The Novel as Communal Form: H. T. Tsiang’s Asiatic Mode of Literary Production

Abstract Focusing on his 1937 novel And China Has Hands, this article shows how H. T. Tsiang used romantic anticapitalism to contest settler-colonialist notions of Asian economic efficiency, as well as the frequent equation of Asian subjects with abstract capital. Specifically, Tsiang drew from Marx’s long-discredited Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP) to turn our understanding of “Asiatic form” from economic efficiency to communal property, while also critiquing both imperialism in Asia and racial capitalism in the US. The article then finds in Tsiang’s use of the AMP a portable way of reading and writing geared towards claiming the past as a resource for communism rather than fascism. The key here is Tsiang’s literary unevenness, identified here as his “communal form”: the novel’s juxtaposition of modern and archaic modes of production through a combination of proletarian realism, experimental modernism, and romantic anticapitalism. The result is a case study of advancing reliably progressive ends via visions of prelapsarian wholeness.