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SHANGHAI AND THE CHINESE UTOPIA IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY AS PRESENTED IN “THE NEW STORY OF THE STONE”

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Wang Y., Zhu P.

World Literature Studies

2021

vol. 13

issue 2

19 - 32

The novel The New Story of the Stone (Xinshitouji [1908] 2016), by Wu Jianren, is one of the most representative Chinese utopian works of the late Qing dynasty, or the early 20th-century. The novel is evenly divided into two parts. The first 20 chapters probe into the political and social conditions of late Qing China through the depictions of the protagonist’s travels to cities such as Shanghai, Wuhan and Beijing where the relations with the West had been established. The last 20 chapters, which are antithetical to the first part, depict a utopia – the Civilized World. There is a twisted mirror-image relationship between Shanghai and the Civilized World. The Civilized World alludes to civilized Shanghai with advanced hospitals, factories, museums, schools for women, trading markets and so on. The author works out this “genuine civilized country” in the hope of competing with the “false civilized Western country” based on the image of Shanghai which is the highly westernized and modernized Chinese metropolis. Therefore, by making the geographic location of “the Civilized World” both fictional and real, the author finds his way to imagining a unique Chinese utopia which might surpass the Western civilization in the late Qing China.

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1 World Literature Studies

1 Wang Y.

1 Zhu P.

1 2021

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SHANGHAI AND THE CHINESE UTOPIA IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY AS PRESENTED IN “THE NEW STORY OF THE STONE”