Wadham College, Oxford 14-15 September 2006

The emphasis in China over recent decades has been overwhelmingly one of change: economic, technological, social, cultural, environmental and political. Superficially, this process again appears to be wholesale Westernisation, yet in some areas we are certainly seeing a reaffirmation of earlier Chinese values, as the country grows in confidence and as the system tolerates greater private space. What effect are the tensions and strains between competing ideologies (communist, post-communist, resurgent Confucian etc.) having on a sense of Chinese identity - personal and political? And how is the change being refracted in literature and new media?

John Adams (China Financial Services)

Rewriting an English Chinese Dictionary of Finance, 1991 and 2006. From FECs to IPOs.

In 1991 the author rashly undertook to compile a modern English Chinese Dictionary of Finance for Midland Bank. In 2006 he revised it for Standard Chartered Bank. What do the intervening 15 years tell us about the Chinese language’s engagement with the western financial system?

In 1991 there were no qualified trained actuaries, so that none of China’s 1.3 bn people could know how long they were likely to live. China has now pushed ahead with financial training on a grand scale - with many western trained MBAs and CFAs (reputed to be one of the most difficult of financial examinations). But how has this been achieved? Was training localised, or conducted in English?

This paper looks at how the Chinese language has changed to carry these meanings. It examines the terms adopted or translated from western usage. It also goes on a small foray into the limited joys of Chinese financial advertising. A ‘must read’ for the financial illiterati in Modern Standard Chinese.

Dr Elena Barabantseva (University of Manchester)

From the Language of Class to the Rhetoric of Development: the Evolution of the Notion of 'Nationality Question' in China's Official Discourse on Modernisation 

In the PRC's continuous state-building project since its establishment in 1949, the notion of nationality (minzu) has been uninterruptedly utilized by the leading elite in its political programmes. From the very beginning, the new state was promoted as multinational, and it has remained the case until the present day. The notion of 'nationality question' (minzu wenti) was introduced especially for addressing the issues of the officially identified minority nationalities at the time when the multinational nature of the state was made fundamental. However, how a multinational character of the Chinese state is interpreted by the state elite and how this interpretation is shaped by their policies arguably changes along the political and economic preferences of the regime. This paper aims to explore the meaning of 'nationality question' during the period of socialist construction, and traces the shift in its notion during the reform period started in the 1970s. For example, among other issues, the paper pays attention to the change in the translation of the Chinese term minzu wenti into English. 'Nationality question' was the preferred translation of the term during the socialist modernisation period, while 'ethnic question' has been extensively popularised since the start of the reforms. The paper analyses why this shift in the preferred language occurred and what this tells us about the nature of transformations proliferated by the Chinese state. This paper uses the method of historically contextualised analysis of the official texts and of the language of academic articles.

Anna Boermel (University of Oxford)

Based on twenty months of multi-sited anthropological fieldwork conducted in Beijing between 2003 and 2005, this paper explores how older people in China’s capital make sense of and constructively deal with the tension that arises from the values which have shaped the social landscape of their childhood, youth and middle age and those of the more recent past and present.

Paying close attention to differences in social status, generational cohort and gender, the paper documents older people’s narratives about their gains and losses in the reform era.

In these narratives the dominant theme of economic progress and the resulting rise in living standards is counterbalanced by bitter complaints about increasing social stratification, rising crime rates and spiralling health care costs.

In the second part of the paper, several strategies which older people have developed to deal with rapid social change are examined. These include conflict avoidance by retreat (nan de hutu), the maintenance of values championed in the Maoist era such the careful use of resources (bu yao langfei), and, in particular, the rapid growth of self-organised activities in public spaces which have given rise to a new kind of sociality in the search for happiness (zhao le).

While older people draw on recent official discourses of self-reliance and activity, core features of these activities, such as the denial of monetary incentives, reveal central themes of socialist organisation.

Dr. Qing Cao (Liverpool John Moores University) & Prof. Neil Renwick (Coventry University)

The political elite in China raised the importance of ‘cultural power’ in 2002 at the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 16th National Congress. However it is at the Fourth Plenum of the 16^th Congress in 2004 that the push for cultural development as a strategic move gathered momentum. ‘Enhancing the advanced socialist cultural capability’ is prioritised as one of the central objectives of the CCP. ‘Cultural security’ is seen as a new but essential component of national security in contemporary China.

