Tragedy in China

Abstract

It has frequently been noted that there is no tradition of tragedy in Chinese literature. Yet, for centuries, China's history has been punctuated by tragic events and its people must, as a culture, find ways of explaining or coping with this experience. This article compares Greek and Shakespearean tragedy with examples from Chinese literature and considers the different ways they confront similar issues of fate, justice and responsibility. It is argued that an examination of tragedy in China raises questions about Western concepts of tragedy, its generic form and the value it is conventionally accorded. Assumptions concerning catharsis or the moral good supposedly inherent in regarding the pain of others are interrogated in the cross-cultural encounter.

It has frequently been noted that there is no tradition of tragedy in Chinese literature. Characters in classical Yuan (1271–1368) or Ming (1368–1644) dynasty plays do not display any inner conflict, nor do they allow unrestrained passions to get the better of them. The plays depict man as only a small element in the cosmos, in a world that is basically just and benevolent.¹ Consequently, the heroes do not pit themselves against their harsh fate nor question whether there is any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts. They are not racked by internal dilemma, nor are they sent into exile as scapegoats, their story unresolved. There are no Hamlets wondering whether to be or not to be. Unlike Hamlet, those heroes from Chinese drama, such as the Orphan of Zhao, wreak their revenge as soon as they hear the summons, no questions asked. Karl Jaspers pointed out the supposed contrast between China and the West as he saw it, provocatively casting ‘tragic knowledge’ as a form of ‘achievement’:

The greatest chasm separates those civilizations that never achieve tragic knowledge – and consequently its vehicles, tragedy, epic and the novel – from those whose way of life is determined by poignant awareness of the intrinsic part tragedy plays in man's existence. … The relaxed and serene face of the Chinese still contrasts with the tense and self-conscious expression of Western man.²

But what might be criticised as Jasper's Western bias is also echoed by Chinese literary critics. ‘The highest dramatic art is of course tragedy and it is precisely in tragedy that our old playwrights have to a man failed’, commented Ch'ien Chung-Shu.³

Yet for centuries China's history has been punctuated by tragedy. Millions of lives have been lost over the years in the name of some grand national cause. The first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, fatally press-ganged thousands of men into building his Great Wall and his giant tomb outside Xian, and ordered the wide-scale persecution of writers and intellectuals, the first of many emperors to do so. In the nineteenth century, the country suffered a humiliating loss at the hands of British imperialism with widespread opium addiction as the price of defeat. In the late 1950s, Mao was responsible for the death of 38 million people during the Great Leap Forward, a famine that, according to Jung Chang's biography and Yang Jisheng's comprehensive recent history, he ‘knowingly’ generated by his policies.⁴ These are just a few dark examples in a 2,000-year-long history, but they reveal a pattern of hardship and sacrifice which must structure the Chinese collective memory and trouble what the sinologist William Dolby called its ‘various concepts of existential harmonies’.⁵

So it was with a fair degree of apprehension and humility that I accepted an invitation recently to lecture on tragedy at various universities in Beijing and Shanghai. How could I talk to the students about the siege of Troy and Euripides' play The Women of Troy when their grandparents had lived through the Japanese Occupation and the Rape of Nanjing? What could I teach them about Macbeth's harsh brutality in Scotland, when the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) had resulted in the suffering of 100 million people, just a generation ago?

In staging the Olympics in 2008, China opened itself up to the outside world. Indeed it celebrated its right to hold one of the great legacies of ancient Greece, the Olympic Games, with its associated virtues of national unity and pride, peace, democracy, and the supposed excellence that is inspired by competition.⁶ A floral display in Tiananmen Square on National Day, a few months before the start of the Olympics, depicted the Parthenon and the Great Wall directly connected by a line of flowers, as if there were a direct historical continuity between ancient Greece and modern China. But is the country ready to accept that other cultural institution inherited from the Greeks: tragedy? And why should it want to do so anyway? As Julia Lovell has described in relation to China's quest for a Nobel Prize in literature, the country is deeply ambivalent about Western influences and values, its simultaneous desire for recognition by the West and yet fierce defence of its different traditions amounting to what Lovell terms a ‘complex’.⁷ Tragedy raises similar issues about the universality (or not) of critical values, of cultural and political expectations, and of the conventional, collective response to sorrowful experience. So it was not only a question of whether Chinese students would appreciate Western tragedy or whether there was anything in Chinese drama which Westerners would call tragic. The cross-cultural encounter also causes us to rethink our assumptions about tragedy, its generic form, and the high literary or ethical value it is conventionally accorded. After all, the word for tragic drama in Chinese is Bei-ju or ‘sad drama’, and it carries no preconception of profundity or literary elevation which the English word ‘tragedy’ brings with it. What sort of assumptions led Karl Jaspers and Ch'ien Chung-Shu to speak of tragedy in terms of a civilisation's ‘achievement’ or ‘failure’?

