Ideology, Power, Text

Self-Representation and the Peasant 'Other' in Modern Chinese Literature

Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9780804765190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Asiatische Literaturkritik

The division between the scholar-gentry class and the "people" was an enduring theme of the traditional Chinese agrarian-bureaucratic state. Twentieth-century elites recast this as a division between intellectuals and peasants and made the confrontation between the writing/intellectual self and the peasant "other" a central concern of literature. The author argues that, in the process, they created the "peasantry, " the downtrodden rural masses represented as proper objects of political action and shifting ideological agendas.

Throughout this transition, language or discourse has been not only a weapon of struggle but the center of controversy and contention. Because of this primacy of language, the author's main approach is the close reading or, rather, re-reading of significant narrative fictions from four literary generations to demonstrate how historical, ideological, and cultural issues are absorbed, articulated, and debated within the text.

Three chapters each focus on one representative author. The fiction of Lu Xun (1881-1936), which initiated the literary preoccupation with the victimized peasant, is also about the identity crisis of the intellectual. Zhao Shuli (1906-1970), upheld by the Communist Party as a model "peasant writer, " tragically exemplifies in his career the inherent contradictions of such an assigned role. In the post-Mao era, Gao Xiaosheng (1928—) uses the ironic play of language to present a more ambiguous peasant while deflating intellectual pretensions. The chapter on the last of the four "generations" examines several texts by Mo Yan (1956—), Han Shaogong (1952—), and Wang Anyi (1954—) as examples of "root-searching" fiction from the mid-1980's. While reaching back into the past, this fiction is paradoxically also experimental in technique: the encounter with the peasant leads to questions about the self-construction of the intellectual and the nature of narrative representation itself.

Throughout, the focus is on texts in which some sort of representation or stand-in of the writer/intellectual self is present—as character, as witness, as center of consciousness, or as first-person or obtrusive narrator. Each story catches the writer in a self-reflective mode, the confrontation with the peasant "other" providing a theater for acting out varying dramas of identity, power, ideology, political engagement, and self-representation.

1

From Tradition to Modernity: Intellectual and Peasant in Transition

THE BIFURCATION between the scholar-gentry class (shi) on the one hand, and the people (min) on the other, had always been one of the distinctive themes of the traditional Chinese agrarian-bureaucratic state. While inheriting that legacy, their twentieth-century counterparts, “intellectual” and “peasant,” have also altered it in significant ways. In moving from past to present, the meaning of these two signifiers changed in themselves, and continually changed in relation to each other. The reconstitution of the people (min) into “peasants” (nongmin) was a corollary of the intellectuals’ struggle for a new self-formation as they made the transition from the scholar-officials (shi) of the past, with their well-defined position within the state establishment, into zhishifenzi, the increasingly uncertain intellectuals of the modern period.

While “tradition” versus “modernity” is commonly used to refer to changes that began to take place as China responded to the significant impact of the West, how they should actually be defined within the Chinese context is far from clear. “Tradition” was, first of all, not something that was fixed and coherent. In discussing some of its central themes, I will highlight certain internal tensions and contradictions, especially regarding the situation of the intellectual. Nor does the transition to “modernity” simply mean the emergence of a marked break between past and present, the disintegration or radical displacement of what had been an integrated, self-sufficient, and self-enclosed society.¹ One may further argue that the “tradition-modernity” paradigm itself is a product of Western parochialism or ethnocentrism that the Chinese too readily imported or accepted as they found themselves faced with the unprecedented historical realities of the early twentieth century. If modernity means to change in accordance with what the West defines as “universal,” then China could not but be entrapped forever in the effort of trying to “catch up” in a losing game.

Yet that may be precisely the bind in which the Chinese placed themselves in their determined but problematic search for modernity. Whatever the definitions, one feature that seems above all to characterize the modern generation has been the insistence on its own differences from the past. All the while, however, it has continued to carry, as a conscious or unconscious burden, themes and contradictions of tradition even as that “tradition” has been constantly reinterpreted and reconstructed. The debate between the traditional and the modern—neither of which is a stable, essential category—would continue to be carried out on a shifting ideological terrain caused by political upheaval.

All linguistic utterances, including literary and scholarly discourse, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, bear traces of the social structures they both express and help to reproduce.² In the case of traditional China, the functioning of such “symbolic power” or “symbolic domination” might seem to have been glaringly obvious when we consider the political authority the old imperial system invested in the intellectual elite, the dominant producers of literary and scholarly discourse. But the ongoing interplay between politics and literature in China was often a highly complex and tortuous matter.