Tracing the evolution of the ideas of human security and establishing a 'critical' human security perspective, this paper explains the conception of 'security' in China and to identify the development and principal thematic characteristics of an emerging Chinese human security discourse (pointing out the similarities and dissimilarities between the Chinese version and those outside China). The paper focuses particularly upon 'national cultural security’ (guojia wenhua an’quan) in the Chinese human security discourse. It traces the structures, forms and characteristics of ‘national cultural security’ and assesses the contextual background of ‘cultural security’ focusing on a Chinese discursive construction of national cultural legacies within existing ideological reorientations. The paper’s conclusion assesses what, if anything, is distinct about this Chinese discourse; the potential policy implications; how it relates to the wider global human security discourses and ‘security’ more broadly; and how can the Chinese discourse be understood/explained in terms of the global/local.

Ming-Hui Chen (Loughborough University)

Whilst globalisation, urbanisation and explosive expansion of urban spaces are the most dynamic and challenging issues in the Asia-Pacific region today, modernisation and cultural re-interpretation are also taking place at a rapid speed. In this region, new understanding and new models of modernisation have been finding their own voices to negotiate this phenomenon. Asia-Pacific metropolises, combining most of their nations’ population and resources, are at the centre of its globalisation process and intend to create their own characters whilst information and fashion have been moving between territories. Taipei, being the capital of Taiwan, has been the spotlight of the Taiwanese government’s policy and social resources distribution. The Taipei Biennial 1996: The Quest for Identity was organised under this kind of ideology to seek for a Taiwanese identity in terms of history, nation, politics, culture and gender.

While cities start to expand, gather and create their own images and property, traditions are forced to be re-interpreted and replaced in order to survive. Women, especially those who have shared men’s property and middle-class status, are criticising their roles in a society influenced by Confucianism society. Taiwanese women, being the main labour force during the periods of industrialisation and modernisation, have been changing their appearances and values during the post-Martial Law era, which started in 1987. In this paper, I am arguing that through the Taipei Biennial 1996: The Quest for Identity Taiwanese women artists strategically used their art as power to force the public to re-consider sexuality and gender identity; how Taiwanese women artists decoded the myth of nationalism; how Taiwanese women artists created their work to respond to globalisation and urbanism in the post-Martial Law era.

This paper examines the changing images of China characteristic of the recent Chinese cinema by exploring Lyotard’s concept of "rewriting modernity". The films of the "fifth and sixth generation" go beyond a simple historical and theoretical connection with reality. The images and visual experience of these films have formed new cultural and socio-political dynamics, which have participated in a re-formation of subjectivity, narrativity and imagery shaped by these films. The recent Chinese cinema affords a new and fresh aesthetic reflection upon an era when rapid changes are taking place. These works cut deep into making a fundamental and profound meaning out of the rather "schizophrenic" reality in recent and contemporary Chinese history.

Chinese cinema has become a locus where the past is questioned and appreciated, the reality is confronted and challenged and the possibilities of future are projected. It provides an avenue to understanding China’s past and reality through visual representation and constructs new meaning to a distinctive Chinese modernity which resists many of the paradigms developed in social, economic and political discourses, particularly in what Lyotard calls "that supposed postmodernity."

The films produced in recent years, in particular the works of the sixth generation filmmakers, as will be argued in this paper, have injected new meanings into Chinese cultural and socio-political life and become a major signifier of Chinese cultural and political identity producing regimes of meaning, truth and representation from which there have emerged particular relations of signification in the new era. They have evidently become a very important aspect of China’s recent development. These films contribute to charting the discourse of a distinctive Chinese modernity and its course of development informed by these films by registering contradictions of sense of betrayal and vision, of shame and pride, of violence and serenity, and of anguish and triumph.

Rossella Ferrari (SOAS)

Since the 1980s artists such as Gao Xingjian, Mou Sen, and Meng Jinghui produced a number of controversial works that challenged dominant theories and socio-political perceptions of the theatre in China, contributing to the emergence of a new avantgardist aesthetics. Whereas at first the avant-garde performed its attack against official dogmas drawing largely on Western models, many experimentalists subsequently embarked on a rediscovery of previously marginalised local traditions and artistic legacies. Both trends – the extracultural and the intracultural – are encapsulated in the theatre of director and playwright Meng Jinghui, both acting as strategies against ideological and cultural hegemony.