In many ways, my task as a lecturer turned out to be less difficult than I feared. Chinese students, I found, do not readily draw connections between their study in the classroom and the world outside. Hard pressed by the need to pass examinations in the highly competitive world of university education, they don't have time to let their thoughts range far beyond the words on the page in front of them. Literature does not need therefore to relate to life. Indeed, Confucius questioned the purpose of literary knowledge:

The Master said: ‘A man may be able to chant all three hundred Songs from memory, and still falter when appointed to office or waver when sent on embassies to the four corners of the earth. What good are all those Songs if he can't put them to use?’⁸

Ever since the time of Confucius, the sense that literature must have a utilitarian function seems to have been coupled with a hard-headed pragmatism, which means that the distinction between fact and fiction has been clear-cut. ‘We can deal with tragedy on stage because it's not true’, one student commented in Shanghai. ‘We can't confront tragedy in life in the same way because it's true.’

This separation of literature from historical reference or political relevance seems to pertain not only in the classroom in China but also in the theatre. There has, for example, been an interesting series of productions of Greek tragedy staged in China in recent years, adapted by the director Luo Jinlin to suit one traditional Chinese dramatic form, the hebei bangzi.⁹ A version of Medea was put on by the Hebei Bangzi Theatre Company in 1991 and 1998; Antigone, by the same company and directed by Su Genshu, was put on in 2001; and a version of Oedipus, renamed Nie Yuan Bao or ‘Retribution on a Sinful Affair’, opened in Taiwan in 1994. But unlike the recent upsurge in performances of Greek tragedy in Britain, which reflect contemporary political anxieties (I think particularly of the two productions of Hecuba in London in the autumn of 2004, at the height of the ‘insurgency’ in Iraq), these Hebei Bangzi productions do not seem to have carried any striking resonances with current Chinese concerns. Instead, it seems from descriptive accounts of the performances that the emphasis was upon the spectacle of the production, the virtuoso singing of the actress playing Antigone, for example, or the acrobatic martial arts exhibited by Polyneices and Eteocles.¹⁰ Indeed, as Alexander Huang has suggested in relation to recent productions of Shakespeare in China, it is ‘precisely because there is no perceived connection on personal or political levels’ between ‘the contemporaneity of the Chinese and the historicity of Shakespeare’ or the Greeks that they are seen as ‘safe and desirable’ productions to stage.¹¹ The apolitical nature of these performances might, therefore, paradoxically actually reflect something of the sensibility of contemporary China.

Happy, then, to discuss tragic deaths or injustice if they were safely fictional or portrayed within the boundaries of the theatre, the students readily joined in a debate about Shakespeare or Sophocles from different perspectives. We talked endlessly about Aristotle's hamartia, the moment of decision, the fatal flaw. ‘You know, we Chinese aren't actually interested in the individual's motivation’, one Tsinghua University professor confessed to me after my lecture on this topic. ‘The Chinese aren't concerned about motivation or explanation. They are interested in the solution. The solution is in the system, not in the individual.’ This attitude is dependent partly on a different concept of the individual in China, in which his/her relation to the collective defines the person. Hegel was pinpointing something similar when he declared, in his Aesthetics, that ‘truly tragic action necessarily presupposes either a live conception of individual freedom and independence or at least an individual's determination and willingness to accept freely and on his own account the responsibility for his own act and its consequences’ and that in Chinese drama ‘there is no question of the accomplishment of a free individual action but merely of giving life to events and feelings in specific situations presented successively on the stage’.¹²

