Early Republican China Research Articles

佐藤仁史著, 『近代中国の郷土意識-清末民初江南の在地指導層と地域社会-』, 研文出版, 二〇一三・二刊, A5, 四五一頁, 七〇〇〇円

佐藤仁史著, 『近代中国の郷土意識-清末民初江南の在地指導層と地域社会-』, 研文出版, 二〇一三・二刊, A5, 四五一頁, 七〇〇〇円

詞論與實踐：以周濟《存審軒詞》爲中心之考察

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 周濟（1781—1839）爲確立常州詞論的重要人物，影響了清代中葉以降至民國時期的詞壇。雖然學界對周濟詞論的論述頗多，然而並未對周濟詞作所體現的詞學現象進行較深入的分析。《存審軒詞》爲周濟早年至中年的詞作總集，成書年代介於《詞辨序》、《介存齋論詞雜著》以及《宋四家詞選》之間，正好能與周濟詞學理論建構過程的軌迹互爲比對。
 本文著眼於周濟詞論與詞作實踐。首先析理周濟詞情的兩種層次，以及他如何通過詠物詞落實個人的寄託説，藉此與浙派區别。其次對照周濟詞論與詞作的創作特徵，觀察周濟詞學理論完備之前，他對白石、稼軒以及清真等詞作的模擬，以辨明他早年受浙西詞派的影響程度。最後從周濟詞作中梳理四家門徑之説的形成端倪，補充學界對周濟“由浙至常”此一詞學轉向研究未足之處。
 Zhou Ji (1781—1839) is a person of great influence on Ci’s theories from the middle Qing dynasty to Early Republican China. Most of the researchers have mentioned the importance of Zhou Ji’s Ci theory; however, the contemporary researches of the relationship between his Ci theory and works are still insufficient. Cunshenxuanci is Zhou Ji’s collections of Ci from his early to middle years, which is written among ‘Cibianxu,’ “Jiecunzhailuncizazhu” and “Songsijiacixuan.” It is not only a reveal of his talent for Ci, but also the reflection of the transitive procedure from Zhe Xi to Chang Zhou in the middle Qing dynasty.
 This article focuses on the relationship between the practice of Zhou Ji’s works and his Ci theory. It starts with the connections among Ci Qing, Ji Tuo and Yong Wu. Then attempting to analyze how was he influenced by Wentingyun and JiangKui in his early years and the reason why Jiaxuan became one of his ideal agendas of Ci. Based on both the textual analysis and the interpretation of his Ci theory, we can re-understand the formative progress of Zhou Ji’s Ci theory.

Rethinking the temporalization of space in early Republican China: Liang Shuming’s Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies

This article discusses the temporalization of space central to the mainstream discourse of European modernity: a discourse which hierarchized all cultural spaces into a temporal narrative enabling Europe’s self-portrayal as the emancipatory future of humanity. This discourse created a gap between the perceived particularism of non-European cultures (seen as traditional) and the universalism of a modernity associated with the contemporary cultures of Europe and North America, while portraying modernization as a passage from the former to the latter. Chinese intellectuals who adopted this metanarrative therefore faced the following challenge: how can Chinese particularism be adapted to a culture of modernity regarded as universal? While May Fourth iconoclasts answered this question by simply rejecting the idea that an accommodation between Chinese particularism and modern universalism was possible, other intellectuals attempted to argue that at least some aspects of Chinese culture could still be of value within the context of modern universalism. This article discusses an interesting instance of such an attempt at negotiating the perceived tension between the modern discourse of universalism and the particularism of Chinese culture, as provided by Liang Shuming in Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies. This work attempted to show that Chinese culture could still be of value within the context of modernity by providing a new metanarrative which peripherized the role of Western culture in the process of modernization. This article suggests, however, that by adopting a portrayal of modernization as a passage from particularism to universalism, Chinese culture could be reauthorized, within Liang’s metanarrative, only at the cost of being de-complexified, homogenized, and de-historicized; only at the cost of being no longer Chinese.

