Organizer and Chair: Mark Csikszentmihalyi, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussant: William G. Boltz, University of Washington, Seattle
Keywords: archaeology, ritual, music, sacrifice, divination.
Scholars such as Ge Zhaoguang have recently argued that excavated archaeological materials challenge us to significantly reconfigure traditional historical approaches to early China. The materials that have been unearthed in the last thirty years not only add new texts to the corpus, but fill in gaps that had been created by the selection processes of continuous transmission. As a result, areas of traditional life about which little was known, especially technical areas such as law, burial and divination, are now accessible in great detail. It remains to integrate this information into the models that remain in use.
One of the areas in which this integration is most crucial is in the discussion of ritual. Classical discussions of funeral and sacrificial rites and the promotion of the virtue of ritual propriety (li) by early writers like Xunzi have created a picture of Chinese ritual that is weighted toward court culture and moral self-cultivation. Yet there are clear continuities between these discussions and those of divination and sacrifice; they share important vocabulary, structures, and rely on a similar cast of semi-mythical characters.
This panel will examine the elements that inform both the received tradition and the recently excavated materials. Is there a thread that binds daily prohibitions and the diviner’s compass to the received tradition’s emphasis on ritual and ethics? Do they share underlying notions of contingency and cosmology, and is there a common understanding of the efficacy of ritual action? The papers in this panel will both examine particular Warring States and Early Imperial texts that deal with practices such as divination, musical performance, and sacrifice, and relate them to the Chinese term li and the English "ritual." The resulting description of early Chinese ideas about the efficacy of ritual action will be broad enough to cover both received texts and the practices revealed in newly excavated texts.
The creative aspect of this panel will follow the individual presentations. A brief "theoretical excursion" will be an open discussion of the applicability (or lack thereof) of several prominent theories of ritual action. Each participant will summarize and offer opening remarks on a particular theory. The discussant will follow the excursion.
Musical Offerings and Emotional Rhythm in the Ritual Practices of Early China
Scott Cook, Grinnell College
Warring States texts are full of references confirming the status of music and its regulated expression as a privileged part of the ritual system. The entire purpose of ritual itself is sometimes characterized in these texts as one essentially musical in nature: to "bring rhythm and pattern to human emotions" (Liji, "Fangji"). And music itself, as part of the ritual system, must in turn be regulated by these same rhythms of emotional expression: playing the proper music at the proper time, or, in some cases, simply keeping silent—doing otherwise was thought to signal dire consequences for those who commissioned such untimely performances. Indeed, recently excavated textual materials from pre-Han China reveal that the issue of timeliness in action was a continual and ubiquitous source of concern, resulting in the codification of a kind of liturgy of auspicious behavior based on Heavenly cycles of fortune. And while the received philosophical texts place their focus more on ethical concerns and inner emotional rhythms in the determination of behavioral consequences, their similar emphasis on rhythm and timeliness resonates quite closely with the concerns reflected in these divinatory calendars. Focusing on the musical aspects of ritual and the ritualized use of music as revealed in both the received and archaeological materials, this paper will address the issue of emotional rhythm both in terms of the performative aspects of ritual and music, as well as in the broader cultural context of early Chinese thought.
Divination, Omens, and in Between: Ritual and Contingency from Wangjiatai to Wang Chong
Mark Csikszentmihalyi, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This paper attempts to survey the numerous and diverse prediction methods found in recently excavated Qin and Han dynasty tomb texts, and match them against the received record. Speaking of these methods as forms of "divination" reduces the complexity of the cosmological assumptions behind these methods, and obscures very real differences between the way that different methods were seen to work.
Different prediction methods are found in tombs from roughly the same period, and sometimes in the same tomb. Predictions from the Hubei Baoshan bamboo slips were addressed to particular spirits, and results were never generalized into a result covering a class of occurrences. They show that multiple divinations could be carried out about the same matter over time, indicating actions could mitigate negative outcomes. By contrast, the Hubei Wangjiatai bamboo slips include day books (rishu) and interpretations of disasters as omens. Both are methods that epitomize the practice of predicting outcomes for a class of occurrences, and neither rely on the authority of particular spirits. A similar type of generalization is in the Guizang hexagram divination system rediscovered there.
Different ideas about the malleability of predictions and their applicability to like situations are also found in the received tradition. Ideas about the ability of ritual action to affect change in other spheres break down along similar lines. These explanations and criticisms of rituals of prediction provide evidence for a more accurate and robust view of early Chinese religion.
Placing the Spirits: The Art of Sacrifice in Early China
Michael Puett, Harvard University
The issue of sacrifice in early China has been a topic of lengthy discussion in both anthropological and Sinological studies. However, paleographic materials discovered over the past several decades have greatly expanded our understanding of both the competing forms of sacrificial practice employed in early China and the complex contexts within which these practices were formulated and debated. We are now in a position to re-evaluate our understanding of these issues, and to develop a more nuanced historical interpretation of them.
In this paper, I will attempt to re-examine the debates that emerged in early China concerning the nature, efficacy, and significance of sacrifice by analyzing some of these competing practices and exploring the concerns that underlay them. Using both paleographic materials and received texts, I will analyze why sacrifice became a prominent topic of debate during this period, discuss some of the differing ways that sacrifice was defined and employed, and explicate how this debate was connected to the larger arguments of the time concerning the relationship between humans and spirits.
Organizer: Alison J. Dray-Novey, College of Notre Dame of Maryland
Chair and Discussant: Beatrice S. Bartlett, Yale University
Keywords: Beijing, China, history, 1900–1925
Beijing in the first quarter of the twentieth century was a city of two-wheeled country carts, rickshaws, and motorcars—a mixture of old, new, and even newer. During this period, the imperial gendarmerie, which existed until 1924, was being supplanted by a modernized city police force. Especially after the 1911 fall of the Qing dynasty, which always had given Beijing special treatment and resources, authorities in the city saw the need for municipal taxation to support public services such as police. Whereas the gendarmerie traditionally had dealt mainly with males, and with different ethnic groups in distinct city territories, the new police and taxation measures focused on the urban population of about 800,000 as a whole, male and female, Chinese and Manchu. Women had rarely taken part in the street crowd before the twentieth century. Now they began to be more visible and active in the streets, adding a new dimension to police problems of social reform, charity, and control of public space. This panel explores the emerging Beijing public realm ca. 1900–1925 from the perspectives of police, municipal taxation, and gender.
Women on the Street: Gender, Class, and Female Expansion in the Public Space in Early-Twentieth-Century Beijing
Weikun Cheng, California State University, Chico
The urban public space in China is becoming a new dimension of scholarly inquiry, but little attention has been so far devoted to women in the public space. This article thus examines women’s use of urban public space through analyzing their street activities. The street is accessible for everyone, but it is a gendered place where women are restricted, discriminated, and harassed by men. The street is also a place for women’s living, working, celebration, and entertainment. The ideological separation of public sphere and private sphere is not entirely correspondent to the spatial division between sexes, and women have many opportunities to present themselves on the street. How do women use the street and why? What kinds of activities do women sponsor on the street? Do upper-class and lower-class women use the street distinctively? What is the attitude of the state toward women’s public freedom?
Based on archives, newspapers, magazines, memos, legal documents, guidebooks, and many other primary sources, this paper reveals the linkage between the street and women’s lives. The paper is divided into five sections: using streets for festivals, working on the street, seeking street harmony and justice, ordering the street, and female expansion in the public space. In the conclusion, I argue that women’s use of public space is diversified by class, transformed by modern trends, and politicized by the feminist movement.
The Twilight of the Beijing Gendarmerie, 1900–1924
Alison J. Dray-Novey, College of Notre Dame of Maryland
The modernized city police founded in Beijing in the aftermath of the Boxer uprising did not occupy the urban stage alone. The imperial gendarmerie had institutional roots as old as the Ming dynasty and had carried on systematic police activity with a force of over 33,000 men during the nineteenth century. Beijing under the Qing had been characterized by a multiple-police structure in which the large gendarmerie acted in competitive balance with other authorities such as the Censorate and the two districts (xian) of which Beijing was composed. In the decade between the Boxer uprising and the fall of the Qing dynasty, and even afterward until 1924, a smaller gendarmerie continued functioning in a multiple structure that now included a separate, modernized city police organization.
Although records of the new Beijing police generally do not mention the gendarmerie, the reverse is not the case. Documents ca. 1900–1910 in the First Historical Archives in Beijing show the gendarmerie leadership communicating with the new police and sharing personnel with them. They also describe gendarmerie operations continuous with the Qing past, for example, guarding avenues, walls and gates; tracking provincial shipments of silver ingots into the city; repairing roads and watchposts; protecting the imperial family and high officials when outside the Forbidden City; arresting criminals and gangs; and closely watching arrivals and departures at the new railway stations. As late as 1921 the gendarmerie was providing soup kitchens for the poor and still occupying the headquarters in the northern part of the Inner City where it had been since the eighteenth century. It is probable that when the gendarmerie was extinguished in 1924, some of its members were absorbed by the new police.
The record of the almost quarter century of co-existence of modernized city police and the older gendarmerie reveals how new organizations were built up partly from the debris of the old, how not only foreign but also indigenous models underlay the rapid rise of a distinctive modern Chinese institution, the urban police.
Municipal Taxation in Early-Twentieth-Century Beijing
Mingzheng Shi, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Urban residents in late imperial China paid no taxes. The lack of a municipal tax structure in the late imperial period can be attributed to the lack of independent status of Chinese municipalities. In the Qing dynasty, most Chinese cities were governed by county seats. Daxing and Wanping, two counties in the prefecture of Shuntian, jointly administered Beijing. Partly due to this lack of status, residents of cities paid no direct taxes into what might be called municipal treasuries. All public improvements, measures for sanitation, police administration, and the like, either came out of the rural land tax and the special federal taxes on the stamp tax, the lijin, salt, wine, and tobacco, or were financed by public subscription. For the most part the countryside bore the expenses of the city, and the residents of cities paid nothing unless they owned arable land outside their city walls.
In the early twentieth century, however, inspired by Western urban experience, modern municipal institutions were established throughout Chinese cities. Both the modern police force and the Municipal Council in Beijing had tax collecting agencies that relentlessly pursued tax revenues from the urban society. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, more than thirty new local taxes were levied, ranging from taxes on property to taxes on prostitution. However, the tax revenue could hardly meet the overwhelming demand for public works, social services, and a large city police force. Occasionally the central government helped defray certain costs, but its subsidies were erratic and unpredictable. To make matters worse, the municipal government was not aggressive in seeking other means of funding. Municipal debt was not considered a viable option, nor were municipal bonds issued to support the various capital projects. The only borrowed funds were foreign loans received by the central government, which occasionally trickled down to finance municipal projects, as in the case of the streetcar loans.
The city government was not entirely to blame, however. Beijing has never been the kind of laissez-faire and market-driven capitalist city that some American and European cities became. Essentially, the city did not have the modern industrial sector, powerful market mechanism, and large middle class that would constitute a significant tax base. Despite increased taxation, the modernist government was still hamstrung by a lack of financial resources to transform Chinese cities spatially and socially.
