Buddhist Healing in Medieval China and Japan, edited by C. Pierce Salguero and Andrew Macomber Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World, edited by C. Pierce Salguero, Kin Cheung, and Susannah Deane

In the western theoretical system of “Modernity”, terms such as “pre-modern”, “early modern”, “modern early “, “modern”, “post-modern”, and “modern and contemporary” are very popular. In addition, although the interpretation system established by the academic circles for the research of “modernization” and “Modernity” provides a broad and solid thinking paradigm, it seems to be unable to match with China's national conditions. The theory of “Bie-modern” put forward by Professor Wang Jianjiang was an original concept in the field of aesthetic modernity. The three backgrounds of this theory are not only unique in the field of aesthetics. Today's Chinese society integrates “highly modern”, “pre-modern” and “post-modern”, which is applicable to such a background for any subject field. China's academic field is facing the problem of “Bie-modern”, rather than the problem of modernity and post modernity in the West academics. On the one hand, the theory of “Bie-modern” provides original thinking for China to construct modernity theory based on its own development logic; On the other hand, it also provides another “modern vision” for the whole modern world. The development of Chinese modern design history is also in such a diversified modernity. It is extremely unbalanced in region, different in system, diverse in development path and continuous in depth. The research on the periodization of Chinese modern design history has encountered the embarrassment of unclear distinction between “modern” and “contemporary”. In fact, the discipline of design history may follow the growth path of “bie-modern”. The development of design in modern history has encountered a very complex reality. Xiaoou Cao once argued that “Chinese modern design was born in modern China”, and academician Shiling Zheng also pointed out that “modern architecture in Shanghai itself includes modern architecture”. This kind of “awkward” expression in the field of design history shows that the “dislocation” and “discord” in Chinese modern design and Chinese modern design history showing the form of “bie-modern”. The introduction of “Bie-modern” theory into the study of Chinese modern design history is an appropriate return of local theory. It is the interpretation and application of a creative theory aimed at China's special “Bie-modern” social form and institutional culture in the staging of design history. By borrowing the “Bie-modern” theory, the paper firstly analyzed the reasons for this situation, and then summarizes three important reference principles for the periodization of Chinese modern design history through the historical review, research and discussion of the breaking limit of the periodization of Chinese modern architectural history: the staging difference between general history and special history The non antagonistic relationship between “China Centered Theory” and subject ontology, as well as modern architecture and modern architecture. Clearly put forward three basic assumptions about the stages of Chinese modern and modern design history. One is to take the Central Academy of Arts and crafts established in 1956 as the beginning of Chinese modern design. The other is to turn the design history before 1949 into modern design history, followed by Chinese modern design history. The third is to divide modern, modern and modern design history into three independent stages. The staging of Chinese modern design history can provide a reference framework for its research towards clearer, accurate and in-depth research.

