This dissertation demonstrates how revolution configures and constructs space in modern China. Those processes are articulated through both texts and social practices from literary works and visual images to demographic movements and techniques of the body. The dissertation's formulation of space, politics, and cultural representation challenges dominant paradigms in the study of modern Chinese literature and culture during the past two decades. Although scholars in political science, history, and literary studies have all recognized the historical significance of revolution, they have rarely explored how revolution works in and on space. Furthermore, the dissertation introduces space itself as an analytical category into the study of modern Chinese literature, a field that usually privileges historical chronology.
I look at space in three dimensions: physical, social, and symbolic. I introduce a prehistory of these distinctions through an example from the late Qing period. The example is a problematic map of disputed territory between Russia and China, a map which existed not just as a visual historical document but also as a literary image in the novel Flowers in a Sea of Sin (Nie hai hua). Against the backdrop of later transformations in China's socio-political space, I focus in the rest of the dissertation on cultural representations in relation to the following revolutionary events, each of which resulted in radical changes to Chinese space: the Land Reform in the 1920s, the Long March (1934-1936), the Mainland-Taiwan split in 1949, and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).1 contend that besides redirecting the flow of Chinese history, revolutionary movements promoted Chinese spatial construction in three main aspects: maintaining territorial sovereignty, redefining social relations, and articulating an imaginary realm.
Chapter One traces the emergence of space in the Communist agenda back to land reform of the 1920s. Chronologically as well as logically, Land Reform is a starting point of space and revolution in modern China. By looking at writings, policies and actions at various political fronts, we can see how the Chinese Communists understand the significance of land and be able to transform the peasants' will to land into a will to revolution. Chapter Two describes the formation of the Long March as a national myth in discursive space, analyzes various cultural products in representational space, and explores how and why the Long March subsequently evolved into a site of Chinese collective memory. Chapter Three addresses the under-representation of women in revolutionary discourse by comparing female perceptions of space during the period of national crisis to those of their male counterparts on the Long March. The central examples in this chapter come from the women writers Ding Ling and Xiao Hong.
Chapter Four investigates the literary imagination of national space in the 1950s after the 1949 Mainland-Taiwan split, when both sides claimed sovereignty over China's territory. I contrast the glorification of Yan'an as a holy land in the Mainland's revolutionary-historical novels and the demonization of the Mainland in Taiwan's anti-Communist fiction. This spatial imagination articulates the Mainland's fear of losing China and Taiwan's desire to possess China. Chapter Five analyzes how the specters of revolution haunted China and reconstructed a phantasmatic space as it was imagined during the heyday of the Cultural Revolution from 1966-1969. The writer Old Ghost (Lao Gui, alias of Ma Bo) and the multiple versions of The Red Detachment of Women demonstrate the fantasmatic nature of space during the Cultural Revolution. In addition to these five chapters, this dissertation includes an appendix of maps that help illustrate the transformation of China's national space during the twentieth century.
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