Organizer: Vivienne Shue, Cornell University
Chair: Edward Friedman, University of Wisconsin
Wining and Dining at Public Expense in Perspective through Sayings
Helen X. Wu, University of Toronto
The past sixteen years of post-Mao China have seen a dramatic rise in the practice of officials wining and dining at public expense. Meanwhile, there have appeared a large number of sayings-a poetic form of phrases which is widely used to reflect to a considerable extent the accumulated experience of society and the current realities. This research explores mainly two groups of such sayings which have come into common use in China. The former are sayings composed by the general public who are discontent with the current situation whereas the latter have been created by officials who try to defend themselves. Both groups expose the corrupt behavior of officials who take advantage of their positions and power to seek personal gain.
Sayings, as a part of the popular expressions which have emerged among the noticeably growing neologisms in the past decade, play an important part in understanding official corruption in China, yet no attention has been paid to this aspect, despite studies of banquets and the art of social relationships in China. However, this study will go beyond the linguistic and literary phenomena in order to examine the society in which these sayings have been generated. The analysis will emphasize similar practices in ancient China and in modern times and a conclusion will be offered in socio-political terms.
Love, Sex and New Social Forms: Producing Identity and Organization in
Contemporary Beijing
Virginia Cornue, Rutgers University
This paper discusses the complex meanings and practices of love and sex which "confuse" the gendered self-perceptions of a burgeoning population of single, professional Beijing urbanites, members of China's first social club for singles.
This group stands at the nexus of competing discourses, including the "past" of socialist "tradition" and the "future" of metropolitan "modernity." The former discouraged sexual expression, and promoted equality and love for the good of others. The latter yields popular, commercial and state-produced conceptions of love explicitly saturated with individualized, assymetrical and sexual representations drawn in part from American cultural sources. These are iconographically conjoined with notions of modernity. Reinvigorated assumptions of pre-1949 ethics compete with the already edgy connection of singles to the promise of modernity-symbolized by speaking English and being "open."
Club members, children of the Cultural Revolution, acknowledge that sex is of little importance to them. Love, however, is critical. As a new social form, the club provides a fictive familial love unlike other recent organizations whose direct purpose is marriage.
Most critical for these socially displaced urbanites is the question of normality-of bodily, emotional, social and organizational gender(ed) relations. Personal interviews, a formal survey, and participant observation with associates of the club and its parent organization draw out the conflicting meanings of ethical gender behavior, romance and family in a Beijing reconstituting itself as a modern metropolis and China as a modern nation.
How Do We Write Zawen?
Mary Scoggin, University of Chicago
In this paper I will outline some of the processes that effect the contemporary production of zawen in China. Drawing on recent texts and field observations, I argue that practices surrounding the exchange, publication and other treatments of literary zawen reflect two major tendencies in Chinese intellectual relations. The first is summed up in the Confucian proverb "yi wen hui you," or "using writings to form a community." In this connection I discuss both institutional and informal links between writers, editors, "censors," and other literary associates. The line that follows "yi wen hui you" in the Confucian text, "yi you fu ren," or "using friends to convey moral personhood" neatly represents process dialectically opposite "community-making," and ultimately appeals to an individualized, independent sense of ethics related to but distinguishable from political power. A concrete examination of some of the newspapers and magazines in which zawen appear, and study of the environment zawen writers inhabit, including their work units (mostly newspapers and writers unions), their life histories, their literary social relations and specific components of their work (texts, sources, scholarship, ideologies, etc.) will lend context and insight to current views about the relationship between contemporary Chinese writers and political authority.
Contemporary Chinese Drama as Religious Experience: The Sacred and the Profane
Michelle DiBello, Stanford University
Chinese drama in the post-Mao years has come to resemble the situation of that in the West-as the gap between popular and serious literature grows in a consumerist environment, successful writing is no longer so easily defined. This is even more so for drama, dependent as it is on the audience. The breed of Chinese theater I focus on in this paper can be described as "avant garde," in that it resembles that modern Western movement, which advocated a protest to modern society, the return to "primitive roots," and spiritual transcendence. The avant gardists aimed for a religious experience, in which actor and spectator are united through emotional participation in archetypal situations, for a kind of cathartic experience which would ideally reaffirm man's spiritual potential in the face of a hostile universe. I assert that China has a "holy theater" of its own-child of the humanist intellectual cult whose ideals and privileged knowledge of Truth are increasingly threatened in a changing social climate. It signals the marginalization of these intellectuals, rendering them an exclusive group much like the Western avant gardists. Such plays show a heightened mood of tragedy and crisis, evoking religious archetypes from both indigenous and Western traditions.
