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Chinese reportage
The aesthetics of historical experience
By Charles A. Laughlin Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-2971-9
Chapter One
Travel: Writing a Way Out
One of the first treatments of Chinese reportage in English, Yin-hwa Chou's 1985 article "Formal Features of Chinese Reportage and an Analysis of Liang Qichao's 'Memoirs of My Travels in the New World,'" boldly asserts that Liang's 1903 travel essay was the origin of Chinese reportage. Chou's article was an important first step in filling out the historical background of reportage in China and linking it to fundamental concerns and methods of modern Chinese culture.
Liang Qichao visited over twenty cities in Canada and the United States over a ten-month period "1. to examine the conditions of Chinese living in America; 2. to study the socio-political establishment of the United States; and 3. to solicit financial backing for the 'Protect the Emperor Society.'" Travels in the New World records Liang's efforts on the first two matters. Structured by his travel itinerary, Liang's text provides extensive statistical information on Canadian and American societies and the place of Chinese immigrants in them, alternating with copious analytical commentary and polemics on the part of the writer. Although Yin-hwa Chou's brief formal typology of reportage provides a sound basis for further investigation of the genre, her explication of Travels reveals these expository aspectsmuch more than it sheds light on the genre's status as literature.
Chou argues that Liang's piece is a conscious and unprecedented transformation of the traditional travel essay. She divides the latter (following the Zhongguo congshu zonglu) into the categories of jijing (landscape descriptions) and jixing (chronicles of journeys), emphasizing the aesthetic and anecdotal qualities of both. The differences Chou attributes to Liang's travel essay are that the narrator has become "a highly self-conscious, reflective and judgmental commentator dedicated to methodical information-building" and that Travels has "a deliberate narrative and conceptual framework," which she further analyzes as "braided narrative-a preliminary itinerary substantiated by historical information, sociological statistics, and analyses, but with a minimum of descriptive passages." Chou cites Liang as explicitly dissociating this text from traditional travel narratives, emphasizing his exercise of a "citizen's obligation to contribute what he knows to his motherland with the hope that it will benefit, however slightly, our immature society" (213).
Chou's argument holds as a distinction of Liang's Travels from traditional travel narrative but fails to mention earlier such divergences, such as Xu Xiake's geocultural survey of China, Gu Yanwu's socially and politically engaged travel notes, and numerous late Qing narratives of foreign and domestic travel that preceded Liang's yet shared his narratorial stance as an engaged commentator acting as the conscience of the Chinese nation at a time of crisis.
Moreover, Chou's treatment of Travels fails to establish it as a prototype of a genre that she herself defines quite correctly as "a consciously artistic narration of a series of factual events" (202). While Liang as a late Qing literatus includes a small amount of scenic description and poetry, Chou makes it clear that he is exerting efforts to keep artistic embellishment to a minimum, preferring to dominate the text with an abundance of facts organized into thematic exposition. Though taking the outward form of a travel memoir, Liang's text is essentially discursive and expository. If anything, it is consciously nonartistic.
The difficulties Chou thus encounters have a number of significant implications. Foremost among these is that Northrop Frye's distinction between "ornamental" and "persuasive" speech, upon which Chou bases her typology of reportage, fails to explain how persuasive speech (or writing), as opposed to ornamental speech, can be regarded as literary or artistic. In fact, Frye's discussion of literary expression strongly implies that it is not, and this conflicts with Chou's assertion that reportage is a literary genre. As a result Chou's typology of reportage, while succeeding in categorizing different kinds of reportage narrative, fails to demonstrate how any of them are literary. By characterizing reportage's literary aspect as a veneer of subjective ornamentation Chou renders reportage's literary quality trivial and superficial, and Liang's Travels seems to bear this out.
However, in defining the Travels' divergence from traditional travel narrative in terms of a self-conscious, judgmental narrator and a "deliberate narrative and conceptual framework," Chou approaches a more essential aspect of reportage's literariness-the verbal and figurative construction of a new kind of subjectivity for the expression of historical experience-that Frye's definition of literary writing as a "hypothetical verbal structure that exists for its own sake" is unable to account for as literature. Reportage is literature because it makes historical events, facts, and persons symbolic of abstract processes and in this very process creates a narrator who perceives events and social phenomena in this way, not as an individual or generalized human being but as one who primarily and collectively identifies with the Chinese nation. The historical nature of this subjectivity, particularly its close association with the historical and intellectual problems of modern China, as well as its indebtedness to a cultural tradition that has developed literary subjectivity not as the internal world of an autonomous individual but as an unspecified yet cultivated form of collective experience, is precisely what make reportage inaccessible to Northrop Frye's purely formal taxonomy.
