stefan henning - history of the soul. a chinese writer, nietzsche, and tiananmen 1989

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History of the Soul: A Chinese Writer, Nietzsche, and Tiananmen 1989Author(s): Stefan HenningSource: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Jul., 2009), pp. 473-501Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40270342 .Accessed: 24/02/2015 08:49

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Comparative Studies in Society and History 2009;51(3):473-501. 0010-4175/09 $15.00 2009 Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History doi: 1 0. 1 0 1 7/SOO 1 04 1 7509000206

History of the Soul: A Chinese Writer, Nietzsche, and Tiananmen 1989 STEFAN HENNING

University of Oxford

... the entire history of the soul so far and its possibilities that have not yet been drunken up.

Friedrich Nietzsche, 18861

In December of 1984, Zhang Chengzhi, a thirty-six-year-old ethnologist from Beijing and an important novelist in contemporary Chinese literature, reached a small village on the loess plateaus of northwestern China. An impoverished farmer, Ma Zhiwen, hosted Zhang during his brief stay and introduced him to the local community of Muslims who practiced Sufism, a form of mystical Islam. Night after night, the Muslim villagers sought Zhang out to tell him about events in the history of their Sufi order, the Zheherenye.2 Zhang learned that Zheherenye

Acknowledgments: I thank the imam who let me stay at his mosque in northwestern China during my research for this article. He must remain unnamed. I thank audiences at the University of Toronto, the

University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Hong Kong for their responses to this project. Par- ticular thanks go to Daniel Buck, Joseph Askew, Anna Lora-Wainwright, Hilde De Weerdt, and

Timothy Brook at Oxford, and Helen Siu and Wu Yi at Hong Kong. I am grateful to my wife, Monica Prasad, for insisting on preserving my description of Zhang's mythical experience in the snowfall when I wanted to delete it. I thank Vivienne Shue and the Contemporary China Studies Programme at Oxford for a three-year postdoctoral fellowship free of teaching, and for funding a summer of research in China. Without Vivienne Shue and her program, I could not have written this article. I thank my two advisors for their respective forms of encouragement: hyperbolic praise from Brinkley Messick and relentless optimism from Erik Mueggler. I am most grateful to four anonymous CSSH reviewers who opened up for me perspectives on Zhang's History of the Soul to which I had been blind. All translations from the Chinese and German are mine unless otherwise indicated. 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Base. Vorspiel zu einer Philosophie der Zukunft and Zur Gnalogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift (Beyond good and evil: Prelude to a philosophy of the future and On The Genealogy of Morals. A polemic), 3d ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 65. Nietzsche emphasized "so far." 2 The name of the order derives from their rich tradition of recitation practices, according to Jianping Wang, Glossary of Chinese Islamic Terms (Richmond: Curzon, 2001), 135; and He Kejian and Yang Wanbao, eds., Huizu Musilin Changyongyu Shouce (Handbook of common terms used by Muslims from the Hui nationality (Yinchuan: Ningxia People's Press, 2003), 166. Zheherenye is the representation of Arabic al-Jahrfya with Chinese phonetic units. The name

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474 STEFAN HENN1NG

Sufis carefully cultivated historical memories reaching back to the mid-eighteenth century when the order was founded by a Chinese Sufi returned from Yemen. Since then, the order had been led by a murshid, the Arabic word for mentor or spiritual guide. During the last dynasty of the Chinese empire, which fell in 191 1, the Zheherenye were often outlawed and clashed repeatedly with the imperial army in regional wars that the Sufis always lost. Interpreting their defeats as martyrdom, the Zheherenye narrated the lives of the successive murshid in their transmission of oral histories, but also in handwritten histories that were often written in Persian or Arabic.

Zhang was shaken by his encounter with a religious minority whose members stood up to the authoritarian state for their faith. The idea took shape that Zhang write the history of the Zheherenye. But this mission was more than Zhang had bargained for. Overwhelmed, he thought about leaving. Then it began to snow: It was before noon when heavy clouds cast us into a twilight and made the temperature drop ....

We gathered into groups and milled around in panic. A heavy snowfall had already set in and it wouldn't take much more to seal the mountain passes. Then I would be unable to escape from this cut-off loess plateau.

A fire like venom spread in my mind. I understood: This is a struggle between the meanness [e] in human nature [renxing] and Heaven-ordained [tianming] humanism [rendao]. However, it was unbearable to make a choice. I rather wanted to be an asshole, let my desires run loose, unfettered and unbound. I only wanted to run, to leave Farizo to someone brave and pure ... I rushed out the door and found myself standing at the edge of the ravine.3

A mystical experience held him back. He experienced the snowstorm as a language and felt his senses melt into this wordless speech that addressed him. Standing at the point where the plateau dropped off into the ravine, Zhang suddenly heard Ma Zhiwen's indistinct voice behind him in the night. He could not make out what Ma was saying: Might it be that the Zheherenye who were exiled, placed under surveillance, oppressed, and yet loudly recited the praise of their own ideals, have suddenly changed for my sake to a language resembling the snow, full of deep feelings and yet shallow and soft?

Shagou's two mountain passes turned white. The Peach Palisades and the Stinking Water River turned white .... In the human world, snow was streaming about as if it

al-Jahriya stems from Arabic jahar, meaning to express something aloud and publicly in reference to their praying practice. Zhang estimated the number of Zheherenye members as from four to six hundred thousand. See Zhang Chengzhi, Xinling Shi (History of the Soul) (Canton: Huacheng Press, 1991), p. 5 of the preface. Significant Zheherenye communities can be found in Beijing and in the provinces and autonomous regions of Hebei, Ningxia, Gansu, Xinjiang, Heilongjiang, Shandong, and Yunnan.

Zhang Chengzhi, "Libie Xihaigu (Parting With Xihaigu)" Daluyu Qinggan (The mainland and sentiment) (Jinan: Shandong Pictorial Press, 1998), 181-82. In the same essay Zhang glossed Farizo as "the will of Heaven" (tianming) (p. 178).


HISTORY OF THE SOUL 475

were crying and lamenting, like a song or like a poem. Barred on all sides by snow, I felt even more insignificant. Moment by moment, I felt I was melting into snowflakes along with this [snow] storm sent by predestination [q landing], in accordance with this mysterious dance [of snow] that seemed willed by Heaven [tianming].4

Zhang implied with "predestination" and "willed by Heaven" that the sudden snow that locked him into Shagou in the moment he wanted to flee to Beijing was a sign for him to take on the mission from the Sufis. Zhang's two expressions go even further to imply that it was the will of Heaven that he commit himself to the cause of the Sufis.

For the following four and a half years, Zhang cooperated with the Sufis to translate handwritten histories and collect oral histories. The result of their col- laboration, History of the Soul, describes the lives and deaths of the first seven generations of Zheherenye leaders from the mid-eighteenth century up to the death of the seventh murshid in 1920. Zhang followed the structure of handwritten Sufi histories and divided History of the Soul not into chapters but into seven "gates (men)," each devoted to one Zheherenye murshid. The narrative is interspersed with Zhang's descriptions of his research of Zheherenye history, of how he began to pray and participate in pilgrimages, and with Zhang's explorations of what it might mean to have faith in one God in China.5

In the first section of this study of Zhang Chengzhi and his History of the Soul, a genre-transcending text at once history, novel, religious parable, and an autobiographic account of Zhang's turn to Islam, I approach ethics as the practice of creating ethical meaning to examine how exactly Zhang achieves his ethical critique of 1980s China. The second section is based on the premise that creating ethical meaning is a way to shape the self. I bring Nietzsche's analysis of ascetic ideals to the context of Zhang to argue that ethical self-fashioning is politically significant under authoritarian rule. After matching in the second section a passage from History of the Soul to a surpris- ingly similar passage in Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, I historicize in the

4 Ibid., 182-83. 5 Scholarship on Zhang is still scarce. In Chinese, see He Qing, Zhang Chengzhi: Canyue xia de Gulti (Zhang Chengzhi: Solitary sojourn under the crescent) (Jinan: Shandong Literature and Arts Press, 1997); Huang Fayou, Shixing de Ranshao: Zhang Chengzhi lun (Poetic burning: On Zhang Chengzhi) (Nanchang: Baihuazhou Press, 2002); Ma Lirong, Caizaijipian Wenhua shang: Zhang Chengzhi Xin lun (Treading on several cultures: A new discourse on Zhang Chengzhi) (Yinchuan: Ningxia People's Press, 2002); and Yan Min, Shenmei hangman Zhuyi yu Daode Lixiang Zhuyi: Zhang Chengzhi, Zhang Wei lun (Aesthetic romanticism and moral idealism: On Zhang Chengzhi and Zhang Wei) (Beijing: Huaxia Press, 2000). For scholarship in English, see Howard Choi, '"To Construct an Unknown China': Ethnoreligious Historiography in Zhang Chengzhi 's Islamic Fiction," Positions 14, 3 (2006): 687-715; Anthony Garnaut, "Pen of the Jahriyya: A Commentary on The History of the Soul by Zhang Chengzhi," Inner Asia 8 (2006): 29-50; Yibing Huang, "From 'Orphans' to 'Bastards': The Legacy of the Cultural Revolution and Contemporary Chinese Alle- gories of the Individual" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2001); Jin Wu, "The Voices of Revolt: Zhang Chengzhi, Wang Shuo and Wang Xiaobo" (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 2005); Jian Xu, "Radical Ethnicity and Apocryphal History: Reading the Sublime Object of Humanism in Zhang Chengzhi's Late Fictions," Positions 10, 3 (2002): 525-46.


