Author: denton.2@osu.edu

Language Diversity in the Sinophone World review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Ashley Liu’s review of Language Diversity in the Sinophone World, edited by Henning Klöter and Mårten Söderblom Saarela. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/ashley-liu/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk A. Denton, editor

Language Diversity in the Sinophone World: Historical
Trajectories, Language Planning, and Multilingual Practices

Edited by Henning Klöter and Mårten Söderblom Saarela

Reviewed by Ashley Liu

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright March, 2021)

Henning Klöter and Mårten Söderblom Saarela, eds. Language Diversity in the Sinophone World: Historical Trajectories, Language Planning, and Multilingual Practices London: Routledge, 2020. xv + 330 pp. ISBN: 9780367504519.

Language Diversity in the Sinophone World is a collection of studies on the language policies and practices in polities that “pursue official language policies on the use of one or more Sinitic languages,” which include the PRC, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Singapore. Whereas the study of language policies and multilingualism in the Chinese-speaking world is not new, the unique contribution of this volume is its “intervention in the developing field of Sinophone studies” (1). Regarding the importance of this volume, Klöter and Saarela highlight the “paradox” that Sinophone studies place an inherent emphasis on language but rarely address issues of language policies and practices (1). The Sinophone world as constructed by Klöter and Saarela is significantly different from that characterized in existing Sinophone studies. Whereas existing Sinophone studies, following the vision of Shu-mei Shih, mainly involve postmodern, postcolonial, and postnational critiques and analyses of literature and cinema, Klöter and Saarela’s volume primarily relies on historical, linguistic, sociological, and quantitative approaches regarding language policies and practices. In doing so, they expand a domain previously dominated by scholars of literature and cinema to include historians, linguists, sociologists, language policy experts, and those who employ quantitative methods. As someone who belongs to the former category—the status quo in Sinophone studies—I evaluate this volume’s usefulness to literary and film studies. Continue reading Language Diversity in the Sinophone World review →

The Suicide of Miss Xi

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The Suicide of Miss Xi: Democracy and Disenchantment in the Chinese Republic
By Bryna Goodman
Harvard University Press. 352 pages. HARDCOVER $39.95 • £31.95 • €36.00; ISBN 9780674248823
Publication Date: 07/13/2021

About this book

A suicide scandal in Shanghai reveals the social fault lines of democratic visions in China’s troubled Republic in the early 1920s.

On September 8, 1922, the body of Xi Shangzhen was found hanging in the Shanghai newspaper office where she worked. Although her death occurred outside of Chinese jurisdiction, her U.S.-educated employer, Tang Jiezhi, was kidnapped by Chinese authorities and put on trial. In the unfolding scandal, novelists, filmmakers, suffragists, reformers, and even a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party seized upon the case as emblematic of deep social problems. Xi’s family claimed that Tang had pressured her to be his concubine; his conviction instead for financial fraud only stirred further controversy. Continue reading The Suicide of Miss Xi →

Newman Prize videos

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Both the Newman Prize Award Ceremony and Symposium videos are now available online.

The Newman Prize Award Ceremony was held in person at Renmin University in early March and again online on March 19th in an event on zoom which included the acceptance speech of Yan Lianke as well as the nomination statement of Eric Abrahamsen and speeches by others.

The results of this year’s Newman Prize for English Jueju were also revealed and celebrated. Finally, the Newman Prize symposium can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/oRDRCR-prDg which featured a conversation about the winner’s work with leading experts on Yan Lianke: Shelley Chan, Howard Choy, Carlos Rojas, and Eric Abrahamsen, moderated by Zhu Ping and Hosted by Jonathan Stalling.

Marriage rate drops

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Source: SupChina (3/19/21)
A generation without money, houses, or work-life balance also doesn’t want marriage
The government wants young people to get married and have kids. They aren’t having any of it.
By Jiayun Feng

chinese couple marriage

Reuters

China’s marriage rate fell to its lowest level in nearly two decades last year, and experts think that the number will likely sink even further as Chinese people in Generation Z start to reach childbearing age.

New statistics (in Chinese) were released last month by China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs, showing that only 8.1 million couples tied the knot in 2020, a 12% drop from the previous year and a super-steep drop from the 13.4 million couples who got married in 2013.

Most Chinese media reports attributed the decline in marriage rates to a drop in the number of people of marriageable age after decades of the one-child policy, a harshly enforced system introduced in 1979 to curb the country’s population growth.

