MCLC

announcements of MCLC book reviews, publications, etc.

Finding Asia and the Concrete Universal: A Review Essay

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Viren Murthy’s essay “Finding Asia and the Concrete Universal,” which reviews two books: How Asia Found Herself, by Nile Green, and Asia after Europe, by Sugata Bose. The essay appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/murthy/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translation/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Finding Asia and the Concrete Universal:
A Review Essay

How Asia Found Herself, by Nile Green
Asia after Europe, by Sugata Bose

Reviewed by Viren Murthy
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2024)

Nile Green, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. 472 pp. ISBN: 9780300257045 (hardcover).

Sugata Bose, Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024. 288pp.ISBN: 9780674423497 (hardcover).

In the past few years, there has been a renewed interest in the category of Asia. This might seem strange because, at least since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism and, more recently, Martin E. Lewis and Kären Wiggen’s The Myth of Continents,[1] “Asia” has been easy to deconstruct. Harry Harootunian puts the problem succinctly in his critique of area studies:

It has been one of the enduring ironies of the study of Asia that Asia itself, as an object, simply doesn’t exist. While geographers and mapmakers once confidently named a sector on maps, noting even its coordinates as if in fact it existed, this enmapped place has never been more than a simulacrum of a substanceless something. It refers only to itself in the expectation that something out there will eventually correspond to it or be made to align with it. The cartographers’ art has been produced by an age-old fantasy and then reinforced by requirements of World War II. Nonetheless we have in this country professional organizations devoted to the study of this simulacrum, and educational institutions pledged to disseminating knowledge of it, even as the object vanishes before our eyes once we seek to apprehend it.[2] Continue reading Finding Asia and the Concrete Universal: A Review Essay →

Professionalism and Amateurism–cfp reminder

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Professionalism and Amateurism in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Arts: A Special Issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture
Guest edited by Ruijiao Dong, Man He, and Yizhou Huang

This special issue welcomes essays on professionalism and amateurism in modern and contemporary Chinese arts. From the anti-commercialism in the 1920s to the unification of “red and expert” (Mao Zedong, 1958) in socialist China; from the market-oriented professional artists after 1978 to current-day practitioners who work with foreign commissions and the international festival circuit, the evolving meanings of professionalism in Chinese arts has yielded various (un)spoken rules in the making and the reception of arts in China. Correspondingly, the definition of amateurism has also transformed in a shifting political and cultural terrain. Once, it was celebrated as the mode of participatory mass art, and, at other times, it was disparaged as cheesy and unproductive. Understandings of these two concepts, as well as their porous boundaries have been repeatedly ruptured and redefined. How do we trace this shifting ground on which professionalism and amateurism have assumed new meanings and significance? How do the expressions of professionalism and amateurism in the social, political, and cultural discourses channel into Chinese arts, and how do Chinese arts, in turn, continuously shape and reshape these discourses? How do professionalism and amateurism produce and formulate each other in Chinese arts? Continue reading Professionalism and Amateurism–cfp reminder →

Shifts of Power review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Theodore D. Huters’ review of Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society, by Luo Zhitian, translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/huters/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Shifts of Power:
Modern Chinese Thought and Society

By Luo Zhitian
Translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun

Reviewed by Theodore D. Huters
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2024)

Luo Zhitian, Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society Trs. Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Xvi + 425 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-35055-7 (hardbound) ISBN 978-90-04-35056-4 (e-book)

Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society, by the prolific historian Luo Zhitian 罗志田 and admirably translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun, was originally published in Chinese in 2014 as Quanshi zhuanyi: jindai Zhongguo de sixiang yu shehui (权势转移: 近代中国的思想与社会). With one exception, this important book consists of an assemblage of nine separate articles that appeared over almost twenty years in academic journals between the late 1990s and the date of its Beijing publication as a monograph. The titles of the chapters and their original publication dates are as follows: (1) The Worship of the New: A Shift of Power in Modern Chinese Thought under the Impact of the Western Tide (1999-2000); (2) The Abolition of the Examination System and the Disintegration of the Four-Class Society: Modern Social Change in the Eyes of an Inland Member of the Gentry (1997); 3) The Impact of the Abolition of the Examination System on Rural Society (2006); (4) Shifts of Social Power in Modern China: The Marginalization of Intellectuals and the Rise of the Marginal Intellectual (1999); (5) The Worries and Responsibilities of Educated Chinese in the Age of Transition (2009); (6) The Monolithicization of Chinese Tradition: The Development of Anti-Traditional Trends in the Late Qing and Early Republic (2003); (7) The Divided West: The International Storm and the Development of Chinese Thought in the May Fourth Era (1999); (8) Reflections on the Uniqueness of Modern Chinese Nationalism (2003); and (9) The State Advances, the People Retreat: The Rise of a Trend in the Late Qing (no date). Continue reading Shifts of Power review →

‘A Jocular Colleague’

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MCLC Resource Center s pleased to announce publication of Guo Wu’s translation of “A Jocular Colleague,” by Wu Yuanxin. A teaser appears below. For the full introduction and translation, go to: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/a-jocular-colleague/. My thanks to Guo Wu for sharing his work with our community.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

A Jocular Colleague 活宝

By Wu Yuanxin 伍元新

Translated by Guo Wu

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August 2024)

Wu Yuanxin

Introduction

Wu Yuanxin 伍元新 (1935-2012), my father, was a Guizhou-based writer and literary copyeditor, born in a Sichuan village in 1935. He lost his father, a small landholder, in the 1951 land reform when his father committed suicide under political pressure. Wu left the village, joined the workforce constructing the Chengdu-Baoji railway, and attended a machine-building school near Xi’an. He began publishing in 1956 in the Shaanxi Daily (陕西日报), focusing on village life. After graduating and securing a job in Guizhou, he published a play titled “Double Selection” (双选) in Beijing in 1963 that reflects socialist village life. After working in the editorial office of Flower Creek (花溪), a monthly magazine in Guiyang that enjoyed a national reputation, he was reassigned to the Guiyang Municipal Cultural Bureau when the Flower Creek editorial office was disbanded following the first anti-bourgeois liberalization (反对资产阶级自由化) campaign in 1981. The campaign criticized the magazine for publishing a sequence of short stories with liberal tendencies. While his writing was initially influenced by the genre of agricultural realism represented by Liu Qing 柳青 (1916–1978) and Wang Wenshi 王汶石(1921–1999), and he interacted in Guizhou with local writers of national influence such as Republican-era writer Jian Xian’ai 蹇先艾 (1906–1994) and sent-down youth writer Ye Xin 叶辛 (1949—), Wu Yuanxin’s short stories in the 1980s gradually shifted from rural themes to focus on young people who moved from the countryside to cities as migrant workers. He also paid attention to work units, or danwei 单位, in a purely urban setting.

“A Jocular Colleague” (活宝) is such a realistic urban story. I selected it from the author’s Selected Short Stories of Wu Yuanxin (伍元新小说选), published by Guizhou People’s Publishing House in 1996. The plot focuses on a cultural affairs unit in the mid-1980s where a group of local artists and intellectuals experienced the conundrum of the rapid transition from the “socialist cultural mechanism” (社会主义文化体制) to marketization, and the tension between the party-state’s control and individual confusion, resistance, and self-expression. The story revolves around the dynamics among three characters: Old Y, a bureaucratic party secretary whose authority is waning in the 1980s; and Little V, the bold, playful, and non-conformist main character who has his own ideas and plans, but who is also charitable and serious at heart; and the frustrated singer Little B as the narrator. Defying the early post-Mao stereotype of rigid and oppressive communist officials, the story portrays Old Y as kind-hearted, honest, and tolerant, though still entrenched in his communist mindset and jargon and in his role of presiding over routine “political study” (政治学习) sessions. The female narrator, Little B, seems to be a passive conformist who tries to understand her old schoolmate and current colleague, Little V, but generally disapproves of his character and bold rebellion. The author uses Old Y’s language in a humorous and out-of-place manner, highlighting the contrast between his old-fashioned ways and the era of marketization and modernization. The story is filled with dialogue that is often joking, sarcastic, and quick-witted, creating a sense of humor and cynicism rarely seen in contemporary Chinese fiction, in addition to providing a glimpse into the internal dynamics of a Chinese work unit.

