Book reviews

mclc book reviews

A Certain Justice review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Paul Katz’s review of A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination, by Haiyan Lee. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/paul-katz/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

A Certain Justice:
Toward An Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination

By Haiyan Lee

Reviewed by Paul Katz

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2023)

Haiyan Lee. A Certain Justice: Toward An Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023, xii + 352 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82524-3 (cloth) / ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82525-0 (paper) / ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82526-7 (e-book).

A Certain Justice: Toward An Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination represents a pioneering achievement in our understanding of Chinese legal culture as well as its significance in the context of judicial systems worldwide. Haiyan Lee has amassed and boldly explored an astonishing array of literature, ranging from the writings of Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881-1936) and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) to the Cultural Revolution “model opera” (樣板戲) The White-Haired Girl (白毛女) and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

The main goal of the study is to present an overview of how Chinese forms of justice have been conceptualized and practiced from the dynastic era to the present day. Lee endeavors to achieve this goal by exploring texts that have largely been overlooked yet possess the potential to address significant philosophical questions concerning truth, freedom, humanity, etc., particularly literary works that shed light on justice’s place in the complex realities of human life. The author’s views have been profoundly molded by a comparative perspective resulting from her experiences as an immigrant academic as well as from he “enduring fascination” with American legal culture (ix).

The theoretical framework applied in A Certain Justice features a “tension-filled triune” formed by justice, law, and morality (2). A second triune involves the Chinese ideas of qing 情 (human feelings), fa 法 (the law of the land), and li 理 (cosmic order), which Lee posits as being roughly equivalent with customary, bureaucratic, and divine forms of law (4-5). However, the heart of her analysis lies in the concepts of “high” and “low” justice as organizing principles “to make sense of the political-legal culture of a nonliberal society” (in this case China; 7-8), with the former highlighting the “legitimacy and moral supremacy of the ruler” (achieved via penal law) and the latter “fair treatment” of individuals (during civil law procedures; social justice). One of the author’s main arguments stresses the “subsumption of low justice under high justice,” with high justice consisting of actions rulers deem to be justified. Moreover, in order to ensure the attainment of high justice, low justice may on occasion be curtailed, made partial, or otherwise modified (5, 21, 27). Continue reading A Certain Justice review →

Siting Postcoloniality review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Kyle Shernuk’s review of Siting Postcoloniality: Critical Perspectives from the East Asian Sinosphere, edited by Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hau. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/shernuk-2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk A. Denton, MCLC

Siting Postcoloniality:
Critical Perspectives from the East Asian Sinosphere

Edited by Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hau

Reviewed by Kyle Shernuk

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August, 2023)

Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hao, eds., Siting Postcoloniality: Critical Perspectives from the East Asian Sinosphere Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022, xii + 331 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1668-7 (cloth) / ISBN: 978-1-4780-1931-2 (paper) / eISBN: 978-1-4780-2395-1 (e-book).

Siting Postcoloniality: Critical Perspectives from the East Asian Sinosphere is an engaging volume that successfully expands our understanding of Postcolonial and East Asian studies, as well as these two fields’ many points of intersection. In his “Introduction,” Pheng Cheah traces the history of postcolonialism as a field and demonstrates how the histories of dynastic China, Republican China, and the People’s Republic of China are largely incompatible with existing models. In the East Asian context, Cheah identifies how individuals often changed subject positions over time, with the colonized becoming the colonizer or perhaps occupying both roles at once. He rightly argues that this reality challenges “two fundament axioms of postcolonial studies: the correlation of West and non-West with the opposition of colonizer and colonized and the power of colonial discourse as an ideology and technology of subjectification” (8). After rehearsing twentieth-century Chinese history and identifying the “semantic flexibility and referential elasticity” of the terms “Chinese” and “colonialism” (13), he articulates the volume’s two additional theoretical contributions. First, the volume exposes how the “mechanical application of Orientalist discourse analysis exaggerates the continuing hold of Western colonialism over the present”; second, it demonstrates that the “PRC’s position as a global hegemon is arguably secured at the infrastructural and ideological levels by networks and cultural resources that predate Western colonialism” (19). Importantly, this volume situates East Asia within prevailing debates of postcoloniality that simultaneously links it to postcolonial studies in other regions of the world. Continue reading Siting Postcoloniality review →

