Antiquity as cultural identity

In Chapter 20 of Nie Hai Hua, a dozen distinguished scholar-officials gather together to celebrate the birthday of Li Cunke (李莼客), an aged, well-known scholar who no longer holds an official position. He commands authority among these scholar-officials simply because he has the power to fulfil a function traditionally delegated to Chinese scholars, which was to write history. In the previous chapter, the son of an official, bewildered by his father's eagerness to please Li by giving him money, asks: ‘What power does this old man have that makes you so eager to please him?’ His father replies:

This dialogue reveals how a consciousness of history plays a role in the life of the scholar-officials. They feel that each one of them has a personal connection to history and they care about how they will be portrayed.

The party being held in honour of this scholar takes place in the private garden of a relative of the emperor. The guests enjoy themselves playing music and composing poems, as Chinese scholars often do in their leisure time. The host suggests that together they compose a poem as a birthday gift to the star of the day. Each scholar will write a line in praise of one treasure in his household, and offer compliments to one another. The importance of this activity lies in the fact that the items of which they proudly boast are antiques they have collected, varying from rare prints and old stone tablets to manuscripts by ancient scholars.

On the surface, the party does not have direct political significance. However, the scene, which is marked with a kind of warmth and easiness, stands out distinctly from the backdrop of an eventful outside world. It seems that the scholar-officials have stolen a few hours to find comfort in the familiar world of antiques and to shelter themselves momentarily from the uncertainties and insecurities of daily life. The antiques’ embodiment of history make them feel at home. For the scholars—and Wen Qing, the hero of the novel, in particular—feel strongly the contrast between ‘the heimlich pleasures of the hearth’ and ‘the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other’.Footnote ⁵

Collecting antiques was clearly more than a contingent and casual activity for these scholars. In fact, its function may be compared to that of a museum, an institution that did not exist in China at that time. The discussion of museums as institutions of power in Benedict Anderson's Imagined Community may be illuminating here. As Anderson points out, ‘museums, and the museumizing imagination, are both profoundly political’ and institutions such as the census, the map, and the museum, ‘profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion—the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry’. Although his discussion is mainly focused on nineteenth-century colonial archaeology, his thoughts are useful for us as we ponder the significance of the antiques in Nie Hai Hua. If the colonial regimes in Anderson's study consider antiquity to be important for quite ‘straightforward Machiavellian-legalistic reasons’, the Chinese scholars’ attachment to antiquity was clearly an effort to hold onto a history that reassured them of their cultural identity in a changing world.Footnote ⁶

What significance, then, can we attribute to the activities of these scholar-officials who indulged themselves in such apparently trivial matters at a moment of cultural crisis? This passion for antiquity, as discussed by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, is more than a form of contingent activity:

Collecting antiques seems to have enabled the scholars to establish a direct connection between themselves and Chinese history. Displaying their private collections was a symbolic action, as if these individuals had divided up and were protectively guarding their collective ancestry. The fate of a national culture was in their hands: together they would enable its survival or it would perish. This strong demonstration of the connection between the individual and the history of the nation clearly shows that collecting antiques was much more than a simple hobby for the scholar-officials.

This fear of being swamped by Western culture was exactly what Chinese scholars felt at that time. Facing the modern world, which threatened to render their way of life obsolete, they tried both to adapt themselves to the emerging modern society and, at the same time, to cling to traditional cultural values. In this sense, Nie Hai Hua proposed a nationalist discourse, a common feature of which is its ‘Janus-faced quality’. According to Deniz Kandiyoti:

This goes some way to explaining why Zeng Pu was, on the one hand, very critical of many traditional Chinese cultural institutions, such as the imperial examination and the eight-legged essay, and yet enthusiastically and warmly portrayed many other traditional cultural activities, on the other.

Like most Third World nations, China's modernization was an unnatural process in that it started as a project that was imposed on it by the outside world. As a nation with a rich cultural tradition, China's journey into modernity is one that is full of tension and agony. Nie Hai Hua vividly reflects the tension between a traditional Chinese culture struggling to survive a profound crisis and an emerging modern culture that contains both hope and uncertainty. The new culture the Chinese had in mind was one that modelled itself on Western civilization.

In the novel the contrasts and conflicts between traditional Chinese civilization and modern Western civilization are represented not only at the level of political commentary, but also in its portrayal of everyday objects and technical novelties. The Chinese literati are equally fascinated by Western technical inventions such as railways, ships, and guns as by Chinese antiques such as rare prints and paintings. A collective and profound nostalgia was felt by Chinese intellectuals, torn as they were between longing for the old and wonder at the new, while simultaneously experiencing a deep sense of despair over the destiny of the empire and the culture.