Although China relaxed its restrictions on births in 2015, allowing all married couples to have two children, many couples have not chosen to do so. To make things worse, the birth control program, coupled with an age-old preference for sons, has created an excess of 30 million males, who are facing a hard time looking for partners. Continue reading Marriage rate drops →

Infrastructure as Planetary Sculpture (1)

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Interesting. A bit credulous, is it?

Anyhow, it makes me think of Sun Yat-sen’s manifesto, The International Development of China, 1922, which pretty much laid out the same entire infrastructure plan, including railroads to Europe and all that. While Sun emphasized it would be for peace, not domination, he’s totally blatant about annexing and colonizing the nations that had already been conquered by the Chinese empires he himself had only just overthrown.

It’s a manifesto of naked colonialism: On pp 20 ff (in the 1953 Taipei reprint available online), Sun speaks of how Chinese colonization of Sinkiang etc. will be profitable just as colonialism — in tandem with transportation infrastructure — has been so nicely profitable in places like the USA, Canada and Australia.

Until I saw Sun Yat-sen’s uninhibited but unrealized plans from the 1920s, which must be the origin of the Communist Party’s current schemes, I had thought the current BRI schemes may have originated with the fringe-extremist sect founded by the American Lyndon LaRouche, a curious figure whose political cult (in Europe, and beyond) has been widely dismissed as nuts, and ignored. But in China, curiously, he’s praised, books are written about him — and Chinese embassies abroad can’t get enough of photo-ops with local Larouchians regardless of their local insignificance, which ought to have made them a bit of a non-starter. Embassies never do anything except on Beijing instructions, so this means it is probably all because Larouche (1922–2019) was a BRI believer and open proponent long before anyone else, and so orders have been issued to honor him (albeit not directly credit him too much). (A bit like Russia shall never forget Kim Philby?).

Nevertheless it’s clear that today’s grandiose schemes, of all roads leading to the Communist party, actually precedes it, as a specifically Chinese-modern Gargantuan fantasy.

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Yan Lianke lecture

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Dear Colleagues,

On March 29, the novelist Yan Lianke will give a lecture on the writing of his novel The Explosion Chronicles. The lecture will be in Chinese, accompanied by English translation. We hope you will consider attending and help spread the word about this exceptional opportunity to meet one of the greatest writers of today’s China.

You can register for the lecture here.  The lecture is generously sponsored by the Hightower Fund, the Confucius Institute in Atlanta, and the East Asian Studies Program at Emory University.

Maria Sibau
Guangchen Chen

About the Speaker

Yan Lianke is one of today’s foremost Chinese novelists. His writings capture the stunning development of China in recent decades with remarkable insight, imagination, courage, and irony, throwing into stark relief pressing social issues such as the stigmatization of illness, pandemics and economic inequality, women’s struggle, and the consequences of over-development. His major works include Dream of Ding Village, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, Serve the People!, and The Ladies. He has garnered a number of major international awards, including the Lu Xun Literary Prize (awarded twice), the Franz Kafka Prize, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award, and most recently the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, as well as being shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.

HK Polytechnic events

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List members might be interested in these two talks co-organized by the Confucius Institute of Hong Kong and the Department of Chinese Culture at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Talk 1: Topic: Locations of China in World Literature and World Cinema
Date: 25/3/2021 (Thursday)
Time: 10:00-11:30 am (HK time)
Language: English
Platform: Online (Zoom) (Quota: 300)
Registration link: https://wj.qq.com/s2/8161389/2851/

Abstract: 

This lecture takes a located approach to Chinese literature as world literature and tracks parallel debates on world literature and world cinema by revisiting recurring issues of invisibility, circulation, mapping, worlding, cosmopolitanism, humanism, and globalization. The first section tracks the invisible locations of China in the history of world literature. The second section discusses the emphasis on circulation in new world literature that emerged at the turn of the new millennium and its discontents. The third section examines a parallel development in world cinema and its proactive engagement with circulation and globalization as well as its self-awareness of its evolving locations over the twentieth century. The final section returns to the question of locations of China by evaluating competing positions on world literature in China and the West as well as interrogating what the periodic refashioning of literary studies in the West would mean to Chinese literature as world literature. Continue reading HK Polytechnic events →

Chinese Ibsenism

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Tam, Kwok-kan. Chinese Ibsenism: Reinventions of Women, Class and Nation. Springer, 2019. xi+298. pp. ISBN: 978-981-13-6303-0 (eBook); 978-981-13-6302-3 (hardcover); 978-981-13-6305-4 (softcover).

