A Conversation between Hang Tu (National University of Singapore) and David Der-wei Wang (Harvard University).
Hang Tu (Ph.D. ’21), Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore, recently joined the Harvard Asia Center Author Talk Series to discuss his new book, Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past (Harvard Asia Center, 2025). In the book, Professor Tu introduces emotion as a critical lens for understanding public intellectual debate in post-Mao China. Focusing on four major ideological camps—the liberals, the left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists—he examines how debates over Mao’s revolutionary legacy have been shaped not only by ideas and ideologies but by powerful emotional undercurrents. By analyzing how rival intellectual camps stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, he argues that the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia. In this conversation, Professor Tu explains his approach to writing intellectual history through the lens of affect rather than pure ideology; his interest in using empathetic understanding to reconstruct the emotional worlds of thinkers; and, finally, he previews his next project, which looks at cynicism as a means to a more subtle and artful form of dissent in twentieth-century China.
Could you start us off with a general overview of Sentimental Republic—the questions that drive it, its structure, and what you’re hoping to achieve?
Sentimental Republic explores the formative role of emotion in shaping political thought in post-Mao China. Intellectual history is conventionally framed as the domain of ideas—structured by rational argument, ideological systems, and abstract principles. This book asks a different question: what if feeling—grief, guilt, nostalgia, anger—has also been central to the development of political identities and intellectual commitments? Two inquiries guide the project. The first is methodological: can intellectual history be written in a mode that foregrounds emotion, not as a deviation from reason, but as intrinsic to the production of political discourse? The second is historical and contextual: why have Chinese debates over Mao’s revolutionary legacy, since the advent of reform in 1978, been so emotionally charged, so deeply polarized? In response, the book traces how Chinese intellectuals, from the late 1970s to the present, have grappled with Maoism not merely as a political problem, but as a terrain of personal memory and moral reckoning. These emotional undercurrents, I contend, are not secondary to ideological formation—they are constitutive of it.
What I find particularly compelling is your insistence that emotions and political reasoning are not opposites. You delve into what you call “affective ideas.” Could you elaborate a bit on that?
Yes, what I term “affective ideas” are political positions grounded in emotional experience. For many liberal intellectuals who endured persecution under Maoist campaigns, liberalism was not simply an abstract inheritance from John Locke or Hu Shih, but a posture forged in the crucible of personal trauma, grief, and moral indignation. Their call to “bid farewell to revolution” was never merely a dispassionate critique of revolution; it was an act of remembrance, saturated with the anguish of lived experience. Conversely, for those who came of age during the high tide of Maoism, the revolutionary era often remains a site of profound emotional investment—a time remembered not through the lens of catastrophe but as a moment of collective purpose and idealism. For these individuals, Maoism evokes not dogma, but a lost affective world. This condition, drawn from Enzo Traverso’s recent exploration of left-wing melancholy, signals more than the eclipse of a political ideal; it marks the disappearance of an entire sensibility, a way of being in the world once defined by utopian conviction.
In your chapter on liberalism, you explore the phenomenon of “Republican fever” (民國熱)—a nostalgic recuperation of Republican-era intellectuals such as Chen Yinke 陳寅恪 (1890—1969). Strikingly, Chen is transformed into a kind of tragic hero in these narratives, despite the fact that he was neither (strictly speaking) a political liberal in orientation nor particularly engaged in the political discourse of the Mao era.
Precisely. Chen Yinke was, at heart, a cultural traditionalist. Yet his suffering during the Cultural Revolution became a powerful symbolic episode. For liberal intellectuals, such as Yu Ying-shih, Chen was reimagined as a martyr of conscience, the final custodian of a beleaguered cultural tradition. In these retellings, his death becomes more than a personal tragedy; it is elevated to an allegory of moral resistance. What we witness here is not merely historical narration, but a form of political mourning—a transformation of grief into critique, and memory into ideological affirmation.
At the other end of the intellectual spectrum, you turn to popular nationalism. Your chapter on the 1996 Chinese best-seller China Can Say No 中國可以說不 is, I must say, a wild ride. There’s a theatrical bravado in those texts that’s difficult to overlook.
The figures in the earlier chapters tend to be grave and high-minded—preoccupied with the grand narratives of revolution, enlightenment, and civilizational mission. They are measured, restrained, often unfailingly polite. By contrast, the authors of China Can Say No were a different species entirely. Their writings exude swagger, a brand of cynical realism laced with over-the-top bravado and a tone that veers between performative xenophobia and tongue-in-cheek showmanship. At times, they come across as cynics, charlatans, even theatrical quacks. And yet, their ineloquence—their “truthful hyperbole,” to borrow a contemporary phrase—makes them both revealing and oddly compelling. You may not take them seriously, but they are impossible to ignore. For all their rhetorical excess, they were a joy to write about. And perhaps that joy says something about the unruly, theatrical undercurrents of the political imagination in post-Mao China.
You also draw a compelling contrast between authentic feeling and manufactured sentiment. You suggest that while liberal and leftist emotions are often grounded in personal experience, nationalist affect tends to be staged—performed, even instrumentalized.
