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Organizer: Daria Berg, University of Durham
Chair: Allan Barr, Pomona College
Discussants: Allan Barr, Pomona College; Grace S. Fong, McGill University
Keywords: gentility, women, Ming-Qing China.
The concept of gentility transcends the categories of gender and class by probing beyond; this panel analyzes the social and cultural aspirations embedded in the discourse about and by women in late imperial China. Recent research has focused on the culture of elite women in traditional China (Widmer and Chang, 1997) and has discussed how the term encompasses questions of status, social hierarchies and social capital, as well as connotations of femininity and gentlemanly elegance in Chinese literature and history (Berg and Starr, forthcoming). Gentility need not be tied to actual status or power but relates to ideals and desires. Berg analyzes perceptions of gentility in the portrayal of courtesans in seventeenth-century cultural discourse, focusing in particular on Xue Susu (fl. 1575–1635). Gerritsen investigates two nineteenth-century collections of writings concerning late Ming women writers by Chen Wenshu (1775–1845) and Wang Shoumai (nineteenth century). Ford examines the attitudes of Qing women writers Sun Huiyuan (late seventeenth century) and Su Wanlan (nineteenth century) to their literary predecessors in view of their concerns about class, gender and gentility. This panel takes an innovative approach to presentation by publishing key issues on the WAGNET (Women and Gender in Chinese Studies Network) website before the meeting, inviting questions and discussion (http://www.wagnet.ox.ac.uk/). The presentations will then elaborate on these themes. The panel thus aims to open a forum for the debate of a variety of methodological approaches to literary and non-literary sources negotiating the notion of gentility.
Bohemian Rhapsodies: The Quest of the Courtesan in Late Ming Jiangnan
Daria Berg, University of Durham
This paper investigates perceptions of courtesans and the discourse on gentility from various perspectives, using both literary and non-literary sources. Analysis focuses on representations of the celebrated courtesan, poetess and painter Xue Susu (fl. 1575–1635) by writers of different backgrounds, gender and class, including contemporary and later literati, gentry wives, courtesans, and Xue Susu herself. In late Ming times women emerged on a larger scale than ever before as protagonists, readers, writers, and artists in the public eye and on the cultural scene. Courtesans gained prominence in elite circles and the arts, playing a formative role in shaping cultural ideals. Late imperial Chinese discourse embeds the image of the courtesan in the formation of new beauty ideals and negotiations of gender roles and power. Paradoxes abound, linking the courtesan with notions of chivalry, chastity and loyalism. The search for gentility involves not only the courtesan but also the social and cultural aspirations, dreams, and desires of those who write about her. Her quest epitomizes the literati’s attempts to reassert their status and identity.
Loyalism or Longing for Ming Gentility? Nineteenth- Century Writers on Late-Ming Women
Anne T. Gerritsen, University of Warwick
In the early nineteenth century, Chen Wenshu (1775–1845) published Lanyinji, a collection of essays and poems written by him, his friends and his students about three woman scholars from West Lake. Two of the three women had lived in the late Ming, one in the Song. Several decades later, Wang Shoumai published a similar collection, Yanyuanjilu, with materials by himself and his friends about the girl poet Ye Xiaoluan (1616–32). Both Chen and Wang had restored the graves of the women, and both had solicited writings from their social circles to celebrate the restoration. Both collections contain poems by men and women, in the case of Lanyinji from the Hangzhou region, in the case of Yanyuanjilu from near Suzhou. The nineteenth-century nostalgia for the late Ming has been noted before (most notably by Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang), and is most prominent in the writings by Chen Wenshu and his daughter-in-law, Wang Duan. This paper will attempt to answer the questions these publications raise: what motivated these nineteenth-century men and women? Was it nostalgia, Ming loyalism, or sympathy with the women’s cause? Were these men and women aspiring to belong to the genteel classes associated with the late Ming? Class and gender are part of this analysis, but the essay goes further by looking at the cultural environment of the nineteenth century in which these writings were received, suggesting that for Chen and Wang, late Ming women’s writings represented the fragile cultural ideals so threatened in their own time.
Not Their Mothers’ Gardens: How Qing Women Writers Regarded the Literary Works of Their Predecessors
Carolyn Ann Ford, University of Oxford
For some time now, scholars have noted the ways in which literary activity by Qing dynasty women had been constrained to following one of two (ancient) models, Ban Zhao (d. 116) or Xie Daoyun (fl. 399). These models, although set down by male literati, were supported and propagated by gentry women. This paper searches for fissures in literary terrain by examining the works of Qing women such as Sun Huiyuan (late seventeenth century) and Su Wanlan (nineteenth century) who engaged in poetic composition, criticism and compiling of anthologies. Both these women, in addition to their own literary works, collected poems by famous women of the past which were later published. These three types of works will be analyzed for their overall consistency on the matter of literary models. This paper will determine the extent to which certain women writers may present a face of public solidarity with orthodox models yet with subtle traces of alternative ones. In doing so, the paper brings into play Qing women’s attitudes to their literary predecessors as well as how such assessments shed light on their own concerns about class, gender, and the appropriateness of female literary activity. Which women ‘count’ as their literary predecessors? As it turns out, Qing women do not consider all the works by past women writers to be their mothers’ gardens.
Organizer: Peter Bol, Harvard University
Chair: Angela Schottenhammer, University of Munich
Discussants: Jun He, Zhejiang University; Peter Bol, Harvard University
Fundamental ideas of Daoxue ("Learning of the Way") philosophy were established in Northern Song by the Cheng brothers and Zhang Zai. When Southern Song scholars such as Zhang Jiucheng, Hu Hong, Lyu Zuqian, Chen Liang, Zhang Shi, Zhu Xi, Lu Jiuyuan, and Ye Shi continued to develop these ideas, they took them in different directions. It was not until the late Song, when all of these central figures were dead, that the elements of Daoxue gradually were brought together into a new whole which came to be known as the "Learning of Master Zhu" and became the mainstream of elite philosophy. In this panel, we will focus on regional elites who accepted this philosophy and who also played influential roles in the movement. This process of change in Zhuzixue can be interpreted as the "Daoxue movement."
Much has been written about Daoxue by scholars in America, China, and Japan. They have all looked at the Daoxue movement and its relation to Chinese society and history. However, the way in which the scholarly traditions of different nations have approached the study of Daoxue is worth remarking on and one of the goals of this panel—in addition to presenting recent research on Daoxue by leading intellectual historians—is to explore these different scholarly traditions. We will have two scholars from Japan, who see themselves as both participants in East Asian Confucian traditions and outsiders to it; one scholar from the PRC, for whom the study of the past is the study of one’s own culture across the divide of modernization; and an American scholar, for whom the foreignness of a society is not an impediment to asking disciplinary questions.
Disciples Make the Master: Zhu Xi’s Students Interpret Zhu
Tsuyuhiko Ichiki, Hiroshima University
After the death of Zhu Xi in 1200, his disciples transmitted Zhu’s ideas differently while claiming alike to be representing Zhu’s doctrine. This paper asks how we can account for these differences. A close reading of their work shows that the differences in their outlook can be tied back to the differences in their motives when they first became disciples of Zhu or the reasons for which they first became interested in his doctrines.
This paper will focus on several of Zhu Xi’s noted disciples in order to cast light on the master-disciple relationship. It will discuss how this relationship influenced these disciples’ devotion to and admiration for Zhu Xi after his death.
Local Realities and Later Representations: Ningbo Scholars and Daoxue
Toshihiro Hayasaka, Shinshu University
The statecraft oriented scholarship of Eastern Zhejiang (the "Zhedong School") had a subtle and complicated relation with Daoxue movement. However, the investigation of this relationship depends largely on the Case Studies of Song-Yuan Learning (Song Yuan xue’an). The use of that text requires first that one distinguish precisely between actual phenomena in the twelfth and thirteenth century and the representations found in the Case Studies. In effect we must narrate local history from another point of view.
This paper offers a critique of the Case Studies of Song-Yuan Learning’s explanation of Zhedong school in the Song period as part of a project to sort out the differences between actual phenomena and constructed representations of the Daoxue movement in the Zhedong area (especially in Ningbo) during the latter half of Southern Song. As such it is a starting point for the study of Zhedong thought.
Political Persuasion and Local Shrines
Ellen Neskar, Sarah Lawrence College
In the early twelfth century, Daoxue followers began to build shrines to the Cheng brothers and Zhou Dunyi, honoring them as important teachers and local worthies (xiang-xia). In the late twelfth century, Zhu Xi, his colleagues and disciples actively encouraged the building of these shrines and in the process transformed the significance of the three masters from local teachers to creators of a new civilization and successors to the Way (daotong) of Confucius and Mencius. Much of this local work was done against the backdrop of official government censure of Daoxue and its proponents. Yet by the 1220s, shrines honoring the three masters had been founded in almost every prefecture of Song territory. And in the 1240s the central government officially sanctioned Daoxue’s version of the succession to the Way by enshrining the Three Masters in the national Temple to Confucius. This paper traces the spread of Three Master Shrines from a local phenomenon to a national pantheon and examines the political and cultural symbolism of the shrines. It argues that part of the Daoxue movement’s success owed a great deal to the use of local institutions and strategies to promote both political and intellectual agendas on the national level.
Organizer: Evan Nicolas Dawley, Harvard University
Chair and Discussant: Gray Tuttle, Trinity College
Keywords: borders, territory, nation, Taiwan, empire, identity, overseas Chinese.
What distinguishes an empire from a nation? How can the process of transformation from one to the other be described and defined? Can a single moment be pinpointed as the key turning point? Although we do not claim to have definitive answers to these questions, this panel will attempt to show that the issue of border definition is one important component of this process. Furthermore, all of the papers will argue, in one way or another, that dealing with Taiwan has forced various governments and groups of people to alter their conceptions of both their territory and of themselves.
During the period under study here, Taiwan marked the boundary of first the Qing and then the Japanese Empire, while at the same time it was also the site of "internal territorialization" as these two governments in their own ways attempted to define the borders of aboriginal territory as they sought to exert greater control at their frontiers. In addition, the transfer of sovereignty not only forced the migrants who continued to travel from the Mainland to Taiwan to cross new political borders, but it also introduced more complex issues of identity, citizenship, and nationalism. By examining how these governments and migrants dealt with establishing and crossing all of these borders, we hope to contribute to both the understanding of this particular historical period, and to the larger theoretical discussions of identity construction, territory, and the differences between empire and nation.
From Frontier to Overseas: Taiwan and Migrants from the Mainland, 1895–1945
Joseph Wicentowski, Harvard University
The ceding of Taiwan to Japan in 1895 greatly upset the established patterns of migration between Taiwan and the mainland. Japan quickly moved to restrict all labor migration to the island, but soon it conceded that migrant labor was economically vital to the colony. These migrants, who thus became "overseas Chinese" (huaqiao) in Taiwan, were caught squarely in the politics of Sino-Japanese relations. Their attempts to make a living, to organize themselves, and to make demands of both the colonial government and governments on the mainland show how each of these parties operated within the realities of post-Shimonoseki Asia.
Thus, first, this paper examines how, for the migrants, colonization transformed Taiwan from an imperial frontier into an overseas destination. Second, in addition to discussing the institutional changes themselves, the paper considers this population within the comparative global history of "the overseas Chinese"—a history within which this group has not been considered. Like other overseas Chinese groups, these migrants had varied regional and dialectical backgrounds. They organized themselves along these lines, as well as along the lines of broader umbrella organizations (e.g. Zhonghua huiguan) so typical of Chinese communities abroad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This paper thus follows a newly-born, short-lived population of overseas Chinese across imperial and national borders, at a time when their home governments vied to co-opt patriotism, and when their host government hoped to restrict its display.
Territoriality, Ethnicity and Colonial Governmentality: Qing and Japanese Colonization of Aboriginal Taiwan, 1875–1915
Lung-chih Chang, Harvard University
How do the principles of territoriality and ethnicity interplay in the historical process of boundary making and colonial governance? This article aims to explore the spatial history of frontier Taiwan and the political geography of the Qing and Japanese empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the key Chinese and Japanese policy debates and state projects on Taiwan’s aboriginal territory, I explore the important continuities and interesting contrasts between the transformation of the Qing aboriginal boundary (fanjie) and the emergence of the Japanese guard line (aiyu sen) between 1875 and 1915. I argue that the traditional ethnic classification of "raw vs. cooked" was rendered obsolete since the mid-nineteenth century by the new realities of border crossing, and that the state objective of resource control had led to the emergence of a new boundary-making strategy that emphasized territoriality over ethnicity. This process of internal territorialization characterizes both the famous late Qing project of "opening up the mountains and pacifying the savages (kaishan fufan)" led by Shen Baozhen and Liu Mingchuan, and the Japanese colonial enterprise of "aboriginal management (riban)" under Goto Shimpei and Sakuma Samada. Furthermore, the introduction of new cultural technology such as mapping and ethnography in the late nineteenth century helped facilitate the Qing and Japanese territorial projects for aboriginal Taiwan. By offering a comparative case of frontier state building that differs from conventional state-centered narratives, this paper hopes to contribute to the recent scholarship on the cultural geography of imperialism as well as the theoretical debates on territoriality and governmentality.
Defining Borders: Elite Responses to the Loss of Taiwan in 1895
Evan Nicholas Dawley, Harvard University
In early 1895 Japan issued its demands to the defeated Qing, and when word of these demands began to filter out to Qing officials and other elites they responded with a brief but intense wave of opposition. Memorials came from all parts of the empire, urging that the Treaty of Shimonoseki be rejected. However, while the general opposition was strong, the responses to the cession of Taiwan were somewhat more muted. Although there were some who argued stridently that it absolutely must not be relinquished, most did not react that strongly to that particular demand, and many may not have even been specifically concerned with Taiwan itself.
What was really at stake in the loss of Taiwan was the issue of territory more generally. This was certainly not a new issue for the Qing, which from its origins had focused on expanding the imperial territory and had paid close attention to any encroachments upon it. But a close examination of the ways in which elites framed their responses to this part of the treaty reveals that by 1895 many had begun to change the way in which they defined their borders. In particular they relied on international law and non-geographic characteristics to more strictly delineate where the borders lay. This redefinition was closely linked to various currents of reform in the late Qing, and thus was one important aspect of the transformation from empire to nation.
Organizer and Chair: Dennis Grafflin, Bates College
Discussant: Jeffrey Riegel, University of California, Berkeley
Keywords: Chinese intellectual history, human nature, change, law, medicine.
The year 0239 saw the completion of the eclectic Lw-shr Chun/Chyou (LSC), or at minimum its first 12 chapters, under the patronage of Chìn minister Lw Bùwéi. In the following year, 0238, the rival enterprise of Sywndž in Chu came to an end with the death of his patron. These precisely known completion dates invite a survey of some tendencies of mid-third century thought: its attempts to combine previous insights into a viable system for the coming Empire, and its reflection of new interests which would be fully developed only in later centuries. To mark the recent publication of the LSC’s translation by Jeffrey Riegel and the late John Knoblock, we here consider these tendencies with special reference to that text. Dan Robins and Scott Cook will focus on the strategy of the LSC’s treatment of certain Sywndzian and Confucian philosophical positions, and Karen Turner and Nathan Sivin will examine how LSC relates to the larger questions of state control and the natural order. There will be a pause for general audience discussion, led by Jeffrey Riegel, after each group of two papers.
The Human Nature Argument in LSC
Dan Robins, Hong Kong University
This paper examines the discussions of human nature and related issues in LSC 1–12 against the background of the earlier conflict between the Mencian and Sywndzian points of view. It argues that LSC implicitly recasts what was in fact a disagreement over fundamentals as a simple difference of emphasis. Developing this conclusion will support and add detail to the view that LSC was designed in part to reconcile the competing philosophies of the Warring States period. The argument draws both on general points of agreement and disagreement and on what may be specific responses to one or both Confucian points of view.
Historical Continuity and Change in Lüshi chunqiu
Scott Cook, Grinnell College
The LSC defined its unified and comprehensive vision for the rulership of the new empire not so much by adoption and exclusion of preferred views as through the resolution of conflicts and the merging of contradictory positions. As an example, this paper will consider how LSC deals with the notions of historical continuity and change in the "Cha jin" chapter (LSC 15) from the lan ("Survey") section of the work. It will show how the author of this chapter, by redefining a key notion borrowed from Xun Zi, ingeniously reconciles two diametrically opposed philosophies of historical change. It will examine this reconciliation against the backdrop of similar strategies found elsewhere in LSC, and in light of its overall objectives.
Legal Ideals and Practices
Karen L. Turner, Holy Cross College
This paper draws from three mid-third century sources to examine the intersection between Xunzi’s legal theory, represented in books 7–16, the systematic program for running a complex state proposed in the core chapters of the LSC (1–12), and the procedures for implementing law preserved in a local official’s procedural manuals from the Shuihudi site. All three texts articulate the value of clear laws and consistent punishments and maintaining separate public and private spheres as key elements for constructing a viable government. But whereas the first two provide for limitation of the scope of law, the Shuihudi materials, which offer a glimpse of the law in action, reveal that the sheer cost of maintaining a complex state and of keeping order at the local level required a draconian control of human and material resources that promised to thwart even the most eloquent proposals for tempering the power of the emerging empire.
Science and Medicine
Nathan Sivin, University of Pennsylvania
As more scholars read the formerly ignored LSC, its importance in shaping the various Hàn syntheses becomes clearer. This study will take its discussions of science and medicine as an example. An analysis of LSC will also throw light on the social processes that shaped a unitary theory of monarchy, cosmology, and medical doctrine. An important outcome, mainly in Hàn, was the appearance of distinct scientific doctrines and writings that were no longer subordinate to philosophy.
Organizer and Chair: Yibing Huang, Connecticut College
Discussant: Yunte Huang, Harvard University
Keywords: contemporary Chinese poetry, Chinese American poetry, underground poetry, cultural hybridity, history, enlightenment.
The panel attempts to break down boundaries between studies on contemporary Chinese poetry and Chinese American poetry and to start a new and meaningful dialogue between these two fields so far separated in discipline. The panelists share the same belief that Chinese and Chinese American poets can no longer be bounded by a single national identity; instead, their identities must be multiple and hybrid. While this cultural hybridity has always been one of the most important concerns for Chinese American poets, it has also increasingly generated much discussion and debate among contemporary Chinese poets who are now entering into an era when transnational and diasporic culture and identity are significant. Their different experiences of hybridizing "Chineseness" are certainly illuminating to each other.
All of the three panelists, besides being scholars, are poets themselves. They have all experienced and witnessed different moments of recent Chinese and Chinese American poetry history, which they discuss respectively in their papers. Jianhua Chen presents on underground poetry in Shanghai from the 1960s to the 1970s, of which he himself was a participant and witness. Russell Leong, the well-known Asian American poet and critic, chooses two famous Chinese American poets and compares their different conceptions of engaged enlightenment. Finally, Yibing Huang focuses upon the "after history" theme in contemporary Chinese poetry by examining how Chinese poets have striven for new alternatives and hybrid identities which can eventually break down the once narrowly defined category of "Chinese poetry" against a transnational and "post-history" new world.
Historicizing the Underground Romanticism: A Shanghai Poetic Group in the 1960s
Jianhua Chen, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
As more poems secretly written during the Cultural Revolution have been discovered in Shanghai, the local history of underground poetry from the 1960s to 1970s evinces a clear contour, with its distinct aesthetic characteristics. The recent phenomenon that Shanghai poets memorize and canonize the underground poetic legacy is worth critical attention for its literary and political implications in the current local and global context.
Focusing on the poetic group in the mid-1960s in which I myself participated, this paper is a personal testimony as well as a historical reflection. While recounting how the group was formed in 1965 and brutally oppressed by the Cultural Revolution in 1968, I will introduce how Zhu Yulin, a talented translator of Baudelaire, was imprisoned and tortured, and finally took his own life as a manifestation of his ideal of freedom and poetic dignity.
An analysis of Qian Yulin’s and my poems will reveal our common political and poetic pursuit, i.e. to break with the dominant official dogmatism of literature and art and seek free expression and formal invention by intertwining diverse traditions, such as Chinese classical lyricism, the modern poetics of the 1930s, and Western Romantic movements. Whereas Qian expresses his ideal love influenced by Li Po, Dai Wangshu, Keats, and Pushkin, Chen explores the themes of dream and death after Li He, Li Jinfa, Poe and Baudelaire. Their stylistic sophistication not only owes to particular literary and cultural resources in Shanghai, but also reflects their efforts to reconstruct Chinese culture as a dynamic continuity.
My talk will include readings of the poems and a presentation of the materials referring to the literary and cultural conditions of the period (books we read, copies of classical and foreign poems, and manuscripts).
Chinese American Poets: Elements of Engaged Enlightenment
Russell Leong, University of California, Los Angeles
Chinese American poets such as Alan Chong Lau or Lee Young Li have most often been studied ethnographically—that is, in terms of the nature of their content and what their writing reveals about Chinese American identity. The poets themselves, while utilizing elements of their past and background, through language and structure—and through dramatic artifice—have, in fact, helped to create elegant poetic dynamics that reveal their aesthetics and nature of their craft. Lau, I maintain, creates a poetics of "the people," while Lee opts for a poetics of "individual transcendence." Both are highly distinctive, yet equally valid approaches, to reaching a kind of engaged modern enlightenment—the former buddhistic in the case of Lau, and the latter Christian-tinged, in the case of Lee.
After History: Re-positioning Contemporary Chinese Poetry
Yibing Huang, Connecticut College
Since 1989, contemporary Chinese poetry has experienced a profound identity crisis. On the one hand, many Chinese poets went into exile and had to confront a series of new challenges in relatively unfamiliar cultural environments. On the other hand, as China has begun to enter into a new era of rapid capitalization, the social role of poetry has also been questioned and re-scrutinized by those poets who have stayed in China. In either case, there persists a sense of loss and anxiety of history seemingly having come to an end. How can one write poetry after history? This Ardononian question demands a timely answer.
My paper will focus on this "after history" theme and present a series of answers offered by different Chinese poets, such as Gu Cheng, Duoduo, Wang Jiaxin, Ouyang Jianghe, Xichuan and Zang Di. They each have discussed and re-examined the long-standing issues in modern and contemporary Chinese poetry: history, nation, exile, revolution and language. While pointing out all the places where they agree or disagree with each other, I will emphasize that it is through this negotiation with a transnational and hybrid "after history" that contemporary Chinese poetry has re-opened itself to embrace new alternatives and has been instilled with new vitality.
Organizer: Christopher Kaplonski, Cambridge University
Chair and Discussant: Elizabeth Endicott, Middlebury College
This panel presents several papers that offer innovative approaches to the study of Mongolia. Drawing upon anthropological methods and theory, the papers of this panel seek to understand and explore a variety of issues that cross-cut traditional boundaries of research in Mongolian studies. In particular, the papers seek to move from simple historical, ethnological and linguistic accounts into providing a deeper understanding of how Mongolians perceive and engage with the world about them. In doing so, the papers also go beyond the standard approaches to transition studies, to offer a greater understanding of how the transition from socialism has affected how people view and think about the world about them. In particular, the panel examines similarities and differences between the rural and urban populations of Mongolia to further highlight these issues. David Sneath’s paper examines the rural-urban differences in attitudes towards the economic transition and their impact upon Mongolian lifestyles. Peter Marsh continues to explore the differing perceptions of urban and rural populations in regards to identity and tradition through their understandings of music and other art forms. Katie Swancutt looks at Mongolian conceptions of temporality and understandings of magic. Finally, Christopher Kaplonski examines Mongolian attitudes towards the concepts of rights and laws and relates this to changing conceptions of the relationship between people and the state.
The Rural and the Urban in Pastoral Mongolia
David Sneath, Cambridge University
Mongolian representations of rural and urban life provide contrasting images. The urban setting is associated with technology, modernity and centers of political power. Rural life, by contrast, is associated with the ancient lifestyle of nomadic pastoralism, authentic Mongolian culture, simplicity and tradition. In reality, however, social networks in rural districts have long crossed the boundaries between mobile and settled aspects of Mongolian life. Products and people (particularly children) move between the settlements and the mobile pastoral encampments, to create a social matrix that includes both rural and urban contexts. Social networks continue to link those in the political and economic centres with families in remote pastoral regions. Many of those who moved to rural districts tapped into their networks of kith and kin to gain help and advice with livestock and herding.
This paper explores the social effects of these recent processes of de-urbanization and the new relationship between rural and urban society that is emerging in Mongolia’s Age of the Market. It begins by tracing the long history of relations between elements of Mongolian culture that have been oriented towards political and ritual centres, and those oriented towards rural pastoralism. Although these interlinked constellations have undergone a series of transformations, they remain central themes in both rural and urban society and continue to frame relations between the two.
"Our Traditions are Blossoming Nicely": Music, the Rural-Urban Divide and Challenges to National Identity
Peter Marsh, Indiana University
In the decade since the end of single-party rule in Mongolia, the national cultural institutions have continued to develop the professional musical arts along paths nearly unchanged from those developed during the nation’s 70-year experiment with socialism. These paths are characterized by an emphasis on professionalization, Westernization, and nationaliz-ation. But the weakening influence of these centralized, primarily cosmopolitan, and urban-oriented cultural institutions has also made it possible for alternative conceptions of tradition to arise, particularly in the nation’s rural peripheries. This paper seeks to extend Duara’s notion of alternative histories into the realm of art, and particularly the musical arts, where we find conceptions of national identity being played out—and challenged—through performance. We find that the lines dividing these alternative conceptions of tradition fall not only along those that divide the center and periphery, but also the settled and nomadic and urban and rural in this swiftly developing nation.
Tempos of Magic
Katie Swancutt, Independent Scholars of Asia
Always it is the case that misfortunes are recognized through misgivings, even presentiments that something went awry. Whenever facing adversity, people couple their apprehensions about it with efforts to ascertain its unknown variables. Initial attempts to counter dilemmas thus are predicated on clarifying both the sources and causal limitations of uncertainty in one’s surroundings. At the outset (and often only when seen from hindsight), a person manages this by establishing the temporal sequences through which his past and present tribulations came to be manifest. Armed with this perspective on time, he then confronts problems either by directly altering causation or otherwise working within and around its parameters. By reorienting himself in time and advancing his interests through space, a person forges desirable, rare, even magical future outcomes in his surroundings.
It is the express purpose of this paper to show how people adjust their bearings in time whenever attempting to predict and control their circumstances. Among Mongols in northeastern Mongolia and China, people manage conflict and curses (kharaal) by reorienting themselves according to the timing that is specific to their category of fortune. Following Gell, I argue that living in the world requires processing it through a singular cognitive means of engagement whereby subjects cull information (perception) from the environment (territory) and fashion this into intelligible experience (an image) by means of cerebral templates (time maps) (1996:239). Three Mongol categories constitute what I call temporal vicinities of the mind. These are luck-opportunity (az zavshaan), fortune (khiimor) and fate (khuv zaya). Of these three, the timing of fortune is most amenable to discovering how extraordinary events were manifest in the past and present. For this reason, it also is the most decisive category for determining the means by which favored outcomes can be obtained in the future.
Rights and Obligations: Changing Conceptions of Law in Mongolia
Christopher Kaplonski, Cambridge University
Since the democratic revolution in 1990, Mongolia has become increasingly engaged with Western concepts of law and rights. Much attention has been given to rule of law, seen as an integral part of a domestic government, although the rule of law existed under socialism as well. In addition, a great deal of attention has also been given to the concept and promulgation of human rights as Mongolia positions itself within the international community. These key concepts of laws and rights, however, remain largely unexplored in terms of how Mongolians actually understand and engage with them. This paper will address these questions, illuminating the interaction between Western conceptions of laws and rights and their reception in the Mongolian political imagination. In particular, I wish to explore the possibility that the concept of rights has largely come to replace the concept of law, which is increasingly perceived as associated with the socialist period. In doing so, I argue for a need to move beyond the often simplistic understandings of democracy and democratization often found in Western scholarship on Mongolia. Finally, this paper also addresses larger issues of the influence of Western political discourse in non-Western settings.
Organizer and Chair: Scott Kennedy, Indiana University
Discussant: Vivienne Shue, University of Oxford
This panel examines the extent to which the Chinese state has successfully managed to adapt its manner of governance to the evolving political, social and economic environments in which it finds itself at the turn of the 21st century. The papers presented here focus on the latest trends in the development of the modern regulatory state, something that has received vast attention in advanced capitalist states, but is relatively unstudied in the context of reform China. Regulatory development is studied in four areas: industrial policy (Pearson), trade policy (Kennedy), workplace safety (Su), and corporate governance (Steinfeld). The papers differ in their estimates of the progress China has made toward developing sound regulatory methods. However, they agree that the quality of governance is shaped by multiple factors; several that will be touched upon in the papers include: domestic political institutions, the spread of markets domestically, the rise of corporate lobbying, evolving global norms, and China’s location in the international political economy. Finally, the papers address several of the consequences that the shape and quality of China’s regulatory state have on the country, including China’s economic development, the distribution of influence and which interests benefit most (both internally and vis-à-vis other states and foreign actors), state capacity, and the regime’s legitimacy. The papers are based on recent fieldwork in China and utilize a variety of data sources, such as interviews, surveys, and written primary materials, supplemented by secondary sources.
The Rise of China’s Regulatory State: Norms and Bureaucratic Interests
Margaret M. Pearson, University of Maryland
One of the major political changes in China over the past decade—but also one of the least subject to scholarly analysis—is the rise of China’s regulatory state. PRC reforms that move the state from producer and direct manager to a more arms-length regulator mean a whole new role for the state in economic matters, and a new relationship with business. The rise, operation, norms, etc. of the regulatory state in the U.S., Europe, and Japan has been the focus of enormous amounts of scholarship—in economics, law, and political science. Oddly enough, the rise of China’s regulatory state has gone virtually unmentioned by Western scholars of China. This is true despite the fact that China’s entry into the WTO has placed increasing pressure on the state to gets its regulatory act in order—to build capacity, and even to build the regulatory institutions themselves. This paper analyzes one part of this regulatory evolution: the creation of institutions to regulate the insurance and telecom sectors at the central level. It examines the role played by domestic regulatory norms, by bureaucratic history, and by the globalizing force of the WTO.
Protectionism by the Book: How Global Regimes and Competing Interests Shape Chinese Trade Policy
Scott Kennedy, Indiana University
While most scholarship has properly stressed that the GATT/WTO is central to liberalizing China’s trade regime, this paper argues that it is equally fair to see the global trade regime as providing China a guide to the appropriate tools and conditions under which it can legitimately protect domestic industry. In place of quotas and bans, China has begun to increasingly employ a variety of protectionist techniques widely practiced by other WTO members. This trend is clearly displayed in China’s developing anti-dumping regime, which it has used since 1997. As such, Chinese officials and industry are learning how to play by the rules of the game.
However, the initiation of cases and their outcomes reflect the growing proactive involvement of industry, domestic and international, in the policy process. The extent to which anti-dumping cases are resolved on behalf of domestic industry complainants is constrained by the varying interplay of multiple domestic and international economic interests. Depending on one’s perspective, the foiling of protectionist efforts can be interpreted as either victories for liberalization or as confirmation of China’s dependent status in the international political economy.
These conclusions are reached through an overview of China’s anti-dumping regime, a comparison of several cases, and comparison between China’s anti-dumping regime and other potential protectionist tools. The paper draws on recent interviews with participants to and observers of China’s anti-dumping cases and on secondary written materials.
The Agency Problem and Institutional Design: Regulating Workplace Safety in China’s Coal Industry
Fubing Su, Brown University
As the Chinese economy is gradually growing out of the plan, the state is also redefining its role vis-à-vis the economy. No longer assuming the role of a social planner, the Chinese state is trying to position itself as a taxation authority and a regulator. This has led to serious efforts to rebuild a new state. Many government agencies have been created or demolished in the past decades. The internal structure of some has also undergone tremendous changes. Like the state building process in the United States during the progressive era, state rebuilding in China is going to shape the political development for the years to come. This paper analyzes this process by focusing on the Chinese state’s effort to regulate workplace safety in coal mining. China is not only the world’s largest coal producer but also accounts for 80 percent of casualties in coal mining in the world. Workers in the Chinese coal industry are 120 times more likely to get killed than their counterparts in the United States. This prompted the central government to tighten safety regulations in the early 1990s. The saturated market made this policy easy to be adopted. However, despite the central government’s strong commitment, this regulatory policy failed. During the 1994–98 period, the safety record worsened. Since 1998, the central government has decided to change its regulatory structure, and this improved the effectiveness in the following years. The paper offers an agency logic of this ineffectiveness and institutional designs. It can shed some light on developments in other areas as well. In the empirical analysis, the paper focuses on players’ incentives and examines how institutions shape their calculations.
Chinese Enterprise Development and the Challenge of Global Integration
Edward S. Steinfeld, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
China over the past two decades has achieved extraordinary growth and impressive integration into the global economy. Assessing the sustainability of these outcomes, however, is made difficult by the fact that China is enmeshed in not one single transition, but rather two simultaneously. First, China has been undergoing a transformation from plan to market, one that has included the freeing up of markets for goods and services, the liberalization of prices, and ultimately a dramatic burgeoning of private enterprise. Second, as it attempts to foster domestic change through further integration with the global economy, China is being forced to adapt to a global system that is itself in great flux. China, in effect, is undergoing a domestic transition to the market at the very same time it is participating in a transformation in the way global markets as a whole function.
This paper focuses particularly on the second transition. Utilizing data from a 2001 World Bank survey of 1,500 enterprises in China, the paper argues that while Chinese firms have become deeply enmeshed in global supply chains, they have generally failed to command positions of power, and have instead ended up focused on low-margin, low value activities. Moreover, Chinese firms have failed to accommodate important changes in the structure of global supply chains. The reasons in part stem from generic problems of economic development, but more importantly pertain to particular institutional features of China’s political economy.
Organizer: Kenneth Klinkner, University of Illinois, Urbana-Chambaign
Chair: Aili Mu, Iowa State University
Discussant: Hsingyuan Tsao, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Keywords: Chinese popular culture; entertainment; diversions.
China’s market economy and its concomitant commercialization of social intercourse have led to a florescence of China pop. This emerging China pop increasingly negotiates/contests the established econ-omic, political, ethical, and cultural norms with alternative systems of signification and modes of expression. Looking at a quartet of popular diversions (a pop cult, plebian culture, holiday entertainment, and pro sports), this panel focuses on the dynamics and implications of popular culture and assesses the forces and directions of social change in contemporary China.
Kenneth Klinkner’s paper discusses the Chinese Odyssey pop cult that has animated campus life and internet chat rooms. His analysis finds elements of both stasis and change in how the coming generation explores the vagaries of life. Hongwei Lu examines beliefs and practices of urban plebian romance in Chi Li’s Lailai Wangwang. Her analysis of the residual and emergent cultural values embedded in romantic liaisons shows the advent of new social forces. Judy Polumbaum chronicles the explosion of popular interest in pro sports. Focusing on basketball and soccer fandom, she analyzes how the Chinese sort out their loyalties in the globalized venue of sports. In her study of a pair of recent comic skits on the national stage, Aili Mu illustrates the increasing political content of social satire in today’s China. This sharp satirical bite is indicative of the public finding a political voice. Together these four critical examinations of pop cultural artifacts help reveal the nature and direction of social and political changes in China.
Joker’s Magic Mirror: Reflected Images of Chinese Urban Youths
Kenneth Klinkner, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
This paper examines the Chinese Odyssey (Dahuaxiyou) popular phenomenon that captivated the urban youth in China—particularly college students—the past few years. The craze began in 1997 when a two-part Hong Kong film parodying the classic yarn Journey to the West caught on in China because it spoke directly to the young and addressed the big questions of identity, relationships and purpose that no longer came with pat, ready-made answers. Chinese Odyssey explored the multi-dimensional nature of an individual’s personality, the equivocal nature of romance, gender roles, the burdens of obligations and the notion of ‘true love.’ All of this was done in a wulitou (nonsense) style that captured the spirit of these times with a playful irreverence. It is this element that found a special resonance with Chinese youths trying to locate themselves in an evolving world. Chinese Odyssey provided the new generation with a language—rich in symbols, sarcasm and timely sense—and the models for dealing with life’s vagaries. The internet provided the urban youth with the media (websites, chat rooms, online gaming sessions, etc.) and the freedom to pose and work out answers to the big questions posed above. This examination of this pop cult classic and its artifacts finds elements of both stasis and change as the next generation of Chinese attempt to make sense of—and put in order—the world in which they find themselves.
Romance and Plebeian Culture in Postsocialist China: On Chi Li’s Novella Lailai Wangwang
Hongwei Lu, University of Oregon
This paper studies emergent morals, values and sentiments of "plebeian culture" (shimin wenhua) during a time of depoliticization, globalization and consumerism through close analysis of Chi Li’s bestseller romance Lailai Wangwang (1997). It explores how romance in postsocialist China’s urban heartland adopts modes of expression and a system of signification perpetuated by and in complicity with transnational capitalism, which undermines and displaces the hegemony of the official discourse of the state. By means of "best-selling" themes of "love affair" and "rags-to-riches tale," the storyline showcases the economic empowerment of the urban common class and disintegration of socialist traditions of asceticism, egalitarianism and statism. Its libidinal dynamics express an overt rejection of sexual puritanism that symbolizes the communist past and that has been dominating the Chinese public cultural sphere for decades. The romances in the story employ formulas that appeal to values and morals of an alternative system of social life and new social categories that emerged in the frenzy of China’s growing consumerism and transnational capitalism. The locus of my analysis focuses on studying the beliefs and practices of the four main protagonists (Kang Weiye, husband; Duan Lina, wife; Lin Zhu, first lover; and Shi Yupeng, second lover) in the novella, whose breakups and makeups represent the reformation of contemporary plebeian culture. Each of them personifies residual and emergent cultural values that signify the emergence of a pluralist public cultural sphere with a diversity of forms and structures in urban China.
China’s Global Sports Engagements: The Case of Yao Ming
Judy Polumbaum, University of Iowa
This study examines the interactions among professional sports, television and globalization from the perspective of mainland Chinese athletes, media and fans. Against the backdrop of China’s growing sports imports (in the form of hosting of international sporting events, media coverage of international sports figures and contests, and expansion of the marketplace for sports-branded products) and exports (primarily labor, as top players in both women’s and men’s soccer and basketball gain opportunities to play abroad), the study considers how mainland print, broadcast and internet media both reflect and help constitute globalizing tendencies in sports. It focuses especially on basketball and soccer fandom as a matter of complicated and intriguing negotiations among local, national and global interests, loyalties and passions. In particular, it looks at how mainland media and fans have interpreted the role of Shanghai Sharks player Yao Ming, the U.S. National Basketball Association’s number one draft pick in 2002, as simultaneously a local, national and global star.
Understanding the "Zhao Benshan Phenomena"
Aili Mu, Iowa State University
This paper joins the discussion of "Zhao Benshan phenomena" by providing a different understanding of the implications and importance of Zhao Benshan’s work in the context of China’s recent historical transformation. Through a close reading of both the written and visual texts of Selling Crutches and Selling a Wheelchair, this paper argues that "Zhao Benshan phenomena" signifies a process of gradual but fundamental change in the Chinese people’s way of thinking, which promises both the plurality of meaning and a public voice within the state apparatus. Focusing its attention on how the deception is accomplished and what is being ridiculed in both cases, this paper shows, in four steps, how these skits unveil the absurdity of established patterns of thought and behavior, expose the ideological construction of desired subjects, uncover the arbitrary nature of truth and reality, and lay bare the consequences of the exercise of hegemonic power. The new critical orientation represented by these comic skits has problematized and contested the role and the dictum of the party-state to such an extent that constant amendments must be made to keep its credibility/legitimacy and to carry on the task of improving public life.
Organizer: Philip Clart, University of Missouri, Columbia
Chair: Robert E. Hegel, Washington University, St. Louis
Discussant: Wilt L. Idema, Harvard University
Keywords: religion, hagiography, myth, literature, novels, Daoism, popular religion.
While the religious aspects of traditional Chinese narrative fiction (for example, in such works as the Journey to the West) were never ignored, they were usually examined as part of the overall plot structure and aesthetic composition of the work in question. What has been investigated less commonly is the relationship of these aspects with contemporary religious life. Such an investigation needs to look at the social and cultural location of the religious ideas found in narrative fiction, as well as at the impact of literary works on religious beliefs and practices in their own and later ages. With papers ranging from the pre-Tang (Campany) over the Ming and Qing periods (Cedzich, Clart, Katz) to present-day Taiwan (Clart), this panel explores both of these issues: the sources of narrative themes in living religious cults, and the function of literature as a carrier of myths that helped to spread and shape such cults. In the course of this exploration, fundamental questions concerning the relationship of literature and religion, and the nature of "fiction" in a traditional Chinese context will be raised and discussed. This discussion will not be limited to the paper presentations, which will be kept fairly short and succinct (with longer paper versions circulated ahead of the conference). The panel will employ an interactive format in which about half the session will be devoted to a structured discussion by the panelists and the audience of the key issues underlying all four papers.
The Hagiographic Process and Its Products in Early Medieval China
Robert F. Campany, Indiana University
In the study of religion and culture, the relationship between story and cult, or myth and ritual, is an old problem. In historical work, the things that happen between the lives and deaths of revered persons and the final recording of stories about them are things we would very much like to understand. Whatever the "facts" of those lives and deaths might have been, the ongoing religious and cultural identities of such figures are socially constructed, and hagiographic literature is a trace of the processes of construction. Focusing primarily on narratives of "transcendents" but also on those of monks and other achievers in pre-Tang periods, my paper will attempt to summarize what is known of how and by whom such narratives came to be made and received. With an eye toward the old and wide-ranging cross-cultural literature on such issues, I will entertain such questions as these: What is the relationship between these Chinese narratives and particular cult sites and their regional communities, and between those sites and the hagiographer who produced the texts we have now? Who created these stories—the hagiographer or someone before him? In what senses are they "fictive," in what senses not, and is this a meaningful and a helpful question to ask? How did these narrative reverberations start, and where, if at all, do they stop?
About the Creation of Gods and Novels in China
Ursula-Angelika Cedzich, DePaul University
This paper will focus on some prominent divine figures widely known from late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth-century Chinese novels, such as the Beiyou ji (Journey to the North), the Nanyou ji (Journey to the South), and the Fengshen yanyi (Enfeoffment of the Gods), and commonly counted among the group of the so-called Thirty-Six Heavenly Generals. Neither the group as such, nor its individual representatives originally emerged from these novels. The cults of these divine heroes often go far back in Chinese religious history, and their origins are both diverse and mixed. Quite a number of the gods have Buddhist as well as Daoist characteristics; many of them were also believed to have once been the ghosts of humans or nature demons, both feared and propitiated by the people. What mechanisms inform the genesis of such composite gods? And what is the role of popular narrative in the propagation of their cults? These shall be the main issues of the paper. The deities to be analyzed are Marshal Ma, Zhao Gongming, Yin Jiao, and/or Wen Qiong. The study will attempt to relate these divinities to Daoist and Buddhist rituals, and to popular religion and myth. The novels mentioned above are understood in this context not just as "mere fiction," but as mythic accounts that impacted broader, popular, understandings of the gods portrayed in them. Thus, the paper hopes to cast light on conceptions of divinity in China and on the function of popular narrative in connection with these theologies and their ritual roots.
