Representation Of China Research Articles

Monitoring Building Deformation with InSAR: Experiments and Validation.

Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) techniques are increasingly applied for monitoring land subsidence. The advantages of InSAR include high accuracy and the ability to cover large areas; nevertheless, research validating the use of InSAR on building deformation is limited. In this paper, we test the monitoring capability of the InSAR in experiments using two landmark buildings; the Bohai Building and the China Theater, located in Tianjin, China. They were selected as real examples to compare InSAR and leveling approaches for building deformation. Ten TerraSAR-X images spanning half a year were used in Permanent Scatterer InSAR processing. These extracted InSAR results were processed considering the diversity in both direction and spatial distribution, and were compared with true leveling values in both Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression and measurement of error analyses. The detailed experimental results for the Bohai Building and the China Theater showed a high correlation between InSAR results and the leveling values. At the same time, the two Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) indexes had values of approximately 1 mm. These analyses show that a millimeter level of accuracy can be achieved by means of InSAR technique when measuring building deformation. We discuss the differences in accuracy between OLS regression and measurement of error analyses, and compare the accuracy index of leveling in order to propose InSAR accuracy levels appropriate for monitoring buildings deformation. After assessing the advantages and limitations of InSAR techniques in monitoring buildings, further applications are evaluated.

Visual representations in South Africa of China and the Chinese people

ABSTRACTVisual images are significant in framing and shaping representations of China and Chinese people within Africa. At times, visual imagery adds subtlety and complexity to the differentiated and fluid nature of the Africa–China relationship but at other times it simplifies and reinforces stereotypes. This study of imaging from South Africa reveals the layering and ambivalence of colonial and postcolonial representation. The study supports a literature which points to the unstable and fragmented nature of Orientalist framing. The ambivalence towards China and the Chinese people has evolved in complex ways and has taken different forms through history, although each period of representation has left its legacy for the next. The current period is especially challenging as relationships, perceptions and representations are mutating at an accelerated pace. Exploring visual imagery enables us to engage with the tensions, uncertainties and details that are produced in this process with greater sensitivity and nuance than a study of text alone would allow. This study uses the representations of China and Chinese people as an illustrative case but offers pointers to a broader engagement with representations of non-Africans and Africans in Africa that is both comparative and relational.

‘With those views, you should work for the Communist Party of China’: challenging Western knowledge production on China-Africa relations

China’s relations with the African continent continues to be misrepresented within the Western (North American and European) academe. This is due, in part, to the methodological and epistemological assumptions underpinning many research agendas. These agendas are founded upon a range of histories, theories and frameworks that have been produced in the West, by the West, and for a particular end within a particular location, or, event.This paper brings forward some original empirical data - from five months field research in South Africa which questioned power and agency (participation and self-determination) in response to Chinese Development assistance to support, and bring into conversation, emerging literatures which focus upon the ‘uneven production of knowledge’ on and about China. It works with critiques of historicism and emerging concepts such as Sinological-orientalism and Sinologism, to explain how the continued measuring and representation of China through Western concepts, understandings and logics, come to reduce, in an Orientalist manner, accurate relations between China and Africa.Conclusions join calls for more balanced and disinterested scholarship on the China-Africa relationship and argue that this can only be achieved through greater geo-graphical and temporal specificity within writing. Within current work on China-Africa relations there is a lack of empirical qualitative data being collected, or, arguments are being extrapolated from limited cases. This paper represents a critical case that introduces new voices and alternative narratives from (South) African’s themselves.

China Circulating in Early Modern German Print Media

This paper argues broadly that China was an important concern at early modern German courts because East Asia constituted a region into which German electors hoped to expand their own political power. Their ventures were only sometimes successful, leading thus to a cycle of political engagement with and detachment from East Asia. Within the publishing world, information about China was constrained by the limited access Europeans had to the Middle Kingdom. Even though Jesuit missionaries provided the most scholarly accounts of the Chinese elite, their reports and translations did not satisfy the growing demand for writing about China; thus early modern publishers repeated many of the same narratives and descriptions of China in ever-new reformulations of familiar texts. This article examines the on-again, off-again media cycle of early modern representations of China. (DP)

Gli studi goldoniani in Cina alla metà del XX secolo

This paper aims at analysing the critical interpretation of Carlo Goldoni’s theatre in China in the second half of the twentieth century, reading it as, using the definition of Chen Xiaomei, a form of Occidentalism. Chinese essays are analysed and compared with the Russian and Italian studies of the same period so as to highlight the peculiarities of the Chinese interpretation. The paper illustrates how Chinese criticism has mainly focused on the social and ideological meanings of Goldoni’s works rather than on their formal aspects. As a consequence, the Venetian’s plays have been introduced as an example for the creation of revolutionary and modern Chinese theatre, and in order to endorse this effort made by Chinese theatre experts.