Organizer: Joan Judge, University of California, Santa Barbara
Chair and Discussant: Lisa Ann Raphals, University of California, Riverside
Keywords: late Imperial China, women’s history, exemplary biography.
Liu Xiang’s Lienü zhuan (Biographies of exemplary women), published in the first century BCE, served as the template for a myriad of forms of female biography over the succeeding centuries. These later works formed a textual tradition which both upheld fundamental conceptual continuities and reflected shifting historical contexts, cultural priorities, and gender norms. This panel examines several aspects of this textual tradition in the late imperial period. It specifically questions how the Lienü zhuan tradition was transformed over time and what these transformations reveal about cultural change in the particular periods under consideration.
Paying close attention to both texts and contexts, these papers focus on questions of genre, content, and audience. They reveal that tales of notable women took various forms in the late imperial period: from poems modeled on the Book of Songs in the Yuan dynasty; to illustrated expansions of Liu Xiang’s text in the Ming; to a popular pictorial series in the late Qing; to short biographies accompanied by photographs in the early twentieth-century press. These various genres presented shifting repertoires of notable women: from actual acquaintances of the author (Yuan); to a combination of stock Lienü zhuan figures with real local heroines (Ming); to celebrated examplars from the Qing dynasty (late Qing); to foreign women in the short biographies (also late Qing). Finally, each of these papers probes the questions of the intended and real audience for these texts: was their purpose, for example, to uplift the benighted (Yuan); to promote a particular lineage (Ming); to convey a high-minded message on female virtue at time of social change (late Qing); or to encourage that social change by presenting models of "New Men and Women"?
Echoes of the "Songs": Exemplar Poetry in Yuan China
Beverly Bossler, University of California, Davis
Writing about exemplary figures began to proliferate in the late Song, as the state increased its awards to "righteous men, faithful women, filial children, and obedient grandchildren" and local elites worked to enshrine exemplars from their towns. It was only in the Yuan, however, that exemplary texts became a standard feature in the "collected works" of literati. Moreover, where biographies constituted the main type of exemplar writing in the Song, in the Yuan exemplar writing increasingly took the form of poems, and prefaces to collections of poems, in praise of faithful wives, filial sons, and heroic girls. Often such poems celebrated and publicized the virtue of a friend’s widowed mother, and both author and subject were able to share in the social capital thus generated; other poems were acts of creative imagination, often written in the voice of the female subject. Still other poems were written by men devoted to the cause of "transforming customs." Taking the "Book of Songs" as their model, such men composed simple, easily memorizable ditties, in the apparent hope that their compositions would be popularly adopted and help improve public morality. This paper will examine all of these types of poetry and poetry prefaces, and analyze their diverse implications for social practice and gender values in Yuan society.
Mixed Messages in the Zhi buzu zhai Lienü zhuan
Katherine Carlitz, University of Pittsburgh
In this paper, I will examine a widely reprinted Lienü zhuan expansion that was compiled in She county, Anhui. The Beijing Library possesses an extended fragment of the original 1620s edition, and the work in its entirety was reprinted in 1779 by the Zhi buzu zhai and other printing houses as well. Like other collections in its genre, this Lienü zhuan uses the cases of the Han dynasty classic to begin a survey of female virtue down to the compiler’s own era. The collection concludes with a juan of sixteenth-century cases concentrated in the Wang lineage of She county.
What is the actual aim of this book? The Lienü zhuan genre is conventionally considered exemplary literature for women, but prefaces and commentary often read as though the male compilers intended the books for an audience of men. The women eulogized in the Zhi buzu zhai Lienü zhuan range from martyrs to mothers to singing girls. Was this really considered appropriate reading for young women? I will put this collection in context by comparing it to contemporary household encyclopedias that women are likely to have read. Such encyclopedias tended to mix tales of exemplary virtue with erotic anecdotes. My working assumption is that girls did indeed read this book, but if that is the case, the diversity of its contents may have sent readers messages that ranged well beyond ru virtue.
Exemplary Women of the Qing Dynasty: Lienü in an Early-Twentieth-Century Popular Pictorial
Joan Judge, University of California, Santa Barbara
One of the last texts in the Lienü zhuan tradition to appear in the imperial period was the series entitled "Zhongwai Xin Lienü Zhuan" (Biographies of new Sino-foreign exemplary women) published in the popular journal the Tuhua ribao (Daily pictorial) in 1907. This series departed from the standard repertoire of notable women featured in late Qing texts in two significant ways. Despite its title, it does not include one foreign exemplar, and rather than celebrate Chinese women from the distant past, it was composed of the tales of notable women of the Qing dynasty. Most of these women were associated with famous men: the wife of the renowned scholar-official Ruan Yuan (1764–1849), for example, or the mother of the celebrated poet and man of letters Hong Liangji (1746–1809). A few were noted for their own heroic deeds, however, such as Shen Yunying (1624–61) who was awarded military rank for her struggle against bandit forces.
The paper places this series in its historical context in order to ask larger questions concerning both the transformation of the Lienü zhuan tradition over time, and the relationship between late Qing cultural norms and the past. It traces the lineage of the Tuhua ribao text by examining other Qing compilations of exemplary female biographies and by comparing the pictorial’s illustrations to those found in earlier editions of the Lienü zhuan. It further analyzes how the series functioned in the Tuhua ribao itself—a journal which highlighted and satirized all aspects of contemporary urban culture—in order to probe the role these heroines so reminiscent of ancient models of womanhood played in the newly emerging popular consciousness of this period.
Modeling Lives of/for Women: Late Qing Biographies
Ying Hu, University of California, Irvine
The short biographies, or xiaozhuan, became a hot genre in the newly popular print media in the late Qing, often accompanied with photographic portraits, xiaozhao. Writers were urged to produce them and readers avidly read them, perhaps giving themselves rapid makeovers, as New Men and New Women.
The central question this paper addresses is the role of women’s biography in the late Qing cultural scene. More specifically, how did the biographies construct gendered roles, at a time when traditional models of behavior were being questioned and imported icons from the West began to gain currency? The biographies I examine include both famous and not well known ones. Some of the biographies appear quite traditional, yet the familiar virtues they celebrate may be attached to unlikely figures such as Madame Roland. Others proclaim to be radically different, with photographs to illustrate the unconventional lives. Yet we find normative features in the biographies often domesticate the apparently deviant behavior.
This paper investigates the generic features of these late Qing biographies, especially their didactic elements, to try to tease out the different senses of what counted as normative in terms of gendered behavior. I compare selected examples from earlier Lienü zhuan with the late Qing biographies and attempt to answer in what ways the new gender roles differ from or remain similar to traditional roles. I study the biographies alongside the photographic portraits and ask how the late Qing interest in biography and fascination with photography came together in producing new gender roles.
Organizer: Pierre Landry, University of Mississippi
Chair and Discussant: Melanie Manion, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This panel explores the changing dynamics of mass-elite interactions in post-Deng China based on quantitative analyses of survey data. Each paper addresses a key dynamic linking economic development and political change in post-Deng China. Specifically: (1) attitudinal differences between the masses and the elites with respect to democratic values; (2) the ability of news elite types (private entrepreneurs) to act as a vehicle for political change; and (3) the shifting bases of party membership in an increasingly diverse social landscape.
Elite and Mass Attitudes toward Democracy and Democratization in Urban China
Jie Chen, Old Dominion University
Comparison of elite and mass attitudes toward democracy and democratization in China is critical for understanding elite-mass interaction and hence political development in this rapidly changing society. Yet such studies are very scarce. This paper is intended to explore the differences and commonalities between elite and mass orientations, in terms of their conceptual constraints (or consistencies), socioeconomic sources and behavioral effects. This study is based on the responses to identical questions on democratic values and changes asked of both mass and elite in two surveys conducted in Beijing in 1995 and 1997. The potential findings from this study will have important implications on both the strength/weakness of the CCP’s rule and the general trends of political development in China.
Private Entrepreneurs and the Party in China: Agents or Obstacles to Political Change?
Bruce Dickson, George Washington University
It has become a truism that continued economic reform in China, and privatization in particular, will contribute to political change. Policy makers as well as many scholars expect that formation of a private sector will lead—directly or indirectly through the emergence of a civil society—to political change and ultimately democratization. The rapidly growing numbers of private entrepreneurs, the formation of business associations, and the cooperative relationships between entrepreneurs and local officials are seen as initial indicators of a transition from China’s still nominally communist political system. This paper focuses on two fundamental theoretical issues. The first is whether economic change leads to political change, and whether economic privatization leads to democratization. In particular, it asks whether China’s entrepreneurs can be a vehicle for political change. The second theoretical question concerns the CCP’s willingness and ability to adapt to the needs of economic development by replacing its traditional techniques of mobilization, with a new strategy of inclusion: the co-optation of new elites and the creation of links with new non-party organizations, namely business associations. This paper uses survey project targeting private entrepreneurs and local communist party and government officials in China to address these questions. These data reveal both the personal and institutional relationships that are developing between these two key groups in the course of reform and the degree of similarity in their political beliefs and behaviors.
Explaining Party Membership in Urban China
Pierre Landry, University of Mississippi
As we assess the long-term political impact of economic reforms, it is important to understand whether the CCP has been able to adapt to a rapidly changing social landscape in China. This paper explores the correlates of party membership based on surveys conducted in several urban areas in recent years. It explores whether party membership is still more prevalent among traditional strongholds of the CCP (the state sector and bureaucratic agencies) or whether the CCP has instead successfully shifted its recruitment efforts to the more dynamic segments of urban society. In addition, the analysis of survey data allows us to test whether the party’s official pronouncements favoring the educated has a measurable effect in its current recruitment policy.
Organizer and Chair: Sophia Lee, California State University
Discussants: David Barrett, McMaster University; Parks M. Coble, University of Nebraska; Tokushi Kasahara, Tsuru University; Sophia Lee, California State University, Jiu-jung Lo, Academia Sinica; R. Keith Schoppa, Loyola College, Maryland
Keywords: Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), occupied China, collaboration, wartime atrocities.
Since the early 1990s, English-language works about Japanese-occupied China during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) have begun to appear in print with some frequency, mostly as articles. More numerous are Chinese- and Japanese-language publications, principally, from conferences commemorating anniversaries of the start and the end of the war. This welcome growth has also made it increasingly difficult, even for specialists, to exchange up-to-date information about research projects and archival sources, and to engage in ongoing debates about conceptual issues.
This roundtable will provide a forum for six specialists from North America and East Asia, plus the audience, to exchange information and ideas. All six have done extensive research in archives and libraries in China, Taiwan, Japan, the US, and the UK: Barrett (Wang Jingwei regime); Coble (Chinese capitalists in Shanghai); Kasahara (North China villages and the Japanese Army’s Three-All Policy); Lee (social and cultural conditions in Beijing); Lo (the discourse of collaboration); and Schoppa (collaboration in Hangzhou). Several have also conducted interviews and on-site investigations.
In a brief statement, each discussant will: (1) explain approaches and methodologies regarding his/her project; (2) assess archival and other sources, plus strategies to overcome their limitations; (3) analyze conceptual and theoretical issues in current scholarship, and offer alternatives to prevalent theories and paradigms; (4) place his/her findings in the broader context of modern Chinese history; and (5) suggest future directions in the study of occupied China. Following these short presentations, the audience will be included in a question-and-answer discussion.