I translate the narrative in the past tense because it is told by the first-person narrator, Little B, as a reminiscence. I have divided the original short story into three sections, each reflecting a distinct sub-theme. This structure guides the reader through the character development and thematic evolution of the story: the first section covers the meeting of the characters and the initial conflicts between Little Y and the establishment; the second focuses on Little Y running the dance hall; and the third on Little Y’s departure from the work unit.

A Jocular Colleague

1

If you want to know more about Little V’s background, ask Old He. He is the director of our unit’s Human Resources Department, and he manages Little V’s personal files.

It’s true that Little V and I were old schoolmates. But in a school with over a thousand students, we were in different classes, and he was a year ahead of me. We weren’t close. He didn’t stand out, especially not to a girl like me. The only memory I have of him from those days is from when we were sent down to the countryside as part of the youth program. The commune’s propaganda team came to perform a Model Opera, and he played Hu Chuankui, a comical nationalist officer during the Anti-Japanese War. I remember him protruding his belly and delivering his lines: “Thinking of the past, when my army just started, I had only a dozen soldiers and seven or eight guns . . .” [READ THE FULL TRANSLATION HERE]

Shanghai Urban Life review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Andrea Janku’s review of Shanghai Urban Life and Its Heterogeneous Cultural Entanglements, by Xiong Yuezhi. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/janku/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk A. Denton, MCLC

Shanghai Urban Life and Its
Heterogeneous Cultural Entanglements

By Xiong Yuezhi
Translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun

Reviewed by Andrea Janku
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August, 2024)

Xiong Yuezhi, Shanghai Urban Life and Its Heterogenous Cultural Entanglements Trs. Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Xvi + 425 pp. ISSN: 1874-8023; ISBN 978-90-04-51110-1 (hardback); ISBN 978-90-04-52289-3 (e-book)

Shanghai Urban Life and Its Heterogeneous Cultural Entanglements (异质文化交织下的上海都市生活, 2008) is the first in the Urban Life in Shanghai series, which comprises no less than twenty-five monographs covering a range of aspects of the history of Shanghai urban life and was published between 2008 and 2011. Led and coordinated by professor Xiong Yuezhi (熊月之), former vice president of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and director of its Institute of Historical Research, this almost encyclopaedic collection is the product of a major municipal research endeavour bringing together top academics from research institutes and universities across Shanghai. Xiong is the author of the first volume of the series, here under review in its translated version. Xiong’s monograph is also the first of the series to be translated into English by co-translators Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun, for the Brill Humanities in China Library, co-edited by Zhang Longxi and Axel Schneider. The Urban Life in Shanghai project was launched in 2001, building on almost two decades of research on the history of modern Shanghai that began with the political and economic changes and concomitant cultural and intellectual departures of the 1980s. Until then, Shanghai embodied all the dark sides of Western capitalist imperialism and China’s weakness in the face of it. From then on, Shanghai’s history could be seen in a far more nuanced and even positive light. While initial interest in Chinese scholarship focused on Shanghai’s economic modernity—Rhoads Murphey’s study on Shanghai as the “key to modern China”[2] remains an important reference—this more recent project is part of a trend in the scholarship toward a focus on culture and everyday life in the modern city. In addition, the present study explicitly aims at moving beyond this focus on modern urban culture to include the rural and “backward” that also continued to exist in the modern city, adding to its contradictions and diversity.[3] This mundane urban life unfolds in what Xiong portrays as a uniquely fertile environment created by the coexistence of the Chinese and the foreign, the local and the global, the rural and the urban, the rich and the poor in the International and French concessions and the old Chinese town. Taken as a whole, in the eyes of the author, the “heterogeneous cultural entanglements” characterizing this city, together with space for dissent (not Xiong’s wording) created by the fault lines along its multiple administrative boundaries, elevates Shanghai to an exceptional city, unparalleled in its diversity—administrative, ethnic, religious, linguistic, cultural, etc. This claim goes beyond Marie-Claire Bergère’s conceptualization of Shanghai as “the other China.”[4] In her 1979 study of Shanghai as Republican China’s center of modern industry she highlights how the stigma of colonialism had marked Shanghai’s history after the Communist victory in 1949 and obscured the city’s national significance (despite its continuing centrality in practice). Then, Shanghai’s distinctiveness and otherness constituted a problem. Not anymore. Continue reading Shanghai Urban Life review →

