‘Humanity’ in the title refers to human activity in the broadest sense, and ‘nature’ refers to interaction with the environment at all levels: physical, psychological, philosophical, artistic, etc. The theme was felt to offer scope for scholars from a wide range of disciplines to address the issue of the Chinese people’s relationship with their environment from a broad perspective. Nature has been an inspiration for philosophy, literature, art and architecture throughout Chinese history from the earliest times. China has a long and distinguished history of working physically with nature in building canals and managing water resources to develop some of the most productive and sustainable agriculture in the world. However, does China’s recent record on pollution mean the Chinese have forgotten how to respect and live in harmony with their environment? We invite individual scholars and panel organisers from both humanities and social science disciplines, researching China from the contemporary world back to classical times to join with us in addressing this theme. As usual, BACS is willing to consider papers on other topics relevant to the interests of BACS and its members. BACS promotes scholarship on all disciplines relating to China, both traditional and modern, and including China proper, other Chinese-speaking areas and the diaspora. As always we welcome papers across the whole spectrum.
ABSTRACTS
Keynote Speakers
Zhiyun Ouyang: "China's Environmental Challenges in a Globalizing World"
Professor Zhiyun Ouyang is currently Director of the Key Laboratory of Systems Ecology, Research Center for Eco-environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. He graduated from Hunan Agricultural University in 1983 and completed MA & PhD degrees in systems ecology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Research Center for Eco-environmental Sciences in Beijing. His primary research interests are in ecosystem services, ecosystem assessment and ecological planning, biodiversity conservation, GIS application in ecology and environmental research. He is one of China’s pioneers in the application of ecological science to the resolution of environmental problems. He has published dozens of articles, and carried out collaborative work at Tufts and Michigan universities.
Isabel Hilton: "Is clean air just for the Olympics?"
Isabel Hilton is a London based writer and broadcaster who has reported extensively from Asia, Latin America, Europe and Africa. In addition to her writing career, she has made several radio and television documentaries. She is currently a columnist for the Guardian and presenter of BBC Radio 3’s flagship cultural programme Night Waves, and founder and editor of www.chinadialogue.net, an innovative, fully bilingual Chinese English website devoted to building a shared approach on climate change and environmental issues with China. Isabel Hilton initiated and launched the chinadialogue project, supervised the site build, with its challenge of bilingual design and functionality, recruited staff in Beijing and London and set up a volunteer network for forum translation. The site launched in 2006, is now well established in China and internationally, with a growing readership and reputation. Her current responsibilities include project development, site expansion and editorial direction.
She also lectures extensively and is frequently called upon to talk on international affairs. She was recently been awarded an honorary doctorate (D. Litt) by Bradford University in recognition of her contribution to international understanding.
James Kynge: "China in a new cycle of rising prices"
James Kynge is an author and journalist who specialises on the Chinese economy and its impact on the wider world. He worked for 20 years as a correspondent in Asia with postings for the Financial Times and Reuters in China, Taiwan, Japan, Mongolia, the five states of Soviet Central Asia, Malaysia and Singapore, winning several international awards. His book, China Shakes the World, has been translated into 19 languages and won the Goldman Sachs/FT “Business Book of the Year” award in 2006, as well as other prizes.
From 2005 until mid-2008, James headed up the business operations of the Pearson Group of companies in China, overseeing a period of rapid expansion in the group’s education, publishing and media businesses. He speaks Chinese and Japanese.
Robert J. Buckley (Independent Scholar) Key Questions in Mongol Maritime Development
This paper outlines a significant project in Mongol History focusing on the development of Amphibious and Naval capabilities by the Mongol Army from the middle of the 13th Century.
The Mongol army was extremely successful, and well suited, to land warfare in Central Asia and Northern China. Two later phases of Mongol expansion during the 13th Century, amphibious warfare in Southern China and Naval Warfare against Japan required changes to both Mongol tactics and logistics.
The project aims to write a detailed history of this adaptation and to answer the following key questions:
The paper will discuss these questions in detail with a special emphasis on the preparation for the naval expeditions against Japan.
