Perspectives on Architecture of (Modern) China

Reviewed by: Daoism and Anarchism: Critique of State Autonomy in Ancient and Modern China by John A. Rapp Yuri Pines (bio) John A. Rapp. Daoism and Anarchism: Critique of State Autonomy in Ancient and Modern China. Contemporary Anarchist Studies. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012. xi, 240 pp. Paperback $32.95, isbn 978-1-4411-7880-0. Throughout most of its known history, China was a monarchic state, and, in the eyes of many, it was a paradigmatic monarchic state. While the actual power of kings and emperors varied in time and space, the ideology of monarchism—namely, the conviction that all under heaven should be ruled by a single, omnipotent sovereign who should preside over a powerful bureaucracy—remained intact. Yet it would be patently wrong to identify the entire Chinese political or intellectual history as merely a manifestation of uninhibited Oriental despotism. Actually, Chinese political thought had a powerful countercurrent of strong and pointed criticism of individual rulers and of interventionist state apparatus. A few of the most radical critics even questioned the very legitimacy of the monarchic rule and of the organized state in general; their views strongly resonate with modern anarchist thought. Although historically these radical critics remained a tiny minority, their ideas might have been conducive to the acceptance of anarchist ideology in China at the beginning of the twentieth century. These ideas may be of relevance to current critics of the state in China and elsewhere. The history of China’s anarchism—from its origins to current attempts to revitalize it—has not been heretofore systematically addressed in a single study; hence, publication of John Rapp’s Daoism and Anarchism could have become a most welcome addition to the Sinological library. Unfortunately, the book is disappointing. In particular, its first part, dealing with Daoist philosophy, is so full of inaccuracies that it cannot be recommended to any scholar interested in the supposed anarchist strands in so-called Daoist thought. This failure, in addition to manifold methodological weaknesses and an inadequate understanding of [End Page 381] primary sources, invalidates the book in general, even though its second part, which deals with anarchism in modern and current China, is undoubtedly stronger than the first. Actually, the book improves from chapter to chapter, so the last two—which deal with extra-Party and inner-Party neoanarchist critiques of the state in the People’s Republic of China—are, indeed, the best; they are well written and are highly informative. However, in what follows, I shall focus exclusively on the first part, which is essential for the author’s project to “help non-China specialists to see anarchism as not just a Euro-American concept” (p. 3) and which is, unfortunately, the weakest. Weaknesses of Rapp’s first chapters are manifold. To begin with, they are written so haphazardly that one may well believe that the manuscript was never edited by either the author or the publisher. The chapters are full of inaccuracies and typos. These include wrong transliterations (e.g., Shen Nong 神農 and Xu Xing 許行 are consistently transliterated as Shen Nung and Xiu Xing; Empress Lü 呂后 loses the umlaut to become Empress Lu [pp. 96, 247]), incorrect dates (e.g., 141–187 c.e. for the reign dates of Emperor Wu of Han [漢武帝, r. 141–87 b.c.e.], or incomprehensible ca. 220 b.c.e.–62 c.e. for the Wei-Jin period [魏晉, 220–420 c.e.]), and odd syntaxes, for example, on p. 22, where a single sentence comprises no fewer than 132 words. At times, Rapp’s statements are simply misleading, for example, when he attributes to unnamed opponents an argument that “separation of Daoism into daojia (philosophical Daoism) and daojiao (Daoist teaching, for example, alchemical and religious traditions) is itself only a later concept of the historian Sima Qian (165–110 b.c.e.)” (p. 8). This sentence is doubly wrong: First, Rapp means not Sima Qian 司馬遷 but his father, Sima Tan 司馬談; and, second, Sima Tan did not “separate Daoism” into “daojia and daojiao,” but was arguably the first to define daojia as scholastic lineage.1 Making two obvious mistakes in a single sentence is not a good start for the book, and, unfortunately, many...

This chapter tells of the technological achievements in hydrologic and hydraulic survey in ancient and modern China. Firstly, water level survey appeared very early in ancient China, and by the Song Dynasty, it had reached a peak, with water gauges widely used. Besides water level survey, flow measurement and calculation were also attached importance to. In modern times, more advances were made in hydrologic survey. Secondly, in terms of hydraulic survey, leveling instruments and practice are elaborated on. In addition, this chapter also introduces measurement of distance, height, depth, and bearings. Thirdly, the chapter sums up the achievements in hydraulic surveying in both ancient and modern China.

