Modem China Research Articles

Civil-Military Relations in China: An Obstacle to Constitutionalism?

The armed forces have three massive political advantages over civilian organizations: a marked superiority in organization, a highly emotionalized symbolic status, and a monopoly of arms. They form a prestigious corporation or Order, enjoying overwhelming superiority in the means of applying force. The wonder, therefore, is not why this rebels against its civilian masters, but why it ever obeys them. A standing army can pose a threat to the stability of any civilian regime. Constitutional regimes have evolved legal mechanisms to assure the subordination of the military to civilian authorities. However, given the advantages of the military in terms of both physical force and organization noted by Finer above, restraining military power requires much more than legal texts. When armed force was used to reassert authority in June 1989, the Communist Party of China demonstrated the paramount importance of the role that civil-military relations play in the current regime. Civilian control is both a matter of the organization of civil society in a manner which neutralizes the organizational advantages of the military, as well as of the subjective inculcation of a military ethic to habituate the military to civilian control. As observed by Tuan-sheng Ch’ien, there is a tendency for the military to idealize obedience, all the while recognizing their pivotal role in government. The way then to diminish military dominance in times of peace is to develop a political force with equal or greater organization and power than the military. This article begins with a discussion of various ideals of constitutionalism and of civil-military relations thereunder. The focus then turns to the status of civil-military relations in pre-revolutionary, revolutionary, and modem China. Finally, this article explores the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (the “CCP” or the “Party”) and the Chinese armed forces, the People’s Liberation Army (the “PLA”) and its affiliated paramilitary police, the People’s Armed Police, with a view to establishing the minimum conditions under which civil-military relations in China could be made to conform to constitutional rule.

Social Justice in Sun Yat-Sen ’s The Three Principles of the People

The intent of this paper is to derive an understanding of social justice from Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s San Min Chu I, The Three Principles of the People. Sun Yat- sen, the founder of modem China, gave a series of lectures in 1924, setting the goals of the revolution against the Qin dynasty and the foundation of a modem China. The word “justice” is mentioned only once in the lectures and it is paired with “faithfulness,” or trust referring to the ancient moral character or virtue. And yet underlying the whole programme is a notion of justice that is not interpersonal but social. The first part of the paper gives a summary of the meaning of the three principles: nationalism, democracy and people’s livelihood. The second part attempts to draw the meaning of social justice from the three principles, hopefully showing the relevance of Sun Yat-sen’s ideas to our time.

TSUCHIYA Takahiro, Military System of Modem China: The Party, the Government, and the Army Relations involving National Defense Expenditure and Military Expenditure

TSUCHIYA Takahiro, <i>Military System of Modem China: The Party, the Government, and the Army Relations involving National Defense Expenditure and Military Expenditure</i>

The Shaping of National History in Textbooks of Modern China and "Zhonghua Minzu"

This paper examines the modern transition of historical studies and the impact of national history on modern Chinese textbooks in order to observe ongoing international disputes over history in East Asia today. The main subject here concerns “Zhonghua minzu，” the idea central to the depiction of Chinas national history.BR The search for modern historical studies between the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China began against a backdrop of nationalism that arose in the late Qing dynasty. Important is that the conception of such studies was influenced by Meiji Japan’s history of civilization and idea of evolution. Representative of this was Liang Qichao’s appropriation of Japanese concepts and classifications in categorizing the histories of China and East Asia in order to redefine the category of Chinese history and coin the term Zhonghua minzu. This new historiography had great bearing on the shape of new textbooks not only concentrating on the foundation, unification and conquests of a dynasty, but also illustrating its cultural heroes. It is in this process that a Sinocentric distinction between Hua and Yi, as well as historical knowledge produced by modern Japan, had seeped into Chinese textbooks. After the May Fourth Movement, Chinese intellectuals sought to describe their national history based on modern scholarly methods. For example, Gu Jiegang applied anti-traditionalist thoughts to dismantle the unitary, single-rooted nature from the origin of Zhonghua minzu and attempted to put forth a pluralistic narrative encompassing the cultures of all ethnicities. This sort of descriptive tendency held the potential to develop into diverse directions once modernity became established in the methods and system of studying Chinese history. However, the Nationalist Government of China intensified training on nationalism through a centralized education system and curriculum. The leadership of the Han Chinese and their integration of surrounding ethnicities was highlighted over the nation’s ethnic-plurality and cultural diversity. Along with mass mobilization against Japanese invasion during the period, this rationale incorporated Han Chinese into Zhonghua minzu and subsumed the history of northeastern China and the northern part of the Korean peninsula under the history of China.BR To conclude, modern Chinese nationalism consistently affected the development of national history that accepted the nationalist historiography of modern Japan, promoted the idea of Zhonghua minzu sufficient to assimilate minor ethnicities, and legitimated the political necessity of defending China’s borderlands against Japanese imperialism. Hence, it is necessary to understand the perception of history in China’s Northeast Project as a knowledge system formed over a lengthy process throughout modem China.

