From Frankenstein’s Creature to ‘Sleeping Lion’ China: The Transformation of a Haunting Monster and the Power of Falsehood in Chinese Context

• In Event: Literary Migrations: Transformation in and out of Text in Qing and Early Republican China

Abstract

“Napoleon said that China is a sleeping lion, and when she awakes, the world will shake,” stated PRC President Xi Jinping in a Paris speech on March 27, 2014. However, there is no evidence that Napoleon ever used the sleeping lion metaphor. China as a sleeping lion was first coined by the late-Qing reformist Liang Qichao (1873-1929), and Liang was inspired by Yan Fu’s (1854-1921) annotation on a translated newspaper article, which compares China to the monstrous creature in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. This paper examines the transformation of the haunting monster from a fictional character to a national symbol. Beginning with a semiotic analysis, I argue that the transformation was complete when the image of a leaping and roaring lion made the influential front cover of Xinmin Congbao in 1903, accompanied by “Ode to the Awakened Lion” on the journal’s endpaper. This transformation was embraced by late-Qing reformist literati, and close readings on political essays, poems, novels, and illustrations reveal that the reformists were passionate participants in the process of forging a national symbol. Contrary to Umberto Eco’s claim that the intellectual community grounded on constant suspicion about the fallibility of knowledge will always fight “the power of falsehood,” the late-Qing literati were not afraid of twisting stories in the name of saving the country. The transformation of the lion symbol thus becomes a tale of the blurry boundary between fictional and non-fictional narratives in the late-Qing context, in which social impact was the dominating cause of writing across media.

Author

• Li-hsing Ho, National Tsinghua University