Cultivation Games and Cosmotechnics: Reimagining Sinofuturism in Chinese Cultivation Narratives

Contributors

Reviewed by: The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture Yiyan Wang (bio) Song Geng . The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004. x, 256 pp. Hardcover $39.50, ISBN 962-209-620-4. The study of gender relations and forms of sexuality is an established field in Chinese studies, and van Gulik's pioneering Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 1974) was among the earliest inquiries in this regard. However, for decades most of the publications in the field have focused primarily on the gender identity and living conditions of women. It was not until the mid-1990s that an investigation of masculine roles began, with a focus on literary representation. In premodern Chinese literary studies, there are Louise Edwards' Men and Women in Qing China: Gender in the Red Chamber Dream (Leiden: Brill, 1994) and Keith McMahon's Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). In contemporary Chinese literature there are Lu Tonglin's Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics: Contemporary Chinese Experimental Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) and Zhong Xueping's Masculinity Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). More recently, Kam Louie and Morris Low's edited volume, Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), offers a number of chapters on the literary representation of masculinity, and Ding Naifei explores sexual practice and sexuality in detail with her monograph Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Kam Louie's Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) also devotes a considerable amount of space to Chinese masculinity as manifested in fictional characters. The historical study on Chinese masculinity is a recent event, most noticeably beginning with the forum "Gender and Manhood in Chinese History" in American Historical Review (vol. 105, no. 5 [2000]) and Susan Brownell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom's edited volume, Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Song Geng's The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture is devoted to the study of effeminate male characters and their cultural connotations in premodern Chinese literature. He claims that his book is a "postcolonial reading of Chinese masculinity" (pp. 8-9), and his emphasis is on the differences in masculinity between China and the West in the time before colonialism and Westernization. Song considers the outstanding features of the premodern Chinese gender discourse to include the absence of male and female polarity, [End Page 554] the absence of mind-body duality, the presence of ungendered figures in Confucian classics, the presence of desexualized military heroes in popular fiction and drama, and the presence of the correlative "yin/yang" and wen/wu dichotomies (pp. 10-11). Noticeably, Song disagrees with Kam Louie on the significance of the notions of wen/wu in Chinese gender configuration. While Kam Louie considers wen/wu as fundamental in shaping Chinese masculinity, Song places strong emphasis on yin/yang, asserting that only when one acknowledges the essential role played by yin/yang in the Chinese perception of gender relations can one explain the effeminacy of men in Chinese literature and culture and understand the reasons why the fragile scholar has been held as an embodiment of the ideal male in Chinese culture (pp. 15-16). Song's study of Chinese masculinity is framed in the gender theories of Western thinkers, in particular those of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. He employs Foucaultian concepts of history, power, and sexuality in his reading of premodern Chinese texts. He positions his investigation in the postcolonial context and pays special attention to the distinctive quality of Chinese masculinity as a cultural practice with very different origins from that of the West. It is important to note that Song's reading of the yin/yang discourse is primarily Foucaultian in the sense that his study is centered on power politics and its subsequent determination of gender role by the positioning of the...

Chinese culture can be reflected, to a great extent, by Chinese popular sayings and famous quotes as it is generally acknowledged that the richness and beauty in the popular sayings and famous quotes in Chinese literature and culture are most representative of the mind and spirit of the Chinese people. The sources of all the entries of the popular sayings and famous quotes are listed and translated in dictionary. The task of tracing and translating the sources of all the entries is daunting. There are as many as 20,000 literary idioms and tens of thousands of popular maxims and sayings, in addition to the pithy and profound quotes to be gleaned from three millennia of Chinese philosophy and literature. The Chinese people place great emphasis on the way they talk, what should be talked about, how to avoid offending others in their talking, and how to judge a person by his speech.

