This dissertation asks how a long-established literary culture exposed to the depredations of modernity reinvents itself. In the early twentieth century, Chinese activists and intellectuals, reeling from decades of political setbacks since the Opium Wars, sought to drag Chinese society out of an allegedly benighted backwardness into a westernized modernity. I show that modern Chinese realist writers frequently turned to the topic of material poverty—peasants suffering from famine, exploited urban laborers, homeless orphans—to convey their sense of textual poverty and national backwardness. Writers wished to break with a literary and linguistic tradition that for thousands of years had largely been the purview of the ruling scholar-official class. This tradition was, according to modern reformers, woefully impoverished in comparison to Western models, and writing about poverty was a strategy to ameliorate this cultural deficiency. The combination of a radically new subject matter and experimentation with diverse literary resources (indigenous and foreign) generated major innovations in narrative technique and form. Depicting poverty allowed writers to revolutionize the nascent forms of modern Chinese narrative, innovating strategies of representing the nation, the social other, time, and space, while problematizing their deployment of this weighty topic for aesthetic purposes. Though it was contact with Western cultures that produced their sense of backwardness, Chinese intellectuals appropriated from those foreign literary traditions narrative tools to remedy China’s purported textual deficiency by writing about poverty. I examine why Russian literature, itself long preoccupied with a problem of belatedness vis-à-vis Western Europe, occupied a privileged place for Chinese intellectuals of this era. Comparing Chinese fiction about poverty to Russian intertexts by Gogol, Andreev, Chekhov, Turgenev, and others, I show how Chinese writers drew and innovated upon themes (such as madness or human animality) and formal elements (such as metonymy) to invent a new, syncretic realism. In contrast to criticism about the limits of realist writing in China, I argue that it is a heteromodal form, capable of encompassing many modes of narration or literary genres. Here I draw upon on Mikhail Bakhtin’s principle of the omnivorously heteroglossic nature of language and the novel. Chinese writers were so omnivorously intertextual, absorbing different Western genres and -isms simultaneously while continuing to make use of traditional Chinese literary resources, that modern Chinese realism is necessarily informed by a broad spectrum of narrative modes and styles. My dissertation thus contributes to recent critical discussions about peripheral realisms and the transformation of discursive modes or generic conventions when they cross borders.

This dissertation studies the paradoxical relationship between print culture and occult knowledge production in China’s age of print, i.e., the epoch between the Chinese commercial print revolution in the late sixteenth century and the coming of a multimedia age in the early twentieth century. While in print culture studies it has become a commonplace that print helps disseminate knowledge and creates a reading public, this dissertation asks: what happens when a book about occult knowledge is printed and thrown into the market for popular consumption? To what extent does this book still bear any of the “secrecy” that it claims? This question arises from the discovery of a vast network of books known as “secret scrolls” (miji 秘笈) that were produced in this age of print. They include magic kung-fu guides, sectarian scriptures, secret society manuals, notes from séances, spirit photography, and Mesmerism how-to books. Delving into the textual and intertextual histories of these materials, as well as various literary works and social discourses that engaged with the “secret scroll” as a cultural trope, this dissertation conceptualizes the paradox of secrecy in an age of print. It argues that the secrecy of a “secret scroll” is established precisely because it is revealed and multiplied by way of a new public constituted by print culture.