China's modern architecture modeling carries the subtleties of the ancient architectural art, it combines the architectural art of the west developed. However, in general, it is also a bit behind compared with developed countries. There are still many problems in art design and Material performance of buildings. This paper, from the Chinese modern architecture art foundation started talking about, Analysis of the materials performance and building aesthetic, Elaborated on China's modern architectural art in the combination of Chinese and Western problems, as well as in their own institutional occurred problems.

The ecological agriculture movement in modern China

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...

The entrance of “nature” from English to Chinese and the transformation of the word ziran in Chinese had been intertwined together. In the formal process, “nature” was not translated as ziran at first while in the latter process, the western concept and Chinese ideas of nature combined together with multiple, comprehensive meanings in the history of modern China. This means the second process consists some major transformations of ziran as a key concept in modern China. Firstly, it has been a process of materialization for the traditional concept of ziran from ancient China. Secondly, traditional ideas of nature like tian, tianran, ziran, got revived during their association and collaborations with western understandings of nature as a concept of naturalist philosophy. Thirdly, it was also in this process where a humanistic and existential definition of ziran began to emerge, not only as a response to the materialized understanding of ziran, but also created the confrontation between a material occidental civilization and a spiritual oriental civilization. This dualist view not only ignored other thought like Romantism, Humanism and ideas which go against materialism or scientism, but also overlooked materialism and scientism itself in the history of Modern China.

In modern China, there has been a notable shift in the usage of 'X dog', disparaging words involving the word "dog" with a noun, resulting in a progressive diminution of its negative impact. Using Lynne Tirrell's theory of derogatory terms, this paper employs a combination of literature review and corpus analysis to explore the ways in which the essentialism condition has contributed to the historical prevalence of 'X dog' as a widely used derogatory term in ancient China, and how its shifting perception has impacted its usage in the modern era. This study gives vital insights into the intricacies of linguistic and social practices in Chinese society by exposing the deep relationships between disparaging terminology and the essentialism condition. In addition, the paper discusses potential disagreements and differing perspectives regarding the usage of pejorative terminology, providing nuanced explanations and perspectives on this contentious matter. Overall, this research presents a nuanced examination of the manner in which 'X dog' and other pejorative labels are created by historical, cultural, and linguistic factors, and highlights the need for more investigation into the intricate dynamics of language use in modern China.

The following essay attempts to compare and collate Ezra Pound's poetico-political 'mission' of redeeming the West through his interpretations, translations and commentaries of the Confucian system of thinking with the ongoing revival of Confucius in China. Did Pound's poetico-political visions of a Confucian framework for the Western world consider whether or not Confucianism had ever taken root in Ancient China much less in modern China ? Is present day China's return to the Old Master a re-idolisation of him or a promotional stimulus to her globalising crusade ? Or can this return be interpreted as the spiritual and cultural asset to sustain and nurture her global élan ? Where does the 'real' Figure of Confucius lie between Pound's poetico-political 'mission' and China's own mission to influence the world ? Indeed, my readings of Pound's meditations on Confucian thinking, and their poetic and political implications in today's ever-expanding Chinese economy, may explain, relatively speaking, the Chinese Communist Party's need to accompany its economic and technological discourses, challenges and drives by a Mentor whose towering momentiousness, however 'ancient' or 'antiquated', confers to these discourses, challenges and drives, a powerful civilising Figure, whose rectitude, probity and virtue quell or mitigate any untoward consequence of these economic and technological adventures, purvey them a sound and stable humanised or enlightened resource. Keywords : Confucius-Ezra Pound-Cantos-globalization-mission-Order-Beauty-Harmony-Analects DOI: 10.7176/JAAS/79-04 Publication date: April 30 th 2022

Political governance and urban systems: A persistent shock on population distribution from capital relocation in ancient China

Review of urban drainage and stormwater management in ancient China

STUDIES ON RELIGIONS IN MODERN CHINA CHEN LINSHU Survey article The purpose of this paper is to give a brief survey of the publications on religious studies by academic circles in modern China so as to facilitate academic exchanges in the same field with scholars in the West. Since ancient times China has produced a series of literary works on religious studies, but to regard religion as an object of scientific research resulted mainly from the impact of the 19th century tide of religious studies in the West. The history of religious studies in modern China, beginning at the end

In the modern period, the politics, economy, culture and life of the Chinese society have undergone great changes, and there is a fierce collision between western thinking and traditional culture, and the intricate historical environment has profoundly influenced the development of modern Chinese architecture. In this paper, the new fourth army site in Nanchang, a modern excellent historical building, is selected to carry out field research and on-site mapping, and on this basis, relevant analyses are carried out, with a view to grasping the natural geographic environment and historical environment of the construction of the new fourth army site in Nanchang, and to understand its historical accumulation and architectural style, and in this process, deepen the knowledge and understanding of China’s modern architecture.