“The Second Mother”

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Brian Yuhan Wang’s translation of “The Second Mother,” by Ba Jin. A teaser appears below. For the full translation, go to: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/the-second-mother/.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Second Mother 第二的母親
(La dua patrino)

By Ba Jin 巴金 [1]

Translated by Brian Yuhan Wang

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August 2024)

Ba Jin (1904-2005).

Everyone called me an orphan.

My parents died young; I don’t even remember clearly what they looked like. I was brought up by my uncle. He had no children of his own, so he treated me like a son.

My aunt had passed away, and I led a lonely life. My uncle was often away from home, leaving only a houseboy and an old nanny to look after me. There was also a middle-aged servant, who often accompanied my uncle on his errands. My home was spacious, and there was a small garden where I could play, but I didn’t have any playmates. The world of the houseboy and nanny was quite different from mine. Though only a child, I often felt lonely.

Back then, I had started studying. My uncle hired an old, stern-looking tutor to keep me disciplined. I had to spend four to five hours in the study every day. While the tutor silently pored over his books, I read out the strange words and verses in books like the Thousand Character Classic over and over in a weary voice, with my mind wandering off into unattainable fantasies. The moment the tutor abruptly announced, “All right, class is over!” in his serious tone, I couldn’t resist laughing as I rushed out of that prison-like study.

I often had dreams at night, and they always featured the tutor’s face, which would transform wildly into various guises. I occasionally had more pleasant dreams, but they were always ruined by thoughts of studying—I even found myself studying in my dreams sometimes. Anyway, the only person I feared was that tutor, who always looked so serious; the only thing I dreaded was studying. [click here for the full translation]

Vol, 36, no. 1 of MCLC

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We are pleased to announce that the latest issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 36, no. 1 (Summer 2024), has now been published and will be sent out in the coming days. Please find the table of contents below. Abstracts and full-text articles can be accessed from the journal’s online repository:

https://www.euppublishing.com/toc/mclc/36/1

Natascha Gentz and Christopher Rosenmeier, editors

Table of Contents

Note from the Editors

Trauma, Lu Xun, and the Specter of the Taiping Civil War
Andrew Emerson

Anticipatory Self-Martyrdom: The Image of Christ’s Crucifixion in Ai Qing’s Poetry
Andrew Kauffman

Seeing Others: Ethics of Ghost Narrative in Sinophone Hong Kong Literature
Di-kai Chao and Riccardo Moratto

Ethnicity in Print Media: Alternative Framings of the Short Story “The Gray Robe”
Mario De Grandis

Lü Ban’s Comedies, Transnational Film Auteurism, and Comedic Modernism in Early Socialist China
Chuanhui Meng

The Cult of Craftsmanship in China: The Industrial Hand and the Artisanal Hand in the Age of High Technology
Yu Zhang

Contributors

Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Chris Berry’s review of Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality, edited by Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/chris-berry2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Routledge Handbook of Chinese
Gender & Sexuality

Edited by Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao

Reviewed by Chris Berry

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)

Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao, eds., Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2024. Xvii + 379 pp. ISBN: 978-1-032-22729-0 (cloth); 978-1-032-22733-7 (paper); 978-1-003-27394-3 (e-book).