But the Tsinghua professor's comment was also influenced by a different concept of justice and moral responsibility. If you wait long enough, it seems, the solution will come. Maybe not in your lifetime, but at some point in the future, since the nature of the world is basically just. You must simply adopt a long-term, cosmological perspective, seeing the individual's guilt or vindication within the wider collective punishment or redemption. This is the message of one of China's oldest Zaju dramas, The Injustice to Dou E (sometimes translated as Snow in Midsummer), written in the thirteenth century by Guan Hangqing. Abandoned by her father and later widowed, Dou E is subjected to the unwanted attentions of a boorish man, Donkey Chang. When she refuses him, he accuses her of poisoning his father, having inadvertently killed him himself. First she is threatened with trial, unless she agrees to marry Chang. When she chooses to stand trial and withstands torture rather than admit her guilt, the judge advocates beating her mother-in-law. Faced with the prospect of witnessing the torture of her mother-in-law unless she confesses to a murder she did not commit, Dou E prefers to save her mother-in-law and be wrongfully condemned to death. At this point she makes a dramatic speech, questioning natural justice:

Without knowing I have violated the laws of the land,

Without any defence I am to meet with this punishment.

I cry Injustice! Let Earth be moved, let Heaven quake!

There the sun and moon hang by day and night,

There the spirits and gods dispense life and death.

Heaven and Earth!

It is for you to distinguish between right and wrong,

What confusion makes you mistake a villain for a saint?

The good suffer poverty and want, and their lives are cut short;

The wicked enjoy wealth and honour, and always live long …

Earth! You cannot distinguish good and evil, can you yet be Earth!

Heaven! Who mistake the fool for the sage, you are Heaven in vain!¹³

But having, in these striking lines, questioned the very existence of divine justice, in a manner reminiscent of Hecuba in The Trojan Women or of King Lear, she quickly returns to a belief in nature's stabilising power, pinning her hopes on natural retribution after her death. Just before her execution she makes three prophecies: that if she has been beheaded unjustly, none of her blood will stain the ground; that it will snow, even though it is midsummer, until her corpse is buried; and that for three years her town will suffer drought and famine. These three prophecies, inevitably, are fulfilled. The earth and heaven, which she had briefly questioned, finally cannot suffer the injustice of wronged innocence and operate miraculously to indicate the transgression.

The play is similar to Sophocles' Antigone, of course, both in its portrayal of female martyrdom and in its notion that nature itself will react abnormally if its laws have been violated. In Sophocles' play, after Antigone has been walled up alive the prophet Teiresias reports that birds have been polluting the altars of the city, dropping pieces of rotting flesh which they have pecked from her brother's unburied body outside the city walls. It is this augury that finally convinces Creon to relent and seek to undo his punitive action. But it is too late; Antigone has already died, and the deaths of his son and wife follow shortly afterwards. At the play's close, the audience's attention is drawn to Creon's agony. In his self-recrimination, he attempts to cancel himself out in an almost untranslatable excess of negatives: ‘me, a being who is not being, less than nothing’.¹⁴ In contrast, there is in the Chinese drama no Creon figure lingering on, broken and confused, by the play's conclusion. Instead of pity for Donkey Chang in Snow in Midsummer or interest in his reaction and regret, the long-lost father of the martyred Dou E promises due punishment for the wrongdoers. A recent retelling of the play, designed to make it ‘suitable for today's readers’, glosses the conclusion thus:

Thus finally wrong was righted and all the criminals in Dou E's case were punished. The commoners of Chuzhou clapped their hands in high glee. And to the surprise of everyone, soon after this the sky became overcast and pleasant rains poured down. The people in Chuzhou, who had suffered heavy drought for three years, all gave a great shout for joy.¹⁵