Print Culture and Media in Late Imperial and Early Republican China

Print Culture and Media in Late Imperial and Early Republican China

Predicated on the People: Legitimating Mass Politics and Parties in Early Republican China

Chinese political culture during the May Fourth period featured hundreds of small societies and associations, as well as several parliamentary factions, but by the mid-1920s politics were conducted mainly by large political parties that courted mass support. This article examines what prompted this change. Whereas many studies have focused on the conflict between the Nationalist and Communist Parties, this article explores how the very form of mass political parties emerged and argues that the turn to mass politics involved two complementary processes in the way in which politics were conceived. In one, intellectuals reflecting on politics and on the social order legitimized and promoted the involvement of the masses in politics. In the second, they pointed to politics—specifically to political institutions and most notably to political parties—as a legitimate arena for action. This was innovative because, at the time, politics and politicians were deemed irreparably corrupt. Intellectuals therefore considered various forms of social and political organization that might solve China's problems, and turned from organizing in small societies to advocating larger organizations that would recruit and mobilize the masses. These processes laid the foundations for a new political culture characterized by mass mobilization guided by political parties.

Regional Cultural Enterprises and Cultural Markets in Early Republican China: The Motion Picture as Case Study

The transition of the motion picture from foreign amusement to local enterprise was primarily the result of transnational commercial activity linking investors, entrepreneurs, and entertainment professionals. Amid the ongoing urbanization of China’s early Republican period, the enterprises emerging from this activity became increasingly profitable and, as a result, film production and exhibition became regularized phenomena, rooted in identifiable genres and standardized approaches to engaging audiences within the immersive space of the theater. By the early 1920s, those closest to the nascent industry were eager to legitimize its power by portraying the medium as a tool for political and social reform. However, commercial strategies and aesthetics remained relatively undisturbed despite this progressive rhetoric. In geographic terms, motion picture–related enterprises and culture remained strongly regional: affected and constrained by the non-Chinese national industries operating in politically divided China, by competing forms of local popular culture, and by existing geographies of exchange and infrastructure. The early Republican “experimental” period in Chinese cinema was, from an enterprise-centered perspective, one of numerous coexisting subnational cultural centers and zones.

Making National History with Literary History: Hegel’s Influence via Taine on Meiji Japan and the Late Qing and Early Republican China

Through analyzing Hegel’s influence via Taine on Meiji Japan and later, on the late Qing and early Republican China, this paper will shed lights on the process of the making of national history with literary history in modern Japan and its influences on modern China. It argues that the simultaneous establishment of modern Japanese historiography and the writing of literary history in Japan had a direct impact on the establishment of Chinese historiography in the late Qing, and the writing of Chinese literary history in twentieth-century China. It will focus more on the philosophical ideas of Taine and Hegel and their influence in Japanese literary historiography and, due to the limited length of this paper, only by extension, that of China as well. The primary focus of this paper is the interaction of the modern Japanese and Chinese pursuit of new historical narratives in the construction of new national and cultural identities in the context of global modernity. It also stresses that, an invisible “origin,” the writing of Chinese (literary) history in the early twentieth-century, ironically, directly and indirectly, has been internalized by the writing of Japanese national history in an exclusive framework of nation-building.

Ensouling the Nation through Fiction: Liang Qichao’s Applied Buddhism

以小说赋魂予国家： 梁启超的应用佛学 摘要 梁启超的应用佛学在他对构建现代中国的政治想象和社会倡导中起到了重要的作用。本文以梁启超的政治小说为个案提出三个相互关联的论点。第一，梁启超在他倡导政治小说的过程中所表达的民族主义是一种源于欧洲的浪漫民族主义，但是在晚清民初的语境下被推动；第二，梁启超的应用佛学是当时汉传佛教世俗化的一部分，其目的并不像欧洲政教分离式的世俗化，而是致力于把佛教价值观普及到中国社会里；第三，梁启超的应用佛学应该被追认为当代左翼佛教的前驱之一。

