Public passions and civic engagement

Public Passions

Shi Jianqiao became a media sensation in Nationalist China during the 1930s for shooting the ex-warlord Sun Chuanfang, a leading member of the Tianjin Qingxiu lay-Buddhist society (jushilin). She shot Sun three times on November 13, 1935 in prayer hall (congregation site) on Nanma Road. Although she was prosecuted for murder, the courts returned a controversial final verdict of judicial leniency, and the Nationalist (Guomindang) regime overturned this final verdict by issuing a state pardon. These events led to a public debate on the merits and demerits of filial revenge, although contemporary accounts do not examine the larger sociopolitical implications the case may have had. Shi Jianqiao represented the female assassin's singular and violent expression of filial sentiment (xiao), as well as the female warrior code of "chivalrous virtue" (xia), and helped give rise to a new communal form of ethical sentiment - "public sympathy" (tongqing). For liberal and leftist elites who hoped to modernize China, such a case of blood revenge based on filial piety was a throwback to the most regressive and feudal values of the Imperial state, although it certainly fit within the parameters of the neo-Confucian revival promulgated by the Nationalists in the 1930s. For the masses who supported her cause, the qing (emotion) associated with the case represented ethical sentiment in favor of her actions. Her lawyers also appealed to the "moral authority" of public sympathy and used the Confucian classics in court (Lean 73).

This case raises questions about whether the rationalist modernism of the Enlightenment really had mass support at all. To be sure, the Nationalist regime itself was hardly free of the taint of private violence, corruption, revenge and murder of political opponents, and could not exactly be considered a model of respect for liberal values and the rule of law. This paper therefore explores how the case of Shi Jianqiao prompted public dialogue over the relevance of sentiment (qing) to Chinese modernity, as the debate raged over whether filial heroism was suitable for a citizen in modern China. Public sympathy became a source of particular social anxiety for the educated elites, but on the other hand, this communal sentiment also served as an antidote to an era of inauthenticity generated by slick mass media, the corrupt factionalism of the Nationalist regime, and the lack of justice in its courts. Even so, the modernizing elites also regarded collective emotionalism as barbarous, reactionary and dangerous. In this sense, the crime of Shi Jianquing holds up a mirror the Nationalist society for conceptualizing the development of urban publics in modern China within the context of a burgeoning consumer mass culture and growing political authoritarianism

Lean based her history on extensive research in the primary sources such as the Municipal Archives of Beijing and Chongqing and the Academia Historia in Taipei, as well as contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts. This was a highly sensationalized event in Nationalist China in 1935-36, with even the most 'respectable' newspapers like the Tianjin Dagongbao (L'Imparial) running headlines that screamed "Blood Spatters Buddhist Shrine!" And describing in graphic detail shot how the calm and composed Shi Jianqiao shot Sun Chuanfang in the head and blew his brains all over the shrine (Lean 2). There were even plays, radio programs and films about her, with titles like All about an Avenging Daughter, while "the trial itself was a spectacle." Periodicals "gave substantial editorial space to the debate among urban professionals and social critics advocating reforms over the merits and demerits of filial revenge" (Lean 2). Her attorneys were first rate, and argued that she had the right and duty to seek revenge after Sun had decapitated her father and stuck his head on a pike ten years previously, while the prosecution upheld the role of law and public order. For the Nationalist government that finally pardoned her, warlords like Sun would not be missed, particularly since they already had the support of his rivals, the Zhili clique. On the other had, Sun had brutally repressed striking workers, dealt in opium and collaborated with the Japanese. Behind the scenes, the Zhili's were powerful lobbyists in Shi Jianqiao's cause, who became a Nationalist heroine although for the Left she was a throwback to the feudal and reactionary past of blood feuds and private revenge. This is why she suffered under the repression of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, and was only rehabilitated shortly before her death in 1979.

Post-Confucian Social and Political Order

Studies the complex notion of qing that have primarily been focused on late imperial culture, philosophy and literature, rather that the fascist and quasi-feudal culture of violence in the Republican era, or the role of ethical violence in modern justice. Confucians and Taoists insisted that the moral and righteous had to 'identify himself with the Way's true nature (tongqing)'. By the late Ming period, a philosophical and literary movement known as the "cult of sentiment" challenged this classical ambivalence toward qing by reversing the trend of placing emotion below ritual authority. With the fall of the Ming, the celebration of qing as a foundational moral force once again became problematic, due to criticism of acts promoted by spontaneous feelings. While the late Qing saw tentative explorations involving new notions of interiority and emotion, it was not until after the collapse of the imperial system and the dethroning of its attendant Confucian orthodoxy during the May Fourth movement that the notion of modern subjectivity predicated on an emotional core became the basis of an entirely new cosmological order. Haiyan Lee (2002) points to this genealogical shift by characterizing the late Qing discourse on qing as a "Confucian structure of feeling" that sought to assert the moral authority of qing in order to rejuvenate what was essentially a Confucian social order that rested on hierarchical ethical relations.

