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Organizer: Anthony Barbieri Low, University of Pittsburgh
Chair and Discussant: Hung Wu, University of Chicago
Keywords: China, Han Dynasty, art history, architecture.
The panel forms an interdisciplinary team to study the mid-second-century Wu family cemetery located in present-day Shandong. Stone slabs engraved with pictorial scenes survive from at least three structures in the cemetery. The surfaces of the slabs are entirely carved with bas-reliefs and have become an important source for the study of Han iconography ever since they were rediscovered in 1786. The carvings also number among the earliest works from China to be examined on an international stage by art historians. Important recent studies have focused on reconstructing a pictorial program for the carved scenes in the shrine traditionally believed to be dedicated to Wu Liang (AD 78–151). The other structures in the cemetery and the configuration of the whole site have received less attention.
Panelist Cary Liu will propose a new reconstruction of the entire Wu family cemetery based on the pictorial carvings and comparative archaeological materials. Michael Nylan will propose a novel reading of the iconography of the two altars at the front of the cemetery. Anthony Barbieri-Low will discuss the rise of private luxury workshops during the Han, focusing on the workshops commissioned to create the Wu structures. Klaas Ruitenbeek will discuss a Han artifact known as a "money tree," whose iconography is related to that of the Wu carvings.
By reexamining the pictorial wall carvings at the Wu family cemetery in the contexts of tomb architecture, ritual practice, and workshop organization, this panel seeks to reconfigure the study of Eastern Han tomb and shrine decoration.
Architectural Reconfiguration of the Wu Family Altars and Shrine
Cary Y. Liu, Princeton University
This paper examines the Han dynasty Wu family cemetery structures in relation to their architectural typology and pictorial carvings in order to reconfigure possible ritual burial patterns. Proposed is a reconstruction for the site layout and order of the Wu structures that presents a new reading of the pictorial carvings corresponding to a sequence of two front two-bay altars and one rear, one-bay ancestral shrine arranged facing north and ending with the unexcavated family tumulus in the south.
Newly published fuller rubbings of the pictorial stones and reconstructions of three halls will be relied upon for this analysis, along with comparative archaeological materials from the same region. In addition, a sketchy description of the cemetery design recorded in a Wu family stele inscription found at the site will be compared to precedents of ritual burial practices outlined in the Book of Documents and Book of Rites. These materials lend credence to the possible reconfiguration of the Wu cemetery as having front altars and rear shrines.
The Iconography of the Wu Family Altars
Michael Nylan, University of California, Berkeley
Many previous studies have focused on the Wu Liang iconography, while saying little or nothing about the two altars in the same complex, which can be traced to the same private workshop. Looking at these altars complicates our picture of the iconographic program, specifically regarding views of gender, the afterlife, the relation between myth and history, and the function of the altars in public display culture. For example, the program of the altars appears to place much more emphasis on mothers and female deities than previously thought.
Private Luxury Workshops during the Han Period
Anthony Barbieri-Low, University of Pittsburgh
This paper investigates the nature of the privately-sponsored luxury workshops which arose during the late Warring States period and flourished during the two Han dynasties. It first introduces a set of historical and economic factors which encouraged the establishment of the shops. Then, using inscriptions from recovered objects made by private workshops, the paper discusses issues of market area, advertising, competition, and distribution.
Focusing in on the Wu family cemetery, the paper closes with a discussion of the workshops which were commissioned to build and decorate the altars, shrine, and pillars at the site. Issues of workshop style, division of labor, and compensation will be discussed.
Money Trees of the Eastern Han
Klaas Ruitenbeek, Royal Ontario Museum
Since Susan Erikson’s seminal article in the BMFEA 66 (1994), much more money tree material has come to light. My paper centers on four money trees in the Royal Ontario Museum, and one in the Princeton Art Museum, as well as on the three that are part of the "Ancient Sichuan: Treasures from a Lost Civilization" show that tours the U.S. and Canada in 2001–2. There are two main types of trees: one with very fine, detailed figures and decorations in the branches, with sharp outlines in relief lines, and another type where the decorations are less sharp. The fine type especially invites close reading and this will be my point of departure. Many comparisons with Han engraved stone decorations can be made, and much can be learned about Eastern Han religious ideas and paradise beliefs.
Organizer and Chair: Piper Gaubatz, University of Massachusetts
Discussant: Stanley Toops, Miami University
Keywords: China, frontier, geography, environment.
Owen Lattimore’s Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1940) highlighted the historical dynamism of political, economic, and cultural change through contact between agriculturalists and nomadic pastoralists. Since the 1960s, Chinese geographers have brought new perspectives to these issues through the pioneering work of Hou Renzhi and his students and colleagues at Beijing University. In 1998, Hou Renzhi and more than a dozen researchers from China and the U.S. initiated a long-term project on the historical geography of people-environment relations, funded by the National Science Foundation of China and the Henry Luce Foundation.
This panel presents a selection of this research emphasizing three main themes:
(1) The inclusion of the environment as a factor in understanding settlement patterns and economic dynamics;
(2) A new interpretation of the role of climate change, as well as human impacts, in historical desertification and environmental degradation;
(3) Multidisciplinary research methodologies. The papers integrate analyses of Chinese historical sources with field research and other data ranging from archeological materials to aerial photography.
The session will begin with an overview of environmental change on the northern Chinese frontiers from ancient times to the present, followed by three case studies: the changing geography of settlement and evolution of the division between farmers and herders in Shang and Zhou Shaanxi/Shanxi; environmental change and settlement and subsistence patterns in the Inner Mongolian Maowusu desert from the fifth century to the present; and the environmental impacts of Inner Mongolian urban development in the Ming and Qing eras.
Environmental Change on the Northern Chinese Frontiers: A Geographical Perspective
Shouchun Wang, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The role of human activities in the degradation of the environment on the northern Chinese frontiers has long been debated. The historical record provides rich detail on aspects of environmental change ranging from desertification to deforestation, which twentieth-century historians often ascribed to human activities. However, reanalysis of these historical records in the context of fieldwork, climatic change data, pollen analysis of vegetation change, landsat and air photograph analysis of landforms, and environmental archeology reveal that prior to 300 years ago climate change may have played a more important role than human activities in environmental change in many areas of the northern frontier. This paper presents an overview of current thought on environmental change on the northern Chinese frontiers illustrated with case studies from the author’s research on vegetation change on the ancient loess plateau, the rise of cities in the Ordos region, and desertification in the West Liao River basin.
The Guifang: Environmental Change and Subsistence Systems in Northern Shaanxi and Shanxi during the Shang and Zhou Periods
Xiaofeng Tang, Beijing University
The Han dynasty historian Sima Qian identified a land use division in the Shang and Zhou eras between a southern agricultural zone and a northern mixed agricultural and pastoral nomadic ("semi-agricultural/ semi-pastoral") zone along a line from Longmen (today’s Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces) and Jieshi, in today’s Hebei Province. It now appears that in northern Shaanxi and Shanxi this land use geography developed during the Shang period and reflects adaptation to climatic change. This paper examines land use change and establishes the time period of the emergence of the Longmen-Jieshi line by utilizing archeological, historical, and climatic change data to analyze the Guifang people of northern Shaanxi and Shanxi.
This area was an agricultural region from 5,000 BC to 2,000 BC. During the Shang dynasty, when the climate became more arid, the Guifang people placed an increased emphasis on pastoralism and developed a subsistence system which combined agriculture and pastoralism. Evidence for this comes from a 67,000 m2 settlement at Lijiaya, unearthed in 1984, which has a rammed earth wall as well as stone and pottery artifacts associated with both agriculture and herding. This is a revision of standard accounts of the Guifang, who have usually been described as pastoral nomads through interpretations of historical sources such as the Shi Jing, which states that the Guifang were widely scattered. Guifang land use thus exemplifies the development of a transitional mixed agricultural and pastoral nomadic zone in the Shang and Zhou periods, which corroborates Sima Qian’s account.
Tongwan: An Analysis of Urban Form and Environmental Change in the Inner Mongolian Maowusu Desert
Hu Deng, Beijing University
Tongwan, a city established on the southern edge of the Ordos Plateau by the Xiongnu in 419, is an example of cultural interaction between the northern frontiers’ nomadic peoples and the Chinese, and of changes in the relationships between people and environment. This study analyzes historical records, archeological evidence, field research data, and aerial photographs in order to reconstruct the form and development of the city and local environmental change over the past 1,500 years.
This analysis confirms that the city consisted of two adjacent walled areas: an "inner city" on the west, and an "outer city" on the east. The city was established by the Xiongnu, who decorated the city walls with many horse’s heads (on defensive towers) and oriented the buildings along an east-west axis, in a manner different from Chinese tradition. The city also, however, incorporated aspects of Chinese urban form, particularly in the alignment of the walls, gates, and monumental structures.
By 431, Tongwan city and its hinterland supported a population of more than 40,000, which consisted of nomads and Chinese farmers. By 984, however, the city was abandoned, and the regional population declined dramatically. Eventually it was almost buried by shifting sands. Historical records suggest that Tongwan city was established at a place with a rich natural environment at the edge of a desert. Aerial photographs indicate a dry moat and a stream channel, relics of a more favorable environment, while other scientific evidence of historical desertification correlates with accounts of the abandonment of farming in the region.
Hohhot: Environmental Impacts of Urban Development on the Mongolian Frontier (1557–1911)
Piper Gaubatz, University of Massachusetts
When Altan Khan established a walled city at the site of modern-day Hohhot in 1557, the nearby Daqing mountains were thickly forested. By 1736, when the Manchu built the walled settlement of Suiyuan adjacent to what had become the Chinese-Mongolian city of Guihua, the forests of the Daqing mountains had been devastated. This was only one of a number of environmental impacts that the early development of Hohhot as a frontier city had on its immediate surroundings and mountain and grassland hinterland.
For many centuries the establishment of self-sufficient military outposts and cities was an important component of Chinese control and settlement of the frontiers. These cities created new regional patterns of land use and environmental change as they generated demands for their construction and the subsequent maintenance of urban life. Adjacent areas were opened for agricultural settlement and development, and the cities served as channels and collection points for large-scale resource extraction to supply distant core areas. Successful frontier settlements also became destinations for migrants from China’s heavily populated core areas.
This paper is a case study of the environmental impacts of the development of the twin cities of Guihua and Suiyuan, the nucleus of contemporary Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. It examines the influences of Chinese, Mongolian, Manchu, and Muslim architectural and urban design traditions; urban demand for timber, bricks, stone, charcoal, firewood, coal, salt and grains; transformation of grassland to farmland; and long-distance trade in timber, salt, wool, hides, and livestock.
Organizer and Chair: Charles W. Hayford, Independent Scholar
Discussant: Steven I. Levine, University of Montana
Keywords: China, United States, international relations, history, political science, culture.
