One of the questions at the core of Chinese society is this: how do you take thousands of years of history and tradition and put it together with the modern world? This is the question that my research focuses on, specifically in the context of modern Chinese poetry.

Poetry is one of the ways that Chinese people, from the most elite to most average, have stayed connected to their ancient past. My project focuses specifically on perhaps the most famous collection of ancient Chinese poems, the Shijing. This is a collection of about 300 poems from the ancient Zhou dynasty, written about 3,000 years ago. It is one of the Five Confucian Classics and is one of the most famous Chinese texts. The Shijing is the source of many chengyu, or four-character sayings that most Chinese people are familiar with today. 

In the 20th century, China was facing a reckoning with the modern world, which included not just modern technology like steam engines but also dangerous modern ideas like democracy, feminism, and nationalism. At this crossroads between ancient and modern, Chinese literature and poetry were thriving because of newspapers and periodicals. There were hundreds of these publications and they helped get average people interested in issues of society and politics.

Many poets decided to publish in these periodicals about contemporary issues, like wars and free love, using poems from the Shijing as a model. They called these poems Xin Shijing, or New Shijing. My research involves finding early 20th-century newspapers and periodicals in library archives, transcribing and translating these Xin Shijing poems, and analyzing them in the historical context of Republican-era China.

Through these poems, my research advisor and I have discovered a window into Chinese society of the time. A poem about the corruption of government officials helps us examine contemporary political debates. A poem about lovers in the cinema shows daily life and free love in a conservative society. A poem about soap reveals the changing standards of beauty and sexuality. And all of these poems place these modern, intimate concerns into dialogue with ancient wisdom. 

By studying these New Shijing poems, we understand how writers used China’s classical past to envision a modern future for Chinese society.