tp86kuta – Page 3

Dancing with Ghosts and Spirits

Observations on Encounters with Supernatural Beings in Chinese Folk Religion and Literature
Friday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room F

Organised by Anthony Hu
Anthony Hu, “A World of Ghost and Spirits in Ancient China: A Folk-Oriented Perspective”
Dirk Kuhlmann, “Getting the gui of the Land: On the Rediscovery of Taiwan’s Supernatural World”
Yang Sheng, “Chinese Intellectuals and Their Karmic Beliefs in the Anomaly World—As Shown in the Late Qing Collection Yeyu qiudeng lu”
Daniela Murillo, “The Souls of Zhongguancun: Ghosts from the Past, Stories of the Present”

The folk religious and literary landscape of China is fascinating not only because it is inhabited by myriad ghosts and spirits including monsters and demons in the shape of animals, plants, birds, insects, and other living beings in heaven and on earth, but also because of their social relations and interactions with each other, in particular their interference in human mundane affairs. They coexist in the framework of a world of ethical-utilitarian dualism, that is, between good and evil. Being determined to pursue good fortune and avoid calamity, countless common people simply conduct ritual performances such as prayers and sacrifices in order to satisfy these supernatural beings whom they believe in, on the one hand; in cases when they fail to live a prosperous life, they believe it is due to the terrible influence of the evil ones and will seek the aid of magical spells, witchcraft, or other forms of exorcism, on the other hand. Ghosts, demons, and strange creatures of this negative kind are depicted in abundance in a wide range of materials, especially in literary accounts of the fantastic. These materials offer a significant glimpse into human lives, popular beliefs, customary regulations, and ritual practices, though some phenomena will still remain inexplicable. Therefore, in order to present an overall view on this aspect of the rich Chinese popular culture and profound religious beliefs, the panellists will explore the world of ghosts and demons in four presentations respectively focusing on the early and late classical literature as well as on modern and recent literature.

Anthony Hu, “A World of Ghost and Spirits in Ancient China: A Folk-Oriented Perspective”

The presentation focuses on the religious landscape of ancient China mainly depicted both in the book of Mozi 墨子 and the manuscript of the Rishu 日書 (Daybook) excavated at Chengguan Shuihudi 城關睡虎地 in Hubei Province in 1975. Although the former presents a world of ghosts and spirits from a socio-political point of view and its orientation is primarily connected with the circle of the elite class and culture, the source of which it makes full use contains anomalous writings from the contemporary popular culture of that time. The latter obviously comprises the hemerological material circulating among common people of ancient China and its foremost concern is ordinary people’s daily life. A holistic approach is thus employed to illustrate the strong visual world of ancient Chinese popular culture and religious beliefs in terms of the authors’ intentions, their writing style and readership, ritual performances, and worldviews. My purpose is not only to present various ghosts and spirits, regardless of being named or unnamed, as well as plants, animals, or other forms of beings by their respective origin, but also to compare those pieces of strange writings in the Mozi and the Rishu in an attempt to obtain an overall understanding of religious culture of Ancient China.

Dirk Kuhlmann, “Getting the gui of the Land: On the Rediscovery of Taiwan’s Supernatural World”

This paper will introduce a fascinating motif within Taiwanese literature: The rediscovery of stories dealing with the supernatural, i.e., ghosts (gui) and monsters (yaoguai), in a Taiwanese context as markers of a cultural identity. The focus of my analysis will be on novels with fantastic elements, two by indigenous authors of Taiwan, Neqou Soqluman’s Tonggu shafei chuanqi (The Legend of Tongku Saveq) and Badai’s Wulü (The Journey of a Wu Practitioner), and one by the Hakka author Gan Yao-ming entitled Sha gui (Killing Ghosts). In addition, I will discuss several publications which are presented as modern “accounts of the strange” (zhiguai) or even catalogues of supernatural beings specific to the island. There is a close interrelation and overlapping between these publications and other subgenres, such as fantasy literature or Manga graphic novels, and some of these records are rather tongue-in-cheek. However, at the same time, the works mentioned above also manage to connect popular culture, literature, and the academic world by cooperating with renowned scholars in folk religion and indigenous culture of Taiwan. The novels, the “accounts of the strange” as well as the catalogues share the genuine motivation to showcase unique features of Taiwanese culture, in particular its diversity, and make the readers aware of Taiwan’s history as a conflux of several cultures.

Yang Sheng, “Chinese Intellectuals and Their Karmic Beliefs in the Anomaly World—As Shown in the Late Qing Collection Yeyu qiudeng lu”

Zhiguai 志怪 (records of anomalies)—a category of biji xiaoshuo 筆記小説 (narratives in note-form) – is a special genre in the history of Chinese literature. Such collections mainly contain hearsay narratives about ghosts, immortals, fox fairies, spirits, etc. collected by the authors/compilers in everyday life, and the stories are usually provided with commentaries by the authors. By approaching these stories, we can understand the worldview and values of Chinese intellectuals as well as the world order they believed in. The records of anomalies are not simply meant for the amusement of readers but they reflect the author’s way of thinking. Thus, analyzing the zhiguai stories is not only a study of Chinese literature but also research on the ideology of Chinese intellectuals. The zhiguai collections always include many stories about yebao 業報 (Karma or Vipāka). This paper will focus on Yeyu qiudeng lu 夜雨秋燈錄, an eminent zhiguai-collection of the late Qing period, its author Xuan Ding 宣鼎 (1832–1879) being a typical intellectual of the time in question. Most zhiguai stories in this work are composed with a karmic structure, i.e., the plot development follows a certain karmic logic. This presentation, by examining a typical story in this collection, will show how Chinese traditional intellectuals were influenced by the sanjiao 三教 thought—namely syncretic ideas of Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist origin.

Daniela Murillo, “The Souls of Zhongguancun: Ghosts from the Past, Stories of the Present”

Zhongguancun is one of China’s intellectual powerhouses; it is home for several of the most prestigious universities of the country, as well as for several of the most renowned Chinese tech giants. The “Chinese Silicon Valley” seems to have its eyes fixed in the future. Thus, not many would associate the area as a fertile place for folk beliefs and stories. Its present name “中关村” camouflages the past history of the area. Originally called “中官坟” (meaning “Tomb of middle officials,” or Eunuchs), the area was chosen in Ming and Qing Dynasty to bury high-rank officials, due to its good energy, or Feng Shui 风水. Important historical figures are believed to be buried in the area; such is the case of the Qing poet Nalan Xingde 纳兰性德 (1655–1685), whose family cemetery is believed to be located in nowadays Renmin University Campus. Ancient deaths, as well as more recent ones, give origin to a myriad of legends related to ghosts. As a result, its inhabitants have to find their own mechanisms to deal with these overwhelming interactions of different realms, bringing traditional means of protection into the predominantly intellectual environment. This paper aims to unearth, with the help of local informants, the beliefs on the supernatural present in the area of Zhongguancun, and how they shape the forward-moving spirit of the area.

