Melancholic and monastic: moss as a symbol in Chinese literature

Contributors

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.

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...

Reviewed by: Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture by Robin R. Wang Ian M. Sullivan (bio) Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture. By Robin R. Wang. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 205. isbn 978-0-521-16513-6. Robin Wang’s latest book, Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture, is an indispensable contribution to Chinese studies. Wang highlights the diverse uses of yinyang throughout two thousand years of Chinese cultural development in order to deepen the complexity of the concept for the Western reader and to bring it to life as a full-fledged thinking paradigm. She argues that yinyang “serves as a horizon for much of Chinese thought and culture … in the sense that although the terms are invoked in particular contexts for concrete purposes, they imply a deeper cultural background and a paradigm for thinking about change and effective action” (p. 5). Wang utilizes three methodological approaches to develop the yinyang thinking paradigm. The first approach is descriptive and historical in that it draws from texts familiar to a Western audience, such as the Yijing and Daodejing, as well as those less familiar, such as the Guiguzi, Heguanzi, Wenzi, and Zhouyi cantong qi, in order to illustrate how widely utilized the concept of yinyang is in Chinese culture and also to demonstrate that while many of these uses are different, there is an underlying structural unity across the diverse array. The second approach is philosophical in that it works to develop yinyang as a conceptual thinking paradigm. To accomplish this, Wang explores the function of yinyang in the fields of Chinese cosmology, epistemology, ethics, medicine, and visual interpretation. The third approach is pragmatic in that Wang emphasizes the practical and strategic functions of yinyang that overlap with the conceptual elements in ethical, medicinal, and interpretive practices. The order of the chapters proceeds through five areas of Chinese thought and culture. Chapter 2 focuses on the cosmological functions of yinyang and articulates the notions of the Dao 道 (the way), qi 氣 (vital force or energy), yi 易 (changes), and taiji 太極 (the great ultimate). In chapter 3, Wang explores the logic of yinyang through an examination of how yinyang and lei 類 (kinds) parse the world and relate elements of the natural and social orders. Various strategies (shu 術) of yinyang are the topic of chapter 4. Here Wang examines how yinyang can be used efficaciously to integrate “being, thinking, and doing” (p. 20). Chapter 5 focuses on the embodied dimensions of yinyang and is a study of the yinyang structure that informs medical understanding and practices of bodily self-cultivation (xiushen 修身). Wang emphasizes the importance of the rhythm, balance, and transformation of yinyang for health in traditional Chinese medicine. Chapter 6 is structured around the notion of [End Page 656] xiangshu 象數 (images and numbers) and serves as the conclusion to the project. It culminates in an explication of the “visual thinking” and the “analogical reasoning” found at the heart of the yinyang thinking paradigm and the practice of reading yinyang visual symbolization. From the project’s ambitious aims and Wang’s exemplary scholarship emerges a must-read for anyone interested in Chinese philosophy. Ian M. Sullivan University of Hawai‘i ian2@hawaii.edu Copyright © 2015 University of Hawai‘i Press

Study on Dialectical Relationship between Chinese Culture Flourishing and Psychological Healing

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.

WHO International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Chinese Medicine: Use in Context, Creatively

Chinese prose has a long history. During this period, various famous artists have created many excellent works. Prose is a very important literature and art form which takes writing as creation and aesthetic object. In ancient Chinese literature, prose just like verses and parallel writings, does not pursue rhyme and sentence pattern. This is prose in a broad sense. And I would like to talk about prose in a narrow sense. In modern Chinese literature, prose refers to a literary genre which is in parallel with poetry, novel and drama. The major characteristics of prose are the sincere feeling and the beautiful language. After May 4th Movement, the social literature form was influenced by the New Culture Movement, a number of splendid writers in our country created a good deal of excellent works of prose. These are the precious treasures of Chinese literature, carrying the Chinese spirit and culture. But it is a pity that academics at home and abroad have done few researches on the modern Chinese essays translation, and the study about it is rare. The research on Chinese prose translation study, however, is far from enough. The Chinese prose translation study has lagged behind the other literary genre study all the time. Mr. Zhang's two series of "Modern Chinese Prose Selection" translations are his classic masterpieces. The selected works are all famous prose of young intellectuals after the May 4th Movement in China. The essays in them are of profound significance and full of characteristics of the times. So this article tries to explore Professor Zhang Peiji's translation art style in combination with prose selection. The fact that Professor Zhang has successfully translated also proves that the Chinese can make a great contribution in the Chinese-English translation career. The author also expects that Chinese scholars and translators will actively participate in the translation career, and to learn from each other's strengths in future translations. Really let Chinese culture go to the world as soon as possible.

"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.

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.

