tp86kuta – Page 4

Papers on Premodern Literature VIII

Translations
Friday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room C

Chaired by Roland Altenburger
Lifei Pan, “A Travel through Time—The Eight Prerequisites and Its Contemporary Version for Buddhist Text Translators”
Massimiliano Canale, “The Modern Re-Evaluation of the Chinese Song Lyric: The Importance of Judith Gautier’s Translations of Li Qingzhao”
Anna Di Toro, “The Scholars, Chronique indiscrète or Neoficial’naja istorija? The Challenge of Translating Rulin waishi for Western Audiences”
Lidiya Stezhenskaya, “Liu Xie’s Literary Mind Translations in European Languages”

Lifei Pan, “A Travel through Time—The Eight Prerequisites and Its Contemporary Version for Buddhist Text Translators”

The eminent monk Yancong 彦琮 (557–610CE), a Buddhist text translator, who was well versed in both Chinese and Sanskrit, proposed in his treatise, Bianzheng lun 辩正论 (On the Right Way) the Eight Prerequisites for Translators of Buddhist texts. However, since these prerequisites were originally written in classical Chinese, scholars today have various explanations for their meaning. Meanwhile, prerequisites for Buddhist text translators exist not only in the first millennium of China, when the translation of Buddhist texts was at its heyday but also in contemporary Buddhist texts translation organisations, such as Buddhist Text Translation Society. It coincides that in this organisation there are Eight Regulations for its translators. Though not exactly the same, parts of the Eight Prerequisites and the Eight Regulations overlap with each other. This paper first tries to discern the meaning expressed in the Eight Prerequisites by Yancong, and then compares the Eight Prerequisites and the Eight Regulations to find out their similarities and differences, and analyse the reasons of the differences. As both are rules for Buddhist text translators, it is supposed that the contemporary Eight Regulations are the adapted version of the heritage of the ancient Eight Prerequisites, which further indicates that the discourses by ancient Chinese Buddhist text translators can still have their value in contemporary times.

Massimiliano Canale, “The Modern Re-Evaluation of the Chinese Song Lyric: The Importance of Judith Gautier’s Translations of Li Qingzhao”

This paper aims at analysing the importance of Judith Gautier’s translations of six-song lyrics by Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1084–1155?) in her second edition of Le livre de jade (1902), one of the earliest instances of ci 詞 lyrics being included in a successful collection of Chinese poetry in the West. Our main goal is to demonstrate how Gautier’s translations were a breakthrough in the Western reception of a genre like a song lyric, which had been traditionally disregarded by Confucian moralists in China and ignored by Christian missionaries in Europe, probably due to similar ethical concerns.
We will try to understand why this young Frenchwoman represented a new type of translator compared to the previous generations of missionaries and diplomats, focusing on their different attitudes towards the song lyric. In particular, we will reflect on her identity as a woman and as a member of the Parnassian movement, which held an aesthetic rather than utilitarian interest in Chinese literature. We will also examine the way Gautier approached the peculiarities of the Chinese song lyric in her translations. As a result of this study, we will draw some broader conclusions on the modern re-evaluation of traditionally despised Chinese literary genres during the first decades of the 20th century, both in China and the West.

Anna Di Toro, “The Scholars, Chronique indiscrète or Neoficial’naja istorija? The Challenge of Translating Rulin waishi for Western Audiences”

Lu Xun claimed that Rulin waishi 儒林外史, by Wu Jingzi 吳敬梓 (18th cent.), was the main Chinese novel of social satire, centred as it is on the merciless portrait of the moral decay of the mandarins. Many scholars, however, have questioned whether the novel should actually be read through the lens of satire, stressing the narratological operations made by the author and his idea of a reform of Confucian rites (Anderson 1997; Shang Wei 2003). As it happens in the Western tradition of satire (a miscellaneous form, from lanx satura, a dish filled with various firstlings), Wu Jingzi, in describing a human reality desperately corrupted by ethical blindness, displays many devices, moving from refined irony to grotesque.
Rulin waishi, one of the highest achievements of the ‘literati novel,’ was translated into some European languages between the 50s and the 70s of the last century (Li Hanqiu 2012). The aim of this contribution is to observe how the peculiar expression of humour in the Chinese text, rooted as it is in the highly ritualised codes of the literati, has been reproduced in the English, Russian, and French versions and which strategies were adopted by the translators in order to give a new life to 18th-century Chinese humour and satire.

Analysed Translations
Tchang Fou-jouei (transl.), Chronique indiscrète des Mandarins, Paris, Gallimard, 1976.
Voskresenskij Dimitrij N. (transl.), Neoficial’naja istorija konfuciancev, Moscow, Chudožestvennoj Literatury, 1959.
Yang Gladis, Yang Hsien-yi (transl.), The Scholars, Beijing, Foreign Language Press, 1957.

Lidiya Stezhenskaya, “Liu Xie’s Literary Mind Translations in European Languages”

Vincent Yu-chung Shih publication of The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wen xin diao long) in 1959 pioneered translation of Wen xin diao long into European languages. Within a historically short period of time in the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, we obtained a number of translations of this medieval treatise in English, Italian, Spanish, German, Czech, French, and Russian (several chapters). These translations apply various strategies and declare different approaches to Liu Xie’s ideas and concepts. Although reverberations of the much more formidable and imposing studies of Liu Xie’s treatise in China could be easily traced in the European counterpart, the wide range of nations and variety of languages point out that European ‘dragon studies’ have made their way and got their foothold in Europe. It is a matter of fact that comparing with Modern Chinese translation any foreign language rendering from Classical Chinese would require much ‘narrower’ handling of the original text. This presentation will draw attention to some obscure or dubious passages in the treatise and propose their alternative translations.

Visual and Textual Portrayals of “Barbarian” Peoples in Late Imperial China

Friday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room 2

Organised by Dmitri Maiatckii
Nikolay Samoylov, Chair
Dmitri Maiatckii, “Qing Ethnographic Albums: Political, Functional, or Commercial Goals?”
Joachim Mittag, “Charting the Non-Chinese Peoples in Late Ming: The Records of All the Guest Peoples (Xian bin lu, 1591) and the Visual Collection Presenting the Three Spheres (Sancai tuhui, c. 1609)”
Hang Lin, “Illustrated Record of the Exotic Lands: Knowledge and Imagination of the World in Late Ming China”
Martin Hofmann, “Of Giants, Dogs, and Trees with Heads: Accounts of Distant Countries in Late Imperial Visual and Textual Sources”

Under the combined influence of ancient description and increased maritime activities, China from the fifteenth century witnessed a broad range of literary and visual materials which depict non-Han peoples in and outside China. These materials consist of various genres, including ethnographic pictorials, historical and geographical works, maps, and pieces of classical poetry and prose. As sources of the exotic, they provide abundant information, both real and imagined, on “barbarian” peoples, ranging from physical appearance, history, daily life and folkloristic customs as well as of the geographical location and natural conditions of their respective lands. Even though not always factual, these portrayals in some cases offer a glimpse into the lives of peoples about whom we otherwise know very little. At the same time, these sources reflect traditional Chinese spatial and political concepts, in particular the tribute system. Through an examination of several sources that include visual and textual accounts of “barbarian” peoples, this panel aims to analyse how different modes of representation complemented each other in these works and what functions did this combination serve. By making a conversation with these materials, it further explores to what extent the portrayals in specific text genres differed from each other when dealing with peoples within the Chinese realm, those neighbouring China, or those in the far-away distance.

Dmitri Maiatckii, “Qing Ethnographic Albums: Political, Functional, or Commercial Goals?”

