Representation Of China Research Articles

The Recognition of the Chinese Government and the Convention on International Civil Aviation

This article traces the membership and representation of China in the International Civil Aviation Organization. It examines which of the two governments claiming to represent China, the Government of the Republic of China (ROC) or the Government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), has, at any one time, been regarded as competent to exercise China’s membership rights under the Convention on International Civil Aviation (Chicago Convention). In particular, the article asks which government can today validly designate “customs airports” in China, including Taiwan, and exercise the various other rights in respect of non-scheduled and scheduled flights referred to in Articles 5 and 6 of the Chicago Convention. It explains why airlines can operate direct international air services to non-designated airports in Taiwan without the special permission or other authorization of the Government of the PRC, despite the latter being regarded as having complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above Taiwan.

Diplomatenfrau between Two Worlds: Elisabeth Heyking's China Journal

In the context of German colonial representations of China, this essay focuses on the travel journals of Elisabeth von Heyking, a Diplomatenfrau , who lived in Beijing from 1896–99 while her husband played a key role in acquiring Germany's concession in Qingdao. The article examines Heyking's travel text as a mapping of her desires, anxieties, disavowals, and shifts in textual strategies as her vision for Germany's entrance into colonialism is destroyed by the competitive realities of the New Imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century. When her use of colonial representational strategies breaks down in China, Heyking moves to writing fiction. Her first novel of 1903, Briefe, die ihn nicht erreichten , was the best-selling novel of the year in Germany and was translated into several languages. This novel's conservative critique of imperialism diminishes for its protagonist the connection between home and nation. Because Briefe's resolution does not produce a replacement vision to modern imperialism, this piece of writing represents an unintentional contemplation of the impossibility of unified solutions grounded in bordered nations and binary gendered distinctions.

Yuanyang Zhong (Mandarin Duck Tomb) (review)

YUANYANG ZHONG (MANDARIN DUCK TOMB). By Zhang Huoding Theatre Workshop, National Peking Opera Theatre of China, Chang'an Grand Theatre, Beijing, 24 November 2006. In the current context of (Chinese opera) in crisis, performances are opportunities for diagnostic investigation by xiqu artists and fans who search for signs of artistic health. In late 2006, during a fi ve-week stay in Beijing, the clearest evidence I had that jingju ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.], Beijing/Peking opera), while certainly not thriving, is far from dead was the performance of Yuanyang zhong ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.], Mandarin Duck Tomb) starring the National Peking Opera Company of China's ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.], Zongguo Jingjuyuan) performer of young female roles, Zhang Huoding (b. 1971), at Beijing's Chang'an Grand Theatre in November 2006. One prong of the strategy to attract xiqu ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]) audiences is revivals, directly counter to the more common focus on innovation and importation. Spurred by increasing national and cultural pride engendered by China's phenomenal economic growth and international importance, symbolized most potently by the run up to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, xiqu artists have been delving into the rich repertoire of plays with counter-revolutionary or feudal elements that have not been seen in live performance for decades. Mandarin Duck Tomb is such a play. When I attended the Chang'an Grand Theatre in 1999, it had barely been open three years but had already become the prominent venue for Beijing opera performance in the city, though this status is being challenged by the recent November 2007 opening of the National Peking Opera Company's Mei Lanfang Grand Theatre. The Chang'an Theatre staged regular performances by Beijing's major resident xiqu companies as well as presenting troupes from around China required to perform in Beijing to be eligible for prestigious national awards. Housed in a high-rise office building on the multi-lane boulevard due east from Tian'anmen square and a quick walk from the subway station, the Chang'an Grand Theatre is in an excellent location to attract both local and tourist audiences. Unfortunately, in 1999 it shared the building with a bar that pumped rock music at volumes so loud the bass beat was often clearly audible in the theatre during performances. By 2006, the bar had been replaced by a much less aurally intrusive health club and theatre management was working to serve both xiqu fans and tourist audiences with a varied program. (Zhao 2006) At the performance I attended of Mandarin Duck Tomb, the house was near capacity with Chinese patrons. I was seated in the balcony, able also to view the spectators below. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of black hairs, a term used to connote younger audience members, and even more delighted to fi nd an older man seated on my right and a young man in his twenties on my left. The older man was a dedicated opera fan, toting a small recorder to tape his favorite arias along with which he hummed quietly during the performance. I recognized a number of the younger people in the balcony as students from the Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts (Zhongguo Xiqu Xueyuan), where I was observing classes. It was not surprising to find young people training to become professional performers in the audience. But the young man next to me had no such direct connection. An entrepreneur with his own wedding planning business in the neighboring city of Tianjin, he said that he had never studied xiqu performance. Rather, he was simply a fan--especially of Zhang Houding, having adjusted his business travel to allow him to attend this performance. As the older man on my right repeated the in crisis mantra, that young people are not interested in xiqu, I pointed to the conflicting evidence in the audience surrounding us, and the younger man offered his perception that increasing numbers of his friends were becoming interested in xiqu. …