This dissertation has five chapters, each focused on a single or a cluster of secret scrolls about a particular form of occult knowledge. The chapters are all related, in different ways, to the late Qing novel The Travels of Lao Can authored by Liu E 劉鶚 (1857–1909), which this dissertation reads not only as a secret scroll par excellence, but also as a theory of how to read secret scrolls and approach occult knowledge. Each chapter, in addition to manifesting the “paradox of secrecy” that the dissertation conceptualizes, also attends to a particular aspect of occult knowledge production in its historical context. Chapter 1, “The Travels of Lao Can as Book of Prophecy,” concretizes how and why The Travels of Lao Can, a canonical novel in contemporary literary historiography, was received as a secret scroll, replete with prophetic knowledge, in its own historical time. Through the discovery of a “fake edition” which was in fact the best-selling edition of this novel in the early Republican era, this chapter highlights the marketing logic of the “secret scroll” and the role played by the profit-seeking publishers. Chapter 2, “Restoring the Taigu Genealogy” provides a new narrative of the relationship between Liu E, The Travels of Lao Can, and the so-called “lost scrolls” of the “Taigu school,” an esoteric and “heretical” teaching originating in the eighteenth century with which Liu E was associated. Analyzing a dispute regarding whether the school’s “lost scrolls” should be published in printed form or kept secret as manuscripts, this chapter underlines the tension between manuscript culture and print culture. Chapter 3, “Transforming the Body, Transforming the Book” focuses on the Yijin jing 易筋經 (Sinew Transformation Classic), the most famous kung-fu secret scroll in postwar martial arts popular culture. Examining dozens of editions of the book produced throughout the age of print, this chapter argues that the Yijin jing is not a singular or bounded book, but is instead comprised of a network of numerous actors, including both things and human agents, that is in constant making, remaking, and reconfiguration. Chapter 4, “Rivers and Lakes” reads “Chinese martial arts fiction” born in the early twentieth century not as a self-conscious literary genre, but as a new manifestation of secret scrolls about the mysterious world known as jianghu 江湖, or the “rivers and lakes.” The interplay between secret scrolls, literary works, and serialization as a mode of literary production is a key concern of this chapter. Chapter 5, “The Spiritual and the Global,” shifts from traditional Chinese occult traditions to the influence of Western occultism since the late nineteenth century. It focuses on how secret scrolls about Western occultism, most noticeably how-to manuals to Mesmerism, were disseminated and consumed by way of a global postal network, and how they fostered an “imagined global community,” which not only granted Chinese readers access to the spiritual world, but also invited them to imagine their positions in the modern global order in a new way.

Whereas contemporary postsocialist China is typically depicted in terms of rampant, ideologically vacuous commodification, the Mao era––and especially the apogee of Maoist fervor, the Cultural Revolution (1966-76)––is normally cast as a time of ubiquitous politics and scarce goods. Indeed, the Cultural Revolution landscape of things has been strangely stripped of the mundane: with the exception of the likeness and words of Mao Zedong, the material culture of the Cultural Revolution is most notably characterized as a void out of which the postsocialist world of commodity consumption sprang fully formed. This dissertation instead examines how interactions between individuals and things during the Cultural Revolution were themselves intertwined with the circulation and consumption of ‘socialist commodities.’ I focus on objects associated with the yangbanxi, or ‘model performances,’ as a critical part of ‘real existing’ Chinese socialism, with which individuals interacted on a daily basis. Hailed as the pinnacle of socialist artistic production, the yangbanxi repertoire of Beijing operas, ballets, and orchestral works was intended to act as vanguard in the revolution in the performing arts. Objects promoting the yangbanxi were therefore produced spanning every conceivable form. I focus here on paraphernalia in three ‘media’: recorded sound, porcelain statuettes, and amateur bodies. Interactions with these instances of yangbanxi remediation, I argue, constituted a critical way in which revolutionary subjects and socialist commodities produced themselves as such. Moreover, this dissertation ultimately contends that, in this way, socialist commodity consumption made the consumer subjectivities of the postsocialist period possible.

I begin by focusing on the theorization of the socialist commodity and its role as articulated in Chinese political economic texts of the Cultural Revolution. I argue that these works, intended to counteract the enchantment of commodity fetishism through the popularization of Marxist political economy, were themselves fetishistic in their privileging of discourse over materiality. A similar predicament arises with the notion of the ‘newborn socialist thing’ (shehuizhuyi xinsheng shiwu) as well, supposed herald of the transition to commodity-free communism. Too often the relational nature of newborn socialist things meant that they were not really things at all. I ask how we might nonetheless benefit from thinking about the yangbanxi—quintessential newborn socialist things in their own right—as relationally complex, systems of remediation and, furthermore, how those systems’ economies of signification mirror the workings of the socialist commodity. As I argue in my second chapter, the production and organization of revolutionary space was enmeshed with a complex topography of consumption in which persisting pre-revolutionary notions of (bourgeois) domesticity played an enduring role. Drawing on vinyl records, flexi-discs, and published photographs, I examine the positioning of the citizen-subject as an aural consumer of yangbanxi in a ‘public’ soundscape, which was nonetheless facilitated by that most ‘domestic’ of recorded sound technologies, the record player. The home itself remained a crucial site of socialist consumption, and in my next chapter, I consider the importance of yangbanxi porcelain statuettes, as components of politically au courant home decoration, in emplotting subjects in socialist time as well as a temporality very much reminiscent of the always-already passé postsocialist commodity. Moreover, these pieces of home decor also constituted idealized, prescriptive models for the sculpting of bodies and subjectivities, particularly for amateur performers of yangbanxi, the focus of my final, full chapter. Implicated in a highly (re)mediated system, the performer’s very body is ultimately rendered as exchangeable and consumable as the record or ceramic tchotchke. I close the dissertation with a coda, in which I analyze contemporary discourse on collecting Cultural Revolution memorabilia and what I read as a continued longing for an alternative to the—now explicitly capitalist—commodity-form.

