Mingwei Song is Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Wellesley College.
From foreign students to student activists and from socialist
revolutionaries to Red Guards, this book explores the myriad ways
in which China’s youth have shaped their nation, and often been
transformed, twisted, and sometimes sacrificed in the process. In
Young China, Mingwei Song not only tells the story of how
Bildungsroman narratives evolved in twentieth-century China, but
through this process he also paints a complex portrait of modern
China’s own coming-of-age story. This is an essential work from one
of the most gifted and insightful readers of modern Chinese
literature.
*Michael Berry, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of A
History of Pain and Speaking in Images*
Brisk, refreshing, and brimming with youthfulness, this book paints
a self-fashioning journey from old to young China, and articulates
sentiments, ideas, hopes, and energy invested in the young and
restless. Mingwei Song has broken new ground in literary
scholarship by weaving the Bildungsroman into China’s pursuit of
nationhood and modernity.
*Ban Wang, William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies at Stanford
University and author of The Sublime Figure of History*
Young China is a groundbreaking book. Mingwei Song deals with the
poetics and politics of ‘youth’ as a dominant trope in the making
of Chinese modernity from the late Qing to the founding of the
People’s Republic of China. In this book, ‘youth’ is understood as
a political agency constructed by Chinese revolutionaries from both
the rightist and leftist wings; a pedagogical machine instituted by
the May Fourth enlightenment project; and an affective register
entertained by Chinese intellectuals. Song contends that the
imagination and institutionalization of ‘youth’ evolved to become a
powerful discourse in the first half of the modern century,
exerting enormous cultural and political impacts on the making of a
new, and young, China.
*David Der-Wei Wang, Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard
University and author of Fin-de-Siècle Splendor*
A major contribution of this book—in addition to its spectacular
interpretations of a wide range of youth discourses and Chinese
fictional representations of youth—is its defining characterization
of the Chinese Bildungsroman in a broader context of the genre’s
central importance to world literature.
*Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center*
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