However, critics so far have been very unsympathetic to the ambivalence portrayed in the novel. Existing commentary on Nie Hai Hua enthusiastically embraces the novel's portrayal of the reality of the decaying feudal Chinese empire, but is blind to the ambivalence that is revealed by the profound sympathy it shows towards traditional culture. Its critics rarely realize the contradiction inherent in their own criticism: that while early modern Chinese novels are praised for their harsh depiction of Chinese culture and reality, at the same time they are criticized for their cultural conservatism. The critical paradigm, which serves the interests of a revolutionary ideology and valorizes progress and development, is obviously incapable of overcoming this contradiction in reasoning.

A paradigm shift is needed in order to understand and appreciate the struggle of Chinese scholars during the process of transformation. My argument is that, despite its sometimes ironic portrayal of the Chinese intelligentsia of the time, the novel's main purpose—in contrast to that which has been held for so long—is not to criticize the Chinese scholars of the time for their decadent lives, but to depict the cultural shock that China was experiencing as it stood on the threshold of modernity, through an examination of the activities of a group of intellectuals.

Condemnation or disenchantment

In his Modernity, an Unfinished Project, Jürgen Habermas notes that Max Weber ‘described as “rational” the process of disenchantment which led in Europe to a disintegration of religious world views that issued in a secular culture’. Nie Hai Hua vividly portrays the disenchantment with traditional Chinese culture in late imperial China. This is the beginning of China's modernity. From this point on, China embarked on, in Max Weber's words, ‘the path of rationalization’.Footnote ⁹ If, according to Weber, the ‘rational’ process of disenchantment in Europe had led to a disintegration of religious world views and issued in a secular culture, similarly the process of disenchantment in China led to the disintegration of traditional Chinese world views.

Peter Li found ‘a unifying principle’ of the novel ‘in the fact that practically all of the anecdotes are about a dozen or so high-level officials or men of letters in Peking: the late Ch'ing Intelligentsia’.Footnote ¹⁰ The activities of these people—with the exception of a few who were associated with the real political and diplomatic events of the day and whose efforts often failed tragically—are mostly literary and cultural ones. These activities include scholarly discussions of academic issues, the collection of antiques, services at imperial examinations to recruit officials, and literary pursuits such as composing poems and criticizing essays. Several people in the group were zhuangyuan, the champions of the imperial examination, and who therefore had achieved the highest honorary position for a Chinese scholar and epitomized the traditional cultural orders.

Why did the author choose scholar-officials and their lives as the major subjects for the novel? The scholar-officials in Nie Hai Hua may be classified into two groups: one composed of scholars who were loyal to the cultural traditions and who took part in the traditional practices such as presiding over the civil examination, and another group of progressive scholars who had been exposed to the West and who enthusiastically embraced reform. The head of the former group was Gong Hefu, a minister and teacher of the emperor; and the latter was Xue Shuyun, a former ambassador to Britain, France, Italy, and Belgium. Wen Qing served as the bridge between the two groups as he belonged to both: his position as zhuangyuan in the civil examination and thus as the inheritor of a cultural tradition secured his position in the traditional camp, while his diplomatic service affiliated him with the other group which attempted to modernize China by learning from the West. In the novel, however, the progressive group is portrayed considerably less than is the conservative group. The enthusiasm for the new, represented by the progressive group, is surpassed by enthusiasm for tradition, represented by the conservative group. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote:

Indeed, we find that what the Chinese intelligentsia in the novel are attempting to do through their often-clumsy activities is no other than to construct a national identity. This was their response to the cultural identity crisis that had arisen as modernity took root. As Levenson observes:

At this time, Confucian authority was being replaced by Western authority. The emotional connection with the former was strong even as the rational acknowledgment of the latter was growing. Caught in the horns of the dilemma, Chinese intellectuals could not help but demonstrate a kind of clumsiness. One Chinese historian's comment may help justify the novel's choice of a group of scholar-officials as its subject: ‘When a culture was decaying, those who had been cultured by this culture would inevitably suffer. The more he embodied the culture, the harder his suffering.’Footnote ¹³

Together with several other late Qing works of fiction, Nie Hai Hua was understood as a novel of condemnation. This was less a criticism, however, than a display of profound cultural disenchantment with traditional Chinese culture. Traditional society was dissolving, and what used to hold China together no longer made sense in a changing world. As one historian observed:

The pathos of Nie Hai Hua is that it displays more disenchantment than condemnation. The subjects’ position originates not from an abstract historical philosophy or moral principles, but from their real experience of modernity. This rationalization they were living through did not happen as a result of a natural development of the native culture but as the consequence of China encountering the West. The novel is a vivid representation of Chinese intelligentsia's clumsiness in embracing the new and a demonstration of their weak and futile defence of tradition.