During the Qing Dynasty there appeared a variety of ethnographic albums in China. The library of St. Petersburg State University possesses a collection of at least eight handmade and one xylographic ethnographic albums created in the 18th and 19th centuries. They include Diansheng yixi yinan yiren tushuo (滇省迤西迤南夷人圖, 43 pictures), Quanqian miaotu (全黔苗圖, 28 pictures), two albums of Yunnan minorities without a title (72 and 74 pictures), Huang Qing zhi gong tu and four albums by Zhou Peichun (周培春, in total 117 pictures). The illustrative material of the albums portrays physical appearance, everyday life activities of Han and non-Han people, living mainly in Beijing, Yunnan, Guizhou, and some other places.
The aims of drawing the pictures were quite different. Zhou Peichun made pictures on his own initiative for “export” (waixiaohua 外銷畫), to earn money, to introduce foreigners to Chinese everyday life, trade, and culture. The other albums were created for “internal use”, since they were ordered by the Chinese Emperor or officials who wanted to know more about these peoples. All of the illustrations are supplied with titles, some of them go with annotations. In one case they are even accompanied by the maps of the localities in question.
The albums are an invaluable source of information for those who study the activities that disappeared in the Chinese capital and national territories a long time ago.

Joachim Mittag, “Charting the Non-Chinese Peoples in Late Ming: The Records of All the Guest Peoples (Xian bin lu, 1591) and the Visual Collection Presenting the Three Spheres (Sancai tuhui, c. 1609)”

Geographic and ethnographic interest in the non-Chinese peoples culminated in the mid-and late Ming 明 (c. 1530–1650). A formidable example of this trend is the work entitled Records of All the Guest Peoples (Xian bin lu 咸賓錄), compiled by Luo Yuejiong 羅曰聚 (dates unknown) in 1591. Using the conventional classification of the “barbarians” according to the four cardinal directions, this work surveys altogether 105 states and peoples which had sent tribute to the Ming court. In the great Visual Collection Presenting the Three Spheres (Sancai tuhui 三才圖會, c. 1609) this number is increased to 171 and an image is added for each people entried, thus being the earliest extant most comprehensive visualisation of non-Chinese peoples. The large increase of entries is mostly accounted for by the inclusion of mythical, legendary, or fantastic peoples from the rich folklore tradition. Leaving the illustrations of these peoples aside, the paper will focus on the encyclopaedic striving after picturing the plenitude of known and actually existing peoples.

Hang Lin, “Illustrated Record of the Exotic Lands: Knowledge and Imagination of the World in Late Ming China”

This paper aims to provide a better understanding of Ming China’s complex knowledge and lively fantasies about the cosmos and its inhabitants through an examination of the Illustrated Record of the Exotic Lands (Yiyu tuzhi 異域圖志), an illustrated text that was one of the most comprehensive and popular sources of documentation about exotic lands and peoples. Assembling images and descriptions, it encompasses entries of 190 real and imagined countries and polities across Asia, the Indian Ocean region, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Focusing on the hitherto only known copy of the book in the collection of the Cambridge University Library, it will trace the production and circulation routes of these pictorials, mixed with conventional stereotypes and contemporary information from maritime activities, and then explicate how it fell into neglect but revived as a popular text under its alternative title Rubric of Various Barbarians (Zhuyi men 諸夷門) included in different daily-use encyclopedias. In this way, the illustrations and descriptions of the foreigners and foreign lands gained its firm place in the system of knowledge in the Ming. This analysis shall recover a sense of its specific relevance to the cultural and social world of late-Ming China, as well as to observe how these pictorials and descriptions formed part of a global system of exchange involving not only material objects but also forms of knowledge fashioning.

Martin Hofmann, “Of Giants, Dogs, and Trees with Heads: Accounts of Distant Countries in Late Imperial Visual and Textual Sources”

Various late imperial sources include portrayals of foreign countries and their inhabitants with peculiar mixtures of ethnographic and novelistic accounts. This paper will focus on a small number of distant countries. By analysing how Chinese scholars described them in books, and to which places they spatially assigned them on maps, it will demonstrate that the notions of these countries were not uniform. Chinese scholars drew on different sources, collected the information for distinct purposes, and enlisted diverse visual and textual means to highlight the characteristics of the foreigners. The diversity of descriptions suggests that there was not a single coherent perception of foreign countries at a given time, but that different world-views coexisted. Thus, rather than assuming liner progress from fantastic to factual accounts, this paper attempts explore how different textual and visual accounts mutually informed each other, and what information was genre-specific or used only in particular contexts.

Beyond China

The Long-Distance Transmission of Knowledge and Technology from the Bronze Age to the PRC
Friday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room 2

Organised by Dongming Wu
Yijun Wang, Chair
Dongming Wu, “Exchanges beyond the Western Zhou World: Remodeling the Metal Economy in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1045–771 BCE)”
Yijun Wang, “Migrant Miners and Global Trade: Transmission of Tin Mining Technology from China to Southeast Asia, 1700–1850s”
Yuanxie Shi, “European Lace, China Made: Localisation of Chaoshan Lace Production in the 20th Century China”
Dongxin Zou, “Women in Reproduction and Representation: Chinese Obstetric Care in Rural Algeria and Morocco”

From the Bronze Age to PRC China, knowledge and technology travelled across regional and cultural borders with the movement of people and commodities, bringing social, and cultural changes. Concerning the long-distance transmission of the knowledge and technology of mining, textile, and medicine between China, Southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa, this panel looks at how technology moved across geo-cultural boundaries and how the movement of knowledge transformed social networks, political economy, and cultural perceptions in three millenniums. Dongming Wu discusses the transmission of bronze goods and technology within and beyond the Western Zhou world. He shows how the metal economy contributed to the formation of political-economic networks in the Western Zhou (1045–771 BCE). Yijun Wang follows the transmission of tin mining technology from China to Southeast Asia from 1700 to 1850s. She demonstrates that the social organisation of Chinese miners played a key role in the successful spread of Chinese mining technology. Yuanxie Shi examines the localisation of European lace production in Guangdong province in the Republican period to show how traditional craft skills affected the geographical distribution of labour in the modern textile industry. Through a study of Chinese medical aid in north Africa, Dongxin Zou shows how the cross-cultural experience of Chinese female doctors constructed the nostalgic perception of socialist health care in post-Mao China. Standing at the intersection of the history of technology and medicine, this panel contributes to the understanding between knowledge, culture, society, and power.

Dongming Wu, “Exchanges beyond the Western Zhou World: Remodeling the Metal Economy in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1045–771 BCE)”

This paper examines how the transmission of bronze goods, casting technology, and the bronze culture of the Zhou dynasty contributed to the formation of the network of the metal economy within and beyond the Western Zhou world. The Western Zhou economy has been regarded as a redistributive model in which strategic resources were regulated by the central court. In discussing new archaeological evidence from southern China, this paper adopts a bottom-up perspective to discuss the limitations of the central court in the borderland and the agents involved in the metal economy. I identify three political-economic powers: the central court, the regional states established by the Zhou, and the local peoples beyond the Zhou world. Although the central court held the authorities in ideological and technological powers, they had to rely on the regional states to secure the long-distance transmission routes, who seized the opportunities to develop themselves and even rebelled against the core. Moreover, the central court relied on local peoples to exploit raw material and used foreign traders to reduce the costs of direct management, who selectively adopted cultural forms rather than waiting to be annexed by the centre. By demonstrating the vital roles of different players in the metal economy, this paper reexamines the redistributive model and argues that the maintenance of the Western Zhou economies results from the negotiation and cooperation of different political-economic powers within and beyond the Zhou world.

Yijun Wang, “Migrant Miners and Global Trade: Transmission of Tin Mining Technology from China to Southeast Asia, 1700–1850s”

This paper examines tin mining technology and its transmission from the east coast of China to Southeast Asia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beginning in the 1700s, tin became an international commodity that was as important as silver in the global trade. Following the itinerary of tin and the migration of miners, this paper discusses how Chinese miners transferred their mining technology across regional boundaries. Furthermore, it explores how Chinese intellectuals and European natural philosophers understood Chinese technology of mining. This paper argues that in contrast to our current perception of industrial technology, which emphasises machinery and tools, the social technology of mining was the key for Chinese miners to establish a capital- and labour-intensive industry. The social technology of mining, which was embedded in the social organisation of the Chinese mining community, enabled the long-distance travel of technology from China to Southeast Asia. On the other hand, the close connection between the social organisation and mining technology also limited the spread of large-scale mining operations from Chinese migrant communities to native communities in Southeast Asia.