Scholars and diplomats debate across disciplinary boundaries about which factors in international relations are more powerful in which situations: "culture" (presumably the less conscious or articulate set of institutions, assumptions, and vocabularies which characterize particular groups), "ideology" (whether Marxist, liberal, or otherwise), or diplomatic "realpolitik." An intriguing test is the stages of relations between United States and China from the 1940s to the present. We have long debated "who lost China?"—was there a "lost chance," or "no chance"? Our international panel of historians and political scientists will gain fresh perspective by reexamining the periods before, during, and after the so-called Cold War in light of new materials and recent arguments. One paper examines the cultural basis of the Cold War in American Open Door writings, another the classic 1956 Cold War confrontation and misunderstanding. Two papers present post Cold War scenes to ask whether the Cold War has indeed ended. One reports on the notable rise of anti-American sentiment during the 1990s arguing that the new hostility is different from the Cold War mentality. Another examines 2001 diplomacy of apology to test how far cultural analysis will take us. There is continuity; tension and conflict persist. Can we describe this continuous theme without using the term "Cold War"? Should we rather say "the culture of conflict"? Was the 1949–1972 period an "inter-regnum," that is, a passing and anomalous phase of misunderstanding and learning, or a realistic expression of underlying structural forces which will lead to a "new Cold War"?
The American Open Door and Cultural Roots of the Cold War with China
Charles W. Hayford, Independent Scholar
From 1898, many Americans saw the uplift of China as part of their self-justifying role in the world; fostering "middle class revolution" was a more than political mission, but one which involved deep cultural self-definitions. The public writings of Americans who lived and worked in China—such authors as Pearl Buck, Alice Tisdale Hobart, Richard McKenna, Carl Crow, and the wartime journalists—represent informed and earnest attempts to understand emerging Chinese nationalism and revolution. Increasingly critical of American Open Door ideology, they construed various and contending Chinas for their audiences back home: some pictured a China waiting to be brought light by already enlightened Americans, others a China dominated by Boxer-like mobs who defied rationality, and still others a revolutionary China working towards an alternative modernity. The lack of effect of these writings in domestic American politics has often been remarked upon, but their less well noted internal contradictions and difficulties reflect deeper problems of the larger American political project. The diplomatic policies of the post-1949 Cold War were not dictated by these images or perceptions (although they certainly affected how policies were publicly presented), but they did sorely constrain policymakers in the early 1950s.
Cultural Categories, Moral Perimeters, and Ideological Rhetoric in Sino-American Interactions in the Mid-1950s
Simei Qing, Michigan State University
In 1956, for many American officials, China’s rapid transformation of private enterprise and the rural collectivization drive led to clear conclusions: "Sino-centrism" combined with a militant communist ideology to make China a more efficient tool in Moscow’s global ambition; the PRC was set to do what Nazi Germany had done in Europe. Meanwhile, Moscow was worried that Beijing was "flirting" with Washington and trying to break away from socialism. In fact, China’s domestic developments and foreign policy intentions in the mid-1950s were neither anti-Soviet nor anti-American, but part of its ongoing search for a "unique" Chinese path to modernity. Thus, in 1956, Beijing proposed the concept of socialism without class warfare, which focused on mobilizing all Chinese people to engage in China’s industrialization. More important, in the mid-1950s, Beijing attempted to apply the five principles of peaceful co-existence not only to nations of different political systems, but also to the socialist bloc, which included Beijing’s recommendations of withdrawing the Soviet troops from Eastern Europe and the Chinese troops from North Korea. Beijing also launched a "peace initiative" toward Washington, the centerpiece of which was Zhou Enlai’s invitation for American journalists to visit the PRC.
How could Washington and Moscow both miss out on a major portion of the Chinese "reality" and misinterpret Beijing’s foreign policy intentions in their respective observations in the mid-1950s? This paper will focus on the complex relationship between culture, society, and ideology to answer this question in terms of long-run China-United States relations.
Other and Self: Chinese Intellectuals’ Discourse on the United States in the 1990s
Jing Li, Institute of Modern History
After the formal Cold War more or less ended in the 1970s, Chinese intellectuals went through two major stages in their discourse on the United States. In the 1980s, the Chinese intelligentsia, eager to foster liberal change, came to focus on certain works which they interpreted and expounded in close connections to the ongoing events in China: Alvin Toffler, Thomas Kuhn, Milton Friedman, Samuel Huntington (with his discussion on democratic transition in developing countries), and Max Weber. Entering the 1990s, as the reform in China accelerated and Sino-American relations assumed a new tone which some argue is a return to Cold War rhetoric, Edward Said and Samuel Huntington, the latter with his controversial notion of the "clash of civilizations," generated heated discussion and debate on Chinese national identity and its relationship to the West; American scholars’ studies of East Asian history and culture provided a special impetus for Chinese intellectuals to reflect upon their own country; and the emerging mass media and mass market also gave rise to the kind of demagogic intellectuals whose strong nationalist and anti-American views, as expressed in works such as China Can Say No, seemed to indicate a reversal of the cosmopolitan trend of the 1980s. But, since China’s new self-confidence has arisen out of the liberal changes in the past two decades, the latest development is more in the nature of continued dialogue between the East and West, at a higher level, than the simple affirmation of self and rejection of the other, and not a return to the Cold War.
Culture Clash or New Cold War? Apologies East and West in 2001
Peter Gries, University of Colorado
Following the April 1, 2001 plane collision over the South China Sea, China and the United States engaged in two weeks of intensive "apology diplomacy." What role did culture play in these events? Drawing on experimental findings in social and cross-cultural psychology, we argue both against those pundits who essentialized cultural difference and against those who denied that culture matters. Instead, we maintain that both cultural differences and cultural commonalties played a significant role in Sino-American apology diplomacy.
Organizer: Ping-chen Hsiung, Academia Sinica
Chair: Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota
Discussants: Angela Zito, New York University; Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota
Keywords: sentiment, desire, Ming-Ch’ing, neo-Confucian orthodoxy, personal intimacy.
Recent studies on Chinese society and culture in the Ming-Ch’ing period suggest an environment that presented its inhabitants with many new, exciting possibilities as well as some ultimate constraints. We reexamine the surprising dynamics that emerged out of strict orthodox frameworks, exploring both the potentials of drastic change and profound perseverance. Human "sentiments and desires" is the theme we chose to bring forth some of the results of these intellectual excises that started a fresh foray in the "history of emotions" from a comparative perspective.
This panel consists of three papers, from history, literature, and classics study respectively. Ping-chen Hsiung’s paper will discuss the way Ming-Ch’ing male authors recorded mother-daughter relations, comparing that with the way women did it and the way men wrote of male kinship ties to show the matrilineal lives lived behind and within patriarchal order. So-an Chang’s study of Ch’ing philologists’ reconsideration of key Confucian rituals (of mourning, marriage, and inheritance) intends to reveal the intellectual dynamics of change at the core of late imperial classicism. Hua Wei’s paper on an eighteenth-century commentary on the Poeny Pavilion calls attention to the powerful potential of revolt carefully wrapped under the terms for little noticed literary criticism. Together these three studies hope to showcase some of the exciting new results of the Ming-Ch’ing research on "sentiments and desires," whereby both the presumably fixed orthodox culture in shifting its fundamental grounds, and numerous new channels of expression in social practices and textual representations were created. At the end, all three participants shall reflect on the intellectual significance of these discoveries in review of the development of the field, and on their historical implications as they are related to the past or connected with the future in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
With her studies in Ming politics, ritual, and religion, Ann Waltner (she will be attending an international conference on "privacy" and "sentiment" therefore meeting with the three panelists) shall serve as the chair. With her own research on the High Ch’ing court ritual, Angela Zito, who has visited Academia Sinica and witnessed the growth of the research project on history of emotions as well as participating in a conclusive conference on "sentiments and desires of the Ming and Ch’ing," shall act together with Ann Waltner as discussants of this panel. By supporting this presentation, the AAS takes an important step in sharing the newest works in the field that are of strong interest across many academic disciplines and institutional boundaries.
Unlike Mothers, Unlike Daughters: Ming-Ch’ing Men’s Inscription of their Genealogy at Heart
Ping-chen Hsiung, Academia Sinica
As part of a monographic study on changing domesticity in late imperial China, this essay will examine how Chinese men individually and collectively write about mother-daughter relations as they understood, or imagined, them. It begins by categorizing the different social and literary contexts that men might raise or be requested to take note of and reports about these ties. Out of these various kinds of mother-daughter pairs (e.g., from the author’s perspective, those between his mother and maternal grandmother, his wife and mother-in-law, his sisters and mother, his aunts and paternal grandmother, or his own daughter and his wife), a typography is then mapped out to show the priorities a man placed on these various female kinships in his mind, the degrees of intimacy he held them in his world, and the particular angle he chose to gaze at and thus record about them.
Out of this exercise, the investigation intends to answer three questions. One, how was a man’s observation, engagement, and representation of this matrilineal linkage different from the self-reporting or the recording of similar female ties from the perspective of a woman? Two, what subjective feelings we may detect as the main operating mechanism of the male psychology as he chose his materials and fashions of recording. And three, from these traces of a genealogy of the sentiment according to the masculine angle, what may be learned of his emotional world in the daily life as it reflects on the social sanction and collective recognition of the feminine bondage sustaining, reproducing, and working for the continuous existence of China’s patriarchal social order.
Ritual Learning, Evidential Studies, and the Reconstruction of Ritualism in Late Imperial China
So-an Chang, Academia Sinica
Two major cultural trends emerged in the eighteenth century: the rethinking of human desire and the revival of classical learning. Ritual learning then took the route of evidential studies in order to re-appropriate the original classical Confucian ritualism.
What is ritualism or the reconstruction of ritualism? It took two forms of anti-orthodoxy debates. That is, opposition to the Song-Ming Neo-Confucian way of institutionalizing the rituals on one hand; and, opposition to the totalistic Confucianism of the May Fourth (1919) Movement on the other. In this context, the target of the eighteenth century was Song-Ming ritualism.
Three examples of in-depth study of changes in philologically-based on classical studies in High ch’ing are offered as specific examples:
1. The significance of the evidential studies debates over whether "elder-brother’s wife and younger brother cannot be mourned as relatives" and "what kind of a relationship is appropriate between elder-brother’s wife and younger brother?" lay in the relaxation in the theory of the boundary between men and women.
2. Evidential studies took the notion of "[the husband] personally goes to welcome [the bride]," rather than "engagement ceremony" as marking marriage in order to explain why "becoming a wife" was more important than "becoming a daughter-in-law." They thus attacked the custom of engaged women’s chastity.
3. The basic notion of "respect" in evidential studies was to respect "the inheritor" rather than the "ruler," thus attacking autocracy, in order to show that the respect due the emperor was on account of his duties, not his position. The functional view of the monarchy was thus gradually forming.
With these, we see the rethinking of the private self and human desire. The private realm and desire were affirmed and gradually expanded in the field of social relations.
