Leisure and Chinese Culture: A Symposium

The essays in this special issue of the Chinese Historical Review focus on leisure as a subject of writing in China. This is not a study of Chinese leisure culture, which is a large and growing field among social historians, sociologists and anthropologists, but of certain kinds of writing and the lifestyles, activities and attitudes they portray as an aspect of Chinese humanistic culture. The idea of leisure in the modern world is intimately tied up with the impact of industrial capitalism on all social classes. We may think of leisure as the other of labor or work, and we may also think of a “leisure class” who by virtue of wealth or high birth need not engage in manual labor or even administrative work, who have cultivated leisure as a lifestyle. What we are exploring here is the possibility of a pre-industrial discourse of leisure that does not map easily either onto a strict distinction between work time and play time, or the division of classes in terms of leisure versus labor. Instead, we view the discourse of leisure in China as a millennia-long elite conversation about value and meaning making outside of the halls of political power and orthodoxy.

Beginning with American sociologist Thorstein Veblen's seminal 1899 work The Theory of the Leisure Class, and developing again quickly in the period after World War II as a window into modern postindustrial society, leisure studies in the west has essentially been a topic in social science, attracting sociologists, psychologists and political scientists. Its theory is heavily reliant on categories of class, race and gender. There have been strands of leisure theory that emphasize the subjective and cultural aspects more, such as those centering on the factor of lifestyle and, for example, Chris Rojek's placement of performance (as of roles, status, taste, etc.) at the center of his 2000 study Leisure and Culture.¹ Social psychology approaches like the contemplation theory of Sebastian de Grazia, John Neulinger's continuum model, Seppo Iso-Ahola's motivational theory and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” theory of leisure all emphasize the affective dimension more than the behavioral.² But the critical Marxist strain of the field, associated with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, has continued to push back against the emphasis on culture and the notion that sociologically homogenous groups often can be differentiated from one another in terms of lifestyle or taste.³

The study of leisure in China has also been primarily sociological, examining consumption patterns, amusements, sports and games—in other words, areas of activity that have been defined as leisurely in the modern industrial and postindustrial world in relation to contemporary society, without an examination of how leisurely practices and intellectual and artistic attention thereto have formed part of the legacy of traditional Chinese culture.⁴ Many studies of leisure that touch upon cultural difference and involve China derive their data from ethnically Chinese communities outside China, as in the U.S. and Australia, rather than looking at material from China and from earlier stages of history. On the Chinese studies side, humanistic studies of Chinese culture have not generally focused on leisure as a meaningful activity, or as a point of view from which to observe and understand cultural production. This is what we have endeavored to do in this symposium: to place leisure in the context of traditional Chinese culture, particularly among contending systems of value and meaning.

In my book, The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity I use the xiaopin wen 小品文 form of informal essay to explore the relationship between traditional Chinese culture and the search for modern forms of artistic expression.⁵ The xiaopin wen connects back not only to late imperial written antecedents, but also a whole system of practices and knowledge, including appreciation of the performing arts, life in the pleasure quarters, art and antique connoisseurship, landscaping, gardening, interior decoration, furniture and the appreciation of cuisine, tea and incense throughout Chinese history. Although modern Chinese culture was to a large extent founded in the early twentieth century on a rejection of “tradition,” many modern cultural figures such as Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Lin Yutang, Feng Zikai, Liang Shiqiu embraced the informal essay, not because they resisted modernizing, but because they found within it a sophisticated subject position that was both distinctively Chinese while also having socially progressive tendencies and more compatibility (they thought) with the modern world than orthodox Confucianism was. The Chinese discourse of leisure extends to intellectual history and debates about the individual, subjectivity, the interpretation of the classics, as well as the relationship between pleasure, sensual experience and spiritual enlightenment. The question of whether leisure activity presented in a positive light is a perennial aspect of Chinese culture or a particularly late imperial/early modern phenomenon, and its relationship to cultural modernity has yet to be fully explored. Finally, the culture of leisure raises questions about its relationship with counterparts like labor, business and governance—whether they are opposed, combined or complement each other, as well as the roles of servants, hosts, guests and performers in leisure activities.