The acoustics of the Beijing National Grand Theatre of China

The National Grand Theatre of China opened in December 2007 in Beijing. It is a complex of three performance halls: the Opera (2400 seats), the Concert Hall (2000 seats) and the Theatre (1100 seats). These three halls are covered by a super-ellipsoidal shell made out of titanium and glass. The history of the acoustic design evolution from the winning of the competition in 1999 by the Architect Paul Andreu to the final construction will be retraced including the preliminary design, the acoustic simulations and auralisations. The acoustic design of each hall will be presented with its specifications and detailed particularities. Final acoustic measurements have been done in the three empty halls and in the occupied concert hall. The results and acoustic criteria will be discussed. In addition, a subjective evaluation has been done with psychoacoustic questionnaires and the results will be presented and analysed.

Chinese Indians: a James Gillray print, Covent Garden’s The Loves of Bengal, and the eighteenth‐century Asian economic ascendancy

This essay examines a James Gillray print, A Sale of English‐Beauties in the East‐Indies (1786), and Edward Topham’s Covent Garden farce, Bonds without Judgment; or, The Loves of Bengal (1787) in the light of the implications of André Gunder Frank’s ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998) and Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000) which outline the global economic ascendancy of China in the period up to 1800. The Loves of Bengal coincided with the impeachment of Warren Hastings. While it strikingly borrows a number of specific visual motifs from Gillray’s print and incorporates them into the farce’s comic action, Topham introduced two completely novel Chinese characters (Japan and Nankeen). Their dominant role in the play, together with the relationship of Topham’s drama to the anti‐slaving plays Inkle and Yarico (Colman, 1787) and Harlequin Mungo (Bates, 1787), reveals the presence of the underlying economic templates which both determined China’s premier role in the world economy and Britain’s marginality relative to it. Late Georgian London theaters presented remarkably nuanced representations of China in conformity to the general propositions concerning economic history pre‐1800 set out by Frank and Pomeranz.

Bridging Revolution and Decolonization: The “Bandung Discourse” in China's Early Cold War Experience

The years 1954-1955 witnessed visible changes in Beijing's representation of China's international policies. After its establishment in 1949, the People's Republic of China (PRC) appeared as a “revolutionary country” on the international scene, challenging the legitimacy of the existing international system controlled by Western imperialist powers—and the United States in particular. Mao Zedong and his comrades made it clear that a primary mission of the “new China” was to destroy the “old world” in which China had been a humiliated member during modern times. In the context of the PRC's revolutionary foreign policy, its international discourse, reflecting the Cold War's bipolar structure, was dominated by a class-struggle-centered language; and its attitudes toward non- Western, nationalist countries combined harsh criticism with tactics and actions designed to neutralize them in the Cold War confrontation.

Between Spiritual Self and Other: Vladimir Solov'ev and the Question of East Asia

In this essay, Susanna Soojung Lim examines the philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev's representation of China and Japan in his theory of Pan- Mongolism. Emerging at the disjuncture between Solov'ev's ecumenism and the geopolitical realities of contemporary history, Pan-Mongolism was a creation onto which the philosopher projected his anxiety and disillusionment at the failure of his vision. Lim begins by surveying Russian perceptions of East Asia before the 1850s and situating Solov'ev within the popular discourse of the “yellow peril.” Discussing how Solov'ev recapitulates previous notions of this east, she considers Pan-Mongolism in terms of an acute Russian response to the historical and cultural changes originating in China and Japan at a period when the modernization of these nations was challenging the existing relationship between, and indeed the very categories of, east and west. A hybrid construct shaped by Russian occidentalism as well as orientalism, Pan-Mongolism is an idea that reveals both the strength and weakness of Solov'ev's Utopian universalism.

Mechanical Design and Dynamcis of an Autonomous Climbing Robot for Elliptic Half-shell Cleaning

This paper presents an auto-climbing robot for cleaning the elliptic half-shell of National Grand Theatre in China. The robot consists of a climbing mechanism, a moving mechanism, two cleaning brushes and supporting mechanisms. The mechanism and unique aspects are presented in detail. A distributed control system based on CAN bus is designed to meet the requirements of controlling the robot. After that the emphasis for discussion is on the motion realization which includes climbing and cleaning movements. The robot independently climbs and descends in the vertical direction and cleans in the horizontal direction. It takes the circling tracks as supports for climbing up and down between strips and moving horizontally along one strip around the ellipsoid. For system design and control purposes, the dynamic models of the climbing and cleaning processes are given applying of the Lagrange equation. Furthermore the force distribution of the front and rear supporting mechanisms is computed in a way that ensures the safety of the climbing process. In the end, the successful on-site tests confirm the principles described above and the robot's ability.