This dissertation investigates the crucial roles that the discourse and fantasies of a coming information society played in China's post-Mao transformations. In the late 1970s, "information" became a buzzword in both the official discourse of modernization and intellectual discourse of enlightenment, culminating with the introduction and translation of works by Daniel Bell, Alvin Toffler as well as Toffler's visits to China in person. Reading across science fiction, modernist writing, films, scientific treatises, historical monographs and key intellectual debates, this project unearths a heretofore neglected history of China's participation in the global production and flows of discourses about "information," revealing the ideological entailments of "information" beneath its guise of neutrality, and most importantly, opening new possibilities for rethinking the historical and theoretical intermeshing between post-socialism and information discourses.

Chapter One outlines the historical background and my theoretical interventions. Chapter Two discusses the parallel crazes from the late 1970s onward for what was referred to as the "science of extraordinary powers" and qigong (a practice of breathing and meditation techniques based on Chinese philosophy) -- crazes which understood telepathy and other paranormal phenomenon as a key to the secrets of information transmission, and were rooted in a concurrent fascination with the centrality of information in the process of modernization. Examining how this scientific discourse was interwoven with the science fiction of the same period, I demonstrate the tension between the intellectual discourse of enlightenment and the technocratic rule of an information society, and reveal a new regime of controlling bodily affect as augured in these stories.

Chapter Three explores stories about robots in the context of Marxist humanist debates of the 80s, as well as the influx of Daniel Bell's and Alvin Toffler's "information theory of value" -- that value is no longer produced by labor but by information. These intellectual interests were concurrent with widespread discussions of the intelligentsia's status in the post-Mao restructuring of the division of labor. My reading of the linguistic characteristics of science fiction reveals that "information," presented as neutral, objective knowledge, allowed an increasingly specialized Chinese intelligentsia to advocate for their own autonomy. I am also engaging with the notion of "interface" in new media studies to rethink human-machine-communication in terms of affective labor, reflecting on current theoretical formulations of affective labor and interface in post-socialist context. By redefining interface as a productive site where communications between humans and machine-systems are constantly redefined, I argue that the notion of "human" also becomes fluid when merged by the way of the interface into information circuits.

The following two chapters focus on the new aesthetics of 1980s films. Chapter Four uncovers the intellectual ferment bridging the distinctive aesthetic of the fifth-generation films with a cybernetics-informed view of Chinese society represented by Jin Guantao's "ultrastable systems theory." Undergirding both the detached long-take aesthetic of the Fifth Generation and the scientific rationality of Jin's theory were a shared desire for modernization and a critique of Chinese culture as "an ultrastable structure of feudalism." I delineate how this view also influenced film critique and theories, which characterized Chinese cinema as "an ultrastable structure" mired in the "shadow-play" tradition and theatrical didacticism. The advocacy of "modernizing cinematic language" is examined against this backdrop. Ending this chapter with a close reading of Black Cannon Incident, I argue that its modernist cinematic language inadvertently provides a form for the structure of feeling in anticipation of the drastic changes as China was reincorporated into the global capitalism.

Chapter Five looks at how the proliferation of mediascapes and fantasies of new media technology expanded the very notion of cinema in this period. This effort to bring cinema into the "information age" and out of the confines of the theater, envisioned in both entertainment films and art films, generated a new aesthetic divorced from socialist realism and social realism, exploring instead the plasticity of cinema. This expanded, plastic cinema also provided a medium for fantasies and sentiments of this time, which on the one hand demonstrated the explosion of senses with the proliferation of media, and on the other hand signaled new ways of modulating affect that were increasingly channeled into marketization in post-socialist China.

