Introduction: Early China and its natural and cultural demarcations

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 “中國近代知識轉型”是一個龐大的研究工程。欲探討這個東西方學術交會衝擊與裂變的議題，至少得從兩個大方向進行，一是西方近代科學式知識如何在中國建構，包括體制與觀念；一是傳統中國學術在近代如何轉變。本人一向致力研究後一議題，一方面想了解傳統中國學術是否有一知識體系，一方面則探討傳統學術在近代早期亦即明清以降的變化，並試著梳理出傳統學術的分化與開放的可能性。
 欲探討傳統學術的變化，“經學”———這個處於傳統學術中心並和政治極度結合的學術載體毫無疑問是一焦點。本文即以經學爲主題，觀察它在明清尤其是清代乾嘉以降的變化情形，並解釋這種變化的學術意義。欲研究經學，議題與角度極其繁多。本文則把主綫放在經數與經目的變化上，從歷代經數與經目的變化來觀察經學的學術轉變意義，尤其把重點放在18、19世紀———也就是清代中期考據學最興盛的乾隆、嘉慶、道光時段，事實上經數與經目的變化也以這個時期最爲劇烈。這個研究主題的意義，不僅欲指出傳統經典中的正統與流派，同時也想證明在知識擴張的晚清，“經學已不能構成單獨的學術權威”，以期彰顯正統之外的知識界是如何面對知識擴張與典範轉移的新學術局面。换言之，傳統中國學術的變化，經典未必只在内部以詮釋的方式作變遷，它很可能遭受其他鄰近學科的挑戰，而産生性質上的大變化。
 “Constructing Modern Knowledge in China, 1600-1949” is a topic of large scope and special significance. To explore colossal research project, I propose two basic approaches: First, to examine the differentiation of knowledge that was already occurring in traditional Chinese scholarship, including the rise of new fields and classifications of knowledge. Second, to explore the construction and practice of Western knowledge in China. Without the latter, it is impossible to grasp the overall development of Chinese modernity; without the former, it is impossible to understand how the system and nature of traditional scholarship clearly established the position of Chinese scholarship and opened up a dialog between China and the West. I have devoted my research to the internal dynamics and evolution of traditional Chinese scholarship and would like to address the fundamental question: Given the dynamics and evolution, was there a unity of intellectual system in traditional China? To do so, I have been studying the change of scholarship in early modern China and attempting to analyze how traditional Chinese scholarship could differentiate, specialize and maintain an open system.
 To examine the intellectual change in early modern China, I focus on classical knowledge — the prestigious location of both politics and culture in China for millennia. Previously historians had adopted many perspectives to study classical knowledge in early modern China. In this paper, I will investigate the evolution of the numbers of Classics and versions of the Confucian canon in order to shed new light on the history of classical knowledge and its cultural implication. Over the past two millennia, the numbers of Classics and versions of the Confucian canon changed in accord with contemporaneous political and intellectual contexts and intensified during the peak of evidential scholarship movement, roughly spanning from Qianlong, Jiaqing, and Daoguang reigns [1730-1850]. My research will not only discern the imperial orthodoxy from different version of classical knowledge but also show that classical knowledge could no longer be the sole academic authority in late Qing China. I would like to demonstrate that the discursive space craved out for classical knowledge in High Qing China was indeed more energized and active than we previously assumed. Moreover, the transformation of the classical knowledge in Qing China was not merely an internal evolution of classical knowledge itself but also an outcome of rapid change of academic disciplines as well.
 The multifarious and intensified change of the numbers of Classics and versions of the Confucian canon in the nineteenth century can be found in the new arrangement of twenty-one Classics by Duan Yucai (1735-1815), ten classics by Shen Tao (1792-1855), a different justification of twenty-one Classics by Liu Gongmian (1824-1883), and the new justification of orthodox version of the Confucian canon in Six Classics espoused by Gong Zizhen (1792-1841).
 As a result, the traditional classical knowledge had already significantly expanded and even shifted paradigmatically before the advent of the industrial West. The emergence of these new branches of specialized knowledge in the Confucian canon demonstrates the expansion and paradigmatic shift of classical knowledge during the nineteenth century. I shall call it the germination of modern specialization in China. This sort of differentiation within the traditional classical knowledge was an indispensible step toward the construction of modern knowledge in China. The academic prototype in modern China should be traced to the specialization of classical knowledge in the Qing dynasty.

