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China and Inner Asia
Organized Panel Session
Late Qing political fiction is often recognized as a discursive genre born alongside print media. But its potential as a performative medium capable of reenacting politics has remained understudied. This essay explores the intermediation between political fiction and current-affairs plays developed around the 1905 anti-American boycott movement. Focusing on the literary adaptations of a suicide protest, it examines how fiction remediates different performative modes in late Qing theatre to envision various forms of political activism. The key inspiration of these texts, the suicide of Feng Xiawei—an expatriate activist from Mexico, reveals a tension between direct action and democratic deliberation inherent in contemporary mass politics. This tension finds its embodiment in the martyrdom play The Spring of Overseas Chinese through a dual construction of ritual gesture and diegetic speech, both widely employed in theatre reform of the time. Transforming the two theatrical functions into narrative, the vernacular fiction The Golden World further situates Feng’s stance within the boycott through the dialectic between monologue and dialogue. This stylistic differentiation not only highlights the conflicting modes of activism that would continue to diverge in modern Chinese political culture; it further adumbrates the burdened agency of modern Chinese literature staggering between direct mobilization and distanced critique. By unfolding the intermedial production of political fiction, I contend that the political consciousness of modern Chinese literature at its birth has to be understood in light of performative features that existed across print culture, theatrical stage, and political space.
Keren He
Oberlin College