Images of Lü Dongbin in Ming Literature
Paul Katz, Academia Sinica
The goal of this paper is to explore the representations (or "images") of Lü Dongbin in Ming-dynasty literature, as well as compare them to other representations that circulated throughout China prior to and during the Ming. In doing so, I pose the following questions: How did Lü’s cult change over time? Who contributed to these transformations? In what ways did different images of Lü coexist and interact? A number of scholars have already researched the cult of this popular Taoist immortal, but most of their work has focused on the Song and Yuan dynasties, and has tended to overlook the importance of Ming literature. In this paper, I argue that novels like the Journey to the East and the Record of the Immortal Lü’s Flying Sword played an important role in both popularizing Lü’s cult and presenting irreverent images of him normally not found in other texts, including literati collected writings, temple inscriptions, and the Taoist Canon. The paper’s structure is as follows: I begin by summarizing data on images of Lü Dongbin that circulated during the Song and Yuan dynasties. This is followed by a much longer section about images of Lü presented in the Dongyou ji and the Lüxian feijian ji. In the conclusion, I explore the processes that caused diverse images of this famed immortal to circulate and also interact.
Han Xiangzi: A Story Without a Cult
Philip Clart, University of Missouri, Columbia
The paper explores the narrative tradition focussing on Han Xiangzi, one of the Eight Immortals (Baxian). This tradition began in the Tang dynasty and evolved to include dramatic pieces, vernacular novels, and various forms of popular literature such as precious scrolls and ballads. Its main themes are Han Xiangzi’s efforts to achieve immortality through internal alchemy and his subsequent deliverance of his relatives, including most prominently his uncle Han Yu, the famous Tang dynasty scholar, and his wife Lin Ying (or Luying). Mixing Daoist proselytization and anti-Confucian polemic, the Han Xiangzi story merges religious and literary concerns in a manner that throws an interesting light on the interplay of religion and literature in late Imperial China.
In addition to analyzing the key themes in the Han Xiangzi literature, the paper addresses instances of popular worship of Han Xiangzi and the degree to which his perception in this context was shaped by his literary images. Given the often close relationship between cult and narrative literature in the cases of other deities, the question needs to be asked why the fairly well-developed Han Xiangzi lore does not correspond with an equally developed religious cult. As a number of interpretive options are explored in tackling this problem, general issues of the relationship of religion, myth, and literature in late Imperial and modern China are addressed.
Organizer: Naifei Ding, National Central University
Chair and Discussant: Rob Wilson, University of California, Santa Cruz
Keywords: fantasy, science fiction, globalization, animal-cyborg, puppet, sexuality.
In an era of compressed development and rapid globalization, issues and discourses of gender and sexuality in Taiwan have quickly exceeded the traditional "genres" in which they have come to be examined and understood. Hybrid genres such as the Pili televised serial puppet shows, and the fantasy "science fiction" of a new generation of young writers in the Nineties demand new modes of reading and analyses. This panel is such an attempt as it presents four papers that range from: a juxtaposition of late Qing reading of the "not-humane" with Nineties Taiwan fantasy science-fiction (Ding), an analysis of the politics of "roaming" representations of cyborgs in both feminist discourses and award-winning science fiction (Liu), the examination of global "science fiction" in contradistinction to a "minor" local writing that defines itself against both global and local hegemonic forms as it articulates a "gothic sexuality" (Parry), and finally, how science fiction and futurism is in the particular style that technological utopian fantasy takes in the Pili television serials that have spouted fan clubs and fan activities all over Taiwan as it negotiates changing political and technological-economic realities (Silvio).
The underlying logic of hegemonic discursive systems is rarely explicitly stated from within; however the papers in this panel attempt to locate this kind of unstated logic and make it accountable to its political functions by analyzing the ways in which fantasy and science fiction texts on gender or sexual deviance evade, challenge or appropriate it. The slogan of one of the Pili puppets is a case in point: "The failure of others is my joy!" (always accompanied by an evil laugh). Such a fantastic appropriation reveals a politics of schadenfreude (a malicious joyful satisfaction derived from others’ misfortunes) which is deployed to very different ends in differently positioned cultural texts. As appropriation it may make explicit the encompassing strategies of orthodox gender and sexuality discourses as its invisible violence and joy, while deriving its own satisfaction in fantasizing other kinds of failures.
In the Company of the "Not-Human(e): Mad Dog Yinfu and Queer Crocodiles
Naifei Ding, National Central University
This paper juxtaposes fantasies of the "company of the not-humane" (feiren/buren) in late Qing commentaries of pornographic fiction (Jin Ping Mei, Wen Long commentaries, 1879–1882), and Nineties queer fiction in Taiwan (Qiu Miaojin, Journal of a Crocodile, 1994). The cultural memory of dangers of sex with bondservant maids and conniving concubines is an important if oftentimes forgotten shadow influence on the taboo and stigma of non-reproductive sex and sexuality in Chinese-speaking places today. Thus, the deep shame of sex as work or for pleasure, non-marital, non-reproductive sex, queer sex and so on, has to do at least in part with how instrumental (non-human) sex has been historically and culturally tainted, made over to become inherent to socially base and morally improper persons. In present-day Taiwan, queer fiction and fictional protagonists have resorted to what might be termed a "fantasy-science-fiction" use and context for such base animal imagery, one that can be seen as tactically similar to the reclaiming and recoding of "queer" in the U.S., where what had before signaled social and sexual stigma; animal and other non-human figures can thus insistently work against the "humane" order that had heretofore placed such representations of illegitimate sex and base persons in an inferior, tolerated but encompassed position. My paper analyzes the differences as well as continuities between late Qing elite reading fantasies and Nineties Taiwan queer refiguring of non-human-animal imaginaries.
The Roaming Politics of Postmodernism and Cyborgs: Science Fiction and Feminist Body Discourse in Taiwan
Jen-Peng Liu, National T’sing-Hua University
The general understanding of Taiwan’s recent developments in gender issues tends to locate important events in women’s and homosexual movements or in academic discourses. This perspective, however, obscures the many other genres in which gender issues are made meaningful. For example, in 1994, three of the recipients of an important science fiction award were Zhang Qi-Jiang for Big Sister Is Watching You, Hung Ling for Memory’s Story, and Chi Da-wei for In The Bottom of His Eye, The Palm of Your Hand, a Red Rose Is about to Bloom. These very different works all use the genre of science fiction to represent gender and sexuality in unconventional ways that cannot be accounted for by current academic and feminist discourses. These novels are set in the contemporary world of informatics, bio-technology and globalization. This is the world of science fiction, yet it is also a new reality in which issues of gender and post-gender take on more complexity and significance.
This paper analyzes the politics of representing postmodern bodies in these three works. It does this by examining the extent to which these novels resist the encompassing strategies of orthodox and mainstream gender discourses and how, in the midst of globalization, roaming into different fields can become the survival strategy of cyborgs.
I Love You, but That Has Nothing at All to Do with You: Gothic Sexuality and the Sci-fi Imaginary in Taiwan
Amie Parry, National Central University
This paper explores what I loosely term gothic sexuality in two science fiction narratives that circulate very differently in contemporary Taiwan: one is a Hollywood film which due to language (English), medium (film) and budget (Hollywood production) has relatively global reach; the other is an experimental literary text by a young queer woman fiction writer and cultural critic in Taiwan. The film in question is the Wachowski brother’s The Matrix; however, I emphasize what was taken out of their original script as it became a Hollywood production, despite its revolutionary plot and the ideological critique (couched in Baudrillardian terminology) of late capitalist society and gender norms. The latter is Taiwan lesbian science fiction writer Hung Ling’s Walking on the Glass-made Cliff. Ultimately the "comparative" aim of this paper is to account for the importance of writing like Hung Ling’s which, due to its difficult experimental form and obvious violent content, appeals to a smaller audience within Taiwan and perhaps in a Mandarin homosexual diaspora. The disregard for conventional morality and refusal to take up in the narrative voice the position of a moral higher ground reserved for women writers, I argue, constructs a dark side of fantasy that opens up representational possibilities not contained by the invisible violences that occur in the broad daylight of contemporary moral values.
Animating Globalization: The Pleasures of Media Overload in Television Puppet Serials
Teri Silvio, Academia Sinica
The televised puppet serials of the Pili Multimedia Company are often seen in Taiwan as combining the traditional art of Taiwanese hand-puppet theater with "science fiction." But the world created in these serials is explicitly that of jianghu—the world of knights-errant fiction. There are magical swords, Taoist immortals and demons, but no spaceships, no laboratories, no indices of "the future." So what is it that makes these serials "science" fiction?
I argue that what gives these serials the feel of science and futurism is not their content, but their style. The technological utopianism lies in the fantasy of animation itself—the power to give inanimate material the appearance of human life—and in the fantasy of humans taking on the powers of mass media technologies. In Pili serials, the diegetic world and its characters are brought to life through a layering of animation technologies, including puppetry, cinematic editing, line drawing, digital animation and special effects. Fans add to the list by drawing manga, creating animated short films on their websites, and enacting the characters at costume-play conventions. The episodes are framed by title sequences and music videos starring the puppets in which the power/pleasure of controlling multiple media is celebrated.
I relate this form of futurism to Taiwan’s intense imbrication in the global information technology industry. The Pili puppet serials represent the fantasy of a cosmopolitan world in which nation-states have been replaced by competing corporations marked by distinctive management philosophies, but whose animating deity is unmistakably Taiwanese.
Organizer: Seunghyun Han, Harvard University
Chair: Benjamin A. Elman, Princeton University
Discussants: Tobie Meyer-Fong, Johns Hopkins University; Benjamin A. Elman, Princeton University
Keywords: China, Qing, regional identity, local culture, literati activism.
This panel addresses the renewed emphasis on regional cultures and identities in early nineteenth-century China through three case studies of literati activists at the local level. In contrast to the eighteenth century, we suggest that regional identities constructed by local literary elites became more salient in the early nineteenth century.
While the three papers exhibit a high degree of thematic and chronological coherence, they explore the issue of local elites and identities over a wide geographical range. Han presents one of the major cities in the culturally dominant Jiangnan region through an examination of portraits and statues of local Suzhou worthies in the General Shrine for the Famous Worthies of Suzhou in the Pavilion of the Green Wave. Moving from the cultural center of the Qing empire towards the southern periphery, McMahon and Miles explore literati activists associated with two academies in newly emerging centers of scholarship. McMahon examines links between literary activism in Changsha and the Yuelu academy, while Miles portrays literary circles in Guangzhou as predecessors to the Xuehaitang academy.
We hope that the three papers will stimulate discussion regarding the extent to which trends found in early nineteenth-century Suzhou, Changsha, and Guangzhou were relevant to other parts of the Qing empire. In addition, we seek to address the issue of how unique the early nineteenth-century emphasis on the local was in comparison to other periods such as the Southern Song, the seventeenth century, or the post-Mao era.
The Cult of Local Worthies in Early Nineteenth-Century Suzhou: Shrines, Images, and Power
Seunghyun Han, Harvard University
In the early Daoguang period, members of the local Suzhou elite cooperated with one another to build the General Shrine for the Famous Worthies of Suzhou in the Pavilion of the Green Wave (canglangting). They engraved the portraits of those figures on the walls of the shrine and soon thereafter published the portraits. My paper explores the cultural significance of this event in the context of the early nineteenth century.
The use of visual images such as portraits or statues of Confucian worthies and local worthies was popular at shrines within government schools before the mid-Ming period. From the Jiajing reign, the government tried to control the cult of local worthies and famous officials, including the measure of banning the use of images or portraits in the Confucian temple. However, it was only after the Yongzheng reign that those cults were strictly regulated by the central authority. With the demise of Qianlong emperor, the Suzhou elite was more able to express freely the local sentiment that had been subdued during the Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns. Moreover, the Qianlong 41 decision to rehabilitate the Ming loyalists created a need to include these figures in the local tradition.
Since the shrines for local worthies and famous officials were already under tighter government control, the local elite of Suzhou in the early nineteenth century rather chose to rebuild their local tradition in a more private place, where one could include as many local worthies as possible without government sanction, even including the portraits.
The Yuelu Academy and Activist Identity in Early Nineteenth-Century Hunan
Daniel M. McMahon, Ching Yun Institute of Technology
Central to China’s nineteenth-century statecraft resurgence was a cadre of Hunanese scholar-officials: luminaries such as Yan Ruyi, He Changling, Tao Zhu, Wei Yuan, Zeng Guofan, Hu Linyi, and Zuo Zongtang. These activists, connected by common provenance, were also alumni of Shanhua’s (Changsha’s) Yuelu Academy, Hunan’s premier educational center and the heart of the "Hunan School."
This paper examines the relationship between the Yuelu Academy and literati activism, arguing that the drive for effective action, and the sense of identification it entailed, was rooted in Yuelu teaching. Undergoing a period of transition in the early nineteenth century, the Yuelu Academy pioneered a focus upon aggressive public work—a change prompted by local tradition, late eighteenth-century problems, and a strengthening sense of regional identity. As the century continued, this academy became more closely tied to national trends in statecraft, particularly those offered by Canton’s Xuehai tang. It, however, remained distinctive in its inculcation of self-conscious activists dedicated to Yuelu principles and innovative ideas.
Before the Xuehaitang: Northern Patrons and Southern Poets in Early Nineteenth-Century Guangzhou
Steven B. Miles, Harvard University
The Xuehaitang academy played a central role in the production of local culture in nineteenth-century Guangzhou. This paper examines the local origins of the Xuehaitang—two literary events that predated the founding of the academy in the 1820s. These events celebrated local sites, and the core participants included local poets, such as Huang Peifang and Zhang Weiping, who would later become important Xuehaitang scholars. The first event surrounded the construction in 1811 at the Guangxiao Temple of a shrine honoring Yu Fan, a third-century classicist who had been banished to Guangzhou. This was followed a year later by the construction of the Cloudy Springs Mountain Lodge on Baiyun Mountain north of Guangzhou. In addition to honoring the famous Sichuanese poet Su Shi at the lodge, the Cloudy Springs literati also enshrined local cultural predecessors from the Song and Ming.
Literature produced around both events presaged some themes that would later be stressed in Xuehaitang classes, such as the celebration of the local, an appreciation of pre-Song classical exegeses, and parallel prose composition. Writers associated with the Xuehaitang would repeatedly revisit these sites and continue to write about them throughout the nineteenth century. Also like the Xuehaitang, these two literary events were connected to the support of northern scholars and writers—Lieutenant-Governor Zeng Ao in the case of the Yu Fan Shrine and Weng Fanggang in the case of the Cloudy Springs group—and illustrate the interplay between, and contrasting agenda of, northern patrons and southern poets.
Organizer: Hua-Yu Li, Oregon State University
Chair: Evgeny Dobrenko, University of Nottingham
Discussant: Thomas P. Bernstein, Columbia University
Keywords: Sino-Soviet relations, Sino-Soviet exchange, Soviet influence, Soviet models, Chinese socialism.
Cold War scholarship analyzed deployment of Soviet models and Stalinist frameworks in Chinese socialist construction to compare communist economics, politics, and culture in two nation-states. New archival resources and scholarly approaches encourage reconsideration of Sino-Soviet relations beyond Cold War paradigms and conventional understandings of nation-states as primary analytical units. The papers for this panel consider how particular individuals, texts, and films created "contact zones" in which leadership styles, economic transformation, and political culture were forged.
Chen asserts that the circulation of Soviet film which shaped the Chinese political culture contributed to "everyday internationalism" in China that challenged aspects of Chinese socialism. Li critically examines the importance of the Stalinist text, the Short Course, and demonstrates that the presumed Maoist acceptance of a Stalinist model of economic development emerged from dialogue with this text and Maoist interpretations of the Chinese situation. Pantsov, through analysis of the role of personality in transnational history and proletarian internationalism, considers how Chinese leadership appropriated and adapted Soviet models.
The panel highlights the multiple power dynamics that informed Soviet practices in China, Chinese interpretations of Soviet models, and the structures—political, economic, social, and culture—that gave meaning to Sino-Soviet exchange in the 1950s. The papers address a variety of levels: political leadership, economic transformation; and everyday culture. We suggest that a multifaceted approach to Sino-Soviet relations that focuses on processes of translation and transmutation (as part of transnational history and nation building) is necessary for the study of Chinese socialism as internationalist and nationalist ideology and practice.
Soviet Film, Chinese Political Culture, and Everyday Internationalism in the 1950s
Tina Mai Chen, University of Manitoba
In 1950s China, film projection units composed of small groups of young men and women carried projectors, generators, film reels, and propaganda materials across the Chinese countryside to educate and entertain peasants and workers. Soviet films, translated and dubbed into Chinese, were warmly received, frequently requested, and made up the majority of films screened. These films also acted as an important impetus to political participation by Chinese youth. How Soviet film contributed to the everyday experience of Chinese socialism, however, has not been addressed in scholarship on Maoist or Soviet culture, politics, or aesthetics.
This paper addresses the multiple levels at which Soviet films informed the experience of socialism, internationalism, and the Cold War in China. I explore the ways in which technologies of mass communication, Sino-Soviet cultural exchange, and Soviet icons contributed to Chinese political culture. I argue that the combined effect of these elements rendered Sino-Soviet cultural relations integral to the Chinese experience of modernity and internationalism in the 1950s. Not only did Soviet cultural products and technology provide the newly formed Chinese nation with novel technologies, spaces, images, and practices but they also enabled understandings of gender, sexuality, and international politics that differed from Maoist and Stalinist conceptions. Through consideration of the tensions between the everyday experience of Soviet film in China and official policy and rhetoric of China and the Soviet Union, I introduce the concept of "everyday internationalism" as essential to understanding the experience of Sino-Soviet relations in 1950s China.
Stalin’s Short Course, Mao, and China’s Socialist Economic Transformation in the Early 1950s
Hua-Yu Li, Oregon State University
I seek to explain the influence of one of Stalin’s most important books on Mao during the early 1950s as he led the CCP in transforming China’s then largely private economy into a socialist one. Almost unknown in the West, the book is usually referred to simply as the Short Course, in place of its full title, Short Course of the History of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), which was first published in the Soviet Union in 1938.
A few Western scholars have recognized the impact of the Short Course on Mao. Benjamin Schwartz has emphasized Mao’s uncritical acceptance of Stalin’s "image" of socialism as described in the Short Course. Tony Saich has argued that Mao rewrote the history of the CCP during the rectification campaign, according to his own interpretation, inspired by Stalin’s rewriting of CPSU history in the Short Course.
While agreeing with Schwartz, I go further in arguing that Mao also created a Stalinist economic structure based largely on his interpretation of the Short Course. Stalin adhered to two principles in building socialism in the Soviet Union. First, certain measures need to be taken to create the proper conditions for building socialism. Second, a socialist economic transformation requires industrialization, collectivization, and the elimination of all capitalist elements. While essentially following the steps outlined in the Short Course, Mao took shortcuts to complete each step on the road to socialism in China faster than Stalin had in the Soviet Union.
On the Role of Personality in History: Stalin’s Impact on the PRC Leadership
Alexander V. Pantsov, Capital University
In the history of Sino-Soviet relations, the 1950s are conventionally viewed as a time of close cooperation between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. There have been different interpretations of the relationship by Western scholars. Was the relationship characterized primarily by Stalin’s benevolent paternalism toward the PRC leadership or by his attempt to promote his own nationalistic agenda? Alternatively, was the relationship shaped by a combination of these and other factors? This paper examines new archival sources and offers some possible answers.
My paper suggests that Stalin’s China policy was extremely nationalistic. While he supported the CCP’s victory in 1949, he was at the same time concerned about the consequences of the CCP’s seizure of power. As a nationalist, he worried about the emergence of a competing center that might challenge his hegemony over the communist world. A new study shows that until his death Stalin tried to limit Mao’s ambitions to the "democratic" tasks of China’s revolution. Stalin tried to dominate the Chinese leadership and compel it to follow his policy recommendations. In addition, he sought to moderate the pace at which Mao was building socialism in China. The death of Stalin in March 1953 finally allowed Mao to proceed with his socialist program.
Organizer: Charles Musgrove, University of Arkansas, Little Rock
Chair and Discussant: Rebecca Nedostup, Purdue University
Studies of China’s great cities abound. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Xi’an have attracted much attention from scholars trying to understand the nature of Chinese urbanism(s) across the vast temporal and regional boundaries of China’s socio-cultural landscape. This panel brings together scholars researching the history of a city that has largely been overlooked since F. W. Mote’s seminal work in G. W. Skinner’s The City in Late Imperial China (1977). "Imagining Nanjing" investigates the physical, social, and cultural transformations over the centuries that followed capital building efforts of the early Ming dynasty. Each panelist explores subsequent re-definitions of the city: as the Ming’s "southern capital," as a regional administrative and ritual center under the Qing dynasty, and as the locus of Nationalist revolutionary ideals in the Republican era. From city wall building efforts of the late Ming, to the reconstruction of Qing rituals following the devastation wrought on the Taiping capital, and the self-conscious attempts to use international standards to redefine the city as a "model capital," each paper interrogates various layers of Nanjing’s urban identity. How was Nanjing conceived of as an urban entity, and how did conceptions change? What were the physical structures and ritual embodiments of state and social hierarchies within it? What roles did city residents play in collectively imagining those ideals? Each paper offers a distinct vision of how state and society "imagined" Nanjing and the changes and continuities of those visions over time.
Society on Display: Imagining Ideal Residents for an Ideal Capital
Zwia Lipkin, Harvard University
When the Nationalists made Nanjing China’s capital in April 1927, they pushed the city to the foreground of national and international attention, and offered ambitious plans for the city’s reconstruction. These were a part of a larger project aimed at constructing a new China, which required implementation of changes in the capital before they could be applied to the rest of the country. "If Shanghai modernity could be defined as ‘the material transformation of everyday life,’" remarks Kirby, "Nanjing was consumed with the industrial metamorphosis of national life."1 In that regard, Nanjing fit James Scott’s model of high modernist miniaturization, or "the creation of more easily controlled micro-order in model cities."2
Many of the Nationalists’ efforts targeted Western opinion, which became an indicator to the success or failure of their reforms. The Nationalists’ ideal Nanjing, based on Western models and intended to inspire other Chinese cities and enhance China’s position in the world, was to be a splendid city with modern facilities, inhabited by educated, patriotic, and democratic people. The transformation of residents was believed to be both a means to bring about physical change, and its result. Yet, although residents were not expected to be conservative, traditional, resistant or poor, in reality, as in other model cities such as Brasilia, the majority were impoverished rural in-migrants who did not care much for the government or its efforts. This paper will outline the social experiments conducted in the city after Nationalist expectations of the capital’s society clashed with reality.
1. William Kirby, "Engineering China," p. 137.
2. James C. Scott, Seeking Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1998, p. 4.
Sun Said So: Myth Making, Regionalism, and Ideology in the Debate over China’s National Capital, 1927–1928
Charles Musgrove, University of Arkansas, Little Rock
In April 1927, members of the Nationalist Party (the Guomindang, or GMD) established Nanjing as the capital of China. In doing so, the party claimed to represent the will of the entire country; but the capital at Nanjing, like most new capitals, was actually born of factional and regional conflicts. Nonetheless, by 1930 Nanjing was widely recognized as the capital of Nationalist China, and Beijing had effectively lost its capital status. This paper explores the creation of popular legitimacy, both for the capital and the GMD that established it, by focusing on a bitter public debate that erupted in 1928 over the issue of the permanent capital. In this contest, regional biases between southern and northern Chinese were quite apparent, and would have to be transcended if Nanjing were to be accepted as the legitimate capital of all of China. To this end, the KMT turned to familiar symbols and rituals built around their extremely popular late founder Sun Yatsen. Sun Yatsen was presented as a national hero and "founding father," whose temporary presidency in 1912 was used as the basis of a founding myth for the new capital at Nanjing. These efforts were an effective beginning to the process of legitimizing Nanjing as the capital, but it would take time to create the kind of broad collective imagination that would allow that legitimacy to fully develop.
Nanjing in the Eyes of Neighbors: Late Ming City Wall Building in Southern Nanjing
Si-yen Fei, Stanford University
In the winter of 1597, in a county neighboring Nanjing, more than four hundred people gathered without any planned coordination in front of the Censor’s office to petition against a proposal from the magistrate to build a city wall. After vehement debates, the proposal was refuted. This was not the only event of its kind. The county gazetteer records numerous episodes over this issue from at least 1572 to 1605, with a city wall building plan proposed by officials under the rhetoric of defending the southern capital Nanjing, and then disputed and negated by local activism. A similar pattern can be found in other counties adjacent to Nanjing as well. This phenomenon touches on several important issues regarding the field of Chinese urban history, which is the main focus of this paper. To begin with, the conventional perception that all Chinese cities were "walled cities" is an overstatement. At least in southern China, most of the cities were not walled until the end of the Yuan dynasty. Throughout the Ming dynasty, there were several waves of wall building movements. Most were initiated in response to local bandits and pirate attacks. As a result, three hundred years later, most of the cities became walled cities. How was this accomplished and why? Did a new perception emerge about the physical prerequisites of a "city?" How were resources, both labor and money, being mobilized for the walls? How did the urban community respond to such projects? A specific case study of city wall building in Nanjing’s southern metropolitan area will help to answer these questions and further our understanding of this historical phenomenon. Especially given the trend favoring city wall building, the reasons why people in the southern metropolitan area objected so strongly to walls are particularly interesting and help to illuminate the dynamics of early modern urbanism in sixteenth-century China.
The Taiping Rebellion and the Transformation of State Ritual in Nanjing
William Wooldridge, Princeton University
Following the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864), Zeng Guofan and other officials imagined Nanjing as both a seat of government and a center of ritual activity. These roles were intimately related because Qing officials were required by law to make offerings at certain times of the year at temples to a variety of gods and moral exemplars. The reestablishment of Qing government in the city necessitated the revival of this state cult, so Nanjing officials and literati devoted considerable resources to constructing new temples and to rebuilding those that the iconoclastic Taiping rebels had systematically destroyed. The result of these efforts was not a return to the status quo antebellum, but rather a transformation of the religious landscape of the city.
Nanjing elites confiscated lands formerly belonging to independent institutions and appropriated them for the state cult. Officials and literati also built new shrines honoring huge numbers of people who died in the rebellion. Thus after the rebellion most of Nanjing’s larger temples were associated with the state cult, and many of the temples in the state cult were now dedicated to martyrs. This shift in the locus of state ritual activities toward humans was not simply a consequence of the rebellion; it was also a product of social pressures already in evidence before the war. The changes marked a new way of portraying in ritual the relationship of Nanjing’s residents to the dynasty, a technique that proved adaptable to continuing changes in the polity over the course of the twentieth century.
Organizer: Chia-Ling Yang, SOAS, University of London
Chair: Su-hsing Lin, Ohio State University
Discussant: Doris Ledderose-Croissant, University of Heidelberg
Keywords: Meiji Japan, early modern China, Shanghai, Canton, painting, cartoon, cultural interactions.
This panel explores the cultural interactions and conflicts in the art and politics of China and Japan from the end of the Opium War (1839–42) until the early twentieth century. It poses three broad questions: What were the relations between artistic development in the port cities of China and Japan? How much did art and national policy mingle together in this period of turmoil? How did artists and politicians conceive and respond to foreign stimuli?
The panel brings together scholars from the field of art history with attention given to politics and artistic development in early modern China and Japan. Chak-Kwong Lau presents the artistic careers of Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and Gao Jianfu (1879–1951) within the frame of political development. In addition to influence from Japan, he argues that Canton was the matrix of innovative ideas that enabled a revolution in painting to occur at the turn of the century in south China. Chia-Ling Yang studies early Western art education by Jesuits at the Craft and Art School of Tushanwan Orphanage in Shanghai, and the artistic exchange between selected painters from Shanghai and Japan, with an eye to their different responses to Western techniques and media in painting during the second half of nineteenth century. Su-hsing Lin explores Sino-Japanese relations through a case study of "Painting on the Preservation of Life" consisting of six volumes by Feng Zikai (1898–1975). By stressing Feng’s stylistic source, and his close relationship with an artist who learned Western-style painting in Japan with a modern publishing house, she presents the cultural complexity and new role of a traditionally trained painter in the early Republican era in Shanghai. Prof. Doris Ledderose-Croissant will act as discussant and will comment on these viewpoints on Japanese history, politics, artistic movement, and the nation’s response to the West.
The Reformer-Calligrapher Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and the Revolutionary-Painter Gao Jianfu (1879–1951): The Origins and Embodiments of Their Advocacy of Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy and Painting
Chak-Kwong Lau, University of California, Santa Barbara
I am very interested in exploring the artistic careers of Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and Gao Jianfu (1879–1951) within the frame of political development in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China. Since its unique geographical location enabled Canton to be the matrix of innovative ideas where foreign stimuli were present much earlier than the official opening of the port for international trading in 1842, I will stress the cultural influence from Japan on these two native Cantonese exemplars’ lives and works through an examination of Kang Youwei’s calligraphy theory and his calligraphy reformation, and by comparing Kang’s work with that of Gao Jianfu’s revolutionary painting. We hope the conflict in politics, representation in arts, and the value of bringing innovative visual vocabulary nourished from their contacts with foreign art into Chinese painting from the late imperial to the early republican era will be illuminated.
Feng Zikai and Li Shutong’s Alternate of Modernity: A Case Study of the Sino-Japanese Relationship in Republican China
Su-hsing Lin, Ohio State University
With the development of capitalism after the Opium War (1839–1842) and the boom in printing technology and the publishing industry, cover designs and cartoons (mahhua) became increasingly important in the twentieth-century Chinese art world. Feng Zikai (1898–1975) was an outstanding modern Chinese artist as well as an accomplished writer, calligrapher, scholar, musician, and translator. Feng’s artworks include traditional Chinese painting, calligraphy, woodcut prints, cartoons, illustration, and cover designs; however, he is best remembered for his role in the modern Chinese cartoon movement. The focus of this paper is to discuss the position of Feng in the art world of twentieth-century China and his religious art books, Paintings on the Preservation of Life (Hunsheng huaji), including six volumes and dealing with the Buddhist teaching of non-killing and the preservation of life.
This set of Paintings on the Preservation of Life was to commemorate the birthdays of Feng Zikai’s mentor, Li Shutong (1880–1942). Li was one of the earliest Japanese-trained artists in Western painting. Returning to China in 1912, he both taught art and music in schools and introduced graphics in the pages of The Pacific Times, of which he was an editor. Li took the tonsure in 1918 and became monk Hongyi. Li inspired Feng to become an artist, remained his mentor, and strongly influenced Feng’s artistic career. Feng Zikai’s artistic features and intellectual background, such as his Buddhist faith, revealed his strong connection with traditional Chinese art. However, because of the influence of Li and so forth, Feng’s art works, like Paintings on the Preservation of Life, also betrayed the significant influence of Japanese art. By using the six volumes of Paintings on the Preservation of Life and letters between Feng Zikai, Hongyi and their cultural circle, I will address Feng’s stylistic source, the cultural complexity, like the relationship between artists and publishing houses, and Sino-Japanese art in Republican China.
Artistic Responses to Foreign Stimuli and Early Western Art Education in Late Qing Shanghai
Chia-Ling Yang, SOAS, University of London
Since the beginning of the Meiji period (1868), modernization occurred at a fantastic pace in Japan. It was marked as much by an indiscriminate adoption of Western institutions, customs and ideas as by an equally indiscriminate disdain for all things Japanese. While contact between Shanghai and Nagasaki was frequent during the late nineteenth century, it is worth noting that the Chinese and Japanese port cities, respectively, had quite different responses to all things Western. Although Shanghai was the center of Western activity in late imperial China—with a significant presence of foreign architecture, Christian-based schools and Western technologies in the foreign quarter—the reform and complete Westernization of both politics and art did not occur in Shanghai in the same way as it did in Japan.
One might wonder to what extent the Chinese and Japanese affected each other through the exchange of their works, aspects and tastes in the field of art? Japanese painters like Takahashi Yûichi (1828–1894) who had contact with Shanghai painters applied Western influences into Japanese subject-matter, thus becoming masters of Yôga (Western-style painting) and photographic-based hyper-realism of portraiture. Why did Ren Bonian (1840–1895), the most prolific Chinese painter at the time and his Shanghai fellow artists not move completely from traditional ink painting to Western oil painting? What were the Chinese and Japanese artists’ opinions of each other and their thoughts for contemporary situations?
I will base this paper on the artistic development of multi-cultural Shanghai from the Opium War (1840) to the Sino-Japanese War (1895) and review how Shanghai artists negotiated between the two realms of traditional practice and foreign stimuli in comparison to that of Japanese artists. I will also stress the development and influence of the Craft and Art School of Tushanwan Orphanage conducted by a Western catholic organization, an important, pioneering cradle of Western arts in China.
Through a consideration of contemporary politics, early Western art education and comparisons of artistic performance between selected Japanese and Shanghai painters, we hope that the situation of art in the nineteenth-century metropolis of Shanghai before the nation and its art moved to a complete Westernization provoked by the Sino-Japanese War (1895) will be better understood.
Collecting Culture and Wu Changshuo’s Fame in Japan
Aida-Yuen Wong, Brandeis University
Wu Changhsuo (1844–1927) was arguably the most critically and commercially successful artist of old Shanghai. His painting, calligraphy, and seal carvings were eagerly sought after by art collectors not only of his own region. Beginning in the early 1910s, Wu’s patrons included admirers from Japan, including many political and cultural luminaries of the time. In Japan, few Chinese artists in modern history commanded greater esteem than Wu. My paper examines the factors that contributed to this popularity, during Wu’s life and after his death. Putting aside artistic merits for the moment, the study considers Wu’s social circle, exhibition practices and the culture of art collection in the modern period.
Chair: Wei Shang, Columbia University
Capitalizing On "Main Melody": China’s TV Drama Industry since the 1990s
Ruoyun Bai, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
This paper examines the unprecedented boom in Chinese television drama production in the 1990s and later. Media scholars have observed that except for news broadcasts, the Party’s control over television has been greatly diminished in proportion to the increased reliance of television on advertising and other non-official avenues of sponsorship. This trend is especially true for entertainment programming such as drama serials. Because entertainment is generally regarded as trivial and apolitical, its presence has not drawn so much scholarly attention as that of broadcast journalism. I propose that China’s TV drama industry deserves to be taken seriously if only for its phenomenal growth over the past ten years. Further, I show: (1) more often than not, Chinese drama serials are produced not for pure escapism, but often explicitly address and help audiences come to terms with the rapidly transforming Chinese society; (2) the importance of TV dramas as advocates of "main melody" (official ideology) has been recognized by the Party and exploited with ready compliance on the part of drama producers; and (3) a theoretical issue is involved here—the meshing of market imperatives with the Party’s need to justify its current policies and its leadership. I attempt to document and explain the development of the TV drama industry since the 1990s in the context of the changing political economy of Chinese media. I examine several features of the TV drama industry as described above as well as their implications. For a concrete example, I look at a show, "Talky Zhang Damin’s Happy Life," one that addresses hardships surrounding ordinary people in the aftermath of the restructuring of state-owned enterprises.
Country, City and Borderline Crossing: A Case Study of Two Left-Wing Chinese Films of the 1930s
Vivian Shen, Davidson College
This paper contends that the majority of 1930s left-wing Chinese cinema involves issues of country, city, and the borderline crossings between the two. By examining two similar popular films, Small Toys (Sun Yu, 1933) and Songs of Fishermen (Cai Chusheng,1934) it will demonstrate that borderline crossings from country to city in the 1930s reveal disparities and conflicts between the center (typically Shanghai) and the rural periphery. These crossings also reveal even more profound conflicts between the Chinese upper and lower classes, between modernization/Westernization and Chinese traditions, between agrarian society and industrial society, and between patriotism and imperialism.
Contrary to Ernest Gellner’s assessment, the transition from agrarian society to industrial society in the 1930s was forced upon the Chinese peasant as a direct or indirect result of imperial aggression, according to these films. Furthermore, China’s social, political, and economic realities potentially posed disastrous problems for the peasants to march toward an industrial society.
Although most Chinese peasants were rarely touched by films of any kind, as Jay Leyda has observed, "the portrayal of peasant problems was nevertheless a crucial revolutionary claim for the left filmmakers to emphasize." However, the tragic ending of both films suggests, understandably, that left-wing directors were not able to resolve these conflicts.
Between Entering the International Stage and Serving Local Markets: Chinese Cinema(s) from the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan from 1979 to 1999
Martin Gieselmann, University of Heidelberg
In terms of international recognition, the transnational Chinese film industry since the late 1980s—nurtured by the productions from the PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan—became the most successful motion picture industry in Asia. The international success of Chinese cinema, that was relying on the films of a mere handful of auteurs, resulted in a severely biased reception of what should be considered as "Chinese film." Reception in the West tended to concentrate on a rather small body of films, while developments on the local film markets were rather neglected. As a consequence, local frames of reference, that even the majority of internationally well-known Chinese directors address to or react against, are a widely unexplored terrain.
To understand Chinese film production in the 1980s and 1990s in its internal logic, it seems therefore necessary to overcome this gap in reception by following three strategies of research, that will be addressed in the paper. First to explore the particularity of the three major film traditions as well as their transnational character; second, to shift attention to popular forms of movie production and define the position that auteur film productions have inside their own film traditions; and third, make use of the methods of film analysis. These strategies that include the most important features of film studies namely content (genres), production (center-periphery) and reception (local-international reputation) shall finally answer our questions about the development and character of "national" Chinese cinema.
A New Stage in Global Innovation Networks? Why Multinational Corporations Locate Advanced Global Innovation Centers in Beijing and Shanghai
Yun-Chung Chen, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper will analyze the locational factors critical to the growth of Multinational Corporations’ (MNCs) advanced Research and Development (R&D) centers in China since the mid-1990s. Against the established assumption that multinational corporations (MNCs) locate more "intellectual" activities in more advanced countries, while putting routine production in developing countries, this paper reveals a puzzling phenomenon: many world-class MNCs are now locating advanced Research and Development (R&D) centers in Shanghai and Beijing. China, once principally a routine production site, is now seemingly becoming a "center of excellence" in global innovation networks.
Through a comparative analysis of the operation of MNCs’ R&D centers in the telecommunications sector of Beijing and Shanghai, I argue that MNCs are "forced" to locate advanced R&D centers in China due to: (1) the competition with successful local Chinese firms over the Chinese market; (2) the necessity to rapidly upgrade telecommunication products; (3) the requirement of the "Market for Technology" policy enforced by the Chinese central government ; and (4) the advantage of exploiting special knowledge assets in China, e.g. cheap skilled labor good at basic research, aggressive local governments’ knowledge-based development strategies, and the transnational technology experts—mainly the returnees from Silicon Valley. More specifically, I attempt to resolve the puzzling question: why Beijing, a highly controlled and politicized city, can out-develop Shanghai, a highly commercialized global city, to become the high-tech "center of excellence" in the Asia-Pacific region. This has major implications for high-tech development and planning in other Asian cities, too.
Organizer and Chair: Yomi Braester, University of Washington
Discussants: Evelyn S. Rawski, University of Pittsburgh; Robert Chi, State University of New York, Stony Brook
Keywords: film, realism, documentary, modernity, propaganda, Maoism, postsocialism.
The panel investigates realism as the preeminent yet highly unstable aesthetic standard in Chinese cinema practice and criticism. Filmmakers, critics, and ideologues equated realism with truthfulness and authenticity; furthermore, the identity of modernity, realism, and progress has often been taken for granted. However, various and often contradictory versions of realism have been proposed—from Maoist documentary propaganda to 1980s Neorealism; from pre-1949 Social Realism to post-1949 Socialist Realism (and its contemporary Taiwanese counterpart, Healthy Realism). More recently, the New Documentary movement has been a powerful force in mainland China. The panel addresses films from 1949 to the present and traces the development of the terms within specific social, political and economic situations. Focusing on specific works as well as on the methodological debates of their time, the presenters investigate the films’ claims to truth and explore their stylistic and ideological implications. Separately and as a whole, the papers offer insights into hitherto unacknowledged connections among the disparate forms of cinematic realism in the PRC.
Postsocialist Realism: A Genealogy of Jishizhuyi in the Chinese Cinema
Chris Berry, University of California, Berkeley
This paper traces the development of the critical debate and cinematic practice relating to realism in Post-Mao China. As various commentators have pointed out, claims to "realism" are always-already ideological, for the term "real" proclaims transparency and objectivity rather than a located and enunciated discourse. In Chinese, the "shi" in the common term for realism, xianshizhuyi, has a similar effect. Yet efforts to return to and reinvent realism in Post-Mao China ran into the discredited status of xianshizhuyi, because of its association with the socialist realism of the Maoist project. Maoist-era films were frequently referred to in later critical discourse and by filmmakers as "false" or "not true" (bu zhenshi). Therefore, the term jishizhuyi or "on-the-spot realism" has been used to refer to a new realism that gains its specificity from its differences with socialist realism. Although many people are aware of this term today and its association with the new documentary movement, its origins can be traced to the very early 1980s. In this paper, I will try to locate those origins, trace the usage of the term, and relate it to the filmmaking practices it has been used to characterize, as well as its relation to the cultural struggles of the postsocialist era.
Postsocialist Realism in Sixth-Generation Chinese Cinema
Jason C. McGrath, University of Chicago
One of the most distinctive characteristics of much contemporary "Sixth Generation" Chinese cinema has been a new aesthetic of critical realism. Several young filmmakers have made stylistic choices such as on-location shooting, natural sound and lighting, long-take cinematography, and the use of non-professional actors in an effort to depict the lives of ordinary people struggling to survive in urban China in the midst of economic and social transformation. This cinema thus echoes the golden age of Shanghai cinema of the 1930s–40s in its concern with representing poverty and social injustice. However, in contrast to both Republican-era social realism and Mao-era socialist realism, the postsocialist brand of realism resists the tendency to deliver reality as a totality with a clear moral message. Instead, these films often set up a tension in the narrative between the ambiguous, fragmented reality of the characters’ lives and the relatively pat imaginary realms promulgated by the media and the popular arts to which the characters are exposed. Problems of contemporary Chinese life, such as income disparity, the "floating population" of illegal migrants, unemployment, and prostitution, are depicted frankly and unromantically. In this way, the Sixth Generation filmmakers deploy a rhetoric of radical realism that explicitly juxtaposes an intractable Chinese "reality" against both official media representations and the promises of global capitalist culture. Although several directors and films will be referenced, this paper focuses particularly on Jia Zhangke’s exemplary Pickpocket (Xiao Wu, 1997) and Platform (Zhantai, 2000) to define and explore the new aesthetic of postsocialist realism.
Stealing the Real: On Realism in Urban Cinema
Yiman Wang, Duke University
Despite continuous attempts to demystify realism, capturing "reality" on celluloid remains an important aesthetic enterprise often mobilized for specific ideological agendas. To address the issue of cinematic realism, one needs to examine what is the "real" that is being framed, how the "real" is translated onto the reel, what agendas such purported indexicality serve, and how the celluloid "truth claim" seeks to respond to its socio-historical coordinates. Close attention to these interrelated questions allows us to place the issue of cinematic realism in relation to specific historical conjunctures, and thereby to trace how realism is constantly deconstructed and reconstructed in filmmaking and film criticism.