476 STEFAN HENNING

third section the unexpected correspondence to ask whether there exists a relation between two ethical critiques that are otherwise separated by a century and seemingly vast cultural difference. In the fourth section, I try to recover how History of the Soul, written in Beijing within a year of the Tianan- men Incident, could have been politically meaningful to urban Chinese in the wake of the violence of 1989. I conclude with methodological remarks on the empirical study of ethics as practice and as entangled histories. With this study, I address the question: Is the study of ethics as politically and historically significant possible in a way that is empirically convincing? More concretely, how can we posit a relation between a specific instance of creating ethical meaning and a specific politically significant act? We need a theory of consciousness. It is for such a theory that I have turned to Nietzsche.

There is a second theme. Muslim activists first introduced me to Zhang's book during my fieldwork in China. They treasured Zhang for putting into words, and into print, what they went through silently: A sense of outrage against the Chinese state, not only for making it hard for them to practice Islam; even more so for turning social relations into a shape that activists recog- nized as mistaken, even inhumane. Analyzing Zhang's ethical critique, I present Zhang's answer to the question why authoritarian rule in China seems to be so stable.

THE ETHICS EFFECT IN HISTORY OF THE SOUL

Zhang addressed two audiences at once with History of the Soul: Chinese- speaking Muslims and non-Muslim urban readers. Introducing the histories of Chinese Sufis to non-Muslim readers, Zhang communicated to his urban readers a vision of life and an approach to existence that condemned zhuanzhi, the autocratic system of the authoritarian state, for making a life in accordance with self-chosen ethical ideals impossible, even by lethal force. I call the com- munication of Zhang's vision and the ethical condemnation of the political order the "ethics effect" of Zhang's book. Zhang appropriated the conceptual tools and rhetorical instruments for his ethical critique from the historical memory and the religious practice of Chinese Muslims. I call these tools "ethical resources," and analyze in the following three subsections how Zhang created ethical meaning by appropriating narrative plots, making lexical choices, and casting broad-blanket statements in History of the Soul.

Narrative Plots In "The Fifth Gate" of History of the Soul, Zhang described how Ma Hualong, the fifth murshid, decided in 1870 to shelter defeated Muslim refugees from central China in his fortress in northwestern China, even though the refugees were not Sufis. His decision brought the war with the dynasty to the Zhehere- nye. After years of holding out against the imperial army, as the defenders of smaller Zheherenye strongholds began to starve and a break of the siege



around his own fortress became illusory, the murshid Ma Hualong asked one of his imams about the sacrifice at qurban. At qurban, which means "sacrifice," Muslims slaughter and consume sheep to commemorate Abraham's piety. Zhang quoted the dialogue between Ma Hualong, here referred to by the title maola,6 and his imam from a secret handwritten Zheherenye history from the nineteenth century: "The maola asked: 'What is the most precious thing that can be sacrificed at qurbanT [The imam] answered: 'A camel. After that comes a cow, then a sheep.' The maola said: 'Your qurban is only these types of livestock. Even you, an imam, do not know the most precious sacrifice. The most precious is: Abraham who was willing to sacrifice his son Ishmael. To save the masses, I have made up my mind to sacrifice myself.'

"7

Ma Hualong walked out the gate of his fortress and into the encampment of the commander of the imperial army. Ma Hualong was not merely executed for his violent resistance to the state, but slowly tortured to death. He died on his fifty-sixth day in the enemy camp. After Ma Hualong's surrender, the imperial commander searched out the survivor's of Ma Hualong's lineage and executed all the three hundred and two members he could identify. Yet, Ma Hualong's surrender did stop the fighting. His group survived.

Zhang commented on Ma Hualong's enactment of Abraham's story: "It was a small event in the history of China. But in the history of faith, of religion, of the soul, and of sacredness, it was a rarely seen outstanding event. Especially in China, where the morality and ethics of the Confucian order replace religious faith, the realization of the ancient theme of Abraham by Grandmaster Thirteen Ma Hualong signaled the degree of the pursuit of the soul among Chinese. Even more so, it explained the difficulty of religion to exist in Chinese society."8

Zhang suggested here that Confucian ethics and Islamic faith are two different ways of approaching existence and of arranging collective life. But rather than to pass, like Zhang, blanket statements about huge cultural and religions formations, statements that are so general that they approach stereotyping, I would like to stress the specificity of the story of Abraham's piety as a con- crete example of what I am calling ethical resources. The story is a tool in the ethical repertoire of Chinese-speaking Muslims used to interpret a political situation on an existential level. For Ma Hualong, it made the self-sacrifice imagin- able, and hence doable. Since the story of Abraham is part of Islamic traditions, but not of Confucian or Daoist ones, this specific interpretation and conse- quently the path of action to cope with the violence of an authoritarian state

6 Yang Wanbao and Jianping Wang both trace the Chinese maola to the Arabic word for "pro-

tector," "lord," and "patron," which Wang transliterated as maul and Yang as mawl. Both gloss it as an alternative term for murshid, the leader of the Sufi order. See He and Yang, Huizu Musilin, 87-88; and Wang, Glossary, 74. '

Zhang, Soul, 180. Ibid., 1 8 1 , paragraph breaks omitted.


478 STEFAN HENNING

was open to Ma Hualong, a Chinese Sufi Muslim, but would not be available to non-Muslim (or non-Christian) Chinese.

Much later in History of the Soul, in a section titled "Questioning Heaven" (Tianwen), Zhang took up the theme of Abraham again to make sense of the situation of Muslims in China. "Questioning Heaven" is a well-established trope in traditional Chinese literature, meaning that the author addresses Heaven to take Heaven to task for perceived injustices in one's fate. It bears a faint resemblance to the biblical theme of Job. It is an example within Chinese traditions where a person dares to insist on a personal stance even if that means opposing the cosmic order. Zhang addressed God to demand an explanation for the history of suffering of Sufis in China and asked three ques- tions: "The lamb that redeemed [shuhui] the son fathered by Saint Abraham himself, when will it appear for us? Do you mean to say the Zheherenye have only the destiny of being that lamb? Do you mean to say that the state authorities [gongjia] who commit sins [gan zui] and practice corruption are the fortunate Ishmael [Abraham's son who was not sacrificed]?"9

In the story of Abraham, the sheep died so that the son could live. In the first question of Zhang's "Questioning Heaven," Zhang likens the Zheherenye to a son for whom the saving sheep never appeared. In the second and third question, Zhang cast the state that had killed Sufis through the generations, had ruled with violence, and was beset with corruption, in the role of the son. In this interpretation, the Zheherenye were the sheep and died so that the state authorities, and, thus the ethically abject Chinese order, may live. Zhang implied that the Zheherenye took on the guilt of China and with their death washed the guilt off of the state authorities.

Anyone familiar with the story of Abraham in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions will be startled by how Zhang transposed the story to the Chinese context. By saying shuhui, redeeming or atoning, Zhang projects into the story the crucial element of guilt or sin. Yet, in the story of Abraham, there was no guilt involved. Instead, God demanded from Abraham that he prove his faith, a test Abraham passed. To understand Zhang's effort to make sense of death in China, I turn to a passage where he, a Muslim, refers to the Jews and their history of suffering:

In 1987, when I visited the headquarters of the international Jewish network (B'nai B'rith International) in America's New York, they thought it strange that a Chinese Muslim should come to visit them. I said at the time: Only the situation of the Jews resembles that of Chinese Muslims ....

Later on, I wrote a letter to a foreign Jewish friend ... : Perhaps, God chose the Jews in Europe to prove something. And to prove something, God chose Muslims in China.10

9 Ibid., 273. IU Ibid., p. 11 of the preface.



Relating the history of suffering of Jews in Europe to the generations of Sufis who died at the hands of the Chinese state, Zhang suggested that God wanted to prove something to us: The violent death of minorities who believed in God demonstrated the degree of ethical abjection of Europe and of China. In Zhang's eyes, the Sufis were the noblest people in China because they lived their lives according to abstract ideals (obeying God on how to live one's life; martyrdom). That the state had to persecute the most noble of all Chinese, those who lived in the presence of God and were obedient to him, demonstrated to Zhang that the Chinese order could not tolerate them because it was corrupt. God tested the Chinese by putting Muslims in their midst.