Governance of peking union medical college in 1920s - 1930s

Peking Union Medical College has an important position in medical education history in modern China. There are many administrative documents in the college archives and among them are the college By-laws (1920s-1930s). These recorded changes in the College Board, the establishment of various committees and their power and responsibility, which reflect the governance of the college. The governance is analyzed in the paper, using the different versions of the by-laws, which is of reference value to the current university governance reform in China.

Making religion, making the state: the politics of religion in modern China

Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L Wank (eds), Making Religion, Making State: The Politics of Religion in Modem China, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009, 294 pp.akin g Religion, Making State is an important contribution to field of religious studies in that it constitutes a sophisticated attempt to escape what editors consider a prevailing paradigm in today's research, namely analysis of and in dichotomous frameworks of antagonism and (p. 3). Instead, volume emphasises complexity of a religious field in which actors are plentiful (government agencies, clergy, religious associations, overseas Chinese, etc.), engage in strategies that, beyond conflict or competition, also include cooperation and adaptation, and ultimately all attempt to implement modern category of religion. The institutionalisation of religions therefore takes place in a context in which state and are mutually constitutive (pp. 5-6).To some extent, book's inspiration comes from work of Talal Asad and idea that the processes by which situations are adapted to modern definition of are (p. 7). Four types of political processes are identified in Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank's stimulating introductory essay and are exemplified by various articles (pp. 12-17): Politics within state (i.e., debates within state apparatus about how to institutionalise religion); state imposition of religion (as a category) on and its outcomes; accommodation of state institutions by religions (i.e., strategies of different religions to adapt to category of religion, for example by suppressing activities that might be considered superstitious); and popular institution and politics of (i.e., how popular religious undertakings may contribute to shape politics of religion).The contributions included in volume cover five main religions (Buddhism, Daoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam) plus a case-study of popular and an article on qigong. In addition, a study by Timothy Brook provides some insight into late-imperial origins of regulatory state, and highlights elements of continuity between Confucian and Republican/Communist hostilities to religion.With examples drawn mainly from Buddhism, Yoshiko Ashiwa discusses two periods (the Republican period and era beginning with reform and opening) and shows how state and have aggressively moved to create their systems and position themselves vis-a-vis other (...) (p. 70). Richard Madsen and Lizhu Fan study case of Catholic pilgrimage to Sheshan, on outskirts of Shanghai, and explain various layers of meaning it has had across history up to present, as a result of which no one is able to fully control cult. Carsten T. Valla explores training of China's Protestant leadership and shows totally counterproductive nature of state attempts to shape compliant pastors (and impose state views on religion). David L. Wank's article builds on fieldwork conducted in Xiamen (Nanputuo monastery) to introduce diverse phases of a local Buddhist revival and evolving strategies of different actors to accommodate religious discourse of state and strengthen their position. …

Political Integration in Modem China

Political Integration in Modem China

身處時代交替裏——北京大學第一任校長嚴復

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.&#x0D; 辛亥革命雖然一夜之間推翻清王朝的統治，但却不能將封建王朝遺留下來的建制一并推倒。新的制度來不及建立，舊制度下的各種規章與人事安排仍然繼續影響著新時代的領導者。改革者要在這個時代交替的時期開拓新氣象，往往需要相當勇氣與毅力，然而，很多時候都仍只會是吃力不討好。&#x0D; 有“西學第一人”美譽的嚴復(1854—1921 )，早年留學英倫，掌握西方新知識，對中國的高等教育發展也有所見解。1912年，他被委接任京師大學堂監督。隨着學堂其後更名爲國立北京大學，嚴復也成爲大學首任校長。他在任内致力整頓各學科課程，積極籌措經費，對提升大學水平貢獻良好。可惜，他與以蔡元培爲首的教育部時生衛突，令他的工作受到諸多掣肘。半年後，心灰意冷的他選擇離任。The Revolution of 1911 had overthrown the regime of Qing Dynasty, nevertheless the original management culture including old regulations and personnel could not be abolished immediately. It still remained and affected those new leading cadres until new culture was created in the future. In this changing era, reformers always felt frustrated since they worked diligently but gained very little.&#x0D; Yan Fu who was a returned student from Britain in the late Qing, mastered well much new Western knowledge and had a lot of progressive insights about the development of higher education in Modem China. He was appointed as the chancellor of National Peking University in 1912. He devoted much effort in dealing with those works such as Modified subjects and raised money to support the university’s expenditure. Unfortunately, he could not solve the conflict with the Educational Ministry which was headed by Cai Yuanpei at that time. Having no alternatives, he resigned from his post at last.