Papers on Religion III

Popularisation
Thursday
09:00 am – 10:45 pm
Room F

Chaired by Laura Lettere
Zi Chen, “An Ethnographical Study of the Producers of Paper-Offerings in Shandong Rural Society”
Kai Wang, “The Migration and Its Impacts of Jiangsu and Zhejiang Monks in Late Ming and Early Qing Dynasty”
Zhenzi Chen, “The Strategic Features of Publishing Activities of Chinese Missionary Journals in Late Qing Dynasty”
Kaiwen Jin, “The Image of Taoism and Folk Belief in the Late Qing Dynasty and the Republican China—From the View of Intellectual Elites in Chengdu”
Xin Yang, “Taoism in the New Culture Invention Progress: A Landscape that the Statistic Analysis of Modern Newspapers and Periodicals Exposes”

Zi Chen, “An Ethnographical Study of the Producers of Paper-Offerings in Shandong Rural Society”

This essay is an ethnographical study of the producers of paper-offerings and their households, focusing on the roles played by these producers in the culture logics, social relationships, and religious life in the Chinese local society. Paper-offerings in Chinese belongs to a general category of traditional folk handicrafts and religious materials. They have been customarily used as a form of offering in funerary ceremonies and religious rituals staged for gods, ancestors, and ghosts in Han Chinese society since the Song Dynasty. The producers of paper-offerings could be regarded as craftsmen as well as “the household religious specialists”, and they play a key role to not only support the religious life in the village communities but also participate in the construction and function of the local societies. In the essay, I discuss the nature, characteristics, functions, and identities of the producers of paper-offerings, in order to understand the roles played and the position occupied by this group in the village communities, and the relationships between the people working on religious production and the local society, from the perspective of the producers of religious articles themselves and the villagers. I also compare the producers of paper-offerings to a larger group of household religious service providers (Chau 2006; 2010) to discern the operation of household religious service systems in the local society.

Kai Wang, “The Migration and Its Impacts of Jiangsu and Zhejiang Monks in Late Ming and Early Qing Dynasty”

The monks’ travelling around or migration is a long-established tradition of Buddhism. The social changes in Jiangsu and Zhejiang in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties gave this tradition lots of new characteristics: On the one hand, the changes in the political situation has made monks more and more concerned about their own survival and promoted secularisation of Buddhism. For example, the form of chanting gradually changed from catering to the tastes of intellectuals to satisfying the tastes of the masses, the economy of monasteries changed from relying on gentry class donations to relying on commercial operation, and the daily life of monks shifted from traditional meditation work to religious rite work; these efforts of Buddhist monks to actively take part in social affairs in their migration have made people in the middle and lower classes more and more involved in Buddhism, which has triggered the movement of Buddhist life. For example, in the funeral ritual, it changed from traditional burial to Buddhist cremation, in the concept of wealth from traditional self-sufficiency to the multi-sufficiency, and in daily life, it changed from focusing on the family to focusing on the neighbors. These interesting changes not only reflect the internal logic of the development of Chinese Buddhism, but also the diverse evolution of social beliefs during the Ming and Qing Dynasties.

Zhenzi Chen, “The Strategic Features of Publishing Activities of Chinese Missionary Journals in Late Qing Dynasty”

In the late Qing Dynasty, the publication of periodicals was one of the most influential activities of Western “Social Gospel” Protestant missionaries in China. This paper focuses on the “strategic” characters of these Chinese missionary journals published in the last 50 years of the late Qing Dynasty. The underlying assumption of the paper is that the “Social Gospel” faction in China was not only a theological direction but also a strategic choice to attract Chinese potential readership. Publishing of these journals as the main vehicle of “social gospel” should also be regarded as a strategic activity, to ensure the legitimacy of its existence, explore the needs and tastes of readers, seek economic self-support and maximise its role. Based on this assumption the following characters of these journals should be noticed and discussed: from the external perspective, these journals were strategically positioned in the interwoven social network of missionaries and secular world in China. From the internal perspective, the scientific, informational, and religious materials were strategically organised according to the changing situation. The Confucian discourses were strategically reconstructed to serve as a contrast and foil to Christianity. In the explanation of the nature of a journal, the missionaries combined this newly imported western medium with the tradition of collection of folk songs (采风) in ancient China at the political level. And the identification of missionaries themselves in the journals always swayed between western “scientists” and traditional Confucian scholars, but their identity as missionaries was always intentionally concealed.

Kaiwen Jin, “The Image of Taoism and Folk Belief in the Late Qing Dynasty and the Republican China—From the View of Intellectual Elites in Chengdu”

Under the impact of western culture in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republican China, the conflict between tradition and modernisation became more intense in China. Under such circumstance, Taoism, as a native religion, together with its related folk beliefs, suffered much more queries and criticism as never before from Chinese intellectuals. Although Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, was located in southwest China, which was more isolated and uninformed than the coastal areas in theory, and enjoyed a high status in Taoist history, many traditional concepts here were still greatly affected by western culture. Besides individual publications and local chronicles, the intellectual elites could express their various kinds of opinions through new media at that time like newspaper, magazine, and periodical, which were more popular and widespread than traditional ways. Most of them preferred to show their dissatisfaction, rather than sympathy to Taoism and were even more radical when talking about folk beliefs, though they sometimes admitted that the tradition did have its positive and valuable side.

Xin Yang, “Taoism in the New Culture Invention Progress: A Landscape that the Statistic Analysis of Modern Newspapers and Periodicals Exposes”

Newspapers and Periodicals were active media in the formation of new knowledge and common sense in Late Imperial China after 1840 and Republican China. It is not hard to figure out that when observing the concept, knowledge, belief, and mind change in the first half 20th century China, they are important sources. At the same time, as the new-emerging Digital Humanity approach rapidly developing, it exposed to us some new landscape. It is commonly agreed that Taoism was heavily criticised under the background of embracing modernity in the 20th century. However, when searching the keyword “Taoism” based on Quanguo baokan suoyin, a database that collects Newspaper and Periodicals from 1833–1951 and includes more than 50 million literature, it is surprising to notice that the keyword “Taoism” is no more often mentioned during 1910–1920, when the “New Culture Movement” that characterised itself as radically against “tradition occurred, than in 1930–1940. This article firstly tries to explain this phenomenon that why Taoism seemingly didn’t generate so much attention during the decade when it was supposed to be, but why suddenly more discussion in 1930–1940? Secondly, in the whole results, the two English publication: North-China Herald and Supreme Court & Consular Gazette, count nearly half of the total records mentioned “Taoism”. This article aims to compare the content emphasis difference between Chinese and English written world. In this way, through the lens of the important media at that time, it contributes to reveal position of Taoism in the so-called New Culture Invention Progress.

Papers on the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

Friday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room 6

Chaired by Huayu Li
Paolo De Troia, Gabriele Tola, “Between Xinxiu yingjing, Shinshū yōkyō, and Shinshū takakyō—Some Remarks on the Origin of a Manuscript on Falconry”
Baoli Yang, “Meeting in Dunhuang: The Japanese Gaze at the Chinese Cultural Legacy and Modernisation of Sinology in Japan in the Early 20th Century”
Yating Yu, “Poirot and Beijing hua: Some Remarks on the Chinese Version of Guxin shengjing 古新聖経”
Yufei Zhou, “Transoceanic Contacts in the Making of Sinological Knowledge: The Case of Karl August Wittfogel’s Sojourn in Asia (1935–1937)”

Paolo De Troia, Gabriele Tola, “Between Xinxiu yingjing, Shinshū yōkyō, and Shinshū takakyō—Some Remarks on the Origin of a Manuscript on Falconry”

The authors present a manuscript on falconry: Xinxiu yingjing 新修鷹經 or, in Japanese, Shinshū yōkyō (also read as Shinshū takakyō). Various copies of the text, composed in different epochs, are stored in Japan. The manuscript is generally considered as composed in 818 and attributed to Saga emperor (Saga tennō 嵯峨天皇, 786–842; regnal years: 809–823).
The manuscript was written in Chinese; Xinxiu yingjing is a text of practical falconry and veterinary medicine and its contents range from the description of falconry and the species of falcons to the way of healing their diseases.
According to Edward Schafer (1959), even though Xinxiu yingjing is usually considered as composed in Japan during the ninth century, it might be a reworked edition of the Yingjing 鷹經, or the Classics of falconry. The latter is the oldest Chinese falconry text; it dates back to the Han dynasty and is today lost (Sanguo zhi, Wei, juan 9).
The authors will introduce the manuscript of Xinxiu yingjing, its editions and some later related works derived from it; the authors will also present some hypotheses on its alleged correlation with the Yingjing through an examination of its contents and of other relevant Japanese and Chinese sources.

