History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 19

Previous◀ Chapter 18

History of Chinese Literature

NextChapter 20 ▶

Chapter 19: Late Qing and the Shock of Modernity (1840–1911)

1. Introduction: The Collapse of the Old Literary Order

The period between the first Opium War (1840–1842) and the fall of the Qing dynasty (1911) was the most traumatic and the most transformative era in the history of Chinese literature. In the space of seven decades, the Chinese literary tradition — which had developed continuously for more than three thousand years, evolving within a framework of shared assumptions about language, genre, aesthetics, and the social function of writing — was subjected to a series of shocks that shattered that framework and forced Chinese writers to confront fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of literature that their predecessors had never had occasion to ask. What is the relationship between literature and national survival? Can a literary tradition that evolved to serve the needs of an imperial civilization survive the collapse of that civilization? Must Chinese writers adopt Western literary forms in order to address the realities of the modern world, or can the resources of the native tradition be adapted to new purposes? These questions — which would dominate Chinese literary discourse for the next century and beyond — were first posed in the late Qing period, and the answers that late Qing writers proposed, however provisional and often contradictory, laid the foundations for the literary revolution of the early twentieth century.

The proximate cause of this literary crisis was, of course, political and military: the devastating revelation, delivered by the guns of the British navy in the Opium War, that the Chinese empire — which had regarded itself for millennia as the center of civilization and the superior of all other nations — was in fact militarily helpless against the industrial powers of the West. The Treaty of Nanjing (1842), which ended the first Opium War and forced China to cede Hong Kong, open five ports to foreign trade, and pay a massive indemnity, was followed by a succession of further humiliations — the second Opium War (1856–1860), the Sino-French War (1884–1885), the catastrophic defeat by Japan in 1894–1895, the Boxer Uprising and the occupation of Beijing by the Eight-Nation Alliance in 1900 — that progressively demolished the Qing state's capacity to defend its sovereignty and its citizens' confidence in the viability of Chinese civilization.

The literary consequences of this political crisis were complex and far-reaching. The first response — characteristic of the 1860s and 1870s — was the "self-strengthening" movement (自强运动, ziqiang yundong), which sought to preserve the Confucian cultural tradition while adopting Western military technology and organizational methods. This approach, summarized in the famous formula "Chinese learning as the foundation, Western learning for practical use" (中学为体,西学为用, zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong), assumed that the Chinese literary and moral tradition was fundamentally sound and needed only to be supplemented with Western practical knowledge. By the 1890s, however, the repeated failure of the self-strengthening approach — culminating in the devastating defeat by Japan in 1895 — had convinced a growing number of Chinese intellectuals that the crisis was not merely military or technological but civilizational: that the problem was not the absence of Western guns and ships but the fundamental inadequacy of the Chinese cultural tradition — including its literary tradition — to meet the challenges of the modern world.

2. The Opium Wars and the Crisis of Chinese Civilization

The two Opium Wars (1840–1842 and 1856–1860) were watershed events not only in Chinese political history but in Chinese literary and intellectual history. The wars — provoked by China's attempt to suppress the British opium trade and fought with a military technological disparity that made the outcome a foregone conclusion — demonstrated with brutal clarity that the balance of power between China and the West had shifted decisively in the West's favor. The Treaty of Nanjing and the subsequent "unequal treaties" imposed by Britain, France, the United States, and other Western powers established a system of extraterritoriality, foreign concessions, and economic privilege that reduced China to a semi-colonial status — a status that was deeply humiliating to a civilization that had always regarded itself as the center of the world.

The literary response to the Opium Wars was initially muted. The wars were, of course, recorded in official histories and commemorated in poetry, but the early literary responses tended to treat the defeats as temporary setbacks rather than as symptoms of a fundamental crisis. The poetry of Lin Zexu (林则徐, 1785–1850), the official who had precipitated the first Opium War by confiscating and destroying British opium stocks, expressed a patriotic defiance and a moral confidence that assumed the ultimate superiority of Chinese civilization; the poetry of Wei Yuan (魏源, 1794–1857), another official who witnessed the defeats firsthand, was more troubled but still fundamentally confident that China's problems could be solved by the adoption of Western military technology within the existing framework of Chinese civilization.

