Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945-1965

By Nicolai Volland

Socialist Cosmopolitanism offers an innovative interpretation of literature from the Mao era, proposing to read Chinese socialist literature as world literature. China after 1949 engaged with the world beyond its borders in myriad ways and on many levels—political and economic, cultural as well as literary. Far from rejecting the worldliness of earlier eras, Nicolai Volland demonstrates, the young People’s Republic developed its own cosmopolitanism.

Rather than a radical break with the past, Chinese socialist literature should be seen as an integral and important chapter of China’s long search to find a place within world literature. Socialist Cosmopolitanism revisits a range of genres, from poetry and land reform novels to science fiction and children’s literature, and shows how Chinese writers and readers alike saw their own literary production as part of a much larger literary universe. This literary space, reaching from Beijing to Berlin, from Prague to Pyongyang, from Warsaw to Moscow to Hanoi, allowed authors and texts to travel, in the course reinventing the meaning of world literature. Chinese socialist literature is driven by a hugely ambitious—and ultimately doomed—attempt to redraw the literary world map.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Mar 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9780231544757

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SOCIALIST COSMOPOLITANISM

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

STUDIES OF THE WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia.

SOCIALIST COSMOPOLITANISM

The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945–1965

NICOLAI VOLLAND

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York    Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54475-7

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Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

Cover image: Stefan Landsberger Collection, International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).

For Chang

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Politics of Texts in Motion

2. The Geopoetics of Land Reform in Northeast Asia

3. Fictionalizing the International Working Class

4. Soviet Spaceships in Socialist China

5. Sons and Daughters of the Revolution

6. Mapping the Brave New World of Literature

Conclusion

Notes

Glossary of Chinese Characters

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book—as the cliché goes—has been long in the making. Along the way, with is many twists and turns, I have amassed what turns out to be a staggering amount of intellectual debts. It will be up to readers to decide whether I have done justice to all the suggestions, advice, and generous support I have received over these years.

I am especially grateful to Jen Altehenger, Prasenjit Duara, Eric Hayot, Lena Henningsen, Chris Rea, Chang Tan, and Rudolf Wagner, for reading draft versions of individual chapters as these gradually evolved. Their feedback and critical input has forced me to rethink my approaches and refine my arguments, making the result immeasurably richer and adding nuance to many of the insights presented here.

This book began as an offshoot of a postdoctoral project on twentieth-century Sino-French literary relations. I am grateful to the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan, where I enjoyed the luxury of two years’ worth of time as a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow. A decade later, I continue to draw on the accumulated fruits of sustained reading, research, and writing on the outskirts of Taipei. I thank my host at the Institute, Peng Hsiao-yen, but also Chen Yung-fa, Yu Miin-ling, and others at the Institute of Modern History, who shared and supported my transdisciplinary curiosity. Outside Academia Sinica, I found an inspiring intellectual community in the maze of alleyways around Shida and Taida. I am grateful to Chen Shuowin, Cheng Wen-hui, Joscha Chung, Guan Kean-fung, Mei Chia-ling, and Pan Shaw-yu, for sharing their passion for the pursuit of knowledge, and for hosting me on visits to Taiwan over the years that followed.

At the National University of Singapore, I found a stimulating professional environment that allowed me to formulate the scope of this study and to research most of its chapters. I thank Chua Ai Lin, Koh Khee Heong, Lam Lap, Lee Seung-joon, Ong Chang Woei, and Xu Lanjun, who provided company in the sprawling community of Asian studies scholars in and around the NUS’s campus. In spring 2012 I spent a semester-long research leave at NUS’s East Asian Institute, where I wrote down the core chapters of this book. I am grateful to Zheng Yongnian and his team, and to Prof. Wang Gungwu, for flinging open their doors and welcoming me into their group.