Yuanxie Shi, “European Lace, China Made: Localisation of Chaoshan Lace Production in the 20th Century China”

The paper concerns the localisation of Western technology in twentieth-century China by examining the export lace industry in Shantou and Chaozhou in Guangdong Province. Often regarded as a quintessential Western craft and technology, lacemaking was first introduced by Western missionary groups to Chinese port cities in the late 19th century.
With the development of the industry throughout the 20th century, lace designers incorporated Chinese taste (e.g. blue-and-white or polychrome colouration) as well as traditional iconographies (e.g. dragons and phoenix) into visual expressions, which expanded Western lace vocabulary at large. Moreover, newspapers and government reports of the Republican Period claimed that rural female artisans applied indigenous Chaozhou-embroidery techniques onto the making of lace products. For instance, padded embroidery (diangao xiu) was used to imitate the raised relief effect of those made in Appenzell, Switzerland or Madeira, Portugal. Yet, such a localisation process is often difficult and ambiguous to identify due to the visual and technical similarities, but the claimed localness uncovers another layer in the process: technology is socially perceived. Locally perceived technology further impacted the social organisation of production. The specialisation of local skills shaped the distribution of orders and labours among cities, suburbs, and villages, which I would call “geo-technicality.”

Dongxin Zou, “Women in Reproduction and Representation: Chinese Obstetric Care in Rural Algeria and Morocco”

This paper examines the obstetric care provided by Chinese women ob-gyns in Algeria and Morocco and their perceptions of local reproductive culture and ideas of the female body. The Chinese government has sent medical teams since 1963 to mostly rural provinces of Algeria and 1975 to Morocco, to offer primary health care for rural and suburban communities. Among a whole range of medical branches in the Chinese service, obstetrics and gynaecology practised by almost all women doctors have been in persistently high demand. This paper explores this little-known history of China’s medical engagement in post-colonial North Africa, and in particular, the experiences of women professionals—not white middle-class women as variables for all women—in health care, and the complexities of their association with their women patients. Drawing on an ever-expanding pool of Chinese medical “mission literature”—medical reports, doctors’ testimonies, and published memoirs, this paper argues that while Chinese women ob-gyns claimed “sisterly” solidarity and sympathy with their patients, they essentialised the North African female patient as ignorant and vulnerable. Furthermore, this paper explores a reversed process of using “peripheral” experiences to reflect upon the medical system and health care culture in China. It argues that the doctors’ experiences in North Africa offered them a comparative venue to construct a nostalgia for a lost golden past—or a past that never was—of socialist medicine as well as a site of criticism about the moral tensions between doctors and patients in China’s for-profit health care system.

Religion in Late Imperial Narrative

Friday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room B

Organised by Andrea Kreuzpointner
Vincent Durand-Dastès, Chair
Andrea Kreuzpointner, “Xiwangmu References in Ming Novels and their Influence by Ming Theatre as Examples of Popular Religion?”
Barbara Witt, “The Late Ming Book Market for Popular Religion”
Lucrezia Zanzottera, “Inner Alchemy in Yaohuazhuan: An Example of nüdan?”

In late imperial China, religion and narrative literature were not separate entities, but rather different aspects of a shared cultural landscape. As such, religious themes surfaced in many shapes or forms in vernacular novels. They ranged from crude displays of divine fighting powers, through hagiographical narratives and sermon-like allegories to sophisticated metaphors of advanced practices of Daoist Inner Alchemy or Buddhist philosophy. This panel will highlight three very different embodiments of religious themes in Ming and Qing dynasty narrative literature. Andrea Kreuzpointner will outline depictions of Xiwangmu 西王母 across several popular late Ming novels as well as theatre plays and the traces of Daoist culture found in those. Barbara Witt seeks to uncover the market mechanisms behind the large increase in publications of religious knowledge, popular vernacular narratives, and hagiographical novels in the late Ming and early Qing. Finally, Lucrezia Zanzottera’s paper analyses the hypothesis that the Qing vernacular novel Yaohuazhuan 瑤華傳 (1803) by Ding Bingren 丁秉仁 presents an example of female Inner Alchemy treaty (nüdan 女丹).

Andrea Kreuzpointner, “Xiwangmu References in Ming Novels and their Influence by Ming Theatre as Examples of Popular Religion?”

“The Queen Mother of the West” Xiwangmu 西王母 has been an integral part of Chinese text and art history since the Western Han Dynasty (207 B.C.–7 A.D.). Early sources like the Shanhaijing 山海經, the Lunheng 論衡, or the Zhuangzi 莊子 describe her as a crown wearing beast with tiger teeth and a leopard tail, as a name of a region or as a mythological figure having obtained the Dao 道 respectively. It was not until the Ming Dynasty as a unitary image of Xiwangmu evolved as the famous novels Xiyouji 西遊記, Dongyouji 東遊記 and Xiyangji 西洋記 amongst others depict Xiwangmu as the host of the peach festival pantaohui 蟠桃會, which takes place on the third day of the third month on mount Kunlun 崑崙. Those lucky enough to get invited enjoy a great banquet and get to taste the most desired fruit: the peaches of immortality bestowed by Xiwangmu herself. Guests to her festival have been as illustrious as the Eight Immortals or Buddha Amitabha. The Ming novels not only show Daoist and Buddhist influence but have greatly influenced each other as well as they have been influenced by another popular Ming genre: the theatre, especially the plays written by Zhu Youdun 朱有燉 (1379–1439) like Qunxian qingshou pantaohui 群仙慶壽蟠桃會 or Yaochihui baxian qingshou 瑤池會八仙慶壽. The aim of this talk is to trace down those influences as well as the impact of popular religion on those novels and theatres.

Barbara Witt, “The Late Ming Book Market for Popular Religion”

The mid to late Ming saw a rise in book culture and printing activity. Most famously, this led to numerous editions of the Four Masterworks 四大奇書, but also led to an increase in publications related to popular religion. Among these are religious novels of the genre that Lu Xun 魯迅 would go on to call Novels about Gods and Demons 神魔小說. Some of those novels, such as for example Xiyouji 西遊記, Fengshen yanyi 封神演義, Xiyangji 西洋記, and the collection Siyouji 四遊記, have already been studied to varying degrees. Less focus has so far been given to the shared features of these novels and surrounding literature, such as popular historical fiction, religious encyclopedias, or encyclopedias for daily use 日用類書. In fact, quite a number of literati were engaged in the publication of several works as publishers, authors, or editors. Striking examples are Luo Maodeng 羅懋登 (fl.1590s), Yu Xiangdou 余象斗 (1550–1637), and Zhu Dingchen 朱鼎臣 (fl.16thc.) among many others whose publishing effort touched various forms of popular literature. Considering the influence that popular narratives of Chinese history and religion retain to this day, a reevaluation of these works in light of the late imperial book market for popular prints is long overdue.

Lucrezia Zanzottera, “Inner Alchemy in Yaohuazhuan: An Example of nüdan?

Daoism and Buddhism have a great influence upon Ming and Qing novels, especially shenguai xiaoshuo 神怪小說. Since the late Ming period, we can see the emergence of a new literary phenomenon: specific feminine inner alchemy texts (nüdan 女丹). This is as long as feminine literacy increases and it’s linked to the emergence of female literature. The novel I analyze is Yaohuazhuan 瑤華傳 (1803) by Ding Bingren丁秉仁. This is a very peculiar xiaoshuo which relates to the history of a male fox spirit condemned for his sexual crimes to be reincarnated in the granddaughter of emperor Wanli 萬曆, Yaohua 瑤華, expert in poetry, performance, and in martial arts, who temporary defeats the rebels Li Zicheng 李自成 and She Chongming 奢崇明. The book is the story of the progressive refinement of the fox spirit to become immortal under the guide of other two female immortals, Wu’Aizi 無礙子 and Zhou 周. Among the many passages relating the transformation of the fox spirit, we notice one excerpt which in the purification process is particularly devoted to the female nature of the protagonist. Can it be considered as an example of nüdan?

