Imperial Chinese Research Articles

Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature by Wai-yee Li

Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature by Wai-yee Li

Ways of Perceiving Late Imperial Chinese Art

Ways of Perceiving Late Imperial Chinese Art

Body, Gender, and Disease: The Female Breast in Late Imperial Chinese Medicine

This paper examines the diverse ways in which Chinese medical experts historically gendered breast disease as a female ailment. By comparing representations of the female breast from the "Imperially-Compiled Golden Mirror of Medical Learning (Yuzuan yizong jinjian, 1742)" to those from earlier and contemporary texts, this paper analyzes how breast disease was alternately categorized as an ailment of childbearing and as a disease rooted in pathological female emotion. Medical awareness of breast disease in men did somewhat challenge these connections between womanhood and disease. Nevertheless, medical illustrations of women helped to reinforce the idea that breast disease was a characteristically female problem.

Special Section on Gender and Medicine

Special Section on Gender and Medicine Marta Hanson Two articles in this issue of Late Imperial China pay intellectual tribute to the illuminating scholarship on the history of gender and medicine in China of Charlotte Furth. Yi-Li Wu's contribution, "Body, Gender, and Disease: The Female Breast in Late Imperial Chinese Medicine," carries out an unpacking of the layers of meaning of the diseased and lactating breast comparable to that done by Furth for the gendering of blood and the body in Chinese medical history. Hsiu-fen Chen's analysis, "Between Passion and Repression: Medical Views of Demon Dreams, Demonic Fetuses, and Female Sexual Madness in Late Imperial China," does for the gendering of emotions, dreams, and madness among non-reproductive women—nuns, widows, and spinsters—what Furth did for our understanding of the history of women, gender, and reproduction in late imperial Chinese medicine. Before Furth turned her attention to comparable subjects in the cultural history of Chinese medicine, however, she started her career in the 1960s in intellectual history at Stanford, where in 1966 she finished a dissertation on the geologist and public intellectual Ding Wenjiang. The resulting book, Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China's New Culture (Harvard, 1970), approached the British-educated scientist as a modern-day scientific positivist and elite technocrat who also had a Confucian ethic of social responsibility. She argued that his approach to western science as a type of epistemology helped shape the "new culture" of the May 4 movement. After this book, she developed an interest in the nexus of science, politics, and reform among Chinese conservatives of Ding's generation. This led to the edited volume Limits of Change: Conservative Alternatives in Republican China (Harvard, 1976). Her chapter on "Intellectual Change: From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895-1920" in the Republican Era volume 12 of the Cambridge History of China (1983) also developed from her initial research questions. While she was a Fulbright fellow in China from 1981 to 1982, however, her interests shifted to both the deeper past of late imperial China and the literate medical tradition. Her shift from intellectual and political to social and cultural history, engagement with feminism, and work on kinship, gender, [End Page 49] and sexuality during the Ming-Qing periods resulted from engagement with the broader transformations in history from the 1970s to the 1980s. This analytic reorientation also dovetailed with her role as co-editor with James Lee of Late Imperial China for eight years from 1985-93. Her prodigious scholarship on gender and medicine culminated in A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History 960-1665 (Stanford, 1999). The rich Chinese tradition of medical case histories she mined for this monograph became the subject of an even broader synthesis of "case reasoning" in the co-edited volume on Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History (Hawai'i, 2007). After eighteen years of teaching in the Department of History at the University of Southern California in 2008 she became Professor Emerita of Chinese history. This transition in her position, however, has not decreased her intellectual contributions to the field through editing the work of others or publishing her own. Co-edited with Angela Leung, Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Public in the Long Twentieth Century (Duke, 2010), once again expands our collective vision, provides a new synthesis, and opens yet further paths of productive inquiry. [End Page 50] Marta Hanson Department of History of Medicine Johns Hopkins University Copyright © 2011 Society for Qing Studies and The Johns Hopkins University Press

Nutritional Governmentality

Among the most powerful metanarratives in discourses on modernity, especially about China, is that of the transition from a condition of premodern food scarcity to one of potential plenty. Employing insights yielded from the recent discoveries of the calorie and of vitamins and minerals, republican Chinese identified patterns of widespread malnutrition throughout the country. Yet a closer look at the documentary record suggests a different historical trajectory than that implied by the scarcity-to-plenty model, with implications for how we think about “empires of food” across the early-modern to modern divide. In China, famine was common but relatively well managed until the modern period, and the late imperial poor, even when living at subsistence levels, appear to have been relatively healthy in nutritional terms. Instead, late imperial Chinese expressed considerable concern about the nutritional health of the rich. They further employed a discourse on nutrition that, unlike modern biomedicine, postulated different nutritional needs and indices of health for people living in different parts of the country. In examining discourses of nutrition in imperial and republican China, this article introduces the idea of “nutritional governmentality,” defined as a state's use of nutritional knowledge to conceptualize its political objectives and administer the health of its population in a manner suitable to meeting those objectives.

Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (review)

Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (review)

Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (review)

Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (review)

Imperial Chinese Justice and the Law of Torture

Imperial Chinese Justice and the Law of Torture

Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative (review)

Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative (review)

Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction

In the traditional Chinese symbolic vocabulary, the construction of gender was never far from debates about ritual propriety, desire, and even cosmic harmony. Competing Discourses maps the aesthetic and semantic meanings associated with gender in the Ming-Qing vernacular novel through close readings of five long narratives: Marriage Bonds to Awaken the World, Dream of the Red Chamber, A Country Codger's Words of Exposure, Flowers in the Mirror, and A Tale of Heroic Lovers. Epstein argues that the authors of these novels manipulated gendered terms to achieve structural coherence. These patterns are, however, frequently at odds with other gendered structures in the texts, and authors exploited these conflicts to discuss the problem of orthodox behavior versus the cult of feeling.

Book Reviews

Books reviewed: China Edward Friedman and Barrett L. McCormick (eds), What if China Doesn' t Democratize? Implications for War and PeaceShaohua Hu, Explaining Chinese DemocratizationS. A. Smith, A Road is Made: Communism in Shanghai 1920–1927Maram Epstein, Competing Discourses: orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction Japan, Korea Brian J. McVeigh, Wearing Ideology: state, Schooling and Self‐Presentation in JapanAlison McQueen Tokita, Kiyomoto‐bushi. Narrative Music of the Kabuki TheatreTimothy J. Craig, Japan Pop! Inside the World of Japanese Popular CultureBert Edstrom (ed), The Japanese and Europe: images and Perceptions South, West and Central Asia Siri Gamage and I. B. Watson (eds), Conflict and Community in Contemporary Sri Lanka: “Pearl of the East” or the “Island of Tears”.Ranabir Samaddar, The Marginal Nation: transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal General Asia David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939J.S. Eades, Tom Gill and Harumi Befu (eds), Globalization and Social Change in Contemporary JapanYamamoto Yoshinobu (ed), Globalism, Regionalism & Nationalism. Asia in Search of its Role in the 21st CenturyDonald Denoon, Getting Under the Skin: the Bougainville Copper Agreement and the Creation of the Panguna MineJoanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell (eds), The East Asian Challenge for Human RightsAnne‐Marie Hilsdon, Martha MacIntyre, Vera Mackie and Maila Stivens (eds), Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia‐Pacific Perspectives

Competing discourses: orthodoxy, authenticity, and engendered meaning in late Imperial Chinese fiction

Competing discourses: orthodoxy, authenticity, and engendered meaning in late Imperial Chinese fiction

Bell Doctors in the Late Imperial Chinese Novel Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan

明末清初小说《醒世姻缘传》中的铃医形象长篇白话小说《醒世姻缘传》是明末清初最重要的小说之一。十七世纪中叶 西周生所写的《醒世姻缘传》承续了讽世小说和人情小说的传统，以喜剧的 手法、诙谐的口吻、以及怪诞的故事情节揭示了中国传统社会道德崩溃的 社会现实。小说通过理想与社会现实的对比，表现了对儒家理想的追求 和对与理想主义背道而驰的社会现实的批判。疾病、医术及行医者在小说 中占了很重要的地位。医生中不但有太医、医官、而且也有铃医，后者所 使用的非正统的治疗手段、以及通过其所反映的生活中堕落、黑暗的方 面，都是在其他作品中很少见到的。本文将置这篇小说于其文学、历史的 背景下，来研究它的论点的表达与语言使用的技巧，以便了解作品故事背 后所表达的对十七世纪的中国的批判。

Re-thinking the Late Imperial Chinese Economy: Development, Disaggregation and Decline, circa 1730–1930

In this paper, I want to explore a very simple contrast which has many potential implications. China at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century was, by most measures, a very poor society. China in the latter part of the eighteenth century seemed – both to its own members and to most, though not all, visitors from abroad – a very rich society. So what happened in between?