One fascinating illustration of this communal theater mentality is Si fan (Longing for Worldly Pleasures). As a traditional Kunqu opera on a Buddhist theme, it was adapted to the contemporary "spoken drama" stage in 1993, loaded with avant gardist intentions. In both form and content, Si Fan marks a protest, a return to Chinese roots, and spiritual transcendence, towards an ideal of unity. However, when the Beijing audience on opening night failed to react with the hoped for spiritual change and sincerity, the young creator/director, Qi Li, was so affected that he committed suicide soon thereafter. His drastic action is not only reminiscent of the "social suicides" of Artaud, Van Gogh, and Mayakovsky, but also of the Chinese icon, Qu Yuan, famous for ending his life in order to preserve the integrity of those Confucian "higher principles" which defined his existence. Chinese drama, with its public-oriented nature and roots in religious ritual, is a major battleground of the "holy war" over such threatened ideals.
But the story of Si Fan does not end there: the play was picked up by another, more mainstream company and turned into a hugely popular comedy. Does its success as such speak of victory ,and progress for the Chinese stage-or betrayal, of an original, holy vision? Is Qu Yuan hero or fool? This question lies at the crux of the current contention among multiple moral perspectives. The answer, of course, is a matter of opinion, but the very fact that morality is no longer "understood" is significant, and represents the challenge now facing Chinese artists and intellectuals. The crisis has generated a whole era of "searching for truth," drawing on native as well as foreign cultural treasuries. Whether grounds for "hope" or "despair," the current situation does promise more change to come in the theater and other artistic arenas, and, of course, in Chinese society at large.
From Sentimental Trilogy to Gangster Trilogy: Moral Dilemmas in a Cultural Crisis
Han Chen, Indiana University, Bloomington
Wang Shuo is a compelling figure in contemporary Chinese literature. Even though he is labeled by critics as the "most subversive" writer, he is never censored by the government. The very publishing of his fiction reflects ideological loosening in China and indicates that the government has lost firm control of the cultural world and the individual's mind. Furthermore, Wang Shuo is the most popular writer with Chinese readers, especially with college students and young urban professionals. In fact, Wang Shuo's popularity has earned him discredit from some elitist critics. His depiction of the Chinese underworld in the age of economic reform is disparaged by these critics as "hooligan literature." At first glance, Wang Shuo's portrayal of popular elements such as sex and violence seems to justify the criticisms that his gangster characters have no moral conscience, that Wang Shuo embodies the spiritual deprivation of young people. But closer examination shows that Wang's portrayal is intended neither to be pure entertainment nor moralistic. As a sophisticated writer teetering on the line between popular and serious fiction, Wang Shuo's fiction registers moral consciousness in a cultural crisis, i.e., the transition from Communist to capitalist ideologies, rather than providing lessons of youth gone astray. The mixed reception of Wang Shuo is partly due to the fact that many critics overlook the transformation of an idealistic young man into a hardened criminal and elements of sentimental nostalgia in his early works. This kind of sentimentalism is crucial to the understanding of an anti-hero's conflict between moral conscience and evil seduction in his later works. To give his fiction a comprehensive treatment, I propose to trace the thematic developments of Wang Shuo, and classify six representative works of his fiction into two groups: the sentimental trilogy Kongzhong xiaojie (The Flight Attendant, 1984), Fuchu haimian (Floating Above Sea, 1985), Yiban shi huoyan, yiban shi haishui (Half is Flame, Half is Seawater, 1986) and the gangster trilogy Xiangpi ren (Rubber Man, 1986), Wanzhu (Master of Game , 1987), Wan'r de jiushi xintiao (No Fast Heartbeat, No Play, 1988). My characterization is meant to shed light on the complexity of Wang Shuo's gangster character through an examination of the developments between the two trilogies.
The sentimental trilogy raises such issues as idealism and materialism, gender and sex, morality and crime, which Wang Shuo discusses with more sensitivity and complexity as his craft reaches maturity. The sentimental trilogy not only manifests Wang Shuo's mainstream pop romanticism but also increasingly exhibits the rebellious spirit that is more substantial in his latter trilogy.
In the gangster trilogy, while Master of Game is a satire that builds its entire plot on absurdity, the "rubber man" image in Rubber Man and the narrators in Rubber Man and No Fast Heartbeat, No Play embody the moral dilemmas of Wang Shuo's alienated and self-alienating anti-hero: lonely and depressed, torn between residual morality and total dehumanization, alienated from both society and the criminal world. In a larger context, the painful and humiliating experience of the gangsters' degeneration symbolizes the demoralization of the cultural landscape-the fast loss of humanity and decency caused by the conflicting ideologies of residual Communism and mercurial commercialism.