Another motivation for our symposium project is to work against the tendency to cast both traditional and modern Chinese culture in the form of an almost puritanical seriousness toward life and livelihood. The awareness of this limitation can be dated back some decades to Lin Yutang's The Importance of Living.⁶ A risk posed by study and explanation of the Confucian tradition in particular, and shared by the study of China's modern revolutions and the socialist society that has resulted from them, is the notion that Chinese cultural figures approached issues of the good life and good government with an attitude of persistent seriousness, when in truth there have been vigorous voices extolling pleasure and zest for life even under difficult circumstances throughout history. Although James Hargett is dismissive of Lin's claims in his article, Lin Yutang was, with Zhou Zuoren, a fervent and earnest advocate of the modern literature of leisure under the influence primarily of the xiaopin wen essay, and this can be observed in his Chinese writings as well as his English works.⁷

While our authors take as their point of departure the conventionally accepted concept of leisure as time unencumbered by work or duty during which one engages in recreational activities, I want to emphasize that they show us much more. This issue can be illuminated by reference to some terminology. The phrase “the literature of leisure” in my book title derives from a modern Chinese phrase xianqing wenxue 閒情文學 that is often used to refer to the kind of writing I explore in it. James Hargett, the contributor who devotes the most attention to terminology and its definition, raises a number of Chinese terms (xian 閒, xia 暇, jia 假 and xiu 休) but interestingly he does not use the binomial xianqing 閒情. This term goes at least back to the title of Li Yu's (1611–80) early Qing Xianqing ouji 閒情偶記 (1671), a defining text in the literature of leisure with comments and anecdotes ranging through the topics of dramatic criticism, gastronomy, interior decoration, topiary … in a word, all aspects of domestic and private enjoyments. What the term xianqing in his title has that the notion of “leisure” as being only a category of time does not is qing 情 or “feeling.” As we continue through this introductory essay, the importance of this will become increasingly clear: as an evolving Chinese written discourse, leisure is as much a state of mind as it is a special type of activity.

What we are interested in is how people proactively endeavor to enjoy life when given the opportunity, how they think about it, and how they write about it. In this respect our papers view leisure activity and its memorialization in writing as intentional and thoughtful gestures toward achieving the goal of liberating oneself from care and obligation. Unlike the modern industrial conception of leisure as the exclusive amusements (world travel, polo, bridge, sailing, formal dinners and cocktail parties) of higher social classes who are not encumbered by labor, or with modern cultures of commercial entertainment and amusement for the working classes in their time off the clock, Chinese elites for millennia have shown in certain kinds of prose writing (travelogues, diaries, biji miscellanea and even philosophical works) both that they may cultivate a leisurely state of mind in the course of their official duties, but also that when not serving in an official appointment, they might nevertheless be strenuously exerting themselves in the pursuit of the collection and appreciation of art and antiques, which one might normally think of as something other than work. We may also observe that someone writing about enjoying wine and scenery with other cherished companions may in fact be full of worries about the troubled times, political struggles and suffering among the people.

Taken individually, each of our authors defines leisure for the purpose of his or her own essay with much in common but notable differences. Anne Kinney, who examines early texts from the Zuo zhuan and Shang shu to the Analects and Zhuangzi, takes “leisure” to mean “an activity that serves no specific political or religious agenda.” She shows that the representation of leisure activities in early writings, including the collecting of exotic animals, drinking, and even such sartorial eccentricity as wearing snipe feather caps, is overwhelmingly negative, usually being behavior of specific rulers or nobility that led them astray from the way of propriety and order. Moreover Kinney argues that the Zhuangzi, the beloved Daoist work which we might at first think celebrates leisure, actually “goes beyond the mere distinctions of work and relaxation to a realm that transcends distinctions such as joy and sorrow or pleasure and pain,” and references enjoyment and rest mainly as manifestations of making use of the useless. In this Kinney implies that “relaxation” away from work is part of the definition of leisure, but it must also be observed that the Daoist image of the True (or Perfected) Man is usually presented in the Zhuangzi as being relaxed and carefree, and as such has been an important model for the discourse of leisure in later ages.