It was the second generation of writers — those who came of age in the aftermath of the wars and who witnessed the continuing erosion of Chinese sovereignty through the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s — who began to articulate a more radical assessment of the crisis. Wang Tao (王韬, 1828–1897), a journalist, essayist, and cultural intermediary who spent years in Hong Kong and traveled to Britain and France, was among the first Chinese writers to argue that China needed not merely Western technology but Western political and social institutions — a free press, a parliamentary system, a modern educational system — in order to survive in the modern world. Wang Tao's essays — written in a style that combined the classical essay tradition with the new journalistic prose that was emerging in the treaty ports — anticipate many of the themes that would be developed more fully by the reformers of the 1890s and 1900s.

The literature of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) — the enormous civil war that devastated southern China and killed an estimated twenty to thirty million people — also contributed to the sense of civilizational crisis. The Taiping movement, led by Hong Xiuquan (洪秀全, 1814–1864), who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, challenged the foundations of Chinese civilization with a radical program that included the destruction of Confucian temples and texts, the redistribution of land, the abolition of foot-binding, and the establishment of a nominally egalitarian society based on a heterodox version of Christianity. The Taiping Rebellion was eventually suppressed, but its devastating impact — on the physical landscape, the social order, and the psychological confidence of the Chinese elite — reinforced the sense that the old order was crumbling and that radical change was necessary.

3. Liang Qichao and the "Revolution in Fiction"

Liang Qichao (梁启超, 1873–1929) was the most influential intellectual of the late Qing period — a polymath of extraordinary energy and range whose writings on politics, history, philosophy, journalism, and literature transformed the intellectual landscape of China and established the terms of debate that would dominate Chinese intellectual life for decades to come. His contribution to literary history was concentrated in a single, electrifying essay: "On the Relationship Between Fiction and the Government of the People" (论小说与群治之关系, Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi), published in 1902, which called for a "revolution in the world of fiction" (小说界革命, xiaoshuo jie geming) and thereby inaugurated a new era in the history of the Chinese novel.

Liang Qichao's argument was radical in its simplicity. China, he argued, was in mortal danger, threatened by Western imperialism and by the weakness and corruption of its own government and society. The salvation of the nation required a transformation of the Chinese people — a transformation of their knowledge, their attitudes, their values, and their understanding of the world. And the most effective instrument for achieving this transformation was fiction. Fiction, Liang Qichao argued, had a power to influence people's minds and hearts that no other form of writing could match: it could make abstract ideas vivid and concrete, it could create models of behavior for readers to emulate, it could expose social evils and inspire reform, and it could reach a mass audience that was untouched by the scholarly and philosophical writings of the elite. Therefore, he concluded, the reform of fiction — the creation of a new kind of fiction that would serve the purposes of national salvation — was the most urgent cultural task facing the Chinese nation.

Liang Qichao's essay was revolutionary in several respects. First, it elevated the novel — which had always occupied an ambiguous position in the Chinese literary hierarchy, respected by some critics but condemned by others as a frivolous or even dangerous distraction from serious moral and intellectual pursuits — to the status of the most important literary genre, the genre with the greatest power to shape public opinion and influence social behavior. This elevation of the novel's status was itself a radical act of literary criticism, and it prepared the ground for the even more radical elevation of vernacular fiction that would occur during the May Fourth Movement of the 1910s and 1920s.

Second, Liang Qichao articulated a vision of literature as an instrument of social and political transformation — a vision that would become the dominant paradigm of Chinese literary thought for the next century. Before Liang Qichao, the Chinese literary tradition had included many different conceptions of the purpose of literature — moral edification, aesthetic pleasure, personal expression, the preservation of historical memory — but it had never before elevated the political and social function of literature to such a dominant position. Liang Qichao's insistence that literature must serve the nation — that the value of a literary work is ultimately to be measured by its contribution to the reform and modernization of Chinese society — established a framework of literary evaluation that would be adopted, in different forms and with different emphases, by virtually every major literary movement of the twentieth century, from the May Fourth writers to the Communist literary theorists.