Organizer: Scott J. Palmer, Indiana University
Chair and Discussant: David C. Buxbaum, Brand, Farrar, Buxbaum LLP
Keywords: China, legal history, legal institutions.
A common theme in recent comparative legal scholarship is the notion of "legal culture," and the apparent incommensurability of Chinese and Anglo-American legal regimes, particularly with respect to the role that legal institutions play in the maintenance of social relations within the state. But many of these studies present Chinese legal culture as a relatively monolithic and uncontested phenomenon, and fail to account for institutional variations and developments within Greater China.
This panel will bring together specialists in Chinese Legal Studies from law firms and universities in the United States, Canada, Mainland China, and Taiwan, to present papers and discuss the interface of Chinese legal history and culture on contemporary law in Greater China, and the possibilities of institutional convergence among seemingly dissimilar legal systems within the region. The panel specifically seeks to develop a dialogue on the social and cultural contexts that inform the evolution of historical and contemporary legal institutions in Greater China, and to investigate theoretical and practical approaches to issues of immediate concern.
Institutional Compatibility and the Possibilities for Convergence of Legal and Political Culture in China-Taiwan Relations
Pitman B. Potter, University of British Columbia
China-Taiwan relations have been a source of considerable legal and policy debate since the founding of the PRC, and have been particularly problematic in recent years. A key element in understanding and resolving conflict between China and Taiwan is the issue of institutional compatibility and the prospectus for convergence in legal and political culture. The political and legal systems of China and Taiwan have many common antecedents, which provide a basis for institutional compatibility and accommodation. However, there is increased divergence in political and legal culture in China and Taiwan, reflecting in part contrasts in institutional performance driven by different degrees of commitment to legal and political reform.
This paper will examine the interplay between institutional compatibility and attitudinal divergence in China-Taiwan relations, through an interpretive analysis drawing on primary data as well as existing legal and social science discourses. With particular attention to administrative and constitutional law, the paper will suggest approaches to strengthening institutional compatibility as a basis for building convergence of political and legal culture.
The Transformation of Traditional Institutions of Power and Law in Mainland China and the Rule of Law
Jinfan Zhang, China University of Political Science and Law
This paper assesses the historical interface of power and law in China, and the evolution of the idea of Rule of Law. It will also discuss the effect that the changing dynamic of power and law has had on the recent development of legal institutions in Mainland China, and the work that is yet to be done.
Rule of Law is the goal toward which China is currently struggling, a goal that necessitates the establishment of the authority of law, and institutions that ensure an efficient and effective judicial system. In Mainland China, Rule of Law entails on ongoing process of strengthening legal institutions that militate against entrenched ideas of the supremacy of power over law.
Administrative Governance in China: Imperial Antecedents and Contemporary Correlatives
Donald J. Lewis, University of Hong Kong
It is postulated that the dominant system of political and economic governance in contemporary China may be characterized as an "administrative system" as juxtaposed against other forms of governance, such as legal systems in the West. In this regard, the current administrative system operating in China would appear to be the most recent incarnation of that original and highly developed Chinese conception—the Chinese imperial bureaucracy.
In recent decades, the socialist leadership in China has sought to create a potentially competing system of governance—the Chinese legal system, largely along Western lines. At present, the developing Chinese legal system would appear to occupy a subordinated position to the indigenous administrative system. Given this systemic duality, questions arise as to the complementarity and prospective convergence of these different traditions of governance.
This initial inquiry undertakes to explore the historical sources of contemporary Chinese administrative governance, principally by reference to the bureaucratic institutions and practices of the Qing dynasty. Comparisons and contrasts will be drawn between traditional imperial structures and processes and contemporary socialist counterparts. The role of law in Qing administrative practices and procedures will be assessed and weighed against other modalities or instruments of governance employed by the Qing bureaucracy. The question of the continuing utility and relevance of imperial models and processes in modern Chinese circumstances, and the potentially dynamic rate of Western administrative law as a modernizing force, will also be considered.
The Interface of Traditional Legal Culture and Contemporary Legal Institutions in Taiwan
Jingjia Huang, Huang and Partners, Taiwan
The contemporary legal system of Taiwan has been influenced by competing socio-cultural factors, and since 1949, has diverged greatly from the legal system of Mainland China, despite common cultural and historical roots. In light of changing conceptions of rule of law in Mainland China, these common cultural and historical roots have been heralded as both an apparent restriction on the development of rule of law, and a common ground for negotiating the differences in "legal culture" between Taiwan and Mainland China.
This paper will trace the development of Taiwan’s unique legal culture, and the influences of traditional Chinese jurisprudence, Japanese Law and the Law of Nationalist China. It will also trace the divergence of legal institutions in Mainland China and Taiwan, and the role that traditional culture and new points of common concern will play in the future of relations between China and Taiwan.
Organizer: Sarah Schneewind, Southern Methodist University
Chair: Edward L. Farmer, University of Minnesota
Discussant: Martin J. Heijdra, Princeton University
Keywords: China, Ming, ritual, state, society.
The Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang (r. 1368–1398), developed ritual and institutional policies to regulate society. Historiography maintains a myth that developed in the Ming: that Zhu was able to implement those policies and create, for a time, a stable society. This panel examines both the truth of that myth and its development in mid- and late Ming. Martin Heijdra, the discussant, has himself proposed an interpretation of Zhu’s impact on rural China in his dissertation. Edward Farmer, major American scholar of the founder, will chair.
The community libation ceremony illustrates the seven stages of Zhu’s social policies. Sarah Schneewind shows that each stage reversed, revised or augmented earlier, failed policies. Later officals chose among the various rituals and institutions. In the 1400s, Anne Gerritsen shows, some early Ming policies were reversed, others ignored, and still others selected by individual policymakers, who at the same time frequently invoked Zhu’s legacy. Edicts and memorials on clergy illustrate the evolving myth that Zhu’s policies were coherent and had been effective. Sixteenth-century social critics invoked and extended the myth. Jaret Weisfogel shows how Guan Zhidao selectively reinterpreted Zhu’s regulations on status distinctions.
The founder frequently changed his policies as he attempted to control society. The records of those regulations gave later emperors, administrators and thinkers a diverse repertoire of institutions and rituals whose legitimacy was heightened by the idealization of the early Ming.
Revising the Vision: Early Ming Social Policies and the Community Libation Ceremony
Sarah Schneewind, Southern Methodist University
The Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, pursuing a vision of an ideal social order, created a new state through which to shape society. But he faced resistance that forced him to repeatedly revise and even reverse many of his local social institutional policies. His policies on population control, worship, community rituals, taxation, dispute resolution, commendation and primary education fall into seven stages. Within each stage, all policies constitute a coherent approach to local society. From one stage to the next, whole systems were created and dismantled. For instance, the community elder (lilaoren) system replaced the senior (qisi) system for settling disputes; the lijia system replaced rural assemblies; brand-new community schools were abolished. Far from binding Zhu’s successors, these contradictory policies constituted part of the repertoire from which later emperors, administrators, and thinkers picked and chose, as Weisfogel and Gerritsen show.
This paper traces Zhu’s revisions of the village-level community libation ceremony (xang yinjiu li) to illustrate the seven stages, and discusses a fifteenth-century implementation of the ceremony. Normally, the ceremony is described as confirming social hierarchies of rank, age and virtue. Zhu also used it to promulgate the laws of the dynasty, commenting on or prescribing it in each stage. The increasingly negative cast of the ceremony shows Zhu’s frustration with his inability to control society, even as he tried to insert the state more firmly into the ceremony.
The Founder’s Legacy: Fifteenth-Century Views on Zhu Yuanzhang’s Ritual Policies
Anne T. Gerritsen, Harvard University
The social policies instituted during the reign of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, were intended to bring about an ideal social order. As the paper by Sarah Schneewind suggests, Zhu’s policies formed a far from coherent set of injunctions. In this paper, I will analyze the fifteenth-century reception of the Ming founder’s policies. In the decades that followed Zhu Yuanzhang’s death, some of his policies were quickly reversed, and many of the systems he intended to bring about far-reaching social control simply fell into disuse.
At the same time, both central government officials and local thinkers constantly harked back to the social institutions of Zhu’s reign. An analysis of a number of edicts and memorials concerning the treatment of monks and nuns in local society will illustrate the idealistic representation of early Ming institutions. While Zhu’s policies took on an increasingly mythological status as a coherent and effective system, their disjointed nature is illustrated by their highly selective adoption. Fifteenth-century emperors, court officials and local policymakers alike chose only those elements in the early Ming regulations that suited their personal preferences and the changing social and economic circumstances.
Zhu Yuanzhang’s Ritual and Institutional Legacy: A Sixteenth-Century Idealization
Jaret Weisfogel, Columbia University
Late in the sixteenth century, the social critic Guan Zhidao (1536–1608) wrote a set of proposals for reviving the ritual models and social institutions of the dynastic founder, Zhu Yuanzhang. In his Proposals, Guan devotes close attention to certain early Ming edicts establishing status distinctions in local society. The edicts regulate matters ranging from the etiquette that members of local society must use when they meet to the construction of ancestral halls and the keeping of bondservants. Guan focuses especially on the edicts’ distinction between retired officials and the rest of the population, which he further justifies on the basis of the Record of Rites, in the canonical terms of rank, age and virtue. In reasoning thus, he not only privileges certain strands of the early ritual tradition, but also similarly interprets the founder’s edicts in a rather specific light. He picks and chooses among the founder’s regulations and, further, often construes the wording of a given regulation to allow for exceptions and qualifications. Guan’s selective and ambivalent application of Zhu’s edicts reflects his own mixed social ideals and tensions in the traditions on which he draws more than anything about the early Ming, though of course he reads his ideals back into that period. Guan’s statist and authoritarian leanings are indeed reminiscent of the founder’s rule; but beyond these general tendencies, Guan’s vision largely reflects his particular place within the society and intellectual culture of his own time.
Organizer: Robin Visser, Valparaiso University
Chair and Discussant: Charles A. Laughlin, Yale University
Keywords: China, ethics, contemporary, literature, film.
Despite narrative’s long tradition of ethical engagement, ethics has fallen from favor in recent literary theorizing. The emergent field of narrative ethics works against this trend by re-addressing the nexus of plot, philosophy, and lived experience. Ethical categories have particular salience for contemporary Chinese narrative, as the past decade has seen China’s strong tradition of literature as moral discourse threatened by a market-driven popular culture often unmindful of moral mission. By exploring intersections of the narrative and the normative in literature and cinema, this panel interrogates the shifting relations among text, ethics, and everyday life in late 1990s China.
