China studies

"BEIJING – I am as excited as you are that the new Yenching Academy of Peking University (PKU) [北京大学燕京学堂] has been successful established and is now recruiting its first 100 graduate students. This will be the opportunity of a life-time for you, and I strongly encourage any up-and-coming China scholar to apply for this program. You will only regret if you didn’t send your application form:

“The Yenching Academy offers a 1-year Master of Chinese Studies program (in English) designed to prepare an elite class of future leaders to meet the challenges of the 21st century global landscape.” –PKU

Your author had been a visiting student at PKU from 2004 to 2006, and returned for his doctoral studies from 2007 to 2012. Back then, there was nothing like the Yenching scholarship; academic poverty was a big issue (it still is for many Chinese students), letting alone PKU’s guerrilla bureaucracy (graduation procedures required eight signatures and seals). There was also the existential threat of sky-rocketing rents outside campus (now exceeding $1,200/month for a one-bedroom apartment). As to the interview process, we didn’t even use Skype back in 2006, so there was a lot of traveling back-and-forth (obtaining visa was much easier then, though). Luckily (for the new generation of students), Peking University has addressed the issues of funding, housing, and guidance by creating this first-class residential scholarship program. [...]"

""NOTE: This was slated to appear in "Frontiers of Literary Studies in China" (Brill Press but controlled/owned by HEP in China/Beijing; edited by Zhang Xudong). But was cut/censored at the last minute by a wise Party editor for mentioning Mao and the Cultural Revolution too much [which it doesn't really do, but I digress].  It now finds a happy home in a longer-standing, bilingual, Shanghai-based journal instead.  Such are the vagaries of publishing in China-- not that speech is so free elsewhere either.



Abstract: With a few exceptions much of the knowledge of modern China produced in the world either ignores or demonizes the Mao era. On the cultural front things are not much better, whether we are speaking of the “Seventeen-year’s Literature” or the culture of the 1960s and 1970s. The negation of the Mao or radical era is, in short, a crucial part of contemporary Sinological-orientalism. There is however a recovery and reorientation project underway that seeks to restore the complexity of the Mao decades and its pursuit of an alternative, agrarian, and socialist modernity.  As part of this project I offer an appropriately Foucaultian and Marxist notion of Maoist discourse. By framing that era in terms of its past Maoist discourse we can at least begin to take the revolution and its culture more seriously in its own terms and self-understanding. This has the added advantage of explaining the productive power and subjectivity of Chinese Maoism and its culture without recourse to the Cold War/colonial notion of “totalitarianism.” Yet Maoist discourse, like China’s “alternative modernity,” remains concepts more often announced than substantiated. The rich, challenging work of the rural writer Zhao Shuli offers us an ideal case study of what Maoist discourse was in cultural-philosophical terms. The second part of this essay offers a reading of selected short fiction from Zhao in terms of how it draws on and illuminates Maoist discourse, resulting in a literary art of remarkable political complexity and contextual detail. With Zhao it is “politics in command” in a genuine sense; this is not a flaw but its entire point.

KEYWORDS : Zhao Shuli    orientalism    left-wing literature    rural labor    Marxism

Daniel Vukovich (胡德) works at Hong Kong University in the School of Humanities, where he teaches post-colonial, literary, and cultural studies with an emphasis on the PRC and “China-West” issues.