SHARON KINSELLA. Adult Manga: culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000. xii, 228 pp. £12.99, paper. STEPHEN ESKILDSEN. Asceticism in Early Taoist Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1998. vii, 229 pp. US$19.85, paper. H. A. J. KLOOSTER. Bibliography of the Indonesian Revolution, Publications from 1942 to 1994. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997. Bibliographical Series no. 21. 666 pp. J. E. HOARE (ed). Britain and Japan: biographical Portraits, Volume III. Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library, 1999. xviii, 397 pp. £45.00, hardcover. AYAKO HOTTA‐LISTER. The Japan‐British Exhibition of 1910: gateway to the Island Empire of the East. Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library, 1999. xvi, 256 pp. £45.00, hardcover. JACQUES GERNET. Buddhism in Chinese Society: an Economic History from the Fifth to the Tenth Centuries (trans. by Franciscus Verellen). New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. xvii, 441 pp. US$21.00, paper. GREGORY M. PFLUGFELDER. Cartographies of Desire: male‐male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xi, 399 pp. US$45.00, hardcover. GAIL HERSHATTER. Dangerous Pleasures: prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xii, 591 pp. 26 b/w illustrations, 6 tables. US$18.95, paper. TSERING SHAKYA. The Dragon in the Land of Snows: a History of Modern Tibet since 1947. No location given: Columbia University Press, 1999. xxix, 574 pp. US$29.95, paper. J. E. HOARE. Embassies in the East: the Story of the British and their Embassies in China, Japan and Korea from 1859 to the Present. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999. xvi, 238 pp. £40.00, hardcover. PADMASIRI DE SILVA. Environmental Philosophy and Ethics in Buddhism. London: Macmillan Press, 1998. xv, 195 pp. A$69.95, hardcover. ROB GOODFELLOW. The Green Iguana, and Other Short Stories (cartoons by Weldon Neville). Wollongong: Kang Djoko, 1999. 96 pp. A$20.00, paper. GAO MINGLU (ed). Inside Out: new Chinese Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 223 pp. US$29.95, paper. EVELYN S. RAWSKI. The Last Emperors: a Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii, 481 pp. 10 b/w illustrations, 3 line figures, 3 maps, 18 tables. US$45.00, hardcover. RANA MITTER. The Manchurian Myth: nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xi, 295pp. US$45.00, hardcover. KATSUICHI HONDA. The Nanjing Massacre: a Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame (ed. Frank Gibney, trans. Karen Sandness). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. 400 pp. Photographs, map, index. US$68.95, hardcover; US$25.95, paper. E. BRUCE BROOKS and A. TAEKO BROOKS (eds). The Original Analects: sayings of Confucius and His Successors. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. x, 342 pp. US$34.00, hardcover. ALEX MCKAY (ed). Pilgrimage in Tibet. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1998. xi, 228 pp. £35.00, hardcover. LISA RAPHALS. Sharing the Light: representations of Women and Virtue in Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. 348 pp. US$21.95, paper. LING HUPING. Surviving on the Gold Mountain: a History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. 252 pp. US$19.95, paper. DENNIS HIROTA (ed). Toward a Contemporary Understanding of Pure Land Buddhism: creating a Shin Buddhist Theology in a Religiously Plural World. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. ix, 257 pp. US$21.95, paper. WENDY LARSON. Women and Writing in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. 267 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. US$51.00, hardcover; US$19.95, paper. BURTON WATSON (trans). The Zen Teachings of Master Lin‐Chi: a Translation of the Lin‐chi Lu. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xxxii, 140 pp. US$18.00, paper.