The Emerging Role of the Director in Chinese Xiqu

The Emerging Role of the Director in Chinese Xiqu Megan Evans As with so many traditional performing arts, xiqu (the umbrella term encompassing the more than three hundred regional forms of Chinese opera) and particularly jingju (Beijing opera, the one nationally prominent form of xiqu) is perceived by its artists, scholars, and fans as being in a state of crisis. Owing to a complex web of factors, including interruption of traditional conduits of transmission during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and a massive increase of competing forms of entertainment (both foreign and domestic) beginning in 1976 with the policy of "Reform and Opening Up" (gaige kaifang), audiences for xiqu, at least in Beijing,1 are declining precipitously. At the same time, companies must rely increasingly on box office revenues to support their work (Wichmann-Walczak 2000: 96–98; "Renewed theatre shakes off old image" 2004: 1–3). Thus there has been a general call for innovation in all aspects of xiqu performance to lure back audiences. Traditionally xiqu did not use a director, and one common tactic employed to facilitate innovation was to bring in directors trained in Western-style realistic spoken drama (huaju). By the early 1990s, this experiment was generally thought to have been a failure, because most huaju directors are simply not fluent in the complex performance language of xiqu, usually marginalizing it from its traditional centrality in the aesthetic event to mere decorative addition to the dramatic text (Wichmann 1990: 158–160). More recently, however, the practice has [End Page 470] reemerged in several high-profile productions. In Zaixiang Liu Luoguo (Prime Minister Hunchback; premiered in 1997, revived in 2000) award winning xiqu-trained director Shi Yukun was assisted by two huaju directors to stage this extravagant experiment in updating jingju for modern audiences (Jiang 2000: 9). In 2003, the National Peking Opera Theatre of China (Zhongguo Jingjuyuan) brought in leading huaju directors Lin Zhaohua for a jingju production of the ancient script Zhang Xie zhuangyuan (No. 1 Scholar Zhang Xie) ("Brushing the Dust off Old Script" 2003: 1–2) and Cao Qijing for a jingju adaptation of Puccini's Turandot. Xiqu-trained company head Wu Jiang stated recently that he is not opposed to huaju directors working in xiqu. Citing Turandot as an example he explained that he himself maintained a level of artistic control sufficient to prevent many of the problems associated with huaju directors leading xiqu productions (Wu 2006). Though the production sparked controversy for its incorporation of nontraditional elements such as pop music and choreography drawn from Western ballet ("Peking 'Popera' Makes Waves" 2004), it continues in the company's repertoire and represents an important adjustment in the pervasive creative authority previously wielded by huaju directors in such projects. Nonetheless, in response to the perception that the use of huaju directors for xiqu productions had been of mixed success, while at the same time accepting the importance of the directorial function to the creation of new xiqu plays, by the mid 1980s xiqu artists generally recognized the need to develop directors specifically trained for work in xiqu (A 1983: 449; Gao 1985: 2). Throughout this article I am purposefully using the term "directorial function" rather loosely, because what that function is or should be in relation to xiqu artistic practice is still in flux. Particularly with regard to the discussion of pre-twentieth-century circumstances that follows, I am including a broad range of practices that xiqu scholars and artists have identified as precursors to modern conceptions of the director. This approach, while not marking clear boundaries for the functions of a xiqu director, does allow for useful exploration of the strategic gains that may have been made by associating particular activities of past xiqu creative practice with contemporary concepts of the director. The goal of this article is to examine key phases in the historical development leading to current understandings of the role of the xiqu director. Important staging practices and productions are discussed with special emphasis placed on three artists. First is Li Zigui (1915–), who began studying and performing xiqu as a child and became a famous performer of martial male roles. Because of...

China Through Western Eyes. A Case Study of the BBC Television Documentary Roads to Xanadu

AbstractDespite a growing body of literature on the study of the Western media's portrayal of China, little attention has been paid to the structures underlying the representation of China. This essay aims to address this issue through an in-depth analysis of a British television documentary series, Roads to Xanadu (1990). It focuses on dominant perspectives constructed in the series by analysing documentary narrative as a mode of realising discourse. The essay argues that underlying the representation is a technological view of society. Shifting between realpolitik industrialism and liberal democratic humanism, the series attempts to arrive at a unified and unifying version of 'progress' through a modernist discourse.