Yanting Guo (Oxford University Centre for the Environment) Behaviours, Attitudes and Values of Wild Meat Consumers in Guangzhou, China
Abstract: In China, the consumption of wild meat, which is defined as the meats and parts of wild animals, has a history of more than two thousand years and it is currently still a normative practice in some areas of China. It has become a significant threat to wildlife because the demand for wild animals is huge and involved some endangered and rare species. This survey studied the residents of Guangzhou, the biggest city in south China and the largest consumer of wild meat in the world, with the objective of drawing a detailed profile of consumer’s behaviour pattern and their attitudes and values in relation to wild meat and wildlife. 259 Guangzhou residents were interviewed in the summer of 2007. 91.5% of the interviewees admitted consuming some kinds of wild animals, although 86% claimed they have no preference to wild meat. Many consumers claimed that they only consume wild meat when it is offered by other people in dinner parties or other social occasions, and the most responded motivations for wild meat consumption are, in descending order, “being or having guests”, “tasty”, “for curiosity”, “everyone eats”, “to gain supplement” and “natural”. It indicates that people value the good taste and medical benefits of wild meat as they did in the past, moreover, in modern China, it is used as delicacy in social occasions. The latter is found as the major reason for wild meat being popular in Guangzhou. Based on the knowledge of people’s consumption pattern and values towards wild meat, several suggestions for reducing wild meat consumption in urban areas of China are proposed.
Robyn Hamilton (Honorary Research Fellow, University of Auckland) “An ‘elegant gathering’ for Chinese women: the literary garden as a contested site”
This paper will focus on the eighteenth-century painting Shisan nüdizi qingye Hulou tu which depicts Chinese painters and poets attending a literary gathering in a garden. The form and content of the painting both reflected and contested contemporary gendered understandings of how women and men should look and act.
By the end of the eighteenth century the literary garden was becoming one of the sites where the right of women to appear in public was being played out. The long hand-scroll Thirteen Female Disciples Taking Instruction at Lakeside Pavilion (1792-95) was commissioned by the controversial scholar-official Yuan Mei (1716-1798). It depicts several women who were part of Yuan Mei’s informal poetry group attending a social occasion in the outdoors.
This painting is an artistic record of changing attitudes toward the increasing visibility of women in public. It also acts as a point of departure for beginning to develop new questions concerning representations of individual Chinese women in the setting of the natural environment. The main question to be explored in the paper will be how we might view the nuances related to the environment that are presented in this painting. Evaluation of the portrayal of Chinese women in paintings, where the setting is the natural environment, can add another strand to understandings of history and culture.
Alison Hardie (Lecturer in Chinese Studies, University of Leeds) Modernity in Flower: Private Gardens in Republican Shanghai
There have been many studies of the architecture of Shanghai in its Republican heyday, and some studies of its public parks and gardens, but little attention has been paid to its private gardens. This paper will examine the gardens of some Chinese-owned private houses, discussing their design characteristics and how these may have been influenced by or reflected current ideas of modernity. These houses and gardens were generally owned by leading reformist political figures or progressive ‘national capitalists’. (The gardens of foreign-owned houses, such as the famous Sassoon Villa in Hungjao Road, are not included in the present study, since my interest is in how the Chinese in Shanghai understood modernity.) The gardens often combined Western features, such as expansive lawns or sculptural fountains, with traditional Chinese garden features such as rockeries, pavilions and bridges. Such combinations can be understood as an attempt to integrate the best of East and West in order to produce a ‘modern’ form of Chinese living environment, in the same way as ‘Chinese essence and Western functionality’ were meant to be combined in other aspects of life. Some features may indeed have had a very functional value, such as the expansive lawns which provided space for the kind of large-scale entertaining essential to the production and maintenance of social capital. Although some private houses (such as the D.V. Wood house at 333 Hardoon Road, designed by Ladislaus Hudec) were strikingly modern in design, it is not clear that their gardens were equally modern in design concept; indeed it is not clear to me whether gardens were normally designed by the architect of the house or by someone else. Much research remains to be done in this area, and the present paper is a preliminary attempt to open it up for discussion.
Miao He (Ph.D Candidate, University of Manchester) Transplanting advanced western system without suitable background: A study of Chinese recent corporate governance development
As the Chinese Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been increasing by 9% annually for the past ten years and its economy is gradually integrating into the global economy, China is attracting more foreign investors to its capital market. Since China's transition from a state-planned into a market-oriented economy only started two decades ago, the capital market and the corporate legal system is far from providing adequate levels of protection for investors. It is important for China to achieve efficient and long-term growth in its corporate sector so that Chinese business can compete internationally and attract foreign trade and investment.
