In Lu Xun’s æ|®* (1881-1936) short story “New Year’s Sacrifice” ب*÷ (1925), the intellectual first person narrator is confronted by an illiterate peasant named Sister Xianglin.  This confrontation involves a bizarre yet important reversal.  Sister Xianglin asks the narrator whether there is an afterlife and then unwittingly captures him in a conundrum.  If there is no afterlife, then what meaning do we have?  If there is an afterlife, then might we suffer for our worldly deeds?  Caught in this trap, the narrator is stripped of his intellectual pretense, and demurs before “beating a hasty retreat.”  She renders silent the intellectual narrator.  The confrontation becomes the source of consternation instigating the narrator to tell his story.  This intriguing reversal of language, where the silent, represented one, the illiterate peasant, silences the one who actually controls the modes of representation, constitutes one of the decisive moments in twentieth century Chinese literature with regard to the problem of representability.  What is the complex concatenation of processes, parties, and interests involved in the project of representing “China” through literary, cinematic, musical, and artistic means?  This is the subject of my inquiry.

        From the Chinese educated elite through sinologists and translators, there are many levels to the whole enterprise of representation, including the way we as teachers of Asian Studies represent China to our students.  I am particularly interested in the manner in which Chinese texts, both literary and cinematic, thematize the issues surrounding representation.  In addition, I am interested in the attendant problems of cultural critique, filiality, the relationship of China to the West and Western values.  As a method of understanding this complex web of issues, I have employed the scholarship of Pierre Bourdieu.  Bourdieu’s work is relevant for several reasons.  Pierre Bourdieu’s work concerns itself with the implicit, taken-for-granted, or almost transparency of fundamental aspects of culture.  As he states in his classic The Outline of a Theory of Practice, the midpoint between individual, subjective action and social conditioning is the “regulated improvisation,” an unspoken yet readily appreciated boundary to the set of practices one deploys.  Acceptable behavior falls within this “system of dispositions,” this habitus that allows one to act without guile and yet adhere to convention.  Sister Xianglin’s irruption into the epistemology of the narrator in Lu Xun’s story represents her last ditch attempt to come to terms with her disorientation within the habitus of traditional China.  With each subsequent inauspicious step, she loses the free use of speech and begins to repeat the story of her woes.  She stands on the faultline of the traditional Chinese habitus, which though it seems natural, spontaneous and true, has in reality been cultivated and reinforced by the educated elite.

        The educated elite have become the custodians of Chinese culture, responsible for its maintenance and representation.  In the twentieth century, however, they have come to question the sanctity of its Confucian tenets.  Western philosophical discourse has informed this radical critique of traditional Chinese culture notably regarding the issues of subjectivity, values, and language.  The skepticism toward linguistic representation in works such as Ding Ling’s §B¨ (1904-1985) “The Diary of Miss Sophia” *Ôµ·§k§h™*€*« (1927), where Sophia, whose name means “to know,” simultaneously reveals and conceals the shifting aspects of her identity.  Miss Sophia’s ethereal existence probes the boundaries of Chinese subjectivity in the 1920s, seeming to question whether representability is even possible without a stable sense of what constitutes individual and cultural identity.  Her passion for Ling Jishi, the half-Chinese half-foreign English-speaking intellectual, indicates her desire to move beyond the traditional sphere of Chinese culture and, advancing on Lu Xun’s critique, dismisses the traditional habitus.

        This investigation of how China is represented is not simply a metatheoretical approach to Chinese studies.  By beginning with an example from a Chinese text, I have tried to suggest that the problem of representation is actually thematized in Chinese literature and film itself.  Indeed, this self-reflexivity is pervasive in modern Chinese literature.  Wang Anyi, §*wæ– (b. 1954) for example, is a member of the post-Mao group of writers known for “seeking roots” (xungen ¥MÆ/).  As a method of shuffling off the power of Maoist discourse and the control that it held on the educated elite, a work such as Baotown §p¿j*¯ (1985) is simultaneously an endearing tale of rural folk and a subtle yet searing attack on Communist Party control of the representational apparatuses.  Wang Anyi casts Bao Renwen, whom I call the literate peasant, in the unique position of a mediating agent between the unrepresented peasant and the educated elite, anathema to the peasantry.

        Renwen writes stories about various characters in the village, such as Bao Bingde’s loyalty to his insane wife, and the eventual heroic activities of Picked Up.  But the major story that he writes, and what becomes the focal point of the narrative’s denouement, is the tale of the main character, Dregs, his death and investiture by the Communist Party as a hero to be emulated.  Renwen’s narrative of this relationship raises interesting questions for the problem of representation and serves as the vehicle sustaining the latter one third of the novel.  Having received the story submission at the provincial party headquarters, some cadres, “party hacks” as they are regarded in Chinese literary circles, seek out Bao Renwen, interview him, and decide to publish his piece after significant revision.  Their offer to “revise” the text, however, contains an ulterior motive, for as it is transformed into a work of Communist hagiography Renwen ceases to see his own words in the story.  However, after its publication, Renwen reads back the story to himself and his neighbors, over and over again, repeating key scenes to the relevant actors in their enhanced glory, so that they seem then to re-member the narrative as it is now written.  The revision of his text by the party hacks reveals a re-adjustment, a re-presentation, a re-membering of the events of Baotown, enshrining Dregs for time immemorial in such as way as to serve their ends and insure that Renwen will remain a member of the subaltern group who are silent, who have no voice.  The monument they build for Dreg’s grave is on a scale with the imposing monuments of the PRC, divorced from the simple life of the countryside.

        Pierre Bourdieu is precisely concerned with the way in which the educated elite both intervene in and mask their power over cultural institutions, even as the strictures of the habitus seem invisible to those adhering to it.  What seems spontaneous and just beyond the realm of linguistic description and consciousness, is in fact to a certain extent modified by this elite intellectual class for the purposes of its own “distinction.”  Thus, culture derives from the word “cultivate,” as if to suggest that while we are all participants in the amorphous social web that we consider “this culture of ours,” we are not equal participants in it.  Just how the habitus is altered is never quite clear, but in this study I aim to investigate at least some of the ways in which the traditional habitus is questioned and represented in a variety of cultural artifacts.  The whole enterprise of representation is highly complex and involves several levels or stages, some of which I have tried to illustrate through this brief analysis of Wang Anyi’s Baotown.