Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern Community: Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei, and Lu Xun Ban Wang In the last three decades, influential commentators on Chinese aesthetics such as Li Zehou have tended to treat poetics as a distinct topic in its own right and to valorize certain literary forms as if they transcended their socio- political environments. In his acclaimed 1981 work, The Path of Beauty, Li, a Marxian aesthetician, defended the lifestyle and writings of literati in the Wei and Jin dynasties (220–266 CE, 265–420 CE) as evoking a “humanist theme.” Though Li was generally a politically engaged writer, he argued that Wei-Jin poetics departed from the imperial ideology of the Han dynasty in a time of state collapse to revel in poetic license and behavioral eccentricity, giving rise to a “pure” mode of philosophy and genuinely lyrical and affective litera- ture. 1 This seemingly apolitical aesthetic of the “expressive and affective” gained new respectability in the 1980s in reaction to the highly politicized lit- erature of Mao-era and Cultural Revolution artworks. Indeed the “affective- expressive” mode has long been regarded as the hallmark of Chinese poetics. 2 This poetics evinces a primary focus on the expression of inner feelings and in- tents rather than on the representation of dramatic action. Haun Saussy’s read- ing of Xunzi suggests, however, that the alleged expressive mode turns out to be quite mimetic—of an ideal ritualistic activity. Aesthetics is not about art per se nor about what is beautiful. “Good” music promotes collective ritual and Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. Li Zehou, Mei de licheng (美的歷程, The Path of Beauty) (Beijing, 1981), p. 87. 2. Quoted in Haun Saussy, “Music and Evil: A Basis of Aesthetics in China,” Critical Inquiry 46 (Spring 2020): 483. Critical Inquiry 46 (Spring 2020) © 2020 by The University of Chicago. 00093-1896/20/4603-0003$10.00. All rights reserved.