May Fourth thinkers sought to put forth a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between sentiment and modern society. The May Fourth individual possessed psychological interiority and was part of a universal humanity in his or her ability to feel, to weep, and to fall in love. For many May Fourth writers, the New Woman (xin nuxing) was a model in her rejection of the strictures of Confucian arranged marriage and familial ritual obligation and her adoption of a life of free, romantic love and sexual liberation. Much of the moral venom was simply the sting of iconoclasm inherited from the May Fourth movement. Revenge was denounced as selfish because it was motivated by a dangerously outdated ethic of filial piety. Competing interpretations abounded over whether Shi's revenge was a treacherous product of the earlier decade or an effective resolution of it, and the divergence in the two interpretations stemmed from differences in views about the national and moral implications of female sentiment in the 1930s. Having matured significantly since the initial forays into anarchism and socialism during the May Fourth period, Chinese Marxism of the late decade articulated a more sophisticated narrative of historical materialism, at the center of which was the concept of society. In the 1930s Chinese Marxists believed that collective emotion posed a serious threat to the Chinese nation, these critics envisioned the new affective public as the inferior feminine 'other' with regard to the superior discourses of masculine rationality. Most legal observers of the case were left aghast at the thought that sentiment should ever take precedence over the faithful application of the legal code.

Western Marxist and neo-Marxist critics of liberalism like Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno regarded mass-produced and mass-consumed culture as an instrument of domination and social control. Obviously, even within the cities the majority of Chinese hardly participated in a mass consumer culture in the 1930s. If they had been mostly middle class consumers, the Communists would have had little success in converting them to the cause or overthrowing the Nationalist regime. Just the opposite, the many social, political and economic failures of the regime and its lack of popular support opened the door to the Red Revolution. In the absence of a large middle class, at least outside the largest urban centers, liberal modernism and the Enlightenment did not have deep roots in the China of the 1930s. Those interested in the question of a 'public' in modern Chinese history have focused on finding evidence of an authentic rational, autonomous, and liberal public, and they tend, therefore, to gravitate toward either the late Qing period of the 1920s.

To an extent, the sensationalist mass media in the cities of the 1930s provides us with an interesting position from which to consider how this might have helped to mobilize or call to being, a modern public that expressed a powerful critique of an actively centralizing regime. Public sympathy could be mobilized into a force that could sway legal proceedings, threaten the moral authority of cultural elites, mediate center-warlord relations, and influence the state's tactics in legitimating its power. At the same time, the emotions of the masses always remained vulnerable to manipulation by higher authorities. Shi's gender was crucial in engendering public sympathy, and the lack of attention to gender is in part a legacy of the Frankfurt school, whose theorists tend to elide the issue of gender even while gendering as masculine their idealized public sphere and its attendant rational forms of communicative action.

Emotion-Based Publics vs. Rational-Modern Publics

In 1934, Jiang Jieshi initiated the New Life Campaign, a regime-engineered movement that advocated a reconfigured form of Confucianism as the basis of national spirit and civilian discipline. These were the prerequisites for the strengthening of society and the nation, moving away from May Fourth ideals of explicit female passion and to emphasize more sublimated, virtuous forms of qing, which could be used to legitimize terror and violence and assassinations, all of which could be deemed legitimate as means of pursuing justice. Sun's legacy was ambiguous, and some thought he clearly deserved to die because of his violent suppression of labor strikes in Shanghai, where he had been the military ruler from late 1925 -- 1927. Shi Jianqiao's provided a personal will and account of her father at the police station, which quickly became public and was widely circulated in the press. She cast Sun Chuanfang's murder not as a mere political assassination, but as a highly justified act of righteous revenge. Shi was mobilizing a range of powerful cultural motifs that proved to have great emotional appeal, both through her prose and poetry. Even Shi Jianqiao's marriage to Shi Jinggong was out of devotion for revenge rather than love, and her husband was seeking a divorce while she in jail