Study on Dialectical Relationship between Chinese Culture Flourishing and Psychological Healing

"Where there are Chinese people, there is Chinese education". The Malaysian Chinese ancestors practised Chinese education in Malaysia since their arrival and with their efforts, Malaysia has the most comprehensive and systematic Chinese education in Southeast Asia. It is also considered the country that has preserved Chinese culture the best (Qian, 2017). Since 2011, the Chinese language has been offered as an elective subject in the standards-based curriculum for primary school (KSSR) syllabus. Since introducing Chinese into classrooms, there have been two versions of Chinese textbooks for the national primary schools: (KSSR) National Primary School Chinese Textbook from grade 1 until grade 6. Its subsequent revision in 2017 KSSR (Semakan 2017) National Primary School Chinese Textbook has been applied up to grade 5. By studying these two versions of the textbooks, this paper will discuss how Chinese culture is depicted in Malaysian national primary school Chinese textbooks. It will also analyse the elements of Chinese culture and subsequently investigate whether cultural content is necessary to be reinforced in national primary school Chinese textbooks for its text to be enriched. The research objective is determined using integrated studies done within and beyond Malaysia and includes relevant materials, research reports, literature, and dissertation papers. Through literature review, this paper summarises, categories, and analyses content about traditional Chinese cultural elements that can be found in both versions of the Chinese textbooks in national primary school. The traditional Chinese cultures found in both versions of textbooks are listed under seven elements which are: Traditional Chinese Festivities, Traditional Chinese Folk Games, Traditional Chinese Family Appellations, Traditional Chinese Food Culture, Traditional Chinese Arts, Traditional Chinese Customs, Chinese Literature. The collected content is then categorised, arranged, and analysed. A deduction can then be made to provide conclusive recommendations. It can be deduced that the textbooks are pretty packed with relevant and related Chinese cultural elements, but primarily, it is apparent that the Chinese culture is mainly influenced by local cultural elements, which are very close to our daily life. National primary school Chinese language education plays a role in cultural dissemination. It enables pupils of different ethnic backgrounds to learn Chinese and gain a deeper understanding of Chinese culture. As well as can help prevent misunderstandings caused by cultural differences.

Reviewed by: Chinese Literature and Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism: Renaissance or Rehabilitation? by Wang Xiaoping Gal Gvili Wang Xiaoping. Chinese Literature and Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism: Renaissance or Rehabilitation? Leiden and Boston: Brill. 2021. Pp. x+388. US$167.00 hardcover, US$167.00 ebook. Wang Xiaoping is a prolific scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, [End Page 568] cinema, and culture and a keen observer and interpreter of contemporary academic debates in China. In English alone, Wang has published four books and numerous articles, and his output in Chinese far surpasses these numbers. In Chinese Literature and Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism, Wang embarks upon an ambitious endeavour: mapping the contours, the premises, and the impetus fueling Chinese literature, cinema, and cultural criticism from 1976 to the present. Wang reads poetry, films, short and long fiction, as well as a robust set of critical works in English and Chinese that all, in his thesis, engage an acute identity crisis China has been facing. Namely, Wang investigates literature, culture, and academic debates to search for an answer to the question: what constitutes Chineseness in the current era, in which China is both a Communist country and a major player in global capitalism? The answer is given through an extensive discussion and close readings of Chinese new poetry, 1980s Avant Garde Fiction, 1990s Historical Fiction, Six Generation Cinema, and critical essays and books by thinkers associated with the Chinese New Left and Liberal camps. Wang argues that Chineseness today is refracted in cultural texts as a dialectic between a socialist consciousness that harks back to the Mao era while looking forward to envision new possibilities, and a liberal mentality that draws upon both the Chinese pre-modern, mostly Confucian ethos and Western liberalism to forge a future for the Chinese nation. In a dense analytical narrative, Wang moves chronologically from the late 1970s to contemporary times, and examines each cultural phenomenon by loosely employing Raymond Williams’s concept of Three Cultures. Williams suggested, as early as the late 1950s, that the complex dynamic underscoring national cultures can be understood as a dynamic of triangulation between the dominant hegemonic culture, residual culture-a culture of a previous age that resides within the dominant national culture either as a fortification of or as a disruption to its values-and an emergent culture that generates new social structures and values and thus becomes a new force that challenges dominant culture. Wang adopts this framework for one main use: detecting residues of socialist culture in poetry, fiction, and cinema that had often been misread, in his view, as emblems of a new “free” expression that the end of the Mao era supposedly enabled. In the impressive array of texts examined, Wang identifies a slow “disappearance of idealism” (18) that nevertheless remains a fait accompli. Socialist themes, aesthetics, and value continually inform Chinese language literature and cinema even though they have diminished over the years. Juxtaposing, for example, in Chapters Six and Seven, the films Dirt (Toufa luanle 頭髮亂了, 1992) and The Making of Steel (Zhangda chengren 长大成人, 1997) with Lust/Caution (Se/Jie 色戒, 2007) demonstrates how, in Wang’s reading, even as thematic eulogizing of the revolutionary generation made way for more so-called universal engagement with espionage and sex, residues of the CCP/KMT conflict, with their radically different ideologies, still shaped the artistry and the reception of Ang Lee’s 2007 work. Indeed, as Wang states in the opening pages of the introduction, this academic study promotes a political agenda, which is calling for a “socialist re-orientation” [End Page 569] (313) that could carry forward, revitalized, the values of China’s socialist revolution. One way to move in this direction, this book suggests, is by revisiting contemporary culture and reading it through a lens that is sensitive to socialist undercurrents: While China’s postsocialism is, to a certain extent, characterized by pragmatism-a political principle practiced by Chinese politicians in the post Mao period in general, as well as the living conditions and life philosophy followed by the Chinese populace in their daily activities in particular-we must still pay close attention to...