标题：对毛泽东时代话语的一种厚重描述：以赵树理为例
摘要：在当今世界对现代中国的知识生产中，毛泽东时代要么被忽视要么被妖魔化；而在文化领域内，提起“十七年文学”或上世纪六七十年代的文学时，事态也不见更好。对这激进时代的否定可谓是当代东方主义式汉学的关键内容，但当下学界也有一种试图恢复并重建的努力，将毛泽东时代的追求作为一种另类的农业社会的现代性，对其复杂性加以探讨。本文试图从福柯理论与马克思主义的角度研读毛泽东时代的话语方式，将所述时代置于其自身的语境阐释其生产力与主体性，以区别于当下将这一时代置于冷战-殖民观念之下的阐释视野。赵树理小说创作为我们从文化哲学层面阐释这个时代提供了理想的个案，本文第二部分即以赵树理的短篇小说为例。作者认为赵树理的小说，以其具有高度政治复杂性的艺术自觉，达到了真正意义上的“政治挂帅”的文学。
关键词：赵树理      东方主义    左翼文学    农民    马克思主义
作者：胡德（Daniel Vukovich），香港大学人文学院副教授，主要从事后殖民、文学、文化等领域的教研工作。电邮：vukovich@hku.hk
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"This paper presents the sources, characteristics and limitations of the PRC’s soft power. It also tries to answer the question what will be the future role of soft power in the foreign policy of the fifth generation of Chinese leaders. The paper puts the emphasis on the fact that soft power in the PRC is linked with Chinese characteristics. This means that the rich Chinese cultural and historical background should be taken into consideration in order to understand the motivations and objectives of Beijing’s policies.

The PRC promotes terms such as “harmonious world” and “peaceful development” as core parts of its foreign relations and tries to avoid “zero-sum game” with Western powers. In the paper it is also underlined that Chinese soft power depends on the internal condition of China, and not its international relations. Next, the paper briefly discusses the PRC’s engagement in Africa, South Asia and Latin America. It is stressed that most of these countries are interdependent and coupled with Chinese economic development. At the end, despite the existing limitations of Chinese soft power, the author considers the PRC’s soft power as of great potential due to the fact that it perfectly matches China’s needs. "

"This paper presents a comparative study about words and about sovereignty; about the ancestry of the words that construct the discourse of sovereignty in the context of China; about the analysis and interpretation of the civic discourse and the rhetoric that construct Chinese sovereignty in the field of international relations and foreign policy, and about the consequences of this analysis and interpretation for the formulation of EU foreign policy with regard to East Asia, especially China, and the United States, as well as the feedback that notions of sovereignty have on the construction of Chinese civic discourse. For many contemporary Chinese thinkers, China should modernise without repeating the process of modernism, should leap over the system of values established by the Enlightenment that seemed to justify imperialism, and develop an economy and institutions that would serve to create wealth and to raise the standard of living of the population, without imposing values that are advantageous to a “West” that is already wealthy. They have identified a cultural dissidence within developed societies that advocates the values of postmodernism as a way of rejecting the values of modernism. In this context, they advocate the possibility of modernizing their society without having to accept the imposition of values that originated in societies that have already begun to question them. In this way, China could reach postmodernism in a relatively short period of history without having to pass through the traumas that characterised the development of modernism in the “West” over a period of centuries (it would be difficult not to discern echoes of Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” in these Chinese versions of the postmodernist  paradigm). The communicative strategy to be adopted by the EU in the rhetorical construction of its dialogue with China should be fully cognizant of and sensitive to the criteria of China’s moral order as outlined in this study and specified in the Five Principles (mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity; non-aggression; non-interference in each other’s internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence), the Spirit of Shanghai and the ASEAN Way, with special emphasis on mutual recognition, parity of esteem, and mutual benefit. Any other discourse will be perceived semiotically as unilateralist and exploitative. Respect for diversity is paramount, and the ability to harmonise diversity is a major function of Chinese political and cultural thought. “Harmony” and “ peace” are the same word in classical Chinese: 和 hé (和平 hépíng is the modern word for “peace” and 和聲 héshēng is the modern word for “harmony”). As a result, any practice that produced harmony, such as music or cooking, was a form of training for maintaining peace, social cohesion and solidarity in society (or among nations).
Keywords: China .Modernisation. Modernity. Postmodernity. Postcolonialism. Culture studies. Cross-cultural transfer. EU-China relations. Comparative sociocultural studies. Critique. Paradigms
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"First issue of new academic journal. Studia Turkica Mongolica Tibetica Manchurica Sibirica Russica et cetera.

Tartaria Magna is a peer reviewed e-journal in Russian. Editors accept papers and reviews in English and provide Russian translation. We may consider publication of the papers and reviews that have been published in other journals within the period of 3 years. More info: www.tartaria-magna.ru"