China and the West

Oscar Wilde : Rezeption in China allgemein.
Bonnie S. McDougall : In the debates which took place in the early stages of the new movement in China, Oscar Wilde's name did not commonly appear, nor did he provide the major inspiration to any group of young writers. He did have some influence : the Xin yue she (Crescent Moon Society) writers acknowledged his theories on art.
Wilde's work had much to offer the creators and critics of China's new literature. On the social side, there is his defence of individualism and of feminism, his criticism of governments and politicians, his exposure of the moral poverty underlying conventional respectability and his contribution to libertarian socialism ; on the artistic side, apart from the actual example set by his own work, there is his stress on the importance of criticism in art, and on the importance of art in literature. If there were other aspects of his writing left unexplored or unappreciated, such as his ideas on abstract art, or his general theory of making an art of life, this is hardly to be wondered at, the violent prejudice which led most English and American critics to dismiss him as 'insincere' and 'frivolous', obscured Wilde's standing in his own country for many years. It is even possible that the initial enthusiasm for Wilde in China was dampened by the unfavourable remarks of these critics who had an undue influence among the intellectually impressionable young critics of the early twenties. Neither in China nor in England could censorious critics prevent the widespread popularity of Wilde's fairy-tales and plays.
For Chinese readers, less dazzled by the brilliance of Wilde's wit and remembering his persecution in England, the satire of the plays was sharp and powerful. Again, less aware of the luxury and artificiality of his personal life, they were able to believe in the sincerity of the fairy-tales and prose-poems, which describe the beauty of humility and simplicity.
Wilde's theories on art and literature were neglected in the early period of the new literary movement, though there is some evidence that the Crescent group took them up in the late twenties and early thirties. None of the critics seems to have said that he liked Wilde's plays simply because they were very funny.

Zhou Xiaoyi : The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a 'Wilde-mania' throughout China. After his tragic death in Paris in 1900, the English aesthete was introduced into China as the figure head of England's aesthetic movement. Chinese responses to his works, which adumbrate the principle of art for art's sage, were enthusiastic. A large number of Chinese writers were attracted to aestheticism and produced voluminous works in the aesthetic style. Wilde was regarded as the symbol of an artistic lifestyle and the major representative of those Western writers who lived cloistered away from the ordinary world and devoted themselves entirely to pure art.
Wilde was first introduced into China not simply as a writer of a Western literary genre entirely new to the Chinese, but mainly as an apostle of pure art or, to be more specific, a practitioner of a new way of life.
The aesthetic ideas of Wilde that attracted modern Chinese writers were in many ways simplified. Wilde's earlier thinking, which developed in his first 'aesthetic' period during the 1880s, was much emphasized by his Chinese audience. In the Chinese account of Wilde, his various ideas from that period, such as art as religion, art for art's sake , and pure form as the ultimate value of artistic creation, subtle impressions and feelings, the flamboyantly aesthetic mode of being and the severe critique of the existing social order, were regarded as basic principles of aestheticism and key concepts of Wilde's thinking. But the moral radical side of Wilde and his most radical conceptions which are presented in The picture of Dorian Gray and Intentions and other essays on life and art are pointedly ignored. In 1920s and 1930s, Wilde was better known for his literary works than for his critical essays.
The Chinese reception of Wilde's works was thus highly selective. If Wilde was not entirely misread, he was at least only partially received and interpreted. His aesthetic theory and literary practice were transfigured into the forms which conformed to the social realities and cultural dynamics of China at that time. He was regarded as an artistic symbol of the time surrounded by a mysterious aesthetic aura. His life and his thought on art were widely admired, and his arguments were frequently quoted as the most important sources for Chinese modernists defending their aesthetic approach to art.
Wilde represented an idealized image that rebellious May Fourth writers could identify with. It is not the Wilde of wit and paradox that fascinated the Chinese aesthetes, it is the flamboyant Wilde, the extravagant and self-fashioning Wild, that impressed the Chinese minds questing for a new and alluring way of life.

Linda Pui-ling Wong : The reception of Wilde in China in the 1920s and 1930s, new and modern modes from the West surfaced in various areas like fashion, general Westernized appearance, schools, establishment of different social and literary communities and journals.
The Chinese intellectuals' new perception of their social and personal positions in relation to Chinese traditions, in which a different and modern mentality emerged. Such consciousness warred against the conservative Confucian mode of thinking and engendered new, or anti-traditional, visions of the concept of self.
Wilde was widely known for his extravagant and eccentric clothes, which was a mark of his 'aesthetic dandyism'. Guo Moruo condemned such a movement which was entirely external and had nothing to do with inner problems.
The Chinese writers, as seen in their commentaries and essays, praised Wilde for being a phenomenal literary figure of the nineteenth-century, especially for his leading position in the aesthetic movement. Their reviews and comments on Wilde's work basically were consistent with those of the Victorian readers. Readers of both cultures, regardless of the time and cultural lapses and gaps, understood ideas like social satire, hypocrisy, conservatism, social injustice, and class discrimination shown in his plays.