Media sensationalism and butterfly fiction promoted sentimentalized Confucian virtues such as filial piety as the basis of both modern, urban Chinese subjectivity and the collective identity of a sentimental reading audience. Haiyan Lee discussed how this mass-produced Butterfly fiction sentimentalized the motives of virtue that drove its protagonists and shows how they moved readers to sympathize with the plight and actions of the characters. In fictional adaptations of the Shi case, the heroic daughter's virtuous motive was fused with emotion. Hardly a disciplined, ritualized expression of filial piety, Shi Jingqiao's devotion to her father was passionate and heroic; as such, it inspired readers to consider new ways of being. Her story was widely adapted to pictorial series, serialization ads for 'reality-based' novels, and performances on the radio, as well as the theatre. These fictional adaptations were forms of sentimental narratives that helped shape modern subjectivity, although their themes were highly reactionary, feudal and pre-modern.

In this sensationalist fiction, filial piety as always the primary motivation for the protagonist's groundbreaking forms of female behavior and engagement in modern xia pursuits -- the crucial ethical sentiment required for modern moral subjectivity. Whereas in May Fourth thought, individualism was as important as nationalism, by the Nanjing decade the more statist and corporatist discourse on the nation had taken hold, and individual morality was not celebrated as an end in itself, but was mobilized in the service of national collective morality. Morality was crucial, it argues, because it serves as the lifeline of 'individual moral character' (geren renge) and thus as the strength of the nation. This link between individual morality and national strength was at the heart of the state-engineered New Life movement.

In a context where Nationalist courts were failing to persecute warlord traitors and ensure national security, the media celebration and public investment in Shi Jianqiao's killing of a militarist threatened to shed critical light on the ruling regime's failures. Celebrated in the media and entertainment worlds as a heroic xia undertaking, Shi's successful killing of a warlord was seen as an act of national redemption and as an expression of xiayi, or public justice. Nor was the media at all free during the Nationalist era, but subjected to ever-increasing censorship during the 1930s, although the regime clearly made no effort to suppress the sensationalism of Shi's case, which suited its own political purposes. Even among the elites, ambivalence about her actions was the norm, and the primary point of debate for this body of opinion-makers was the question of whether the female avenger's sentiment-based revenge should be praised as a public act of virtue morally beneficial to the nation or castigated as a private vendetta no modern society should ever condone.

Public Sentiment vs. The National Legal Code

Whereas the pardon for Shi Jianqiao was defensible from the perspective of sentiment, he elaborated, it was highly inappropriate according to the principles of jurisprudence. Writers commenting on the Shi trial were concerned that the state would once again use public sympathy to justify an official decision to overrule any court decision. Both sets of commentary contributed to the complete reversal of the long-standing Confucian view in which social and political truth stemmed from classically sanctioned moral sentiment. Now, more than any eternal Confucian virtue, modern notions of society and a rational legal code stood at the center of imagining the larger polity. For Leftists and advocates of legal reform, Shi Jianqiao's crime of female passion was the counterpoint to their implicitly masculine discourses of modernity. The May Fourth agenda of identifying the sexually liberated, romantically free New Woman as a harbinger of modernity had failed, and notions of unbridled female sexuality and desire associated with May Fourth cosmopolitanism increasingly smacked of bourgeois liberalism and selfish individualism. In this context supporters of Shi Jianqiao in the women's press shied away from touching upon her sexuality and focused on her heroic motive of virtue instead.

On August 25, 1936, the Supreme Court upheld as final the Superior Court's light sentence of seven years and the decision that her righteous vengeance constituted mitigating circumstances deserving of judicial compassion. Modeling its judicial system after that of Germany, Republican China did not establish a jury system, but had a panel of judges to decide cases. What was unprecedented with the arrival of the mass media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the scope of public access to the courtroom. Shi's defense lawyers offered an official strategy of sentiment, but how Shi Jianqiao's family was able to procure trial lawyers of the highest caliber remains a mystery. As Shi revealed in an interview, she had received several letters from lawyers offering their services. She may very well have obtained funding and assistance from the Nationalist regime or the Zhili warlords, who felt no regrets at Sun's passing.

Sensing that the growing social resentment against warlords in the Nanjing decade could work to their advantage, the lawyers sought to channel the widespread social frustration with China's national problems into public sympathy for Shi Jianqiao. During the 1920s reformists had made significant inroads by establishing bar associations and law schools, and by reforming the courts. A reformist commitment to the institutionalization of judicial autonomy continued into the Nanjing decade. In the actual court proceedings, prosecutors and the attorneys for the plaintiff built their arguments on all three points, emphasizing the final warning that the failure to privilege the rule of law over the rule of sympathy would lead to social unrest. Demanding only a strict application of law, court prosecutors and the lawyers for the Sun family implored the courts to treat the modern legal code as the ultimate source of judicial authority. By extension, the prosecution reasoned that popular endorsement for Shi was yet another expression of an utter lack of faith in China's legal system. It was precisely as exceptional spectacles of justice that these cases helped shape the parameters of twentieth-century Chinese law.

