Reinventing Self-Cultivation: The Body, Race and the Evolutionary Dream in Modern China

Reviewed by: Discourses of Weakness in Modern China: Historical Diagnoses of the "Sick Man of East Asia." ed. by Iwo Amelung Ying-kit Chan (bio) Iwo Amelung, editor. Discourses of Weakness in Modern China: Historical Diagnoses of the "Sick Man of East Asia." Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2020. 586 pp. Softcover €45.00, isbn 978-3-593-50902-0. From the late nineteenth century, when Qing China suffered a series of military defeats and "national humiliation" at the hands of Japanese and European powers, to the early 1940s, Chinese officials and scholars created a cache of references to the weakness of China in the face of imperialism and foreign aggression. They established and explained China's links with other nations in the world and sought both inspiration and lessons from them for elevating China in the global hierarchy of national power. Taking its cue from Rebecca E. Karl's conceptualization of nationalism as a "global historical problematic," this book examines how the metaphor of the "Sick Man" in Chinese discourses of weakness has produced a distinct form of Chinese nationalism that "can be consumed and maybe even enjoyed" (p. 14). A collection of papers presented at an international conference held at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, in December 2015, within the framework of the Collaborative Research Cluster "Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes," funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the book argues for a more historically grounded understanding of contemporary China's national identity, self-image, and self-representation. Featuring mostly German and mainland Chinese scholars, the book ultimately traces the current Chinese government's obsession with sovereignty and fear of foreign intervention in its internal affairs. It also suggests how China, with its innovativeness and economic might, has turned the tables on Europe in recent years, forcing Europe to generate its own discourses of weakness with which Europe's China historians have had to grapple through a comparative lens. Running to almost 600 pages, this massive book is divided into four parts. The first part, "Examining the Sick Man—Describing Symptoms of Weakness," explores the development of the Sick Man metaphor in China. As the four essays in the first part suggest, Chinese elites created and deployed discourses of weakness to define China as a modern polity that was enmeshed in global structures. In doing so, they clarified what modernity meant for China and what China had to do—or not do—to be modern and respectable in the global family of nations. The second part, "Diagnosing the Sick Man—Divided, [End Page 53] Imperiled, Humiliated," discusses the concepts of extraterritoriality, national ruin, and social Darwinism in relation to the decline and disintegration of the Chinese nation. The five essays in the second part reveal that Chinese intellectuals held a Darwinian, realpolitik worldview, in which war, interstate rivalry, and global competition took center stage, and China must learn to adapt and survive in the harsh world of diplomatic realism and military conflicts. The third part, "Prognosis for the Sick Man—Ruin, Resistance, and Restoration," is composed of three essays that delve into the Chinese appropriation of foreign knowledge and contextualize the Chinese discourses of weakness in the world. In the discourses, the partition of Poland was a particularly popular and striking trope, which soon developed into a nationalist symbol, a specter of national ruin that China must avoid at all costs. For Chinese intellectuals, India, a supposedly civilizational nation like China, was another prime example of what could happen to their nation if they did not pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The fourth part, "Treating the Sick Man—Coexistence, Science, and Profit," highlights the rallying power of Chinese discourses of weakness in "awakening" and mobilizing much of the Chinese nation for the cause of overcoming the peril of total annihilation. The three essays in the fourth part show how ideas such as pan-Asianism and scientific progress gained credence in print media among increasingly educated and literate Chinese. The ideas were widely debated as possible solutions to China's weakness, and the public debates reflected a Chinese nation that had come to terms with its weakness. In the present day, however, this has been "overcompensated" for with hyper-defensive diplomatic...

