Organizer: Feng-ying Ming, Middlebury College
Chair: Ping-hui Liao, Harvard-Yenching Institute
Discussant: Theodore Huters, University of California, Los Angeles
Scholars on this panel describe different aspects of the late-Qing cultural transformation; working with previously unstudied materials, they attempt to unpack the scholarly construction of the late-Qing in detail. The issues they deal with include: What complexities are involved when we approach the 1890s and early 1900s in terms of the "May Fourth" or the "modern"? How do we perceive the late-Qing condition as a shifting expression of equilibrium among the many forces that constitute it? These papers highlight the pervasive unstability embedded in this period of Chinese history, when seen in light of gender, nationalism, material culture, language, and narrative.
Siao-chen Hu examines the multifarious positions on heroism, sexuality, and domesticity taken in tanci written by women in the late Qing and finds that they go beyond the monolithic agenda of national salvation advocated by the New Novelists. Alexander Des Forges traces the reception of Wu dialect novels in the Shanghai urban milieu, pointing out the tension between the regional culture and the national literary form. Meng Yue contextualizes the formation of the commercial culture and explores its relationship with the institutionalized translation bureau, the family-style enterprises, and the configuration of the literati-merchant class in the late-Qing era. Feng-ying Ming unpacks the scholarly constructions of "late-Qing" by analyzing the differing accounts of the lives and works of the selected late-Qing writers, suggesting that "late-Qing" is constructed by later scholars with different critical apparatuses and cultural preoccupations. As a group, the papers show the diversity and the contention of the late-Qing cultural life that have been neglected in previous scholarship.
National Crisis Feminized: Heroism, Sexuality, and Domesticity in the Late-Qing Tanci
by Women
Siao-chen Hu, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Did late-Qing women writers ever conform to the national discourse? Were they active agents of enlightenment or passive pupils? How did the traditionally defined "talented women" respond to contemporary national crisis? My paper looks into these questions by reading three late-Qing "narratives in verse" (tanci) by women-Liuhuameng (Dream of the Pomegranate Flowers), Jingzhongzhuan (The Northern Song Loyalists), and the Fengshuangfei (The Phoenixes). Liuhuameng reflects an ambitious woman's vision of heroine saviors. The latter two, however, relocate the national crisis in a remote historical context. Jingzhongzhuan rewrites the classical legend of Yue Fei the loyal general, basically transforming the masculine heroic story into a style more accessible to women. Fengshuangfei, on the other hand, galloped across the imaginary field of warfare and male homosexual love. The unconventional choice of topics allows these women writers to perceive the male world of court and frontier through the eyes of feminized characters.
The authors of these three works can all be categorized as "talented women." Their works would have been considered "defective classical narratives" by the standard of the New Novel. In contrast to the progressive tanci such as Qui Jin's work, their works were more related to the tradition of female literary tanci, of less ideological propaganda and with more literary complexities. While incorporating the treatment of national crisis in their works, these three women writers clung to the conventions of domesticity and female fantasy. Their voice should be reincorporated into our re-evaluation of the late Qing.
Writing in Tongues: Wu Dialect Novels in Turn-of-the-Century Shanghai
Alexander Des Forges, Princeton University
In 1892, Han Bangqing began to publish his novel Haishang Hua Liezhuan (Lives of Shanghai Flowers) in Shanghai. This was the first of the "Wu dialect novels," novels in which the dialogue between characters is carried on either in Suzhou hua or in Shanghai hua; it was frequently reprinted. Other Wu dialect novels soon followed, and continued to appear over the next two decades. But by the mid-1920s, despite the interest expressed in the genre by scholars like Hu Shi and Liu Fu, new Wu dialect novels had ceased to appear; though the booming metropolis of Shanghai remained a favorite setting for novels, a new generation of characters spoke only in baihua.
This paper will first examine the relationship between the late nineteenth-century revolution in Shanghai's printing industry-including the publication of fiction in installments-and the use of local dialects in the novels. The second focus will be on the changed relationship between the narrator and the story told that accompanies this differentiation between the narrative voice and the "recorded dialogue" of the characters. The tensions engendered by the self-conscious introduction of a new mimetic technique led to a significant reworking of inherited understandings of the xiaoshuo form. Finally, I hope to show that the decline of the Wu dialect novel was intimately related to a new conception of the novel as the "national" literary form-the most favored genre in the textual hierarchy-in which dialects perceived as regional had no place.
Representing Late-Qing, Re-Presenting the Past: A Case Study of Late-Qing Writer,
Entrepreneur, and Popular Scientist, Chen Diexian
Feng-ying Ming, Middlebury College
In the late-Qing period, we found the cultural "accessories" that constituted the conventional literati life changed along with the rise of a literati-merchant class. Chen Diexian's work exemplifies such a transformation. Even as he wrote traditional romantic novels, in which he identified with the prototypical Chinese hero Jia Baoyu, Chen Diexian was keenly interested in western science and technology. He turned his traditional study into a chemistry laboratory, entertained his friends with exotic western products, experimented with various kinds of mechanic inventions, and founded a toothpaste manufacturing company in Shanghai. His life is emblematic of the late-Qing cultural life. How do we "read" late-Qing writers such as Chen Diexian? What are the conceptual imperatives that might condition our interpretation of the late-Qing works? What is the problem if we take "modern" as an authoritative source of meaning in our examination the late-Qing culture?
This paper seeks to contextualize the scholarly constructions of "late-Qing" by analyzing the differing accounts of Chen Diexian's life and works. I will show how a variety of critical apparatuses and cultural preoccupations colored the perception of late-Qing in these diverse accounts. I will also suggest that late-Qing works, such as Chen Diexian's, illustrate the complex process whereby the discourses of "western learning" mingle with, and are complicated by, the discourses of nationalism, exoticism, and traditional Chinese narrative. This analysis will lead to my view that late-Qing can be read as an alternative case of the Chinese "modern."
Amateur Sciences, Marginal Industry, and a Culture of Modern Commerce: Jiangnan
Arsenal and the Rise of Advertisement in China
Meng Yue, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper explores social and cultural practices of learning, manufacturing, and selling of chemical products prior to the emergence of professional chemists and modern chemistry (in western sense) in China during the late 1920s. Drawing on the evidence from the pre-modern and post-traditional period of Chinese history, this paper challenges the existing formation of "the modern moment" of Chinese sciences, culture, and social class. Examining the historical practices of modern sciences by different social members, this paper seeks to reconstruct an alternative order of change and to reinterpret the meaning of "modern" perceived in the late Qing and early Republican era.
Using the translated textbooks and curriculums applied in the Jiangnan Arsenal (1867-1905) as a starting point, this paper looks into the founding and development of Chinese medicine and cosmetic industries, and seeks a link between the uprising commercial culture based upon such a material modernity and the configurating stratum of Jiangnan literati/merchant. This paper will also use the social and cultural background of a group of amateur scientists, entrepreneurs, medical men, and business speculators, to show how they adapt chemical industry and advertisement to engage with the imperialist, colonial, official, and non-official competitions. In this way, this paper suggests that the late-Qing social and cultural changes reveal an ironical contrast to the western experience of modernity. The late-Qing amateur sciences and speculating merchants generated a commercial culture diverse from both the west and the late imperial China. Their cultural engagement can be read as an illustrating example of an unexplored late Qing experience.