Yue "Mara" DU 杜樂 - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Yue "Mara" DU 杜樂

• Xi Jinping’s vision for the “Great Rejuvenation of the Pan-Chinese Nation” and “China Dream” em... more • Xi Jinping’s vision for the “Great Rejuvenation of the Pan-Chinese Nation” and “China Dream” emphasises a shared ancestry and cultural identity among ethnic Chinese, both within China and abroad. Through “united front work,” the People’s Republic of China (PRC) thus seeks to unite “Chinese sons and daughters at home and abroad” under a common civilisational narrative.
• Since assuming power, Xi has routinely referred to both the “Chinese
diaspora”/“overseas Chinese” (huaqiao) and “foreign citizens of Chinese
descent”/“Chinese overseas” (huaren) as “overseas compatriots” (haiwai
qiaobao, “overseas siblings in diaspora”), blurring distinctions among the
various groups of ethnic Chinese, regardless of their citizenship status.
• This strategy of “uniting Chinese worldwide” builds on the deep historical ties that Chinese abroad forged with China in their struggles against racial
discrimination in host societies, which played a crucial role in the birth, survival, and revival of the pan-Chinese nation during the 20th century.
• Despite its rhetoric of unity and shared heritage, however, the PRC offers
limited legal and political protection to overseas Chinese. Unlike its Qing and
Republican predecessors, the PRC adopts nationality laws and policies that
create grey areas, often excluding ethnic Chinese from citizenship and rights,
undermining the cultural claims that it promotes.
• Overall, the PRC continues to prioritise strategic goals and political expediency over relationships with overseas Chinese seen as part of a nebulous pan-Chinese nation – useful discursively but ill-defined legally and politically.

This article discusses how the legendary general Yue Fei (1103-1142) and his legacy have been per... more This article discusses how the legendary general Yue Fei (1103-1142) and his legacy have been perceived and appropriated in Chinese history. Twentieth-century historians approached Yue's career by highlighting the tension between his dedication to the nation (baoguo) and his personal loyalty (jinzhong) to Emperor Gaozong (1107-1187) of the Song. I argue that for Yue Fei himself and those who wrote about him in late imperial China, Yue's guo, from which he derived his political identity and toward which he devoted his service, meant first and foremost the Song dynastic state. The pushing and pulling of multivalent themes of loyalty and state service in the "historic assessment" of Yue Fei since the turn of the twentieth century speak to the complexities embedded in different Chinese governments' navigation of ethnic and class politics in their pursuit of a new national identity for China.

This essay analyzes ritual and legal texts, case records, and judicial writings and consequently ... more This essay analyzes ritual and legal texts, case records, and judicial writings and consequently challenges the conventional understanding that equates parental authority in late-imperial China with the authority of the father or "head of household" (jia zhang 家長). It traces the gradual development of a child's mourning obligations done equally toward father and mother from the Tang dynasty onward, and it shows how father's and mother's authority was symmetrically upheld in Qing judicial practice regardless of the biological mother's position, or lack thereof, in the child's father's patriline. The logic underlying the late-imperial elevation of the mother's status in both ritual and law was the increasing emphasis on the child's obligation and natural desire to repay the "debt" (en 恩) that he/she naturally owed both parents. While the emotional bond between mother and child was important in social life, the source of legally-buttressed maternal power was state sponsorship of the authority of fathermother (fumu 父母)-a bi-gendered concept lying at the heart of formal ritual-legal establishments of an empire that "ruled through the principle of filial piety."

