Shuming, see Zhang Huajun,“Individuality beyond the Dichotomy,” 551–555.

14. Edmund S. K. Fung, “Were Chinese Liberals Liberal?,” 571.

15. Cheng Chung-ying, “Preface,” 152.

16. Cf. Edmund S. K. Fung, “Were Chinese Liberals Liberal?,” 558, 560. Fung (“Were Chinese Liberals Liberal?,” 569) stresses that for Chinese intellectuals of the first decades of the twentieth century, individualism could not be divorced from questions of morality because it was in some ways a moral issue, and liberal morality could be built on non-individualist grounds. Rights were justified by duties to act in the interest of others. Above all, Chinese liberals did not consider individuality to be in opposition to society but considered it necessary to reconcile rights with duties, the individual with the group, the need to build a strong state and social justice with personal freedoms (572).

17. Yan Yunxiang, (“The Chinese Path to Individualization,” 509) discusses his thesis of disembedment of the individual from the family, kinship, and local community, on the one hand, and the re-embedment of the individual as socialist subject in the state-controlled redistributive system, on the other.

18. Ibid., 489–512. Emphasis is mine. Yan Yunxiang’s essays (including “Introduction: Conflicting Images”) reveal the inadequacy of any theory—from neoliberal to Marxist or Foucauldian theory—to explain the growth of individualism. One may simply interpret the Maoist “individualization” as an attempt of industrialization while still maintaining the rural social structure and replacing the intermediary groups with a totalitarian state organization.

19. Gernet, Tang Zhen.

20. Wang Yuanhua, “A Letter to a Friend,” 81–84.

21. Zhang Huajun, “Individuality beyond the Dichotomy,” 544–545. See also Hansen and Svarverud, iChina, for various aspects of the individualization processes and collective belonging and identity in contemporary China. I borrow the term used by Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 123–129, 331.

22. Beyond the great interest in psychology, sentimental affairs, and individual perspectives, several apparently secondary social phenomena were paradigmatic, for instance the diffusion of Teresa Teng’s banned romantic songs that can be summed up by the popular saying “listening to the old Deng [Xiaoping] during daytime, and listening to the young Deng