Book Overview

This book is a study of the cultural changes brought about by the introduction of Ibsen to China from the 1910s to the 2010s. It is a companion to Kwok-kan Tam’s two other books, Ibsen, Power and the Self: Postsocialist Chinese Experimentations in Stage Performance and Film (Oslo: Novus Press, 2019) and Ibsen in China: A Critical-Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Translation and Performance (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2001). A special feature of the book is that the stage performances, especially those that were performed 80 years ago, are well illustrated with stage photographs which are now difficult to find. Particularly noteworthy is that the front cover shows a color image of Nora from one of the most memorable performances with Ji Shuping playing the lead role in the Beijing A Doll’s House in 1956.

The study is based on forty years’ collection of Chinese materials extracted from library, newspapers and theatre archives from all over the world. Supported by detailed analyses of translations, literary experiments and theatrical performances involved in the cultural debates, the study provides the most comprehensive view of the critical reception of Ibsen in China in the past 100 years. It is moreover a study of the relation between theatre art and ideology in the Chinese experimentations with new selfhood as a result of Ibsen’s impact. It explores Ibsenian notions of the self, women and gender in China and provides an illuminating study of Chinese theatre as a public sphere in the dissemination of radical ideas. As the major source of modern Chinese selfhood, Ibsenism carries notions of personal and social liberation and has exerted great impacts on Chinese revolutions since the beginning of the twentieth century. Ibsen’s idea of the self as an individual has led to various experimentations in theatre, film and fiction to project new notions of selfhood, in particular women’s selfhood, throughout the history of modern China. Continue reading Chinese Ibsenism →

Forced Confessions

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Dear all — I’d like to mention my new article which came out yesterday:

“Forced Confessions as Identity Conversion in China’s Concentration Camps.” Monde chinois 2020/2 (N° 62), 28-43. (not open access, unfortunately abstract only)

What I propose is that the entire Xinjiang camps system is set up to enforced a daily ritual self-denial, used to accomplish an involuntary ethnic identity “conversion” which is the purpose of the camps. While the method is fundamentally the same as in the forced confessions in mainland China, in the brainwashing of captured Falungong sect members, etc. — in Xinjiang it’s turned into a tool of genocide: to erase ethnic identities by turning people into Chinese parrots.

I’m building on my earlier work on the Chinese forced confessions (not in Xinjiang): “The Return of the Show Trial: China’s Televised ‘Confessions.'” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 15.13.1 (June 25, 2017).  (open access)
–In these Chinese confessions, broadcast on Chinese TV, it is not the ethnic identity of the victims that is assaulted, as in the Xinjiang camps, but rather the victim’s professional and personal identity, as lawyers, journalists, writers, and the like. Continue reading Forced Confessions →

In Memory of Fou Ts’ong

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Guangchen Chen’s tribute to Fou Ts’ong (1934-2020), “The Sufferings and Greatness of a Vulnerable Artist: In Memory of Fou Ts’ong.” To read the whole essay, which includes images and video clips, click here. A teaser appears below. My thanks to Guangchen Chen for sharing with us his memories of Fou Ts’ong.

Kirk Denton, editor

The Sufferings and Greatness of a Vulnerable Artist:
In Memory of Fou Ts’ong

By Guangchen Chen

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright March 2021)

Fu Ts’ong program note from a performance in New York in the 1965-66 season.

As if 2020 were not bad enough: about a week before Christmas, I received an email from the pianist Patsy Toh; I assumed it was her usual kind holiday greetings. Instead, it was to inform me that both she and her husband and musical partner Fou Ts’ong 傅聰 tested positive of COVID-19. Patsy seemed to be doing OK and was out of hospital already. Ts’ong would stay on for a few more days, and was expected back home for Christmas. I was shocked, knowing how reclusive they were. And I was worried: Ts’ong was 86 and a lifelong lover of pipe smoking. But I was also hopeful, because he had, until recently, always been bursting with vitality and had weathered one challenge after another through his dramatic life. But 2020 proved, right up to the end, deadly: he passed away on December 28.