Reviewed by: After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China by Howard Chiang Y. Yvon Wang yyvon.wang@utoronto.ca Howard Chiang . After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 391 pp. $65.00 (cloth), $26.00 (paper). After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China, based on the author's Princeton University doctoral dissertation, is the first monograph-length historical account of transformations that both established and challenged sexual binaries in the Sinosphere from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It is wide ranging and ambitious in its themes and scholarly engagements. A succinct introduction surveys the work's narrative arc: Howard Chiang posits a "genealogical relationship" (7) between palace eunuchs, men castrated to qualify for service in imperial households since China's early dynasties, and Cold War–era sexual reassignment, which saturated the Taiwanese press under the Nationalist (Guomindang) Party after its retreat from the Communist-ruled mainland in 1949. The connection, Chiang argues, was a transformation in ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender between the 1920s and the 1940s. Chiang sees this shift as comparable to Michel Foucault's model of the rise of scientia sexualis, 1 anchored by state power and scientific/medical expertise, in modern Europe. In China, too, new notions about sex grew symbiotically with nationalistic ideas about the naturalness of "China." The opening chapter focuses on representations of eunuchs from the late Qing empire (1644–1912) to the Republic of China (1912–1949). The nineteenth-century court was forced by military and diplomatic reversals to grant increasing concessions to foreign states and individuals. Eunuchs surfaced in venues from expatriate European medical experts' publications to the emergent Chinese news media; Chiang also cites published recollections by eunuchs themselves. The ambiguity of what castration entailed and self-contradictory characterizations of eunuchs, including those who had self-castrated, Chiang contends, did not stop either foreign observers or increasingly nationalistic Chinese commentators from linking castrated bodies with China's weakness and backwardness, paralleling the contemporaneous condemnation of female footbinding as symptomatic of "the sick man of Asia." Chiang's subsequent chapters take up three facets of the transformation of Chinese sexuality and gender across the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century: "visibility," "new layers of visual evidence that made it possible for sex to become an object of observation" (71); "carnality," would-be sexological experts' debates about desire in the urban press; and "malleability," knowledge about sex hormones and intersexuality that made it possible to imagine any human body changing sex. [End Page E-6] Chapter 2 charts three phases of visualizing sex in textbooks and other texts of scientific expertise; they explain "how and why Western biological notions of sex" became the intellectual default (107; emphasis original). A novel "anatomical aesthetic" emphasized mapping organs and tissues and defining sexual difference physiologically. Next came "morphological sensibility," which compared male and female animals, drawing links to human sexual difference. Finally, Chiang describes the "subcellular gaze," which construed chromosomes and gonadal tissues as proof of sexual dimorphism. Chapter 3 documents "epistemic modernity" (129–33) in the new field of sexual science, mainly through writings by French-trained philosopher Zhang Jingsheng (張競生 1888–1970) and American-educated eugenicist Pan Guangdan (潘光旦 1898–1967) and responses thereto in the urban media. Chiang calls sexological discourse "heterogenous—and perhaps even ambiguous" (158) though it reified the "science" of sex and the authority of scientific expertise. Debates over the category of homosexuality and its threat or value to modern Chinese society illustrate this point. Sexologists formulated "homosexuality" as a totalizing identity distinct from older status- and performance-based understandings even as they projected it anachronistically backward. In chapter 4, Chiang traces an unprecedentedly fluid view of sexual difference. A hormonal conception of sex based on Euro-American research prevailed among Chinese intellectuals by the 1940s. Chiang takes the 1935 coverage of Yao Jinping (姚錦屏 ca. 1915–?) to exemplify the flexibility of sex in this endocrinological perspective. Yao, a young woman, claimed to have undergone "physical sex change" literally overnight (209) media, doctors, and the army general who had commanded her missing father...

「經濟」一詞在中文裹原意為「經世濟民」或有關「經世」的才能，它包含儒學特殊的經濟觀，就是將道德規範的約束視作社會組識原則。中國近代之所以用「經濟」一詞來指涉economy，與儒學將經濟關係隸屬於道德秩序這一傳統思維模式密切相關。新文化運動前期(1915~1919)，中國知識分子接受了西方自由主義社會組識原則，即社會由獨立自主的個人通過契約組成。在這種社會組識原則中，經濟秩序與道德秩序的關係不那麼密切。正是在這一時期，「經濟」一詞與道德脫離關係，獲得了今天中文「經濟」一詞的含義。但當時中國正面臨引進西方代議政治的失敗以及現代經濟快速發展引發的社會普遍的生計危機。這使得很多知識分子放棄自由主義社會組識原則，把社會看作由獨立個人根據新道德規範組成；這是五四知識分子接受馬列主義的思想史內部原因。 本文通過對一八三○至一九二○年間近七千萬字政治思想言論中「經濟」一詞的意義分析，揭示出中國知識分子經濟觀的變遷。我們發現，馬列主義經濟決定論被中國知識分子廣泛接受，是與他們把社會視為由道德規範組成的思想模式密切相關。五四時期中國知識分子接受馬列主義經濟決定論的過程與馬克思主義經濟決定論在西方興起存在著共同的機制。