Due largely to the apparent coincidence yet constant tension between the political and moral order, an important part of the self-image of those who produced literature was their “sense of mission” (shiminggan). This placed them and their literary enterprise in a peculiarly ambiguous space vis-à-vis the authoritarian state structure. Among other things, the sense of mission had also habitually obligated this intellectual elite to take some account of the subordinate peasant class. It is against such a tradition that we must examine the fluctuating relationship between the two classes and its manifestation in modern Chinese literature.

The radically changed conditions for literary production brought about by the collapse of traditional institutional structures in the twentieth century entailed reconceptualizations of writing as writers searched for ways to discharge age-old moral and political responsibilities while engaged in the constant struggle to resituate themselves in an intensely problematic relation to power. Their attempts to forge a new literature has implicated them in concomitant exercises of textual self-inventions, most often against the process of constructing the peasant “other.”

INTELLECTUALS AND THE STATE: COINCIDENCE AND TENSION BETWEEN THE POLITICAL AND MORAL ORDER

When the philosopher Mencius stated in the fourth century B.C. that those who used their minds (laoxin) ruled and those who used their muscles (laoli) were ruled, he provided the classic formulation of the traditional binary relationship between scholar-official and peasant, while seemingly positioning the two groups into a perennial relation of domination and subordination. By xin Mencius was not simply referring to what is commonly rendered into English as “mind,” for xin in Mencian philosophy was much more than a matter of the intellect; it was even more the seat of moral feelings. The power and authority of the ruling elite was therefore legitimated by their intrinsic worth, their highly developed heart-mind, their moral as well as intellectual superiority, which anyway were supposed to coincide.

But if the underdeveloped masses of people were thus “rightfully” relegated to the lower part of the power structure, they nevertheless had always to be taken into account, since the other side of the coin in the Mencian theory of government claimed that the mandate to rule was deserved only if the people’s economic and moral welfare were properly attended to. Thus the people were always “there,” both as objects of paternalistic concern and as a yardstick for evaluating governmental success. They were furthermore always present as a latent threat of insurrection, since the same ideology sanctioned the right of the ruled to rise in rebellion in the event that their rulers lost the Mandate of Heaven by failing to discharge their proper responsibilities toward those below.

When this Mencian political ideology was later institutionalized into the civil service examination, increasingly the route for recruiting the scholar-literati into the official ruling hierarchy, the rationale was that what most qualified candidates to administer the affairs of the empire was their mastery of the Confucian classics, their demonstrated indoctrination into the state ideology. By early Ming—that is from the fourteenth century on—Chinese society was dominated by a scholarly elite made up of officeholders in the imperial bureaucracy plus the many more who aspired to hold office, intellectuals who shared a remarkably uniform cultural outlook.

Political authority has always sought after the approbation of the learned, of the intellectuals. In behalf of its own legitimacy it needs to claim, as Edward Shils puts it, some sort of involvement with what is “essential,” “ultimately right,” the sacred, the ideal, involvement which overlaps with the normal preoccupations of intellectuals everywhere.³ Conflicts will arise when intellectuals criticize the political establishment as wanting in these respects, or seem to infringe on its authority. What is remarkable in the Chinese situation was, first of all, a political ideology that tied the basis of legitimacy so explicitly to intellectuals as a group, and secondly, a political system that managed for centuries to give them a clearly defined and privileged place within its own structure, thereby incorporating or co-opting its potential critics into the system. While actual power always resided in the hands of the imperial state with intellectuals as its subservient subordinates, they could nevertheless, as carriers and interpreters of the Confucian ideology that legitimated that power, claim an allegiance to a “higher” authority from which they could exercise their right to judge those who held power over themselves. In its actual application, Mencius’ principle that the “use of heart-minds” entitled those above to rule did not mean so much that the Confucian scholar possessed the political power to govern, but rather that he would be recruited to assist those who did, while at the same time being charged with the function of legitimating their authority.⁴

The outstanding characteristic, indeed one might say, the genius, of Confucianism, was the ethical continuum that linked individual person to state, subjective self-cultivation to social vocation and political service. “The Confucian intellectual” in Tu Wei-ming’s words, “defines what politics is from the center of his moral being.”⁵ It was this dimension of moral aspiration and self-fulfillment, a feature shared by all religions, that so inspired personal commitment and that no doubt reinforced the performance of Confucianism as an ideology capable of holding together one of the longest continuing political systems in human history. Yet while many Confucian intellectuals did “take part in the governing process not as servants of the emperor but as messengers for their moral ideals,” ⁶ such a role carried within itself contradictions that were far from easy to reconcile.

