Chinese Cultural Life Research Articles

Representation of Chinese Opera in Xiong Liang’s Picturebooks

Abstract: Xiong Liang is an illustrator widely recognized as a pioneer of Chinese picturebooks. His works seek to be both visually appealing and educational in familiarizing readers with traditional aspects of Chinese cultural life. This article focuses on Wu Song Da Hu 武松打虎 [Wu Song Beats the Tiger] and 长坂坡 [Battle of Changbanpo], a picturebook adaptations of the operas of the same titles. In Xiong’s work, the human characters are depicted as charming street cats for their playfulness. This article analyses Xiong’s picturebooks to unveil the creation of a clever synergy of word, sound, and image to introduce young readers to the traditional art of Chinese opera.

Cultural Institution and Institutional Culture from the Transcultural Perspective: What Is the Culture behind the Stage, and What Is the Culture inside a Cage?

This article presents the profile of the East Asian theatre artist Danny Yung, director of the acclaimed Zuni Icosachedron theatre in Hong Kong. In the first part, Maciej Szatkowski offers a synthesis of his artistic biography, from his early years as a theatre maker in Hong Kong in the 1980s to the creation of a transnational Chinese theatre, which provides a space for artistic encounters of established and emerging artists from the Sinosphere and beyond. The article focuses on highlighting the main areas of Yung’s work and contextualizing them in terms of the realities of Chinese cultural life. The author describes the central distinguishing features of Yung’s activity and its consecutive stages over the years, as well as the impact of his work on theatres in China and Taiwan. The appendix provides a transcript of Yung’s talk at the conference Contemporary Acting Techniques in Eurasian Theatre, Performance and Audiovisual Art: Intercultural and Intermedia Perspective (2021). The guiding idea of the lecture is the role of institutions in shaping theatre policy and connecting artists and ideas. Yung draws on examples from his own experience, describing the process of creating his most recent productions. He emphasizes the importance of collaboration and dialogue between artists, as well as the role of theatre institutions as major actors influencing the development of theatre art in contemporary Eurasia.

Qigong improves balance in young women: a pilot study

Balance problems are common in people of all ages and can lead to falls, thus causing fractures with consequent disability. Qigong practice has long been part of daily life in Chinese culture, and has good effects on physical health maintenance. The present work describes the change in balance in young, healthy women after practising Qigong for eight weeks. The study took the form of a controlled, randomised longitudinal trial, and involved 30 women aged 18-25 years. The subjects had no prior experience of Qigong or Tai Chi and were unaware of the aims of the study. Subjects were randomly assigned to a Qigong intervention group or a control group. Those in the Qigong intervention group performed "exercises in 20 figures for health and long-life" (Wang Ziping) for 1 h twice per week, for 4 weeks. The control group undertook no exercise at all. The main outcome measure was the stabilometry values. These were obtained in a unipodal support test, using a plantar pressure platform with optical sensors. The Qigong subjects showed a significant improvement in their stabilometry results (40.1% pre-intervention and 56.4% post-intervention) (P< 0.045), while no improvement was seen in the control group (51.2% pre-intervention and 53.5% post-intervention). At the beginning of the intervention, the stabilometry values recorded for the Qigong intervention group were worse than those recorded for the control group (40.15% and 51.21% respectively; P=0.121). However, a comparison of the post-intervention values between these groups showed that these differences have disappeared (P=0.653). Qigong can improve balance in healthy, young women.

Negotiating with the Past: The Art of Calligraphy in Post-Mao China

Chinese Calligraphy, an integrated form that combines language, art, philosophy, and poetry, was considered the highest art in traditional China. Although no longer used for daily communication, calligraphy manages to sustain its presence in Chinese cultural life even in the computer age. The classical forms that were canonized nearly two millenniums ago continue to command a large following while new styles and new practices have emerged in response to social, cultural and artistic influences. This paper looks at present trends in calligraphy and calligraphy-inspired practices against the backdrop of tradtions. It is apparent that even within the most radical changes that have taken place, whether in the way calligraphy is practiced or evaluated, there are strong indications that the fundamental aesthetic principles passed down from the past are still very much alive today, showing the resilience of this ancient art.

The fate of semiotics in China

In recent years, fuhao (sign) has become a buzz word in Chinese cultural life, which itself has been undergoing rapid transformation, from a more or less pre-modern society not long ago to a highly hybridized one with salient post-modernistic characteristics.

Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary (review)

Reviewed by: Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary Jens Damm (bio) Fran Martin. Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 290 pp. Paperback $23.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-4680-7. In this work, Fran Martin, one of the most prolific authors on the topic, provides a fascinating kaleidoscope of the female homoeroticism found in Chinese media and literature. By shifting between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) proper, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and referring back to the Chinese Republican period of the 1920s and 1930s, Fran Martin shows how various narratives, discourses, perceptions, and representations have interacted. By bringing in Western discourses and descriptions, she succeeds in breaking up and broadening standard descriptions of the Eastern-Western binary that have often been prevalent in writings about homoeroticism and homosexuality in China and Hong Kong. She focuses on descriptions found in the mainstream media to present a convincing picture of the “crisis of the dominant sex-gender system” (p. 7), arguing that “the system of enforced adult hetero-maritality coexists alongside its own remarkably candid critique” (p. 8). After offering an overview of the existing English-language literature on female homoeroticism, which is enlarged upon in chapter 1, she provides a brief introduction to the period under research, which started with a complicated process shaped by the indigenization of European sexological theory in China in the 1920s and 1939s; a similar process could also be observed in Taiwan, which, at that time, was a Japanese colony. For the author, the two most important issues are the adaption of Havelock Ellis’s mutually exclusive situational/temporary and congenital/permanent categories of homoeroticism (p. 11). Fran Martin does not, however, provide a complete history of homoeroticism in the twentieth century, but regards the 1920s and 1930s as the necessary background for a better understanding of the post-1970s developments, which are the main focus of her work. In her analysis, the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are perceived as three historically linked areas, but with various pluralities and different developments. Thus, Martin avoids any essentialized understanding of Chinese forms of homoeroticism as being fundamentally different from the West. After the mid-1980s, in particular, there was growing interest in the interaction in these three areas in the form of an exchange of popular texts, other media representations, and also of persons traveling more freely. Television and the World Wide Web, of course, played another important role (p. 21). While the material employed by the author covers various forms of text and other media representations, a more concentrated focus is laid on the stories of school girl romances in order to illustrate the links between female sex-love and contemporary Chinese cultural life (p. 21). This complex and demanding project is carried out in various stages: chapter 1, “Tragic Romance: The Chinese Going-In Story,” deals with short stories written in the 1920s and 1930s by Lu Yin, Ling Shuhua, and Yu Dafu. This was the time [End Page 459] when the translocation, translation, and transculturation of Western sexual discourses to China took place, often via Japan, during the course of which Western discourses changed, were adapted, and transformed into new hybrid structures. Martin shows that “adjacency and interconnection” exist between various “Western” and “Asian” discourses, but that it would be wrong to assume the existence of an essentialist binary between the two (p. 31). In Martin’s view, the homoerotic schoolgirl and the tomboy were created during the 1920s, but then also survived to live on in contemporary China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. In chapter 2, “Voluble Ellipsis: Second-Wave Schoolgirl Romance in Taiwan and Hong Kong,” Martin analyses two fictional works, one by the Taiwanese author Chu T’ien-Hsien and the other by the Hong Kong author Wong Bikwan. Each of these novels makes specific reference to earlier works, such as those by Qiong Yao and Eileen Chang. Martin points out that these are not merely reproductions of heterosexualized romantic stories; these stories do not cite romantic heterosexual models, but create new forms and, therefore, also subversive forms of this genre. Interestingly enough, these two authors...

The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (review)