The conclusion of Snow in Midsummer, like so many plays and stories from China which might be considered tragic, depicts the redress of the heroine's wrongs in a way designed to fill the ‘commoners’ of her village, and the audience, with hope. While she individually has suffered, the perpetrators will ultimately be punished and justice will prevail. The Yuan plays were written at a time when the Han Chinese had been conquered by Genghis Khan's army, and the old rigid Confucian system had been displaced by the more fluid Mongolian nomadic culture. Playwrights were therefore liberated to experiment with drama in a way that had not been possible under the old conservative establishment, but they felt encumbered to present depictions of unjust oppressors and to offer hope that these overlords would, at some point, be overcome. As Chu Kwang-Tsien pointed out, it is as if Greek tragedy had been first produced not in the time of Pericles but under the Roman occupation, two centuries later.¹⁶ The effect in Yuan plays is to allow for a particular sympathetic focus upon the ordinary victim of a regime. More than in Greek tragedy or Shakespeare, these stories examine the suffering of the conquered, the oppressed, the little person who must somehow adjust him- or herself to the larger scheme of things. In this respect, it seems that, in its concern for the victim, Chinese tragic drama does, pace Hegel, focus upon the individual.

In the case of Meng Jiang Nu, the traditional story retold recently for the Canongate Myths series by Su Tong, it is her very capacity for grief and suffering which brings about the revelation of imperial exploitation and the restoration of justice. She travels miles across the Middle Kingdom to give a winter coat to her husband, who has been pressganged into the vast army of workers building the emperor's Great Wall. Her journey entails extreme hardship but she is driven by her love and duty to her husband. At the Great Wall, however, now in the depths of winter, she discovers that her husband was killed in a landslide the previous summer. There is not even the possibility of mourning at his grave, since he was buried alive under the rocks that now form the foundation of the Great Wall. Her repeated demands for her husband's bones are rejected by the officials, who are uninterested in her petty loss and embarrassed by her presence. Crying is banned at the wall, since it ‘disturbs the workers and delays the work’. In any case, tears are perceived as surplus to requirements. ‘Rain moistens the land. The river provides for people … Only human tears are useless; they are the most worthless things in the world’, she is told.¹⁷ Finally, however, she breaks down and howls, an apocalyptic flood of tears without ceasing, and at this point nature responds, the Great Wall crumbles, and the skeleton of her husband is revealed, along with other victims, bricked up into the wall. Construction is halted, and the harsh general who was overseeing the work returns to the northern steppe whence he came. The suffering of the poor individual therefore gives hope to the masses, since it reveals a world that is basically just and which will redress wrong in time.

The students I encountered were also keen to learn about the religious dimension of Western tragedies. So much of Shakespeare explores the implications of a loss of faith, whether it be Macbeth's nihilistic ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’, or Hamlet's fascination with physical decomposition beside Ophelia's grave, or even King Lear's bleak conclusion. The plays pose the question whether, without religious belief, the world is absurdly meaningless. ‘But in China, God is dead’, one student announced sanguinely, unconsciously echoing Nietzsche. ‘God was abolished by the communists.’ ‘Well, we don't have God, but we do have heaven’, her friend corrected her. So, I asked them, what is heaven? Some thought that it was like the Buddhist belief in Nirvana, others that it was related to the traditional belief in reincarnation. A couple spoke of Confucian t'ien or heaven, operating in relation to the complementary force of the earth, according to Tao cosmic principles of natural balance. But the overwhelming consensus was that it was just like present-day China, only better. ‘There are expensive cars and big houses in paradise’, one joked. Now I could begin to understand Dou E's final request to her mother-in-law. Before praying to the heavens and earth, she begs her to ‘burn some sacrificial paper money at my grave’. Pragmatic girl that she is, she does not want to be caught with empty pockets in the afterlife. This practice still continues in China today; families can buy paper cars and mobile phones to burn so that their dead relatives can continue to live in heaven in the style to which they have (very recently) become accustomed.

So while the Shakespearian tragic hero might be dogged by existential enquiry, his Chinese counterpart worries about practical, social concerns in this world. ‘You haven't learned to serve the living, so how could you serve ghosts?’, the Master Confucius told his disciples. ‘You don't understand life, so how could you understand death?’¹⁸ In fact, ghosts actually play a large role in Chinese drama, crucially to continue a love affair beyond the grave or to instigate the revenge plot. So the soul of Ch'ien-Nu can leave her body and follow her lover to the imperial capital.¹⁹ So, too, the ghost of Dou E alerts her father to the injustice she has suffered and urges him to punish Donkey Chang. Indeed, the force of ancestors who clamour to be avenged, even if they do not literally appear as ghosts, is unquestionably powerful. The eponymous revenge hero of The Orphan of Zhao is merely shown pictures of his father's death, and that of 300 of his ancestors, all at the hands of the General Tu-an Ku, and vows immediately to kill him, even though he has been brought up as Tu-an Ku's adopted son and knew nothing of his origins until that time: ‘Would men of iron and stone not break out into a wail? I will go to any lengths to take that villain alive.’²⁰ The notion of the continuing presence, and witness of the ancestors, helps to provide the sense of cosmic justice that is otherwise often missing in classical Chinese society.