It is only in the Analects that Kinney finds the ascription of positive value to leisure as “an exercise in getting outside of an ongoing agenda of self-promotion in order to revitalize the spirit and reassess what is really important.” She illustrates this with the famous passage in which Confucius surveys four of his disciples about their aspirations; while three of them express ambition to practice rulership in one way or another, Zeng Xi (Dian) declares that

In the last month of spring, when the spring garments have been completed, along with five or six young men who have assumed the cap, and six or seven boys, I would bathe in the Yi, enjoy the breeze at the Rain Dance altar, and return home singing.

Zeng Xi's restorative frolicking is presented as part of the broad spectrum of self-cultivation that is outside of, but essential to the practice of principled public service and government. Kinney describes this “outside” as “political disengagement,” caused by the growing perception that there are unprincipled and unfit rulers and that worthy men at times could find better things to do than abet their misdeeds. So while a space has been created here for activity that serves no specific political or religious agenda, the gentleman still needs to redeem himself in terms of a capacity to potentially rule well under the right circumstances. That is, Zeng Xi can enjoy his retreat, and it even ennobles him, but at some point he must re-enter society and perform his role as a Confucian gentleman.

James Hargett devotes more space to the question of definition, adding the important distinction between “leisure” as referring to the free or uncommitted time that may be at a person's disposal, and “recreation,” or the activities that may be conducted in times of leisure. Hargett's article on Su Shi's travel writing takes several of the early texts and themes examined in Kinney's article as a point of departure to situate records of travel like Su's in the Song dynasty as leisure writing. Hargett further makes the point that “only a very small segment of the population in China enjoyed leisure on any sort of regular basis and the opportunities for pleasure it offered,” which suggests the element of class or social status involved in leisure, as modern Western studies of leisure generally emphasize. Hargett's observation about the travails of the lower classes is certainly true, but the implication that non-elites in China never had any fun probably goes too far, and the problem here again is in the assumption of leisure as necessarily being time unoccupied with work. I think it is fair to say that even extremely hardworking farmers and laborers found the means to enjoy themselves (as at temple fairs and seasonal festivals) without necessarily having a lot of free time to do so. But that is beyond the scope of this study in that their amusements, which fall into the broader scope of leisure culture, only have an indirect relation to the written discourse of leisure. That is, non-elites would not have been writing about their amusements, and we usually would only be able to learn about them through the observation and description of them by elites.

Though recreational activities had existed for centuries before, one of the crucial points Hargett makes is that there was a huge expansion in recreational activity during the Song. His article focuses on a genre of prose writing, the “daytrip account” youji 遊記 which Hargett describes as a new literary trend that would continue throughout the late imperial period, narrating excursions undertaken primarily for the purpose of pleasure. Hargett contrasts the more leisurely “daytrip accounts” from the more “serious-minded” commemorative accounts (ji 記, as on the construction or renovation of towers, pavilions and the like) from which daytrip accounts descended. Hargett then points out some features that emerged with this new, more “light-hearted” prose essay, including recommendations for touring certain sites, comments on earlier writers’ poetry and prose on the sites visited, a dynamic style for description of natural scenery, and perhaps most importantly, the expression of more optimistic attitudes even in the midst of difficulty than were seen previously in prose accounts and most poetry as well. Thus in Su Shi's daytrip writing, we see much more than written evidence of recreation taken at leisure, we see that writing about such activities takes on a style and mindset of its own, and it is in this sense that we can observe the development of a discourse of leisure, a way of reading and writing that to some extent itself becomes a recreational activity.

