Xiandai Zazhi and an alternative vision of Chinese modernity

Abstract

This thesis examines the literary and cultural practices of literary journal, Xiandai zazhi (现代, Les Contemporains, May 1932–May 1935), and explores the ways in which a mild cosmopolitan view of Chinese modernity is constructed in relation to the mainstream discourses of nationalism and radical Communist leftism in the early 1930s in China. The thesis situates the discussions of cosmopolitanism within the project of Chinese modernity in the early 1930s, and engages in the issues of nationalism, Westernization, Chinese tradition and revolutionary Communist discourses. Organized around the theme of cosmopolitanism as an alternative view of Chinese modernity, this thesis will first identify the journal’s cosmopolitan attitude, featuring contemporaneity and all-inclusiveness, through its practices of translating and introducing world literature. This cosmopolitan perspective, however, does not imply a radical anti-traditionalism. Rather, Xiandai zazhi opted for a more balanced view towards modernity and Chinese tradition, and this constitutes the second feature of the alternative stance of Xiandai zazhi. The thesis also examines the journal’s attempt to go beyond the class-based stratification of people and literature, as prescribed by the Chinese left-wing camp. Furthermore, it will examine the trans-national and cross-cultural writing practice of Pearl S. Buck and certain Chinese writers as a way of overcoming the ethnographic and national boundaries of self and Other. It thus reveals the spectrum of dimensions of Chinese modernity in the 1930s.