Representation of China and the United States in Africa in Online Global News

This article examines global representation of the primary continental imperialisms reshaping contemporary Africa: the parallel expansionist exercises of China (centering on commercial expansion) and of the United States (centering on military expansion). Our analysis assesses the current state of these continent-wide involvements and sets out the background of how U.S.-African and Sino-African relationships have been portrayed by news media. We then analyze how both Chinese and U.S. expansions in Africa are represented by 3 prominent global media organizations online: Al Jazeera English, BBC, and CNN. This research concludes that global media report modern imperialism in Africa mostly in ways that support the imperial project rather than mobilize resistance toward it.

The two starting points of World War II: a reexamination from a global perspective

ABSTRACTAlthough the factual chronology of World War II is not in dispute, how to best make sense of these facts and how to objectively evaluate that history have always been limited by political circumstances and personal biases. Viewing WWII seven decades later, we need to move away from Eurocentrism and to stop seeing the war from the prism of a European war or Pacific war. The entire history of WWII, from beginning to end, including its several phases characterized by fermentation, outbreak, climax, and conclusion, is extremely complex. This paper argues that the war has two origins or starting points because it resulted from disparate prewar conditions in Europe and Asia. Viewed from this perspective, the strategic importance of the China Theater in WWII and the enormous sacrifices and contributions the Chinese people made to the victory over Fascism and for world peace ought to be given due credit.

Representations of China by Western Travellers in the Blogsphere

Representations of China by Western Travellers in the Blogsphere

The Metamorphosis of Tianxian Pei: Local Opera Under the Revolution (1946–1956) by Wilt L. Idema

Reviewed by: The Metamorphosis of Tianxian Pei: Local Opera Under the Revolution (1946–1956) by Wilt L. Idema Josh Stenberg THE METAMORPHOSIS OF TIANXIAN PEI: LOCAL OPERA UNDER THE REVOLUTION (1946–1956). By Wilt L. Idema. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2015. 344 + x pp. $45.00 Tianxian Pei, translated throughout this text as Married to a Heavenly Immortal, is a well-known Huangmei opera. Popular in the PRC since its performance at the 1954 East China Theater Festival, its success led to an iconic film the following year, an adaptation that in turn influenced the stage as well as spawning innumerable televisual and cinematic imitations. The Huangmei opera is a version of the legend of Dong Yong, one of the Twenty-four Exemplars of Filial Piety, a narrative known since the second century bce and recorded in many versions in oral literature and popular literature. Idema treated the prerevolutionary history of the narrative and translated texts in his 2009 work Filial Piety and Its Divine Rewards: The Legend of Dong Yong and Weaving Maiden with Related Texts. Along with similarly structured books on such narratives as White Snake, Meng Jiangnü, and the Butterfly Lovers (Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai), Filial Piety contributes to a monumental corpus Idema is establishing for the study of central Chinese folklore narratives and early Chinese performance texts in English translation. With this follow-up work, Idema tracks the Dong Yong narrative into the modern era. In the prerevolutionary Huangmei performance as known through extant scripts, Dong Yong, an impoverished scholar, must sell himself to buy a coffin in order to give his father a proper burial. Meanwhile, intrigued by the human world, an immortal girl, Seventh Sister, is punished by her father, the Jade Emperor, for her immoral longing. As punishment, she has to descend to earth for a period and, in the guise of a human woman, contrive to have Dong Yong wed her. Then, aided by her heavenly sisters, she accomplishes [End Page 504] an amazing feat of weaving, for which Dong Yong is rewarded by a diminution in his contract of indenture. That term concluded, they set off for Dong Yong’s home. But instead of accompanying him, the immortal, having fulfilled her karmic duty, must return to heaven. Dong Yong, though initially dejected, is blessed by this heavenly alliance, and his virtue earns him imperial praise and high office. The script concludes with Seventh Sister returning to earth to present their son to Dong. The titular metamorphosis refers to the process by which this story of Dong Yong’s filial piety rewarded was turned, through two major rounds of rewriting, into a tale of class struggle and romantic love in response to early PRC culture and theatre directives; it also echoes the transformation the heroine undergoes to live among mortals. Adapters in the early PRC (the translation here is of a 1955 edition, reflecting changes made in response to certain critiques of the 1954 festival version) altered the social status of the protagonists (the scholar becomes a peasant, the heavenly maiden takes on the guise of a girl of the people), demonized the previously fatherly landlord to whom Dong Yong sold himself, excised comic ribaldry and some of the auxiliary deities, and so on. Seventh Sister is motivated not by immoral lust but by wholesome curiosity and the tedium of the heavenly realm; her descent to earth is an unpermitted escapade rather than a punishment. Calls for her return above are met with spirited resistance, and she is finally vanquished only by threats to harm her beloved Dong Yong. This version ends with her leaving a message promising to return in order to present their son to him, thus omitting the riches and glory showered upon Dong Yong in earlier versions (and which were presumably unsuitable rewards for a character of the 1950s suggesting the awakened proletarian). In this way, while retaining much of the structure, the story of filial piety turns in its post-revolutionary incarnation into a tale showing how devoted love can defeat the machinations of class oppressors and struggle against the very will of oppressive heaven. As with other recent works by Idema, Metamorphosis is a...