Yating Yu, “Poirot and Beijing hua: Some Remarks on the Chinese Version of Guxin shengjing 古新聖経”

The paper focuses on Guxin shengjing 古新聖經 [The Old and New Testament], a text composed by the Jesuit painter and missionary Louis Antoine de Poirot (He Qingtai 賀清泰, 1735–1813). After a brief presentation of the text and of its role, the speaker presents the sources of terms Poirot used in Guxin shengjing. Through a linguistic analysis of nouns, adverbs, classifiers, and adjectives of Guxin shengjing, the speaker argues that Poirot mostly adopted the Beijing dialect (Beijing hua 北京話) of the 18th-century. Nevertheless, exactly because he served at the court during the reign of different emperors of the Qing Dynasty, he adopted also peculiar and rare expressions used only at the court and not present in Beijing dialect. The purpose of the speech is to demonstrate that, from a general point of view, Guxin Shengjing can be considered a text is written in Beijing dialect, using the lower of the three traditional styles (gaoti 高體, zhongti 中體, and diti 底體).

Baoli Yang, “Meeting in Dunhuang: The Japanese Gaze at the Chinese Cultural Legacy and Modernisation of Sinology in Japan in the Early 20th Century”

Thirty years after Ferdinand von Richthofen coined the term “Silk Road” in 1877, several foreign exploration teams, including the Japanese team lead by Kozui Otani (1876–1948), marched to northwest China and acquired pre-modern Eurasian cultural artefacts, including various valuable manuscripts, mural paintings, and excavated materials in Dunhuang, without being authorised to do so by the Chinese government. As a result, besides introducing the Dunhuang materials to the Japanese audience, these pursuits accumulated a sufficient amount of academic capital for the explorers and preconditioned the study of medieval China in Japan. On the other hand, the cultural heritage falling into foreigners’ hands devastated many Chinese scholars in Beijing and motivated them to petition for governmental protection of the rest of the cultural legacy, while scholars like Chen Yingque displayed indifference to the obsession with Chinese holding onto the artefacts. The dissemination of the Dunhuang cultural materials in Japan reflected how modern scholars viewed scholarship and defined Sinology in the modern East Asian context. However, in various later narratives recounting the discovery and dissemination of Dunhuang artefacts, a strong Chinese nationalist rhetoric obscured those plural agencies and multilayered effects which shaped the complicated process of globalising the knowledge of ancient China. My paper examines the competing discursive practices in the literature related to the Japanese acquisition and dissemination of Dunhuang cultural heritage through the lens of various biographies and memoirs. I argue that the Dunhuang manuscripts disseminated in Japan both reinforced the Japanese colonialist agenda and enhanced the globalist understanding among academicians.

Yufei Zhou, “Transoceanic Contacts in the Making of Sinological Knowledge: The Case of Karl August Wittfogel’s Sojourn in Asia (1935–1937)”

In May 1935, Karl August Wittfogel, the young Marxist China expert in exile, set out on his journey to East Asia. Together with his second wife Olga Lang, Wittfogel firstly toured Tokyo and Osaka, exploring the success story of this Asian nation’s transformation into a modern capitalist economy. On June 23, the couple arrived in the College of Chinese Studies in Beijing and launched their 2-year fieldwork in China. With the generous support from Peking Union Medical College, Beijing University, Institute of Pacific Relations and a number of other institutions, Wittfogel established his personal network with a variety of persons ranging from professional historians, China connoisseurs to intelligent agents and Communist activists. Backed up by his wide circle of acquaintances, Wittfogel started up after his return to the U.S. the “Chinese History Project”. This ambitious project existed in Columbia University and had given shelter to a large number of refugee Chinese historians during and after WWII.
This paper seeks to reconstruct Wittfogel’s experiences during his 27-months-sojourn in East Asia, focusing on his personal contacts with Asian and Western scholars during this period. The historical materials used in this paper include Wittfogel’s remarkably intensive exchange of letters with his mother Johanne Wittfogel during this period and his retrospective oral narratives recorded in 1966. The material also covers correspondence, published reviews, critics, and reminiscences from the related persons.

Mind the Gap

A Reappraisal of the Role of Sinology in China Studies
Friday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room 6

Organised by Li Huayu, Annie Ren
Chaired by Nicholas Loubere
Annie Ren, “’New Sinology’ and Its Implications for China Studies”
Huayu Li, “Gozan Studies: A New Perspective on Japanese Sinology in the Medieval Period”
Peilin Li, “Concentricity and Incremental Structure: Spatial Patterns in Zhu Yizun’s Yongwu ci”
Alice Simionato, “’Our Corrective Views’: On the Multifaceted Purpose of the Manifesto of 1958”

In 1958, partly against the rise of the cold war era “area studies” and partly against the appropriation of Chinese culture by the Chinese Communist Party, four prominent scholars from Hong Kong and Taiwan jointly published a manifesto calling for a reappraisal of Sinology and for a renewed understanding of Chinese culture. This was the first in a series of calls for a more holistic and multifaceted understanding of China and the Sinophone world—an appeal that is more relevant than ever given that the study of China today has become synonymous with the study of the People’s Republic of China. Further adding to our concerns is the general academic trend of over-specialisation which means that China is often studied through the limited viewpoint of economists, political scientists, or gender studies specialists. More alarmingly, we are faced with the increasingly powerful Chinese party-state, which seeks to promote its own version of China and Chinese culture through various means such as the Confucius Institute. The goal of this panel is to address some of the challenges we face as scholars working in China today. It brings together scholars who have worked in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Australia, and Europe, to discuss different traditions of sinological approach while also offering a general reflection on the future of Sinology as a discipline.

Annie Ren, “’New Sinology’ and Its Implications for China Studies”

The establishment of the Australian National University (ANU) after the Second World War under a mandate to pursue scholarship “in relation to subjects of national importance to Australia”, saw the creation of a research school dedicated to the study of the Asia and Pacific region. This in turn produced a rich and varied community of scholars, translators, politicians, and economists who played a fundamental role in shaping Australia’s understanding of China, and its engagement with the Chinese world. While their positions varied, and their subject of study ranged from trade policies to Song-dynasty lyrics, their engagement with China can be underpinned by a tradition known as “New Sinology” 後漢學, which calls for a holistic and multi-disciplinary understanding of China and the Sinophone world, based on strong foundations in both the classical and the modern Chinese language, and in-depth understandings of China’s past and present. This paper will first provide an introduction to the background and development of “New Sinology” at ANU. It then argues for the relevancy of “New Sinology” in the study of China not just in Australia, but for the larger scholarly community. “New Sinology” not only represent a historical approach which sees China as a vibrant and living entity where present consciousness is shaped by its historical past, but it is also a humanistic approach in its attempt to include China and its broader cultural world as part of our shared humanity.

