‘Loving nation’ and ‘subjugated nation’: Popular narratives of the nation in early twentieth-century Shanghai

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the nationalist discourse in Shanghai popular print media during the late Qing and the early Republican period, focusing on the literary representation and imagination of ‘loving nation’ (aiguo) and ‘subjugated nation’ (wangguo) in popular fiction. It discusses the popular nationalism through ‘patriotic stories’ (aiguo xiaoshuo), a fiction genre promoted by Shanghai popular media in the 1910s, which, on the one hand, responded to the external plights of the newly established Republic of China, while on the other shaped the popular imagination of a new national identity and modern nation state. I argue that ‘patriotic stories’ contributed to this national imaginary through a discovery of sentimentality, female emotionality and an increasing fancy of the ‘other’, while simultaneously producing the competing narratives of romantic love and patriotic feelings, and private and public realms. This sentimental narrative was also inextricably interwoven with the narratives of trauma and humiliation, and an imagination of wangguo in popular fiction. Viewing patriotism as a cultural production constructed through memory, imagination and reinterpretation, I suggest that the popular imagination of nation generated a hybrid and uniquely powerful mode of nationalistic narrative, one conjoining sentimentalism, patriotism and commercial interests in early twentieth-century China.