But the difference between Western tragedy and Chinese drama is that religious enquiry is not linked to social and political enquiry, and neither is really open to radical questioning in the way that it is in Shakespeare or indeed in Euripides. The appearance of ghosts and the revelations about injustice or treachery do not lead to a wider interrogation of the meaning of life and death, the purpose of life, or the bonds of loyalty. The play A Banner of Loyalty, first written by Li Meishi and revised by Feng Menglong, takes the story of the twelfth-century national hero General Yue Fei to explore the depths of his patriotic belief and sense of duty.²¹ The general resists the army invading from the north, even when his more cowardly emperor, under the influence of a treacherous and calculating adviser, has decided to sue for peace. Yue Fei is then condemned for his rebellion. But the irony is that he returns to the court, where he knows that he will face probable death, because his emperor, whom he has supposedly betrayed, demands it. Thus Yue Fei continues to follow his emperor's instructions even when they conflict with common sense and his own safety and, crucially, even after the very foundation of their authority has been shown to have been undermined by circumstances. In other words, he never breaks off to question the meaning of his beliefs or the purpose of his life, even though the principle to which he is loyal has been revealed to be treacherous, self-seeking, and unreliable. Death does not concern him, so long as the social rituals of this life – loyalty to the emperor – are left untarnished. Indeed, his declaration of loyalty is literally tattooed upon his back as an ever-present ‘banner’, and is revealed when he is stripped for torture, ironically under the orders of his ineffectual imperial master. The indelible tattoo operates as a symbol of his intractable beliefs – ‘Serve the nation with boundless loyalty’ – and only disappears as his back is flayed on the cruel orders of that deceptive ‘nation’. A similar self-destructive sense of loyalty is evidenced in the Orphan of Zhao when, in order to save the orphan, the family doctor allows his own son to be butchered in front of him without any outward indication of distress. In both these plays, it is as if the focus of dramatic attention in King Lear were transferred to Kent, while Lear had no redeeming features, and yet there were no Fool figure to point out the absurdity of everything.

In the end, however, during my lecture tour, it was the concept of catharsis that proved to be the main point of debate, raising questions of cross-cultural difference. Why should watching tragedy be good for you? What is the function of learning about other people's suffering? Didn't it – some students wondered – well, just make them feel depressed?

Of course, Bertolt Brecht had reservations about catharsis. Committed Marxist that he was, he believed that tragedy was nothing more than self-indulgence. The audience would expend all its energy in identifying with the troubles of the actor on stage, and then would leave the theatre cleansed and satisfied, utterly indifferent to injustice in the outside world. Tragic response was consequently a type of bourgeois aesthetics, not the first step in a radical ethics. But these students, although they must attend a Maoism class once a week, were not troubled by catharsis because of Brechtian revolutionary zeal, nor were they wary, either in their intellectual work or in their individual personal conduct, of what he might have called decadent sympathy. It was just that the premise which lies behind civic liberalism and has traditionally informed our media, and which we take unthinkingly as a given, suddenly wasn't a given any longer. ‘It seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one's sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others’, asserted the great liberal commentator Susan Sontag, in her book on war photography entitled Regarding the Pain of Others.²² ‘It seems a good in itself’, but suddenly that ‘seems’ and that ‘good’ needed to be justified.