Mass media: Playground of stereotyping

China’s position in the world has grown, but reliable information about China and reporting on China is often problematic due to reasons both from European and Chinese side. This leads to speculation, creation of wrong perceptions, the situation where journalists and writers copy each other. Before turning to issues at stake in the practice of mass media reporting about China in the West, this article considers the historical background, namely the postcolonial context, the schools of thought of Eurocentrism, Sinocentrism, Orientalism and Occidentalism. It also contemplates the information flow in China and in Europe respectively, as it takes place in different cultural, social and political contexts. Against this background, this article looks into issues in the practice of media reporting and the production of journalistic texts about China in Europe, such as news selection and news value, journalists and writers, language issues and presentation and representation of China in mass media in the West.

Fantastic histories: The Battles of Coxinga and the preservation of Ming in Japan

People in Japan reacted to the bewilderment they felt at the fall of Ming by creating a bifurcated view of China, evident in encyclopedias and gazeteers: On the one hand, there was the traditional China represented by the Ming; on the other, there was the new China ruled by the Dattan or the Tatars. Such was the power of the Ming as an image that it endured in Japanese literature and theater for centuries after its fall. This article explores the preservation in popular discourse of the Ming as the most natural representation of China, focusing on Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s hit jōruri play The Battles of Coxinga (Kokusen’ya kassen), first staged in 1715 and produced many times after that, showing how the political turmoil was filtered through both misunderstandings and creative fabrications. It shows that The Battles of Coxinga creates a fantastic image of China, as opposed to the barbaric Dattan, by drawing on historical memories internal to Japan and readily available images of foreignness. I argue that the preservation of the Ming in popular theater offered audiences a means of rethinking Japan’s position as the inheritor of a “universal” Chinese essence in an age when knowledge of the world was being dramatically expanded by imported European cartography, complicating earlier views of a world centered on the Three Realms or the Sinocentric world order.

Cultural critique and avant-garde theatre in post-socialist China: Meng Jinghui’s ‘I love therefore I am’

The literal translation of avant-garde from French is ‘foreguard’. While the front has been diversely defined in various permutations of the movement, the cutting edge of avant-garde theatre in China and many post-socialist countries is largely retrospective and anti-futuristic. This is particularly true for the campus-based fringe theatre of the early 1990s, which is regarded as the highlight of avant-garde theatre in China. An alternative venue spearheaded by young theatre artists, avant-garde fringe theatre is notable for unpacking the cultural and political constructs of the Chinese socialist period as it played out through the artists’ own formative experiences. Directed by Meng Jinghu, I Love XXX chronicles the moral emotions that are central to a generation’s self-identity. The play, which is composed of more than 700 parallel sentences prefixed with ‘I love’, presents a meticulously constructed emotional archive of the generation that was born in the late socialist period and came of age in post-socialist China. Imitating rites of passage and classroom drills, the play effectively illuminates the impact affective education had on an individual’s self-perception. The fact that the play was revived in 2013 – 19 years after its initial appearance – proves its enduring relevance in contemporary China.