Foxes and Sex in Late Imperial Chinese Narrative

AbstractThis article explores the nature of sexuality in narratives about shape-changing fox spirits from the Ming and Qing. The concept of an inherently sexual species was refined through associations with sexually marked categories of women, notably prostitutes and dangerous concubines, which work differently in different narrative genres. Although more attention is devoted to sexually disruptive vixens, stories about male foxes with human sexual partners of either gender shed light on gendered ideas of the relationship between will and desire. At the same time as the fox narrative explores the danger of sexuality, concepts of parasitism and self-advancement divert focus away from desire as such.

Adult Daughter Caregivers

As part of the discussion on resource allocation for the aged, it crucial to ask not only about who the family caregivers are and whether they need assistance, but also to ask how an understanding of the obligation to give care can contribute to a more just allocation. This work examines only one type of family caregiving--that of adult children to parents--focusing particularly on the experience of adult daughters as caregivers. l offer a conceptual analysis of the basis of filial obligations as a resource for dealing with some of the dilemmas experienced by these caregivers. The stereotype that the elderly the United States are abandoned by their families and warehoused nursing homes a myth.[1] Only 5 percent of the elderly the U.S. are institutionalized. Nine ten of the disabled elderly not nursing homes receive unpaid care from relatives and friends. Up to 7 million Americans are unpaid caregivers to the elderly, with the majority of caregivers being women.[2] Adult daughters and daughters-in-law not only provide the principal help to older people who care for disabled spouses but are also the primary caregivers to the more than 9 million widowed older people who are dependent.[3] The current average caregiver to the elderly forty-five years old, female, and married. Among children who are primary caregivers, daughters outnumber sons three to one.[4] Gender-Specific Filial Caregiving According to Elaine Brody, one of the most dominant and powerful shared themes of women's filial caregiving experience is their fundamental acceptance that parent care a woman's role. Brody goes on to say that in virtually every culture, the nurturing role belongs to women, no matter how it has come about.[5] The predominance of adult daughters and daughters-in-law as caregivers at the very least enforced sociological, cultural, and religious traditions. Parents are not equally esteemed all cultures, of course, and filial obligations for care may vary between duties to one's own or one's spouse's parents. Consider, for example, salient features of several influential Western (and one Eastern) traditions. Some traditions, like the Greek, honor the father above all; others, such as Islam, esteem the mother over the father. And still other cultures expect a daughter to honor both her parents equally (Judeo-Christian) or her in-laws after marriage (Imperial Chinese). So too, a woman's first duties as caregiver may be to her own parents (as the Christian and Jewish traditions), though she may also be to assist caring for her husband's parents. Or duties of filial care to her in-laws may supersede a woman's obligations to her own parents once she has married, as Classical Greece and Imperial China.[6] The focus of filial obligations the written historical texts on what sons owe to their parents, with emphasis on what sons owe to fathers. In the patriarchal traditions listed above, women marriage are necessary helpers to husbands fulfilling their filial obligations. Family caregivers are predominantly female because these societies assign the role to the feminine sphere. In Revolutionary America as well, filial duty was gender-specific, with sons to provide financial contributions and daughters to provide the hands-on care and nurture of aged parents. Women perceived their responsibility as both appropriate and necessary within the prescribed limits of woman's sphere.[7] Current data on the effects of women's changing roles and attitudes toward responsibility for care of elderly adults reflect significant generational differences concerning sharing of parent care and household tasks by men and women. In a study of three generations of women, the youngest generation was most favor of egalitarian gender roles.[8] Interestingly, the study revealed that those the youngest generation were strongly favor of family caregiving and yet at the same time they expected to work much longer than their mothers and grandmothers had to work when they were young women even though the grand-daughters to marry and to have as many children as their mothers and grandmothers. …

States in Evolution: Some Afterthoughts

While discussing the 'Environment of Developmental Alternatives' in the larger treatise bearing the above title,1 I outlined three models the European, the imperial Chinese, and the Latin American, elaborating on the first two in the bulk of the book. The European model involves the intraand inter-state effects of intraand inter-regional balance-of-power systems (or protosystems); the Chinese model corrects or supersedes the first by the effects of involvement by outside great powers verging on competitive apportionment of pre-eminent or exclusive influence; and the Latin American model entails the suspension or arrest of regional system evolution due, among other things, to a lopsided or aberrant impact by such outside great powers. Each of these developmental models will affect, in one way or another, the relation between conflict-focused regional system of power equilibrium and co-operation-centred functional regionalism. When I now attempt to respond to the Journal's invitation to re-examine these themes in the light of subsequent events, I find the intervening time span too short to justify definitive pronouncements on what are, after all, very long-term secular trends and alternatives. This is especially true for the basic option in the Third World between arrest and continuance of the ongoing evolution of regional balance-of-power systems, each alternative having portentous implications for the timetable, the power