Perceptions of China in the Turkish Korean War Narratives

Turkey’s decision to enter the Korean War in the early 1950s was a major event in the republic’s history. As the country became a NATO member after the war, most scholars see this event as the beginning of a new era in Turkish foreign policy. This article argues that the Korean War has also been important in shaping the long‐term image of East Asian cultures and peoples in Turkish collective memory. The article’s main focus is on the Sino‐Turkish military encounter and the representation of China and the Chinese in the Turkish war memoirs, journals, and other narratives. This study also aims to discuss the critical role of these narratives in constructing a negative image for China while they created a favorable cultural stereotype for Koreans and Japanese.

The pathological empire: Early medical photography in China

This paper provides an overview of the history, stylistic development and ideological features of medical photography in China during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Based upon photographs found in personal and institutional collections, and published in medical journals and books, the author charts changing representations of China and the Chinese.

Representation of China: An across time analysis of coverage in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times

This study examined the coverage of China in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times between 1992 and 2001. Across time comparison were made both within and between the two newspapers in terms of total number of stories, media frames used and favourability differences. Findings show that coverage of China has increased significantly over time, but the overall tone remained negative. Stories presented in political frames and ideological frames were more likely to be unfavourable. No significant differences were found between the two newspapers.

20 Years of the Experimental Theater in China

20 Years of the Experimental Theater in China

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...

Hope: A Modern Chinese Play by Yang Qian

The municipal government of Shenzhen, China, does not sponsor a huaju (modern spoken drama) troupe. 1 At the same time, the Ministry of Propaganda still controls cultural production. Consequently, Shenzhen thespians must creatively manipulate the state apparatus in order to secure approval ( pizhun ) for dramatic productions. But, as the playwright's introduction to Xiwang (Hope, 1997) indicates, the lack of institutional support for huaju has also produced a unique opportunity not only to redefine the relationship between artistic production and the Chinese state but also to push the envelope of acceptable plots, style, and form. A journalist by profession, Yang Qian came to the attention of the huaju public when the National Experimental Theatre of China staged his play Guyi Shanghai (Intentional Injury, 1994). In 1997, he registered Ling Ri Yue (Zero Sun Moon)—the first experimental theatre troupe in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone—as a social club, a gesture that finessed and restructured the administrative organization of huaju in Shenzhen.

Streams of Cultural Capital

Well, I have to confess it took me a while to get over the title of this collection. I am afraid it brought out the brat in me; I tried rhyming alternatives (Creams of Cultural Capital) and water metaphor alternatives (Swamps of Cultural Capital) to exercise/exorcise my annoyance, with limited success in each area. However, the title, which I found off-putting in its naturalizing and reifying of the concept of cultural capital, provides my only real quibble with this book. (And, after all, irritation is memorable.) But the contents are solid and valuable, and that is should always count.I should add that Streams also came with at least two marks in its favour. First, it is part of the series Mestizo Spaces/Espaces Metisses, in which Open the Social Sciences, the Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (1996), is also published. This small, eminently readable work not only gives a useful capsule history of the disciplining of the social sciences, including anthropology, but also asks critically value such disciplining has for academics and for society today. Clearly, this series is in the forefront of critical and accessible writing on issues of concern to anthropologists and other students of culture. Second, a glance at the contributors shows that this is a truly international collection, not just another reproduction of the same old, same old what Americans think about publication that is all too characteristic of gets published -- and reviewed -- in the U.S.I think it is always necessary to refute the belief that is published in the U.S. is international, and is published in Canada, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, etc., is national or regional. Collections like this, by juxtaposing sociocultural contexts and texts, contradicts those who assume that we are always interested in everything that happens in the U.S., but only specialists are interested in Corsican identity (discussed by Anne Knudsen with respect to the writing of history and literature) or in theatre in China (explored by Xiaomei Chen, who looks at Occidentalist productions).This is a very useful, thought-provoking collection of concrete, specific examples from a diversity of genres and locations. It is a series of situated elaborations of the concept of cultural capital, particularly useful for showing the value of anthropological views on colonizers as well as colonized. For those of us who are tired of the backlash against poststructuralism, which has in many cases taken the form of an anti-intellectual move against critical thinking of any kind in anthropology, collections such as Streams can provide hope that it is not all over but the crying.Streams is taken from a special issue of Stanford Literature Review (1993), but has two additional essays which open and close the collection. …

