This panel seeks to provide a forum for tracing the evolving concept of modernity in China. When we talk about Chinese modernity, there are many debatable questions. For instance, what event—the decline of the Ming Dynasty, the Opium Wars, the Xinhai Revolution, the May Fourth Movement—should we consider the “beginning” of the modern era? How has China experienced commercialization and modernization? How did Chinese people construct their modern identities and traumatic memories of becoming modern? Has China ever been modern?

The panel rejects the definition of modernity in non-Western societies as an “alternative” modernity, a byproduct of an “original” modernity that began in the West. It will review classical Chinese literary tradition while also investigating Western impacts in modern China. Meanwhile, the panel holds a critical view on the Chinese Community Party (CCP)’s “socialist modernity” and “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” hence the title of the panel. To do so, the panel first presents an identity crisis of Chinese literati in 16th century Chinese commercial society. Zhenxing Zhao will argue that the emergence of Jin Ping Mei is related to the identity crisis of the Chinese literati in the commercial society of early modern China. Zhao’s discussion of literati’s ambivalent and complex attitudes towards the emerging commercialization and urbanization will establish a reflection on early Chinese modernity.

Literati’s identity crisis was later aggravated by the national crises that China had encountered at the turn of the twentieth century. The decline of the Chinese intelligentsia vis-à-vis the rise of merchants from the 16^th to the 19^th centuries contributed to what Yü Ying-Shih (2016) calls “the radicalization of China in the twentieth century.” China’s radicalization eventually resulted in the establishment of People’s Republic of China and communist revolutions and their consequent traumatic experiences. Scholars of modern China have typically read representations of trauma either through the paradigm of national allegory—one person’s trauma represents that of an entire collective—or through the complementary notion of “lyrical,” self-expressive individuality.

The other three presentations show Chinese intellectuals’ diverse responses to representing China’s modern experiences. To advance our discussion of representational strategies, Andrew Emerson will offer a close reading of Wong Kar-wai’s film The Grandmaster and define what he calls “allegories with nonallegorical characteristics.” Emerson will argue that this film works as an allegory on two levels. Whereas its underlying narrative reads as a familiar allegory about the national traumas that defined mid-20^th-century Chinese history, the film’s form—more precisely, the contrapuntal relationship between image, sound, and on-screen text—constitutes a meta-allegory on the making of national allegory, suggesting a way of recounting national allegory that can simultaneously and paradoxically foreground individuality. Ultimately, Emerson seeks to contribute to a revised understanding of nation-building, namely the processes through which narratives of trauma can help form what Benedict Anderson famously called “imagined communities.”

Following criticisms of (literary) tradition and capitalism since the May Fourth era, Chinese communist revolutions should have brought an enlightened and liberated modern experience. Yun- Chu Tsai’s study of cannibalism, however, will foreground the failure of revolutionary ideals by revealing two paradoxes of cannibalism. The second paradox in post-1989 China, involves a related logic of “auto-cannibalism,” though employs revolutionary rhetoric to rupture people’s revolutionary spirit and legitimize the regime’s legitimacy. Tsai, through analyzing facts and metaphors of cannibalizing political dissidents as enemies of the state in Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma, will show the CCP’s reconstruction of a violent, centralized hierarchy, which the revolutionary ideology and reconstituted memories helped to fortify.

Relatively, Yun Zhu will explore an increasingly dehumanizing technocapitalist environment and question the possibility of enlightenment in postsocialist Chinese modernity, in which the state of being is predominantly shaped by power and money. In reading Can Xue’s Love in the New Millennium, Zhu will examine the novel’s fusion of surrealism and philosophical pondering in a tortuous quest for a true “history” that pays respect to the lived experiences and embodied memories of everyday individuals. Zhu will contend that, with a gaze into the various layers of Chinese modernity—urbanization, migration, socioeconomic restructuring, institutionalization of state power, technological advancement, cultural reorientation, and so on— the novel critically reflects upon the conditions of human existence and presents an important existentialist task not only to its fictional characters but also to the reader: to reconstruct the human self through making conscious choices and decisions.

There will be 14 minutes for each presentation and 19 minutes for discussion.