In 1993, China adopted German (civil law system) Company Law structure into its first modern Company Law. Since 2001, China is transplanting advanced corporate governance practices from the UK and US (common law system) to ensure that its listed companies avoid the problems that bedeviled Southeast Asia in the 1990s. Strong corporate governance also attracts foreign and domestic investment which is necessary to promote economy growth. However, how are these transplanted western mechanisms working in China?
This paper is going to discuss the conflicts between Chinese previous corporate governance mechanisms and transplanted western ones, based both on paper law and in legal or business practice. It is trying to prove that China may face risky tasks by fleetly introducing advanced mechanisms without the corresponding legal, business or cultural background.
Yuqin Huang (Ph.D Candidate, University of Essex) From ‘the feminisation of agriculture’ to ‘the ageing of farming population’: Demographic changes and farming in a mid-Chinese village
Based on ethnography in a mid-Chinese village, this presentation discusses the changing demographic features of the farming population in the reform era and their impacts to the farming. It suggests that, since late 1970s, the configuration of farming has experienced a transition from ‘the feminisation of farming’ to ‘the ageing of farming population’ due to the changing demographic features and household division of labour among the main farming population. It argues, from late 1970s to early 1990s, facing the relaxation of rural-urban migration restricts, women from a ‘post-revolutionary baby boomers’ generation’ constituted a main force for farming and attending family at home while their husbands were away for odd jobs in cities, caused by their demographic features such as a large number of siblings, training for farming and/or skilled manual occupations, and mainly living in a nuclear family after getting married. But since mid-1990s, a newly-grown-up generation, that is, ‘the first family planning generation’ who is supposed to become the main force of farming hardly farms, but works in cities, male or female, while leaving farming, housework and childcare to their parents, which is due to factors including small number of siblings of this generation, prolonged school education, limited training for farming and a cooperative family after getting married. This has caused a phenomenon of ‘ageing of farming population’ in rural China.
This transition implies a danger to farming and food security in rural China as the question ‘who will be farming in 10 years’ time?’ is raised. Concerns are particularly showed to western China, where there is a lower level of industrialisation but higher level of labour migration, which means a bigger proportion of farmland is left to an ageing farming population. And peasants’ understanding of farming as an occupation has put farming in an even more alarming situation.
Jungeun Jo (Ph.D Candidate, Seoul National University) Music, li and Nature in Ancient China
A close examination of the musical discourses around the 3rd century BCE reveals a relationship between music, li 禮 (institutions and rules of behaviour) and Nature.
Firstly, music engages in natural phenomena. Although records such as the Xunzi
荀子 (Book of Xunzi) describe music in relation to Nature, their depiction of this relationship primarily refers to the outward resemblance, namely the similarity in their harmonious appearance. In other words, the belief that music exerted an influence on Nature had not yet formed. However, music came to be related not only to Nature’s outward appearance but also to the principle that achieved Nature’s harmony, as revealed in the Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋 (Annals of Mr. Lü). This significant role of music is a reflection of the widely prevailing mutual relationship between Nature and human society.Secondly, li assumed significant importance by becoming a counterpart to music. Originally, it was music that had a profound effect in relation to Nature. However, li also came to have a close relationship with Nature as a counterpart to music which, in turn, led to the rise in li’s status. This distinguished status of music and li is described in the Yueji
樂記 (Record of Music): Music is the harmony of Nature and li is the order of Nature. (樂者, 天地之和也; 禮者, 天地之序也.)As such, this paper argues
that the idea that the principle of music interacted with that of Nature led to important changes in the view on music. As a result, music assumed complete authority over Nature as well as human society. In addition, li also had the same authority with music based on its close relationship to music.
Charles Kwong (Associate Professor of Chinese & Translation, Lingnan University) “Ziran in the Zhuangzi: Naturalness, Natural Humanness and Nature”
As cosmic domain, source and setting of terrestrial life and ultimate ontological principle that cuts humanity down to size, ziran offers a comprehensive frame of reference illuminating the human condition in the Chinese vision of existence. Literally “self-so”, ziran is the Chinese term for Nature, used first in Daoism for a cosmic principle of naturalness informing the spontaneous dynamic of the world, then to describe original (and fully realized) human nature before being applied to the physical world. Thus ziran acquired three interrelated areas of meaning in the Chinese conception in the course of time, as literati came to relate ontological naturalness and human nature to the natural world.