But Zhang's unorthodox appropriation of the theme of Abraham went further: "I truly believe: The Zheherenye had really been chosen by the all-powerful creator. To prove one truth, God [shen] had chosen them to take on and bear [chengfu] the guilt [zuinie] of China, just like God chose Jews to take on and bear the guilt of Europe."11 This understanding of Muslims' suffering in China harks back to and extends Zhang's reference to Abraham translated above. He had asked in disbelief whether the Zheherenye must die like Abraham's lamb so that the state authorities may live, like Abraham's son, thereby introducing guilt into Abraham's story. Here, Zhang suggested even more clearly that the Zheherenye took on, and not just made visible, the guilt of China and bore it. In other words, the Zheherenye rid in a mysterious way the Chinese order of its guilt. This stress on guilt is as unusual in Chinese traditions as it is in Islamic ones; the very word Zhang used for "guilt" existed in Chinese as a translation from Buddhist texts. Even more so, the illogical and hence mysterious conception that the Sufis' death cancelled out guilt and cleansed China of its guilt points clearly to a different inspiration: Zhang had been interested in the mid-1980s in Christianity and incorporated a Chris- tian protagonist into his novel from that time. Intentionally or not, Zhang's attempt to understand the Sufis' death in light of the story of Abraham evolved into the more complex story of the death of Jesus. Many Christians understand the killing of Jesus by humans paradoxically as washing off human sins. As Jesus' death redeemed all human beings, the death of the Sufis atoned for China's guilt. When Zhang initially introduced the story of Abraham, he spoke of the "sheep" being sacrificed. In the passages translated above, Zhang eventually replaced sheep (yang) with "lamb" (gaoyang). This might again refer to Jesus, who is also referred to by Christians as the sacrificial lamb whose blood washes away the sins of humans.

Without appropriating the themes of Abraham and Jesus, Zhang could only have portrayed the deaths of the Sufis in pursuit of their ideals as tragic, but

11 Ibid., 138.


480 STEFAN HENNING

ultimately meaningless. The hold of China's rulers on the military makes any direct confrontation by those who oppose authoritarian rule out of a commitment to abstract ideals, be it in the case of the Sufis or of those who died on Tiananmen in 1989, futile and as such absurd. This experience of a combination of ethical outrage and utter powerlessness is unbearable and yet impossible to evade. It might have contributed to the abrupt switch from high-minded ideal- istic politics in the 1980s, which was the precondition for Tiananmen, to the leap into money making and consumption in the early 1990s following Tianan- men as a flight from the question of meaning. In contrast, by appropriating from Islamic and Christian ethical traditions, Zhang was able to give meaning to the suffering of the Sufis and, implicitly, the crackdown on Tiananmen. It enabled Zhang to continue to take life seriously and sustained his opposition to the authoritarian state.

The trope of the sacrificial lamb whose death takes away the guilt of those who do not deserve the sacrifice also saved Zhang from being consumed by hatred. The irrational story of a self-sacrifice that atones for the guilt of others saves Zhang from being locked into the simple opposition of those on the side of ideals against those on the side of the state. The story of Jesus' sacrifice showed the overwhelming love of God for humans despite human guilt. Indeed, "love" (ai) is a recurring keyword in History of the Soul. More than about Islam or God, Zhang cared about, and in fact, loved the Chinese, whom he referred to with Mao's term "The People" (Renmin). His love over- rode the enmity against not only the state authorities who had killed Sufis and then killed on Tiananmen, but also against the Chinese order which in Zhang's eyes suppressed the pursuit of abstract ideals. Like the notion of atone- ment above, the word "love" is marginal in Confucian traditions.

Lexical Choices: Dunya Zhang composed History of the Soul out of four different lexical fields. These fields were Arabic terms from Islamic traditions that Zhang had learned in his interactions with the Sufis; the vocabularies of intellectual debates from the 1980s that originated in translations from Western Enlightenment as well as Marxist thought; the political vocabulary Mao used to mobilize mass move- ments, particularly the Cultural Revolution; and Zhang's own lexical choices that assembled a vocabulary on care, gentleness, and love. All four enabled Zhang to create ethical meaning.

For reasons of space, I can here only consider one specific example from the Islamic terms that Chinese Sufis had appropriated from Arabic. These terms were utterly foreign to his urban readers. The example I present here is dunya: The loess plateaus of faith had in him [the Zheherenye founder Ma Mingxin] their sole explanation and interpretation. Those rolling yellow dunes that extend for thousands of // and make people despair rose up because of him and gained direction.

Of course, all this is the understanding won by the inquiry of later generations.



He began his journey in his childhood. He was nine at the time. He was an orphan. Living in that region, being born into such a family, dunya (the world among human

beings, the social world outside of the world of faith) held absolutely no prospects for him.12

Zhang's dunya denoted the world of social relations and social interaction. In Islamic theology, dunya has its counterpart in al-khira that Muslims in China pronounce through Mandarin phonetic units as aheilaiti or aheiretiP In this pair, dunya refers to life in this world and al-khira to the life of the soul after death, whether in paradise or in hell.14

Zhang used dunya differently when he contrasted it not to al-khira, but to jiuli. Jiuli is not derived from Arabic or Persian, nor does it exist in standard Mandarin. The word was formed in Chinese mosque education as part of the technical language of mosque instruction (Jingtangyu)}5 Zhang glossed jiuli as: "This is a technical term of the Chinese Hui people that refers to the religious world which is the counterpart to the 'floating layer' [fuceng], the world of conventions [sujie]. The feelings which the word evokes are particularly serious among the Zheherenye."16 In this definition, "the floating layer" and "the world of conventions" are synonymous to dunya. The innovation Zhang introduced was to see the counterpart to dunya not in the life after death, but in a different dimension of life here in this world. But unlike dunya, this dimension is not readily apparent. It has to be sensed and it has to be built through a transformation of dunya as the challenge to ennoble or sublimate pragmatic quotidian life. And indeed, "noble" (gaogui) and "sublime" (chonggao) are key terms in History of the Soul Zhang's pairing of dunya and jiuli turns life into a constant struggle, but it also gives meaning and hope to life by suggesting that we can give shape to our lives according to abstract, God-given ideals.17

12 Ibid., 13. The gloss of dunya in parentheses is Zhang's own. 13 He and Yang, Huizu Musilin, 2. See also the entry for al-khira in Wang, Glossary, l\ me

hereafter, world to come, the afterlife in paradise. In contrast with this world, dunya" 14 On these conventional uses of dunya that differ from Zhang's, see, for example, He and Yang, Huizu Mus il in, 32; and Wang, Glossary, 23. 15 Chinese imams and their students imitate the pronunciation ot hundreds ot Arabic or Persian

key terms in jingtangyu with Chinese phonetic units. The phonetic imitation is often too vague to be

intelligible to native speakers of Persian or Arabic. Uninitiated Chinese speakers cannot understand the language of mosque education either, not only because of the terms derive from Persian and

Arabic, but also because the syntax follows Arabic syntax. Over the last three centuries, Mandarin has undergone dramatic changes while the language of mosque education has changed little. It is in this sense a linguistic fossil that has preserved parts of classical Chinese. 16

Zhang, Soul, 157. 17 Dunya has approximate corresponding terms in Mandarin Chinese, which Zhang also uses,

for example, zhuoshi, chenshi, and sushi. Choosing dunya, Zhang escaped the grasp of established lexical and conceptual conventions and wiped the slate clean to introduce his own definition.


482 STEFAN HENNING

Blanket Statements

The Chinese People [Renmin] are of astonishing coldness [lengdan], slave nature, and selfishness.

Zhang Chengzhi18

Throughout History of the Soul, Zhang made vast, generalizing statements about the nature of political rule in China and about approaches to existence in Chinese culture, statements that shock and antagonize scholarly sensibilities. In the first part of this section, I argue that it is an "activistic" text through which Zhang intended to change the reader; shocking, provoking, and alienating are Zhang's methods of luring the reader to engage with this text.19 I will then approach Zhang's text as practice, namely the activity of writing, to ask how writing was a way to cope with life in the first decade of Deng's reforms, when Chinese were searching for an existential and political vision beyond Mao.

Academic readers of History of the Soul will dismiss Zhang's generalizations as stereotypes. But we should consider whether Zhang might make sense in a way that differs from scholarly expectations. Characterizing Nietzsche's truth claims, Henry Staten wrote: "This confidence enables [Nietzsche] to take the breathtaking risks he takes in his writing, enables him to address us as from a great height, and is thus precisely what makes a claim on our attention .... At the same time Nietzsche is afraid no one will listen to him; he fears the lonely echo of his own voice resounding in his ears and doubts whether anyone else will hear it, or whether, hearing it, they will hear it as he intends to be heard."20

Staten meant by "breathtaking risks" that Nietzsche appealed to no outside authority to support his sweeping and sometimes offensive claims. If we as his readers do not go along with Nietzsche's arguments, or if we do not hear his voice "as he intends to be heard," his statements would simply implode. Nietzsche presented an interpretation of life, of things that many of us can sense but that only he succeeded in making explicit. The challenge for writing like Nietzsche's is not to lay claim to objectivity and then make good on that claim with logic and empirical evidence, but rather to achieve statements about life in which readers can recognize themselves.