Study on Residential Water Use in North China: Analysis of Nationwide Statistical Data and Case Study of Taiyuan City

Residential water use is gradually becoming the focus in China's municipal water supply planning and management in recent years. Little is known, however, about the residential water use in modem China due to the transition of economy and enhancement of management on water conservation. In order to better understand the characteristics of residential water use in North China, a model for identifying the determinants of residential water use was established and analyzed by using panel data and cross-section data methodologies. Then Taiyuan city, the capital city of Shanxi Province in Northern China was selected as a case study. Both the analyses and field investigation indicate that the relatively slow increase of residential water use in recent years may result from the implementation of strict laws and regulations on water conservation. And through the investigation, first-hand information about water consumption pattern, water reuse/conservation, people's attitude toward water quantity and quality, etc. have been obtained.

Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modem China

"Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modem China." Journal of Chinese Religions, 32(1), p. 291

'Which West Are You Talking About?' Critical Review: A Unique Model of Conservatism in Modem China

'Which West Are You Talking About?' Critical Review: A Unique Model of Conservatism in Modem China

Alternative Approaches to Chinese Ritual Robert P. Hymes, Way and Byway: Taoism, Local Religion, and Models of Divinity in Sung and Modem China

(2003). Alternative Approaches to Chinese Ritual Robert P. Hymes, Way and Byway: Taoism, Local Religion, and Models of Divinity in Sung and Modem China. Journal of Chinese Religions: Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 151-166.

The Making of a Public: Emotions and Media Sensation in 1930s China

The Making of a Public: Emotions and Media Sensation in 1930s China by Eugenia Lean After assassin Shi Jianqiao killed Sun Chuanfang to avenge the death of Shi Congbin, her father, a national sensation ensued and a sense of justice gladdened the hearts of the.people; theaters in each locale competed to perform the tale of the avenging daughter and the force of the people'ssentiment was truly great.l On 13 November 1935,Shi Jianqiaoentered the Qingxiu lay-Buddhist monastery in Tianjin, positioned herself behind ex-military leader Sun Chuanfang, her sworn enemy, and shot him three times. As the place of worship quickly descended into chaos and terror,· the female assassin maintained her cool and triumphantly declared, "I have avenged the murder of my father. Do not fear, I won't hurt anyone else, nor will I run away." In the days, weeks, and months after the assassination, Shi's. extraordinary act of revenge became the focus of intense media interest. The protracted courtroom trial as well as the eventual Guomindang [GMD] state pardon continued to generate headline-making news for over a year. The affair was so sensational that theaters fought over performing dramatic renditions of the Case of Shi Jianqiao, the media scrambled to publish serialized fiction inspired by the event, and the radio broadcast sung performances about the affair. But what was perhaps most notable about the case was, as the above observer states, its ability to "gladden people's hearts" and give· rise to the great force of the "people's sentiment." In this article, I examine this high-profile case to explore the rise of "public sympathy" (tongqing), an unprecedented political and moral authority in the early twentieth century. The "public sympathy" so evident in the case of Shi Jianqiao was not the first conceptualization of "public" in modem China. Reformers at the end of the Qing dynasty such as Liang Qichao had already begun avidly to promote the notion of "public opinion" (yulun), a concept that was adapted fromWestem political discourses and transferred to China as a neologism from Japan. Liang and others had advocated using the term as the basis. of imperial reform and modemization.2 Like this late Qing conceptualization of a new collective, "public sympathy" was, largue, an "imagined authority," to borrow a term coined by Keith Baker in his discussion of the pre-revolutionary French notion of I'opinion Twentieth ..Century China, Vol. 29, No. 2 (April, 2004): 39-61 40 Twentieth-Century China publique.3 Furthermore, as an "imagined authority," collective sentiment in the 1930s, like its predecessor, was perceived to function as a tribunal of sorts against which the caprices of officialdom were tried. Yet, while similarities exist, the two conceptualizations were fundamentally different in important ways. The earlier notion of "public opinion" embodied reason and progress, and arose in the pages of a new reformist press. Late Qing intellectuals were promoters of the concept and expressed enthusiasm about the possibility that the opinion of the people could serve as an effective antidote to the ebbing power of the Qing state. In contrast, the later concept of "public sympathy" was explicitly grounded in the emotions of the people and was formed through the consumption of media sensation. Further, whereas late Qing intellectuals promoted "public opinion," left-leaning critics of the 1930s, who were highly suspicious of the rise of a mass public, vociferously lamented mass sentiment as feminine, emotional and mired in superstition. The importance of media spectacle and emotions in the making of publics will allow us to rethink some issues about how the modem China field has approached the study of critical urban publics. The earliest debates on the matter narrowly centered on either promoting or refuting the possibility of finding something similar to Jurgen Habermas' s notion of the bourgeois public sphere in the Chinese experience.4 More recently, however, scholars have shifted from the highly charged teleological question of whether an actual "public sphere" existed in modem China toward a more reasoned inquiry into the historically specific configurations of Chinese "publics" in late imperial and twentieth-century China. To this end, they are concerned with understanding how the rise of new urban...

