This innovative work is the first to approach the awakening of China as
a historical problem in its own right, and to locate this problem within
the broader history of the rise of modern China. It analyzes the link
between the awakening of China as a historical narrative and the
awakening of the Chinese people as a political technique for building a
sovereign and independent state. In sum, it asks what we mean when we
say that China "woke up" in this century. Fiction and fashion,
architecture and autobiography, take their places alongside politics and
history, and the reader is asked to move about among writers,
philosophers, ethnographers, revolutionaries, and soldiers who would
seem to have little in common. Rumor is sometimes taken as seriously as
truth, novels are consulted as frequently as documents, and dreams are
given a prominence normally reserved for facts in the writing of
history. This book follows the legend of China's awakening from its
origins in the European imagination, to its transmission to China and
its encounter with a lyrical Chinese tradition of ethical awakening, to
its incorporation and mobilization in a mass movement designed to wake
up everyone. The idea of a national awakening crossed all discursive
boundaries to make room for nationalist politics in personal culture and
helped to conscript personal culture into service of the revolutionary
state. The book focuses on the Nationalist movement in south China,
highlighting the role of Sun Yat-sen as director of awakenings in the
Nationalist Revolution and the place of Mao Zedong as his successor in
the politics of mass awakening. Of special interest is the previously
untold story of Mao's role in the NationalistPropaganda Bureau, showing
Mao as a master of propaganda and discipline, rather than as peasant
movement activist.