Indeed. The emotional registers of liberal pathos and leftist melancholy frequently emerge from lived histories of loss and disillusionment. By contrast, nationalist anger is often carefully orchestrated—produced through the discourses of the state, mass media, and online platforms. It is, as Arlie Hochschild describes, a form of “emotional truth”—a narrative that may lack empirical accuracy but resonates viscerally with those who feel marginalized or aggrieved. That resonance lends it political force, but also makes it volatile, and in some cases, deeply manipulative.
Let’s shift to the theoretical underpinnings of your project. Your work engages with affect studies, yet you also draw upon the Chinese tradition of the reason-emotion nexus (情理之辩). How do you situate your intervention within this broader theoretical landscape?
I’d like to offer a few reflections on how my work engages with affect theory. In contemporary scholarship, affect is often associated with postmodern and in particularly, Deleuzian thought—especially the notion of affect as a pre-conscious, bodily intensity, an impersonal and autonomous force that circulates before it can be named, narrated, or captured. There is, of course, a political dimension to this formulation: the idea that we do not fully know what we think we are doing, that reason does not necessarily govern our actions, and that affective forces often precede and exceed rational deliberation. While I find these insights stimulating, my project takes a different path. I am not interested in reducing thought to a bundle of reflexes or somatic impulses. To do so would risk caricaturing intellectual debate as irrational outburst—as if Chinese intellectuals quarreled not out of principle or conviction, but because they were “too emotional” to think clearly. That is a misreading I am intent on avoiding.
Instead, my work investigates the dynamic interplay between feeling and thinking. Within Chinese literary and philosophical traditions, this relationship—known as the reason-emotion nexus (情理之辩)—has long been a subject of sustained inquiry. From the moral metaphysics of Song-dynasty Neo-Confucianism to the cult of feeling in Ming-Qing fiction, Chinese intellectual culture has rarely treated emotion (情) and reason (理) as opposing forces. Rather, they are understood as mutually imbricated, shaping and informing one another in subtle and often paradoxical ways. The aim, then, is not to determine which dominates, but to trace how they intersect, co-constitute, and give form to the textures of intellectual and ethical discourse.
Let me press you on one point. Your book concentrates on elite intellectuals—professors, essayists, and political theorists. But where are “the people”? The workers, the peasants, the voices from below?
I have been wrestling with this question for quite some time. Zhu Xueqin, in his poignant essay “Those Who Disappeared from Intellectual History” (思想史上的失蹤者), reflects on his own experience as a sent-down youth working in a factory during the 1980s—just as the New Enlightenment was beginning to take shape as a national intellectual movement. He recounts how, after long days of manual labor, ordinary workers would gather in the evenings for Marxist reading groups, engaging earnestly with questions of humanism, alienation, and historical agency. And yet, when scholars later chronicled that moment, only the iconic names remained—Wang Ruoshui, Li Zehou, Bei Dao. The factory-floor philosophers vanished from the historical record.
Any intellectual historian must confront this absence—this original sin, if you will. It is a problem of representation, and a structural one at that. It’s true that the figures I examine are, for the most part, members of the cultural elite. But many of them were profoundly invested in the question of how to represent “the people.” Take Chen Yingzhen (陳映真, 1937—2016), for instance. He was not merely a theorist of leftist ideals; he was a committed activist who endured imprisonment and founded the left-wing journal Renjian (人間). While he may not have been “of the people” in the strictest sociological sense, his life’s work was animated by a deep concern for speaking with—and perhaps for—those historically excluded from intellectual discourse. In that sense, the representational struggles of elite thinkers themselves become a part of the story—a way to trace how intellectual history might be made more porous, more democratic.
Your training is in literature, not political science or history. What does that disciplinary background bring to the study of intellectual life?
At heart, I’m drawn to the tradition of critical biography—the effort to enter the life of the mind and to reconstruct, however provisionally, the intellectual’s lived world. For me, the desire to understand ideas as lived—as embodied, practiced, and felt by particular individuals—has only intensified in what some now call our posthuman age. This is why I continue to find inspiration in Chen Yinke’s ideal of “empathetic understanding” (了解之同情). It is a call to inhabit the intellectual horizon of another, to stand as much as possible in the thinker’s own realm, and to use historical and literary imagination not merely to critique but to comprehend, to see the world through the eyes of those who once believed in it differently.
And what comes next? What are you working on now?
I am currently developing a new project tentatively titled How to Be a Cynic: Satire and the Subtle Art of Dissent in Twentieth-Century China. We live in an age saturated with cynicism, where grand ideals are met with suspicion, and sardonic detachment permeates the public sphere. But is cynicism merely corrosive, a symptom of disillusionment and disengagement? Or might it offer a subtler, more artful mode of resistance? This project traces the formation of cynical reason in twentieth-century China through the lens of satirical literature and cultural expression—from the sharp ironies of Lu Xun to the mischievous provocations of Wang Xiaobo, from late Qing exposé fiction to the contemporary youth culture of “lying flat.” Along the way, it examines how the “art of bamboozlement”—parody, dark humor, and ethical ambivalence—became tools for negotiating ideological fatigue and political constraint. Rather than treating cynicism as jaded negativity, I approach it as a mode of thinking and feeling otherwise—an attitude shaped by disenchantment, but not devoid of commitment. Ultimately, this is a study of how irony and irreverence can become forms of moral improvisation, of how one might cultivate an art of subtle dissent in dark times.