Huayu Li, “Gozan Studies: A New Perspective on Japanese Sinology in the Medieval Period”

Compared to the Heian and Edo periods, little attention has been paid to Japanese Sinology in the medieval period. During the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (1185–1573), hundreds of Zen monks travelled to China to study under well-known Zen masters of the time. Upton their return, only did they bring back religious practices, they also brought back new ideas on painting, calligraphy, and poetry. As a result, Chinese studies flourished in Zen temples—a large variety of Chinese books were published, and notes known as Shomono 抄物 on studying Chinese poetry were written. Zen monks also wrote Chinese poems that imitated the style of Song Dynasty poetry. This later became known as Gozan Bunka 五山文化 (culture of the Five Mountain Monasteries), which is a second climax in the study of Chinese culture in Japan. In the past ten years, “Gozan Studies” has become the new hotspot in Japanese Sinology as scholars delve into this previously undiscovered treasure trove of materials on Japan’s engagement with China and also the understanding Chinese studies in medieval Japan. This paper will provide a critical overview of the history of the “Gozan Studies” in East Asia and illustrate the transformation from “Tang-style” to “Song-style” in Chinese poems written by Japanese monks. Furthermore, this study will re-examine the possibility of incorporating “Gozan Literature” into the so-called “broad concept of Chinese literature” in East Asia.

Peilin Li, “Concentricity and Incremental Structure: Spatial Patterns in Zhu Yizun’s Yongwu ci”

When the allusive characteristics of the yongwuci 詠物詞 (poems in praise of things) were combined with the complex structure of “long tune” 長調, a delicate and elaborate form of ci-poetry was created. The focus of this paper is on a series of long tune yongwu ci by the early Qing dynasty poet Zhu Yizun 朱彝尊 (1629–1709). Zhu himself claimed that these poems were written in the style of the Yuefu Buti 樂府補題, a collection of musical ballads from the late Southern Song dynasty, but many of his critics saw the poems as highly unconventional. The traditional style of Chinese literary criticism, which is impressionistic and often fragmentary, makes it very hard to engage in a detailed and analytical study of Zhu Yizun’s yongwu ci and its relation to the Yuefu Buti. This paper uses the lenses of “Spatial Patterns” put forward by the Chinese-American scholar Kao Yu-kung 高友工and compares the rhythmic pattern and focus points of Zhu’s poems through a process of close reading to show the structural similarities between Zhu Yizun’s yongwu ci and the Yuefu Buti. In addition, this paper also offers a reflection on Kao Yu-kung’s theory and its impact on literary studies in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan. Being a Chinese-American scholar, Kao’s theory occupies a unique position in sinological studies and provides inspiration for generations of young scholars to come.

Alice Simionato, “’Our Corrective Views’: On the Multifaceted Purpose of the Manifesto of 1958”

The well-known Manifesto of 1958 represents a great project of cultural reconstruction, but the stated purpose of the text “is primarily to benefit Western intellectuals in aiding them to appreciate Chinese culture”. At the same time, the authors explain that “Any attempt to modify Westerners’ prejudices toward our culture should be based first on our own true evaluation and self-examination”. The twelve sections of the Manifesto are concise while, at the same time, examining the authors’ view on a great variety of topics such as Chinese contemporary politics, religion, scientific development, and philosophy. The latter, in particular, is of great relevance since the terms “Chinese culture”—as discussed by other scholars such as John Makeham and Jesus Solé-Farràs—are used throughout the document as a synonym for Confucianism. With these premises in mind, this paper examines the purpose of cultural reconstruction advocated by the Manifesto of 1958. In particular, it argues that the authors of the document advocate for a recognition of the fundamental continuity which characterises Chinese thought throughout its development, whether it be past or contemporary. On the one hand, the document represents a reaction to the denial of tradition proper of the Maoist era while, on the other hand, it offers ‘corrective views’ to Western intellectuals who, according to the authors—enter the study of Chinese culture as if it was a museum piece, instead of a living organism. Since this tendency is still present in contemporary scholarship, the authors’ discussion remains of great relevance.

Papers on Language IV

Dictionaries
Friday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room H

Chaired by Wolfgang Behr
Nikolai Voropaev, “Precedent Phenomena diangu in Chinese Lingua-Culture”
Tilman Schalmey, “Experiments with Automated Dating for Classical Chinese Texts”
Yoann Goudin, “From Extended Latin Grammar for Describing Sinograms to the Phonetic Representation of Chinese Language. Tableau des éléments vocaux de l’écriture chinoise by Henry Kurz (1829)”
Chiara Bertulessi, “Chinese Lexicographical Discourse and Ideology: A Critical and Diachronic Study of the Xiandai hanyu cidian 现代汉语词典”

Nikolai Voropaev, “Precedent Phenomena Diangu in Chinese Lingua-Culture”

The term of traditional culture and philology of China diangu 典故 denotes classic precedents, plots, quotes from classical sources, aphorisms.
If we analyze the articles of numerous Chinese diangu dictionaries, we can conclude that all of them include units, which in their majority 1) are stable and are regularly reproduced in speech; 2) can be unfolded to the scope of a small text; 3) are always associated with any famous personalities and events (historical or fictional); 4) they name an event (a situation, phenomenon) or character. All of the above, we believe, allows us to correlate the concept of diangu with the concepts of a precedent phenomenon, a precedent statement, a precedent name, a precedent situation.
Diangu occupies an important place in the modern communication of the Chinese.
We believe that it was the ancient precedent phenomena (texts, situations, names, statements) that largely formed some important Chinese behavioural strategies.
Our analysis made it possible to concretise the meaning of the term of traditional Chinese philology diangu.
We also correlated the terms used in Russia with the terms of Chinese scholars and developed a classification and term system for describing and analysing precedent names and other precedent phenomena (diangu) of Chinese-language discourse.
Studying diangu helps to better understand the behavioural strategies and national character of the Chinese.

Tilman Schalmey, “Experiments with Automated Dating for Classical Chinese Texts”

Classical Chinese is often used as a term to refer to the written form of Chinese, reaching from the earliest literature such as the Shijing and Shujing until the beginning of the 20th-century. Aggravated by the continuity of Chinese writing, it appears that the pace of language change is slower—especially for the written language—than for languages with purely phonetic writing systems.
While observations regarding changes in grammar, vocabulary, and spelling are elsewhere used to date texts, the long-lasting, and rigid tradition of Classical Chinese obstructs pinpointing in which century a perceived text was originally written, especially when relying on later or digital editions.
Employing a diachronic word database created from the Hanyu da cidian, enriched with metadata and findings from other corpora, I experiment with methods from the field of computational linguistics to solve these issues. It is found that simple, innovative techniques which allow us to visualise a text as a temporal profile may outperform mathematically more complex machine learning solutions.
In my talk, I will present my conclusions and the resulting software developed as part of my dissertation project. It aims to assist the arduous work of philologists dealing with the temporal classification of texts and may also help to address issues of forgery.
The data produced during this work also sheds new light on the history of the development of written Chinese, especially on the expansion of the lexicon and the rise of polysyllabic words.

Yoann Goudin, “From Extended Latin Grammar for Describing Sinograms to the Phonetic Representation of Chinese Language. Tableau des éléments vocaux de l’écriture chinoise by Henry Kurz (1829)”

This paper proposes to shed a new light on how European sinologists crafted the notion of radical in the 19th century and interpreted the sinograms. Linguistics of Chinese often argues with sinology as soon as it deals with the characters (Budberg vs Creel in T’oung-pao (1939, 1940), Sagart vs. Vandermeersch 2006). These disputes are dated back to jesuits discussions—Bichurin vs. Callieri (in Kozha 2013)—by the new born Chinese philology two centuries ago. But these representations have to be recontextualised: the Extended Latin Grammar advocated by Auroux had a deep influence on grammatical analysis but also for describing the Chinese graphic system with sometimes antonishing conclusions. For this presentation in the field of history of linguistics, we will introduce the rarely mentioned Tableau des éléments vocaux de l’écriture chinoise (1829) by Henry Kurz, member of the just founded Société Asiatique de Paris in which it is possible to observe two trends: in one hand, how training in Latin influenced philogists of the time in distinguishing “radicals” from désinences even in sinograms, but on the other hand, an unexpected interpretation: for the first time in Europe, this was a linguistic representation of Chinese characters based on their readings—and not their meaning—a decade prior to Callery’s Systema phoneticum scripturae (1841) and almost one century Karlgren’s Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese (1923). We will discuss how upon the same documentation composed by missionnaries, and through a euro-centric framework based on Latin grammar, Kurz’s publication proposed a very original observation confirmed by linguistics against ideographic interpretations by classical sinologists…still taught nowadays.