We begin by examining issues of bioethics in Zhang Yuan’s Erzi (Sons, 1996) and Zhou Xiaowen’s Guanyu ai de gushi (The Common People, 1998), two docu-dramas whose conceptualization of health and illness has energizing potential for social movements challenging discrimination, and whose renegotiation of the divide between biology and culture suggests a mode of ethical reasoning able to inform quality of life issues. We continue with a discussion of urban fiction by Zhu Wen, Qiu Huadong, and He Dun. Here we consider the ethical conundrum presented by a marketplace logic that brands altruism, the aspiration to a "higher" ideal than pure self-interest, as irrational behavior. We conclude with recent "alternative" (linglei) fiction of woman writers Mianmian and Wei Hui, noting in particular how Wei converts this emergent genre into a form of self-promoting postmodernism that compromises available critical categories for reading contemporary narrative.
Questions of Bioethics in Recent Chinese Cinema
Deirdre Sabina Knight, Smith College
Responding to recent research in the medical humanities, this paper analyzes works of contemporary Chinese cinema to emphasize their vital contribution to bioethics, medical ethics, and the emerging field of narrative ethics therein. Specifically, I examine Zhang Yuan’s docu-drama Erzi (Sons, 1996) and Zhou Xiaowen’s docu-drama Guanyu ai de gushi (English title: The Common People, 1998) to show how these films frame concepts of health and illness and present possibilities for social movements challenging discrimination. Treating cerebral palsy, mental illness, alcoholism, domestic abuse, and new biotechnologies and medical practices, these films grapple with fundamental public policy issues pertaining to the allocation of resources, conceptions of risk, and conflicts between autonomy and paternalism. I argue that these films portray pain and suffering and comment on the value and quality of life in ways that challenge the plausibility of clearly differentiating biology from culture or the etiology of disease from the experience of illness. They also reveal how power relations in hospitals and medicine more generally can lead characters to accept a medicalized sense of self and binary oppositions between health and illness that may exclude other terms and experiences. The paper ends by inquiring into the relation between narratives and norms to underscore the importance of cross-cultural explorations into narrative’s role as a complement to moral principles in ethical reasoning.
Urban Ethics: Modernity and the Morality of Everyday Life
Robin Visser, Valparaiso University
Twentieth-century debates over effects of the urban space on the cultural imagination of China converge in their focus on ethical issues. Questions posed in relation to national identity shift to individual constructions of meaning at century’s end, as the city becomes interrogated in relation to subjectivity and the public sphere rather than serving as a foil for national authenticity. This presentation examines ethical questions explored in controversial urban fiction by Qiu Huadong, Zhu Wen, and He Dun. In particular, it investigates how these narratives interrogate the ethical conundrum presented by the logic of the marketplace, where altruism, or the aspiration to a "higher" ideal than pure self-interest, is irrational behavior.
Debates about 1990s urban literature divide along lines reminiscent of Hume’s ethical legacy from the Enlightenment, in that they fail to provide a determinant relation between the proposition of ought and is. Discussions about the crisis of renwen jingshen (humanist spirit) are rife with a sense that Chinese writers have "lost" their moral sensibilities and no longer adhere to zhongji guanhuai (ultimate concerns). Other critics celebrate the "unreflective, post-modern sensibilities" exhibited by embrace of what is rather than prescribing what ought to be. I disagree with both evaluations of 1990s urban fiction, demonstrating that one of its defining characteristics is inquiry into the greater good. While these open-ended narratives express moral ambiguity, they are governed by a movement toward the eventual identity of is and ought, probing universal ethical issues which arise in conjunction with modern commercial life.
Shanghai Babe and the Impasse of Post-Modern Self-Promotion
John A. Crespi, University of Chicago
The 1990s in China have been a decade in which an intensively commodified popular culture has eroded to near disappearing high literary culture’s ability to set or even suggest a distinct moral mission or critical social agenda. Into the breach have come a new generation of writers, many born during the 1970s, who have set about reworking fiction in the absent presence of the overarching narrative and allegorical schema that have guided and lent meaning to modern Chinese literature, and the modern Chinese writer, since the 1910s. Two of these recent arrivals, Mianmian and Wei Hui, present an interesting case for the potential degree-zero dispersal of a critical position for contemporary writing in China.
Where Mianmian’s semi-autobiographical La La La (1997) opened up to fictional representation an unexplored and taboo subcultural realm of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Wei Hui has brought this emergent cultural alternative flamboyantly yet insidiously "to market." Most notable in this respect are Wei’s recent Shanghai Babe (Shanghai Baobei) and Crazy Like Wei Hui (Xiang Wei Hui nayang fengkuang), two semi-autobiographical texts rife with the facile and utterly non-ironic conversion of critical categories—such as post-revolutionary desire, inscription of feminine subjectivity, post-colonialism, and national allegory—into a contentless and eminently marketable "attitude" for China’s New Rich. Be it fin de siècle vanishing point or dialectic rallying point for critical literary consciousness, this self-promoting post-modernism confronts China’s modern project of social engagement through literature with a vision of its own demise.
Organizer: Philip Clart, University of Missouri, Columbia
Chair: Terry F. Kleeman, University of Colorado, Boulder
Discussant: Jean E. Debernardi, University of Alberta
Spirit-mediums have played a central role as intermediaries between the human and the spirit worlds throughout the history of Chinese civilization. While proponents of modernization on both sides of the Taiwan Strait have long demanded and predicted the demise of "superstitious" practices such as spirit-mediumship, mediums continue to fulfill important functions within local society. In addition, they are taking on new roles within the emerging social structures of modernizing Chinese societies, serving as religious foci in urban contexts and in new religious movements. The study of spirit-mediumship is therefore central to the understanding of both traditional and modern Chinese religious life. All of the papers in the session are ethnographically based and address functions and perceptions of spirit-mediumship in modern contexts. In her study of a medium-led temple in Taipei, Shin-yi Chao addresses its structural adaptation to urban conditions by combining elements of traditional neighborhood temples with those of modern voluntary religious associations. The focus of Scott Davis’ paper dealing with another Taipei spirit shrine is the negotiation of illness and healing within a shared religious universe between medium and client. Brigitte Baptandier switches the perspective from the functions of mediumship for others to its role for the medium herself, focusing on the construction of identity through the trance process mastered during the medium’s period of "apprenticeship." Finally, Philip Clart examines the popular perceptions of two different types of spirit-mediums and the underlying cultural rationale for their separate role expectations.
City Mediums: Spirit-Mediumship in Urban Taiwan
Shin-yi Chao, University of British Columbia
Based on fieldwork conducted in 1997 and 1998, this paper seeks to shed light on contemporary religious life in urban Taiwan through the examination of a Taipei temple led by a spirit-medium. The Zhendong Gong is one of many small temples that have flourished in urban Taiwan by combining techniques of neighborhood-based temples with those of voluntary religious sectarianism. They reflect a new style of religious community that not only withstands the challenges of city life, but actually benefits from the urbanization of Taiwanese society.
The paper first examines the social background and geographic distribution of the temple’s members, finding that under urban conditions of high horizontal mobility the cult extends its geographic boundaries of membership far beyond its immediate neighborhood. Next I analyze the temple’s liturgical schedule, the two main types of rituals being the séance typical for spirit-medium cults, and the annual jiao or offering rite more characteristic of local community temples. These activities draw financial resources and devotees to the temple while they provide believers with occasions to spend evenings (for the séances) and long weekends (for the annual jiao ritual) together. In this way urban dwellers who live far apart can find a community to be involved in, and transcend the limits of traditional neighborhood-based communities. Religious communities such as the Zhendong Gong provide illuminating examples of how traditional religious groups evolve, adapt and perpetuate themselves amidst the conditions of the modern world.
Levels of Reality at the Hall of Bright Virtue
Scott Davis, Miyazaki International College
The study provides descriptive analysis of religious activities observed in an urban shen-tan (spirit shrine) under the supervision of a Taiwanese ki-tong (tang-ki, jitong, spirit-medium or shaman). Based on observations made during several years of fieldwork, its primary interest is the spirit shrine as a site for healing. So the explication is basically affiliated to medical anthropological research into folk or community based health care delivery.
These data prove susceptible of layered presentation, going step-by-step from the social context, to the diagnostic system and its nosology, to the logic of attribution and of the self, enacted in this context. These factors work within the linguistic frame of possession treatment in Taiwan. Finally, the spirit shrine’s religious practices are based on the overall symbolic realm established in Chinese culture and in contemporary Taiwan.
Histories of religion usually study textual traditions to accomplish their analyses. Studies in shentan religion suffer from lack of texts establishing this form of cultural activity as an integrated tradition. To allay this, this investigation attempts to provide an analytic description of religious activities conducted at the shrine under study, specifying frameworks conditioning the shrine’s clients’ experience. It seeks to define the levels of implication between these structures. It attempts to convey the quality and gradations of experience available to devotees. It suggests that trance phenomena observed in Taiwanese possession religion can be understood as linguistically based and embedded in a complexly layered symbolic field. The shaman negotiates these levels of symbols while effecting treatment for her clients.
Fashioning the Deity within Oneself: In Search of a Locus of Articulation
Brigitte Baptandier, CNRS, Paris
In Fujian province, female mediums of the Daoist Lüshan tradition are endowed with unusual abilities said to be beyond explanation. In this paper, I look for an explanation of the supposedly unexplainable by investigating their mediumship from three different angles: from their "apprenticeship," which is actually more of an exercise in ascetic practice; from the idea of a specific "destiny" which traditional cosmological notions ascribe to them; and from the deity that seems to possess them, but that actually needs to be fashioned by the medium herself. Focusing my analysis on the period of ascetic practice during which the deity is fashioned and the trance process establishes itself, I pose the following questions: In this particular process, who is that speaks and from where? Who is that deity present within oneself? In this period of ascesis and articulation of destiny, how is the speaker constituted narratively as she spells out episodes from her life and step by step reveals what has been called her "secret focus"?
The transition from ascesis to trance is a negotiation of the tenuous borderline between the medium’s own person (benshen), widely held religious ideas concerning the deity in question (shen), and madness (sanjieshen), that is to say the sort of uncontrolled behavior that is qualified as illness rather than trance. From this perspective, trance may be considered as a kind of extreme metonymic discourse in which tradition expresses itself directly through the person engaged in constructing her own identity.
The Moral Economy of Chinese Spirit-Mediumship
Philip Clart, University of Missouri, Columbia
Students of Chinese popular religion have long been aware of status differences between speaking and writing spirit-mediums, with the latter enjoying greater prestige than the former. Often this is vaguely ascribed to the greater prestige of written over spoken language in Chinese culture, or of the "civil" (wen) over the "martial" (wu). Based on field research conducted among spirit-writing cults in central Taiwan from 1993 to 1994, the present paper takes a closer analytical look at this issue and argues that the true root of the distinction lies in popular views of moral agency. The ideal typical speaking medium is chosen for reasons of karmic affinity and defective destiny, while the (again ideal typical) spirit-writer is selected by the gods for his or her high moral standing. While the former is called for reasons beyond his or her control, the latter actively earns an appointment through personal efforts at moral cultivation. The different selection criteria shape the relative prestige the two types of mediums enjoy, their ongoing relationship with their patron deities, their trance behavior, their functional differentiation, the public’s perception of their supernatural power (ling), and the nature of the messages they transmit. The paper examines each of these areas and concludes by suggesting that issues of moral agency play an important role in the field of role expectations in which each actual medium has to define his or her place.