Apart from missing the special subjective foundation and historicity of reportage, Chou's account glosses over the complex relationship between the modern travel essay and reportage as such. As Chou shows, the modern departure from the traditional travel essay was in evidence in China as early as 1903 and was particularly common in the early 1930s; it was a recognizably distinct form of writing practice before the notion of reportage was proposed in 1930. Moreover, reportage was initially conceived in the 1930s narrowly as agitational reports on labor conditions; only in recent decades, with the compilation of comprehensive anthologies of reportage, have certain works of the modern travel essay form been included in the reportage canon. Thus, there is no reason to suppose that modern travel essayists associated what they were doing with the emerging reportage form, even after it became a prominent part of the literary scene in the mid-1930s.
However, insofar as modern travel essays resemble reportage they are illustrative of reportage's essential aspects. The writers I discuss in this chapter express their conscious divergence from traditional travel narratives clearly in terms of explicit discussions of method that could serve as guides for the writing of reportage. Their comments on method rarely concern travel as such but rather deal with society, culture, direct authorial engagement, and the author's quest for solutions to China's historical predicament through immersion in social life and the expression of that immersion and its consequences as a distinctive form of literary practice.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF TRAVEL LITERATURE IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA
Travel literature is unique among the types of writing I am discussing in that in China it is an explicit response to a familiar, traditional form: youji or "records of journeys." Since the earliest times there have been records of travels real and imaginary in both the orthodox and lesser literary canons. The well-known Shanhai jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas) is structured explicitly as a record of travels outside the borders of the known world, and Qu Yuan's Li Sao (Encountering Sorrow) can be read as an extended cosmic journey. Medieval landscape poetry such as that of Xie Lingyun (385-443) features a distinctive travel component, and travel makes a conspicuous intervention in Chinese narrative with the rich and varied "journey to the west" (xiyou ji) tradition, based in part on the factual seventh-century journey of the Buddhist priest Xuan Zang (596-664) to procure the Mahayana corpus. The travel essay as a specialized activity, in which the practice of writing is intimately involved with the experience of travel, found perhaps its earliest extended treatment in the Song dynasty travel diaries of Fan Chengda (1126-91).
Once youji became a distinctive literary genre, writing about travel developed into a form of sophisticated aesthetic appreciation that fit into a repertoire of literati leisure activity, including antique connoisseurship, calligraphy, painting, and poetic composition. In works of the traditional travel essay, the landscapes and communities described either become the passive scroll upon which the writer paints his or her refined and highly trained emotional expressions or a repository of curiosities and exotica that the reader can enjoy as a form of leisurely amusement. In addition to providing a rich context for social interaction among the traditional literati, such activities aimed to evoke moments of aesthetic transcendence and spiritual rejuvenation.
By the late Ming dynasty, Xu Xiake (1586-1641), one of the best-known and certainly most prolific of travel writers of late imperial China, devoted most of his energies to renovating the travel essay tradition. Xu was concerned far more than any of his youji predecessors with accurate empirical (specifically geocultural) knowledge assembled through travel and observation; he created an unprecedented, new way of writing about places linked in spirit to the interpretive revisionism of kaozheng xue. Xu Xiake's work is encyclopedic; he was clearly not concerned with producing belles lettres. However, Xu has something important in common with modern Chinese travel and reportage writers as well: an obsession with truth manifested in the actual, the accurate account as an (occasionally uncomfortable) antidote for popular myths and fantasies taken as truth about places, peoples, and environments.