The prominent architectural historian Liang Sicheng devoted much of his career to the photographic, graphic, and textual documentation of old Chinese buildings. This project was grounded in his efforts to (re)construct a Chinese architectural “Order,” and in so doing to posit a functional equivalence between Chinese civilization and that of the West. This essay examines the genealogy of this claim by situating Liang's work in relation to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century practices of architectural photography. It argues that colonial photographs of Chinese architectural monuments and surrounding urban spaces serve not only to “document” these buildings as signifiers of civilizational difference but also to transform them into a form of currency (both real and symbolic) in the unequal economy of colonial exchange. At the same time that these buildings begin to circulate as images in the global marketplace, in other words, they also serve to reify and fix in place the lived spaces and historical processes that they pictorially represent. This reification takes place in collusion with the distinctive characteristics and constraints of nineteenth-century photographic technologies. This essay compares the work of two war photographers, Felix Beato and James Ricalton, who documented Beijing in conjunction with imperialist military campaigns against the Qing dynasty, first in 1860 and later in the wake of the Boxer uprising in 1900. An understanding of the divergent imaging technologies these two men employed (wet-collodion photography and stereography, respectively) is crucial to decoding not only how these images look to us now but also the way they suggested and perpetuated imperial ways of seeing, evaluating, and profiting from technologically reproduced visions of “China” and Chinese architecture, particularly the walls and monuments of Beijing.

Clinker bricks were popular as a facade material in the United States between the 1890s and the 1930s. However, this material was unknown to Chinese builders and was seldom found in Chinese modern architecture from 1840 to 1949. The Smart Memorial Gymnasium built in the years 1934–1937 in the Tiancizhuang Campus of Soochow University (Suzhou, China) is one of the rare examples of a building featuring clinker bricks in modern China. Notably, those clinker bricks were not imported but locally manufactured. Despite the heritage significance of the Smart Memorial Gymnasium as part of a major historical and cultural site protected at the national level in China, the history and characteristics of those historical bricks have remained virtually unexplored. This study first provides a historical analysis of those bricks, giving insights into the general knowledge of this construction material around that time based on British and American historical sources from the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on historical treaties and documents. This analysis sheds light on the raw materials mixtures of clinker bricks, their manufacturing processes, and their architectural applications at the time. Moreover, this study presents a physicochemical analysis of the clinker bricks employed at Soochow University, focusing on the correlation between historical studies and physicochemical characteristics, as well as the materials’ characteristics that respond to the natural environment. X-ray diffraction (XRD), Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS), and total immersion tests were employed to investigate the physicochemical properties of the bricks at various locations of the Smart Memorial Gymnasium facades. Our findings deepen the knowledge and understanding of clinker bricks transferred from the West to China in the early 20th century. Additionally, our results reveal the chemical composition and physical characteristics of different types of clinker bricks used in the Smart Memorial Gymnasium, outlining practical implications and future research directions. Overall, this study lays a foundation for the heritage recognition and conservation of Chinese clinker bricks.

The eighteenth and nineteenth century was the heyday of biological illustration in western world.However, China did not have the tradition of scientific biology as early as the West, though it had a long history of herbalism.Biology was not introduced into this country until the late nineteenth century, around the end of Qing Dynasty, while the practice of biological illustration was even much later than that.In ancient China, a lot of illustrated books did exist, especially herbals, which also contained animal illustrations, since traditional Chinese medicine often used both plant and animal materials.However, it is hard to say whether these illustrations were scientifically accurate and correct, because they were drawn mainly according to experience, not scientific standard.As the founder of biological illustration in China, Chengru Feng (1896-1968), not only drew for botanists and zoologists, such as Xiansu Hu, Huanyong Chen, and Bing Zhi, but also trained the earliest Chinese biological illustrators, who greatly contributed to the progress of biology in China.He also published Biological Illustration, which was the first Chinese handbook in this field.Affected by his family, Chengru Feng, whose father ran an old-style private Chinese school and was also engaged in farming, entered a normal college and then became an art teacher in an elementary school at the age of twenty.As an artist, Chengru Feng was gifted at traditional Chinese painting, pencil sketch, still life, and also western oil painting and water colors as well.His biological illustrations combined techniques of Chinese claborate-style painting and western painting, whilst exhibiting his own style.From 1921 to 1922, when teaching art in National Nanjing Higher Normal School (now Nanjing Normal University), Chengru Feng was invited by botanist Xiansu Hu and zoologist Bing Zhi to draw dozens of large biological illustrations for a newly established biological department in Southeast University and Biological Institute of Chinese Scientific Society.This