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The opening chapter frames love as difficult to find in contemporary China while describing early twentieth-century debates about marriage, equality, and “true love.” It situates key cultural change in Shanghai’s treaty-port publishing world and highlights how Western ideas influenced writers and stories, including Eileen Chang’s “Stale Mates.”",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":15,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/when-true-love-came-to-china/608028/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/when-true-love-came-to-china/608028.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"xXChrisXx","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-22","2026-10-17",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":8},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"Why does the chapter say pure love is hard to find in China, and what is the historical context?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"It argues that romantic love was not treated as a deciding priority in choosing marriage partners, except among a minority. It then connects changing views to debates that intensified in the years leading up to 1949, when older customs began to shift.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"What role did Shanghai play in changing Chinese attitudes to love, sex, and marriage?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"Shanghai functioned as a Westernized treaty-port publishing center where books, magazines, and translations introduced new ideas about love. The chapter describes a 1920s boom in periodicals and columns focused on romance, divorce, and mate selection.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"How does Eileen Chang’s “Stale Mates” relate to the book’s theme?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"The chapter explains that the story is set in the early 1920s and explicitly echoes its subtitle about love arriving in China. It uses the narrative’s portrayal of young people reading Western poetry and discussing beloveds to illustrate a “universal predicament” before marriage and parenthood became common.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},608028,1792633080,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":14,"category_name":15,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":8,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":144,"read_time":145},8796112263567,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_3d24733baf745e90a7e4bdd5f77d97b2","When True Love Came to China  \nLynn Pan  \nHong Kong University Press The University of HongKong Pokfulam Road  \nHongKong  \n[www.hkupress.org](www.hkupress.org)  \n© 2015 HongKong University Press ISBN 978-988-8208-80-7 (Hardback)  \nAll rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.  \nBritish Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data  \nA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.  \n10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1  \nPrinted and bound by Hang Tai Printing Co., Ltd. in Hong Kong, China  \nContents  \nAcknowledgements vii 1. Love’s Entrée 2  \n2. Confucius and Freud 14  \n3. Love in the Western World 26  \n4. Keywords 50  \n5. Two Great Works on Love 74  \n6. The Camellia Lady 88  \n7. Joan Haste and Romantic Fiction 98  \n8. The Clump 108  \n9. Two Ways of Escape 120  \n10. Faust, Werther, Salome 138  \n11. Ellen Key 154  \n12. One and Only 170  \n13. Looking for Love: Yu Dafu 190  \n14. Exalting Love: Xu Zhimo 208  \n15. Love Betrayed: Eileen Chang 230  \n16. Love’s Decline and Fall 254  \n17. Afterthoughts 278  \nNotes 285  \nReferences 309  \nIndex 319  \n1 Love’s Entrée  \nWith love being in an embryonic state in the China of today, pure love is hard to find.  \nChen Guangding, in The Ladies’Journal, 1926  \n‘We don’t put much store by love,’ you hear the Chinese say of themselves, not in any tone of self-depreciation but matter-of-factly. In one sense it is true: except among a small minority, romantic love is not felt to be of overriding importance in the choice of whom the Chinese marry.  \nSmall as that minority is, it is still considerably larger than it was in the early years of the twentieth century, when all marriages were arranged by parents through appointed go-betweens, and no one chose their own spouses on the basis of romantic love. At the urging of the intellectual vanguard of the time, this millennia-old custom began to change in the years leading up to the communist revolution in 1949. It was to the start of this change that the person quoted in the epigraph to this chapter traced the‘embryonic state’ of love in 1926.  \nOf course, not to marry for love is not necessarily to be innocent of love: lovelessly married Chinese men had immemorially looked to courtesans and concubines for romance. But that was not true love, according to those intellectuals, for it could only be that with the exercise of free will and the attainment of man-woman equality; love was only true if it was a relationship freely entered into on the basis of man-woman equality. And since relations were neither free nor equal in China, the Chinese ‘have no love to speak of,’ some said of themselves,‘Chinese don’t understand what love is, so you can’t talk about love to Chinese.’ A commentator who heard these words thought them a little exaggerated: ‘It isn’t that the Chinese don’t understand love,’ he wrote,‘it’s that we don’t get a chance at true love; and we don’t because Chinese society won’tallow it . . . and therein lies the Chinese tragedy.’ Chinese society would not allow it because it was shackled still by such age-old Confucian ritual practices as sequestering maidens, so the liberty to love was simply not there. How, he asked, are we to improve and evolve? He himself came to the conclusion that a ‘love revolution’ was needed.1  \nLove’s Entrée 3  \nCalls for such a revolution were hard to ignore in one place in particular. This was Shanghai, the most Westernized of China’s cities by virtue of its being a treaty port harbouring British, American and French concessions. China’s chief publishing centre, Shanghai was where all the books, magazines and especially translations of foreign works introducing new ways of love saw the light of day. There was a flood of these in the 1920s, a period exceptionally preoccupied with love. A per","cbCain8aWtKsOyDt","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCain8aWtKsOyDt","pdf",316052,54,"English","# Acknowledgements\n# Love’s Entrée\n# Notes\n# References\n# Index","[{\"question\":\"Why does the chapter say pure love is hard to find in China, and what is the historical context?\",\"answer\":\"It argues that romantic love was not treated as a deciding priority in choosing marriage partners, except among a minority. It then connects changing views to debates that intensified in the years leading up to 1949, when older customs began to shift.\"},{\"question\":\"What role did Shanghai play in changing Chinese attitudes to love, sex, and marriage?\",\"answer\":\"Shanghai functioned as a Westernized treaty-port publishing center where books, magazines, and translations introduced new ideas about love. The chapter describes a 1920s boom in periodicals and columns focused on romance, divorce, and mate selection.\"},{\"question\":\"How does Eileen Chang’s “Stale Mates” relate to the book’s theme?\",\"answer\":\"The chapter explains that the story is set in the early 1920s and explicitly echoes its subtitle about love arriving in China. It uses the narrative’s portrayal of young people reading Western poetry and discussing beloveds to illustrate a “universal predicament” before marriage and parenthood became common.\"}]","When True Love Came to China | PDF",1792210542,83]