Gu Yanwu (1613-82) is another late Ming/early Qing transition figure whose travel essays played an important role in his contribution to intellectual history but who is utterly ignored by literary historians. Even more than Xu Xiake, Gu Yanwu has in common with later writers of travel essays, even to the present day, a sense of cultural crisis. In his case it was a perception of the practical and social problems that were being ignored or exacerbated by the reigning philosophy of neo-Confucianism, particularly its idealist strains. Immanuel Hsu points out that Gu "traveled widely in North China and studied the practical problems of geography, frontier defense, farming and trade. From his geographical investigations he drafted two treatises based on practical applications: On the Strategic and Economic Advantages and Disadvantages of the Counties and States of the Empire ... and his Local Geography." Few other than Hsu have linked Gu Yanwu's emphasis on textual research with the pragmatic empiricism of his travel essays. In this light, we can see Gu making an important connection between text (the Confucian classical corpus) and landscape (the culturally saturated territory of China), and his approach to both puts emphasis on vigorous exploration and the support of intellectual positions with empirical evidence.
The kind of investigative, geographical travel essays of writers like Xu Xiake and Gu Yanwu diverged from and even directly critiqued traditional travel literature for its reliance on stereotyped diction and imagery and unconcern with true conditions or whether the writer had actually visited the place described. These voluminous and less aesthetically inclined works openly criticized and overturned misperceptions and distortions of actual conditions that had been propagated within that tradition as well as investigating a wide variety of anthropological, social, economic, and military issues. It is significant that such travel essays and their writers were closely aligned not only with the kaozheng xue (evidential studies) critique of late Ming neo-Confucian idealism but also with the Chinese cultural nationalism that characterized the Ming loyalists of the early Qing (Hsu, The Rise of Modern China, 114). While there were reactions against and revivals of the School of Evidential Studies (kaozheng xue pai) throughout the Qing, one way or another it conditioned the intellectual climate of the entire dynasty. Adherents did not always, like Xu Xiake and Gu Yanwu, advocate personal investigation of social conditions as well as textual research, and indeed many of the prominent late Ming neo-Confucians were highly engaged social activists. However it was applied, though, the spirit of the movement continued to be an outward-directed adherence to the facts and a determination to overturn baseless assumptions as opposed to relying on subjective judgment.
In the late Qing dynasty, in part because of the increasingly conspicuous presence of Western powers in China and throughout Asia, written accounts of foreign travel began to appear in significant numbers, and by the end of the nineteenth century such accounts, written largely by ambassadors and ministers, were legion. Because of the legacy of evidential studies and also because of its unprecedented international scope, late Qing travel literature bears a resemblance to that of European writers in that the writer's journey itself arises from a passion or need for knowledge and the quest for knowledge about the world through personally observed, actual conditions is conceived as a liberating historical force.
Travel writers' persistent interest in cultural comparison encourages them to view every detail of their journeys, from events the writer may consider to be of great historical importance down to their most minute observations, as symbolic of cultural difference. These observations are frequently expressed in an evaluative context, and the writer takes on the responsibility of accepting or rejecting the phenomena he or she observes on behalf of China. In this sense, the allegorical dimension of late Qing travel literature consists in offering the individual's actual journey as a surrogate for China's journey into the modern world, observing other cultures and accepting or rejecting them in a piecemeal fashion.
An interesting illustration of how dangerous it could be to harbor doubts about China's cultural superiority during the Qing dynasty is Guo Songtao's (1818-91) record of his mission to London and Paris (1876-79). Guo, a young minister with an established reputation as a pro-Western agitator, was sent on the European mission under the supervision of an older, much more conservative minister, and the diary often records the friction between these two men as well as their contrasting reactions to the welter of modern Western intellectual and material culture to which they were exposed. A portion of this diary published by the Zongli yamen (Office for the Management of the Business of All Foreign Countries, established by the Qing government in 1861 to manage foreign affairs, particularly with Western countries), in which Guo boldly asserts that the West "also has a two-thousand-year-old civilization," caused such a stir in the prevailing conservative faction of the Qing government that, according to Zhong Shuhe, Guo was recalled from diplomatic duties, the printing blocks of his book were destroyed, and there was a ban placed on existing copies. Ten years after Guo's death in 1879, an imperial order was carried out to disinter and mutilate his and Ding Richang's corpses to "avenge the realm." Liang Qichaomentions Guo's travelogue in his "Wushi nian zhongguo jinhua gailun" (An Outline of China's Evolution in the Past Fifty Years), and it is likely that his Travels in the New World was influenced in theme and method by Guo's work, among others.
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Excerpted from Chinese reportage by Charles A. Laughlin Excerpted by permission.
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