It is not, in fact, as if the concept of catharsis is unheard of in Chinese literature. The early twentieth-century short-story writer Lu Xun, for example, explored its implications in a series of stories involving unreliable, intellectual narrators who exhibit an ambivalent attitude to the suffering of others and gain quick but uneasy relief through the telling of their tales. His story ‘New Year's Sacrifice’ recounts the travails and eventual demise of an old servant woman, whose tragic tale of losing two husbands and a son, of kidnap, forced marriage, and mistreatment at first intrigues the villagers who seek her out for her story. ‘When she broke into sobs, their own tears, ready at the corners of their eyes, would also gush out; then with a sigh, they would leave, perfectly satisfied and still discussing it animatedly among themselves.’ But with regular retelling, the old woman's story soon bores her auditors: ‘her sorrow, having been chewed deliciously for so long, had now been reduced to dregs’. With a type of disgust worthy of Flaubert, the old woman even starts to lose pity for herself: ‘she would stand there, mouth hanging stupidly open, watching as they distanced themselves, before moving on herself – as if she, too, were bored with her own tragedy’.²³

Lu Xun charts, in ‘New Year's Sacrifice’, the easy shift from pity to fear to disgust in the response to tragedy displayed by the ordinary villagers in the story. The move to fear is, of course, exacerbated by the Chinese superstition about misfortune. The old woman's series of devastating tragedies is perceived as a sign of her bad luck, and nobody wants to get too close to her or allow her to come in close proximity to their family or sacred rituals. She is, in a sense, hounded to her death by their fear and neglect, terrified by her mistress's harsh warning that her two husbands will savage her in hell. But the most problematic moment, as far as the issue of catharsis is concerned, occurs with the narrator's comments at the conclusion. He has been at a sceptical distance from the story, the intellectual looking wryly at the ignorant superstitions and limited sympathies of the common peasant. But at the end he confesses that the ritual of the New Year's Sacrifice has ‘cleansed’ him of the ‘doubts and misgivings that had troubled [him] all day’. His listening to the old woman's story, which failed to do anything to alleviate her grief and anxiety, and his narration of the tale, make him very little different from the villagers who chewed it deliciously and then spat it out. And, like them, he is content now to accept the ‘comfortable, torpid embrace’ of New Year, satisfied that, pace Sontag, his sense of human sorrow has been ‘enlarged’. How do we read the irony of Lu Xun here? It could be that the author wished to satirise the lack of compassion in his society, but it could also be more self-reflexively critical, probing the shortcomings of the literary, aesthetic faux pity, and casting a jibe, in the words of Julia Lovell, at ‘the moral cheapness of catharsis’.²⁴

A few years ago, a terrible mining accident occurred in Shanxi province, the coal-mining heartland of the country. On average, around 300 miners die every month in China, but at this particular mine near Linfen, more than 105 men were killed in a single night. The number of fatalities was increased by the fact that the mine operators did not immediately call in rescue workers, preferring instead to hush the accident up. Even after miners attempted their own rescue operation and finally kidnapped an executive to force him to inform the police of the incident, many Chinese newspapers did not give the story front-page coverage.

Of course, it might have been a politically motivated decision to attempt to hush up bad news. There is a huge number of unlicensed coalmines in China, which do not hide their presence on the landscape but which strive, sometimes quite violently, to prevent journalists from photographing or reporting on their activities. But in this case, the lack of press coverage might also be based on factors that predate such political considerations. It might be due to a fundamentally different attitude to tragedy and the acceptable response to it.

It could be argued that the Chinese did not react excessively to the news because, schooled in pragmatism for centuries, they have an instinct for getting things in proportion. After all, people die all the time. Ten men were due to die that night in mines anyway, just to keep up the monthly average. Thinking about tragedy can always tie one up in knots regarding the numbers game. How many people have to die to make it a tragedy? Would it have been less tragic if only fifty men had been killed? Or ten? Writing about the accident in the Herald Tribune, commentator Howard W. French compared it with the mining accident in Utah a few months earlier when nine men were killed. That event, he observed, had dominated the news agenda, the Utah hills ‘crawling with reporters struggling and competing to humanise the victims’.²⁵ The Americans, he thought, had a tendency to ‘self-dramatisation’. In contrast, the Chinese just got on with their lives, believing that suffering is necessary in order to make progress. ‘We learn through suffering’, some translations would have the Chorus in Aeschylus's Agamemnon say: pathei mathos. The Chinese prefer to talk about ‘eating bitterness’ (chi ku), or stoically going through necessary hardship in order to reach promised prosperity.