Made in Censorship review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Jeremy Brown’s review of Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film, by Thomas Chen. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/jeremy-brown/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen
Movement in Chinese Literature and Film

By Thomas Chen

Reviewed by Jeremy Brown

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2023)

Thomas Chen, Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film New York: Columbia University Press, 2022, xii + 248 pp. ISBN: 9780231204019 (Paperback). ISBN: 9780231204002 (Hardcover).

Censorship and restricted research access can spark creativity and open up new paths, as Thomas Chen’s Made in Censorship shows. I first experienced this myself during the 2000s, when I went to the flea market in search of documents after archive staff denied me access to what I wanted to read. That denial of access shaped my project in fruitful and beneficial ways. And when I encountered state-enforced amnesia about June Fourth, I was so bothered by the lies and erasures that I chose to write a book about the topic. So did Thomas Chen. Like so many other artistic and scholarly projects related to China, our works were sparked by censorship and, as Chen argues, made in censorship.

Chinese censorship literally shaped Made in Censorship. Chen received Chinese government funding that contributed to the publication of his thought-provoking book. Think about that.  The Chinese party-state funded a project that resulted in a book with the words “Tiananmen Movement” in the title, although Chen wisely framed his project in safe and innocuous terms while researching in China. Chen also participated in what he calls a “collaborative” and “collegial” (133) process of censoring a Chinese translation of one of his articles, a revised version of which appears in this book, revealing what censors excised. These backstories, which Chen recounts with thoughtful reflexivity, enliven and enrich the book. They support Chen’s point that cinematic, literary, and scholarly output about June Fourth is not only possible, but has been occurring continuously in China since 1989. Continue reading Made in Censorship review →

Taiwanese Literature as World Literature review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Lingchei Letty Chen’s review of Taiwanese Literature as World Literature, edited by Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/letty-chen/. Normally, our literary studies book review editor, Nicholas Kaldis, would oversee publication of this review, but since he has a chapter in the book, I filled in for him. Enjoy.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Taiwanese Literature as World Literature

Edited by Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li

Reviewed by Lingchei Letty Chen

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2023)

Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, eds. Taiwanese Literature as World Literature London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 232pp. ISBN 9781501381355 (cloth).

The consequences of WWII and the subsequent Cold War exacerbated Taiwan’s long-held peripheral position in the international community. Taiwanese literature, as a result, has stood on the margin of Chinese literature. But that was last century. Now in the twenty-first century, Taiwan has moved into a more prominent position in global geopolitical and economic conflicts, particularly between the US and China, and Taiwanese literature has gained higher visibility through international circulation. In the past few years, we have seen more and more conferences, symposiums, and workshops featuring Taiwan and Taiwanese literature. Thanks also to the controversial notion of Sinophone, which has generated a great number of productive discussions and debates in the last decade or so, Taiwanese literature has attracted unprecedented attention from scholars around the world. With publications such as The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature (Hong Kong UP, 2022) and Taiwanese Literature as World Literature, which is under review here, it is not difficult to foresee how “Sinophone,” “world literature,” and “Taiwanese literature” will continue to be entwined in more scholarly work to come.