My time in Singapore was interspersed with extended visits to Southern California, where I want to thank Eileen Cheng, Paul Pickowicz, and Jeff Wasserstrom. Apart from becoming good friends, they provided a network of professional contacts that gave me a foothold on this side of the Pacific. Paul Pickowicz in particular welcomed me with open arms in this Modern China seminar at UC San Diego, a vibrant group that made me look forward to my weekly commute through the deserts of Southern California.

After moving to the Pennsylvania State University, I found an environment of energy, scholarly rigor, and professionalism that is exemplary in every sense. At Penn State, I enjoyed the good fortune of joining not one but two thriving intellectual communities, in the departments of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature. I thank Jessy Abel, Jon Abel, Kate Baldanza, Erica Brindley, Carey Eckhart, Bob Edwards, On-cho Ng, Shuang Shen, We Jung Yi, and Ran Zwigenberg, for being interlocutors as much as friends, providing support and advice at every turn. It was in State College where I completed the final draft of this manuscript.

The intellectual debts of this project cannot be limited to institutional settings. In researching this book I have benefitted from a far-flung network of friends and colleagues across three continents, all of whom have me lent their advice and help. Thanks to Moritz Baßler, Tom Bernstein, Yomi Braester, Xiaomei Chen, Cheng Yinghong, Rob Culp, Arunabh Ghosh, Alison Groppe, Margaret Hillenbrand, Xuelei Huang, Bill Kirby, Wendy Larson, Hua-yu Li, Ying Qian, Chris Reed, Liying Sun and Sören Urbansky, Bo An, Tom Mullaney, and Anne Labitzky-Wagner have helped to secure some of the illustrations that appear in this book. Maura Cunningham helped to buy obscure volumes of 1950s Chinese science fiction and ship them from Shanghai.

During the main research phase, a small army of undergraduate and graduate research assistants at the National University of Singapore helped me in innumerable ways. I am indebted to Huang Shiqi, Huang Yanjie, Ji Xing, Lee Shumin, Lee Weiying, Lim Shiyun, Lim Yufen, Ling Mu’en, Ma Jilian, Ma Lujing, Grace Mak, Phoon Yuen Ming, Yang Yan, Zhao Xiaoyi, and Zhu Yi. Invisible though it may be, their diligent labor permeates most of the chapters of this book.

Over the years, I have been able to present some of my research at lectures and conferences at Cambridge University, East China Normal University, Heidelberg University, the Junge Akademie in München, National Taiwan University, the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, UC Berkeley, and Yale University. Other parts of the manuscript developed from presentations at the meetings of the Association of Asian Studies, the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature, and the European Association of Chinese Studies. My heartfelt thanks go to my hosts and the organizers of these conferences and panels: Rob Culp, Lena Henningsen, Barbara Mittler, Pan Shaw-yu, Shen Zhihua, Doug Stiffler, Jing Tsu, Eddy U, and Tuong Vu. I owe a debt of gratitude to the audiences of these presentations and their questions and input. The title for this book, initially followed by a question mark, first appeared as a lecture title at the University of California, Irvine. The question mark later disappeared, causing Jeff Wasserstrom, who organized this lecture back in 2010, to jokingly draw analogies to another (in)famous pair of article/book titles.

Libraries and archives around the world were indispensable for the work that has resulted in this book. I am most grateful to the professional staff at the Chinese Library of the National University of Singapore, Shanghai Library, the National Library of China, Beijing University Library, the library of the Institute of Modern History at the Academia Sinica, Harvard-Yenching Library, the German Foreign Ministry Archives, the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives, and the Shanghai Municipal Archives.

An early version of what became parts of chapter 3 was first published in Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and Culture, edited by Tuong Vu and Wasana Wongsurawat, and is reprinted here with permission from Palgrave Macmillan. Different parts of chapter 4 appeared in Modern China Studies and as a comment in the Journal of Asian Studies, and are reproduced here with kind permission.

My research was generously founded by a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded by Academia Sinica, by a start-up fund and multiple travel grants provided by NUS, and by a start-up fund at Penn State.

