Abstracts of the Annual BACS Conference 2004
‘GOUTONG: COMMUNICATING’
Durham University, January 2004

As a contemporary word, ‘goutong’ calls up a range of concepts ranging from trust to ‘getting through to’. ‘Let’s talk about it’ offers a translation of the word which includes related concepts of communication and connectedness, sharing, trust and credibility, even criticality. As the theme for the conference, the term therefore offers the possibility of examining linked practices and representations in different fields, in different moments of Chinese history, and in different Chinese societies.

Collected Communications: Letter Collections in Late Ming and Early Qing China
Paper presented by David Pattinson, University of Leeds
Focusing on how the compilers of a number of letter collections from the late Ming and early Qing dynasties presented their work to the reading public through their prefaces, this paper will examine why these compilers often seemed defensive about their interest in letters, and how they sought to justify this interest. I will argue that the source of this insecurity was partly that the genre label they most commonly used for the letters they were publishing, chidu, did not have a clear place in the Chinese literary canon, and partly that publishing such collections could be commercially profitable.

Pretexts of authority: self-justification in the Chinese authorial preface
Paper presented by Frances Weightman, University of Leeds
This paper is part of an on-going Leverhulme project looking at statements of motivation by Chinese writers in authorial prefaces to works of fiction. Such statements tend to be formulaic, and generally ascribe to one or more of the following theories of the function of literature: didacticism (chengquan jiaohua); emotional release (xie fen); or an appeal against perceived injustice (buping ze ming). Within this broad framework, the body of the paper derives from analysis of a selection of around thirty authorial prefaces from the zhiguai tradition of recording anomalies. I will consider the ways in which different writers presented their personal motives for writing such works, and to which authorities they appealed, in order to justify their projects in the face of Confucian disapproval of the subject matter.

Maiden Spirits at Peace?Communicating with the Dead in Contemporary Taiwan
Paper presented by Fang-Long Shih, The Study of Religions, SOAS
This paper will examine the issue of goutong ‘communicating’, in this instance, with the dead in the religious context of contemporary Taiwan. The practice of ancestor worship involves the lighting of incense and is a form of communication with the dead that is surrounded by rules and prohibitions. I will focus on those female dead who die before they marry, such that they are prohibited from becoming ancestors and so are excluded from the social practices of communicating that ancestor worship enshrines. However, there are a variety of practices that establish ways of communication with maiden spirits and thus, constitute a correction to the exclusion and prohibition of deceased maidens. I call them 'corrective practices’. I will look at two cases of corrective practices. One is Miss Ng who, after death, returned to her family in a dream. In the dream she ‘demanded to be a maiden’. The family thus granted her ‘a piece of land’ as her ‘dowry’ and on this land built a small shrine to house her spirit tablet. This shrine then serves as a place to communicate with the dead maiden. The other case is Nun Shiwu who pursues her rebirth in the Pure Land and dedicates her life to take care of the dead. She communicates with the dead by chanting sutra and creating a peaceful space for them to rest in the Pure Land never to come back to this world. I will articulate how these two corrective practices reopen communication with apparently forgotten dead maidens. I will then analyse how these two forms of communication reflect and negotiate with ancestral orthodoxy.

Goutong: between daughters and mothers in contemporary urban China
Paper presented by Harriet Evans, Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster
As part of a research project on women’s subjective understandings and experiences of gender in a world in which enormous changes are reshaping their lives, this paper explores the notion of ‘goutong’ in reflections on their relationship with their mothers that emerged in conversations I had with four young women in Beijing in the spring of 2002. The term ‘goutong’ is prominent in popular media culture in Beijing, and is a standard feature of the day-to-day language used by young people in Beijing. Oprah Winfrey’s ‘let’s talk about it’ indicates a register and a definition of the term that comes close to the way it currently circulates in popular culture in Beijing. This paper, in contrast, examines the gendered inflections of the concept in references to trust, connectedness, affection, and the desire for intimacy with the mother. The term ‘goutong’ offers a lens to analyse aspects of the relationship between daughter and mother which constitute a crucial part of young women’s sense of themselves as women.

Goutong and Gemenr Communicating Masculinity in Chinese
Paper presented by Katie Hill, Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster
This paper aims to demonstrate how the subject of contemporary Chinese art which embodies recently formed historical subjectivities, communicates and is disseminated through masculine vocabularies and terms of reference. More specifically, the subjectivities shown in neo-realist oil paintings and performance art, both of which foreground the human figure, are often distinctly macho, presenting a threatening, underlying or overt violence, hinting at an ambivalent relationship between power, brutality and victimhood.

