Book Talk: 𝘚𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘙𝘦𝘱𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘤: 𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘢𝘰𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘗𝘢𝘴𝘵

This event, part of the Asia Center Author Talk Series, took place on February 25, 2025.

Speaker/Author: Hang Tu, Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

Moderator: David Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

About the book: How does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post-Mao cultural controversy. As it entered a period of market reform, China did not turn away from revolutionary sentiments. Rather, the post-Mao period experienced a surge of emotionally charged debates about red legacies, ranging from the anguished denunciations of Maoist violence to the elegiac remembrances of socialist egalitarianism.

Sentimental Republic chronicles forty years (1978–2018) of bitter cultural wars about the Maoist past. It analyzes how the four major intellectual clusters in contemporary China—liberals, the left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists—debated Mao’s revolutionary legacies in light of the postsocialist transition. Should the Chinese condemn revolutionary violence and “bid farewell to socialism”? Or would a return to revolution foster alternative visions of China’s future path? Tu probes the nexus of literature, thought, and memory, bringing to light the dynamic moral sentiments and emotional excess at work in these post-Mao ideological contentions. By analyzing how rival intellectual camps stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, Tu argues that the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia.

Sponsored by the Harvard University Asia Center and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies