Sovereign Suns and Dying Trees: Sangley Poetic Agency in Colonial Manila


 
 
 The Hispano-Philippine style of ivory sculpture production in colonial Manila is almost synonymous with the growth of Spain’s global empire from the sixteenth century onward. These sculptures have been studied by historians and art critics alike in terms of Latin American consumer demand, marketability, Catholic devotion and conversion, and “Chineseness,” among other veins of inquiry. Common across these investigations is discussion of the significance of Chinese immigrants within the Spanish colony, who have been consistently identified as the creators of these sculptures. One community of artisans important to Philippine sculpture-making, however, has been understudied: the native Filipinos of colonial Manila, by far the largest group in the city. Why has the role of native Filipinos, despite being documented as painters and sculptors contemporaneous with the Chinese immigrants, been disregarded in the art-historical record of ivory sculpture production? In this article, I address these “silences” within the Hispano-Philippine sculptural archive by historicizing the sociocultural milieu of colonial Manila, performing visual analysis informed by postcolonial theory, and interrogating commonly referenced sources and narratives, an endeavor I maintain will enable art historians to contextualize these sculptures within a larger imperial, intercultural, and intersubjective framework of artistic creation.
 
 

Bibliometric and visualized analysis of China's coal research 2000–2015

Reviewed by: Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila: Family, Identity, and Culture, 1860s–1930s Jerry Dennerline (bio) Richard Chu. Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila: Family, Identity, and Culture, 1860s–1930s Leiden: Brill, 2010. xviii, 451 pp. Hardcover $179.00, ISBN 978-9-004-17339-2. In this study, Richard Chu explores the unfolding of the tension between Chinese and Filipino identities over the past 150 years. He begins and ends his book with personal stories that underscore the significance of the problem today, but the study itself is historical. The primary question is, how and why did the boundary between these two identities harden? His differs from previous studies primarily by focusing on legal documents such as marriage licenses, baptismal certificates, wills, and court documents involving disputes over immigration status, inheritance, and business contracts. Following the lead of Edgar Wickberg’s The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850–1898 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), he argues that the roots of the problem are in the period before the American colonial regime. Beyond this, like Andrew Wilson, in Ambition and Identity: Chinese Merchant Elites in Colonial Manila, 1880–1916 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), he rejects the notions that ethnic identities were structurally determined by Spanish colonial attitudes or Chinese ethnic identity alone. Unlike Wilson, he employs a method that is “basically ethnographic, reconstructing and reconstituting individual and family life stories as well as describing particular everyday commercial and domestic practices” (p. 15). His fieldwork, he says, is in the “bundles of baptismal and matrimonial records” (p. 15) in church and state archives. With this approach, he succeeds in showing a wide variety of ways in which the Chinese and Chinese mestizo merchants and their families pursued social and economic strategies that reflect the transnational and multicultural resources available to them. The flexibility and fluidity of these strategies underscore the basic conclusion that legal and institutional controls were more influential than ingrained traditional or modern ethnic structures in hardening the ethnic boundaries. The Chinese mestizos gradually became Filipino, while the Chinese became aliens, vulnerable to stereotyping and scapegoating that, while it was not entirely new, tended to isolate the self-identifying Chinese in a space where they had fewer options for flexibility and negotiation. In this review, I will focus on a few key issues of interest to social historians and students of transregional Chinese communities during this period. My own familiarity with the Philippines is extremely limited. My perspective is shaped by my study of family and kinship in the Lower Yangzi region and, more recently, the China-born and Straits-born Chinese communities in Malacca and Singapore during this period. From this perspective, I find the most important contribution of this book to be in its meticulous attention to the details of marriage strategies in relation to family continuity, social networking, and business practices. With these details in place, one can approach what Chu calls the “macro-historical” issues [End Page 43] with a much clearer vision of what the rapidly developing global economy and shifting political circumstances meant for the people who lived in this social and cultural milieu. The first two chapters offer overviews of the Minnan (Southern Fujian) region of China and the place of the Chinese in late-Spanish-colonial Manila. In the third chapter, the author uses detailed evidence from the archives to show how the most prominent merchants engaged in credit systems, founded joint stock companies, and employed name changing and citizenship strategies while under Spanish rule. In this context, he introduces, among other individuals, Carlos Palanca Tan Quien-sien as “the consummate border-crossing diasporic subject” (pp. 128–141). While Chu wants us to focus on “everyday commercial and domestic practices,” we cannot help but notice that Carlos (Chen Qianshan) was an exceptionally famous, very controversial figure who engaged in high-level political negotiations as well (see also Wilson, pp. 110–139). He did engage in all the activities that could serve to identify him as a typical Chinese rags-to-riches case, but the point here is to shift the focus of attention from what was well known about him, and could, therefore, be used by the...