Chiara Bertulessi “Chinese Lexicographical Discourse and Ideology: A Critical and Diachronic Study of the Xiandai hanyu cidian 现代汉语词典”

The present paper adopts the theoretical framework of critical lexicography and, specifically, of Critical Analysis of Lexicographical Discourse (Hornscheidt 2008) to carry out a study of the lexicographical treatment of selected entries in the different editions of the Xiandai hanyu cidian 现代汉语词典 (XHC). The XHC, which is compiled by the Institute of Linguistics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is regarded as one of the most authoritative dictionaries of modern standard Chinese.
This paper is based on the theoretical premise that dictionaries should be understood and analysed as a historically situated form of discourse (i.e. lexicographical discourse) (Benson 2001). Dictionaries are both products of their extra-textual reality and tools playing an active role in the construction and consolidation of those meanings that are considered as correct by the dominant ideology in a specific historical context.
The main objective of the paper is to verify whether the lexicographical discourse constructed by the XHC reflects and interacts with its extra-textual, ideological, and, therefore, political, and social context, also relying on the analysis of a corpus of China’s official political texts. The critical approach is combined with a diachronic perspective, in order to identify changes in the entry-lists and in the definitions in the different editions of the dictionary.
Furthermore, the paper intends to fill a gap in the critical literature on the XHC, in which the studies on the relationship between lexicographical discourse and ideology are, at the present day, still very limited.

Papers on Language III

Linguistics
Friday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room H

Chaired by Tommaso Pellin
Vladislav Kruglov, “Opposition Pairs as a Peculiarity of the Classical Chinese Text and Its Phraseological Expression in the Socio-Political Discourse”
Tommaso Pellin, “How re 热 are Chinese reci 热词? A Temptative Survey on Most Frequent xinci 新词 and liuxingyu 流行语 in Some Corpora for Chinese”
Nerina Piedra Molina, “Pars pro toto: The Description of Individuality in Chinese through the Nose 自 and the Hand 手”
Ping-Hsueh Chen, “Chinese Equivalents of the French Causative Lexicon: Corpus, Methodology, Results”

Vladislav Kruglov, “Opposition Pairs as a Peculiarity of The Classical Chinese Text and Its Phraseological Expression in The Socio-Political Discourse”

The opposition of the concepts of traditional Chinese philosophy is manifested in the Classics and sets a certain terminological system, which gives the key to the analysis, interpretation, and translation of these classical texts and, precisely, philosophical terms. The author analyses the system of oppositions of central ontological terms and proposes a new approach to the translation of classical Chinese texts on the example of the commentary to I Ching, The Great Commentary 系辞传. The paper focuses on the analyses of such oppositional pairs, as 天地, 乾坤, 貴賤, 動靜, 剛柔, 象形, 男女, 易簡, 德業. The second step of this research is the revealing the usage of these terms in the form of traditional Chinese ideomatic expression chengyu 成语 in the socio-political discourse on the material of the speeches of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping. One of the results of the study is the fact that these concepts become ideologems in the light of speeches of Chinese politicians. Thus, the author traces the political tradition of modern China and the continuity of the top leadership through linguistic and lexicographic analysis.

Tommaso Pellin, “How re 热 are Chinese reci 热词? A Temptative Survey on Most Frequent xinci 新词 and liuxingyu 流行语 in Some Corpora for Chinese”

Since the first years of the twenty-first century, PRC’s language policy included the creation and maintenance of several linguistic corpora, collecting a vast amount of linguistic material, mined from several sources (written, spoken, video, web, etc.). This system of corpora is the basis for a number of surveys on the Chinese language. Among them, several lists for China’s most frequent neologisms and buzzwords are published every year. The Language Situation in China (LSC) reports, since 2006, including the “Neologisms yearly list”, as well as a number of lists of buzzwords. The lists of the LSC reports encompass a high number of entries, from 200 to 500 every year. Each list indicates the number of tokens of every entry and the number of texts where every entry occurs, within the corpus taken into study.
This contribution aims at looking up, in a number of Chinese language corpora, the most frequent neologisms and buzzwords published in the lists of the LSC reports. The goal of this survey is to verify the rate of their occurrence and, if possible, to explain the major differences. Considering that the corpora on which LSC reports are based seem not to be accessible, the corpora looked up are Cncorpus and Beijing Yuyan Daxue BCC, but also Sketch Engine corpora for Chinese. The corpora of Renmin Ribao and Xinhua were searched as well, inasmuch as these neologisms and buzzwords occur mostly infrequently updated corpora and in press.

Nerina Piedra Molina, “Pars pro toto: The Description of Individuality in Chinese through the Nose 自 and the Hand 手”

Human bodies play a prominent role in the establishment of certain linguistic meanings in the Chinese language. Given the theoretical perspective of cognitive semantics, we want to explore the process of metonymy that Chinese words referred to some body parts such as hands (shou 手) and nose (zi 自), by analysing words containing these two characters and their meanings. The fact that human body parts are one of the main categories of pictograms created according to the Shuowen jiezi has influenced the creation of metonymies as well. This depicts a necessity for representing them but also points out the fact that, as these were some of the first characters ever created, they might have experienced more changes than the ones created after them.
Max Black defended that “the metaphoric meaning is achieved when words appear in a linguistic context different than the regular one”. These words firstly related to body parts have gradually been used in more abstract contexts mainly representing oneself.
After the process of metonymy, a character can bear too many meanings, leaving the original one to a secondary stage and making it necessary to create another character to recover the original meaning. That is the case in zi 自 with the creation of bi 鼻, but it has not happened with shou 手. One possible explanation is that “hand” has not lost its meaning in its entirety, because the words which use shou 手 as a metonymy for a person still keeps the nuances for “handwork.”

Ping-Hsueh Chen, “Chinese Equivalents of the French Causative Lexicon: Corpus, Methodology, Results”

This paper aims to show how Chinese expresses the causality conveyed in the French lexicon. To do this, we will start from the Scale of compactness (Dixon, 2000), which ranks the causative mechanisms from the most compact to the least compact, namely: causative verbs (eng: walk, melt, fr: causer, provoquer); causative morphemes (eng: lie / lay; fr: simplifier, moderniser); complex predicate (fr: faire+Vinf), and causative periphrasis (eng: make somebody cry; fr: forcer qqn à+Vinf). This ranking is an effective filter for the study of causality in languages (cf. Novakova, 2015: 106–107). We applied it to the analysis of French causative mechanisms function in comparison with Chinese. Our contrastive study, based on a parallel corpus (French→Chinese), shows that Chinese has four ways to express causality conveyed in the French lexicon, namely: causative verbs (yǐnqǐ 引起, lead to, zàochéng 造成, cause, etc.); suffixed verbs with huà化 (qiánghuà 强化, intensify, etc.); light verbs + V2/adj. (dǎ duàn 打断, litt. hit break, interrupt, etc.), and causative periphrasis (causative V1+non-causative V2: shǐ 使, make + V2, ràng 让, let + V2, etc.). Following the results, we will propose a range of Chinese functional equivalents of French causative verbs and constructions.