In recent years, moreover, as economic reforms gained momentum and "high" art was challenged by mass culture and market factors, Meng succeeded in finding a happy middle ground between the avant-garde’s customary radicalism and the mounting commoditization of the cultural sphere. Meng’s current conception breaks away not only from the mainstream, but also from "classic" 1980s/1990s experimentalism, thus marking a change also within the avant-garde itself. As exemplified by "cross-cultural hybrids" such as Bootleg Faust, Bedbug, and King Lear, Meng’s latest work integrates experimentalism and tradition, Chineseness and Otherness, art and entertainment by means of an idiosyncratic aesthetic construct that I define as pop avant-garde. Meng’s success and, conversely, the demise of earlier experiments such as those of Gao and Mou, show how "pop avant-gardism" might constitute a winning strategy for "high" cultural producers in an increasingly commoditized yet still politically constrained environment such as that of contemporary China.

The avant-garde in contemporary Chinese fiction is generally considered to be a phenomenon of the 1980s. After that decade the radical narrative experimentalism of authors such as Yu Hua and Ma Yuan presumably disappeared, as the writers in question developed a more marketable style or stopped writing altogether. Consequently, continuities between fiction of the 1980s and fiction of later decades are rarely explored. This paper traces such continuities by reconstructing the career trajectory of the Shanghai author Chen Cun, whose literary disposition took him into the world of web literature (wangluo wenxue) where he has attempted to uphold the avant-garde spirit.

When the World Wide Web became widely available in China in the late 1990s, Chen Cun was the first print-culture author of some repute to recognise its potential for literary innovation. By the year 2000, however, he was expressing his dissatisfaction with the commercialisation of web literature, sparking a nationwide debate which attracted much critical and scholarly attention. Chen quickly achieved cultural celebrity status which he has since utilised to carve out smaller niches inside cyberspace to accommodate the tastes of a select few. Moreover, in doing so, he has come to explore continuities with older styles of writing, especially the biji genre, placing his avant-garde gestures perhaps paradoxically within a tradition of emphatically Chinese (i.e. not Western) literature. The paper discusses works by Chen Cun from the 1970s, 1980s and today, focusing especially on a recent work of web literature entitled "Xing biji" (Random Jottings on Sex).

Protestantism’s survival from the severe suppression of China’s Cultural Revolution and its rapid growth since the late 1970s has posed an intriguing question: why is Protestant Christianity in China doing better under communist rule than in its missionary era?

One seemingly accepted explanation is: the increasingly globalised market economy may lead to a preference in Christianity perceived by many Chinese as a modern, cosmopolitan meaning system. However, this approach only satisfactorily addresses the increase of young, well-educated converts, which remains proportionally insignificant among overall Protestant population in China. Others argue for the close relationship between Christian activities and traditional cultural patterns, but seldom explore further whether or to what extent the local culture has assimilated Protestantism into its religious ideas and practices, and how Protestants in China maintain their Christian identity.

Based on the oral-historical interview data in a specific community in Southeastern China, this paper traces the success of Protestant Christianity to its transformation under the Cultural Revolution. I argue that the lack of religious authorities for Protestant underground groups in the 1970s resulted in a Christian religiosity susceptible to people’s practical needs and local cultural premises. This religiosity emphasises the access to supernatural power. Nevertheless, the potential tendency of being appropriated by the local culture has been resisted by Protestant strategy of demonising local gods and their power. The spiritual warfare between Christian God and local gods claimed by Protestants suggests a type of Christianity that is neither a product of Western cultural penetration nor an indigenous cultural expression.

Toby Lincoln (Oxford University)

Subalterns in Republican Shanghai are generally considered to be the Chinese and traditional Other to its modern and Western oriented culture. This paper will re-evaluate this dichotomy through an analysis of subaltern engagement with the city during public festivals, in which lack of economic capital was not a significant barrier to attendance. The foreign-dominated modern cultural atmosphere of Shanghai, often termed haipai, permeated and defined these events, allowing the poorest inhabitants to enter into a complex dynamic of negotiation with the urban space. However, subalterns approached this field from the perspective of their own socio-cultural universe. For them, public festivals retained meanings with long traditions in China, which were maintained alongside new motifs arising from permeation of foreign-dominated modernity through the urban space. This is evidenced by attendance at the racecourse during the lunar New Year in which gambling, a long-standing practice believed to invite wealth in China, occurred in a new setting.

That this hybrid of Chinese and foreign culture extended to subaltern groups reflects the role that the migration experience played in their engagement with urbanisation. Interaction with people from across China within Shanghai provided a basis for such groups to make a claim to urbanity, while some association with haipai ensured that their lives in the city had something in common with elite groups.

This re-evaluation of the place of subalterns in urban life questions the value of modern/traditional and urban/rural dichotomies and offers scope for a more nuanced understanding of urban China.

Since China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation in December 2001, China has undertaken an extensive programme of reforms and amendments to its intellectual property laws in order to comply with its commitments under the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). However, it is clear that IP infringements continue unabated in China and that improvements in enforcement lag far behind reforms in the substantive law.