What binds overseas Chinese communities together? Traditionally scholars have stressed the interplay of external factors (discrimination, local hostility) and internal forces (shared language, native-place ties, family) to account for the cohesion and Chineseness of these overseas groups. Andrew Wilson challenges this Manichean explanation of identity by introducing a third factor: the ambitions of the Chinese merchant elite, which played an equal, if not greater, role in the formation of ethnic identity among the Chinese in colonial Manila. Drawing on Chinese, Spanish, and American sources and applying a broad range of historiographical approaches, this volume dissects the structures of authority and identity within Manila's Chinese community over a period of dramatic socioeconomic change and political upheaval. It reveals the ways in which wealthy Chinese merchants dealt in not only goods and services, but also political influence and the movement of human talent from China to the Philippines. Their influence and status extended across the physical and political divide between China and the Philippines, from the villages of southern China to the streets of Manila.

This article examines the complex interplay between heritage, cultural identity, and state power, as exemplified by the contested heritage discourse surrounding a sea temple and the Chinese cult of Guandi in Mauritius. The main temple of Guandi in Mauritius abound in aquatic and oceanic manifestations, which stand in sharp contrast with state-endorsed, land-based Guandi temples in China. This contrast suggests a distinct cultural identity of the Chinese society in the Southwest Indian Ocean region. As reflected in the narratives of both Mauritian and Chinese authorities, the temple and cult also figure prominently in the re-imagining of Mauritian nation building and China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative. Drawing on critical heritage studies and the revitalised academic focus on sea temples that revisits the overlooked maritime connectivity, this article demonstrates how a historically-forged transoceanic identity in the name of Guandi is being contested by the new processes of heritagisation initiated by the Mauritian and Chinese states and how appreciation of the maritime heritage of Chinese diaspora in the Indian Ocean can re-emerge when the interpretation of the cult shifts from its role as one component of Mauritian and Chinese national heritage to its unorthodox oceanic reinvention.

Background: Globalization has created the academic community’s need to learn English in order to publish internationally and caused intensive research into academic prose by non-native writers with the aim of revealing prevailing culture-and discipline-specific rhetoric structures and suggesting ways of improving academic writing skills. Purpose: This contrastive study explored preferences in the employment of stance features in English-medium research article abstracts by second language writers from two different cultural backgrounds (Russia and China) assuming that variations in stancetaking are culturally shaped. Method: Hyland’s (2005b) taxonomy of stance resources was adopted for the current study as the most comprehensive one including a wide range of writer-oriented features. This taxonomy can help identify pragmatic functions of linguistic markers used for stancetaking in academic prose. The methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis were applied. Results: A contrastive analysis of the findings showed that the Russian and Chinese academic communities manifest different stancetaking preferences. The quantitative analysis revealed that Chinese-authored RA abstracts contained considerably more stance features than those written by their Russian counterparts. Most quantitative differences between the application of stance features by Russian and Chinese authors were statistically significant. It was also revealed that while the Chinese academic writers seemed to be more careful in making claims, anticipating and acknowledging, the Russian scholars chose to create an impression of certainty and assurance, instilling confidence in their readers. The differences in the employment of stance features identified in the study are likely to reflect culture-specific writing peculiarities of the Chinese and Russian academic communities which favour slightly different discursive strategies. Conclusion: The findings carry pedagogical implications for academic writing course designers and can enhance L2 writers’ familiarity with the culture-specific academic writing conventions in the knowledge domain.