Papers on Modern Literature VIII

Translations
Thursday
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Room D

Chaired by Aleksei Rodionov
Joscha Chung, “Soong Tsung-faung’s Translation of Hermann Sudermann’s Teja”
Tianyun Hua, “Contemporary Intercultural Theatre between Orientalism and Occidentalism: An Example of Grzegorz Jarzyna’s Theatrical Adaptation of Lu Xun’s Forging the Swords”
Marco Lovisetto, “Exploring the Attachment to Tradition through Intertextuality: The Translation of Su Xuelin’s Autobiographical Jixin”
Aleksei Rodionov, “Changing Priorities and Emerging Factors: On Recent Translation of Contemporary Chinese Prose into Russian Language”

Joscha Chung, “Soong Tsung-faung’s Translation of Hermann Sudermann’s Teja”

This paper focuses on the introduction and translation of the German playwright Hermann Sudermann’s dramatic works in the May Fourth period. Although some efforts were paid earlier to translate Sudermann’s novel, it was not until 1918 and 1919 when his name received serious attention in China through Soong Tsung-faung (or Song Chunfang in today’s spelling), who was probably the most important promoters of modern Western drama during that time.
Prof. Soong of the Government University of Peking has been well known for his compiling of a list of one hundred modern plays for interested Chinese translators to consider. It is a much less discussed matter that he managed to translate a few of the listed plays, including Teja, Sudermann’s three one-act plays in the collection called Morituri (1896).
The absence of Teja in Soong’s three volumes of On Theatre (1923, 1936, and 1937) lead to little scholarship on this early Chinese translation of Sudermann’s drama. The fact that Soong’s translation was published in The Renaissance (or Xinchao), a leading journal edited by members of the Government University of Peking, enabled its wide circulation among participants and followers of the New Culture Movement. On the other hand, Soong’s choice to translate the play’s realistic dialogues into classical Chinese clearly contradicted the journal’s cultural standpoint. By presenting both circumstantial and textual evidence, this paper demonstrates that Soong’s choice of language was in fact influenced by Sudermann’s English translator.

Tianyun Hua, “Contemporary Intercultural Theatre between Orientalism and Occidentalism: An Example of Grzegorz Jarzyna’s Theatrical Adaptation of Lu Xun’s Forging the Swords”

With the deepened mutual cultural communication, it is no more the case of one-way Orientalism or Occidentalism. This paper will demonstrate a more interwoven relationship using the example of Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna’s theatrical adaptation of Chinese writer Lu Xun’s Forging the Swords: the director combines the Chinese story and western philosophy to reinterpret and fit the story into a contemporary social context, while the play is performed by an international team, and is accepted and commented by the Chinese audience. Through a detailed analysis of the stage language used by Jarzyna compared with Lu Xun’s story, including the representation of “man and superman” and “eternal recurrence”, and the futuristic visual style applied, the paper wants to contend the harsh critiques received by the play and argues that it is a meaningful adaptation which not only provides a brand-new angle to reinterpret the story but also uses both the western and eastern recourses of thoughts to reflect critically on the contemporary situation. Through this example, this paper intends to show the potential of the contemporary intercultural theatre to be a platform beyond one-way Orientalism or Occidentalism but contains both sides, where world literary canons can get reinterpreted and responded to in a relevant context, and also wants to advocate a more open attitude instead of cultural nationalism to allow and accept such sharing.

Marco Lovisetto, “Exploring the Attachment to Tradition through Intertextuality: The Translation of Su Xuelin’s Autobiographical Jixin”

This paper introduces the peculiar features of the translation process of Su Xuelin’s 苏雪林 Jixin 棘心, a co-translation project that aims to newly introduce one of Su’s masterpieces to English-speaking readers. A prominent intellectual figure of the May Fourth Movement, Su was initially considered one of five major female writers in China but was put aside due to her criticism of Lu Xun and departure from the Mainland. Along with her recent rehabilitation in the Mainland and her undeniable academic, didactic, and literary influence on Taiwan, Su’s literary heritage is worth studying and disseminating. In this paper, I will argue that the translation process of the novel reveals to the target reader the depiction of a pseudo-autobiographical character, Du Xingqiu, with distinctive features expressing some of the historical and social changes of modern China.
My analysis of the translation process will take into consideration three textual aspects: intertextuality, register, and narrative point of view. By focusing on significant examples of intertextuality encountered during the process of translating the novel, this paper demonstrates elements that characterise Su’s attachment to both Catholic and Confucian traditions. Additionally, a textual analysis of the changes between different registers and narrative points of view throughout the novel illustrates the variations of the author’s tone between narration, introspection, and evaluation. Throughout the paper, I will present an in-depth textual analysis of these passages and the translatological strategies that my co-translator and I have adopted in order to thoroughly understand and convey the implicit messages emitted by the source text.

Aleksei Rodionov, “Changing Priorities and Emerging Factors: On Recent Translation of Contemporary Chinese Prose into Russian Language”

Looking back to the history of Russian-Chinese literary communication we can see that translation of contemporary Chinese literature into the Russian language for a long time has been highly dependent on historical, political, and academic circumstances. The latest period of translations, which commenced in 2009, is driven by Chinese and Russian government support, as well as the influence of international literary prizes and the changing image of China, but at the same time is balanced by the book market and deacademisation of the translation process. By 2015 after several decades of domination of classical Chinese literature in Russian translations, the publication of contemporary Chinese literature caught up and in 2016 surpassed the number of classical literature editions.
In 2009–2018 there were 291 pieces of contemporary Chinese prose translated into Russian, which included 46 novels, 70 повестей, 137 short stories, and 38 essays. These were the works of 174 contemporary Chinese writers, among them those translated most often were Mo Yan, Liu Cixin, Bi Feiyu, Cao Wenxuan, Yu Hua, and Liu Zhenyun. This selection of writers shows a considerable shift from the previous period of 1992–2008, where the most popular authors were Wang Meng, Feng Jicai, Jia Pingwa, Zhang Jie, and Can Xue.
The paper is based on extensive statistics and discusses the tendencies of the recent translation of contemporary Chinese literature into the Russian language in wide context as well as its driving forces and key actors.

Papers on the History of Law

Friday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room 3

Chaired by Roger Greatrex
Roger Greatrex, “Trafficking in the Fifteenth Century—The Case of Mancang’er”
Lara Colangelo, “The Law of the Twelve Tables in China: From the Earliest Descriptions in Late 19th Century Sources to the First Studies on This Legal Code”
Ruiping Ye, “A Socialist Legal System with Chinese Characteristics: Legacies from History”

Roger Greatrex, “Trafficking in the Fifteenth Century—The Case of Mancang’er”

The latter half of the fifteenth century saw simultaneously a judicial system in worsening disarray as a result of unclear and often conflicting legislation, and a steady rise in criminality in the capital and the provinces. At the same time, there occurred with ever-increasing frequency and intensity abuses of the judicial system carried out by the officials from the Eastern Depot (Dongchang 東廠), among others. The trafficking of young women to the capital to serve as prostitutes in the city’s brothels was endemic and was repeatedly condemned in memorials. This paper concerns the case of a young woman named Mancang’er 滿倉兒 whose ordeal reached its conclusion in 1496. The case is remarkable for the twists and turns that occurred in it, including the abduction of Mancang’er from a brothel by her mother and brother, the death of the brothel owner as a result of judicial torture, and the intervention of the Eunuch Director of the Eastern Depot in the case, among other unexpected events. What is perhaps the most remarkable feature of the case is that a clerical employee in the Ministry of Justice acted in the way that we today should call being a ‘whistle-blower,’ by revealing the illegal irregularities being perpetrated by officials. The case of Mancang’er raises a number of important legal questions that the paper addresses, foremost of which is the trafficked victim’s right to decide her own future once freed from sexual slavery.