One of the major concerns regarding case-control studies of diet and cancer is that dietary measures based on current habits may not accurately reflect dietary intake from the time period of cancer initiation and early promotion in the more distant past. Thus, the extent to which current diet correlates with past diet and the reliability of retrospective estimates of past diet are important questions for researchers investigating dietary factors in cancer causation. For these reasons, we conducted this study of the reliability of dietary history as recalled from the distant past. Individuals (N = 175) who completed dietary interviews between the years 1957 and 1965 were reinterviewed in 1982. Subjects were asked to report the usual frequency of intake of selected food items, both at the time of their original interview in the 1957-1965 era as well as at the current time. Dietary histories as recalled from the distant past more closely agreed with those originally recorded than did current diets. The diets as recalled from the distant past appeared to be biased, however, by current dietary habits. The implications of these findings for diet and cancer research are discussed.

Both China and England experienced a secularized cultural transformation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. This essay examines how these transformations relate to conceptions of female authority and emotion in the two contexts. It starts with Thomas Percy's interpretation of the female protagonist of Haoquizhuan, showing that Percy's mis(reading) illuminates the differences between fictional representations of exemplary women from early modern England and China. It then proceeds to a comparative study of narrative imaginings of women's cultural functions in early modern England and China, arguing that, in both contexts, female agency and authority ascended in circumscribed ways, creating significant impact on the subsequent histories of narrative fiction.

Contrary to the long-standing idea of a scientific failure in early modern China as compared to Europe, some recent work has emphasized the existence of a tradition of ‘evidential’ research in the natural sciences, antiquarianism, and geography, especially during the Sung, Ming, and Qing periods. This article seeks to develop this new perspective by offering a comparative history of the genres of travel writing and ethnography in early modern Europe and Ming/early Qing China. We argue that there were qualitative as well as quantitative differences in the way that these genres functioned in each cultural area. Even when we find apparent similarities, we note different chronological rhythms and a different position of these genres of travel writing within a wider cultural field—what we might term their ‘cultural relevance’. The specific nature of Chinese state imperialism—or, conversely, the particular nature of European overseas colonialism—played a role in determining the type of ethnographic approach that came to predominate in each cultural area. These parallels and differences suggest a fresh perspective on the cultural origins of the ‘great divergence’.

Books of Fate and Popular Culture in Early China is a comprehensive introduction to the daybook manuscripts found in Warring States, Qin, and Han tombs (453 BCE–220 CE) and intended for use in daily life.