The proposed paper will outline these three senses of ziran mainly as seen in the Daoist text Zhuangzi, and to a lesser extent in the Laozi. There is no doubt that early Chinese poets and philosophers (including Confucius) feel a moral resonance between man and Nature, while the Zhuangzi itself makes extensive references to Nature, from infinite time and space to a small butterfly and leisurely fish: it is in blending into the environment and spirit of Nature that Zhuangzi becomes one with the transformational flux. Without being explicitly stated, the implication is that the natural environment is the purest embodiment of the natural Dao untarnished by human values and artifice.
Chun-Yi Lee (PhD Candidate, University of Nottingham) Has Civil Society Arisen in China? Denotation from the Labour Movement in China
Since China has been driven by neoliberal capitalism in the 1990s, numerous branches of the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) have been established in the mushrooming foreign-owned private sector. This paper aims to answer this question: Have these increasing activities between the workers and the ACFTU, spontaneous labour NGOs led to the emergence of civil society in China? This research question aims to uncover the social relations of production by exploring the labour movement: the influence of the ACFTU and spontaneous labour NGOs in Chinese society. Furthermore, it aims to assess what role this dynamic labour movement plays in the state–society relationship in China. The nature of this dimension will be gained by applying a neo-Gramscian approach, which emphasises that the main concept of hegemony comprises three levels: the social relations of production, the forms of state and finally the world order.
Samuel Y. Liang and Yupin Chung "Collectors, Collections and Cultural Impacts: Imageries and Arts of China in the West 1650-2000
This panel explores themes in the cultural history of Chinese objects and arts in Europe across three centuries. It consists of three papers, each of which focuses on a particular period: Samuel Liang examines the contribution of Chinese imageries to the rise of secular culture in early modern Europe; Yupin Chung analyzes Lord Leverhulme’s collecting pattern and explores issues of cultural consumption in late-nineteenth-century England; and Fiona Slattery investigates issues of cultural identity, colonialism and cultural interaction surrounding the Franklin Collection in contemporary Birmingham. These papers together seek to demonstrate the extent of cultural exchanges between China and the West through the ages and in the global and local contexts, and thereby call into question the established boundaries between Chinese and European cultural and visual studies.
Samuel Y. Liang (Lecturer in Chinese Cultural Studies, University of Manchester) Confucius, Great Cham, and Chinoiseries: The Fall of Cathay and the Rise of Secular Culture in Europe, 1650-1750
This paper analyzes the transformations of key Chinese icons/images in early modern European visual culture. It first discusses the Jesuits' construct of Confucianism as an archaic monotheism and shows that this construct was riddled with contradictions and led to the same religious eclecticism which the Jesuits initially sought to condemn. I focus on the images of Confucius in seventeenth-century publications, which were, I argue, instrumental in the rise of secular powers in early modern Europe. In comparison with Confucius, the fascination with the Chinese emperor or the Tartar Cham, as in Johan Neuhoff' s influential book Embassy to China (1665), became a more direct inspiration for those who were building absolute monarchal power or mercantile supremacy. I then trace the later (re)production of Chinese images in eighteenth-century chinoiseries; now the Cham or Confucius was no longer a majestic emperor or sage but a profane image in the burgeoning consumer culture. While the chinoiseries represented a less respectful attitude to things Chinese than the Jesuit's Confucius or Neuhoff's Great Cham, they in fact faithfully embodied the secular and syncretistic aspect of Chinese folk culture. The paper concludes that the European (visual) construct of Chinese culture, as embodied in the Jesuit Matteo Ricci' s famous dictum ‘forcing Confucius to accord with our opinion,’ ironically transformed Europe's own culture into a ‘Orientalized’ one that is more syncretistic (or hybrid) and secular (or profane).
Yupin Chung (Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Glasgow) Lord Leverhulme and China: ‘My lord, I have secured a large collection for you.’
In the late nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, interests in the Chinese art market in Britain coincided with a boom in the manufacturing and trading industries. The export trade in Chinese porcelain to Europe from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries had left its influence on a taste for things Chinese. Accordingly, a great deal of ‘china’ (another English word for Porcelain) was gathered in largely domestic arenas, and some objects later were even placed in prominent museums for the display and definition of middle class identities.