How Dangerous Can the Peony Be? Textual Space, Caizi Mudanting, and Naturalizing the Erotic
Hua Wei, Academia Sinica
Of the many editions of Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion that survive, Caizi Mudanting is rarest and most unconventional. The physical format of this edition places the text of the Peony Pavilion in the bottom two-fifths of the page and its commentary in the top three-fifths, the discrepancy in space due to the much larger size given over to notes. This commentary is attributed to Cheng Qiong, the wife of the publisher Wu Zhensheng (1695–1769), and presents an erotic rereading of this popular late Ming drama text. The commentary follows a fixed format: each scene is first provided an erotic lexicon and then explained in detail by lengthy annotations and forays into philosophical discourse about seqing or sensual passion. The author of the commentary proposes that seqing, which includes a mutually equal ability to express and admire beauty and talent, is the distinct characteristic of humans, not ethics or morality. She challenges stringent moral doctrines about female chastity and sexuality, proposing mutual female lovemaking (duishi) as a release for sexual tension that arises from the needs of remaining chaste. In at least two instances, she discusses the sexual tension that exists between fathers and daughters and boys and older women, subtly suggesting that sexual energy is a natural, irrepressible force. In that context, she challenged prevailing Neo-Confucian attitudes about child-rearing and family as overly disciplining and punishing. Most importantly, she opened up a critical space for female readers, one that satisfied their erotic imagination and justified their own sexual desires. With this example, we can perhaps reconsider the possible ways in which subversive social voices circulated in eighteenth-century China, and the use of literary criticism as a powerful tool of resistance to cultural hegemony.
Organizer: Dahua Li, Academy of Social Science
Chair: Xun Liu, University of Southern California
Discussant: Fabrizio Pregadio, Technical University, Berlin
Daoism underwent great change in the Tang Dynasty when inner alchemy which focuses on the cultivation of the Mind-Nature (xing) and the Allotted Life or Body (ming) gradually replaced the laboratory alchemy aimed at the refining elixir for prolonging life. Almost all Daoist schools have since sought to cultivate the Mind and the Body of the individual rather than alchemic transformation. As a result of this shift in focus, a whole new system of cosmological and existential outlook on life, man and nature evolved with regard to the inner body.
This change played an important role in shaping the attitudes to body and bodily cultivation practices in the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. As the body became the object of philosophical contemplation and physical cultivation, Daoist cultivators perceived their body as a microcosm that was governed by the same laws of the larger universe outside their body. This perceived intrinsic linkage between the body and the universe convinced the Daoist cultivators that by physically cultivating and refining their Mind and Allotted Life, they would not only attain the transformation of their own body, but also of the world. Out of this vision of the body and the cosmos evolved the Daoist life philosophy and ethics for human conduct, outlook on human existence, which in turn shaped many other aspects of Chinese culture and thought from cosmology, medicine, and morality.
This panel assembles three leading scholars of Daoism from China whose work addresses various aspects of this vital inward shift in Daoist self-cultivation practices that occurred in late Tang, and seeks to assess the theoretical and practical ramifications in areas of Chinese cosmology, medicine, and self-cultivation practice from the Tang to the Qing periods.
How Did the Life Philosophy Form?
Dahua Li, Academy of Social Science
Laozi of Daoist classic ever said that Dao meant Perpetuity, and De meant permanence. This viewpoint was approved by Daoism in Han, Wei, and Jin Dynasty. When Daoism was created, as a basic belief, the immortality of life was established, though Daoism can not refuse its other social duty for this reason. However, in the long term, Daoism chose a way of taking alchemy, it based on the viewpoint that Dao was both the spirit of world and the special substance, so whoever got Dao, one could be immortal. Tang dynasty was transformed period, due to a series of problems from alchemy, people gradually paid attention to traditional cultivation. While the cultivators were practicing inwardly, they found the body was so complicated, that they believed the body was a little universe just similar to the big universe outside, and both had the same construction, law of movement, time and orientation. Further, the body became the object of research, of learning through practice. Meantime, this cultivation was linked with Chinese Medicine, cosmology, and the like. Almost all Daoists believed that there were little universe and big one, and medicine should study this little universe. Especially, they were sure that Dao originally existed in body, so long as people kept on practicing on Xing and Ming inward (Xing means mind, Ming means body), they could found it. On the fundamental outlook, the Life Philosophy of Daoism formed. Later, Confucian, in the light of Daoism, thought the spirit of heaven and earth existed in body. Simply, the influence of the change of Taoism gradually enlarged various aspects, such as the outlook of life, Chinese cosmology, epistemology, ethical ramifications, and so on.
Inner Alchemy and Dynastic Life-Philosophy: Some Examples from the Late Yuan and Early Ming
Lowell Skar, Tufts University
Some of the most vital, subtle, and prolific writers on Inner Alchemy worked in South China during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Although their concerns varied considerably, they generally promoted the traditions of alchemical revitalization taught them by their masters, revived earlier traditions with new alchemical interpretations and revelations, and hoped to restore order to the larger social and political disruptions around them. For many of them, in other words, the project of alchemy was central to the project of restoring the order of Chinese life to the lands and lives diminished by Mongol rule. This included not only teaching disciples the specifics of returning their lives to the order of the Dao, but also reminding non-initiates about the wider general significance of their activities. It may have come as a surprise to the heirs of these alchemical traditions, then, when the first Ming emperor sought to diminish the role of alchemy in the appropriate means needed to run the empire. Far from quashing adepts’ ambitions, however, these efforts led to a greater integration of their writings, ideas, images, and integrating vision of a spiritual life into many new popular religious traditions. They also became central to the literary edifice that best demonstrated the fullest dimensions of the Dao’s workings in the world—the Daoist Canon—and some of the ritual traditions that gave Daoism its social purpose. This essay will explore several major compilers, commentators, and practitioners from the late Yuan and early Ming.
The Symbol Metaphor of Long Life and Golden Elixir
Shichuang Zhan, Xiamen University
The theory of Jindan (Golden Elixir) is very important in Daoist health-preserving culture. Jindan is a longevity medicine which is taken for the purpose of long life, and the skill of making elixirs is known as golden elixir refining. Because of the golden elixir materials, the mineral picked from outer of the man’s body, this medicine is entitled "Waidan" (Outer Elixir). Later, many peoples take the activity of assorting with the essence, breath and spirit in the inner of body as the practice of alchemy. The "Dan" in the body is called the "Inner Cinnabar." Without reference to Outer Elixir or Inner Cinnabar, they are all related to the idea of long life in the ancient times. In many stories of Huang Di (Yellow Emperor), we can discover the wish for long life, as the story of the highly skilled doctor, Bianque, is the symbol of long life. Moreover, Pengzu, the master-hand of health preserving, he established the preserving theory foundation for Daoism because he possessed of many skills of life. Checking and unscrambling the mythologies and the legends, we can find many mysteries of Daoist health-preserving culture.
Organizer: Maurizio Marinelli, State University of New York, Fredonia
Chair: Merle Goldman, Harvard University
Discussant: Stephanie Donald, University of Melbourne
The title of this panel paraphrases the famous painting by Rene Magritte commonly known by its subtitle "Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe)." This image epitomizes the potential challenges in any apparently clear-cut or one-sided representation of reality.
The idea, the rhetoric, and the vision of China as provided by the propaganda apparatus have been for decades based on the axiomatic existence of a relation between a precise "sign" and a pre-defined "referent." To use Chinese traditional categories: they have depended on a correspondence between a "name (ming)" and a more or less fictitious "reality (shi)." For decades, the ritual of propaganda (xuanchuan), (that in Chinese overlaps with "political communication") has carried out the complex task of "preparing public opinion" and "unifying thinking." Role models and "correct" imagery have offered a positive, reassuring, mimetic, and unequivocally codified image of experience. Today, however, even though government control of public discourse remains, the framework of communication practices and processes at work in Chinese communities have become much more diversified. The role of traditional rhetorical topoi has assumed different forms or expressive modalities.
This panel brings together scholars with different backgrounds or specializations. They work in different academic contexts but all of them share an interest in Chinese government "propaganda."
All the participants have conducted extensive research or fieldwork on political discourse and communication, analyzing the practices or the processes through which representation, meta-representation, or hyper-representation of reality are created and how they operate at the national or transnational level. All the speakers share a commitment to understanding the significance of the official representation of a claimed reality and its effects on political discourse.
The panel pursues the following themes:
• the role played by the creation of an image of China in the definition of national specificity,
• the characteristics of communication processes through which the representation of a claimed reality is constructed,
• the relation between this claimed reality and public discourse in Chinese society.
An interdisciplinary panel will allow each participant to present his/her research as it relates to the main topics. It is hoped that the audience will contribute to a wide ranging discussion on scholarly approaches to the understanding of political communication in contemporary China.
Consumer Citizenship, Spiritual Consumerism: Privatizing Propaganda and Commercial Advertising in the People’s Republic of China
Steven W. Lewis, Rice University
Political communication is undergoing a gradual but radical transformation in the People’s Republic of China. The decentralization of state authority has provided incentives and organizational structures for local governments and Party organs to experiment, innovate, and adapt forms of political communication best suited to local agendas. Local authorities are currently shaping a national "socialist spiritual civilization" propaganda campaign to create images of a model citizen who identifies with distinctly local development needs.
At the same time, the shrinking of state ownership and the semi-privatization of state media have turned propaganda cadres into "public relations" technologists and merged political organs with marketing and advertising firms. Such privatization has provided sophisticated new communications technologies for state actors, but has also sparked the evolution of new forms of political communication that are mediated by the norms of consumerism. Decentralization and privatization have created the potential for consumer citizenship and spiritual consumerism, a merger between political and commercial communication.
This paper examines the interplay of the production of images—representations of a claimed reality—of transnational, national, and local lifestyle identification by political and economic actors. I draw upon surveys of outdoor political signs from the "spiritual civilization" campaign and underground subway commercial advertisements in Beijing and Shanghai in 1998 and 1999 to obtain images of collective lifestyle identification, and then examine the degree to which these political and commercial advertisements share common form, content, and language. I conclude with speculation about how this interplay between consumer citizenship and spiritual consumerism will affect future public discourse in Chinese society.
Propaganda Posters in the Reform Era: Promoting Patriotism or Providing Public Information?
Stefan Landsberger, Leiden University
Through the ages the Chinese government has educated the people in what was deemed to be correct thought, by various means and media. Since 1949, this educational process has continued in the People’s Republic of China. So-called propaganda art reproduced on posters has played a supportive, but still major role in the many campaigns that were designed to mobilize and educate the people.
Conditions in the twenty-first century certainly do not bode well for government-inspired education, in whatever form. The educational images, slogans, and messages that the Party continues to produce are increasingly seen as irrelevant and fall on unseeing eyes and deaf ears. With popular interest in politics at an all-time low, people no longer care about being ideologically or politically pure. They are more interested in having fun, and therefore in the size of their paychecks or in the question of whether they’ll still be employed tomorrow.
