The Making of a Public: Emotions and Media Sensation in 1930s China

Abstract

The Making of a Public: Emotions and Media Sensation in 1930s China by Eugenia Lean After assassin Shi Jianqiao killed Sun Chuanfang to avenge the death of Shi Congbin, her father, a national sensation ensued and a sense of justice gladdened the hearts of the.people; theaters in each locale competed to perform the tale of the avenging daughter and the force of the people'ssentiment was truly great.l On 13 November 1935,Shi Jianqiaoentered the Qingxiu lay-Buddhist monastery in Tianjin, positioned herself behind ex-military leader Sun Chuanfang, her sworn enemy, and shot him three times. As the place of worship quickly descended into chaos and terror,· the female assassin maintained her cool and triumphantly declared, "I have avenged the murder of my father. Do not fear, I won't hurt anyone else, nor will I run away." In the days, weeks, and months after the assassination, Shi's. extraordinary act of revenge became the focus of intense media interest. The protracted courtroom trial as well as the eventual Guomindang [GMD] state pardon continued to generate headline-making news for over a year. The affair was so sensational that theaters fought over performing dramatic renditions of the Case of Shi Jianqiao, the media scrambled to publish serialized fiction inspired by the event, and the radio broadcast sung performances about the affair. But what was perhaps most notable about the case was, as the above observer states, its ability to "gladden people's hearts" and give· rise to the great force of the "people's sentiment." In this article, I examine this high-profile case to explore the rise of "public sympathy" (tongqing), an unprecedented political and moral authority in the early twentieth century. The "public sympathy" so evident in the case of Shi Jianqiao was not the first conceptualization of "public" in modem China. Reformers at the end of the Qing dynasty such as Liang Qichao had already begun avidly to promote the notion of "public opinion" (yulun), a concept that was adapted fromWestem political discourses and transferred to China as a neologism from Japan. Liang and others had advocated using the term as the basis. of imperial reform and modemization.2 Like this late Qing conceptualization of a new collective, "public sympathy" was, largue, an "imagined authority," to borrow a term coined by Keith Baker in his discussion of the pre-revolutionary French notion of I'opinion Twentieth ..Century China, Vol. 29, No. 2 (April, 2004): 39-61 40 Twentieth-Century China publique.3 Furthermore, as an "imagined authority," collective sentiment in the 1930s, like its predecessor, was perceived to function as a tribunal of sorts against which the caprices of officialdom were tried. Yet, while similarities exist, the two conceptualizations were fundamentally different in important ways. The earlier notion of "public opinion" embodied reason and progress, and arose in the pages of a new reformist press. Late Qing intellectuals were promoters of the concept and expressed enthusiasm about the possibility that the opinion of the people could serve as an effective antidote to the ebbing power of the Qing state. In contrast, the later concept of "public sympathy" was explicitly grounded in the emotions of the people and was formed through the consumption of media sensation. Further, whereas late Qing intellectuals promoted "public opinion," left-leaning critics of the 1930s, who were highly suspicious of the rise of a mass public, vociferously lamented mass sentiment as feminine, emotional and mired in superstition. The importance of media spectacle and emotions in the making of publics will allow us to rethink some issues about how the modem China field has approached the study of critical urban publics. The earliest debates on the matter narrowly centered on either promoting or refuting the possibility of finding something similar to Jurgen Habermas' s notion of the bourgeois public sphere in the Chinese experience.4 More recently, however, scholars have shifted from the highly charged teleological question of whether an actual "public sphere" existed in modem China toward a more reasoned inquiry into the historically specific configurations of Chinese "publics" in late imperial and twentieth-century China. To this end, they are concerned with understanding how the rise of new urban...