Reviewed by: A Grammar of Guìqióng: A Language of Sichuan by Li Jiang David Bradley A Grammar of Guìqióng: A Language of Sichuan. Li Jiang. Leiden: Brill. 2015. Pp. xiii + 452. $209.00 (hardcover). This is a very valuable study of an underdocumented Qiangic Tibeto-Burman language of western Sichuan in southwestern China. The speakers, like most other related small groups in western Sichuan, are mostly officially classified as part of the Tibetan nationality; the author suggests a much larger population than any previous study, over 12,500 in the ethnic group, of whom nearly ten thousand are speakers of the language and the rest are able to understand but not speak; previous studies have suggested six to seven thousand speakers. One reason for the difference is that about fifteen hundred of these in two villages are officially classified as Han Chinese. However, the author also says that the language is “seriously losing its vigour” (p. 18), with those over sixty mostly monolingual, those over forty bilingual but now using mainly Chinese, and younger people having limited knowledge of the language. The usual name for this group used in the linguistic literature, “Guìqióng,” is a Han Chinese exonym based on the autonym [gu33tɕhiɐŋ55] or [gu33dʑɦiɐŋ21] (p.5); this latter name has not previously appeared in the literature, and the author tentatively relates it to the word [dʑiɐŋ33] ‘north’, as their origin story says that the group came from the north like most other Tibeto-Burman groups; the first syllable may be linked to the in-group plural suffix (pp. 82–83, misglossed there as ‘exclusive’). An earlier extensive study of the language, Song (2011), appeared as one in a series of progressively more detailed Chinese studies beginning with Sun (1983:111–25, 1991:227–30 and passim) and Huang (1992), all of which are in Chinese and are cited and discussed by Li; below, these are compared with the book under review where relevant. Both this book and Song (2011) start with very useful introductions on the historical, geographical, and cultural background of this group (pp.1–22; Song 2011:1–36), which is unusual in grammars, but extremely relevant and useful; the book also includes a number of useful pictures. We are told that another exonym, “Yútōng,” said to be derived from Tibetan, has been used for some six hundred years; it refers to the fact that the Guìqióng are the only group in the area who wear large turbans (pp. 5–6). The presentation of phonology (pp. 23–62) is uneven and would benefit greatly from a complete table showing the cooccurrence of initial consonants and vowels, which may also have led to a somewhat different analysis. There are very substantial phonological and lexical differences between the large and valuable vocabulary presented here (pp. 349–442) and the considerably more extensive vocabulary provided by Song (2011:230–93), as well as the smaller vocabularies of Sun (1991) and Huang (1992). These differences are in part notational, as the author chooses an idiosyncratic way of representing tones with apostrophes before or after initial consonants, while Song (2011), following other Chinese authors, uses numbers (5 for high, 1 for low), as does this review. There are numerous and profound differences in the analysis of the segmental systems as well. This is surprising, as Song and Li worked with the same main consultants on the same variety of the language. Li (pp. 23–31) posits eight vowels i y ɛ ə ɐ u o ɔ, five of which also occur contrastively nasalized, and a very large array of diphthongs. There is a contrast between syllables with final n, syllables with final ŋ, and nasalized vowels, but there are no other final consonants. Other analyses propose much larger vowel inventories; Song (2011:41) lists fourteen monophthongs and nine nasalized vowels. Some of the differences are the result of different allophonic analyses; the additional vowels proposed by Song are e ø ɿʉ ɯ ər, most of which are treated as allophones of one of the author’s nine vowels, but some of which should not be. For example, the author...