Third, Liang Qichao's essay helped to create a market for the new fiction he was calling for. The essay was published in Xin xiaoshuo (新小说, New Fiction), a literary journal that Liang Qichao founded in Yokohama, Japan, where he was living in exile after the failure of the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898. The journal published both original fiction and translations of Western and Japanese novels, and it was widely read by the Chinese students and intellectuals who were then flocking to Japan in search of modern knowledge. The success of Xin xiaoshuo inspired the creation of numerous other literary journals in the following years, establishing the literary journal as the primary vehicle for the publication and discussion of new fiction — a role it would continue to play throughout the twentieth century.

4. The Late Qing Novel Boom

The decade following Liang Qichao's call for a "revolution in fiction" — roughly 1902 to 1911 — witnessed an extraordinary explosion of novel production that has been described as the first "novel boom" in Chinese history. Hundreds of new novels were published in this period — in books, in literary journals, and in the rapidly expanding newspaper press — and they addressed an unprecedented range of subjects, from political reform and social criticism to science fiction and detective stories. The late Qing novel boom was not merely a quantitative phenomenon; it represented a qualitative transformation of the Chinese novel tradition, as writers experimented with new subjects, new narrative techniques, and new conceptions of the novel's purpose and form.

The most distinctive genre of the late Qing novel was the "exposé novel" (谴责小说, qianze xiaoshuo), also translated as "novel of castigation" or "condemnation fiction" — a genre that used fictional narrative to expose and condemn the corruption, incompetence, and moral depravity of Chinese officialdom. The four most famous exposé novels — Li Boyuan's (李伯元, 1867–1906) Guanchang xianxing ji (官场现形记, Officialdom Unmasked), Wu Jianren's (吴趼人, 1866–1910) Ershinian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang (二十年目睹之怪现状, Bizarre Happenings Eyewitnessed over Two Decades), Liu E's (刘鹗, 1857–1909) Laocan youji (老残游记, The Travels of Lao Can), and Zeng Pu's (曾朴, 1872–1935) Niehai hua (孽海花, A Flower in a Sea of Sin) — were all written in the decade following Liang Qichao's essay and all respond, in different ways, to his call for fiction that would serve the purposes of social criticism and national reform.

Lu Xun — who admired these novels but also recognized their limitations — coined the term qianze xiaoshuo in his pioneering Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue (中国小说史略, A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, 1923–1924) and offered a penetrating analysis of their strengths and weaknesses. The exposé novels, Lu Xun argued, were motivated by genuine moral indignation and social concern, and they provided vivid and often compelling portraits of the corruption and incompetence of the late Qing bureaucracy. But they were also limited by their episodic structure — which strung together a series of loosely connected anecdotes rather than constructing a unified narrative — and by their tendency toward caricature rather than genuine characterization.

Of the four great exposé novels, Liu E's Laocan youji is generally regarded as the most artistically accomplished. The novel follows the travels of a wandering physician through northern China, providing a panoramic portrait of late Qing society that combines social criticism with lyrical descriptions of landscape and an unusual degree of psychological depth. The novel's famous description of the Yellow River in winter — and its extended metaphor comparing the Chinese state to a sinking ship — is one of the most powerful passages in late Qing fiction.

The late Qing also produced China's first science fiction novels — most notably, Wu Jianren's Xin shitou ji (新石头记, New Story of the Stone, 1908), which transports the hero of Hongloumeng into a utopian future China equipped with submarines, airships, and other technological marvels, and Huangjiang Diaosou's (荒江钓叟) Yueqiu zhimindi xiaoshuo (月球殖民地小说, Colony on the Moon, 1904), a narrative of interplanetary travel. These works — which drew on the rapidly increasing Chinese awareness of Western science and technology — represent an early attempt to use fiction as a vehicle for imagining China's future and for exploring the possibilities and dangers of modernization.

Political novels — fictional narratives that advocated specific programs of political reform — constituted another important genre of the late Qing novel boom. Liang Qichao himself wrote the most famous example: Xin Zhongguo weilai ji (新中国未来记, The Future of New China, 1902), an unfinished novel set in the year 1962 that imagines a reformed and modernized China that has achieved equality with the Western powers. The novel is more interesting as a political document than as a work of literary art — its characters are mouthpieces for political arguments rather than psychologically realized individuals — but it demonstrates the extent to which the late Qing novel had become a vehicle for political expression and political debate.

