China’s Revolutions in the Modern World. Rebecca E. Karl

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proposition. In Hu’s proposal, safeguarding the vernacular for the literary required it to be properly regulated and channeled, by and through the intellectual elite. In pursuit of this endeavor, Hu chose to praise earlier vernacular writers, such as the authors of the Dream of the Red Chamber or Water Margin, who “faithfully write about the contemporary situation,” thus entering the halls of “true literature”⁸ rather than the far bawdier (and actually more popular) narratives of the Ming-Qing marketplace, such as Jin Ping Mei (The Golden Lotus). Hu’s call for the vernacular as a literary language sparked enormous backlash, with conservatives, including the prolific translator Lin Shu, accusing the foreign-educated Hu of having lost his Chinese-ness and been enslaved by foreign thinking, and with radicals accusing him of snobbish elitism. (No one at this point culturally defended the wildly popular and profitable “lowbrow” novels classified as “mandarin duck and butterfly” literature.)

      Ever since, the battle over what constitutes “the vernacular” (baihua / ) has been continuously waged. As China has a huge number of spoken languages, often corresponding to very specific locations, the question of which of the major languages was to constitute the “standard” spoken vernacular to be reflected and refined in “high” literary form was a cause for much debate. The issue is still not completely solved, although the imposition by strong states after 1949 of a “national language”—in Taiwan called guoyu (, language of the state), and in the PRC called putong hua (, common speech)—foreclosed some possibilities, while leaving the door open for others. In post-1949 Nationalist-ruled Taiwan and Communist-ruled PRC alike, the national language ultimately was modeled on the Northern Chinese dialect that had become the spoken language of the dynastic bureaucracy (“Mandarin”); and yet, most people in China did/do not speak this language as a matter of daily life, or at all. Thus, while various geographical-linguistic forms were offered as possible contenders for literariness (Cantonese, Fujianese, Shanghainese, etc.), until recently, they were excluded a priori. With the rise of regional media empires, however, these languages have staged somewhat of a comeback. The problem of language in today’s China is still part of a struggle over how to be Chinese. The question was systematically raised for the first time in the mid 1910s.

      The most ambitious of the language revolutionaries of the New Culture / May Fourth period, Qu Qiubai, advocated not the endorsement of a particular regional language but rather the creation of an entirely new language, to be pieced together from the ongoing and contemporary comingling of the multilingual, rural-derived proletariats working in urban factories.⁹ Instead of what he called the “mule language” (neither horse nor donkey) of a Europeanized Chinese / Mandarin vernacular that conformed to foreign-educated elites and their lifestyles in the treaty ports but was not spoken by regular folks, Qu’s proposed language was to be based in the very daily practice of the proletariat that came closest to the ways that ordinary people from different language groups found to speak to one another. In Qu’s theory, language was to be a class attribute rather than a national one. Ultimately Qu’s radically democratic advocacies were dropped from discussion.

      With the successive arrival of radio, recordings, talkie cinema, popular music, and other modes of sound reproducibility, the question of language and form continually (re)imposed itself as a political, social, and market problem. It also became completely intertwined with the intractable issue of the written form itself, the hanzi (, characters) that were distinctive to China’s historic expressive system. European language experts, who, through the nineteenth century, had come up with immutable (colonial) taxonomies of world languages, had long since decided that China was hampered by the hanzi form of writing, and that this “pictographic” or “ideographic” form could never be flexible enough to express modern thinking or conceptual matters properly. On this view, Chinese were imprisoned in and by nonalphabetic backwardness. After considering and discarding Esperanto as a possible solution, Chinese language experts in part accepted European theories and tried over many decades to find an adequate linguistic logic for the transformation and/or simplification of hanzi: using alphabetic equivalents, inventing new pronunciation symbols and guides, and ultimately reducing the number of strokes required for the writing of any given character (the 1950s PRC solution to the problem). With the telegraph and then the advent of computers, the issue was rejoined from yet other angles.¹⁰

      The difficulty of writing/reading in the process of learning redounded immediately to the sphere of education and textbooks. The explosive expansion of schools and literacy helped to redefine the purpose of education. From a tool of gentility, good breeding, or male access to state power, education for boys and girls became, on the one hand, a form of training for individual fulfillment and/or creating activists to lead the fight for social justice; on the other hand, as education came under the control of agents of a would-be state and the conservative forces of textbook publishing, it became a way to produce citizens as patriots and servants of a putative (still nonexistent) national state. Grammar texts became one key to producing whatever sense of citizenry could be wrought from the disunified territorial whole. Meanwhile, emulating Germany and Japan, physical education was incorporated into the new-style schools, based on the conviction that the old separation of effete scholarship (wen / ) from brawny military pursuits (wu / ) was outmoded and inimical to an all-round ideal militarized citizen of the nation. Even the young Mao Zedong was captivated by the practice of physical exercise, although he was hugely critical of the mechanical, rote way in which it was taught in schools.¹¹

      Thus it was that from the earliest phases of the New Culture movement’s calls for a radical transformation in language, literary form, and the social purpose of culture, the issues raised went to the core of how “Chinese” or “Chinese-ness” was to be practiced, inculcated, experienced, and understood in modern terms. Over the course of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, these issues were repeatedly debated and re-raised, in ever-deeper and ever more expanded form. They remain at issue today.

      In late 1917, the Russian Revolution did not wash across Chinese radical circles in a wave of clarity. In the immediate aftermath, the October Revolution was understood as a “victory of anarcho-communism.”¹² Indeed, through the 1910s and well into the 1920s, the major language of radicalism in China was that of anarchism: Peter Kropotkin’s mutual aid, Leo Tolstoy’s agrarian utopianism, Mikhail Bakhunin’s laborism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s collectivism, Emma Goldman’s radical feminism, Daoist eremetism, and of course, with even less theoretical rigor, various advocacies for assassination and nihilism. There was little to distinguish Bolshevism or Marxism from anarchism as an anti-state and pro-labor form of socialism.¹³ It was only in late 1918 through 1919 that the various “isms” started to get separated out and elaborated more clearly in relation to one another. Yet even as the intellectual scene was muddled, Chinese state agents and foreign authorities were not confused about the potential dangers of the revolutionary appeal of Russia; large numbers of journals, whether merely liberal or more radical, were shut down while what was called “Bolshevist” activity was sought so as to be rooted out of foreign concession areas. Most of the captured activists were in fact anti-Bolshevist anarchists, but that mattered to no one in power.

      By late 1918, Li Dazhao, a professor at Beijing University and soon to be one of the founders of the CCP along with Chen Duxiu, was lauding the victory of Bolshevism in Russia in the pages of the quintessential journal of the time, New Youth (Xin Qingnian / ); by 1919 he was writing more about Marx and Marxism than Bolshevism. Meanwhile, Qu Qiubai, temporarily sidetracked from politics

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