Images of modern-day China in Chinese-European literature since the Second World War

Since the beginning of the twentieth century China has seen many changes: the end of the longstanding imperial regime of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), destructive wars (Sino-Japanese Wars, Chinese Civil Wars), ideological debates (capitalism and communism) and cultural revolutions (the Vernacular Movement, the Cultural Revolution). These turbulences resulted in large waves of emigration from China to the U.S., South East Asia and Europe and had a profound influence on the experiences and writings of Chinese diaspora migrants in Europe. Chinese-European literature became notable at the beginning of the Second World War and began to flourish in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the works of diasporic Chinese writers, which have emerged in various European countries and have been published in Chinese as well as in European languages, explore China’s twentieth-century revolutions and their influences on China’s culture, history and politics. Although several authors have been awarded literary prizes, such as the Prix Femina (François Cheng, 1998), the Nobel Prize (Xingjian Gao, 2000) and the Goncourt des Lycéens (Shan Sa, 2001), Chinese-European literature has received far less critical attention than its counterpart in the United States. This study addresses the current research gap in the field of Chinese-European literature by examining how Chinese-European men and women have portrayed modern-day China and its culture since the Second World War. The selected corpus covers texts published in different phases: mid-twentieth century works produced in the context of the Second World War, late-twentieth century works written in the context of China’s Reform and Opening Up policy and early twenty-first century works, addressing more recent socio-political changes. By means of a case study of thirteen literary texts written in Chinese, French and English and belonging to different genres (memoirs, Bildungsromane and travel narratives), the PhD thesis shows how the authors’ “auto-images” (Joep Leerssen, 2007) of China reproduce or challenge cultural stereotypes of China that exist beyond its borders. This imagological close-reading reveals how two radically different types of auto-images—Orientalist and Anti-Orientalist images—are constructed by Chinese-European authors. Various authors, including the earliest writers studied Hsiung Shih-I and Han Suyin, explicitly address Western conceptualisations of the Orient and develop new perspectives on the Orient and China that differ from the (Sinological-) Orientalist image found in (neo-)imperialist European (literary) discourses (cf. Edward Said, 1978; Daniel F. Vukovich 2012). While Hong Ying, Gao Xingjian and Guo Xiaolu adopt Anti-Orientalist imagery, other late twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries authors, such as Dai Sijie, François Cheng and Xue Xinran, are resorting to Self-Orientalisation in their literary responses the “Cultural Revolution”, “Economic Reform” and “One-child Policy” that China has adopted in recent decades and that have stimulated China’s international reputation. With its exploration of these varied images of modernday China, this PhD thesis contributes to the understanding of the complexity of the cultural dynamics between the West and East in Chinese-European literature since the Second World War.