Early China Research Articles

From Literati to Modern Teachers: The Identity Transformation of the Educated Elites in Early Twentieth-Century China

This article focuses on how part of traditional educated literati transformed into modern teachers. It argues that teachers’ schools became a tool of social transformation that recast surplus officials and old literati into public resources as educators and professional teachers. It was teachers’ schools that provided a considerable number of individuals who were trained for imperial civil service examinations with a new and independent identity, and supplied the state more manpower for the expansion of its educational activities than it ever had before in twentieth-century China.

Restoring bamboo scrolls: Observations on the materiality of Warring states bamboo manuscripts

ABSTRACTFocusing on two groups of manuscripts from Tsinghua collection, in this article, the author reconstructs two Warring States manuscripts to illustrate the diversity of the manuscript format of early China. The reconstruction is based on a series of observations on the materiality and textuality of the manuscripts. The first group consists of three manuscripts concerning the stories of two historical figures: Yi Yin and Shang Tang of the Shang dynasty. Based on the basis of verso line, bamboo nodes, and the narrative chronology, the author determines these three manuscripts originally formed one continuous scroll. The second example is the Mathematical Chart, also from the Tsinghua University collections. Based a series of observations of the physical features such as the verso imprints, the traces of decayed silk, and signs of damage to the bamboo slips, it is suggested that the Mathematical Chart manuscript was not in the familiar “scroll” format, but rather a “folded” format. This reconstruction provides the first concrete evidence of a “folded” book format since the archaeological discoveries of early Chinese manuscripts in the early 20th century.

Body and Mind in Early China and Greece

This article surveys several early Chinese and Greek representations of the self, with particular interest in relations between body and mind. I begin with Edward Slingerland’s application of recent research in conceptual metaphor analysis to early Chinese texts, his arguments on early Chinese root metaphors for self and an important study of mind-body dualism in early China. Next I introduce metaphors of mind and body in texts from technical expertise traditions that Slingerland’s survey does not cover. The last section introduces three apparently comparable sets of early Chinese and Greek metaphors: (1) analogies between mind and body and ruler and subordinates; (2) metaphors of the body as a container in which the mind is somehow contained; and (3) the notion that a person is a set of balances between constituent elements.

Introduction to the Forum on “Nation, Gender, and Transcultural Modernism in Early Twentieth-Century China”

Introduction to the Forum on “Nation, Gender, and Transcultural Modernism in Early Twentieth-Century China”

Shamanic Eroticism in the Jiu ge (Nine Songs) of Early China

This article presents an analysis of certain erotic strategies employed by shamans of the early Chinese state of Chu that were intended to attract and seduce an array of spirits thought to inhabit the world of nature. These strategies are analyzed from a collection of songs gathered together under the title of the Jiu ge from the Chuci anthology, and they provide some of the clearest evidences for a tradition of early Chinese southern Chu shamanism. After setting forth certain elements of the religious, historical, and theoretical background of this shamanism, this article approaches and analyzes it in terms of the eroticized gender relations between humans and spirits upon which this shamanism is centrally based. Because the present author understands shamanism in terms of face to face communication between human beings and bodiless beings in a séance event, and because these communications are represented as taking place by way of either the shaman journeying to the spirit or the spirit coming to take possession of the shaman, the final sections of this article analyze each type of séance event separately.

Lin Shu's Translation of Shakespeare's Religious Motifs in Twentieth-Century China

When Christian values fall into the hands of translators, how are these Christian values represented in a non-religious or areligious target culture? How do the translations reflect the conflicting ideologies of the time and of the individual translators? This article will examine Lin Shu's major translations of The Merchant of Venice in early twentieth-century China, an important period when reform of Confucianism encountered imported Western ideals. Close textual analysis of the translation produced by Lin Shu, a Confucian literatus and a reformist, reveals that religious content in English literary works was manipulated, Christian references often being omitted or adapted. This study illustrates the translator's strategies, picking and choosing what to domesticate in the translated work to suit his ideology, and how a society's expectations and ideologies shape the translation product. The analysis offers some perspectives for understanding how the translator's linguistic and religious roles and ideologies shaped the Chinese Shakespeare, and how the religious values were re-presented in early twentieth-century China.

Zhuangzi: Closet Confucian?

Confucius (aka Kongzi) and Zhuangzi are the two most famous thinkers in all of Chinese history, aside from Laozi, the Old Master. They occupy positions in the history of Chinese thinking roughly comparable to those held by Plato and Epicurus in the Western narrative of civilisation, in that they offer visions of the engaged political life and the engaged social self to which later political theorists and ethicists invariably return. For the last century or so, if not longer, Sinologists and comparative philosophers have been apt to name Confucius the ‘founder’ of a Confucian ‘school’, and Zhuangzi, one of two ‘founders’ of a rival Daoist ‘school’, despite the lack of evidence for sectarian factions in early China. What is at stake in this essay is nothing less than a recasting of the entire early history of Chinese thinking in ways both bracing and potentially troubling to modern academics.