This paper will discuss how the propaganda poster seems to have arrived at a crossroads. On the one hand, I will show how many posters continue to serve a political purpose, albeit in a diluted form: they are used to bolster patriotism and other elements of socialist spiritual civilization, in particular among school children. On the other hand, the increasing number of posters devoted to real topics, both positive (2000 national census) and negative (floods), points to an attempt to transform the poster into a medium providing a more "public information service" type of message.
Icon of Power: The Little Red Book
Robert Benewick, University of Sussex
In this paper we argue that the iconization of Mao Zedong thought was fundamental to the founding of a revolutionary political culture. We develop this argument through an examination of three related themes: its material manifestation as packaged in the Little Red Book; the visual representation of the Little Red Book as an icon of political activism in posters and related visual cultural and material objects (Evans and Donald 1999, 1–6, Gittings 1999, 32); and the parallels between the Maoist politicalization of society and the personalization of power and the depoliticalization of society and depersonalization of power under the leadership of the post-Maoist reformers. We suggest finally that the depoliticalization of China has involved the strategic reinvention of Mao in popular memory. The story of Mao Zedong, and therefore the lasting significance of the Little Red Book, may be understood to be a traveling site of national memory in China’s thrust towards global economic power.
The Role of Language in Political Communication
Maurizio Marinelli, State University of New York, Fredonia
The topic of this paper is an analysis of the linguistic aspects of political communication in the PRC, where language has always played a crucial role in the construction of a claimed reality. Under Mao Zedong, the authoritarianism of official language constituted one of the most effective devices to set boundaries in the people’s range of representation of the "real" world. "Mao’s style" had a strong illocutionary force and a high potential for alignment, absorption, and internalization on the receiving end.
In post-Mao China, the reiteration through the media of the same formalized linguistic patterns—even though the keywords had changed—claimed to create another fictitious image of a one-sided reality, based on the preassumption of annihilation of any possible dichotomy between surface and underlying structures of names (ming) and actuality (shi).
In this paper I examine the basic semiotic and ideological processes acting on and through the official language. I argue that in the last two decades official language and its authority have undergone a progressive devolution along with the vertical and horizontal cleavages of ideology. I believe that language determines thought as much as thought determines language: if we really want to disclose the treachery of codified images we have to consider language "as an instrument of discovery, clarification and insight" (Whorf 1956). I have decided to use the peculiar relationship existing in Chinese language between the name (ming), the saying (yan), and the actuality (shi) as a paradigm to evaluate the degree of distance between the values proposed by the propaganda apparatus via the official language and the possible expressive range of reality.
Hong Kong: Virtual Tourism and Political Transition
Stephanie Donald, University of Melbourne, Australia
This paper explores our observation that tourism is important both as a marker of changes in commercial practice and as a mediator of national (or quasi-national) self-description. Focusing on the phenomenon of virtual tourism we examine therefore web-based profiles of Hong Kong, a society in political transition. Transition is defined in this context as a national or quasi-national community moving from one political sphere of influence to another. Thus, Hong Kong is a quasi-national and postcolonial "special administrative region," with a long history of British domination and a new history of democratic struggle. It is also struggling to maintain its position as the most popular Asian destination city for overseas and regional tourists. Its national status is poised between community histories and Chinese imperatives. These constitutive states of being fall on a spectrum between banal nationalism (exemplified by US interests) (Billig 1995), and active nationalism (demonstrated by Chinese political edict).
The paper traces both the expansion of US influence in the management of regional tourism domains online, and micro and national (Chinese) level attempts to combat this trend. Our case study exemplifies a wider contextual shift in world politics and the status of nationhood as an organizing concept within world economic and cultural flows. Following Brian Winston’s argument that "the technological idea will be grounded in scientific competence" (1998), this paper suggests that the technological intervention into commercial interests will be strongly associated with national self-description at an ideological level.
Organizer: Victor Shih, Harvard University
Chair and Discussant: Edward S. Steinfeld, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Keywords: China, political economy, economic reform, SOE, financial market.
This panel examines the problems of the Chinese economic reform in the 1990s. Focusing on various sectors and factors of production, participants will explore the fate of well-meaning reform policies intended to replace old structures of the planned economy with market-based allocation mechanisms. The questions panelists will address include: how have forms of administrative allocation and planned redistribution persisted alongside the reformist measures? In what ways has the political economy of this new policy environment prolonged and modified politically-motivated interventionist policies? Does it create new obstacles to further reform?
The four panelists each focus on one aspect of the Chinese economy, using fresh empirical data gathered during recent fieldwork. Bill Hurst (UC Berkeley) examines how political institutions induce layoffs in SOEs independently from forces of market necessity. Kun-Chin Lin (UC Berkeley) argues that the imposition of Western corporate governance on top of the pre-existing socialist industrial organizations creates unintended and inefficient outcomes. Matthew Rudolph (Cornell) explains the conflicting objectives of securities market reform and the persistence of state dominance and discretion. Victor Shih (Harvard) will examine how the state’s growth target and political agenda conflict fundamentally with the stated goal of reforming the banking sector.
Panelists each employ different theoretical perspectives, ranging from organization studies to interest group coalition theory. Panelists also use a variety of research methodologies, including in-depth case studies, large-N statistical analysis, and macro- and microeconomic data comparisons. Ultimately, the authors arrive at similar conclusions. Recent reforms have created as many problems as they have solved.
The Political Logic of Laying off Workers in China’s State Owned Enterprises
William Hurst, University of California, Berkeley
Beginning in 1993, and continuing through the present day, 20 million workers in China’s State Owned Enterprises have been laid off. Though some of these layoffs are necessary in order for SOEs to avoid bankruptcy, the decisions at the firm level regarding whom to lay off and how many workers must be cut are often motivated far more by political ambition and personal self-interest of managers than by raw economic necessity. The root cause of this is a misguided directive from the 15th Party Congress to make SOEs profitable by 2000.
Based on numerous interviews with SOE managers, employees, and local officials in at least two cities, I will demonstrate that managers lay off workers in an effort to appease their superiors and represent to the central state that they are serious about meeting the Party’s directive. By examining workers’ statements regarding their dismissal or that of their acquaintances, I will show that corruption and illicit stripping of assets and extraction of bribes from workers by managers also play a role in the logic of decisions regarding lay offs.
This paper will illuminate the ways in which well intentioned, but poorly thought out and implemented, reform directives can skew the political landscape at the firm. level. These altered political incentives and constraints promote legally dubious and often economically sub-optimal outcomes at the firm level. Today’s rushed reforms can actually impede the smooth and rational functioning of an emerging labor market in the state sector.
Between Socialist Relics and National Champions: Limits in Statist Manipulation of Organizational Behaviors in the Chinese Oil and Petrochemical Industries
Kun-Chin Lin, University of California, Berkeley
In 1998, PRC Premier Zhu Rongji directed the Chinese oil and petrochemical sectors to reconsolidate all assets and operations under two integrated and territorially protected national oil corporations (NOCs) in which the state held the controlling share. Zhu further directed the NOCs to split themselves into a profitable "core" part consisting of the most competitive assets, and a disadvantaged "non-core" part consisting mostly of technical and production service units and social functions. This centrally-imposed, path-breaking reform sought to simultaneously correct distortions in industrial structures, rigidities in enterprise management, and property rights, as well as to end the conservative moral economy of socialist enterprises. The establishment of a modern corporate governance structure on top of existing production units was the silver bullet to cure the above evils.
From my fieldwork in several key oilfields and petrochemical plants in China, I found that the intended efficiency ends have been seriously threatened by political contentions arising from the new production relations, including: asymmetric bargaining between the core and non-core parts, obsolescing administrative hierarchy within the SOE, and the increasing burden on the local economy to absorb SOEs’ surplus workforce and operations. In sum, I identify the areas where modern corporate institutions have actually converged with the prior political economy to create new and vicious behavioral patterns and suggest that statist manipulation of industrial structures bears a heavy risk despite the good intentions of the central reformers and the soundness of the blueprint.
The Politics of Marketizing Capital: Institutional Legacies and the Development of China’s Securities Market
Matthew Rudolph, Cornell University
State control over the allocation of capital has been the sine qua non of late development strategies. China’s recent efforts to reform its capital markets thus marked a significant shift for CCP policymakers. Creating a market for capital includes the process of securitization in which tangible assets such as firms (equities) and intangible assets such as revenue streams (bonds) are packaged into uniform, anonymous, tradable instruments. Creating a market for securitized assets diminishes the government’s ability to control the allocation of finance.
The government sidestepped this problem by segmenting the share market, and by maintaining a huge controlling share of all securitized assets. The limited goal was to raise "free" funds to support loss-making SOEs. However, once these "one-off" gains were achieved, this mercenary use of the securities market left a new set of reform problems, including: (1) determining the purpose of the securities market, and the government’s role in it, (2) how to sell off the state’s huge share without depressing the market, and (3) how to control emerging powerful financial actors.
Focusing on China’s securities regulator, the paper relies on interviews, official documents, and market data to explore these questions and to evaluate several explanations for the persistence of distributive intervention by a regulator designed ostensibly to conduct procedural supervision. These explanations, include: (1) the structure of fiscal and external economic exposure, and in particular an over-dependence on FDI, and, (2) the conflicting objectives of increasing efficiency in capital allocation and the need to maintain state control for social and development purposes.
Questionable Reforms: Political Obstacles to the Commercialization of State Banks in China
Victor Shih, Harvard University
Since the passing of the Commercial Banking Law in 1994, China has implemented a series of banking reforms that seemingly brought Chinese banks closer to commercialization. This trend accelerated in 1998 when Zhu Rongji strongly signaled bureaucrats at all levels to stop meddling with banks. Despite these encouraging developments, this paper argues that banks in China have achieved only marginally increased independence from the government. Rather, the central government has merely taken control of the banks from the local government.
Drawing from hundreds of internal documents and over 70 interviews with central and local government and bank officials, this paper further outlines the ways in which politics and state priorities have directed the flow of bank loans in the banking system. Specifically, Premier Zhu has used the central government’s control over banks to fulfill his "campaign promises" of alleviating SOE losses, preserving social stability, propping up the rural economy, and maintaining growth. Moreover, the banking system has and will play an important role in the development of Western China, a campaign that makes little economic but much political sense. Finally, although less pervasive, personal connections and factional allegiance still exert a subtle effect on the distribution of bank loans.
In conclusion, this paper points out that while recent reform policies have slowed down the formation of non-performing loans, continual state intervention in the banking sector means that inflationary pressure on the economy will persist. Moreover, the centralization of control over banks might further decrease the efficiency of capital allocation in China.
Organizer: Paola Zamperini, University of Aveiro
Chair: Stephen H. West, University of California, Berkeley
Discussants: Jinlin L. Hwang, Tunghai University; Sandra Teresa Hyde, Harvard University
Keywords: China, space, desire, dream, gender, identity.