Reviewed by: China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia David Christian Peter C. Perdue , China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. 752 pp., illus., maps. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. ISBN 067401684X. $35.00. China Marches West is a massive and important book. It is richly researched, profoundly intelligent, sharply focused, and rich in its historiographical implications. It is also beautifully produced; both the maps and the illustrations are gorgeous. At its core is what will surely prove a definitive contemporary account of a fundamental yet neglected topic: the closing of the ancient Eurasian frontier between steppe and sown lands as a result of the Qing conquest of modern Xinjiang. Perdue argues that the closing of the Eurasian frontier was as momentous an event in Eurasian history as the closing of the American frontier was according to the Turner thesis. What makes this book so valuable for those who are not China specialists (such as the author of this review) is that Perdue uses the distinctive perspective of his central theme to illuminate many fundamental issues in modern historiography and world history. These include the nature and origins of modernity, how we conceptualize states and empires of the modern world, how states and empires conceptualized and represented themselves, how "the frontier" played out in Eurasian history, and, perhaps most interestingly of all for those interested in world history, how to place modern China within modern world history. Perdue himself highlights three themes or "theoretical perspectives": "frontier environments, state-building, and the construction of national and ethnic identities through historical representation" (15). Perdue gained his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from Harvard University, and he is currently the T. T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations in the History Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850 AD and numerous articles on Chinese history.1 Though I have no doubt of this book's fundamental importance for China specialists, this review will focus mainly on its value for those interested in world history and comparative history. [End Page 183] China Marches West is not a book to be read quickly: it is too full of information and ideas for that. It deserves a slow, careful reading and an openness to the many different questions it explores. Perhaps the most useful thing a reviewer can do is to summarize some of the book's contents and describe some of the many lines of inquiry it sets in motion. At its simplest, the book is about the Qing conquest of what is today Xinjiang province, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. This is a vast and important topic that has been largely neglected in modern historiography. Until Perdue's book, the main European language accounts dated, respectively, from 1912 (Courant) and 1964 (Zlatkin). While Courant's 1912 volume relies mainly on a single Chinese source, Zlatkin's Soviet-era publication uses Manchu and Russian sources but none in Chinese.2 There is considerable Japanese and Chinese scholarship on the issue but, as Perdue notes, these accounts are constructed firmly within the nationalist historiographical paradigms that he is keen to transcend. From the start, Perdue takes issue with an official historiography that sees the conquest of Xinjiang as a natural process of "unification." In this view, the ultimate outcome of Qing conflict with the western Mongols was never in doubt. The conquest was the inevitable result of geography and of Chinese cultural, economic, and technological primacy in eastern Eurasia. It was also the culmination of a process that had begun 2,000 years earlier with the initial Han conquest of the "western regions." In the official view, the conquest brought pre-existing ethnic communities into new relationships under the civilizing umbrella of the Chinese empire. The logic of this historiographical perspective explains why the People's Republic of China (PRC) has managed to persuade the United Nations to classify the Eastern Turkestan independence movement as a terrorist organization (xiii). Perdue describes a much more complex and less predictable process involving a competition among three empires for the heartlands of Eurasia. The three...

As translator of Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Shi Jianyun, a research fellow at the History Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, offers a comprehensive overview of Pomeranz's book. She duly gives acknowledgment of its innovative approach and fresh perspectives on the study of Chinese economic history during the late imperial period. Shi believes that many of the questions and issues Pomeranz raised and discussed in the book will inspire many new studies in the field both in China and abroad. At the same time, she also points out several places in the book where the statistical data used by the author seem questionable, for they were not in agreement with the findings made by her and her colleagues. She also writes that, while a China scholar, Pomeranz cites fewer works in Chinese history, especially those by Chinese scholars, than one would usually expect.

Over the past three decades, the production of historical scholarship on non-European world regions has shown that history’s global turn allows us to place the histories of Europe and its white settler societies into a revised frame of reference. We no longer privilege the traits distinctive to those countries as the sole indicators for what to expect to happen in other places as cultural, economic, political, and social connections become thicker and more entwined across the world. The importance of Europeans teaching others all that is needed to become modern has also been qualified by the discovery in other world regions of practices and sensibilities once thought to be unique to Europeans. Chinese history has been one site where efforts at reframing Europe’s economic rise have been mounted through what Kenneth Pomeranz famously labeled the “Great Divergence” (The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy [2000]). Tonio Andrade’s The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History is an engaging recent contribution to this literature. Andrade’s focus is on China’s military history. His book is organized into four parts framed by an introduction and a conclusion. The four chapters of part I, “Chinese Beginnings,” situate the development and uses of gunpowder in Chinese history; the five chapters of part II, “Europe Gets the Gun,” shift the focus to Europe and the development of gunpowder technologies, ending with the confrontations between Chinese and Portuguese forces in 1521–1522. Part III, “An Age of Parity,” moves in six chapters from the developments of European cannon and military organization through drill and discipline to the use of muskets in East Asia. Part IV, “The Great Military Divergence,” opens with a chapter on the Opium War, which is followed by separate chapters considering different nineteenth-century periods of Chinese military modernization. This richly researched analysis begins with a discussion of early modern Chinese military history with key contrasts to European practices. This prepares the reader for the author’s account of China’s nineteenth-century military reform efforts, his assessment of their successes and limitations, and his concluding ruminations on the possible future of military conflict between China and the West.