I suggest that we read Zhang like Staten read Nietzsche, namely, not (only) as an ethnography or history, even though the Zheherenye Sufis do in fact exist and Zhang presented the major events of their history as empirical facts, but rather as an interpretation of life in China in ethical terms. In their different ways, Nietzsche and Zhang tried to communicate an approach to existence and an atti- tude toward life that can be spoken of only in metaphors. For Nietzsche, sweeping,

18 Ibid., 142. I coined the neologism "activistic" because there is no adjective for "activism." ("Active" is

the adjective to "activity.") Nietzsche did the same in German; see note 41. Henry Staten, Nietzsche's Voice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 34.



and to the specialist suspect, claims about Greek antiquity were the material with which to formulate his metaphors; Zhang used Sufi history as the material to articulate his vision of an ethically meaningful life in China. As such, Zhang's statements on Chinese political culture should be considered in terms of not only how he buttresses claims with evidence, but also whether he was able to move his readers toward a reflexive relation to their own lives within that culture.

Zhang defined political rule in China as an extreme concentration of power that was based on state violence. Researching the history of the Sufi order, he was shaken by the capacity of China's government authorities to mete out violence against subjects and later against citizens throughout the centuries and into Zhang's present of 1989, seemingly without scruples or emotional qualms. State violence not only eliminated those who might pose a threat to the authorities. It also had an emotional and affective effect on those who survived and who witnessed state violence: "coercive power humiliated the people's hearts."21 The humiliation was bom out of the utter powerlessness of survivors, witnesses, and in fact all those who Zhang called "The People." State violence caused grief over the death of friends, colleagues, and family members. It also caused intense hatred and the desire for revenge. Blocked from being translated into action by the state's hold over the military, grief and the desire for revenge formed an intense resentment toward the state authorities, but also against one's own life. In this sense, citizens suffered their utter

powerlessness every day of their lives. Zhang implied, then, that the emotional and affective condition of Chinese under authoritarian rule was ill.

At this point in his argument, Zhang introduced the term KongMeng Zhong- guo, the China as shaped by Confucius and Mencius. A variant of this term is

KongMeng zhi Dao, "the approach to existence of Confucius and Mencius." The terms address the question how the other, non-Islamic lived philosophies and religions in China enabled the majority of Chinese to arrange themselves with authoritarian rule, thus making the authoritarian state possible. Zhang suggested that the Chinese state on the one hand and Confucian, Daoist, Bud- dhist, and popular religions on the other existed in symbiosis:

This truth [about China] is: Although Chinese civilization as represented by the way of life

shaped by Confucius and Mencius (and this includes Buddhism and Daoism which are of the same essence as the way of life shaped by Confucius and Mencius) is the most splendid of the

great civilizations in the world, from the perspective of all those people who pursue spiritual fulfillment, absolute justice, and the freedom of the soul; from the perspective of religion and

any ideals; from the perspective of any [form of] purity, the core of Chinese civilization, namely the way of life shaped by Confiicius and Mencius, is their strongest enemy.

Any extreme, any idealism, anything beautiful, any fresh hope, if they want to exist and live, they must keep at bay the way of life of Confucius and Mencius within Chinese culture.22

21 Zhang, History, 210. 11 Ibid., 130.


484 STEFAN HENNING

He contrasted in this programmatic passage the pursuit of abstract ideals (for example, "absolute justice") to the Confucian traditions and their influence on approaches toward existence in China. He stated that "the Chinese on the way of Confucius and Mencius" denigrate that which can inspire enthusiasm about life, namely idealism, hope, and fulfillment. Contrasting the Zheherenye to KongMeng Zhongguo, Zhang said that they had pushed themselves to emotional extremes ("yearning for martyrdom"23), which implies that he considered "Chinese on the way of Confucius and Mencius" emotionally sober, numb, and dull.

Zhang defined "the China of Confucius and Mencius" as pragmatic: "Up to the present day, it is the case that as soon as Chinese enter spring, they forget their memories of winter. The People, and that includes the minds of the educated, are for the most part coarse and pragmatic [shijide]: First of all, they want, no matter under what conditions, to survive [huoming]. After that comes the means of live- lihood of their families [jiating shengji]"24 Worldly morality according to Zhang posits the survival of one's own person as the highest value, whereas Zheherenye Sufis were willing to die for abstract ideals. To all of this, a concern for the "prosperity of the families" adds a kinship-oriented dimension that organizes groups along bloodlines and not along shared ideals.

I suggest we approach Zhang's generalizations not only as factual statements about the link of emotions and politics, but also as an activity, namely the practice of writing. I am following here Tyler Roberts who wrote about Nietzsche and affirmation, "Writing is Nietzsche's most important transfigurative practice."25 He examined Nietzsche's writing as an ascetic technique to achieve emotional states and to shape his personality: "Finally, one might also ask whether Nietzsche's writing is in some sense constitutive of his experiences. . . . In other words, can writing itself be a kind of mystical practice?"26

The astonishing resemblance between the following statements by Nietzsche and Zhang about writing encourages me to transfer Roberts' insight to the context of Zhang's writing. Roberts framed a quote from Nietzsche with the following comments: "The philosopher . . . 'takes a host of painful things . . . and as it were impales himself with a kind of needle-point: - is it any wonder if, with such sharp-pointed and ticklish work, a certain amount of blood occasion- ally flows, if the psychologist engaged in it has blood on his fingers and not always only - on his fingers?' (HH: 210) ... The philosopher uses writing to tattoo a pattern into the wounded body."27 Compare this to Zhang: "In this

23 Ibid., 130. 24 Ibid., 129. Tyler Roberts. Contesting Spirit: Nietzsche, Affirmation, Religion (Princeton: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1998), 93. 26 Roberts, Contesting Spirit, 122. Roberts, Spirit, 93. Within this quote, Roberts quoted from Nietzsche's Human, All Too

Human, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 210, which he abbreviated as "HH."



story of the length of a novel, my pen was again and again like a thorn that pierced my own skin ... I am like some shattered bits and pieces."28

Roberts' insight made me aware of the movement of Zhang's writing as it performed the unraveling of his personality until he addressed in the epilogue China, Mao, his father, and God directly in a hysterical staccato of verse-like sentences. In the end, Zhang wrote he does not care whether anyone reads his book, and that he wrote History of the Soul "to save myself."29 Formulating a vision of a different China against a culture that terrified him, Zhang achieved moments of elation that saved his love for life.

Roberts contended that Nietzsche intended his writing "to provoke others toward their own experience through a certain kind of linguistic performance."30 Again taking a cue from Roberts, I suggest that Zhang intended History of the Soul to cultivate in his readers a sensitivity for what he circum- scribed as "soul," namely for what is precious about life, what is worth pursu- ing and nurturing, and what is worth defending, even against authoritarian rule. He presented what he had found among Sufis - recitation practices, loyalty to the Sufi guide, a mnemonic culture that cultivated collective memories of past martyrdom, and an openness to miracles - to his urban readers to shock readers into asking themselves how they were able to arrange themselves with authoritarian rule.

CUTTING INTO LIFE! ASCETIC IDEALS AS S E L F - FA S H I ON I N G

Spirit is life that itself cuts into life. Friedrich Nietzsche

I now read Zhang through Nietzsche to analyze the activity of creating ethical meaning as self-fashioning. Zhang set out to narrate in History of the Soul how the Zheherenye survivors retreated to a hill fortress in the northwest that was surrounded by the imperial troops in 1784. He was thrown off by an odd detail in the oral histories of today's Zheherenye that he compiled in the late 1980s. Zheherenye members he interviewed for History of the Soul claimed that the defenders of the fortress were killed right on the day that marks the breaking of the fast at the end of Ramadan. Martyrdom on that day would incur enormous merit for the afterlife and Zhang scoffed at the forced coincidence. He consulted several historical calendars to ascertain the exact date of the fall of the fortress and the end of Ramadan that year. He matched the

28 Zhang, Soul, 219. 29 Ibid., 279. Roberts, Contesting Spirit, 122. ' Friedrich Nietzsche. Also Sprach Zarathustra. tin Buck jur All und Keinen ( 1 hus spake Zar-

athustra. A book for all and none) (Munich: German Paperback Press, 1988), 134, 312.