Organizer: Ming Dong Gu, Rhodes College, Memphis
Chair: Victor H. Mair, University of Pennsylvania
Discussant: Anthony C. Yu, University of Chicago
Keywords: Chinese literature, canonical texts, contemporary theories, creative integration, new and interesting readings.
In the study of canonical texts in traditional Chinese literature, scholars in the field are often confronted by what Harold Bloom calls the "anxiety of influence." The anxiety can be boiled down to a question: how can one generate new and interesting readings out of the canonical texts that have been examined and reexamined by scholars from generations to generations? The time-honored perspectives, which focus on historical context, author’s biographical data, philological exegeses, sociological inquiries, etc., and frequently used methodologies, which explore the genesis, authorship, composition, editions, transmission, and thematic concerns of a text, have been utilized again and over again before us. In reusing these paradigms and methodologies, we the latecomers cannot help but cook huiguo rou (twice cooked meat): restatements or variations of old scholarship. How can we avoid this? We need to create new paradigms and methodologies. For this purpose, we may integrate contemporary theories into the study of traditional literature. In the process of integration, we may reap creative inspirations to construct new paradigms and methodologies that are appropriate for the study of canonical texts. In the postmodern era, the explosion of new theories may be dazzling to the eye, but some theories that have stood the test of time are no longer totally alien to us. They can supply us with inspirations for constructing new paradigms and methodologies as well as producing new readings.
People may ask: since contemporary theories are derived from the study of Western literature and culture, are they appropriate for Chinese literature, which has been produced in entirely different cultural conditions? This doubt has been debated by scholars in the field. A notable debate was carried out on a roundtable panel at the 1990 AAS Annual Conference (see CLEAR 1991). The debate ended inconclusively. Now ten years after the debate, the situation has not changed much in the field of traditional Chinese literature. By contrast, impressive achievements have been made in the field of modern Chinese literature. The introduction of postmodern theories into that field has drastically enlarged the horizons of modern Chinese literary studies. A series of innovative and fascinating studies have proved that the introduction of contemporary theories works. We believe that it may work equally well in traditional Chinese literature. Ten years after the debate, the question now is no longer one of whether we should introduce contemporary theories but one of how we can do a good job of integration. We recognize the huge gap between traditional literature and contemporary theories, but the gap is by no means unbridgeable.
Our panel represents a modest attempt to construct a bridge across the gap. It is concerned with how to integrate contemporary theories into traditional approaches, how to go beyond existent scholarship, and how to enlarge the hermeneutic space of canonical texts. Simply stated, our main objective will be focused on how to generate new and interesting readings of canonical texts using contemporary literary theories. Each of the panelists has chosen a canonical text and set to read it with the aid of one or multiple facets of contemporary theories. By so doing we hope to demonstrate that the integration of contemporary theories will not only facilitate dialogues between Chinese and Western literatures but also open up new vistas for traditional Chinese literary studies.
Deconstructing Life and Death: Variations on a Theme in the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi
Shuen-fu Lin, University of Michigan
One of the distinctive features of the early Daoist classic Zhuangzi is the persistent critique of such binary oppositions as large and small, this and other, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, useful and useless, success and failure, nature and culture, dream and wakefulness, and life and death, that have structured Chinese thought. The purpose of this paper is to perform a close reading of this persistent attempt to deconstruct traditional values by focusing on the important theme of life and death as it is treated in the Inner Chapters which constitute the core, earliest, as well as most brilliant portion of this masterpiece in ancient Chinese philosophy and literature. I hope to demonstrate that Zhuangzi (who is traditionally believed to be the author of the Inner Chapters) uses all resources of language and the literary art available to him—resources such as metaphor, paradox, irony, mask, fable, and parable—to carry out his deconstructive endeavor. Further, I hope to demonstrate that in "constructing" his own treatment of the theme throughout the Inner Chapters, Zhuangzi resorts to a strategy that resembles the "variations on a theme" in music. Finally, I hope to show that in "constructing" the Inner Chapters that ultimately "self-deconstruct," the Daoist author also points toward a world that exists outside of language and thought, a world that seems to have been denied by the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida who asserts that "there is nothing outside of text."
Intertextual Dissemination: Re-reading "The Great Preface" to the Book of Songs
Ming Dong Gu, Rhodes College, Memphis
The "Great Preface" to the Shijing (Book of Songs) is a foundational text in Chinese literary thought. Although it consists of only a few hundred words, it touches upon a number of central issues in Chinese literary theory. Its significance has been emphasized again and again throughout Chinese history. In the past two millennia, however, scholarly appraisal has been confined to two related aspects. One aspect deals with its function as a piece of literary criticism. In this respect, it has been viewed as a synthesis of the transmitted interpretations about the Book of Songs. The other aspect centers on its significance as a piece of literary theory. On this theoretical level, it has been regarded as the first sustained statement on the nature and function of poetry in early China. Both aspects are concerned with the content of the discourse. So far, practically no one has paid any attention to the implied significance of its formal presentation. Due to an undervaluation of its formal presentation, the Preface has been misunderstood and even charged with a number of faults. One common fault attributed to it is its alleged loose structure. Because of this fault, scholars have rearranged the sections of the Preface according to their understanding and reassigned the divisions to different places of the Book of Songs. In Chinese history, the most drastic rearrangement was carried out by Zhu Xi (1130–1200), who practically dismantled the whole piece.
I suggest that the Great Preface is a well conceived and coherently argued text on the nature and function of poetry. Moreover, its way of presentation in relation to its content contains an implicit statement on a paradigm of reading and writing, which may perhaps be appropriately called "disseminative exegesis." This paradigm of reading not only set the pattern for reading the Book of Songs but also influenced the hermeneutic development of the Chinese tradition. In this essay, I do not attempt to tackle the complex issue of how the paradigm of reading influenced exegesis of other canonical works. I will limit my essay to an exploration of how the Preface is constructed on an overarching structure and how it implicitly advances a paradigm of rending and writing, which anticipated significant aspects of contemporary theories such as textuality, intertextuality, and dissemination. The Preface is not just a random treatise in Chinese literary thought; it is the first milestone in the development of Chinese literary theory. Since it attaches great importance to the signifying mechanisms of discourse, it may also be considered an embryonic form of a poetics, the underlying principle of which is intertextual dissemination.
Sequence and Significance in Sikong Tu’s Twenty-four Varieties of Poetic Experience
Dore Levy, Brown University
The subject, and object, of Sikong Tu’s (837–908) Twenty-four Varieties of Poetic Experience (Erhshi si shipin) is to define ultimate categories of aesthetic experience, for the poet and for the reader. Twenty-four Varieties of Poetic Experience embraces multiple influences in the history of literary theory, yet is profoundly innovative. To begin with, it takes its title from Zhong Rong’s Classification of Poets (Shipin), yet Sikong Tu classifies no poetry, ranks no poets; indeed, names no names. Nor can the twenty-four verses of Twenty-four Varieties of Poetic Experience be considered just a list of styles. The expectations of classification are blocked, for the work far more closely evokes, both in its use of poetry for its exposition and its subject matter, the "Rhymeprose on Literature" (Wen fu) of Lu Ji. The mode of exposition may be linked to Liu Xie’s Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diaolong), although the link is to Liu’s enigmatic verse summations of his chapters rather than to his expositions. Sikong Tu’s vocabulary and his use of the tetrasyllabic line link the work to a completely different mode of discourse, the "abstruse utterances" (xuanyan) of Eastern Jin (Dong Jin, 317–420) Taoist philosophical poetry. All of these links are tantalizing, and the poet was certainly aware of them. None are sufficient, for Twenty-four Varieties of Poetic Experience is unique, idiosyncratic, and perhaps purposely impenetrable.
The objective of this paper is to explore Twenty-four Varieties of Poetic Experience as a work in the genre of poem sequences, with a view to explore its meaning not as 24 different problems, but as an integrated whole. The poem sequence is a distinctive structure in Chinese poetry, and analyzing its mode of discourse depends on new understanding of the nature of narrative in a primarily lyric tradition. Sikong Tu’s intention is not to explain poetry, which after all is only a partial reflection of the patterns of the universe, but to remind his readers of the scope of the patterns of the universe even beyond the edges of imagination. To attempt a piecemeal reading of the nature of poetic experience is futile. Twenty-four Varieties of Poetic Experience attempts nothing less than to give the discourse of literary theory the mental and emotional resonance of lyric poetry. As one reads about the principles of poetry, one re-creates within oneself the experience of poetry in its totality. The process of passing through the twenty-four "experiences" leads the reader to an epiphany of the nature and scope of poetry itself.
Understanding History and Historical Understanding: Jin Shengtan’s Prefaces to Xixiang Ji
Liangyan Ge, University of Notre Dame
This paper discusses what can be called a critical schizophrenia in Jin Shengtan’s two prefaces (xu) to his edition of Xixiang ji, or The Sixth Book of Genius. The two prefaces are permeated by a strong historical consciousness, as suggested by their titles, "To Grieve over the Ancients" ("Tongku guren") and "To Be Bestowed on Later Generations" ("Liuzeng houren"). The author places himself in the middle of the rapid passage of history, where he as a critic relays the literary heritage from the past to the futurity. Yet, in an interesting twist, Jin Shengtan questions his own ontological status as writer, who is never a "true" and absolute self but a subjectivity molded by its historical and linguistic existence. As writer, he is, therefore, a "non-I" that functions in "I" (Yi fei-wo zhe wei wo), as he finds himself following the conventions in language that inevitably precede him. Since a writer is himself a product of language, as Jin Shengtan suggests, what he can leave to the posterity is a linguistic reconstruction of his historical existence but never that existence itself. As Jin Shengtan takes pains to remind us, even though he writes about a bee and an ant in his study, that particular moment itself when that bee and that ant accompanied him in his study will never be known to his reader. This emphasis on the indeterminacy between the signifier and the historical signified opens the door for interpretational multiplicity, as Jin declares that what he offers in his commentary on Xixiang ji is just one more interpretation which may or may not conform to the playwright’s "original intent" (chuxin). While Jin Shengtan seems to claim to be an agent of history linking the past and future, he undercuts that claim by suggesting that any understanding of history has to be determined by its own historical and linguistic situatedness.
Organizer: Tze-Ki Hin, State University of New York, Geneseo
Chair: Arik Dirlik, Duke University
Discussant: Don C. Price, University of California, Davis
Focusing on the first two decades of the twentieth century, this panel examines the debates over modernity during the 1911 Revolution and the May Fourth Movement. Despite many studies of these two events, few attempts have been made to study those participants deemed traditional or ambiguous in the discourse on modernity. In viewing these "conservatives" as part of the debate over the meaning of modernity, we show that the picture of the intellectual scene in early-twentieth-century China was more complex than that presently held.