Indonesia is in the midst of a publishing renaissance. The number of published titles doubled in 2003 to a sum greater than any year under Suharto. Titles unimaginable 10 years ago now line bookstore shelves: books about Marx, books by and about ethnic Chinese, and books with the words 'sex' or 'homosexual' and 'Islam' in the same title. In 2000, the publisher of Nobel Prize-nominated author Pramoedya Ananta Toer released a special Emancipation Edition of the previously banned Burn Quartet, named after the island on which the Suharto regime had imprisoned the writer for almost 14 years. Oblivious to the efflorescence of publishing in the world's fourth most populous nation, few outside the country have read a single Indonesian book. Unlike well-known works by Indian, Colombian, Russian, and Chinese authors, most people in the world are not likely to come across a book by an Indone sian writer in their own language at the local bookstore, in the library, or even online. Better known for its volcanoes, island paradises, shadow puppets, and world's largest population of Muslims, Indonesia's books remain largely untranslated, a secret library ringed by fire and water. Sadly, Indonesians are not reading Indonesian books either. Reading culture is low. Libraries are few, their books dusty and mildewed. The 98 percent literacy rate1 among younger Indonesians does not tell the whole story. The overall lit eracy rate is much lower, 84 percent.2 And half the population drops out of school between the ages of 15 and 19 (BPS 2002: 103). Forty-five percent of the titles pub lished in 2004 came from a single publishing conglomerate, Gramedia. Another 55 percent were translations (Suwarni 2004; Y09 2005). Nevertheless, reading culture is on the rise, in large part because Indonesian publishing is freer than it was under Suharto's New Order. But freedom of the press is still under threat. Current publish ing freedoms are largely an outgrowth of the more passive role taken by a recently decentralized government, a political restructuring that also diminishes the capacity

The share of nanotechnology publications involving authors from more than one country more than doubled in the 1990s, but then fell again until 2004, before recovering somewhat during the latter years of the decade. Meanwhile, the share of nanotechnology papers involving at least one Chinese author increased substantially over the last two decades. Papers involving Chinese authors are far less likely to be internationally co-authored than papers involving authors from other countries. Nonetheless, this appears to be changing as Chinese nanotechnology research becomes more advanced. An arithmetic decomposition confirms that China’s growing share of such research accounts, in large part, for the observed stagnation of international collaboration. Thus two aspects of the globalization of science can work in opposing directions: diffusion to initially less scientifically advanced countries can depress international collaboration rates, while at the same time scientific advances in such countries can reverse this trend. We find that the growth of China’s scientific community explains some, but not all of the dynamics of China’s international collaboration rate. We therefore provide an institutional account of these dynamics, drawing on Stichweh’s [Social Science information 35(2):327–340, 1996] original paper on international scientific collaboration, which, in examining the interrelated development of national and international scientific networks, predicts a transitional phase during which science becomes a more national enterprise, followed by a phase marked by accelerating international collaboration. Validating the application of this approach, we show that Stichweh’s predictions, based on European scientific communities in the 18th and 19th centuries, seem to apply to the Chinese scientific community in the 21st century.

Has a united or singular “Chinese Australian community” ever actually existed? If so, is a united community a means to an end or an end in itself? And where might this community sit in contemporary multicultural Australia? In the Face of Diversity offers answers to these questions with the history of more than a dozen Chinese Australian community organisations from across the country, drawing on the English- and Chinese-language materials produced by these organisations, as well as interviews with past and present leaders. Instead of a single community, the evidence demonstrates the existence of many diverse Chinese Australian communities. Familiar and fascinating moments of recent Australian history are treated with new and evocative perspectives in relation to Chinese Australian communities, from the official turn away from the White Australia policy and embrace of multiculturalism in the 1970s to the debate about China’s influence upon Australian politics and society, beginning in the 2010s and continuing into the present. In the Face of Diversity advances that “unity” has only ever been momentarily or partially grasped by Chinese Australian community organisations but that it has nonetheless produced real-world outcomes, the most prominent being a highly participatory style of Australian multiculturalism. Gardner Molina dismantles the myth of a single Chinese Australian community and rebuilds a solid understanding of many diverse communities instead; each with their own aims, needs and participatory capacities.