The edited volume, Taiwanese Literature as World Literature, is published by Bloomsbury Academic under the series Literatures as World Literature. It is not often that we see an Asian/East Asian scholarly work published by Bloomsbury Academic, a niche academic publisher known primarily for its imprints in British and European studies; The Arden Shakespeare and Methuen Drama, for example, are two of its prestigious imprints. A quick browse of its website and we find it has an “Asia Studies” umbrella category. Searching more closely its sub-categories, under East Asia Studies one finds only six titles; but fifty-one results under China studies; and twelve results under Asian Literature. The Literatures as World Literature series has twenty-eight titles, among which Taiwanese Literature as World Literature and Pacific Literatures as World Literature are Asia/East Asia related. Apparently for a niche academic publisher such as Bloomsbury Academic to expand beyond its traditional coverage, tapping into Asian studies and world literature studies is a smart route to go. For Taiwanese literature to have its distinct title in this series is certainly a laudable effort by the two editors, Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li. Continue reading Taiwanese Literature as World Literature review →

Chinese Film: Realism and Convention review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Victor Fan’s review of Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age, by Jason McGrath. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/victor-fan/. Given the obvious conflict of interest, I filled in for Jason McGrath, who would normally oversee publication of our media studies reviews. Enjoy.

Best,

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Chinese Film: Realism and Convention
from the Silent Era to the Digital Age

By Jason McGrath

Reviewed by Victor Fan

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2023)

Jason McGrath, Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022, 404 pages. ISBN 978-1-5179-1403-5 (paper); ISBN 978-1-5179-1402-8 (cloth).

Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age is one of the most ambitious, thought-provoking, and groundbreaking works on the subject to date. Besides being an inspiring piece of research, the book also provides a solid method of critical analysis that is highly accessible to university students of all levels, without compromising the complexity and nuances of its discussion.

Although titled Chinese Film, the book addresses an intersection between three concerns that go beyond the study of Chinese cinema: (1) What is realism and how is it related to the question of cinematographic reality? (2) Can we rehistoricize Chinese cinema based on how the cinematic works of each historical period negotiate their specific sociopolitical conditions and aesthetic values through modes of realism? (3) With our current knowledge of Chinese film theory and criticism, how do we fully incorporate them into the larger discourses of film studies in order to develop a method of analysis that can address Chinese cinema’s cultural and sociopolitical specificities and its situatedness in global cinemas?

McGrath explicitly addresses the first two concerns. The third concern, however, may not be entirely visible to most readers but is in fact McGrath’s effort to address the current debate on Asia as method: how one relates bodies of knowledge generated in Asia to Euro-American knowledge under the pressures of colonialism and imperialism, and how one uses such knowledge not as a universalizing theory, but as a method that can address the intricate relationship between the universal and the particular.[1] In my opinion, this is the most trailblazing contribution of this book, and I daresay that the method McGrath proposes is the method employed in the book itself. Continue reading Chinese Film: Realism and Convention review →

Liang Hong’s ‘The Sacred Clan’

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Source: The China Project (6/30/23)
‘The Sacred Clan’: Liang Hong turns to fiction to explore rural China
Realism and the supernatural mix in Liang Hong’s “The Sacred Clan,” a collection of short stories that continues the author’s lifelong work of capturing rural China.
By Jonathan Chatwin

Illustration for The China Project by Derek Zheng

“Without some exposure to the Chinese countryside, nobody should say that they really understand China,” the translator Esther Tyldesley observes when asked about the significance of the work of writer Liáng Hóng 梁鸿.

Over the last 13 years, Liang has established herself as the pre-eminent chronicler of contemporary Chinese rural life. Her 2010 book, published in English as China in One Village, sold hundreds of thousands of copies in China and garnered a medley of literary prizes. It recounted Liang’s experiences as she returned from Beijing to her childhood village in landlocked and traditionally agricultural Henan Province; it was a bleak portrayal of an already traumatized countryside that was now suffering the indignity of being forgotten in China’s pursuit of urban-oriented development. “We have forgotten what a scholar once said,” she wrote in that book. “‘Modernization is a classic tragedy. For every benefit it brings, it asks the people to pay with all they hold of value.’”

Liang continued to write about her home village in two subsequent nonfiction books, to similar acclaim, but the professor of Chinese literature at Renmin University in Beijing has more recently turned to fiction to tell the story of rural China, publishing the novels The Light of Liang Guangzheng (2017) and Four Forms (2021). This summer, a translation of her collection of short stories, The Sacred Clan, is to be published, a book which, as Tyldesley says, “displays life in the rural areas of her province in all its messy, unvarnished, fascinating complexity.” (Tyldesley won a PEN Translates award for her translation of The Sacred Clan.) Continue reading Liang Hong’s ‘The Sacred Clan’ →

Dear Chrysanthemums review

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Source: Mekong Review 8, 31 (May-July 2023)
No Fragile Flowers, These
By Christina Cook

Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories (Scribner: 2023), by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s novel Dear Chrysanthemums offers a provocative look at the defining events of the past half-century of Chinese history. The interconnected stories follow several female Chinese characters whose travails intersect during the Cultural Revolution or the Tiananmen Square massacre through to contemporary diasporic life in America and France. Sze-Lorrain empowers each of these characters to tell her own story, even if she doesn’t yet have the knowledge required to see its connection to the broader context. Each consecutive narration reveals more about a complex web of truths, both known and secret; of secrets both personal and national.

As a Singaporean-born French woman who has lived and studied in New York and Paris, Sze-Lorrain knows this complex web well. As a writer, poet, translator and editor, she has spent decades gathering people’s perspectives on modern Chinese history. Dear Chrysanthemums resonates with a rich and efficient prosody. The narrative structure is creative, with each story placing an increasingly complete puzzle on top of the last. In this way, the novel’s form follows its function, for fragmentation is a theme that lies at its very core. As the modus operandi of the Chinese state, fragmentation is the force that sets the events of the novel in motion; the force against which female protagonists fight to stay connected to a truth that aligns with their ethics and experiences. Continue reading Dear Chrysanthemums review →

‘Beijing Sprawl’ review

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Source: The China Project (6/23/23)
Jogging everywhere and nowhere: Xu Zechen’s ‘Beijing Sprawl’
In this collection of nine interconnected short stories, characters are constantly moving without really going anywhere.
By William McCormack

Illustration for The China Project by Derek Zheng

Cliché is generally considered toxic in writing, but Beijing Sprawl, a newly translated collection of connected stories, embraces it. Author Xú Zéchén 徐则臣 packs an entire book with storylines that echo, and although each piece has its own tragic, unexpected twist, they follow a similar structure as Xu features fragments of young migrants’ lives on the periphery of Beijing. It seems the resemblance is exactly Xu’s intention: For a book about urban migrants hoping to eclipse the tired rhythms of their own daily lives, the repetition comes across as a literary choice.

The connected stories unfold with a looping circularity that made me feel disoriented and déjà vu at the same time. The same images keep appearing: roasted yams, donkey meat, birds flying overhead. The book’s nine stories riff off one another, and their repetitive form gets at the frustrating contradiction inherent in Xu’s characters’ lives: one of constant motion and social immobility.

Muyu, an anxious 17-year-old who dropped out of high school and jogs incessantly to stave off his “weak nerves,” narrates each story. He has moved to Beijing to help an uncle post advertisements for his fake-ID business and pursue a vague but grand vision of something bigger. Muyu lives in tight quarters with roommates from his same village in Zhejiang Province who have only finished middle school, Xingjian and Miluo. Big talkers (and time wasters), the bro-y duo have also landed in Beijing wanting something more — they just don’t know exactly what. The three are joined by a rotating cast of other Beijing transplants, including a pigeon herder, a subway busker, and other young migrants, whom they recruit to defray the cost of their rented room on the very western outskirts of Beijing. Many are in and out as they make ends meet in the informal economy. Continue reading ‘Beijing Sprawl’ review →

32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley’s review of 32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema, edited by Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Darrell William Davis, and Wenchi Lin. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/rawnsley/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis for overseeing publication of the review.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema

Edited by Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Darrell William Davis, and Wenchi Lin

Reviewed by Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley 

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright June, 2023)

Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Darrell William Davis, and Wenchi Lin, eds. 32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2022, xii + 563 pp. + 40 illus. ISBN: 978-0-472-07546-1 (cloth) / ISBN: 978-0-472-05546-3 (paper) / ISBN: 978-0-472-22039-7 (e-book)

It has always been a rewarding experience to read works by Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis. In their Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (2007), Yeh and Davis took an auteur approach and provided readers with a careful study of several Taiwan-based filmmakers, including Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee, and Tsai Ming-liang. That volume explored Taiwan film directors’ particular styles of image composition and editing patterns, as well as how, from a larger perspective, their artistic trajectories and career developments were related to Taiwan’s social, political, and cultural history. One year later in East Asian Screen Industries (2008), Davis and Yeh adopted an industry-focused approach and articulated new benchmarks set by Japanese, South Korean, and the three Chinese-language cinemas—Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China. Their examination of structural features and strategies employed by these five film industries between the 1990s and the 2000s illuminated an emerging trend of “increasing decentralisation, deregulation and regional cooperation” (p. 3). This framework has contributed enormously to our understanding of East Asian screen cultures and talents within the global flow of communications.[1]

In their new volume, 32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema, published in December 2022, Yeh and Davis team up with co-editor Wenchi Lin and take a conventional approach from the discipline of film studies—that is, a meticulous examination of individual films. As the editors state, their aim is to reveal a wide spectrum of Taiwanese cinematic output in addition to updating the existing literature. Their stated criteria of selection include (1) films that represent different historical settings, genres, auteurs, and formats in the post-war era; (2) films that are less studied in the English language literature; (3) prioritizing films produced in the twenty-first century; (4) films that are readily available for viewing with bilingual subtitles and suitable audio-visual quality; and (5) films that the contributors themselves prefer (p. 2). Based on the above considerations, Yeh, Davis, and Lin offer readers thirty-two original interpretations of films released between 1963 and 2017, arranged chronologically, which together demonstrate a fresh and expansive perspective on Taiwan cinema. Continue reading 32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema review →

Into the Desert review

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Source: World Literature 世界文学 (forthcoming in the bilingual journal World Literature accessible online at http://xuemo.cn/en/en_search.asp?q=World+Literature&t=1)
“Journey to Spiritualism in the Novel Into the Desert by Xuemo”
By Dian Li (University of Arizona)

Cover of Into the Desert

Xuemo’s novel Into the Desert begins with this sentence: “Mountains of sand reached into the sky, dropping the sun closer to the grounds than when they’d set out.” Here “they,” as we quickly learn, are a father-daughter pair embarking on a nighttime trip into the desert. As we appreciate the beauty of the desert led on by this sentence, we are also besieged by the ominous feeling of a coming disaster: the reference to a fox (never a lucky animal in Chinese folklore), the howling wind and the bitter cold (often signs of the destructive forces of nature). Two pages later, the daughter, who was just nine years old, was left alone by her father: “She sat down to wait for Papa. Drowsiness slowly descended and enshrouded her like an enormous net.”

The abandonment of a child is a cruelty that no one can bear, worse yet, imagining how this child would have fared by herself in the unforgiving desert disturbs us endlessly, giving us a lingering anticipation that will foreshadow our transition from the Prologue to the main story of the novel, which turns out to be an extensive journey into the same desert, a place of both fear and spirituality.

“Early in the morning, before the sun made an appearance, Ying’er and Lanlan left their village for the salt lakes in the heart of the Gobi.” So begins the long journey into the desert in Chapter 1, which is cast in a detached but suggestive third-person narration rich in verbs but stingy in adjectives. We will find this style to be characteristic of Xuemo, a contemporary Chinese writer who has already enthralled many English readers with several translated works of fiction. Undoubtedly, many more will embrace him with this novel that was masterfully translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin. Continue reading Into the Desert review →

Secondhand China review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Miaowei Weng’s review of Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation, by Carles Prado-Fonts. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/miaowei-weng/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Secondhand China:
Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation

By Carles Prado-Fonts

Reviewed by Miaowei Weng

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2023)

Carles Prado-Fonts. Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780810144767 (paperback); 9780810144774 (cloth).

