Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China, By Ting Guo

Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China, Ting Guo’s fascinating and innovative book, follows the line of love as it weaves in and out of the complex politics—religious, secular, and everything in between—of Chinese history since the end of the imperial period at the beginning of the twentieth century. Guo adeptly combines conversations in religious studies, secularism studies, and affect theory with a history of power in post-imperial China. At one point, Guo quotes at length from a song widely circulated during the current leadership of Xi Jinping, “Xi Dada Loves Peng Mama” (Peng is Peng Liyuan, Xi’s wife):

Xi Dada loves Peng Mama

Such love seems a fairy tale

Peng Mama loves Xi Dada

The land with love is powerful.

This stanza captures both the leitmotif of Guo’s historical analysis—that love has been a central theme of Sinosphere politics all through the republican period, from the nationalist uprising through the communist era and into the contemporary Hong Kong protest movements—and the argument of the book as a whole: that love is placed at center stage as a mode of building political power. And, crucially, that this promotion of love is entangled with the complex lineage of religion/secularism in Chinese history.

In the process, Guo also makes a vital contribution to conversations taking place in fields like affect theory and history of emotions. In these domains, emotions and affects (sometimes, but not always defined as fundamentally separate from emotions) are taken seriously as necessary for the operation of power. As Sara Ahmed writes in her article “Collective Feelings: Or, the Impressions Left by Others,” “emotions work to secure collectives through the way in which they read the bodies of others” (Theory, Culture & Society 21[2] [2004]: 25). Guo draws on Ahmed’s attention to love as a powerful emotion that functions not just to include, but to exclude. Rather than a self-evidently universal, inherently apolitical feeling, love can be deployed in a variety of arrangements to different political ends.

But Guo also picks up where Ahmed leaves off, noting the distinct absence of sustained reflection on love in the corpus of studies of affect and emotion. This is where Guo’s most intriguing contribution takes the stage—a contribution that will be valuable to a range of scholars across disciplines. Guo builds up a new vocabulary around love, fixing our attention to love as a political emotion as a way of understanding religion, secularism, and the political in a range of contexts. This is the project of her introductory chapter, which lays out her argument that “political efficacy flows not only through bodies and emotions but through language too, the language of affect” (10). Passing beyond the simplistic claim that language and affect operate on separate tracks, she proposes to examine the way love is mobilized through discourse in the full spectrum of post-imperial Chinese history.

Guo supplements her dialogue with contemporary theoretical discussions around love in affect/emotion studies with a sophisticated overview, in Chapter 1, of the history of the concept of love in Chinese thought, beginning with the Confucian approach in which rituals lead to love as ren’ai—benevolent conduct. With an influx of new ideas through western contact and colonization in east Asia in the nineteenth century, Chinese intellectuals rapidly developed a new conceptual armature that allowed them to articulate more precise translations of different varieties of love, such as aiqing for “private sentiments” and aiguo for “love of nation” (26). But Guo is careful to note that the words do not create the feelings—these ideas had been floating in Chinese literary circles avant la lettre even before the coining of the terminology.

At the same time, Guo notes the emergence of a utopian synthesis of the essential properties of “the East” and “the West” during this period. Her exploration of this vision is fleshed out in Chapter 2, which focuses on the early nationalist movement embodied by Sun Yat-Sen and his wife, Soong Ching-ling. Guo pushes back on commentary that claims Sun’s ideas about love were derived from his exposure to Christianity. Sun’s own influence from Christianity has been overstated, she suggests, in part because he tended to play up his debt to Christianity when speaking to western audiences: “Although bo’ai (universal love) appears to be an idea borrowed from Christian vocabulary,” she writes, “its meaning was in fact more closely connected to socialist universalism and radical affect” (35). Soong, too, was deeply invested in a politics of love, one that had more affinities with the secular socialist movements of the day than the bourgeois nationalist movements. Through careful attention to Soong’s letters, Guo documents how her ideas about love were formed, in part, through her exposure to white supremacism in the US while studying at Wesleyan College in Georgia. Moreover, the Soong-Sun love story itself came to be a useful propaganda tool deployed by both nationalists and communists.

Chapter 3 pivots to the communist movement, and in particular the era of Mao’s ascendancy. Building on Kang Xiaofei’s notion of the Chinese communist revolution as an “enchanted revolution,” Guo argues that “the discourse of love was what Mao used to enchant the revolution but also what the people used to channel their devotion and spiritual connection during and after Mao’s revolutions” (Guo: 2025, 88). She has a particular interest in arguing against the claim that love and sex went into abeyance during the Maoist era, exploring instead the way love was used in communist cultural artifacts to advance their political purposes.

Guo also notes that the vehicle for this campaign was often popular religion and folk culture. Ultimately, this leads into the creation of a folk religion around Mao himself, a kind of new religious movement that remixed ritual, narrative, and material elements from existing traditions. “As a political religion,” Guo notes, “the Maoist personality cult consisted of a totalitarian political agenda carried out through a series of campaigns, movements, and everyday rituals” (19). The focus, in all of these instances, was on the production and circulation of love. The highly successful song “I Love Beijing Tiananmen” from Mao’s lifetime was one such example: “The affective power of this song was felt, received, and reciprocated by listeners as they participated in a shared emotional regime” (103).

A discussion of the complex status of the Mao personality cult in contemporary Chinese society provides a bridge to Chapter 4, which focuses on the politics of love surrounding Xi Jinping and his wife. Xi is much more explicit about his effort to link Marxism and traditional Chinese culture. For Mao, this had been an implicit project; but Xi has superseded a blunt-force secularist impulse by unambiguously relinking Marxism to Confucian tradition and its attendant version of hierarchy (116). This immediately translates into a reimagining of society along filial lines—lines that are fused by love—the love of the father and mother (Xi and Peng) as an ideal romantic couple for their people, and the love of the children for their parents. As Guo writes: “Big Love, contemporary China’s brand name for its reinvention of ‘traditional cultures,’ therefore operates as a spiritual force that brings together ‘thousands of years’ of ideas and practices as a providential, superior, and legitimate regime for its domestic as well as international audiences” (136).

Chapter 5 draws this attention to love into an assessment of the Hong Kong protest movements since the handover to the communist government. Reiterating the attention to gender that marks one of the strengths of her book, Guo discusses how Carrie Lam (former chief executive of Hong Kong) describes the protests as “unloving” and presents herself as a mother who must correct her children (137). The book’s conclusion notes how the same attention to the politics of love that is marshalled by the communist party leadership has now been appropriated and redeployed by the young protest movements in Hong Kong in recent years.

Guo writes that “the inception of this book began, in part, to answer my own question: why was it that as someone who grew up in the PRC, our first association of ai—the very discourse of love—is always political?” (159) Guo proves beyond doubt that, as the song says, “the land with love is powerful.” Her book is bold, convincing, and an extraordinary window into the emotional history of post-imperial China that will be of interest to readers from a range of fields and disciplines.