5. Lin Shu and the Translation of Western Literature

Lin Shu (林纾, 1852–1924) was one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of Chinese literature — a classical scholar who could not read a single word of any foreign language but who nevertheless produced more than 180 translations of Western literary works into classical Chinese, introducing Chinese readers to Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, Cervantes, Dumas, Tolstoy, and dozens of other Western writers and fundamentally transforming the Chinese literary landscape.

Lin Shu's method was unique: he worked with collaborators — typically young men who had studied abroad and who could read English, French, or Japanese — who would read the original text aloud and provide an oral summary of each passage, which Lin Shu would then render into elegant classical Chinese prose. This method — which involved no direct contact between the translator and the original text — inevitably introduced distortions, omissions, and misunderstandings, and Lin Shu's translations are often significantly different from their originals in detail, emphasis, and even plot. Nevertheless, the translations were enormously popular and enormously influential: they introduced Chinese readers to the Western novel tradition at a time when very few Chinese could read European languages, and they demonstrated — through the power of their own literary style — that Western fiction could be compelling and moving even when filtered through the conventions of classical Chinese prose.

Lin Shu's translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (黑奴吁天录, Heinu yutian lu, A Record of Black Slaves Crying to Heaven, 1901) — his most politically influential translation — was widely read as an allegory of China's own semi-colonial status and contributed to the growing Chinese awareness of the parallels between Western imperialism in China and Western imperialism in other parts of the world. His translations of Dickens — particularly Oliver Twist and David Copperfield — introduced Chinese readers to a tradition of social realism that would exert a powerful influence on the development of modern Chinese fiction. And his translations of Scott's historical novels demonstrated the possibilities of historical fiction as a vehicle for national consciousness — a lesson that was not lost on the late Qing novelists who were attempting to create a new Chinese fiction that would serve the purposes of national salvation.

The paradox of Lin Shu — a classical scholar who championed classical Chinese and opposed the vernacular language movement, yet whose translations of Western literature did more than almost any other single body of work to create the conditions for the literary revolution that would overthrow the classical tradition — is one of the most poignant ironies of late Qing literary history. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Lin Shu became one of the most vocal opponents of the May Fourth Movement and its call for the replacement of classical Chinese with the vernacular as the medium of literary expression. He attacked Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu, and the other advocates of the literary revolution with passionate conviction, defending the classical tradition as the repository of Chinese moral and aesthetic values. But the very success of his own translations — which had demonstrated that Chinese readers were eager for Western fiction and that the Chinese literary tradition needed to engage with the literatures of the world — had already undermined the cultural isolation that the classical tradition depended upon for its survival.

6. The Arrival of Western Literary Concepts

The late Qing period witnessed the arrival in China of a range of Western literary concepts, genres, and critical categories that would profoundly influence the subsequent development of Chinese literature. These concepts — which included the novel as a genre of serious literary art, the idea of "realism" as a mode of literary representation, the concept of "tragedy" as a dramatic form, the notion of literature as an expression of individual subjectivity, and the idea of literary "progress" — entered China through multiple channels: translations of Western literary works, translations of Western literary criticism and aesthetics, the writings of Chinese students who had studied abroad (particularly in Japan), and the works of Japanese literary theorists and critics who had already absorbed and adapted Western literary ideas.

The concept that had the most immediate impact was the idea of the novel as the most important literary genre of the modern world. In the Western literary tradition, the novel had achieved literary respectability in the eighteenth century and literary dominance in the nineteenth; by 1900, the novel was universally recognized in Western literary culture as the genre best suited to the representation of modern social reality. This idea — that the novel was the characteristic literary form of modernity — was enthusiastically adopted by Chinese reformers like Liang Qichao, who used it to justify their elevation of the Chinese novel from its traditional position of cultural marginality to a position of central importance.

The concept of literary "realism" (写实主义, xieshi zhuyi) — the idea that literature should provide a faithful and accurate representation of social reality — also entered China during this period and exerted a powerful influence on the development of the late Qing novel. The exposé novels of the early 1900s, with their detailed depictions of bureaucratic corruption and social dysfunction, were clearly influenced by the Western realist tradition — particularly the tradition of social realism associated with Dickens, Balzac, and Zola — even though most of their authors had only indirect acquaintance with Western realist fiction.