Ordering the social: History of the human sciences in modern China

In The Order of Things (1966 [1970]), Michel Foucault unearths the discursive redistribution of the episteme underlying the process 'when man constituted him-self in Western culture as both that which must be conceived of and that which is to be known'.1 His investigation into the historical epistemology of what he called sciences humaines (a term that dates back at least to the 17th-century) has prompted historians of western science to dig deep in a growing body of literature on the history of the related disciplinary subjects.2 Two landmark volumes that have encapsulated the evolving historiography of the human sciences are Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870-1930 edited by Dorothy Ross (1994) and The Cambridge History of Science Volume 7: The Modern Social Sciences coedited by Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross (2003).3 With the notable exception of one chapter in the latter volume, historical research on the sciences of social organization and human experience in China, unlike its western counterpart, has only begun to mature in recent years.4 This special issue pushes the field in new directions by highlighting the latest research of an international company of early career researchers. Whereas Foucault's later work on sexuality and power has invited many scholars to wrestle with its Eurocentric burdens, the omission of a parallel mode of historical inquiry for his work on the human sciences denotes precisely what this special issue aims to recalibrate.5 To achieve that goal, the following essays share an attention to the mutually generative relationship of politics and scientific inquiry in 20th-century China.John Feng's opening essay probes the science-politics nexus by focusing on the rise of a discipline in the scientific study of the state in early republican China. Building on the life of Lu Zhengxiang (1871-1949), China's Ambassador Extraordinary to The Hague Peace Conference, it reconstructs the early years of the Chinese Social and Political Science Association (CSPSA), a replica of the American Political Science Association, and analyzes the heated discussions of state-building in its official publication (in English), the Chinese Social and Political Science Review. Already in the final years of the Qing, Lu had submitted a memorial to Empress Dowager Cixi urging China to become more attuned to the new international order of law and constitutionalism. Lu's effort to modernize China through legal and constitutional reform culminated in his collaboration with Paul Reinsch to found the CSPSA in December 1915. The meanings of democracy, state sovereignty, international relations, law, politics, and other key terms in legal science carried significant weight in the visions of CSPSA members, most of whom were cultural elites educated in the west and thus fluent in English. Feng's essay captures an important episode in early 20th-century China during which science, culture, and politics intersected in the envisioning of a new social order that paved the way for the May Fourth Movement.Hsiao-pei Yen's meticulously researched essay extends the investigation of the role of international politics, especially in terms of the antonymous friction between imperialism and nationalism, in the development of republican-era Chinese science. Specifically, it traces the historical transformation of what Yen calls 'from paleoanthropology in China to Chinese paleoanthropology', or simply the Chinese indigenization of the internationally oriented scientific study of ancient human fossils. Yen provides a detailed account of the different archaeological expeditions conducted by scientists of various national origins in central Asia. Between the May Fourth Movement and the Japanese occupation periods, these international scientists acquainted themselves with one another and other like-minded Chinese scientists (who were, again, often fluent in European languages) in cosmopolitan Beijing. However, after their research agenda came to public attention, the foreign scientists were drawn into joint expeditions with Chinese scientists, such as the Sino-Swedish scientific expedition to northwestern China, in order to assure the Chinese that locally excavated materials were not exported out of China to serve the hegemonic ambition of European imperialism. …

The Mercantile Enlightenment in Late Qing and Early Republican China

Although late Qing and Republican China failed to witness an enlightenment movement in the European sense, China did go through an enlightenment process of its own. Chinese mercantilism, in close association with industrialization and the rise of capitalism, constituted an intellectual movement that cannot be overlooked. The mercantile enlightenment expressed in mercantilism went through various evolutionary stages, from birth to development to maturation. In this process, the values and beliefs of China’s feudal agrarian society were rejected and attacked and the new values championed by industrialists and merchants grew and spread. Although China’s enlightenment movement had its limitations, it played an important role in promoting the country’s transformation from an agrarian to an industrialized society and helped lay the foundation for China’s modernization. It also has implications for the rebuilding of commericial morality in China.

Through A Japanese Prism: Foreign influence and Chinese telecommunications in the early Republican era

AbstractThis paper examines the key modern infrastructure of telecommunications in early Republican China, through the eyes of a Japanese, Nakayama Ryûji, who served as a telecommunications adviser to the Chinese government from 1913 to 1928. Nakayama's numerous reports and recommendations to his Chinese employer and frequent confidential dispatches to the Japanese government, when read together, constitute a fascinating prism. They not only reveal problems as well as the potential in China's telecommunications sector, they also highlight Japan's efforts to compete with other foreign actors in China through the provision of Japanese equipment, expertise, and loans. While Nakayama strove to shape China's telecommunications development in ways that would, in his view, benefit both China and Japan, his efforts were often undercut by the aggressive actions of the Japanese government in China, such as the infamous Twenty-One Demands. Though promising at first, Japan's influence on China's modernization in the early Republican era came to be more limited, especially when compared with the final decade of the Qing Dynasty. Ultimately, what can be seen through this Japanese prism confirms that the development of an information infrastructure in modern China, as elsewhere, was as much shaped by technological and economic forces as it was influenced by political and diplomatic factors.

Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture by Michael Gibbs Hill

Frank Schätzing Limit Shaun Whiteside et al., tr. Quercus The pressing need for an energy source to replace earth’s finite and dwindling fossil fuels brings international power politics, cyber warfare, and a full cast of fascinating characters together in German sci-fi writer Frank Schätzing’s latest epic volume. Conflict over control of the newly discovered resource along with the potentially catastrophic danger of transport from the moon to the earth keeps the story moving at a rapid pace. Parinoush Saniee The Book of Fate Sara Khalili, tr. House of Anansi Massoumeh Sadeghi, the teenage protagonist of The Book of Fate, always dreamed of getting a university education. Instead, she was forced into an arranged marriage with a man who lived a dangerous life in Tehran as a political dissident. The trajectory of Massoumeh’s life takes an unexpected course during fifty years of Iranian social and political upheaval. Nota Bene he finds that “the Chicago I came back to belonged to me. Returning from home, I returned home.” In several family-focused essays, Hemon’s unique sensibility, earlier expressed frequently in mordant tropes, portrays simple joys with warm humor. From a family adventure -turned-debacle, the Hemons salvage “some makeshift joy.” An essay on “Family Dining” concludes: “The crucial ingredient of the perfect borscht is a large, hungry family.” Reunited in Canada with his family ’s dog, Mek, Hemon retrieves large parts of his vanished Sarajevan self when Mek puts his head in his lap: “some of me came back.” In the last and most powerful essay, “The Aquarium,” Hemon eschews memory and doubleness as he confronts the prolonged illness and horrific death of his infant daughter , to whom he dedicated this collection . He here forsakes mediated irony before the immediacy of death. But his healthy toddler’s creation of an imaginary friend through whom she processes her new experiences finally helps him better understand his own creative process: “I’d needed narrative space to extend myself into; I’d needed more lives. . . . I’d cooked up those avatars in the soup of my everchanging self.” Michele Levy North Carolina A&T University Michael Gibbs Hill. Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture. Oxford, England. Oxford University Press. 2013. isbn 9780199892884 Lin Shu, Inc. offers a multifaceted study of the translation practices of Lin Shu and his collaborators in late Qing and early Republican China. Situating these translation efforts within the social and cultural context of China at the turn of the twentieth century, Michael Gibbs Hill’s book convincingly shows how Lin was not just a commercially successful translator of popular romance but also an active shaper of modern Chinese culture. By examining Lin’s translations of nonromance works together with compilations of classical Chinese anthologies, Hill’s book explores how traditional literati continually reinvented their roles to maximize their cultural capital in the midst of rapid social change and cultural transformation. This eight-chapter book begins with an introduction to the rationale behind Hill’s placing Lin Shu within the “serious” cultural debates and intellectual discourse of modern China. The second chapter discusses Lin’s use of guwen (an ancient style of prose) as a medium for translation . The third chapter then examines how Lin used guwen to mediate Western sociopolitical concepts and how he extended Liang Qichao’s discourse on “new fiction” through his rendering of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Aesop’s Fables. The fourth chapter investigates Lin’s (and Wei Yi’s) January–February 2014 • 77 78 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews translations of two Charles Dickens novels; it demonstrates the limits of cultural adaptation Lin encountered as he strove to re-create the verisimilitude in Dickens’s work in the context of late Qing China. Chapter 5 analyzes how Lin revived traditionalism through his translation of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book and other essays. The final two chapters look at Lin’s contribution as a textbook writer and editor, with a focus on Lin’s emergence as a “reputable master of ancient-style prose” and his role as an impresario of traditional Chinese culture. Hill argues that Lin’s classicist stance, like the May Fourth intellectuals ’ iconoclasm, was a...

Should Nandan Be Abolished?: The Debate over Female Impersonation in Early Republican China and Its Underlying Cultural Logic

This essay examines the debate over female impersonation in theatre in early Republican China (1912-1937). The adversaries of nandan (female impersonators) saw the social equity between the sexes and the normalcy of gender, sex, and sexuality as integral parts of the process of building a modern nation and contended that theatre should contribute to this endeavor. Supporters of female impersonation saw female actors as hedonistic, underscored women's inferiority in xiqu performance, and emphasized that female impersonation was essential to the artistry of xiqu 's distinct aesthetic.

Aftermath of the Revolution: Experiments in Western-style Democratic Politics in Early Republican China

The Revolution of 1911 in China not only put an end to the feudal monarchy that had lasted several centuries but also opened a new chapter, the era of republicanism in China. The founding of the Republic of China led to the proliferation of political parties, the thriving of legislative organs and the emergence of a cabinet system. However, historical evolution does not always conform to people’s expectations. Revolutionary ideals could not be fully realised in a country which had been dominated by authoritarianism for thousands of years. As a result, Western-style democracy failed to take root in Republican China. Instead of embarking on a journey towards democracy, prosperity and independence, China gradually descended into a state where warlords took control and plunged the whole country into conflict.