Notes on Contributors

The development of relations and interactions between historical China (the Celestial, today People’s Republic of China /PRC/) and historical Russia (the Russian world, today Russian Federation /RF/) largely determines the course of political and economic processes not only in Eurasia, but – especially today – also at the global level. The goal of the proposed research is to review the Sino-Russian relations in the past and the present and predict their likely future. This goal is achieved with the tasks presented in the main sections of the work: 1. The historical legacy in the relationships and interactions of the “Celestial” with the “Russian World” – about the ups and downs in the dynamics of the past; 2. The modern world – factors and circumstances determining the positives and negatives in the Euro-Asian China-Russia part of the US-China-Russia global equation; 3. Instead of a conclusion: About the prospects of Chinese-Russian relations and interactions – optimistic, balanced, and pessimistic scenarios. The main thesis of the paper is that, despite the sometimes more-than-ambiguous historical past, today’s positive trends in the development of the relations between the PRC and the Russian Federation, which are determined by objective circumstances, create a higher probability in a shorter or longer-term perspective for an optimistic or at least balanced development scenario rather than a pessimistic one.

At the outset of the Nanjing decade (1928–1937), a small group of Chinese legal elites worked to codify the terms that would bring the institutions of marriage and family into the modern world. Their deliberations produced the Republican Civil Code of 1929–1930, the first Chinese law code endowed with the principle of individual rights and gender equality. In the decades that followed, hundreds of thousands of women and men adopted the new marriage laws and brought myriad domestic grievances before the courts. Intolerable Cruelty thoughtfully explores key issues in modern Chinese history, including state-society relations, social transformation, and gender relations in the context of the Republican Chinese experiment with liberal modernity. Investigating both the codification process and the subsequent implementation of the Code, Margaret Kuo deftly challenges arguments that discount Republican law as an elite pursuit that failed to exert much influence beyond modernized urban households. She reconsiders the dominant narratives of the 1930s and 1940s as “dark years” for Chinese women. Instead, she convincingly recasts the history of these years from the perspective of women who actively and successfully engaged the law to improve their lives.

The ideas and practices of written constitutions and constitutionalism that originated in the West in the 18th century were first imported into China in the late 19th century. There were three eras of constitution-making in modern Chinese history: the last decade of Qing imperial rule (1901-11), the republican era (1911-1949), and the communist era (1949-). The establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Mainland in 1949 inaugurated a new era of constitution-making under the Soviet Union’s influence. However, even today, the discussion of “constitutionalism” (xianzheng) is still discouraged by the PRC regime, although the concepts of the (socialist) Rule of Law and human rights have been affirmed by constitutional amendments in 1999 and 2004 respectively. This paper will first review the historical evolution of constitutions and constitutionalism in the modern world (part I), and consider possible typologies of constitutions and constitutionalism in the contemporary world (part II). It then introduces the historical and ideological contexts of constitutional developments in modern China, and describes the operation of the Chinese constitutional system (part III). Finally, it considers whether or to what extent, or what type (if any) of, constitutionalism is practised in contemporary China (part IV).

Tea has played a prominent role in Chinese history and in China’s relations with foreign cultures near and far. It was a luxury product, along with porcelain and silk, that defined Chinese civilisation and was eagerly sought after by all peoples who acquired a taste for its stimulating brew. Tea was also pivotal in the ‘opening’ of China to the modern world through the first Opium War (Sigmond, in Tea its effects, medicinal and moral, 1839–1842). We tend to only focus on the ‘opium’ side of the equation forgetting that it was the desire to acquire large quantities of tea that brought the British and other Western nations to the shores of China in the first place. In the 21st Century, as China is on track to become the world’s largest economy and reshape the global order in ways that are still difficult for Westerners to comprehend, tea and tea culture is being ‘rediscovered’ and ‘redeployed’ within China as a means of reinforcing a sense of unique Chinese identity and national character. In this paper I further explore the place of tea in Chinese and world history. I conclude by examining the rise of Chinese tea nationalism and consider how tea is shaping Chinese identity in the 21st Century.