Early Chinese Legal Manuscripts

Friday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room B

Organised by Ulrich Lau
Ulrich Lau, Chair
Alexander Herzog, “A Systematic Comparison of the Statutes on Agriculture (tianlü 田律) from the Qin and Early Han Periods”
Ernest Caldwell, “Locating the Law: Evidence of Legislative Cross-Referencing in Qin and Han Excavated Legal Statutes”
Xiaomeng He, “The Organisation of Legal Knowledge: Aspects of the Filing System from Qin and Han Local Archives”
Chun Fung Tong, “The Reconfiguration of Social Activities and the Construction of Social Order in the Qin Dynasty: Evidence from New Qin Ordinances in the Collection of the Yuelu Academy”
Enno Giele, Discussant

The number of legal manuscripts from Qin and early Han times excavated by archaeologists or looted by grave robbers has been constantly increasing.
The panel aims to discuss new insights into the legislation at the beginning of the Chinese empire gained from the analysis of recently discovered legal manuscripts. Four young researchers will present the results of their studies on various aspects of legislation. Two papers deal with legal statutes (lü) from Qin (Shuihudi 11, Yuelu shuyuan edition) and early Han times (Zhangjiashan 247). The first one compares statutes on agriculture from different provenance in order to determine the extent to which the respective Qin statutes have been adopted by the following Han dynasty. The second paper examines the practice of cross-referencing in Qin and Han statutes. The study comes to the conclusion that this practice reflects the development of a corpus-based approach to legislative drafting.
The next papers evaluate ordinances (ling) from Qin times (Yuelu shuyuan edition). The third paper reconstructs the filing system of the authorities at different levels and attempts to identify several stages of the transformation of individual administrative documents into written law. The last paper interprets Qin ordinances stipulating that members of a family or a community shall be rewarded for applying social norms in their mutual relations or are subjected to penal sanctions in case of violating such moral principles. It is the purpose of the interpretation to assess the actual effects of this legislation on the local society.

Alexander Herzog, “A Systematic Comparison of the Statutes on Agriculture (tianlü 田律) from the Qin and Early Han periods”

The Statutes on Agriculture have the oldest documented history of any statute collection in early imperial Chinese law. Besides, they were of special and great interest for the early empire as they laid the economic basis of the state by defining the standard size of agricultural fields and setting the amount of taxes based on those holdings. Although research on bamboo texts has vitally developed during the past years, there are hardly any studies which systematically compare the tianlü fragments found so far. Therefore, this presentation provides such a systematic comparison of tianlü findings from Shuihudi No. 11 睡虎地11号, Qingchuan No. 50 青川秦墓50号, Zhangjiashan No. 247 張家山247号 and the Yuelu-Academy-Texts 嶽麓律令.
The different statutes and articles of these collections will be examined from a legal and linguistic perspective in terms of their language and structure. This comparison shows, that there are some major congruencies between them, as well as numerous congruencies regarding the content of certain statutes and articles. For this reason, it becomes apparent that during the early Han period the tianlü were almost exactly copied from the Qin predecessor, with only minor modifications with regards to penalties and fines. Moreover, the Han tianlü are much more comprehensive and detailed. Therefore, such comparison greatly enhances and transforms our knowledge of Qin and Han statutes.

Ernest Caldwell, “Locating the Law: Evidence of Legislative Cross-Referencing in Qin and Han Excavated Legal Statutes”

How were laws known to those individuals tasked with interpreting and enforcing them? This paper engages one facet of this question by building on previous scholarship related to the practice of cross-referencing in early imperial Chinese legal manuscripts. Legislative cross-referencing is a linguistic practice wherein a law will cite another law either with a direct reference to its title or by specifically quoting segments of the law. Such a practice demonstrates the interconnectedness of separate laws and the development of a corpus-based approach to legislative drafting. That is to say, individual laws were drafted with a consciousness of how the contents of one law should relate to the contents of other existing laws. Furthermore, the use of cross-referencing serves as useful signposts for those individuals required to assess a particular legal situation and to locate and apply the correct legal statute. With the continual discovery of legal manuscripts dated to early imperial China, we now have the means to undertake a comprehensive and diachronic analysis of the development of cross-referencing in early imperial Chinese legal manuscripts. This paper analyses evidence of cross-referencing within excavated legal statutes from the Shuihudi corpus, Yuelu shuyuan Qin manuscript collection, and the Han Zhangjiashan corpus.

Xiaomeng He, “The Organisation of Legal Knowledge: Aspects of the Filing System from Qin and Han Local Archives”

The record-keeping and storing of administrative documents has a long tradition in China. However, only little is known about concrete archiving practices on the lower administrative levels in Qin and Han times. At the same time, this knowledge is of utmost importance in order to understand the operating principles of a government that was confronted with a constantly growing number of administrative tasks. Based on findings in legal manuscripts of the Yuelu collection and further archaeological sources, this paper focusses on certain aspects of the processes of filing, copying and (re-)organising written law as well as the purposes behind them. For that reason, the chosen approach combines different methods: a textual comparison of several (nearly) identical legal stipulations in combination with a paleographical analysis allows to identify different transformative stages of copies; an analysis of numerical systems (like the Heavenly Stems and numerical order), as well as different types of titles for legal stipulations, enables to draw conclusions concerning the filing system; and additional archaeological sources (like specific containers and labels) provide further information about the keeping and storing of administrative documents. Finally, this paper argues that the above-mentioned processes played a critical role in the transformation of administrative documents into written law.

Chun Fung Tong, “The Reconfiguration of Social Activities and the Construction of Social Order in the Qin Dynasty: Evidence from New Qin Ordinances in the Collection of the Yuelu Academy”

This paper delves into the efforts made by the Qin rulers to construct a new social order in their new empire on the basis of new evidence provided by newly published legal ordinances. It argues that although the Qin rulers acknowledged the value of morality in forging social stability, the ways which they incorporated these cultural elements to their utopia were under the social engineering framework of Shang Yang and Han Fei, both of whom advocate policy reforms through punishments and reward rather than education or indoctrination. New evidence datable to the imperial Qin period reveals that the Qin rulers exerted an aggressive plan to disseminate sanctioned social values (benevolence, uprightness, filial piety, etc.) to the populace. Specifically, these designed reforms would result in direct interventions on social activities, thereby building the utopia that the Qin rulers envisaged. From this perspective, the Qin empire, unlike the pre-imperial era, mirrored the political system of those modern totalitarian regimes.
Under these new policies, the lives of people were now under the active and direct intervention of government apparatus. While the policies might aim at disseminating positive social values, the strong “Legalist” mentality might offset the effect of lenient policies and, in turn, became a nightmare of the people. In the end, instead of building a utopian society, the First Emperor’s scheme might result in a horrific dystopia that was administered by terror rather than the benevolence, reverence, or righteousness that the Qin rulers envisioned.

Papers on Modern History VI

Mao and after Mao
Friday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room A

Chaired by Sascha Klotzbücher
Igor Chabrowski, “Reforming Opera in Chongqing: The Birth of the Communist ‘People’s Art’ (1949–1952)”
Fabienne Wallenwein, “Cultural Heritage Conservation: Becoming a Key Dimension of Chinese Urban Development?—A Study of Two Cases from the Jiangnan Region”
Anna Stecher, “The Biographical Representation of the Late Zhou Enlai: A Dramaturgical Approach”
Yumi Ishii, “Orphan of Zhao: A Story and the Dynamism of Village Community in Shanxi China”

Igor Chabrowski, “Reforming Opera in Chongqing: The Birth of the Communist ‘People’s Art’ (1949–1952)”

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) revolutionary cultural policy in the 1950s is often presented as a well-organised, determined, planned, and effective system. On the example of the opera reform in Chongqing’s early 1950s, I shall demonstrate that this picture is very hard to sustain when faced with much of newly available evidence. I am going to argue that CCP understanding of the function of culture in the “socialist construction” and its ability to exploit artists and their work for the Party’s ends were very limited. The Party devolved cultural work to the military regions and provinces acted without any clear aim and was overwhelmed by the daunting task of providing basic subsistence to actors, writers, theatre administration et al. At the same time, Communists took over a country already shaped by the Nationalist Party wartime propaganda system and by a vibrant commercial market of theatre houses and opera troupes. In such conditions, the early 1950s cultural reform developed through efforts of suppression, adaptation, and subversion of the existing institution of cultural production, which made opera only partially serviceable to the political campaigns such as the land reform. Only the ongoing stress on China’s resources by the Korean War, motivated CCP leadership to form a national mechanism for exploitation of opera, reformulating it on the ideas, experiences, and definitions of the wartime propaganda developed during the Russian October Revolution, Sino-Japanese War 1937–45, and the Civil War 1946–49.