This article aims to present Confucius’ mother, Yan Zhengzai, in the Chinese ancient literature and history, remembering her feats of home education and praising her wisdom as the first representative of wise women in the Chinese traditional culture. China has never had a Mother’s Day, because there is no consensus on the typical representative of a Chinese mother. Confucius (28 September 551 B.C. — 11 April 479 B.C.) is one of the representatives of Chinese culture, his doctrine — Confucianism — is the foundation and spiritual mentality of the Chinese nation. Yang Zhengzai was both Confucius’s mother and first teacher. With her unique and new vision, concept, content, and teaching method, she brought up Confucius as the “Wise Teacher of Antiquity”, a great thinker, and educator of the traditional society of ancient China. She left the precious wisdom for Chinese matriarchal culture behind, making this great woman a worthy Chinese Holy Mother. This paper details the hard mental journey of the great mother and her teaching principles for the dignified development of the great son, as well as presenting other Chinese great mothers. The authors note that Yan Zhengzai is the most successful female model of family education in China and the world. Therefore, the authors propose to establish a Mother’s Day in China honoring Yang Zhengzai.

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.

Reviewed by: Chinese Aesthetics and Literature: A Reader Karl S. Y. Kao (bio) Corinne H. Dale, editor. Chinese Aesthetics and Literature: A Reader. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. xxi, 247 pp. Hardcover $81.50, ISBN 0-7914-6021-5. Paperback $27.95, ISBN 0-7914-6022-3. As explained in its Preface, this book is modeled after Japanese Aesthetics and Culture: A Reader, edited by Nancy Hume (State University of New York Press, 1995), a book designed for use by non-Asianist college instructors in their teaching of Japanese literature. Like Hume, Dale is a professor of English, and she has done a similar volume on Chinese literature, likewise intended for nonspecialists. Although most readers of China Review International probably would not be "non-Asianists" in Hume's sense—most are probably specialists of Chinese studies or avowed students of it in one related area or another—this volume could be of interest to them as a source book for a class in Chinese literature. The book contains eleven essays selected from various sources on Chinese philosophy and literature. In addition, there are an Introduction by the editor that explains the selections, an outline history of Chinese literature, and ancillary material such as the headnote that precedes each essay and the annotated classified bibliography, which includes a bibliography of bibliographies, general reference books, studies on various genres, et cetera. The title of the book is indeed an attractive one for students of Chinese literature in general. But it should be pointed out that one of the words featured in it, "aesthetics," is itself not a focus of inquiry; no essays in the collection are specifically devoted to the topic. Dale's Introduction explains that aesthetics is here understood in a general sense of "artistic values or preferences" based on a "philosophically informed understanding of human experience." In other words, philosophy is assumed to play a role in the shaping of literature and could help explain its properties and values. Organized apparently with this understanding, the selection includes, besides essays on Chinese literature itself, philosophical writings concerning the traditional Chinese worldview, cosmogony, and cultural outlook. The selections are taken from existing sources, mostly by scholars eminent in their own fields, and many of them may in fact give students in different fields of Chinese studies, including literature, a feeling of déjà vu. The first three essays are by Pauline Yu and Theodore Huters (joint authors), Roger Ames, and Tu Wei-ming, and they all go back to the early philosophical or mythological sources to find the origins of Chinese conceptions of cosmology and the world and of the Chinese cultural outlook. Students of sinology will reencounter such ideas as the one that the Chinese worldview is organic, characterized by a correlational thinking about all things in the universe—ideas that Joseph Needham and his collaborators in their work on Chinese science and civilization [End Page 302] have made widely known. Frederick Mote's notion of the "uncreated world" of Chinese cosmogony is also often reiterated. These concepts are here best described in Ames' essay, the second in the collection, titled "Language and Interpretive Contexts" (adapted from his introduction to Ames et al., eds., Interpreting Culture Through Translation: A Festschrift for D. C. Lau [1991]). In concise, lucid language, Ames explains from a comparative perspective the fundamental differences between the Western and Chinese worldviews. Tu Wei-ming approaches the question of Chinese cosmogony through the concept of ch'i (qi) in his "The Continuity of Being" (originally included in Leroy S. Rouner, ed., On Nature [1984]). Drawing from both early Confucianism and Neo-Confucian writings, Tu argues that qi in these traditions is at once the "basic stuff" that makes up the cosmos and the "vital force" that energizes all modalities of being, thus making it possible to see matter and spirit as one and the same, undifferentiated and undifferentiable. Tu further emphasizes the concept of "transformation" in place of creation; according to this view, humanity is but part of a great continuum of being. The first essay, Yu and Huters' "The Imaginative Universe of Chinese Literature" (originally an introductory essay to Chinese literature for the book Masterworks...

Traditional Chinese medicine culture is rooted in the excellent traditional Chinese culture, has a deep cultural heritage and unique value. It is an important part of the soft power of Chinese culture. With the recent increase in the number of overseas Chinese migrating to Southeast Asian countries, the role of overseas Chinese in the international dissemination of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is becoming increasingly significant. The overseas dissemination of Chinese medicine is conducive to helping Chinese medicine culture to go out and boosting China's cultural soft power in Southeast Asia. This paper applies the causal mechanism, taking Thailand as an example, to analyse the three basic ways of international communication of Chinese overseas Chinese: Chinese media, Chinese associations, and Chinese education, and analyses how the dissemination of Chinese traditional medicine has helped China to improve its cultural soft power in Southeast Asia, which is of great practical significance to China's efforts to promote the mutual understanding of civilizations and people's hearts and minds, and to promote opening up to the outside world and economic development.