Amy Tan's The Chinese Siamese Cat: Chinoiserie and Ethnic Stereotypes

Amy Tan’s The Chinese Siamese Cat: Chinoiserie and Ethnic Stereotypes Sheng-mei Ma (bio) I was never able to describe precisely my discomfort with Amy Tan until I chanced upon her children’s books—The Moon Lady (1992) and The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), both illustrated by Gretchen Schields. Schields’s graphics along with Tan’s written texts are an amalgamation of the style of chinoiserie, on the one hand, and of ethnic stereotypes of Chinese, on the other. Both sources for Schields’s creation are orientalized images of China. Chinoiserie idealizes Cathay, a mythic China; ethnic stereotypes demonize the Chinese people. The representation of China is hence polarized between two frozen moments—a timeless golden age of ritualistic festivity and a debased recent past of the Ching dynasty. The contradiction of the two Chinas recalls the coexistence of Charlie Chan, the good and entertaining detective, and Fu Manchu, the evil Oriental, in the American popular culture. 1 The West simplifies the Other in stark black-and-white contrast in order to situate itself squarely in the middle, resisting the evil heathens but aided by the loyal Asian servant. The female counterparts of the two archetypal males are the Japanese geisha of Madame Butterfly, eager to please, and the Chinese Dragon Lady, eager to displease. In this article, I argue that Amy Tan partakes in the creation of a new, “alternative” Orientalism. Schields’s illustrations provide a starting point in demonstrating Tan’s Orientalism because the paintings embody what lies behind Tan’s mass appeal. Tan is actually in an inextricable double bind. Having grown up in the 1960s when ethnic consciousness movements permeated the United States, particularly her home city, San Francisco, Tan must have felt compelled, with the instant sensation of The Joy Luck Club in 1989, to come to terms with the issue of ethnicity as an eminent Chinese-American novelist. But the root-searching is equally informed and conditioned by the 1990s, where the urgency of racial [End Page 202] identities has slowly given way to the exigencies of class interests. 2 Ethnicity in Amy Tan serves rather as a front for the psychological needs of her middle-class readers. Tan’s racial essentialism, one based on a mystical landscape called China and a hidden yet indestructible Chinese bloodline, is articulated as a feel-good project for the writer and the reader, who wish to probe into ethnicity on paper, in fiction, so that real pains and afflictions in our midst can be avoided. People of color are welcome in American society as writers and as characters, so long as they comple(i)ment the mainstream culture. Indeed, with her well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, yuppie protagonists, Amy Tan is irresistible to her devotees who are desperately seeking an alternative American myth. Let me acknowledge at the outset that it would seem unfair to critique Tan the novelist solely on her choice of illustrator. Tan clearly endorses her coworker’s imaginings of China but is perhaps not responsible for Schields’s use of chinoiserie and stereotypes. But what is at stake here is not a straightforward matter of legal accountability as, for example, in copyright disputes. Indeed, the personal relationship of the two partners is quite amiable. One cannot help suspecting that the books carry more than Tan’s blessings for joint business ventures. Schields is in all likelihood a close friend of Tan’s as The Moon Lady bears the dedication of “For our nieces with love” (both Schields’s and Tan’s nieces). In addition to their cooperation on two children’s books to date, Tan includes Schields in the acknowledgements to all three of her novels. Not only is Schields apparently a confidante, but the subject-matter of The Chinese Siamese Cat is close to Tan’s heart as well. The book carries the dedication “For Sagwa and Sluggo.” Sagwa happens to be the name of the feline protagonist. Instead of a dedication to some fictitious characters, Sagwa (probably Sluggo as well) is Tan’s own pet cat, as we learn from the blurb to the hardcover edition of The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) that Tan and her husband live in “San Francisco...

China and the world: Perception and analysis

This paper considers whether China's images of itself may have influenced analyses of China from the outside, and thereby skewed understanding. A sense of Chineseness, of a culture and civilization which is somehow very different from any other, is a recurrent theme in China's history and in the history of Europe's direct contacts with China. Acceptance by Europeans of such images as true representations of China is itself a tradition which stretches back many centuries, and the sentiment of China's uniqueness often seems to have been drawn into contemporary studies of China.

Operation ‘cardinal’: The OSS in Manchuria, August 1945

To protect thousands of Allied military prisoners of war, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), China Theater parachuted a small team into Mukden the day after the Japanese surrender. Operating amid a disintegrating security situation, the OSS team's military and diplomatic skills enabled success of its humanitarian mission. Afterward, the team reverted to a secondary mission of intelligence gathering. Witnesses to the beginning of the Cold War in Asia, the team's intelligence reporting revealed the strength of the Chinese Communists in Manchuria, and how in the flush of victory over Japan, the United States was already facing problems with a resurgent Soviet Union whose ambitions were far different from those of America.