On July 8, 1890, Xue Fucheng (1838-94), the Qing government's ambassador to Great Britain, France... more On July 8, 1890, Xue Fucheng (1838-94), the Qing government's ambassador to Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy, received an inquiry from the Zongli yamen, the Qing central bureau in charge of "affairs of various countries" (geguo shiwu) since the early 1860s. Yamen administrators wondered about the attitude of major European countries toward the new republican government established in Brazil in 1889. Citing official communication from the new Brazilian government regarding the change of the country's form of government and Brazil's continuous observance of international treaties and obligations, the Yamen conceded that replacing a monarchy with a republic was an established practice in the "Western" (taixi) international legal system; however, to regard the change of regime as "final" (dingju) depended upon whether or not the world's major independent countries (zizhu zhi daguo) recognized the new government. The Yamen asked Xue to report on European countries' reactions toward this regime change in Brazil, which would help Beijing decide whether or not to formally receive the new ambassador sent by the Brazilian Republic. Xue had negative opinions on the military coup that led to the establishment of a "democracy" (minzhu zhi guo, a standard translation of "republic" during this period). But Xue's major concern was that only France and the United States had formally recognized the new Brazilian government, while Britain, Russia, Germany, and Italy adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Xue recommended the same for the Qing, requesting the Yamen to suspend recognition

This article examines the intense debates over the New Criminal Code of Great Qing (Da-Qing xin x... more This article examines the intense debates over the New Criminal Code of Great Qing (Da-Qing xin xinglü) in the National Assembly (Zizheng yuan) during the Qing empire's New Policy Reform (1901-11). The focus is on the conflict between those who drafted and supported the new code and those who expressed reservations, especially over reform of the laws on filial piety and fornication. The issue of reconfiguring the family and social order through law was closely related to the overarching agenda of twentieth century legal reform in China-making an empire that "ruled through the principle of filial piety" into a modern nation-state that had direct relationships with its citizens. More importantly, an analysis of the late Qing debate over family law enables this article to problematize such concepts as "Chinese" and "Western" during this crucial moment of China's empire-to-nation transformation. It showcases the paradox of China's modern-era reforms-a contradiction between imposing Western-inspired order with a largely indigenous logic and maintaining existing sociopolitical order in the name of preserving national identity.

Tongyang, rearing daughters-in-law from childhood, was widely practiced as a form of bride price ... more Tongyang, rearing daughters-in-law from childhood, was widely practiced as a form of bride price marriage and transactional family building in late imperial and Republican China. Denounced as feudal and backward in twentieth-century public discourse, this time-honored and once legally-protected form of marriage went through significant law reforms in the Republican era. This article examines how the Nationalist Guomindang (GMD) party-state (1928-1949) re-conceptualized tongyang by introducing foreign-inspired notions of parenthood as duty-bound guardianship, and marriage as a union of free choice between spouses. The reformed law annulled the legal relationship between "parents-in-law" and their adoptive daughters-in-law, which enabled adoptive daughters in law and their natal parents to dissolve previously established tongyang arrangements through litigation. But outside the courtroom, the Nationalist state adopted a non-interventionist approach toward the practice of tongyang, and took no actions to identify people who violated the law. This particular way of reforming social customs through reforming the law limited the effect of the GMD anti-tongyang legislation on a deeply-rooted social practice. The Nationalist reform of the adoptive daughter-in-law provides historians with a useful lens to discuss the dilemma Nationalist lawmakers faced as they treaded between the lines of offending popular customs and enforcing a rigid new social order through law, the balance of which was intimately connected with the regime's legitimacy. Keywords adoptive daughter-in-law (tongyang xi)-transactional family-law in Republican China-judicial intervention-bride price © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 |

Using court cases culled from various national and local archives in China, this article examines... more Using court cases culled from various national and local archives in China, this article examines two strategies widely employed by Qing litigants to manipulate state-sponsored filiality to advance their perceived interests in court: "instrumental filicide to lodge a false accusation" and "false accusation of unfiliality." While Qing subjects were willing and able to exploit the legalized inequality between parent and child for profit-seeking purposes, the Qing imperial state tolerated such maneuvering so as to co-opt local negotiations to reinforce orthodox notions of the parent-child hierarchy in its subjects' everyday lives. Local actors, who appealed to the Qing legal promotion of parental dominance and filial obedience to empower themselves, were recruited into the Qing state's project of moral penetration and social control, with law functioning as a conduit and instrument that gave the design of "ruling the empire through the principle of filial piety" a concrete legal form in imperial governance.