Book Reviews 95 Holloway’s book is problematic on many fronts. His model of what counts as religion is iconoclastic at best. Although there are many ways to argue that moral cultivation can indeed relate to religion, to lay such an emphasis on the role of faith, the faith that humanity is a physical substance and the faith that such a physical substance can be deployed in the world to create a religious community, would be very difficult to sustain against a generally Confucian worldview that for the most part resists the label religion, its dependence on the role of Heaven, ancestral sacrifice, funerary rites, and other forms of ritual notwithstanding. Second, his concentration on the tension between humanity and righteousness is a serious and valid topic of scholarly inquiry, but his conscious claim to ignore any examples from the received texts other than what is found in the “Tang Yu zhidao” radically reduces his argument to a kind of word-play with the text. One might compare his treatment to the masterful study of the same tension in Sarah Allan’s The Heir and the Sage: Dynastic Legends in Early China,4 which he cites but never discusses. But perhaps the most problematic aspect of Holloway’s monograph is his refusal to engage Csikszentmihalyi’s Material Virtue, which laid the groundwork for any study of “The Five Aspects.” Holloway has only two brief and tangential footnotes to that work. Finally, Holloway often claims that his study is of the “Guodian texts,” but he only deals with two in any depth (“The Five Aspects” and “Tang Yu zhidao”); a much more valuable study would have situated his topic within the total corpus of excavated texts from Guodian as well as the numerous sites dated to roughly the same period, and in such a way he could have built upon the foundations laid by previous scholars, including Allan and Csikszentmihalyi. THOMAS MICHAEL, Boston University Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture PAUL R. KATZ. London, New York: Routledge, 2009. xiii, 224 pages. ISBN 978-0-415-44345-6. £70.00, US$140.00 hardcover. In this fascinating and groundbreaking study historian Paul Katz investigates the intimate links between China’s legal culture and its religious culture, combining textual analysis with ethnographic investigation, all the while drawing analytical inspirations from legal 4 San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1981. 96 Journal of Chinese Religions anthropology as well as performance studies and speech act theories. The book should interest scholars in Chinese history (including Chinese diaspora studies), Chinese religions, ritual studies, legal history, comparative law, and anthropology (especially legal anthropology). After a useful introductory chapter summarizing the book’s key arguments and methodologies, Katz opens the book with a comparative exploration of how the idea of a “judicial underworld” developed in the West and in ancient China. As opposed to the Western, Christian model of a “moral death” that hinged upon a person’s status of having been saved or not (by God’s grace), the Chinese model of how a person fares after death is based on judgments on his acts while alive (an amalgam of Daoist and Buddhist conceptions); instead of the Christian “Final Judgment,” the Chinese developed an underworld court system that mirrored the worldly courts, including the details of bureaucratic, judicial procedures. Judicial deities emerged that specialized in handling underworld (and sometimes not so underworld) justice matters, the most prominent of which are the City God (城隍 Chenghuang) and the Emperor of the Eastern Peak (東嶽大帝 Dongyue dadi). Religious specialists such as Daoist priests, Buddhist monks, and plaint writers provided ritual services for a fee to aid people in seeking justice or attempting to dodge divine punishment. One intriguing question arises: Why didn’t similar legalistic and judicial metaphors develop in the Christian West during the Roman times when law became such a prominent institution? Or did the Christian model supersede an earlier Roman model that resembled more the Chinese model? In chapter 2 Katz introduces the key notion of “the judicial continuum” to highlight the intermixing of, and “reverberation” between, a wide range of legal and dispute resolution practices found in traditional and modern China that encompasses not...

In 1895, the failure of Sino-Japanese prompted the trend of comprehensive and systematic study of western pattern in China. In urban planning and construction, urban reform movement sprang up slowly, which aimed at renovating and reconstructing the traditional cities into modern cities similar to the concessions. During the movement, Chinese traditional city initiated a process of modern urban planning for its modernization. Meanwhile, the traditional planning morphology and system started to disintegrate, on the contrary, western form and technology had become the paradigm. Therefore, the improvement of existing cities had become the prototype of urban planning of early modern China. Currently, researches of the movement mainly concentrate on large cities, concessions, railway hub cities and some special cities resembling those. However, the systematic research about the large number of traditional small and medium-sized cities is still blank, up to now. This paper takes the improvement constructions of small and medium-sized cities in Southern region of Jiangsu Province as the research object. First of all, the criteria of small and medium-sized cities are based on the administrative levels of general office and cities at the county level. Secondly, the suitability of taking the Southern Jiangsu as the research object. The southern area of Jiangsu province called Southern Jiangsu for short, was the most economically developed region in Jiangsu, and also one of the most economically developed and the highest urbanization regions in China. As the most developed agricultural areas in ancient China, Southern Jiangsu formed a large number of traditional small and medium-sized cities. In early modern times, with the help of the Shanghai economic radiation, geographical advantage and powerful economic foundation, Southern Jiangsu became an important birthplace of Chinese national industry. Furthermore, the strong business atmosphere promoted the widespread urban improvement practices, which were incomparable of other regions. Meanwhile, the demonstration of Shanghai, Zhenjiang, Suzhou and other port cities became the improvement pattern of small and medium-sized city in Southern Jiangsu. This paper analyzes the reform movement of the small and medium-sized cities in Southern Jiangsu (1895-1927), including the subjects, objects, laws, technologies and the influence factors of politic and society ,etc. At last, this paper reveals the formation mechanism and characteristics of urban improvement movement in early modern China. According to the paper, the improvement of small-medium city was a kind of gestation of the local city planning culture in early modern China，with a fusion of introduction and endophytism.