Reviewed by: Buddhist and Christian Responses to the Kowtow Problem in China by Eric Reinders Amos Yong BUDDHIST AND CHRISTIAN RESPONSES TO THE KOWTOW PROBLEM IN CHINA. By Eric Reinders. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. ix + 187 pp. The very brief acknowledgments paragraph by this Emory University associate professor of East Asian religions intimates that the subject of this book was researched and first written in the 1990s but does not explain the almost two-decade delay in [End Page 234] publication. The title of the published version correctly suggests a more comparative stance than the doctoral dissertation—“Buddhist Rituals of Obeisance and the Contestation of the Monk’s Body in Medieval China,” which was awarded a PhD by the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1997—although it is perhaps more accurate to say not only that the book engages with Christian resistance (not merely “responses”) to the bowing rite but that the original study that focused more narrowly on seventh-century China has been expanded into a broader historical approach that includes the modern Christian encounter with China and other more specifically history-of-comparative-religions concerns. Further, the bibliography of the volume under review indicates that the author has attempted to keep up with the literature on the topic that has appeared in the intervening years. Last, although perhaps most important, Reinders has in the intervening years built on and extended the line of inquiry charted in his doctoral studies—including two books: Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion (University of California Press, 2004), and Buddhism and Iconoclasm in East Asia: A History (with Fabio Rambell, Bloomsbury Academic, 2012)—and these have in turn now also influenced his revisioning, rewriting, and expanding of the original research and thesis. Readers of Buddhist-Christian Studies will appreciate at least the following three lines of comparative inquiry. First, Reinders cut his scholarly teeth riding one of the first waves of research on religion and the body, and this book exhibits the expertise honed by one who has inhabited this realm of inquiry since it appeared in the religious studies academy. Although almost half of the book (chapters 2–4, of seven) is devoted to the imperial debate in 662 that pitted Confucian pro-bowing arguments against Buddhist anti-bowing apologetics—led by the monk Daoxuan (596–667)—Reinders helpfully situates the affair historically, textually, philosophically, and religiously. From an intra–East Asian perspective, the dispute exhibited how and why Confucians and Buddhists, while imbibing each other’s traditions over the millennia, have not always seen eye to eye (pun intended). On the one hand, both granted deferentiality was innate to the human condition, whether manifest in filial piety or when oriented respectfully to the Buddha as symbolic of human awakening and enlightenment; on the other hand, bowing to one’s parents, or to the emperor, was not the same as obedience to the Buddha and his representatives (monks in the Buddhist order and its various levels), and certainly not always to be demanded. While the more philosophically inclined will be drawn to assessments regarding bowing in relationship to power or authority, to the gendered aspect of postures of obeisance, or to theories of verticality and hierarchy as illuminating the sociality of the bow (all explicated in chapter 6), others interested in the materiality of religion will be treated episodically to how human relationships are structured spatially and habitually, how sacred space (Buddhist temples, for instance) is defined topographically and ritually, and how spiritual awakening is not only manifest in embodied practices but also achieved through acts of obeisance conducted on the proper occasions. The phenomenological insights into the kowtow that appear at crucial junctures throughout the book highlight the symbolic density encoded in the act of bowing, although it is not just what is socially and conventionally accepted about the import of the rite that may [End Page 235] be most important, but how its habituated intentionality expressed multiple layers of enlightened or awakened self-consciousness in approaching others or interacting with one’s environment (whether construed “naturally,” interpersonally, or apropos the Buddha and “his” representatives). Overlooked in the modern world as no more than a perfunctory...

