The Qing Opening to the Ocean: Chinese Maritime Policies, 1684-1757. By Gang Zhao. (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2013. Pp. viii, 267. $56.00.) (original) (raw)
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China and the World -the World and China Volume 2 Transcultural Perspectives on Late Imperial China, 2019
A wide range of topics is covered in this collection of four volumes of essays in honor of Rudolf G. Wagner. The expansive time frame from pre-modern to contemporary China in China and the World-the World and China reflect the breadth of his own scholarship. The essays are also testimony to his ability to connect with scholars across the globe, across disciplines and generations. The first volume (Transcultural Perspectives on Pre-modern China) brings together a set of contributions relating to the pre-modern period which reveals thematic clusters that correspond to the three main periods of Chinese pre-modern history. While the first six contributions on the early China period focus on conceptual questions of text interpretation and reconstruction, the following five on medieval China all deal with religious topics whereas the last four contributions, covering the late imperial period, address issues of the entangled relationship between the self and the exterior. The contributions in the second volume (Transcultural Perspectives on Late Imperial China) are linked by a common interest in questions of transculturality, hybridity, contact zones and third spaces. These are concepts and ideas quite central to Rudolf G. Wagner's scholarly oeuvre. Each of the contributions addresses these notions in their own particular manner, sometimes more, sometimes less explicitly. But there is more: the authors in this volume also share an interest in the hidden, the unsaid, the unknown-forgotten people and objects become main protagonists. In addition, the importance of translation as a cultural practice and new perceptions and understandings of the role of translation in Late Qing cross-and transcultural interactions and the significant impact of particular actor networks involved in these translations emerge as two more common questions addressed throughout this volume. The studies in the third volume (Transcultural Perspectives on Modern China) span a long twentieth century of cultural production in China. All of them, each in a different manner, deal with one crucially important set of questions, one that has been very much at the heart of Rudolf G. Wagner's work: questions of readership and reception, and, related to this, of persuasion, legitimation and trust: how does one successfully draw an audience in China; how does one convince; what is an effective rhetorics or argumentation? The fourth and last volume (Transcultural Perspectives on Global China) is testimony to the imprint Rudolf G. Wagner has made beyond many borders, with contributions from Indo logy to Egyptology and Theology, from world history, to world literature, to Esperanto as a world language, and talking about travelling concepts and objects such as tea, comics, and knowledge. This volume also contains a number of reminiscences about Rudolf G. Wagner, the border-crosser: his radical bonmots, his role as great master-teacher for people from many different walks of life, in short, his expansiveness, … and more.
The China Quarterly, 2008
Four decades ago, Benjamin Schwartz opened his book In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West by reflecting on the phantasmagoric nature of received wisdom about the objective status of cultural difference. He observed: "Few would claim that the West which has emerged out of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries forms an easily apprehended synthesis on any level-political, social, or intellectual. Yet when we turn our gaze outward to the non-Western world, that which has been obscure suddenly becomes clear. The West suddenly assumes the guise of a fixed, known quantity. " 1 Schwartz was targeting a mode of reflexive and negative knowledge that had dominated public opinion and scholarship on China, and he did so in a time when the Cold War area studies was in full swing. Have things changed much since he wrote the above? To be sure, Schwartz was neither the first nor the last to take notice of the kinds of unsettling aporia that seem to dwell at the heart of any positive assertions about the objectivity of what is known about China or the West. As recent as Harry Harootunian's book History's Disquiet, the author had to remind us again of a central irony in Asian studies: Asia does not exist by itself as an object, and whatever goes by that name is a simulacrum or a self-fulfilling prophesy of Asian studies. 2 The past few decades have witnessed a thoroughgoing critique of knowledge and modernity by postcolonial scholars following the work of Edward Said, resulting in what one might call a paradigm shift in historical scholarship in North America and elsewhere. In this general climate, the field of Chinese studies has made huge strides as evidenced by the steady output of sophisticated new works in social, cultural, and literary histories that are aimed to deepen our understanding of the processes of modernity in the late Qing and the twentieth century. As confidence in our general accumulated knowledge about modern China grows, the urgency to engage with the sorts of epistemological issues that had worried Schwartz diminishes proportionately in our field with only a few exceptions. One reason for this phenomenon, I suspect, is a shared sense of boredom with selfreflection as well as a lack of inspiration for tackling the subject in innovative ways. Whatever it is, I believe it is premature to declare that we have laid the ghost of the West to rest when the mental juggling of reflexivity and negativity contin
Translating China to the Atlantic West: Self, other, and Lin Yutang's resistance
Atlantic Studies: Global Currents , 2018
This article examines how the Chinese author and translator Lin Yutang challenged the misconstructions of China in the Atlantic West. From the perspective of the inhabitants of the Pacific Rim, the Atlantic is considered a symbol and metaphor for the union of the West (Europe and North America). Due to significant cultural and linguistic differences, China has frequently been misrepresented by Atlantic nations. Within this context, the leading translation theorist Lin Yutang conceived two key translation concepts, tongshun (通顺, fluency) and zhongshi (忠实, fidelity, faithfulness), as powerful weapons to fight against this trend of false recognition. This article analyzes Lin’s means of representing China by looking at (para)textual materials he produced. It explores how Lin combines tongshun and zhongshi to forge a space of zhongyong (中庸, central harmony), a space that reveals the unceasing efforts in mediating, through the translator’s balancing act, between his “Chinese Self” and “Atlantic-Western Other.” The space of zhongyong can be read as Lin’s creation that goes beyond the confines of strict “surrendering” and “withstanding.” Lin’s translation of China to the Atlantic nations therefore presents the possibility of transcending the limits of traditional representations, and offers a renewed understanding of the relationship between China and the Atlantic West.
