in “Gary Snyder: Translator and Cultural Mediator Between China and the World” by examining Snyder's poetry and prose, which according to Tsai “are not limited to a particular national boundary.” According to Tsai, Snyder is a “transcultural ecopoet,” a “syncretist who combines different cultural and geographic origins that include the Americas, Japan, India, mainland China, and Taiwan in order to generate a new world ecopoetics.”The articles in this issue address the entanglement of modern China and the West (that is, the world) in various literary representations and texts, from theory to the new media, from translations, adaptations, and readaptations to the cross-cultural writings of Chinese women writers and American poets and concludes with an afterword by Marshall Brown, an American scholar of English and European literature. In fact, most contributors to this issue, including myself, majored in English, American, or French literature in Chinese universities during the gaige kaifang era. And our writings are truly cross-cultural, offering certain self-reflections on the nature of kaifang/openness, which may or may not shed light on the larger questions raised by this introduction. Hopefully, the forced opening or crashing of the iron house, to return to Lu Xun's metaphor, will at least invite some fresh air, empowering us in our search for truly shared values of humanity while preventing monolithic views of divine destiny or origin from prevailing.