This paper aims at teasing out a sort of "archeology" of cinematic realism by comparing three films: The Watch (Biao, 1949, a realistic film from the civil war period), The Bicycle Thief (1948, representative of Italian neo-realism) and Beijing Bicycle (Shiqisui de danche, 2001, related to China’s Sixth-Generation filmmaking). Apparently unrelated, the films nevertheless evolve around a similar scenario (i.e., stealing and its consequences), dwell upon life experiences of similar figures (i.e., urban outsiders and outcasts), and utilize comparable cinematography conventionally associated with a realistic aesthetic. I compare how the effect of the "real" is constructed in each film with the aesthetic and ideological implications. On this basis, I discuss street-side stealing as a trope for the films’ exploration and appropriation of a "realistic" urban habitat. In conclusion, I put forward a perspective for studying films addressing "reality" as experienced by lower-class urban dwellers/sojourners.
From the Founding Ceremony to The Founding Ceremony: Tiananmen in Documentary, Docu-drama, and Fictional Films
Yomi Braester, University of Washington
The founding ceremony of the PRC is largely remembered through documentary films, which have become a point of reference for other films. This paper examines the images recorded at Tiananmen during the ceremony and traces the after-images left on the collective retina. I argue that from its inception, PRC cinema was motivated by a documentary impulse aimed at encapsulating the historical events in film. At stake, however, was not simply the preservation of the fleeting moment but rather the dissemination of a normative image of the state.
The Birth of New China, a documentary film made of the founding ceremony, served to disseminate images of the event and survived in the collective memory even as the space in front of Tiananmen was radically remodeled. Yet the documentary footage not only extended the physical boundaries of the spectacle but also suggested a narrative of ideological triumph.
Films of the 1980s integrate original footage and reenact specific scenes, thereby drawing out the implications of the documentary impulse. Dissident readings of Tiananmen’s spatial symbolism in films such as The Big Parade (1986) foreground the role of cinematic fiction and subjective interpretation, while productions that tow the party line—prominently The Foundation Ceremony (1989)—reconfirm the function of documentaries as a vehicle for identifying with the collective experience. Comparing the two genres and their relation to documentary film sheds light on the use of documentary and quasi-documentary film in PRC propaganda and provides insight into the ideological function of state-sponsored and independent films.
Organizer: Cynthia J. Brokaw, Ohio State University
Chair and Discussant: Daniel K. Gardner, Smith College
Keywords: book culture, China, history, late imperial period.
Recent studies of publishing enterprises and their output have significantly increased our understanding of book production—how texts were produced and what texts were produced—in China. Less well explored, however, are the linked and crucial issues of the circulation and consumption of texts, yet information on these topics is necessary to any understanding of the shape and size of Chinese book culture and the real impact of books on Chinese society. The first of these issues, the circulation of texts, includes consideration of both the commercial distribution or sale of texts and the practices of book borrowing that supported examination study and scholarship in the Ming and Qing. The second issue, consumption of texts, refers to the ways in which texts were used, read, and interpreted—"consumed"—by purchasers and/or borrowers.
The panel addresses the issues of circulation and consumption from three different perspectives: (a) elite access to books in the late Ming, in particular how rules developed by collectors to regulate book lending affected the non-commercial circulation of texts (McDermott); (b) access to popular texts among a much broader population of literate book buyers in south China in the Qing, with special attention to the mechanisms and networks of sale and the development of different types of markets (Brokaw); and (c) manuals developed in the late Ming and Qing to guide the reading or consumption of texts in a range of genres (the Classics, histories, fiction, drama, and so forth) for a broad audience of readers (McLaren).
Borrowing Books: The Formation of a "Learned Public" in Late Imperial China
Joseph P. McDermott, Cambridge University
This talk will analyze the formation of a "learned public" in late imperial China, examining how literati and scholarly readers from the tenth through the seventeenth century sought to overcome obstacles in the way of securing access to books they wanted to read. Usually bereft of public institutions that provided easy access to significant collections of books, they turned to private book supplies. In some cases, they relied on bookstores for purchase and rental; but these outlets remained too few and concerned primarily with popular titles. When they turned to private owners, they were confronted with a traditional hostility among book owners and collectors to the loaning of books even to kinsmen and friends. In the late Ming and early Qing, however, this antipathy weakened. Some major collectors, increasingly aware of past losses to China’s book heritage by fire, mishap, and destruction, drafted "pacts" (yue) that formalized the conditions for the mutual loaning of books among themselves. Focusing on two such pacts of the seventeenth century, I will explore the assumptions behind these agreements, their influence on other reading associations, their relation to other types of association pacts current then, and eventually their inadequacies in meeting the demand for books from kaozheng scholars. In conclusion, this talk will consider how the remaining obstacles to the formation of a learned public from a common but private consumption of reading would begin to be overcome only through government intervention in the eighteenth century.
Book Markets and the Circulation of Texts in Rural China, 17th–19th Centuries
Cynthia J. Brokaw, Ohio State University
The paper by panelist Joseph McDermott is concerned with the non-commercial circulation of books, exploring in particular the relationship between the exchange and borrowing of books among collectors and the formation of a "learned public" of elite readers in late Ming and early Qing Jiangnan. In contrast, my paper takes as its focus the commercial circulation—that is, the sale—of books and the formation of a much broader—and considerably less learned—public of readers and aspiring readers in hinterland areas of China in the Qing. I trace the development of book markets in three major areas: (1) Sibao (Fujian), the center, despite its geographical isolation, of a network of booksellers serving the lower levels of the book market in Jiangxi, Guangdong, and Guangxi; (2) Yuechi (Sichuan), the site of a small publishing industry serving a primarily local readership with textbooks, songbooks, and other cheap texts; and (3) Xuwan, a market town in Jiangxi, and the center of a large publishing industry that supplied texts to all the surrounding provinces as well as the book markets of Nanjing. I will examine the types of texts produced, the markets targeted and the networks of distribution established, and the methods and context of book sale (to the extent that these can be known) for each site. By comparing these different elements, I will consider the geographical and social reach of popular book culture and the repercussions for our understanding of literacy in the late imperial period.
"Studying the Book" and "Stirring the Reader": Discourses on Reading and Readers in Late Imperial China
Anne McLaren, University of Melbourne
The sixteenth century saw the appearance in China of the first text dedicated to the experience of readers and reading. Qi Chenghan’s Instructions for Reading, a slender compilation of anecdotes about how the ancients had studied the classics and histories, was the first of many similar compilations by Ming and Qing period literati figures. This sub-genre of instructional texts sought to perpetuate familiar notions such as reading for self-cultivation and reading in the manner of past sages and worthies. Recommended reading practices included rote-learning, slow focused reading, vocalized reading, and the exercise of discipline and self-control with regard to reading matter. The "scriptural" reading practices enjoined in these instructional texts contrast with the descriptions of readers and reading practices found in paratextual material in fiction and dramas of the same period. Instead of an emphasis on "studying the book," considered as fixed and immutable, one finds instead a new focus on "stirring the reader," with a "repackaged" text subject to the demands of fashion and the reader’s convenience. This paper will analyze shifts in discourses on reading and readers in China from c. 1550 to the high Qing period in the context of the proliferation of printed matter, the emergence of new vernacular printed genres and the formation of a distinctive "print culture" in China.
Chair: Nancy E. Chapman, Yale University
Discussants: Joan Kaufman, Harvard University; Sandra Teresa Hyde, McGill University; Kaveh Khoshnood, Yale University; Ann B. Williams, Yale University; Deborah Davis, Yale University
China stands on the precipice of an HIV epidemic of enormous proportions and consequence. The lack of comprehensive surveillance data for China limits the reliability of estimates of HIV infection and predictions of AIDS cases. Chinese authorities recently acknowledged that actual HIV cases may exceed 600,000, while UNAIDS warned that number could rise to 20 million by the year 2010 in the absence of an effective response.
HIV/AIDS in China is not homogenous, but rather an evolving constellation of epidemics, each concentrated in a distinct population and representing the consequences of multiple introductions of HIV viral strains. These include most notably injection drug users and their sexual contacts, primarily in southwestern China (Yunnan and Guangxi), and Xinjiang, and concentrated clusters of individuals in parts of Henan, Hubei, and Shanxi provinces infected through the illegal but prevalent customs of a blood donation system that include re-infusion to donors of contaminated, pooled blood products. While little is known about infection rates in other at-risk groups, the virus is likely present in at least some sectors. Recent and continuing social and economic changes are setting the stage for explosive epidemic growth among commercial sex workers, men who have sex with men, young migrant workers of both sexes, adolescents, and health care workers.
Participants in this roundtable will consider the health, policy, and social dimensions of the unfolding epidemic, focusing on sexuality, reproductive health, potential interventions, including harm reduction strategies for injection drug users, and the role of international health and development organizations.
Organizer and Chair: Yonglin Jiang, Oklahoma State University
Discussant: Edward L. Farmer, University of Minnesota
Keywords: law, late Ming, local society.
Maintaining legal order in local societies was a basic administrative task for local magistrates in late Ming China. The scholarly field, however, has known little about how legal regulations were enforced at the local levels. Indeed, for Ming legal history, in part due to the lack of case archives, our attention has primarily focused on the legislative achievements of the formative years of the Ming. Some newly-discovered case records, however, will facilitate studies of Ming legal history and enrich our understanding of how local magistrates dealt with legal disputes.
This panel, based on those newly-available materials, offers new perspectives on the local legal order in late Ming times. Yonglin Jiang looks at the sources on which local magistrates rely to judge law cases and finds that a multi-faceted system of sources existed in the legal practice. Yanhong Wu specifically examines how magistrates punished the crime "doing what ought not to be done" and demonstrates that local officials systematically employed both legal and extra-legal remedies to solve legal problems. Tom Nimick explores the special role of the prefectual judges and argues that it was these lower-middle-level judges who made the decisions for most law cases. Zujie Yuan investigates how local officials handled the problem of clothing transgression and depicts an intriguing picture of conflicts between local officials who tried to enforce the law and local gentry who inclined to adopt new cultural trends. Ted Farmer, one of the leading scholars in the field, will critique the papers.
Finding Sources to Promote Justice: What Made Local Magistrates Judge Law Cases in Late Ming China?
Yonglin Jiang, Oklahoma State University
During the late Ming dynasty, a time of drastic social and economic change, local magistrates became increasingly busy in handling law cases. What did they rely on in deciding crimes and punishments? The fundamental law code of the Ming—the Great Ming Code—requires that officials strictly apply the Code in judicial activities. Our conventional assumption, based on such general historical records as the Ming History, holds that in the latter years of the dynasty local magistrates less and less used the dynastic Ming Code, which eventually became "a mere scrap of paper." This paper uses the newly-discovered late Ming casebooks to examine the sources on which the local magistrates relied to judge law cases. It asks the following questions: What role did the Great Ming Code exactly play in the late Ming judicial process? And what other sources did magistrates use to settle legal disputes?
The newly-discovered sources shed much light on these issues. We find that, contrary to the conventional argument, the Ming Code indeed played a significant role in local legal practice. Magistrates primarily applied the Code to deal with the complex social problems. Meanwhile, local officials occasionally used li, or supplemental regulations to the Code; but the li had not constituted a major legal source. In addition to legal texts, magistrates also frequently resorted to certain unwritten sources, including human sentiment and social customs. Local case records in the late Ming provide us with a more dynamic picture of the local legal order.
Striking, Banishing, and Shaming: Meting Out Punishments on "Doing What Ought Not to Be Done" at Local Courts in Late Ming China
Yanhong Wu, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
The crime "doing what ought not to be done" was a special category in the Ming Code. Based on human feeling and ethical principles, it includes the acts that are not specified in the law but considered dangerous to society. The vagueness of the concept led to frequent application of the said law article in legal practice. Indeed, at the local level, according to some case records compiled by local magistrates, more than half of the cases were labeled as "doing what ought not to be done."
An examination of both the legal text and the case records indicates certain discrepancy between the two. It also brought about the uncertainty when the judge made his decisions. According to the law, all cases of "doing what ought not to be done" shall be punished by either 40 or 80 strokes of beating with a stick. However, case records demonstrate that the crime was also punished by either banishing out of the community or parading the criminals through the streets (youjie).
Three factors caused the frequent application of the law and multiple remedies of the crime. First, the penal system in the Ming dynasty changed constantly. Second, the gap between the law and its enforcement was significant. And third, when making decisions on such crimes, local judges seriously took basic human feelings and ethical principles into account. The dealing with such crimes at local courts, therefore, provides us with an example of how law was enforced in society.
The Role of the Prefectural Judge in Local and Legal Administration in Ming China
Thomas G. Nimick, U.S. Military Academy
This paper will examine the relatively unknown role of the prefectural judge (tuiguan) in Ming local and legal administration. The prefectural judge was formally charged with being the first court of review for legal cases being forwarded from counties and departments. Prefectural judges also were often tasked to serve as acting magistrates in counties without a regular magistrate. By the late Ming, they could also be heavily involved in the evaluation of other local officials as the assistant of the regional inspector (xun’an yushi).
This paper will explore how these officials handled the duties of their office and how the duties changed over time. Particular attention will be paid to the prefectural judge’s role in the review of legal cases. This is an interesting problem because the prefectural judge was often a new metropolitan graduate of the same rank as the county magistrates whose cases he was to review. This part of the paper relies heavily upon collections of case reports prepared by prefectural judges in the late Ming in addition to the better known sources on institutional history.
This paper will also examine the other administrative roles of the prefectural judge, as acting magistrate and as assistant to the regional inspector. It will attempt to explain why these roles developed within local administration. This part of the paper draws upon the case reports and upon an important handbook for prefectural judges prepared in the Chongzhen period.
Between Ritual and Law: Ming Clothing Regulation and Local Practice
Zujie Yuan, University of Minnesota
Clothing regulations, as well as many other sumptuary laws in imperial China, were referred as both ritual and law in contemporary literatures. This problem of identity, however, caused a certain amount of confusion among local officials and gentry, who bore the mission to enforce the law and impose education respectively. According to the classical interpretation of Confucianism, while law enforcement often leads to penalty, ritual practice invites more efforts in education.
By examining the local practices of the Ming clothing regulation, my paper will investigate how local officials handled the problem of clothing transgression. Late Ming commercialization generated a certain kind cultural pluralism that shook some traditional values and undermined state control. Increasing phenomena of clothing transgressions put local officials in a dilemma between enforcing the law and accepting these changing customs. The different responses from local officials and local gentry toward these phenomena reflect their own concerns and interests, and therefore the political relations on the local level of the power structure.
Organizer: Haiyan Lee, Cornell University
Chair and Discussant: Theodore D. Huters, University of California, Los Angeles
Keywords: translation, emotion, love.
Recent interest in the study of emotion has sparked fresh and innovating scholarship in the field of Chinese studies. This panel contributes to the effort to historicize emotion by focusing on the role that romantic love has played in China’s "translated modernity." We begin with the assumption that emotion has a history and embodies culturally and historically specific ideas about individual and collective identities. We ask how it is translated from one cultural, historical, and generic context to another and how ideas of gender, self, and society are redefined in the process. Li Li shows that the prolific late Qing translator Lin Shu infused his translations of foreign novels with Confucian moral sentiments, thereby remapping Enlightenment universalism in Confucian terms. Haiyan Lee examines the historian Gu Jiegang’s effort to translate the Lady Meng Jiang legend into the language of modern romanticism in order to reimagine the Chinese folk as modern subjects. Gary Xu explores the popular novelist Zhang Henshui’s metaphoric use of modern visual devices in his fiction to translate a self-consciously moralist conception of romantic love. Discussant Theodore Huters, a leading scholar in the study of late Qing and Republican cultural formations, will bring a valuable historical perspective to the panel and help situate its concerns within the larger contexts of area and cultural studies.
Affective Reconfiguration and Moral Sentiment in Lin Shu’s Translations
Li Li, University of California, Los Angeles
Current scholarship identifies Lin Shu primarily as a Confucian scholar, who, via his translations of Western fiction, strove to prove the universal value of Confucian morality. I intend to bring a new critical inquiry into this assumption by calling attention to the notion of qing (emotion, feeling and affection) presented in Lin Shu’s translations and exploring how the changes in the conceptions of qing in late Qing shaped Lin Shu’s cultural imagination.
On the social-political level, Lin Shu’s attitude toward China and the West was rather ambivalent. On the one hand, he criticized Chinese social reality and called for reform; on the other hand, he was harsh on the dark side of the West, particularly the impoverished state in Victorian England. However, taking Lin Shu’s work as a whole, we find that his reaction to the West constituted neither a critique nor an approval. Rather, it is an affective reconfiguration and remapping of the universal structure based on his notion of qing. By projecting the authorial qing to those who were economically deprived, socially humiliated, politically oppressed and ethically disgraced, Lin Shu, on the one hand, revealed qing as a fundamental and universal pathos, and on the other hand, cast a moral repellent toward the agents which were deprived of the sentiment of qing. In this light, the excessive emotion and empathic registers in Lin Shu’s translations are not only romantic or literary, they also construct a new universal moral sentiment.
The Tears that Crumbled the Great Wall: Gu Jiegang’s Sentimental Translation of a Classical Tale
Haiyan Lee, Cornell University
Meng Jiang Nü, or Lady Meng Jiang, is a folktale heroine whose weeping for her dead husband causes the Great Wall of China to collapse. However, in the earliest historical record that can be linked to this legend, Lady Meng Jiang is only mentioned in passing as a general’s widow who conscientiously observes ritual propriety. How does a stereotypical Confucian wife turn into a colorful legendary heroine whose tears are powerful enough to bring down the Great Wall? The metamorphosis of Lady Meng Jiang deeply fascinated Gu Jiegang, a renowned historian and folklorist. He led a pioneering study of the origins and transformation of the legend in the 1920s that soon evolved into a collaborative project involving dozens of scholars and folklorists from around the country. In this paper, I examine Gu Jiegang’s effort to use the language of modern sentimentality to "translate" both the classical records and oral narratives of the legend. I argue that Gu’s archeology of feeling was not an innocent excavation of emotional artifacts, but part of the May Fourth nationalist project of remaking the "people" by mobilizing the enlightenment notions of interiority, gendered self, and the repressive hypothesis. Gu’s reinterpretation of the legend was also a critical moment in the shift to the modern episteme wherein weeping was no longer a ritualized instrument of social/cosmic integration but a protestation of subaltern subjectivity.
Edifying Romance: Zhang Henshui’s Translation of a Modern Visuality
Gary Xu, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Zhang Henshui, the most popular and prolific novelist in Republican China, is considered a modern representative of traditional fiction. He constantly acknowledges his indebtedness to tradition, but his acknowledgment manifests more intricate linkages between "modern" and "traditional" Chinese fiction than normally believed. Zhang’s "edifying romance" is built up ("edify" originally means to "build a house") around his education in traditional Chinese fiction, so much so that it becomes self-reflexive. The self-reflexivity serves as a mirror, which not only reflects the social reality in a traditional narrative mode, but also visualizes the social reality in interactions with the narrative itself so as to bring the past into present and to preserve the present as the immediate past. Focusing on Zhang’s novel Tixiao yinyuan (1930), my paper explains how Zhang makes this visualization possible through his metaphoric use of modern optical apparatus, especially photography and cinematog-raphy. Zhang’s practice, involving the rendering meaningful of one semantic/symbolic entity into another, is an act of translation.
Zhang’s romance is also relevant to the normal sense of "edify"—to improve morally. Zhang insists that moral improvement is impossible without the mediation of qing (love, emotions), for qing signifies an unconditional acceptance of the other as the object of affection, a mechanism required for one to strive for proper morals in relationships. Zhang’s writing of love thus reenacts the tension between eros and morals in the historical conceptualization of qing; his visualization, meanwhile, adds more dimensions to qing, making it more susceptible to changes of a transforming modern society.
Organizer: Kun-Chin Lin, University of California, Berkeley
Chair and Discussant: Thomas G. Rawski, University of Pittsburgh
This panel examines a crucial and neglected issue in China’s market reform—the formation of prices for key factors of production, financial services, stock markets, and environmental externalities. Throughout the 1990s, Chinese reformers have aimed to dismantle the state-administered price system. We inquire: How are prices determined? What information do they convey to domestic actors? How have forms of administrative allocation persisted alongside "market" prices? What are the emerging regulatory and political relationships between the state and its major constituencies under the pressure of liberalization?
The four panelists each focus on one type of price and pricing process in the Chinese economy, using fresh empirical data gathered during recent fieldwork. Kun-Chin Lin reveals the political contentions behind the pricing of factors of production and outputs of state-owned oilfields and refineries. Professor Thun investigates the new phenomenon of emissions trading between power plants and firms, given severe national and local institutional constraints. Victor Shih explores the political and bureaucratic interests behind the central government’s continual control over the price of money through interest rate and administrative allocation of credit. And Mary Cooper analyzes the determination of prices for shares on China’s stock exchanges, both in initial offerings and in trading on the secondary market.
The panelists will draw on sociological-organization theory, trade and institutional economics, and coalition theory; we employ diverse methodologies from in-depth case studies, interviews with elite bureaucrats, to large-n statistical analysis. Our general consensus is that so-called "market signals" in emerging markets actually embody complex power and information contexts.
Pricing on the Chinese Stock Exchanges
Mary Comerford Cooper, Stanford University
The Chinese stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen have several distinctive features. China created stock markets not to enable private enterprises to raise capital, but to channel funds to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and to promote market-based reform within the state sector. To guarantee the dominant position of state ownership, the Chinese markets are segmented according to several categories of investors: state shareholders, domestic legal person (corporate) shareholders, domestic individual shareholders, foreign shareholders, and Hong Kong shareholders. Shares may not be exchanged across these categories, resulting in significant price differences between different types of shares for the same company.
This paper analyzes three aspects of pricing on the Chinese stock exchanges. First, how are initial public offering (IPO) prices determined? Second, what factors affect secondary market trading prices? And third, what information does fluctuation in share prices convey to investors? The analysis is based on interviews, market pricing data, and close examination of companies with dual listings (domestic/foreign or domestic/Hong Kong).
The paper highlights the role of politics in influencing stock prices, both on the primary and the secondary market.
The State as the Market Surrogate: Pricing Goods and Services for Oil and Petrochemical Production in China
Kun-Chin Lin, University of California, Berkeley
After two decades of reform, Chinese central planners have relinquished direct control over all but five commodity prices, of which crude and finished oil products account for two. The state considers two opposing strategies in further price liberalization: (1) laissez-faire, risking ensuing chaos from disorderly competition and collapse of exchange relations; or (2) convergence with global prices through incremental adjustments in administered prices. Continuing state intervention would subject Beijing to intense lobbying from interest groups whose rent-seeking margin is affected by price fluctuations.
Drawing on interviews and economic data from nine oilfields and refineries in seven provinces, I describe the dynamics of industrial price formation external and internal to these enterprises. External pricing refers to the prices of crude and finished oil products set by the State Council and modified through direct competition of domestic producers and with imports. Internal pricing refers to the intrafirm valuation of various factors of production, for which there are severe limits on free competition. For example, by how much should a manager’s wage be increased, and a worker’s reduced? How much should oilwell maintenance crews be paid for their service to the oil recovery team? Since these production units had formerly worked together without any notion of price as a signal for opportunity costs, the initial determination of their relative worth must be arbitrary to a large extent. I show how the state, as the regulator and shareholder of national oil corporations, asserts its political priorities while playing the role of "market surrogate."
Explaining Stagnation in Interest Rate Liberalization
Victor Shih, Harvard University
Despite reform, China’s market for money, as embodied by the banking sector, remains heavily under the control of the government. Using a quarterly data set of interest rates, lending, and growth, two time series models will first show that interest rates have had no systematic impact on the distribution of money or growth in the past twenty years. Instead of price signals, bankers reacted to political signals to either devolve lending power to the localities or centralize lending power, which generated lending and inflationary cycles in China.
The second part of this paper will explore the reasons behind stagnation in interest rate reform. Using over seventy interviews with bankers and officials, as well as a wealth of internal government documents, this section will outline the interest of various governmental players, including PBOC officials, state bankers, local officials, and Party elite. The preliminary conclusion is that while different sets of actors in the government have strong motives to compete over financial authority, none of them has an incentive to liberalize interest rates. Liberalization would only undermine the government’s ability to direct specific quantities of credit for policy and political purposes. This is an outcome that no set of players wants, especially without any pressure from capital mobility. This finding contrasts sharply with previous findings in other Asian growth economies, where government insulation is often seen as a force for promoting reform. The conclusion of this paper will point out forces for interest rate liberalization in the future.
Markets for the Environment in China: Assessing the Prospects for Emissions Trading
Eric Thun, Princeton University
The purpose of this paper is to assess the prospects for emissions trading in the People’s Republic of China. Emissions trading is widely viewed in the United States as a tremendous success, and many believe the approach offers a potential solution to the severe environmental problems in China. By shifting from a command-and-control approach to a market-based approach, the intent is to more efficiently reduce pollution levels. Emission levels are capped at a certain level, firms are granted permits to emit a given portion of this amount, and if they exceed this amount they must purchase additional permits from other firms. The primary advantage of the market-based approach is that it creates the incentive for least-cost attainment of environmental objectives. If a firm finds the cost of abatement to be relatively low, it has the incentive to lower emissions beyond its initial allotment, and then sell allowances to those firms that have relatively higher costs of abatement.
The challenges of implementing this system in a transitional economy such as China, however, are immense. Due to the ambiguity of national environmental regulation in China, local governments must establish the regulatory and legal framework that will set up the basis for the allocation of permits, monitoring, trading, and the penalties for non-compliance. Although emissions trading in China is still only in its infancy, the pilot projects that are examined in this paper create the opportunity to assess the institutional constraints on market-based approaches to environmental protection in China and the potential opportunities.
Organizer: Xun Liu, Harvard University
Chair: Everett Yuehong Zhang, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Indiana University
Keywords: Chinese sexuality, gender, bedchamber arts, shuangxiu (paired cultivation), Chinese medicine, aphrodisiacs, menstruation, Mawangdui texts, and Dunhuang scriptures.
Joining the perspectives of anthropology, sinology, medical and religious history, this cross-disciplinary panel seeks to examine and historicize the uniqueness and diversity of "Chinese sexuality" from early imperial to contemporary China, going beyond Van Gulik’s modern sexology and the Foucaultian model of ars erotica vs. scientia sexualis in discussing different constructs of sexuality between the East and the West.
In his study, Everett Zhang confronts a plan by doctors of Chinese medicine to build a center of yangsheng (the cultivation of life) to reintroduce the practice of bedchamber arts in post-socialist China. He asks: how could the ancient practice be reinstalled into today’s consumer culture centered around sexual pleasure? Was life cultivation practice a consistent, distinctive component of "Chinese sexuality" in history? Comparing the Mawangdui and the Dunhuang scriptures, Donald Harper examines the sexual practices of the male elite from Han down to medieval times. He demonstrates the continuity of the practices of managing sexual desire and pleasure for life cultivation among the elite. Focusing on women’s suffering, Jen-Der Lee shows that male doctors in early imperial China were concerned over female sexual desire and pleasure, yet chose to deal with them in ways and for purposes different from those encountered in Harper’s study. Complicating the issue of Chinese sexuality, Xun Liu demonstrates that Daoist paired cultivation, a practice long conflated with bedchamber arts, featured a distinctive ethos and "asexual" performances of the body between men and women in pursuit of spiritual transcendence in the early seventeenth century.
On the Mountain of Female Immortals: The Revival of Bedchamber Arts in Post Socialist China
Everett Yuehong Zhang, University of California, Berkeley
Toward the late 1990s and early 2000s, doctors of nanke (men’s medicine) in Chinese medicine were planning to build a center of yangsheng baojian (cultivating life and preserving health) near the grave of Peng Zu, the legendary founder of bedchamber arts, at the foot of the Mountain of Female Immortals in Pengshan, Sichuan. Their plan would incorporate the tradition of fangshiyangsheng (cultivating life in bedchamber) with medical therapies to cure impotence while enhancing the patient’s capacity for sexual pleasure.
A close look at the plan reveals the frustration in their efforts to integrate the life cultivation tradition with the pleasure-centered modern consumer culture. Apart from likely political difficulties and financial uncertainties, the frustration can be seen in the contradictions in rediscovering and refashioning of bedchamber arts on the basis of cultural memories and reinterpretations of history under the condition of post-socialist China. First, the yangsheng tradition was both praised as the ideal model of the erotic yet harmonious body and criticized as evidence of the suppression of human desire. Second, the yangsheng tradition was described as a male-centered sexual practice that valued the female desire at the same time. Based on anthropological fieldwork, this paper will explore the social conditions that have both motivated and constrained the reinterpreting and reinstalling of bedchamber arts, and to contemplate the possible outcome of reconstructing such a tradition in today’s China.
Aphrodisiacs, Philters, and Sexual Cultivation in Ancient and Medieval China
Donald Harper, University of Chicago
The earliest Chinese writings on sexual practice, discovered among the medical manuscripts from Mawangdui tomb no. 3 (burial dated ca. 168 B.C.), attest to the careful management of sexual relations to promote physical and spiritual well-being (primarily for the men to whom the texts are addressed) along with various aids to sexual gratification. The latter range from foods that enhance sexual performance and drugs that stimulate the sexual organs to philters that seduce the object of desire. A comparable sexual literature occurs among the medieval manuscripts from Dunhuang. The ancient and medieval manuscripts document the culture of sexual desire among the elite, which is the topic of the present paper.
Pain Relief? Sex in Medical Discourse on Menstruation in Early Imperial China
Jen-Der Lee, Academia Sinica
The prominent Han doctor Chunyu Yi was recorded to have once cured the waist pain of a royal maid. She was diagnosed, through pulse reading, to have been frustrated by her unsatisfied sexual desire and suffered from retention of menstruation. Chunyu Yi prescribed some herbal medicine, which not only resumed her periodic flow but also relieved her of the pain. Patients in the post-Han period continued to complain about pain and discomfort caused by menstrual disorders. In addition to a variety of herbal remedies, post-Han healers also proposed for such ailments physical therapies that were suggestive of sexual intercourse. Clearly sexually minded, they also took pains to distinguish married women, widows and Buddhist nuns in their diagnoses and prescriptions.
Pain and discomfort caused by menstruation or its irregularity have not attracted as much scholarly attention as the history of either pain or menstruation disorder. Focusing on the images of sex in medical discourse about menstrual pain, this article will depict the bodily experiences as described by the suffering women themselves, and those by the practitioners, and analyze the discrepancy between the two types of narratives. It then examines the cures, and their underlying rationale, with special attention to the medical, male gaze on the otherwise sexually satisfied women. In the end, it seeks to deepen our understanding of the history of bodily experiences concerning the relationship between sexual desire and menstruation pain.
Numinous Father and Holy Mother: The Ethos of Late Ming Paired Cultivation Practice
Xun Liu, Harvard University
One of the most striking features of the late Ming duo or paired cultivation (shuangxiu) texts is their persistent denunciation of bedchamber arts (fangzhong), the "triple mound" (sanfeng) and the "gathering battle" (caizhan) as being morally deviant. Both traditional and recent scholarship has largely dismissed those invectives as a disingenuous and self-serving smokescreen aimed at confusing the public about their sinister goal of sexual pleasure at the expense of women.
But new evidences from early seventeenth-century shuangxiu texts allow for a different approach. These texts envision the practicing male and female duo as Numinous Father and Holy Mother (lingfu shengmu) joined in search of spiritual transformation. They also devise strict "asexual" regimens and techniques to ensure the integrity of that vision of the practice. In light of these and other evidences, I argue that the rhetoric must be read as sincere forms of self-representation, embodying a distinctive set of cosmology, ethos and cultivation techniques for the goal of transcendence. I seek to demonstrate that the late Ming paired cultivation was a historically specific practice pursued for the goal of immortality by Daoist and like-minded practitioners. Moreover, the ethos of paired cultivation practice also problematize simplistic interpretation of the practice as gender oppression, calling for a more nuanced understanding of the sexual-spiritual dynamics of a practice that involved male and female practitioners in a more cooperative way than its critics understood.
Organizer: Qiang Ning, University of Michigan
Chair and Discussant: Martin Powers, University of Michigan
Keywords: patronage, image-making, Buddhist art.
Records on patrons of medieval Chinese Buddhist art are abundant but information about artists, by contrast, appears to be extremely limited. The scarcity of textual evidence on artists makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, to understand the ideological and visual structures of Chinese Buddhist art if we follow the traditional way of concentrating only on the ties between artists and their works. One possible way to break through this dilemma is to make full use of the written records on patrons, which are available to us in the forms of dedicative inscriptions, historical texts and ancient documents, to establish concrete links between patronage and image-making. Papers in this panel focus on the intimate relationship between patrons and the artworks sponsored by them and intend to understand the hidden forces that shaped the visual forms of Chinese Buddhist art.
The Problem of Reading
Stanley K. Abe, Duke University
Inscriptions on works of Chinese sculpture adhered to a set form from early on. A typical inscription identifies the patrons, indicates the type of image, states for whose benefit the image was made, the benefit that the patron hoped would accrue through the donation, and the date of the dedication. Because the named patrons were rarely known historical figures and because much of the other information contained in inscriptions was generic in nature, scholars have not found these texts especially helpful in understanding the process through which images were made. In this paper, I will turn to some inscriptions on stone stele of the Northern Wei dynasty and in carved niches in the Longmen Guyang Cave that are anomalous in structure and content. These texts fail in various ways to follow the set form. Some are unfinished; others are impossible to understand in terms of intention, that is, why they should have been composed or carved in such an odd manner. Through a discussion of such anomalous inscriptions I will suggest some ways in which they might help us understand the process of image making in the fifth and early sixth centuries C.E. These inscriptions may also serve as a caution to those seeking to discover the intention of the makers or patrons of Chinese sculpture.
Robing the Avamtasaka Universe: Images of Buddha Vairocana of the Northern Qi
Puay-peng Ho, Chinese University of Hong Kong
In the tenth year of Tianbao of the Northern Qi (559), monk Daofei made an image of Buddha Vairocana for all sentient beings, so that they could achieve proper enlightenment. The stele text is brief and precise, naming the image as the image of Vairocana Buddha among the people of Dharmadhatu. This description is rather unusual. Unfortunately, the image accompanying the text is now lost and its exact iconography not known. Judging by the increased number of votive texts on Vairocana Buddha in the Northern Qi, particularly among the ordained of Shandong province, such a phenomenon must point to the surge in popularity of the Avamtasaka school. On the other hand, there are standing images of the Buddha found in the painted caves of Kizil and Dunhuang grottoes as well as stone images from the site of Longxingsi in Qingzhou and elsewhere that are referred to as the image of Vairocana Buddha of this particular description. This paper attempts to trace the development of the iconography of the cosmic Buddha up until the end of the sixth century. This will be placed within the context of the transmission of the Buddhist sutra and the Avamtasaka school. The paper will explore the motive and method of image making within the Buddhist church of sixth-century China.
The Making of the "Puti Ruixiang Image" and Governor Bi Chonghua of Lizhou in the Tang Dynasty
Luo Shiping, China Academy of Fine Arts
Patronized by the governor of Lizhou, the well-preserved stone carvings in the Puti Ruixiang Cave at Guangyuan, Sichuan Province, are refined in style and significant in history. Focusing on a stone stela remaining in the cave, entitled "Praise to the Puti Ruixiang Image," this paper will try to answer four questions concerning the issue of patronage and image-making:(1) the name of the governor of Lizhou and the date of the cave; (2) the origin of the Puti Ruixiang iconography; (3) the various copies of the Puti Ruixiang in different regions; and (4) the relationship between the Puti Ruixiang and Vairocana Buddha. This paper will also compare the records remaining on the stone stela and the records in historical texts to trace the changes or misunderstandings in historiography surrounding the image and its powerful patron.
Visual Politics in the Frontier of the Great Tang Empire: Empress Wu and the Dunhuang Caves
Qiang Ning, University of Michigan
Empress Wu of the early Tang dynasty is probably the most controversial woman ruler in Chinese history. The debate on the legitimacy of her rulership had a strong impact on not only political theories on the imperial throne but also the religious conflicts and cultural changes in Tang society. Several Buddhist cave-temples remaining at Dunhuang, which were made during the reign of Wu Zhao, provide important clues for our understanding of the political meanings of medieval Chinese Buddhist art. The giant Maitreya statue, shaped according to female bodily structure, in Cave 96, the paradise of a "female emperor" shown on the south wall of Cave 321, and the victories of Buddhism over Daoism painted on the north and south walls of Cave 323 can all be viewed as the political and religious responses of local people in the frontier toward the cultural politics in the capital, particularly in the court, in the Wu Zhao period. Connecting visual materials with local historical records, this paper will study the role of patrons in shaping the sculptures and paintings in the Dunhuang caves made during Empress Wu’s reign in the late seventh century. The political function of the Buddhist caves will also be discussed in the historical context of the early Tang.
Organizer and Chair: Bettine Birge, University of Southern California
Discussant: Robert Hymes, Columbia University
Keywords: China, history, Song, cultures, methodologies.
This panel represents collaboration and dialogue between Japanese and Western scholars that explores new approaches, sources, and methodologies in the study of Song history. The panel focuses on local culture in the late Northern Song, especially the Huizong era, with the aim of reevaluating previous understandings and assumptions concerning this important period.
Each paper uses newly discovered or excavated materials, or uses old sources in new ways, and discusses how these can be interpreted. They look at the meaning of "local culture" and bring in the perspectives of different time periods, regions, and class difference. Ihara’s paper uses newly unearthed materials along the Yellow River to reevaluate state-society relations in small urban areas and the regional economic basis of the Song state. Sue uses temple inscriptions to examine multiple discourses and perspectives within the "cultures" of a local region. Using sources from the entertainment world, West challenges the old paradigm of "local culture" altogether through an analysis of how a particular "culture" forms as an organic unity within other cultures.
The papers, all by leading scholars in Japan and the United States, both senior and junior, are in dialogue with others of their countrymen as well as across the cultural divide between Japanese and American sinology. The panelists hope to clarify these dialogues and extend them to the audience, thereby raising fundamental questions about the study of Song society and Chinese history in general.
Villages and Communities in the Yellow River Basin as Seen through Newly Unearthed Materials
Hiroshi Ihara, Josai International University
Heretofore, there has not been much discussion about local societies during the Northern Song. In particular, details about regional societies in North China, an important cultural and economic foundation of the nation at the time, are virtually unknown. Furthermore, satisfactory research has not been conducted on the Henan area, which supported the dynasty. In this paper, I will investigate the administrative realities as well as actual conditions of regional societies during the Northern Song, based on recently excavated materials along the Yellow River and in Henan province. The paper will focus on welfare systems in small urban areas, and it will explore what these tell us about local society and government in general during the Northern Song. The paper will also discuss the use of new sources and new approaches to Song history and Chinese history in general.
Structures of Regional Society and Multiple Discourses as Revealed in the Records of Ritual Halls and Temples
Takashi Sue, Nihon University
This paper will examine from multiple perspectives records on ritual halls and temples built during late Northern and early Southern Song times. It will look at the special characteristics of these records and their use as historical sources. Moreover, through a systematic analysis and categorization of the documents, I will thoroughly analyze who wrote them, for what purposes they were written, and through what processes they came into being. In doing so, I will investigate the images and understandings of society held by people of different social status, including central government officials, local officials, regional elites, and certain groups of non-elites.
Capital, Court, and City: The Center as Local
Stephen H. West, University of California, Berkeley
When we use the term "local" in the context of studying Chinese cultures of the past, it invariably means regional culture. We seldom stop to consider the fact that there forms about the body of the emperor and in the capital a world that operates according to local rules. This extends from the imperial bureaucracy, which was often in contest with the central bureaucracy over the control of large construction projects and the policing of the capital, to local food culture, argot (as a form of local dialect), and to different sets of hierarchies. I propose to examine one feature of court life in which scholar-officials were subject to ridicule by the lowest social class, actors, as an example of how normal hierarchies of power and prestige were subverted within the court. I propose to use examples of court entertainers’ ridicule of scholars, and consequently of the examination system and the social and political power it created to examine how the very center of the state fostered a culture that could criticize entrenched social ideals. I will suggest furthermore, that this case could be a starting point for investigating the role of how "culture" forms, in a rough parallel to biological cultures, creating an organic system that is immune to other systems in a polycultural world. The implication is that traditional tianxia was less like a unified cultural entity and more like a body that held within it cultural systems that formed, changed, and died out as the body of tianxia changed.
Organizer: K. E. Brashier, Reed College
Chair: David C. Schaberg, University of California, Los Angeles
Discussant: Wen Xing, Mount Holyoke College
Keywords: oral performance, early China.
Since the 1920s, much ink has been spilt on Western oral culture, so much so that studies of Homer or the Bible often begin by addressing the text’s oral transmission. Yet early Chinese texts have not enjoyed the same scrutiny, and modern students of early literature rarely ask the question of just how their texts circulated as texts. Were they strictly part of a chirographic culture, or were they committed to memory and then orally performed? This question is growing in importance because excavated manuscripts now reveal ample evidence of a well-established oral tradition working in tandem with a chirographic tradition. If medium affects meaning, early Chinese oral culture is not merely one worthy topic among many that modern scholars should address; it is a paradigm that can significantly influence the way we see those other topics.
For this panel, Schaberg examines whether Warring States textual citations reveal how texts were recited, taught and improvised, and Brashier focuses upon how oral recitation was evaluated just after imperial unification. In her own paper, Nylan explores the Han venues in which written and oral texts were given public expression, and Kern addresses the complex issue of Han song culture. Finally, Xing as discussant provides an archaeologist’s viewpoint to place these four perspectives on oral performance within a physical context.
This panel intends to begin a discussion on the oral aspect of early Chinese culture and on whether an oral medium should affect our interpretation of the surviving written record.
Speaking of Documents: Shu Citations in Warring States Texts
David C. Schaberg, University of California, Los Angeles
Citations of the Shu in Warring States texts show that the writers of that period had access both to variant versions of extant Shu chapters and to chapters that are no longer extant. Such citations have been tabulated and analyzed by Matsumoto Masa’aki and others. Shu citations in recently recovered tomb texts, including the Guodian and "Shanghai Museum" texts, have not yet received comparable attention, but they too show that writers had access to Shu chapters that were only rarely identical to our received version.
The sometimes radical variations among versions of cited Shu passages raise anew the question of how Warring States writers acquired and used the Shu. The prevailing view holds that these writers read and cited written versions of authentic early chapters. The scholars who support this view recognize that different versions of the Shu circulated during the pre-Qin period but do not explain how assumed practices of copying could have produced such differences.
We may account for the available data more precisely by recognizing that any copying of early Shu texts must certainly have proceeded in conjunction with frequent viva voce citation, recitation, teaching, discussion, and even improvisation. This paper aims to reconstruct practices of Shu discussion in light of the full range of relevant material, including the variant citations, the chapters that were produced partly or wholly during the Warring States period, and Shu-like lore found in Lunyu, in Yi Zhoushu, and in many other texts.
The Chants Encounter: Evaluating Recitation Skills in the Western Han Dynasty
K. E. Brashier, Reed College
Textual recitation in early China regularly implied some form of evaluation. In the pre-imperial era, it was often the choice of poem or passage that was evaluated, but at least by the Western Han, the recitation skill itself also came under scrutiny. Excavated in Hubei Province, the Zhangjiashan regulations (ca. 186 B.C.E.) stipulate how the "recitation" or "chanting" abilities of would-be clerks, diviners and supplicators were to be tested, even specifying the volume of characters in named texts for each.
