Tie Xiao.Revolutionary Waves: The Crowd in Modern China.

KANG Ling

The conception of

qunzhong

群众 (the political crowd) has always been a contested yet generative site of cultural and political interests and investments in modern Chinese history.Tie Xiao’s new book,

Revolutionary Waves: The Crowd in Modern China

, offers a refreshing critical analysis of this challenging and long-overdue topic.Drawing on a wide range of inter-disciplinary materials including political discourse, psychological theory, intellectual history, and literary writings, the book investigates the “crowd” less as a given, self-explanatory entity than as an emerging problematic whose forms of intelligibility take hold in both the global circulation of knowledge, which renders the crowd a legitimate object of inquiry, as well as the troubling relationship between the elitist intellectuals and the masses in the domestic mass politics.In other words, the topology of the crowd takes shape-and makes sense-only through the new ways of knowledge production and representational acts that register the profound anxieties among modern Chinese intellectuals and writers about the distance (or lack thereof) between self and others, individual detachment, and communal solidarity in the making of the revolutionary future.

To sort out the implications and ramifications of the modern science and literature on the crowd, the author focuses more specifically on the discourse of crowd psychology as well as fictions and poetry informed by the imag(in)ing of the crowd.The first two chapters (Chapters 1 and 2) reveal the fascinating story of how, during the Republican period, new concepts and vocabularies were invented in the disciplinary framework of psychology to come to terms with and diagnose the “crowd psychology,” which claimed, with a “scientific” tenet, that the physical massing of collective people would result in peculiar crowd mentality and behavior, making them irrational and vulnerable to hypnotic acts.With the translation of Le Bon’s works and the like, crowd psychology enjoyed great currency among diverse intellectuals such as Hu Hanmin 胡汉民 (1879-1936), Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 (1879-1942), Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白 (1899-1935), Gao Juefu 高觉敷 (1896-1993), etc., who sought in an era of unprecedent scale of mass politics to both understand and control the spontaneous while dangerous energies of collective passions and actions-energies that served either as “a moral basis” for patriotism or obstacle to “political reasoning.” (37-38)

Lebonian crowd psychology, though disqualifying the crowd of rationality, inspires radical thinking about the formation of collective subjectivity nonetheless.In Zhu Qianzhi’s 朱谦之 (1899-1972) revolutionary philosophy (examined in Chapter 2), it is precisely the intuitive, impulsive emotion of the mentality of the crowd that attests to the authenticity of their consciousness and action, hence wherein lies the true revolutionary potentiality.Combining the late imperial cult of

qing

情 (love, emotion, or feeling), the ideas of emotion and instinct of Wilhelm Wundt and Henri Bergson, and Le Bon’s crowd psychology, Zhu envisions a collective revolution whose formation and mobilization are grounded in the affective force and resonance among the spontaneous crowd.However, by psychologizing the crowd, i.e., by attributing the constitution and characteristic of the crowd to certain mental phenomena, Zhu and his contemporary psychologists circumvent the “common interests or a shared culture” (84) underlying collective actions.As Tie Xiao aptly points out, in psychological determinism, “the specificity of social antagonism disappears,” betraying the “rhetorical nature and ideological implications” of the discipline.(58)Shifting gear to the realm of literature, the author turns to other dimensions of the crowd in the following chapters, in particular the problematic relationship between individual intellectuals and the masses.Chapter 3 gives a broad survey of fictional writings featuring the tensions between the desire for and anxiety about the dissolving boundaries between self and collective.Whereas the proximity of a collective social revolution was widely believed in and imagined by intellectuals, such an imagination was accompanied by persistent negotiations of the role of the individual.Xiao’s analysis of Ye Shaojun’s 叶绍钧 (1894-1988)

Ni Huanzhi

《倪焕之》(Ni Huanzhi), for example, shows how the aesthetic distance between the protagonist and the masses conditions the visibility of the crowd itself.Such a distance, in turn, allows the intellectual beholder to witness and reflect how the crowd could become “a docile object for political manipulation” (110) under a devious hypnotist, suggesting “the danger hidden behind the veneer of identification with the masses” (113).In contrast, rather than the negation or discipline of private passions in the process of collective identification, Hu Yepin’s 胡也频 (1903-1931)

Guangming Zai Women de Qianmian

《光明在我们的前面》(The Light Is Ahead of Us) exemplifies the (re)constitution of a selfconscious individual subject enabled by the formation of the revolutionary crowd.More importantly, as Xiao argues in Chapter 4 by comparing Hu’s revolutionary novel with his early works of romantic indulgence and decadent isolation, the fantasy of crowd in revolutionary realism provides imaginary scenarios through which one’s private desires could be legitimized, fulfilled, and overcome in “the conflation of romantic sensation and political excitement” (148).The conflation as such could not find a better manifestation in the merging of the intellectual’s voice and the crowd’s “torrents of sound.” However, as Chapter 5 shows, the purportedly harmonious merging could easily fall prey to the form of ventriloquism that, on the one hand, destabilizes the intellectual’s sense of identity and, on the other hand, appropriates the collective voice of the crowd so as to authenticate the authority in the name of transparency.

The history of the crowd and its representational order, as the book displays, have always been informed and mediated by such competing potentials and limits.From the calling for the unification of “a tray of loose sand” as a means of national awakening to the ritualized and performative struggle session of some revolutionists, the physical massing of human bodies not only marks various technologies of social and political mobilization, but also fetishizes multiple ideas and ideologies of revolutionary legitimacy, moral authority, and utopian imagination of the becoming state.A comprehensive retrospection such as Xiao’s therefore works less to fulfill a revolutionary nostalgia in today’s distinctly individualist neo-liberal condition than to offer a much-needed analytical framework, in which new forms of solidarity could be imagined.