MCLC

announcements of MCLC book reviews, publications, etc.

Imperial-Time-Order review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Magnus Fiskesjö’s review of Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire, by Kun Qian. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/fiskesjo/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Imperial-Time-Order: Literature,
Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire

By Kun Qian

Reviewed by Magnus Fiskesjö

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2025)

Kun Qian, Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire Leiden: Brill, 2016. xii + 368 pp. ISBN: 9789004309296 (hardback) / ISBN 9789004309302 (e-book).

It used to be, in China, that empire and imperialism were words associated with evil foreign powers—especially Western powers encroaching on Asia—and, to a lesser extent, with China’s own past empires, also characterized as unjust and oppressive.

Today, we see an increasingly explicit embrace of the idea of empire in China. In a complete reversal of Communist Party policy, there is even a renewed identification of today’s China with its own past empires, in discourse as well as in state actions both inside and outside of the modern Chinese nation-state that replaced the Qing empire after 1911.

Kun Qian’s Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire provides a very useful analysis of how this shift occurred, with particular focus on the cultural realm. Because of current developments, her remarkable and extremely rich book is gaining in timeliness every day. Grounded in a deep engagement with both Chinese and Western philosophy and literature, Imperial-Time-Order will continue to help explain the roots of the Chinese imperial imagination to readers and students for a long time to come.

The book begins, appropriately, with an introduction to the ambivalent figure of Mao, who regarded himself as a revolutionary overthrowing the old and creating something new—not just another imperial dynasty. And yet, at the same time, as many have observed, Mao took on imperial manners. Kun Qian emphasizes how deeply influenced Mao was by the history of the imperial eras that came before. She argues that Mao saw himself as part of a Chinese continuity, unfolding on a Chinese time, a “universal time” in which there always is a China. Continue reading Imperial-Time-Order review →

On the Edge review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Shaoling Ma’s review of On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China, by Margaret Hillenbrand. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/shaoling-ma/. This review is a leftover from Jason McGrath’s tenure as our media studies book editor. My thanks to Jason for ushering this review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

On the Edge:
Feeling Precarious in China

By Margaret Hillenbrand

Reviewed by Shaoling Ma

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2025)

Margaret Hillenbrand. On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. ??? pages, ISBN 9780231212151 (Paperback)/ ISBN 9780231212144 (Hardback)/ ISBN 9780231559232 (E-book)

On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China scrutinizes the role that contemporary cultural forms play in rousing feelings of precarity among the underclass—marginalized rural and urban Chinese populations subject to internal expulsion or what the book terms “zombie citizenship”—and its less disenfranchised counterparts. Rooted in cultural studies but with an ambitious interdisciplinary arc spanning sociology, art history, anthropology, political economy, and the law, Margaret Hillenbrand conceives of performance art, visual art about waste, workers’ poetry, suicidal protests, and short video and livestreaming apps as “factious forms,” which stage and vivify class strife at a time when the Chinese ruling party has banished class as part of its political lexicon. On the Edge extends existing scholarship on the well-acknowledged problems of inequality and migrant labor in the People’s Republic of China by excoriating the less perceptible threats of social descent and civic jeopardy confronting cultural workers, online platform employees, unemployed university graduates, tech workers, and other people not usually associated with the underclass. This book decisively rectifies China’s absence from influential discourses of precarity over the last two decades; more subtly, it marshals resurging discussions in China studies and beyond on the increasingly troubled relation between aesthetics and politics under late capitalism. It is the stakes of cultural production that are most salient in Hillenbrand’s searing study: do aesthetic practices that reincite class as a political category assume or reject their own commodification? In other words, are the cultural practices in Hillenbrand’s consideration independent from the material determinations from which they emerge? Continue reading On the Edge review →

Hong Kong Crime Films review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of of Tom Cunliffe’s review of Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986, by Kristof Van den Troost. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/cunliffe/. My thanks to Shaoling Ma, our media studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Hong Kong Crime Films:
Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986

By Kristof Van den Troost

Reviewed by Tom Cunliffe

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright April, 2025)

Kristof Van den Troost, Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986 Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. 256 pages, ISBN 9781399521772 (Paperback)/ 9781399521765 (Hardback).