Warring States texts already group these three career types with maintaining territorial records, and they particularly paint the supplicators as well versed in the canonical tradition. Here in the Zhangjiashan regulations, supplicators faced three years of study that began at the age of sixteen, and they then had to pass the highest initial threshold of reciting seven thousand characters, thus giving credibility to the common Han claim that supplicators were "good with words."
Heretofore our understanding of Han oral performative culture was limited to anecdotal evidence ranging from testing the recitation ability of future emperors to indoctrinating unruly kings via a chanted education. Academicians evaluated the oral performance of would-be students in the capital, and investigators judged the chants of youth in the district villages as an indicator of regional health. Now the Zhangjiashan regulations offer us specific insights into the institutionalization of verbatim recall, encouraging us to ask what role memorization and recitation played in the daily lives of lettered people.
Performance Venues in Han
Michael Nylan, University of California, Berkeley
My paper will focus on five main performance venues in Han that regularly punctuated the social calendar: (1) court audiences; (2) scholastic contests; (3) local funerals; (4) public performances in honor of the gods; and (5) demon-expulsions. Each of these performance venues requires some knowledge of reading, reciting, and writing, yet each makes a distinctive use of texts, written and oral. Equally to the point, each of them commands special traditions, activities, costumes, and participants as well.
Recently excavated materials help us expand and reinterpret the picture presented by the fairly extensive received literature touching upon performance, which includes prose poems, texts of the masters, classical canons, standard histories, letters, and eulogies. The focus on typical functions and venues for the use of texts may help impart some of the texture of daily life in Han to the study of texts.
Song Culture in the Western Han
Martin Kern, Princeton University
Not much is known about the song culture of Western Han times. Historians have left it aside, while scholars of literature have been discussing and anthologizing Western Han songs mostly as works found in Six Dynasties and even later literary collections. Not only is the dating of these pieces in many cases dubious, they also come to us disconnected from any historical context—a free-floating "pure literature" arranged in generic categories that were defined only centuries after the purported composition of the songs they include.
The present paper takes a different approach by looking at the various songs and song fragments that are sprinkled across Han sources and by discussing them in their own contexts. Who composed these songs? For whom? Under what circumstances? What are the genres and themes? How and on what occasions were these songs performed? And why did historians and philosophical thinkers include them in their works—or invent them in the first place? Furthermore, was there a genuine "popular" tradition of song culture that we can still recognize and appreciate? How was it connected to the performance culture of the Western Han imperial court, and to the dominant poetic genre of the rhapsody (fu)? How do the songs that we find in Han sources tally with the anthology pieces that surface in later collections?
In short, can we recover some of more complex issues of early imperial song culture? Can we get beyond the anthology version of early Chinese poetry?
Organizer: Arianne M. Gaetano, University of Southern California
Chair: Tamara Jacka, Australian National University
Discussant: Delia Davin, University of Leeds
Keywords: gender, migration, contemporary China.
A significant aspect of rapid change in contemporary Chinese society has been a huge increase in unofficial migration from rural to urban areas. This panel presents a selection of papers from a forthcoming book on the experiences of women in rural-urban migration in China. It is framed by a common focus on two cross-disciplinary themes: (1) the agency of rural women in shaping the meanings, experiences, and consequences of migration; and (2) the construction of migrant women’s identities through negotiations of discourses relating, in particular, to gender, modernity, and rural-urban relations.
All the papers draw on extensive qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork, and pay careful attention to migrant women’s narratives and the particular ways in which they present their identities and experiences.
Arianne Gaetano examines the ways in which young rural women living in Beijing try to achieve "modernity" and to negotiate the contradictions between their identities as filial rural daughters and modern urban women. Louise Beynon discusses the aspirations of rural women migrants in Chengdu, focusing on their hopes for marriage and the opportunities and constraints shaping their ability to fulfill their dreams. Tiantian Zheng examines the ways in which migrant women working as bar hostesses in Dalian both contest and reproduce their marginality through their negotiation of discourses relating to modernity, consumption, gender and sexuality, and rural-urban relations. Finally, Cindy Fan discusses the agency of rural women in migration processes, and the contribution that their migration makes to social change in villages in Sichuan and Anhui.
Migration and the Identity of Dagongmei in Reform-Era Beijing
Arianne M. Gaetano, University of Southern California
Young rural women’s motivations and expectations for, and experiences of, migration and work are configured within powerful cultural discourses and practices of Reform China’s socialist modernity (xiandaihua). Accordingly, urban spaces and society appear progressive in contrast to backward rural areas and populace. Unlike remaining on the farm, migration signifies participation in modernity. Young rural women are especially attracted to urban modernity at this stage of their life course, as they contemplate future marriage. Yet while living in the city is a means by which rural women craft a modern identity, formidable obstacles block their full participation in urban social and economic life. The household registration system and labor market discrimination channels migrants into low wage, low-skill jobs, while notions of gender-appropriate work relegate women into low status service occupations. Migrants also face subtle forms of social discrimination directed at them by urban society. Moreover, as unmarried daughters, they remain under the scrutiny of rural villagers, whose critical assessment of such an identity could affect a young woman’s social standing in her home community. During this period of rapid social and economic transition, young rural women who traverse the boundaries of the "rural" and the "urban" must contend with the contradictions of their position as temporary "outsiders" to the city and to the village, compounded by negative associations of gender and mobility in each of these places. In this paper, I argue that agency is located in women’s everyday negotiations of their contradictory identities as filial daughters and modern women across these social spaces.
Rural Migrant Bar Hostesses in Post-Mao Dalian
Tiantian Zheng, Yale University
Previous researchers on migration, labor and gender in China have debated whether migration and labor has liberated or victimized migrant women. They have confined power within institutional machineries and failed to address the disguised, internalized and inculcated discursive "identifying" power that not only marginalizes rural-migrant women, but also enables the current prevalent phenomenon of city men consuming rural migrant women. This paper addresses the ways in which hostesses are discursively constructed, and how, in turn, they contest and reproduce their marginality.
Through the different stages of identity formation, in which they are turned from migrants into bar hostesses, rural women are variously "othered" in state and popular discourse as a counterpart to the civilized urban citizen, the moral, modest and demure urban woman, and the sexually potent and powerful city man.
Rural migrant hostesses resist, resignify, yet reproduce their labels through their practices and through devious references to, and reinterpretations of, their marginality. This paper will delineate how hostesses perform their stigmatized "docile Madonna/whore" cultural image and appropriate state-recognized consumption styles in order to alter their backward country bumpkin image. It will also show, how, paradoxically, these efforts reproduce dominant constructions and legitimize their exploitation and low social status.
Dilemmas of the Heart: Rural Working Women and Their Hopes for the Future
Louise Beynon, SOAS, University of London
This paper draws on two years’ fieldwork in Chengdu city, centered around one household services labor market, to understand young rural migrant women’s experiences in the city and their hopes for the future. I argue that, as unmarried rural women, the pertinent question for these migrants is not "what does tomorrow hold," but "where is tomorrow." In their attempts to secure a place—both in terms of geographical place, economic security and a sense of belonging—rural migrant women’s agency and ideals are constrained by the structural and institutional barriers to their integration into urban life. In particular they are faced with the dilemma of marriage. Many have migrated as a means to evade an early marriage and see migration as a way to make a better marriage; in the cities they gain a sense of value and worth through work and independent living. However, their increasing aspirations are rarely matched by their actual economic and social standing and the necessity to make a decision before becoming an "old maid" forces many into difficult choices. Although there are more opportunities for employment and long-term residence in cities, and there is a growing multiplicity of experiences of rural migrant women, key constraints limit their agency and ability to realize their dreams. The paper highlights the barriers to integration into urban communities and the potential openings in the rural-urban divide that might enable rural migrant women to secure a place in the cities.
Out to the City and Back to the Village: The Experiences and Contributions of Rural Women Migrating from Sichuan and Anhui
Cindy Fan, University of California, Los Angeles
Research on migration in China has generally downplayed the agency, contributions and experiences of migrants, and is even scantier on rural women migrants. In this paper, I analyze the Interview Records of the 1995 Sichuan and Anhui Survey conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture, to examine four aspects of the experiences and contributions of rural women migrants. First, I argue that rural women, when given the opportunity to pursue migrant work, are as economically active as their male counterparts and are able to make important economic contributions to the village household. Second, I illustrate the central role women migrants play in forging networks of rural-urban migrants. These networks are highly gendered. They facilitate the migration of women migrants but also channel them into segregated jobs and homogenize their urban experiences. Third, I show that women migrants are empowered by their urban work experiences, and that they are potential agents of social change in rural areas. Fourth, I emphasize that sociocultural traditions related to marriage continue to be a powerful constraint on the economic and physical mobility of single and married women alike, and that such constraint limits rural women’s agency and contributions. The qualitative data examined in this paper highlight the utility of using migrants’ narratives to study their experiences and agency.
Organizer: Vincent Goossaert, CNRS
Chair and Discussant: Prasenjit Duara, University of Chicago
Keywords: China, religion, anticlericalism, Buddhism, Taoism, religious conflict.
Chinese society has known religious pluralism for longer than most other societies. It has also experienced religious intolerance. Examining various expressions of religious intolerance in premodern and modern China, participants in this panel attempt a critical test of concepts developed in the West, notably anticlericalism. Anticlericalism, defined as criticism of religious institutions and professionals, may differ from anti-religious or anti-superstitious sentiments. In the Chinese context, anticlericalism is directed mostly at Buddhist and Taoist clerics. It is related to Confucian fundamentalism, while anti-superstition and atheistic anti-religion appear only in the early twentieth century, under Western influence. In order to explore these different modes of thinking in religious conflict, the panel participants do not focus on issues of dogma but look specifically at situations involving relations between different clerical or quasi-clerical groups. The papers will specifically discuss scholar-officials, Buddhists of Chinese or Tibeto-Mongol rite, Taoists, mediums and sectarian leaders. Cooperation between these different specialists was often the norm in China. Yet, whether out of competition for charismatic dominance or control of actual socio-economic power, or because of beliefs regarding morality and the nature of religious vocation, some clerics attempted to disqualify others, often by means of a highly aggressive and violent discourse. It is the nature of this discourse and its role within the larger body of polemics concerning religion that we aim to define.
Local Drought Crises and Charismatic Competition among Clerical and Extra-Clerical Ritualists in Ming China
Donald S. Sutton, Carnegie Mellon University
Rejecting the common assumption that local officials of the late imperial period generally were cynical rationalists in practicing rituals to stop drought and rain, or that they mechanically carried out little-noticed official rain-praying duties, this paper argues that drought rituals were significant both ideologically and politically. Ming writers placed them in relationship with the historical canon and increasingly with hallowed Neo-Confucian ideals, and celebrated local official successes in printed descriptions, prayers, collective poems and epitaphs. By the late fifteenth century, local accounts show the importance of drought rituals in supporting an official’s authority, pitting him in charismatic competition with Buddhist and Daoist clergy, and with the extra-clerical spirit mediums and their clay dragons. The paper explores changes in interpretations of how rain praying could be effective between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, and suggests a typology of local relationships among ritualists, including Confucian "clerics." In the terms of the panel, it describes neither anti-religion nor anti-superstition, but focuses on competition at the level of both theory and practice among official, and other religious practitioners—a competition that was at once inter-clerical, intra-clerical and clerical/extra-clerical.
Tibeto-Mongol Buddhists and the Chinese Anticlerical Discourse
Isabelle Charleux
The Chinese phantasms on Tibetan and Mongolian monks are made of fascination and repulsion, and produce long-lasting stereotypes. Indeed, the Chinese perception of "lamas" is as fantastic as its Western counterpart, with which it has had reciprocal influences. It appears to be a superposition of the various images of all the foreign clerics (fanseng) who have come from the "West" (India, Central Asia and Tibet) since the first millennium, mixing together the depraved Tantrist, specialist of black magic and the exotic saint, arhat. "Lamas" are subjected to the general anticlericalism targeting the whole Chinese clergy, but anti-lamaist feelings are also fueled by xenophobia and historical grievances dating back to the Yuan dynasty. As a result, some of the critics and judgments on lamas made by Han Chinese are found similarly in Tibetan and Mongol anticlerical discourses, while others are proper to the Han. To better understand the Chinese reactions caused by the presence of lamas as a category of clerics coming in addition to "indigenous" clerics, I offer a comparison of the discourses on lamas during the Qing period, in Peking, in frontier towns with mixed populations, such as Hohhot, Xining, or Songpan, and in Chinese towns where lamas were rarely seen, such as Shanghai. Through the study of local gazetteers, bureaucratic literature, novels, anecdotes, the press, and available iconographic documents, this paper highlights local variations in the intensity and the themes of the anti-lamaist expressions.
Anticlerical Saints and Alternative Clerics in Chinese Novels from the Late Ming to the Mid-Qing
Vincent Durand-Dastes
The clerical characters in Chinese vernacular novels have generally been described as rascals and/or lascivious bandits, an expression of the novelists’ purported strong dislike of anything clerical. But more attention should be paid to the many novels from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century who chastise "bad" clergy while having as main or secondary characters exemplary clerics, or what could be described as quasi-clerics: monks or religious-like leaders, sometimes solitary saints but very often charismatic people with a few faithful followers. They generally appear in novels with a pronounced didactical tone, to correct wrongs or chastise evildoers, including "ordinary" Buddhist or Taoist clerics. Through those eccentric characters the novelists convey both a critic of the actual clerics and a redefinition of sainthood informed by religious models (such as the immortal or the bodhisattva) and the common "Confucian" ethics of the cardinal Five relationships. This paper will study how the novelists’ imagination created such priest-like heroes, in novels written between the end of the Ming (Feijian ji, Dongdu ji, Chanzhen yishi), the early Qing (Qu toutuo Jigong quanzhuan), and the mid-Qing (Lüye xianzong, and Yesou puyan). More than the mere portrayal of stray monks, such fantasies may be viewed as truly anticlerical phenomena: creating purer and "truly deserving" clerics has been a constant feature of anticlerical discourses in many cultures.
Did a Break Occur in 1898 in Chinese Antireligious Thinking? From Nineteenth-Century Anticlerical-ism to Twentieth-Century Antireligious Policies
Vincent Goossaert, CNRS
The anti-religious discourses and actions of the late Qing period (1860–1911) can be analyzed as the product of a growing intolerance within China’s elites towards Chinese religion, its institutions (mostly temple cults) and clergy (Buddhist and Taoist). This trend came to a head with the 1898 reforms that called for the forcible transformation of all Chinese temples into schools. Although this measure was soon repealed (because of the failure of the Wuxu reform government), it heralded the beginning of a new era where the huge majority of politicians, in spite of sharp ideological differences, agreed on the necessity to dismantle Chinese religion in order to build a modern, educated Chinese nation. This paper argues that there was a major shift around 1898 from a discourse basically aiming at the reform of Chinese religion (removing the influence of Buddhists, Taoists and mediums in temple life) to a project to invent a new Chinese religion (removing the temples themselves). The former discourse, although sometimes extremely violent, can be analyzed as "believing anticlericalism," that is an idealist, fundamentalist religious ideology. By contrast, the latter, fueled by the newly introduced notion of "anti-superstition," was action-oriented and lay the path to very far-reaching policies. To make this point, the paper looks at different sources such as laws and administrative texts, political essays and press editorials, and popular literature, while paying close attention to the chronology of this period and the process of the introduction of foreign ideas.
Organizer and Chair: James L. Hevia, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Discussant: Magnus Fiskesjo, Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, public museums have been a focal point of the production and reproduction of the modern nation-state. Museums display the material wealth of nations, educate the public on national institutions, technological and scientific advances, and organize the nation’s past. But because the life of the nation is not static and its past open to interpretation, public museums undergo continual, and sometimes contentious renovation. This has been the case regardless of the particular political structure of the nation-states.
This panel seeks to explore recent developments in the museums of the People’s Republic of China, where rapid change has contributed to a major transformation of museum culture, especially the form and content of museum displays. The three papers that make up this panel address various aspects of these changes. Marina Svensson explores the historical background and ideological ground upon which new history museums were created in the PRC after 1949. This allows her to highlight the specific kinds of changes that have emerged in museums in the 1990s as new policies promote both "Socialist Spiritual Civilization" and national heritage. Ren Hai focuses on the traveling exhibition "Hong Kong’s History and Development." By being attentive to the kinds of historical artifacts that were placed in the show, Ren is able to raise questions about the ways in which narratives of national sovereignty and identity are reconfigured in relation to the vast sweep of China’s history. Lastly, James Hevia compares displays at Dagu and the Yuanmingyuan museums in their depictions of Western imperialism and China’s Century of Humiliation. By noting differences between the two sites, Hevia explores the unresolved tension in Chinese nationalism between a safe past constituted as national heritage and one fraught with painful lessons requiring vigilant recollection.
Museums and Historic Buildings as Sites for Patriotic Education in the People’s Republic of China
Marina Svensson, Lund University
Museums and heritage sites can be seen as places of memory where the construction, or invention, of national identity and heritage takes place. Museums do not exist in an ideological or political vacuum but reflect the society in which they exist and thus embody and transmit certain social and political ideas and values. In socialist countries, museums and heritage sites are furthermore explicitly conceived of as sites of ideological and political instruction and therefore have a direct bearing on issues of power and political legitimacy. After 1949, the People’s Republic of China engaged in a revolutionary remaking of museums to assure that their exhibitions were in accordance with historical materialism and fostered allegiance to the new regime.
This paper begins with a brief historical background to the revolutionary transformation of Chinese museums and its ideological underpinnings. It also analyses and documents the successive announcements over the years of protected revolutionary sites and monuments and their use in political education. The focus of the paper is directed toward the 1990s and the implications of the new policies of "Socialist Spiritual Civilization" and the "Three Representatives" on museum and heritage work. Museums and heritage sites are today conceived of as sites of patriotic education that help foster a sense of national identity and pride. The paper addresses the issue of patriotic education by looking at themes and displays in different museums and at the protection and presentation of historic and revolutionary sites and monuments.
Chinese Museums and the Problem of Representing Colonial Modernity
Ren Hai, Bowling Green State University
The construction of Chinese modernity has been based on historical discourses about the repression and invasion of Western colonialism and imperialism since 1840. This colonial history has been primarily related to the British occupation of the three parts of Hong Kong from 1842 to 1899—Hong Kong Island, Kowloon Peninsula, and the New Territories. How does "Hong Kong’s return to the motherland" affect the official narrative of Chinese modernity? To address the question, I examine ways in which museum artifacts are used to deal with the problem of representing colonial modernity since the 1950s. I focus on the National Museum of Chinese Revolution in Beijing established in 1959 to use "revolutionary artifacts" to display "modern" and "contemporary" Chinese history. I discuss how the differentiation between "historical artifacts" (lishi wenwu) and "revolutionary artifacts" (geming wenwu) is related to the conceptual separation between "modern" (jindai) and "contemporary" (dangdai) China from "ancient" (gudai) China. I examine the traveling exhibition "Hong Kong’s History and Development," which opened at the museum in July 1996 and then moved to Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. I analyze what artifacts were included and named as "valuable historical artifacts," how some were manufactured to tell a particular story about the past, and how visitors appropriated the gallery space and the theme of the exhibition to promote consumer products. Not only does this study deepen the understanding of the role of Chinese museums in shaping cultural changes, but it also contributes to the debate over the question of sovereignty in historical narration.
Re-Presenting the "Century of Humiliation": The Dagu and Yuanmingyuan Museums
James L. Hevia, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
A founding principle of modern Chinese nationalism has been the overcoming by the Chinese people of the humiliating military defeats and infringement of national sovereignty European powers visited upon the Qing dynasty in the nineteenth century. As a result, a central element in state-sponsored efforts to fashion national identity in the Republic of China and in the People’s Republic has involved public remembrance of these events. National governments designated national days of mourning, erected monuments, and created and patronized historical museums. Focusing attention on the last of these, this paper addresses two instances of the presentation of the history of Western imperialism in China to be found in the Dagu Forts museum and at the Yuanmingyuan.
The most recent displays at both museums address not only the specific instances of Western aggression that occurred at these sites, but the broader issues of Euro-American imperialism in the context of the recession of Hong Kong and Macao. By considering the specific elements of the displays, the modes of presentation used in them, and the comparative relationship between these museums and other kinds of sites in which the PRC government takes special interest, it will be possible to draw some general conclusions about how the past is being mobilized in a period of rapid cultural and socio-economic change in contemporary China.
Organizer and Chair: Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Arizona State University
Discussants: Charles Hartman, State University of New York, Albany; Wen-hsin Yeh, University of California, Berkeley
German scholarship continues to contribute to Chinese studies especially by developing its distinctive approaches to texts, but few here benefit from the research of German colleagues because few East Asianists in North American read German. To enhance scholarly communication and collaboration, this panel will highlight the current work of three scholars from the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of Munich (LMU in München).
The panel’s central theme is how texts and editions can enhance our understanding of the tensions and interactions among intellectuals, as well as between intellectuals and political elites. Dr. Soffel’s paper explores the publication strategies whereby Wang Yinglin’s students misled unwary censors by writing certain prefaces to conceal his monumental work’s ideological content. Reflecting a different context for censorship and textual manipulation, Professor van Ess documents the political and ideological differences between Chunqiu commentaries that led the Qianlong emperor’s Siku editors to promote one commentary while criticizing another that had circulated more widely. Dr. Vogelsang reports on his pioneering project to establish a critical edition of a late Qing reformer’s important work. Thus, the papers cover a wide range of texts, beginning with the Song and ending with the Qing, but there is a central thread or theme running throughout.
Discussant Charles Hartman has published recently on political impositions on, and alterations of, major Song texts, and his current book project examines censorship in China since the Song. Wen-hsin Yeh’s scholarship on 19th- and 20th-century reformers is extensive.
Publishing Strategies in the Early 14th Century: Thoughts on Editions of Wang Yinglin’s Kunxue jiwen
Christian Soffel, University of Munich
Wang Yinglin (1223–96) was a loyalist and polymath who served at court during the last decades of the Southern Song. While in office, Wang strove to save the Song from the Mongol threat. After the capital was seized by the Mongols, he spent the rest of his life in the countryside, where he taught students and wrote books. His most important written work is the Kunxue jiwen—probably the largest collection of notices and statements on diverse topics of Confucian thought from the late thirteenth century. Mirroring experiences during his lifetime, this work is replete not only with allusions to the demise of the Song but also with anticipations of an early end to Mongol rule over China. After his death, Wang Yinglin’s children and students began to publish his works; however, they had to find ways to get permission to print the Kunxue jiwen despite its criticisms of the new rulers, so the content was apparently compromised. What we have today is a well preserved undated edition from the early fourteenth century, as well as some prefaces dated to 1322 and 1325, but the edition and prefaces do not match very well. My paper addresses some oddities in different editions of the Kunxue jiwen itself and in its prefaces. I shall provide evidence and arguments for another (no longer extant) edition. This paper should shed light on the predicament of loyalists who tried to publish works of their teachers or parents in such a time of foreign rule and dynastic transition.
Censorship and the Texts Copied from the Yongle dadian into the Siku quanshu
Hans van Ess, University of Munich
Ever since the path-breaking book by Luther Carrington Goodrich on Qianlong’s literary inquisition, it has been a well-known fact that Qianlong gave orders to compile the Siku quanshu not only to be able to judge all important books available in his day and to find less well-known ones, but also to streamline scholarship and to produce politically correct versions of ancient texts that would neither offend the Manchu themselves nor contradict their ideas about orthodoxy. It is equally well known that the compilation of the Siku quanshu began with Zhu Yun’s suggestion to use the Ming-encyclopedia Yongle dadian. Yet, while the Siku quanshu editors and editions are routinely criticized because of the negative role they played in Qing censorship, the fact that the editors used the Yongle dadian is often praised by modern critics because the decision to focus on Yongle dadian editions saved many texts which had not heretofore circulated widely. By looking at the contents of two Chunqiu commentaries from the Song period, namely the ones written by Hu Anguo and Gao Kang, this paper will raise some doubts about the Yongle dadian texts. I will argue that the Siku compilers used Yongle dadian editions not because they were bibliophiles but because these texts served Qianlong’s purposes. In the case of Chunqiu commentaries, the Yongle dadian text of the Gao Kang commentary was instrumental in challenging the anti-barbarian sentiments that were one of the main themes of the previously more well-known commentary by Hu Anguo.
A Critical Edition of Feng Guifen’s Jiao Bin lu kanyi
Kai Vogelsang, University of Munich
Fang Guifen’s (1809–74) Jiao Bin lu kangyi is generally considered a seminal work of the late Qing "Self-Strengthening Movement." Though widely discussed and frequently reprinted, its text has never been critically established. This paper will present the ongoing project of a critical Kangyi edition. Based on the collation of eight manuscript versions and the first print edition, the text is presented in its 1863 form. The critical apparatus documents early drafts as well as numerous alterations that took place in the course of textual transmission. The edition will be accompanied by an annotated German translation of the entire text. Today, there is still no critical edition of any Chinese text from the late imperial period; so the Kangyi edition is the first of its kind. A large part of the paper will be devoted to discussing general problems and principles in doing a critical edition: Which text should be established? What principles should govern decisions on doubtful points? How should orthography, punctuation, and elevation be treated? What kind of information belongs in the apparatus, and how should it be presented? In what ways should introduction, translation, and annotations complement the data given in the apparatus? What other material (photographs, stemmata, indices) should accompany the edition? The paper describes a work in progress; it is not meant to prescribe ready-made solutions, but explicitly calls for critical comments.
Organizer: Emily Yeh, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: Ralph Litzinger, Duke University
Discussants: Janet Sturgeon, Brown University; Ralph Litzinger, Duke University
Recent years have witnessed a dramatic rise in popular consciousness about environmental issues in China, as well as the increased influence of new national and international resource management regimes. As a result, environmentalism is now an important part of the Chinese state’s discourse of development; in fact, environmental protection was listed as a top priority of the "Great Development of the West strategy" launched in 1999. The number of nature reserves has grown from a mere 19 in 1965 to over 1,200 in 2002. Enforcement of reserve rules and boundaries varies widely, as do the frequency and nature of conflicts between reserve officials and local people. Thus, reserves are frequently sites of political and cultural contestation. This is particularly true in China where most reserves have been established in the west, in economically underdeveloped areas occupied by "minority nationalities."
The papers in this panel examine the role of the state and conflicts in three nature reserves. Elena Songster highlights the importance of the often-neglected domestic initiative in conservation by analyzing the establishment of one of the PRC’s first nature reserves in a period of international isolation. Similarly, Emily Yeh examines a nature reserve in Tibet which is run without international involvement, and asks whether conservation has become a technique for extending the reach of the state by restricting local access to resources. Melinda Herrold picks up on the theme of local access to resources, but in the context of conflicts around a reserve in which international NGOs play a role.
Reserving Nature for Communist Conservation
Elena Songster, University of California, San Diego
During the few years between the wake of the Great Leap Forward and the onslaught of the Cultural Revolution, the central government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) unexpectedly showed keen interest in nature conservation. In 1962 the central government, with continued encouragement and advice from the scientific community and active members of the Ministry of Forestry, drew up a plan to create fifteen nature reserves throughout the nation. Among these reserves, the Wanglang Nature Reserve in Sichuan Province became the first nature reserve established explicitly for the preservation of the giant panda and other animals listed under state protection. The establishment of the Wanglang reserve, officially stamped in 1965, occurred several years after the Sino-Soviet schism of the late 1950s and preceded China’s efforts to reestablish ties with Western industrialized nations by nearly a decade. The striking international involvement in present-day panda conservation efforts has masked this important history of domestic initiative during a period of isolation from the international community. The creation of Wanglang counters conventional understanding of central planning during this era, yet it was a deliberate component of the government’s agenda. This study, focusing on the creation of the Wanglang reserve, examines the impetus behind the central government’s interest in setting up nature reserves and initiating wildlife protection during the early 1960s.
The Lhalu Nature Reserve: Environmental Protect-ion and Resource Management in Tibet
Emily Yeh, University of California, Berkeley
This paper discusses how changes in use and management of the Lhalu wetlands over the past five decades encapsulate a broader history of development and landscape transformation in Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region. In the early part of the twentieth century, Lhalu covered dozens of square kilometers and was a habitat for abundant wildlife. Local residents managed the wetlands and used marsh grasses as fodder. In the 1960s the army drained much of the marsh in an attempt at agricultural reclamation. When the 1980s brought economic reform and urbanization, new roads and buildings encroached on the wetlands. By the early 1990s, more than half of the wetlands had been drained and built over. Loss of habitat was exacerbated by a flood control canal built around the Lhalu perimeter in 1992.
In 1999, however, the TAR government officially declared Lhalu a nature reserve. Current techniques for environmental protection focus on limiting local residents’ access to the marsh grasses, even though the impact of fodder harvesting is minimal compared to the desicccation of the marsh caused by the canal. Residents have been dependent on livestock for their livelihoods since most of their farmland has been expropriated for urban construction. Thus, they are resentful of the rules and fearful of further restrictions. Current state environmentalism assumes that local people are incapable of resource management despite evidence to the contrary. It has become a form of governmentality which limits access to resources without addressing root causes of ecological harm.
Cranes and Conflicts: NGO’s and People-Park Relations at Caohai, Guizhou
Melinda Herrold, University of California, Berkeley
This paper discusses natural resource conflicts in Caohai Nature Reserve and the reserve’s changing role in the lives of local people as its NGO-sponsored programs have come to provide numerous social services that state-sponsored poverty alleviation programs have failed to provide. Caohai Lake, in Guizhou Province, has been the scene of sweeping transformations of the landscape and equally radical changes in philosophies over how natural resources should be managed. Two drainage campaigns that converted lake bottom into farmland; a later lake restoration project that inundated the previously reclaimed farmland; and the subsequent establishment of a nature reserve to protect rare black-necked cranes have significantly affected the landscape and local livelihoods. As is the case in many nature reserves throughout the world, Caohai Nature Reserve has been the site of intense conflicts over natural resources. What distinguishes Caohai from other reserves, however, is that its role in the lives of local people has changed dramatically in the past decade. Initially the establishment of the reserve, which criminalized much local fishing, hunting and land clearing, led to conflicts between reserve managers seeking to protect endangered species and local people struggling to maintain their access to natural resources. Following the introduction of community development programs sponsored by two U.S.-based NGOs in the early 1990s, the nature reserve has become the most conspicuous provider of village infrastructure development and poverty alleviation programs. Many Caohai farmers now see the reserve as their main partner or patron for the promotion of local economic development.
Oraganizer: Lydia H. Liu, University of Michigan
Chair: Stephen C. Averill, Michigan State University
Japanese Imperialism and the Shaping of Chinese-Muslim Minority Nationalism in Republican China
Zvi Ben-Dor, Boston University
Drawing on hitherto unexamined Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic sources, this paper presents and discusses the scholarly activities of nationalist Chinese-Muslims during the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Specifically, it focuses on the activities of the Japanese occupying forces in Manchukuo and their role in promoting a Chinese-Muslim identity that saw itself as distinct and separate from China and the Chinese.
The paper also explores the reactions of the Chinese nationalist government and of Chinese Muslims in the rest of China to the Japanese initiative. It suggests that, paradoxically the Japanese efforts in Manchukuo helped shape a Chinese-Muslim identity which both saw itself as strongly connected to China and ultimately gained the close attention and the support of the Chinese government.
Financial Liberalization and State Autonomy in Taiwan
I-Ru Chen, SOAS, University of London
The theme of this paper is to analyze how the Taiwanese state responded to financial globalization in the 1990s. While some people say state autonomy will decline in the age of financial globalization, it is argued that even though Taiwan is weak in terms of its international diplomatic standing, it has been able to resist the pressures of financial globalization and pursue a strategy of limited liberalization that puts the issue of state survival as a priority.
The paper begins with the domestic and international challenges confronted by the government in the mid 1980s, which included escalating foreign exchange reserves, mounting trade surpluses, the U.S.’s pressure for appreciating the New Taiwan dollar and a rising trend of financial globalization. Responding to these challenges, the government drew up the Asian-Pacific Regional Financial Centre plan, aimed at developing Taiwan as a centre for facilitating the free flow of capital and the promotion of Taiwan’s international standing. However, the changing cross-straits relations in 1987 and the persistence of China’s threat to Taiwan have reminded the government of the potential political dangers, and the government’s awareness could be summarized with the concept of "no haste, be patient." This concept has had a knock-on effect on financial sectors—policymakers have become more cautious about financial openness, which could make Taiwan more vulnerable to external shocks, and especially the shocks that might result from China. Therefore, the government has adopted a relatively conservative approach to the opening of financial markets.
To conclude, the process of financial liberalization in the 1990s in Taiwan has been fundamentally shaped by the issue of state survival, which has granted the state far greater autonomy in governing the pace and direction of change.
Aspects of Social Security in Rural China: Local Governments and Philanthropic Organizations
Andre Laliberté, University of Ottawa
This paper examines the potential and the limits to philanthropic organizations’ contributions as providers of social services in rural contemporary China. My paper situates this issue in the context of the constraints that limit the Central government’s ability to offer comprehensive schemes of social insurance to every Chinese. It notes that, because of such limitations, policy planners have tolerated, if not openly encouraged the reliance by county governments on charity organizations to address the needs of the poor in rural areas to a degree unseen since 1949. The paper explores the response to these trends during the last ten years by some local governments in the interior provinces, in their efforts to address the needs of the poor. The paper focuses on counties affected by natural disasters, for which community support has been disrupted, and in which local governments have decided to call upon charity organizations based outside their own counties to provide relief. In particular, it looks into counties where a Taiwan-based charity has been involved for years in the provision of social services ranging from relief provision to school building. It suggests that community-based relief may work under specific conditions: the peripheral situation of the communities concerned, and narrow, well-defined objectives on the part of philanthropic organizations. In light of the limited results currently achieved by charity organizations, whether they are state-sponsored or independent, the paper questions the claim that Chinese society can revitalize traditional forms of philanthropy as an alternative to the Welfare State existing in other societies.
Toward a Legal Anthropology of Taiwan: The Case of the 9/21 Chi-Chi Earthquake
Shaw-wu Jung, New School University
At 1:47 a.m., September 21, 1999, with a registered magnitude of 7.3 on the Richter Scale, a huge earthquake ripped open the central part of Taiwan, leaving no part of the nation untouched. Soon after the earthquake, the central government proposed a lot of emergency guidelines aimed at rebuilding the disaster areas. Legitimate proof of title to property and land is the sole qualification for benefits and compensation. However, in Dongshih, Taichung, where I conducted fieldwork for my Ph.D. dissertation since May 1999, kin members hold the land under the total title of kinship and every individual usually acquires very minor shares. Under the current reconstruction measures, residents living on such land cannot be granted permission and benefits to rebuild their homes. Law aims to settle the reconstruction problem, but ends up finding itself tied up in a puzzle rooted in the local structure and traditional practice. As recent developments in the anthropology of law have argued, law is constituted not simply as a powerful political instrument, but also as a fund of beliefs and values for every group. This paper echoes their theorizing and wants to show that while the law retains the absolute power to cope with the reconstruction problems caused by the disaster, its meanings are sufficiently volatile and puzzling—and it is adopted in different ways by unequally positioned social groups competing for justice, citizenship, and identity. They are discussed in the Dongshih context that full social consequences are recognized. The discoveries here provide another angle examining the essence of the state, the meaning of the laws themselves and the interaction between the state and local groups.
Local Enforcement of Environmental Protection in China: A Role for Civil Society?
Jonathan Schwartz, State University of New York, New Paltz
Chinese government officials and the general public are expressing increased concern over China’s deteriorating environment. The central government has responded with improved environmental protection policies. However, since the 1978 initiation of reforms, enforcement powers in China have been devolving from the central government to the provincial and sub-provincial levels. As a result, environment policies are largely funded and enforced by sub-national governments.
Decentralization in itself is neither good nor bad—it is a means to a political end (World Development Report 1999–2000). Decentralization can provide numerous benefits, including enhanced efficiency and growth, contributing to rapid modernization (Ma and Norregaard, 1998). The benefits of decentralization to environmental protection are less clear (Beach 2000–2001). While decentralization means greater autonomy for environmental organizations, it also drives local governments to concentrate on economic growth to the exclusion of most other issues. This often results in a focus on short-term economic gains at the expense of environmental protection (Lieberthal 1997).
This paper evaluates the contributions that decentralization can make to improve environmental policy enforcement by exploring public participation in the environmental sphere. Can public participation, exemplified by environmental NGOs and citizen interest groups, effectively advance environmental protection? Or, is environmental protection best enhanced by concentrating enforcement powers at the central government level?
The paper opens by evaluating environmental conditions and describing the decentralization process in China. Is decentralization inevitable? Relying heavily on interview data and analyses of environmental policy enforcement, the paper evaluates the potential role of civil society in enforcement.
Organizer and Chair: Craig Calhoun, Social Science Research Council
Keywords: Internet, China, globalization, civil society.
The development of new information technologies has aroused worldwide interest. China analysts have been particularly intrigued by the social and political implications of the Internet, yet there is relatively little systematic research in this area. Much of the groundwork for theoretically informed research is yet to be laid. Sponsored by the Journal of Contemporary China, this panel brings together the work of social scientists to bear on this important concern.
We will explore the social and political implications of the Internet at the intersection of three social forces—the Chinese state, Chinese civil society, and global civil society. First, how does the diffusion of the Internet affect the behavior of Chinese state actors at the central and local levels? What kind of regulative policies do state actors develop in response to these challenges and how do these policies shape Internet use by individuals and organizations? Second, how is the Internet used by citizens and civil society groups in China? What kind of individuals and groups are more likely to use the Internet? For what purposes and with what consequences? Is there a digital divide in Internet access? The third set of questions concerns whether and how the development of the Internet helps to forge transnational connections between Chinese civil society and global civil society and how such connections impinge on Chinese politics. Discussants will address one or more of the above questions by drawing on their own empirical and theoretical research.
Leadership and the Politics of Internet Diffusion in China’s Civil Society
Duan Qing and Ernest J. Wilson III, University of Maryland
The Internet is widely and rapidly diffusing throughout Asia, especially in China. Some claim that this new means of interactive, distributed communication is beyond the control of governments and national sovereignty no longer much matters. Others insist that patterns of Internet diffusion simply reflect the current power configurations in society. This paper takes up this dispute in the context of the Peoples Republic of China. We explore the intersection of civil society, leadership and the Internet in the context of that country’s rapidly changing economic and societal conditions. We ask whether the Internet itself brings greater civic awareness and engagement in society? Does state or society gain influence, or is there mutual empowerment simultan-eously as the country moves toward a more knowledge-intensive and communication intensive future? The paper is drawn from research conducted in China across a number of different sectors.
local.gov.cn: The Local State and the Internet in the Yangzi Delta Region
Kathleen Hartford, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Although the Chinese central government has occupied the Internet limelight, the local state has played key roles in constructing and regulating the Internet. One finds, however, major differences in those roles. This paper focuses on Internet development in Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hangzhou. Their governments and government spin-offs have promoted infrastructure construction, created online content and applications, and taken on significant regulatory responsibilities, but with distinctly different patterns and results.
The paper concentrates on four arenas in which the process of local Internet development highlights intra-state and state-society dynamics in this high-stakes sector: (a) choices made in building the telecommunications infrastructure, including the timing of rapid buildout, dominant investors, and related networking projects; (b) government online strategies, as demonstrated by online content created by local state agencies, local state "information" companies (including news media), and "nongovern-mental" organizations under direct state control; (c) patterns of use by other local nongovernmental organizations and by citizens using the Internet to communicate with the local state, with each other, and with those beyond the immediate region; and (d) patterns of regulation and control at the local state level, including both economic and political/ ideological regulation, handling of disputes and infractions of rules, and the mix of agencies and roles in each of those.
The Digital Divide of Internet Use in China
Eric Harwit, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Internet use in China has grown at a tremendous pace over the past decade, and as of the end of 2001 the PRC has more than 30 million users. Access to data networks is forming a key part of China’s economic and social fabric. This paper highlights one of the main problems for continued Internet growth in China: the Digital Divide. The ratio of Internet access of the most connected parts of China, in the large cities, runs up to 100 times that of the poorest rural regions of the country, such as Guizhou and Yunnan provinces. The disparity will likely lead to increasing economic division among the wealthy coastal residents and the hundreds of millions of inland citizens.
I begin by examining government policy toward addressing the digital divide. It looks at spending patterns by the national government on telecomm-unications construction, at local government efforts to improve access, and on ways foreign investment may be channeled to less-developed areas. The essay then considers the social ramifications of a continued digital divide. Are education disparities growing wider as children lack Internet access? Are businesses in rural areas missing chances to grow as they are left out of the digital arena?
Expanding Space under Refined Control: Party-State, Intellectuals and Cyberspace in Contemporary China
Yongming Zhou, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This paper examines diverse techniques adopted by both the party-state and Chinese intellectuals to negotiate power within the new space provided by the advancement of the Internet since the late 1990s. It focuses on a unique niche in Chinese cyberspace—intellectual websites, which refer to those websites that focus on academic, critical and theoretical discussions on political, cultural, as well as intellectual topics. As part of the growing Chinese electronic press, these websites show an unprecedented degree of openness, frankness and tolerance, and expand the space for political participation in China. Since many websites give dissident or non-conformist intellectuals a place to publish works that are banned from the print press, they are often in direct opposition to the party-state’s desire to develop the electronic press while keeping control of publication and editorship. The paper examines the complex and fluid relationships between the party-state and Chinese intellectuals in their desire to master this new domain. For the foreseeable future, Chinese intellectuals will continue to take advantage of Internet technology and expand the space for freer exchange of ideas and information, while the state will continue to monitor these development with more refined techniques of control, such as to exert pressure on website editors to ensure self-censorship.
The Internet, International Public Sphere, and China’s Environmental Discourse
Craig Calhoun, Social Science Research Council; Guobin Yang, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Information technology and globalization have each been the objects of enormous hope and considerable disappointment. So too is their combination in the notion of an international public sphere supported by the Internet and other communications media. This is basic to the dream of international civil society that has flourished since the early 1990s as the collapse of communism and opening of capitalist markets. And indeed, such an international public sphere clearly already exists. Equally clearly, however, it has not yet provided the basis for cosmopolitan democracy its advocates have hoped.
The task of this paper is to outline something of the stakes of thinking about an international public sphere, the role that information technology can play in it, and some of the challenges that lie in the way of realizing its potential. We address these questions in the context of the rise of an environmental discourse in China, showing the extent to which the emergence of such a discourse is facilitated by the development of the Internet but also dependent on other social and political factors. Our key argument will be that in considering the role of the Internet in the creation of China’s environmental discourse, it is important to understand the complex international and domestic factors that surround not only the development of an environmental discourse, but also the civil society actors involved in the production and consumption of this discourse. We also contend that in considering the role of the Internet, it is necessary to understand how the Internet is used in combination with other media, including newspapers and television.
Organizer: Seth Harter, Marlboro College
Chair: Ming K. Chan, Stanford University
Discussant: Alvin Yiu-Cheong So, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Ever since the Portuguese settlement of Macau in the 16th century, Sino-Western relations have largely been played out in enclaves: tiny pockets of territory marked off from their surrounding societies by either distinct sovereignty, a distinct culture, or both. Despite these distinctions, these enclaves were not, as they have often been portrayed, completely isolated from their host societies, or from each other. This panel examines the welter of political, economic, and cultural questions that arise from connections between enclaves, their host societies, and colonial metropoles.
