Sentimental Republic : Chinese intellectuals and the Maoist past / Hang Tu.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tu, Hang, 1990- author.

Series:

Harvard East Asian monographs ; 475.

Harvard East Asian monograph series ; 475

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Politics and culture--China--History--20th century.

Politics and culture.

Politics and culture--China--History--21st century.

Intellectuals--China--History--20th century.

Intellectuals.

Intellectuals--China--History--21st century.

Emotions--Political aspects.

Emotions.

China--Intellectual life--1976-.

China.

China--Politics and government--1949-.

Physical Description:

xv, 326 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Asia Center, 2025.

Summary:

"How does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post-Mao cultural controversy. As it entered a period of market reform, China did not turn away from revolutionary sentiments. Rather, the post-Mao period experienced a surge of emotionally charged debates about red legacies, ranging from the anguished denunciations of Maoist violence to the elegiac remembrances of socialist egalitarianism. Sentimental Republic chronicles forty years (1978-2018) of bitter cultural wars about the Maoist past. It analyzes how the four major intellectual clusters in contemporary China-liberals, the left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists-debated Mao's revolutionary legacies in light of the postsocialist transition. Should the Chinese condemn revolutionary violence and "bid farewell to socialism"? Or would a return to revolution foster alternative visions of China's future path? Tu probes the nexus of literature, thought, and memory, bringing to light the dynamic moral sentiments and emotional excess at work in these post-Mao ideological contentions. By analyzing how rival intellectual camps stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, Tu argues that the polemics surrounding the country's past cannot be properly understood without reading the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Pleasure and Guilt: Reason and Emotion in the Age of New Enlightenment

Enlightened Sentiments

Reason and This-Worldly Pleasure

Emotion and Other-Worldly Guilt

The Convergence of Pleasure and Guilt

The Liberal Imagination: The Politics of Mourning in the "Chen Yinke Fever"

The Pathos of Chinese Liberalism

A Cultural Loyalist in Despair

An Apolitical Academician

A Martyr of Liberalism

Debating Chen Yinke's Legacy in Contemporary China

Left Melancholy: A Dialogue between Chen Yingzhen and Wang Anyi

Fin-de-Siècle Socialism

The Melancholic Intellectual

The Vanquished Left

Utopian Verses

A Chronicle of Revolutionary Shanghai

Toward a Melancholic Marxism

A Passion for God: Liu Xiaofeng and the Conservative Revolt against Modernity

Revolution and Religion

Early Romanticism

From Cultural Christian to Chinese Straussian

A Conservative Revolution

Leap of Faith

China Can Say No: Popular Nationalism and the Spirit of Ressentiment

The Business of Nationalism

The Psychology of Ressentiment

Divided Reception

Epilogue: Searching for the Chinese Dream

The Problem of Ideological Polarization in the Post-Mao Era

A Passion for God

Between Melancholy and Nostalgia

The Pathos of Liberalism

From Ressentiment to Righteous Anger.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-311) and index.

ISBN:

9780674297579

0674297571

OCLC:

1452729809