The three papers of this panel separately address different aspects of early-twentieth-century China. In historiography, Chiu-chun Lee re-evaluates the role that late Qing thinkers played in the rise of "national history." He argues that in addition to Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, Zhang Taiyan was instrumental in making history a vehicle for expressing collective consciousness. Considering literature written in the period, Hung-yok Ip questions whether the May Fourth Movement was entirely a rupture from the past. Focusing on Su Manshu, she shows that despite the stress on rationality and individualism in the 1910s and 1920s, romances remained a popular genre in literary writing. In respect to the cultural debate, Tze-ki Hon compares the images of the West in two rival journals—the Critical Review (Xueheng) and New Youth (Xin Qingnian). In contrasting Wu Mi’s interpretation of the American philosopher, Babbit, with Hu Shi’s Dewey, he shows how the domesticated new humanism and pragmatism represented two different approaches to the contested issue of modernizing China.
The Origins of Modern Chinese Historiography: A Study of Zhang Taiyan’s Historical Thinking
Chiu-chun Lee, Chinese Culture University, Taipei
In the current scholarship, much has been said about the importance of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao in the rise of modern Chinese historiography, or the "new history movement." While Kang’s re-interpretation of Confucian classics in the 1890s is linked to the historical skepticism of the 1920s, Liang’s call for a new historiography in 1902 is considered to be the beginning of the writing of national history. But is this the full picture of modern Chinese historiography? Were there other historical figures, besides Kang and Liang, who helped to shape the modern Chinese historical consciousness?
To examine the complex origins of modern Chinese historiography, this paper focuses on Zhang Taiyan (1869–1936) as a possible source of the new history movement. A revolutionary leader and a master of the Old Text School of Han Confucianism, Zhang has been studied for his political thought and classical scholarship. But little attention has been paid to his talents in history, especially his contribution to the rise of national history. Based upon a close study of Qiushu (Book of Raillery, 1900) and Guogu lunheng (Critical Essays on Antiquity, 1910), this paper will trace the process in which Zhang created a new historical genre to define modern Chinese national boundary. This paper argues that by combining philology with cultural studies, Zhang created a linguistic approach to history that has a lingering effect on modern Chinese historians.
Imagining Love: Reinterpreting Su Manshu’s Romances
Hung-yok Ip, Oregon State University
Monk and writer, Su Manshu (1884–1918) has captivated many people with his romances. While some hail him as a rebellious romantic who heralded the May Fourth rejection of the "feudal" family system, some heed his celebrated literary theme of tension between love and monkhood. But to understand Su Manshu’s romances, we should analyze his imagination of love.
In dissecting Su’s romances such as The Lone Swan and The Broken Pin, I shall focus on the following questions: How did he define romantic love as an important kind of qing? How did he design the social settings where love emerged and persisted? How did he represent ill-fated love as the conflict between the individual and society? And how did he envision such a conflict to be resolved?
I plan to compare and contrast Su’s discourse on love as qing and what scholars usually regard as the May Fourth perspective on love. While Su’s similarity with the May Fourth writers presses us to think about how pre-May Fourth context set the stage of the May Fourth quest for "individualism," his differences with them are equally revealing. As his romances continued to fascinate young readers who were exposed to "New Culture," and as he both won admiration and encountered criticisms from the May Fourth luminaries, Su Manshu’s controversial popularity prompts us to explore the co-existence, complicity and even clashes between the non-May Fourth and May Fourth intellectual-emotional currents in the making of modern Chinese subjectivity.
Babbit versus Dewey: Differing Images of the West in Critical Review and New Youth
Tze-ki Hon, State University of New York, Geneseo
Much attention has been paid to the New Youth (Xin Qingnian) as the mouthpiece of the May Fourth radicals and the Critical Review (Xueheng) as the stronghold of the opponents to the New Culture Movement. The two journals are often presented as a pair of opposites, encapsulating the fierce battle between the modernists and the traditionalists, and the progressive and the conservatives. Notwithstanding that this is a valid way to understand the cultural debate in early-twentieth-century China, this hero-villain picture of the two journals neglects significant common ground that they share, i.e., their quest to define the role of the Chinese in the modern age. With returned students from Europe and America as their major contributors, both journals competed to present a particular image of the West that lent authority to their differing perspectives.
Drawing upon current scholarship on the May Fourth as well as recently published firsthand materials (e.g., the multi-volume diary of Wu Mi), this paper examines the competing images of the West in the New Youth and Critical Review. With a comparison of the construction of Irving Babbit and John Dewey as cultural icons, this paper will consider what the new humanism and pragmatism meant to the Chinese in the 1910s and 1920s. The goal of this comparison is not to ascertain how accurate the Chinese interpreters were in presenting the two American schools of thought, but to identify the distinctive social and political visions embedded in the Chinese imagination of the West.
Organizer: Martin W. Huang, University of California, Irvine
Chair: David Rolston, University of Michigan
Discussant: Robert E. Hegel, Washington University, St. Louis
It is estimated that approximately more than ten percent of the vernacular xiaoshuo (fiction) produced before the Republican period were xushu or sequels. This panel is designed to examine this prevalent and yet little-studied literary phenomenon. One reason for the neglect of xushu by literary historians is its reputation as "unimaginative imitation." However, the panelists will argue that without taking xushu into serious consideration, our understanding of Chinese xiaoshuo will remain vastly inadequate. If xushu is blamed for its advertised "derivativeness," then derivation is a quality shared by almost all major works of the traditional Chinese xiaoshuo, many of which were the products of repeated rewritings by multiple authors based on pre-existing sources. Xushu only highlights such second-degree nature shared by almost all literary works in the sense that each has to deal with its own literary precedents. Xushu as a discursive practice reinforces the paradox that innovation is impossible without "imitation."
Xushu is literature in the second degree also in the sense that it is deliberate responses to, or "commentaries" on, a previous work. Xushu is a "readerly" project with its author self-consciously playing the dual role of reader/writer. As some of the panelists will demonstrate, xushu can be a "corrective" or an "affirmative" "reading" of the original work. A topic to be explored by some panelists is how gender relationship is re/formulated differently as xushu tries to "rewrite" its parent text, while other panelists will show how xushu "continues" or "affirms" the themes of the original work by "rebuilding" the latter’s story.
What Is Not Xushu? The Boundaries of the Sequel in Chinese Xiaoshuo
Martin W. Huang, University of California, Irvine
In 1905 Zeng Pu published his novel Niehai hua (in 20 chapters). Zeng published a "sequel" (in 5 chapters) in 1907. Two decades later he published another much revised and expanded version of the novel (with 10 extra chapters). However, well before the appearance of this expanded version, another writer, Lu Shi’e, following the plot plan forecasted in the first chapter of the 1905 version, published his sequel (Niehai hua xubian; beginning from chapter 21) in 1912. Consequently, while ignoring the "original" author’s own first sequel, Lu produced a sequel many years before that author’s second "sequel" could even see print. Furthermore, prior to this "faithful" sequel, Lu had already published another much less "faithful" sequel titled Xin Niehai hua in 1910. Yet in 1943 a "new" sequel titled Xu Niehai hua was produced by Zhang Hong with the claim that it had been authorized by the "original" author, Zeng, although the latter had died in 1935. To complicate the matter further, Zeng’s "original" novel was in fact based on a text written by another writer and a portion of it already published in 1903. Zeng’s initial 20 chapters were, therefore, already a "sequel" to start with. The "history" of Niehai hua is a process of constant rewriting and sequeling. By focusing on the textual evolution of several novels (including Shuihu zhuan, Honglou meng and Sanxia wuyi) and their "continuations," I’ll explore the implications of xushu in terms of the derivative nature of the xiaoshuo discourse in general.
Daiyu as Zhiji or Principal Consort in Honglou meng Sequels up to 1850
Keith McMahon, University of Kansas
Honglou meng sequels take as their main problem the issue of the failed love affair of Baoyu and Daiyu. Solutions revolve around the dialectical contradiction between monogamy in the form of knower-of-each-other scholar-and-beauty and polygamy in the form of one man, Baoyu, successfully married to one main woman, Daiyu, and to all others who were formerly assigned worse marriages. A predominant tendency among sequels is to infuse the rebuilt Honglou meng story with compulsive eroticism which directs Baoyu in sagely and masterful intimacy with his consorts until all bad fates have been turned into happy endings.
The set of sequels is best regarded not only in contrast to Honglou meng but also to other later works which are not direct sequels but take after Honglou meng in numerous essential ways. Along with the sequels, these works bring out the central theme of qing which Honglou meng inherits from the late Ming and which focuses most strongly on the same problem of the contradiction between monogamy of Baoyu and Daiyu and the polygamy of Baoyu and his numerous consorts. The Problem can be summarized as that of either the feminine position of monogamy, which is best realized in sublime love-death (Huayuehen), and the masculine position which is that of polygamy with the man at the center directed by the alliance of his numerous wives (e.g., Ernü yingxiong zhuan). The seeming contradiction of a polygamist directed by the alliance of his wives is framed by the fact that the women take up a fundamentally masculine position in their approval and direction of polygamy.
Regulating Sexuality, Rectifying Patriarchy, and Reestablishing Order: Chen Tianchi’s Ruyijun zhuan as a Xushu
Hua Laura Wu, Huron University College, London, Ontario
As a xushu, Chen Tianchi’s Ruyijun zhuan (1833) is highly unconventional because it lacks the usual generic markers. It doesn’t rewrite its mother text’s denouement by dishing out new fate for the original stock of characters, as the sequels to the Honglou meng do. It doesn’t create a new set of heroes and heroines, depicting this younger generation’s exploits and adventures, as Xiao Wuyi does. It doesn’t transplant the original cast of characters into a dramatically changed new environ to have it react to new or old situations in the new setting, as Xin Xiyou does. The only sign that tenuously relates Chen’s Ruyijun zhuan to the Ming novella is the common title. However, my paper will show that despite the apparent lack of connections, Chen’s novel shares numerous parallels with the Ming Ruyijun zhuan, especially in the intertwining of the sexual and sociopolitical orders. My paper will analyze these thematic parallels and their often diametrically different depictions and demonstrate that they are more than mere intertexual borrowings but form a fictional critique. Thus I will argue that Chen Tianchi, by celebrating his protagonist’s perfect satisfaction and complete dominance in the harem, intends his novel as a comment on the chaotic sexual and sociopolitical orders paraded in the earlier text. I will also situate Chen’s Ruyijun zhuan in the overall xushu phenomenon and contemplate on the raison d’état of a xushu.
The World of "Male Women": The Anti-Feminism and Polemical Stance of the Xu Jinghua yuan
Ying Wang, Mount Holyoke College
This paper will first look at the relationship between Li Ruzhen’s Jinghua yuan and its sequel-the Xu Jinghua yuan (1910) by Hua Qinshan and argue that the connection between the two takes the form of contestation. Extending the story of women’s kingdom of the Jinghua yuan, but betraying its expectation of an idealized female rule, the sequel actually creates a fictional world dominated by "male women." A mixture of female appearance and male body, the "male women" is a literary construct that embodies the male-oriented concepts of gender, sexuality, and social roles. As the concerns and activities of these "male women" become the single most important unifying element in the plot, the narrative inevitably proceeds in a polemical direction, subverting the criticism of patriarchy and idea of women’s superiority underscored in Li Ruzhen’s novel.
This paper will then analyze why and how the sequel takes such a stance towards the primary work. The author’s anti-feminist agenda, repeatedly revealed in the narrative on the issues of foot binding and women’s education, is identified as the driving force of such a critical rewriting. The reverting of the gender role reversal found in the earlier novel and manipulation of staples employed in both the military romance and "the scholars and beauties" novel are considered the literary devices to achieve such a goal.