In their study of Qing dynasty Guangzhou, Ching, Chen, and Liu explore the connections between the management of the Chinese city and the management of foreign trade. Harter likewise studies tensions between foreigners and locals in an enclave in Guangzhou, comparing them to a similar case in Hong Kong. Lo’s paper also begins in the Pearl River Delta, with a study of the recent resolution of sovereignty disputes over Hong Kong and Macau, but he turns the focus from local issues to international ones by using these cases to suggest possible solutions for resolving disputes in enclaves elsewhere. Ng expands on the international theme by exploring the ways in which theaters in North American Chinatowns worked to define features of Chinese culture for members of the Chinese diaspora, both by making connections with theater troupes in China, and by setting the culture apart from the non-Chinese surroundings. Each of these cases provides insight into the ways in which enclaves operated in the tricky terrain between their own populations, their host societies and their distant rulers.
Canton Co-Hongs and Factories in Late Imperial Sino-Western Interface
May-bo Ching, Chunsheng Chen, and Zhiwei Liu, Sun Yat-sen University
From the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, there existed two "Guangzhous." One was the Guangzhou run by the Qing officials in administrative terms and cultivated by the literati who struggled to secure a position in the wider Chinese cultural arena. The other was the old "Canton" which prospered as a result of Sino-European trade operated by the Hong and Factories’ merchants. Situated at the outskirts of the city, the old Canton connected China with the world through the exchange of Chinese and European commodities, bringing to China the cosmopolitan culture, style, and taste of the West. Contacts and exchanges between "Guangzhou" and "Canton" did exist, as shown by the intermediate role played by Hong merchants, and yet such contacts and exchanges have in most cases been obscured in Chinese literature. Based on textual and pictorial evidence found in England, this paper attempts to reveal how far-reaching intercultural exchanges occurred between China and the West as a result of the Sino-Western trade that took place in the Co-hongs and Factories in Canton.
Irritating Pearls of the Orient: The Curiously Linked Enclaves of Shamian Island and the Kowloon Walled City
Seth Harter, Marlboro College
A mix of commercial cooperation, military conflict and cultural exclusion led to the development of a string of enclaves in South China. This paper will use two such enclaves to illuminate the curious combination of attraction and repulsion that characterized relations between colonizer and colonized in the late-19th and 20th centuries. The first enclave, Shamian Island, was a British dominated concession reclaimed from mud flats an the banks of Guangzhou’s Pearl River after the Second Opium War. The second, the Kowloon Walled City, was a fortress built by Qing officials in the wake of the First Opium War. Originally perched on the edge of British Hong Kong, the fortress was surrounded by the colony following the British lease, in 1898, of the New Territories. In some respects the two enclaves could not have been more different. Nonetheless, when viewed in the context of their respective host cities, the two shared more than their surface appearance would suggest. Both were targets of attack: Shamian by Chinese nationalists who saw the island as an unendurable remnant of European imperialism; the Walled City by colonial modernizers who saw the enclave as an unendurable remnant of Chinese disorder. Yet both were also objects of fascination: Shamian for its exclusivity, tranquility, and wealth; the Walled City for its air of exoticism and danger, as well as its gambling parlors, brothels and drug dens. This paper will examine the unlikely connections between these two enclaves, culminating in the near-destruction of both in 1947–48.
Sovereignty Disputes over Enclaves: The Cases of Hong Kong, Macau, Gibraltar, Ceuta and the Falklands
Shiu Hing Lo, University of Hong Kong
Sovereignty disputes over colonial enclaves are still a common feature of international relations in the post-colonial world. The cases of Hong Kong and Macau offer some important lessons for other enclaves with contested sovereignty, such as Gibraltar, Ceuta and the Falkland Islands. Hong Kong and Macau became Special Administrative Regions of the People’s Republic of China in July 1997 and December 1999 respectively. Two crucial lessons to be drawn from the resolution of the disputes over Hong Kong and Macau are that: (1) a modified solution such as joint sovereignty can be experimented with in the cases of Gibraltar, Ceuta, and perhaps the Falkland Islands; and (2) mutual trust has to be established between the disputing states prior to a peaceful settlement. The trust-building process developed in the course of Sino-British and Sino-Portuguese negotiations over the South China enclaves can serve as a model for the resolution of enclave disputes elsewhere in the world. The paper will also examine the Hong Kong and Macau cases with regard to the problem of self-determination during sovereignty disputes and will argue that local rule is an attractive idea for the future of Gibraltar, the Falklands, and Ceuta.
Transnational Mediation of Enclave Culture: Chinatown Theater in San Francisco and Vancouver before the Pacific War
Wing Chung Ng, University of Texas, San Antonio
Compared to other ethnic institutions like newspapers and voluntary associations in Chinese enclaves overseas, the history of popular theater has drawn surprisingly little scholarly attention. Lore of earlier Chinatowns in North America, furnished by non-Chinese, typically took the incomprehensible performance of Cantonese opera and its deafening music as unmistakable proof of Chinese exoticism. This paper seeks to examine the multiple functionalities of Chinatown theaters within the immigrant enclaves in San Francisco and Vancouver prior to the Pacific War. Part of the discussion will focus on popular theaters as cultural space, especially their role in negotiating social norms, maintaining cultural knowledge and practices, and delineating ethnic boundaries. Theaters were often the largest and most accessible public space to undertake community action and general political mobilization. More important, the performance of traveling companies, the negotiation with the immigration bureaucracy for their entry, and the vital business and social networks connecting Chinatown merchants—especially those with an interest in the theater business—with their peers and associates in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and other Chinese enclaves in foreign countries were notable aspects of a vibrant transnationalism undertaken by the immigrant Chinese.
Organizer: Colin Hawes, University of Alberta
Chair: Margaret Woo, Northeastern University
Discussant: Pitman B. Potter, University of British Columbia
Keywords: law, contemporary China, judicial reform, court cases, access to justice.
The Chinese legal system has experienced rapid and wide-ranging reform over the past two decades. China now has a comprehensive body of laws, statutes, and regulations, many revised and refined frequently to keep up with the rapidly modernizing economy and society. Yet without a rational and fair system in place to implement the written laws, they will remain dead letters, superficially impressive but ineffective in practice.
What efforts have Chinese lawmakers and the judiciary made to ensure that China’s laws are implemented and enforced fairly and justly? How are the concepts of rule of law and rule of virtue put into practice in China today? This panel addresses these questions from various perspectives: Randall Peerenboom and Colin Hawes focus on recent efforts to overcome corruption and incompetence in the Chinese judiciary. Peerenboom examines the supervision of individual cases by higher judicial and executive bodies. Hawes discusses experiments in publishing verbatim court judgments, including dissenting opinions, by the Guangzhou Maritime Court. Margaret Woo and Ronald Keith address the civil and criminal spheres: Woo considers how the current Chinese legal order constrains or enables weaker groups, especially women, within the civil law arena. Keith explores how "rule of law" and "rule of virtue" theories play out in the criminal justice arena, focusing on various new crime categories created during recent criminal reforms in China.
Dissent and Transparency in Recently Published Chinese Court Judgments
Colin Hawes, University of Alberta
The Supreme People’s Court has frequently called for increased transparency within the Chinese adjudicative system to overcome endemic problems of corruption and incompetence among judges and court personnel. However, as yet there is virtually no open and systematic publication of court judgments in China. Only the deciding court and parties to the case have access to the verbatim texts of judgments. Some important decisions are published in anthologies authorized by the People’s Courts, but these may not accurately reflect the relevant facts and the reasons for judgment. A further problem is that, until very recently, no Chinese courts published the differences of opinion among their panels of judges. This existing system reduces adjudicative transparency and allows corrupt and incompetent judges to remain in place, knowing that their erroneous decisions will not be reported in full, or will be concealed behind a misleading facade of unanimity.
This paper examines a recent experiment by the Guangzhou Maritime Court to unmask judicial corruption and incompetence by: (1) openly and regularly publishing verbatim judgments of the Court on a freely accessible website; and (2) requiring all judges on panels to make clear their own opinions within the judgment texts, including dissenting opinions. Besides critically analyzing samples of these judgments, the paper also discusses the reasons for introducing this experiment, based on interviews with the Court President, and speculates on the possibility of extending the experiment throughout Mainland China.
China’s Changing Approach to Criminal Justice and the Struggle for the Rule of Law
Ronald C. Keith, University of Calgary
This paper updates and builds on some of the arguments in "China’s Struggle for the Rule of Law" (Macmillan, 1994). The authors propose to analyze legislated and interpretative changes in the Chinese approach to criminal justice in light of the contemporary development of a range of new crime since the major revisions to criminal law and criminal law procedure in 1996–97. This range will selectively include, for example: reference to organization of, and membership in, "heretical cults" (e.g., the Falungong), the advent of new categories of "organized crime" relating to terrorism and "organized crime of a triad nature," and crime relating to illegal migration and to the trafficking of human beings. This range of crime and the strategy for criminal justice will be critiqued within the political context of law as it relates to newly articulated substantive emphasis on combining the "rule of law" with the "rule of virtue" and the balancing of human rights protection with the ongoing emphasis on public order.
Individual Case Supervision in the Chinese Court System
Randall Peerenboom, University of California, Los Angeles
This project examines the tension between judicial independence and accountability. Issues of judicial competence and corruption have led to increased supervision of individual cases by people’s congresses, the procuracy and adjudicative supervision committees within courts. I along with members from the National People’s Congress, Supreme Court and Supreme Procuracy (and their local counterparts), are currently conducting a survey of each of these three types of review in six provinces. I will present preliminary results and an analysis of this survey.
Access to Justice and Chinese Legal Reforms
Margaret Woo, Northeastern University
Since the latest legal reforms in China, the Chinese courts have played an increasing role in the civil arena. Civil lawsuits are on the rise, while the use of mediation has decreased. Two primary functions are often attributed to the role of courts—to resolve individual disputes and to uphold the legitimacy of the state. But courts in China may be shifting in the continuum from simply enforcing central policy and asserting social control to performing the task of conflict resolution. Rather than serving simply as an adjudicator of opposing interests, courts in China also serve as a much-needed social lubricant to adjust social values. Inasmuch as courts are being used to maintain existing power, how are courts being used by the powerless? How does the Chinese legal order constrain weaker groups as well as enabling them? This paper looks at how women citizens have used the Chinese courts, how they have fared under the Chinese legal reforms, and the obstacles facing them in accessing justice. Because Chinese women have the most ambiguous relationship with the Chinese state, how they have fared under the recent legal reforms may be most telling on the future direction of China’s legal system.
Organizer and Chair: Angela Howard, Rutgers University
Discussant: Richard von Glahn, University of California, Los Angeles
The cliff sculpture of Dazu embodies the efflorescence of China’s two major religions—Daoism and Buddhism—during the Song dynasty. Using as case studies the sites of Nanshan and that of Baodingshan, the papers explore contemporary attitudes towards the two religions, their respective artistic expressions, and ask to what degree religion and art were responding to Sichuanese demands and outside models. The architectural frame of some three-hundred Daoist deities assembled in the Ancient Grotto of the Three Pure Ones, for example, suggests the existence of a local ritual tied to an indigenous gentrified congregation, but also prompts one to question whether similar solutions were available in other areas of the Song realm. The artistic interpretation of this pantheon, furthermore, is a disclaimer of the old cliché that Daoist deities were modeled on a Buddhist prototype. That the Nanshan Daoist gods are in fact completely independent creations is most evident when one studies the Buddhist deities sculpted at Baodingshan. At this site, the appearance of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas broke also with earlier traditions in response to local efforts to reach a synthesis of all Buddhist schools and form a pilgrimage ground. A new "monumental" style originated at Baodingshan, the most innovative artistic creation of the Song period on a national scale. Moreover, a scrutiny of Baodingshan’s enormous body of visual references forces us to clarify the nature of its Esoteric elements within the overall Chinese matrix. Are such elements comparable to their Indian and Himalayan counterparts or are they mere appropriations without doctrinal and monastic support? Providing answers to these questions ultimately leads to recognizing the existence of an Esoteric movement during the Song dynasty distinct from that transmitted to the northern plains during the Tang.
The Ancient Grotto of the Three Pure Ones: A Song Daoist Cave at Nanshan, Dazu
Anning Jing, Michigan State University
This paper examines a very important Daoist cave shrine known as the Sanqing Gudong or Ancient Grotto of the Three Pure Ones at Nanshan, Dazu. Sculpted during the Southern Song dynasty (1131–1161), the grotto presents a complete Daoist pantheon, the only survival of its kind from the Southern Song. In exploring the placement of the images within a complex architecture and their interrelationship, a comparison is made with earlier Daoist caves in Sichuan to highlight the degree of iconographic and artistic maturity achieved at Nanshan. Secondly, one investigates the role of local elites—landowners and scholar-officials—in forging and promoting a special cultic expression of Daoism. The paper’s conclusion asks whether the way patrons performed Daoist rites at Nanshan was specific to the region or reached beyond Sichuan.
Open Secrets: Esoteric Buddhist Themes at Baodingshan, Dazu
Rob Linrothe, Skidmore College
The paper addresses the Esoteric Buddhist themes in the Baodingshan sculptures, as well as their role within the overall complex. Besides the presence of images iconographically identified as Esoteric Buddhist deities, dharanis and practices are also mentioned in the inscriptions and surviving text associated with the site. But how do these Esoteric themes relate to earlier Esoteric Buddhism in Tang China, as well as to contemporary and later traditions in Tibet and among the Tanguts? Can the claim to Esoteric Buddhist values, lineages and techniques staked out by the creators of Baodingshan be accepted at face value? If so, what is local, what is Chinese and what is derived from Indian or even Tibetan sources? If not, what were the motivations for incorporating Esoteric Buddhist signals into a non-Esoteric matrix? Distinguishing among these interpretations requires clear definitions of what is and is not Tantric and, somewhat different, what is Esoteric Buddhism?
How Art Met Doctrine at Baodingshan, Dazu
Angela Howard, Rutgers University
This paper discusses the reasons underlying the unprecedented artistic "look" of the Baodingshan complex and how this art became unmistakably subordinate to religion. Unlike the numerous individual niches that characterize the great northern Buddhist sites of China, the presentation of religious themes at Baodingshan extended beyond the confines of a single grotto to embrace several grottoes in a doctrinal web. The daunting task of organizing a three-dimensional synthesis of the most prominent Song Buddhist teachings called into being a completely new "monumental" style. The term refers not merely to the sheer size of the images but also to the awesome doctrinal content of the reliefs. Notable features of this style are the simultaneous use of realism to express the human aspects as opposed to the abstract idealism associated with divine representations; conversely, within the grandiose niches, sculptural sizes are subordinate to their "human" or "spiritual" role within the multi-plane construction of stacked-up registers. Arrangements in space, size, and the interrelationship of numerous images converge to personify for the viewer a higher doctrinal message.
Organizer: Keith Knapp, Citadel
Discussant: Robert Eno, Indiana University
A culture’s conception of the "natural world" is bound to function as a guarantor for that culture’s ultimate values. Hence, this panel aims to illuminate the conception of the sacred in China through a reading of various depictions of elements in the natural world. The papers in this panel use literary evidence to argue that certain elements of the Chinese construction of the natural world (animals, the physical landscape, and breast-feeding) support and reflect particular notions of transcendent values.
By examining metaphors of maternal-feeding in Warring States Confucian texts, Jane Geaney’s paper argues for an implicitly feminine conception of filial piety, which by extension might indicate an unexpectedly feminine aspect to the Confucian sacred. Keith Knapp’s paper, focusing on early medieval tales of filial animals, also analyzes concepts of filial piety and gender. He argues that, in spite of a few types of abnormally unfilial animals, these tales manage to make the point that the virtue of filial piety is characteristic of animals, particularly female animals. Alan Cole’s paper, which examines nature rhetoric in early Chan texts, argues that these texts used "nature" to vindicate lineage claims and to prove that even a Chinese person with no knowledge of Buddhist scriptures or India could become a Buddha. Finally, Charles Hammond’s paper also looks at virtuous animals, specifically the fox as depicted in Qing dynasty tales, contending that even apparently unethical animal behavior is constructed to serve as a moral guide.
The Feminine and Beastly Nature of Filial Feeding
Jane Geaney, University of Richmond
The vast majority of filial tales in early Confucianism concern feeding. Indeed, it seems that the virtue of filial piety is epitomized by feeding one’s parents. At the same time, there is a distinct suggestion in these texts that feeding is in some way ethically inadequate. This paper argues that the ambivalence about feeding masks other concerns about gender and "nature." The value of feeding derives from the fact that it seems natural. By the same token, it is also undermined by the fact that it is characteristically done by women and animals.
In these texts, feeding and educating form a variation on a nature/culture opposition. As Mencius 3A4 asserts, to be fed and not educated is to be a beast. The Xunzi aligns that opposition with gender difference—the role of mothers is to feed, while the role of fathers is to educate (19/10). The test case for this gendered opposition is its slippery application to animals. Both the Xunzi and the Mencius assert that animals (being uneducated) do not recognize the parent/child bond, but in making this claim, they use ambiguously gendered terms that can be read to say only that animals overlook the father/son bond. In this way, the texts evade the possible counter-evidence of female animals feeding their young, while preserving the original contrast.
The paper builds upon recent scholarship that finds the Mencius more sympathetic to maternal ("natural?") virtues, but its overall claim that filial piety is modeled on female and animal feeding-habits seems applicable even to the Xunzi.
The Naturalness of Filial Piety: A Study of Tales of Filial Animals
Keith Knapp, Citadel
During China’s medieval age (100–900 A.D.), hundreds if not thousands of filial piety stories circulated throughout China. Surprisingly, the protagonists of some accounts are animals, which occasions a number of questions. Since Chinese writers did not think that animals had moral reasoning, they undoubtedly thought that filial piety was instinctual to the animals in the stories. But, were the authors commenting on animal nature, or were the filial beasts merely rhetorical props? If they were not merely props, did the authors believe that filial piety was instinctual to all animals, or only to certain types? By inference, were humans filial by nature too? There is no doubt that the animals serve as rhetorical props that are meant to urge people to be filial, since even animals can be so. Nevertheless, many of these tales also seem based on personal observation; hence, the authors truly did believe that at least for some creatures, like crows and monkeys, filial piety was instinctual, while others, such as owls, were instinctually unfilial. For these authors, even though humans were prone to err, they resemble animals that naturally tend to be filial. Thus, people only have to do what is natural to them to be devoted to their parents. What separates animal filial piety from its human counterpart, though, is that due to their lack of the Rites, animals are only filial to their mothers.
All Natural Buddhas: The Rhetoric of Nature in Early Chan Literature
Alan Cole, Lewis & Clark College
It is commonly assumed that Chan represents a hybrid form of Buddhism that developed, in part, through incorporating a Chinese aesthetic for nature. This paper questions this assumption by arguing that nature motifs in the earliest Chan texts are not really about nature per se, but serve to sanitize sectarian claims being made at court. Rereading early Chan genealogies and hagiographies, I will show that the image of rustic origins served primarily as an alibi for the very literature that was constructing the Chan masters. Once recontextualized within the eighth-century struggles over Buddhist leadership, literary efforts to cloak various masters in rustic outfits appear as a particularly crucial gesture within the attempt to promote supposedly apolitical "Chinese buddhas" as suitable national teachers (guo shi). Thus, ironically, claims to naturalism, i.e., love of manual labor and a disdain for literature, appear calculated to have maximum impact at court. Equally ironic, it was by recycling stock nature motifs from pre-Buddhist literature that Chan authors constructed images of the "all natural" masters who supposedly owned perfect enlightenment apart from the literary tradition and competitive society. More than anything, these naturalisms set the masters apart from the sophisticated court authors who were constructing the images of just those masters.
The Moral Aspect of Qing Fox Spirits
Charles Hammond, Southern Illinois University
Compilations of stories in classical Chinese about unusual phenomena refer to various baleful (yao) creatures, the best known of which is probably the fox spirit (huli jing). Qing texts such as Pu Songling’s (1640–1715) Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from Make-do Studio), Ji Yun’s (1724–1805) Yuewei caotang biji (Jottings from the Thatch Hut of Close Observations), and He Bang’e’s (fl. 1736–ca. 1779) Yetan suilu (Casual Records of Night Talks) include many such stories. Not only do the stories themselves implicitly reveal Qing moral attitudes, but the compilers of such stories often explicitly discuss the details of the plots in moral terms. In some stories, the baleful fox serves as a counter-example of how not to behave, and in others, the occasional virtuous fox ironically serves as a model for proper human moral behavior. Other stories show how an affinity from a previous lifetime (yuanfen) may also protect the human in an encounter with a fox spirit, suggesting that such a relationship has a sacred character. Aside from such affinities, what causes a baleful influence to appear before someone is that person’s moral deficit: virtue is what enables people to withstand such baleful influences.
Organizer: Elisabeth Köll, Case Western Reserve University
Chair: William Kirby, Harvard University
Discussant: Linda Grove, Sophia University
Keywords: China, history, transportation and communication, 20th century.
Recent research on twentieth-century China has called for crossing conceptual and territorial boundaries and better integration of local histories with the national narrative. In direct response, this panel seeks to address the development of transportation and communication in China from the last decades of the 19th century to the end of WWII through approaches that are sector-specific (steamships, railways, bicycles, and telecomm-unications) as well as interregional (the Yangzi river area, the provinces along the Tianjin-Pukou railway in northern and central China, Manchuria, and major urban centers).
Two papers use a political/economic perspective on transportation and telecommunication: Reinhardt’s paper shows how state policies turned the development of the steamship business into an anti-colonial, nationalist cause, while Yang’s paper analyses the attempt of the Japanese occupiers to gain control over China’s telecommunication network for war-related, political purposes. The other two papers use a socio-cultural/economic focus in their discussions: Rhoads explores the history of the bicycle as a consumer good in 20th-century China, while Köll discusses the social and economic impact of the Tianjin-Pukou railway with regard to its workers, passengers, and residents along the line. By discussing the emergence of modern transportation and communication in the context of nation building, different political agendas, social mobility, and economic ramifications, the papers offer fresh perspectives across time and space.
All papers are based on recent archival research in China and Japan and present the work of three young scholars at the beginning of their careers and the new research project of one senior scholar. The group brings together one Chinese, two American, and one European scholar teaching in the U.S.
Steamship, Semi-Colony, and Nation: The Politics of the Steamship in Qing and Republican China, 1860–1937
Anne Reinhardt, University of Rochester
As a novel transport technology introduced to China in the mid-nineteenth century, the steamship made coastal and river navigation faster and more predictable, and altered relationships of trade, travel, space, and time between places along shipping routes. Yet the steamship’s impact on everyday life in China was shaped significantly by political factors. The steamship was brought to China by foreign navies and traders intent on economic expansion into the Qing empire, and as steam navigation became common in Chinese waters in the 1860s, steamships could not be isolated as a technological variable independent of the political struggles between expanding foreign powers and the Qing dynasty (and subsequent Chinese governments). This paper examines the steamship as a site of political contestation under semi-colonialism in the Qing and Republican periods, as well as how these political conflicts shaped the actual impact of steamship technology in China.
The paper will focus on the evolution of Chinese government policy from the Qing dynasty’s attempts to limit steam navigation to the open treaty ports in the 1860s—thereby subsuming the steamship into the treaty system—to Republican efforts to make shipping a site of broad-based anti-colonial nationalist activity, articulated as "shipping rights recovery" (shouhui hangquan). The paper will also address the effects of the steamship on the Yangzi River in particular, as well as the process of technology transfer under semi-colonial conditions. Finally, it will make the argument that the steamship is a useful site from which to re-examine the dynamics of semi-colonialism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China.
Cycles of Cathay: The Bicycle in Twentieth-Century China
Edward J. M. Rhoads, University of Texas, Austin
In China, bicycles were as ubiquitous in the second half of the twentieth century as rickshaws had been in the first half. However, whereas the rickshaw has attracted considerable attention from writers and scholars, the same cannot be said of the bicycle. This paper is a preliminary attempt at a history of the bicycle in China.
Bicycles were first introduced to China in the 1890s during the "bicycle craze" in Europe and the United States. For the next half-century most bicycles in China were imported from abroad, particularly Britain, Germany, and Japan. In the late Qing and early Republic—before the introduction of the automobile—the bicycle was often viewed as a symbol of modernity. The total number of bicyclists, however, was relatively small throughout the Republican era. One reason was the bicycle’s expense, which was beyond the reach of all but upper-class urban Chinese and foreigners. Another reason was the availability of alternative means of transportation, such as buses, trolleys, and especially rickshaws.
Only after the Communists came to power in 1949 did the bicycle achieve its importance as a mode of personal transportation. Rickshaws for hire were condemned as the quintessence of human exploitation, while public transportation in the form of buses and trolleys was then still very inadequate. Bicycles offered an obvious alternative. However, due to the U.S.-imposed embargo on foreign trade, they could no longer be imported. So, the new regime, as a part of its industrialization program, actively promoted the manufacture of bicycles. It succeeded in meeting the huge domestic demand for bicycles in the late 1980s—just as, ironically, they were about to be overtaken by scooters and motorcycles.
Modernization on Track: Social Mobility and Economic Development along the Tianjin-Pukou Line in Republican China
Elisabeth Köll, Case Western Reserve University
Existing studies on railways in China have predominantly focused on the diplomatic, political, and macro-economic role of railroads in the context of the presence of foreign powers and their colonial interests in the late-19th and early-20th century. Very little has been written on the social history of the railway in China.
Using the Tianjin-Pukou line, linking North China with the Yangzi area, as a focus, this paper discusses the social transformation of Chinese society, meaning here the people who built, worked, traveled, and lived along this railway. Issues such as new employment and career opportunities due to the railroad, its impact on urbanization and commercialization will be discussed as well as the question of how Western concepts of discipline, efficiency, and corporate culture shaped the railway as a business enterprise. The railway as a metaphor for modernity and social progress will be explored in different contexts such as class, gender, urban and rural integration, and whether and how they transformed over time.
I will argue that major railways like the Tianjin-Pukou line turned into successful business enterprises in the late 1920s and 1930s due to the improved legal and financial environment. Industrial discipline and modern technology were combined with Chinese personnel management, creating Western-style railway companies with "traditional" characteristics of the Chinese firm. At the same time, railways increasingly influenced Chinese popular culture through literature and film. The Tianjin-Pukou line reinforced industrialization in already existing urban centers and commercialization in rural areas that were able to link themselves to the long-distance transportation network.
Fragmentation vs. Integration: Telecommunications in Occupied China, 1931–1945
Daqing Yang, George Washington University
Since its introduction in the late-19th century, the strategic value of the telegraph came to be gradually appreciated by Chinese government elites, whereas the business class in coastal urban centers embraced the telephone for its convenience. Despite the strong foreign presence in both sectors, Chinese came to play an increasingly prominent role in telecommunications in the early-20th century.
This paper will discuss how during the period of Japanese occupation, from the invasion of Northeast China in 1931 until 1945, telecommunications infrastructure was expected to facilitate Japan’s political control and economic exploitation of the occupied areas. Out of political and economic considerations, Japan departed from its long tradition of government monopoly and set up three regional telecommunications "joint ventures." The Japanese installed new long distance communication cables over trunk lines between Nanjing and Shanghai, Manchuria and the Tianjin-Beijing region. In order to broaden public usage so as to increase revenue, Japanese and their Chinese collaborators experimented with new Chinese telegraphic codes. The new facsimile technology was considered a potential means to reduce the communication language barrier between Japan and its occupied areas in China.
As I will argue, the Japanese occupation altered the composition as well as traffic patterns of Chinese telegraphic communication. The largely political need to maintain three separate political entities, and hence separate companies, however, made it impossible to produce a single integrated telecommunications network in China as desired by Japan’s own engineers. However, integrating local telecommunications operations into three regional networks laid the groundwork, if inadvertently, for the post-1945 Chinese construction of a truly national telecomm-unications network.
Organizer: Daisy S. Y. Ng, National University of Singapore
Chair: Emma Teng, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Discussant: Yue Meng, University of California, Irvine
Keywords: Chineseness, language, translation, film.
This panel explores the construction of "Chineseness" in literature, translation and films ranging from the 19th century to the present. The three papers analyze the respective processes of transplantation, translation and transmigration of an imagined "Chineseness" in diverse geographical, historical and cultural contexts. Using specific examples of cultural productions from cross-cultural situations and multicultural environments, the panelists discuss issues surrounding cultural identity, hybridity, diaspora, Orientalism and Occidentalism. Alison Groppe’s paper shows language to be a site of contention between homogeneity (the ideological promotion of Mandarin as proper Chinese in official discourse) and hybridity (the multifarious language practice of Chinese dialect-speakers) in fostering a local Chinese cultural identity within the multiracial societies of Singapore and Malaysia. James St. André’s paper examines the formation of an ambivalent view of China by the West through translation of the Chinese language into English in the 19th century. The hybrid languages created by the early translators to pass as "Chinese" in the English texts became the standard for what was regarded as "Chinese" in later translations, which also gave rise to a new poetic medium in English. Daisy Ng’s paper analyzes the mirroring of Occidentalism and Orientalism in Hong Kong cinema’s stereotypical representation of Chinatowns and overseas Chinese communities. Paradoxically, Orientalism is manifested as self-exoticism in Hong Kong cinema’s Occidentalist imagination upon the very premise that its imagination of the West is made possible only through a limiting imagination of the "Chinatown Chinese" in the West.
Hybridity vs. Purity: Expressing Chineseness in Singapore and Malaysia
Alison M. Groppe, Harvard University
Given the multicultural environment in which Malaysian and Singaporean Chinese societies have evolved, we might expect contemporary Malaysian/ Singaporean Chinese identities to exhibit a high degree of cultural hybridity. Certainly the Straits or Baba Chinese culture that flourished in colonial Malaya in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provides evidence that the intermingling of different ethnic groups, specifically Malay and Fujianese Chinese, can result in the development of hybrid cultural forms, the Baba Malay language being one example. In recent years, however, a more traditionally defined version of Chineseness—marked especially by the promotion of standard Mandarin for younger Chinese speakers as opposed to the various southern Chinese dialects used by the older generations—has restricted the possibilities for hybridization to symbolize a localized Chinese identity. This paper will consider the forces that inhibit the formation of hybrid cultural forms by looking at language use among the writers in contemporary Malaysia and Singapore. While an effort to foster a kind of linguistically-hybridized writing style inspired by the range of languages and Chinese dialects spoken in these societies has marked the work of some writers, other pressures, such as the concern to protect the "Chinese" language/culture (represented by Mandarin) from the encroachment of English or Malay, the ambition to assert a "more pure" (educated in the classical canon) Chinese identity, and the technical challenges of expressing heteroglossia in written form, have limited the extent to which linguistic hybridization is possible and/or seen as a desirable expression of local Chinese culture.
"Long Time No See, Coolie": Passing as Chinese through Translation
James G. St. André, National University of Singapore
The first generation of British translators faced the daunting task of representing the Chinese language to their fellow countrymen. This process was not a simple one, and there were many disagreements as to the "proper" translation of both specific terms and of the best way to deal with differences in syntax. In this paper, I will examine how early translators such as Sir George Staunton, Sir John Francis Davis, P. P. Thoms, Walter Medhurst, William Milne, Robert Morrison, Samuel Beal, James Legge and Herbert Giles created at least two distinct models of the Chinese language in English: one abstruse, reflecting Enlightenment ideals of the Chinese, and one pidgin, reflecting the emerging nineteenth-century negative view of China. These hybrid languages were neither Chinese nor English, sharing characteristics of both languages, but both sought to pass as "Chinese" through the use of specific linguistic practices. In turn, the creation of these hybrid languages allowed later writers such as Ezra Pound to translate Cathay (1915) and later Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot and The Great Digest (1947), and create a new poetic medium in English, and Ernest Bramah to write Kai Lung’s Golden Hours (1922), in which the language not only of the characters, but also of the narrator, passes as "Chinese" to the British and American public. This happens in a closed loop where what is represented as Chinese becomes the standard for judging what can pass as Chinese.
Chinatown and Occidental Imagination in Hong Kong Cinema
Daisy S. Y. Ng, National University of Singapore
Mainstream Hong Kong cinema has a tradition of portraying Chinese immigrants and overseas Chinese, particularly those in North America, as "Chinatown Chinese" rather than "uptown Chinese." The portrayal of overseas Chinese communities in numerous Hong Kong films is complicit in stereotyping Chinatown as a criminal underworld, which the Hollywood cinema has long been accused of doing. However, Hong Kong cinema’s stereotypical characterization of Chinatown as a dangerous place of gang activities, drug trafficking, prostitution, and exploitation of illegal immigrants is generally not an end in itself but part and parcel of its Occidentalist imagination of the West, especially of major cities like New York where there is a sizable population of both legal and illegal Chinese immigrants. An exemplary case is Clara Law’s Farewell, China (1990). The film portrays New York City as a maze into which a woman from China has mysteriously disappeared. The labyrinthine New York Chinatown is represented as the underbelly of the city, nexus of the violence and corruption reigning beneath its cosmopolitan sheen. By analyzing the images of Chinatown in mainstream Hong Kong movies, this paper examines the dialectical relation of Orientalism and Occidentalism: how Orientalism is manifested as auto-exoticism in the portrayal of Chinese emigrants in mainstream Hong Kong cinema, contributing to the construction of Orientalist images of the Chinese in Hollywood movies; and how Occidentalism is expressed as imagination of the West paradoxically through Orientalist representation of Chinatown and overseas Chinese communities.
Organizer: Eileen J. Cheng, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair: Joan Judge, University of California, Santa Barbara
Discussant: Mary B. Rankin, Independent Scholar
Keywords: late Qing, gender, genre, nationalism, identity.
Through the use of existing and previously overlooked sources and a variety of innovative perspectives, this panel offers a radical departure from conventional scholarship on Qiu Jin (1875–1907). Qiu Jin has become an iconic image, a revolutionary martyr canonized by both nationalists and communists. What made her such a remarkable figure in her time, however, is not solely nor even predominantly her role as a revolutionary, as much scholarship suggests; it is, rather, the ways in which she was able to forge and negotiate a variety of public identities including that of a writer, anarchist, revolutionary, and feminist.
The panel explores the complexities and contrad-ictions of Qiu Jin’s multiple identities through a variety of perspectives and sources. These include: an analysis of the material details behind and the gendered and cultural implications of photographic images of Qiu Jin in light of previously overlooked Japanese sources; an examination of Qiu Jin’s body as a site of her own self-creation and a source of widespread controversy through memoirs left by her contemporaries; an exploration of the intersection between gender and genre in Qiu Jin’s writings and in the late Qing more generally through a close reading of her shi, ci, songs, political essays, private correspondences, public speeches, etc.; and an inquiry into her subjectivity as it emerged in her autobiographical writings. In allowing the complexities and contradictions of Qiu Jin’s multiple identities to emerge, the panel will also offer new insights on the interconnections between gender and nationalism in the late Qing.
Three Images of Qiu Jin: Reassessing a Cultural Icon in Light of Japanese Sources
Joan Judge, University of California, Santa Barbara
Qiu Jin was a revolutionary cainü (woman of talent) who used her classical education to make radical political and social statements in a number of different registers. Her most striking and memorable statements were made with her own body, however. This was a highly self-conscious act refracted and sustained through a number of media. Qiu’s cross-gender and cross-cultural poses were statements addressed not only to her contemporaries but to posterity in the form of photographs, poems written to those photographs, and lithographs made from those photographs. The most striking of Qiu’s performed identities included Western male, Japanese female, and Chinese male.
In this paper, I use Japanese sources to probe the material details of these three images. These sources, which include recollections of Qiu’s Japanese acquaintances and teachers, have not been taken into account in any serious way by Western or Chinese scholars. They are valuable for a number of reasons: they provide concrete details not only about Qiu’s experience in Tokyo but the preceding and following years, they are less subject to the revolutionary teleology which has shaped most Chinese writing on Qiu, and they offer glimpses into her daily and emotional life which other sources are silent on. I will use these materials to examine the cultural and gender complexities of the three images of Qiu Jin—in a Western suit, a Japanese kimono, and a mandarin’s gown. In so doing, I will also probe the possible meanings of Qiu’s obsession with historical visibility and revolutionary martyrdom.
The Menacing Public Body: Qiu Jin’s Troubling Gender
Eileen J. Cheng, University of California, Los Angeles
Scholarship on Qiu Jin has tended to appropriate her martial body as a symbol of nationalism and revolution. Such treatment, however, largely ignores the complexities behind her identity as a woman and revolutionary, as well as the tactical nature of Qiu Jin’s self-presentations. What is at stake in such occlusions?
This paper will focus on Qiu Jin’s body—as a site which Qiu Jin manipulated in the process of personal and political transformation, as well as a site that generated widespread controversy. Qiu Jin’s writings lament the exclusion of women from public spaces; her cross-dressing and adoption of a male persona served as a means for her to negotiate and circumvent such exclusions. That Qiu Jin’s public and political identity was forged by a visual gender transformation of sorts points to the dilemma of a public woman in the late Qing: her voice and public legitimacy had to be mediated through a renunciation of sexuality and the female body. Yet, despite and in spite of her gender transformation, Qiu Jin’s body continued to be a site of attention, fascination, and controversy throughout her lifetime. That subsequent scholarship has overlooked this issue may be due to several factors: traditional notions of gender, in which the woman’s body and its publicity is linked with social and moral bankruptcy; as well as to the fact that Qiu Jin’s public body and her ability to transgress and blur gender boundaries may have proved a menace to prevailing gender discourses.
Herself Multiplied: Qiu Jin in Different Genres
Ying Hu, University of California, Irvine
Like her contemporary writers male and female of the late Qing, Qiu Jin wrote in many different genres: traditional poetry (shi, ci and ge), tanci, private correspondence, public speeches, newspaper articles and editorials, etc. In each of these genres, a somewhat different Qiu Jin emerges, sometimes a fairly conventional cainü, other times an anarchist/feminist/ revolutionary. That different facets of the self would appear in different genres is hardly new, as generations of literati before her had indeed exploited. What this paper examines is the precise point at which gender intersects with each genre. In other words, this paper asks the following question: at a time when definitions of the female gender was particularly unstable and fluid, how does each genre facilitate or hinder specific constructions of gender?
This paper compares Qiu Jin’s use of traditional genres, such as shi and ci, with the gravity of their conventional usage and established formula, and her use of new and/or imported genres, such as speeches and newspaper articles, whose attraction was precisely their lack of sedimented weight of tradition. I argue, through the example of Qiu Jin, that the short period of the turn of the 20th century afforded women writers a uniquely wide range of literary tools of self-construction, a range that was arguably unprecedented and certainly not to be repeated in the rest of the twentieth century.
Woman, Writing and National Embodiment: A Study of Qiu Jin’s Life and Autobiographical Writing
Lingzhen Wang, Brown University
Since 1907, the year she was beheaded in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, Qiu Jin has been praised and studied as a symbol of the republican revolutionary cause and as a pioneer of Chinese women’s emancipation. Admired as a nationalist and feminist role-model, Qiu Jin was also a talented and prolific writer who left behind numerous poems (shi), lyrics (ci), political articles, familiar essays, song lyrics, and an autobiographical tan-ci fiction. These works stretch from her girlhood to her execution and show very different self-images, desires, and ideals at various stages in her life, indicating a constant self-negotiation and transformation. Even though Qiu Jin ended her life as a nationalist revolutionary, her journey through life was much more complicated than can be defined by any single term.
In this paper, through studying Qiu Jin’s life and autobiographical writing, mostly poems and lyrics, I emphasize Qiu Jin’s emotional life and her subjective and material negotiations with diverse historical forces at different stages of her life, untangle the constructed myth of her as a self-determined national hero and revolutionary martyr, and illustrate her personal struggles over the available choices for women at that time and over ideas and the embodiment of a nation, woman, and self. I will also briefly examine the historical significance and contingency of feminism and nationalism in a specific context—China at the turn of the century, and their particular relationship to a particular woman, Qiu Jin.
Organizer: Christopher Lupke, Washington State University
Chair and Discussant: Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, University of California, Davis
By examining films of the 1990s from Taiwan and the PRC, each of which recalls prior events in the modern history of "China," the four papers in this panel form a dialogue on how this past is rendered. Such films have questioned the casting of the past in terms of nostalgia, a mode that appeals at least as much or more to Western sensibilities as it does to Chinese. Each paper offers an interpretation of this turn away from nostalgia and attendant concerns such as the connection with the United States/Soviet Union, the reshaping of heroism, aesthetics, and national heritage.
Christopher Lupke suggests that A Brighter Summer Day portrays the imitative minutiae of American culture in Taiwan in terms of filmic modes that run against the pervasive Hollywood grain, thus confounding normative film appreciation. Xinmin Liu shows how shifts in attitude toward the past reflect the emergence of new visions of progress in China, ones that do not privilege the West as an apotheosis for Chinese modernization. While the move away from narratives of "noble sufferings" that Liu detects may not be evident in The Postman, the subject of Wendy Larson’s paper, Larson’s discussion of the past as merely a "trace," as well as the depiction of claustrophobic spaces of the present, undercuts the idealization of the protagonist, a latter-day Lei Feng. Finally, Nicholas Kaldis reads Hou Hsiao-hsien’s hermetic interiors of old Shanghai as a critique of exoticized images of historical China, so craved by the West.
Jailhouse ROC: Edward Yang and the Mimesis of America in Martial Law Taiwan
Christopher Lupke, Washington State University
From the Elvis Presley allusion in the title of Edward Yang’s landmark film A Brighter Summer Day (1991) onward, the audience knows it is engaged with American popular culture. Rock and roll classics, penny loafers and ducktails barely conceal the cascade of binary power relationships (America/Taiwan, military/civilian, adult/child, male/female) reinforced by the neo-colonial framework of the Cold War. Yang’s film epitomizes a crisis of subject matter versus technique: it interrogates the Hollywood aesthetic and thus the "mimesis effect," the cultural imitation of the U.S., even as the camera eye tracks the love story of two teenagers caught in a turf war between rival gangs.
But this is no teenage beach blanket romance: the male bonds in the film, overwrought with masculinity, are also unmistakably homosocial, since, as the protagonist’s father fumes, "women can’t understand the affairs of men." In defiance of Hollywood and audience expectation, the film offers no sympathetic hero, no neat ending, and no musical overlay to cue audience reaction. The mise en scene, camera deployment, pace, and subject matter are contrived to unsettle received notions of film appreciation and in turn have established Yang as one of the biggest bad boys the global film industry has seen in quite a while, and one of its most respected. Through the use of formal film analysis and postcolonial theory, this paper proposes to disentangle Yang’s parable of hermeneutic and physical violence.
Noble Sufferings? Probing the "End" in Memorial-izing the Cultural Revolution
Xinmin Liu, Wesleyan University
If critiquing Fukuyama’s "end" of history means to challenge the neo-liberals’ celebration of the global triumph of capitalism, we must confront the misuse of political memoirs as noble sufferings in Chinese cinema, and question their complicity in tailoring China’s Cultural Revolution to fit the "dark age" narrative. Recent films, such as In the Heat of the Sun (1997) and The Making of Steel (1997) depart from the binary of the past (read "repressive socialist China") vs. the present (read "free and liberal West"). These films prove that the Cultural Revolution is as complex, ambivalent yet vivacious as any historical traumas.