Cong Ellen Zhang takes this further into Song prose by looking at a typical biji (miscellaneous writings) collection, Wang Bizhi's Record of Enjoyable Conversations at Sheng River. Zhang does not define leisure as such, but she does attend to the matter of its justification as subject matter befitting publication both by looking at the two prefaces to Wang Bizhi's collection, analyzing its organization into chapters, and analyzing the vocabulary used among Song biji generally and within Wang Bizhi's work in particular. We see something of what Kinney calls the “space created by political disengagement” in the leisure activities of middle- or low-ranking Song officials, but not with the sense of implicit frustration at unworthy rulership Kinney sees in Warring States texts. Rather, Wang Bizhi, Man Zhongxing and their friends find pleasure and intrinsic value in their informal interactions that is separate from the values of formal philosophical or political writing: “we cannot help but notice the author's overwhelmingly positive representation of these gatherings.” Hargett also points out that a defining feature of Su Shi's day trip accounts is their optimism and positive imagery; Zhang shows that this enthusiasm is more than an element of Su Shi's personality, but a phenomenon in Song informal prose writing more generally.

Their optimistic and appreciative attitude is comparable to that of Zeng Xi's bathing in and singing by the river (including emphasis on companionship, which is a common thread throughout the discourse of leisure), but there is an important difference. Zeng Xi's aspiration comes before the beginning of a career that could place him in a lofty political position, whereas Wang Bizhi is reflecting on his experiences in officialdom at the end of his career, and his attribution of value in his collection is not (as so much in the Analects is) for the instructive articulation or performance of a correct attitude for a gentleman, but for his own amusement in his waning years, as well as that of his readers. What Zhang describes as the “utility” of the biji collection is actually itself recreation—in the form of reading—which is perhaps why the emergence and proliferation of biji as well as Hargett's “daytrip accounts” in the Song is so interesting. It not only validates recreational activities such as tourism and partying by writing about them, but the texts produced also become recreational reading material.

This sense of the alternative value of informally shared stories of valor and loyalty is also central to the emergence of short and long fictional writing, which also began to proliferate in the Song and expanded rapidly through the late imperial period, as can be seen especially in Feng Menglong's defense of fiction in his preface to his first collection of vernacular stories, Gujin xiaoshuo (Stories Old and New, ∼1621),⁸ Jin Shengtan's preface to the Shuihu zhuan (Outlaws of the Marsh, or The Water Margin, 16th c.) with its celebration of the enjoyment of informal gatherings of friends,⁹ not to mention Cao Xueqin's wholehearted admiration of the virtue and powerful personalities of the young elite women he had known in his life as an inspiration for Honglou meng (Story of the Stone, or Dream of the Red Chamber, 1791),¹⁰ a novel that more than most others can be viewed as an elaborate parade of Chinese elite leisure activities.

Zhang's essay also addresses the issues of (lack of) privacy and the necessity of morally redeeming value raised in Kinney's paper, when she discusses how the enjoyment of social interaction had to be not only edifying, but the pleasures depicted could not be excessive or undignified:

But just as a ruler was always supposed to be on duty, a gentleman scholar was expected to never relax from his official obligations and moral cultivation. For this reason, both parties were ever careful in upholding an image of responsible entertainment, as the dividing line between the proper measure of emotional engagement and excessive excitation was a fine one.

This tension or problem goes to the core of this symposium, the definition of “leisure” as spare time, time in which one could choose freely how to conduct oneself in recreational activities. In the premodern Chinese context, especially where leisure is examined through writing, it is never this simple. The public quality of committing leisurely pursuits to writing, the concern for reputation among elites that would constrain one from excessive indulgence in pleasure, ensured that the written and spoken discourses of leisure would strive to articulate redeeming value in these activities, even when they were not conventionally productive or did not include obligatory “business” to be conducted. So what we are studying here is not what people choose to do with their free time, but rather the emergence of an alternative value system on the basis of informal interactions, particularly of social elites, in premodern China.

