This paper examines the remapping of libido and capital in Zhu Wen's Nanjing-based stories and discusses their influence from, and innovation against, modernist literary traditions. Drawing upon the theories of Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Henri Lefebvre, and David Harvey, as well as the scholarship on Chinese postsocialism, I contend that, like the Western flâneur whose existence and experience are key to our understanding of both modernity as an empirical experience and modernism as a literary-cultural aesthetic, Zhu's fictional urban wanderers and drifters present a self-reflective response not only to the changing conditions of the postsocialist subject but also to the representational endeavors of the postsocialist writer. In particular, the spatialized manners in which Zhu's wandering characters encounter history and temporality — often facilitated by the locale of Nanjing utilized as an ancient-capital-turned-modern-city and as a provincial capital — reveal the convoluted nature not only of China's urban (post)modernity but also of such attempted artistic “ruptures” by contemporary writers like Zhu Wen.

What insights can be gleaned concerning the aesthetic underpinnings of Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien beyond the long take, long shot, static camerawork, and his affinity for neorealism? This article explores Hou’s departure from language since the turn of the new millennium and its interplay with the modern Chinese lyrical tradition contextualized within the contemporary milieu. The article begins by dissecting Hou’s methods of diminishing language and rendering it unfamiliar. It then addresses the collaboration between Hou and Zhu Tianwen, a Taiwanese writer who serves as a scriptwriter, shedding light on Hou’s postmillennial disengagement from history and preconceived narratives. The accompanying aesthetic strategy of reducing and estranging language, in turn, facilitates a more genuine manifestation of the individual personalities of the actors, empowering them to create fiction. Hou’s method also influenced Zhu’s evolution as a novelist, which is visible in her latest literary work. By examining the lesser-known perspective of Shen Congwen concerning cinema, the article illustrates the convergence between Hou and Shen in their shared aspiration to cultivate an atmospheric cinematic ambience. The article posits that Hou’s postmillennial cinema outgrows the detached observational style of his, Zhu’s, and Shen’s earlier works. Instead, Hou’s departure from language as an information medium transforms the narrative into a transgressive lyrical experience, traversing subjective and objective realms and blurring the lines between fiction and reality.

This article addresses the affective pull of the idea or fantasy of the better life that is seemingly promised by neoliberalism. Chan Koonchung's speculative novel The Fat Years ( Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013 nian), now available in at least thirteen languages worldwide, is one of the most widely circulated literary works by a Hong Kong writer to date. Despite its global success, Chan's novel has been criticized for its Sinophobic and antiestablishment disposition. While some might frown on the perceived Sinophobic discourse in The Fat Years, this article argues for careful consideration of the novel as a complex exploration of the state's manipulations of happiness as a tool of political control, addressing the broader implications of such affective techniques in post-2019 Hong Kong. Although Chan's novel predates Hong Kong's 2019 National Security Law, I frame my analysis within the context of post-2019 Hong Kong to highlight how these new laws are part of a broader continuum of imperialist practices China has long used to exert control. Additionally, I argue that the novel functions as a “small story” — a conscious act of deconstruction or delegitimization of a hegemonic and monolithic image of the Chinese future, especially as it serves as a horizon of potentiality, a not-yet-here. Despite its apparent limitations, I argue that Chan's dystopia can be understood as an aid in affectively reaching beyond the boundaries and quagmire of the stultifying, deadening, capitalist present.

Discussions of the concept of love in Republican China have privileged romantic love and regarded the sentimental depictions of mothers by women authors as a conservative and outmoded legacy of the Confucian past. Scholarship has overlooked the discursive split between the material and spiritual formations of love throughout the modern period. Whereas Republican texts invariably depict the liberatory potential of romantic love collapsing under the weight of material forces, mother love is deployed as a spiritually pure affective force powerful enough to awaken China’s alienated youth and cathect them to the communitarian ideal of the nation. This article analyzes the trope of mother love, meaning both the child’s love for a mother and the mother’s love for her children, in fictional texts by Bing Xin and Su Xuelin to push beyond psychological readings of individual daughter-mother bonds. Both women rejected romantic love as offering liberation to women and instead promoted mother love as a philosophy that could save China. Even as mother love took on unique meanings for May Fourth women writers, male writers also embraced it as having a sublime and progressive affective power.

Arising from his life as a high-explosive blast miner, Chen Nianxi’s poems describe not only his precarious life as a Chinese migrant worker but also a set of ecological concerns prevalent in post-socialist China. This essay contends that reading Chen’s poems as ecopoetry helps uncover the relationship between humans and nature in the social ecology of migrant worker poetry. Focusing on Chen’s iconic poem “Zhalie zhi” from 2013, translated here as “Explosion Chorography,” this paper proposes the concept of chorography as a lens through which to examine the nexus of materiality, pathology, and affect in Chen’s poetry. Chorography — the art of mapping a region or its features — teases out the ecosophical relevance and the ongoing process of social, cultural, and natural forces in Chen’s poetry. Drawing on Félix Guattari’s notion of three ecologies, my reading also compares Chen’s poetry with its predecessors in the socialist era and attempts to explore his potential contribution to ecocriticism in the post-socialist context.

The 1954 release of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) in the People's Republic sent shockwaves across the nascent state's cultural establishment. Amongst the Italian neorealist film's commentators were three powerful cultural bureaucrats: Ding Ling, Hu Feng, and Ba Ren — all influential writers of the Republican era. This article uses the three writers’ comments on Bicycle Thieves as a vantage point into how May Fourth realists were experimenting with literary form in the early PRC period, particularly through the notions of “life” and “typicality.” Their reviews demonstrate how the 1930s debates on how real life should be transformed into art continued to divide writers and critics in the early socialist period. Using Hu Feng and Ding Ling's comments on De Sica's film as a framework, the article investigates how both writers’ literary-documentarist prose from the 1950s can be seen as attempts to reinvigorate the realist literary style.