Reviewed by: The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling Kwok-kan Tam (bio) Kirk A. Denton . The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. x, 324 pp. Hardcover $49.50, ISBN0-8047-3128-4. Kirk Denton's The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling merits the double attention of scholars and students in modern Chinese studies. To begin with, it is much more than a study of modern Chinese literature, for it attempts to chart cultural change in modern China in terms of the transformation in Chinese subjectivity. In doing this difficult job, Denton offers an "interpretive social science" perspective in delineating the cultural dimension of the modern Chinese self as a problematic caught between tradition and modernity. In many other studies on Chinese modernity, scholars tend to adopt theoretical models that account for changes in modern China in terms of social continuities and discontinuities, which are more often than not represented as acultural in orientation. In this respect, Denton's book is not only a major contribution to the study of modern China, it also provides a model for placing literature in the broader context of sociocultural developments. The book consists of two parts: "Modernity and Cultural Politics" and "Lu Ling and the Problematic of the Subject." In part 1, there is a detailed discussion of Hu Feng's and Lu Ling's views of subjectivism in the context of cultural politics in modern China, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. This part serves as historical background for the study of Hu Feng and Lu Ling, and also as a theoretical discussion of how to define Chinese modernity. As Denton says, "By modernity I mean the rhetoric of newness, progress, enlightenment, revolution and self received from Western sources but remodeled by intellectuals in response to a specific historical context of imperialism and domestic social decay" (p. 7). Anything that was Western was thus new and exotic to the Chinese from the late Qing through the 1940s. Defined as such, many aspects of Chinese modernity cannot be regarded in the same way as the modernity that occurred in the West at the turn of the twentieth century. Thus, even European Romanticism was received as modern in China in the 1920s and 1930s. Such a view sheds much light on the nature and context of modernity in China. For many scholars working in the field of modern Chinese culture, how to define Chinese modernity remains a problem of central importance. If Chinese modernity can include various aspects of European Romanticism, then how can it still be called modernity? Should Chinese modernity be called something else? If there is something in Chinese modernity that parallels modernity in the Western sense, then what is it? Denton gives the answer that it is the changing Chinese concept of self that marks a cultural shift from tradition to modernity in China; as he puts it: "Chinese modernity and its literature, with their attention to the individual [End Page 434] and the representation of mind, clearly marks a break from tradition. But underlying this radically new narrative orientation lay profound continuities with traditional views of mind, particularly its 'linkage' to the external world of others and the cosmos. . . . This dual nature of self, at once transcendent and determined, and attempts to reconcile this duality inform the writing of modern literary critics" (p. 41). This view of duality and the conflicts that have ensued have been discussed in many books and essays, including the volume edited by Roger T. Ames et al., Self as Image in Asian Theory and Practice (1998). In part 2, Denton focuses on two novels, Children of the Rich and Hungry Guo Su'e, both by Lu Ling. In his reading of these two novels, Denton shows that the changing modern Chinese self is represented as a duality between individualism and collectivism, between the subjective and the objective aspects of the mind, and is caught in the conflicts thus involved. Such conflicts actually are not limited to the characters of Lu Ling's fiction. They can also be found in the...