China as a “Civilization-State”: A Historical and Comparative Interpretation

Book Reviews

Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping

Debating Morals and the Discourse of Social Change in the Anthropology of Modern China Matthew Z. Noellert Yunxiang Yan , Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village 1949-1999. Stanford University Press. 2003. 320 pp. Ellen Oxfeld , Drink Water, but Remember the Source: Moral Discourse in a Chinese Village. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2010. 312 pp. While the majority of the world views contemporary China as the single most formidable economic force on the planet, threatening to define a new age, anthropologists of China are taking a characteristically contrary approach by studying the deeply personal and emotional social worlds of various Chinese communities. Departing from the previous generation of anthropologists who in the 1960s and 1970s focused on the rural Chinese family as a corporate entity and the last bastion of traditional Chinese culture, the current generation, appearing on the scene in the late 1980s, has focused on the rapidly-changing social relationships and family [End Page 757] values that have accompanied China's supercharged modern economic development. While most anthropologists take for granted the dominant discourse of Chinese society's rapid transformation in the past 60 years, the main debate revolves around the role of Chinese culture in both shaping and being shaped by these extreme economic and political changes. The two ethnographies under review here represent what I see as the two sides of this debate: Yunxiang Yan focuses on how the economic and political turbulence of the People's Republic (1949-present) has changed local culture in a Northeast Chinese village, whereas Ellen Oxfeld looks at the salience of traditional values in a Southeast Chinese village as they respond and adapt to new socioeconomic institutions and relationships. From the beginning, this debate has been steeped in Western categories of socialism, capitalism, and the respective social values that accompany these economic systems, although recently at least one scholar has predicted that the increasing global power of China threatens to upset the Western theoretical hegemony that continues to dictate the discourse of "other" societies (Pieke 2009:1). This is in part due to the continued dominance of American-trained anthropologists in China, as well as the traditional place of China in the modern world as an anomaly of both non-West but also non-colonial, a society both traditional yet highly developed. Yan, born in north China and raised during the Cultural Revolution, nevertheless received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University and began by studying social networks and gift exchange in the Chinese countryside. This western training comes through in his overriding view of the rise of the selfish individual, an egotistic morality, and the retreat into private life that accompanies the alienation of individuals in modern societies. Ellen Oxfeld, American, likewise obtained her Ph.D. from Harvard (about ten years before Yan), and originally studied overseas Chinese communities in India and Canada, before these connections brought her back to their ancestral home in China Proper. Her original interest in Chinese history has, perhaps, kept her more focused on the continuities of a traditional Chinese past under the pressures of modern developments. Here I don't mean to draw any overly deterministic conclusions, but I believe this background to be increasingly meaningful as China continues to be one of the most politically charged subjects in the western academe. At the same time, both Yan and Oxfeld, carrying out the main part of their fieldwork in rural villages in the early 1990s, position their studies [End Page 758] within the dominant tradition of anthropology of the family in rural China. Yan directly challenges the entrenched theory of the Chinese family as a corporate enterprise in which the economic self-interest of the domestic group is the driving force of development, a theory held in common by some of the most prominent scholars in the field, beginning with Fei Xiaotong. 1 He points to the importance of the individual as a powerful agent in the formation of the domestic group. Oxfeld, on the other hand, takes a more neutral position, citing some of the same literature as Yan (including Yan's studies) as background to highlight the extent of changes in family structures...

This article examines the image of China in Elizar Magaram’s almanacs Dal’niy Vostok [Far East], Zheltyy lik [Yellow Face], and Kitay [China] (Shanghai, 1920–1923). This rare emigrant publication series has not been sufficiently researched yet, although it reflects the literary trends of its time. The almanac is considered as an intertextual cohesion united by the theme of China. The aim of the article is to identify the ways of forming the image of China in the whole series of almanacs. The article analyzes (1) the poetry and prose of emigrants (E. Magaram, M. Shcherbakov, M. Moravskaya, P. Cherkez, Yu. Viktorov, and V. Temnyi); (2) Russian translations of Chinese texts; (3) essays and articles on Chinese culture in the almanacs. Three main trends of depicting China were found: China as an imaginary space, historical China, and modern China. Graphic materials thematically correlate with the content of literary and popular scientific texts. The first image can be found in the poetry of authors who were not living in China at the time of writing and had never seen it with their own eyes (Shcherbakov, Moravskaya). The image of historical China with its ancient culture, mythology, philosophy, and aesthetics is depicted in Chinese poetry, prose, and folklore (translated into Russian), and in compilations and translations of foreign and Russian pre-revolutionary articles on China. In these texts, China is a very advanced, regulated and conservative civilization that codifies and analyzes everything. Its another trait is the ability to make non-obvious decisions, sometimes even resort to cunning and tricks. At the same time, traditional China values nobility and believes in justice. The writers clarify that some customs that look unacceptable to Europeans are in fact moral and justifiable from the Chinese point of view. But sometimes the reader has to accept all the oddities as a national peculiarity of Chinese culture. Russian translations of poetry do not often pay attention to its underlying meaning and simplify it. The image of modern China (especially Shanghai of the early 1920s) is found in Russian emigrants’ works, conveying their impressions of the surrounding reality (Magaram, Cherkez). The modern world is full of contradictions; old laws do not work anymore. A group of repeated themes, motifs, and images creates the impression of a same reality described by a group of beholders: the portrayal of the main city thoroughfare; a beautiful European woman with golden hair; rickshaws and coolies, embodying the vital forces of China. The last three characters often collide in the tragic plot called love for a foreigner (a Chinese man’s attraction to a forbidden European woman). It is difficult to call the published works a deep personal immersion in Chinese culture; it is more of an outsider’s view, a mixture of personal impressions, copying from nature, playing with literary clichés and the experience of European science.