In their introductory essay in the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality, Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao acknowledge that there are already numerous monographs and anthologies in the field. However, they stake a claim for their book as an intervention rather than just a representative round-up of leading work. All the essays are new. Furthermore, although the editors aim for broad coverage, they also have what I see as four corrective interventions. Whereas, they claim, the field has favored the pre-1949 era, they aim to spotlight the contemporary. Whereas the roots of much work in area studies approaches China and Chineseness as a site of difference or even exceptionalism, they highlight work that is transnational in approach, understanding China and Chineseness as constant processes of becoming shaped and responding to transnational flows. In response to the proliferation of work on the peripheral areas of the larger Sinosphere favored by Sinophone scholarship, they center the volume on the People’s Republic of China (PRC). And finally, whereas the balance of existing work has tilted toward the social sciences, they emphasize arts, humanities, and cultural studies approaches, and, in particular, a “queering” approach that moves away from research that assumes fixed gender and sexual identities and toward work that questions them. In this review, I first briefly introduce the contents of this substantial volume of new writing, and then return to address some of the positions staked out by these four interventions. Continue reading Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality review →

Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Leigh Jenco’s review of Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World, by Liang Qichao, edited and translated by Peter Zarrow. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/jenco/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio:
Essays on China and the World

By Liang Qichao
Edited and Translated by Peter Zarrow

Reviewed by Leigh Jenco
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)

Liang Qichao. Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World Edited and translated by Peter Zarrow. Penguin Classics, 2023. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780241568781 (paperback); 9781802060140 (ebook).

As a political theorist who works on Chinese thought within the notoriously Eurocentric fields of political science and philosophy, I have been waiting a very long time for a volume like this one. Peter Zarrow has finally undertaken the considerable scholarly effort to translate, masterfully and lucidly, key essays from Liang Qichao 梁啟超, arguably the most influential figure of twentieth-century Chinese thought barring only Mao Zedong. We can now easily include in our introductory courses several weeks of key readings from the greatest mover-and-shaker to come out of the late Qing period—the figure who “invented political journalism, promoted democratic reforms, and introduced Western political theory to Chinese readers,” and “led China’s break from tradition” (ix). This volume is a real milestone.

Zarrow begins the volume with a brisk and accessible introduction that sketches the historical context without becoming bogged down in irrelevant detail. His translator’s note explains how he chose the essays to translate: he focuses on those that mainly deal with questions we would consider closer to political theory than to historiography or journalism (the other contributions for which Liang is known), and that are representative of Liang’s thinking at distinct junctures in his life. These junctures also organize the volume’s four parts: Early Reformist Thought (1896-1898), Radicalism (1899-1903), Cultural Reform (1904-1911), and Syncretism and Progress (1912-1929).  Long known as a bit of a plagiarist, Liang’s Chinese translations of Japanese-language material published under his own name are also not included in this volume, nor are his writings on literature or history, which have been published elsewhere (and Zarrow helpfully provides a bibliographic list). Continue reading Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio review →

When the Yellow River Floods review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Robin L. Visser’s review of When the Yellow River Floods: Water, Technology, and Nation-Building in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature, by Hui-Lin Hsu. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/visser/. My thanks to MCLC literary studies book review editor, Nicholas Kaldis, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

When the Yellow River Floods: Water, Technology, and
Nation-Building in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature

By Hui-Lin Hsu

Reviewed by Robin L. Visser

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)

Hui-Lin Hsu, When the Yellow River Floods: Water, Technology, and Nation-Building in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2024, X + 163 pp. ISBN: 978-988-8842-77-3 (Hardback).