Given this attention to the pleasures of social interaction and banter as a subject for writing, one must acknowledge the legacy of medieval collections such as the Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 (A New Account of Tales of the World) and other collections compiled under its influence. These compendia of anecdotes are not as trivial as orthodox taxonomies would imply—they embody the assertion of values that both resonate with and challenge those of the Confucian canon, embracing eccentricity, valorizing political disengagement and more importantly wit and wisdom as an alternative greatness to that of moral rectitude. The poetry of the Six Dynasties, particularly that of eccentrics, hermits and prolific travelers like Ruan Ji, Tao Qian and Xie Lingyun, as well as of landscape painting, no doubt also helped create space for Su Shi's exhilaration in nature.¹¹ The celebration of drinking referenced in Wang Bizhi's biji echoes Tao Qian's legendary zest for wine, and contrasts the harsh criticism evinced in the pre-Qin “Announcement about Liquor” in Kinney's article. In fact, if we view leisure not only as the availability of time and certain recreational activities that can be enjoyed at leisure, but also as an attitude or a state of mind, it seems to me that in the Chinese context, expressing enthusiasm for drinking wine would seem to be central to it, especially as this at once pushes back against the puritanical admonishments of Confucian texts and also celebrates conviviality among friends as an important value.

Timothy Brook rounds out our leisurely journey in the Ming dynasty with a close look at the diary of Li Rihua (1565–1635) that illustrates his activities as a connoisseur and collector of art and rare objects. In it, Brook challenges another implication of the definition of leisure as unoccupied time: that leisure must be restful and inactive. The picture Brook paints of Li Rihua's daily life is one of frenetic and exhausting activity, even though he uses the same basic definition of leisure that the other contributors do. From the point of view of officialdom, the somewhat disaffected scholar official Li Rihua managed to relieve himself of public service halfway into his career, at which point he turned his efforts to the art market. The study reveals much; clearly Li loved what he was doing, it was not official business and he did it as a matter of personal choice, so his art trading seems to fit the consensus definitions of recreational activity, but it does not appear to have been relaxing or restorative at any point, and did not seem to be aimed at returning to public service: “Leisure, at least in Li's case, was not sitting about doing nothing; it was an intermittently intensive enterprise that placed heavy demands on his time, attention, and physical stamina.” On August 14, the first day not devoted to examining and evaluating art objects, even Brook describes his accompanying a drinking friend on a lake excursion as being “dragged off.” As Brook puts it later, “There were times when a man of leisure was too busy to follow through on all that his leisure activities demanded.”

There are definitely moments at which Li expresses pleasure, but there seem to be more at which he is annoyed. Part of this is due to the different literary vehicle—the diary, which as Brook points out was a form of writing more significant than scholars have realized. With this in mind we can see some things in common between Li Rihua and Wang Bizhi. Although they adopt different genres, they are similar genres made up of brief prose entries that come together to create a variegated but loosely unified whole (even if the whole text is not available, as is the case with Li Rihua's diary). The difference is that the subject matter of Li Rihua's text is confined to his own daily activities, while Wang Bizhi was celebrating a broad, connected community of men who admired extraordinary stories and people. At the same time, Li Rihua does not come across even in his own diary as being one in a million—he has friends, including those he looks up to—who have similar interests, and he is able to easily make contact with others in the art trade as he travels about, even on family business. As a result, Li Rihua's diary is also the story of what might be called an alternative community, or subculture, of connoisseurship and trade in antiquities, one in which Li played an important role, as Brook points out, as a creator of canons of calligraphy and landscape painting that are well-established today.