This article explores the significance of the cult of Sun Yat-sen, often referred to as “Father o... more This article explores the significance of the cult of Sun Yat-sen, often referred to as “Father of the [modern Chinese] Nation” 國父 (Guofu), for Nationalist state-building in China. Although Sun Yat-sen’s title of Guofu was formalized only in 1940 as a result of competition over Nationalist Party (Guomindang, GMD) orthodoxy between opposing Nationalist regimes in Chongqing and Nanjing during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the term reflected the ongoing importance of Sun’s legacy in securing political legitimacy in the Chinese Republic. Overall, the GMD promulgated state-sponsored veneration of the Guofu to justify its political tutelage in the name of parental guardianship over the Chinese people. Yet Sun’s legacy allowed for multiple interpretations, which complicates any effort to lock this legacy to one political purpose. The development of different elements of the Guofu’s legacy by competing wartime regimes shows how it failed to provide a truly unifying tool for political legitimation.

This article explores concubinage, a widespread form of quasi-marriage in Qing China (1644–1911),... more This article explores concubinage, a widespread form of quasi-marriage in Qing China (1644–1911), and its relationship with motherhood and social mobility. By examining legal codes and court records, this research challenges the academic paradigm, mainly based on literati writings, that portrays concubines as reproductive tools for their husband-masters and their husband-masters' wives. It shows that bearing or raising sons or daughters helped concubines achieve upward social mobility recognized and protected by law and that motherhood remained the major source of power and security for concubines in the Qing. After household divisions, concubine-mothers gained lifelong custodial rights of property, which formally consolidated concubine-mothers' upward mobility from daughters or widows in lower-class families to matriarchs in well-to-do households.

This article considers the Qing formal judicial-administrative system in Mongolia and the Manchu-... more This article considers the Qing formal judicial-administrative system in Mongolia and the Manchu-Mongol marriage alliance together in the framework of rulership and law. In studying the Qing court's strategic handling of a 1771 criminal case involving a Mongol imperial son-in-law’s poisoning of his Manchu princess wife, this essay argues that Qing princesses as imperial agents enabled the Qing court to keep a watchful eye on Mongol elites who tended to compromise Qing interests. However, gendered tensions hidden in multi-layered Qing law rendered it difficult for the court to convey the message of justice with existing legal language when conflicts occurred.

Thesis Chapters by Yue "Mara" DU 杜樂

Parenthood and the State in China, 1644-1949: Law, Ritual, and State-Building

PhD Dissertation, New York University, September 2017.