Organizer and Chair: Nicole Huang, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussant: Edward Friedman, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Keywords: Cultural Revolution, memories, literary underground, contemporary Chinese poetry, contemporary Chinese cinema, visual propaganda.
The panel constructs a changing narrative of the Cultural Revolution with a focus on how words and images from the time are preserved, reconfigured, and disseminated in the post-Cultural Revolution era. Collectively we address the following issues: How exactly do poetry, memoir, film, posters, and other visual representations make their meaningful connections to past experiences? And to what extent are the memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution kept alive in personal, national, as well as global politics of today?
Yibing Huang studies how an underground poet and his lines of protest have been written back into the collective memories of the Cultural Revolution and further asserts that the politics of contemporary Chinese poetry is anchored upon a shared effort to reshape a literary past. Also addressing the rediscovery of a literary underground, Nicole Huang chooses to focus on the physical construction of this seemingly gloomy and obscure space. She argues that the experience of writing in the underground has to be addressed in the context of a history of everyday life and material cultures of the time. Yomi Braester examines how the experience of the past is visualized in early 1980s Chinese cinema, that is, how the film medium renders national and personal catastrophe at the same time when contemporary fiction has presented various accounts of the "wounded." And finally, Megan Ferry’s work adds a global perspective to the panel by looking at how the Maoist visual propaganda, which had previously entered into a global circulation of messages of revolution and continued revolution, took on new meanings in 1980s Latin America.
Why "Believe in the Future"? The Rediscovery of Guo Lusheng and a Case of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Memory
Yibing Huang, Connecticut College
Guo Lusheng (Shi Zhi) has long been recognized by his peers (Bei Dao, Duoduo, Lin Mang, Ah Cheng) as one of the most important forerunners of the "underground poetry" during the Cultural Revolution as well as the "obscure poetry" that emerged in the post-Cultural Revolution era. He is the author of some of the most hand-copied, circulated, and memorized poems for the "Red Guard" and "educated youth" generation. However, throughout the entire 1980s, Guo never won much public fame and was gradually forgotten. It was not until the 1990s that he was rediscovered and redefined as a living martyr and witness of a bygone era.
My paper studies Guo’s poetry as well as a history of the reception of him in China over a span of three decades (1967–1997). Through a close reading of one of his most famous poems, "Believe in the Future," I will explore the historical connections and cultural mechanisms at work behind Guo Lusheng’s underground popularity among the "educated youth" generation during the Cultural Revolution and the public rediscovery of him in the midst of a sense of cultural nostalgia shared by that generation in the 1990s. I will also examine the further implications of this renewed interest in Guo Lusheng by placing his fate as a poet against a hotly contested cultural field—the contemporary Chinese poetry.
Courtyard after the Dark: Picturing the Literary Underground
Nicole Huang, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Was there a literary underground during the Cultural Revolution? If so, what were the physical features of this marginalized space and how was it positioned in relation to the larger social realm? Memoirs of underground literary writing are usually permeated with a telling dilemma: the writer’s reluctance to be played into the post-Cultural Revolution politics, and yet an urge to shape the memories of the immediate past. As a result, there is a sense of mystique surrounding the notion.
Through a reading of poetry by Huang Xiang and Guo Lusheng and an analysis of memoirs of the underground published in the 1990s, I examine the dynamics between literary writing and an individual’s sense of daily routines and the actual living space. My essay pictures how, where, and under what conditions a highly personalized style of poetry was constructed during a period of time generally considered as one of the darkest moments in modern Chinese history. I detail the notion of a literary underground in the context of everyday life and material cultures of the Cultural Revolution era. I further suggest that the post-Cultural Revolution fascination of the space of the underground points to a cultural nostalgia for a gloomy and yet highly personalized physical space which is rapidly disappearing in the midst of a drastic reorganization of urban spaces taking place in major Chinese cities in the last decades of the twentieth century.
A Blinding Red Light: The Displacement of Rhetoric in Post-Cultural Revolution Cinema
Yomi Braester, University of Georgia
Relatively little attention has been paid to Chinese cinema of the early 1980s, although it made the first steps of departing from Maoist rhetoric and reintroduced filmic and narrative techniques unpracticed during the Cultural Revolution. The present paper examines several films produced by the Shanghai Film Studio, including Lushan lian (Love in Lushan, 1980), Bashan yeyu (Night Rain at Bashan, 1980), Tianyunshan chuanqi (The Romance of Tianyunshan, 1980), and Xiao jie (The Alley, 1981). The films address their function as a medium for reflecting on the Cultural Revolution and generating public debate. They invent a cinematic vocabulary for dealing with the trauma and negotiate the narrator’s position as a witness. Rather than simply bearing testimony to the events, however, the films struggle with the aftermath of the literary tropes and dramatic aesthetics of the Cultural Revolution. They do not celebrate the direct communication between the work of art and its audience but find the response to Maoist rhetoric in characters’ inner thoughts. Especially telling is the repeated call to "think for a while," an expression earlier used to invoke submission to the Party line. In the productions of the early 80s, the phrase signals a plea for revising the experience of the Cultural Revolution through a literature that stimulates the audience to think for themselves and supports an artistic realm of free thought.
"Mao Zedong Thought Lights the Whole World": Keeping the Cultural Revolution Alive in 1980s Peru
Megan Ferry, Union College
In the last month of 1980, the guerrilla Maoist group, the Shining Path, announced that their revolution had spread from the countryside to the cities by bombing the Chinese embassy with molotov cocktails. Severed wolves heads with handwritten signs saying "Deng Xiaoping, son of a bitch" were hung on lampposts and traffic lights throughout Lima. For these Maoists, Deng’s economic reforms signified a shift away from the policies and revolutionary legacy of Mao Zedong. Disappointed with the course China was now taking, it was up to the Peruvian left extremists to preserve the memory of Mao and his calls for prolonged revolutionary struggle. This paper examines the impact of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on local revolutions in Latin America, with a specific focus on Peru. I argue that Chinese visual propaganda that circulated throughout Latin America (as well as around the globe) projected a unified, global revolutionary struggle. This created the impression of a universal Maoist struggle by which all oppressed peoples shared a common experience and a common goal. The visual propaganda showed the Cultural Revolution to be successful and claimed that China’s today was the world’s tomorrow. All one needed to do to succeed at revolution was to follow Mao’s model. Therefore, the leader of the Shining Path set up conditions for his country’s revolution by re-constructing Peru’s past to fit China’s feudal agrarian model. He himself was depicted in emulation of Mao as Mao’s logical successor. China’s revolutionary "family" was thus expanded beyond China’s borders. This paper examines how a guerrilla group from a different continent and a different time claims to be the legitimate inheritor and preserver of the Cultural Revolution.
Organizer and Chair: Anne Behnke Kinney, University of Virginia
Discussant: Wei-yee Li, Harvard University
Keywords: women, early China, biography.
Despite the vast array of studies now available about women in mid- to late-imperial China, little has been written about women in the early phases of China’s cultural tradition. The proposed panel should begin to fill this void with three studies of gender in early China. In the first paper, "The Three Uglies of Qi," Eric Henry discusses the shifting significance of feminine beauty and ugliness and how these themes relate to larger biographical motifs.
In the second paper, "Rethinking Women in the Han Dynasty," Grant Hardy explores how Sima Qian and Liu Xiang both drew on the Zuo zhuan as a source for their biographical portraits of women but that they differed significantly in how they saw women fitting into their conceptions of the world. A close examination of the ways in which they edited passages from the Zuo zhuan shows that Sima Qian was able to grant women more individuality, perhaps because they were so often peripheral to his main interests, while Liu was anxious to categorize women into prescribed types.
In the third paper, "Filial Suicide, Mutilation, and Infanticide: Representations of Dutiful Daughters from the Han to the Ming," Keith Knapp, examines the various works such as the Lives of Outstanding Women and their illustrations in art to explore the changing parameters of female filial piety. He discusses how superlative filial women had to outdo their male counterparts and despite the dramatic potential of these narratives, female filial devotion always played second fiddle to male filial piety.
The Three Uglies of Qi: A Narrative Subgenre in Lie Nü Zhuan
Eric P. Henry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
In Book Six of Lie Nü Zhuan, devoted to accounts of women who were skilled in argument, three adjacent items occur in which each of three successive kings of Qi has an interview with an ugly woman whose counsel contributes decisively to the strength and prestige of Qi.
In this paper I discuss the relationship of the pattern exemplified by these three items to other narrative patterns in early Chinese historical legend. In one sense the "three uglies" stories are femme fatale stories in reverse: the opposite of a beautiful woman who brings trouble or destruction to a dynasty or state is an ugly woman who brings strength or salvation to a dynasty or state. Beauty and ugliness have the same symbolic significance in the "three uglies" tales as they do in the tales of such glamorous but dangerous women as Bao Si, Xia Ji, and others: beauty stands for flattery, disloyalty, and extravagance; ugliness stands for honesty, loyalty, and frugality. In another sense the "three uglies" stories are lightly disguised embodiments of the sage-seeking motif an unusually perceptive or sincere ruler finds valuable counsel in a highly unlikely source such as a cook, a cattle driver, or a fisherman, etc. Viewed in this sense, the ugliness of the three women is structurally equivalent to the social obscurity of Yi Yin, Fu Yue and others.
Later, the symbolic function of beauty and ugliness is nearly reversed: beauty stands for loyalty and wisdom; ugliness stands for selfishness and stupidity. The appearance of the new pattern did not result in the disappearance of the older pattern, however; the two kinds of narrative coexist throughout the subsequent development of historical legend in China.
Rethinking Women in the Han Dynasty
Grant R. Hardy, University of North Carolina, Asheville
Both Sima Qian and Liu Hsiang drew on the Zuo zhuan as a historical source. In doing so they used incidents from the lives of exemplary women, but they were working from very different objectives. While both hoped that the history of China would reveal the moral and political principles necessary for appropriate action, they differed in how they saw women fitting into their respective conceptions of the world. A close examination of the ways in which they edited passages from the Zuo zhuan shows that Sima Qian was able to grant women more individuality, perhaps because they were so often peripheral to his main interests, while Liu was anxious to categorize women into prescribed types. The construction of women’s roles, by Han writers rethinking their tradition, shows what possibilities were available within the social constraints of the early Han.
Filial Suicide, Mutilation, and Infanticide: Representations of Dutiful Daughters from the Han to the Ming
Keith Knapp, The Citadel
Through examining the various works known as the Lives of Outstanding Women, Lives of Filial Offspring, the Twenty-four Filial Exemplars, and their illustrations in art, this paper explores the changing parameters of female filial piety. What it finds is that the lot of an exemplary filial daughter was not a happy one. That is because to express superlative filial piety, women had to outdo their male counterparts. Consequently, tales of filial daughters overwhelmingly feature women who commit suicide, mutilate themselves to either feed their flesh to parents or prevent remarriage, or who directly or indirectly kill their own children. Despite the dramatic potential of these narratives, though, female filial devotion always played second fiddle to male filial piety. Many tales of the Song version of the Twenty-four Filial Exemplars sympathetically underline the enormous cost of female filial devotion. Significantly though, Guo Jujing’s canonical version of this work drops these narratives.