Digital media is perpetually evolving, significantly impacting the Chinese language and literature. Concurrently, the rapid pace of modern lifestyles poses challenges to the transmission of cultural heritage within Chinese literary traditions. Accordingly, this study explores the pathways for digital innovation in Chinese literature, focusing on the integration of key virtual technologies to facilitate the cultural inheritance of the Chinese language. This research highlights the application of advanced virtual technologies in preserving and transmitting Chinese linguistic culture. It involves designing an experiential process for cultural inheritance, utilizing these technologies to process graphic and textual information pertinent to the Chinese language and literature. Furthermore, the study innovates cultural transmission methods through the synthesis of virtual 3D scenes and the implementation of human-computer interaction functionalities. An experimental evaluation approach was employed to assess the impact of virtual reality technology on the learning outcomes in Chinese literature and its cultural transmission. The findings indicate that users who interactively engage with the content in a virtual environment achieve a learning effect score that is 0.6528 points higher than those using traditional browsing methods. This underscores the enhanced efficacy of interactive experiences in facilitating the learning of Chinese literature. The regression analysis further demonstrates the significant promotional effects of the number of virtual experiences in Chinese literature (P1) and the rate of user interaction with computers (P2) on the dissemination of Chinese cultural content. The fixed and random effects for the number of virtual experiences are 0.9428 and 0.9784, respectively, while those for user interaction rates are 0.8945 and 0.8835. These results suggest a substantial impact on the broader dissemination and transmission of Chinese language literature, reinforcing the value of integrating virtual reality technologies in cultural education.

Moss, though seemingly insignificant in nature, holds great significance in Chinese literature. Unlike the precise scientific definition and taxonomy of the English term, the Chinese term “taixian” (苔藓 ‘mosses’) more loosely indicates any small, flowerless, leaf-stemmed plant, including moss, algae, and liverwort. In Chinese culture, moss is associated with “Yin” (阴), one of the two basic constitutive elements in the universe. Chinese folk culture and medicine classifies objects in the world into five natures, and within this scheme, moss is assigned a “cool” nature due to its preference for moist environments. According to the doctrines of Taoism and Chinese folk philosophy, the nature of things is always changing and can be converted into something different or opposite. Thus, moss in ancient Chinese literature initially conveyed negative emotions, such as women’s loneliness and complaint, while later becoming a more positive symbol of retreat from worldly concerns and delight in solitude. This duality established moss as a subject of aesthetic appreciation in Chinese literature and art. Often juxtaposed with bamboo, moss came to represent the spirit of a true gentleman. This tradition has deeply influenced Chinese cultural expressions and continues to shape artistic and environmental sensibilities today.