Chinese Nationalism

Reviewed by: Realms of Freedom in Modern China Merle Goldman (bio) William C. Kirby , editor. Realms of Freedom in Modern China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. 396 pp. Hardcover $60.00, ISBN 0-8047-4878. William Kirby, the editor of Realms of Freedom in Modern China, explains in the Introduction to this fifteenth volume in the series "The Making of Modern Freedom" that realms of freedom are not unique to Western civilization. They also existed in Chinese civilization but without the protections of law established in the West. He points out that these realms were particularly prevalent in the areas of personal and community autonomy. Although during the Republican era in the early decades of the twentieth century, laws were partly codified to protect such areas, the increasing level of state control established under the Goumindang (1928-1945), culminating in the 1949 Chinese Communist revolution and the rule of Mao Zedong (1949-1976), resulted in a reign of despotism that closed down these areas of freedom. Yet, after Mao's death in 1976, China reverted to the pre 1949 realms of moral autonomy, political protest, economic opportunity, and relative religious freedom that had existed off and on through most of China's history. This edited volume presents a rich, substantive discussion of these realms [End Page 400] of freedom in pre-1949 and post-Mao China and Taiwan from a variety of perspectives and with a diversity of views. The volume begins with an essay by Irene Bloom emphasizing that classical Confucian thought recognized the universal dignity of human beings, the morally autonomous individual, and legitimate protest. She points out that while "doctrines of political freedom did not originally grow on Chinese soil, there was a non-doctrinal but discernible sense of philosophical freedom . . . intertwined with an identifiably Chinese sense of a free personality" (p. 20). Moreover, the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven held rulers responsible for the well-being of the people and provided justification for rebellion if rulers did not fulfill their responsibilities to the people. William Jones further explains in his essay that while China did not have any institutions that resembled Western parliaments, there were ways in which individuals, specifically the elites, were able to make their opinions known to the rulers. Moreover, there was the Confucian tradition of moral dissent, in which the individual criticized the ruler for not living up to the highest standards of Confucianism and spoke out in order to prevent corruption, instability, and ultimately the collapse of the regime. While Wen-hsin Yeh similarly cites the Confucian practice of loyal ministers, who spoke the truth to power, she cautions that "Such loyalist opposition critiqued policies and individuals, but rarely questioned the underlying assumptions of governance" (p. 166). Although dissent in imperial China came in many forms—Daoist renunciation of power and peasant rebellions as well as Confucian acts of moral protest—they were criticisms of the failings of individuals in positions of power and rarely aimed at the system itself. But with the development of an urban culture and press in the early decades of the twentieth century and the educated members of society gaining financial autonomy from the state, Yeh stresses that civic associations proliferated and dissenting intellectuals repeatedly mounted ideological challenges against the regime. Madeleine Zelin focuses on areas of freedom in the economic realm. Although China during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) was an autocracy, she points out that it developed a free economy in which individuals had freedom to "transact" business to a degree greater than most European states until the nineteenth century. Even without a formal commercial code, there existed a relatively free market, the protection of property rights, and de facto sanctity of contracts. Furthermore, several of the institutions that economists believe to be necessary for modernity in the West were found in late imperial China, such as considerable geographic mobility, state recognition of the self-governing authority of merchant organizations, and avenues of access to the bureaucracy. Thus, contrary to the conventional view, Zelin asserts that the Qing state did not hinder the entrepreneurial impulses of the Chinese people. Another contributor, Jerome Bourgon, presents a different view of the Qing in...

As the third volume of a three-volume set on the indigenization of Christianity in modern China, this book analyzes the endeavors of Christianity in adapting to the changing social environment between the late 1920s and the end of the twentieth century.Over the course of its growth in modern China, Christianity has faced many twists and turns in attempting to embed itself in Chinese society and indigenous culture. This three-volume set delineates the genesis and trajectory of Christianity’s indigenization in China over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, highlighting the actions of Chinese Christians and the relationship between the development of Christianity in China and modern Chinese history. Chapters in this volume focuses on the late 1920s; the 1930s and the period before and after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The author discusses key transitions in indigenizing Christianity, including efforts to bring the religion to rural regions, devotions to anti-Japanese national salvation, discussions on the coexistence of Communism and Christianity and the Church’s adaptation to accommodate Chinese society after 1949.The book will appeal to scholars and students interested in the history of Christianity in China and modern Chinese history.

From 1910 to 1945, A considerable number of books on the history of Korea’s subjugation were published in China, among which 23 are verified in this article. Authors of these books are either political activists with education experience in Japan, or popular fiction writers in Shanghai. The former group mostly wrote in a style of political commentary. The latter group produced historical novels which were part of the emerging cultural industry in Shanghai.<BR> The popularity of these books was closely related to the social atmosphere of national salvation in modern China. Following the eclipsing of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the republic, Korea’s subjugation was widely used as a failure story to advocate the identity on nation-state and the concern over “nation perish”.<BR> The books on Korea’s subjugation were highly welcomed by readers. Most of them were repeatedly republished or reprinted in large quantities, and were sold or distributed for long duration. Many ordinary readers published their thoughts and feelings on newspapers and magazines after reading these books. Memoirs also show how the stories of Korea’s subjugation had stimulated young people for revolution. Many organizations and assemblies used these books as materials for study or publicizing. It was precisely through readings including books on Korea’s subjugation that modern concepts of nation and state had been integrated into minds of readers in a sensual way. Nationalism had changed from a way of thinking of the intellectual elites into a true “national” thinking.<BR> Books on Korea’s subjugation were by no means the only way for the people in modern China to accept nationalism. However, Korea has a special connection with China both in geopolitics and in history and culture, so it received special attention from people at that time. Examination of the production, circulation and social influence of the books on the history of Korea’s subjugation fully proves that such books were indeed an important source of new ideas, and their significance in the history of social thought of modern China cannot be ignored.

