In Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China Prasenjit Duara maintains that the nation is often conceived as the primordial subject of history: the foundation upon which a multiplicity of social, political and economic phenomena may be analysed[1]. As such, historiography surrounding nationalism has often taken a ‘top-down’ approach, suggesting that the reification of nationalist sentiments is instantiated by governing bodies or international events[2]. Hence historians such as Lloyd Eastman, Maggie Clinton, Frederick Wakeman Jr., and William Kirby have analysed China’s quest for modernity as a response to the dynamic rise of fascist states in Europe, as Germany and Italy’s rapid national rejuvenation provided a model for nationalists in China who coveted national development[3].
However, these analyses provide an impoverished account of China’s ineluctable path to modernity. Most notably, they overlook how apparently superfluous cultural phenomena such as love, and sex could contribute to China’s national development. Frank Dikötter’s Sex, Culture and Modernity in China provides a necessary response to such historiography by demonstrating how ideas related to sex and sexual desire contributed significantly to China’s modernising discourse[4].
Dikötter argues that in Republican China interest in the subject of sex grew exponentially, as evidenced by the proliferation of new periodicals such as The sex periodical, The sexual desire weekly, The sex journal bi-weekly and ‘The sex journal’[5]. This interest was grounded in the belief that the control of sexual desire was somehow integral to the restoration of a strong China, for if ‘evil’ sexual habits could be eliminated, then Chinese citizens could sacrifice their attention to the development of the nation[6]. For example, great interest was placed upon reproductive health and the procreative behaviour of couples, as medical scientists sought to understand the optimum conditions with which healthy offspring could be produced, as such offspring could then be successfully integrated into China’s fledgling industrial workforce[7].
Contra Eastman, Clinton, and others, one cannot fail to see that discourses around sex and China’s national well-being were inextricably linked. Chinese nation-building was not simply a process of emulating Europe, rather, it embodied certain indigenous cultural transformations such as more open discourses surrounding sex and changing attitudes towards love. Haiyan Lee develops this argument in Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950 in which she demonstrates the significance of love in the discourses surrounding national development. The May Fourth Movement (a political and cultural movement emanating from Beijing in 1919) is one such example, where love and its free expression became symbolic of equality and autonomy from foreign interference[8].
Therefore, an intellectual history of the discourses surrounding China’s national development in the Republican period cannot and should not overlook these cultural factors. The history of Republican China should not be a history of competing political ideologies, viewing Chinese nationalism as a tabula rasa upon which a European creed could be imprinted. The Chinese path to modernity is more complex than this, and, in like manner to Dikötter and Lee, explanations which reflect these complex cultural and social dynamics are imperative.
[1] Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, (Chicago, 1995), pp. 27-29
[2] Jing Tsu, Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937, (Stanford, 2005), p.1
[3] Lloyd Eastman, Fascism in Kuomintang China: The Blue Shirts, The China Quarterly, 49: 1 (1972), pp.1-31. Maggie Clinton, Revolutionary Nativism: Fascism and Culture in China, 1925-1937, (Durham, 2017). Frederick Wakeman Jr., A Revisionist View of the Nanjing Decade: Confucian Fascism, The China Quarterly, 150: special issue: Reappraising Republican China (June, 1997), pp.395-432. William Kirby, Germany and Republican China, (Stanford, 1984)
[4] Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China, (London, 1995), p.2
[5] Ibid., p.1
[6] Ibid., p.2
[7] Ibid., pp.62-71
[8] Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China 1900-1950, (Stanford, 2007), p.5