This richly empirical study examines a much-neglected subject: how the Chinese use classical historical narratives to produce allegorical codes and complex symbols in modern political discourse, enabling multifaceted communications and structuring responses at moments of national crisis.

In Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China, Paul A. Cohen focuses on the modern use of the story of Goujian and outlines the classical narrative as contained in the Zuozhuan, the Shiji, and the fictional Wu Yue chunqiu. The king of Yue (modern Zhedong) warred against the kingdom of Wu (modern Jiangnan). He suffered defeat and humiliation and went home to plot revenge. He slept on brushwood and tasted daily the bitterness of gall (woxin changdan) to shame himself into a stiff resolve. He showed patience and used wise counsel in building up the wealth, power, and determination of the Yue people (shinian shengju, shinian jiaxun). This deceitful, brutal ruler disciplined his people to serve his will. He pursued a broad range of strategies against his enemy, including a “beauty trap” (meiren ji) in which China's Helen served as the Trojan horse to bring down the defenders' walls. The result was a happy Goujian who avenged himself (baochou), wiped clean the national shame (xuechi) of Yue, and became himself the hegemonic king (baye).

Cohen identifies the late Qing as a “Goujian moment” in public discourse, when a growing number of Chinese, reeling from Chinese defeat in the Sino-Japanese War and the terms of the Boxer Protocol, discerned a “close structural correspondence between the basic structure of the story and China's contemporary experience” (p. 86). His analysis is at its most compelling when he documents the “sympathetic vibration” (p. 86) between the Goujian story and the emerging Chinese nationalism. The narrative structure of this nationalism is fashioned after the Goujian story, when Shanghai journal articles called on the Chinese people to recognize the shame (guochi) and set about wiping it clean (xuechi), or when Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader after 1927, identified himself with Goujian (p. 44) and vowed to “cleanse” China of the shame and disgrace suffered at Japanese and Western hands. Republican Chinese nationalists narrated Chinese experiences (and organized their political rituals) using tropes such as the commemoration of national humiliation, the determination to avenge, the necessity to “eat bitterness,” the patience to endure hardship, and the imperative to stir up and discipline the entire people to “never forget (wu wang)” the shame (p. 47). Cohen calls the Goujian story “a body of shared cultural knowledge,” “a paradigmatic narrative,” and “a kind of template that shaped the ways in which [the Chinese people] processed contemporary experience” (p. 49). The opening chapters of the book persuasively draw attention to the preeminence of the Goujian story in the structuring of modern Chinese nationalist experience when competing narrative paradigms and templates—such as the stories of Yue Fei and Wen Tianxiang—were equally available.

The binary of humiliation/revenge diminished in political relevance in post-1949 China. Nonetheless, Goujian continues to appear in a large amount of work on both sides of the Taiwan Strait and in all genres. Cohen focuses on selected textbooks, general histories, stage plays, fictions, and television scripts, all of which widely circulated in their day. The chapters contain a reading of the general histories meant for the edification of schoolchildren (Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan), an examination of the commissioned plays meant for the service of the Communist Party (Mao's China, 1960s), a synopsis of historical fictions with political criticisms meant for the initiated reading of fellow intellectuals (Deng's China, 1980s), and a description of a melodramatic television series produced for popular entertainment and the promotion of Zhejiang tourism. Multiple editions of Goujian emerged, ranging from a sage king (i.e., Chiang Kai-shek) who teaches filial piety, a mover of history (i.e., Mao Zedong) who imports the iron plow (the Great Leap Forward), and a despot who kills his intellectuals (in post-Mao scar literature), to a backdrop for an affluent man's idyllic romance (in the postreform marketplace). There may be opportunities for further analyses on issues of genre, audience, and public discourse under the Chinese literary system, including the translingual reconfigurations of contemporary Chinese narrative repertoire. Goujian, in short, loses his preeminence and coherence in the narrative structuring of post-1949 Chinese experiences. The versatile Goujian adapts and keeps, albeit edited, the currency of aspects of his story.

Existing scholarship tends to study popular culture and national politics separately. This lucid and extensively researched volume bridges that historiographical gap and offers a narrative of China's modern history in multiple layers. It challenges the field to move beyond sheer descriptions of happenings to grasp the multiplicities in politics and cultural history—as encountered, for instance, in Ulysses—in Chinese organizations and negotiations of the telling. This is an important work of Western discovery of Chinese history in Chinese discursive practices. The volume merits much consideration for a long time to come.