Sentimental Republic by Hang Tu offers an incisive reinterpretation of emotion as a fundamental force shaping ethical reasoning and political thought in post-Mao China. Structured in three parts, the book maps the emotional and ideological landscapes navigated by Chinese cultural elites. Tu challenges the notion of emotion as merely personal, instead illustrating how figures across the political spectrum – from liberals and leftists to cultural conservatives and nationalists – strategically employed emotional registers like guilt, mourning, melancholy and resentment to engage with the traumas of the past. Through close analysis of key thinkers and cultural works, Tu reveals how these emotional modes became instrumental in confronting Maoist legacies, redefining national belonging, and working through the ethical complexities of China’s reform era.
The major contribution lies in its fusion of conceptual rigour and interpretive richness. Tu reconceives emotion not as a peripheral experience but as a central lens through which political commitments and ideological divides take shape in post-Mao China. Drawing from both Chinese and Western traditions, he positions affect as integral to political discourse, challenging the conventional separation between reason and sentiment. His method is equally layered: by interlacing philosophical analysis with close readings of literature and media, Tu reconstructs how emotional investments shaped the ethical and cultural vocabularies of China’s intellectuals. The result is a strikingly original interpretation that highlights the affective underpinnings of modern Chinese thought and recasts how we understand the moral texture of political life.
Another standout aspect is Tu’s use of “critical biography” – which combines life events and achievements with analysis of work, character and cultural impact – in profiling both performing and non-performing pro- or anti-US figures such as Zhang Xiaobo, Fang Fang, Wu Jing, and Zhang Shaozhong. Although framed by four ideological spectrums, these discussions inadvertently expose how cultural elites interpret the four-decade US engagement policy toward China (1978–2018) from a distinctly Chinese perspective. Moreover, this research also sheds light on the cultural underpinnings of China’s US policy, which has consistently oscillated between cooperation and resistance in the post-Mao era. I acknowledge, however, that this insight may not have been the author’s explicit intention.
Regarding popular nationalism, the author describes “the politics of ressentiment against the backdrop of surging Chinese nationalism in the 1990s” (p. 248) by focusing on the 1996 bestseller China Can Say No. This chapter is particularly illuminating in showing how cultural authenticity, cultural performance and political imagination intertwine in Chinese nationalism. Its broader foreign policy implications – particularly how such sentiments influence the external strategies of both China and the US – deserve greater attention.
For American China policymakers, the most salient theme may be the politics of ressentiment. Amid intensifying US–China superpower rivalry – highlighted by confrontations like the recent “who-blinks-first” tariff conflict and the potential ripple effects of the newly enacted “Big, Beautiful Bill,” domestic political pressures in the US risk stirring undercurrents of racialized grievance tied to broader economic anxieties. On China’s side, Chairman Xi’s ideological campaigns, “wolf warrior” diplomacy and firm ideological stance have energized nationalist rhetoric, much of which has been amplified and internalized by ordinary nationalists through social media, official narratives and performative displays.
However, the chapter would be even more enriching if it addressed a deeper ideological thread that predates the bestseller. Specifically, Wang Huning’s 1991 book America Against America offers another vital layer to this narrative. Currently the chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Wang, an academic who rose to become the CCP’s top ideological advisor to Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, articulated a systemic critique of American liberal modernity that continues to shape China’s political imagination today. His book, published several years before China Can Say No, provides a high-level ideological complement to that book’s popular nationalist sentiment. Bringing in Wang’s work would help trace the continuity between elite strategic thinking and mass nationalist expression – bridging intellectual and popular currents in the formation of China’s nationalist identity.
Additionally, the author’s discussion of “the business of nationalism” is particularly insightful. A brief reflection on “offshore nationalism” – how nationalist identity is enacted by the Chinese diaspora and overseas influencers – could deepen the analysis. This phenomenon, both spontaneous and state-influenced, serves to reinforce domestic narratives and project soft power abroad. It manifests in National Day parades in Chinatowns and protests when Taiwanese officials transit through the US. Whether organic or orchestrated, it reveals how nationalist affect is performed or instrumentalized for emotional and geopolitical impact. Including this transnational dimension would show how nationalism operates beyond China’s borders as a globalized performance of state-aligned sentiment.
Where are the workers, the peasants, the everyday voices so often left out of intellectual history? asked David Der-wei Wang in his conversation with the author about this book in 2025. I like the question but found Tu’s response not entirely convincing – though highly understandable and acceptable. While Tu emphasizes that many elites in the book “were profoundly invested in the question of how to represent ‘the people’,” such investment – however sincere – does not necessarily mean they succeeded in truly representing them. Intent does not equate to voice.
I would add a follow-up question: why did the “factory-floor philosophers” vanish from China’s historical record? In the US, Eric Hoffer – America’s “longshoreman-philosopher” – spent decades as a manual labourer before gaining recognition as a public intellectual. Why have similar figures not emerged, or remained visible, in China’s intellectual history?
After all, as we say, it takes a village to raise a child, but writing a book demands a sharp focus on a single question. For Tu, that question centred on how the legacy of Mao’s revolution has been contested not only through ideological and intellectual frameworks, but also through deeply rooted emotional dynamics – especially as traced in the affective experiences of post-Mao intellectual class. In this sense, he has meticulously and innovatively fulfilled his intellectual mission. I enthusiastically recommend Sentimental Republic.