Secondhand China offers an in-depth examination of the complex relationships between East and West, Spain and Europe, and Catalonia and other parts of Spain between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s. Carles Prado-Fonts analyzes Spanish and Catalan cultural texts about China produced during this period, providing a unique perspective on the cultural and political dynamics at play in these relationships as well as on the politics of translation.

Secondhand China should be read in the context of the distinction between the study of China (Sinology, or, more politically correct, China Studies) and the study of written China(s) (Sinography). While China studies scholars focus on China as a geopolitical location, exploring its culture, society, history, politics, and various other aspects, Sinographers like Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao take a different approach. In Sinographies: Writing China (2008), they propose in a provocative way that “China” is not simply something to be studied, but rather, something to be thought through, or a lens through which to examine or even redefine the crucial problems of contemporary thought. “China” is viewed as central to many of these problems, such as the problems of translation, subalternity, the value of texts, and so on. Obviously, Secondhand China participates in this ongoing project of Sinography that “thinks through ‘China.’”[1] Continue reading Secondhand China review →

The Specter of Materialism review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Wenqing Kang’s review of The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus, by Petrus Liu. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/wenqing-kang/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory
and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus

By Petrus Liu

Reviewed by Wenqing Kang

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2023)

Petrus Liu. The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus Durham: Duke University Press, 2023, x + 239 pp. ISBN 978-1-4780-1942-8 (paper) / ISBN 978-1-4780-1679-3 (cloth).

Queer theory emerged in the early 1990s to challenge social norms and move beyond LGBT identity politics. In recent years in the US, however, it has become a tool for advocating gender and sexual diversity and equal representation. Petrus Liu’s The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus is an imaginative intervention that aims to transform the field into a Queer Marxist critique of capitalism on a global scale.

Since its inception with Michel Foucault and Eve Sedgwick, queer theory has tended to treat the non-western world such as China as “the other” and deny its coevality in order to establish modern western sexual identity as the historical vanguard. In an earlier work, “Why Does Queer Theory Need China?”, Liu pointed out this blind spot and provided a trenchant critique of this Orientalist and Western-centric mode of thought.[1] Although queer theory should not use China as the other, the field still needs China to expand its geopolitical scope and make queer theory a tool that can provide a critical understanding of gender and sexuality in contemporary global capitalism. In this new book, Liu makes a persuasive case that China’s recent rise in the capitalist system (i.e., the Beijing Consensus) “presents an opportunity for queer theory to develop a more analytically precise vocabulary (and politics) for deciphering the matrix of gendered life and political economy” (5). Continue reading The Specter of Materialism review →

Young China review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Pu Wang’s review of Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959, by Mingwei Song. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/pu-wang/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC book review editor for literary studies, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Young China: National Rejuvenation
and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959

By Mingwei Song

Reviewed by Pu Wang

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2023)

Mingwei Song, Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. xiv+379 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-08839-9 (cloth).

Mingwei Song’s Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 opens with a discussion of the beginning of the young protagonist’s journey in Ye Shengtao’s 葉聖陶 novel Ni Huanzhi 倪煥之, which Song identifies as “the first major Chinese novel to showcase the formative experience of a modern youth” (1-2). Song’s Prologue is accordingly titled “The Beginning of the Journey.” Concepts and emotions associated with a young person setting out on a journey are central to Song’s literary historical narrative. As the author notes, the beginning of the journey “is highly allegorical. Journey and dream, passion and promise, hope and future—these elements constitute the foundation of a master plot of China’s modern story about youth” (1); the point is reiterated throughout, as in this later observation: “In the Bildungsroman of the new youth generation, the protagonist’s journey stands as a central motif” (237). Terms associated with the young person’s journey and its affects reappear like touchstones throughout this engaging monograph.