I am most grateful to Ross Yelsey at the Weatherhead Institute who expressed his enthusiasm for my project from the moment he first heard about it, and who consequently supported it on the way from manuscript to printed volume. At Columbia University Press, I had the good luck to work with Philip Leventhal, whose professionalism and responsiveness are the dream of every author, and who has accompanied this project with his expertise on its path to become a book. I want to thank Miriam Grossman, Susan Pensak, and Lyndee Stalter, who ably and swiftly steered my manuscript through production.

Last, but most certainly not least, my deepest gratitude goes to my family. Chang has accompanied this project almost since the day of its inception, and followed its every twist and turn, providing an intellectual soundboard for the sometimes wild conceptual ideas I kept coming up with. Jackie was born just days after I had sent the manuscript to Weatherhead; her earliest memories are of her dad glued to his desk—how much she would have loved to play with those piles of page proofs! It is to Chang, emotional and intellectual companion extraordinaire, that I dedicate this book.

The Hajjar House

State College, Pennsylvania

November 2016

INTRODUCTION

Light snow was drifting over Red Square in the heart of Moscow when Wang Meng 王蒙 (b. 1934) joined the queue outside the Lenin mausoleum. Not many people were intent on seeing the remains of the Soviet Union’s first leader on this cold and wet day in November 2004, but for Wang it was the completion of a lifelong quest. Wang Meng had started writing his first novel, Qingchun wansui 青春萬歲 (Long live the youth), in 1953, at the age of eighteen, in the hope that his book might win him enough fame to be selected as a delegate to that year’s World Youth Festival, and thus given the opportunity to travel to Moscow. His dream faded when his book failed to find a publisher. Over the next half century, politics, chance, and fate intervened, time and again, preventing Wang from paying his respects to Lenin. It was not until the dawn of the twenty-first century that he finally found himself at the doors of what had been, for many years, the most holy site in the secular socialist world.

In his crystal sarcophagus, inside the brightly lit mausoleum, Lenin’s face and clothes appear fresh and neat. I reverentially bow to the body. Who would have thought that it would take me so long to come to Lenin’s final place of rest?

If it had been back then … But in Russia today Lenin is spoken of in disrespectful and profane ways. How can there be such dissipation, such carelessness? How can we ignore history? Has the pendulum of history now swung to the other extreme?

Silence. Silence says more than words can express.¹

Wang Meng recalled his visit to the Lenin mausoleum in a 2006 collection of essays, Sulian ji 蘇聯祭 (Mourning the Soviet Union). After his failed debut as a novelist, Wang had been in turn celebrated and condemned by the party-state; spent more than a decade in banishment to the far western frontier of the People’s Republic of China (PRC); and in the 1980s become one of its most acclaimed writers (and, for a brief period, the PRC’s minister of culture). By the time he visited Moscow in 2004, navigating the streets of the Russian capital with the help of paperback translations of Soviet novels, their pages yellow with age, Wang was past his prime. His visit was personal and private. Its aim: to recover memories, if not the spirit, of the heyday of the Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s, a decade that had shaped his country and his generation. Wang Meng and many of his peers had experienced their most immediate encounter with the socialist world through cultural channels: novels, films, songs. On the flight to Moscow in 2004, Wang searched the inflight radio menu in vain for Soviet-era folk songs; he tossed away his headphones in annoyance—all he could find was Russian rock. He would be vindicated later, when his hosts took him to a Stalin-era-themed restaurant in central Moscow, where a singer young enough to have been his granddaughter, Wang comments, performed all the classics from the days of his youth.

Wang Meng’s account speaks of a bittersweet nostalgia. China’s engagement with the socialist world had lasted but a decade before it fell apart in acrimony. The power of images etched into the memory of millions of Chinese in the 1950s, however, outlasted the political and economic split of 1960, the polemical debates over ideology in 1963, and the military clashes along the two countries’ shared border in 1969. Even as the Sino-Soviet alliance receded into history, it remained a powerful, lasting presence for Wang’s generation, which had grown up surrounded by images of the Soviet Union and China’s other brethren nations in the socialist bloc.