The Reconciliation of Filial Piety and Political Authority in Early China

This essay traces changes in the relationship between filial piety and loyalty in early China. During the Spring and Autumn and early-mid Warring States periods, a conflict existed between the two values. Confucian thinkers such as Confucius and Mencius put a priority on filial piety, while Shang Yang 商鞅 regarded it detrimental to the state. However, scholars later tended to reconcile the values, as is evident in the Xiaojing 孝經 (The Classic of Filial Piety) and the “Zhongxiao 忠孝” (“Loyalty and Filial Piety”) chapter of the Hanfeizi 韓非子. The two texts reconcile filial piety with political authority, and show that the two values are based on the same foundation. Ancient Chinese legal documents are in agreement with the same trend. Early Chinese governments made unfiliality illegal and permitted the head of a family to have very strong authority over other members of the household. Still, governments maintained control of individual households by putting the head of the family’s authority under political authority.

Predicament and responses: Discussions of history education in early modern China

ABSTRACTSince the early modern era, following the abolishment of the imperial civil service exam and the rise of modern schools, the subject of history was included in education at all levels, from primary to tertiary. However, in comparison with traditional society, the degree of attention devoted to historical knowledge has in fact declined rather than improved. In the 1920s, many contemporaries vocally criticized and pondered the low level of historical knowledge among primary and secondary school students, and occasionally voiced dissatisfaction with history education at the university level as well. Critics primarily focused their discussions on the insufficient attention for history classes, imperfect standards formulated for history classes, poor history teaching materials, and lack of qualified, specialized teachers, forming a universal consensus among contemporaries on the failure of history education. However, the widespread opprobrium attached to history education was closely tied to two facts: first, the historians of early modern China had as yet failed to compile a general history of China acceptable to the majority, greatly disappointing many educators; second, historical resources failed to exercise the mobilizing effect on early modern Chinese society that contemporaries had hoped for, and history thus often became the scapegoat paying the price for practical setbacks and failures in the political arena.

The Evolution of the Ecumenical Vision in the Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Context: A Case Study of the Church of Christ in China (1927–1937)

This paper focuses on the Church of Christ in China – a visible fruit of the church unity movement in early twentieth-century China – as a case study. Through examining its formation and development from 1927 to 1937, especially its progress in the advocacy of ecumenism in China, this paper aims to explore how the idea of ecumenism had been transplanted, rooted, accommodated and applied in the Chinese context during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper argues that, although the Chinese vision of ecumenism was derived from the West, it had taken a rather different path and reflected an indigenous understanding of ecumenism and ecclesiology. The case of the CCC demonstrated that national requirements played a significant role in reshaping the universal Christian message. The Christian message, in this case the vision of ecumenism, would always have to revise and incarnate itself in the local context which it encountered.

The Distant Reading of Religious Texts: A “Big Data” Approach to Mind-Body Concepts in Early China

The Distant Reading of Religious Texts: A “Big Data” Approach to Mind-Body Concepts in Early China

Archeology of the Lu City: Place memory and urban foundation in Early China

By comparing the Zhou state-building narrative from textual sources with patterns observed in our archaeological survey in the Qufu region, our collaborative research project investigates the role of place memory in the creation or renewal of urban tradition in the Zhou society of the early first millennium BCE. Our study of the regional archaeological landscape as a palimpsest identified evidence for field system associated with the establishment of a Zhou colony at the turn of the first millennium BCE and its transformation from a military stronghold to a full-blown Eastern Zhou urban center during the late first millennium BCE. We conclude that the Zhou political rhetoric of settling on the ruins of past regimes allowed the architects of Zhou state to tap into the emplaced social memory shared by the diverse memory communities in its vast territory. A shared social memory about an important episode from the past contributed an enduring aura to the Chinese urban landscape, and thus deserves to be studied as a central component of urban history in early China.

Miranda Brown. The Art of Medicine in Early China: The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive. xv + 237 pp., illus., tables, app., bibl., index. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. $99 (cloth).

Miranda Brown. <i>The Art of Medicine in Early China: The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive</i>. xv + 237 pp., illus., tables, app., bibl., index. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. $99 (cloth).

These Bones Shall Rise Again: Selected Writings on Early China By David Keightley. Edited by Henry Rosemont, Jr. SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. Pp. xviii + 340. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $34.95.

These Bones Shall Rise Again: Selected Writings on Early China By David Keightley. Edited by Henry Rosemont, Jr. SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. Pp. xviii + 340. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $34.95.

Why was there no capitalism in early modern China?

