Author: 丙

Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of the Love in China 1900-1950, Haiyan Lee’s post-structural analysis of a seismic shift in the emotional life of Modern China, seeks to reconceptualise the cultural construction of emotion. Lee references an exhaustive list of writers from the first half of the twentieth century, aggregating these texts and in doing so identifying a series of common tropes, scenes, stock characters, themes, and philosophies. As a result she is able to trace discourses on emotion, or rather, the fundamental essence of what emotion is, from the late Qing to the revolution, to the May the Fourth Movement in the late 1910s, up until the CCPs consolidation of power. That said, Lee focuses most closely on the effect of Romanticism on Chinese culture, and therefore hems in quite narrowly on the May Fourth and New Culture movements. Through this analytical focus, Lee formulates a framework by which one can effectively understand the astounding complexities of a  ‘genealogy’ of emotional structures, by establishing three discrete ‘structures of feeling’, the confucian(native), enlightenment(western), and revolutionary(synthesis), and tracing points of emergence, appropriation, and interpretation between the three. This brief piece will attempt to familiarise the reader with the basics necessary to understand this framework. 

Historiographically Lee’s framework disrupts a highly binary way of perceiving the Confucian and Romanticist construction of emotion, in referencing this Lee borrows from Sulamith Potter’s anthropological studies of Rural China. While this binary is, (as Lee argues), inaccurate, it is important to understand before deconstruction Lee’s framework. The ‘west’, or more specifically romanticism emphasizes the human being as being fundamentally differentiated from animals through its capacity to feel emotion. This notion, that one should principally be considered a ‘thinking feeling being’, has permeated fully throughout western culture. In this romanticist conceptualisation of the self, one places an innate value on being open an honest with ones emotions, as well as on emotions themselves, they view the expression of feeling as the means by which relationships are ‘created and renewed’, they therefore have an innate distrust of those who are not able to convince of their openness about their inner lives, because they have made one’s ‘emotions’ the experience of one’s inner life, the central legitimizing basis of all social relationships and actions. Simply put, the confucian construction of emotion does not ground the basis for social action in emotion, rather, it emphasizes the importance of meeting series of meeting a series of social expectations. It is not that the confucian construction of emotion fails to acknowledge the existence of an emotional inner life, but rather that within this context the “culturally shared code of expression and conduct” in the words of Lee, “does not have to be consistent with inner feeling” (Lee, 2006 pg.2). In essence, emotion was not thought of as a fundamental aspect of social life, the notion of ‘sincerity’, or clarity of intention, was therefore reserved for the proper enactment of a social expectation rather than the act of ‘baring one’s soul’. 

In formulating her framework, Lee adopts the working assumption that discourses of sentiment, (i.e new conceptualizations of emotions and their legitimacy,) open the individual up to new experiences of inner life on the basis of these evolving expectations. This notion also grounds Raymond William’s concept of structures of feeling, which Lee relies on in her framework. The  structure of feeling  captures social consciousness as lived experience in process, or in solution, before it is  “precipitated”  and  given  fixed  forms. It is essentially a cultural re-working of Marx’s base-superstructure idea, that changes in one’s material circumstance and lived experiences precipitate larger cultural and political changes, and generally not vice-versa.

With this in mind one can reasonably assert that Lee’s framework supposes that in the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of literati the very way in which emotion was capable of being perceived changed fundamentally over the course of the late 19th and early 20th century. This change was gradually integrated into the prevailing literary genres, then into the social action of the May Fourth Movement, and finally it manifested politically in the form of the abolition of arranged marriage.  

Many Chinese writers dismiss the relative importance of Christianity in producing the Taiping ethic, which spread like wildfire in Southern China through the middle of the 19th century, it was adopted so quickly and deeply by so many, that the result was the bloodiest known pre-industrial conflict in history. The Taipings, now often depicted as a proto-communist cult, which constituted a ‘warped’ vision of Christanity are often the subject of the ‘no true scotsman’. Taiping theology is dismissed as not really being Christian, Carl S. Kilcourse, and other contemporary historians have recently challenged this narrative, rather than a bastardisation of Christianity, they perceive it as a highly original form of Early Chinese Christian theology, which is best understood on its own terms, In this brief piece, we will engage in a brief rebuttal of the claim that the Taipings were in any way ‘innately unchristian’.

Many western writings attempt to deconstruct Taiping Theology based on the assumption that it is a “misunderstanding” of some “true” scriptural message. Samuel Moffett, for instance, argues that it is a bastardization of “Liang Fa’s Good Words to Admonish the Age (1832) .The issue with Moffet’s assumption is that it assumes both Liang Fa’s Good Words and any perception of the gospel built on the frame of belief it establishes must innately be a perversion of the text. The notion that the Taiping synthesis must rest on some misunderstanding of the text, rather than a localized interpretation, has been a fundamental aspect of the western scholarship of Taiping ideology -((Kilcourse, 2016, pg.3)).The development of this misconception arises partially out of continual reaffirmation of the racism and imperialist attitudes of the missionaries who established the first scholarship on the taiping rebellion in the nineteenth century. Such missionaries originally saw the Taipings as vehicles for the christianisation of China but quickly grew discontent, and judged their beliefs incompatible with their respective doctrine’s. Their judgement of the Taiping Theology arose out of the notion that converts could only be judged as Christians if they accepted the “pure” truths of orthodoxy, and relied on the guidance of the missionary community, in essence, they saw it as impossible to accept the word of Christ and reject the West as the two were perceived as inseparable. Nicolas Standaert calls this “an a-priori expectation  that  a ‘successful’ trans- mission is a transmission  which keeps the cultural element  in its ‘pure’ form”¹. 

This perception of Taiping theology, as fundamentally un-christian and “grievously marred with error” in the words of one nineteenth century missionary, also arose out of a fundamental misapprehension of the process of meaningful substantive transformation that a text undergoes when it is translated into another language and therefore encounters an entirely new worldview². If one were a fan of postmodernist thought, they might characterise it as an encounter with an entirely new set of binaries against which meaning is created, with the potential of thereby creating an entirely new synthesis of meaning even through an excellent translation of the text. Beyond issues of direct translation, one must also consider the effect of both Hong and his followers various encounters with Chinese Christian literature, which innately implies an encounter with a myriad of unique metaphorical imagery, literary styles, local folk traditions, metaphysical reference points, all of which had a significant influence on the collective consciousness of the taiping ethic, or in other words, how most people within the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom understood their place in the universe. To deem Hong’s antagonism towards protestant ‘orthodoxy’, or  the scriptural deviations of the Chinese bible from the King James bible or some other English bible, as so severe as to distance it completely from the word of christ, is to dismiss out of hand a reciprocal and constantly evolving relationship between the Judeo-Christian worldview and a series of local and national perceptions which add, rather than subtract to their understanding of the biblical text. If authors such as Samual Moffet are to be taken at their word, that these linguistic and cultural transformations amount to a dilution of a substantively purer religious outlook, than they should logically apply the same outlook that any translation from the original aramaic as a distortion of the true gospel, to European understandings of the biblical texts as well. Under this paradigm, the King James Bible (an English translation from Latin) and the Latin Vulgate (Greek to Latin), are both perversions of the word of God. 

References:

Kilcourse, C. S. (2016). Taiping theology: The localization of Christianity in China, 1843-1864.    Palgrave MacMillan.

1. Kilcourse, 2016, pg.4 [↩]
2. Kilcourse, 2016, pg.2 [↩]