Culture was the conduit. Translated novels, poetry, children’s stories, and dubbed films; performances by visiting orchestras, ballet troupes, and acrobatic ensembles; exhibitions of photography and arts and crafts; and many more—the socialist world permeated Chinese culture throughout the 1950s. Chinese books, films, and performances, in turn, were exported, to the Soviet Union and other nations in the socialist bloc. Just as the young PRC joined a transnational alliance spanning half the globe, Chinese literature became part of a global circuit of cultural production and consumption. The intellectual creations of individual nations, Karl Marx had prophesied, become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.² A century after the Communist Manifesto was written, the day had finally arrived, it seemed, for a brand new form of literature, and New China was not to miss the celebration of this new epoch. Chinese literature of the 1950s was a literature in the world, a literature of the world, a literature for the world. The moment of worldliness was brief, alas. After little more than a decade, friendship and celebrations gave way to shouting matches, vilifications, and xenophobia. And yet, the cosmopolitanism of the 1950s, the cultural exchanges back and forth across the socialist world, resonated deeply and shaped the worldview of an entire generation. Its enduring power is felt in Wang Meng’s pilgrimage to Moscow, in his quixotic quest to recover the spirit of his youth, to roll back amnesia. And it pervades the literature of that era. The encounter with the socialist world was constitutive to Chinese literature—and culture in general—of the 1950s.

*   *   *

This book proposes to read Chinese socialist literature as world literature. The worldliness of its very moment of inception, the high tide of cultural internationalism in the 1950s, forces us to reinsert this literature into its historical context, which is at the same time its epistemological context, its horizon of significance. Pointing out and zooming in on the multiple and multidirectional links and connections, the intersections and nodes that embed local literary production and consumption within transnational cultural circuits, ultimately opens up new avenues to the texts themselves. The vantage point of the world provides a historicist perspective that brings into purview authors and readers—the agents of cultural circulation—without privileging them over the works themselves; it lays open potentials of meaning within and beyond the literary text.

The world and worldliness, its attendant mode of being-in-the-world, figure on several levels that are at once distinct and overlapping. These multiple understandings tie in with the debates about world literature over the past decade and a half, but, this book contends, no single definition of world literature is capable of fully capturing the worldliness of any given moment. To account for the meanings and functions of the world in the literary space of, say, socialist China in the 1950s, we need to acknowledge different configurations of world-ing that are at work jointly, and aim to understand them both in distinction from each other and in their actual interplay and collusion. The complexity of the transnational and transcultural literary imagination precludes any single conceptual denominator for the world and world literature.³