The medical profession in modern China comprised two radically different schools—modern (Western) medicine and native medicine. The difference in philosophy, theory, and technique made a conflict between the two schools almost inevitable, and the conflict was intensified by the modernization process that was quickened during the Republican period. Western-trained or modern doctors advocated national salvation through science and denounced native medicine as superstitious, unscientific, and an impediment to the development of medical science in China. On the other hand, native medical practitioners insisted that what they learned and practiced was part of the national essence (guocui) and should be protected against the cultural invasion of imperialism (diguo zhuyi wenhua qinlue) including Western medicine. To be sure, both sides used such rhetoric to camouflage the business competition between them, but this rivalry and its implications did point to a profound cultural conflict between Chinese tradition and Western influence in China's modernization. It epitomized a burning issue of the day: whether or not China's modernization meant Westernization and whether a respectable position for China in the modern world was to be achieved through Westernization or preservation of what was regarded or claimed as national heritage.

Reviewed by: Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 ed. by Axel Schneider and Thomas Fröhlich Viren Murthy (bio) Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949. Edited by Axel Schneider and Thomas Fröhlich. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. ix + 323. Hardback $177.00, ISBN 978-90-04-42653-5. The essays in this volume edited by Axel Schneider and Thomas Fröhlich deal with a crucial topic, namely discourses around the concept of progress in China. Although numerous authors, including Prasenjit Duara, Luke Kwong and others,1 have dealt with this issue, this volume goes further by examining the details of the interpretation of ideas of progress and showing that the incorporation of linear time in China was far from linear. The book is divided into an Introduction, three parts, and nine chapters. The first part, "Initial Conceptual Encounters," consists of two chapters, Kai Vogelsang's "The Chinese Concept of Progress" and Takahiro Nakajima's "The Progress of Civilization and Confucianism in Modern East Asia: Fukuzawa Yukichi and Different Forms of Enlightenment." Part Two, "Tides of Optimism," consists of five chapters, Li Qiang's "The Idea of Progress in Modern China: The Case of Yan Fu," Thomas Fröhlich's "Prospect Optimism in Modern China: The Foundation of a Political Paradigm," Peter Zarrow's "An Anatomy of the Utopian Impulse in Modern Chinese Political Thought," Leigh Jenco's "The Optimism of Cultural Construction in the 1930s: Wholesale Westernization, Cultural Unit Theory, and Cultural Construction on a Chinese Base," and Rui Kunze's "Fantasizing Science: The Idea of Progress in Early Chinese Science Fiction." Part Three, "Margins of Skepticism," consists of two chapters: Axel Schneider's "Critiques of Progress: Reflections on Chinese Conservatism" and Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik's "Playing the Same Old Tricks: Lu Xun's Reflections on Modernity in his Essay 'Modern History.'" Together the essays cover a wide range of topics and consequently, I will selectively deal with a few essays to bring out the philosophical contribution of the volume. From the perspective of comparative philosophy, one of the key points of interest will be the manner in which traditional Chinese philosophies continue to inform visions of time and progress during the modern period, after 1895. The editors' choice of 1895 is significant because it is the date of the Sino-Japanese War, after which Chinese began to translate Western texts related to linear history and evolution. Joseph Levenson famously contended that the modern period implied a radically new conception of history in which the [End Page 1] tradition merely became a symbol of national identity.2 Levenson's claim was later challenged by many, including Chang Hao and Thomas Metzger, who argued for the continuing relevance of tradition in ways that many overlooked.3 This book goes beyond this traditional response by showing how modern Chinese thinkers transcended any simple opposition between universality and particularity whether they affirmed or rejected the idea of progress. Moreover, the book takes readers beyond the opposition between China and the West. Fröhlich writes: Chinese calls for catching up with the industrialized countries in the West rarely comprised the idea of a complete Westernization of China. Most advocates of "catching up" expected that China would follow a special path to modernity as compared to Western countries. Such an outlook was by no means exclusively Chinese. Similar discussions about a special path (Sonderweg) of catching up with the West from the starting point of a "belated nation" had taken place in Germany, Russia and Japan since the mid-nineteenth century. (p. 21) The book places China within a larger global intellectual trajectory, where starting late could imply different historical trajectories. Some of these trajectories could point beyond modernity itself. In the Introduction, Fröhlich cites the Chinese anarchist Wu Zhihui 吳稚暉 to show belief in progress could be connected to a universal utopia. Wu writes: [W]hen the world of great uniformity is reached, all forms of labor shall have been replaced by machinery… When the time comes that each can take according to his need, every human being will have an exalted, pure, and exemplary character… This is not a utopian idealization. There is already some evidence of its realization in countries...

