Research Trends
Zhang Peiheng’s A New History of Chinese Literatureand Its Japanese Translation
CHEN Zhenghong*Before dawn on June 7, 2011, Zhang Peiheng, the most liberal Chinese
scholar of the history of Chinese literature, passed away at the age ofseventy-seven in Shanghai. Only a month earlier, Kansai University Press
published the first volume of the Japanese translation（Chūgoku bungaku shishincho）of his last and most influential work, the three-volume Zhongguo
wenxue shi xinzhu（A New History of Chinese Literature）.
Zhang was from the same hometown as the famous early-twentieth-century
Chinese writer Lu Xun. He was born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, inJanuary 1934. Though as early as May 1949 he became a member of theCommunist Party, he engaged in scholarship throughout his life, took Lu Xun
as his role model, and sought individual liberty and freedom of expression.
After he graduated from the Department of Chinese at Fudan University inJanuary 1954, he never left this well-known university, the only university in
Mainland China whose school song hails “independent scholarship andfreedom of thought.” The last position that he held was director of theResearch Institute of Chinese Classics at Fudan University. Most of thecontributors to Zhongguo wenxue shi xinzhu were professors who held concurrent positions at this institute or young scholars who graduated from thisinstitute with doctorates.
Compared with Zhongguo wenxue shi（A History of Chinese Literature）,
coedited by Zhang Peiheng and Luo Yuming and published in 1996, this is acompletely new work. More than half of the text was written by Zhang
himself, and the main views of the rest of the text sprang from him. He also
revised the text several times. Hence, it is no exaggeration to say that heauthored this work himself.
This work, from a broad perspective, gives expression to Zhang’s view,acquired through many years of research, of the evolution of Chinese literature, namely, that the literature of the New Culture Movement was an inevi* Professor at the Research Institute of Chinese Classics, Fudan University.

86

Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol.3 2012

table development of prior Chinese literature. The influence of Westernculture merely accelerated this inevitable development of Chinese literatureand did not alter its course. A prelude to contemporary literature seeking aliberation of the human spirit had already begun in the early modern literature of the late Jin（1115-1234）and early Yuan（1279-1368）dynasties. Laterthe vanguard literature of the Ming dynasty（1368-1644）strove to free itself
from the strictures of the Rational School of Neo-Confucianism [under Cheng
Hao, Cheng Yi, and Zhu Xi,] and to display all the complexities of humannature in the realms of material cravings and spiritual yearnings.
On the basis of the above perspective is constructed another special featureof the present work, namely, its rejection of the conventional practice ofsimilar works of discussing Chinese literary history in terms of dynasticperiods. Rather, it divides all of Chinese literature, from the pre-Qin period（before 221 BCE）to 1900, into ancient literature, medieval literature, andearly modern literature. And each of these stages of literature it further
divides into several periods.
To give a concrete example, the book breaks early modern literature down
into a period of reversal, a period of revival, and a period of wavering, underwhich it mostly discusses Ming-period literature. This portion of the work,nearly entirely written by Zhang, contains a discussion of Ming poetry, withmuch that has gone previously unnoticed. In a detailed discussion of Ming
works of literature, Zhang did not follow the usual path of literary history.
For example, he wasted little ink on the Jingling School（early 17th cent.）,
since he thought that it did little more than carry one step further the regression after Yuan Hongdao（1568-1610）. But he praised the late-Ming love poet
Wang Yanhong（1593-1642）for his outstanding displays of human nature,
though prior histories of Chinese literature invariably excluded him.
Especially interesting is the fact that the theoretical point of departure forZhang’s praise of Wang Yanhong is the explanation of love found in KarlMarx’s work. Also arousing interest is when the present work informs us that
the Japanese novelist Nagai Kafū （1879-1959） praised Wang Yanhong,comparing his poetry to that of the French poet Charles Baudelaire, in hiswork Hatsusuzuri（Calligraphy for the New Year）.
The main difference between the Japanese translation published by Kansai
University Press and the Chinese original is that Zhang wrote a preface, at thebeginning of volume 1, for Japanese readers. In this preface he systematicallyelaborates, for the first time in writing, his own independent view of the periodization of modern Chinese literature. He thought that the beginning periodof modern Chinese literature was from 1901 to 1917, and that the first decadeof the new Chinese literature was from 1918, when there occurred a revolution in Chinese literature, to 1927. He gave this first decade a high appraisal,Zhang Peiheng’s A New History of Chinese Literature and Its Japanese Translation 87

saying, “It was a period when authors of Chinese literature could best manifest the demands for the free expression of human nature and the spirit ofhumanity, when the individual was the standard, and when authors werestylistically their most creative （boldly absorbing foreign influences andstriving to make form express new content）.” In the next decade, from 1928
to the first half of 1937, he noted that though a Chinese revolutionary
Proletarian literature movement sprang up, mainstream literature continued tomaintain and develop the basic cultural geist of the new literature of the firstdecade. Worth noting is that he did not think highly of the literature of therelatively long period after 1937. He thought that from the latter half of 1937
to 1947, the new literature regressed, in that literature then sought mainly tosupport a higher authority. And the thirty years from 1948 to 1977 was “afrightful period in the development of modern Chinese literature,” for thiswas “a period when modern Chinese literature continuously regressed until itreached a point of hopelessness.” In 1978, according to Zhang, Chinese literature began its return to the main tradition of the new literature of the firstand second decades. By familiarizing ourselves with the contents of the textof the present work, we can see that Zhang endeavored to present his independent views on the history and present state of Chinese literature.
Also in this preface, Zhang clearly states that in “China, the establishmentof the discipline of the history of Chinese literature was modeled on Japanese
research of the history of Chinese literature.” Citing Lin Chuanjia’s Zhongguo
wenxue shi（A History of Chinese Literature, 1904）and a series of otherhistories of Chinese literature published from 1905 on, Zhang explains thatfrom then “to the first half of the 1930s, every respected history of Chinese
literature published in China has to some extent been influenced by Japanesescholarship. This influence declined in the latter half of the 1930s, but it did
not die out. And from the 1980s, this influence gradually revived.” Obviously,
in present-day China, acknowledging such historical facts requires not only abroad perspective, but also an open mind.
The translators of volume 1 of the present work were Inoue Taizan,professor in the Faculty of Letters at Kansai University, and his doctoral
student Hayashi Masakiyo. The other two volumes are being translated byInoue and two other students of his: Gotō Yūya and Shikata Michiko.
Judging by volume 1 of the translation, the translation will be faithful to theoriginal, and will take into consideration the needs of contemporary Japanesereaders in that the original literary Chinese of premodern literary texts quoted
are all translated into Japanese and the Japanese reading of Chinese characters is indicated right above the relevant characters. One can imagine what agreat undertaking this is.