When the Yellow River Floods comprehensively analyzes polymath author Liu E’s (刘鹗, 1857-1909) popular late Qing novel, The Travels of Lao Can (老残游记, 1907), by engaging hydraulics, medicine, occult knowledge, and literary, social, and political history. Published in 2024 by Hong Kong University Press, the hardcover edition of 163 pages is comprised of an introduction, five chapters, and a brief conclusion. In his analysis, Hui-Lin Hsu challenges conventional understandings of late Qing literary history by connecting water management principles to literary nation-building, demonstrating how river engineering techniques inform the novel’s landscape descriptions and its medical, political, and national sentiment discourses. Though Liu E died in infamy after being exiled to Xinjiang on trumped-up charges, Travels was first serialized in 1903 to popular acclaim and retains scholarly relevance into the twenty-first century.[1]

The introduction pairs the frequent flooding of the Yellow River during Liu E’s lifetime to his work as a river engineer from 1888 to 1893 after a catastrophic dike breach in Zhengzhou killed over 930,000 people. Based on his surveys and mapping of the Yellow River in Henan, Zhili, and Shandong, Liu wrote Chart of the Course of the Yellow River (豫,直,鲁三省黄河图) and Five Essays on River Management (治河五说), key sources for Hsu’s analysis of The Travels of Lao Can. In them, Liu proposes a new embankment system of oblique dikes (斜提) that “defend water with water” (以水敌水), inspired by flood control methods attributed to the mythical Da Yu (大禹). Hsu argues that this pliant water management technique directly informs Liu E’s understanding of late Qing politics. Continue reading When the Yellow River Floods review →

HK Media and Asia’s Cold War review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Man-Fung Yip’s review of Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War, by Po-Shek Fu. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/man-fung-yip/. My thanks to our new media studies book review editor, Shaoling Ma, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War

By Po-Shek Fu

Reviewed by Man-Fung Yip

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)

Po-Shek Fu, Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 256pp. ISBN: 9780190073770 (paperback); 9780190073763 (hardcover)

Over the decades, Po-Shek Fu has established himself as one of the most respected scholars in the field of Chinese-language cinema. His latest book on the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong of the 1950s and 1960s, with a focus on film and print media, offers the first systematic English-language study of this important but little-examined subject.

Divided into four main chapters, plus a preface and an epilogue, the book covers the period—from the late 1940s to the late 1960s—to which the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong was most germane. The first chapter offers a comprehensive mapping of the cinematic Cold War in Hong Kong and makes a convincing case for what Fu calls the “cinematic containment” of leftist or pro-communist “patriotic” cinema on the part of pro-Taiwan forces and the United States. Each of the following three chapters focuses on a case study to further explore the complex dynamics and meanings of the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong: the US-sponsored Chinese Student Weekly and its ties with the liberal “third force” movement in Republican China in chapter 2; Asia Pictures, a film studio founded by Chang Kuo-sin 張國興 with support from the Asia Foundation (a CIA-funded nongovernmental organization), in chapter 3; and the Shaw Brothers studio in chapter 4. The epilogue concludes the book by focusing on the period of the late 1960s and 1970s, when the rise of a new, local-born generation challenged and reshaped the Cold War networks of émigré cultural production, which in turn led to a gradual winding down of Hong Kong’s status as a battlefield of Asia’s cultural Cold War. Continue reading HK Media and Asia’s Cold War review →

Look Back in Anger

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Thomas Chen’s “Look Back in Anger: The Long Season (2023),” an essay on the TV series The Long Season. The essay appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/the-long-season/. My thanks to Prof. Chen for sharing his work with the MCLC community.

Kirk A. Denton, MCLC

Look Back in Anger:
The Long Season (2023)

By Thomas Chen

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July 2024)

Figure 1: Marketing poster for The Long Season.

First released in China in April 2023 and now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, The Long Season (漫长的季节) is the most popular and critically praised Chinese miniseries in recent memory. On Douban, China’s near-equivalent of IMDb, it has over 900,000 ratings, with an average score of 9.4 out of 10. What accounts for this stupendous acclaim?

The Long Season has an arresting storyline: complex, tightly written, and unpredictable. It is a double-plotted crime drama set in the fictional steel town of Hualin in northeastern China, deftly interweaving a mysterious hit-and-run incident in 2016—the present in which the series opens—with a case of murder by dismemberment in 1998.