World-orientedness, first of all, results from the global flow of texts. David Damrosch, for instance, defines world literature as encompass[ing] all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language.⁴ World literature, in other words, is a mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is as applicable to individual works as to bodies of material, available for reading established classics and new discoveries alike.⁵ The focus on flows and movement, on global trafficking in literature, gestures to the globalization of culture and provides a seemingly transparent standard for inclusion in or exclusion from the domain of the world. It does not, however, ask so much what precisely makes some texts travel and others not, what it is in these texts that makes them enter the world. On a second level, then, worldliness needs to be understood as contained within a text, in the way it operates and relates to other texts, to the larger universe of literature. Wolfgang Iser, for example, points out that texts must already contain certain conditions of actualization that will allow their meaning to be assembled in the responsive mind of the recipient.⁶ In the model developed by reception aesthetics, fictional texts stand in a dynamic relationship with their readers: they acquire meaning only in the process of being read, while at the same time, they carry in themselves the very conditions that structure their reading. Yet neither producers nor consumers of literary texts exist in a vacuum, in empty space. In actual practice, they move to and fro in the wide spectrum of texts available to them, in chaotic and often frenzied motion, in the process obscuring any externally imposed boundaries—boundaries between texts just as those between national literatures. Literary works, consequently, never exist in isolation, but always in relation to other works, relations that are actualized by both their producers and consumers.⁷ Writers and readers alike respond to the textual universe by way of reference and allusion, fleeting association and (un)conscious grouping. Worldliness, hence, is wrought into texts by authors and by their audience, where it constitutes a node pointing outward toward the (literary) world at large. Literature, in other words, establishes its own being-in-the-world, through the myriad processes of transculturation.⁸ Even the dynamic interplay of the inner and the outer, however, does not exhaust the possibilities of worldliness of a text or body of texts. On a third level, we can finally ask how literary texts create their own image and understanding of the world, a literary world, as it were. Such an understanding of world can be diegetic, as proposed by Eric Hayot.⁹ Alternatively, it can be extradiegetic, referring then to the world (or image of the world) created by a multiplicity of texts, by a body of literary works, a canon. In either case, the literary world provides structuring principles, the rules that define the continents and regions of its world, and—by extension—the hierarchies of meaning that point beyond the world of literature to the world at large. A world literature perspective, in sum, can operate on at least three distinct but interrelated and mutually complementary levels. Taken together, they provide a vantage point to reevaluate both larger literary systems and individual texts. It is this perspective, outlined here in the briefest of terms, that I will be developing in the chapters of this book.

The 1950s offer an especially fertile ground to inquire into the meanings of worldliness and to test the ability of a world literary perspective to throw new light onto both the literary macrocosm and its manifold microcosms. The emerging Cold War world in all its self-contradictoriness challenges commonsensical definitions of the world: two blocs—political, economic, ideological, cultural, literary—each a world that understands itself as the world. A dual universalism, as it were, produced by the Cold War constellation, which, ultimately, itself becomes a universal framework. Paradoxically, this framework is both Manichean and monologic, singular and dualistic at the same time. In this schizophrenic world, defined by a war of ideology and a fight unto the death,¹⁰ the worldliness of cultural production and consumption appears in sharpened relief, seen as through a prism. The political and diplomatic structures facilitated, even encouraged, circulation on a massive scale, creating not one, but two, competing world literatures. Writers and readers alike—and not least the texts themselves—found themselves hurled into this transnational space, where new literary constellations emerged that inscribed themselves into practices of reading and writing. And cultural production itself, without fail, came to shape the contours of the emerging worldview(s), literary and otherwise.

Chinese socialist literature, and in particular the rich body of texts written in the 1940s and 1950s, has followed a less than straightforward trajectory of reception, which has been replicated in close turn by criticism: celebrated in the 1950s, critiqued and selectively rewritten in the early 1960s, vilified during the Cultural Revolution, revived briefly in the post-Mao era, forgotten during the 1980s, dug up during a nostalgic 1990s, exploited by crass commercialism in the twenty-first century. Renewed interest, both popular and critical, in major works of the period dates to the 1990s, with the rise of the red classics, a shorthand for a dozen or so full-length novels that were reprinted and marketed by state-owned publishers. The origins of the term red classics (hongse jingdian 紅色經典) remain somewhat uncertain, but are most likely traceable to the energetic marketing efforts of publishers like Renmin wenxue chubanshe 人民文學出版社 or Huashan wenyi chubanshe 花山文藝出版社, which started selling bundles of these canonical works in the mid-1990s.¹¹ At around the same time, scholars in mainland China and in overseas journals such as Jintian 今天 (Today) and Ershiyi shiji 二十一世紀 (Twenty-First Century) turned critical attention to a similar body of works.¹² In the new millennium, cash-rich Chinese multimedia corporations in search for politically as well as commercially feasible entertainment drew on the alleged canonicity of these works for a constant stream of films, multiepisode TV dramas, and even video games. In the expanding Chinese university system, meanwhile, the socialist texts from the 1950s became a popular subject for MA and PhD theses, fueling a new wave of research.