My dissertation explores a cultural history of the body as reflected in meditative and therapeutic forms of the Chinese martial arts in nineteenth and early twentieth-century China. Precursors of the more familiar present-day taijiquan 太極拳 and qigong 氣功, these forms of martial arts techniques focus on the inward cultivation of qi 氣 and other apparently ineffable energies of the body. They revolve around the harnessing of “internal strength” or neigong 內功. These notions of a strength derived from an invisible, intangible, yet embodied qi came to represent a significant counterweight to sports, exercise science, the Physical Culture movement, physiology, and other Western ideas of muscularity and the body that were being imported into China at the time.

What role would such competing discourses of the body play in shaping contemporary ideas of embodiment? How would it raise the stakes in an era already ideologically charged with the intertwined issues of nationalism and imperialism, and so-called scientific modernity and indigenous tradition? This study is an inquiry into the epistemological and ontological ramifications of the idea of neigong internal strength, tracing the popular spread of the idea and its impact in late Qing and Republican China vernacular discourse. I pay particular attention to how the notion of “internal strength” might shed light on thinking about the body in the period. Using the notion of neigong as a lens, this project examines the claims of the internal forms of Chinese martial arts, and the cultural work that these claims perform in the context of late Qing and Republican China. I locate the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the key formative period when the idea first found popular conceptual purchase, and explore how the notion of neigong internal strength became increasingly steeped in the cultural politics of the time.

Considering the Chinese internal martial arts not only as a form of bodily practice but also as a mode of cultural production, in which a particular way of regarding 'the body' came to be established in Chinese vernacular culture, may additionally yield rich theoretical fodder. How might such claims about a different kind of “internal strength” revisit or disrupt modernist assumptions about the body? The project highlights the neglected significance of the internal martial arts as a narrative of the Chinese body. More broadly, it suggests fresh avenues for scholarship on the body, in showing how these other-bodily "ways of knowing" took on meaning in the period and beyond.

The affective landscape of the global Cold War is commonly associated with fear and paranoia about ubiquitous enemies who had to be purged to preserve life worth living. My dissertation argues instead that the Cold War was one of the most comic times in recent history; not in spite of, but because of the apocalyptic stakes of the global stand-off. In East Asia, where authoritarian governments carried out the ideological war through tight media policy and censorship, comic culture became a vital form of mass communication out of necessity. Comic culture’s circuitous nature allowed transgressive public affects to gather in plain sight, fostering new rituals of collective understanding that bypassed state control.

This dissertation demonstrates the regional resonance of the Cold War comic aesthetic through a comparative methodology, revealing cultural convergences among two US-allied East Asian countries that were also former Japanese colonies, Taiwan and South Korea. The similar contours of their comic cultures arise from these historical factors, as well as their common participation in global anti-Communism and their rapid industrialization under developmental policies. Nevertheless, the comic cultural field became a particularly important space of vernacularization for Taiwan and South Korea as they encountered the norms of new global cultures under Pax Americana, and it was there that the differences between them were articulated and amplified.

I identify three intertwined comic aesthetics that side-stepped the state’s totalizing machine of anti-Communist, developmental ideology, creating a counterpublic in the process of coming into being. Caricature, genre game, and nonsense were the three intermedial aesthetics that forged new forms of communication by cleaving to the margins of expression. If caricature suggests the method of minimalism, of communicating with the least amount of visual information possible, genre games offer the method of maximalism, of engaging heterogenous genres all at once. Nonsense, in turn, suggests the liberating possibility that reckoning with the impossibility of communication in the Cold War era is itself the most honest act of communication. Together, these aesthetics playfully invert the power structures of the era by making the trivial aim of collective laughter a primary and immediate affective objective.

This dissertation examines the relationship between discourses of realism and dreaming in modern Chinese literature from the Republican period to the end of the Mao era. It examines how the interplay of oneiric and realist discourses illuminated the way in which the realist mode juggled its professed fidelity to scientific values and historic critique with the utopian desire that propelled the mode's will to embody these empiric attitudes in the first place. Dream discourse constituted an "unconscious" of the realist mode through which utopian desires otherwise suppressed in the realist narrative proper could be expressed within brackets. The friction between dreaming and the real in literary texts was thus evocative of the contradictory relationship between revolutionary utopian desire and grim political reality that marked China's ordeal of modernity.