It means that there is a kind of trickle-down philosophy of happiness in China, where happiness is the test of success, not compassion. And it raises the question: is it better to have a nation feeling bad about themselves and others, after learning about the widespread suffering in the world, as Sontag would have it? Or is it better to have a nation feeling good about themselves, or at least hopeful that the bliss of their superiors will trickle down to them, given time? It is interesting, in this case, to note that in a recent BBC World Service poll the Chinese came out top as the most optimistic nation in the world, but according to a Leicester University survey they are actually only the 82nd happiest nation. The future's bright, even if the present situation is far from rosy.

1

See, for example, William Dolby, A History of Chinese Drama (London 1976) p. 47; Cheng-Wen Shih, The Golden Age of Chinese Drama: Yuan Tsa-chui (Princeton 1976) pp. 41–2, 154–7.

2

Karl Jaspers, Tragedy Is Not Enough, trans. H. A. T. Reiche, H. T. Moore, and K. W. Deutsch (London 1953) pp. 31, 33.

3

Ch'ien Chung-Shu, ‘Tragedy in Old Chinese Drama’, T'ien Hsia Monthly, 1 (Aug. 1935); repr. in Renditions (Spring 1978) p. 85. See also Chu Kwang-Tsien, The Psychology of Tragedy (Strasbourg 1933) pp. 216–23.

4

Jung Chang, Mao: The Unknown Story (London 2005); Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao's Great Famine (London 2012).

5

Dolby, A History of Chinese Drama, p. 47.

6

See Julia Lovell, ‘Beijing 2008: The Mixed Messages of Contemporary Chinese Nationalism’, in J. A. Mangan and Dong Jinxia (eds.), Beijing 2008: Preparing for Glory. Chinese Challenge in the ‘Chinese Century’ (London 2009) pp. 8–9.

7

Julia Lovell, The Politics of Cultural Capital: China's Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature (Honolulu 2006).

8

Confucius, The Analects, trans. David Hinton (Washington, DC 1998) XIII, no. 5, p. 141.

9

See Min Tian, ‘Adaptation and Staging of Greek Tragedy in Hebei Bangzi’, Asian Theatre Journal, 23/2 (Fall, 2006) pp. 248–64.

10

For an account of other productions of Greek tragedy in Asia which also allegedly ‘orientalise’ the texts for visual spectacle without substance, see Catherine Diamond, ‘The Floating World of Nouveau Chinoiserie: Asian Orientalist Productions of Greek Tragedy’, New Theatre Quarterly, 15/2 (May 1999) pp. 142–64.

11

Alexander Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (New York 2009) p. 163.

12

Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on the Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1975) ii. 1205, 1206.

13

The Injustice Done to Dou E, Act III, in Six Yuan Plays, trans. Liu Jung-en (London 1972) pp. 139–40.

14

Antigone, l. 1322 (my translation).

15

Snow in Midsummer: Tragic Stories from Ancient China, trans. Zhao You (Beijing 2001) p. 41.

16

Chu Kwang-Tsien, The Psychology of Tragedy, p. 219.

17

Su Tong, Binu and the Great Wall, trans. Howard Goldblatt (Edinburgh 2007) p. 250.

18

Confucius, Analects, XI, no. 12, p. 116.

19

The Soul of Ch'ien-Nu Leaves Her Body, by Cheng Kuang-tsou, in Six Yuan Plays, pp. 83–113.

20

The Orphan of Zhao, by Chi Chun-hsiang, in Six Yuan Plays, p. 77. The Orphan of Zhao was the first Chinese play to be translated into a Western language. First translated into French in 1735, it was adapted by Voltaire and that adaptation was in turn translated into English, and staged in Drury Lane in April 1759.

21

A Banner of Loyalty, trans. Zhao You, in Snow in Midsummer, pp. 120–64. Feng Menglong was one of the great compilers of ancient Chinese stories and plays in the Ming dynasty. I have been unable to source any English translation of the play, entitled Jing Zhong Qi, besides Zhao You's popularising prose narrative version.

22

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London 2003) p. 114.

23

‘New Year's Sacrifice’, in The Real Tale of Ah-Q, and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun, trans. Julia Lovell (London 2010) p. 174.

24

Julia Lovell, introduction to The Real Tale of Ah-Q, p. xxiv.

25

Howard W. French, Herald Tribune, 14 Dec. 2007.