The selective revival of Chinese socialist literature since 1989 carries the imprint of national and transnational trends. For one, the gung-ho commercialism of the 1990s—decreed by the Party as a means of compensation for the feverish and freewheeling climate of the 1980s that had come to an abrupt halt in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989—fostered a conservative turn that allowed the reemergence of literary works from China’s early socialist period. At the same time, a rising tide of nationalism, part grassroots and part officially sponsored, structured the reading of these texts. Tales of class struggle and land reform thus were refocused, through the lens of patriotism, into images of national pride. The end of the Cold War, finally, had removed the larger intellectual framework, the Manichean world in which the young PRC had to choose sides. The erstwhile transnational context, with its allegories of solidarity and intertextual references, collapsed into monistic nationalism; texts that had functioned as variations on transnational themes were now read as national histories of distinction and achievement. The Soviet Union disintegrated not just as a global political entity but also as an intellectual frame of reference for Chinese socialist literature. And the same mix of domestic and geopolitical transformations can be felt in critical discourses on this literature.

Worldliness has collapsed in scholarly engagement with Chinese literature from the 1940s and 1950s, in a striking inward turn. Titles such as The Russian Hero in Modern Chinese Fiction, common from the 1960s to the 1980s, have given way to Milestones on a Golden Road: Writing for Chinese Socialism, 1945–80.¹³ Richard King’s insightful longue durée study of the evolution of the main themes in Chinese socialist fiction is by no means blind to Soviet influences, and indeed discusses the impact of socialist realism on important writers. Yet it is striking how it is Chinese socialism that is the goal of writing, or so the title suggests—in fact, how Deng Xiaoping’s notion of socialism with Chinese characteristics has not just gained acceptance beyond its place of origin but is applied retroactively, here to literature from as early as 1945. Where the Soviet Union once overdetermined Chinese literary studies—which often applied models developed in the study of Russian literature to the Chinese, as in Ng’s book—the former has all but disappeared today, as a critical paradigm (for good?) and as a major historical condition in the making of Chinese socialist literature.¹⁴

More recently, interest in the 1950s as a crucial period in modern Chinese literary history has resurged from another direction, aiming to recover, in an archaeological manner, modern voices and lyrical traditions that had been long submerged, drowned out by the epic chorus of socialist writing. In Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature Across the 1949 Divide, Xiaojue Wang traces the fate of some of modern China’s greatest stylists, authors such as Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, and Ding Ling.¹⁵ Wang’s nuanced study demonstrates how writers—in socialist China as well as in postcolonial Taiwan and colonial Hong Kong—transformed the modern heritage of the Republican era, searching for a new language to express concerns rooted in the wide-open, worldly literary culture before 1949. Following a different intellectual pathway, David Wang aims to restore the lyrical in epic time to its rightful place in literary history, pointing out that the midcentury cataclysms and revolutions bring into view the extraordinary work of Chinese lyricism at its most intense.¹⁶ Far from being displaced and expelled from the brave new world of socialist China, the lyrical—itself a notion containing both traditional and cosmopolitan layers of meaning, as Wang points out—assumed new forms and shapes, providing inspiration to writers in the PRC (just as in Hong Kong and Taiwan).

Taken together, these and other revisionist studies provide a much-needed corrective that enriches our understanding of the 1950s, first by focusing attention on some of the finest and most sophisticated writing of the period, which had been swept aside by the maelstrom of revolution, and second by highlighting continuities and connections that tie the socialist period more closely than ever before to an earlier, openly acknowledged period of cosmopolitanism.¹⁷ Timely and important as these interventions are, they fail to address the elephant in the room. Shen Congwen and Eileen Chang, and other writers of their generation, were marginal figures in the PRC literary world. They were marginalized, not because of their cosmopolitanism, but because they professed to the wrong cosmopolitanism.¹⁸ If cosmopolitanism, as these studies show, was carried over into the socialist period, can it be limited to those nonsocialist writers? Can the divide that wasn’t, 1949, block out and seal off the world for most, when it is shown allowing for continuity in some? Can we limit our critical purview to the margins, without addressing the very same questions to those works that occupied front and center of the stage, that stood in the limelight of literary life in the PRC? These are some of the central concerns that the study of Chinese socialist literature must address. Can we assume, a priori, the insularity and lack of worldliness of the many, the mainstream socialist authors and their works, the literature of the 1950s? Or, to put it differently: can there be such a thing as a socialist cosmopolitanism?