Buddhist Literature and Progressive Thinking in Late Qing and Early Republican China

Buddhist literature in late Qing and early Republican China contributed to the new thinking in modern Chinese literature in a number of ways. Writers of Chinese Buddhist literature strove to elucidate the similarities between Buddhist culture and the scientific spirit, or to reveal the scientific spirit in Buddhist culture. Buddhist writers were aware of the importance of the spiritual enlightenment and mental reconstruction of the people, and realized the impact that literature and art as a kind of social ideology had on the national spirit. They were also interested in folk genres and vernacular literature. The May Fourth Movement put its emphasis on the people, while Buddhist literature in this period emphasized the related concept of humanity.

On the Translation of Children‟s Literature

This paper aims at exploring the history of the translation of the children’s literature in the four periods, that is, the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republican China, the May Fourth period, the Anti-Japanese War period, and the period after 1976, and finds that each period has its own characteristics in the translations. The paper also studies some strategies that the translators usually adopt and illustrates the accordant merits.

Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Edited by Nanxiu Qian, Grace S. Fong, and Richard J. Smith. Leiden: Brill, 2008. xi, 415 pp. $162.00 (cloth).

Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Edited by Nanxiu Qian, Grace S. Fong, and Richard J. Smith. Leiden: Brill, 2008. xi, 415 pp. $162.00 (cloth). - Volume 69 Issue 4

晚清“崇實”思潮與現代印刷文化的興起——以張元濟爲中心的論述

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 本文以張元濟爲中心，討論晚清“崇實”思潮與現代印刷文化興起之間的關係。論文首先“呈現”了清末民初的知識和思想狀況，解讀了“崇實”思潮何以在晚清發生，這一思潮使當時的知識群體對建設一種新的文化有怎樣的想像等問題，探討了具有“現代”意義的印刷文化何以在晚清民初興起的原因。論文指出，以張元濟爲代表的“精英”知識群體，把印刷媒介作爲“智民救國”的一種武器、一種方式，分析了文學“與群治的關係”何以在那樣的時刻通過印刷出版發生之原因。在這樣的分析背後，論文認爲，印刷技術變革帶來的運作方式的變化使印刷媒介内在地成爲社會變革運動中的一個重要組成部分，而不僅僅是一種手段，“現代”印刷文化的興起不僅僅是一種知識傳播方式的變革，更是一種“在地”的“做”和“運動”。
 Taking Zhang Yuanji (1867-1959) as an example, this paper discusses the relation between the wave of “pragmatism” and the rise of the modern printing culture in late Qing and early Republican China. From a macro perspective on history of thought and cultural background, this essay specially “represents” the intellects’ situation of late Qing, explains how the wave of “pragmatism” and the modern printing culture took shape during that periods. After analyzing the reasons why literature became related to the mass culture and social control through the development of printing technology, the essay points out that a group of “elitists” represented by Zhang Yuanji made the new printing culture a medium and weapon to enlighten the mass and save the nation.
 The essay points out, the notion of “modernity” penetrated into the organization of cultural production, institutional management, capital operation and management due to the wide application of printing technology in the process of cultural production. In the forming process of new social pattern, the modern printing technology became a significant part of social power by acting more than an instrument. This means, the rise of the modern printing culture is not only a reform on the means of knowledge spreading, but also a “doing” culture and movement in late Qing and early Republican China.

The Role of the Japanese Advisor in Early Republican China

The Role of the Japanese Advisor in Early Republican China

Summaries of Scholarly Symposia 1.1

The Trans-Asia Photography Review is pleased to publish summaries and reviews of symposia, conferences, panels and workshops on topics related to photography in Asia. In addition to the symposia summarized here, summaries of the symposia on 19th Century photography in India held at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts can be found via their website at www.acparchives.com and abstracts from the Facing Asia conference (National Gallery of Australia, August 2010) can be downloaded at http://hrc.anu.edu.au/events/facing-asia. Please send information on other meetings that could be summarized to the Editor at asianphotography@hampshire.edu. This issue features three symposia: The Role of Photography in Shaping China's Image, 1860-1945 (Northwestern University, April 24-25, 2009) China Seen by the Chinese: Documentary Photography, 1951-2003 (Princeton University, October 24, 2009) Photographic Practices, Visual Transgression, and National Identity in Meiji Japan and Early Republican China (Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, Chicago, March 2009)