Jiang Wen adapts the travesty of cynical pranksters in Wang Shuo’s original fiction into a genuine coming-of-age tale for Beijing teenagers, while Lu Xuechang traces a Beijing youth’s quest to reconnect with a nurturing mentor via nostalgic rediscovery of a past Soviet hero. Both films focus on adolescent figures whose rites of passage coincide with the Cultural Revolution. Without much parental or societal restraint, these youths set forth on a guileless and bumpy passage through familiar rituals of youth: bittersweet taste of first love, pleasure in misbehavior, disdain for their parents, playful mimicry of bygone heroism. They grow amidst pain, bewilderment and even violence, but not devoid of their individual character or a core of decency and integrity. Thanks to cinematic double-endings, these recent films reveal a growing awareness of alternative routes of historical progress, of reconnecting with nurturing communities and following different teleological "ends."
Lei Feng in the Postmodern Age: He Yi’s The Postman
Wendy Larson, University of Oregon
Although the 1995 film Youchai (The Postman) by Sixth Generation director He Yi (He Jianjun) never refers to the Cultural Revolution, its main character, Xiao Dou, is a New Age Maoist who, like his model Lei Feng, wants only to Serve the People. The film is the director’s claim that although severely truncated by contemporary conditions, revolutionary culture—with its notions of collectivism, moral social behavior, and self-sacrifice—is still relevant in contemporary China. Although the film’s portrayal of work is, on the surface, almost opposite to what we find in ideal Maoist images, in Xiao Dou’s attempt to right what has gone wrong we see utopian idealism underlying his concept of what work should be.
The seemingly blasé work environment that has replaced the Maoist vision of passion and positive social change is actually a physical and mental space—the only one in the film, and one presented with both irony and hope—where positive social change can be conceptualized and put into action. To imply as He Yi does that spatial organization has determined human consciousness and limited agency or even any thought of agency guts traditional ideas of authority, diffusing it into buildings, the ground, images in the sky, and the environment in general. The film steers clear of several current approaches to revolutionary culture, including nostalgia, eliminated first through a relentlessly dark portrayal of society’s shrunken spaces, and second through its presentation of the past as a mysterious trace rather than as a fully imagined and embodied presence.
Orientalism against Itself? Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai
Nicholas A. Kaldis, State University of New York, Binghamton
Taiwan director Hou Hsiao-hsien earned his reputation with a series of films chronicling post-WWII political and social changes in Taiwan. Until recently, his films had rarely dealt (directly) with Mainland China, and then only within the context of a primarily Taiwan-centered narrative.
Hou’s 1998 film, Flowers of Shanghai, however, breaks with two of his established trademarks. First of all, the entire film takes place in late 19th-century Shanghai; secondly, it is Hou’s first film to totally eschew on-location filming in favor of studio sets. When a mainland-born Taiwan director makes his first "all-China" film, set in the pre-communist-era and shot entirely in Taiwan, a host of questions can be raised. Issues of nationalism and the "Taiwan" question are certainly relevant, as are questions regarding both the director’s contemporary historical context and his vision/representation of late Qing China. However, owing to Hou’s exclusive focus on events in the inner chambers of a few upper-class brothels (huafang), I wish to discuss Flowers of Shanghai in relation to the ongoing critique of films representing traditional Chinese society and customs and their reception by Western audiences. These critiques often focus on the director’s "self-orientalizing" and/or "cultural exhibitionism."
I will argue that Flowers of Shanghai should be seen as an artistic intervention into this debate. I will demonstrate that both the content and cinematic form of Hou’s film constitute a sustained reversal of the commodification of nostalgic, exoticized images of historical China for Western viewers’ visual pleasure and consumption.
Organizer: Daniel James Meissner, Marquette University
Chair: Robert P. Gardella, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy
Discussant: Carl A. Trocki, Queensland University of Technology
Keywords: modern China, globalization, commercial history, development.
Although China’s capitalist development and integration into the global economy are popular contemporary topics, they are issues with deep roots. Well before the mid-nineteenth century, control of many key commodity markets in China was being challenged by highly standardized, foreign processed products. As competition for global markets intensified during the late Qing and Republican periods, domestic production and distribution of key commodities in China were seriously affected. Market control slipped out of Chinese hands and into those of foreign producers, exporters, or (in some cases) smugglers, whose products proved more competitive in terms of quality and price. Foreign domination of these commodity markets was a blow not only to private enterprise in China, but to government finances which depended on commercial taxes and duties as stable sources of income.
This panel examines the development and distribution pattern of four key commodities—tea, sugar, opium, and flour—which represent a cross-section of China’s import, export, and domestic trade, from Yunnan to Shanghai and Manchuria to Guangzhou. Each of these commodities was a major commercial product during the late Qing and Republican periods, and each was significantly affected by China’s integration in the world market. The individual panel papers explain how private and government objectives converged at this critical period to effect changes in the production and distribution of these key commodities in order to improve standards, enhance quality, and re-establish control over domestic and international markets. Finally, as this panel demonstrates, the economic history of these commodities provides new insight into the role of commerce as a powerful political tool during this critical period of early globalization.
Chinese Responses to the Globalization of Tea Production, 1865–1930
David D. Buck, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
After 1865, British producers in India surpassed the Chinese as the largest source of British tea imports. Over the remainder of the 19th century, Japanese and British tea from Ceylon further eroded China’s previous monopoly in the world tea export market. These non-Chinese producers had close links with new innovations in machine processing and quality control, as well as marketing systems based on brand names and standardized packaging. Although the world market for tea grew rapidly in the late 19th century, total Chinese tea exports entered a serious decline.
This paper details the responses of Chinese producers and the Qing state to this changing world market. Following the earlier work of Robert Gardella, this paper explores the Chinese response in three separate tea-growing regions, Minan and Minbei in Fujian and the Qimen region of Anhui and Jiangxi. One effort came from Qing officials who reduced tax levies in hopes of reviving the trade. Foreign tea merchants worked through their compradors and other Chinese business associates to compete with the new Anglo-Indian producers. Also Chinese entrepreneurs, usually in conjunction with Chinese tea merchants in Shanghai, Fuzhou or Quanzhou, made significant improvements in tea processing and marketing in order to compete. The paper ends with the efforts of the new Guomintang government to impose state capitalism as a means to revive the tea trade after 1930.
High Tariffs and Illicit Imports of Sugar in North and South China, 1933–1937
Emily M. Hill, Queensland University of Technology
This paper argues that the organized smuggling of sugar was a significant foundation of the autonomy of the Japanese forces in North China during the 1930s. Seemingly innocuous, sugar was the most valuable of the imports controlled by the Japanese commanders’ "special trade" on the eve of war. In Guangdong, for example, Japanese shipments became dominant in an established sugar smuggling business which had helped that province maintain its independence from Nanjing. Relying on profits from the illicit trade, Cantonese commanders were said to "feed their armies with sugar."
Illicit imports to China under protection of the Japanese military presence reached a peak in the spring of 1936, when national tariff revenue seemed to decline alarmingly due to losses to smugglers. The smuggling of white sugar, with its assessed import tariff of 175 percent, composed a significant percentage of this lost revenue, and severely affected the financial stability of National China, which relied on Maritime Customs collections as its most important source of income. Moreover, these losses also concerned China’s creditors, as most of the national foreign debt was formally secured by the Maritime Customs collection.
As well as exploring military logistics and politics along northern and southern stretches of the China coast on the eve of war, the paper places supply and demand in China’s foreign trade in the perspective of depression conditions in world trade. It can be seen that the pressure of over-capacity in sugar milling in Java, Taiwan, and the Philippines during the 1930s was a contributing cause of the Sino-Japanese conflict.
Global Society and Local Society: Development and Underdevelopment of Native Opium Cultivation in Late-Nineteenth-Century China
Man-houng Lin, Academia Sinica
As the annual Maritime Custom reports of Zhifu of 1875 pointed out, the high price of Indian opium caused by its monopoly stimulated opium cultivation among the Chinese. This paper will show: how price mechanisms stimulated native opium production in China from the 1820s onward, which reached about nine times the level of imported opium around 1906; how such cash crops eased the miseries of China’s many peripheral areas which had been devastated by civil war between the 1850 and the early 1870s; and how they reinforced interregional trade links between the peripheral areas and core areas of China that had been severed by civil war.
Lin Zexu stated in his memorial of 1833, "comparing the two evils, if people grew opium themselves, the money they gained would stay in China, and . . . eventually it would be better if it didn’t go abroad." The concern for financial security over that of health in China was, however, increasingly changed by the global opinion toward opium—from deeming it a medicine to a poison. The spread of opium smoking by native opium cultivation became increasingly described as a national shame.
Between stimulating the national economy and deepening the national shame, this paper will point out how the global society created a difficult tension for late nineteenth-century China.
Imports and Industrialization: China’s "War" with American Flour, 1870–1910
Daniel James Meissner, Marquette University
In 1870, American west coast millers and exporters shipped over 150,000 barrels of flour to China, where it found a ready market among foreigners and native urban elites. Since China’s traditional millstone technology was incapable of producing flour equal in quality and price to American imports, the continued expansion of this trade—and control of these markets—was limited only by American productivity and resolve. By the turn of the century, west coast millers had conscientiously built the trade into a vital market for surplus production, flooding China’s costal and inland urban markets with well over 1,000,000 barrels of flour annually. As one of the country’s most valuable export commodities in the Asian trade, flour translated into high profits for American firms, and conversely, represented a significant economic incursion and silver drain for China.
This paper focuses on the response of Chinese entrepreneurs to the growing domination of native markets by American flour. It examines the failure of early efforts to mill quality flour by modifying traditional technology, and details the introduction of new technology, which provided the means to compete with imported flour. It also traces the growth of the modern Chinese flour milling industry, and examines the factors which contributed to its successful re-capturing of urban markets, long dominated by American flour. Finally, the paper places the growth of this industry within the context of a patriotic movement to combat the effects of globalization through import substitution industrialization, in order to enhance the wealth and protect the political sovereignty of China.
Organizer: Eugenio Menegon, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Chair: Charlotte Furth, University of Southern California
Discussant: Paola Paderni, University of Napoli
Keywords: China, virginity, chastity, gender, erotic literature, law, religion, Christianity.
In Western societies since the advent of Christianity, virginity has been represented as one of the highest forms of moral virtue available to women. In China, the "Confucian" imperative of filiality elevated marriage and reproduction to a dominant position. Therefore, especially in late imperial times, chastity of a married, widowed, or betrothed woman, rather than virginity, was considered the core female virtue.
For this reason, scholars have so far paid little attention to the meanings of virginity in the Chinese context. This panel considers virginity as a cultural construct revealing unexpected Chinese expressions of gender and identity from the perspectives of history, law, religion, and literature.
Janet Theiss explores how bodily definitions of chastity and the concept of virginity were salient both in social practice and in Qing law. Paola Zamperini examines representations of virginity and its loss in Qing vernacular fiction as reflections of male desire and of the "socialization" of the female body. Eugenio Menegon considers the disputed meaning of virginity and filiality in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Catholic conversion in southern China.
From these different angles, virginity emerges as an indicator of boundaries between socially acceptable and transgressive female behaviors. This examination of virginity also offers a novel perspective on male and female attitudes towards the body, and on women’s social practices and cultural representations associated with marriage, public morality, erotic liaisons, and religious cultivation.
Presentations will be kept to 15 minutes, and the discussant’s response to 25 minutes, leaving ample time for discussion. The role of the discussant will be not so much to summarize and critique the papers, but rather to raise broad questions that will tie the papers together and stimulate a lively dialogue with the audience. Given her expertise on law and sexual morality in the Qing period, Paola Paderni is ideally suited to the role of discussant for this panel.
Virginity and the Body of Law in the Qing
Janet M. Theiss, University of Utah
In late imperial China, the cult of female chastity shaped notions of women’s sexual morality. Chastity was defined in relation to marriage as sexual loyalty to one husband and thus virginity, per se, was not the core female virtue. The quintessential icon of chastity was not the unmarried virgin, but the married or widowed woman, or betrothed maiden, who defended her sexual chastity against assault, insult and remarriage. Yet bodily definitions of chastity, and the concept of virginity, in particular, were salient both in Qing law and in social practice. This paper will examine how the embodiment of virtue for unmarried and married women was understood in Qing law by adjudicating magistrates and by ordinary people.
Illicit sex with girls under twelve was, by definition, coerced because they were considered to be sexually immature and incapable of engaging in consensual sex. Chastity was, in a sense, irrelevant for them. However, most girls did not consummate marriage until after age fifteen. For sexually mature, unmarried women, virginity was the key indicator of chastity. Its loss, even with a fiance, was understood in law and popular mentality to pollute chastity. The social consequences of its loss varied, sometimes harming marriage prospects, sometimes not. Moreover, as chastity could also be impugned through insult or flirtation, many young women defined their virtue not simply by physical virginity, but in a broader social sense. The law construed virginity more narrowly than did popular practice, focusing on penile penetration, often established through medical examination, as the criteria for distinguishing rape and attempted rape.
Bloody Virgins: Sex and Violence in Qing Fiction
Paola Zamperini, University of California, Berkeley
This paper studies representations of virginity and its loss in Qing vernacular fiction. We will first unravel the meanings attached to the virgin body and the way in which they are entangled with contradicting desires. Presented as a powerful object of desire, virginity’s very transitory nature enflames the male imaginary and causes many violent acts. At the same time, the awareness of its sex appeal drives many female characters to manipulate their virginity, blurring the borders between sexual aggression and agency.
Secondly, we shall show how defloration is constructed as the most violent among the different forms of socialization of female (and in some cases male) bodies. Sickness, abuse, social disgrace are often the implications and the consequences that the loss of virginity carry with it for the fictional characters of this period. While for men, sexual relations with a virgin are presented as beneficial and rejuvenating, for women the fall into adult sexuality is often presented as an unavoidable disease that progressively destroys their bodies.
Gender, agency, age, social class, power, control—all these factors determine the way in which a fictional hero or heroine will enter the circuit of adult sexuality. Thus looking at the issue of the sexual socialization of the body in the context of Qing novels will reveal the intricacies of the physical and erotic imaginary of Chinese men (the authors of these sources), while at the same time giving us useful insights into the cultural horizons of China.
Child Bodies, Blessed Bodies: The Contest between Confucian Chastity and Christian Virginity
Eugenio Menegon, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
In late imperial China, to be filial as a woman usually meant accepting marriage and its reproductive necessity in the context of the patriarchal organization of family life. The obedience to one’s husband and his family, especially in the Ming and Qing periods, was even extended beyond the spouse’s death in the institution of chaste widowhood. Women, however, had ways to evade the strictures of married life. One of these ways was religious chastity, as offered in Buddhism and other Chinese religious traditions. However, in China, unlike in the West, women who took religious vows were little concerned with the state of virginity.
In the seventeenth century, when foreign missionaries first introduced the Catholic institution of consecrated religious life to southern Chinese women, they also presented the concept of virginity in the service of God as a desirable prerequisite for novices. These women were known as beatas ("blessed women") in Spanish, and tongzhen or tongshen ("virgins") in Chinese.
In order to legitimize virginity as a virtue and a perpetual state of life for these women, missionaries and their converts had to ingeniously revise the meaning of filiality. To do so, they employed existing circles of meaning about chastity in the Confucian and Buddhist discourses. Concurrently, however, they subtly and unwittingly undermined some of the premises of marriage, chaste widowhood, and male dominance. As a result, Christian virginity became a contested ground among the state, local elites, missionaries and female converts over a period of three centuries (1630s–1950s).
Organizer and Chair: Yan Sun, Gettysburg College
Discussant: Cho-Yun Hsu, University of Pittsburgh
Recent scholarly attention has been given to the relationship between the state-level society in the Central Plain and regional cultures beyond in the 2nd millennium B.C.E. Some authors have even suggested that the Shang and Zhou dynastic peoples in the Central Plain co-existed and interacted with various neighboring groups who had a similar, or at least equally complex, level of societal development.
The papers in the panel will examine the nature and mechanisms of interactions between the Central Plain and regional cultures from archaeological, art historical and historical points of view. How and why the interaction took place and its impact on both sides will be the focus of the panel.
By studying the use and style of bronzes, jade and bone objects as well as bronze inscriptions, the authors will discuss particularly the following issues: how local cultures responded to the cultural and political expansion of the Shang, how and why regional styles of artifacts and decor have been found in Shang royal tombs, how the Zhou exported its elite cultural traditions and how a trading network between north and south China was established. It is hoped that the panel discussion will propose a new theoretical and methodological framework to study the issue of cultural interactions in Bronze Age China.
Shang and Its Northwest Relative: A Comparison of the Carved Bone Spatulas of Qijia and Anyang
Ying Wang, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
The carved bone spatulas were not only excavated exclusively from the royal cemeteries at Anyang, the last Shang center (1300–1046 B.C.E.), but also controlled by the highest-rank male rulers of the Shang. However, these particular artifacts indicate that the Shang had connections with the northwest. The use of bone spatulas for the high-ranking male deceased can be compared to the Qijia Culture (ca. 2500–1500 B.C.E.), which appears to be the only direct connection to this burial custom, among all other cultures, earlier or contemporary, in and outside the late Shang domain.
I will study the distribution patterns of the carved and non-carved bone spatulas at both the Anyang and Qijia sites. I will also study the tombs without spatulas at the Qijia sites, and look for a pattern of burial gift offerings that relate to gender, rank, status, and profession, if any, to the deceased. My study shows that even at the royal center of the late Shang, a culture line can be hypothesized extending back to an earlier culture beyond the Shang domain.
Adoption, Rejection, and Manipulation: Local Strat-egies on the Interaction with the Shang
Yan Sun, Gettysburg College
The late second millennium B.C.E. witnessed the emergence of several regional powers. The Shang centered at the Central Plain was only one of these who had the earliest known history. Beyond this dynastic center, two powerful contemporaries of the Shang were found at Sanxingdui (1500–1000 B.C.E.) in southwestern China and at the Gan River valley in the south named as Wucheng Culture (1500–1200 B.C.E.). Not different from the Shang, these two cultures were supported by the well-developed bronze industry. The Shang style or Shang inspired design was evident on the bronzes in these two regions. Nevertheless, a distinctive local style was also presented on a large number of bronzes that owed little or nothing to the Shang.
Comparative studies of the style and use of the bronzes indicate that regional cultures responded differently to the cultural and political expansion of the Shang. How and why these regional cultures accepted or rejected certain Shang styles from the Central Plain, how this phenomenon was affected by the wax and wane of local powers, and what roles they played in the dynamics of the interactions with the Shang will be the focus of the discussion.
"Barbarians" and Literacy: Evidence of Cultural Exchange from Western Zhou Bronze Inscriptions
Feng Li, Columbia University
The Western Zhou state was from the beginning a mixture of the Zhou people with various ethnic groups. The present paper explores the cultural exchange between the Zhou elite and the political and cultural leaders in the periphery of the Zhou world, through examining bronze inscriptions. The paper focuses on the issue of how literacy was learned and transmitted from the Zhou elite to the so-called "barbarians," and identifies a number of inscriptions that were cast by individuals of possible "barbarian" background. These inscriptions and the bronzes on which they were cast are evidence of cultural transformation and assimilation in pre-Qin China. They also provide us with new standards for authenticating ancient Chinese bronzes and bronze inscriptions.
Notes on the Collared Disk-Ring from Bronze Sites in Yunnan
TzeHuey Chiou-Peng, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Artifacts excavated from the Bronze Age sites of Yunnan (circa 1300 B.C. to A.D. 100) consist of unique perforated stone/jade disks with distinct T-shaped cross-sections, known as the collared disk-rings. Evidence taken from burials near Lake Dian of Yunnan suggests that similar artifacts were used as bracelets by the elites of the chiefdom society in the region. Available scientific data also point to the possibility that these artifacts were prestige goods acquired from distant lands. The Yunnan objects find close parallels in the comparable disk-rings archaeologically reported at Bronze Age sites in China and Southeast Asia. The distribution of such stone ornaments delineates a complex trading network in an expansive area, within which various typical northern stone types also had been transported. This network was created by riverine passages along the Mekong, Red, Yellow, Yangzi and Zhu rivers, and their tributaries. It may have already been in existence during the Neolithic period.
Organizer: John Williams, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: Erling von Mende, Free University, Berlin
Discussant: Iona Man-Cheong, State University of New York, Stony Brook
According to modern historians and contemporary observers alike, corruption was the ubiquitous bane of Qing bureaucratic culture, contributing to the ultimate downfall of the state. Often, formally fraudulent irregularities were tacitly accepted as an inevitable feature of officialdom, while at other times political circumstance demanded the circumvention of legal precedent altogether in the prosecution of allegedly corrupt acts. Some instances of corruption, however, proved impervious to domestication by the normally flexible Qing state, flaring into scandals that severely disrupted bureaucratic functioning. Nonetheless, between every alleged act of corruption and its eventual adjudication lay an administrative process which not only restructured political networks, but facilitated a discursive process anchoring and validating the Qing state.
Through papers investigating corruption as an administrative, factional and ideological complex, this panel explores the ways in which corruption management legitimated the construction of the Qing bureaucracy, even as it mediated between contested aspects of the state. John Williams analyzes "impeachment" as an administrative, discursive, and above all political practice regulating a spectrum of bureaucratic malfeasance ranging from minor incompetence to gross misconduct. Rui Magone focuses on fraudulent practices and anti-fraud measures in the civil examinations, presenting case studies from the 17th and 18th centuries that problematize both traditional and modern historiographies of the Qing examination system. Luca Gabbiani illuminates the way in which corruption allegations furthered factional ambitions within the wider context of metropolitan politics and the decay of central authority in 19th-century Qing China.
Corruption and Its "Enemies": The Political Implications of Corruption in 19th-Century China
Luca Gabbiani, Ecole des Hautes Etudes
Widespread administrative corruption has long been considered one of the main factors underlying China’s secular decline in the 19th century. In fact, more or less corrupt practices were an important facet of the Chinese "bureaucratic monarchy" at the time, as well as before. The Qing state tried to cope with the problem of corruption by developing an unprecedented host of regulations and detailed judicial procedures, reflecting the growth of corruption while giving it an ever greater visibility. Nevertheless, corruption—or at least allegations of it—had also long been recognized as an efficient political tool among the highest spheres of power.
This last point is the focus of my paper, which concentrates on two distinct bureaucratic crises: first, the large flood that hit the metropolitan region in 1801; and second, the Shuntian examination scandal of 1858. Through a close scrutiny of both events, I seek to show how and under what circumstances acts of corruption, real or alleged, have been instrumental in the wake of political and power struggles. These two crises culminated in the impeachment of several officials. Drawing on archival material and litterati writings, I show that the sanctions cannot be fully understood if only considered in the wake of the events themselves. In both cases, I argue, the cashiering or execution of officials was the result of factional feuds relating to the wider political context—the early Jiaqing period rally by the new emperor to strengthen his power on the one hand, and the late Xianfeng era crisis (1857–1861) on the other.
The Corruption That Wasn’t There: Fraud Prevention and Its Limits in the Qing Civil Examinations
Rui Magone, Free University, Berlin
Modern historians have frequently characterized the Qing civil examination system as a politically regressive institution, further marred by fraud and corruption. In contrast, traditional sources, such as the so-called Examination Records and Reports, repeatedly praise the system’s perfection. Behind the praise, however, institutional regulations and precedents expose the almost overwhelming pressure of fraudulent irregularities. In fact, both stereotypes—the Qing official’s blithe praise and the historians’ dark charges of corruption—require further interrogation to uncover the real nature of the functioning (or malfunctioning) of the examination system.
In my paper, I take a close look at the question of corruption in the examinations by analyzing several instances of fraud that occurred at provincial examinations in the 17th and 18th centuries. The analysis of these cases shows that the prominence of exam scandals in our extant sources was not necessarily related to the actual scope of the fraud scheme, but was often a reflection of the bureaucratic context in which the scandals unfolded.
In the final section of the paper, I argue that the only way to understand exam scandals is through a micro-historical approach. By looking closely at the actual institutional workings of the exams, we see through the official Qing discourse, according to which corruption wasn’t there. At the same time, we avoid the corrupt historiographical assumption of inevitable corruption in the Qing examination system.
The Rules of the Game: The Bureaucratic Theory and Political Practice of Impeachment during the Qing Dynasty
John Williams, University of California, Berkeley
From the infamous 1972 burglary of Democratic headquarters in the Watergate hotel to Clintonian oval office dalliances, the term "impeachment" conjures a variety of images of twentieth-century American presidential improprieties. Impeachment is equally familiar (if much less well understood) to the historian of China as the means by which the imperial bureaucracy theoretically policed itself. Arguing that Qing political and bureaucratic culture cannot be adequately understood without a clear conception of how that process functioned, this paper analyzes impeachment as an administrative, discursive, and above all political process during the Qing dynasty.
First, the paper will briefly discuss evolution of the censurial function in the Euro-American political tradition as a means of both providing a comparative framework and suggesting that the range of connotations associated with the English term "impeachment" are not necessarily appropriate to the Chinese case. After a short recapitulation of censurial traditions in Chinese bureaucratic history, the paper will describe impeachment practices as defined by the Qing administrative codes, showing them to encompass a spectrum of functions ranging from the administrative sanction of minor incompetence to the prosecution of gross malfeasance or corruption. After discussing the practical adjudication of several impeachment cases in the early Qing, the paper will conclude by addressing the panel’s core issues of how impeachment functioned as a political process for the restructuring of factional networks, and as a discursive practice upholding the legitimacy of the state.
Organizer and Chair: Alana Boland, University of Toronto
Discussant: Joshua Muldavin, Sarah Lawrence College
Keywords: China, environment, development.
Ecological modernization is a term used to describe development strategies that start from the assumption that economic growth and the resolution of environmental problems can be reconciled. In China today it is not uncommon to see references to this formulation of a new relationship between nature and society: "sustainable development," "ecological construction," and "green communities" have become integral in discussions of local and national growth strategies. While the state is directly involved in the formulation and implementation of these projects, they are also underwritten by a profound shift towards more market-based approaches to the regulation of nature. As elsewhere, this emergence of eco-modern strategies in China has important implications for the access and distribution of the environmental and economic benefits promised by the advocates of market-driven forms of green development.
The papers in this panel critically examine the process of ecological modernization in China based on local and sectoral case-studies. They highlight the specific forms and effects of recently developed strategies in the following four environmental arenas: solid waste management, urban water supply, deforestation control, and agricultural production. The questions addressed in each of these arenas include: What are the material and discursive foundations of the environmental issues identified in each case? How is the general shift towards ecological modernization and implementation of related environmental management strategies shaped by economic forces and interests operating at local, national and global scales? And what are some of the contradictory effects of these new eco-modern modes of environmental regulation in relation to the physical and social landscapes? Organized as an interdisciplinary panel, this session will offer an opportunity for the discussion of varied theoretical approaches to understanding the complex relationship between economic development, social change and environmental policy in China today.
Valued Garbage, Disposable Citizens: Beijing’s Trash-pickers and the Economics of Recycling in an Olympic City
Joshua L. Goldstein, Franklin and Marshall College
As China merges into the many-layered system of global capitalism, the explosion of consumerism that has been transforming China’s cities has transformed their solid waste streams as well. The pressures that this domestic consumption is placing on China’s resource base has lead to growing recognition of the value of conversation and intensified efforts at developing new recycling programs for solid waste. This paper analyzes the socioeconomic tensions arising from the urban recycling solutions currently in play in Beijing, especially the tensions between the market and the state, migrant workers and municipal authorities, and local and global forces. Beijing is now serviced by an enormous recycling system, built almost exclusively through illicit networks of migrants over the last 15 years. The network employs over 100,000 laborers and generates an annual profit of over 1 billion yuan. Until recently this system and its labor received little if any support from municipal authorities, while the government-run recycling companies were operating at deficit. Recently the city administration has become more directly involved, actively encouraging residents to recycle while simultaneously using various administrative and legal measures to monopolize the city’s recycling markets. This paper will examine how these local transformations interact in a system of nested hierarchies, to understand how a local migrant community’s imperiled status as second-class citizens is being reinforced and rearticulated by an emerging global capitalist regime that purportedly embraces environmental concerns.
Environmental Transitions: Market Reforms and the Fluid Nature of Urbanization in China
Alana Boland, University of Toronto
In recent years there has been a move towards more explicitly green forms of urban development in China. This trend can be seen in the built environment and the flow of resources through the city. This paper uses urban water supply as a case to examine the processes of urbanization in China during this new era of ecological enlightenment. Changes in the organization of urban water supply have seen the application of more market-oriented approaches in its management. Environmental imperatives are typically used to explain the need for these reforms in water supply. However, I argue that it is critical to also consider how the reforms are conditioned by broader structural transformations in the scale and organization of the urban political economy, and by new modes of governance and expressions of citizenship. Introducing this larger context into the analysis of water supply reforms and related efforts to build more ecologically friendly cities helps to denaturalize the market in relation to urban environmental management. In turn, this helps to highlight the importance of understanding the political and cultural aspects of ecological modernization in China. The paper concludes by drawing on this wider perspective to examine the actions and interests of different social groups involved in the production and consumption of the cleaner waters flowing through China’s cities.
China’s Logging Ban: Environmental Narratives and Policy Impacts
Justin Zackey, University of California, Los Angeles
After the devastating flooding of the Yangtze River in 1998, the Chinese Central Government, as part of the larger National Natural Forest Protection Program, imposed a logging ban on the upper reaches of the Yangtze watershed. This paper explores the environmental narratives that have justified China’s logging ban, and looks at some of the social and environmental externalities of the policy. I argue that although the logging ban has certain successes, it is a reactionary and problematic solution to failures in China’s environmental policy. It represents another dramatic shift in forestry policy that has changed, not stopped, the nature of deforestation in China. The logging ban, combined with other factors, has made village collective forests more vulnerable to deforestation, and thus undermines the long-term "sustainability" of village life that depends on forests. Theoretically, this paper addresses links between perceptions of environmental crisis and policy-making, and subsequently how the resulting "environmental interventions" impact local communities and environments. This paper draws on extensive village-based field research in northwestern Yunnan Province during 2000–2002, and focuses on high-altitude, rural communities.
"Green Agriculture" and "Green Trade Barriers": WTO Benefits to the Chinese Countryside Reconsidered
Abigail R. Jahiel, Illinois Wesleyan University
Since China’s accession to the WTO in December 2001, conditions in the countryside have been one of the most hotly contested issues debated in political circles. Projected structural changes to the rural economy brought about by trade liberalization are expected to cause significant dislocation and job loss in a rural economy already burdened by hefty tax rates, high medical costs, and lack of social welfare. Ironically, some of the structural changes brought by WTO accession that are likely to aggravate these social hardships are instead being hailed by environmental officials as potentially beneficial both to the environment and the economy. This paper reconsiders the material and discursive foundations of the claims made about the benefits of WTO accession for the rural economy. It demonstrates how these conclusions regarding positive environmental gains are drawn largely from the same ecological modernization logic that now under-girds the international trade regime. It concludes by offering an alternative perspective on the likely social and ecological implications of trade liberalization for rural agricultural communities.
Organizer and Chair: Mark Edward Lewis, Stanford University
Discussant: Susan Weld, Harvard University
Keywords: Family, China, history and culture, Han.
The Han dynasty is a key period for studying the Chinese family. First, it is the earliest period for which we have detailed information about families at all levels of society. Second, our understanding of Han families has been significantly altered by archaeological discoveries in recent decades. Third, improved knowledge of the Han family reveals how far removed many Han ideas and practices were from those of later imperial China. The topic thus merits renewed attention. This panel examines Han families from three perspectives, each involving the use of new materials. Robin Yates considers the Han family as a legal unit from the perspective of the state. Relying on the early Han Zhangjiashan legal documents, he compares the statutes applied to commoner, slave, and noble families with those of the Qin. The Han continued the Qin’s deployment of the law to forcibly constitute the family, enabling it to extract maximum tax and labor resources. Mark Edward Lewis examines the tension between the nuclear family as a legal unit and residence group, and the larger lineage constituted in the ancestral cult. This examination incorporates received sources and new textual and material discoveries. Anne Behnke Kinney considers the family from the perspective of the life cycle, looking at changing attitudes towards fetal development and childhood. This includes the use of archaeologically recovered texts on medicine and self-cultivation. Taken as a whole, the panel will reveal new aspects of the Han family as a distinct stage in the development of Chinese kinship structures.
Law and the Family in the Early Han
Robin D. S. Yates, McGill University
The discovery in 1975 of a cache of Qin legal documents at Shuihudi, Hubei, enabled researchers to understand the processes by which the early imperial state gained control over the diverse populations in the newly constituted empire. While it was known that the Han initially adopted many of the Qin bureaucratic and legal institutions, exactly how the Han adapted what they had inherited from the Qin was unclear due to the lack of sources. The discovery of statutes and other legal documents dating from the reign of Empress Lü (ca. 186 B.C.E.) in tomb #247 Zhangjiashan, published in November 2001, permits us to analyze the continuities and changes in the early empire. I argue that the Qin and Han states co-opted the family as their primary means of controlling social behavior. In fact, the state created the nuclear family as a legal entity, with a male as its head. The Han asserted the right to be the source of legal and social status, demanded household registration, and the right to punish the family as a collective as well as to punish differently individual members and co-residents, including slaves, depending on their age, gender, and ritual and socio-legal status. The state was able to extract labor and other taxes from them, depending on whether they were commoner or noble. The Han therefore created new forms of the family as the basis for the economic and military expansion of the empire, influenced by, and influencing, changing ideology and political interests.
Embryos, Emperors, and Empires
Anne Behnke Kinney, University of Virginia
My paper explores changing paradigms of human life in relation to political changes in the Warring States-Han transition. In the third century B.C. philosophers began to refer with increasing frequency to fetal development in discussions of cosmology and meditation. This interest marks a departure from earlier concerns with gerontocratic institutions that privileged elders, ancestors, and worthies of antiquity. At this time, the fetus came to be perceived not only as the stage in human development most perfectly attuned to the Dao but also as an embodiment of the Dao. The fetus embodied the Dao by virtue of its indeterminate shape, its complete accord with the ever-shifting cycle of the Five Phases, and its lack of a fixed identity. Earlier schemes of self-cultivation often began with an adult practitioner who was to develop toward a sagely ideal modeled on the worthies of antiquity. Late Warring States texts promoting meditation on fetal growth, however, show how reversing human development allows one to trace the path from the sub-system of human life back to the macro-system of the Dao. Moreover, through its origins in a cosmogonic process, the fetus expresses the workings and laws of nature rather that the power of ancestors and human artifice. This philosophical shift may reflect a similar change in politics from emphasizing the authority of ancestors to forces of nature, from identification with clan to participation in empire, and from the power of charismatic kingship to rule of law.
Household and Lineage in Han China
Mark Edward Lewis, Stanford University
The major kinship units in Han China were the family (jia) and lineage (zu, zong). These differed not only in scale but also in their principles of organization, which created a central tension in Han society. The family, in law and in practice, consisted of those who lived in a single household. It contained two or rarely three generations and sometimes servants. It was built around the conjugal couple, so women wielded great authority, particularly as mothers. The lineage, patterned on the practices of the Zhou nobility as described in ritual texts, consisted of all descendants of a common ancestor, and thus contained many generations. It was largely an elite phenomenon. Structured on the relations of fathers to sons, the lineage formed a masculine construct where women figured only as adjuncts. The authority of women within the household was for ritual theorists and orthodox moralists a scandal that was censured, denied, or passed over in silence. Nevertheless, the reality of female power manifests itself in many places. These include anecdotes on remarriage and stepmothers, poems on dominating women, a Han dynasty will, discussions of imperial affines, the division of the mortuary cult between grave and temple, and the contradictory meanings attributed to the "inside" in the spatial structure of the household. In this paper I will examine the tensions between family and lineage, and show how they figured in the conduct and values of families at different levels of society.
Organizer: Marta E. Hanson, University of California, San Diego
Chair: Yi-Li Wu, Albion College
Discussant: William C. Summers, Yale University
Keywords: medicine, China, history and anthropology, early modern and contemporary.
Using methods from medical anthropology and the history of medicine, this panel analyzes the lived experience of social change in modern China and Taiwan. Hanson’s paper examines the transformation of Lingnan (Guangdong, Guangxi). By tracing the medical analysis of this area from the late Ming to the present, she finds that Han ideas about Lingnan cultural geography inform the medical understanding of environmental influence on the constitutions and illnesses of the local people. Shapiro’s paper analyzes the rise of the discourse of nerves in Chinese medicine and society. He suggests that the experience of neurasthenia posits a different way of understanding the relationship between the medicine of China and the West. Lei’s paper analyses an influential work of alternative medicine in Taiwan. He shows how local medical traditions are refashioned as "alternative medicine," providing cognitive alternatives to modern biomedicine. While "kitchen pharmacy" aims at empowerment, he finds that the practice of domestic medicine might also reinforce existing gender categories. Farquhar’s paper analyses the unprecedented resurgence of life cultivation practices in contemporary Beijing, practices drawing on classical visions of hygiene. She shows yangsheng as the individual response of an aging cohort to the economic, practical, and political upheavals of China’s neoliberal market society. These papers question the relationship between identity, language, and medical paradigm, while scrutinizing the praxis of hygiene as a response to social transformation. This panel shows bodily experience in the modern era as rooted in the medical corpus and the clinical, dietary, and hygienic practices of imperial China.
Lingnan’s Medical Geographies: Why Miasmas, Once Feared, No Longer Matter in Modern Chinese Medicine
Marta E. Hanson, University of California, San Diego
In medical literature since the Tang Dynasty, the Lingnan region of the far south has been synonymous with miasmas (zhangqi). Physicians described the Lingnan miasma as the poisonous vapors, malignant mists, and malarial rains that assaulted the well being of northern visitors. Official discourse blamed the government’s difficulty in gaining control over this region on the deadly effect of miasmas. The mists and vapors of the tropics were considered not only noxious, but the main barrier to Han conquest and colonization of the non-Han populations living there. The Ming-Qing medical literature on Lingnan miasmas focused on prophylaxis, on what northern travelers, officials, and merchants should consume to protect themselves when visiting Lingnan.
However, from the late Qing to the present-day, physicians who had settled in the region began recording a different perception of Lingnan’s medical geography. Whereas in Ming-Qing medicine miasmas were once linked with the minorities and environment of Lingnan, miasmas nearly disappear from the medical discourse of physicians living there during the twentieth century. Instead of emphasizing Lingnan miasmas, they focused on heat and dampness familiar in central and north China, but considered even more dominant in Lingnan. This paper argues that this transformation from the conflation of miasmas, Lingnan, and local peoples to the near disappearance of miasmas in late-Qing and contemporary medicine marks one of the most significant changes in Lingnan; namely the control of malaria and the successful migration, agricultural development, and cultural domination of the Han Chinese in the region.
What Changes When Words Change: Nervousness in Modern China
Hugh L. Shapiro, University of Nevada, Reno
Why did the idea of nervous weakness, or neurasthenia, enjoy such phenomenal success in twentieth-century China? When it first appeared there in the 1910s, self-consciousness about national development magnified the image of neurasthenia not only as a modern disease but a disease of modern people. The complaint of neurasthenia grew throughout the century, until it became the most common diagnosis for psychiatric outpatients. Indeed, despite its alien origins, neurasthenia has flourished in China as nowhere else, long after the category was abandoned in the countries of its origin and first popularity. How do we understand the popularity and longevity of this disorder?
Neurasthenia’s contemporary prevalence must be considered together with its total absence from the past. Nerves, simply, do not have antecedents in traditional Chinese medicine. The nervous system as such entered medical discourse in China only in the late nineteenth century. The transformation spurred by the new discourse of nerves raises profound questions about the relationship between language and experience, between talking about the body as an object of discourse and the body as the site of experience.
In the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China, modernity’s alleged pathology constituted the main etiology of neurasthenia. From this perspective, its spread to China can be seen as one aspect of the spread of modernity to China. This paper proposes an alternative interpretation: the prevalence of neurasthenia is rooted in China’s classical paradigm of depletion, which in turn exhibits a profound resonance with nineteenth-century ideas of nervousness in the West.
Kitchen as a Family Pharmacy: Exploring a Space of Alternative Medicine in Contemporary Taiwan
Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, National Tsing-hua University
Drawing on Dr. Zhuang Shuqi’s Chinese Style Health Management (CSHM), arguably the most influential work on alternative medicine in contemporary Taiwan, this study explores these questions: how do local medical traditions refashion themselves as "alternative medicine?" How does this adaptation reconfigure the cause of illness, the conception of the body, the site of medical intervention, and medical role of the patient? Finally, if Foucault is right in claiming that modern subjectivity is largely constituted by the medical sciences, then the crucial question arises: do local medical traditions provide cognitive and cultural resources for constructing alternative identities against modern biomedicine?
Zhuang’s medical doctrine constitutes a distinct feminine space. The target consumers are homemakers, the major medical therapy is dieting, the site of healthcare provision is the kitchen. Zhuang claims to be a caring female physician, a filial daughter, and a beloved wife. Zhuang’s remarkable career and her efforts in promoting domestic medicine offer a possible role model for female medical practitioners. Besides, by comparing food preparation to medical treatment, Zhuang significantly raises the value of women’s traditional labor in the kitchen. The problem is: does Zhuang’s alternative doctrine really provide an alternative link, albeit not necessarily a liberating one, between medicine and gender? Furthermore, does Zhuang’s medical doctrine empower her patients and homemakers, or does she just reinforce patriarchal values by legitimizing the existing gender division of work? Based on an empirical analysis of Zhuang’s medical doctrine, I will explore the gender consequences of re-valorizing kitchen into a medical space.
Crafting Experience after Mao: Life Cultivation Practices in Contemporary Beijing
Judith Farquhar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Practices of yangsheng, or the cultivation of life, are gaining popularity in Beijing. As the population ages, economic change forces early retirement, while access to health insurance remains uneven. In such circumstances, conditions are ripe for aging urbanites to fortify themselves against unpredictable forces such as the marketplace by concentrating efforts on their health in daily exercise, nutrition, and hobbyist routines. These activities, ranging from the keeping of pets and the drinking of tea to Taiji in the park, are often described as a form of preventive medicine. But they are much more than this.
This paper will argue that yangsheng activities mobilize classical visions of hygiene in response to shifting economic, practical, and political conditions. Yangsheng involves ways of crafting experience that go beyond the powers of official and unofficial discourses, inducing both physical and psychological relief from the dislocating conditions of an emerging consumerist society. As a group of technologies for filling time and space, yangsheng practices—with their deep pedigree in the Chinese medical literature—amount to an assertion of both individuality and nationality within the discouraging climate of China’s brash neo-liberal market society.
Organizer: Matthew Rudolph, Cornell University
Chair and Discussant: Elliott Sperling, Indiana University
Keywords: Tibet, China, India, sovereignty, Kashmir, empire.
Sino-Tibetan relations have varied widely over time, across dynasties and regimes, and in specific relation to institutional Buddhism. They have at times been quite close, at others nearly non-existent. Prior to the twentieth century, issues of political status, and the elemental tasks of governance were often finessed—with varying degrees of success—using a range of strategies including diplomatic and religious recognition, neglect, military force, and intentional ambiguity. With the decline of the Qing Dynasty and the encroachment of Western powers, exclusive, rigid ideas and practices of state sovereignty gradually displaced these earlier modes of interaction. Our collective effort here is to clearly address the causes, processes, and consequences associated with this change in political relations between Tibet and China.
