Nationhood, Cultural Politics, and the Cold War: How Modern Chinese Literature Was Invented

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University presents a talk with Xiaojue Wang on how modern Chinese literature was invented as a discipline in post-1949 mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan through critical reading of three foundational treatises that informed the cultural politics of these divided entities

In Cold War China, modern Chinese literature was employed for the construction of nationhood and national imaginaries in the name of socialism, anti-Communism, or cultural nationalism. Xiaojue Wang will examine how modern Chinese literature was invented as a discipline in post-1949 mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan through critical reading of three foundational treatises that informed the cultural politics of these divided entities: Mao Zedong’s 1940 “Xin minzhu zhuyi lun” (on new democracy), the 1958 “Wei Zhongguo wenhua gao shijie renshi xuanyan” (a manifesto to the world on behalf of Chinese culture) by the New Confucianists, and Chiang Kai-shek’s 1953 “Minsheng zhuyi yule liangpian bushu” (supplementary treatises on education and recreation to the “Principle of Livelihood”).

Xiaojue Wang received her PhD in East Asian languages and cultures and comparative literature at Columbia University in 2007 and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Her main area of research is modern and contemporary Chinese literature and film and comparative literature, particularly Cold War German and Chinese cultures. She is a member of the graduate group in German languages and literatures and the cinema studies program at UPenn. She is currently completing a book, “Modernity with a Cold War Face: Re-imagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide.”