This study argues for reading dreams as a supplementary form of historical knowledge that transcends the limitations of conventional narrative through its innovative reconfiguration of the relations between language, bodies and history. It goes on to consider how the May 4th advocacy of science granted dreams a new intellectual legitimacy by recasting them in the paradigmatic mold of psychoanalysis. The relative simultaneity of psychoanalysis and literary realism in China, both emblems of Western scientific discourse, culminated in an arresting problematic between empirical restraint and utopian desire that found its symptomatic literary expression through the presence of dream discourse within realist texts.

This dissertation explores in detail the vexed relationships between dream, reality and history in four writers: Lu Xun (1881-1936), Mao Dun (1896-1981), Yang Mo (1914-1995) and Zong Pu (b. 1928). By focusing on careful textual analysis of oneiric discourse in these writers' texts, this study reveals the conflict between literature and the historic reality to which it sought to be commensurate. However, it also argues that the dream form, while highlighting the problem between literature and its social referent, also suggested an allegorical reconciliation between narrative, history and utopia.

My dissertation explores the ways the media industries of the Chinese Nationalist Party turned Taiwan and Hong Kong—the Nationalist’s industrial home-front and informational hub—into what I call a regime of logistics after 1949. As one of the greatest human migrations in modern history, the mass exodus of millions of Chinese people to Taiwan and Hong Kong upon the triumph of the Communist party has been relatively understudied. The movement of military personnel, intellectuals, technocrats, and business communities represented a singular mode of migratory culture, as they were not only victims displaced by the Chinese Civil War but also a powerful cluster of human resources with which the Nationalist regime engineered the image of a “Free China” with the support from the United States. In this context, I ask how military, industrial, and commercial logistics forged a propaganda media infrastructure that both circulated and represented the movement of labor, information, and affects in the supply-chain capitalism during the Cold War.

My dissertation inquiries into the specific ways state-sponsored cinema and literature turned the narratives of displacement into narratives defined by postwar developmentalism. It is my contention that in the process of being relocated and downscaled from a continental sovereignty to an exiled island-state, the Nationalists’ pursuit of a techno-utopia forged a series of media environments from which new cinematic and literary aesthetics emerged within the intertwined milieu between warfare and development. How did Taiwan and Hong Kong reshape the Nationalists’ narratives of nation-building and military logistics with their own aesthetic strategies? What do these strategies tell us about the relations among militarism, migration, and environment? To map out the interconnected conduits of aesthetic transformation between propaganda discourses and creative freedom, I read audiovisual images and literary texts against four principal enterprises for Nationalists’ mobilization—military science, agricultural campaigns, transportation networks, and architectural planning. Each of these medium/environment clusters is centered around a state-run enterprise—transplanted from China to either Taiwan or Hong Kong—and its correlated technocratic discourses. In aggregate, these images and texts provide the basis for a new narrative of Taiwan and Hong Kong’s Cold War culture.

This dissertation, “Technological Futures,” examines animated media from mainland China, as it transitioned from the political regime of the Republic of China to that of the People’s Republic of China. This study emphasizes the role of animation and animated media in promulgating new modes of education, in representing national and natural histories, and in disseminating popular science. The dissertation argues that animation served as a new visual vernacular and pedagogical mode for socialist Chinese media, while also conceptualizing animation as pushing past the boundaries of genre studies and questions of medium specificity.

A broader, mass media context for a visual mode of animation emerged beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, encompassing not only animated films but also science education films, photographic slides, and popular science films and texts. This dissertation contends that such media in socialist China enabled the formation of new socialist subjectivities, national historical narratives, and spatio-temporal reality. To support these claims, this dissertation examines animated media from this period in conjunction with internal studio documents, film bureau censorship reports, educational publications, and critical essays published by animators and filmmakers. The research here finds that the use of animated media was fraught with questions of how to teach perception, and how to reconcile scientific representations of reality together with futuristic visions of the future. “Technological Futures” finds that during its earliest developmental stages, the socialist Chinese state utilized the affordances of animation—in its imaginative form, motion, and space—to envision its past, present, and future as nation.