486 STEFAN HENNING

Chinese lunar, the Islamic, and the Gregorian calendars and found that the fortress fell indeed the day after the end of Ramadan.32

Confused and alarmed, Zhang searched for further source texts and located the contemporary account of a low-ranking official in charge of grain supplies in the area and at the time of the Zheherenye war. The personal account of the official recounted how rival Muslim militias had educated the imperial commander about the significance of Ramadan suggesting that the commander choose the break of the fast to mount his final attack when the Zheherenye would be engaged in prayer.33 Zhang read the official military account again and identified one sentence that "had escaped the [self-] censorship" of the official dynastic historians: "On the third day of the lunar calendar, one could sense panicked chaos from the camp of the outlaws. At that time, one could hear the voices of women and girls shouting and crying."34 Zhang concluded that there is only one way to make sense of this sentence. At the day when the fast should be broken, the highest surviving imam in the hill fortress announced his decision to postpone breaking the fast to let it coincide with the enemy's attack. At that moment the defenders cried out because the decision meant that they would not leave the fortress alive. Zhang's textual research revealed the official version by the last dynasty to be a lie. The scholar-literati commissioned by the throne to write the official account of the campaign could not acknowledge that the Sufis undercut the function of state violence in the logic of authoritarian rule by laying down their weapons to realize an abstract ideal, martyrdom, rather than resist violence with violence.

But why did the state-commissioned historians have to lie? What was so threatening about the truth? Zhang explained: There was no counterattack [in defense]. There was only massacre. Before this sense of self-discipline [fencun] that resembled a knife's blade, Emperor Qianlong and the literati he employed were terrified. Encountering a humanity of that kind, a government based on violence [baozheng] was suddenly afraid. They attempted a cover-up. They did not dare to cross a great borderline about which they themselves were not clear.

Therefore, A Concise Record of the Pacification of Stone Peak Fortress transmitted a forgery through time until the mosque student Yang Wanbao and I penetrated and exposed it .... [Texts like A Concise Record] are a shame among "books."35

Emperor Qianlong, who called himself lord over a world of abundance, discovered that an opponent was hiding in some place in the northwest. ... He felt this opponent was strange .... He was incapable of dispelling this black shadow in the northwest. He sensed it was an organization. The investigation commenced under [Emperor] Qian- long's personal supervision.36

32 Zhang, History, 90. Howard Choy, "To Construct an Unknown China," 699; and Jian Xu,

"Radical Ethnicity," 539 and 546, n. 27, also discuss Zhang's source critique, but in a different analytical context.

Zhang, History, 91. 34 Ibid., 92. Ibid., 93, paragraph breaks omitted. Ibid., 94, paragraph breaks omitted.



This quote bears an eerie resemblance to a passage in Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil: So far, the most powerful humans have bowed to the saint in veneration as the riddle of self-conquest .... They sensed in him ... the superior force that wanted to test itself in such a conquest, the strength of the will ... In addition, the sight of the saint aroused a suspicion in them: such a monstrosity of negation, of anti-nature won't be desired for nothing .... [T]he powerful of the world learned from him a new fear, they sensed a new power, an alien, as yet unvanquished enemy: - it was the "will to power" that made them stop in front of the saint. They had to ask him. . . .37

The saint's will to dominate was not directed out into the world, like the ruler's, but toward his own personality. The ascetic voluntarily subjected his body to torture, an absurd act in the eyes of the ruler who tortured others so as to rule his world. The saint forced himself to face his worst fears and deprive himself of his deepest wishes. Subjecting his personality and body to a regimen of discipline, the saint strengthened his will to rule over his body, his feelings, and, through the absurdity of voluntary self-torture, even his reason. Through this self-mastery, the saint became immune to the worldly hegemon's will to rule. His worldly rule worked with an incentive and a threat. The incentive was the safety and sensual pleasure in an empire of abundance that numbed the self-awareness of a life directed by another's will. The threat was persecution at the hands of the ruler's henchmen whose military could not be challenged. The saint could not be attracted by the incentive nor be cowed by the threat.

Nietzsche's saint and Zhang's Sufis trained their selves by disciplining their emotions. The ascetic did this through bodily techniques and the Sufis by placing their collective politics under an abstract ideal, martyrdom, which assigned a role to the authoritarian state which the state authorities played out unwittingly. Both jammed the logic of worldly rule. The parallel between Nietzsche and Zhang also extends to the rulers. In Nietzsche's scenario, the ruler felt toward the ascetic simultaneously fear and curiosity, just like in Zhang's passage Emperor Qianlong, the most powerful of all Chinese rulers before Mao, "was suddenly afraid" and "felt his opponent was strange." Nietzsche's ruler and Zhang's emperor approach the saint and the Sufis because they sense a new power.

I suggest that this way of relating feelings, ethics, and power was first made explicit by Nietzsche. I further suggest that it eventually traveled to China in introductions and translations, which were read since the early twentieth century by scores of Chinese writers, philosophers, and revolutionaries, including Mao Zedong. Nietzsche's combination of feelings, ethics, and power enables a person to form oneself, and that includes one's conscience. Con- science, in turn, is politically relevant under authoritarian rule. Nietzsche's

37 Nietzsche, Jenseits, 71.


488 STEFAN HENNING

passage on the soul highlights the relation of conscience to the state. He defined "soul," the keyword in Zhang's text, as: All instincts that are not discharging themselves to the outside turn inward. This is what I call the internalization of the human being. Only through that grew on the human being what one would later call his or her "soul." The entire inner world, originally thin like being strapped in between two skins, went apart and rose, gained depth, width, height, to the degree that the discharge of the human being to the outside had been repressed. Those terrifying fortifications with which the organization of the state protected itself against the old instincts for freedom - punishments belong first and foremost to these fortifications - brought it about that all those instincts of the wild, free-roaming human being turned backwards, against the human being him- or herself.38

Nietzsche understood soul in this passage as a self-relation. To form a society, each person must control their behavior toward others, including aggressive affects like "hostility, cruelty, taking pleasure in persecution, in ambushing, in change, in destruction."39 The person splits in two, the raging of the "old instincts," and the attention that monitors and regulates their actions along cultural injunctions. Because "all instincts" do not simply dissipate under stigmatization by ethical injunctions, they latch on to this self-relation, so that the self-relation is emotionally charged and laden with pleasure, desire, and satisfaction. For example, if I deny myself a craving, I experience the realization of this denial not only as pain, but also as triumph and strength, or as the pleasure that comes with being cruel to myself. That means the self-relation is implicated in the dynamics of affects, emotion, and feelings that constitute a person.

Because the self-relation is implicated in these dynamics, it is possible to shape one's personality through internalizing and practicing ethical injunctions: "The material onto which the form-creating and raping nature of this force unleashes itself is the human being itself, its entire old animal self .... This stealthy self-rape, this artist-cruelty, this desire to give oneself as a heavy, recalcitrant, suffering material a form . . . this stealthy and horrible-pleasurable work of a soul that is willingly split in two contradicting itself. . . this entire activistic 'bad conscience' . . . has in the end drawn into the light a wealth of affirmation."40 Nietzsche suggested here that conscience uses ethical injunctions to give oneself as the "heavy, recalcitrant, suffering material" a form. The important point is that "the horrible-pleasurable work" of ethics forms affects, emotions, and feelings that are not entirely conscious and are otherwise not directly accessible to the conscious will.

I suggest that Zhang in the passage about the Qianlong emperor who had sensed a "new enemy" in the northwest comprehended what Nietzsche had understood in his passage on the saint: It is possible to shape one's personality

38 Nietzsche, Zur Gnalogie der Moral, 322-23. JV Ibid., 323. Ibid., 326. "Activistic" translates Nietzsche's neologism "aktivische"



by interpreting one's life through ethical injunctions and then acting on these injunctions. Zhang's Sufis who practiced this under the empire still felt fear, but by shaping their personalities in collective recitation, prayer, and carefully cultivating memories of resistance and state persecution, they built the affective strength to insist on their ethical vision and hence to stand up to state authorities. This means that ethics under authoritarian rule is by no means politically innocent. Using ethical concepts and practices to shape one's personality in a way that brings one's person in contradiction to the ethical effects of authoritarian rule - first and foremost having to live one's life according to another's will - is a way of doing politics. I call this the politics of conscience.