The panel will blend "bottom-up" studies that examine Tibetan experiences of resistance, exile, and internationalization, with "top-down" studies of Chinese, Indian, and Tibetan government policy in the context of world politics, diplomacy, and comparative state-formation. Carlson’s paper will discuss the development of PRC notions of sovereignty with specific reference to Tibet. From the perspective of comparative colonialism, McGranahan will analyze Chinese rule in Tibet as a form of non-liberal empire. Focusing on how constitutional and institutional forms in Republican China have shaped political subjectivity, Rabgey’s study offers a new outlook on the competing ideologies and practices of different Chinese governments vis-à-vis Tibet. Finally, Rudolph compares Tibetan integration in the Chinese state-building process with the experience of Kashmir in its relation to the Indian state.
Sovereign Self-Determination: China’s Approach to ‘Tibetan’ Sovereignty During the 1980s and 1990s
Allen Carlson, Cornell University
This paper is comprised of a theoretically informed examination of China’s stance during the 1980s and 1990s on the People’s Republic’s (PRC) sovereignty over Tibet. It begins with a re-consideration of the relationship between sovereignty and the norm of self-determination, and the manner that individual states substantiate a position on the two sets of norms. Guided by this survey, I then demonstrate that over the last twenty years Chinese elites have consistently enacted practices that seek to firmly inscribe the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) within the PRC, and did so in an increasingly strident and confrontational manner during the 1990s.
At a fundamental level such a stance is the product of the unease in Beijing over the tenuous status of PRC authority and control over the TAR. However, I also argue that such basic considerations were intimately tied to elite reaction against the perceived rise of an expansive interpretation of the right to self-determination in the international arena during the 1990s. The depth of Chinese resistance to such a trend, and emphasis upon China’s sovereign rights over Tibet, far exceeds contemporary realpolitik considerations and the post-Tiananmen push to legitimize the Chinese state through a turn to nationalist rhetoric. It can only be understood with reference to the shadow of the historical loss of the jurisdictional authority of past Chinese empires over outlying regions.
China as Empire: A Colonial Studies Perspective on Tibet
Carole McGranahan, University of Colorado
China’s fifty-year rule of Tibet may be considered a form of contemporary colonialism. Ironically initiated as Europe was in the process of de-colonizing its territories around the world, Chinese colonialism of Tibet follows some of the same logics and organizing principles of European colonialism. My interest in this paper is in tracking the similarities and differences between these colonialisms in order to learn more about empire in general and contemporary Tibet in particular. With regard to the former, Tibet presents a case of socialist colonialism, a divergence from the liberal empires that have dominated the last three centuries. With regard to the latter, our academic and diplomatic understandings of Tibet are often grounded in the post-imperial epistemologies of international politics. I suggest that a colonial studies perspective offers a new and valuable means for assessing Tibetan-Chinese relations. Drawing primarily on insights from anthropology and history, I will first provide a comparative colonial analysis of the People’s Republic of China’s rule in Tibet; second, I will consider how colonialism factors into the respective claims of Beijing and Dharamsala towards Tibet; and third, I will present research findings on Tibetan responses to Chinese rule.
Taiwan and Tibet: National Narratives, Political Subjectivity and the Tibetan Question in the Republic of China
Tashi Rabgey, Harvard University
The overwhelming majority of contemporary perspectives on Chinese-Tibetan relations refer to the People’s Republic of China. In this paper, the focus is instead on Chinese-Tibetan relations from the perspective of the Republican government of Taiwan. Both officially and otherwise, the Republic of China (ROC) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have varied in their treatment of Tibet and its political status. While history, especially Chinese dynastic history, is often invoked to explain Chinese-Tibetan relations over the century, a comparison of ROC and PRC policies on and views towards Tibet reveals the deficiencies of a teleological or evolutionary view of the sometimes intricate, sometimes bare-boned relations between China and Tibet. A better understanding of the departures, as well as the convergences, of ROC and PRC approaches to Tibet may be obtained through an investigation of the political foundations and cultural grounds of these two governments. Towards this end, this paper begins to map the competing claims of these different Chinese governments by focusing on the development of Chinese historical consciousness and nationalist narratives with respect to Tibet. Is there a specifically "Chinese" approach to Tibet? If so, how does that approach change when incorporated into ROC or PRC rhetoric on the nation-state? This paper will address these questions through an examination of constitutional issues, institutional forms, and popular consciousness in Taiwan. Through documentary and interview materials, the analysis traces the development of Tibetan political subjectivity, and the varied forms in which sovereign claims of the ROC over Tibet are constructed.
Securing the Periphery: Tibet, Kashmir, and the Construction of Chinese and Indian State Ideologies of Incorporation
Matthew Rudolph, Cornell University
China and India are inheritors of expansive, heavily populated imperial legacies. They have faced the challenge of maintaining security and stability while engaged in highly demanding state-building and development projects. This paper examines the political challenge of territorial consolidation, and specifically these two states’ efforts to incorporate nationally distinct peripheral areas, such as Tibet and Kashmir. In the early years both states conferred special "autonomous" status on both areas, but quickly violated the spirit, and often the letter of those de jure arrangements.
Why have these arrangements failed? What conditions render the incorporation of Kashmir and Tibet "problematic"?
Blending sociological institutionalist and Gramsican approaches, this paper will analyze state borders as institutions. The shape of states is treated as a social construction in which territorial incorporation and the constitution of borders are understood as processes of institutionalization. The degree to which a peripheral territory may be embedded in a metropolitan state, and normalized as such, varies across time in each case and across the two cases. This variation can be explained with reference to the ideological power of the incorporating myth, the relative success of ideological resistance to that myth, and outright conflict in the political and military arenas.
This probe of the Kashmiri and Tibetan cases suggests that, for multinational states like India and China, political integration as a basic means of pursuing security is difficult to achieve. Incorporation, in the narrow sense of "national" integration, and "the creation of a nation-state from above" is highly problematic. There is a fundamental paradox between coercion and consent inherent in any such supra-national incorporation project.
Organizer, Chair, and Discussant: Kathleen Ryor, Carleton College
Keywords: drama, art history, China, Ming Dynasty.
While recent scholarship has examined the relationship between late Imperial printed texts of plays and their illustration, much of the analysis focuses on how illustrations depart from or enhance the text. In this panel, scholars from literature and art history will consider additional ways in which drama and the visual arts interacted during the late Ming dynasty. The papers address the larger issues of how the visual spectacle of drama influenced two- and three-dimensional representation and how the visual arts, particularly woodblock printed illustrations, transformed conventions from dramatic themes or performance into new expressions of visual experience.
Central questions to be explored by the panel include: how do the practices of dramatic performance, textual recensions and printed editions of drama, and art making play with the notions of representation and vision? In what ways do drama and the visual arts reflect a specific spectacular sensibility, defined as both lavish display and a display of scenic effects, in the late Ming? The four papers of this panel also trace the connections and intersections of dramatic performance and printed illustrations of drama to other period discourses, which include: social expectations of women, increasing artistic self-consciousness of representation and its materiality, engagement with alternative paradigms of visual and optical devices, and new developments in the philosophical correlation between performance and existence.
"Writing Poetry on a Leaf" as a Theme in Ming Drama and Visual Art
Kimberly Besio, Colby College
A beautiful woman writes a poem upon a leaf, and casts it back into nature to be discovered by her future husband. The late Ming, a period in which more and more women were publishing their poetry and thus sending their words beyond domestic boundaries, witnessed renewed interest in this Tang anecdote, not only as an allusion in poetry, fiction and drama, but also as the subject of several plays and pictorial representation in woodblock prints and paintings. Visually, the story is recalled by the moment of production—a beautiful woman in a garden setting, brush-wielding hand poised over a leaf, ink and inkstone nearby. While this image evokes the romantic associations that women writing poetry had come to emblematize, the woodblock prints, only some of which were play illustrations, also recall the boundaries breached by this act through the garden walls surrounding the woman. The dialogue, songs and stage business of the plays further develop this tension between the public nature of poetry production and social expectations that women confine themselves to the domestic realm. By comparing the evolution of "writing poetry on a leaf" as both a dramatic and pictorial theme in late Imperial China, I will illuminate various ways that these two arts reflected contemporary debates over developments in a third—that is, poetry. At the same time, this study will suggest the utility of considering the overlaps and interactions between drama and visual art as we map the contours of the late Imperial imagination.
Imprinting Self: Artistic Identities in Mudan Ting
Christine Tan, Princeton University
Late Imperial illustrated editions of Tang Xianzu’s 1598 chuanqi opera Mudan Ting ("The Peony Pavilion") invariably include depictions of the Xiezhen ("Sketching Likeness") scene. The famed sequence, which describes the protagonist Du Liniang completing her self-portrait before dying, occurs in at least six different versions from the period. Recalling the tradition of meirenhua ("beautiful women painting") and gongzhongtu ("palace women painting"), printed images of Xiezhen drew upon visual motifs associated with the superficiality of physical beauty in light of Confucian virtue. The most prominent of these were mirrors, screens, canvases, and paintings. Late Ming and early Qing observers recognized the ability of these motifs to illuminate the distinctive self-consciousness at the heart of qing, the late Imperial celebration of love and desire. Embracing such expressions of self-consciousness in their own terms, print artists sought ways to insinuate themselves into pictures of self-portraiture by emphasizing the specular and representational aspects of these pictorially charged elements. The presence of the artist is felt most acutely in the meta-pictorial effects of the framed, the reflected, and the superimposed, which emerge in carefully staged depictions of looking and painting. In mirrors, screens, canvases, and paintings, which had frequently occurred in portraits of physical beauty, print artists recognized new ways to embed and animate their professional identity. Building upon scholarship that has ascribed growing artistic autonomy among late Ming printmakers, this paper explores the emphatic pictorial means by which the same artists at once crafted and claimed a new sophistication for their enterprise.
Scopic Frames: Proto-Cinematic Visuality and Late Ming Illustrated Drama
Jennifer G. Purtle, University of Chicago
Representational conventions found in late Ming illustrated drama reflect broad spectra of sensibilities of spectatorship and spectacularization, vision and visuality. Such notions of spectacle and seeing are then deployed in the pictorialization of ephemeral or imaginary performances of plays given material form in these illustrations. The elasticity of spectacular and visual senses indicates that illustrations of drama were conceptualized both in visual conventions descriptive of stage performance and in pictorial conventions external to the theater. This paper will argue that the expansion of representational possibilities for the late Ming illustration of printed plays linked to, but not embedded in, dramatic performance was generated in response to four factors. These are contemporaneous visual cultures of: emergent materialities and material technologies of printing images; novel pictorial practices of composition and framing; newly-circulating knowledge of optical devices and images generated by engagement with them; and, spectacularized conspicuous consumption.
A desire to create a durable "record" of a dramatic performance concomitant with the advent of new technologies of image-making, new optical knowledge, new paradigms of pictorial representation, and issues of spectacle and audience characterize the production of both late Ming illustrated drama and early Chinese films of traditional drama. This paper will thus conclude by examining the proto-cinematic quality of selected works of late Ming illustrated drama, which, like early Chinese films of traditional drama whose precursors they might be understood to be, permitted pictorial imagination to transcend significantly the limitations of the stage.
A World on Puppet Strings: Performance, Illustration, and Metaphysics in the Late Ming Period
Li-Ling Hsiao, University of North Carolina
The Min Qiji edition of Xixiang Ji published in 1640 includes a color illustration of a puppet performance that embodies a set of complicated metaphysical concepts. This unique illustration shows a puppet performance in which the puppeteers are not only visible, but are prominent and strongly emphasized. This unusual emphasis suggests the embeddedness of theatrical reality, and by extension all human reality. Through a detailed analysis of the puppet tradition and drama illustration, this paper examines the ways in which two different kinds of mimetic activity parallel each other in the transfer from text to performance and from text to illustration. Both of these modes of reproduction conflate past and present in the mind of the viewer, thereby collapsing the distinction between reality and representation. This paper attempts to demonstrate that these two seemingly different media—performance and woodblock illustration—may be conceived as analogous, both serving to stimulate reflection about the place of humans in a vast and mysterious universe.
Organizer: Dongfeng Xu, University of Chicago
Chair: Karl S. Y. Kao, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Discussant: Lionel M. Jensen, University of Notre Dame
In late imperial China, many, including Neo-Confucians, Daoists and the newly arrived Jesuits from the post-Reformation Europe, gave their attention to the notion of qing or emotional attachment. In their works, however, these authors and thinkers seldom treated qing as a psychological category. Instead, they often hoped to use qing to help defend, propagate and legitimate their respective philosophical, political and religious beliefs.
The three papers on this panel approach qing by discussing its use and abuse in the philosophical, religious, literary and cultural (cross-cultural as well) context of the period. The first paper discusses the Neo-Confucian presentation of human desire not as the awakening of human nature but as a strategy of totalization. The paper exposes how the Neo-Confucians like Wang Yangming and Liu Zongzhou attempted to recapitulate the totality of Oneness by repeatedly disavowing the rupture between renxin (the human mind) and daoxin (the mind of the Way) or between qing and xing (nature). The paper argues how this rupture, while paradoxically reconfirmed throughout this history of denial, resurfaced dramatically in Ming-Qing fictional narratives. Furthermore, the paper critiques the assumption of "Chinese nonduality" widely circulated today as the repetition of the Neo-Confucian rhetoric of disavowal. The second paper looks at Tianyuan qiyu or Marvelous Encounter of Heavenly Matches, a popular Ming erotic novella that saw many editions. The story—its hero’s copulation with over thirty women—purported to show how sexual desire ultimately doubles itself, turning out to be both the essence of immortality and the very motivation of Daoist cultivation. In short, discussing the "renegotiation" of the carnal indulgence and the religious transcendence, the paper tackles the boundary of sex and the Daoist cultivation of immortality. While the first two papers focus on the Chinese discussions on qing, the third paper turns to the Jesuit missionaries in late imperial China to look at their understanding of qing in their works on friendship. In these writings, the Jesuits were careful enough not to elaborate directly on the religious aspect and use of friendship. But by pointing out what a fundamental doctrine the concept of friendship or love—God’s love and brotherly love—was in Christian theology, the paper argues that the Jesuit understanding of friendship meant first of all to serve the Western metaphysics of identity by erasing differences between friends. But despite all of the Jesuits’ efforts, the paper demonstrates that differences between friends cannot be suppressed. Differences remain for the simple reason that the Jesuit rhetoric and their very act of talking about friendship affirmed that the difference of the Other—the disparity between the West and China—is irreducible.
Together, the papers display the paradox of qing in some Ming and Qing works. In those works, the presentation of qing for various religious, political, and ideological purposes often reveal the double bind of qing that sutures and underlies difference.
Emotional (In)Difference, or, How Chinese Culture Became Nondualistic
Ling Hon Lam, University of Chicago
The legitimation of desire and sentiment (renxin, qing, yu) in Ming-Qing Neo-Confucianism is usually hailed as the awakening of human nature. I would rather argue that this "enlightened" gesture, going hand-in-hand with the disavowal of the dichotomy of daoxin/renxin and xing/qing, should be regarded as part of the totalizing strategy to eradicate radical differences, from which we can deduce a genealogy of today’s cliché of Chinese holism vs. Western metaphysics. Underlying the totality of emotion, however, is its own rupture that in the first place necessitates the repeated disavowal of duality. The dualistic split keeps resurfacing in late imperial philosophical discourses and finds still more foregrounded expressions in fictional narratives. To illustrate this history of repeated denial (that continues well into today’s celebration of "Chinese nonduality" and hence "Chineseness"), I will first show how Wang Yangming’s disclaimer in the name of "Essential Oneness" (jingyi) in fact reproduces the very rhetoric of Zhu Xi’s dyad of daoxin and renxin, and then examine how the ironical doubling of the heart of Oneness is dramatized in the novel Xiyou ji and its sequel Xiyou bu. Paralleling this reading I revisit the erasure of the distinction between xing and qing in Liu Zongzhou and read it as more than compensated by the split between qing and yu in the so-called "scholar and beauty" novella. In this light, the apparently conservative exclusion of carnal desire (yu) from qing in this early Qing middlebrow genre should be reconsidered as the radical rupture at the core of totality.
An Erotic Immortal: The Double Desire in a Ming Novella
Richard G. Wang, Chinese University of Hong Kong
The paper examines the religious elements in the Tianyuan qiyu (Marvelous Encounters of Heavenly Matches), a late Ming novella. Daoist elements, in addition to eroticism, are the main feature of this Ming novella. Written between 1550 and 1587, Marvelous Encounters circulated widely, with nine extant Ming editions. The novella might originally have appealed to the eclectic tastes of the reading public. Marvelous Encounters is about the outstanding playboy-type character Qi Yudi’s wild erotic life with more than thirty women. Qi and his ladies, practicing Daoist cultivation, finally all attain immortality and ascend to Heaven. In addition to the more conventional Daoist images, allusions, or descriptions, Marvelous Encounters shows a very different representation of the relationship between eroticism and Daoism. It more directly treats the eminent Daoist vision and belief: immortality in relation to erotic love. By analyzing the structure of story, images, allusions and description of Daoism in the work, I argue that sexuality in the novella functions as the medium for an experience of Daoist holy possession, its knowledge, practice, and revelation. Daoist themes in Marvelous Encounters are even further developed in the later editions of the novella. This theme of double desire is thus the most prominent feature of the work.
In such a representation of Daoist visions, the merging of these two themes into one story reflects a pursuit of double desires, or the "erotic immortal," a notion raised by the Ming commentators. Such an attainment could guarantee the protagonist’s continuing pleasure in the transcendent paradise with his enticing paramours. This work can be seen as a love story with the atmosphere of immortality, including even an affair between a transcendent goddess and a mortal man. In other words, Marvelous Encounters depicts a sexual pursuit in the context of a transcendent ideal, namely, double desire. Ironically, in this link between Daoist immortality and sexual pleasure, both the author and editor of Marvelous Encounters pursue the Daoist ideal of immortal happiness by hallowing the higher order of eros. In this sense, in the novella, immortality is the continuation of sex, and sex is the motivation of Daoist cultivation. This way, the mundane and the supernatural, the carnal and the spiritual, the enjoyment of life and the abandonment of it, and sex and enlightenment are all integrated. This interpretation may at least be reasonably inferred from the work and the popular Daoist culture of the late Ming. This novella thus reveals the merging interest in Daoist immortality and sexual pleasure in the minds of the author, editor, publisher, and reader in the context of popular Daoism and eroticism at that time.
With its impact on late Ming and early Qing erotic novels, Marvelous Encounters transmits its combination of sexual pleasure and religious salvation to later erotic novels. The notion of the "erotic immortal" in the work established a model for later novels because, following this model, the limitation of carnal pleasure can be overcome by extending the pursuit of desire to paradise, and personal salvation can be guaranteed by transcending the worldly life in literary imagination, without fear of the punishment for indulgence or the danger of harming health. In this sense, Marvelous Encounters functioned as a cultural resource and a religious alternative in the minds of common people.
A Brotherhood Under/With God and Difference: The Jesuit Writings on Friendship in Late Imperial China
Dongfeng Xu, University of Chicago
Examining three Jesuit writings on friendship by Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and others in late Ming and early Qing China, this paper discusses the dilemma embedded in the Jesuit presentation and use of friendship. Though all three works under discussion shared a similar enthusiasm or effort to form a friendly relation with the Chinese by introducing to the Chinese the Western concept of friendship, what truly concerned the Jesuits was nothing short of the conversion of China to Catholicism. In other words, the ultimate goal of the missionaries was to unite China and the West under the Christian God by negotiating or erasing the differences between the two civilizations. To this end, the concept of friendship became naturally a powerful notion for the Jesuits, because in Christian theology friendship had always been a term virtually identical with such fundamental doctrines as agape and caritas or God’s love and brotherly love. From this perspective, the paper points out, the Pauline phrase "faith working through love" (Gal. 5:6) describes vividly what the Jesuits hoped to accomplish in China with their texts on friendship.
Treating friendship as a concept or discourse concerning the Other, the paper looks to dismantle the effort of suppression or assimilation in the Jesuit friendship. Indeed, the missionaries elaborated on friendship repeatedly and vigorously, hoping to establish some parallel or analogy between, eventually an assimilation of, the West and China. Their rhetoric and their very act of speaking to the Chinese audience, however, not only show that the difference could not be erased, but also prove that the Other is the absolute condition of possibility under which friendship—friendship between two individuals or a friendly relation between two cultures—happens.
Organizer and Chair: Esther Yau, Occidental College
Discussant: Hector Rodriguez, City University of Hong Kong
Keywords: Chinese cinema, Hong Kong cinema, national cinema, historiography, ruin, agency.
The "ruin" is a critical and historical figure for cultural criticism and national cinema. To Walter Benjamin, the allegorical exemplar is the ruin: "allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things." The "ruin" has appeared as a powerful trope of history in Chinese films: from Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town (1948) to Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite (1992), ruins provoke thoughts of the nation’s traumatic pasts and of decadence. Taking an allegorical turn in the direction of rewriting cinema history and aesthetics, the essays in this panel depart from the dominant uses in Chinese films of the "ruin." The essays attempt to rewrite film aesthetics, film genres, and local agency through the notions of unraveling, rebuilding, re-mapping, and anti-monumentalizing. These essays engage the temporal notion of decay, the idea of weak redemptive power, and the role of slighter texts. They approach the screen images as the palimpsest and the ephemeral, and they characterize Chinese and Hong Kong cinema as an apparatus of fear production and a screen of incomplete ethical agency. The "ruin" in these essays became allegorical for "the other beginnings" of critical approaches in Chinese film studies and cinema historiography. It no longer remains the illusive, fear-inspiring center of the nation’s traumatic encounter with history. The "ruin" is the site where work for a liberated future for Chinese film studies is being done.
Ruin and the Real: A Certain Aesthetic in Chinese Cinema
Leo Chanjen Chen, University of California, Los Angeles
Ruin features prominently, both literal and figural, in Chinese cinema. Ranging from an aesthetic of decay visually presented through the dramatic personae of ruin in Spring in a Small Town (1948) to the reconstruction of a collective imaginary/real in the settings of ruin from King Hu’s films, ruin as a trope and a visual form mediates the intertwining discourses of diaspora, historiography, and nation-building. This paper breaks down in pairs the "signature" characteristics of Fei Mu’s and King Hu’s cinematic styles: Fei Mu’s static long take with short pan vs. King Hu’s constantly moving camera that goes both vertically and horizontally; Fei Mu’s in-camera dissolves vs. King Hu’s modular editing. These enumerated contrasts shed light on their aesthetics while shot analysis, mise-en-scene, and framing devices engage with the issue of a cultural specific film theory and film style. Firmly established as the palimpsest of Chinese film, it is in their shared belief in adapting elements of calligraphy painting and theatricality that a cinematic style of Chineseness become crystallized. Predicating and rebuilding on Ruin, there emerges an aesthetic of transparency in their stylization which provides access to an episteme while undergoes an exacerbation in every tumultuous historical juncture where no periphery was left for Chinese intellectuals cum scavengers to dwell in. Perhaps only in media res (film), where every frame is ephemeral and with every celluloid frame saturated with opacity (the image), there is always a complementary transparency (the celluloid) that lets the light through.
Shadow Citizens of the Cold War Cinema Screen
Esther Yau, Occidental College
Spies pose threats to the nation as homeland and they undo the inside/outside opposition that peasants are made to sustain. Spies in their everyday guises and peasants with their docile appearances could throw normative perception off guard at any moment. They are shadow citizens who could bring about a collapse of the national security state from the inside. The subjects of a paranoid vision, they turn looking into surveillance—all visible surfaces will be monitored yet sights are not to be trusted. In Chinese cinema, the "espionage" genre (fante pian) and the "village" genre (nongcum pian) turn cinema into an apparatus for the mass production of fear. The dark world that appears in the counter-intelligence narratives is also the only legitimate setting for screen murders, suicides, affairs, and decadent behavior. To the extent that these elements have been completely purged from the sunny and productive countryside in the village film and from "worker-peasant-soldier" films altogether, the espionage genre became a pretext for traces of capitalist modernity to maintain their attraction on screen as an open secret during the Maoist era. This essay approaches the espionage film and the village film as complementary genres that make up an illusive, fear-inspiring center of the national imaginary during the Cold War. It examines cinema visuality as transformed by the looks of fear and it reconfigures fetishism and fantasy in the context of surveillance. Selective films of the 1950s will be discussed and compared with film and television drama series of recent years.
Slicing, Street-Mapping, and Fractured Reality: From the Nation-State to Screen Citizenship
Linda Chiu-Han Lai, City University of Hong Kong
Where is "Hong Kong Cinema"? Could we locate the history of Hong Kong cinema outside the larger scheme of Chinese cinema history? What are the possibilities of re-situating the "beginnings" of the history of Hong Kong cinema, and how do we re-map the objects of inquiry on the ruins? This paper proposes and examines three modes of historiographic operation in an actual case to re-locate Hong Kong cinema and to make up for the absence of any accounts to qualify its early industrial moments. They are: (1) the slicing method: the segmentation of a single year for study instead of normative approaches that trace (dis)continuity and development/disruptions over time. In this paper, the year 1934 will be chosen for slicing; (2) Street-mapping: it appeals to geographic paradigms as alternative resources to focus on the study of space, particularly the locational distribution of movie theaters and their urban surrounding; and (3) anti-monumentalizing: it turns away from the notion of "cinema of significance" to attend to slighter texts that manifest feeble articulations grounded in local concerns that stand in contrast with the dominant discourse of nation-state and patriotic, nationalist loyalty. Along the way, the general question of the relation of film and culture will be reconsidered. Rather than viewing film as an agent of popular culture and/or dominant ideology, this paper proposes to view screen drama as a unique location where individual viewers’ ethical agency is exercised in response to ethical incompleteness schematized through narrativity.
Organizer: Nixi Cura, Union College
Chair: Mark C. Elliott, University of Michigan
Discussants: Patricia Berger, University of California, Berkeley; Mark C. Elliott, University of Michigan
Keywords: art history, ethnicity, gardens, Manchus, Mongols, Qing tombs, visual culture.
In recent years the extensive multi-lingual literary production of the Qing dynasty has been the focus of "New Qing History," which has reevaluated previous Sinocentric paradigms in favor of interpreting the Manchu enterprise through the various lenses of identity, ethnicity, and cultural difference. This panel expands upon this project by incorporating the study of visual culture in the eighteenth century, during the height of the Qing empire. In considering how culture and visuality are enmeshed, and how visual representation and production played a role in the discourse of Qing rule, case studies presented will examine: the political and artistic processes governing production of material culture; the reception of these works among different constituencies; and the interplay of "Manchu" and other visual topologies in the creation of a new Qing aesthetic.
Individual papers will assess Qing visual culture in different media and from two primary interpretive frameworks. John Finlay and Nixi Cura investigate court involvement, while Johan Elverskog studies the impact of this cultural production on the ground. Finlay looks at the cultural appropriation of Western perspective drawing within the Qing court, while Cura discusses the proto-Tibetan iconography of the Qianlong emperor’s crypt within the context of imperial tomb-building. Elverskog, on the other hand, looks less directly at the imperial project, but instead turns to how Qing culture influenced Mongol visual representations. Two discussants, one each from the disciplines of history and art history, will further explore new insights provided by visual culture in the construction and maintenance of the Qing dynasty.
Manchu Imperial Tombs: Inter-Changes in Iconography and Belief
Nixi Cura, Union College
With its statuary-lined spirit road and gabled golden roofs, the Qing Eastern and Western tomb complexes resemble imperial mausolea of previous dynasties. Geographic and temporal proximity point to the Ming tombs as a likely model. This paper considers concordances to Han burial practices as well as differences in architectural elements, funerary goods, and ritual observance that can be ascribed to Manchu customs and their appurtenances. Comparative material includes the tombs of Nurhaci (d. 1626) and Hong Taiji (d. 1643) in present-day Shenyang, as well as the excavated remains from tombs of Qing nobility. The discussion will then focus more narrowly on the tomb of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95). Although its exterior conforms to traditional "Chinese" forms, the walls of the surprisingly intimate interior crypt are embellished exclusively with Tibetan Buddhist script and iconography. This and other unique features of the Qianlong tomb not only confirm a distinct aesthetic orientation in Qing burial structures, but also raise important questions about the relationship between visual representations of imperial ideology and individual belief.
The Western Perspectives of the Qianlong Emperor
John R. Finlay, Norton Museum of Art
Taking his first cues from European illustrated books, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95) ordered Jesuit missionary-artists at his court to design and build European-style fountains, palaces, and landscaping in a small, isolated section of the now lost garden-palace Yuanming Yuan outside Beijing. The professionally trained artist Giuseppe Castiglione (active in China 1715–66) supervised the greater part of this construction in various stages between 1747 and 1759. Castiglione had previously collaborated with Nian Xiyao (d. 1738) in the compilation of his woodblock-illustrated Shixue (The Knowledge of Perception), published in 1729 and revised in 1735. Their work helped introduce Western perspective-drawing methods into the Qing Imperial Painting Academy. Based in large part on selections from European perspective manuals, the Shixue included plans, elevations, and descriptions of a theatrical stage set that mimicked architectural perspective. Perspective drawings and practices in European theater and garden design took solid form in the stage set composed of masonry flats that completed the sequence of European palaces at the Yuanming Yuan. Along with large-scale trompe-l’oeil wall paintings inside imperial buildings, this solid architectural perspective embodied the Qianlong emperor’s program of encompassing the West—like Tibetan, Mongol, and other non-Chinese cultures—within Qing China. This presentation will examine the appropriation of Western perspective focusing on the pivotal figure of the Qianlong emperor in the construction of a distinctively Qing visual culture.
Mongol Culture in the Visual Narrative
Johan Elverskog, Southern Methodist University
In Mongol nationalist historiography and its Western romantic counterpart, Mongol culture during the Qing is often presented as being in stasis. Indeed it was the appropriation of a static Mongol culture, especially Buddhism, which was grafted onto the Qing’s "Great Enterprise" that explained Manchu hegemony and Mongol "backwardness" at the turn of the twentieth century. It seems unfeasible, however, to assume that Mongol culture did not change in the nearly 350-year period between the "second conversion" in 1578 to the fall of the Qing, not only in regards to the cultural upheaval ensuing from the Qing formation, but also in terms of the extensive transformations in cultural production wrought throughout the Qing period. The aim of this paper is therefore to explore these changes as reflected in Mongol visual culture, in particular how Mongol forms of self-representation changed in the transition period from being the "Mongols" to being "Qing Mongols." Murals, illuminated manuscripts, thangkas, and ancestor portraits illustrate how Qing Mongol culture developed in dialogue with the metropolis and how this cultural mimesis reflects the logic of empire.
Organizer: Mary E. Gallagher, University of Michigan
Chair and Discussant: Frank Upham, New York University
Throughout the reform period, Chinese state elites have legislated and enforced (with different degrees of success) numerous new laws regulating economic, political, and social activities. These laws give legislative expression to rights that had previously been unknown in the PRC and create institutions for enforcing such new rights. In this panel we examine the question of mobilization in this context of greater legal rights and institutionalization. As has been shown in other regions of the world, mobilization is a critical factor in the development of the "rule of law" but has been relatively overlooked in research on law in the PRC.
This panel brings together four wide-ranging topics that are unified by their interest in the effect of laws on societal mobilization in the PRC. The first paper examines the role of foreign commercial actors in China’s law enforcement regime. The author argues that these foreign actors act as an important constituency in both the making and the enforcement of Chinese laws. The second examines how the politicalization of law in China’s current system can, in fact, work in favor of disgruntled societal actors. In the third paper, the administration of justice for war veterans is examined. Despite the lofty position of veterans in official rhetoric, in reality the state’s administration of justice has clashed with the expectations of veterans, leading to their greater mobilization throughout PRC history. Finally, through analysis of China’s labor and employment laws, the last paper argues that laws and the way in which they are written matter greatly for patterns of societal mobilization.
Frank K. Upham, an expert on law and social change in Japan, has accepted our invitation to serve as chair and discussant. We believe that his inclusion brings a "border-crossing" element to our panel—both in region (Japan) and in discipline (law).
Hollow Glory: The Administration and Conceptualization of Justice for PRC Veterans, 1949–1969
Neil Diamant, Dickinson College
Among social groups that demand recognition, benefits, and status from the state, few are as prominent as military veterans. After years of service, deprivation and sacrifice, veterans have frequently demanded that they be repaid for the loss of time, limbs, friends, and future earning power. After 1949, the PRC actively promoted veterans to political posts, adopted affirmative action policies in urban employment, and invested a great deal of manpower and resources in educating society at large to treat them with the respect and honor due to heroes. For their part, veterans were expected to be at the forefront of activism for the state and models of patriotic behavior.
In this paper I will take a look at the extent to which state regulations concerning veterans’ benefits were actually carried out, and what happened when state, societal, and veterans’ conceptualization of "just rewards" clashed. Based entirely on recently declassified archival documents from two urban and rural archives, this paper will argue that instead of becoming a favored political group, PRC veterans became among the most disgruntled. This happened mainly because of the wide gap between the status they were supposed to enjoy given state policy and rhetoric, and the daily injustices they experienced in day-to-day life at the hands of ordinary citizens, bureaucrats, union officials, courts, policemen, factory managers, and village cadres. This paper will focus both on the reasons for this discrepancy as well as the various ways veterans responded to injustice, ranging from suicides to work slowdowns, strikes, petitions, and penning letters to central state leaders. Veterans’ activism—fueled by a strong sense of moral and political outrage over justice denied—continued throughout the Cultural Revolution as well as in the 1980s and 1990s.
"Use the Law as Your Weapon": Legal Develop-ment and Labor Conflict in the PRC
Mary E. Gallagher, University of Michigan
In this paper, I examine the codification of China’s labor and employment laws during the reform period and the concomitant rapid rise in arbitrated labor disputes. Through both textual analysis of the laws and empirical analysis of patterns of labor disputes, I analyze possible causal relationships between the legal framework and certain patterns of disputes. I seek to show that the way in which laws were written has mattered in shaping labor conflict in China. That is, despite widespread pessimism about the implementation and enforcement of Chinese laws, a conclusion that therefore "laws don’t matter" is overdrawn. In fact, these laws are important in shaping individual and collective action, in both expansive and restrictive ways. For some types of disputes and some types of workers, wider legal channels and greater recourse to legal institutions are the results. And yet, I also show that the transition to a "rule of law" and contract labor relations has worked against the moral grievances of a large majority of the Chinese workforce, in particular former state sector workers.
"Going Native": Chinese Bureaucracies, Foreign Actors and the Evolution of China’s Anti-Counterfeiting Enforcement Regime
Andrew C. Mertha, Washington University
In this paper, I argue that the growth in the number of foreign commercial actors in China has made them active participants in Chinese society. Indeed, they have become part of Chinese society itself and form an important constituency in China’s law enforcement regime and even within its lawmaking process. Foreign commercial actors arrived in China with the expectation that trademark protection would be guaranteed by the courts under the Civil Trademark Law. When it became clear that the courts were unwilling and/or unable to ensure trademark protection, many of these firms turned to China’s administrative apparatus with greater success. However, administrative enforcement could not establish a credible deterrent to would-be counterfeiters, and in recent years, foreign trademark-intensive companies have established a close association with central and local Chinese government agencies to press for the prosecution of trademark violations under existing statutes in China’s Criminal Law.
Suing the Local State: Administrative Litigation in Rural China
Kevin J. O’Brien, University of California, Berkeley; Lianjiang Li, Hong Kong Baptist University
This article examines the dynamics of admin-istrative litigation in rural China. It shows how local officials often attempt to preempt, derail or undermine administrative lawsuits by blocking access to official documents and regulations, pressuring courts to reject cases, failing to appear in court or perjuring themselves, discrediting attorneys, and intimidating litigants. It also discusses, however, how villagers fight back by drawing in sympathetic elites (such as people’s congress deputies and the media) and mobilizing collective appeals and staging public protests. The paper concludes that administrative litigation provides a useful window on Chinese state-society relations and on the interplay of legal and political mobilization. It also suggests that should more villagers incorporate administrative litigation into their repertoire of contention, a reform designed to extend the life of an authoritarian regime may play a part in nudging China a step closer to rule of law.
Organizer: Jin Jiang, Vassar College
Chair and Discussant: Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa Cruz
The 1950s is one of the most understudied periods of modern Chinese history, one that is, if not neglected, often considered a mere prelude to the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). It is, however, an important period of unscripted, uneven, often frankly experimental urban social change, one that we can now begin to describe for the city of Shanghai on the basis of recent archival and oral history research. Jishun Zhang’s paper examines the "impure" nature of neighborhood committees in the early 1950s and the CCP’s strategies in dealing with various elements involved in these committees to achieve its grassroots political mobilization. Zheng Wang’s paper looks at grassroots Women’s Congresses established by the Shanghai Women’s Federation to mobilize housewives for socialist transformation, and at how these women’s organizations influenced existing gender relations. Mark Swislocki’s paper takes on the nationalization of Shanghai’s restaurants in the 1950s to examine changes in culinary culture and the efficacy of state efforts to foster a classless, unified national identity. Jin Jiang’s paper investigates the state’s efforts to transform a market-oriented popular entertainment to a centrally planned popular culture, and shows how the entertainers and the state interacted to inform this multifaceted social and cultural process. Together, these papers depict 1950s Shanghai as a dynamic and unstable society, neither a totalitarian society under rigid state control, nor one leading inexorably to the Cultural Revolution.
Neighborhood Committees and Grassroots Political Mobilization in Shanghai in the Early 1950s
Jishun Zhang, East China Normal University
During the first decade of the People’s Republic of China, the Communist Party effectively managed Shanghai’s grassroots communities, using neighborhood committees as a bridge between the government and society. On the one hand, neighborhood committees functioned as governmental institutions in carrying out government directives and collecting information from local society. On the other hand, they served local communities by representing common interests of residents and by helping mediate neighborhood disputes and maintain social order.
Mainly based on archival research, this paper examines the Communist Party’s strategies in using neighborhood committees to assert control over local communities. Shanghai’s neighborhood communities were part of modern Shanghai’s social and political ecology, influenced by various elements such as native place associations, underworld gangs, and guilds. Compared to their successors in the 1960s, which were instrumental in carrying out the Party’s line of class struggle, the neighborhood committees in this period were obviously mixed and "impure." There were numerous contradictions and conflicts between the goals and intentions of the government and various elements in the committees. It was precisely in those contradictions and conflicts that the Communist Party found their leverages and successfully carried out its grassroots political mobilization. This success then laid a solid foundation for the establishment of an effective system of political control from the top to the bottom.
Women-Work and Social Reorganization in the 1950s
Zheng Wang, University of Michigan
The CCP began reorganizing local society in Shanghai as soon as they took over power from the GMD. The Shanghai Women’s Federation was established in those early days for the purpose of organizing women for socialist transformation. In order to reach the majority of women—housewives in residential areas, the SWF established a Women’s Congress in the jurisdiction of each residents’ committee, and women representatives elected by women in their neighborhoods in turn elected a women’s committee that paralleled the residents’ committee. The Women’s Congresses played a crucial role in mobilizing housewives to engage in neighborhood work.
Based on interviews with veteran SWF officials and archival research, this paper examines the process of the SWF’s institutional building and mobilization of women in the early 1950s, and explicates the gender implications of the SWF’s involvement in reorganizing the urban society. Multiple dimensions of the SWF’s work need to be scrutinized: the internal workings of the organization; its relationship with the Party power structure; its relationship with other branches of municipal government, especially the Department of Civil Management that was in charge of reorganizing local society; and its strategies in transforming "backward" housewives into socialist constructors. This study aims to understand to what extent the SWF’s work disrupted the existing gender structure or broke gender boundaries, and to what extent its transformation efforts were constrained by the existing political culture that was saturated with gender assumptions and power relations.
"Serve the People": Restaurants, History, and the State in 1950s Shanghai
Mark Swislocki, Columbia University
This paper argues that, during the 1950s, the PRC state came to consider restaurants valuable institutions for standardizing the time and place, or the history and geography, of the Chinese nation. While Republican Shanghai (1912–1949) boasted a diverse restaurant industry that catered to city residents of different socioeconomic status and regional and national origin, the Socialist Government that assumed ownership of Shanghai’s restaurants in the 1950s considered restaurants bourgeois institutions that were elitist and, owing to their regionalist orientation, also barriers to the creation of a national identity. This paper draws on government documents, memoir literature, and fiction to examine the PRC state’s efforts to restructure Shanghai’s restaurant industry in a manner that accorded with prevailing visions of China’s future as a classless society united by its regional cultural heritage. Under the direction of state policy, the 1950s witnessed the emergence of China’s earliest "Chinese" restaurants, a process that influenced the eating habits of diners and the training of professional chefs, if sometimes in unexpected and unanticipated ways.
The Social Engineering of Cultural Transformation in the Early PRC
Jin Jiang, Vassar College
During the first decade of the People’s Republic of China, the municipal government of Shanghai was faced with the complicated task of controlling and managing the city’s hyperactive popular entertainment sector. It sought not only to gain control over popular productions, by eliminating heterodox revues and building a socialist repertoire, but also to manage the entertainers, by taking responsibility for their livelihood and transforming them into new socialist art workers charged with the task of educating the population in revolutionary ideology. Besides the obvious importance of exercising ideological control for a socialist state, the social engineering of cultural transformation was also an integral part of the new state’s efforts to reorder local society. During the 1950s the social and economic dimensions of planning culture consumed considerable government energy and resources, probably no less than that required for censoring and directing cultural productions.
Focusing on the case of Yueju (Yue opera) and drawing on data regarding other entertainment forms, this paper traces the changing structure of popular entertainment, from a market-based, commercial operation to a sector of a centrally planned culture and economy. My study indicates that the degree of success in planning culture was linked with that of the planned economy. It also shows that state control of popular culture and its performers was far from seamless, and that its intrusion into this part of local society was not an irreversible feature of socialist China’s long 1950s.
Organizer and Chair: Peter C. Perdue, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Discussant: Victor H. Mair, University of Pennsylvania
Keywords: art, music, Japan, China, Inner Asia.
The tremendous intercultural contacts along the ancient Silk Routes have entranced scholars and the general public. The cellist Yo-Yo Ma launched the Silk Road Project three years ago to promote collaborative work between modern Western musicians and performers from Silk Road countries. This year, the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival on the mall in Washington D.C., devoted entirely to the Silk Road, drew a large, enthusiastic public.
This panel follows up the inspiration provided by Yo-Yo Ma, his Silk Road musicians, and the Smithsonian festival by putting these intercultural contacts in a political and historical perspective. Here we expand academic horizons beyond textual Silk Road studies by looking primarily at artistic and musical interactions. The many artistic and musical motifs passed from one culture to another along the Silk Routes demonstrate vividly how extensive mobility created widened cultural geographies that transcended the boundaries of any single civilization. This approach, joining historical and contemporary studies, opens the way to cross-disciplinary perspectives that span several media.
In order to stimulate active discussion, panelists will limit their presentations to fifteen minutes, and they will use slides and audio recordings. In conjunction with this panel, we will arrange performances by some of the Silk Road musicians from the Smithsonian festival. The performers will be invited to join in audience discussion of the papers.
