Following the blooming of the Hundred Flowers came a metaphorical springtime. How was it formed? As metaphorical wordplay continued to shape public discourse, the sustained input of creative writers gradually transformed the discussion of flowers to a broader theme of spring. Poets such as Ai Qing wove ever more detailed depictions of bucolic scenes to both comment on the state of the Republic and to join in the word play that was now present across genres of writing. In the process, an ever-expanding circle of writers joined the metaphorical and allegorical debate, including Zhou Shoujuan, who saw the movement as a resurrection of the literary public sphere of the May Fourth era. We also observe the migration of metaphorical imagery from text to visual-culture, as floral scenes and those of spring became omnipresent in magazines and newspapers.

What could you do if you felt out of step with Maoism? What if the great blooming of early 1957 did not reflect your feelings about the People’s Republic? How could you express yourself with the language available to you and circulating throughout public discourse? This chapter traces the frequent but disparate and isolated practices of botanical metaphor inspired by the Hundred Flowers but deployed in critique, echoing practices that have remained potent since the Book of Odes. It begins with the story of Jiang Rende, who arranges grass on his desk and thinks of Lu Xun, and reveals a world of critical but disconnected deployments of the botanical imagery of the Hundred Flowers.

To place the unprecedented initiative within that historical development, the 1925 conference that evolved into UCCLW unanimously affirmed the need for a marshalling of Christian forces in the area of ‘burning’ social problems. Two months later, the IMC missionary thrust so central to ecumenical aims issued a call for Christian experts to take up the study of the ‘Jewish problem’. At the centre of the call was belief that a universal Jewish problem would not have emerged had the Church not failed historically to ameliorate world Jewry through Christianisation. By the spring of 1927 the unanimity of 175 delegates from mainstream Protestant bodies in twenty-six countries had produced a series of transnational conference findings on relations between the Jewish problem and the societal need for Jewish conversion. The International Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews (ICCAJ), whose theoretical base was grounded in the claims of those findings, was brought into existence in 1929 as an international lobbying initiative for adoption of official church policy on Jews and Jewish missions. By the eve of Hitler’s rise, with regional sectors in Continental Europe, Britain and North America, it was a fully constituted body, a brand name programme of Jewish evangelisation said to be promoted in thirty-six countries, and the self-christened agent for educating Protestant churches on the ‘right’ Christian attitude toward Jews, the Jewish problem and Nazi antisemitism. The long-term result was a widely disseminated discourse on conversionary solution under the banner of an enlarging vision of Christian benovolence.

This chapter explores the interactions of high-level Chinese and North Korean leaders. It argues that the actions of Chinese and North Korean leaders – especially Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung – were critical to building political order in the PRC and the DPRK. It shows how the utterances and actions of these leaders were particularly influential in shaping popular emotions and establishing the legitimacy of the PRC and DPRK.

Who had the power to innovate and shape public discourse in the high Mao era? Through the example of Fei Xiaotong and his essay “The Early Spring Weather of the Intellectuals,” this chapter explores what happens when critique, however mild, captures an audience, draws responses, and creates its own eddies of creative imitation. It shows the power of the classical literary canon eight years after the founding of the People’s Republic and that literary brio drawing on this canon could shape public discourse and challenge the dominant framing of a national slogan. It also shows how writers who supported the campaign turned to the same literary canon to attack Fei Xiaotong’s metaphor and restore the sense of springtime. It was not only the Party that was capable of “doing things with words.”

Following the 1578 rediscovery of Roman catacombs, thousands of relics of alleged early martyrs were transported to Catholic communities across the globe. Using Bavaria as a case study, this chapter investigates how these often fragmentary remains were transformed into catacomb saints, complete with names and identities, who served as patrons and protectors for localities far from Rome.

How do national campaigns and local literary practice interact? This chapter tells the story of Liu Shahe and Shi Tianhe, two Sichuanese writers who, following signals from Beijing and Moscow, found themselves on the wrong side of local political and literary elites. It explores how Liu and Shi fell out with the Sichuanese literary establishment, and how what became known as the “poetry case” came to the attention of Mao Zedong. It describes the differential power dynamics that existed among the individual, the local, and the central state in the early People’s Republic of China. Despite becoming known as “anti-Party,” “anti-socialist,” and “poisonous weeds,” the chapter reveals that Liu and Shi fell from grace for putting into practice signals from the Party center.

The postwar milieu in which the unprecedented initiative was conceived had at its centre a global network of Protestant interests that identified as ‘ecumenical’. The use of ‘world’, ‘international’ and ‘universal’ in the names of the bodies that evolved in the 1920s – International Missionary Council (IMC, 1921), Universal Christian Council of Life and Work (UCCLW, 1925), Universal Christian Council of Faith and Order (UCCFO 1927) – signified the breadth of vision for a unified field of world Protestant outreach. The creation of the conversionary project within this structure was purposed by its mandate for the unified world evangelisation of Jews. Critically, all of the bodies emerging in the 1920s did so under the intensity of a bitter World War I debacle between German and non-German churchmen over the issue of Germany’s war guilt. When the first signs of resolution appeared at the 1925 launching of UCCLW, visionaries were driven by concern that further division would recoil on the future of ecumenism itself. UCCLW, forged in the fire of that understanding (1930–38), was the social-action arm of ecumenism until WCCIF was brought into existence (1938–48). The development of the conversionary initiative on Jews within these contexts is one part of the story of how it came to be seen as expert on the Jewish question in the same years that its ‘Final Solution’ was being sought by Nazi Germany. The other is how it came to intersect with the arm of the movement that evolved into the World Council of Churches.

Chapter 4 examines Wahhabism in the new period, showing how it emerged on the agenda of Ottoman ideological reactions in a way that differed from the previous period. I examine the impact of the printing press on the on-going ideological struggle, citing people who wrote about Wahhabism in the capital city as “men of the printing press” because of the diversity of the authors. Ulema, military men and intellectuals in Istanbul penned essays of various genres in which they discussed Wahhabi doctrines and promoted the Ottoman ideological stance over that “hazardous” creed. The writers wrote the essays in plain language that would have been accessible for the common people, including younger generations and students, and they were published in large numbers with the intention of protecting readers from the “bad” influence of Wahhabism. I show that Wahhabism became a concern for the centre as a result of the new technologies in the age of steam and print, and I explore those in reference to the circulation of Wahhabi ideas around the world through print media. I summarize this challenge in terms of an Ibn Khaldunian perspective versus the Ibn Taymiyyaism of the Wahhabi ideology.

As with other aspects of the cult of the saints, relics faced increasing official scrutiny during the early modern period. Drawing on legal cases and a new and burgeoning genre of relic manuals, this chapter examines the evolving but ultimately vexed methods of identifying and authenticating relics in response to Protestant attacks and Catholic reform.