In view of the “postcoloniality” of Chinese society, the paper examines Chinese masculinities from a constructionist and multicultural perspective. Regarding postcolonialism as a reading strategy, it advocates a re-reading of Third World traditions in search of alternative symbolic orders before colonization and globalization. The reading is postcolonial not only because it takes place in a postcolonial world, but also because its fundamental method is motivated by postcolonialism, if we understand postcolonialism as “a process of dialogue and necessary correction.” And taking into account the historical and political circumstances of Chinese society as different from the former colonial countries, such as the British Commonwealth countries, the paper argues that the significance of postcolonialism to the Chinese context is a more sober awareness of Western influence on today’s discourse and a more astute reexamination of China’s past. However, it does not imply that there exists a pure “Chineseness” since any reading has to be from the historicity of the reader. The second part of the paper attempts to identify certain characteristics of the historical and discursive construction of Chinese masculinity from comparative and cross-cultural perspectives. And in doing so, it advocates a conceptualization of Chinese masculinity within the yin/yang paradigm, instead of viewing it as a poorer, effeminate version of “normal” Western masculinity.

In the late twentieth century, stereotypes of masculinity both in the West and in China were deconstructed as never before. I explore this process, one which has been aided by increased East-West contact, in two novels by Brian Castro, an Australian writer of partly Chinese descent who prides himself on writing in a postmodern manner. Castro began publishing fiction in the 1980s, when race and ethnic relations in Australia were being hotly debated in the context of a new multicultural policy. It was at a time when Chinese men were being unfavorably portrayed in both Chinese and English writing. It was also a time when East Asia was on the ascendency, so the idea of what constituted Chineseness generated much discussion, culminating in Tu Wei-ming’s 1991 thesis “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center.” In this paper, I show that in the novels Birds of Passage and After China, Castro uses Chinese Taoist icons such as yin-yang, and Australian paradigms such as Clancy of the Overflow, to destabilise the accepted masculinity ideals of both China and Australia. This debunking produces the fanciful idea of a masculinity that is neither Chinese nor Australian as traditionally understood.

Yung Wing (1828-1912) was the first Chinese national to graduate from an American institute of higher education. His autobiography, My Life.in China and America (1909), has continued to provoke controversy regarding its political and cultural significance. Although most Chinese scholars consider it the record of a pioneering patriot in the promotion of Western education for Chinese modernization, Chinese-Americans have often derided it as a “fake” success story devoid of racial consciousness. Here I will analyze Yung’s strategy of adopting, from a marginalized position, a 19th-century New England middle-class masculinity to gain political and moral capital. Yung created his own genealogy, one showing how he moved from dependence on a “naive, weak, and passive” natural mother to dependence on “scientific, independent, and progressive” surrogate American parents. However, his uncritical adoption of an “American Protestant masculinity” contributed to his marginalization in lateQing Chinese society, and ultimately a failed political career. Yung attempted to transplant American gender stereotypes in China, but failed to address traditional Chinese gender politics. This new (Westernized, Christianized) masculinity asserted by his autobiography is finally ambivalent if not unintelligible, when set in a cultural context that could not absorb it. Yung’s invented genealogy of masculinity ultimately rendered him blind and impotent within a cultural matrix founded on a different kind of gender politics.

While Confucianism demands a man’s obedience to authority, it also endorses resistance to a dominant power which has become corrupt and degenerate. The virile impulse to preserve one’s individual autonomy is developed in the writings of Xunzi and crystallizes in the Mencian persona of the da zhangfu, a mettlesome, awe-inspiring hero. Here I trace the resurgence of this Mencian ideal in the Ming in relation to the trend toward masculinization in Ming-Qing literature. While the despotism of the ruling clique led to political defiance, the ideological suppression of the Cheng-Zhu school triggered a new individualism, culminating in the cult of ging (passion): these were both functions of the scholars’ turn to the Mencian ideal as a model of virility in shaping their identity. I first analyze the valorization of the masculine in Ming thought as shown in the lives and remarks of leading scholars. I then examine how the masculine ideal of the da zhangfu serves as a role model in political confrontation, a driving force in the cult of ging, and a source of inspiration leading to literary creativity and the development of personal authenticity. Finally I look at the literary ntizhong zhangfu (“heroes among women”) as a derivative of the Ming/early Qing cult of the da zhangfu.

In the past ten years there has been increasing Western academic interest in male homoeroticism in late imperial China. This paper sets out to assess the strategies through which the issue has become problematized, and to argue that a number of misunderstandings about homoeroticism in Chinese history result from an uncritical and unreflexive application of pre-given Western categories and assumptions. What is often framed in terms of discovery or even “recovery,” in recent interpretations of homoerotic sensibilities among the literati in late imperial China, may be read as rather a re-covering, or what we will call a “dis/covering,” one that returns as a form of “covering.” This inadvertent oscillation originates from, and points to, a form of erotophobia that might be styled as “covering with discourse,” and in the absence of ironic reflection it betrays continuities with other expressions of neocolonialism.

Through a reading of Zhang Xianliang’s Half of Man Is Woman, this article argues that the ideal of “masculinity” defined two thousand years ago in Chinese culture is still alive today, and serves as a major paradigm for modern Chinese intellectuals. But it also suggests that women are programmed into the author's step-by-step project of reconstructing a lost masculinity for his protagonist. Since its publication in 1986, Half of Man Is Woman has prompted a large number of critiques, mostly static analyses focusing on the relationship between sexuality and politics. Adopting a feminist perspective, I will analyze the roles women play in the construction of the emasculation crisis faced by the protagonist and in restoring his lost masculinity. A close reading of the text reveals that (1) the ideal masculinity of the male protagonist derives from Confucianism, rather than Marxist Materialism as the author claims; (2) the central theme of the narrative is “family oppression” (or women’s oppression), rather than “political oppression” as many critics contend; and (3) instead of achieving a triumph over women as some critics claim, the protagonist fails to reconstruct his masculinity which has been continuously challenged. He was emasculated not once but twice, first by the state and then by himself. Here I suggest that the masculine ideal of male Chinese intellectuals is structured by a matrix of constant elements: hierarchical power and the state, intellectuals and women, and the philosophical past.