Jun Lei. Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, s-s. Series Transnational Asian Masculinities. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, . x,  pp. Hardcover HK$., ISBN ----. Jun Lei’s Mastery of Words and Swords draws on a range of literary and visual sources to analyze the complex construction of masculine identities by China’s intellectual and cultural elites during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her study is divided into two parts, the first of which contains a pair of chapters that establish disciplinary and theoretical frameworks for the four chapter-long case studies in the second. Chapter , “Performing Chinese Masculinities on the World Stage: An Introduction,” acknowledges Kam Louie’s pioneering role in extending the study of gender in Chinese literature and culture from its original focus on women to include the consideration of masculinities as well, and draws on Louie’s influential model of traditional Chinese masculinity as constructed through the negotiation of the categories of wen (civil, literary) and wu (military, martial). The premodern prioritization of wen qualities in the masculine ideal—both for the educated elite and for most of the society whose apex they occupied—was challenged during China’s encounters with global modernity in the form of Western imperialism. Racialized colonial discourse characterized scholarly models of masculinity as effeminate and associated them with the allegedly congenital weakness of the “sick man of Asia.” Internalization of this discourse by Chinese intellectuals led to a crisis in masculinity and calls for a more militant manhood. By opening her review of this familiar story with Lu Xun’s critique of female impersonator Mei Lanfang, Lei skillfully highlights the imbrication of what she sees as some of its most significant elements: the performativity of masculinity, the concern for the gaze of a global audience, and the national stakes in gender identity. She proposes that her own contributions will be threefold. Empirically, she will offer the first systematic study Chinese masculinities during the crucial transitional periods of the late Qing and the early Republic. Methodologically, she will venture beyond canonical literary texts to examine a wider archive of literary, print, and visual culture. And theoretically, she will develop a new set of models and categories that will facilitate a response to a key question: “Can we locate agency, or any form of Reviews©  by University of Hawai‘i Press counter-orientalist discourse in reconstructing Chinese masculinities in spite of the power imbalance in the semicolonial settings?” (p. ). The second introductory chapter, “Violence and Its Antidotes: Theorizing Modern Chinese Masculinities,” casts a wide net in gathering the materials from which Lei will construct her own theoretical apparatus. Lei duly notes the need to attend both to cultural difference and to cross-cultural commonalities in “drawing on strands of scholarship within and outside of China studies, more specifically, poststructuralist theories of gender and masculinities, scholarship on cosmopolitanism, and relevant postcolonial theories of uneven transcultural exchange between the East and the West” (p. ). Balancing Judith Butler’s ideas about subjugated performativity against Erving Goffman’s more agentdriven notion of performance, she argues that the masculinities of this period were characterized by a heightened degree of performativity and staged with reference to both the “elsewhen” of the Chinese past and the “elsewhere” of the West and Japan. She then outlines two strands that will inform the remainder of the study. The first is the “brutalization of scholars,” that is, the alignment of a new scholarly identity with hypermasculine traits, including violence, both physical and discursive. This “brutalization” both emulates and serves as a form of resistance to the hegemonic militaristic masculinity of nineteenth-century Western colonialism. The second is a complementary occupation or appropriation of what she calls “feminine space,” a discursive terrain accommodating qualities, emotions, and desires disallowed by the dominant constructions of masculinity. While this “feminine space” might seem to echo or recuperate some of the qualities of premodern wen masculinity, it differs from its predecessor in being shaped by the demands and limitations of the brutalized scholar-warrior model. In chapter , “The Sick, the Weak, and the Perilous: Colonial Stereotypes and Martialized Intellectual Masculinity in Late Qing...

