Reporting the Self that is Ten Thousand Things: Zhu Qianzhi and His Reminiscences (1927)

• In Event: Resistant Narratives: Chinese Reportage Literature and Its Ideological Function

Abstract

Once regarded by such leading intellectuals as Wu Zhihui as one of the “four representatives of recent Chinese thought”—the other three being Hu Shi, Liang Shuming, and Liang Qichao—Zhu Qianzhi (1899-1972) is not only a radical philosopher but also a prolific reporter on himself. From the 1920s to the early years of the Great Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), he produced a series of autobiographical writings, some of his own will, some out of obligation, and some under coercion. This paper focuses on his 1927 piece Huiyi (Reminiscences). On the one hand, I situate Zhu’s Huiyi within the introduction and prevalence of a new modality of the person construed as a corporeally-bounded and psychologically-motivated individual in the early Republican era. On the other hand, I link his stress on the identity between the “I” and “ten thousand things” with his political philosophy that accented the affective dimension of collective formation and the nonrationality of social bond. Ultimately, Zhu’s early reportage on the self, I argue, aims to forge a “consonance” (gongming) between the self and others, a consonance paradoxically predicated upon a radical egoism. In Huiyi, Zhu found it necessary to justify his desire to expose his personal life to the people and his answer is an expansion of the self that, according to him, contains all others. This paper examines the particular form of his reasoning.

Author

• Tie Xiao, Indiana University