The Revisability Principle

Elisabeth Hsu (ed.), Innovation in Chinese medicine, Needham Research Institute Series, No. 3, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. xv, 426. £55.00, US$80.00 (hardback 0-521-80068-4) - Volume 48 Issue 2

According to Karl Gerth, the author of China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation, this newly published monograph is “a study of nation-making through consumerism” (p. 5). Gerth claims that central to his argument is the pervasive tension between consumerism and nationalism. Such tension, he suggests, was an integral part of the creation of China as a modern nation (p. 1), and a critical examination therefore allows readers to connect all levels of Chinese society (p. 5). To further his argument, Gerth explains that in early 20th-century China an emerging consumer culture defined and spread modern Chinese nationalism. At the same time, the growing conceptualization of China as a ‘nation’ with its own ‘national products’ influenced and shaped its consumer culture (p. 3). By creating a “nationalised consumer culture,” the author argues, “notions of ‘nationality’ and China as a ‘modern’ nation-state were articulated, institutionalised, and practiced.” In Gerth's words again, “the consumption of commodities defined by the concept of nationality not only helped to create the very idea of ‘modern China’ but also became a primary means by which people in China began to conceptualise themselves as citizens of a modern nation” (p. 3).

This chapter argues for a simultaneous Phonographic Revolution in both early modern France and early China, understood as a reconceptualization of writing as recordings of the singing-speaking voice. To make this claim, the chapter juxtaposes two mid-eighteenth-century Parisian quarrels—the operatic ‘Querelle des Bouffons’ and the Orientalist debate on ancient Egypt and China—with contemporary Chinese philology, which drew, in turn, on folksong and opera cultures. Parallelisms and connections between the two scholarly cultures show that both moved simultaneously towards a theory that all writing systems are fundamentally phonographic. These concurrent remappings of writing vis-à-vis the voice offer a new heuristic of modernity oblique to the teleology of Western industrial and scientific progress.

For years massive land takings have been a breeding ground to controversies and conflicts in the Chinese society. The pressing challenges facing land takings and its relevant laws have largely been framed in the existing literature as a contemporary issue. Yet very little attention has been paid to the historical background against which large-scale land takings take place in China. This paper fills this gap by unearthing the theoretical foundations of land taking powers in modern China. It provides a detailed analysis of the Marxist-Soviet-Chinese communist tradition and the nationalist tradition of theories and exercises of the power of non-compensatory nationalization before discussing the impact of classical liberal thinking on property and the idea of socialized property upon the laws on compensatory expropriation in the early 1900s. It argues that despite the notable differences among these theoretical formulations, there is a common legacy that conceptualizes land takings not as an action to be undertaken diffusely and occasionally for specific technical purposes, but an instrument to be used systematically and frequently in order to achieve pre-conceived plans made by the party-state. Although no causal relationship is implied that the contemporary problem of expansive land takings is merely the continuation of history, through exposing the historical evolution of ideas and ideals justifying and guiding land takings in early 20th century China, this paper offers a new perspective on thinking about the present situation.

"Printed novels, guides to daily life, and practical medical texts were relatively new in sixteenth-century China, but they quickly became popular and influential. Novel Medicine shows how fiction shaped and was shaped by medical discourse and how it popularized practical, vernacular kinds of knowledge. A vibrant exchange among literary, commercial, and medical spheres resulted in a web of texts that produced distinct genealogies of romantic and sexual disease, iconographic lineages of heroic doctors, and medicalized attitudes toward reading. Novel Medicine interrogates how fiction incorporated, created, and disseminated medical knowledge. Conversely, it demonstrates how practical medical texts employed literary devices and figurative strategies to propagate information. Employing interdisciplinary strategies, it examines the dynamic interplay between discourses of fiction and medicine as well as their representations of illnesses and healers. Critical readings of fictional and medical texts, as well as sources such as fiction commentary, criticism, medical manuscripts, newspapers, essays, print images, and biographies inform an understanding of the body in early modern China. These readings also provide a counterpoint to prevailing narratives that focus on the 'literati' aspects of the novel, showing that these texts were not merely read, but were used by a wide variety of readers and for a range of purposes. This inquiry into the intersections of kinds and sources of knowledge--fictional and real, elite and vernacular--illuminates the history of reading and daily life and challenges us to rethink the nature of Chinese literature"--Provided by publisher

