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Book Review
| Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. 304. $45.00 (ISBN 978-0-520-24718-5).
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| Eugenia Lean's engaging book explores the implications of a sensational assassination that rocked Republican China in 1935. In the city of Tianjin, a woman named Shi Jianqiao shot a notorious former warlord, Sun Chuanfang, at a public prayer service, and immediately distributed to shocked onlookers a mimeographed manifesto explaining her deed. Her father, an officer in a rival warlord army, had been beheaded by Sun in 1925—and despairing of justice, Shi Jianqiao had finally taken revenge with her own hands and was willing to die herself to prove the righteousness of her cause. |
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There followed a struggle over what we would call "spin": how to interpret Shi Jianqiao's violent vigilantism, and whether to punish or praise her. Shi herself proved a master at public relations: in her manifesto, jailhouse interviews, and testimony, she consistently presented herself as a filial daughter who had acted out of righteous anger, and also as a patriotic citizen who had given a hated warlord the punishment he deserved. The story made good copy, and via the popular press and entertainment media it captured the public imagination. Newspapers breathlessly reported every development; when facts would not quench the public thirst, they serialized fictional accounts casting Shi Jianqiao as a woman warrior expert at martial arts; and theaters offered dramatized versions of her story that ran concurrently with her trial. In the courtroom, Shi Jianqiao's brilliant defense team milked public sentiment for all it was worth. They argued for lenience on the basis of loopholes in law but also by invoking Confucian classics and Chiang Kaishek's campaign to reintroduce Confucian values. The surge of public sympathy implied criticism of the struggling Guomindang state, which had failed to solve China's desperate problems, and which itself had frequently resorted to murder to eliminate political rivals and critics. Sympathy for the filial daughter's vigilantism highlighted both the failures and the hypocrisy of the regime. |
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This tide of public sentiment ultimately played a decisive role. Shi Jianqiao received a light sentence (reduced on appeal by the Supreme Court), and eventually a full pardon which exonerated her as a national hero. Whereas her lenient sentence had been a compromise between the letter of the law and the force of public sympathy, her pardon represented a transparent attempt by the Guomindang state to appropriate for itself that very sympathy, whose political force had come to outweigh any strictly judicial concern. |
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In Lean's view, the significance of this case lies in the political impact of this newly emergent public sympathy: an emotion-based public sphere constituted and expressed through low-brow mass media and popular entertainment. Lean contrasts this sphere of sentiment with the well-known Habermasian concept of "the public sphere," which is based on reason and implicitly gendered as masculine. She argues that past scholarship, by focusing on China's lack of a Habermasian public sphere, has missed the kind of public that actually did emerge during this period, and the important role that public played. |
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Lean contrasts the enthusiasm of public sentiment with the ambivalence of "highbrow" opinion. Across the political spectrum, intellectuals and professionals who were anxious "to establish the legitimacy of 'rational' discourses of modernity" (84) expressed strong disapproval both of Shi Jianqiao's vigilantism and of the popular response. Legal reformers struggling to establish a modern legal system with an independent judiciary denounced the notion that public sentiment should take precedence over faithful application of the law. They watched, appalled, as the courtroom became a spectacle, even as the newspapers and theaters passed their own judgment on Shi Jianqiao's case—a judgment that proved decisive. |
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Lean tells this story well, and I find her analysis convincing. Something missing is engagement with scholarship on the political theater of student demonstrations, which seems highly relevant (especially Jeffrey Wasserstrom's work, which combines social and cultural historical approaches to great effect). The ways Shi Jianqiao played to public sentiment had close affinities with the repertoire of symbolic language and gestures that student activists deployed in their pose as the self-sacrificing conscience of the nation. Much of the same repertoire later reappeared in the protest movements of the Maoist and post-Mao eras. |
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I am curious how divided sovereignty in cities like Tianjin and Shanghai may have influenced coverage in the popular media. Lean mentions the threat of censorship, yet the Guomindang state had no jurisdiction over the foreign-controlled districts of Treaty Ports. In the celebrated case of Yang Naiwu (in the 1870s), the fledgling newspaper Shen Bao helped to mobilize elite opinion in favor of the defendant, who was eventually exonerated. Crucially, Shen Bao was owned by a foreign firm and published in Shanghai's International Concession—so the Qing authorities had to put up with it. In this way, an unprecedented factor was introduced into Chinese judicial proceedings. I would like to know more about the genealogy of Lean's public sympathy, since the sensational cases of the nineteen-thirties, which Lean analyzes so ably, appear to be the heirs to Shen Bao's coverage of Yang Naiwu. |
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| Matthew H. Sommer
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| Stanford University |
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