The concept of "tragedy" (悲剧, beiju) — which had no exact equivalent in the Chinese literary tradition — was introduced to Chinese readers by Wang Guowei (王国维, 1877–1927), who discussed Western tragic theory in his groundbreaking study of Hongloumeng (Honglou meng pinglun, 红楼梦评论, 1904). Wang Guowei — who was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer — argued that Hongloumeng was a genuine tragedy in the Western sense, a work that depicted the inevitable suffering of human existence with a philosophical depth and an aesthetic power comparable to the greatest tragedies of the Western tradition. This argument — which applied Western critical categories to a Chinese literary masterpiece — represented a new mode of literary criticism that sought to bridge the gap between Chinese and Western literary traditions and to evaluate Chinese literature by universal aesthetic standards.

The arrival of Western literary concepts also raised troubling questions about the adequacy of the Chinese literary tradition. If the novel was the characteristic literary form of modernity, what did it mean that China had not developed a theory of the novel until it was imported from the West? If "realism" was the most advanced mode of literary representation, did this mean that the Chinese literary tradition — with its emphasis on allegory, symbolism, and moral didacticism — was somehow primitive or backward? If "tragedy" was the highest form of dramatic art, what did it mean that the Chinese dramatic tradition had no concept of tragedy? These questions — which reflected the profound crisis of cultural confidence that pervaded late Qing intellectual life — would continue to be debated throughout the twentieth century and remain unresolved to this day.

7. Press, Journalism, and the New Public Sphere

The development of a modern press and a culture of journalism in the late Qing period was one of the most consequential institutional transformations in the history of Chinese literature. The newspaper — which had no exact precedent in the Chinese literary tradition, although the dibao (邸报, "court gazette") had circulated official news among government officials since the Tang dynasty — created a new kind of literary space: a public sphere in which news, opinion, fiction, poetry, and political commentary could be published, circulated, and debated on a scale and at a speed that was unprecedented in Chinese history.

The first modern Chinese-language newspapers were established in the treaty ports — particularly Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Guangzhou — in the 1850s and 1860s, often by Western missionaries or by Chinese who had been educated in missionary schools. The earliest and most important of these was Shenbao (申报, Shanghai News), founded in Shanghai in 1872 by the British merchant Ernest Major, which became the most widely read Chinese-language newspaper of the late Qing and early Republican periods. Shenbao published not only news and political commentary but also poetry, essays, and serial fiction — establishing a connection between journalism and literature that would be a defining feature of Chinese literary culture for decades to come.

The late Qing newspaper press created new opportunities for writers and new channels for the circulation of literary works. Serial fiction — the publication of novels in installments in newspapers and literary journals — became the dominant mode of novel publication in the late Qing period, and the demands of serialization — the need to produce regular installments, to maintain reader interest over extended periods, and to respond to reader feedback — influenced the form and content of the novels themselves. The episodic structure of the late Qing exposé novels, for example, was partly a product of the serial format, which encouraged the stringing together of loosely connected episodes rather than the construction of a unified narrative arc.

The press also created new roles for writers. The journalist (报人, baoren) — a professional writer who earned his living by producing regular content for newspapers and journals — was a new figure in Chinese literary culture, distinct from both the traditional scholar-official who wrote as a complement to his primary career in government and the professional novelist of the Ming and Qing periods who wrote for the commercial book market. The journalist occupied a public role — as a commentator on current events, an advocate for reform, a critic of government policy — that gave him (and, occasionally, her) a degree of social influence that was unprecedented for a non-official writer.

Liang Qichao was the supreme practitioner of the new journalistic prose. His essays — written in a style that he called "new prose" (新文体, xin wenti) — combined the elegance of the classical essay tradition with the urgency and accessibility of modern journalism, creating a mode of public discourse that was enormously influential. Liang Qichao's "new prose" — which was more colloquial and more emotionally direct than traditional classical prose but still far removed from the spoken language — was one of the most important literary innovations of the late Qing period and a crucial step in the evolution from classical to vernacular Chinese as the medium of literary expression.

