Hang Tu, "Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Feb 11, 2026

Hang Tu, Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at NUS and scholar of emotion in literature, discusses how feelings shaped post-Mao debates. He traces four emotional intellectual clusters and recounts the Red Guard generation’s role. Short scenes examine liberal mourning, leftist melancholy, nationalist resentment, and how affect steers memory and political power.

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ANECDOTE

Shock Of An Emotionally Charged Debate

Hang Tu describes his first exposure to heated academic debate as an undergraduate when scholars shouted and banged tables over the New Left.
That emotional scene prompted his question: why do debates about the Maoist past provoke such intense moral and personal reactions?

INSIGHT

Ideas Shaped By Feeling

Tu frames intellectual history as a history of feelings, arguing that emotions shape the formation and circulation of political ideas.
He coins 'affective ideas' to show how memory and moral sentiments bind with ideologies in post-Mao debates.

INSIGHT

Four Emotional Intellectual Clusters

Tu groups post-Mao intellectuals into four emotion-driven clusters: liberal guilt, leftist melancholy, conservative piety, and nationalist resentment.
This emotional taxonomy reveals how feelings supply moral authority and shape political judgments beyond pure ideology.

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How does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past (Harvard UP, 2025), Hang Tu proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post-Mao cultural controversy. As it entered a period of market reform, China did not turn away from revolutionary sentiments. Rather, the post-Mao period experienced a surge of emotionally charged debates about red legacies, ranging from the anguished denunciations of Maoist violence to the elegiac remembrances of socialist egalitarianism.

Sentimental Republic chronicles forty years (1978–2018) of bitter cultural wars about the Maoist past. It analyzes how the four major intellectual clusters in contemporary China—liberals, the Left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists—debated Mao’s revolutionary legacies in light of the postsocialist transition. Should the Chinese condemn revolutionary violence and “bid farewell to socialism”? Or would a return to revolution foster alternative visions of China’s future path? Tu probes the nexus of literature, thought, and memory, bringing to light the dynamic moral sentiments and emotional excess at work in these post-Mao ideological contentions. By analyzing how rival intellectual camps stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, Tu argues that the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia.

Hang Tu is Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore and Deputy Director of the CCKF–NUS Southeast Asia Center for Chinese Studies. A scholar of Chinese literature and thought, his research focuses on the cultural politics of emotion in modern and contemporary China. His work has appeared in Critical Inquiry, The Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Intellectual History, MCLC, and Prism.

Camellia (Linh) Pham is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her research focuses on modern Vietnamese literature, socialist realism, and literary translation across French, Vietnamese, Chinese, and English. She can be reached at cpham@g.harvard.edu.

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