Generically a whodunit, The Long Season is also a riot. The Northeast constitutes the wellspring of comedy in the Chinese cultural imagination. Some of the country’s most famous comedians hail from the region, and their skits and sketches on China Central Television’s annual New Year’s Gala have entertained generations of viewers. Directed by Xin Shuang 辛爽, a Northeasterner, the dialogue crackles with repartees, delivered impeccably in the distinctive local idiom by well-known actors Fan Wei 范伟 and Qin Hao 秦昊, both of whom themselves are from the Northeast. They play, respectively, Wang Xiang 王响, a former locomotive engineer for Hualin Steel who is now a taxi driver, and Gong Biao 龚彪, a fellow taxi driver who used to be an entry-level manager in the same factory. The third male lead is Ma Desheng 马德胜, a police captain turned amateur Latin ballroom dancer. All three give bravura performances in dual roles spanning almost two decades that anchor the temporal shifts in the narrative. Continue reading Look Back in Anger →

Theater and Politics in Socialist China: A Review Essay

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Letizia Fusini’s review essay, “Theater and Politics in Socialist China,” which treats recently published books on modern Chinese drama by Maggie Greene, Siyuan Liu, and Xiaomei Chen. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/fusini/. My thanks to Jason McGrath, our soon-to-be-former book review editor for media, film, and drama studies, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Theater and Politics in Socialist China:
A Review Essay

Resisting Spirits, by Maggie Greene
Transforming Tradition, by Siyuan Liu
Performing the Socialist State, by Xiaomei Chen

Reviewed by Letizia Fusini
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2024)

Maggie Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the PRC Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. 260pp ISBN: 9780472074303 (hardcover)

Siyuan Liu, Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. 472pp. ISBN: 9780472132478 (hardcover); 9780472128723 (ebook)

Xiaomei Chen, Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 384pp. ISBN: 9780231197762 (hardcover); 9780231552332 (ebook)

Nearly a decade ago, in Autumn 2016, I had the opportunity and the privilege to teach an undergraduate survey course on the history of Chinese theater, the only one of its kind in the UK back then. I was a freshly minted PhD graduate and that was my first teaching post. Aside from developing my lecturing skills, the main challenge was to find creative strategies to make the subject more accessible to students who were majoring in theater studies and knew almost nothing about Chinese culture and history. The task became even more daunting when, due to time constraints, I had to condense the history of the rise of modern drama (huaju 话剧) and the transformations of classical theater (xiqu 戏曲) throughout the late-Qing, Republican and early socialist epochs within the space of a couple of hours. Since I wanted to avoid information overload, I began to look for a unifying thread that could hthelp me connect these three periods and, in my research, I came across an excerpt from a text written by Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 in 1904, where the future founder of the CCP eulogizes theater as the best “vehicle for social reform” (120), tracing the paternity of this idea to Confucius, who once said that “nothing is better than yue [乐, the performing arts lato sensu] at transforming social conventions” (118). These thoughts, written just before the dawn of the Republican period and yet rooted in the Confucian tradition, prefigured the Zeitgeist of the New Culture and May Fourth Movements, which, in turn, would be lauded by Mao Zedong in his essay “On New Democracy” as “having pioneered an unprecedentedly great and thoroughgoing cultural revolution” (361) whose only fault was that it failed to serve the interests of the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers. Through these connections, I was able to visualize the (r)evolution of Chinese theater in the first half of the twentieth century as a tree growing out of Confucian roots and projecting its branches and foliage in a Marxist direction culminating with the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. My goal was to convey to my students the impression I had gotten vis-à-vis that short statement by Chen Duxiu about the power of theater to effect social change. The fact that in China, the attribution of a pedagogic and political function to theater is a traditional concept rather than a twentieth-century novelty, hence not an exclusive prerogative of the Communist period or of the Cultural Revolution, was the unifying thread I was looking for. What was initially a mere perception on my part, found confirmation in Richard Schechner’s foreword to the collection in which I originally found Chen Duxiu’s text, where he notes that “the roots of Mao’s attitude—that theater is an excellent educator and that rulers ought to use it as such—go deep in Chinese history. From an early date, theater was seen as a way of reaching ordinary people who could not read” (x). Continue reading Theater and Politics in Socialist China: A Review Essay →

