The Other Chinese: Romancing the Folk in May Fourth Native Soil Fiction

Etienne Balibar has argued that no nation possesses a natural ethnic basis. And yet the ”people” tends to be the most taken-for-granted entity in nationalist thought and literature. I argue in this paper that the ”people” is a fictive category invented in the contested field of literary production in the early 20th century. In particular, I examine the concept of the ”folk” in the works of such native soil writers as Yang Zhensheng (楊振聲), Fei Ming (廢名), and Shen Congwen (沈從文). By contrasting the image of the folk in native soil fiction with the more familiar image of the peasants in realist fiction, I call attention to the paradoxical status of the people in the nationalist imagination. If the peasants were ignorant, unfeeling, and parochial under the pen of Lu Xun (魯迅), the folk were revealed to have preserved a deep reservoir of emotions and humanity beneath the stultifying trappings of Confucianism in native soil fiction. I aim to show that representations of the folk and the native soil were intimately bound up with the production of the modern individual as an affective moral agent and of the nation as a community of sympathy.