In the People’s Republic of China, according to Mao Zedong himself, literature was to serve politics. But where did the ideas of politics come from, and how did they circulate throughout the state? This book is an exploration of the literary aspects of a political campaign and how literary practice shaped Maoism and the Chinese state. The spring of 1957 found China in the midst of a great bloom. Floral themes and imagery permeated texts across genres of poetry, journalism, political speeches, and fiction. They decorated covers of literary journals, fabric for dresses, and even architecture. Where did these flowers come from? What happened to them in the second half of the year during the Anti-Rightist campaign? This chapter introduces the major questions of the book through the story of the young Shanghainese poet Xu Chengmiao. Through Xu’s poetry and life we explore the flowering of China and the broader question of how individuals participated in Maoism.

The introduction focuses on the transformations of the age of steam and print. Modern technology brought unprecedented change, reshaping both human interaction with nature and the function of art and craftsmanship. The shift from agrarian life to the industrial age created a radically new world that demands careful attention. The most visible changes appeared in transportation and communication, where journeys once lasting months could now be completed in days, and news circulated within minutes. This revolution enabled rapid movement of people, ideas, and information, profoundly altering knowledge and perception. Although connections among different regions existed earlier, the nineteenth century introduced extraordinary speed and continuity, turning isolated settlements into globally interconnected spaces. Steamships, railways, telegraphs, and the printing press were the key instruments of this transformation. The circulation of newspapers and printed works fostered unprecedented awareness of distant lands and gave rise to new concepts such as the “Islamic world” or âlem-i Islam in Ottoman literature. These inventions not only expanded imagination and ideologies like Pan-Islamism but also reshaped the Ottoman outlook.

Chapter 7 covers the Ottoman political measures implemented with regard to the published works of the two movements. After discussing the censorship policies of the state, which were used in all the provinces, I explore the role of the ulema in terms of censorship policies through the biographical details of scholars based in Istanbul. The selected cases demonstrate that the published works of peripheral ulema were swiftly echoed in the centre and that the central ulema not only censored works spreading “dangerous” ideas but also directly refuted the thoughts of peripheral scholars. In this chapter, I emphasize the fact that censorship was a political means of curbing the circulation of ideas via printed books by providing details from Wahhabi and Mahdist publications. This chapter shows how the Ottomans actively tried to stop “pernicious” publications from entering Ottoman lands and limit their spread in the territories through telegraphed orders sent from the centre to all the provinces.

Where did these flowers come from? They have been traced back to the poet Allen Ginsberg and his November 1965 call for “Masses of flowers – a visual spectacle” to be arranged at the frontline of protests. But ten years earlier, in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the power of flowers had already been put to work. In fact, it was the potency of the flower in China, its ability to do things, to move, and to move people, that not only foreshadowed but had helped inspire Ginsberg and his movement. And it was Mao, not Ginsberg, who Hoffman cited in the last sentence of the quote above. In China, in the years 1954–58, floral arrangements, motifs, illustrations, fashion, and even architectural decoration, were to be found in virtually every sphere and level of society. Flowers decorated the stage as Chairman Mao spoke to the political elite; they appeared not only in newspaper headlines, in the decorative illustrations of magazines and journals, in cartoons, in song, and in poetic paeans to the young nation, but also in private diaries and letters and in poetry and big-character posters (dazibao 大字報) expressing dissent and anger. Where did these flowers come from?

What happens to their words after a writer has been purged? How does the literature of one campaign lay the foundation for the politics of the next? This chapter follows the fate of images rendered heterodox by those such as Fei Xiaotong and Liu Shahe in the period following the labeling of these writers as “rightist” and their ousting from the national literary community. It applies Abby Warburg’s conception of “social memory,” in which the re-adoption of symbols in visual art reflects a process of storing and releasing “mnemic energy,” to the circulation of texts following the shift to the Anti-Rightist campaign. It argues that the continued circulation of literary imagery reflects not only a literature capable of resurrecting memoires, as Reinhart Koselleck suggested, but an inner-literary memory. It also shows that as writers rejected the imagery of Fei’s “spring chill” and Liu’s “Pieces of Plants,” they created a literary bridge between the bucolic splendor of the Hundred Flowers and the supernature of the Great Leap Forward.

The Hundred Flowers movement marked a turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China. How did it begin? While Mao has been credited with sole authorship of the Hundred Flowers, this chapter exposes the plural and deep roots of the blooming of 1957. It traces the gradual coalescing of the political and literary fields, as “let a hundred flowers bloom” spread from a nineteenth-century novel to a twentieth-century campaign slogan. From 1949 to 1956, before they were Mao’s, the Hundred Flowers were captured and appropriated by a growing field of writers, philosophers, scientists, poets, and politicians. In the process, a literary trope became a central term in political discourse and political discourse became a field of creative play. This chapter argues that practices of literary circulation shaped and powered the birth and transformation of the Hundred Flowers.

The introduction explains why China and North Korea would not have survived as communist states without Sino-North Korean friendship. It discusses the relevance of different theories of emotion to this issue. It shows how Sino-North Korean friendship was critical to the emotional regimes created in both states.

Chapter 1 examines the concept of the Caliphate and focuses on how the Ottoman caliphal discourse became a global idea. After discussing the Caliphate’s role in earlier periods, I argue that the idea of the Caliphate began to appear as a global phenomenon in the 1860s by taking up the case of an Ottoman scholar who travelled from Istanbul to South Africa in 1862. I then examine the transnational and intercontinental networks of the Caliphate via examples of people who travelled on steamships and railways from all over the world. In contrast to the popular belief that the Caliphate and Pan-Islamist missions were engendered through the policies of Sultan Abdülhamid II, I claim that such ambitions began before his reign and also continued after him. I discuss the globalization of the Caliphate as a process that took place in parallel with the spread of steam and print in the Ottoman Empire and demonstrate how Ottoman rulers and ulema used printing presses in the service of the caliphal idea. In this regard, I situate the Hejaz, where thousands of Muslims gathered for the Hajj, as a major hub for the communication of ideas and I point out how it was crucial for the Ottomans.

This chapter uses Black confraternities as a case study to show the vital role of such organizations in organizing mutual aid, fostering saintly devotions, and maintaining communal bonds. Confraternities built churches, commissioned art, and took part in public festivals; such activities by Black confraternities also enabled Afrodescendants to navigate social hierarchies and visibly assert their presence in the Catholic world.

Cultural exchange was another critically important mechanism for influencing popular emotions. This chapter looks at Sino-North Korean exchanges in theater, film, and the arts. It argues that these exchanges reached large audiences in both countries while inculcating official emotions.

How were writers not labeled in the first waves of the Anti-Rightist campaign affected? Did they change their writing practices in response to the public excoriation of what were now “poisonous weeds”? How did they balance demands to continue to publish with the now clear danger of circulating texts that could be interpreted as anti-Party, anti-socialist, or simply circumspect in their ambiguity? We inherit a historiography that delineates between those who were labeled and those who acquiesced, but this bifurcation masks complexity and diversity among both groups. This chapter, through the diary and letters of Wu Mi, explores the ambiguous and precarious position of those writers not labeled in the summer of 1957. It also follows those writers who were labeled in 1957, their experiences through and after the removal of their “Rightist” label, and reflects on what it means for literature to “interfere with life.”

The literature generated by the cult of the saints extended well beyond their written lives to encompass plays, poetry, and prose. This chapter explores the vital role played by vernacular print and manuscripts in sustaining English Catholics and their exile communities overseas as one of the many ways literary works on saints could help to construct, foster, and defend early modern Catholic identities.