As my country's top-level cooperation initiative, the "Belt and Road Initiative" covers the Eurasian continent. General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out that in promoting the construction of the "Belt and Road", strengthening "people-to-people connectivity" is the key and foundation, and culture is the soul and life that promotes "people-to-people connectivity". Only through external cultural communication can the "Belt and Road" be better enhanced The appeal and influence of the initiative in countries along the route. It can be said that cultural exchanges serve as bridges and ties in connecting people. The implementation of the "One Belt, One Road" initiative not only accelerates the process of Chinese culture "going out", but also expands the influence of Chinese culture through exchanges and mutual learning. force. Chinese martial arts, as a traditional Chinese physical culture that "integrates human beings, intellectual nature, truth and goodness, and both internal and external", accurately disseminating Chinese martial arts not only promotes the effective implementation of the people-to-people bonds policy in the "One Belt, One Road" initiative, but also enables Chinese martial arts to carry " The Belt and Road Initiative "tells Chinese stories well", "spreads the voice of China well" and interprets China's excellent culture to people around the world. It can also continuously optimize and reconstruct "credible, respectable and lovable" in the international dissemination of Chinese martial arts. image of China. This study uses literature, historical research, case analysis, text analysis and other research methods to first divide the stages of the "One Belt, One Road" initiative, and secondly to sort out the context of the international spread of Chinese martial arts and find out the reasons for the international spread of Chinese martial arts. The overall trends and characteristics are analyzed, and then the status quo and difficulties of Chinese martial arts communication paths in the "One Belt and One Road" countries are analyzed to build a precise communication path. The following main conclusions are drawn through the research:

This paper constructs a Bayesian network text recognition model based on the Bayesian network and explores the role of Chinese language literature in the dissemination of traditional culture by analyzing the embodiment of traditional culture in Chinese language literature network texts. The collection process of Chinese language and literature data in network text is analyzed from the perspective of textual data interaction. The information of node variables in a Bayesian network is used to determine the mutual relationship between Chinese language literature and traditional culture. The degree of interdependence between Chinese literature and traditional culture can be measured by combining mutual information. The results show that the correct rate of text recognition of the Bayesian text recognition model decreases slightly when the training samples are (100-300), but the correct rate always stays around 0.85, thus reflecting the effectiveness of the network recognition model in this paper. Chinese language literature has a certain role in the dissemination of traditional culture, which proves that Chinese language literature, as a carrier of traditional culture, can improve the dissemination speed of traditional culture. This study focuses on the integration of Chinese literature and traditional communication to improve a new vision.

In this pathbreaking study of three of the most familiar texts in the Chinese tradition—all concerning stones endowed with magical properties—Jing Wang develops a monumental reconstruction of ancient Chinese stone lore. Wang’s thorough and systematic comparison of these classic works illuminates the various tellings of the stone story and provides new insight into major topics in traditional Chinese literature. Bringing together Chinese myth, religion, folklore, art, and literature, this book is the first in any language to amass the sources of stone myth and stone lore in Chinese culture. Uniting classical Chinese studies with contemporary Western theoretical concerns, Wang examines these stone narratives by analyzing intertextuality within Chinese traditions. She offers revelatory interpretations to long-standing critical issues, such as the paradoxical character of the monkey in The Journey to the West , the circularity of narrative logic in The Dream of the Red Chamber , and the structural necessity of the stone tablet in Water Margin. By both challenging and incorporating traditional sinological scholarship, Wang’s The Story of Stone reveals the ideological ramifications of these three literary works on Chinese cultural history and makes the past relevant to contemporary intellectual discourse. Specialists in Chinese literature and culture, comparative literature, literary theory, and religious studies will find much of interest in this outstanding work, which is sure to become a standard reference on the subject.