Representation of China in Ha Jin’s Works and the Controversy over Orientalism

Representation of China in Ha Jin’s Works and the Controversy over Orientalism

Effects of Chinese opera on the reproductions of Ibsen's plays

As part of a globalized phenomenon, the reproductions of Ibsen’s plays on the Chinese theatrical stage increasingly focus upon the exploration and expansion of new cultural forms, as Patrice Pavis defines interculturalism as “grasping the dialectical of exchanges of civilities between cultures”. However, how do we evaluate the effectiveness of the many “intercultural” productions that surround us today?I attempt to answer this question by comparing two Chinese reproductions of Ibsen’s plays that employ elements of Chinese opera on varying scales. The first one is a total transformation of Hedda Gabler into a Hangzhou yue opera form, Xin Bi Tian Gao (Aspirations Higher than the Sky, 心比天高) in 2006. As part of the yue opera tradition, Hedda Gabler was staged in an all-female cast. The second one is a fragmented insertion of a Peking opera excerpt into the staging of A Doll’s House by the National Experimental Theatre of China in 1998. One of the highlights of the play is a Norwegian actress, who plays Nora, singing and dancing a short Peking opera excerpt, thus replacing the tarantella dance in the original play. Contextualising the multiple perspectives towards interculturalism by Patrice Pavis, Richard Schechner and Rustom Bharucha, I aim to explore how the appropriation of Chinese opera in such performances might strengthen or weaken the reciprocal flows between the source and target cultures in Pavis’s “hourglass model”, and whether the initial attempt of revitalising both Chinese and Western art forms has backfired and misproduced Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect directed at the contemporary audience.

Between a subject and an object: representation of China in Kuo Pao-kun’s Singapore and Denny Yung’s Hong Kong

Late Pao-kun Kuo in Singapore and contemporary Denny Yung in Hong Kong have made particular ontological and epistemological choices in their experimental theater in the context of the de-colonization and rise of China. We gather, between the two sites, a possible dichotomy in the representation of China: China as a collective subject to accommodate the changing world and China as an individualized object that emerges in each narrator’s chosen perspective. Kuo intends to prompt the audience to reconnect with something greater than their individuality. For Kuo, the crisis is the loss of cultural subjectivity and the privileging of transcendence over individualized meanings of life. For Yung, cultural subjectivity is no longer a question after the return of Hong Kong to China. Yung painstakingly generates the legitimacy and capacity of individual Hong Kong people to have faith in their own ways of transcending any version of the entirety of China.

Shih-Wen Chen: Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911 (Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present).

Shih-Wen Chen: Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911 (Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present).

Cultural hierarchies in the discursive representations of China in the Chronicle of Higher Education

This paper presents the results of a discourse analysis of the Chronicle of Higher Education publications about China in 2011 and 2012. Drawing on postcolonial appropriations of governmentality to frame the discussion of globalization as the context of the study, the author analyzes the stylistic, rhetorical, and semantic strategies used in the newspaper to portray China in relation to the United States and the West. The author demonstrates how the US higher education media acknowledge the accomplishments of China in education, yet construct it as the culturally inferior Other, reinforcing the dominance of Western norms and practices in higher education. The author argues that the Chronicle’s placing of China in a dichotomous position to the West is symptomatic of a larger process of neoliberal globalization, which, in the case of the United States, is also preoccupied with preserving the centrality of the white, Western heritage in diverse society.

Representations of China in British Children's Fiction, 1851–1911. By Shih-Wen Chen. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013. 218 pp. $109.95 (cloth).

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Representations of China in British Children's Fiction, 1851–1911. Shih-Wen Chen. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013. 165 pages.

<i>Representations of China in British Children's Fiction, 1851–1911</i>. Shih-Wen Chen. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013. 165 pages.

Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911 by Shih-Wen Chen (review)

Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911 by Shih-Wen Chen (review)