Aaron Ridley wrote in Nietzsche's Conscience, his book-length study of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, about the self-relation by which Nietzsche had defined soul: "Our relations to ourselves - our consciences - are shaped by [our] valuations and we understand ourselves through them. If, as Nietzsche hopes, it is still possible for us to relate to ourselves in other ways - in ways that are not predicated on hatred of self and world - then that transformation is going to have to be effected through the means that we actually have to hand."41 Understanding Nietzsche's self-relation as "our consciences," Ridley concluded that it is possible to form, sharpen, and intensify conscience. For Zhang, this meant to guide his readers toward a conscience that is scandalized by the demands and effects of authoritarian rule on, in fact, their souls. This is his representation of the conscience he wants to effect: "There will come a day; at that time people will think that torture is a serious crime [zhongzui]; that to humiliate the soul of others is a serious crime; that using one's force to bully others and to engage in corruption is a serious crime. The history of China will be rewritten on that day."42

As Ridley had explained, "That transformation [of our self-relations] is going to have to be effected through the means that we actually have to hand." Zhang offered his readers in History of the Soul the means he had to hand. He presented his readers with the historical evidence of a religious group that had followed its conscience into direct confrontation with the state authorities. In the narrative plots of each chapter, Zhang showed different existential approaches to cope with authoritarian rule. He assembled a lexicon to give conscience a voice. And he tried to explain in broad blanket statements what authoritarian rule did to the subject and how Chinese had been able to arrange themselves with it.

41 Aaron Ridley, Nietzsche's Conscience: Six Character Studies from the "Genealogy" (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1998). 64.

42 Zhang, Soul, 114.


490 STEFAN HENNING

STRANGE CORRESPONDENCE, EUROPE 1886 CHINA 1989

I not only kept myself from reading [Lu Xun's] Weeds, I also forbade myself Dos- toevsky and Nietzsche .... Why after all [does reading them] unexpectedly agitate me so crazily and obsessively? Zhang Chengzhi43 So far, I have mined the resemblance of Zhang's and Nietzsche's passages on the martyr and the saint only for theoretical concerns. But can the resemblance be historicized? The passages resemble each other so much that one might ask whether the Chinese passage is a translation of the German one. It is not, of course. Zhang did not plagiarize Nietzsche. But is Zhang living and writing within a space opened up or at least made explicit by Nietzsche? Answering this question fully would be a huge task. I can here merely sketch out a potential relation between Nietzsche's and Zhang's politics by focusing on an approach to life and politics as continuous struggle and the joy that comes with overcom- ing resistance in this struggle. To this end, I turn now briefly to Zhang's life.44

Zhang and the People's Republic were born in the same place and at almost the same time: Zhang was born on 3 September 1948 in Beijing where Mao was to declare the founding of the socialist state about twelve months later. A son of Muslim parents, Islam was not part of his upbringing in the socialist capital. Zhang made history at age seventeen when he coined the term Red Guard in 1966. He threw himself into the early Red Guard movement until the Red Guards started to value descent from parents who had participated in the communist revolution as more important for the standing of a Red Guard than actual commitment to the movement. Disgusted with yet another Chinese instance of the principle of kinship, Zhang turned his back on the movement he had named and was soon after, like so many urban Chinese of his generation, sent to the countryside to toil in rural China. Zhang worked for four years as a herder and elementary school teacher in Chinese Inner Mongolia where he learned to herd sheep on horseback and to read and write Mongolian. He developed meaningful friendships with local Mongolians, lived his life in his second language, and published his first piece, a prize-winning poem in an obscure periodical, in Mongolian. Zhang began to live a double life - among poor and marginalized herders on the grasslands and among the literary and scholarly elite in the capital - when he returned to Beijing in 1972 as a student and subsequently made a career for himself as a professional

43 Zhang Chengzhi. "Du Yehai Ji (Record of Passing through the Boundless Night)," in,

Huangwu Tingxiong Lu (The barren path of the hero) (Shanghai: Dongfang Press, 1994), 115. I am relying on Xiaobing Wang-Riese, Zwischen Moderne und Tradition. Leben und Werk des

zeitgenssischen chinesischen Schriftstellers Zhang Chengzhi (Between modernity and tradition: Life and works of the contemporary Chinese writer Zhang Chengzhi) (Frankfort: Peter Lang, 2004). I also consulted Zhang's autobiographic remarks in his interview in Laifong Leung's Morning Sun: Interviews with Chinese Writers of the Lost Generation (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994). Zhang describes how he coined the term Red Guard on page 221.


HISTORY OF THE SOUL 4I

ethnohistorian and a celebrated novelist. When he encountered in 1984 Zheher- enye Sufis, poor Muslim farmers gradually displaced Mongolians in Zhang's life. He brought both spheres of his double life together in History of the Soul, which became important to both Muslims and non-Muslim urban readers.

Unlike many of his generation, Zhang refused to disavow the early Red Guard movement long after the revolution had ended. The same goes for his loyalty to Mao Zedong which he professes once more in History of the Soul: "I respect you more than any party member, Mao Zedong."45 As a Red Guard, Zhang experienced political action as struggle, confrontation, adven- ture, danger, risk, excitement to the point of elation, violence, the willingness to sacrifice, dedication to an abstract cause, and loyalty under the spell of char- isma. Much later, Zhang affirmed these qualities on a lexical and conceptual level in History of the Soul where he presented life as a pursuit {zhuiqiu) of abstract ideals.46 His terms to name the emotional effects of living life as a pursuit or quest form a lexical field in History of the Soul: "excitement," "exci- tation," or "agitation" (ciji and jidong), "rapture" or "intoxication" (taozui), "feeling moved" or "being touched" (gandong\ "hotly" or "fervently" (jilie), and "passion" (jiqing).47 With these terms that run through the text like so many red threads, Zhang appealed to the reader to love life so that life may turn into a quest for a treasured goal and so that the resulting challenge may excite and elate. Zhang experienced the emotional states in the first months of the Red Guard movement positively and continued to affirm them as value judgments into the 1980s.48

Similarly, Zhang refused to condemn the four years of toil in rural China, which many participants denigrated as the tragic waste of a generation. Learning Mongolian and turning to Islam were his ways to connect with and care for China's poor, a call he believed to have been a key goal for Mao and the Cultural Revolution: "As for the slogan that I had shouted childishly and without restraint in the year 1978, those three characters For the People [Wei Renmin] which have been ridiculed by people, I can already say without

45 Zhang, History, 288. 46 I am citing the occurrence of these terms in just the Preface and the first one hundred pages

following the Preface (out of a total of three hundred pages) to convey a sense of the centrality of these terms in Zhang's writing and thinking. Beyond their frequency of occurrence, these terms are close in meaning and thus echo and amplify each other. Zhuiqiu: Preface 9, 10, twice on pp. 1 1 and

12; First Gate and after: 17, twice 22, twice 23, 30, 35, 46, 66, 67, twice 81, and 100. 47 Ciji: Preface, 8; First Gate 16; jidong: Preface 1, twice 7; First Gate and after: 56, 90. Taozui:

16, 22, 81. Gandong: Preface, 6, 8, 10; First Gate: 12, 17, 49. Jilie: 54, 100. Jiqing: 78. 4 I see his willingness to live among the poor and his ability to build bridges across social dirier- ence as an important difference from the activism of many other public intellectuals of the 1980s.

They isolated themselves from workers and farmers in their focus on debating how to move China out of the shadow of the Cultural Revolution. This is even truer of the students who made up much of the demonstrations in 1989. Their difficulties in connecting with farmers and workers greatly limited their challenge to the communist leadership's monopoly on political power. Zhang is in this sense much more dangerous.


492 STEFAN HENNING

reservation: I have fulfilled the promise."49 But extending his vision of life and his political commitments that were formed under Mao into the 1980s posed a huge problem: Mao had died and Utopia had not been realized. While Zhang continued to affirm his experiences from the Mao years, many politicized intellectuals drew the opposite conclusion: The task of the 1980s was to move China out of Mao's shadow. They looked for inspiration to contemporary efforts in Eastern Europe that sought to reform Stalinist socialism into socialism with a human face. Accordingly, they promoted procedural restrictions on the state, the party, and any future charismatic leader. They practiced rational debate and advocated voluntary, reasoned self-restraint to achieve security, predictability, and stability. They placed their politics under the value judgment of the utilitarian and the hedonic. By utilitarian, I mean a means-ends analysis to define what counts as good and bad and the striving for efficiency, maximization, and sustain- ability. By hedonic, I do not mean the pejorative hedonistic, but simply striving for prosperity to protect the body from poverty and illness and to gratify bodily desire. A hedonic-utilitarian horizon was the negation of the ideal of permanent struggle, whether as Zhang's "quest" or as Mao's "continuous revolution."50 Zhang seemed increasingly out of place in the environment of the early 1980s.

By virtue of being opposed to Deng's market reform, but also to European reform socialism in the Eastern bloc, Zhang's choices bring us to Nietzsche. Zhang and Nietzsche were inconceivable within a utilitarian and hedonic horizon. Nietzsche believed that every life must flourish like an organism. (He spoke of "the plant called human being.") To flourish, life needs enthusiasm, elation, dedication, fury, and bliss, even if that should eventually lead to the demise of the person or the people. Nietzsche tried to intensify life, even if the intense states achieved were intense pain and even if the intensifica- tion was achieved by bad means such as cruelty. It was an ethical revolution in that cruelty and pain were not necessarily bad and in that safety, comfort, and longevity were not necessarily good. In this sense, his ethical revolution prepared for a political revolution: not only that everything is legitimate as long

49 Ibid., Preface, 1 1 . Zhang combined here the most Maoist of slogans - "For the People" - with

an Islamic expression he had learned from the Sufis: "I have fulfilled it," in the sense of "I have made a religious promise become reality" (quan meile ta, literally, "I have made it completely beautiful").