Fabienne Wallenwein, “Cultural Heritage Conservation: Becoming a Key Dimension of Chinese Urban Development?—A Study of Two Cases from the Jiangnan Region”

Early Chinese conservation initiatives can be traced back to a first conservation movement in the 1930s by the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture (Zhongguo yingzao xueshe 中国营造学社) and to pioneering foreign-educated Chinese architects such as Liang Sicheng 梁思成. Despite these initiatives, historic urban centres suffered great losses of cultural heritage during the Cultural Revolution as well as in the process of rapid urban development, resulting from neglect and destruction. China’s enthusiasm for World Heritage triggered a fundamental change in attitude with historic centres now being increasingly valued and placed under governmental protection. At the beginning of the 1980s, China primarily promulgated a batch of 24 National Historically and Culturally Famous Cities (Zhongguo lishi wenhua mingcheng 中国历史文化名城) characterised by preserved cultural relics and high historical value. The paper investigates the conservation of historic areas in two of these cities located in the Jiangnan region as part of city development: Pingjiang Historical and Cultural Block in Suzhou 苏州平江历史文化街区 and Tianzifang in Shanghai 上海田子坊. In both cases, the increasing significance of local characteristic features in a globalised world and recognition from the international conservation community are strong incentives for the conservation of cultural heritage and its integration into local development. Moreover, intangible aspects, such as references to literary works, philosophical and spiritual traditions or local customs are increasingly considered.

Anna Stecher, “The Biographical Representation of the Late Zhou Enlai: A Dramaturgical Approach”

As research has shown, biographies are not only determined by events or by historical facts but also, or even more, by aspects related to the process of story-telling and narrating. For this presentation, I aim at exploring the category of “dramaturgy” in order to analyse biographical texts. By dramaturgy, I mean all the strategies and techniques which are used for telling a story, comprising both the “what” (what is narrated) and the “how” (how is it narrated) as well as the “why” (the overall dramaturgy). In order to illustrate how this approach can be helpful for getting a better understanding of biographies produced in the 20th and 21st century China, I will especially focus on biographical texts which deal with the life of the late Zhou Enlai. While a number of studies have been conducted on biographies related to other influent Chinese politicians (especially Mao Zedong biographies), biographical texts on Zhou Enlai, although produced in overwhelming numbers also in recent times, remain largely unexplored. Besides examining literary biographies, I will also discuss biographical movies, TV-series, and theatre-plays.

Yumi Ishii, “Orphan of Zhao: A Story and the Dynamism of Village Community in Shanxi China”

This presentation will examine the oral tradition of Zhaoshi gu’er, the original story of Orphan of China, which was the most successful Chinese drama in 18th century Europe. In China, this story was recorded in Zuoshizhuan and Shiji as a historical event in Shanxi in the seventh century BC and widely spread in the villages of Shanxi orally before adapted in Yuan play.
In this presentation, I will argue the relationship between the story and rain-making rituals, which could be dated back to at least Song dynasty in Yu-County, to examine how the story was spread orally and related to the living of people there. Based on oral history research, I found that Zhaoshi gu’er (Zhao Wu in its name) has been worshipped as a deity of rain-making, every village curved a small statue of him to enshrine it in the mausoleum at Mt. Cang where, in the story, Zhao Wu had been hidden from the enemy for 15 years, then carried it back to their village when they need to perform rain-making. These statues were also shared among neighbouring villages and bound them together into several inter-village communities, which survived the prohibition of rain-making and political collectivisation of farming before 1980.
In this presentation, I will try to demonstrate the dynamism of this village network during and after Mao’s era, and show how the story affects people’s daily life and decision making under a crisis such as war, drought, and political turbulences.

Papers on Modern History V

Republican
Friday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room A

Chaired by Brian Martin
Rocco Maria Colonna, “Morality in Qing and Republican China”
Nuan Gao, “Synchronicity and Inner Mechanisms: Building fukan as a China’s Public Sphere During the May Fourth Era”
Brian Martin, “An Incomplete Party State: Zhou Fohai and the Wang Jingwei Government 1939–1940”
Ling-chieh Chen, “Crossing National Borders: The Crisis of International Postal Communication in Manchuria, 1931–1935”

Rocco Maria Colonna, “Morality in Qing and Republican China”

This paper aims to understand some aspects of Chinese civilisation, through the laws that drew the boundaries between morality and immorality at the beginning of the XX Century in China. In particular, this research intends to show how Chinese society deeply changed after the Xinhai Revolution and the advent of new rulers. For this purpose, the present study compares the laws developed both by the Qing and, later, by the Republican authorities to discipline issues such as adultery, rape, concubinage, and prostitution. This comparison is focused on the Great Qing Legal Code (along with some of its commentaries) and certain provisional penal codes were drawn up in the years 1912–35.
Laws regulating morality can help to explain the social groups that adopt them. Such legal provisions reveal essential information about the structure, organisation, and internal functioning of any human community. Besides, by a careful examination of these laws’ evolution, it is possible to find out how and when those communities tried to embrace change. Therefore, the objective of the proposed analysis is twofold: firstly, it tries to isolate and explain some habits that were at the root of the Chinese society, under the Qing dynasty. Secondly, it attempts to understand how these habits were reconsidered, by Republican legislators, after the collapse of the Chinese Empire in 1911.

Nuan Gao, “Synchronicity and Inner Mechanisms: Building fukan as a China’s Public Sphere During the May Fourth Era”

This paper attempts to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the relevance of public sphere, conceptualised by Jürgen Habermas, to the context of Chinese history, employing the cases of the fukans (supplements) of three influential Chinese newspapers of the May Fourth era (circa from 1915 to 1926): Chenbao, Minguo ribao, and Shishi xinbao. All of these fukans served as popular forums for discussion and debates, publishing speeches, articles, and letters by people of different social strata, and showcasing a wide spectrum of literary and political views. This paper firstly argues that the May Fourth era was the general backdrop for the formation of China’s public sphere, as it was a synchronic counterpart to the eighteenth century of Britain and France in terms of the emergence of a critical-minded reading public, thanks to the social transformation since 1840, the abolition of the imperial civil service examination system, and the existence of an interim power vacuum between the downfall of Qing dynasty and the rise of the authoritarian Chiang government, which brought about relatively loose censorship and thus made rational criticism possible. This paper also analyses the inner mechanisms of the fukans, arguing that in constructing China’s public sphere, both the left and moderate intellectuals put conscious efforts and shared the same moral courage, while their roles were quite different: the left was more prominent as passionate and idealist spiritual idols, while the moderate acted as pragmatic and sober organisers, disciplining the discussants with civility and rationality.

Brian Martin, “An Incomplete Party State: Zhou Fohai and the Wang Jingwei Government 1939–1940”

The Wang Jingwei Government was a collaborationist government that considered that it had a ‘national’ mandate covering the areas of occupied China; and it sought to achieve a permanent peace with Japan through negotiations. At ist core, however, it was a Guomindang Party Government, whose organisation and institutions were based on those of the pre-war Nationalist Government, and that mirrored those of the Guomindang Chongqing Government. Zhou Fohai was a key architect of this collaborationist Party-State, who defined the key prerequisites for such a national collaborationist government. In 1939-1940 Zhou led the Wang Jingwei group’s negotiating team in the negotiations with the Japanese. With the creation of the government in 1940 Zhou ensured that he controlled the two key ministries handling the regime’s income and security—the Ministries of Finance and of the Police (the latter having oversight of the newly created Security Service). Zhou Fohai’s attitude to collaboration, however, contained a fundamental contradiction: while he wanted to construct a collaborationist state, yet such a state must have a relationship with the Chongqing government. He saw Wang Jingle’s ‘peace’ state and Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘war’ state, in other words, as being in some form of symbiotic relationship. In Zhou’s view, the complementary activities of Nanjing and Chongqing were essential for the achievement of comprehensive peace. This approach affected his view of the Basic Treaty. While he pushed throughout 1940 for official Japanese recognition, when it came in the form of the Basic Treaty he disliked it as it represented for him a final rupture with Chongqing, and thus the impossibility of achieving a comprehensive peace.