The term “Hong Kong crime film” conjures up numerous images, and ubiquitous among them would probably be Chow Yun-fat 周潤發 wielding dual pistols in a John Woo movie. But what of the rich history of Hong Kong crime cinema and its many sub-genres from the 1950s to the mid-1980s before Woo and others came along and shook the industry up? What of this genre’s complex relationship with Hong Kong society? How have crime films continuously exploited ambiguities in their representation of cops and gangsters? How did the politics of image making develop as colonial censorship protocols morphed? And how was cinematic realism shaped by a contesting array of forces? Kristof Van den Troost sets out to answer these questions and many more in this passionately written and extremely well researched study of Hong Kong crime films during this period. In the process, it lays out a huge watchlist for any crime film aficionado of films rarely written about in English or Chinese. Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986 fills in several blanks in Hong Kong film history in its exhaustive coverage of the various sub-genres within Hong Kong crime cinema before the explosive success of A Better Tomorrow (英雄本色, 1986) kickstarted the heyday of the genre in the mid-to-late 1980s. Such achievements could inspire further research projects on Hong Kong film and media history. Understanding the roots and development of the crime film genre also explains the genre’s continuing popularity in Hong Kong, as exemplified by the recent huge success of Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (九龍城寨之圍城, 2024). Continue reading Hong Kong Crime Films review →

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Wen-chi Li’s review of Queer Literature in the Sinosphere, edited by Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/wen-chi-li/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere

Edited by Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma

Reviewed by Wen-chi Li

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright March, 2025)

Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, eds., Queer Literature in the Sinosphere London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. xii + 284 pp. ISBN 9781350415331 (Hardback) / ISBN 9781350415355 (ePDF) / ISBN 9781350415348 (eBook)

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere, edited by Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, arrives at a pivotal moment when queer communities are gaining more visibility worldwide. The editors first justify their choice of using “queer literature in the Sinosphere” rather than terms such as “queer Chinese literature” or “queer Sinophone literature.” Whereas the former privileges China, the latter excludes works from the PRC. They adopt the term “Sinosphere,” as proposed by Chris Berry, to encompass all works in Sinitic languages. I am particularly impressed by the book’s introduction, which offers a literary history while also pointing to key academic works for readers to gain a foundational understanding. The volume is divided into four sections—“Trans Formation,” “Queer Women’s Spaces,” “Queer Intersectionality,” and “In Queer Memory”—and explores diverse dimensions of queer literature.

In the first section, “Trans Formation,” three scholars examine the possibilities of transgender identities within Chinese contexts. Aixia Huang revisits male homoerotic literature from the Ming-Qing period, highlighting how male characters often undergo male-to-female gender crossing to preserve their relationships with male lovers; the adoption of trans-femininity rationalizes or legitimizes their intimacy with men. This transformation is sometimes driven by practical concerns, such as improving their social or living conditions. Continue reading Queer Literature in the Sinosphere review →

Interview with Kenneth Pai Hsien-yung

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of “Behind the Scenes with the White Peony: An Interview with Kenneth Pai Hsien-yung,” interviewed and translated by Ursula Friedman. Too long to post in its entirety, find a teaser below. For the full interview, go to its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/friedman/.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Behind the Scenes with the White Peony:
An Interview with Kenneth Pai Hsien-yung

Interviewed and translated by Ursula Friedman

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January 2025)

Figure 1: Pai Hsien-yung. National Taiwan University, 2014. Photo by Yang Chenhao for Life Magazine.

[*Note: The interview was conducted in Santa Barbara on February 25, 2023. Passages in blue were originally spoken in Mandarin Chinese; those in black in English.]

Ursula Friedman (UF):  You were isolated for five years as a child due to a contagious strain of tuberculosis. How did this period of isolation influence your creative writing and shape your personality?