The global positive change in public opinion about China has been constantly growing in recent years. However, there is still some misunderstanding of China and the Chinese culture in the world due to ideological and cultural differences. The relevance of the development of theoretical innovations and their application in practice to disseminate traditional culture is an essential moment of state and public life in China. The article represents the natural transmission of traditional Chinese culture, the characteristics of which are clearly reflected within moral civilization and affirmed in the philosophy of a new stage of modern Chinese society development called the ‘New Era’. The importance of traditional spiritual culture of Chinese people in the process of realizing the value of human life towards the development of socialism whereas the Chinese specificity is shown. Historical and retrospective analysis determines the role of the stages of civilization and personalities in the formation of the spiritual values system of the Chinese nation. The semiotic method, as a basic one, is aimed at interpreting the elements of traditional Chinese culture, in particular the symbolic system. The article highlights the main spiritual characteristics and defines the meaning of the traditional Chinese culture in modern culture, defines the specific feature of the concept of ‘cultural gene’ as the Chinese spiritual culture, covering varied and differentiated content and characteristics of the Chinese national culture and defining the difference between the Chinese nation and other ethnic groups in the world. The value of harmonious and unified relations between a man and nature in the Chinese culture is considered using the example of bamboo, a typical traditional symbol that actively transfers traditional cultural information into modern everyday life in China and determines the continuity of the foundations of Chinese moral philosophy. The analysis of the expansion of Chinese cultural symbols to the west is given and the main problems in the work on the popularization of Chinese cultural symbols abroad are identified. The contemporary Chinese culture is represented as an open system that recreates a comprehensive hands-on process that effectively enhances the influence of the Chinese culture.

Reviewed by: Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future Lingchie Letty Chen (bio) Yibing Huang . Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. x, 219 pp. $90.00, ISBN 13: 978-1-4039-7982-7; ISBN 10: 1-4039-7982-0. Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future puts forth an insightful and original approach to the study of contemporary Chinese literature, but is at the same time marred with a glaring theoretical lapse on its key operative concept: bastard. This word, and at times the term "cultural bastards," is used to characterize those contemporary Chinese writers who have lived through the Mao era—a group that basically includes the majority of Chinese writers whose works represent the corpus of what is recognized as contemporary Chinese literature. To use such a provocative word certainly can attract attention. However, without sufficiently elaborating on how this word-as-concept came about in the context of modern/contemporary Chinese literature and culture, and without teasing out the many implications and confusions inherent in the word itself, Yibing Huang also makes it exceedingly difficult for this reader to overcome the nagging skepticism whenever the author evokes "bastards" or "cultural bastards" to discuss the generation that survived the Mao era: Cui Jian (b. 1961), Duo Duo (b. 1951), Wang Shuo (b. 1958), Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948), Wang Xiaobo (b. 1952)—the artist and writers that Huang discusses in depth in this book. To give a more comprehensive view, the list includes Bei Dao (b. 1949), Zhang Yimou (b. 1951), Can Xue (b. 1953), Han Shaogong (b. 1953), Gu Cheng (b. 1956), Mo Yan (b. 1956), Yu Hua (b. 1960), Su Tong (b. 1963), Ge Fei (b. 1964), and so on. In calling these writers and artists "bastards" or "cultural bastards," Huang is at once claiming them to be illegitimate, false, spurious, counterfeit, and hybrid. Without getting into the meanings of each of these words and their possible implications (and complications), we only need to point out their antonyms to immediately put Huang's operative concept in jeopardy: legitimate, true, genuine, authentic, and original. Hence, we must ask this question: What qualifies as legitimate, true, genuine, authentic, and original culture or literature? Or, to put it bluntly, is it even possible to define such a culture or literature without falling back on racial fundamentalism and extreme nationalism? Huang, however, seems to imply that Chinese culture only began to bastardize since the nineteenth century as Western thoughts and products flooded into China and eventually culminated in the May Fourth sociocultural-political movement. Huang contends that the "new man" who was conceptualized by intellectuals to be free of the burden of the past was in actuality "nothing less than an 'orphan of history' as opposed to one with a contaminated, impure and illegitimate origin, that is, a damned 'cultural bastard' " (p. 2). Taking Lu Xun's "A Madman's Diary" as his springboard, Huang continues to argue that "this Madman, the very first 'new man' of modern Chinese literature, suffers from the discovery of his own rootedness in and contamination [End Page 237] by a premodern history." (p. 2) Meanwhile, almost simultaneous with the publication of "A Madman's Diary," Mao Zedong had developed his own vision of the Chinese subject, which "was a result of a hybridization of the traditional Confucianism with the newly imported German idealism and nationalism" (p. 3). This madman-turned-new man-turned-orphan of history-turned-bastard process, as Huang concludes, replayed itself in the post-Cultural Revolution era after Mao's nearly three decades of nationalizing the Chinese subject to create a "Maoist 'new man' " (p. 4). Huang's application of the word "bastard" thus seems to be more of a descriptive function than to operate as a theoretical concept by any measure. Regardless of his intended usage, words, however, do convey unintended meanings to readers. Inherent in this line of argument is the suggestion that Chinese culture as a whole was once pure and unhybridized because the so-called (cultural) bastards obviously did not exist before the May Fourth Movement, or at least Huang mentions none. Taking...