Lara Colangelo, “The Law of the Twelve Tables in China: From the Earliest Descriptions in Late 19th Century Sources to the First Studies on This Legal Code”

Promulgated in the 5th century B.C. and destroyed when the Gauls sacked Rome (387 B.C.), the Law of the Twelve Tables has been for centuries the primary source of Roman Law and since the Humanistic era, Western jurists have constantly attempted to reconstruct the original text. In recent years Chinese academia began to show increasing interest toward this code, which during the 20th century has undergone several translations into Chinese. Although few, yet significant, studies on the history of the reception of the Twelve Tables in China have already been carried out, many aspects of this process still need to be further investigated, especially with regard to how and when information about the Twelve Tables started to circulate in China. In order to shed some light on the initial phase of the introduction of the Romanist legal tradition in China, this paper aims at providing a specific illustration of how written mentions of the Twelve Tables appeared already at the end of the 19th century, decades earlier than what it is generally stated in the studies on this topic. Special attention will be given to some of the earliest descriptions of the Twelve Tables which can be found in late Qing Chinese sources and which seem to be still unknown or too little studied. Moreover, by comparing these documents with more recent ones, this paper is also intended to analyse the evolution of the studies on this legal code in China during the first half of the 20th century.

Ruiping Ye, “A Socialist Legal System with Chinese Characteristics: Legacies from History”

In 1949, the Communist Party of China founded the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and swiftly abolished all laws of the previous regimes. The Constitution Act 1982 of the PRC declares the PRC to be a “socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship,” and the ruling party resolved to “build a socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics” in 2014.
This paper looks to history to find out what “Chinese characteristics” may mean. The paper examines the guiding principles of law, the constitutional arrangements and some aspects of the law of the PRC in comparison with historical arrangements in the same areas. Many principles and practices have roots in tradition: the principles of yifa zhiguo (ruling the country according to the law) and yide zhiguo (ruling the country by virtue), the internal checks and balances of different branches of the government and the local governments, the insistence on centralised control, the functions of law enforcement bodies, the regulation of public servants, the system of household registration and restriction on freedom of movement, and the intervention in family affairs for the purpose of the state economy.
This paper argues that the socialist legal system with “Chinese characteristics” is a continuation of the traditional Chinese legal system and culture, with modifications according to contemporary circumstances.

Rethinking China’s Future

Gender, Youth, and Technology in post-1990s Chinese Popular Literature
Friday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room E

Organised by Federica Gamberini
Fang Wan, Chair
Federica Gamberini, “All Youth Need is Love: Love Stories, Youth Subjectivity, and Multimodality in Luo Luo’s The Last Woman Standing and Jiu Yuehui’s The Fleet of Time”
Chen Ma, “Time Immigrants: A Sense of Risk and Destination”
Fang Wan, “‘Strong Women’ in an Online Matriarchal World”

The past two decades witnessed an unprecedented technological and economic development in China, inviting Chinese writers to question the foreseeable effects of these changes and rethinking questions of gender and identity. Fostered by the favourable circumstances set by the liberalisation of China’s publishing market and the Internet’s democratisation of writing, Chinese popular literature witnessed a boom in works problematising the construction of the Chinese social reality while representing new forms of subjectivity recording the impact of China’s technological development on gender and cultural identity.
This panel presents research in three areas: it discusses how female writers represent womanhood in matriarchy online fiction blurring traditional gender boundaries; how science fiction responds to the ecological challenges of the country problematising human earning for modernity; and how balinghou youth narrative challenges normativity to express their generation’s life experiences and concerns.
Adopting a feminist, ecological, and a socio-semiotic approach to Chinese popular literature, this panel explores how writers from different age and cultural groups engage with the political and social structure of China, using technology to rethink questions about gender identity and individuality amidst China’s economic boom. Embracing the technological development of their country, Chinese writers, however, took advantage of new technologies—as a medium of communication or as a trope in their stories—to ponder about the role of the individual at the dawn of a new era, where technology could both be an empowering tool and a threat for the human world.

Federica Gamberini, “All Youth Need is Love: Love Stories, Youth Subjectivity and Multimodality in Luo Luo’s The Last Woman Standing and Jiu Yuehui’s The Fleet of Time”

As the interest toward romantic stories rekindled during the 1980s and the 1990s, idealised representation of love and courtship started appearing on TV and the Internet voicing young people’s life views and concerns. At the crossroad between romance novels and soap operas, balinghou love stories relocate love in a central position in the life of high-school students, but also young and successful career people, to question the role of youth in the ‘Chinese dream.’ Combining the affordances of their books with movie adaptations, balinghou writers challenge social stereotypes related to singlehood and ‘precocious love’ while opening up a public forum of discussion to celebrate youth’s individual choices and to rebel against normativity.
Following Gunther Kress’s socio-semiotic approach to multimodality, this presentation investigates love representations, individuality, and self-expression in balinghou romantic fiction in two case studies: Luo Luo’s The Last Woman Standing and Jiu Yehui’s The Fleet of Time. By looking at these two works, this presentation explores how the individualism of balinghou youth narrative underpins a problematisation of the normative function of young people within China’s post-Deng society. By employing the affordances of visual modes of communication and writing, balinghou romantic narratives not only explore young people’s feelings and life views in-depth, but they use courtship as a way to discuss individual’s self-assertion, independence, and freedom to choose.

Chen Ma, “Time Immigrants: A Sense of Risk and Destination”

Scholarly discussions on science-fictional accounts of climate change suggest that they have a marked potential impact on the public reaction towards ecological challenges. Scholars have pointed out how the “right elements” of science fiction (SF) participate in the ongoing debate on the advance of climate change. Liu Cixin’s Time Immigrants (2014) responds to the above discussions with its accentuation of a strong sense of risk which interrogates the illusion of not only environmental well-being but also both humanity and society’s well-being. This paper focuses on Liu’s interpretation of the risks that develop from the transitional status of a modernised society facing climate change. He delineates a developing risk society in which human yearnings for a more modernised world form a stark contrast with their inherent insecurity regarding the very same world they created. In his explorations of the changing natural landscapes over different time periods, he also stresses how people’s internal landscapes are affected continuously and reshaped by climate change and the external environment.

Fang Wan, “‘Strong Women’ in an Online Matriarchal World”

Chinese internet literature has flourished since the end of the 1990s. The low threshold of online publishing provides some traditionally marginalised groups, such as women, a relatively free platform to express their thoughts and start writing creatively. In light of this, this essay will focus on the vital role of online female writing in the development of Chinese women’s literature.
This essay will discuss Flowers of Four Seasons (Sishi huakai, 四时花开) by Gongteng Shenxiu 宫藤深秀, a representative matriarchy novel published in Jinjiang Literature City in 2006. Through analysing this novel, this essay argues that matriarchy fiction’s construction of a women’s space to be produced and consumed is a ‘dance with shackles’. Female authors and readers of matriarchy fiction have indeed constructed a women’s space where they can discuss their desires, imagine alternative gender relations, and blur traditional gender boundaries. However, rather than a ‘space of their own’ away from state and market intervention, their rebellious potential is limited by the constant negotiation of authors’ intentions, readers’ expectations, economic factors, state censorship, and national and transnational gender norms.

