A salient phenomenon of cultural politics in the twentieth century was the horizontal movement of concepts. Yet the political content of such discourse and concepts cannot be defined from its European origins. Whenever these alien concepts are used under historical conditions totally distinct from the conditions that originally produced them, this not only leads to the birth of new consciousness, values, and movements, but it also produces a new political logic. For this reason, it would be difficult to explain the meaning of China’s twentieth century if we leave behind the perspectives internal to its revolution. This talk takes up the cases of Lu Xun’s “literature of resistance to despair” and Mao Zedong’s “philosophy of victory,” in which one “moves from victory to victory,” in order to examine twentieth-century China’s despairs and hopes, its failures and successes.

Wang Hui is Distinguished Professor of Literature and History and the founding Director of the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Several of his books have been translated into English, including China’s Twentieth Century (2015), The Politics of Imagining Asia (2010) and The End of Revolution (2009). His yet untranslated four-volume work, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004), is considered one of the most important works in contemporary Chinese political thought.