Organizer: Patricia Schiaffini, University of Pennsylvania
Chair: Pema Bhum, Himalayan and Inner Asian Resources
Discussant: Matthew Kapstein, University of Chicago
This panel examines the debates on modern Tibetan literature in the PRC from the early 1980s on, as Tibetan writers, under the inspiration of modern Chinese and Western literature, have produced new literary approaches and styles. Our four papers show that the borrowing of outside theories, styles, and language has provoked heated debate within the Tibetan literary circles and that these debates often go beyond purely artistic issues. Hartley focuses on the debates about traditional elements that appear in the modern literature written in Tibetan language and about the shift in Tibetan literary criticism from a concern with form to issues more directly related to content and readership. Maconi addresses the passionate debates over whether or not literature written by Tibetan authors in Chinese should be considered Tibetan literature. Upton analyzes the causes and implications of the paradox of a Tibetan poem whose original Chinese version became far more popular inside the Tibetan intellectual community than its Tibetan translation was. Schiaffini’s paper deals with the appearance of a so-called "Tibetan Magical Realistic" style, which raised the question of how literature written in Chinese, using techniques borrowed from the West, could speak for "Tibet."
These four papers, products of extensive research including interviews with Tibetan writers, critics, publishers and scholars in the PRC, highlight issues that have yet to be studied in the West: the debates among Tibetan intellectuals over whether the borrowing of foreign literary styles or Chinese language in the creation of a modern Tibetan literature jeopardizes traditional Tibetan culture or, on the contrary, allows Tibetan writers more freedom to express their concerns and even the possibility, as one of our panelists suggests, of "taking up the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house."
Ventures in Clearing the Mirror of Tibetan Literary Theory (1980–2000)
Lauran R. Hartley, Indiana University
A commonly heard lament these days among Tibetan intellectuals in the PRC regards the lack of modern literary theory and criticism. Scholars unanimously agree that it pales in comparison to the large volume of Tibetan poems and short stories published since the early 1980s. Not surprisingly, a growing number of American and European Tibetologists have begun to look at current developments in Tibetan literature. However, little research has been done on theoretical trends.
It is my aim in this paper to provide an overview of debates that have occurred since the early 1980s regarding the role of traditional elements in contemporary literature and the paths and models prescribed for its development. In particular, I am interested in what can be identified as a general shift in literary criticism from a concern with form to issues more directly related with content and readership. As a heuristic device, I will contrast writings by the same critics over this period, as well as the approaches taken in related studies by scholars of different generations. I will also draw on interviews with Tibetan writers and literary scholars conducted during my year of fieldwork in Amdo and Lhasa from 1999–2000.
This study will offer insight on the literary encounters of critics and writers as they negotiate new positions in the wake of several centuries predominated by the theories of Sakya Pandita and Snyan-ngag me-long. In conclusion, I will discuss the significance of these exchanges for understanding how and why "tradition versus modernity" discussions are reaching a critical point in contemporary Tibetan society.
Tibetan Authors, Chinese Texts: "Post-Liberation" Literature in the Diglossic Context of China’s Tibet: The Language Debate
Lara Maconi, Langues’O Inalco
When the Chinese PLA marched into Lhasa in 1950, led by ‘Ba’-ba Phun-tshogs dByang-rgyal, epoch-making historical, political, social, and cultural changes were to radically affect the Tibetan traditional settlement in a way Tibet had hardly experienced before.
Regarding literature, previously unheard of Socialist theories spread in the Land of Snow. The new literary policy was to completely upset the Tibetan traditional literary outlooks both at the level of content as well as of language. Socialist Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism became the established guidelines for literary content. As for language, literary composition in Tibetan was not abandoned, even after the official interdiction during the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, in the 1950s, new generations of Tibetans educated in Chinese started to write in the Chinese language. Thus, in Tibet, since the 1950s, a Tibetan language literature and a sinophone literature written by Tibetans have developed in parallel. Within these two, we find expression of some "continuity’’ with tradition, cohabiting with the expression of a major "disjunction."
Faced with this new diglossic context, the crucial question early raised by Tibetan intellectuals is: Should the literature written by Tibetan authors in Chinese be considered as a part of Tibetan literature? And, by extension: Is a language a mere channel of communication? Or, is it the very core of the expression of a national culture? Does the main use of a language lie in its sheer capacity to connect with the greatest number of people? Or, is it that only native languages; although spoken by a small number of people, can thoroughly express important specific aspects of a national culture?
Markedly disparate viewpoints in the different Tibetan intellectual milieux have hindered any satisfying definition of "Tibetan literature" in Tibet so far.
In this paper, on the basis of interviews with Tibetan writers and publishers carried out during fieldwork, as well as from a body of critical articles and literary works, I will clarify the various positions taken in this debate by the different generations of intellectuals, at the official and unofficial levels, according to different literary views. I will show that the language debate in Tibet, far from being a purely speculative activity of intellectuals, is the expression of an effective reality concerning literary composition, book and magazine publications and readership.
Today Tibet is a diglossic society where the "imported" language (Chinese) controls the official means of communication, and where the discussion of questions of language is never a neutral matter for the Tibetan writer.
The "Condor" Flies Over Tibet: The Emergence of a "Tibetan" Magical Realism and Its Significance in Debates about Identity and Nation
Patricia Schiaffini, University of Pennsylvania
The end of the Cultural Revolution witnessed a major translation effort of foreign literary works into Chinese, which made possible the arrival of Latin American Magical Realism to the Tibetan Autonomous Region. In the late 1970s a small group of writers in Lhasa, leaded by the Sino-Tibetan writer Tashi Dawa, enthusiastically embraced this literary style and produced "magical realistic" short stories in Chinese which had traditional Tibetan culture and way of life as their background.
In a culturally effervescent period when Chinese intellectuals were trying to analyze the deep cultural roots of the Maoist catastrophe, the refreshing mix of magic, authenticity and primitivism within these stories fascinated China’s young cultural elite. In Chinese eyes Tashi Dawa became the most famous Tibetan writer, and his style a synonym for modern Tibetan literature. Tashi Dawa’s popularity brought attention also to what other Tibetan writers were writing at the time, and encouraged young Tibetans to engage in literary creation. But the popularity also led to controversy. Tashi Dawa’s Tibetan identity has been questioned; his "Tibetan magical realistic" style has been criticized as an imitation of Western literary styles and as the perpetuation of stereotypical views of Tibet.
This paper, the result of two periods of fieldwork in Tibet in 1994 and 1999, explores the reasons behind the adoption of a "magical realistic" style by authors like Tashi Dawa, the possibilities for freer ways of expression it offered to young writers, and the fascination such writing caused among young Chinese and Tibetan readers. It also explores controversies about the Tibetan identity of these stories and writers as well as the deep problems of identity and nation that underlie the ardent literary debate.
Shuddering on the Dim and Winding Path or Falling into a Deep, Dark Gorge: Translating "Snow Mountain Tears"
Janet Upton, Trace Foundation
This paper aims to examine the politics, poetics and pragmatics of contemporary Tibetan literature through an ethnographically grounded comparative analysis of the Tibetan and Chinese incarnations of a single poem: Dpa’ dar’s "Snow Mountain Tears" (Chin. Xueshanlei, Tib. Gangs ri’i spyan chab). With the lifting of restrictions on cultural production in minority areas of the PRC, the mid- to late-1980s witnessed an explosion of literary production in Tibet. Free verse, with its liberating abandonment of the strict rules of traditional Tibetan poetics, became one of the most popular genres for reform-minded Tibetan authors. Yet even as they pushed the boundaries of literary and cultural expression, many of these authors faced a dilemma: having been educated in an era when the teaching of Tibetan in the classroom was discouraged, if not forbidden, Chinese—not Tibetan—was often the language they found more comfortable. As a result, many contemporary Tibetan authors write frequently or even exclusively in Chinese, even though their works are directed primarily at a Tibetan audience. And in some cases, even when bi-lingual versions of a work are available, the Chinese edition is preferred by the Tibetan audience.
Such is the case with "Snow Mountain Tears," a poem in free verse that has been wildly popular among young Tibetans in Amdo in the 1990s. Originally written and published in Chinese, it was later translated into Tibetan and published in the literary journal Moonlight (Zla zer). The Tibetan version is not well known, however. Instead, it is the Chinese version of the poem that circulates widely in the informal channels of literary distribution, where poems, song lyrics and short stories are inscribed from one notebook to another, passing through schools and work units in an extremely intimate form of transmission.
In this paper, I examine the two versions of "Snow Mountain Tears" from an ethnographic perspective, looking at the numerous cultural factors that can make a contemporary Tibetan poem more accessible and powerful in its Chinese incarnation. I consider such factors as: (1) the rule-breaking nature of free verse, which poses particular threats to Tibetan literary traditions and may therefore be less palatable to both authors and audiences; (2) the relative economy of Chinese poetic language, which does not necessarily translate easily or well into Tibetan poetry’s more ornate forms; and (3) the risky appeal of "speaking truth to power," and the attractive possibility of taking up the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. In conclusion, I consider what the two incarnations of "Snow Mountain Tears" and their reception in the Tibetan literary community can tell us about the nature of literary production, transmission and reception in the Tibetan community in the PRC today.
Organizer: Margherita Zanasi, University of Texas, Austin
Chair and Discussant: Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, University of Heidelberg
In the wake of the Revolution of 1911, various regimes and interest groups, aiming at establishing a new legitimate political order, sought to anchor their claims to power in new narratives of political legitimacy. These narratives highlighted their own role in the history of the republic and of its identity—and also in stories of justice, historical necessity, and alternate modernity. This panel examines how a number of reconstruction efforts went beyond Western-centered ideas of nationhood to build a new body politic out of the shards of the old imperial discourse and a variety of cosmopolitan sources.
Peter Zarrow attributes Yuan Shikai’s ultimate failure to legitimize his rule partly to contradictory messages, whether of heroic modernity (republican revolution), or imperial charisma; nonetheless, Yuan’s discursive techniques shaped later political narratives. Louise Edwards examines racializing narratives in the women’s suffrage movement as a cosmopolitan anti-colonial discourse; in the context of China this involved the creation of a new "outgroup" based on "race" rather than gender. Margherita Zanasi examines how the imperial trope of "founding the country on agriculture" continued to be influential in the Nationalist modernization effort and the on-going discourse on Chinese identity. And Steve Phillips links Nationalist authoritarianism on Taiwan to a historical narrative that essentialized "Chineseness" while politically marginalizing all actual Chinese who had been tainted by communism, feudalism—or, like the people of Taiwan, the Japanese. Together, these papers illuminate the different ways the new China was being defined through discourses that reached beyond the nation to transcendental or universal concerns.
Yuan Shikai’s Rhetorical Strategies at the Birth of the Republic
Peter Zarrow, Academia Sinica
Yuan Shikai attained the presidency in 1912 as the nearly universal choice of politically active Chinese and interested foreigners alike. Yet he had o