Afterword. Notes on Rereading and Re-enacting “China”
Rereading Travellers to the East
In Europe, the historical representation and narration of China and the Orient more in general from an outsider’s point of view has conjured up an exotic and a-historical image of a poetical, mystical and refined civilization. In Walpole’s Britain, for example, “the argument from the Chinese”—namely, the admiration for a prosperous and densely populated kingdom which did not belong to a single faith—was frequently used in religious disputes when claiming a wider or more coherent policy of tolerance or seeking to cut down the prerogatives of the clerical hierarchies. This chapter explores further Western uses of "the argument from the Chinese" in modern times and through different media (Antonioni; Yanne; Martin).
Review Essay: Transnational and Global Processes in Modern Chinese History
Journal of International and Global Studies, 2013
A book review essay of Prasenjit Duara, The Global and Regional in China’s Nation Formation (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2009) and Bryna Goodman and David S. G. Goodman, eds., Twentieth-century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday, and the World (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).
One thing that struck this reviewer was the absence of the war in the daily lives of people living in rural Sichuan. The book takes place during the Second-Sino Japanese War (1937)(1938)(1939)(1940)(1941)(1942)(1943)(1944)(1945) and the Chinese Civil War (1945)(1946)(1947)(1948)(1949) that came after it. Shen Baoyuan was in Sichuan because Yenching University in Beijing was forced to close and move as the Japanese occupied large swaths of northern and eastern China. Yet, the war is conspicuously absent from the daily level of her subjects of inquiry. This is perhaps a testament to the variations of wartime experiences had by people living in the countryside in the interior as opposed to people living in coastal and northern regions which were under Japanese occupation.
International Journal of Asian Studies, 2016
This article focuses on recent revisionist scholarship demonstrating that China's maritime history in the period 1500 to 1630 is no longer a case of ‘missed opportunity’, a viewpoint fostered by earlier writing dominated by state-centric and land-focused models. To challenge this perspective, this study first reviews analyses demonstrating the far-reaching commercial networks between Ming China and localities in Southeast and Northeast Asia, and then considers the impact of the metaphor of Fernand Braudel's ‘Asian Mediterranean’ and his ideas about ‘world economy’ on the study of East Asian seafaring history. Secondly, this investigation reveals the dimensions of Chinese trade networks which the mid-Ming government officially sanctioned, as well as the extent to which literati from the southern provinces challenged the state's involvement in overseas commerce of trade and exchange. Finally, the article assesses how modern historians have studied late Ming maritime defens...
Sinographies contains within its pages a wide array of theoretical explorations, literary critical elucidations, textual studies, historical investigations, and personal ruminations of what it means to write "China" and "Chineseness". The China that emerges from these pages is plural not primarily because of differences in political and cultural geography, but mostly because of the contributors' shared interest in the processes through which the meanings of "China" and "Chineseness" are produced. The starting point is that "China is written," not in the sense of a text to be deciphered, but rather of a writing process: "'China' is not something one thinks about but something one thinks through" (xi).
Sino-speak: Chinese Exceptionalism and the Politics of History
Journal of Asian Studies, 2012
This article examines how recent books by academics and public intellectuals are reshaping the discourse of the rise of China. While earlier trends argued that China was being socialized into the norms of international society, many texts now proclaim that due to its unique civilization China will follow its own path to modernity. Such books thus look to the past – China’s imperial history –for clues not only about China’s future, but also about the world’s future. This discourse, which could be called “Sino-speak,” presents an essentialized Chinese civilization that is culturally-determined to rule Asia, if not the world. The article notes that nuanced readings of China’s historical relations with its East Asian neighbors provide a critical entry into a more critical analysis of popular declarations of “Chinese exceptionalism.” But it concludes that this critical analysis is largely overwhelmed by the Sino-speak tsunami.