This panel looks at space as a medium through which to rethink Chinese cultural expressions of gender, desire, and identity from the perspective of anthropology, literary criticism, history, sociology, and visual studies. Thinking with space results in a deeper theoretical insight in and broader practical understanding of the dynamics at play in Chinese literary, visual, and historical representations. Debunking the ideas of margins and center, or nei and wai, as the dominant discourse about space in traditional China, each of the papers presented examines this issue from different perspectives. The space allotted to dreams, primary perceptions, and passions and its relationship to gender, history, performance and time are under study here to generate a critical re-examination of this fundamental category of analysis. The proposed panel will be structured in the following way: a discussant’s introduction (ten minutes), three very brief presentations (twelve minutes each) followed by the second discussant’s analysis (ten minutes each). We believe in the importance of changing the traditional panel format to create a more interactive way of presenting and discussing our scholarship. Thus, the role of both discussants will be to raise theoretical questions for all the participants, in order to stimulate an interesting dialogue with the audience, rather than simply critiquing the merits (and/or demerits) of the respective papers.
Secret Gardens: Polysemantic Spaces in Qing Women’s Tanci Narratives
Siao-chen Hu, Academia Sinica
In traditional discourses of space and gender in China, women’s proper position was usually constructed as "nei," inside. Privacy and feelings were thus associated with this feminine positioning, However, in female authored texts produced during the Ming and the Qing dynasties we find quite complex and multifaceted representations of the inner worlds women were supposed to inhabit. Using female author Qing dynasty’s tanci narratives, the present paper explores the multiple functions the enclosed spaces of the garden could play in women’s fictional texts. In these narratives, the garden is depicted as a space where the female characters can find solitude, an area of reclusion within the crowded household. On the other hand, it creates a contact zone between the "inner chambers" and the outside world, and thus it becomes a dangerous area where women’s desire for transgression can be expressed, if not fulfilled. Furthermore, because of the proximity of house and garden, it also symbolizes a place of rest and escape from the menial routine of household work, while providing a mysterious enclosure in which to experience the unusual and the fantastic. Thus the garden can and should be read on all these multiple levels, and its readings can enrich our understanding of women’s spatial perceptions and desires in Qing China.
Remapping Borders: Ren Bonian’s Frontier Paintings and Late-Nineteenth-Century Shanghai
Yu-chih Lai, Yale University
This paper, by examining the frontier-related paintings done by the late-19th-century Shanghai painter Ren Bonian (1840–1896), analyzes how the traditional cultural repertory of the northern frontier helped Shanghai people orient themselves in the midst of the late-19th-century’s radical culture encounters with the West. Unlike a traditional subject-matter-oriented study, which usually focuses on reconstructing the historical development of a particular theme, this study tries to weave a tapestry, where this group of paintings is connected horizontally to the city and the city life. This is an intertextual study of the sense of place (what kind of place Shanghai was), the physical space (the old southern Chinese Shanghai and the new northern foreign settlements), and the Shanghai visual culture. By reading the discussions about physical boundaries, including the coastal defense, the division into two urban enclaves (the south Chinese city and the north foreign settlements), and most importantly, the depictions of the frontier in Ren Bonian’s paintings, supplemented by the rich materials provided by the contemporary novels, tour guides, and journals, this paper will hopefully be able to trace the invisible symbolic boundaries by which Shanghainese perceived the self and the other, and also how this perception contributed to their sense of Shanghai as a place, in a clear fashion.
Dreamscapes: The Vertical Horizons of Late Qing Fiction
Paola Zamperini, University of Aveiro
The present paper looks at late Qing novels and their deployment of dream space to construct new narratives of desire, identity, and nostalgia. The oneiric landscapes that become the background of many novels of this period are essential to understand how late Qing authors depict a disintegration of space and time, forcing characters and readers alike to constantly strive to reach a vertical point of view from which to be able to reorient themselves as well as reorganize the plot. Profound spatio-temporal deformation and metamorphosis take place at the turn of last century, as cities and the people who inhabit them change face. New bodies and new vehicles appear, and a new tempo and speed propel them across the pages of the novels. Thus dream narratives, though a long standing tradition in Chinese literature, become a fundamental narrative component of these texts, as the most appropriate fictional device to mirror the explosive emergence of powerful new desires, consumerism against the urban landscapes of Shanghai, so exotic as to appear unreal. This paper explores this "architecture" of late Qing fiction, namely, the relationship between real and imagined spaces, new bodies of consumption and new fantasies of empowerment.
Organizer and Chair: Uradyn E. Bulag, City University of New York
Keywords: warlords, historiography, ethnic minorities, nationalism, socialism, borderlands.
Recent Western revisionist scholarship has challenged Chinese nationalist and socialist historiography critical of warlords for undermining Chinese national unity, and sees in warlords an alternative or federalist mode of governance of China. Not coincidentally, in China some warlords have recently been resurrected in the new post-revolutionary national historiography. They have been praised not so much for their challenge to the central government as for their contribution to a unified China, issues that resonate with China’s interface with bordering nations and peoples and have deep implications for issues of Chinese nationalism.
This panel, consisting of anthropologists and historians from China and the U.S., reexamines four prominent warlords, Liu Wenhui, Fu Zuoyi, Long Yun, and Ma Fuxiang, who long reigned over parts of today’s Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan and Yunnan, all frontier areas of China in the 1920s–40s. While Long and Ma were ethnic Yi and Hui respectively, Liu and Fu were Chinese. Locating these warlords betwixt and between recalcitrant frontier minorities and an expansive central government, the panelists analyze the role of ethnicity in shaping disparate warlord political visions for China and the regions under their rule, and in the shifting historiographical representations of these warlord regimes in both the Republic and People’s Republic. This panel aims to shed new insights into the changing dynamics of China in relation to its ethnic frontiers in the twentieth century and beyond, so as to deepen our understanding of ethnic and minzu issues in volatile borderlands.
A Double Virtue: The Islamic and Nationalist Agendas of Ma Fuxiang
Jonathan N. Lipman, Mount Holyoke College
Ma Fuxiang was the first of the northwestern Muslim warlords to join the Guomindang, and the only one to achieve high office outside his native region. Though he died young, he had already been the mayor of a major city and a provincial governor. He also served as head of the Tibetan-Mongolian Commission of the Guomindang, in which capacity he reinforced (at least rhetorically) Chinese nationalist claims to rule the entire Qing empire, including his own Hui people.
Well educated in the classical Chinese curriculum, Ma Fuxiang had also studied the Chinese Islamic canon and developed an extensive program of publishing and distributing its major works. He thus consciously placed himself at the intersection of Chinese and Islamic literary cultures, displaying his erudition in filial Chinese stelae as well as deep reading of the works of Qing period Muslim literati.
This paper will delve into his writings and the current scholarship on his life to discover the roots of this double virtue, both Chinese and Islamic, and his vision of a Chinese national future which left ample room for Muslims to live fully Islamic lives. I examine this vision in contrast to the Guomindang and CCP evaluations of him as a warlord, as well as the recent Hui reappraisal of him as a hero. The paper explores potentials in and challenges to such a vision in the aftermath of China’s minzu project which has reified ethnic identities as mutually exclusive.
An Yi Patriotic Warlord: Long Yun’s Ethnic, Provincial and National Politics
Jiao Pan, Central University of Nationalities
Throughout the twentieth century warlords have been denounced in Chinese historiography for hindering China’s national unification. Recent Western scholarship, on the other hand, has given them an aura of progressiveness, representing an enlightened federalism in China’s nation building. Both approaches, however, denied nationalism to warlords.
This paper shows how Long Yun pursued power by taking the Chinese nation-state for granted rather than challenging it in his legendary career starting from a subaltern officer of ethnic Yi origin to a warlord, governor of Yunnan province (1928–45), sympathizer with pro-democracy intellectuals and Jiang Jieshi’s prisoner de facto from 1945 to 1948, a leading minzu and "democratic" representative in the early 1960s, and finally China’s "biggest rightist" in 1957.
Drawing on Long’s case, this paper argues that disintegration in the first half of the 20th century was paradoxically, in rhetoric at least, a product of contending appeals to a better "unitary" Chinese nation-state rather than "de-constructing" it. All power players in China, including the most notorious warlords, strove to present a patriotic public image. To understand how patriotism and "national salvation" became unchallenged hegemonic stances in modern China, we need to take into account power relations in various locales: local power dynamics as well as those of the central vs. the local and China vs. foreign powers. This paper examines Long Yi’s identity as a factor in his changing political fortune under both the Guomindang and Communist governments.
Recycling a Warlord: Liu Wenhui’s Provincialism in Xikang
Wenbin Peng, University of Washington
This paper discusses Liu Wenhui’s provincial and colonial projects in Xikang to explore the hybridization of frontier politics in Republican China, a process mediated by the narratives of Nation and Revolution, but replete with tensions and ambiguity.
Zhao Erfeng, a late Qing warlord, viewed the prospect of a Xikang province on the Sino-Tibetan frontiers as crucial to the incorporation of Tibet into the Chinese Empire. Though no less nationalistic, Liu had to scale down his predecessor’s Xikang blueprint to a more localized one to secure a base after he was defeated by other Sichuanese warlords. Liu’s resurrection of the Xikang provincial project coincided with the Guomin-dang desire to consolidate its grip on southwest China following its retreat there during the war years, yet, Liu’s presence in Xikang continued to haunt Jiang Jieshi’s unification imaginary, reminding him of his unfinished campaigns against those "lesser" warlords on Chinese frontiers. Several times Jiang tacitly supported efforts by a Khampa elite to oust Liu from Xikang.
To Khampa Tibetans and Yi in Xikang, Liu Wenhui has been remembered as a Chinese villain for his assimilationist policies and suppressions of their self-rule movements. But a reading of post-revolutionary history illustrates a complex process in which Liu evolved from a "feudal warlord" to a hero whose "uprising" helped overthrow the Nationalist regime and a model "reformee" whose "progress" on a revolutionary path exemplified the Party’s own transforming power, as Liu himself proudly wrote in his memoir.
Remembering the Great Friendship between Fu Zuoyi and Ulanhu, or How to Write a Post-revolutionary History of Inner Mongolia?
Uradyn E. Bulag, City University of New York
The Inner Mongolian self-determination movement in the 1920s–1940s was predicated on liberation from Chinese chauvinism, epitomized by warlord colonization of Inner Mongolia. Fu Zuoyi, by virtue of his hard-line stance towards Mongols and his position as governor of Suiyuan province, has been the chief Chinese villain in the Inner Mongolian revolutionary historiography of this era. Eliminating Inner Mongol territorial identity, opening up Mongol grassland for agricultural development by military colonies, as well as suppressing Mongol resistance, were among Fu’s great "crimes" against which Mongols led by Ulanhu fought. They eventually built the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in 1947 and eliminated Suiyuan as a province in 1954, or so the Inner Mongolian revolutionary history would tell us.