8. The Abolition of the Examination System and Its Cultural Consequences

The abolition of the traditional civil service examination system in 1905 — one of the most momentous decisions in Chinese history — had consequences for Chinese literary culture that were as profound as they were far-reaching. The examination system had been the central institution of Chinese intellectual and literary life for more than a thousand years: it determined who entered the governing elite, it defined the canon of texts that every educated Chinese was expected to master, it established the standards of literary style and intellectual performance that governed the entire educational system, and it created the cultural homogeneity — the shared body of knowledge, shared habits of thought, and shared literary values — that bound the Chinese elite together across the vast geographic and social diversity of the empire.

The abolition of the examination system — which was part of the "New Policies" (新政, xinzheng) reform program initiated by the Qing court in response to the Boxer catastrophe of 1900 — was intended to clear the way for a modern educational system based on Western models, with curricula that included science, foreign languages, mathematics, and other subjects that had been excluded from the traditional examinations. The immediate practical effect was to make the traditional classical education — the years of study devoted to mastering the Confucian classics and the "eight-legged essay" (八股文, baguwen) that was the required format of examination writing — suddenly useless. Tens of thousands of scholars who had devoted their lives to preparing for the examinations found that their education had become, almost overnight, irrelevant to the new requirements of social advancement.

The literary consequences of this institutional earthquake were enormous. The "eight-legged essay" — the highly formalized prose composition that had been the required format of examination writing since the Ming dynasty — was, whatever its limitations as a vehicle for original thought, a literary form of considerable complexity and sophistication that required years of study to master. Its abolition removed from Chinese literary culture the single most widely practiced form of literary composition and the institutional framework that had sustained the teaching and practice of classical Chinese prose for centuries.

More broadly, the abolition of the examination system severed the connection between literary culture and political power that had been the defining feature of the Chinese literary tradition. For more than a millennium, the ability to write well — to compose elegant classical prose, to write accomplished poetry, to demonstrate mastery of the canonical texts — had been the primary qualification for entry into the governing elite. This connection between literary skill and political authority had given Chinese literary culture an institutional weight and a social prestige that was unmatched in any other civilization. The abolition of the examination system destroyed this connection, transforming literary culture from a pathway to political power into an activity that was valued — or not valued — for its own sake.

The cultural disorientation produced by the abolition of the examination system was compounded by the proliferation of new educational institutions — modern schools, universities, study-abroad programs — that exposed Chinese students to Western knowledge and Western values on an unprecedented scale. The tens of thousands of Chinese students who studied in Japan in the first decade of the twentieth century — and the smaller but culturally significant number who studied in Europe and America — returned to China with knowledge of Western literature, Western philosophy, Western science, and Western political thought that was fundamentally incompatible with the assumptions of the traditional Chinese educational system. These returned students — who included many of the leading figures of the literary revolution of the 1910s and 1920s — brought with them not merely new knowledge but new ways of thinking about knowledge, new standards of intellectual rigor, and new conceptions of the purpose and function of literature.

9. The Zeitgeist: National Crisis, Reform, and the Anxious Search for Modernity

The zeitgeist of the late Qing period — the pervasive mood, the shared anxieties, the dominant preoccupations that colored every aspect of intellectual and literary life — can be summarized in a single word: crisis. The crisis was political: the Qing state was visibly disintegrating, its sovereignty eroded by foreign imperialism, its authority challenged by internal rebellion, its institutions discredited by repeated failures of reform. The crisis was cultural: the Confucian moral and intellectual tradition that had sustained Chinese civilization for millennia was under assault from both Western ideas and the evidence of its own inadequacy. And the crisis was existential: for the first time in their history, Chinese intellectuals were forced to contemplate the possibility that Chinese civilization — the oldest, the most continuous, and (in their own estimation) the most admirable civilization in the world — might not survive.

This crisis generated an extraordinary intensity of intellectual and literary activity. The late Qing was an era of feverish debate — about the nature of Chinese identity, the causes of China's weakness, the appropriate response to Western challenge, the possibility of reform, the desirability of revolution. Every intellectual and literary figure of the period was, in one way or another, engaged with these questions, and the literature of the period — novels, essays, poetry, drama, journalism — was saturated with the urgency of national crisis.