Brook also points out that Li took his diary seriously as a mode of self-expression. There were days on which he wrote nothing, and certain kinds of important information, such as the prices of purchases he made, were reserved for other books. From this and comments made by the author, Brook observes that “the diarist of leisure was not just writing about doing nothing. He was chronicling his engagement in activities that were ‘worth writing down’.” Brook's argument brings us back to the theme of justifying or redeeming the value of writing about what may by some be considered trivial amusements. In fact Brook is asserting that Li Rihua's activities, “leisurely” by virtue of being outside of the realm of official service and obligation, were in fact work, but they were redemptive in being meaningful and significant to the author.

Where, then, is the leisure, if bound up with both hard work and worldly cares? Is it then a category irrelevant to traditional Chinese culture? The authors here show instead that if we take leisure as a cultural gesture, pushing back or moving away from the high seriousness of orthodoxy, from the banality of factional struggles and bureaucratism, there is an alternative value invoked in the act of writing differently than one would for one's ruler or for official purposes, and this value draws upon the various strands of Chinese culture, from Buddhism and Daoism to eremitism and eccentricity. They are the voice of learned men both talking back to power but also asserting avenues of meaning outside power and wealth. It is very much the posture of the modern essayist Zhou Zuoren, brother of Lu Xun, when he writes his influential but controversial essay, “A Garden of One's Own” (Ziji de yuandi, 1923). In the face of a fragile and disorderly society in which the public sphere and even literature pressured modernized elites like Zhou to change the world with their writing, Zhou insisted instead on writing about what he pleased, even if it did not change the world.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charles A. Laughlin

Charles A. Laughlin is Ellen Bayard Weedon Chair Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Virginia. He has published extensively on Chinese literature from the 1920s to 1960s, including two books: Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience (Duke, 2002) and The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity (Hawai'i, 2008). Laughlin also edited Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature (Palgrave, 2005). His current research is on the engagement with desire from Chinese revolutionary literature to the literature and film of socialism.

Notes

1 Chris Rojek, Leisure and Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).

2 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991); Sebastian De Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1962); Seppo E. Iso-Ahola, The Social Psychology of Leisure and Recreation (Dubuque: William C. Brown Publishers, 1980); John Neulinger, The Psychology of Leisure: Research Approaches to the Study of Leisure (Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1974).

3 This is the assessment of Anthony J. Veal in his “Leisure, Culture, and Lifestyle,” Loisir et Société/Society and Leisure 24:2 (Autumn 2001), 359–76.

4 See, for example, Ann Anagnost, Andrea Arai and Hai Ren, eds., Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Judith Farquhar, Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

5 Charles A. Laughlin, The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008), 1–2.

6 Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (New York: The John Day Company, 1937), 148–51 (also discussed in James Hargett's article).

7 Lin shows how serious he is in a kind of manifesto inspired by a similar essay with the same title by Yuan Zongdao (1560–1600): Lin Yutang, “Lun wen: shang xia” 論文上下 (On writing, Parts I and II), in Dahuang ji 大荒集 (The wasteland, Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1985), 197–206.

8 Quoted in Wu-chi Liu, Introduction to Chinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 216.

9 Jin's edition of the Shuihu zhuan was published in 1641. T. K. C. Trans., “Preface to ‘Suihu’,” The China Critic March 7, 1935, 234–35.

10 Cao Xueqin, Story of the Stone: The Golden Days –Volume I (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 3–4.

11 Jack W. Chen has recently examined the Shishuo xinyu from the point of view of gossip (itself an important leisure activity, as Cong Ellen Zhang's article shows) and its role in maintaining and learning about social networks in his “Knowing Men and Being Known: Gossip and Social Networks in the Shishuo xinyu,” in Jack W. Chen and David Schaberg, eds., Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 55–70. He also applies data analysis to the mapping of social networks in the Shishuo xinyu in “The Shishuo xinyu as Data Visualization,” Co-authored with Zoe Borovsky, Yoh Kawano, and Ryan Chen, Early Medieval China 20 (2014): 22–58, a methodology that could be expanded both to biji and diaries. For Shishuo xinyu as the fountainhead of anecdotal compilations, see Nanxiu Qian. Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-Shuo Hsin-Yü and Its Legacy (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001).