This paper reexamines the Inner Mongolian revolutionary historiography of the pre-Cultural Revolution era that legitimized the raison d’être of Mongolian territorial autonomy under the Chinese Communist Party in juxtaposition with the recent Chinese reappraisal of Fu Zuoyi and Ulanhu. In this new nation-centered reappraisal, premised on his contributions to the building of a unified China, Fu Zuoyi has been reincarnated as a builder of Inner Mongolia and even of the Inner Mongolian revolutionary resistance force upon which Ulanhu established his communist, ethno-nationalist, and anti-Japanese credentials. This paper will then discuss the future of the inner Mongolia Autonomous Region when its ideological foundation has been taken away for the sake of a unified Chinese nation.
Organizer: Robert M. Culp, Bard College
Chair and Discussant: Ernest P. Young, University of Michigan
Discussant: Barry Keenan, Denison University
Keywords: education, nationalism, politics, culture, society.
On May 13, 2001, Professor Knight Biggerstaff, one of the founding figures in U.S.-China studies, passed away at the age of 95. By presenting contemporary research on the history of education in modern China, this panel celebrates Professor Biggerstaff’s scholarly contribution to the field with his classic book on the beginnings of modern Chinese education, The Earliest Modern Government Schools in China (1961).
The papers in this panel, all by Cornell alumni, assess different aspects of Chinese education in order to better understand the changing political, social, and cultural landscape of modern China. Jessie Lutz’s (Cornell Ph.D., 1955) research on China’s Christian colleges, which she extends here, has greatly contributed to our understanding of the influence of Christian missionaries on Chinese society and politics. Stephen Averill (Cornell Ph.D., 1982) demonstrates the pivotal role of local schools in the cultural politics of Republican period Jiangxi, and Robert Culp’s (Cornell Ph.D., 1999) analysis of the content of secondary school geography textbooks contributes to ongoing debates about the nature of Chinese national consciousness.
While all the presenters follow Professor Biggerstaff’s lead in using the study of education as a window onto a broader horizon of social and political change, each addresses new subject areas and adopts research methodologies that have emerged since the publication of his book forty years ago. The panel’s discussants will address both the legacy of the history of education within the field of modern Chinese history and the recent changes within that subfield, as represented by these papers.
Chinese and Western Scholarship on the China Christian Colleges, 1950–2000
Jessie G. Lutz, Rutgers University
The historiography of the China Christian colleges, 1950–2000, mirrors the historiography of Christianity in China and also Chinese history in general. Most of the earliest narratives of the colleges were written by former Western missionaries, many of whom had been associated with the colleges as administrators or teachers. Their point of view was Western, with a concentration on the contribution of Westerners and the colleges to the cause of Christianity in China. Based on memory and Western sources, these works of the 1950s and 1960s gave scant attention to the Chinese personnel and made little attempt to integrate the history of the colleges and the history of China, 1850–1950. Mainland Chinese authors of the period were highly critical of the colleges. They depicted them as agents of cultural imperialism, graduating denationalized students who knew more about the West than about China.
By the 1970s trained Western historians were studying the colleges as agents of modernization. Of special interest was the relationship between Chinese nationalism and anti-Christian movements. Though still heavily based on Western sources, the works of these scholars attempted to place the institutions within the context of Chinese history.
Today much of the research on the colleges is being conducted by mainland scholars. A project to locate and catalogue materials in China on the colleges has been launched. The careers of alumni, the role of the Chinese staff, and the student life of the colleges as well as the contribution of the colleges to change in China and to the growth of Christianity in China are topics of study.
The Cultural Politics of Local Education in Early-Twentieth-Century China
Stephen C. Averill, Michigan State University
The end of China’s imperial order intensified ongoing processes of cultural reevaluation, social redefinition, and political reorientation. The tight historical connection between Confucian learning, government service, and social standing meant that educational attitudes and institutions were inevitably deeply implicated in these ongoing processes. This paper examines this complex interaction, as seen in the roles played by schools and study societies in structuring the passage from empire to republic of elites in rural Jiangxi Province.
Networks of schools mediated the flow of people and ideas into the countryside, but they were also politico-cultural combustion chambers in which divergent groups and ideas interacted. As institutions for cultural socialization and elite certification at a time when definitions of essential cultural knowledge and "eliteness" were disputed, Jiangxi schools became sites for contention as differentially situated elites competed to renew or solidify their status by (re)constructing the content and control of educational achievement.
Conflicts over cultural reproduction and elite certification were facilitated and structured by informal elite organizations. The most ubiquitous of these—the study society—amalgamated overlapping conceptual frames drawn from Chinese and Western models. Their organizational versatility made study societies popular vehicles through which diverse elites could express factional interests, explore new ideas, and defend established values. Study societies were also entry points into local arenas for larger political ideologies and organizations. If school networks were transmission routes and staging areas for the introduction of concepts and movements into China’s hinterland, study societies were essential interfaces through which they were translated into concrete political action.
Ambivalent Images of National Community in Chinese Secondary School Geography Textbooks, 1912–1937
Robert M. Culp, Bard College
Recent historiography has emphasized how Republican period Chinese intellectuals and political leaders sought to construct a sense of national community on the basis of shared race or ethnicity. Significantly, geography textbooks of that period, which were written by elite intellectuals and sanctioned by the state, portrayed tremendous diversity among China’s ethnic groups and variation even within the Han Chinese majority. The tremendous racial and linguistic difference textbooks described suggested to students that ethno-racial unity was not a feasible basis for a shared sense of national identity.
Instead, geography textbooks portrayed the nation as an all-encompassing and historically rooted territorial unit, characterized by fixed borders and uniform sovereignty. Yet geography textbooks also problematized this sense of territorial cohesion by relating in detail the stark variations in economic development and level of "civilization" (wenming) across China’s many regions.
Why did these textbooks intended to stimulate national consciousness articulate so clearly the fissures and fragmentation within the Chinese nation? This paper argues that by arranging places and communities within the nation along hierarchies of development or levels of civilization, these textbooks made a compelling case for an aggressive project of economic modernization, centralization, and acculturation of relatively "backward" (luohou) areas. The developmental project justified by these textbooks promoted in secondary students a distinctive mode of active citizenship geared toward national construction. Geography textbooks’ accounts also reinforced the cultural hegemony of China’s modernizing elites and the dominance of urban, coastal areas, which most closely approximated privileged Euro-American patterns of economic development.
Organizer: Ellen McGill, Columbia University
Chair: Mark C. Elliott, University of California, Santa Barbara
Discussants: Joanna Waley-Cohen, New York University; Mark C. Elliott, University of California, Santa Barbara
Keywords: empire, borderland, frontier, Tibet, Mongolia, Inner Asia, Qing, identity, administration.
Empires by definition tie a multiplicity of political and cultural orders to a central power; in the process, they often link them to each other. This panel investigates how aristocratic, religious, and Eight Banner elites mediated between the Qing court and local society, and across different constituencies, in the Inner Asian borderlands. Ruohong Li and Ellen McGill examine the role of eighteenth-century Tibetan and Mongol aristocrats in shaping the institutions of imperial rule in their respective territories. They explore the complex interplay of central concerns and local interests in delineating the ethnic and administrative limits of different facets of the Qing polity. While Li and McGill look at politics on the ground, Johan Elverskog arid Gray Tuttle discuss this question from the perspective of more centrally-affiliated figures. Elverskog focuses on the Mongol elder statesman, Songyun, who was not only active in the consolidation of Qing power across Inner Asia but left a record of his vision of Qing imperial rule in Tibet. Gray Tuttle analyzes the role of the Wutai shan and Yonghegong Tibetan jasagh lamas and the Lcang skya (Zhangjia) lama as intermediaries between the Qing court and the Tibetan government. The panelists draw on Chinese, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Manchu-language sources to ask how the institutions and practices created in part by these Inner Asian elites shaped politics and identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and what legacy they left for the post-Qing period.
Songyun and the Tibet Question
Johan Elverskog, Southern Methodist University
In the wake of the Gurkha wars Qing policy towards Tibet’s political and religious institutions changed dramatically. One reason for this shift was the Qing’s growing awareness of the implications arising from the active engagement between Tibet’s religious and political elites. It was this re-vitalized religio-political fusion, with its imagined political ramifications for Qing involvement in Tibet, that resulted in Qing officials advocating an active de-politicization of Tibet’s ruling structure. The Qianlong emperor subsequently made this policy manifest through his lengthy 1791 imperial edict erected on a quadra-lingual stela in the center of Beijing’s Yonghegong temple. One key official assigned to implement this new initiative was the famed Mongol statesman Songyun. During his tenure in Tibet Songyun wrote a manual in Chinese describing how Tibet should be ruled, of which there is also extant a slightly different Mongolian version. This text provides the basis for this investigation into Qing policy of the incorporation of Tibet. In particular, how did this work by a "minority" member of the imperial elite mediate the Manchu court’s ethnic policies of de-politicization, an approach that had worked so successfully in the Qing incorporation of the Mongols a century earlier? This inquiry into Qing governance in Tibet aims to achieve a better understanding of Qing expansion and the role of elites in the borderlands. It further poses the question of how linkages can be drawn between Qing and PRC multi-ethnic political entities through a comparison of Qing "ethnic policies" and the contemporary "minzu paradigm."
A Tibetan Aristocratic Family in 18th-Century Tibet: A Study of Qing-Tibetan Contact
Ruohong Li, Harvard University
By investigating the precarious political career of the Rdo ring (or Dga’ bzhi) family, an eminent aristocratic family in central Tibet, this paper presents a case study of Qing-Tibetan contacts during the eighteenth century. Drawing upon firsthand sources in various languages, mainly Rdo ring Bstan’ dzin dpal’ byor’s autobiography, this research adopts a micro-historical approach to illuminate the personal and official connections between Tibetan lay aristocrats and Qing officials. The Rdo ring family rose to power as a result of the Qing’s early pro-lay-aristocracy policy, on the basis of their strong ties with the Qing court. The eventual downturn of the family’s political power signaled fundamental problems in Qing Tibetan policy. The lay aristocracy had failed the court; the Dalai Lama’s dominance in both the political and religious realms could not ensure a balanced power structure, and a regency was not a reliable option in the face of a chaotic situation. The Qing court was left with no other choice but to turn to its own ambans.
This paper concludes that the ultimate failure of Qing Tibetan policy resulted from the temporary and opportunistic features of the policies themselves, the inefficiency of the amban system and the decline of the Qing empire from the late eighteenth century. Qing suzerainty over Tibet was largely wishful thinking. Deeply troubled by imperial administrative laxity and widespread socioeconomic disturbances, Tibet was left out of the mainstream of the Qing empire in the post-Qianlong era.
Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted: Defining the Banner in Ordos
Ellen McGill, Columbia University
The key Qing institution for governing the Mongols was undoubtedly the banner. Through this administrative innovation, specific Mongol groups were tied to particular princely lines and territories; the dynasty thus significantly limited Mongol mobility and organizational capacity and implemented its characteristic policy of "ethnic bloc governance." The experience garnered in the incorporation of Inner Mongolia informed Qing approaches to other parts of Inner Asia and bequeathed to twentieth-century Chinese governments an administrative structure that remains to a certain extent still intact in the present day. But how was the ethnically and spatially delimited unit of the Qing banner realized on the ground, especially in historically contested areas? What was the role of the banner princes in this process? This paper takes up this question by analyzing several cases of boundary debates from eighteenth-century Ordos in western Inner Mongolia. Drawing on Mongolian- and Manchu-language archival materials, as well as better-known Chinese-language sources, it describes several instances of conflict and discussion over the precise limits of Mongol and Chinese lands and the rights inherent therein. In doing so, it illuminates a range of views among Qing officials and Mongol princes; it also suggests that the latter at times contested central policy, acting as not just ethnic but also local leaders. By pursuing eighteenth-century questions, this essay hopes to provide a more nuanced perspective on the social role of the Mongol princes and on the administrative and social evolution of Inner Mongolia.
Tibetan Buddhist Intermediaries between the Qing Court and the Tibetan Government
Gray Tuttle, Harvard University
From the Kangxi period until well into the Chinese Republic, the principal representatives of Tibet in China proper were the jasagh lamas of Wutai shan and Yonghegong. The institution of Tibetan-appointed jasagh lamas started during the fifth Dalai Lama’s visit to the Qing capital in the mid-seventeenth century. Over the next three centuries, the various Dalai Lamas appointed some nineteen jasagh lamas to Wutai shan. Whether Mongol or Tibetan, all of these lamas had spent decades at the cultural center of the Tibetan Buddhist world, Lhasa. At the imperial monastery of Yonghegong, the Beijing jasagh lama was typically an ethnic Tibetan appointed to oversee the Mongol monks of the imperial monastery. These Lhasa-appointed monk-officials served the imperial family as preceptors in Tibetan language and Buddhist teachings.
As a counterbalance, the Qing court supported the Lcang skya reincarnation series, with monastic estates in Qinghai, Inner Mongolia, and Wutai shan. Ethnically Mongol, the Lcang skya lamas rarely trained extensively in Lhasa. Nevertheless, unlike the Qing ambans resident in Tibet, they were "insiders" to the Tibetan Buddhist world. They were recognized as important lamas and were able to mediate delicate situations on behalf of the Qing court, especially during the early eighteenth century when the Qing were trying to stabilize the Tibetan government. The importance of these lamas was highlighted in the early years of the Chinese Republic, even after the imperial court ceased to exist, when they became the only real link between China and Tibet.
Organizer: Elizabeth Morrison, Stanford University
Chair: Thomas A. Wilson, Hamilton College
Discussants: T. Griffith Foulk, Sarah Lawrence College; Linda Penkower, University of Pittsburgh
Keywords: premodern China, religion, Buddhism, lineage.
Several schools of Chinese Buddhism boast a "lineage" of masters, or "patriarchs," beginning with the Buddha. The transmission of religious authority through a series of specially designated individuals is not unusual; forms of it occur in many religions, including Chinese traditions predating the introduction of Buddhism to China. In Chinese Buddhism, however, lineage involves an explicit parallel with the family and has to an unusual extent influenced matters of sectarian identity and institutional organization. In addition to "patriarchal" lineage, at ordination, all monks and nuns enter a tonsure lineage, which to a large extent shapes their ecclesiastical careers.
In spite of its centrality, the varying uses and constructions of lineage have not been fully examined by scholars. The three papers will present different approaches to and perspectives on lineage in Chinese Buddhism.
While the formal presentations will focus on lineage within Buddhism, one of the goals of the panel is to explore the wider context of lineage within Chinese social and religious history. With that in mind and in response to the call for innovative formats, the panel will consist of brief presentations of fifteen minutes each, followed by the comments of the discussants. To encourage a substantive roundtable-like audience participation, we plan to secure from several additional scholars with expertise in Chinese Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism informal commitments to read online the papers on which the presentations are based. The papers will be posted a month before the conference, with notices sent to the appropriate academic mailing lists.
Local Lineage, Local Practice: A Critical Look at the Biographies of the Eighteen Eminent Monks of Nanyue (Nanyue shiba gaoseng zhuan)
James Robson, Stanford University
In recent years there has been a thorough rethinking of the nature and existence of clearly defined Buddhist "schools" prior to the Song dynasty (960–1279). It is now evident that the medieval Chinese Buddhist landscape was much more complex and intertwined than heretofore acknowledged. In order to move towards redrawing the contours of that religious landscape, in this paper I suggest a more decentralized approach to medieval Chinese Buddhism by moving away from a sole focus on famous patriarchs and a tacit acceptance of well-entrenched orthodox lineages, and towards the study of regional or local lineages that were often either ignored or subject to erasure in traditional Buddhist historical sources. Here I will be focusing my purview on a significant Buddho-Daoist site in medieval China and looking closely at a local lineage that was nearly edited out of history. This study, based on the fragments of a lost Tang dynasty work titled the Biographies of the Eighteen Eminent Monks of Nanyue that I have been able to cull from local sources, epigraphy and other biographical collections, will, I hope, add to other recent work that attempts to detail the processes and expose the stakes and strategies involved in the construction of an orthodox Tiantai lineage. In order to reflect more broadly on the notion of "local lineages" in medieval China I will also bring forward for discussion the equally problematic nature of local Chan, Vinaya, and Daoist lineages at this site.
The Functions and Meanings of Lineage in Song-Dynasty Buddhism
Morten Schlutter, University of California, Los Angeles
Concepts of lineage and descent line in monastic Chinese Buddhism are strikingly similar to those of family kinship units, to the extent that monastics employ inter-relational terms such as zu (paternal grandfather/master’s master) or shu (uncle/master’s fellow disciple). In this paper I investigate the degree to which the development of Buddhist notions of lineage parallels developments in kinship organization and ask whether Buddhist lineages had functions and meanings that were similar to those of kinship lineages. I argue that in Song-dynasty Buddhism, several different types of lineage, that in many ways functioned differently, can be discerned. When the multivalent nature of lineage in Chinese Buddhism is recognized, it becomes possible to make meaningful comparisons to Song elite lineage practices and theoretical writings. I argue that Buddhist notions of lineage were deeply influenced by the elite interest in descent line and genealogy, but that Buddhist uses of lineage differed in important ways from those of kinship units and that these differences tell us much about strategies of various traditions within Song-dynasty Buddhism.
The Logic and Limits of the Genealogical Model for Chan History
Elizabeth Morrison, Stanford University
The Chan school of Chinese Buddhism emerged from a number of groups claiming Bodhidharma as their spiritual forebear, and this initial self-definition in terms of lineage led to a tradition of histories in the form of genealogies. Critics and rivals of the Chan school repeatedly questioned the historicity of the lineage claims in these early works and made accusations of sectarian self-interest, charges scholars have found to be largely justified. This criticism was perceived as a threat, especially as the Chan school established itself institutionally and rose to prominence in the Five Dynasties and early Song, and it prompted increasingly sophisticated efforts to produce an account of Chan lineage that was both credible and representative of the expanding school. In this paper, I will focus on one such attempt by the Northern Song Chan monk Qisong (1007–1072), the Record of the True Lineage of the Transmission of the Dharma (Chuanfa zhengzong ji), and the accompanying historiographical essay. Despite the importance of lineage to Chan, it is not often discussed explicitly, and the work of Qisong, who is unusually impassioned and articulate on the topic, offers us an excellent opportunity to explore the beliefs about lineage and patriarchs that structured and guided Chan history-writing. I will address as well the nature of the genealogical model itself, which, at least in the case of Qisong, proved inadequate to describe the Chan past.
Organizer: Alvin Yiu-Cheong So, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Chair: Ming K. Chan, Stanford University
Discussant: Lynn T. White III, Princeton University
Keywords: politics, China, public policy, contemporary.
This panel aims at assessing the major crises and crucial changes reshaping China’s Hong Kong. The four papers examine the HKSAR’s interactions with the mainland, cross-border crimes, bureaucratic reform, and the reorientation toward "soft authoritarian developmentalism." Together, they provide an informed and multidisciplinary baseline to evaluate the performance of the new regime as well as the challenges and opportunities confronting the HKSAR in the initial phase of its long march toward full reintegration with the Chinese mainland by 2047.
Specifically, the first paper by public policy analyst and ex-legislator Loh highlights the HKSAR’s new role in offering "software" inputs to facilitate the PRC’s modernization. The second paper by political scientist Lo investigates the trans-border crime issues undermining law and order and regional cooperation between the HKSAR and its South China neighbors. The third paper by public administration specialist and ex-legislator Cheung critiques the reform options for the postcolonial civil service system. The fourth paper by historian Chan and sociologist So charts the HKSAR regime’s shift from laissez-fairism to an interventionist approach in public policy. This, coupled with the illiberal Basic Law polity sowed the seed for "soft authoritarian developmentalism."
The life and work, hopes and fears of HKSAR residents as citizens of the PRC’s most cosmopolitan city-region have been drastically remolded by the China factor and the Asian economic crisis beyond expectation. Collectively, these four papers will illuminate the major dimensions of Hong Kong’s ongoing transformative processes and search for new national/regional identities unleashed by the sovereignty retrocession.
Comprador for "One Country"? A Role for China’s Hong Kong
Christine Loh, Civic Exchange
Hong Kong, a city of seven million and a former British colony, is the world’s ninth largest trading economy where people enjoy higher per capita GDP than in many Western countries. It is also doing better economically than most major East Asian cities. Yet, it feels threatened by the rise of Shanghai, which some say could replace Hong Kong as the region’s premier financial center in the next decade or so. Will Hong Kong just be another Chinese city albeit shinier than some?
To remain a dominant force, the SAR government has adopted the vision that Hong Kong should become "Asia’s world city." Hong Kong people appear skeptical because they have doubts about whether their political leaders have the ability to transform the city. Loh argues that Hong Kong can play a significant role—perhaps the most significant role—as the comprador for "one country" by packaging ideas and people from among the Chinese-speaking world as well as internationally to contribute to building the China of the 21st century. That role will require Hong Kong to think beyond its traditional trading and commercial role to new roles in social undertakings, environmental design, corporate governance, public participation, and more. It should use its traditional, entrepreneurial flair to promote China’s modernization. Hopefully the HKSAR and the Pearl River Delta would become the most preferred place to live in China with a clean environment, strong regulatory systems, rule of law, good schools, fully-wired communication networks, and sensitive city planning, with vibrant culture and entertainment.
Trans-Border Crime in Hong Kong and South China: The Dark Side of Regional Reintegration
Shiu Hing Lo, University of Hong Kong
The intensification of human interactions between the PRC’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and adjacent cities (including the Macau SAR, Shenzhen and Zhuhai special economic zones) reveals that cross-border crime is fast constituting a security threat to law and order in the region. Cross-border crime takes the forms of kidnapping, drug smuggling, sex rings, money laundering, human trafficking, and triad wars that have become increasingly difficult for the law enforcement agencies to interdict. Although extra inputs and coordinated efforts have been made by the South China authorities to combat these vices, money laundering and drug trafficking are still baffling problems. In particular, money laundering became serious between Hong Kong, Macau, and neighboring cities, where banks and monetary authorities cannot plug the trafficking loopholes. Kidnapping also remains a gangland favorite for quick gains.
