ABSTRACT
China scholars from multiple disciplines have demonstrated the correlation between the new gender order and the changing world order in the turbulent times of late Qing and early Republican era. Many have convincingly argued that the concept of gender and concomitant masculinities and femininities at that time were reformulated by Western ideas, Chinese tradition, and national and international politics. Insightful as they are, the seminal works on gender focus almost exclusively on women and femininities. We have yet to take up the question of how the traditional gender order may have affected the male gender and how Chinese masculine ideals have evolved from the past and drawn on epistemological resources from Japan and the West.
This chapter examines the evolution of modern Chinese intellectual masculinities between the 1890s and 1920s, an era that witnessed China’s fall from a “celestial empire” to a semicolony and the most intensive ruptures in personal, sociopolitical, and cultural domains. As such, this historical era can be understood as the crucible that forged modern concepts of gender in China and as the crucial link between the premodern and contemporary configurations of Chinese femininities and masculinities.
In particular, this chapter attends to three modern masculine models: martialized masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century, neoromantic masculinity during the May Fourth era, and middlebrow masculinity in the 1930s. It situates the discussion of these three models within a double frame of reference: elsewhere (contemporaneous West and Japan) and elsewhen (Chinese past). Certainly, wen 文 (literary) and wu 武 (martial) masculinities, as two epitomes of masculine ideals in the elsewhen framework, seeped into the collective unconsciousness. However, new configurations of masculinities in a semicolonial setting went far beyond admiring literary or warrior figures from the Chinese past. Rather, they constantly absorbed new inspiration from the elsewhere. To be more specific, martialized masculinity in late Qing entails emulation of European imperial/military masculinity and reappropriation of Western colonial stereotypes of the Chinaman to reinvent a scholar-warrior with physical aggressivity and sexual prowess. Romantic masculinity in the May Fourth era, on the other hand, shifted emphasis from shen 身 (the body-person) to xin 心 (the heart-mind) and looked to European Romantic writers, philosophers, and theorists of “mind science” for inspiration. Romantic masculinity demands not only a modern man’s capacity to practice true love and to honestly expose the authentic heart but also, paradoxically, his acquired knowledge of the “mind science” to understand, release, and control feelings and passions rationally. As for the neosensationalist writers in the 1930s’ Shanghai, in face of hierarchical class, gender, and racial economies, they delve into the complexities of the inner self and the darker aspects of human psychology, such as sex, violence, and taboo desires. Their endeavors to showcase the vulnerable middlebrow intellectual masculinity was significantly influenced by neosensationalist writers from Europe and Japan, along with Freudian psychoanalysis.