Kenneth Pai (KP):  My grandmother originally lived in the countryside in Guilin, Guangxi province. Later, my father invited her into our home, and I lived next door to her. She was very kind to me. We would cook special meals for her, like chicken soup, and she would share with me. We didn’t know that she had tuberculosis (TB). I caught it from her when I was seven or eight years old. Then, when the Japanese arrived, we fled to Chongqing, and I ran a mild fever every day. After an X-ray screening, they found that a large area on my left lung had been infected, leaving a gaping hole. Second-stage TB. I remember that after seeing the X-ray, my father’s face fell. He was very anxious. That was during the Sino-Japanese War, when many people caught the disease, and there was no special cure. Many people died of lung disease, it was almost a fatal diagnosis. I was very lucky, because our family could afford to drink milk and eat chicken, keep up good nutrition, and then I got calcium injections every day to calcify my lungs. I was quarantined for four, almost five years, until I was 14. Why? Because there were so many children in our family.

TB was a highly contagious disease at the time. So I lost my childhood years. I didn’t have a childhood. I saw children playing outside, but I was locked in a small room all by myself. I remember that little room in Chongqing. Chongqing is a mountainous place—have you ever been to the mainland? Chongqing has changed a lot recently. When I was in Chongqing, it was all muddy, yellow soil, but now it has been transformed into a modern city. We lived halfway up a mountain. And my little room, separated off from the others, was nestled on the foot of the mountain. I watched the activities down below from above—my brothers, my cousins—the children all playing down below. Anyway, I felt that I was deserted, abandoned. So I became very—I wasn’t like that before! My mother used to say that I was a very active child! I was even overbearing. Lung disease changed my entire being, and I became very sensitive. People were all afraid of approaching me, because I was sick, they were afraid of getting too close. My brothers and sisters all gave me a wide birth. Second, I became very sensitive to other people’s pain. Since I was sick myself, it was easy to understand the pain in other people’s hearts and develop empathy for them. . . [click here for full text]

The Anaconda in the Chandelier review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Jeffrey Kinkley’s review of The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China, by Perry Link. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/kinkley2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Anaconda in the Chandelier:
Writings on China

By Perry Link

Reviewed by Jeffrey C. Kinkley

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)

Perry Link, The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China Perry Link. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2025. viii + 287 pp. ISBN 9781589881983 (paper)

Perry Link’s eminence as scholar and as public intellectual is well known to most MCLC readers. His pioneering scholarship on twentieth-century Chinese popular narratives and on the linguistic inventiveness of Chinese oral and written expression more generally is embodied in full-length monographs,[1] supplemented by studies of the circulation of Mao-era printed novels and unapproved hand-copied manuscripts, as well as essays on comedians’ dialogues (xiangsheng 相声) of the Mao and post-Mao years. Link’s 2007 essay on xiangsheng in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC) serves as a bang-up penultimate chapter for The Anaconda in the Chandelier.[2] The book prints in total thirty-one of Link’s 1998-2023 short and medium-length essays, book reviews, and prefaces, including a number of Link’s longer and more academic articles, together with their footnotes. Most are reprints—with revisions, says the preface, but changes are scarcely visible. Many of these contributions take on the dark task of explaining the finely tuned mechanics, psychology, and social psychology of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control of Chinese communication through censorship, pre-censorship, and, above all, the creation of an unconscious, second-nature self-censorship among writers and the general public. Link calls the condition “fossilized fear.” That was the subject of a landmark monograph from Princeton University Press he published in 2000—on the “uses” of literature in China.[3] He updated the story in newsy and learned essays published in The New York Review of Books and various op-ed and human rights forums. (NYRB-related contributions make up about half of the essays anthologized in The Anaconda in the Chandelier.) The author’s expertise, Chinese friends and informants, and ever-critical yet always humanely empathetic social probings enabled what is probably now his best-known research: historical and biographical accounts of Chinese dissidence and protest. That focus, too, dates back to the 1980s, when he began to translate, edit, and publish short fiction and essays by freethinking PRC writers who surfaced, or, like Liu Binyan 刘宾雁, resurfaced, after the demise of Mao.[4] Consideration of the 1989 June Fourth massacre accelerated Link’s major collaborative academic projects and human rights activism, which includes documenting and explaining the before-and-after of China’s nationwide 1989 calamity, the Charter 08 movement, and the life story of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波.[5] Through it all, Link has pursued yet another vocation: teaching in and administering Chinese language programs, while coproducing textbooks for them.[6] Continue reading The Anaconda in the Chandelier review →