Performances of Resistance: Communist Hunger Strikes and Demonstrations in Nationalist Prisons, 1928–1937

Performances of Resistance: Communist Hunger Strikes and Demonstrations in Nationalist Prisons, 1928-1937 by Jan Kiely The history ofCol11lllunist prison resistance in the 1930s·.has long been submerged in the reductive narratives of revolutionary romanticism. Popular fictionalized versions of the sort found in the well-known novel (1958) and film (1959) The Song of Youth and. memoir literature alike··have largely been directed to support Maoist and, later, Dengist political mythologies. Indeed, the great number of prison reminiscences published after 1978 were clearly aimed at reversing Cultural Revolution historical verdicts, like the. "Sixty-One Renegades 'Case," with an eye to raising the non-Maoist "White area urban struggles" to parity with the Long March or Yan' an in the history of the revolution . Such texts tend to declare every hunger strike a "victory" and every moral choice to have been as simple as "Red" and "White."1 All is not lost, however, for those of us who wonder what these experiences and events were really like, how imprisoned Communists actually acted, and what may be learned from these episodes. Memoirists, of course, have a habit of remembering details that do not necessarily fit into their themes and judgments. When such evidence is cross-read with official archival documents and journalistic accounts and the dissonances in the record are closely interrogated , it becomes possible to start peeling back later imposed narratives. What is ex:posed, however, is not merely a sense of the grim, irresolute experiences of political prisoners-though that is surely revealed-but also long-concealed processes , narratives andcultural practices of the time having little to do with the historiography of the revolution. A range of sources, for instance, reveal that only the rare hunger strike lasted as long as six days and most ended after two or three. Why was this? Even allowing for the weakened condition of most prisoners, it seems these strikes were never undertaken with a persistence to the brink of death. On close examination, there are a number of explanations for the short duration of hunger strikes; the most significant of these is that they were not mortal standoffs between the powerful and the desperate, but primarily a form of political theater. Since, at least, the rise of the· influence of Clifford Geertz on historical studies, historians of many parts of the world have made much effective use of theatrical terms to illuminate forms of political practice. For historians of modTwentieth -Century China, Vol. 29, No.2 (April, 2004): 63-88 64 Twentieth-Century China em China, for instance, mention of "political theater" might evoke images of imperial court ritual or student and/or worker demonstrations. But not all political theater in modem China was street theater or dramas set within the halls of governance. In this study, I argue that most Communist-led prison hunger strikes and demonstrations in the 1930s were carefully calibrated· performances of resistance intent on a limited act of communication to several imagined audiences . As such, first, they were framed-restricted, enabled, shaped-by a complex set of institutional and social contexts. The diverse array of institutions' of detention and custodial punishment in Nationalist China constituted the defining stage settings for these acts of resistance. Second, imprisoned Communists acted, as best they could, in accordance with a range of conceptual templates or "scripts" of how properly to conduct resistance. Some of these were Partydirected strategies, but many derived from culturally engrained narratives that were, in Alan Taylor's term, "woven into life" in this period.2 And all were a kind of ordered paradigm of identity performed in a manner to effect meanings of particular relevance within the specific social-cultural setting. In the third and fourth sections of the article, I examine how the performances shaped by these scripts and settings sought, like all performances, to communicate with audiences that the performers conceived of as unified collectivities that would respond in certain predictable ways. Communist resistance in prison not only attempted to forge solidarity with fellow inmates and comrades on the Outside, but, above all, represented appeals to prison staff and judicial officials and a generalized, abstract "public." Patterned on methods devised by European revolutionaries who assumed the...