Ling-chieh Chen, “Crossing National Borders: The Crisis of International Postal Communication in Manchuria, 1931–1935”

This paper aims to explore how the Japanese invasion of Manchuria that began with the Mukden Incident, challenged the Chinese Postal Service (CPS) and China’s postal communication, and why it caused a crisis of the international postal transport. The Nationalist Government of China’s withdrawal of the Chinese Postal Service’s employees in Manchuria and a blockade of postal transport followed the Japanese Army’s invasion in September 1931 and the establishment of Manchukuo on 1 March 1932. The blockade led to a profound crisis of international postal services between Asia and Europe via Manchuria, which eventually became an international issue and aroused the concern of the League of Nations.
This paper first discusses Manchuria as a significant postal transport hub connecting Asia and Europe by transnational railways. Second, it analyses the Chinese Government’s decision of the blockade and its unexpected consequences for the international community. The third part focuses on the Nationalist Government’s compromise in 1935 and the meaning of a ‘national’ postal service during the early twentieth century.
I argue that the Chinese Government regarded the postal service as a useful means to arouse international attention to Japan’s invasion while maintaining international postal service was the priority for the international community. The Chinese Government’s compromise and the international intervention show that despite the feature of only one national postal authority in one country, providing efficient postal services and sharing the responsibility to maintain the international postal service even between hostile regimes were significant features of ‘modern’ postal communication.

Commemoration as a Form of Negotiating Historical Narratives

Friday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room 1

Organised by Kevin Bockholt
Daniel Leese, Chair
Kevin Bockholt, “China and the First World War: No Space for Commemoration?”
Emily Mae Graf, “Conflicting Sites of Memory in Xinjiang: A Critical Reading of Heroines on Display”
Yakai Wang, “The Opium War Museum in Humen: A Challenge to the Leading Narrative?”
Stefanie Sinmoy Schaller, “China’s Educated Youth on Museum Display: Rewriting the Leading Narrative?”

How is history negotiated in memorial sites across China? In this panel, the commemoration is defined as an act of remembrance to affirm, to honour, or to admonish historical events as well as critically assess the deeds and misdeeds of historical figures. The transmission of their memory is conducted by institutions, interest groups, and other actors and is mediated in the form of texts, images, and artefacts, which are displayed in museums and memorial sites. While situated in the past, both the events and figures impact people’s behaviour and thinking in the present and future. Presenting four different case studies, the panel examines symbols of war and peace, trauma and nostalgia ranging from the upheavals at the Qing dynasty’s Western borders to the First Opium War, from the First World War to the collective uproar of the Educated Youth in pre-1980s PRC. The regional scope of the panel extends from Kashgar over Yan’an to Humen. It considers museums and other sites of memory located in these places, while also being concerned with the absence of commemoration in the case of the First World War. Drawing on public, academic, institutional, literary, and artistic discussions, the case studies highlight different forms of commemoration initiated by a variety of actors. The panel discusses government institutions, civic associations, and intellectual circles and other voices that negotiate narratives on heroic figures, military conflicts, and mass campaigns in their attempt to determine what to remember—and what to forget.

Kevin Bockholt, “China and the First World War: No Space for Commemoration?”

The First World War is one of the major themes in memory studies. There is a myriad of literature about the different forms and modes of the commemoration of the war in European countries and the USA. This presentation constitutes the first attempt to approach this topic from a Chinese perspective. China began to play an active role in the First World War even before she declared war on the German Empire and joined the Allied Powers in 1917. Starting in 1916, around 140,000 Chinese labourers were sent to Europe to support French, British, and later on American troops behind the front lines with economic and logistic tasks. However, the dominant historical narrative that evolved after 1919 condemned the war as a result of reckless imperialism, capitalist struggles for markets abroad, or a collapsing Western civilisation. Consequently, until today, the commemoration of the labourers is almost non-existent within China. This presentation highlights the tensions between negative understandings of the war, efforts to rewrite China into the history of the First World War, and public demand for commemorating China’s contribution to the war. It draws on materials related to a planned memorial site in Shandong province as well as the recently emerging academic interest in reexamining the First World War through a Chinese perspective. Furthermore, it explores Chinese public discussions during the centenary of the First World War that reflected upon the increasingly complex forms of European commemoration of the Chinese labourers.

Emily Mae Graf, “Conflicting Sites of Memory in Xinjiang: A Critical Reading of Heroines on Display”

Museums and sites of memory play a key role in commemorating, creating and disseminating narratives and images of historical and legendary figures alike. This presentation approaches figures such as the Beauty of Loulan 楼兰美女 of the famous Tarim Basin mummies dating back to 1800 BCE and the legendary Muslim concubine Xiangfei 香妃, who is said to have lived in emperor Qianlong’s court and whose ‘tomb’ remains one of the key sites of tourism in Kashgar today. In museum spaces and sites of commemoration, archaeological, and historical claims are often inextricably entangled with various, at times contradicting, mythical narratives, and legends. Based on observations at the sites and in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Museum in Urumqi conducted in September 2019, this presentation offers a critical reading of such heroic figures both in the physical spatial context of the museum’s display and in the hierarchical context of the institutional landscape of museums in present-day PRC. It further draws on discourses of the heroines’ reception and evaluation in scientific circles, public discourse, literary production, and artistic reproduction. Which narratives, voices, and institutions make demands on these figures and sites? Approaching these heroines as lieux de mémoire allows us not only to retrace conflicting memories solidified in, among others, Manchu, Han, and Uyghur narratives but also reveals tensions within these narratives (Millward 1994), which turn their sites of memory into highly contested spaces.

Yakai Wang, “The Opium War Museum in Humen: A Challenge to the Leading Narrative?”

The Opium War Museum 鸦片战争博物馆 was founded in 1957 by the provincial government of Guangdong. It was designated as a national site for patriotic education 爱国主义教育基地 in 1994. In line with the Chinese Communists Party’s leading narrative of history, most historians regard the First Opium War (1840–1842) as the beginning of modern Chinese history. Since the 20th century, this event of the Sino-British military conflict has, therefore, been given great historical significance in both Chinese academic research and education. However, taking the development of the Opium War Museums as an indicator, the presentation will show that this narrative did not remain uncontested and underwent certain transformations and revisions in the past sixty years. Changing the name of the museum; adding the theme of drug consumption during the Qing to the exhibition; shifting the focus from achievements of individual historical figures to a broader historical perspective of Sino-foreign relations; all of these adjustments were accompanied by detailed academic studies of the respective aspects. Overall, the museum reflects the conflicting relation between contemporary museums and historical narratives. The main sources of this presentation are journals and publications of the Opium War Museum, government documents, as well as newspaper reports. It shows how the understanding of the First Opium War is continuously affected by the interaction between the mainstream discourse on modern history, academic research, and the exhibitions of the museum itself.

Stefanie Sinmoy Schaller, “China’s Educated Youth on Museum Display: Rewriting the Leading Narrative?”

More than 40 years after its official end, there is no consensus in the PRC on the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the course it took. This presentation elaborates on Educated Youth Museums 知青博物馆 that came up together with a “wave of nostalgia” (Yang 2003) for the generation of the formerly educated youth 知识青年 in the early 1990s. Initiated by civic associations, Educated Youth Museums soon spread over the whole country. Apart from their exhibitions that showed the experiences of enthusiastic and high-spirited young Chinese in the countryside from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, they served as gathering points for acts of commemoration. The conveyed narrative thereby stood in contrast to the “literature of the wounded” 伤痕文学 whose authors priorly had rejected the Cultural Revolution as a decade of personal deprivation and suffering. Based on recent observations during a field study to a selection of national and private Educated Youth Museums in 2019, the presentation demonstrates how they express the call for an alternative narrative of the first three decades after the founding of the PRC. Thirty years after their emergence, the presentation will show, to what extent Educated Youth Museums have promoted the acceptance of a more positive assessment of that time.