From an art history and critical perspective, this paper examines the soap magnate, Lord Leverhulme’s participation in Chinese art as a collector and museum founder. The paper first traces some of the developments of the Chinese art market in Britain. It looks at the art market’s power structure and key players in his time, providing the essential link to previous collectors, dealers and auction-sales. In addition, the paper analyses Lord Leverhulme’s collecting pattern and explores issues of cultural consumption. To conclude, the paper attempts to flesh out a fuller, more complete picture of the characteristics that composed the complex personality of the collector of ‘China’.
Fiona Slattery (Curator (Applied Art) Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery) Aspects of China: Chinese Ceramics from the Franklin Collection
Aspects of China is Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery’s first permanent gallery of Chinese art. Opening on 8 February 2008, the exhibition features historic ceramics from the outstanding Franklin Collection of Chinese art, which spans seven dynasties. This is the first time that the collection has been seen on public display.
As a twentieth-century collector of Chinese art, Andrew Franklin (1914-2002) forms an interesting comparison to the Victorian soap magnate, Lord Leverhulme. This paper discusses his relationship with China through the Foreign Service, his passion for Chinese art, and his friendships with dealers and museum curators. It considers what influenced his choices in the art market of the 1940s to the 1990s.
The involvement of the Birmingham Chinese community in the development of this project is of paramount importance. This paper examines their role, showing how their engagement with and interpretation of the ceramics has resulted in a lively exhibition from a Chinese perspective, which provides the western visitor with an insight into Chinese culture.
Investigating issues of cultural identity, status, colonialism and cultural interaction, the Franklin Collection enables Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery to present a coherent account of Chinese cultural achievement. This paper concludes by assessing the Franklin Collection’s significance to the people of Birmingham and beyond, and its local, regional, national and international role.
Lin Wei-hsin (Lecturer, University of Manchester) The poetry and absurdity of life in Jai Zhangke’s film, Still Live (San Xia Hao Ren)
This paper aims to explore the relationship between Nature and the human activity in the film by one of the most prominent contemporary Chinese director, Jia Zhangke. In his film, Still Live, set in the context of China’s large-scale construction of Three Gorges Dam, Jia Zhangke attempts to portray how the Chinese react to and deal with the huge transformation of their life caused by this hydraulic project. He parallels the geographical changes of the Three Gorges with those of the characters’ life by allegorizing the capriciousness of life by way of the capriciousness of the environment. The sense of absurdity surfaces when a city of the history of two thousand years is about to be submerged within a few month and huge amounts of people who live there and have been part of this history are going to be evacuated. The convergence and contrast between the historic and the contemporary, and between the ancient and the modern intensify the absurd situation current China faces. However, by depicting how the Chinese are determined to make some difficult decisions in order to rein in the changes of their life, Jia Zhangke also distils the poetry of the life of these people who are, for most of the time, defenceless and helpless to the changes of the environment.
Toby Lincoln (PhD Candidate, St John’s College, Oxford) The Dark Side of Humanity: Refugee Movement in Shanghai and Wuxi, 1924 -1937
Shanghai’s growth as a city has always depended on an influx of people during both war and peace, and is commonly seen as the classic example of the emergence of a rural/ urban divide in the Republican period. My research, which focuses on migration in Wuxi, a county midway between Shanghai and Nanjing, casts doubt on this view. Farmers and workers often left their homes to find work, get married and visit relatives, the processes and experiences surrounding movement from village to village and village to city exhibiting similarities that attest to continuities from field to factory. The violence of the age also led to large-scale refugee migration. In particular, the Jiangsu/Zhejiang war in 1924, and attacks by the Japanese in 1932 and most significantly in 1937 had a great impact on the Wuxi community.
Based on accounts of the movement of refugees contained in the journal of the Wuxi Native Place Society in Shanghai, which was central to the relief effort in all three conflicts, as well as descriptions of the impact of the fighting, this paper will set out how conflict and displacement created a community of experience that impacted on people across Jiangsu. In doing so, it will draw attention to the human impact of technological advances in warfare that were all too real to ordinary Chinese in the early part of the twentieth century. This was especially true in the early months of the Second Sino-Japanese war, when unprecedented aerial bombardments caused destruction in cities across the province. Understanding how the atmosphere of fear and anxiety created by both fighting and flight brought the city and countryside together is important in putting the war in its rightful place at the heart of social changes in southern Jiangsu.