The reasons for this lack of enforcement are unclear, but could include the tension between Western legal values embodied in the WTO system and the underlying Chinese legal and cultural values. It is clear that despite continuing pressure from key trading partners such as the U.S., long-term changes in the intellectual property system cannot be enforced from outside and must be supported from within if sustained changes are to be effected. Therefore, this paper will address several key issues. Firstly, the impact of WTO entry on the framework of IP protection will be briefly examined. Next, the remaining problems will be identified and possible reasons for these problems will be proposed. Finally, the process of long-term reform will be considered and suggestions will be made as to how these sustained changes can best be achieved.

Professor Vivienne Shue (University of Oxford)

'Continuity and Change' or 'Mixed Metaphors' in the Making of Chinese Modernity? Reading Notes from the Archive of the Tianjin Guangrentang

Based on archival research, this paper traces the development of the Guangren Tang - Tianjin's largest benevolent hall, established to house and support chaste widows and orphans - and its relationship to changing national and local governmental authorities over the fifty years from 1878 to 1928. It gives a detailed account of the rules governing the everyday lives of the Hall's inmates and chronicles changes in how these charity recipients were regarded and expected to comport themselves. Tracing the Hall's adaptations to shifting economic fortunes and to new ideals of charity's purposes, it highlights the tenacity, but also the elasticity, of certain popular Confucian beliefs and practices as these were confronted by the onrush of 'modernity'. The paper suggests that the interesting fusions of 'old' and 'new' ideals and practices that appeared in the work of the Hall may be understood as akin to a 'mixing of metaphors' in the unfolding of modernity.

This paper studies the role of Haizhuang Si in the history of Sino-Western contacts. It begins with a general introduction of the data and information collected by this author about the temple and its inhabitants. This is followed by analysis and discussion of the temple’s evolution from a traditional place of worship into a multi-function venue for Chinese-Western contracts. Finally, individual cases are given to illustrate the interaction between Buddhist monks and their foreign guests there and then.

Dr Xiaoling Zhang (University of Nottingham)

This paper examines Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou’s first forays into the martial arts/action genre, against the shifting cultural landscape in contemporary China, which has been ‘plagued and glorified’ by conflicting forces of huge ideological shifts, avant-garde art and market forces.

The paper first offers a preliminary sketch of the development of the Fifth Generation film makers and Zhang Yimou’s career trajectory in relation to the latest development in the cultural politics of contemporary Chinese cinema as a guide to the contextual structures which frame the examination of the two films. The paper then goes on to a detailed reading of Hero and House of Flying Daggers and questions the dominant critique of the films for the sanctity of Communist rhetoric. The author believes that drawing upon issues both internal and external to the ‘text’ of the films will enable new insights into the relationship between Chinese artists and the party described by Barme as ‘rebellion and co-option, attitude and accommodation’, or as ‘rebellion and resubmission’ by Dai Jinhua.

The detailed reading of the films lead the author to believe that the films embody acts of change as well as continuity with the Fifth Generation and Zhang’s career development, thus extending Barme or Dai’s view on the relationship between film makers and the party – i.e., resistance to a new, higher level of co-option, conformity within the deep structure of the state.

The paper also argues that the films reflect the change of discourse from cinematic China, from ‘selling out to the west’ to being engaged with the global discourse of peace and non-violence as a member of the global village, and above all, to try to convince the world that ‘Chinese culture is also international’.

Wencheng Zhu

The Evolution of Moral Education in China from the Pre-Mao to Post-Mao Period 

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolution of moral education in China. The argument of this paper is that there is continuity in cultivating collectivism in moral education between the pre- and Mao periods, despite some radical changes. It is further argued that moral education has become problematic in the post-Mao period. Confucianism dominated China's value education for over 2500 years before Mao's socialist state. In Confucianism, moral education was regarded as the fundamental principle in forming the people's group identity to unify the community and the state; thus it sometimes defined as political-moral education. In 1949, Mao attacked Confucian traditions. However, the analysis of the paper reveals continuity in indoctrinating collectivism. Confucian political-moral education actually facilitated the cultivation of socialist collectivism in the Maoist period. In the post-Mao period, it is argued that moral education in cultivating socialist collectivism has become problematic. Since 1978, a series of economic reforms, and especially the openness policy, has meant that the economy was prioritised over moral education. The notion of value-free culture and education has dominated Chinese society. Hence a discontinuity of essential function of education in cultivating collectivism in China has been identified in this period.