ABSTRACT In this paper, we ask the following question: why couldn’t Early Modern China make the leap to capitalism, as we have come to know it in the West? We suggest that, even if China compared well with the West in key economic features - commercialization and commodification of goods, land, labor - up to the 18th century, it did not traverse the path to Capitalism because of the “fact of empire”. Lacking the scale of fiscal difficulties encountered in Early Modern Europe, Late Imperial China did not have to heavily tax merchants and notables; therefore, it did not have to negotiate rights and duties with the mercantile class. More innovatively, we also propose that the relative lack of fiscal difficulties meant that China failed to develop a “virtuous symbiosis” between taxing, monetization of the economy and public debt. This is because, essentially, it was the mobilization of society’s resources - primarily by way of public debt or taxes - towards the support of a military force that created the first real opportunities for merchants and bankers to amass immense and unprecedented wealth.

Shifting diets and the rise of male-biased inequality on the Central Plains of China during Eastern Zhou

Farming domesticated millets, tending pigs, and hunting constituted the core of human subsistence strategies during Neolithic Yangshao (5000-2900 BC). Introduction of wheat and barley as well as the addition of domesticated herbivores during the Late Neolithic (∼2600-1900 BC) led to restructuring of ancient Chinese subsistence strategies. This study documents a dietary shift from indigenous millets to the newly introduced cereals in northcentral China during the Bronze Age Eastern Zhou Dynasty (771-221 BC) based on stable isotope analysis of human and animal bone samples. Our results show that this change affected females to a greater degree than males. We find that consumption of the newly introduced cereals was associated with less consumption of animal products and a higher rate of skeletal stress markers among females. We hypothesized that the observed separation of dietary signatures between males and females marks the rise of male-biased inequality in early China. We test this hypothesis by comparing Eastern Zhou human skeletal data with those from Neolithic Yangshao archaeological contexts. We find no evidence of male-female inequality in early farming communities. The presence of male-biased inequality in Eastern Zhou society is supported by increased body height difference between the sexes as well as the greater wealth of male burials.

Shendu and Qingdu: Reading the Recovered Bamboo and Silk Manuscripts

The terms du (獨) and shendu (慎獨) frequently appear in transmitted texts, notably, among others, the Xunzi and Liji. Drawing reference from the poetry of “Shijiu” (鳲鳩) (Ode 152) and “Yanyan” (燕燕) (Ode 28) in the Book of Odes (詩經), the recovered texts of “Wuxing Commentary” (五行 說) and “Confucian Poetics” (孔子詩論) have provided new material for re-shaping our current understanding of the concepts of du and shendu. This study will briefly survey the semantic ranges of these terms within the exegetical tradition and explore their meaning with regard to the poetry from which they are contextualized. In the final analysis du can be understood as the ontic quality of the heart-mind within the broad sense of cheng (誠 sincerity), or devout love, whereas shendu can be regarded as a process of moral cultivation. To some extent the re-interpretation of these terms finds commonality with, rather than subverts, the semantic ranges established by traditional glosses. The recovered texts have enhanced our understanding of these terms, in particular the concepts of heart-mind and emotion in early China.

Performance evaluation of introducing group technology into machining industry with data envelopment analysis

Because of abundant manpower, easy acquisition of land resources, large markets, and rapidly development of demands, fluency, rapidness, and mass production were the keys in the layout pattern and process design of factories established by early China enterprises. Following the economic take-off, increasing civil consumption power, and rising labor awareness, enterprises faced the pressure of increasing costs. Moreover, the prevalence of economy of scale, the fierce homogeneous competition, and the mainstream awareness of personalized consumption habits further transformed goods into the production trend of small-volume production of a wide range of different items. With the similarity between production process and product design, manufacturing systems in group technology were divided into several manufacturing cells, and the machines producing the same product series were gathered to form a “cell”. Such a manufacturing process and layout pattern was called “cellular manufacturing”. The application of Envelope Method in this study expects to introduce the optimal model of group technology for the rest manufacturers improving the process efficiency.Based on 2013 Chinese Association of Machinery Industry manufacturer list and the manufacturers’ prospectuses and annual reports, this study combines Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Slack Variable Analysis to measure the total efficiency (TE), pure technical efficiency (PTE), and scale efficiency (SE) of machining industry in China introducing group technology for the reference of manufacturers subsequently introducing group technology. The empirical result reveals that KEYARROW (China) Co., Ltd., as the most efficient sector, shows the overall production efficiency 1, while the rest companies reveal low overall production efficiency, especially Tai Shyang Co., Ltd. appears the lowest overall efficiency to be relatively the most inefficient sector. In other words, in addition to the DMU with the relative overall production efficiency 1, the rest 12 DMUs are relatively inefficient sectors.

The Art of Medicine in Early China: The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive by Miranda Brown

The Art of Medicine in Early China: The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive by Miranda Brown

Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry: Intertextual Modes of Making Meaning in Early Medieval China by Wendy Swartz

Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry: Intertextual Modes of Making Meaning in Early Medieval China by Wendy Swartz