The author of the novel was clearly preoccupied with the dissolution of traditional Chinese culture and society under the impact of Western learning—in science and technology—as well as industrialization and capitalism. In Chapter 2, just after Wen Qing gloriously returns home, having achieved the top-prize zhuangyuan in the imperial examination, one of the scholars advises him:

This comment shows a new way of thinking by the Chinese literati that bears a great similarity to Max Weber's idea of rationalization: ‘By “rationalization” Weber meant the process by which explicit, abstract, intellectually calculable rules and procedures are increasingly substituted for sentiment, tradition, and rule of thumb in all spheres of activity.’Footnote ¹⁶

In his Five Faces of Modernity, Matei Calinescu distinguishes ‘two distinct and bitterly conflicting modernities’: modernity as a stage in the history of Western civilization, and modernity as an aesthetic concept. He includes in the former ‘the doctrine of progress, the confidence in the beneficial possibilities of science and technology, the concern with time, the cult of reason, and the idea of freedom defined within the framework of an abstract humanism, but also the orientation toward pragmatism and the cult of action and success’.Footnote ¹⁷ The progressive scholars portrayed in the novel clearly embody this understanding of modernity as they show a more objective attitude towards tradition and begin to adopt more pragmatic reasoning.

The map incident and the border issue

Another episode in the novel to which no adequate attention has been given so far is the map incident. The issue of borders only became important in the modern age. It is no accident that even though he is the ambassador to Germany and Russia, Wen Qing's official diplomatic duties are only briefly mentioned, while the purchase of maps that show the borders between China and Russia, a private act by Wen Qing who is a scholar of frontier geography, is given a detailed description.

In the novel Wen Qing does not carry out any important diplomatic activities; on the contrary, it is his concubine Cai Yun who extends ‘her delicate diplomatic wrist’ by getting invited to a meeting with Empress Victoria and having a secret affair with Waldersee. However, while in Russia, Wen Qing buys 12 maps from a Russian swindler. This transaction not only loses him money, but also causes a lot of trouble as the maps were forged to change the borders between China and Russia, taking away 800 square li of Chinese territory. This incident finally brings about Wen Qing's disgrace, causes him to lose his official position, and hastens his death.

Here the scholarship on the historical geography of frontiers is given a nationalist twist. This episode indirectly reflects both the distrust the Chinese felt towards foreigners and the profound anxiety they experienced when facing a hostile outside world. It ironically points out that it is a task for which Chinese intellectuals are not adequately equipped. Drawing a map of the borders between Russia and China is beyond doubt a nation-building activity. Chinese scholars, represented by Wen Qing, engaged in this activity through the study of historical geography, turning a nationalist mission into an institutionalized academic endeavour. This incident in the novel shows that the Chinese were not prepared for the coming of the age of modern nations, and reveals the weaknesses of Chinese culture when confronted with a world that had been changed by geographical discoveries, industrial revolution, and the globalization of the capitalist economy.

A sense of powerlessness pervades the description of this incident, and the fact that the final settlement of the border conflict was achieved with the arbitration of the British government further proves the inability of the scholar-officials to function in the modern world. Cai Yun thus criticizes her husband:

Chinese intellectuals indeed felt it necessary to carry out such activities, but they did so without consciously putting them to the service of building a modern nation. Not only do the people depicted in the novel not possess such a consciousness, but the author of the novel also betrays his lack of such a consciousness. The map incident—treated too briefly in the novel—is in fact more significant when we understand that one of the important contributions of the novel itself is, in a sense, to remap China.

In the novel a Chinese intellectual's involvement in international politics ends in tragic failure. The map incident also provides an indirect criticism of traditional Chinese humanist culture, which has a tendency to textualize realistic conflicts of all kinds—moral, political, social, and historical. The portrayal of the incident reveals an anxiety about an unpredictable future, a state of confusion, and a sense of helplessness when facing the new world.

Anxiety, hesitation, and paralysis

It is no accident that Wen Qing's first encounter with the West takes place on a ship to Germany. On the ship Wen Qing gets to know Pierre, a trickster, who performs hypnotism. Wen Qing suggests that Pierre hypnotize the Russian woman, Xia Yali. Later it is this same man who sells him the maps of distorted borders between China and Russia, which eventually brings about his disgrace.