Angloscene review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleasesd to announce publication of Ruodi Duan’s review of Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations, by Jay Ke-Schutte. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/ruodi-duan/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Angloscene: Compromised Personhood
in Afro-Chinese Translations

By Jay Ke-Schutte

Reviewed by Ruodi Duan

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2024)

Jay Ke-Schutte, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023. 219 pp. ISBN: 9780520389816 (paperback); 9780520389823 (ebook).

New approaches to China-Africa studies that center the mediating role of race remain greatly needed. Jay Ke-Schutte’s Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations, which is available for free in electronic format from Luminosa, takes on this call. Through an ethnography conducted in the 2010s of the relationships and micro-interactions between Chinese and African students in Beijing, Ke-Schutte argues that these encounters are continually articulated through the vectors of whiteness, cosmopolitanism, and use of the English language. This landscape, Ke-Schutte argues, comprises the “Angloscene,” which is constituted through acts of interpersonal and intercultural translation.

I appreciate many aspects of the book. The ethnographic descriptions are rich and well-composed. Ke-Schutte accords much-deserved attention to how the dynamic afterlives of Third World unity still manifest in current-day grassroots exchanges, such as when an African student implores a Chinese street vendor to “help out a Third World brother!” (5). Relatedly, I find very provocative the connections that Ke-Schutte highlights between labor migrancy in apartheid-era South Africa and the aspirations of female rural-to-urban migrant workers in contemporary Beijing (72-75). Ke-Schutte’s willingness to tackle some of the most impossible questions in the articulation and reception of Black identities in modern Chinese society (i.e., who can be a racist?) leads to unanticipated and deeply insightful observations. For one, I am intrigued by the global reach of “white political correctness” as a register of the civilizational expectations that govern subaltern subjects (89). The exchanges between Adam, a Zimbabwean student, and his Chinese ex-girlfriend Lili at a costume party capture this dynamic. Adam and Lili found themselves trapped in an impossible bind given their use of English language as the vehicle for communication, unable to escape the racialized positions and aspirations that elevate Tim, Lili’s new white boyfriend, to relative unassailability and authority. Continue reading Angloscene review →

Utopian Fiction in China review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Hang Tu’s review of Utopian Fiction in China: Genre, Print Culture and Knowledge Formation, 1902-1912, by Shuk Man Leung. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/hang-tu/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Utopian Fiction in China:
Genre, Print Culture and Knowledge Formation, 1902-1912

By Shuk Man Leung

Reviewed by Hang Tu

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2024)

Shuk Man Leung, Utopian Fiction in China: Genre, Print Culture and Knowledge Formation, 1902-1912 Leiden: Brill, 2023, Xiii + 306 pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-68038-8 (Hardcover).

May 1, 2024 was a strange day to reflect on the theme of utopianism. On university campuses across America, anger and frustration was rife among participants of protests and counter-protests. The violence of the Middle East crisis spilled over into the American public, sharpening partisan divisions in an already polarized country. In such an atmosphere of mutual recriminations and accusations of political crimes, many would dismiss any utopian vision as naïvely, if not recklessly, pedantic, a pale intellectual legacy discussed in seminar rooms. Indeed, throughout the post-pandemic world, regional wars, power rivalries, and the law of the jungle have been taking over. East and West, dystopian sentiment was ascendant—the shared affect of those confronting various failed utopian projects with bitter resignation and cynicism. A second decade into the twenty-first century, to borrow from Enzo Traverso’s apt phrase, we find ourselves in an era that suffers the “eclipse of utopia,” one without visible, thinkable, or imaginable alternatives. Hence, isn’t it simply anachronistic to still be speaking about utopia today? Continue reading Utopian Fiction in China review →