Reviewed by: Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China by Linh D. Vu Daniel Asen Linh D. Vu. Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. 281 pp. Hardcover ($49.95) or e-book. In Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China, Linh D. Vu examines the questions of “how and why a nation cares about its dead” (2) for a period of Chinese history stretching from the founding of the Republic to the Nanjing Decade, Second Sino-Japanese War, and Chinese Civil War. Vu’s approach is wide-ranging: readers will learn about the narratives and textual genres through which successive early twentieth-century Chinese regimes elevated political martyrs and constructed narratives of national history, the ways in which the state attempted to influence death ritual in order to claim political authority, and the bureaucratic regulations and procedures through which relatives of the war dead were compensated amid expanding domestic military conflict. This book is meant for a wide readership in modern Chinese history. It contains material that will be of interest to those who work in political and military history, social history, and cultural history. Vu’s attention to the details of compensation regulations and the process through which relatives of the dead sought benefits might also be of interest to those who study Republican civil law, given that these issues were so often related to how familial relations were defined in law and social practice. Notably, Vu is attentive to the societal and cultural impacts of wartime mass death and its commemoration in other historical contexts, such as in the United States during the American Civil War and in Europe after the First World War. This attention to the global history of death commemoration—as well as the book’s use of “necrocitizenry” and “necropolitics” as framing concepts, discussed below—suggests the possibility that scholars who work on similar issues in other times and places will find in Vu’s study a useful comparative case. Chapter 1 examines how the anti-Qing Yellow Flower Hill uprising of April 1911 was commemorated under the Nanjing Provisional Government, the regime of Yuan Shikai, and the Nationalist state of the early 1920s. Vu shows that these regimes’ efforts to claim legitimacy by commemorating anti-Qing revolutionaries imbued this uprising with new meanings as a symbol of national identity and unity, Confucian virtue, and partyled revolutionary martyrdom. Chapter 2 turns to the Nanjing Decade and the Nationalist state’s efforts to commemorate and lay claim to a broad range of “martyrs,” including anti-Qing reformers and revolutionaries, Nationalist military personnel who died fighting the forces of the Chinese Communist Party or Japan, and even bureaucrats who died of “overexertion.” The Nationalist government used the memory of these revered figures to augment the narrative of its own indispensable role in China’s recent history and to assert its political legitimacy as the inheritor of the Republic. Chapter 3 examines how relatives of those who were recognized as martyrs interacted with the bureaucracy that provided death benefits in the form of stipends, tuition [End Page E-12] assistance, and burial assistance. Vu shows that in practice this compensation system involved inconsistent regulations, a poorly defined financial base (which relied on local governments’ willingness to follow national compensation policies), and discontent among families who did not receive the benefits for which they petitioned. In chapter 4, Vu examines how widows and other female relatives of martyrs petitioned for compensation, the gendered subject-positions that they claimed for themselves in doing so, and the somewhat ambivalent forms of agency that these interactions with the state involved. Vu argues that, while such women were active agents in engaging the state’s compensation system, their petitioning strategies tended to invoke and thus reinforce “traditional wifely virtues of sacrifice and perseverance” (118). Similar tropes were also deployed in the commemoration of women who died while fighting or resisting the enemy. Chapter 5 examines how the prospect of “mass martyrization” (156) during the Second Sino-Japanese War led to ever-finer compensation regulations and procedures, expanded efforts to collect martyrs’ stories and compile...