Xin Fan, University of Cambridge

Scholars have been interested in the rise of communal sentiments in the Republican period in China. As Eugenia Lean’s Public Passions has convincingly shown, sympathy once played a significant role in shaping public opinion towards women through Republican China’s media regime. While a woman’s life was saved by public sympathy in her case study, Dr Fan, instead, tells a story about hate and anger in this talk. In 1934, Chen Hengzhe 陳衡哲 (1890–1976), a feminist writer, a world historian and a public intellectual, published a series of essays to record her family’s journey to Sichuan, an inland province that was dominated by warlord politics and known for its isolation from the outside world. In identifying with the modernizing state’s agendas, Chen was frustrated with widespread opium addiction, student concubinage and warlord atrocities in this region, and she offered her honest but well-intended criticism. Yet, to her surprise, this incited vicious attacks from local media. Newspaper columnists and random readers joined a concerted effort to vilify her and to humiliate her family. Based on archival sources, autographical materials and local newspaper reports, Dr Fan investigates the mechanism in which political forces exerted influence through media regimes to manipulate public sentiments in inland China in the 1930s.  Based on this case study, the audience is invited to rethink the relationship between media, politics and emotions in modern Chinese history.

Dr Xin Fan (范鑫) is a historian of twentieth-century China. He is interested in Chinese intellectual history, historiography and global history. He is the author of World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He also co-edited Reception of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia (Brill, 2018). He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, ‘The Right to Talk about China: The Rise of Emotional Politics, 1900 to 1949’, as well as collaborating with scholars in Europe, America and Asia on several projects on nationalism, historiography and conceptual history. In addition, he is writing about world-historical analogies. Dr Fan is a Teaching Associate in Modern Chinese History at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow and Director of Studies at Lucy Cavendish College.