By contrast, Zhang did not place his hopes in the material prosperity that came with the economic reforms, nor in technology or democratic practices. Zhang's affirmation of rural life, of the poor, and of cultural difference also opened up a perspective on the economic reforms of the 1980s that differed from many politicized intellectuals at the time who valued the period for dras- tically raising living standards and for introducing at least a modicum of intellectual and artistic tolerance. Zhang on the other hand criticized the economic reforms for choosing Western modernity, progress, and material prosperity over the ideals that Zhang had cherished under Mao. In this sense, it is justified to read History of the Soul as directed against "Deng's capitalism" or neoliberalism.



as it intensifies life, but also that in the irrational mix of dedication and euphoria everything seems possible, including Utopia as a political possibility.

Whether Nietzsche had produced these value judgments - which are so foreign to us today, and which were an alternative to both market capitalism and the stable socialism of Eastern Europe - or whether he was merely part of a much wider European context that had prepared for them, no one made them explicit in greater complexity and with more sustained intellectual energy than Nietzsche. And making this approach to existence explicit in print was a precondition for communicating it. As a corpus of texts, the phenomenon "Nietzsche" could be translated and as such be appropriated beyond cultural and historical difference.

Lu Xun, China's most prominent writer of the twentieth century, translated the prologue to Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra twice, first into literary Chinese and then in 1919 into the vernacular, the latter published in New Tide, an influen- tial periodical of his time. He "encouraged and sponsored" the first translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra in the 1 930s.5

x Lixin Shao has shown that Lu Xun mined Nietzsche's text for his own writing. Shao matched the titles of Lu Xun's prose poems "The Beggar," "Farewell of the Shadow," and "Wanderer" to these section headings from Zarathustra: "The Voluntary Beggar," "The Shadow," and "The Wanderer."52 These striking correspondences (and Shao adduces further cases53) lend credibility to Shao's claim that the madman in Lu Xun's Story of Ah Q, an iconic figure in the ethical critique of the May Fourth generation, was modelled on Zarathustra's performance in the marketplace as somebody who enters the public out of nowhere, addresses the majority to educate it, but ends up being incomprehensible like a madman.54 We learn from Shao that Nietzsche was already in the 1920s and 1930s important to Chinese writers, artists, and politicized activists, including the young Mao Zedong, even though hardly any translations existed. It is another indication that Nietzsche's value judgments were crossing historical and cultural difference and might indeed have contributed to the value judgments that structure Zhang's writing.55

51 Lixin Shao, Nietzsche in China (New York: Peter Lang), 71, also 55. Ibid., 61, Shao's translations. " Ibid., 61,71. 54 Ibid., 57. The Chinese intellectual environment saturated with introductions to and increasingly also

translations from Nietzsche might even have included Mao. Mao mentioned Nietzsche in a

journal article that Mao published in 1919 at age twenty-six. See Shao, Nietzsche, 80-81. Mao's

paradigm of the continuous revolution was central to initiating the Cultural Revolution. His irrational choice went against all rational, procedural, and utilitarian politics by destroying what he had produced and by unleashing (internal) war after having achieved and maintained peace. This paradigm was the result of Mao's appropriation of the notion of the "permanent revolution" from Trotsky. See John Starr, Continuing the Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 302-5; and Stuart Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-tung (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1989), 168. Michael Gillespie, in turn, has suggested that late-nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries (who formulated the "permanent revolution") and Nietzsche were part of


494 STEFAN HENNING

We are now in a position to understand Zhang Chengzhi's reaction when he first encountered Nietzsche's writing. Nietzsche's books were finally available in Chinese translations by the 1980s when they sparked a Nicai re, a "Nietzsche fever." Zhang discovered he could not bear reading Nietzsche, because he was too close to him: "Skimming [again] Lu Xun's Weeds, [I had to think] how when I first read it two years ago, I closed it, alarmed. The sensations at the time were simply frightening. I not only kept myself from reading Weeds, I also forbade myself Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. To this day, I am not reading them. If I were able to solve this mystery in this life, I would be satisfied to the extreme. Why after all [does reading them] unexpectedly agitate me so crazily and obsessively?"56 We can answer Zhang's question about just what agitated him "so crazily and obsessively" in Nietzsche's writing in light of the value judgments that Nietzsche had made explicit and which had been translated into Chinese for half a century. When Zhang then encountered these value judgments directly in reading Nietzsche, he experienced a moment of recognition so unexpected and intimate that he had to forbid himself any further reading of Nietzsche's writings. To avoid being pulled into this language and way of thinking (which would have reduced him to a Nietzsche apostle), he had to keep his distance and continue struggling for his own language. This view is further strengthened by the fact that Zhang mentioned Nietzsche together with Lu Xun, who as we saw above was an early and extremely prominent Nietzsche translator. It also shows that Zhang was not exceptional. His sense of an affinity with Nietzsche's writing was part of a long- standing process of appropriating Nietzsche for Chinese contexts.

Even though there are still traces of Zhang's participation in the Red Guard movement in History of the Soul, he had profoundly changed in the intervening years. Seeking to build a liveable socialism, Chinese intellectuals began to discuss imported terms like "alienation" (yihua) and "subjectivity" (zhutixing) at great length. "The humane" (rendao) and "humanism" {rendao zhuyi), two central concepts at the time, were chosen by Zhang as key value judgments for History of the Soul.51 In the name of humanism, he criticizes the violence of the authoritarian state and he defines allegiance to self-chosen abstract ideals

a shared historical trajectory. See his Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 135-202. For example, the notion of a permanent revolution and Nietzsche's Diony- sus both value destruction and chaos positively (ibid., 171-72). If this is true, one could even posit a direct line from Nietzsche through Mao to Zhang. Zhang would have internalized in the early Red Guard movement value judgments that had come to Mao (inspiring Mao's "continuous revolution") from a European context of the late nineteenth century, which included and was to an extent shaped by Nietzsche. 30

Zhang, "Yehai," 115. Zhang loathed intellectuals' debates on humanism as self-serving and inconsequential. But

I think it is no coincidence that he took up "humane" and "humanism" as key terms at a time when they were mentioned daily in magazines and newspapers. See Zhang, Soul, p. 10 of the



such as loyalty to the Sufi leader as humane or humanistic, even if this loyalty should lead to a fatal confrontation with the state: "From the perspective of humaneness, government officials are the lowest kind of existence. Their lives are far removed from the nobility of the poor who are in tatters and rags .... Under the rule of force, in China, martyrs can often not escape humiliation either."58 His invocation of humanism that is opposed to violence and cruelty hints at a transformation of Zhang's ethical underpinnings. It also shows how he was turning away from Nietzsche's value judgments that com- mended violence and cruelty as a stimulant to life.

If efforts to reform Chinese socialism were the first source of Zhang's transformation in the 1980s, his personal experiences with the Sufis were the second source for his modification of his Red Guard commitments. He wrote in History of the Soul. "One character, the ever more luminous character iove'/In the vast darkness, it resembles the sun resting in tranquility."59 Where Zhang had adored in the Mao cult the Great Helmsman as the sun, he was now speaking of the sun as love. While "The People" in the revolution were loved by Mao, they were now loved by God, "God who loves The People."60 This transformation highlights not only Zhang's turn away from an all-out identification with his Red Guard past, it also opens our eyes to the historical gulf separating Zhang from Nietzsche, who sought to overcome the legacies stemming from Christian faith in one God.

"the cult of the surface": history of the soul and TIANANMEN 1989

Bloodshed and terror can change history The state, when this monster, pushed against the wall, raises the butcher knife against its citizens, its capacity for producing terror is unfathomable. Zhang Chengzhi61 It is no surprise that Ma Liesun, a religious authority among the Zheherenye, endorsed History of the Soul with a letter to Zhang. The letter was reprinted with Ma's signature in the original edition of the book and inducted Zhang's book into the Zheherenye canon. Non-Zheherenye Muslims who first introduced me to the book during my fieldwork eight years after its publication read the book as an indictment of authoritarian rule, a reading I internalized as self-evident. Living among them and listening to their lore about the author's life and the fate of the book, I was surprised that non-Muslim

preface; and Merle Goldman, Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China (Cambridge: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1994), 116-21. 58 Zhang, History, 85-86. 59 Ibid., 297. 60 Ibid., 92. 61 Ibid., 65.