The image of a map is symbolic as it signifies the disoriented Chinese intellectuals who were making efforts to find some direction in the modern world. The novel itself embodies the bewildered and confused state of Chinese intellectuals who were torn between a safe cultural tradition and the inevitable coming of an uncertain new world. The narrator in the novel clearly advocates changes, yet an anxiety is clearly discernible throughout the novel.

The map incident is only one indication of a larger—and often unconscious—attempt to distinguish between the inside and the outside of China. Cai Yun's criticism of traditional scholarship on geography is oriented in a modern national sense, but the study of geography by the traditional Chinese intelligentsia was popular because it was a fashionable form of scholarly activity in which a negotiation was going on between an urgent need at the time to draw borders for China and the traditional formal propriety demanded by orthodox culture.

For Wen Qing the study of frontier geography went hand in hand with the pursuit of knowledge about the world. At the time, the former was still a Sino-centred academic pursuit, while the latter showed an international vision that was new to China. Besides being an established scholar of Mongolian history, ‘Wen Qing read Xu Songkan's A Brief Record of the World Around Us, Chen Zizhai's Observations of the Countries on the Sea, Wei Yuan's Illustrated Account of the Countries on the Sea, and thus he gradually became an expert on foreign affairs and was evaluated highly by his superiors.’Footnote ¹⁹

The appearance of frontier geographers and the study of ‘bian-jiang-shi-di’ (边疆史地—the history and geography of border areas) during the nineteenth century has often been considered a change in direction of academic interests within the scholarly community of late imperial China. Many Chinese critics see it as an attempt by the Qing intelligentsia to escape the political oppression and ideological control exercised by the Qing emperors (the ruling class, which was part of an ethnic minority group of China and which discouraged the Han intelligentsia from participating in political affairs). To a certain extent this is an accurate and discerning theory. However, the scholars’ motivation is more than simply a passive academic pursuit. In the beginning, the academic study of China's borders served the interests of the expanding Qing empire in its conquest and control of those ethnic tribes inhabiting remote areas. It also gradually became part of the effort to help confront an increasing threat of encroachment from the West. In the novel, the maps that Wen Qing brought back from Europe were used in negotiations over the border between China and Russia. In this way, traditional scholarship became a powerful and engaging tool in the construction of a modern national identity. In the novel, the national interest clearly replaces ethnic interests. Wen Qing's words clearly proclaim this intention:

Thus the historical geography of the frontiers clearly became a nationalist project as, ‘[T]he frontier does not merely close the nation in on itself, but also, immediately, opens it to an outside, to other nations.’Footnote ²¹ Frontiers are ‘places of communication and exchange’ and ‘places of dissociation and association, of separation and articulation’.Footnote ²²

Besides the geographical mapping of China, there is also what may be termed a ‘political mapping’ of China going on in the novel. The treatment of different political groups is equally sympathetic. A certain camaraderie transcends different political groups with different political interests. The bureaucrats and the nationalist revolutionaries are all treated equally. The novel describes a meeting between Tan Sitong, a leading reformist and royalist who advocates political reforms (with the cooperation of the emperor) and Lu Haodong, a radical revolutionary who is engaged in armed uprisings to overturn the Qing regime. When Lu tries to kill Tan because he overhears the revolutionaries’ secret conversations, Tan tells him ‘We are all comrades despite the differences in our approaches and our goal of saving the nation is the same.’Footnote ²³ This description is almost an illustration of Anderson's observation: ‘Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.’Footnote ²⁴ Zeng Pu is often criticized for his position as a moderate reformist, but my reading of the novel shows that he is first and foremost a nationalist.

If the map incident represents the whereabouts of the Chinese in the collective imagination, the banquet scenes in Chapter 20 are an attempt to search history for its roots. Incidents that show a kind of fixation with the ancient world (such as seals and old paintings) are scattered throughout the novel.

Another incident to illustrate this is a scoundrel's seizing of an old painting from a poor widow in an attempt to bribe officials for an official post. The widow's husband—who was known as Antique Zhang (Zhang Gudong 张古董)—gave away all his property in exchange for the painting and commanded on his deathbed that his children should keep it in the family at all costs. The widow and her son undertake a long journey in pursuit of the scoundrel in order to get the painting back. The scoundrel conspires with local officials to put the widow in prison, but with the help of Master Saber Wang, a righteous martial artist, the widow is released and the painting returned.

