Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis

Abstract

Confucian ritual, to compare and contrast with the filial narratives of Yan Yuan and Li Gong, two ritualism advocates, and concludes that “the authors of the mourning texts were able to embed affective details that resonated with and spoke for their interior moods” (314). Finally, Epstein brings an inspiring conversation with Hiayan Lee and Patrick Hanan centered on the reading of Sea of Regret. Considering their critiques that the author of Sea of Regret failed to embrace romantic love or sexuality in a modern sense, Epstein rather focuses on the fiction’s depiction of filial love as central to the protagonist’s interiorized subjectivity, by borrowing David Der-wei Wang’s concept of “repressed modernities.” Further, Epstein concludes that the new way reading of Sea of Regret, “taking filial piety seriously as a subjective expression of emotion,” counters the May Fourth paradigm of dismissing the accounts of filial sons and daughters in premodern local gazetteers, fiction, and auto/biographical writings as “nothing more than instrumental responses to state attempts to promote filial piety as a tool of social control” (324). Overall, this interdisciplinary and revisionist study challenges the May Fourth paradigm of seeing filial piety and its associated ritual as “an oppositional relationship to the sincere expression of emotions.” It further advocates a new way rereading the eighteenth-century texts by decentering romantic feeling as the dominant expression of love during the High Qing, and calls for a new understanding of the affective landscape of late imperial China.