Reviewed by: The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture James Gao (bio) Richard Curt Kraus . The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. xi, 247 pp. Paperback $27.95, ISBN 07425-2720-4. It is well known that economic reform has transformed China from an economic backwater to a strong competitor in the global market. Less well understood are the accompanying political and cultural changes that have taken place in the reform era. In this well-researched book, Richard Curt Kraus analyzes the reformation of Chinese cultural life that has until now been obscured by ignorance and ideological bias. The book is organized into seven chapters. It begins with a succinct description of the Chinese cultural landscape and then moves to the ongoing reforms. [End Page 144] To help the reader understand what changes have taken place in the arts system, Kraus describes the evolution of artistic life from the Confucian tradition to the Guomindang experience, and from the legacy of Yan'an to the politicization of the arts under Mao. According to Kraus, "reforming culture has been a central issue in Chinese politics for more than a hundred years" (p. 29). Various political forces have affected the thinking of artists and inspired them to translate new visions into artistic expression. Yet, the current transformation of Chinese culture has been the product of a newly developing market economy, which has eroded the former domination of communist ideology. In chapter 2, Kraus examines two revolutions in patronage that occurred in 1949 and after 1976. The first made Chinese artists into employees of the communist state; this brought stability to their lives but at same time placed them under a restrictive, repressive control. Believing that "revolution was not simply a material process, but also a matter of ideological commitment" (p. 49), the Communist Party established various institutions to administer the arts. The author's description of these complex institutions is generally correct, with a few minor inaccuracies. For example, the "Oriental Song and Dance Troupe" does not belong to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Culture never administered Chinese television and broadcasting. To explain how the market economy is redefining the Party-arty relationship, Kraus argues that China's second patronage revolution is manifesting itself in the way that cultural markets supplement state employment. The substantial changes taking place may be summed up in the statement that "art-as-propaganda gave way to art-as-commodity" (p. 64); the market for commercial culture has expanded at the expense of bureaucratic control. One should perhaps read the author's discussion of Chinese censorship (chapter 4) before moving to the case analyses on nude paintings (chapter 3). Kraus criticizes "a double standard for China and the West" on censorship and argues that "our understanding of Chinese censorship would be advanced by greater honesty about the West's own censorship" (p. 134). He sees Chinese censorship "as a kind of game, in which state officials and artists contest the extent of free public expression" (p. 108). China has not established an official censorship apparatus, but Party leaders at different levels do have the power to censor artistic works according to their own understanding of Party policy and their own moral standards. Direct criticism of Party politics can be silenced before the critics speak out, but the censorship of artistic works might take place several years after their appearance. The practice of post-publication censorship and the changes in the political climate make the occurrence of censorship all the more erratic and unpredictable. Serious punishments are meted out to a few writers, while others receive only a warning. This strategy of "killing the chicken to scare the monkey," as the Chinese expression goes, explains how the state has been successful in getting artists to hold to a strict self-censorship. [End Page 145] Kraus examines the reasons why censorship has eased in recent years. This is "not mainly due to the party's goodwill, but because many intellectuals pressed successfully for fewer restrictions and because the emerging cultural marketplace has complicated the censor's job" (p. 122). The...

The changing Chinese interpersonal world: Popular themes in interpersonal communication books in modern Taiwan

This study investigates changing patterns of interpersonal relationship and communication in contemporary Taiwanese society through analysis of popular books on interpersonal skills, translated from American and Japanese sources. Thematic analysis of selected popular books from nineteen series reveal three themes: (1) Taiwan's modernization poses challenges to interpersonal relating; (2) modern people need to promote and protect themselves; and (3) interpersonal skills can be learned through short‐term training. These books underscore an emphasis on self and attempts to equalize various relationships, as revealed in the modern cultural constructs of “self,” “relationship,” and “communication.” Implications of the transformation of patterns of relationship to Chinese cultural life and its future directions are discussed.

Some basic problems in the development of the human sciences in China today

New developments in the social and human sciences in China have aroused worldwide attention. Foreign people are curious about the great changes in Chinese cultural life during the past ten years because China has a brilliant cultural heritage dating back three thousand years; the world still expects a lot from her. That fact raises a big questior both at home and abroad: will a country that contributed so much to world culture in the past continue to do so in the changed, modern period? In order to answer this question we have to understand more thoroughly and more deeply the present situation of Chinese culture and the humanities. China boasts the longest uninterrupted cultural development in the world; this fact helps to explain why people have always taken a great interest in cultural and scholarly activities. Traditionally there were three major scholarly disciplines: philosophy, history, and literature; their formation has been different from that of the corresponding Western disciplines. Even today we Chinese prefer to use the names of this triad to represent the main branches of the humanities. In the earliest period of Chinese scholarship, the practical and theoretical parts were not separated, but later, about two thousand years ago, a distinction between practical learning and quasi-theoretical learning became apparent. Certain subjects like politics, military affairs, religion, entertainment, and other social and private activities became more distinct from one another, especially in the written expression of these matters. But in comparison with the classification of subjects in ancient Western scholarship, practical and theoretical knowledge have always remained linked in China. One can say that traditional Chinese learning is mainly empirical, practical, and ethical, that it is stronger in literary description and moral judgment than in logical analysis and the systematic articulation of the disciplines. When at the beginning of this century Western culture and thought started making inroads into China, Chinese intellectuals were angered