Astrology Along the Silk Road
Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis, Boston University
In 12th- and 13th-century Japan, artists painted visions of a celestial realm governed by the Buddha Sakyamuni. Called "Star" or "Big Dipper" mandalas, these representations of enlightenment focus on Sakyamuni seated atop Mount Sumeru, the cosmic mountain rising out of the cosmic sea. Three concentric rings around the Buddha display human figures and animals, personifications of the celestial bodies. The central of these three circles presents an astonishing sight—the signs of the Western zodiac. A pair of serpents encircling Mount Sumeru suggest an early Indian myth in which serpents use the cosmic mountain to churn the cosmic ocean, creating the ambrosia that nourishes life.
About the same time, another reworking of this Indian myth was underway in Cambodia, where architects were building the temple-city of Angkor Thom. Its ground plan was probably based on the same Indian myth combined with local astrological notions.
This paper examines the Japanese mandalas and the ground plan of the city of Angkor Thom, comparing East and Southeast Asian representations of astrology with those of Islamic West Asia. These connections among astrological representations were part of the complex transfer of culture made possible by the Silk Road, along both its land and sea routes.
Music on the Ancient Silk Road
Bo Lawergren, City University of New York Graduate Center
Although we know little about tunes and melodies sung and played along the Silk Road during the first millennium C.E., there is abundant pictorial documentation (and some texts) which inform us on the circumstances of music. We see which instruments and ensembles were used and how music fitted into society. These sources give information on the infrastructure of music, the framework necessary for melodies and tunes to flourish.
By tracing the association of instruments with foreign musical cultures, we may pinpoint which major regions exerted musical influence on the Silk Road sites: China, India, Iran or the Hellenistic world. Influences varied from site to site and from time to time within the first millennium. In the complete history of Asian musical instruments as it is now known, this millennium is but a brief moment—albeit a well illustrated one. Sketching the history of musical instruments during this period yields a comparative approach capable of insights not found in studies confined to the Silk Road at a particular time.
Overtone Singing in Central Eurasia
Mark C. van Tongeren, North Asia Institute Tengri
Overtone singing is a technique in which a single human voice can simultaneously produce two or more clearly audible tones. The usual sensation of hearing a single tone shifts to hearing a low drone with seemingly independent tones high above it. In central Asia this way of vocalizing has been practiced since times unknown by Tibetan monks and several Turco-Mongol tribes. In recent decades it has stirred Western audiences thanks to such musical pioneers as Karlheinz Stockhausen, David Hykes’ Harmonic Choir, and Michael Vetter. Drawing on various fieldwork experiences, interviews with Eastern and Western musicians, and scholarly studies, presented in greater detail in my book Overtone Singing, I will present a multidisciplinary vision of sound, running from contemporary music to the science of acoustics and the spiritual dimensions of music.
The Silk Road Dilemma and the Construction and Control of Uyghur Music
James A. Millward, Georgetown University
The notion of the Silk Road fits well with modern Chinese sensibilities and needs. It fosters nostalgia for the eras of Chinese imperial greatness, and may even be more profitable (by stimulating tourism) than the silk trade itself ever was. Silk Road romanticism in its Chinese form, replicated in modern art/kitsch, tourist itineraries, advertising imagery, and song and dance shows, remains largely frozen in the pre-Islamic first millennium C.E., when the term "Western Regions" evoked Buddhism, big-nosed merchants and musicians, and small-footed dancing girls. Soundtracks for this imagined Silk Road feature the Chinese pipa in the (anachronistic) pentatonic scale.
Today, Xinjiang’s natives do indeed still strum, dance and sing as they did before. This has been convenient for the PRC Nationalities Committee charged with cataloging cultural characteristics and defining minzu-hood. Despite captivating similarities with the exotic musicians and dancers peopling Tang poems, however, problems arise from the ways Uyghurs and other minzu actually play and dance and especially from what they sing about. Though Han popular and classical music draws constantly on its melodies and imagery, Uyghur music belongs to a musical world with vast continental links, but few close connections to Han culture. The dissonance between Islamic Central Asia and the Chinese Silk Road imaginary inspires this paper, which surveys the twentieth-century state project to canonize and domesticate Uyghur music, and the resilience of individual and private cultural expression in the face of official ideological controls.
Organizer: Christopher A. Reed, Ohio State University
Chair and Discussant: Barbara Mittler, University of Heidelberg
Keywords: print culture, China, history, late Qing, republic.
Recently, the concept of print culture has stimulated a wide variety of scholarly investigations in Chinese studies. Both in the premodern and modern eras, print culture approaches have revealed new insights into Chinese cultural history, business history, educational history, and finally, more generally, political history.
This panel will present some of the most recent work on Republican-era Chinese print culture, particularly that emanating from Shanghai. The panelists and chair/discussant represent a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, methods, genders, ethnic-ities, and institutions. Bridging the premodern and modern eras, Jan Kiely will present a study of a "modernized" form of traditional literature, the morality books familiar from Song, Ming, and Qing studies, but published in large volume by modern Shanghai publishers as well. Christopher A. Reed will discuss the commercial competition that resulted on Shanghai’s Wenhuajie from publishers’ efforts to monopolize the Republican period’s most profitable new-style publication, the modern textbook. Robert Culp will take this story beyond Shanghai to reveal the role of reformist intellectuals and then Nationalist government-influenced editors in advancing ideas of modernity. Finally, Ling Arey Shiao will study the efforts of Shanghai’s Kaiming Press to commercialize May Fourth enlightenment messages by means of successful engagement of the marketplace. Each case, drawing on a wide variety of contemporary source material, will reveal the responses of print-oriented intellectuals to the possibilities of the publishing marketplace for altering cultural, commercial, and educational patterns in late-Qing and Republican China.
Transforming Texts: Nie Qijie and Morality Book Publication in Republican China
Jan Francis Kiely, Furman University
Morality books (shanshu), similar "modernized" compilations and Pure Land Buddhist popular works were likely the most commonly circulating books in China during the first three decades of the twentieth century. There was a formal coherence and a shared popular Confucian and "cause and effect-retribution" (yinguo baoying) ethics to the genre. Many were accompanied by stories of "real evidence" of moral consequences dispensed by karma or ghosts and spirits. Although growing in popularity in the late Qing, such texts underwent a boom of compilation, publication and dissemination amidst the cultural and political crises of the 1910s and 20s when elite public moralists set the modern mechanized print industry, primarily in Shanghai, to work producing texts to transform "the people." As had been the case in earlier periods, these books or the textual selections within them came to be transformed in meaning and purpose as they were deployed to respond to Republican-era concerns with modernity and national survival. Focusing on the Shanghai industrialist Nie Qijie’s reissue of the Ganying leichao, this paper interprets the transformations of the transformative texts in the context of emerging mass print culture.
Conflict in Cultural Commerce: Shanghai Publishers and the Textbook Wars, 1904–1928
Christopher A. Reed, Ohio State University
In the final decade of the Qing dynasty, tentative moves to reform the education system sparked interest in modern Western-style educational commodities. Indeed, the most profitable new-style book commodity to emerge in this period after the heyday of the lithographed examination text was the modern textbook. As time passed, such works became cheaper and were also distributed more widely. Simultaneously, the textbook market became the chief battlefield of modern Shanghai publishers. The opening shots of what may be called the "Textbook Wars" were fired in 1904 by the Commercial Press. The closing chapter in this struggle occurred between 1924–28. During this sixteen-year period from 1904–28, Shanghai publishers produced and marketed machine-printed and machine-bound words in a spirit of cutthroat print capitalism.
My paper focuses on the second generation of new-style publishers, arguing that the Republican publishing corporation and its marketplace attracted a generation of would-be scholars, particularly Wang Yunwu (1888–1980) of the Commercial Press, Lufei Kui (Bohong, 1886–1940) of Zhonghua Books, and, to a lesser extent, Shen Zhifang (1882–1939) of World Books, and transformed them into hard-nosed businessmen whose merchandise happened to be books. Monopoly was the objective that each Chinese publishing corporation sought in the broad potential market of post-Qing China. The by-product of each firm’s scramble to secure monopoly was a fierce competition among these corporations that amounted to war.
Mediating Modernity: Textbook Publishing and the Spread of Ideas in Republican China
Robert M. Culp, Bard College
This paper demonstrates how the production and distribution of textbooks influenced the dissemination of Chinese conceptions of modernity during the Republican period. I reconstruct how textbooks were marketed and distributed, showing that publishers treated them like any other commodities, seeking to increase profits by expanding markets. This drive to extend markets spread ideas generated in cosmopolitan cities like Shanghai into all of China’s macro-regions. Moreover, in areas like the lower Yangzi region, where marketing networks were tightly integrated, textbooks carried new ideas directly into schools in local cities and small towns.
But whose conceptions of modernity did these textbooks spread? Through analysis of the editing and censorship of secondary textbooks, I argue that reformist intellectuals’ voices were dominant between 1912 and 1927 while the Nationalist Party effectively dictated the content of secondary textbooks between 1928 and 1937. During the first period, reformist elites, New Culture movement intellectuals, and American-influenced progressive educators crafted curriculum standards and wrote textbooks that faithfully represented their ideas. Moreover, these leading intellectuals profoundly influenced the growing cadre of professional editors who wrote most textbooks. By contrast, during the 1930s, the Nationalist Party formulated national curriculum standards and imposed them on publishers through effective censorship. The result was remarkably uniform secondary textbooks. Thus, contrary to the conventional wisdom, this paper shows the Nationalist Party to have been a relatively effective cultural broker.
In sum, the market’s invisible hand spread textbooks widely, while intellectual circles and the Nationalist Party, in turn, shaped the ideas in those books.
Bridging Influence and Income: May Fourth Intellectuals’ Approaches to Cultural Economy in the Post-May Fourth Era
Ling Arey Shiao, Brown University
The aftermath of the New Culture Movement presented May Fourth intellectuals with a dual challenge: they needed to expand their social influence while taking advantage of new popular patronage to earn an income. During the 1920s, they set up scores of publishing houses, but, as publishers, they were plagued by the quandary of how to be faithful to their cultural mission while marketing their cultural commodities. Only a handful of these publishers managed to sustain their operations. Kaiming Press, founded in 1926, staffed and supported by a team of celebrated May Fourth intellectuals, was the biggest success story. By the early 1930s, Kaiming became the only press run by intellectuals to achieve status as one of the "Big Five" in the publishing world.
This paper focuses on the critical reforms Kaiming underwent between 1928 and 1930 to reorient itself from its May Fourth intellectual crusade to its low-profile enduring project of popularizing New Culture. I examine not only Kaiming’s journalistic innovations and publishing strategies but also explore its implications for intellectual life. I argue that the Kaiming intellectuals’ successful engagement of the marketplace paradoxically enabled the spread of the May Fourth enlightenment beyond the confines of small college student communities. Furthermore, their heavy reliance on society for both legitimacy and financial resources opened up a cultural space that included their readership. For the first time, the style of May Fourth intellectuals’ communication with their buying public became less instructive and didactic and more interactive and dynamic.
Chair: Lydia H. Liu, University of Michigan
Evidence Matters: Textual Authority and Lineage Dispute in Seventeenth-Century Chan/Zen Buddhism (with special reference to the founding of the Japanese Obaku School)
Jiang Wu, University of Arizona
In my recently completed dissertation, "Orthodoxy, Controversy and the Transformation of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-century China" (Harvard University, 2002), I investigate a series of controversies which involved three Huangbo masters, Miyun Yuanwu (1556–1642), Feiyin Tongrong (1593–1661) and Yinyuan Longqi (1592–1673). Because the third Huangbo master Yinyuan Longqi emigrated to Japan in 1654 and founded the Japanese Obaku school, my dissertation reveals the intellectual origins of this school in China. Based on Chapter 3 of my dissertation, this paper examines one particular controversy over dharma transmission and calls attention to the issue of textual authority in the Buddhist tradition. During the polemics with monks from other lineages, the Huangbo masters were able to establish their textual authority on the matter of dharma transmission in the Chan tradition through their lavish use of evidential scholarship. I conclude that in the seventeenth-century Chan tradition, religious authority was largely defined as textual authority and the establishment of a new orthodoxy was achieved by the manipulation of textual evidence. This paper not only raises the question about the role of textual authority in the Buddhist tradition but also sheds new light on the establishment of the Obaku school in Japan because the principle of dharma transmission formulated in this controversy was inherited by Yinyuan Longqi, the founder of the Japanese Obaku school.
Engendering Heroism: Ming-Qing Women’s Song Lyrics to the Tune Man Jiang Hong
Xiaorong Li, McGill University
The two conceptual categories in the aesthetics and poetics of the song lyric (ci)—"masculine" (haofang) and "feminine" (wanyue)—may have primarily referred to the textual performance of male authors in the tradition. However, the participation of a critical mass of Ming-Qing women lyricists, whose gendered consciousness played a role in their textual production, complicated the issue. Recent studies have offered important perspectives on women authors’ reinscriptions of the feminine image and voice created by male poets. This paper seeks to carry the investigation further by examining how women appropriated masculine poetics, particularly within the dimension of the heroic mode of the tune Man jiang hong, to voice their own concerns and emotions.
Associated with the Song hero Yue Fei, Man jiang hong has become a recognized form for expressing forceful emotions on heroic subjects. The heroic lyric had long been a masculine symbolic space linked with the male social world of career and achievement. How did women cross boundaries to write in the heroic mode? How did they negotiate the insertion of their gender identity? What new poetic or symbolic space did they create through this tune? This paper will explore these questions by analyzing several categories of Man jiang hong lyrics by Ming-Qing women authors.
Women’s self-expression is complicated by its relationship to patriarchal language and ideology, but the representational dimension intersected by the ci form Man jiang hong and the symbolic space of heroism provides a fruitful perspective from which to examine this issue.
Eat, Drink, and Talk Politics—Poetry and Politics at Wine Parties in Late Qing China
Seungjoo Yoon, Carleton College
This paper examines the intricate relationships between "literati drinking" (wenjiu) and the process of making decisions of political importance in late Qing China. With a focus on the behavior of Zhang Zhidong’s private secretaries in the tri-city complex of Wuhan in late Qing China, this paper discusses how literati drinking served to facilitate network building, both horizontal and vertical. Diary entries of Zhang’s secretaries painstakingly list the names of invitees to wine parties under Zhang’s patronage. The paper also examines how this particular literati culture has survived with an increasing flavor of cosmopolitanism. Gathering themselves at local salons or taverns, compatriot hostels, high-quality Western-style restaurants, or at Zhang’s residences, his secretaries shared their innermost thoughts preferably in the form of poems over wine and late-night snacks. It was at these late-night conferences where secret consultations were conducted and key decisions were made. The "real" business began after regular business hours. Existing studies stress the gift-giving aspect of such gatherings. While not downplaying such features, this paper emphasizes the political function of such meetings. The paper concludes that the frequency and routinization of such parties attests to the highly personalized nature of Zhang’s bureaucracy. Late-night conferences over wine were intended to limit access to sensitive information with political importance and thus they remained extremely selective and became highly ritualized. The paper further claims that the art of managing inter-personal networks in Qing China shows a particularistic nature of the modern Chinese state.
Allegory and the Yijian Zhi: Should the Yijian Zhi be Read Allegorically?
Alister David Inglis, Hamilton College
Hong Mai’s (1123–1202) Yijian zhi, or Record of the Listener (hereafter the Record) is a large collection of short, classical stories from China’s Sung Dynasty (960–1279). In recent years it has been ever-increasingly utilized by Sung scholars as a primary source for a broad range of studies. A recent doctoral dissertation on the Record developed an argument for an allegorical reading of the collection’s short stories. The aim of my paper is to counter this claim. Based on an examination of author Hong Mai’s professed assertion that his accounts were not allegorical, I present evidence which renders any allegorical interpretation highly unlikely. I begin by briefly summarizing the argument for an allegorical reading. I then discuss the concept of allegory in relation to the Chinese literary tradition as well as contemporary Western literary theory. Then I argue for a non-allegorical reading, based chiefly on internal evidence found within the text itself which I relate to the social and historical context in which it was written.
Ghost Talk Lined Up: Travesty of Fictional Discourse in He Dian
Roland Altenburger, University of Zurich
He Dian (Which Classical Reference? 1878) is a short (10 ch.) novel written by an obscure Shanghai scholar, Zhang Nanzhuang, probably in the early 19th century. After the text had been published several times throughout the late Qing, it was "rediscovered" by the May Fourth exponent Liu Fu. He called attention to its intellectual dissidence and richness in linguistic reference to Wu regiolects and common people’s language. Despite its popular appearance, this text has continuously puzzled its readership. Liu Fu already felt that it could be tentatively understood only with the help of dense annotation. However, the difficulties of this text are not limited to the level of lexical comprehension, but also derive from the innovative kind of discourse that it unfolds.
On the surface, the text purports to join a minor generic tradition of ghost fiction that served as a conventional disguise for social satire. However, narrative plot apparently is not the main concern of its discourse; the emphasis rather seems to be focused on language itself. Extended passages turn out to be constructed from pastiches of popular idioms and sayings which in many cases are not used in their literal surface meaning, thus opening up ironical gaps of either double entendre or apparent nonsense. Such massive punning cannot be downplayed as an "innocent" intellectual game, but should be brought into broader perspective and acknowledged as an expression of a crisis in intellectual discourse, hinted at also by the text’s title.
Organizer: Miranda Brown, University of Michigan
Chair: Erica Brindley, University of California, Santa Barbara
Discussants: Charles F. McKhann, Whitman College; Irene S. Leung, Asia Society
Keywords: ethnography, China, premodern.
Until recently, standard accounts of premodern Chinese civilization have emphasized the relative isolation and cultural homogeneity of pre-Qing civilization. According to Joseph Needham and John K. Fairbank, Han thinkers, largely unexposed to alien customs and culture, were left unshaken and unchallenged in their beliefs about the supremacy of Confucian institutions, institutions they regarded as being in accordance with the cosmos. More recently, other scholars have argued that the people we now regard as the Han Chinese defined themselves against alien peoples they considered to be less civilized in terms of Confucian institutions and morality. The purpose of this panel is to reconsider these two views of pre-Qing encounters with other civilizations by examining representations of aliens and their customs; it will incorporate the insights of scholars working in different periods (Eastern Zhou through Ming) and in different disciplines (anthropology, art-history, and history). Panelists will address the following issues: how did encounters (actual or imaginary) with alien cultures shape and, in some cases, challenge premodern beliefs about traditional morality and culture? Did such encounters help define or subvert the boundaries separating the civilized "Chinese" self from an uncivilized other? And, to what extent are descriptions of aliens motivated by claims for political, cultural, and/or ethnic superiority? Are there other factors motivating the creation of such writings?
Warring States (453–221 B.C.) and Han (206 B.C.–A.D. 220) Writings about Customs and Habits
Miranda Brown, University of Michigan
This paper seeks to challenge the received wisdom about ethnography in early China, namely that they served to define the Han "self" against an alien and culturally inferior "other" or to reinforce Han cultural superiority. In addition, I will dispute more recent arguments made by Nicola di Cosmo that Sima Qian’s (c. 99 B.C.) Shiji monograph on the Xiongnu represents the first true example of ethnography in China, a development that reflects a shift away from "moralistic" narratives to "empiricist" history. Instead, I will propose an alternative explanation for the emergence of ethnography in China: the practice of writing about alien customs had its roots in Mozi’s (c. 470–391? B.C.) critical re-evaluation of the Zhou (711–221 B.C.) cultural institutions. For Mozi, alien mourning and burial customs underscored the conventional nature of Zhou institutions. Awareness or beliefs about cultural differences and alternatives subsequently led some Han thinkers (especially the Huainanzi authors and Sima Qian) to critically re-examine the value of their own cultural tradition while questioning the boundaries separating themselves from alien cultures.
Myth of the Wanton Female: Gender, Sex, and Conceptions of "Civilization" in Ethnographic Writings on the Yueh Peoples
Erica Brindley, University of California, Santa Barbara
Images of the Southern and Eastern Yüeh as distinct polities, cultures, and peoples south of the Central Kingdoms can be found in writings as early as Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s Records, the Huai-nan-tzu, and the Han Shu. Of these sources, the Han Shu provides a depiction of these peoples—in particular, their women—that would last for centuries and ultimately prove critical to the formation of a gendered mythology of the southern regions. To be sure, the Han Shu claims, the women of Yüeh are wanton; they dominate their landscapes, daring to share the same bathing sites (rivers) as men. This paper examines premodern Chinese writings to uncover the genesis and continuation of the myth of the Yüeh female. It seeks to understand the grounds on which the image of wantonness and sexual transgression was produced, propagated, and transformed in close association with ethnic "otherness." Through an analysis of several different ethnographic genres during the first millennium A.D., this paper also attempts to show how sexually charged conceptions of Han civilization impacted the formation of cultural identities and gender relations both within and outside of the Han cultural sphere.
Realism and Idealism in Yuan Dynasty Ethnography
Michael C. Brose, University of Wyoming
This paper examines the competing discourses present in Yuan Dynasty ethnographic literature by examining the chapters on Foreign Barbarians in the Yuan History. A first reading of those chapters gives the impression that the Mongol political elite viewed peoples outside their realm as uncivilized. However, a closer look reveals a different story. Rather than characterize foreign peoples and states as "foreign barbarians," the text describes them as "foreign states," casting the relationship of those states to the Yuan state in terms of state-state relations. This confusion reflects the multiple discourses on ethnicity and identity in the Yuan Dynasty and on the history of the compilation of the Yuan History. The use of the term "Foreign Barbarians" as chapter headings represents the idealistic Chinese view of the Other, a perspective that reflects Ming editing. But the more Realist description found in the body of the text represents the Mongol approach to other states and peoples. That approach, where ethnicity was but one of many factors used by the Mongols in their relationships with "foreigners," is an important counterweight to the implications provided by the Ming editors, and needs to be taken into account when reading these chapters. In fact, these chapters of the Yuan History provide a fascinating window onto the interactions with and competing views of the Other by Mongols and Chinese, and read within their socio-political context, they reveal the ways that ethnography changed during the Yuan-Ming transition.
Organizer: Daniel Buck, Columbia University
Chair: Ching Kwan Lee, University of Michigan
Discussant: Dorothy J. Solinger, University of California, Irvine
Keywords: China, labor, political economy.
This panel will examine changing labor relations in China’s ongoing transformation from planned toward market economy in the context of rapid development and internationalization. Focusing on four groups of workers in four different types of workplace—urban workers in joint-venture industries, service workers in insurance sales, rural workers in urban-rural industrial networks, and migrant workers—the panelists will explore the role of worker agency in the construction, legitimation, and resistance to forms of domination in the reform period.
This panel brings together scholars who have conducted recent ethnographic fieldwork, each examining at least two of the following three levels: the shop floor, the interfirm division of labor, and the state. Xiaodan Zhang found different types of paternalism developing out of tacit agreements formed through ongoing interaction between workers and managers in three joint-venture factories. Cheris Chan argues that foreign and joint-venture life insurance companies used different mechanisms of control than those in domestic firms. Daniel Buck shows how the spatial restructuring of subcontracting linkages between urban and rural factories has both created and legitimized new rural class and labor relations. Ching Kwan Lee argues that state efforts to regulate labor disputes are forging an increasingly assertive political subject among migrant workers. Dorothy Solinger will evaluate these new empirical findings in light of her expertise on the political economy of Chinese labor, with the goal of generating discussion about the relationships between these three levels, as well as the nuanced mixture of both changes and continuities in Chinese labor relations.
Reworking Networks, Refashioning Labor
Daniel Buck, Columbia University
The proliferation of urban to rural subcontracting in the 1980s and 1990s is often noted but seldom studied systematically. Based on an in-depth study of the spatial evolution of those linkages over time in several Shanghai industries, I found that they are not just one of the most important sets of industrial networks to emerge in the reform period, but also one of the most consequential axes of economic and power relations between a mutually constituting country and city. This paper will document how a violent reconfiguration of those networks in the late 1990s both engendered and legitimized a fundamental reworking of rural class and labor relations. The structural imperatives of a crisis of over-accumulation of capital drove a sudden and drastic restructuring of the networks. In turn, rural localities were forced to privatize many of their collective factories—enabling implementation of much lower wages without benefits—in order to maintain their places in these hitherto lucrative networks. But structural tendencies and institutional restructuring did not translate into automatic and uniform outcomes. They were mediated through local government fears of local labor unrest, on the one hand, and state-sponsored "market economy" discourses, made newly salient by the violence of the network reconfigurations, on the other hand. Privatization and implementation of the new labor regime were political and uneven, and resulted in a polarized rural labor force and a marked increase in the exploitation of rural labor by urban and international capital through the reconstituted networks.
The Force of Law and Migrant Labor Politics
Ching Kwan Lee, University of Michigan
This paper analyzes migrant workers’ "practices of struggle" in Shenzhen. It traces how incidents of strikes, protests, collective dispute arbitration and litigation unfold. I argue that the state, through the operation of the Labor Law and the bureaucratic apparatus dealing with labor disputes, politicizes and incites conflicts as often as it rationalizes their resolution. Through these labor conflicts, an increasingly assertive political subject is forged among migrant laborers. They make claims based on a collective identification as "subaltern group," rather than as a "class" or "citizens" with legal rights.
Working for Pride vs. Working for Money: Comparing the Labor Management of Insurance Agents in Foreign and Domestic Firms
Cheris Shun-ching Chan, Northwestern University
Commercial life insurance was re-introduced to China in 1992 by an American insurer. When foreign and joint-venture life insurers enter China, where the general public has no idea about what life insurance is, how do they establish local agency bodies to generate business? To what extent are foreign players imposing new cultural elements on the local through their training and agency control? When domestic life insurers join the market, how are they similar to and different from the foreign players in establishing their agency bodies? In Shanghai, the life insurance industry has sprung to life over the last ten years and has become a battlefield where foreign and domestic actors and cultural elements dynamically contest and collaborate with each other. Based on an ethnographic case study of the creation of a life insurance market in Shanghai, this paper uses a comparative perspective to understand how foreign, joint-venture and domestic life insurers recruit, train, and manage insurance agents, and how the agents receive the training and respond to the labor management. The findings suggest that the foreign and joint-venture players tend to elevate the meaning of selling life insurance to a sacred level and use more symbolic means for labor management. The domestic players, on the other hand, place the economic interests of selling life insurance at the center and employ more materialistic means for labor management. The differences manifest some patterns of disparity of the workplaces in foreign and domestic firms in China.
Paternalism: Despotic or Benevolent—Chinese Labor Relations on the Shopfloor in the Reform Era
Xiaodan Zhang, Columbia University
This paper is a three-case comparison about the changing labor relations on the Chinese shop floor. Drawing on the data gathered in three joint ventures in Shanghai, my research challenges a popular theory in the field that a more "rational" type of labor relations has replaced a socialist patron-cliental type since the reform. I argue that a paternalistic ruling is still prevalent in Chinese industrial organizations. The three-case comparison shows that despite similar organizational configurations on the firm level, the three companies demonstrate two different kinds of paternalism on the shop floor: despotic and benevolent. Instead of explaining paternalistic capitalism by the panacea concept "culture" or thinking of the labor relations as a mere outcome of systematic structural change, I focus on the process of interaction between low-ranking managers and workers. I suggest that the different types of paternalism are contingent upon the actors’ mutual expectations and tacit agreements that take form in their interaction. The two important factors, the low-ranking manager’s distribution power and workers’ group solidarity, also determine which type will dominate on the shop floor. While the former allows managers to make deals and exchange favors with workers, the latter affects managers with their values of a benevolent "good boss."
Organizer: Henrietta Harrison, University of Leeds
Chair and Discussant: Bradly W. Reed, University of Virginia
Keywords: democracy, China, history, Republican period.
In 1922 a man called Ye Liming committed suicide in Nanjing to protest the election of the son of wealthy industrialist Zhang Jian as head of the Jiangsu Provincial Assembly. Ye’s coffin was then placed at the entrance to the Assembly buildings so that all the members would see it as they entered to vote. This was one of a series of financial scandals that rocked the early Republic and were a major part of the destruction of its legitimacy. In this panel we look from the bottom up at how people saw the role of money in the new democratic state. The three panelists ask three interlinked questions: Was there something intrinsically immoral about a system of appointment by election? What role could money properly play in a political campaign? What constituted corruption in the new political system? The papers concentrate on the early years of the Republic, which were crucial in undermining the legitimacy of the new system of government, but money politics were scarcely new to China. In late Qing China, money was essential to the reproduction of the elite, government ranks and offices were regularly sold, and government corruption was widely criticized. Our discussant has worked on corruption in the late Qing and we hope through the discussion to draw out the reasons why it was only after the establishment of the republic with its democratic forms of government that the use of money in politics became such a major political issue.
Village Level Attitudes towards the National Assembly Elections of 1915 in Shanxi
Henrietta Harrison, University of Leeds
Elections were a primary source of legitimacy for the Republican government that came to power in 1911. For the modernizers who led the government, elections to the National Assembly in Beijing embodied the involvement of the people in the new state. But how widely shared were their attitudes? In this paper I look at one man’s experience of the National Assembly elections of 1915 and argue that elections were understood instead as embodying the identification of the new political system with money politics and money-based values.
Liu Dapeng was an upper degree holder who lived in a village not far from the provincial capital. Elections came to play a significant role in his life as a member of the local gentry in the years following the revolution but the process of representative democracy was morally problematic for someone who had grown up with an entirely different set of political values. Liu understood elections as being intended to select upright men to hold political office, but the very process of an election appeared to be structured to prevent this from happening. In fact, election campaigns seemed to elicit boastfulness, greed, and ignorance in both candidates and voters. Direct bribery, which followed, was merely an extension of the moral depravity of the whole system.
Money vs. Conscience: The 1921 Election of the Jiangsu Provincial Assembly
Qin Shao, College of New Jersey
Zhang Xiaoruo, the son of wealthy industrialist Zhang Jian, campaigned in 1921 for the office of the speaker of the Jiangsu Provincial Assembly. His campaign ended in a scandal because of alleged bribery to purchase votes. The media attacked him as a "money speaker" and depicted the election as a battle of "money vs. conscience." The public was outraged, and one person committed suicide to protest against "money politics." Xiaoruo was fatally wounded by the scandal; he gave up politics altogether.
This study explores a number of issues surrounding the election. Government offices were routinely sold in the last years of the Qing. Why, then, did the involvement of money in politics in the early Republic cause such strong public reaction? This case indicates a deep ambivalence among the people towards the republican system. They idealized the new system as a sharp break with the past and saw money politics as incompatible with democracy, but they were also distrustful of the new political system itself. In this case the students in Nanjing believed that they needed to be physically present to prevent Xiaoruo from being elected. The controversy concerning the election thus illustrates a shifting moral commitment to representative government and an evolving participatory politics in the public domain.
Money and Policy: Feng Guozhang and the Opium Combine Case
Alan Baumler, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
In 1915 Cai Naihuang signed an agreement with a group of foreign opium merchants to buy up the last 6,000 chests of Indian opium in China. It eventually came out that the opium was to be used to create a national opium monopoly, a violation of various laws of the Republic and a betrayal of the highly successful anti-opium campaigns of the previous ten years. Cai was an opium-suppression official, but was effectively acting as the personal representative of vice-president Feng Guozhang and his various allies. As the nature of the agreement became known, public protest grew, centered on the disjuncture between the formal organization of the state and the actual process of decision making. This was not a simple case of bribery, Feng and his associates were also involved in financing the monopoly scheme and would profit personally from its success. Members of various public organizations forced the government to try, unsuccessfully, to justify its actions in both moral and procedural terms. This case is significant first because it reveals a great deal about how the financial interests of national and local figures were tied together, i.e. how corruption worked. It is also one of the few cases where the public good triumphed over self-interest, as the anti-monopoly forces were able to muster a series of arguments that the pro-monopoly forces were unable to counter, thus demonstrating what constituted "corruption" in the eyes of the political elite and how, at least in one case, the political system could prevent it.
Organizer: Liping Bu, Alma College
Chair: Ann B. Jannetta, University of Pittsburgh
Discussants: Ruth Rogaski, Princeton University; Susan L. Burns, University of Chicago
Keywords: China, state/nation building, public health campaigns, nationalism, tobacco prohibitions, empire construction, physical education, sanitation engineering, hygienic modernity, Social Darwinism.
This panel examines different ways in which the Chinese state at different stages in its evolution intervened in areas associated with the health of its citizens. Lihong Du contributes to the literature on Republican-era public health administration by tracing the history of the 1930’s Beijing sanitation bureau’s successful efforts to regulate road cleaning and rubbish collection and its failure to control the profitable trade in night soil. Liping Bu demonstrates how China’s physical education and public health campaigns in the early 20th century aimed to strengthen the "national body" of the Chinese people as an expression of Social Darwinian nationalism. Carol Benedict’s paper looks at early Qing prohibitions against tobacco to reassess prior views that this was an early example of state efforts to protect collective well-being and a precedent for 19th-century anti-opium legislation. Instead, the paper finds that the pre-conquest state’s intervention in its subjects’ lives reflects Manchu interests in building a multi-ethnic empire.
Together, these papers reinforce recent scholarship that regards hygienic modernity in China as the product of early twentieth-century state building. While Hong Taiji’s tobacco prohibitions are an early state attempt to control individual health-related behaviors, public health in China only developed after elites selectively appropriated transnational concepts such as Social Darwinism and sanitary engineering in the early twentieth century. Local municipalities, no less than successive central governments, rested public health programs on appeals to the nation. Yet in the instances of night-soil regulation and tobacco eradication, state efforts faltered under the pressure of individual economic interests.
Early Qing Tobacco Prohibitions and the Construction of Empire
Carol Benedict, Georgetown University
In contemporary China, tobacco is undeniably a major public health concern. With 350 million smokers, China has the highest rate of cigarette consumption in the world (1.8 trillion cigarettes a year). In a recent study, it was noted that 20 percent of all deaths of middle-aged men in Shanghai were caused by smoking-related illnesses. Smoking is already causing 750,000 deaths per year, and if current smoking patterns continue, tobacco is expected to cause more than 2 million Chinese deaths annually by the year 2025. In recent years, in an effort to stem a potentially calamitous epidemic, the government has imposed tobacco advertising restrictions, created an Office of Smoking and Health, and banned smoking in public places in at least eleven cities.
While anti-smoking policies designed explicitly to protect the public’s health are a recent development within China, the early Qing state under Hong Taiji maintained harsh laws against tobacco in the decade leading up to the Manchu conquest. Between 1638 and 1640, his government energetically prosecuted all those engaged in planting, selling, or smoking tobacco. Earlier studies of these prohibitions regard them as moralistic precedents upon which nineteenth-century anti-opium legislation was based. This reassessment of the early Qing tobacco prohibitions argues that Hong Taiji’s decision to ban tobacco emerged first and foremost out of the political, economic, and military strategies upon which he was attempting to build a multi-ethnic empire.
Public Health and Nation Building in Early-20th-Century China
Liping Bu, Alma College
The announcement that China would host the 2008 Olympics staged an overwhelming expression of patriotic emotions among the Chinese. What makes the Olympics so uniquely significant for China and the celebration so nationalistically passionate? In order to comprehend this unusual outburst of national pride and excitement, we need to look at China’s modern history to gain a better understanding of how health and physical fitness were interpreted as important elements to national strength and how the bodies of Chinese individuals were integrated into the national body in the early 20th century as China strove to be strong again. Using archival information both in Chinese and English, I examine the efforts of public health campaigns and physical education programs and analyze how the Chinese understood their national survival and revival in terms of individuals’ physical fitness and national health standards.
The penetration of imperialist powers in China gave rise to the modern Chinese nationalist movement, but Western ideas and practices also helped shape the formation of Chinese modern nationalism. This paper argues that Social Darwinism informed China’s modern nationalism at the turn of the 20th century and continued to be the key theory before political parties (the Nationalist and the Communist) injected political ideologies as the guiding principles of Chinese nationalism.
Organizer: Thomas Buoye, University of Tulsa
Chair: Jonathan K. Ocko, North Carolina State University
Discussant: Nancy Park, Independent Scholar
Only in the last decade have Western studies of Chinese legal history begun to overcome ingrained misconceptions of both Western and Chinese origin. For over a century, Confucian elite representations of Chinese law reinforced Western critiques of Chinese law that justified extraterritoriality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Similarly, the all too common assumption that contemporary Chinese legal practices have deep historical roots has kept misconceptions alive. Longstanding Western and elite Chinese biases unduly influenced the best scholarship, including the works of Derk Bodde and Clarence Morris, and Ch’u T’ung-tsu. With the notable exceptions of William Alford (criminal procedure) and David Buxbaum (civil law) few scholars noticed the positive features of the traditional legal system.
Over the past decade, access to archives of individual civil and criminal case records has allowed legal scholars to examine the day-to-day workings of the Qing legal system. For example, Melissa Macauley’s work on litigation masters and Bradley Reed’s study of yamen runners and clerks have dispelled entrenched stereotypes and have improved our understanding of the Qing legal system. This panel will take the process one step further and analyze the manufacture of legal knowledge and creation of justice at the grassroots level. Jerome Bourgon examines how magistrates went beyond codified law and applied a "sense of the Classics" to render legal decisions. Thomas Buoye analyzes change over time in the use of case-based and rules-based legal reasoning in capital crimes. A study of civil suits involving merchants and brokers in Jiangnan informs Qiu Pengsheng’s exploration of the interplay between law and economy. Pierre-Etienne Will focuses on "forensic science" as a tool adjudicating violent crime and determining just punishments. Together these papers will provide a well-integrated picture of the local judicial process of traditional China.
The Place of Forensic Examination in the Judicial Procedure during the Qing Period
Pierre-Etienne Will, College de France
Ever since the beginning of imperial times in China forensic examination has been a crucial link in the judicial process. Its function was to help determine the exact causes and circumstances of any suspicious or violent death, or even of wounds that might have caused death, with a view to establishing and allocating the exact degree of culpability of the defendant or defendants, and thus, determining the appropriate punishment and avoiding injustice. While the first systematic treatise on forensics, Song Ci’s Xiyuau jilu (A Collection on Washing Away the Wrongs), dates back to the mid-thirteenth century and was in constant use thereafter under the generic title Xiyuan lu, the Qing were the first regime to publish an official version of the text, which incorporated much previous scholarship. Likewise, they enacted precise rules on the numbers, training, and functions of the forensic specialists at local level—the so-called "coroners" (wuzuo). This paper will discuss the place of forensic examination in the overall judicial procedure, both in theory and, based on a variety of sources, in the everyday practice of local administrators. It will show that, despite the coroners’ frequently deplored ignorance and lack of reliability, forensics was taken most seriously by the best specialists of local government and was subject to constant theoretical and technical enhancement. Nevertheless, the existence of an officially sanctioned "forensic science" tended to hinder the development of one of the rare fields in premodern Chinese science where experimentation and direct observation seem to have been a matter of course.
Confucian Justice and Capital Crime: Cases and Rules in Qing Legal Reasoning
Thomas Buoye, University of Tulsa
At the heart of any sophisticated legal system is a tension between case-based and rules-based legal reasoning. To the extent that a legal system relies on the application of general rules, it sacrifices the flexibility of case-by-case judgments. Rendering legal judgments solely on a case-by-case basis conversely, sacrifices the certainty or consistency of rules-bound justice. Every legal system must balance the flexibility of case-based reasoning with the consistency of rules-based reasoning. China’s legal system was not immune to this dilemma, but an examination of legal reasoning in capital crimes and the elaborate institutional structure for adjudicating and sentencing capital crimes reveals how the Chinese criminal justice system accommodated both forms of legal reasoning.
The two-tiered process of adjudicating and sentencing capital crimes in the Qing dynasty created an arena in which judicial officials could adhere to the discipline of rules-based reasoning and simultaneously exercise the flexibility of case-based reasoning. Philosophically, the complex institutional structure of the Qing legal system and its requirement of multiple reviews of capital trials and sentencing allowed Chinese magistrates to fulfill both their legalist responsibility to prosecute crime and their Confucian duty to demonstrate compassion.
The automatic review of all capital cases meant that the homicide report was the most carefully scrutinized document in the Chinese bureaucracy. Thus, homicide case reports provide an invaluable glimpse into the nature of Chinese legal reasoning. This paper will compare the adjudication of several particularly challenging capital crimes to illustrate the delicate balance between case-based and rules-based reasoning in Chinese criminal law.
Patterning Justice: How Abstract Cases Prepared Qing Magistrates to Adjudicate Concrete Situations
Jérôme Bourgon, CNRS
The Chinese legal system is said to have some characteristics of case law. However, the influence that cases or casebooks exerted on judicial decisions is difficult to pin down. Cases consisted mainly of narratives in which the material circumstances were usually well specified, but the motives of the decision were scarcely exposed. Leading cases (cheng’an) were models for fitting punishments to crimes as provided in the code, so as to supply standard sketches of legal reasoning for highlighted categories of crimes. But the closer we get to local justice, the more frequently we find decisions that do not refer to law. On the contrary, some decisions rely on juridical reasoning: instead of applying a written regulation, the magistrate created a provisional norm adapted to the particular circumstances of the case. Such juridical creations necessitated a skill that was cultivated through two kinds of model cases. The first kind consisted of abstract models of standard litigation—inheritance disputes, for instance—whose parties were represented by the heavenly stems (jia, yi, bing, etc.), and whose solution referred to the "sense of the Classics." The second kind used the hexagrams of the Book of Changes to determine the phases of a judgment, or the path followed by the magistrate’s reasoning. This paper will focus on some textbook cases to show how they prepared magistrates to adjudicate disputes not specifically addressed in codified law.
Refining Legal Reasoning from Precedents: Economic Crimes and Rhetoric in Ming-Qing Casebooks
Peng-sheng Chiu, Academia Sinica
One of the most interesting discoveries in Ming-Qing casebooks is the use of economic arguments and discussion of the "economic" changes resulting from the settlement of legal cases. Development of commerce and industry in Jiangnan during the Ming and Qing coincided with an increase in lawsuits between merchants and other parties. For example, liability suits between merchants and brokers became more prevalent than ever. Merchants engaged in long-distance trade and those in the cotton or silk production industries incurred substantial losses due to theft of waterborne or overland cargoes and the embezzlement of commodities and productive materials. Judges at different levels of the legal system rendered verdicts that were relevant to a variety of economic activities and institutions. This paper seeks to answer several questions related to these decisions. Was there any new form of economic reasoning underpinning these verdicts? Did these verdicts become effective precedents within the legal system? If so, did these precedents embody some legal reasoning that officials believed? Can we determine if this legal reasoning was consistent with other forms of reasoning, say, economic or moral reasoning? Finally, did the precedent-generating process in Ming-Qing China reflect some particular "modelization" formula, which we can compare to other legal cultures?
Organizer and Chair: Faye Kleeman, University of Colorado
Discussant: Leo Ching, Duke University
Keywords: colonialism, modernism, hypercolonial, urban culture, transcultural.
Beginning in the 1930s, a tidal wave of modernism swept across East Asia, leading to a flourishing urban culture in cities stretching from Tokyo to Manchuria, Seoul, Shanghai, Taipei, and Hong Kong. This chain of cosmopolitan cities, representing different national cultures and disparate encounters with colonialism, shared a common, Westernized urban experience. The present panel adopts a multidisciplinary, multicultural, interarea approach to examine a single locale of this new international urban scene—Taipei during the 1930s. As capital of Japan’s first colony, 1930s Taipei had developed a sophisticated urban scene charact-erized by a vibrant, hybrid cultural mix, making it an ideal site through which to examine the hypercolonial culture of pre-War East Asia and the evolution of a distinctively East Asian modernity.
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