Hong Kong and Communist Guerrilla Resistance in South China, 1937–1945

Hong Kong and Communist Guerrilla Resistance in South China, 1937-1945 By Gordon Y.M. Chan Throughout its history as a British colony, Hong Kong's politico-economic uniqueness had always been regarded. as a valuable asset by revolutionaries and political dissidents in modem China. For instance, it is well known that Sun Yatsen and his followers had actively exploited the colony's differences with the mainland to try to overthrow the rule of the. Qing Dynasty. They used Hong Kong as their important operational base and organized there no less than eight revolutionary attempts during the years between 1895 and 1911.1 However, a far less recognized and analyzed fact is that Hong Kong had also performed quite a substantial role in the Chinese Communist revolution. Indeed, for a long time before 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had made Hong Kong its headquarters for directing revolutionary activities in Guangdong and sometimes even the whole of South China. Surprisingly, despite Hong Kong's significant involvement in the Communist movement, which can be dated back to the movement's inception in 1921, it has so far attracted little scholarly attention.2 Therefore, it is the objective of the present paper to shed light on this underexplored topic by examining Hong Kong's relationship with the Communists' guerrilla resistance in the province of Guangdong during the Anti-J apanese War (1937-1945). China's war with Japan is generally believed to be a pivotal period for the rise of the CCP, which succeeded in seizing rural control by launching largescale guerrilla activities behind the enemy lines. Although the main arena for thjs guerrilla warfare was in North China, the Communists were far from absent in the south even after Chiang Kai-shek's repeated "encirclement campaigns" to expunge them. In particular, the Party3 was able to develop its guerrilla forces in Guangdong and established there its only two wartime bases in South China, one in the East River valley and the other on Hainan Island.4 It is normal for many scholars, who are obsessed with explaining the Communists' wartime success , to belittle these two small Communisthases. Unfortunately, such endeavor obscures the fact that in the last years of the war their existence actually gave rise to Mao Zedong's ambitious plan for a rapid expansion of Communist power in South C.hina. This plan would very likely have come to realization had it not been thwarted by the Japanese surrender in August 1945.5 Twentieth-Century China, Vol. 29, No.1 (November,2003): 39-63 40 Twentieth-Century China Nevertheless, it is true that the Communist bases in Guangdong were less consolidated than their northern counterparts, and precisely for that reason, as this paper will argue, their survival depended considerably on their connections with Hong Kong. While Hong Kong possessed many advantages, its real importance to wartime Communism in South China cannot be fully appreciated unless they are viewed in light of the Party's position in Guangdong during the AntiJapanese War. The relationship between these two issues will therefore be taken up in the first part of this paper, while the second part focuses on elucidating Hong Kong's contributions to the Communists' guerrilla resistance. These contributions can be divided into four areas: providing manpower to the guerrilla forces, supplying them with funding and other material aid, acting as a communication link between the local Communist bases and the Party Center inYan' an and serving as an arena for the Party's pursuit of the anti-Japanese united-front propaganda. A~ REASONS FOR HONG KONG'S IMPORTANCE Hong Kong's politico-economic advantages. Originally a small fishing village, Hong Kong emerged rapidly into a commercial city after its cession to the British in 1842. With its good harbor and well-established commercial facilities , Hong Kong prospered tremendously from its entrepot trade and, by the end of the nineteenth century, had already become an economic hub of Southeast China.6 Due to this development, Hong Kong possessed an efficient system of communication, which also conveniently linked Guangdong with other parts of the world. For instance, many migrants from Guangdong, the province which probably boasts the largest number of Chinese abroad...

A Cultural History of the Syringe in Modern China

(2002). A Cultural History of the Syringe in Modern China. Twentieth-Century China: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 37-56.