Anna Lora-Wainwright (Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Chinese Studies, University of Manchester) Of farming chemicals and cancer deaths: the politics of health in contemporary rural China
Drawing on extended anthropological fieldwork in rural Sichuan (China), this paper will situate perceptions of cancer and pollution within the complex dynamics of China’s post-socialist moral and political economy. What happens when villagers think that the environment (broadly defined) is making them sick? Who is to blame? What should be done about it and by whom? Farmers’ understanding of the connection between cancer and farm chemicals embodies their ambivalent attitudes to recent developments. Perceptions of who is responsible when farm chemicals cause harm to health – whether it is farmers, cadres, or the market economy which requires their use – and of what should be done, offer insights about how villagers view recent changes, and whether they think the local and central state are making sufficient efforts to provide for their welfare. The transition to post-socialism enables as well as requires requires new forms of biosociality (Rabinow, 1996: 99). The mobilisation by some villagers around water pollution as a cause of cancer embodies claims to a communal ‘biological citizenship’ (Petryna, 2002: 6) and their active engagement with a market oriented economy and a collapsed state health system. These negotiations provide insights on how relationships with locality and the state are reproduced or contested and on collectivism, consumerism, development and modernity as competing models of morality. They concern not only the health of individual bodies, but also that of the entire body politic.
Hongping Annie Nie (Institute for Chinese Studies, University of Oxford) China’s Overseas Environmental Challenges and Their Implications in Diplomacy
China has become increasingly integrated into the world system in the Post- Cold War period. With the magnitude of its size, population, and economic growth, the impact of China’s entry into the world system can felt in almost every part of the world and in various ways. In recent years China has greatly increased the scope and speed in its overseas development, especially in the continent of Africa, which has become a controversial topic.
This paper discusses the environmental policies and practices of China’s enterprises operating in Africa and the consequence of such polices and practices. As a Chinese national trained in the West, the author examines relevant academic writing, official documents as well as news reports in both English and Chinese. It is the author’s desire to better understand to what extent China’s overseas exploration has affected the ecological environment in Africa. Furthermore, the author seeks to understand how the environment issue has changed China’s national image and its relations with the African countries as well as many aspects of its own diplomacy. The author argues that environmental issues have played an important role in the rise of local Africans’ protests and aggressions against the Chinese overseas enterprises in recent years. The author also argues that some changes within China’s diplomatic policies and practices, such as the people-orientation of the “new” diplomacy and the newly established Consular Protection Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, can be seen as China’s coping strategies towards the consequences of its overseas development.
Antony Ou (PhD Candidate, University of Sheffield) Maoist Overinterpretation of Confucianism during Cultural Revolution: A Skinnerian Analysis
The Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) aimed at demolishing every possible form of ancient Chinese cultural heritage—visual and performing arts, literature, religion, philosophy and so on. Confucianism, an ethical and political tradition that dominated the imperial China for more than two thousand years, had been severely criticized. Confucian texts, notably The Analects, were systematically overinterpreted by Maoists. Ironically, Maoists were also the problematic interpreters of Marxism. The Anti-Confucius Movement (1973-1974) during the Cultural Revolution consequently created lots of Confucian “mythology writings”, with peculiar understandings of the Classics. Two research questions are asked: 1) how was The Analects overinterpreted during the Anti-Confucius Movement? 2) What are moral dangers of such overinterpretation activity?
This paper begins with an introduction of the Anti-Confucius Movement initiated by the “Gang of Four” and justifications of why The Analects was the focused text of the movement. Next, I will illustrate what I mean by “overinterpretation” and the interpretive theory of Quentin Skinner. I then will talk about how The Analects was distorted and overinterpreted by various strategies— assigning new protagonist/antagonist roles to personae of the Analects; equating two completely different socio-political contexts; and fabricating the moral implication of the text. Two conclusions follow: 1) Skinnerian framework is useful to uncover the Confucian “mythology writings”; 2) overinterpretation activity is immoral and could be endanger a society.
Gary D. Rawnsley (Professor of Asian International Communications, University of Leeds) Radio Free Asia and the Harmonious Society in China
This paper is a preliminary examination of Radio Free Asia (RFA), an American station that started broadcasting to Asia’s closed societies, including China, in 1996. By interrogating the aims and objectives of RFA, its working practices, the content of its programmes, and the audience response, this paper seeks to understand how the station – and therefore radio broadcasting more generally – influences and is influenced by the creation of a harmonious society in China.