Song’s book-length study of this “master plot,” this “motif” of the journey in the Chinese Bildungsroman of the first half of the twentieth century, can also be read as a critical journey, or more precisely, a genealogy of the various journeys and beginnings of the new youth depicted in modern Chinese discourse and fiction from the late Qing era through the socialist period. The book thus combines a critical study of the “Chinese vision of youth”—in its dynamic and complicated relationship to national rejuvenation as that relationship played out in intellectual discourses—with a brilliant exploration of “fictional representations of young people in modern Chinese novels that integrate the individual’s Bildung into the different visions of national rejuvenation” (8). Continue reading Young China review →

Victims of the Cultural Revolution review

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Source: The China Project (5/4/23)
The battle against amnesia
By Ian Johnson

Illustration for The China Project

For most of her life, Wang Youqin has strived to document victims of the Cultural Revolution, telling their stories without sentimentality or — in many cases, when the victims were also perpetrators of violence — remorse. For the first time, her work is now available in English.

London: Oneworld Academic. £50 / $65. 592 pp.

In 1966, 13-year-old Wáng Yǒuqín 王友琴 watched as some of her classmates at an elite girls’ school in Beijing tortured their teachers. Egged on by the violent directives of the country’s top leaders, the girls forced the teachers to eat dirt, poured boiling water over them, and beat them with spiked clubs. Later, in the school cafeteria, they boasted about it. That night, one of the teachers died of her injuries. Others committed suicide. Some were left crippled.

Horrified, Wang wasn’t sure what to do and kept the experience bottled up. Like many of her peers, she was later forced to labor in the countryside, where she saw the failure of Mao’s revolution to provide farmers with enough to eat. After Mao’s death, she and most other sent-down youth were allowed to return to Beijing. Unable to speak out about the failings of the era, she confronted anguish and guilt in the only way she knew how: by recording the names and details of those who died. Continue reading Victims of the Cultural Revolution review →

Where Waters Meet review

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Source: Asian Review of Books (4/23/23)
“Where Waters Meet” by Zhang Ling
By Susan Blumberg-Kason

Zhang Ling

Zhang Ling

Zhang Ling is so renowned a writer in China that one of her books was adapted to film as China’s first IMAX movie. She has written nine novels, as well as a number of collections of stories, all in Chinese. But Zhang Ling has not lived in China since the mid-1980s, when she immigrated to Canada. She started writing a decade later and has had at least one novel translated into English. But it’s only now that she has published a book in English. Where Waters Meet is a story centered around a family’s grief and takes place in Toronto and its surroundings, as well as various places in China, namely Wenzhou and Shanghai. The title of the book is taken from the large bodies of water that link these parts of the story together.

Where Waters Meet (Amazon Crossing, 2023)

The novel begins when Rain Yuan, or Yuan Chunyu as she was known in China, passes away at her nursing home in Canada. Rain’s daughter, Phoenix, and son-in-law, George, had been taking care of Rain until she started to exhibit signs of dementia. When that started to happen more often than not, George felt proud to find a suitable place for his mother-in-law to receive the best possible care.

“One of the best long-term care facilities in town, a strong Alzheimer’s team. Built with Hong Kong money, so the staff mostly speak Chinese. Chinese menu, Chinese recreational programs,” reported George, with a fluent command of the facts, “government subsidies available. Two blocks away from my hospital, visits are easy.”

But as the story progresses, one may wonder if Rain was really demented or if the trauma from her young adult years resurfaced as she grew older and had no way of dealing with it. She had been living in Canada for the better part of two decades with Phoenix; George became a part of their family of two after he married Phoenix. But Rain had never told her daughter about what happened to her during WWII and the Chinese civil war. The only person who knew the truth was Rain’s sister, Mei, in Shanghai. After Rain dies, Phoenix travels across the Pacific to get the truth from Mei. Continue reading Where Waters Meet review →