The Rebellious Manchu Self in the Early Work of Liu Honglin (Xiao Jun)

Liu Honglin, better known by his pen name Xiao Jun, is widely recognized as the author of one of the first novels to expose the situation in occupied Manchuria, Village in August (Bayue de xiangcun), whose publication in 1935 served to unite the Chinese nation in a time of crisis. However, a reading of Liu Honglin’s early self-referential work, published only a few years before the Japanese occupation, indicates that in the late 1920s, his vision of Manchuria’s attachment to China was highly complicated. This paper argues that the portrayal of the Manchu self in Liu’s stories and essays published mainly in 1929 strained the relationship with China represented in these writings. The paper places Liu Honglin’s early work in the context of the broader sociohistorical factors of the period to demonstrate that it narrates a fragmented borderland subjectivity informed by the marginal position of Manchus and Manchurian Chinese. Proposing to see Liu as an intellectual whose work challenged discrimination against minority groups within mainstream Han Chinese society, the paper opens up a space for a reassessment of Liu Honglin’s early work, highlighting a neglected and unexpected Manchu voice in the history of modern Chinese literature.