Book Reviews by Yue "Mara" DU 杜樂

Philippe Major aims to achieve what appears to be impossible-to demonstrate that New Confucianism... more Philippe Major aims to achieve what appears to be impossible-to demonstrate that New Confucianism in Republican China was an antitradition, which was not conservative but iconoclastic. Major provides a close textual analysis of the two most successful texts of modern Confucianism-Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (1921; hereafter Eastern and Western Cultures), written by Liang Shuming (梁漱溟), and New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness (1932; hereafter New Treatise), written by Xiong Shili (熊十力)-with particular attention paid to their discourse on the role of tradition in human liberation and to the discursive techniques they employed to legitimize their discourse. By doing so, Major shows that modern Confucians emerged in the 1920s as a reaction against the May Fourth wholesale rejection of Confucianism. They owed much of their influence to their ability to adapt to the discursive milieu set up by May Fourth radicals that centered on the pursuit of human liberty, the ideal of philosophical systems, and the claim of scientific objectivity. And they owed much of their appeal to their readers' recognition of the authority of the classical texts they referred to. For me, the most important contribution of this book is the distinction Major makes between "tradition-as-history" and "tradition-as-value," "which made it possible to reject Confucianism's historical manifestations (tradition-as-history) and its enmeshment in state power as a deviation from the true spirit of the tradition, while simultaneously abstracting from the past a number of values purified from history (tradition-as-value)" ( ). Major makes this insightful observation by examining how Liang Shuming and Xiong Shili circumvented May Fourth iconoclasm, which presented Confucianism as emblematic of China's two thousand years of imperial rule and prevailing social evils. Modern Confucians admitted the defeat of Confucianism-as-history but claimed that Confucian tradition as they defined it-ideals imagined and lived by Confucius and a handful of individuals-could enable humankind to reach a universal future of rationality and emancipation that the May Fourth hegemony attempted to monopolize. This book is divided into two parts, with an "interlude" in between. Chapter 1, "Reviving the Spirit of Confucius," looks at how Liang Shuming, in the lectures he delivered amid the widespread disillusionment with Euro-American civilization following the First World War, integrated the desirability of Western liberal goals and the relevance of Chinese culture. Eventually becoming Eastern and Western Cultures, these lectures provided a metanarrative that contrasted a Eurocentric "West" and a Confucian "East." The latter was reduced to Confucius's ideal and spirit, which historical Confucianism never lived up to in practice. The ideal could not be preserved or inherited but had to be revived in the modern age as a cure for both the "East" and the "West" (55). Chapter 2, "Returning to the Origin," examines the "Confucian-Buddhist syncretism" created by Xiong Shili in his New Treatise. Any sign that would situate this syncretism temporarily or spatially seemed to have been erased from it. It was created, however, to present Chinese thought in a systematic way to fulfil Western and May Fourth criteria for "philosophy" and to transform the Chinese citizenry in certain ways to "answer to the national issues that

Amidst rising tensions between the United States and the People's Republic of China, Pete Willwoo... more Amidst rising tensions between the United States and the People's Republic of China, Pete Willwood's new book is a timely contribution that reminds us about the challenges the two countries faced and the successes they made in managing their engagement in the past. Like many other scholarly works, Willwood's book focuses on the formative years of US-PRC relations in the 1970s. This book distinguishes itself from mainstream diplomatic history, however, by looking beyond "great men" and concentrating on non-state actors and "people-to-people" exchanges outside formal diplomacy. The main source base is the archives of two US non-governmental organizations: the National Committee on United States-China Relations (NCUSCR) and the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China (CSCPRC). The author complements these newly available documents with records drawn from nearly 20 archives from across the United States and China. He argues that cultural and scientific exchange visits between Americans and Chinese before the normalization of US-PRC relations not only reconnected these two peoples but also exerted a powerful influence on the diplomatic relationship between the two governments. This book reveals how formal diplomacy conducted by Mao, Zhou, Nixon and Kissinger, and informal ones by athletes, artists and scholars were deeply connected and mutually constitutive. The six chapters in the main body of the book are preceded by a chapter-long prologue that examines the patterns of US and PRC Cold War-era exchange diplomacy before the Nixon era. Beijing mostly selected critics of the US government, many of whom were African American political radicals and emerging Left-leaning students, to visit China. In return, these Leftist cultural and political figures, W. E. B. Du Bois and Susan Shirk among them, were expected to write rosy reports about the PRC. Such reports were partly the results of highly choregraphed tours that the PRC designed to impress foreigners. Meanwhile, the status of the Republic of China on Taiwan, which the US government recognized as the government of China until 1978, became one of the most contested issues in exchanges, lasting into the rapprochement era under Nixon and beyond normalization. Chapter one, "By popular demand," examines 1971 and 1972. It traces how both Washington and Beijing approached the other country's citizens to indicate their interest in dialogue, which is best illustrated by the ping-pong breakthrough of April 1971 that preempted Kissinger and then Nixon's first visits to China. Chapter two, "Ping-pong diplomacy's return leg and after," covers spring 1972 to summer 1973. It explores the instrumental role played by the NCUSCR in building up US-PRC exchange contacts by hosting the return leg of ping-pong diplomacy in April 1972 and the Shenyang Acrobatic Troupe's visit to the US in December 1972. During this period, the NCUSCR and the CSCPRC gained dominance in exchange diplomacy, which was backed up by the US government. Chapter three, "New liaisons," studies the rest of 1973 to the end

