Chinese Memoir Research Articles

Chinese Technology as a Resource: Horn Lantern Manufacturing and Global Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern France

Abstract: In 1793 Alexis-Marie de Rochon, an astronomer by training, was commissioned to set up a manufacturing workshop of horn plates in France. This was meant to make up for the shortage of imported horn plates, a commodity which was necessary for the production of lamps used in the military navy. An unexpected resource allowed him to initiate research on horn plate making: a 40-year-old memoir dedicated to the manufacturing of Chinese lanterns. The paper reconstructs Rochon’s research and explains why the use of a Chinese memoir was far from being coincidental in 18th-century France: it was both the result of a massive accumulation of knowledge on Chinese techniques by the French government and of a lack of literature on a very poorly codified European technical practices.

The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History by Austin Jersild

<i>The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History</i> by Austin Jersild

RememberingŎmŏni: Using Chinese Memoirs to Understand Sino-North Korean Interactions during the Korean War

AbstractThis article assesses the memoirs of Chinese volunteers as a source for better understanding social interactions between the Chinese and North Koreans during the Korean War. The hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers serving in Korea were an almost ubiquitous presence in wartime North Korea. Yet the relationship between the volunteers and North Korean civilians has not been the subject of many studies. Memoirs written by the volunteers are one of the few sources that document these interactions. Among the subjects the volunteers wrote about, their encounters with older North Koreans whom they called “mothers” or ŏmŏni were among the most prominent. While acknowledging the propagandistic intent behind some of these memoirs, the article argues that they do shed light on some of the emotional norms that shaped relations between North Korean women and the volunteers even if they cannot always be treated as completely reliable descriptions of events.

The Liberty Coerced by Limitation: On Subtitling Fengming: A Chinese Memoir

This essay steps into the long history of translation theory, which is replete with examples of translators contemplating their own work of transporting a text from one language to another and deploying metaphors to theorize the task of the translator. The author, a student of Chinese aesthetics and contemporary philosophy, is also a veteran subtitler. In this essay, she describes her own subtitling of Wang Bing’s Fengming: A Chinese Memoir. She begins with a common observation about film translation: Facing extreme limitations in space and time, subtitlers often mourn the many limitations with which they must contend and look with envy at the translators of literature, who appear so free. But the strictures of subtitling can also produce a certain kind of freedom. Akiyama’s essay uses the subtitles for Fengming to illustrate the liberatory possibilities hidden within the act of translation.

The camera in pain: memories of the Cold War in East Asian independent documentaries

This article begins with a discussion of the changing topography of cultural production in East Asia over the last 25 years, especially as it concerns the genre of independent documentary film, and then it turns to three independent documentaries filmed in Japan and North Korea, South Korea and Japan, and China, respectively: Yang Yong-hi's Dear Pyongyang (2005), Mun Jeong-hyun's Grandmother's Flower (2007), and Wang Bing's He Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2006). Erased from the official historical record and excluded from public commemoration, the alternate history of pain traced by these documentaries resubmits the Cold War to examination from deep inside its most private wounds. In the process, the filmmakers encounter not only the memories of the earlier generation that lived through the most violent episodes of the Cold War, but also come to question their own history and identities within the process of the Cold War's decomposition.

Voice, Liveness, Digital Video: The Talking Head in Contemporary Independent Chinese Documentary

This article addresses the use of the human voice in contemporary Chinese independent documentary in relation to xianchang. Broadly analogous to the Anglophone concept of “liveness,” xianchang is a shooting practice that interrogates questions of immediacy (being “on the scene”) and mediated distance (the reflexive consideration of such a practice). It is critical to any genealogy of independent documentary in the People's Republic of China. In turn, sound practice, and particularly direct sound, is critical to xianchang. Analyzing the use of talking heads in early independent documentary, this article argues that they were not simply a relic of the televisual zhuantipian aesthetic but also the focus for a particular form of xianchang: liveness as presence and as testimony. In particular, following Erving Goffman, it suggests that critical moments of “flooding out” in Bumming in Beijing and I Graduated! serve both to construct the documentary subject as an “internal witness” to the events of 1989 and also — by suggesting the uncontrolled and contingent nature of filming “in the present” — to validate this act of witnessing as unofficial, and therefore truthful. While this form of liveness lives on in activist documentary by directors such as Ai Xiaoming, Hu Jie, Zhao Liang, and Cui Zi'en, other directors have used the talking head in ways that highlight its mediated side. Using Shu Haolun's Nostalgia and Wang Bing's Fengming: A Chinese Memoir as examples, the article explores how these films present the talking head as a product of technical intervention by the director, or as a response of the documentary subject to the act of filmmaking. This does not mean that liveness has ceased to be important; rather, that it is understood to be a quality produced from the encounter of director and subject “on the scene” of filmmaking (mediated distance), rather than as existing independently of such an encounter (immediacy). The article connects this increasingly catholic use of the talking head to the emergence of digital video. This has not only facilitated more experimental approaches to documentary — as reflected in Nostalgia — but also encouraged consideration of the self-mediating capacity of the documentary subject. This question is addressed directly in Fengming: A Chinese Memoir. The use of the human voice in these two films thus demonstrates an awareness of documentary production dynamics that is not inherent to digital video as a medium but has been stimulated by its impact on the Chinese independent documentary scene.

‘To Be Worthy of the Suffering and Survival’: Chinese Memoirs and the Politics of Sympathy

Around the mid-1980s a substantial number of Chinese authors started to write, beyond national and linguistic boundaries, about their traumatic experience during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Jung Chang's Wild Swans (1991) is among the first and best-known titles in this emergent literary formation. Whether the memoirs are narrated by a former People's Liberation Army soldier, or a Red Guard, or an innocent subject drawn into the political vortex, their authors all assume the role of victims who bear witness to a China collapsing into an administered ‘national madness’. Details of the brutalities of the Revolution presented in the memoirs resonate with the Western imagination of Maoist China. This article is a critical study of these memoirs. It explores the political and ethical implications of life writing in the post-Cold War era within the context of global capitalism. Given the cultural and political topicality of the Cultural Revolution as a subject for popular history writing in the West, the production of these memoirs, we argue, is occasioned and enabled by a specific set of geo-political conditions, whose temporal and spatial materiality defines and determines the use and pertinence of the memoirs.

Revolution or Just Another Bloody Cycle? Swatow and the 1911 Revolution

The 1911 Revolution in China is usually considered a failure. Changing the perspective of judgement from the national level to the local level permits a reassessment. Enough information is available from Chinese memoirs, contemporary newspapers, and foreign consular reports to make the new judgement somewhat secure if attention is focused on one particular location—Swatow. The old administration was overthrown by expeasants led by deracinated rural intellectuals. They took power in the name of modern merchants. These merchants easily pushed the young radicals out because the ideology of the radical prevented them from using force against the wealth and status of the merchants. Rural disorder of the ex-peasants and republican election victorier for the radicals forced the urban merchants to rely on foreign election victories for theradicals forced the urban merchants to rely on foreign wealth and rural power to maintain law and order needed for trade and to maintain their own urban power base. Armed peasants and the young radicals were suppressed or bought off. Power fell to rural warlords and other political allies in urban enclaves. Only a rejoining of radical intellectuals and ex-peasants could offer China a revolution instead of just another bloody cycle.