Disoriented Disciplines review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Carles Prado-Fonts’ review of Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature, by Rosario Hubert. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/prado-fonts/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Disoriented Disciplines: China,
Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature

By Rosario Hubert

Reviewed by Carles Prado-Fonts

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)

Rosario Hubert, Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2023. 328 pp. ISBN 9780810146556 (paperback); 9780810146563 (hardcover); 9780810146570 (ebook).

The study of Sinographies, or “the particular forms of writing that produce and convey (within China as well as without it) the meanings of China,”[1] has become a meeting point where scholarship from Chinese studies, historiography, and comparative literature merge and interact in productive ways. To be sure, these studies differ depending on each scholar’s background, as well as on their scope and concerns. But, as a whole, they form a field that has now already gone a long way since its original formulation, which mostly covered writings about China in hegemonic Western contexts. The pioneering works of Haun Saussy, Eric Hayot, Christopher Bush, and a few others have now been enlarged, supplemented, and problematized from new angles and new linguistic perspectives, as well as with the aid of archives.

The study of Sinographies in Latin America is an excellent example of such fertile evolution. The past few years have seen a wide array of contributions that study the meanings of “China” in Latin America. Works by scholars such as Araceli Tinajero, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Ignacio López Calvo, and Kathleen López have recently been expanded in new directions by contributions from Andrea Bachner, Monica DeHart, Junyoung Verónica Kim, Ana Paulina Lee, Jorge Locane, Maria Montt Strabucchi, Brenda Rupar, and Laura J. Torres-Rodríguez, among many others.[2] Thus, while a common trope in prefaces and introductions may still claim that China in Latin America is a new and under-researched topic, the fact is that solid scholarship already exists about it—in Spanish and English. The future also looks promising: not only because there is a massive archive that has not yet been fully explored, but also because of the theoretical potential of these discoveries to come. As a “South-South” interaction that escapes the logic of hegemonic scholarship, the study of China in Latin America can raise pertinent critical questions in discussions about truly global and transnational issues. Continue reading Disoriented Disciplines review →

Vol 36, no. 2 of MCLC

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ImageMCLC is pleased to announce publication of vol. 36, no. 2 (Dec. 2024). The table of contents appears below with links to abstracts and, in one case (“Pedagogical Engines”), to a full-text pdf. 

Natascha Gentz and Christopher Rosenmeier, editors

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture
Volume: 36, Number: 2 (December, 2024)

The above issue is now available online.

Note from the Editors
By Natascha Gentz and Christopher Rosenmeier

Promoting Industriousness and Patriotism among Chinese Youth: Lin Shu’s Biography of Two Patriotic Children
By  Zhang Wen and Joseph Ciaudo

Pedagogical Engines: Train Anthropomorphism in 1930s Chinese Children’s Magazines
By  Aolan Mi

Nietzsche’s Übermensch, Lu Xun’s Zhen de ren, and the Emergence of the Anti-fable 
By Eric Hodges and Soraj Hongladarom

In Ceaseless Pursuit of “A Good Art for the Public”: Reinterpreting Lu Xun’s Promotion of Creative Woodcuts in Republican China
By  Wei Wu

Modernist Techniques in Wang Zengqi’s Fiction from the 1940s to the 1980s 
By Tao Peng

The Uneasy Entanglement with the Socialist Legacy: Remapping Avant-Garde Theatre in Post-Socialist China
By Hongjian Wang

Six Poems by Mu Cao

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of “Six Poems by Mu Cao,” translated by Hongwei Bao. The translations, along with the original Chinese poems, appear below and at their online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/mu-cao/. As previously announced on the blog, Mu Cao is a recent winner of the Prince Claus Impact Award.