Ethnic Classification in China: The Case of the Tujia Minority in Guizhou
Paper presented by Lan Li and Richard Oleary, Queen's University, Belfast
This paper on the Tujia ethnic minority in China extends on the research by Melissa Brown in Hubei province, through studying the ethnic classification of the Tujia in Guizhou province. Our concern is with both macro and micro issues in ethnic classification. At the macro level we reveal the incorporation of a religious element into the state classification of the Tujia in Guizhou. At the micro level we follow the behaviour of local state officials and explore the instrumental benefits which minority Tujia affiliation can offer to them and to local people. The data is derived from anthropological fieldwork conducted in Guizhou.

Communication of the Party to the Mass: a case study of reports on SARS in “Focus”, CCTV
Paper presented by Xiaoling Zhang, Institute of Contemporary Chinese Studies, Nottingham University
As part and parcel of the CCP’s ideological apparatus, TV stations in China are defined as ‘tongue and throat of the Party”. This paper, by examining and analysing the corpus of reports on SARS by 'Focus' (Jiaodian Fangtan), CCTV, addresses the issue of how CCP communicates the crisis of SARS to the people through the medium of TV in an era when it wants to construct a positive image internationally, and when it has to convince its own people of its legitimacy and leadership amid the process of globalisation, convergence and commercialisation. The framework used for this study is critical discourse analysis, which allows the researcher to examine the intricate relations between TV discourse and social situations. Looking at the corpus of reports on SARS by Focus, CCTV, from the first report on the 17 February 2003, followed by the second one on the 2nd April after a significant silence on the matter, till the entire country received the WHO all-clear in late June, the paper focuses on the following issues: the extent, the timing and the format of the reports on SARS. The analysis is complemented by a small scale pilot study conducted through emails between the researcher and people from different cities in China. The paper finishes with a discussion on the effect of the remarkable U-turn from news blackout and attempted cover-up of the SARS epidemic to the encouragement of more open reporting, and the impact of SARS on future communication of any event from the Party to the people, followed by a brief introduction to the second stage of the research.

Devils and buffoons: the wilful miscommunication of Jiang Wen’s Guizi laile.
Paper presented by Julian Ward, Edinburgh University
The question of communication lies at the core of Jiang Wen’s 1999 film, Guizi laile, (Devils on the Doorstep), and the controversy that later surrounded it. Set during the anti-Japanese war (1937-1945), the film vividly depicts the confusion of the bumbling peasants of a north China village when a Japanese prisoner is unexpectedly dumped on them and highlights the cunning of the prisoner’s Chinese interpreter who deliberately mistranslates in order to protect himself.

The film’s sensitive subject matter led, not surprisingly, to problems for Jiang Wen: after success at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000, Guizi lailwas labelled 'insufficiently patriotic' and Jiang was banned from making films in China for seven years. Furthermore, a bitter dispute arose between Jiang and You Fengwei, the author of the short story on which the film is loosely based. You accused Jiang not only of lying about the contractual arrangements for making the film but of traducing the tone of his story by removing the positive role played by the Communist Party and concentrating instead on depicting the Chinese people as ignorant fools. This paper will examine the use and misuse of communication both within the film itself and in the ensuing furore.

To tong or not to tong: the problem of communication in modern Chinese poetics
Paper presented by Michel Hockx, SOAS, University of London
Much of the theory and practice of modern Chinese poetry in China has been based on the premise that poetry is a tool for communication. Harking back to the pre-modern notion of 'tong' ('correct', 'understandable', 'logical'), many poets and critics throughout the twentieth century have located poetic excellence in the poet's ability to be understandable. Works that require close reading and active interpretation, or works that appear to defy interpretation, have time and again been devalued. More often than not, such value judgments rest on a belief in the excellence of Chinese classical poetry, and on the assumption that poets must adhere to certain formal rules, or possess certain basic skills, in order to be proper poets.

This paper starts out with a brief look at the pre-modern usage of the term "tong" in poetry criticism. This is followed by an overview of expressions of the communicative nature of poetry by twentieth-century literary figures, focusing especially on the ideas of the wartime poet Wu Xinghua (1921-1966). The final part of the paper will look briefly at Mainland Chinese poetry websites, where interactive communication has become the most essential feature of poetry production.

Please refer directly to the authors for any further information or full papers.