496 STEFAN HENNING

readers who had cherished Zhang's novellas in the 1980s and appreciated his essays in the 1990s did not know what to do with History of the Soul. Its Muslim focus seemed parochial and Zhang's praise of martyrdom irrational. With this dismissal, the urban reading public lost an ethical resource when it most needed it - right after Tiananmen. In this section, I try to show what History of the Soul could have meant to non-Muslim readers in the wake of the Tiananmen Incident.

Like non-Muslim Chinese readers, scholars in the emerging Zhang Chengzhi scholarship too have tended to uncouple the book from an authoritarian critique. Howard Choy, for example, has read it as targeting "Deng's capitalism," the effects of the market reforms on approaches to existence among urban Chinese.62 In this vein, Zhang's depiction of the violent confrontations of Sufis with the imperial armies is not a critique of the authoritarian state, but is to be read instead as a contrastive foil to the sterile and trivial cultural environment of consumption and commodification enabled by Deng's capitalism. In this reading, the problem is not the authoritarian state, but rather what succeeded China's failing socialism. This perspective is part of a larger trend in the study of China that has focused over the last ten or fifteen years on the human costs exacted by neoliberalism rather than on the human costs exacted by an authoritarian political form. And indeed, Zhang called Zheherenye Sufism qiongren zongjiao (religion of the poor).63 He indicated with this expression that in his eyes a religious pursuit and the pursuit of urban affluence were mutually exclusive. But Zhang called Zheherenye Sufism also xuebozi jiao (religion of the bloody necks)64 in allusion to the fact that the state killed generations of Sufis who stood up for their faith. "Religion of the bloody necks" cues the reader to the theme of authoritarian rule. It is not an either/or question; the two themes of market reforms and authoritarian rule reinforce and condition each other. One-party rule is a factor in shaping how specifically China's economy is transforming; rising affluence, consumption, and commodification in turn are political factors in that they distract from the negative effects of authoritarian rule.

62 Choy, "To Construct an Unknown China," 688. In a single sentence, Choy does relate Zhang to

a critique of authoritarian rule, but does not go on to develop this dimension of Zhang's critique: "Thus his humanism has two definitions: first, human spirituality is equated with religion, which serves ... to critique consumerism; second, it means passive resistance to high-handed rule, as ... in the Shifengpu suppression" (ibid., 701).

"Religion of the Poor" is the title of a section of "The First Gate," and referred to the arid loess plateaus where Zhang first encountered the Sufis. Drought impoverishes Zheherenye farmers, so much so that the there is no hope Deng's reforms might raise their living standards significantly. Zhang makes the cynical implication that only if there is no hope for material gain can Chinese lead a religious life oriented toward abstract ideals. *

Zhang, "Xihaigu," 182.



If we read History of the Soul as a critique not only of an emerging Chinese neoliberalism but also of the authoritarian state, we will be open to the often very direct allusions to the Tiananmen Incident. Throughout the book Zhang scattered sudden passages that read like comments on or representations of the violence on Tiananmen Square and the demonstrations it suppressed. "Terror is strong and forceful. Bloodshed and terror can change history Young people and immature folks are able to spout cocky slogans and grand mottos because they do not understand terror, and neither can they feel terror. The state, when this monster, pushed against the wall, raises the butcher knife against its citizens, its capacity for producing terror is unfathomable."65 No laborious decoding is needed to relate this passage to the Fourth of June.

A simple substitution of actors and locations also suffices to transpose Zhang's narrative of public and collective Zheherenye commemoration into a narrative of the Tiananmen protest. In early 1985, Zhang joined thousands of Sufis in the first commemoration of the death of the first murshid after the leader's mausoleum had just been restored in Lanzhou. Zhang experienced his participation in the "religious ermaili" in 1985 as "a demonstration against governmental rule."66 This representation of his experience, written within a year of the Tiananmen Incident and brought in print before urban readers' eyes two years after the violence, openly declares Zhang's opposition to the government authorities.

Zhang sharpened his provocation of the state when just four sentences later his narrative jumps to 1989. He described his commemoration of the first murshid - who like the protesters at Tiananmen was killed by government forces - at a mosque in northwestern China where Zhang was living in early 1989. Zhang pointed out that the memorial day happened to coincide with Ramadan, which lasted from 8 April 1989 to approximately 7 May 1989. During the month of Ramadan, news of the death of ousted general secretary Hu Yaobang sparked mourning activities that brought Beijing residents to Tia- nanmen Square, the government declared demonstrations on the square illegi- timate, and about one hundred thousand students converged on the square in protest of the verdict. Within a week of Zhang breaking the Ramadan fast students began to fast67 on Tiananmen Square, and Gorbachev, the icon of democratic transformation, visited Beijing.68 Zhang cooperated with the mosque student Yang Wanbao to translate the prayer they were reciting during these crucial weeks to mourn the first murshid and ended the First Gate in History

65 Ibid., 65. 66 Ibid., 70. I am grateful to an anonymous CSSH reviewer for pointing out this correspondence. 68 Dingxin Zhao, The Power of Tiananmen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001),

xxv, 147.


498 STEFAN HENNING

of the Soul with this translation. Pretending to speak for the mourning Sufis, he characterized the prayer as, "This is our last word on the hardship and sacrifice of the human species. This is the consolation (anwei) for which the martyr has implored God in the moment of bloodshed. . . . This is an accusation of all the lying whitewashing in China."69 Intentionally or unawares, Zhang gave to urban readers a public recognition of the fact that government forces killed subjects (in the case of the Sufis) and citizens (on Tiananmen), that martyrdom exists in China in that people risked confrontation with the state in the pursuit of abstract ideals (faith for the murshid, the demand for press freedom and an end to corruption for the protesters), and that the state misre- presented ("whitewashed") martyrdom as insurrection (Sufis) and "instigating chaos" (Tiananmen Square).

By the time History of the Soul hit the shelves in 1991, the struggle over the memory of 1989 had begun and the state had placed a taboo on the Incident. Like no other event in reform China, the national government's massacre of Beijing residents and student protesters had antagonized urban Chinese against the national leadership, and many perhaps also against one-party rule altogether. Memory of 1 989, often embodied in grief and rage, was a direct threat to the authoritarian state. Accordingly, the government suppressed public and collective mourning and commemoration. Through a substitution of actors and locations, History of the Soul can be read as a recognition and condemnation of the Tiananmen Incident. Intentionally or not, the book broke the taboo and as such had the potential to reignite ethical outrage. It was as if Zhang had erected a public memorial to the dead of Tiananmen.

The survivors of government violence had to cope with their grief and rage in private and more or less alone. In his collaborative translations of Sufi commemorative prayers, Zhang offered urban readers texts that mourned victims of state violence in China. In his depictions of his participation in Sufi commemoration, Zhang described how specifically these texts were used to "console" (anwei),70 and implied that it had helped him mourn. In this sense, Zhang is enabling readers to come to terms with the affective impact of Tianan- men while the government was preventing public efforts to cope emotionally.

In his extended visits to Sufi communities, Zhang discovered that the commemorative practices he had chanced upon in 1985 were part of a Sufi culture of mourning and commemoration. When he was living in Zheherenye communities to conduct the research for History of the Soul, he participated in ceremonies including the morning prayer. Every morning after the first prayer that begins just before dawn, Zheherenye Sufis recite after the standard prayer the first part of the Islamic proclamation of faith, "Among the myriad beings, there is no lord, there is only God." Arranged in two rows facing each other

69 Zhang, History, 70. For anwei, compare my translation referenced with note 73.



and swaying their heads in the rhythm of the recitation, they recite the proclamation fifty-six times, one for each day that Ma Hualong, the fifth murshid who quoted the story of Abraham and gave himself up to the enemy commander in 1871, had been tortured in captivity well over a century earlier. The repeated recitation is exclusive to the Zheherenye, who call it aolate.71 Zhang joined the morning prayer and performed aolate during his fieldwork among the Zheherenye:

No historical sources recorded those fifty-six days of torture. ... No historian has truly explored the mind of the dying person. And yet, in the darkness before dawn in locations spread out over half of China, people are counting the fifty-six seconds of this history. In the rectangle formed by the praying people wearing white caps, everyone recognizes repeatedly a minimum truth. . . .

As I was reciting along with the crowd, I could not explain the feelings of being moved that flooded my heart. In this way, every illiterate farmer in remote, poor villages could accurately grasp one point in history.72

Jiwei Ci remarked already in 1994 in Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism on the impact of 1989: "What was truly remark- able was the speed of the transformation, the almost obscene rapidity with which the same powers that had crushed the democracy movement were able to lift the hopelessness."73 "As the nation's mood went from shock to despair and then, remarkably soon, from despair to business as usual, I sensed, in a way I had never quite done before, something profoundly wrong with the Chinese spirit."74 To Ci's surprise, most urban Chinese, instead of unconditionally opposing the government aut

stefan henning - history of the soul. a chinese writer, nietzsche, and tiananmen 1989

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