Slave of the Colonizer

This chapter reads Chinese poetry, short stories, and novels (1900–30) that engage the much-despised figure of the Indian policeman stationed by the British in China’s semi-colonial treaty ports. Grappling with the challenge of apprehending this Indian figure—who held the unique capacity to frustrate entrenched binaries of colonized and colonizer, brother and enemy, self and other—the Chinese texts articulate an antagonism at once founded upon intimacy and yet in expression of conflict. The texts engage in an exercise of thinking China and India together outside the tenets of pan-Asianist solidarity, extending a form of relation born out of repulsion. Although it erodes friendly ties, this mode of China–India thought proves generative, reshaping debates on literary language, national autonomy, and revolution underway in late Qing and early Republican China, and telling the story of modern Chinese literature’s development anew from the perspective of this unlikely Indian interlocuter.