Rethinking China, Confucianism and the World from the Late Qing: a Special Issue on Zhang Taiyan and Lu Xun
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Front. Lit. Stud. China 2013, 7(3): 325–332 DOI 10.3868/s010-002-013-0018-4 EDITORIAL NOTE Rethinking China, Confucianism and the World from the Late Qing: A Special Issue on Zhang Taiyan and Lu Xun It is a great honor to have been invited to serve as guest editor of an issue of Frontiers of Literary Studies in China containing essays by my teachers and colleagues on Zhang Taiyan and Lu Xun, with a particular focus on China’s literature, humanistic tradition and their relation to the modern era, starting in the nineteenth century and running to the present. The volume stems from a conference organized in Sydney with the help of my colleagues in Chinese Studies at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). We benefitted from the support of our former Head of School, Hans Hendrischke, who secured conference funding from the Hanban through the good offices of then newly-founded Confucius Institute at UNSW and from the organizational help of Lu Jia, Barbara Hendrischke and others. In my own research, which was directly related to the topic of the conference, I have also benefitted from support from both the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and the Australian Research Council, all of whom I should like to thank at the outset. The antecedents of this conference were the Late Qing Living Texts Workshops held at Columbia University by Lydia H. Liu, with the idea of approaching late Qing literature as “living texts” with an on-going relation to contemporary China and the world, rather than as specimens of the past or objects for historical enquiry. Within the sinological world over the last several decades since Perry Link’s book on Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth Century Chinese Cities (1981) there has been an emphasis on literary continuities from the late Qing into the post-May Fourth era, as scholars such as David Der-wei Wang in Fin-de-Siecle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction (1997) have pointed out with regard to fiction and as I have suggested in my own monograph The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the “Old Schools” During late Qing and early Republican China (2006) with regard to classical-style poetry. Our goal in this conference was to examine literary and intellectual continuities between the late Qing, the Republic and the People’s Republic of China, roughly the period beginning in the 1890s and ending in first decade after 2000, give or take some years. Participants came from Australia, China, Japan, Russia, and the United States. The conference was successfully bilingual: 326 Editorial Note presentations and discussion moved smoothly between English and Mandarin. Although this volume contains only papers written in English, I am planning to edit a subsequent volume in Chinese which will contain revised versions of the papers presented in Chinese by Chian Chin-sung, Huang Qiaosheng, Gao Yuandong, Murata Yujiro, Peng Hsiao-yen, Sun Yu, Wang Dehou and Wang Hui. A number of the English papers have already been translated into Chinese for inclusion. All of the articles in this issue have been substantially revised and I should like to thank both their authors and all the anonymous referees for the work they put into reviewing. Since my own paper had already been published elsewhere,1 I submitted a new one reflecting on my work translating the longest of Lu Xun’s late-Qing era essays, Moluo shi li shuo (On the power of Māra poetry), which was composed during a period of research and reflection on China and the West in Tokyo (1906–9) after withdrawing from his medical studies at Sendai. Likewise, Olga Medvedeva has contributed a new article on Soviet studies of Lu Xun. Although her original conference presentation was about Soviet scholarship on Zhang Taiyan, she is now in Norway and too far from the original Russian materials to revise that article. Hopefully it will be forthcoming in a future issue of this journal. On a personal note, I began reading the first of Lu Xun’s early essays, Wenhua pianzhi lun (On imbalanced cultural development) with the help of Tu Weiming, who had welcomed me as a graduate student at Berkeley and whose kindness and generosity I have never forgotten. Tu Weiming’s paper in this volume and those of John Makeham and Mabel Lee are excellent examples of learning informed by decades of study, yet unencumbered by details. They allow us to survey decades, centuries, even millennia in China with a clarity of vision possible only to scholars whose scholarship has been steeped in in-depth textual study of the classics, yet are able to step out of close reading to reassess the past in light of the present, China in light of India and the West, and the West in light of China. Tu Weiming argues the importance of a spiritual, as well as secular understanding of Confucian humanism and, like Lu Xun in his early essays, he rejects materialism as a credo for the modernization of Chinese society. Unlike Lu Xun, but in some ways similar to Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 and Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893–1988) with their affinity for Yogācāra Buddhism and emphasis on the need for continuity with tradition, pluralism and intellectual freedom, Tu Weiming points toward India as an example for present-day China of a pluralistic, 1 “The Enigma of Su Xuelin and Lu Xun,” Wen yu zhe (Literature and philosophy), Journal of National Sun Yat-sen University (Kaohsiung, Taiwan), issue 16, June 2010, 493–527. A Chinese version of the article titled “Su Xuelin lun Lu Xun zhi ‘mi’ ” (The “Enigma” of Su Xuelin “On Lu Xun”) appeared in Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan (Lu Xun research monthly), vol. 348, 2011, issue 4, 34–46. .