Sentimental Republic : Chinese intellectuals and the Maoist past / Hang Tu.
| Author/creator | Tu, Hang, 1990- author. |
| Format | Book |
| Publication | Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Asia Center, 2025. |
| Description | xv, 326 pages ; 24 cm. |
| Subjects |
| Series | Harvard East Asian monograph series Harvard East Asian monographs ; 475. ^A21267 |
| Contents | Pleasure and Guilt: Reason and Emotion in the Age of New Enlightenment -- Enlightened Sentiments -- Reason and This-Worldly Pleasure -- Emotion and Other-Worldly Guilt -- The Convergence of Pleasure and Guilt -- The Liberal Imagination: The Politics of Mourning in the "Chen Yinke Fever" -- The Pathos of Chinese Liberalism -- A Cultural Loyalist in Despair -- An Apolitical Academician -- A Martyr of Liberalism -- Debating Chen Yinke's Legacy in Contemporary China -- Left Melancholy: A Dialogue between Chen Yingzhen and Wang Anyi -- Fin-de-Siècle Socialism -- The Melancholic Intellectual -- The Vanquished Left -- Utopian Verses -- A Chronicle of Revolutionary Shanghai -- Toward a Melancholic Marxism -- A Passion for God: Liu Xiaofeng and the Conservative Revolt against Modernity -- Revolution and Religion -- Early Romanticism -- From Cultural Christian to Chinese Straussian -- A Conservative Revolution -- Leap of Faith -- China Can Say No: Popular Nationalism and the Spirit of Ressentiment -- The Business of Nationalism -- The Psychology of Ressentiment -- Divided Reception -- Epilogue: Searching for the Chinese Dream -- The Problem of Ideological Polarization in the Post-Mao Era -- A Passion for God -- Between Melancholy and Nostalgia -- The Pathos of Liberalism -- From Ressentiment to Righteous Anger. |
| Abstract | "How does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post-Mao cultural controversy. As it entered a period of market reform, China did not turn away from revolutionary sentiments. Rather, the post-Mao period experienced a surge of emotionally charged debates about red legacies, ranging from the anguished denunciations of Maoist violence to the elegiac remembrances of socialist egalitarianism. Sentimental Republic chronicles forty years (1978-2018) of bitter cultural wars about the Maoist past. It analyzes how the four major intellectual clusters in contemporary China-liberals, the left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists-debated Mao's revolutionary legacies in light of the postsocialist transition. Should the Chinese condemn revolutionary violence and "bid farewell to socialism"? Or would a return to revolution foster alternative visions of China's future path? Tu probes the nexus of literature, thought, and memory, bringing to light the dynamic moral sentiments and emotional excess at work in these post-Mao ideological contentions. By analyzing how rival intellectual camps stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, Tu argues that the polemics surrounding the country's past cannot be properly understood without reading the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia."-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-311) and index. |
| Language | English, with words and phrases in Chinese. |
| LCCN | 2024014015 |
| ISBN | 9780674297579 |
| ISBN | 0674297571 |
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