This case study of Hong Kong’s interactions with South China proves that organized crime has become far more regional, trans-border, sophisticated, and complicated than ever since 1997. Triads have also demonstrated their capacity to transcend South China’s multiple jurisdictions, even participating in local elections and underwriting local elites. Unless effective efforts and Hong Kong-like measures for anti-corruption are undertaken in mainland China and Macau, organized crime will continue to be a fatal erosive threat to the HKSAR and its South China hinterland. Such a cross-border crime wave is indeed a thorn undermining the social, administrative, and legal reintegration of the new Hong Kong and Macau SARs with mainland China.
Transforming the Post-1997 Hong Kong Civil Service: Reconfiguring the Mandarinate and the Rise of a Political Class
Anthony B. L. Cheung, City University of Hong Kong
During British colonial times, Hong Kong’s civil service doubled as both a service organization and a bureaucratic institution which effectively ruled the territory in the absence of party politics and democratic elections. Upon its return to China’s sovereignty, the new Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) is to retain a high degree of administrative continuity from the past. The civil service is regarded as an important pillar of stability.
However, four years into the HKSAR era, after a series of setbacks and crises of efficiency, probity, and efficacy, it has become clear that the civil service institution is embroiled in increasing difficulties over the retention of its power as the most predominant political force. Not only has its previous "invincibility" been greatly questioned externally, within government the civil service’s tensions with the new SAR Chief Executive has also come to a stage where the latter is going to introduce a "ministerial" system of policy officials based on political appointment in the name of enhancing accountability. The evolving development will likely see a redefinition of the role and power of the civil service mandarinate—represented mostly by the Administrative Class—and the corresponding rise of a new political class. Possible scenarios and routes of change are explored in the paper.
Crisis and Transformation in the HKSAR: Toward Soft Authoritarian Developmentalism?
Alvin Yiu-Cheong So, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology; Ming K. Chan, Stanford University
With a "crisis-transformation" framework, this paper will first examine the five major crises—democracy, constitution, governability, development, and legitimacy—facing the HKSAR. Then it reviews the "blessings" empowering the HKSAR actors to confront these crises. Finally, it illuminates Hong Kong’s reorientation toward "soft authoritarian developmentalism."
The SAR regime is developmental in the sense that it is more proactive in guiding the economy than the colonial regime. Besides the 1998 stock market intervention, it has formulated plans to propel the HKSAR into a high-tech hub and launch massive reforms in the civil service, housing, education, and health care to increase Hong Kong’s global competitiveness.
While an executive-led government facilitated the state’s capacity to embark onto a developmental track, it also paved the path to soft authoritarianism. The weakening of the democratic camp and the constitutional compromise through which the judiciary sets its own limits have emboldened the SAR regime to impose itself over the civil society. The proposed "executive accountability" would strengthen the bond of political appointees as senior officials to the SAR Chief Executive. Since the Public Order Ordinance, Society Ordinance, and the Basic Law have already laid the legal groundwork for authoritarianism, it owes only to the "self-constraint" of both the HKSAR regime and the Beijing authorities that such authoritarianism has been taking a "soft" form of intimidation and surveillance rather than a "hard" form of suppression, arrests, and imprisonment. In order to make such "soft authoritarianism" work, the civil society must also play the "soft" game as well.
Organizer: Timothy B. Weston, University of Colorado, Boulder
Chair and Discussant: Stephen R. Mackinnon, Arizona State University
Keywords: journalism, China, history, Republican era.
Each of the papers in this panel is concerned with the various ways that the forms and practices of print journalism contributed to the creation and shaping of public discourse in Republican China. All three papers concentrate on journalism as a vehicle that intellectuals self-consciously used to promote particular political agendas and on the process by which newspapers and journals worked to solidify the parameters of hitherto unexamined or unfixed ideas and values. None of the papers makes claims about journalism’s influence on China as a whole. Rather, each of them focuses on a limited example, and cumulatively they reveal that newspapers and journals played a critically important role in the shaping of competing social visions during a time of ongoing upheaval. The papers span the Republican era. Timothy Weston’s paper inquires into the creation of normative journalistic knowledge and practice by focusing on two of the earliest journalism textbooks published in Chinese. He is interested in the politics inherent in the formation of journalism as a respectable profession during the May Fourth era. Rebecca Karl focuses on the way debates about economics shaped and were shaped by journals and newspapers in order to explore how economics became a central mode of articulating Chinese modernity in the 1930s. Finally, Joshua Howard studies how workers and the CCP used Xinhua ribao (New China Daily) to express their grievances and aspirations in wartime Chongqing and why it is that workers were attracted to that newspaper.
The Politics of Journalistic Knowledge Creation
Timothy B. Weston, University of Colorado, Boulder
Many Chinese reporters of the 1920s and after were graduates of formal journalism programs, which differentiated them from newspaper reporters of earlier decades. These later figures were more self-conscious about their professional identity, more informed about journalistic practices in the West and Japan, and better organized as a corporate body, than their predecessors. In this paper I explore the creation of normative journalistic knowledge and practice during the May Fourth era by focusing on two of the earliest Chinese-language journalism textbooks: Xu Baohuang’s Basics of Journalism of 1919 and Shao Piaoping’s Practical Journalism of 1923. I also consider the Xinwenxue yanjiuhui (Journalism Study Society), which Xu and Shao ran together at Beijing University in the late 1910s.
The purpose of the textbooks and the study society was to train specialists who could take pride in their work and elevate the status of the journalism profession. Xu and Shao asserted that newspapers were among society’s most important institutions, that they had a responsibility not just to cover the news but also to represent and nurture public opinion, develop general knowledge, and promote morality. They emphasized the critical importance of a reporter’s non-partisan, professional stance, yet they offered their instruction within a highly charged atmosphere that left it open to political readings. I pay particular attention to the politics that informed the creation of journalistic norms and to the manner in which core journalistic ideals propounded by Xu and Shao—such as "objectivity" and "neutrality"—themselves carried political meanings.
Journalism, Intellectuals, and Economics in 1930s China
Rebecca E. Karl, New York University
This paper inquires into the ways in which the fierce economic debates of the 1930s comprising, among others, the famous Social History Controversy and the efflorescence of liberal economics and sociology, as disciplines and as modes of knowledge-formation and social inquiry shaped and were shaped by one of their primary forums: the journals and newspapers of the day. The rapid appearance, disappearance, and transformation of various radical, liberal, and conservative journals revolving around economic questions; the anthologizing of debates from these journals into handy pamphlets and overview books that set out the various positions in readily accessible formats; as well as the deepening of intellectual divides through the ideological, cultural, and political specifications of the role of economics, or, more precisely, of economic inquiry in local, national, and global life were all prominent features of this period. The centrality accorded the economy and economic questions in the newspapers and journals, therefore, not only assisted in the airing of different intellectual views, thus consolidating the role of modern intellectuals and of journalism in prescribing and proscribing parameters of social debate, but, more fundamentally, this centrality also shaped how economics became a central mode of articulating the particular form of China’s modernity in the 1930s.
The Communist Press and Workers in Wartime Chongqing: The Case of Xinhua ribao
Joshua Howard, University of Mississippi
As one of the few legal fronts for the Communist Party in wartime Nationalist territory, Xinhua ribao (New China Daily) assumed vital importance in articulating the CCP message and garnering public support. Not surprisingly, it is said that Chiang Kai-shek recalled this conferral of legality as his "biggest mistake vis-à-vis the Communists." This paper examines how both workers and the CCP used Xinhua ribao as an organization and as a public forum to express their grievances and aspirations in wartime Chongqing. I first analyze the subculture of opposition in which radical workers as well as rank and file workers participated to illustrate why they may have been drawn to the Communist daily. One important reason why the Communist press proved so popular was the participatory form of journalism involved in the paper’s production. Certain columns were expressly written by and for workers. I analyze these columns and worker letters published in Xinhua ribao to show how the paper facilitated workers’ class consciousness by promoting an "imagined community" of class. Moreover, the newspaper became a vehicle for workers’ organizing. Both workers and the CCP used the daily as a political weapon during the strike waves of 1946. The history of Xinhua ribao thus sheds light on the fruitful but also tense relationship between workers and Xinhua ribao, and by extension the CCP, as well as the relationship between workers and the Nationalist government during the united front period.
Organizer: Zhen Zhang, New York University
Chair: Xueping Zhong, Tufts University
Discussant: Ban Wang, Rutgers University
Since the early 1990s, the Chinese literary scene has been auspiciously dominated by women writers/ producers. This dominance, characterized by its amazing marketability and commercial success, has triggered a nationwide academic interest in the cultural nature of female writing. While most critics in China hold that women have been playing a double role in literary production, both as the objects of desire and the agency of desire, this panel attempts to give a wider look into some other aspects of the production of female writing and the consumption of female desire. Xueping Zhong examines two novels, both about relationships between Chinese women and Western men, I Love Bill by Wang Anyi and Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui. She is interested in the political and gender power dynamics against the backdrop of China’s globalization. Yiyan Wang presents her reading of Xu Kun’s novella Goddess Nüwa. She tries to highlight the feminist narrative mechanism in the novella and to explore the possibility of a feminist national narrative. Di Bai studies a website in Chinese language produced by women: www.huazhao.com. She analyzes the ways in which web practices have been gendered, different kinds of pleasures are derived, and the traditional feminine contents are subversively addressed. Zhen Zhang intends to explore a different kind of female writing through or mediated by film or video camera, and how this form of visually oriented writing expresses a particular kind of female consciousness and social vision.
Female Desire and the Masculine Other: Contemporary Chinese Women Writers’ Representations of Chinese Women and Western Males
Xueping Zhong, Tufts University
Since the late 1980s and early 1990s an increasing number of Chinese women writers have written about relationships between Chinese women and Western males, thereby creating a rather unique literary phenomenon unprecedented in modern Chinese literature. More than a decade later, especially after the controversy of the novel Shanghai Baby (by Wei Hui), it is time to examine the implications of this literary phenomenon, especially the female desire manifested in it. In this paper, I will first briefly summarize this phenomenon and then place it within the larger historical context of China’s search for modernity and the growing web of globalization. I will do so specifically in conjunction with the political and gender power dynamics that inform the production of desire in this body of literature, in particular, and in China in general. I will then focus on two texts, I Love Bill (a novella by Wang Anyi) and Shanghai Baby respectively, and conduct a comparative reading of the two. I will explore how they share and differ and what their similarity and difference indicate. Additionally, I will examine the ways in which the various representations of female relationships with (Chinese and) Western men signify a complex psychic trajectory in modern Chinese history.
From Feminism to Matriarchy: National Narration and Goddess Nüwa by Xu Kun
Yiyan Wang, University of Sydney
A close link between national narration and the quest for cultur