These incidents, though on the surface unconnected, make it more apparent that the unconscious desire to hold on to tradition was pervasive throughout China. The incident described above shows that even those from the poorest class remained loyal to the tradition symbolized by antiques. This fetishism of antiques is clearly significant in that it reveals a cultural tradition in crisis. What is this fetishism if not an attempt to search in their own cultural legacy for objects that make them proud and enable them to connect with their own past, creating a sense of ownership and of being at home? This attachment and loyalty to antiques represent a desire to maintain and to defend a tradition that was facing changes and the threatening presence of the unknown Other.

At the same time, the novel criticizes and mocks the Chinese intelligentsia for their attachment to antiques. One official, known for his expertise on antiques, is fooled when he is mischievously given ink prints made from cakes and he mistakes them for prints from coins from the Shang dynasty. Another scholar official, upon obtaining a Han seal inscribed with ‘duliao jiangjun’ (general who conquers the northeast), takes it as a divine sign that he will achieve military success in the battle with the Japanese in Korea. Encouraged by his possession of this seal, he volunteers to lead the Chinese army into battle, which ends in tragic failure and shame.Footnote ²⁵ Even when they were facing an urgent war that would change their future, the Chinese scholars still tried to make a connection between their current situation and history. We are reminded of Anderson's remark: ‘If nation-states are widely conceded to be “new” and “historical”, the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and still more important, glide into a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.’Footnote ²⁶

The significance of the party scene in Chapter 20 of Nie Hai Hua is all the more significant when it is seen as a sharp contrast to the party in Chapter 18, where a group of Chinese intellectuals who are enthusiastic about Western culture discuss the cultures of foreign countries and China's reform. These progressive Chinese scholars also discuss the international situation and world politics. They not only openly acknowledge the technological prowess of the West but also praise its political and social systems:

While scholars at the second party enthusiastically embrace Western learning and its political systems, scholars at the first party are trying to reaffirm their connection to history. Their passion for antiques is more than just a passion for the past. When the old scholar in whose honour the party was held says that he has no antique to show off, it is suggested to him that he use his diary instead: ‘The diary of your Excellency, continued for forty years, is a marvellous piece of antique.’Footnote ²⁸ There is a tendency among these scholars to connect their present activity with the past, to seek a conscious and active unification with the past. For them, this is an important part of trying to situate themselves in a changing world.

They do attempt to adopt a modern attitude towards the collection of antiques. One scholar thus advises Wen Qing:

This intellectual, who is enthusiastic about Western learning, clearly has a modern approach and therefore takes a more objective view of China's past. In contrast, the subjective loyalty and passion of those conservative officials appear more political.

In a way the novel also predicted the coming debate between cultural conservatives and those who were in favour of total Westernization. Contemporary post-colonial studies may cast new light on this century-long debate in China over the construction of a national culture. The debate between total Westernization and cultural conservatism started with Zhang Zhidong when he put forward the ideal of ‘Chinese learning as the foundation, Western learning as the means’. The tension between the two is far from reaching an end. China is still in one of the ‘various stages of assimilation and rejection of the culture of the colonizer’.Footnote ³⁰

One very interesting character in the novel—one who is so peripheral that no Chinese critics have paid him any attention—is the collaborator, Gong Xiaoqi. He is the son of a well-known Chinese scholar who was murdered by Manchurian nobility as a result of his love affair with the concubine of a member of the Manchurian royal family. His father's murder turns Gong Xiaoqi into an enemy of the Manchurians and he looks to Westerners for support in taking his revenge on them. His studio name of ‘ban-lun’ (半伦, meaning ‘morally half-human’) represents a complete bankruptcy of traditional Chinese values as it mocks the traditional Confucian precept of the social obligations of each human being. He volunteers to teach Chinese to Thomas Wade, an English missionary. His peripheral position in the novel does not conceal the fact that he provides an alternative to the other possible positions taken by Chinese intellectuals. He is an iconoclast whose position is viewed with both suspicion and admiration by the mainstream Chinese intelligentsia. He controversially suggests to English troops that they burn down Yuanming Garden, the royal garden of the Qing emperor: ‘Some called him a traitor, which he would deny; others praised him as a revolutionary, he would not admit either.’Footnote ³¹ The other Chinese scholars detest him because he puts the interests of his family above those of the nation. What differentiates him from other Chinese scholars is that in a national crisis, other scholars place cultural affiliation above individual or racial revenge. This is clearly stated by the well-known reformer Tan Sitong:

This indirect criticism of Gong Xiaoqi's deeds reveals that among mainstream Chinese intellectuals, the survival of China as a nation had to take priority over the racial interest of the Han Chinese.