Kirk Denton, MCLC
Six Poems by Mu Cao

By Mu Cao 墓草

Translated by Hongwei Bao

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright December 2024)

Photo credit: Fan Popo.

[Translator’s note: The following poems are presented with Chinese version first, followed by its English translation. The dates at the end of the poems indicate when the poems were first written. The author’s and translator’s bios can be found at the end. I have opted to present all the translated lines in lower case.] 

蚂蚁

为了停留在人世间
我强暴地压抑自己
为了感觉生命的存在
我把自身和一只蚂蚁比较

我看到蚂蚁用强忍的牙齿
向野兽说话
我看到另一只冷漠的蚂蚁
带着他的技术
去远方流浪

（2006年9月11日）

ants

to survive in this world
i forcefully suppress myself
to feel the existence of my being
i imagine myself to be ants

i see an ant challenge a beast
clenching its unyielding teeth
i see another ant
take his craft
and leave, drifting in an unknown world

(September 11, 2006) Continue reading Six Poems by Mu Cao →

Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to annnounce publication of Chuanhui Meng’s review of Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation, by Sheldon H. Lu. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/chuanhui-meng/. My thanks to Shaoling Ma, our film/media studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication. This is Prof. Ma’s first review since she replaced Jason McGrath in that position.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Contemporary Chinese Cinema and
Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation

By Sheldon H. Lu

Reviewed by Chuanhui Meng

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright December, 2024)

Sheldon H. Lu, Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Xi + 256 pp. ISBN 978-1350234185 (hardcover)

Zhang Yimou’s 张艺谋 2016 blockbuster production The Great Wall (长城) presents a fantastical narrative where foreign mercenaries join forces with Chinese defenders to protect the Great Wall, and by extension the Chinese nation, from monstrous and foreign invasions. The film’s story and production embody two seemingly contradictory aspects. On the one hand, the diegetic narrative aims to consolidate the “border” of the Chinese nation by fortifying the Great Wall against external threats. On the other hand, the diegetic incorporation of friendly foreign forces and the extra-diegetic, transnational collaborations between U.S.-China-and-Japanese film production companies in the making of the film cross the proverbial “Great Wall” in today’s global film industry. These ongoing tensions—among nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization; among the “walling” and “de-walling” of culture and national borders—capture a central concern of Sheldon H. Lu’s most recent book Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture. In theorizing nation-building in contemporary China within the context of transnationalism and globalization, Lu examines this distinguished phenomenon of “walling,” defining it not primarily as “setting up physical barriers,” but more as “the selective, restrictive flow of information, ideas, and ideology” in both physical and virtual spaces (12). Continue reading Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture review →

One Man Talking review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Charles Laughlin’s review of One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939, edited and translated by Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/laughlin/. My thanks to Michael Hill, our translation/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

One Man Talking: Selected Essays
of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939

By Shao Xunmei
Edited and Translated Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala

Reviewed by Charles Laughlin
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright October, 2024)

Shao Xunmei, One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939 Edited and translated by Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2023. 454 pp. ISBN: 978-9629376604 (paper).

Over the past quarter century, there has been growing scholarly attention to Shao Xunmei 邵洵美 (1906-1968), initially as a poet, but increasingly as a publisher and cultural figure. One chapter of Leo Ou-fan Lee’s 1999 book Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945, introduces Shao as a decadent poet alongside the “dandy” Ye Lingfeng 葉靈鳳, but also devotes space to his important role in the publishing industry.[1] In 2001, Jonathan Hutt published an article entitled “La Maison d’Or: The Sumptuous World of Shao Xunmei.” In 2016, Jicheng Sun and Harold Swindall published a collection of Shao’s poetry in English translation, The Verse of Shao Xunmei. More recently, in 2020, is Tian Jin’s critical study of Shao’s poetry, The Condition of Music: Anglophone Influences in the Poetry of Shao Xunmei.