The history of international radio broadcasting demonstrates that it may be a tool of overt political action by governments and a device of grassroots democracy. International radio broadcasting – on both short and medium waves - has proven particularly effective as a method of political destabilisation and popular mobilisation as demonstrated in the history of the Cold War by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Thus the paper asks the following questions: Is RFA incompatible with the demands of a harmonious society in China? Does it represent external interference with China’s sovereignty? How serious is the challenge presented by RFA to the Chinese government, and does this challenge suggest the recognition of the need for a public sphere that confronts the mainstream political discourse? This brings to the surface critical questions about the authority over discourse and narrative in modern China, and presents for governance there serious problems and opportunities in equal measure. RFA challenges the Chinese government for control over the narrative and thus is a potential source of instability in a harmonious society.
Eileen Rose Walsh (Departmental Lecturer, Institute for Chinese Studies, Oxford University) Searching for Humanity: Touring Nature and ‘Natural People’
Many Chinese tourists seek out environmental beauty and prefer to travel outside of major urban centers to tour China’s periphery. This desire often combines with a desire to tour the ‘Others’ within China’s borders. China’s southwestern province of Yunnan has cornered a large share of domestic tourists by successfully marketing itself as a land of exceptional environmental beauty as well ethnic variety. In this paper, I investigate how the practice of domestic ethnic tourism in Yunnan produces a variety of modern Chinese citizens and acts as a vehicle through which Chinese discourses of modernity and tradition, civilization and the ‘natural’ come together at a single site. While my primary concern is domestic tourists, I will also consider issues of local cultural production in these sites. Within this paper, I focus on domestic tourism at Lugu Lake, home of the ‘matriarchal’ Mosuo, while drawing on research in other Yunnan ethnic tourism sites that combine natural beauty with the allure of a feminized ethnic Other. The Mosuo at Lugu Lake have been represented as both a land of wise matriarchs and a feminist paradise, or a land of frolicking maidens and a place for quick and easy trysts. While some Chinese tourists come to this area for sexual titillation, others come to explore a society with more ‘natural’ human relations, and an area they imagine as full of large loving extended families. The desires of Chinese tourists for nostalgia, exploration, and personal liberation lead them to these peripheral locales, where the weight of their numbers often has drastic environmental as well as cultural costs. I explore discourses and countercurrents of identity produced at this site, as well as the issues of pollution, both cultural and environmental, that are related to the rise in tourism.
Billy Wong (PhD Candidate, University of Aberdeen) ‘Connecting people’: The significance of Internet use for the Chinese in Britain
The visible nature of the Chinese in Britain has been largely restricted to the catering business. This engagement with the food trade has had crucial consequences for the distribution of the Chinese across the UK. While ‘Chinatowns’ in cities such as London or Liverpool illustrate a concentrated public presence, the existence of Chinese restaurants or takeaways in almost every sizeable town confirm their mobile locations. As they are geographically dispersed, scattered all over Britain, the family has been the engine for the knowledge and practice of Chinese traditions.
Statistics from the 2001 UK census unveiled a third of the 250,000 Chinese in Britain today are British-born. Like many immigrant children, British-born Chinese (BBC) has to negotiate their understandings of the world between different cultures and ways of life. Unlike other ethnic minorities, where the formation of ethnic enclaves help and reinforce cultural distinctions and identity, many BBC have limited contacts with each other, creating questions over their sense of belonging and identifications. For many, the family is the only contact with Chinese cultures. This reality, however, has been rapidly changed by technology, such as the phenomenal growth of the Internet. The potentials of cyberspace in shaping the everyday lives of first and second-generation Chinese immigrants remain largely unexplored. This paper examines the social significance of Internet use amongst Chinese residents in Britain, and analyses the processes of identity formation for first-generation Chinese immigrants and their children.
Lei Xie (PhD Candidate, University of Westminster) Environmental Activism in China: a Comparative Study
Organized by environmental non-governmental
organizations (ENGOs), individual citizens in China have played significant role
in political arena in the past few years, representing an environmental movement
in the making. However, movement dynamics differ in different regions across
China, environmental movement’s development in richer cities shows similarities
with those in North America and Western Europe; while in poorer places, it is
characterised by NGOs’ low formality level in their organizational development
and strong reliance on personal networks in coordinating collective actions.