The population of ethnic Chinese in Malaysia ranks second, after ethnic Bumiputra. Some of ethnic Chinese residents write short stories in order to build an image of themselves. Their work pieces are written in the short story anthology of Menara 7 (1998). This Malay anthology is interesting because its authors speak their mother tongue instead of Malay language. The objective of this research was to describe how the symbolic interactions was constructed on the short stories of Menara 7. By using symbolic interaction theory and the Hermeneutic Circle analysis methods, in short stories written by Chinese authors, the efforts to build image were manifested through the use of titles, characterizations, and cultural missions. It showed that short stories were also used as a meaning of cultural mission internally, as a manifestation of tendentious literature.

This study explores how and why different Chinese American authors arrive at their choice of literary subject matter and what this choice reveals about the cultural politics of national identity and belonging. It analyzes the portrayal of the immigrant experience in the United States and also of countries in East Asia and Southeast Asia with their different histories, societies, and cultures. In Chinese American literature, countries such as China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore are experienced as well as imagined—experienced because some authors were born in Asia and have firsthand acquaintance with life in their birth country, imagined because all representation inscribes ideological bias. For US-born authors of Chinese descent, Asia is often imagined with the help of parental stories, reading and research, and awareness of US political involvement and military activities in Asia. For naturalized Chinese American authors, Asia is the site of memories, often manifested as nostalgia or as interrogation and critique.KeywordsChinese ImmigrantChinese ReaderImmigrant ExperienceChinese DescentTransnational MobilityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Reviews of Books

People of Chinese ethnicity are one of the groups at most risk of gastrointestinal and liver diseases in the world. The research status in gastroenterology and hepatology (gastrointestinal [GI]) among Chinese individuals in the three major regions of China-the mainland (ML), Hong Kong (HK), and Taiwan (TW)-are unknown. The outputs of articles published in international GI journals from the three regions were compared in this study. Articles published in 52 journals related to GI originating from the ML, TW, and HK from1996-2005 were retrieved from the PubMed database. The numbers of total articles, clinical trials, randomized controlled trials, case reports, impact factors (IF), citation reports, and articles published in the top general medical journals were conducted for quantity and quality comparisons. The number of articles from the three regions increased significantly from 1996 to 2005. There were 5170 articles from the ML (2969), TW (1551), and HK (650). However, nearly 90% of articles from the ML were published in World Journal of Gastroenterology (WJG), a controversial Chinese journal. Following the exclusion of WJG, the ML had published the least number of articles and had the least total citations. The accumulated IF of the articles from TW (3747.893) was much higher than the ML (775.084) and HK (2272.972). HK had the highest average IF of articles in GI journals and the most articles published in the top, general medical journals among the three regions. The difference between the number of GI research articles published in the ML, TW, and HK still appears to be considerable, particularly when assessed by IF, although the gap appears to be narrowing.

People of Chinese ethnicity are the largest population in the world. Critical care medicine in China is developing rapidly and has achieved great advances in recent 20 years. The research contribution in critical care medicine among Chinese individuals in the three major regions of China--Mainland (ML), Hong Kong (HK), and Taiwan (TW)--is unknown. Articles published in 18 journals on critical care medicine originating from ML, TW, and HK from 1999 to 2008 were retrieved from the PubMed database and Science Citation Index Expanded. Quantity and quality analyses were conducted for the total numbers of articles, clinical trials, randomized controlled trials, impact factors (IF), citations, and articles published in high-impact journals. There were 932 articles from ML (268), TW (506), and HK (158) from 1999 to 2008. The annual total numbers of articles of the three regions increased gradually from 1999 to 2008 (from 57 to 157). From 2002 onward, the number of articles published from ML exceeded that from HK, but TW still has the dominance in both annual and total number of articles published compared with ML and HK. The accumulated IF of articles from TW (1676.67) was higher than that from ML (708.25) and HK (449.51). TW had the highest average IF of 3.31 followed by HK of 2.85 and ML of 2.64. HK had the highest average citations of each article of 10.73, followed by TW of 6.74 and ML of 5.34. The Journal of Trauma was the most popular journal in the three regions. The total numbers of articles in China increased markedly from 1999 to 2008. TW published the most number of articles, clinical trials, and randomised controlled trials among the three regions. The Journal of Trauma was the most popular journal in the three regions.