Although China was one of the strongest performers at 2020’s Tokyo Olympics, media coverage of the ‘medal race’ noted that, for most of the first century of Olympic competition, the world’s most populous nation had been a minor or even insignificant presence on the biggest sporting stage—not winning its first Olympic gold medal until 1984. Twenty years after this first gold, during the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the website of the Beijing’s Olympic Games organizing committee published an article titled ‘From ‘Sick Man of East Asia’ to ‘Sports Big Power’, which included a cartoon allegedly published in what was described as a ‘foreign’ newspaper (but which was published in a Chinese-language newspaper from Singapore). The article notes that the cartoon featured ‘a group of thin and emaciated people. wearing mandarin robes and jackets, carry a huge duck egg—zero’, and explains, ‘the title of this cartoon is “Sick Man of East Asia.” This is humiliation and satire of the Chinese athletes but also indicates that the disaster-ridden old China has no status in the world’.1

The development of Chinese International Relations Theory (Chinese irt) failed to produce a peaceful solution for the cross-Strait conflict because it has not critically examined its conceptual premises, including zhengtong, the Chinese concept that conveys the legitimate political order in imperial China: spatially a unity, temporally the succession of the previous unity, and politically the “authentic” succession. As an essential concept for the legitimacy of imperial China that the roc and the prc succeeded, zhengtong has played a crucial role in justifying wars of unification. The paper argues that zhengtong is part of the indispensable conceptual foundation of the cross-Strait conflict. It does so by examining the theory of legitimate imperial succession permitted by zhengtong that necessitates territorial Grand-Unity, i.e. the legitimacy based on the unification of the territory of the succeeded empire, and by reinterpreting the legitimation of the prc and the roc based on the continuity between imperial and modern China. Such continuity is based on the construct of a Chinese nation, resulting in the monopolization of Chineseness by the contenders of zhengtong, i.e., the prc and the roc, unable to produce a peaceful resolution.

This chapter explores the emergence of a relatively autonomous social space in the late Qing period as a result of state failure. It discusses the re-emergence of this space after China’s economic reforms in the early 1980s. The conception of civil society described earlier, which pits society against state, has gained little currency in China. According to Richard Madsen, the word “society” was unknown in China before its introduction from the West via Japan in the nineteenth century; the idea of civil society was imported even later. In addition to the traditional lack of individualism in Confucian culture, the celebration of statism in modern China has impaired the development of civil society. The idea of a self-organised society has yet to take root in China due to the long tradition of treating the state as the centre of social and moral order.

Existing research on legitimation has largely centered on historical and political narratives, overlooking the complex mechanisms through which contemporary practitioners construct, negotiate, and assert religious authority and authenticity. This study examines the processes of legitimation, transmission, and continuity within the Esoteric Buddhist Tradition in contemporary China. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork-including participant observation at three key sites (Yuanyin Temple, the ancient Yuanyin training site, and the Damodong Temple complex)-and 25 semi-structured interviews with monks, ritual specialists, and lay disciples, this research reveals that legitimacy is co-constructed through both internal and external forces. Internally, 84% of informants emphasized charismatic leadership and ritual efficacy as central to sustaining spiritual authority, while 72% highlighted the significance of lineage authenticity. Externally, institutional recognition from provincial Buddhist associations and participation in at least seven inter-sectarian forums between 2022 and 2024 provided crucial validation and public visibility. Furthermore, sustainability practices emerged as adaptive responses to contemporary challenges: 68% of sites integrated environmental ethics into temple management, 56% adopted digital media platforms for ritual dissemination, and 41% developed youth-oriented engagement programs. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that the legitimation, transmission, and continuity of the Esoteric Buddhist Tradition in modern China are dynamically constituted through the interplay between internal charisma, ritual authority, and institutional embeddedness within a rapidly modernizing socio-religious landscape.