COSMOPOLITANISM: SOCIALIST THINKING AND FEELING BEYOND THE NATION

China in the 1950s was outward looking, engaged with the world beyond its borders through multiple channels and on manifold levels. In the chapters that follow, I will scrutinize the various modes of worldliness that defined Chinese socialist literary life. The cultural formations that emerged in tandem with the new state were not just internationalist in nature—built on cooperation and solidarity, that is, all the while accepting differences of polity as well as culture.¹⁹ Their aims in fact went much further. That is because, first of all, both the producers and the consumers of the new pansocialist literatures were steeped in the cosmopolitanism of the prewar era, in centers of cultural production such as Berlin, or Budapest, or Shanghai. They might have come to oppose that cosmopolitanism, of the decadent bourgeoisie in the European salons and the foreign concessions of Asia, but they did not reject cosmopolitanism per se. They subscribed to the same concerns and aims, to the notion of a shared destiny, to expectations of a common future. Second, and more important, the claims of this new culture were universal: Once space turned into time, the Other (the West, capitalism) became the past, both their own past, now left behind, and that of global history. Socialism, in turn, became present as much as future. Not just the future, but the only future. And socialist literature became the literature of the future, shared by all forward-looking people.²⁰ Finally, this new, common culture understood itself and was to be understood in transnational terms, locating its framework of reference explicitly outside and beyond the nation-state of old. It could not but gesture toward the particular and the universal at the same time. Any socialist literature, hence, positioned itself within the cosmopolitan space of cultural production and consumption.

Socialist writers, ever since Marx, have been among the most vociferous critics of cosmopolitanism. The Kantian Weltbürger was too closely associated with the bourgeoisie and Enlightenment ideas of humanism,²¹ and, by implication, with the global spread of capitalism and the rise of transnational modes of production.²² Socialist critics have routinely (and most notoriously so under Stalin) castigated a sinful rootless cosmopolitanism, all the while boasting their own internationalism.²³ Yet as a matter of fact, Katerina Clark notes, internationalism and cosmopolitanism were mutually imbricated in the Soviet Union of the 1930s (as was nationalism).²⁴ Both party leadership and rank-and-file cultural workers (as the intelligentsia had been rechristened) effortlessly combined an internationalist ideology with cosmopolitan practices in their interactions with cultural production from across the world. Clark’s observation—which is easily supported by similar cases—highlights the need for nuance.²⁵ Notably, cosmopolitanism is not an ideology. It is a set of attitudes and practices, and cultural practices in particular.²⁶

Cosmopolitanism, as a critical paradigm, has undergone a renaissance, triggered not least by the ongoing project of making sense of the post–Cold War world, with its globalized economy and rapid integration of information flows, but also resurgent forms of nationalism.²⁷ This newer conceptual approach builds on a critique of the Kantian humanist universalism and its Eurocentrism and sees transnational experiences and attitudes as particularistic rather than universal, and exclusive rather than inclusive, as situated and located in concrete contexts.²⁸ This critical engagement with the cosmopolitical tradition has freed up the notion of cosmopolitanism for new interpretations and innovative approaches, leading to discoveries of cosmopolitanism in unlikely times and places.²⁹ Sheldon Pollock and his collaborators thus reject the universalistic claims of a monadic cosmopolitanism, and instead call for conceptual openness: "Cosmopolitanism must give way to the plurality of modes and histories—not necessarily shared in degree or in concept regionally, nationally, or internationally—that comprise cosmopolitan practice and history. We propose therefore that