Parallel to this increased attention to Shao’s poetry, Paul Bevan has published extensively on Western impacts on Republican era print culture with a particular emphasis on illustrated magazines, and these works have fleshed out Shao Xunmei’s broader profile as a cultural figure. In 2018, Bevan published a monograph on Shao Xunmei’s Modern Miscellany (時代畫報), and in 2020 he brought out “Intoxicating Shanghai”—An Urban Montage: Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines in Shanghai’s Jazz Age, a broader study on pictorial magazines based in Shanghai and their contributing artists. Bevan has also published a journal article on Mexican illustrator Miguel Covarrubias’ momentous encounter with 1930s Shanghai and his impact on its visual print culture (2021), and more recently a book chapter on Shao’s bookshop The Golden House and his relationship with translation (2024), both of which overlap with the content of One Man Talking. One Man Talking can thus be seen as a collection of source materials on Shao Xunmei that supplements Bevan’s research on Shao and his milieu, that establishes Shao as a cultural figure using his own (prose) voice. This effort is aided by the editors’ collaboration with Shao’s daughter Shao Xiaohong, who provided valuable materials, including an essay on Shao’s wartime publication efforts, and to whose memory the book is dedicated. The book also features a foreword by Leo Ou-fan Lee, translations and commentary by co-editor Susan Daruvala, Michel Hockx, Helen Wang, and Sun Xinqi. Continue reading One Man Talking review →

The Typesetter

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Ping Zhu’s translation “The Typesetter,” by Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writer Shen Yuzhong. The translation appears below and at its online home (which also includes the Chinese original): https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/the-typesetter/. My thanks to Ping Zhu for sharing her work with the MCLC community.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Typesetter 排字人

By Shen Yuzhong 沈禹鐘 (1889–1971)[1]

Translated by Ping Zhu

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September 2024)

The first page of the Chinese original in Red Magazine.

This story is a satire of the concept of “literature of blood and tears” (血和泪的文学) proposed by Zheng Zhenduo 郑振铎 in 1921. Instead of representing the blood and tears of the proletariat, Shen Yuzhong, a Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies author, wrote the story from the perspective of a worker who observes the literal “literature of blood and tears” produced by a writer. The Chinese original follows the translation.–Ping Zhu

The clanging of the bell in the printing factory wakes Wang Qin from his morning slumber. Rubbing his tired eyes, he knows it’s time to go to work at the factory again. He gets up grudgingly, puts on his clothes, grabs a basin, goes downstairs to fetch some water, and returns to his room to wash his face and neck. He lives in a small back room on the second floor, rented from a sub-landlord for five silver dollars a month. If you compare them to those of others in society, his living expenses are at the lowest level. However, Wang Qin’s earning capacity is quite weak; he only earns fifteen silver dollars a month at the factory. One-third of that goes to rent, the rest goes to food and clothing, leaving him perpetually worried about his hard life. Sometimes he thinks about changing his life, but that seems impossible. People’s lives are all assigned by capital, deeply oppressed by its forces. No matter what abilities you have, it’s difficult to struggle against capital.

The factory work starts every morning at seven, not long after the bell rings to wake the workers living nearby. Hearing the bell, everyone hurriedly bids farewell to their morning dreams and goes to obey its call. After washing up, Wang Qin also quickly goes out. He takes two copper coins from his pocket and buys some street food to eat along the way. This is his daily routine, not a one-off. When he arrives at the factory gate, he sees many of his coworkers streaming in. They’ve known each other for so long that they no longer bother with greetings or small talk. Once inside the factory, the workers take off their coats and start working amid the clatter of the machines. Continue reading The Typesetter →

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 →