From Socialist Utopias to Post-Revolutionary Consensus

Dismantling the “Gang of Four”
Friday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room 1

A. C. Baecker, “The Birth of a Genre: Conspiracy Film Criticism and the Gang of Four as Cinematic Auteur”
Benjamin Kindler, “Overcoming the Author, Overcoming the Wage: Yao Wenyuan, Zhang Chunqiao, and the Theoretical Legacy of the ‘Bourgeois Right’”
Mei Li Inouye, “Jiang Qing, the Model Works, and the Confluence of 20th Century Theatre Reforms”

On July 17, 1974, Mao warned Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan to avoid acting as a “Gang of Four,” the first time the term had been used to describe the four prominent party officials. Although they had not operated as an organised group, the label stuck, quickly becoming a pejorative shorthand for the most revolutionary Maoist projects of the socialist period. This panel proposes a critical re-examination of the Gang of Four, separating the idea of the Gang as a post-Mao ideological construction from the Gang as a reference to a set of historical figures with intersecting understandings of socialist policies, cultures, and futures. Benjamin Kindler excavates Yao Wenyuan’s writing on the challenges of socialist cultural production, particularly the entrenched link between wage-labour and the concept of the author. Mei Li Inouye reassesses Jiang Qing’s role in developing model operas through attention to the substance of her career, including her exposure to traditional and folk operas, international musicals, and modern dramas. A. C. Baecker examines conspiracy film (yinmou dianying) criticism and its role in defining a genre of revolutionary filmmaking identifiable by thematic and stylistic markers, ultimately positioning the Gang of Four as cinematic auteurs. The panellists argue that in order to understand the transition from a contentious yet shared pursuit of socialist futures to post-revolutionary consensus, the Gang of Four’s conflation across multiple registers must be dismantled.

A. C. Baecker, “The Birth of a Genre: Conspiracy Film Criticism and the Gang of Four as Cinematic Auteur”

In the months following the Gang of Four’s arrest, prominent film industry workers in China published articles denouncing the Gang’s influence in Cultural Revolution film production. A canon of movies called conspiracy films (yinmou dianying) quickly emerged, films that were officially censured for complicity in Gang attempts to usurp the party through control of mass entertainment. Conspiracy film criticism consolidated Deng-aligned cadre control over the major institutions of film production in China, yet today its conclusions often serve as the basis for scholarship on film production during the Cultural Revolution, shedding its political implications in a consensus view of Cultural Revolution films as works of propaganda, not art.
In this paper, I argue that conspiracy film criticism effectively positioned the Gang of Four as a cinematic auteur, executing a singular artistic vision with consistent stylistic markers and thematic messaging. Conspiracy film criticism identified a signature Gang style (bangqi) recognisable across the conspiracy film canon. Further, by prosecuting or administratively punishing the film industry professionals who were involved in producing Gang-affiliated films, conspiracy film criticism linked the stylistic and thematic markers of late Cultural Revolution films with criminality. Using the 1975 film Juelie (Breaking with Old Ideas) as a case study, I explore Juelie’s production as an industrial process, contrasting the production’s structurally diffuse distribution of agency with the centralised account of Gang control in conspiracy discourse. In addition, I explore how the presentation of Jiang Qing as Gang ring-leader gendered the Gang’s authorial voice and contributed to its presumed illegitimacy.

Benjamin Kindler, “Overcoming the Author, Overcoming the Wage: Yao Wenyuan, Zhang Chunqiao, and the Theoretical Legacy of the ‘Bourgeois Right’”

In his 1958 article On Manuscript Fees, Yao Wenyuan asserted that “the system of manuscript fees is a remnant of the system of bourgeois right, one which itself incorporates signs of the opposition between mental and manual labour in capitalist society.” The apparently innocuous issue of how authors should be paid as part of a series of debates around the problematic of the “bourgeois right” under socialism, itself sparked by the publication of Zhang Chunqiao’s Smash the Ideology of the Bourgeois Right. This presentation takes up the “bourgeois right” as a central component of radical thought in the Chinese Revolution and its proposed relation to new cultural subjects. This conceptual vocabulary, drawn from Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program re-emerged during the Cultural Revolution when Zhang and Yao sought to develop a new textbook on political economy presenting methods for super-ceding capitalist norms of distribution. Zhang and Yao argued that continued reliance on material incentives would re-produce the atomisation of labour and so inhibit the formation of communist social relations. I argue that the demands for the transcendence of the wage-form through the formation of a communist approach to labour were intimately linked to problems of culture. Furthermore, for Yao and others, the problematic of bourgeois right also extended to the challenge of overcoming the “author” as an individual subject of cultural production, investing cultural production with the task of creating the ideological conditions for the transcendence of material incentives.

Mei Li Inouye, “Jiang Qing, the Model Works, and the Confluence of 20th Century Theatre Reforms”

Jiang Qing (1914–1991) was regaled during the late Mao era as the mastermind behind the Cultural Revolution operas, ballets, and symphonic productions that came to be known as the model works (yangban xi). Since the post-Mao era, complex cultural, economic, and political landscapes have obscured the nature of Jiang’s role in modernising, politicising, and nationalising Peking opera during the Cultural Revolution—and what her efforts might mean in the larger context of cultural production and cultural politics during the Cultural Revolution. By examining Jiang Qing’s career intersections with traditional opera, modern drama, folk operas, and international film musicals, this paper conducts an interdisciplinary examination of the aesthetic influences that fueled the creation and production of Cultural Revolution model works. Engaging political theorist Claude Lefort’s theorisation of totalitarian societies, I offer a dramatic reassessment of the culture of the Cultural Revolution by illustrating how Jiang’s synthesis of aesthetic practices and theatre reform enabled her to restructure art with politics and politics with art.

Keywords in Contemporary China

Thursday
2:00 pm – 5:45 pm
Room H

Organised by Beatrice Gallelli
Chaired by Marco Fumian
Beatrice Gallelli, “Jingshen 精神 (spirit): Moulding a Subjective Collectivity”
Adrian Krawczyk, “Ideology: Concepts of Ideology in Contemporary China”
Bettina Mottura, “Constitution 宪法 as a Keyword in Contemporary China”
Federico Picerni, “Worker: Silent as a Riddle”
Runya Qiaoan, “Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)”
Natalia Riva, “A Western-Born Concept’s Journey To The East: Ruanshili 软实力 (Soft Power) In Contemporary Chinese Discourse”

Keywords are those words that we use constantly. Yet, any attempt to provide a univocal definition to each of them ends up in a cul-de-sac, as the words themselves are “elements of the problems” they stand for (Williams, 2015: XXVII). Some may even be the site of fierce political struggles taking place with the ambition to fix their meanings (Laclau, 2005). This is the first of the two panels that bring together scholars from different disciplines to investigate the meanings and performativity of specific keywords in contemporary Chinese discourses. By doing so, each presentation will provide insights into the trajectories of values and ideas leading the construction of Chinese political, social, and cultural reality. While the two panels share the same goals, the presentations included in this first one pertains mostly China’s domestic politics; while the second has to do with China’s “going global”.
In this first panel, two presentations focus on issues that go back to the dawn of Chinese modernity. This is the case of Mottura’s study on xianfa 宪法 (Constitution), a keyword that can be traced back to the late Qing and the republican period, and Gallelli’s discussion on jingshen 精神 (spirit, essence), which concern the vexata quaestio on the relationship between modernisation and “traditions”. Others have to do with the more recent China’s communist-era: Krawczyk discusses the struggle over the meaning of yishixingtai 意识形态 (ideology) in official and intellectual discourses, while Picerni focuses on gongren 工人 (workers) analysing the identity impasse in migrant-workers’ poetry.
Combining perspectives from language, literature, media, and political studies, the panels set up an interdisciplinary dialogue aiming at unlocking the impressive political, cultural, and social changes that have occurred over the past decades in China.

