Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959 by Mingwei Song

Reviewed by: Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959 by Mingwei Song Andrea Bachner Song, Mingwei. Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Centre, 2015. Pp. 379. $49.95 US hardcover. Song Mingwei concludes his monograph Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959 with a reflection on the connotations of youth in contemporary China through the lens of Liu Cixin’s science fiction story “Micro-era” (“Weijiyuan,” 1999): When the last human returns to earth after millennia, he finds a culture of eternally young micro-humans in a perpetual state of happiness, yet without capacity for development. Disburdened from the responsibility of history or politics, Liu’s micro-humans present an eerie image of contemporary Chinese youths steeped in a “Chinese dream” that has erased political action in favor of carefree consumption. This condition, as Song suggests, resonates in strange ways with the hopes for China’s youths that Chinese intellectuals such as Lu Xun uttered during the first decades of the twentieth century and beyond: On the one hand, this is precisely a generation no longer burdened by “the weight of tradition and […] the gate of darkness,” as Lu Xun hoped could be achieved by the sacrifice of the old for the young (qtd. in Song 335). On the other, this salvation of the children—I am echoing Song’s reference to the ending of Lu Xun’s short story “A Madman’s Diary” here—is also emptied of any meaning. As such, the discourse on youth that was of crucial importance to Chinese history and culture during much of China’s long twentieth century has come to an end of sorts. But since this end is an unsatisfactory one, based on the suspended temporality and significance of youth, the trajectory of “young China” is not yet over. Thus, Song’s questions at the end of his book have lost nothing of their urgency: “But who are we? How are we constructed as ‘youths’, new youths, or old youths, or people with memories or regrets about youth?” (339–40, emphasis in original). The discourse of youth continues to oscillate between paradoxical extremes: “Every utopia is at the same time dystopian” (340). This emphasis on the contradictions of youth pervades Young China as a constant rhythm of counterpoints even as Song leads his readers through an exquisitely constructed cultural history of China from 1900 to 1959 viewed through the prism of discourses on and novels about youth: from late Qing discourses to May Fourth, from the realism of Mao Dun and the anarchism of Ba Jin to the lyricism of Lu Ling and Lu Qiao, and finally to the Maoist expressions of youth in Yang Mo’s Song of Youth and Wang Meng’s Long Live Youth in the 1950s. Each of the seven chapters, with Chapter One serving as a more conceptual introduction, focuses on the framing of youth in the work of one author or in a group of texts that are connected through their modes of youthful discourse, determined by the political and historical context at play. Since an excellent chapter outline can be found in the book’s prologue, I will not dwell on the content of each chapter here, but focus on the main insights of the [End Page 175] book as a whole. As the book progresses diachronically from the late Qing to the 1950s, and with its focus on the literary practice of one author or a small number of authors in each chapter, Young China does not present a taxonomy of different avatars of youth, or only insofar as these can be inferred from specific literary examples. Instead, the conceptual trajectory of the book is largely developed through particular cases and leaves it for a reader to infer many of the theoretical ebbs and flows of youth discourse. After all, the book presents itself as a “synthesis of cultural history and narrative analysis” focused on the trope of youth, not a conceptual reflection on the notion as such (2). By the same token, its literary analyses draw on theories of the Bildungsroman, without, however, participating in elaborating or contesting...

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