This article explores contextual factors that affect movement dynamics. Empirical findings from ENGOs in four Chinese cities (Panjin, Beijing Shanghai and Xiangfan) demonstrate that local cultural traditions is the most crucial factor in explaining ENGOs’ informal organizational form and strong reliance on personal network. The stronger the local culture of using personal connections, the more likely that ENGOs remain uninstitutionalized in organizational profile and informal mechanism will be used in organizing coordinated actions. Local governments’ ouput system determines strategies that environmentalists utilize. In regions where strong environmental output system exists, such as Shanghai, environmentalists adopt institutional mechanism to affect environmental policies and realize their goals; they will tend to use informal channels to affect political authorities when weak political output systems are found. This article also discusses reasons of the different development patterns in the Chinese environmental activism, which is territorial decentralization and central government’s lacking capacity in its environmental management. This is also the reason national environmental movement is relatively rare and environmental movement at provincial and city levels are far more active in this country.
Natalya Zakharova (Associate professor of eastern languages, Moscow State Linguistic University) Mysticism in Su Tong’s works
The works one of the favorite modern writer in China (who was born in 1963) can being relate to different literary school: “searching roots”, “family’s histories”, “psychological prose”, “historical prose”, but in all these literary school is retracing mystical frame. In the tale, named “On north outskirt of the town” (1986) about “Cultural Revolution”, superstitious residents of working settlement take great number of victims of tragic event as the result of demon’s actions. Mystical elements are developing in novels of 90’s. Rice, which sound is consonant to “delusion”, became a fate of main character in the novel “Rice” (about a man, who with a help of cereal store gained desired wealth, but not happiness. The main character of “Thebaic family” dies. His business is connected with growth and sale of thebaic poppy, which embodies “delusion” in Chinese’s mind.
In one of the best Su Tong’s tales named “Wives and concubines”, fortunes of two heroines mystically connected with abandoned well in the country estate, where action of novel took place. From the first day, another, fourth wife of master of his own life, come to his house, she is trying to learn the history of this mystical well and after numerous efforts she learnt, that master’s lover committed suicide there. Master orders to drown one more concubine in fatal well. Young woman understands that she won’t be able escape a fate of her predecessors.
At the beginning of the new century, in Su Tong’s works mystical elements become stronger, symbolic elements, belonging to the followers of western modern literary school, that allows referring it to works of so-called “fantastic realism”. Typical example is a novel “Why snakes can fly”. In this novel image of snake not only associate with a “Legend about white snake”, popular in China, but have an implication as well: it is a sign of mysterious world, which defines people’s fate.
Ling Zhang (Lecturer in Chinese Studies, Newcastle University) The Changing Landscape of Northern Hebei in the Northern Song Dynasty: Hebei’s Frontier Ponds and Rice Production
The Northern Song Dynasty is often regarded as an age of great economic
advancement in Chinese history. While previous studies have tended to glorify
this period by focusing on the economic prosperity of south China, little
attention has been paid to north China, especially the crucial northeastern
region of Hebei. In explaining how and why the economy of Hebei stagnated and
declined in the Song, my doctoral research seeks to explore a new way of
understanding the so-called Tang-Song transition in Chinese economic history.
The research proposes to answer the questions from the perspective of Hebei’s
environmental changes. It tries to reveal how its environmental deterioration
was instrumental in the decline of its traditional agriculture and how human
interactions with its environment proved very destructive to this region’s
agricultural economy for arguably the next millennium even until today.
My talk for the conference will draw mainly on one central concern of this dissertation: the impact of the construction of marshes and ponds in the frontier area of northern Hebei and rice production in this area marshalled by the government and its troops. In the tenth century the Hebei Plain served as a bridge between the Liao empire and Han Chinese regimes in the south. Fearing the lack of any natural barrier to halt the Khitan’s horses, the newly established Song government instructed its frontier commanders to dig ponds and connect marshes in northern Hebei in order to create a water ‘Great Wall’. The belt of the interconnected ponds stretched over 800 li from present Tianjin east-westward to high-elevated tablelands, turning the local landscape into an area so wet as to resemble the lower Yangtze delta. Traditional dry-farming agriculture was hence eliminated in this area; instead, the military colonization for paddy rice was performed. My research shows such economic change to adapt the new environment proved unsuccessful. The human life there became serious subject to overflows from the ponds and the dissemination of infectious diseases. The population and economic loss was evident in this area in the late half of the eleventh century; the situation was even worsened by the damage of the Yellow River floods and the inappropriate construction of artificial irrigation during Wang Anshi’s reforms.
Please refer directly to the authors for any further information or full papers.