References
Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London/New York: Verso.
Sorace, Christian; Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere. 2019. Afterlives of Chinese Communism. Political Concepts from Mao to Xi. Acton: Australia National University Press.
Williams, Raymond. 2015. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Beatrice Gallelli, “Jingshen 精神 (spirit): Moulding a Subjective Collectivity”

“Spirit” is a term which has, at the same time, a precise, and vague meaning, that is contemporaneously practical and untouchable, subjective, and collective. In many societies, the term “spirit” is tightly bound to religion(s), if not completely obsolete. On the contrary, in China, jingshen 精神 (spirit, spiritual) is far from being out-of-date or sporadic: it has been a keyword in the debate on China’s path towards modernity since the turn of the 20th century. Jingshen has been a pivot in the discussion on how to build not only a strong Chinese State but also a solid Chinese nation. After 1949, it did not disappear, even though it was sometimes sidelined to give priority to other ideas and political matters.
Since 2012, soon after the 18th National Party Congress, jingshen has again gained a central position in the political debate. Defined by Xi Jinping as one of the main pillars to achieve the “Chinese dream,” jingshen plays a key role in the blueprint of China’s future.
What is this China’s jingshen of the 21st century? What are the meanings, connotations, and functions attached to it? This presentation will answer these questions and provide insights into the discursive construction of a Chinese jingshen in contemporary official discourse. It does so, by analysing Xi Jinping’s talks delivered between 2012 and 2019 in domestic contexts. This presentation will shed light on how a top-down discourse on jingshen attempts to mould a subjective collectivity based on cultural traits and revolutionary history, and which is able to go deeply into the individual sphere.

Adrian Krawczyk, “Ideology: Concepts of Ideology in Contemporary China”

“Ideology” has always served as a polemical concept in political struggles and at the same time is a key concept in the history of Marxism. Unsurprisingly, it is a highly contested term and a generally accepted definition does not exist. The official celebrations of the bicentennial of Karl Marx`s birth in China in 2018 demonstrated the ongoing significance of Marxism in China as a state ideology. But while one can draw on numerous studies of the shifting ideology of CCP leaders in the reform era and especially on the supposed “return of ideology” in recent years, not a single study deals with conflicts over the meaning of the term in China and their relation to official formulations. Therefore, my paper will focus on the work of influential contemporary scholars of ideology in order to clarify the complex relations of theories of ideology in the academic field and Chinese party orthodoxy. How do Marxist philosophers relate their research to the political reality in China? How do they conceptualise the relationship between the Marxian method as a critique of the ideology of capitalist societies with the urgent need for a new socialist ideology that fits the current state of Chinese society? And do they link the analysis of Western theories of ideology to the development of Chinese socialism and society in general? In answering these questions, my paper shall serve as a window into the highly controversial debates on Marxism and socialism in China.

Bettina Mottura, “Constitution 宪法 as a Keyword in Contemporary China”

Constitution 宪法 has been identified as one of the keywords of political and media discourses in China since the end of 2012 (Xinwen Zhongxin 2018). The importance accorded to the word in the last years aimed at reaffirming the centrality of the constitutional text in the country’s political life, thus building and negotiating the discursive framework in which the fifth amendment to the Constitution was adopted in 2018 and implemented (Mottura 2019).
This contribution will highlight how the contemporary use of the keyword contributes at reinforcing political stability and regime legitimacy in China, drawing on a corpus of speeches and documents, issued by the Chinese Communist Party or by state organs, and of official media texts. It will finally discuss that the function performed by Constitution as a keyword can be traced back to the late Qing and the republican period, thus demonstrating the persistence of its cultural relevance.

References
Mottura B. 2019. “Costituzione e discorso delle istituzioni in Cina oggi”. Nuovi Autoritarismi e Democrazie: Diritto, Istituzioni, Società vol. 2, pp. 93-108.
Xinwen Zhongxin 新闻中心. 2018. “2018 Niandu ‘Zhongguo Meiti Shi Da Liuxing Yu’ Zhengshi Fabu 2018年度‘中国媒体十大流行语’正式发布” (2018 ‘Top Ten Terms in the Chinese Media’ Officially Released). Beiyu Xinwen Wang 北语新闻网: http://cnlr.blcu.edu.cn/art/2018/12/24/art_8780_1135674.html.

Federico Picerni, “Worker: Silent as a Riddle”

Today no less than in the past, “worker” is a central word for China. For a long time, the country has been called “the world’s workshop,” and the persistent importance of its industrial sector, although re-adjusting, cannot be underestimated. Furthermore, the ruling party, 70 years after its nationwide triumph, is still characterised by its constitution as the “vanguard of the working class.” Nevertheless, after 1978 and especially with the transition to a postsocialist system, the composition, role, and socio-political and cultural nature of workers have undergone tremendous changes, most notably with the formation of the ambiguous figure of “farmer-workers” 农民工. In this conceptual quagmire, the extremely interesting phenomenon of contemporary worker literature—distinct from “old” worker literature arisen during the 1950s—can offer a unique, significant perspective on what it means to be a “worker” today.
My paper, taking contemporary (migrant-)worker poetry as an expressive medium relevant both as a form of art and as social discourse, presents an analysis of the representation of the figure of worker in the oeuvre of some contemporary (migrant-)worker poets, I will focus on their relationship with the factory, the rupture, or continuity with “old” worker culture, and, of course, literature itself (with its implications as a medium for the subaltern voice). This literary understanding of the problem is framed within a larger dialogue with other perspectives, above all the philosophical and sociological discussion on the concept of “working class.”

Runya Qiaoan, “Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)”

Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) might be the most discussed and least defined buzzword of this decade. Since it was first advocated by Chinese president Xi Jinping in 2013, there has been a constant accusation of BRI: even Beijing does not have a clear and consistent definition of this concept, which makes the “the project of the century” even more mysterious and controversial. This study examines the representation of BRI discourse on Chinese semi-official social media. Through critical cultural discourse analysis of over 50 articles related to the Belt and Road Initiative on a People’s Daily affiliated Wechat public account, we notice two disparate periods denoting a dramatic shift of the meaning of BRI. In the first period (2014-2016), BRI is presented as a China-centered strategy aiming to solve domestic overproduction. In the second period (2017-2019), BRI is constructed into a cosmopolitan initiative to solve worldwide problems. The former aims to persuade the domestic audience and the latter aims to confront international denouncement. Such a shift reveals the fluidity of the BRI representation and it can be argued that the changes are not intrinsically driven; rather, it reflects China’s prompt response to international critics. Thus, this study goes further to assert that the BRI is an empty signifier in Laclau’s and Mouffe’s sense: while the name of BRI remains, any meanings ascribed to the name are contingent and context-dependent.

Natalia Riva, “A Western-Born Concept’s Journey To The East: Ruanshili 软实力 (Soft Power) In Contemporary Chinese Discourse”

In the 1990s, American scholar Joseph S. Nye introduced the theory of soft power as a new aspect of world politics in the post-Cold War era. With culture, political values, and foreign policies as its resource base, “soft power” became a keyword in the realm of international relations discourse.
In China, the theory quickly made its first appearance in intellectual circles. It then gradually penetrated the policy-making and leadership levels and finally became part of the country’s national strategy. Nowadays, debates on soft power are extremely popular in a variety of disciplines among Chinese officials and scholars as well as on the mainstream media.
This paper addresses soft power—ruanshili 软实力—as a keyword of contemporary China. Based on the examination of relevant Chinese leaders’ speeches and a sample of journal and newspaper articles drawn from the CNKI database, it analyses the language used in relation to ruanshili since entering the Chinese discourse.
The analysis aims to reconstruct the journey of ruanshili in the Chinese context, discussing its historical background, process of study and evolution, formalisation, and popularisation. To this end, the formulation “tigao guojia wenhua ruanshili 提高国家文化软实力” (enhance the country’s cultural soft power), officially sanctioned by Hu Jintao in 2007, is examined from different angles (e.g. conceptual, terminological, discursive etc.), with a particular focus on the reinterpretation of ruanshili as wenhua ruanshili 文化软实力 (cultural soft power). This shift and the reasons behind it signal the originality and wider breadth of China’s approach to soft power in which the appeal generated by culture represents the core.