About this talk

How does emotion shape the terrain of public intellectual debate? Drawing on Hang Tu's recent book, Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past, this talk proposes emotion as a new critical framework for rethinking cultural controversy and memory wars in the post-Mao era. With the onset of market reform, Chinese intellectuals and writers did not simply turn away from revolutionary feeling. On the contrary, the post-Mao decades witnessed a surge of emotionally charged debates over the legacies of the Mao era, ranging from the anguished denunciations of Maoist violence to the elegiac remembrances of socialist egalitarianism. Tracing four decades of contentious cultural warfare over the Maoist past, from 1978 to 2018, the talk examines how four major intellectual clusters in contemporary China – liberals, the Left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists – reinterpreted Mao’s revolutionary legacies in light of the postsocialist transition. By analysing how rival intellectual camps stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, it argues that the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia. Hang Tu is Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore and Deputy Director of the CCKF–NUS Southeast Asia Center for Chinese Studies. His research focuses on modern Chinese literature, intellectual history, and the cultural politics of emotion in modern and contemporary China. His work has appeared in Critical Inquiry, The Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Intellectual History, MCLC, and PRISM. He is currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled How to Be a Cynic: Satire and the Art of Dissent in Twentieth-Century China.

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