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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 o