Fou Ts’ong was a pianist of rare musical sensitivity and formidable cultural sophistication. Born in Shanghai in 1934, he was raised in an atmosphere steeped in learning, both East and West. He was tutored at home by his father, the eminent translator of French literature and art critic Fu Lei 傅雷,[1] who spent his formative years in Europe. Fou Ts’ong grew up in the company of old recordings made by Wilhelm Furtwängler, Edwin Fischer, and the Capet Quartet, among others. With relatively scant formal training, he debuted with the Shanghai Symphony at the age of 17. In 1953, he won the third prize at the George Enescu Competition in Romania, and then the third prize and best mazurka performance at the 1955 Chopin Competition in Poland. Subsequently, he had an international performing career that spanned almost six decades. But what distinguished him as a unique artist was his ability to combine the aesthetics of two distinctively different traditions—the Chinese and the European. Furthermore, he and his family were victims of Mao Zedong’s communism, and the pain he suffered his whole adult life can be heard in a palpable way in his music. [continue reading]

Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform

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Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era
Xiaomei Chen, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Diverse perspectives on the effort to reform modern Chinese theater according to socialist cultural policies

Description

The profound political, economic, and social changes in China in the second half of the twentieth century have produced a wealth of scholarship; less studied however is how cultural events, and theater reforms in particular, contributed to the dynamic landscape of contemporary Chinese society. Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform fills this gap by investigating the theories and practice of socialist theater and their effects on a diverse range of genres, including Western-style spoken drama, Chinese folk opera, dance drama, Shanghai opera, Beijing opera, and rural theater. Focusing on the 1950s and ’60s, when theater art occupied a prominent political and cultural role in Maoist China, this book examines the efforts to remake theater in a socialist image. It explores the unique dynamics between official discourse, local politics, performance practice, and audience reception that emerged under the pressures of highly politicized cultural reform as well as the off-stage, lived impact of rapid policy change on individuals and troupes obscured by the public record. This multidisciplinary collection by leading scholars covers a wide range of perspectives, geographical locations, specific research methods, genres of performance, and individual knowledge and experience. The richly diverse approach leads readers through a nuanced and complex cultural landscape as it contributes significantly to our understanding of a crucial period in the development of modern Chinese theater and performance.

Xiaomei Chen is Distinguished Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Davis.
Tarryn Li-Min Chun is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame.
Siyuan Liu is Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of British Columbia.

Curator of Asian Art position

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Joseph de Heer Curator of Asian Art, Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum is hiring a curator of Asian Art. This is an exciting opportunity for an Asian art curator to work with a large and distinguished collection that ranges from antiquity to contemporary, and spans the entire Asian continent. The Chinese art collection is particularly strong, and expertise in Chinese art is necessary. The Denver Art Museum is a destination museum – it welcomes more than half a million visitors annually (pre-COVID, and virtually during 2020) — and it is situated in a city that offers robust cultural amenities and great outdoor activities. It is also committed to serving multi-faceted audiences. It has a world-renowned education program and its website is fully bilingual English/Spanish. The job announcement can be seen on the retained search consultant’s website, www.museum-search.com/open-searches/. The deadline for applications is soon: March 26, 2021. Inquiries welcome at searchandref@museum-search.com

Sincerely,

Connie Rosemont
Senior Search Consultant
Museum Search & Reference
www.museum-search.com

Coal and China’s climate ambitions

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Source: NYT (3/16/21)
The Rock Standing in the Way of China’s Climate Ambitions: Coal
Beijing’s new development blueprint is meant to steer the country to carbon neutrality before 2060, but companies and regions dependent on the fossil fuel aren’t making it easy.
By Chris Buckley

Coal being loaded on to a cargo ship at a port in Jiangsu Province, China, in November. Industry groups say China needs to use large amounts of coal for electricity and industry for years to come. Credit…Wang Jianmin/Visual China Group, via Getty Images

Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has promoted an uplifting vision for growth increasingly freed from greenhouse gas pollution, but turning that plan into action is already proving contentious.

The big issue is coal.

Mr. Xi’s climate-saving ambitions are a pillar of a plan for the country’s post-pandemic ascent that was endorsed by China’s Communist Party-controlled legislature days ago.

The plan is designed to steer the country toward two signature commitments that Mr. Xi made last year. China’s emissions of carbon dioxide would peak before 2030, he said, and the country would reach net carbon neutrality before 2060, meaning it would emit no more of the greenhouse gas than it takes from the atmosphere by methods like engineering or planting forests. Continue reading Coal and China’s climate ambitions →