The mood of the era was captured with particular vividness by the poetry of Huang Zunxian (黄遵宪, 1848–1905), who served as a diplomat in Japan, the United States, Britain, and Singapore and who used his poetry to record his observations of the modern world with a directness and a specificity that was unprecedented in the Chinese poetic tradition. Huang Zunxian's poems — which describe steamships, telegraphs, elections, and other phenomena of modern Western civilization — represent a deliberate attempt to expand the range of Chinese poetry to encompass the realities of the modern world, and they anticipate the more radical experiments of the May Fourth poets who would follow.

The zeitgeist of the late Qing was also characterized by an intense and often agonizing ambivalence toward the Chinese past. The late Qing intellectuals were, for the most part, deeply learned in the Chinese classical tradition and deeply attached to it; they valued the beauty of classical Chinese, they admired the moral seriousness of the Confucian tradition, and they were proud of the artistic achievements of Chinese civilization. But they were also forced to confront the possibility that this tradition — however beautiful, however morally serious, however artistically accomplished — was fundamentally inadequate to the challenges of the modern world. The tension between love of the Chinese past and recognition of its inadequacy — between cultural pride and cultural despair — is the emotional signature of the late Qing period and the source of much of its literary power.

The reforms of the final decade of the Qing — the abolition of the examination system, the establishment of modern schools and universities, the promulgation of a constitutional framework, the creation of provincial assemblies, the dispatch of students abroad — represented the most ambitious program of institutional transformation ever attempted by a Chinese government. But they came too late: the revolutionary movement, led by Sun Yat-sen (孙中山, 1866–1925) and his allies, had already gained sufficient momentum to topple the dynasty. The Wuchang Uprising of October 10, 1911, triggered a chain of provincial secessions that brought the Qing dynasty to an end in February 1912, concluding more than two thousand years of imperial rule in China.

The literary consequences of the fall of the Qing would be explored by the next generation of writers — the writers of the May Fourth Movement, who would carry the late Qing project of literary modernization to its radical conclusion. But the foundations of that revolution had been laid in the late Qing: by Liang Qichao's elevation of the novel, by Lin Shu's translations of Western fiction, by the creation of a modern press and a culture of journalism, by the abolition of the examination system, and by the intense, agonizing, and ultimately transformative engagement of late Qing writers with the question of how Chinese literature could survive — and contribute to — the modern world.

10. Conclusion: The End of the Old, the Beginning of the New

The late Qing period — the seven decades between the first Opium War and the fall of the dynasty — was, in many respects, the end of an era: the end of the imperial system that had organized Chinese political life for two millennia, the end of the examination system that had sustained Chinese literary culture for more than a thousand years, and the end of the unquestioned cultural confidence that had characterized Chinese civilization since its origins. It was also, and equally, the beginning of a new era: the beginning of a modern Chinese literature that would engage with the literatures of the world on terms of equality and mutual exchange, the beginning of a new public sphere created by the modern press and the culture of journalism, and the beginning of a new conception of the purpose and function of literature that would define Chinese literary culture for the next century.

The writers of the late Qing were, in a sense, caught between two worlds — the world of the classical tradition, with its millennia of accumulated wisdom, beauty, and prestige, and the world of modernity, with its promises of progress, power, and national salvation. They could not fully embrace either world: the classical tradition, however beloved, was manifestly inadequate to the challenges of the modern age, while the Western literary tradition, however admired, was alien and imperfectly understood. The literature they produced — the exposé novels, the political fiction, the journalistic essays, the translations of Western literature — was often uneven in quality and uncertain in direction, caught between the conventions of the old and the demands of the new.

But the late Qing writers accomplished something that was, in retrospect, of enormous importance: they broke the cultural isolation that had sustained the Chinese literary tradition for three thousand years and opened Chinese literature to the influences, the challenges, and the possibilities of the wider world. The literary revolution of the May Fourth Movement — which would create a new Chinese literature in the vernacular language, informed by Western literary models and dedicated to the transformation of Chinese society — was the culmination of a process that had begun in the late Qing. And the questions that the late Qing writers first posed — about the relationship between tradition and modernity, between Chinese and Western literary values, between literature and politics, between the beauty of the past and the necessities of the future — remain, more than a century later, among the most vital and most contested questions in Chinese literary culture.

References

Previous◀ Chapter 18

History of Chinese Literature

NextChapter 20 ▶