洋務運動時期의 鴉片問題와 洋務派의 鴉片認識

洋務運動時期의 鴉片問題와 洋務派의 鴉片認識

A Cultural History of the Syringe in Modern China

A Cultural History of the Syringe In Modern China By Frank Dikotter Zhou Xun's article has shown how narcotic substances flooded the market in modem China, as pharmaceutical companies responded to consumer demand by producing a variety of psychoactive substances which competed favourably with opium in a climate of prohibition. 1 This article will highlight the reasons why the syringe became a popular way of administering drugs: not only was it cheap and effective, but it also encountered relatively few cultural obstacles , as an existing needle lore endowed the hypodermic with positive attributes . Recent research has highlighted how biomedicine was selectively appropriated from Europe by cultural intermediaries in China.2 The appropriation of the syringe equally needs to be explained with reference to specific cultural, social and political variables. This article highlights the variety of factors which contributed to the successful inculturation in China of an object still viewed with fear by many in Europe. It will explore the almost magical properties attributed to the syringe in both elite medical culture and popular drug consumption in modem China. Although the hypodermic syringe appeared only in the late nineteenth century , the curative power of the injection captured the imagination of different audiences in China. After-care drugs were initially injected into the veins of opium smokers in detoxification centers, thus introducing many patients for the first time to the hypodermic syringe and contributing to the banalization of injection . Morphine was"commonly applied hypodermically in guesthouses and morphine dens in the 1910s and 1920s. Needles were also used for administering a whole variety of products offered by pharmaceutical companies, from vitamins and tonics to pills and ampoules against cough or a headache. Unscrupulous medical practitioners claiming to be able to cure venereal diseases with the hypodermic needle were legion, a reflection of the popular belief in the efficacy of injected medicine.3 On the other hand, modem medical innovations including serums and vaccines were also reliant on intravenous use. The syringe, in short, cut across the social divides, as the wealthy injected the latest pharmaceutical products while the poor pumped cheap morphine into their veins. The injection of morphine represented a major shift away from the hitherto dominant mode of narcotic consumption, namely opium smoking. As opium Twentieth-Century China, Vol.28, NO.1 (November, 2002): 37-56 38 Twentieth-Century China increasingly became the subject of anti-opium campaigns in the early twentieth century, imports of morphine offered poor consumers a competitive and convenient alternative. However, as in other parts of the world, the syringe also engendered considerable problems, as needles were often dirty, were rarely disinfected when shared, and contained contaminated water used to make the morphine solutions. This was all the more true in China, where the vast majority of morphine users came from the very bottom of the social scale. Contrary to Europe and the United States, where the first generation of "genteel addicts" during the late nineteenth century were generally confined to the middle classes, morphine users in China were overwhelmingly drawn from the lower classes who could no longer afford the price of opium or avoid the long arm of the law. Finally, our own idea that injection habits among drug users are particularly injurious may, of course, be due to culturally determined fears of the syringe which also need to be questioned. Together with the articles by Lars Laamann and Zhou Xun, this article also suggests that prohibition contributed to social exclusion, driving drug consumption down the social ladder as it was criminalized. Anti-opium movements from the late Qing onwards transformed opium from a useful panacea into a harmful substance: both government officials and modernizing elites firmly believed that opium, rather than the fears, fantasies and policies about opium, were undermining society and should be fought. 4 While opium was outlawed in 1906, morphine remained on sale openly until 1914. War on opium created a black market that engendered ever more problems: where prohibition pushed the price of opium upwards, poor smokers switched to morphine injections. Many consumers were forced to use narcotic products in insalubrious conditions, the sharing of dirty needles being an excellent example of how government prohibition policies directly affect...

The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan, and: Yellow: Stories by Don Lee