Public emotions flared over the issue of whether female perpetrators' virtuous motivations or passionate heroism deserved judicial exemption, and had some influence on the process of adjudication itself. In the end, public sympathy not only influenced courts but also attracted the attention of the Nationalist regime, which agreed that "the moral authority of emotions has been a powerful motivating force" (Lean 212). For a government claiming to be 'modern,' the sanctioning of 'traditional' revenge motivated by filial piety was hardly a natural choice. On one level, these pardons were an attempt by the Nationalist regime to resolve tensions laid bare by the assassinations, both within the Nationalist regime and between the regime and elements in society. On another level, however, the pardons only made these tensions more apparent, occasioning a lively dialogue in print over the merits of official support of violence.

The Nanjing-based regime was probably not too disappointed to find Sun Chuanfang and Zhang Zongchang dead, since both Sun and Zhang had both been anti-Nationalists. In fact, it is precisely in the seemingly formulaic nature of the texts that we can see the regime invoking both the legal code and the authority of virtuous sentiment to justify the recourse to executive power, thereby papering over any apparent conflict between the letter of the law and ethical sentiment. In other words, executive pardoning -- issued only after the due process of law had run its course -- became the means to reconcile the classic dilemma discussed above. Filial piety was to play a central role in this national rebirth. An article published in the Nationslists propaganda organ (Journal of the Sun Yat-sen Educational Institution) argued that since Sun Yat-sen had located national strength in China's essential, ethical familial system, the eternal virtue of filial piety was the most basic element of the moral foundation of a strong, forward-moving Chinese nation. As one commentator noted, Sun Chuanfang's cruel decision to impale Shi Jianqiao's father's head on a spike after an unjust death was a sign of the moral and political chaos of the 1920s. By extension, Shi Jianqiao's revenge had dramatically returned things to order, just as Nationalist Revolution and rule were to lead China back to national order.

The pardoning of Shi Jianqiao and Zheng Jicheng allows us to see how actual state and society relationships were being negotiated in the 1930s. Specifically, the regime used the pardoning process to mobilize the authority of public sympathy in order to legitimate its attempts to exert its control over society and the judiciary, and to negotiate its relations with savvy regional players and retired militarists. The power to pardon was first established as part of the Republican governance in 1912. The Provisional Constitution of that year gave China's president the power to grant pardons, amnesties, and other forms of exemption. Article 68 of the Provisional Constitution of June 1, 1931, gave the Nationalist regime with similar powers. Executive intervention after the courts had issued their final verdicts sent an unambiguous message that the judiciary system could not account fully for the extraordinary nature of the circumstances behind the crimes. By 1928, the new Nationalist regime also intensified its desire to bring autonomous civic groups more securely into the Nanjing fold. Jiang Jieshi quickly moved to consolidate what had once been a fairly autonomous Nationalist Party into a state apparatus in order to create a much more corporatist party-state regime than had ever existed before. Speculation regarding the possibility that these acts of revenge were actually political killings proved quite pervasive and heightened preexisting social anxieties about semi-independent militarists and politicians operating just beyond control. Interestingly, Han Fuju, the governor of Shandong, was concerned with public sentiment, wanted the regime's help in presenting the killing as an ethically legitimate act of filial revenge. He was thus drawn into negotiations with Jiang Jieshi.

R. Keith Schoppa (1995) discusses the importance of place and social networks in the making of revolution in China in the early twentieth century. He notes the amazing degree to which political networks and connections of the early Republic were based on personal friendships, school ties, native-place ties, and common revolutionary experience. All such ties were crucial in constituting the complex web of relations that connected Feng Yuxiang with the two assassination cases. The pardoning process showed that the assassinations provided opportunities for groups both within and beyond the regime to assert their own agendas, often at the expense of the central government. Civic groups used the pardons as a chance to assert their own institutional influence. Individual politicians grabbed the opportunity to create space for their own pursuits, even as they mouthed deference to Nanjing. Insofar these pardons recognized the authority of appeals by public groups they clearly served to empower public sentiment as a power potentially distinct from state authority.