remarks that he makes in passing in the text, and, in one case, by an entire chapter (ch. 6, "Dom... more remarks that he makes in passing in the text, and, in one case, by an entire chapter (ch. 6, "Domestic Partnerships in Iberia"). This awareness, however, did not get translated into the bold generalizations, particularly the one about Northern Europe, that are a principal feature of the book.

For understandable reasons, existing scholarship on Asianism heavily focuses on Japanese (pan-)As... more For understandable reasons, existing scholarship on Asianism heavily focuses on Japanese (pan-)Asianism in the context of Japanese imperialism, even though recent studies have proposed complicated frameworks that highlight various forms of Japanese Asianism in different historical periods that could serve as either an anti-hegemonic discourse or an instrument of Japanese imperialism. The biggest contribution of Dr. Smith's new book, Chinese Asianism, -, is treating Asianism as a product of the dialogue between Chinese and Japanese intellectuals against the backdrop of the global trend of internationalism and pan movements. The book is organized both chronologically and thematically. It traces how Asianism was developed and perceived by Chinese intellectuals in China and Japan in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The journey of Chinese Asianism is presented as moving from Confucian Asianism, to racial Asianism, to civilizational Asianism, to socialist utopian Asianism, to Asianism as a means to save weak and small nations, to political Asianism led by China, and eventually to political Asianism led by Japan. For Smith, these categories of Asianism are neither strictly temporally defined nor mutually exclusive. But such categorization does enable the author to clearly display how Asianism intersected with dominant paradigms and concepts in turbulent times. Chapter , "Lips and Teeth," studies the real interest among Chinese and Japanese intellectuals in Sino-Japanese alliance, or even unity, around the time of the  Hundred Day Reform. Through detailed analysis of various leading voices and influential translations, Smith shows how some of the key concepts of Asianism were established during this period-shared script and cultural history by China and Japan, the same "yellow" race of the Chinese and the Japanese, their common fear of Western aggressiveness, and the use of Western frameworks of political thought to imagine a truly Eastern society. Smith also refutes the "Golden Decade" paradigm prominent in current research of Sino-Japanese intellectual exchange between  and , disclosing the distain of Chinese intellectuals that existed beneath the surface of enthusiasm. Chapter , "Jaws and Jowls," focuses on the Datong school in Japan, which was a network of educational institutions operating in Japan's China towns. The Datong school was associated with some prominent Chinese public figures of the time, such as Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and Sun Yat-sen. Discarding the intellectual discourse proposing that Japan leave Asia, Chinese intellectuals in Japan imagined a future that was both Asian and modern. And they espoused a

Parenthood and the State in China, 1644-1949: Law, Ritual, and State-Building

PhD Dissertation, New York University, September 2017.

Book Review, The Power of Print in Modern China by Robert Culp

In Imperial China, the idea of filial piety not only shaped family relations but was also the ide... more In Imperial China, the idea of filial piety not only shaped family relations but was also the ideology by which Qing China was governed. State and Family in China: Filial Piety and Its Modern Reform examines the relationship between politics and intergenerational family relations in China from the Qing period to 1949, focusing on changes in family law, parent-child relationships, and the Chinese state during this period. highlights how the Qing dynasty treated the state-sponsored parent-child hierarchy as the axis around which Chinese family and political power relations were constructed and maintained. It shows how, following the fall of the Qing in 1911, reform of filial piety law in the Republic of China became the basis of state-directed family revolution, playing a vital role in China’s transition from an empire to a nation-state.