3 8 4 WAL 3 7 .3 F a l l 2 0 0 2 The Bonesetter’s Daughter. By Amy Tan. N ew York: G . P. Putnam ’s Sons, 2001. 353 pages, $25.95. Yellow: Stories. By Don Lee. N ew York: W.W. Norton, 2001. 255 pages, $22.95. Reviewed by Seiwoong Oh Rider University, Lawrenceville, N ew Jersey Within the rapidlygrowing bodyofAsian American literature, AmyTan and Don Lee embody two opposite impulses. In her fourth novel following such previ­ ous hits as The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), and The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), Tan again takes her readers to a guided tour ofpre­ modem China, this time to an obscure village near Peking. Lee’s first book, on the other hand, takes us to the fictional town ofRosarita Bay, California, in which he finds engagingcharacters forhis collection ofeight stories loosely connected bythe same setting. While Tan’s protagonists are almost always women victimized by a misogynist culture, Lee’s are mostly male, many of them Korean Americans like the author, whose love affairs are complicated by their ethnicity. Where Tan’s strongcharacters areChinese orChinese immigrants, Lee’scharacters areAmericans of Asian descent, two or more generations away from their immigrant ancestors. In short, while Tan rehashes her successful formula, Lee, a long-time editor of Pbughshares, heralds the beginning of a new phase of Asian American literature, exploring the contemporary world ofpost-immigrant Asian America. The Bonesetter’s Daughter is first narrated by Ruth, a middle-aged Chinese American ghostwriter living in Californiawith her boyfriend and his two daugh­ ters. As her immigrant mother, Luling, shows signs of dementia, she begins to investigate her mother’s past, to be able to preserve her mother’s memory. A translation of Luling’s autobiography written in Chinese makes up the second part of the novel, in which we learn about the tragic life of Ruth’s grand­ mother, a famous bonesetter’s daughter, as well as Luling’s life in China prior to her immigration to the United States. Ruth again takes over the narrative in the third and final part to describe how she comes to embrace her mother as a whole person. Although criticized for pandering to the mainstream’s taste for the exotic, Tan persists in feeding the racial fantasy of mainstream America by portraying Chinese culture as superstitious, misogynist, ghost-filled, secretive, and polyga­ mous. Her narrative humor is commonly subversive of Chinese culture, and again she gives her readers a tourist version of China—bound feet, opium addicts, zodiac signs, and fortunetelling. Despite her commercialism and “political incorrectness,” she is no doubt a great storyteller, giving us another accessible, captivating tale of three generations of women. Tan is also skillful in weaving a multivocal narrative interspersed with humor, magic realism, and intriguing cultural elements. As usual, her strength lies in her lively portrayal of the language and endearing eccentricity of immigrant BOOK REVIEW S 3 8 5 women. Particularly noteworthy in the new novel isher theme-driven approach. By constantly juxtaposing the lives of Ruth and her mother, especially in terms of their relationship with their mothers, Tan drives home her favorite motherdaughter theme. Also, by portraying Luling as suffering from dementia and by having her guilt-ridden daughter desperately sort out truths from hallucinations, Tan develops the theme of memory with multiple doses of irony: “Dementia was like a truth serum,” says Ruth (308). If Tan’s (mis)representation of China and Chinese America appears all too familiar, Lee’s Yellow drags us out of Chinatown and into an all-American town of Rosarita Bay, Lee’s counterpart of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. In Lee, Asian American litera­ ture is dynamic and exciting, exploring the ambiguities inherent in human experiences. The first of the eight stories, “The Price of Eggs in China,” is a quasicrime story in which the author explores the irrational nature of love: a Japanese American chair maker, caught in the rivalry between his girlfriend and her for­ mer college friend, does whatever is necessary to win his girlfriend’s confidence. “Voir Dire,” the next story, is a court...

Tradutore, Traditore

I would like to thank James Hevia for his postpolemical response to my article, Cherishing Sources from Afar, and the editors of Modem China for permitting me the opportunity to reply. exchange helps clarify the differences between Hevia and myself, differences that are illustrative of larger debates in our field. Indeed, the entire Modern China symposium on The Uses of Theory in Modern Chinese Historical Research (24.2, April 1998), together with Hevia's reply, represents a healthy and perhaps overdue extension to the China field of a wider discussion on postmodernism in the historical profession.1 contributions of Alexander Woodside (1998) and Philip Huang (1998) are particularly important. Woodside notes that the epistemological obsession of postmodernism is a peculiarly Western phenomenon; in applying it to China, we are once again imposing Western theory on Chinese data. Both Huang and Woodside argue that the theory threatens to deny both agency and modernity to Asians. For my part, I have always been surprised by the ease with which some Western China scholars have applied postcolonial theory to a country that never became anyone's colony. Above all, I the growing interpenetration of Chinese and American scholarly discourse on Chinese history and believe that we need to engage Chinese realities and Chinese scholarship as much as French theory. Most readers of Modern China will be familiar with my writings and will not accept uncritically Hevia's characterization of my position. For the record, however, let me state that I am not committed to a triumphalist history of the West, or to the value of the status quo,