Guiding Words

“Primary Education” in Imperial China
Friday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room C

Chaired by Christoph Anderl
Christopher Foster, “The Cang-Ya School of Early Medieval China”
Federico Valenti, “Phono-Rhetorical Strategies in Pre-Modern Chinese ‘Primary Education 小學’ Texts: The Erya and its Supplementary ya Tradition”
Rickard Gustavvson, “The Chinese Script as the Root of Cultural Order: Xu Kai’s Philosophy of Writing”
Jan Vihan, “The Dichotomy of Basic and Extended Meanings in Language Rationalisation: The Case of Shuowen”

Throughout China’s imperial era, moral, and political norms were established largely by reference to the Confucian classics. Yet to understand these classics, scholars turned to a variety of dictionaries, glossaries, and reference works. Labelled as xiaoxue 小學 or “primary education,” these texts were treated as a vital key to unlocking the meaning of the classics. For this reason, they enjoyed immense academic esteem. Thus, the official bibliographies found in the Hanshu 漢書, Suishu 隨書, and later dynastic histories, list “primary education” as second only to the classics, before all other genres. Two works stand out in particular: the Erya 爾雅 (itself elevated to a “classic” during the Song dynasty) and the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 (arguably the most influential lexicographical work in China’s history). Despite their renown in Chinese intellectual history, “primary education” texts remain deeply understudied, especially in Western scholarship. The papers in this panel explore the nature and reception of these two monumental pieces. Federico Valenti examines phonetic topoi within the Erya. Christopher Foster investigates the relationship between the Erya and a previous Cang Jie pian 蒼頡篇tradition in medieval times. Rickard Gustavson excavates the intellectual program behind Xu Kai’s 徐鍇 medieval commentary to the Shuowen. Jan Vihan shows how Duan Yucai 段玉裁 transformed the function of the Shuowen in late imperial China. Chairing the panel is Professor Bernhard Fuehrer, among the foremost experts in Chinese philology, traditional exegesis, and literary criticism.

Christopher Foster, “The Cang-Ya School of Early Medieval China”

In the early Han, entry into a privileged scribal class was guarded by the state through mastery of a primer known as the Cang Jie pian 蒼頡篇. The Cang Jie pian initially enjoyed immense prestige. It attracted commentaries by figures like Yang Xiong 揚雄, was the subject of court convened scholastic conferences, and even was included in the manuscript collection of the Lord of Ruyin 汝陰. Yet with the rise of Confucian classicism, by the end of the Han, the importance of the Cang Jie pian was supplanted by “primary education 小學” works that aided specifically in reading the Confucian classics, such as the Erya 爾雅. In this talk, I trace how the Cang Jie pian and Erya traditions competed and merged with one another in medieval China. The question of the Erya’s early origins is addressed, while mentions of a “Cang-Ya 蒼雅 school” of exegesis are compiled and interpreted. A parallelism will be demonstrated between how the Cang Jie pian and Erya traditions developed through their supplements (e.g. the Guang Cang 廣蒼 vs. Guang Ya 廣雅, etc.). Finally, a close reading of the Jingdian shiwen 經典釋文 and Yiqiejing yinyi 切經音義 glossaries will investigate the relative importance placed upon these two traditions as authorities for the exegesis of canonical scriptures throughout medieval China.

Federico Valenti, “Phono-Rhetorical Strategies in Pre-Modern Chinese ‘Primary Education 小學’ Texts: The Erya and its Supplementary ya Tradition”

The early Chinese synonymicon Erya 爾雅 (“Approaching Elegance”, ca. 3rd century BCE) has been almost unanimously attested as the most influent model for the transmission of an authoritative lexicon in the Chinese literary tradition (South Coblin 2017, Bottéro 2017). By dint of the most recent studies in early Chinese phonology and phonetic reconstruction (Schuessler 2008, Zhenzhang 2013, Baxter&Sagart 2014), it is possible to identify some phonetic topoi that might have been used as didactic mnemonic aids for the readers/users of the Erya. These phonetical patterns might tentatively be considered as a well-structured stratagem to perfect the transmission of knowledge in lexicographic works: alliterations, rhymes, paronomasia, and other similar phono-rhetorical strategies make it much easier to memorise and disseminate a broader quantity of information. The introduction of such phono-rhetorical devices paved the way for more complex development of Chinese “primary education,” introducing paronomastic texts like the Shiming 釋名 (“Explanation of Names,” ca. 200 CE) that directly derives from the Erya textual heritage. This work is in fact recorded also as the Yiya 逸雅 (“Lost Erya”) and it is recognised as a part of the so-called Five Erya tradition 五雅, which also include the Guangya 廣雅, the Piya 埤雅, and the Erya yi 爾雅翼. Aim of this paper is to provide new insights about the role of sounds patterns and devices in the internal organisation and arrangement of the Erya and its derivative “primary education” texts.

Rickard Gustavvson, “The Chinese Script as the Root of Cultural Order: Xu Kai’s Philosophy of Writing”

While lexicography in imperial China largely falls into the discipline of language studies, many lexicographers go beyond a narrow linguistic or philological scope. Their interest in language is typically bound up with other intellectual concerns, such as cosmology, ethics, and politics. An example of such a person is the Southern Tang court official Xu Kai (920–974), who wrote the Shuowen jiezi xizhuan 説文解字繫傳, the first known commentary on the Shuowen jiezi. In the first part of this work, Xu Kai provides his commentary on the Shuowen, in which he is primarily concerned with philological and exegetical issues relating to Xu Shen’s text. The second part of his work consists of ten supplementary chapters devoted to specific topics on the philosophical and political significance of writing. Xu Kai finds in the Chinese script a graphic system that reveals, in a concise manner, the integration of heaven, earth, and man, and becomes the ultimate reference point for building socio-political order. In this paper, I outline Xu Kai’s philosophy of writing and his lexicographic method based on the second part of his work. I also briefly demonstrate how aspects of Xu Kai’s philological thoughts are easier understood against the background of his philosophical ideas than they would be if read in isolation. In addition, by relating Xu Kai’s views to the historical context of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907–960), I highlight the value of lexicographic texts as source material for studying Chinese intellectual history.

Jan Vihan, “The Dichotomy of Basic and Extended Meanings in Language Rationalisation: The Case of Shuowen”

Duan Yucai, the authoritative Qing commentator on the Han primer-cum-lexicon Shuowen Jiezi, observes that earlier “primary education” works “were insufficient in enabling scholars to infer the original basis of an expression and, consequent upon this, fitting its various usages together. Therefore Xu Shen took up the shape of a character as the basis to explain pronunciation and meaning and only then did the basic meaning of a so-conceived character become plainly obvious. Once the basic meaning was clear, it became possible to specify as loan usage those instances where only the sound and not the meaning of a character was used.” Apart from gathering disparate word explanations, the Shuowen attempts to rationalise language and writing, or, to paraphrase Xunzi, to create good names which are easy to grasp out of inherently arbitrary designations. In my paper, I show how Xu Shen’s principal methodological invention, the dichotomisation of basic and loan meanings, serves this rationalisation. In negotiating basic meanings, Xu Shen relies on the notion of similarity to sound, orthography, or meaning. In navigating loans, Xu Shen employs the concept of partial identity to transform the earlier tradition of pure phonetic borrowing into his theory of extended meanings. Where Xu Shen’s work is mostly concerned with basic meanings, complicating its use as a lexical aid, Duan Yucai seeks to draw semantic links. I thus conclude with examples of Duan’s semantic network rooted in classical evidence. This last aspect makes the Qing commentator most indispensable to a modern user of the Shuowen.