Remix in writing has very different expressions, and is grounded in very different legal, philosophical and creative materialisms, in Western and Chinese cultures. The infringement of authors’ Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in China is not only an irritant for Chinese-Western commercial and legal relations. It also points to different formations of the creative and legal domains across global space, and serves to introduce notions of creativity and originality that are largely unfamiliar in the West. Calligraphy, as a pictorial and material mode of writing, comprises a practice of Chinese remix in which the apprentice traces the lines of the master’s work: repetition of Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’) stimulates the expression of Qing 情 (‘feelings’). What appears from a distance to be slavish imitation actually involves a philosophy of learning (or more precisely, of ‘unlearnt learning’) that, bypassing plagiarism’s traps, effectively ‘remixes remix’ as a creative model no longer dependent on the familiar Western rationales for the legitimacy of remix as appropriation, homage and/or pastiche. To see this though, one has to deploy a Taoist rather than a Confucian framework in the analysis of calligraphic practices. The case of Kathy Acker, allied with the work of Gilles Deleuze, reveals a largely invisible lineage of Taoist-influenced remix in Western creative writing. In this way, calligraphy emerges as a model of remix relevant to all forms of writing—for all writing is material, whether calligraphic or not. Further, as Acker shows, the materiality of writing constantly replenishes its remixing with cultural elements that may not be otherwise visible.

The principle of the poem title in Chinese poetry changes to a greater or lesser extent and some traditions remain to this day. It is the same for Russian poetry. The problem of the title of a poem has arisen from the first day of the birth of poetry in Russian and Chinese literature. Titles of poetic texts in Russian and Chinese poetry have developed separately from each other; nevertheless, their evolution shows both differences and similarities. The Chinese influence on the titles of poems by the contemporary Russian poet Vladimir Kucheryavkin, who is interested in Chinese culture and literature and knows oriental philosophy, has been discovered. The article discusses one striking formal feature of the “Chinese manner” in Kucheryavkin’s poems: the active use of names that are complete phrases and use the first-person singular verb of the present tense, names that are characteristic of Chinese classical poetry and quite alien to the Russian poetic tradition. Russian names in general are characterized by nominativity. This article pays special attention to the main stages of the evolution of the principles of giving titles poems in the Chinese history of literature and briefly describes the main types of titles. In the first known collection of Chinese poetry Shi Jing (11th–6th centuries BC) poems had no titles. The first two characters are used as titles. From the beginning of the Han dynasty (from 202 BC), titles of poems indicate the content of the work and that it is to be sung. By the end of the Han dynasty (3rd century AD), poems began to be separated from songs and take on the obvious character of texts for reading. In the times of the Song dynasty (10th–13th centuries AD), poems began to be preceded by indications of the time and circumstances of their creation, sometimes quite elaborate. In Chinese literature, this type of the title complex is denoted by the wording “one poem, two titles”; in Russian translations of Chinese classical lyrics, it is such “prefaces” that will be perceived and reproduced as characteristic Chinese titles. A similar phenomenon is also noticed in European literature; this is how the title and the subtitle can correlate. During the Ming and Qing dynasties (14th–19th centuries AD), the title complex continues to increase in volume and content. Titles of Chinese poems began to strive for brevity only in the twentieth century, perhaps under the influence of European models. The article also considers Kucheryavkin’s “Chinese imagery”: he perceives China as one of the main bases of his poetic universe. Kucheryavkin’s “Chinese” poems turn out to be entire cycles (Karasi iz Shankhaya [Carp from Shanghai]) and even books (Do Yandzhou tysyacha li [It Is a Thousand Li to Yanzhou], 2016). The very title of Kucheryavkin’s collection Do Yandzhou tysyacha li manifests Chinese motifs. The four-word title contains two words connected with Chinese culture: Yandzhou [Yanzhou] and li.