The intellectuals’ authority to speak or speak out was, after all, dependent on their status as officials. Their opinions and criticism could be expressed only within a clearly defined and circumscribed perimeter, and through a given set of specific terms; their remonstrations against the emperor, who might be incompetent, vicious, or moronic, were necessarily still couched in terms of personal submission to him.⁷ To position himself vis-à-vis political authority, while functioning both as its servant and its critic, continually forced the scholar-official to carry out a precarious balancing act. Providing moral leadership, as government officials were supposed to do, did not mean that it was easy for those who were qualified in theory to maintain their own moral integrity in practice. Apart from the fact that “the integrity of Confucian teaching constantly had to be defended against the danger of debasement through its use as an official ideology or as mere professional qualification,”⁸ were the dual Confucian values of self-fulfillment and official service ever wholly compatible? All in all, to be active in politics as a responsible literati-official could be as harshly challenging and demanding on the level of one’s personal morality as embarking on the life of a religious devotee. ⁹ Chinese history may have been written as a mirror for good government, but its innumerable biographies of officials are no less the self-reflections of individuals who in the process of participating in that government have had to ponder excruciating moral choices.

There was always the alternative of withdrawing rather than serving in government, but then the Confucian “repudiated not only something outside himself—the corrupt and corrupting institutions of imperial authority, but also, and even more significantly, something within himself, some part of his identity and his duty.”¹⁰ To drop out of the system altogether entailed a loss to the self as well as becoming politically irrelevant. Throughout history Chinese intellectuals have not customarily thought of themselves as “independent, autonomous, endowed with a character of their own” that distinguished them in some “essential way” from all other social groupings, a charge Gramsci leveled against Western intellectuals connected with idealist philosophy.¹¹ The self-image and life work of Chinese intellectuals were always consciously enmeshed in the general complex of social and political relations.

In spite of their avowed break with tradition, China’s twentieth-century intellectuals have not been able to free themselves from their contradictory legacy, but continue to carry within themselves, as survivals from the past, the “two deeply internalized roles” of “servant of the state and of moral critic of the ruler.”¹² Throughout the past decades of political revolution, they have found themselves caught in a relationship with the state that is just as ambivalent and, if anything, even more fraught with wrenching tension and untold risk.¹³

WRITING AND THE AUTHORITY OF LITERARY TRADITION

From the point of view of maintaining the state system through successful management of its intellectuals, the civil service examination must be considered one of the cleverest political institutions ever devised. Its integration of literature into the system played a decisive role in shaping the particular nature of the Chinese literary tradition. Based on the rationale that mastery of the moral teachings in the Confucian classics best qualified people for service in the upper echelons of government, literacy in the classical language became mandatory, and, as much as any factor, helped to perpetuate the division between the ruling and the ruled. The elite’s intellectual and moral superiority was combined with a monopoly over writing and the textual tradition, which in a process of self-reinforcing circularity, embodied and perpetuated its particular ideology and values. Classical literature largely tended to be a carrier and purveyor of the dominant ideology, and therefore occupied a central and prestigious place in the political structure, a support and ornament of the imperial system it served.

The critical factor of literacy in dominance and subordination is highlighted in David Johnson’s social-cultural analysis of late imperial China, which groups the population into nine categories within the “structure of dominance.”¹⁴ In between the very small legally privileged gentry class at the top, including those who had become officials and were at the very top of the top, and the largest group down below, including the urban but mostly rural poor, were seven other classes, ranked by their degrees of dependency. Those at the top were classically educated, in contrast to the dependent masses at the bottom, who were illiterate. Learning and access to the literary tradition were most conspicuously the means, but also the justification, for achieving elite status. In the orthodox view, as Johnson put it, “the learned deserved to rule” and the meritocracy, by Ming and Qing times, had become a “grammatocracy.”

Literature in traditional China was thus deeply embedded in a broad network of public service, political power, class privilege, ideological imperatives, moral responsibilities, and an ongoing textual tradition.¹⁵ This was the case even if not everyone who was educated passed the examinations into officialdom—in fact, by far the majority did not.¹⁶ The number of men who were classically educated but who did not hold office because they had failed the examinations, or who, for one reason or another had dropped out of the system, continued to swell through the centuries,¹⁷ since the territorial administrative structure did not grow proportionately as the empire’s population increased.¹⁸ But even if some may have felt freer to deviate from the orthodox line, classical literature was overall produced and consumed by an indoctrinated elite, and to be engaged in the act of writing was first of all to situate the self within the nexus of a complex and interrelat...