Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 7, Number 1, 2006 ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/06/010024–19 © 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14649370500463109 The collective subjectivity of Chinese intellectuals and their café culture in republican Shanghai 1 Laikwan PANG Taylor and Francis Ltd RIAC_A_146293.sgm 10.1080/14649370500463109 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1464-9373 (print)/1469-8447 (online) Original Article 2006 Taylor & Francis 7 1 000000March 2006 LaikwanPang lkpang@cuhk.edu.hk ABSTRACT Using a brief comment by Lu Xun regarding the thriving café culture in 1920s’ Shanghai as a point of departure, this paper investigates how the male intellectuals of the time constructed, affiliated with, and practiced the café culture in the 1920s and 1930s. The paper first provides a historical overview of Shanghai’s café scene, and it investigates the general relationship between coffee and colonialism. The main body of the paper explores how Shanghai’s café culture in the Republican period was constructed in connection with male subjectivity. The paper demonstrates that the café as a gathering site was attractive to the young and educated male urbanites because it provided them a strong sense of community, based on the mutually conditioning homosocial bonding and heterosexual impulses, where they could socialize among themselves and flirt with the waitresses. It was the maleness of the café that allowed the place to embrace the seemingly opposed discourses of consumerism and revolution – the two major components of China’s cultural modernity. The paper ends with Michel de Certeua’s analysis of the ‘habitable,’ and it demonstrates that the Shanghai café is habitable to male intellectuals because it both promises and rejects the consummation of the libido, in the same way as it promises and rejects modernity. KEYWORDS: Shanghai, intellectuals, modernity, cafe, masculinity, Lu Xun In 1928, a writer named Shenzhi published a short article in a corner of the newspaper Shenbao, introducing readers to a café named Shanghai Café (Shanghai Kafei) located on Bei Sichuan lu (North Sichuan Road) of the Hongkou area. The writer reported that at this café he had found many celebrities of art and literary circles, including Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Gong Binglu, Meng Chao, and Ye Lingfeng. They were either exchanging exalted ideas among themselves or silently contemplating philosophical questions (Shenzhi 1928). Shenzhi luxu- riated in the atmosphere and wanted to introduce it to his readers as a ‘cultural paradise.’ Five days later, Yu Dafu published a short essay entitled ‘Revolutionary Advertisement’ (Geming guanggao) in the magazine Strands of Language (Yusi), in which he denounced his association with this Shanghai Café and criticized the current intellectuals’ fetishization of the concept of ‘revolution’ (Yu 1928). Lu Xun also joined Yu Dafu to ridicule this article (Lu 1928), and it was then selected into Lu Xun’s complete volume under the new title of ‘ The Café of Revolution’ (Geming de kafei dian) (Lu 1973). Lu Xun also pronounced that he had never visited this kind of café, and he despised the pretentiousness of such gathering sites. However, Lu Xun would soon frequent a famous café – Gongfei, which in the early 1930s would become the cradle of the leftist cultural movement. 2 Both the first organizing meet- ings of the Left-wing Writers’ League and the Left-wing Dramatists League were held in Gongfei (Wu 1983: 124–126; Xia 1985: 146–47; Zhao 1991: 51), and Lu Xun took the lead in many of these steering meetings that shaped the development of the left-wing culture at large. Attending this café was a strong act of identification for young intellectuals and