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"Chinese language Reform History 20th century."
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Chinese grammatology : script revolution and Chinese literary modernity, 1916-1958
\"In premodern East Asia, Chinese dominated everything from poetry to international trade, but by the early twentieth century, the ancient Chinese script began to be targeted as a roadblock to literacy, science, and democracy. Its abolition and replacement by the Latin alphabet came to be seen as a necessary condition of modernity. In China, both the Kuomintang Nationalist government in the 1920s and the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s had active movements for replacing Chinese script with Latin characters. Nonetheless, when script reform was taken up by the party in 1958, simplification, not latinization, was instituted, and today Chinese script is alive and well. Yurou Zhong argues that just as broader international currents swept the latinization movement in, a postwar anti-imperial critique of Western ethnocentrism was responsible for the retention of the script. She also relates these political movements to the birth of modern Chinese literature and to similar movements in other--mostly socialist--countries at the time\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Suzhi: A Keyword Approach
The word suzhi has become central to contemporary China governance and society. Reference to suzhi justifies social and political hierarchies of all sorts, with those of “high” suzhi being seen as deserving more income, power and status than those of “low” suzhi. This article examines the rise of the word's popularity during the reform era, the ways in which its meaning has been transformed, and the relationships of the word to earlier discourses. It proceeds through three sections: a linguistic history, a genealogy of related discourses and an analysis of the contemporary sociopolitical context. The historical section focuses on the spread of the word across various political and social contexts during the reform era. It examines the ways in which the word operates semantically and the challenges to translation these semantic structures pose. The genealogical section explores the historical antecedents of the meanings of the word in earlier political and social discourses both in and out of China. Finally, the sociopolitical section examines the uses to which the word is put and asks what the rise of suzhi discourse tells us about contemporary China's governance, culture and society.
Journal Article
Contesting Master Narratives: Renderings of National History by Mainland China and Taiwan
The growing tension between mainland China and Taiwan has a cultural aspect closely related to national identity. We focus on recent history curriculum changes in the mainland and in Taiwan and find that education authorities on both sides have implemented master narratives for content selection in and organization of history textbooks. In mainland China, the master narrative of pluralist unity constructs a geographically consistent Chinese nation throughout history, which bolsters the state's current claim to a territorial integrity including Taiwan. In Taiwan, the master narrative of multiculturalism becomes the essence of Taiwanese identity, and weakens Sinocentrism in Taiwanese official historiography.
Journal Article
Reasserting the Buddhist Tradition: Lü Bicheng and Chinese Vegetarianism in a Global Context
Examining the transnational activities of the famous poetess, journalist, and Pure Land Buddhist Lü Bicheng (1883–1943), this article explores how the Buddhist practices of vegetarianism and nonkilling were transformed during the early twentieth century within an increasingly globalized religious sphere. Lü traveled widely through Europe and North America, and, in her English-language writings and lectures, she presented vegetarianism and nonkilling not only as essential aspects of Buddhist practice but also as forces of social and political reform. Engaging with Buddhists and animal protection activists from around the world, she aimed to spread a more positive image of Chinese Pure Land Buddhism, which was marginalized in international discourses of the time. The activities of Lü Bicheng thereby show how Chinese Buddhists aimed to project their own ideas onto the global stage and became active voices in a global \"coproduction\" of Buddhist knowledge.
Journal Article
Others No More: The Changing Representation of Non-Han Peoples in Chinese History Textbooks, 1951–2003
This article analyzes the changes in the representation of non-Han peoples in textbooks of premodern Chinese history published in China since the establishment of the People's Republic. Whereas in the early 1950s, these peoples were treated as non-Chinese others and were even referred to as “foreigners,” by the beginning of the twenty-first century, they were totally incorporated into the Chinese historical self through a new narrative claiming that they had always been Chinese. Simultaneously, the textbooks exhibit a clear shift from a Han-exclusivist vision of Chinese history to a more inclusive and multi-ethnic one. Based on an analysis of the content, language, and organization of textbooks and other related materials, the article proposes that although the incorporation of non-Han peoples into the Chinese historical subject was gradual, this process accelerated dramatically as a result of a planned reform launched in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The article explains the reasons for the reform and its timing, and examines its implications for the Chinese nation-state and China's ethnic minorities.
Journal Article
Editorial Foreword 77.3 (August 2018)
The first is that interest in dreams has been sparked by current leader Xi Jinping's frequent references to the “Chinese Dream”; the second lies in the increased efforts by China's Communist Party, since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, to emphasize the importance of traditions and to highlight the significance of documents with real or imagined roots in the very distant past. A collaboration by three social scientists—Wonjae Hwang, Wonbin Cho, and Krista Wiegand—it is titled “Do Korean-Japanese Historical Disputes Generate Rally Effects?” Its starting point is the assertion that “rally-round-the-flag effect theory” is the description for how “external crises, especially territorial disputes with other states, can easily stimulate nationalist sentiments among citizens, increase internal solidarity around leaders, and hence positively affect political leaders’ popularity.” The author claims that “spirituality was a fundamental element” of Vietnamese politics in the wake of World War II, but this has often been overlooked due to the emphasis scholars have put on the “security and land reforms” of the period.
Journal Article
God's Translator: Qu'ran Translation and the Struggle over a Written National Language in 1930s China
Translation was crucial to the formation of Chinese modernity. While scholarship has centered on the translation of Western texts, I present here a case of translation from a non-Western context: the translation of the Qur'an into Chinese. Translating the Qur'an—fourteen times in the twentieth century—was a strategic intervention into the relations between Muslims and China's non-Muslim majority as well as between Muslims and the Chinese state. I analyze why the first Chinese Qur'an translations in the twentieth century were accomplished by non-Muslims and how the decision to translate among Muslims followed from an internal critique of Muslim collective life in China. In a close reading of an essay from 1931 on Qur'an translation in China by a friend and collaborator of a Chinese Qur'an translator, I seek to identify the strategic risks and the strategic promises inherent in translating the Qur'an in Republican China by situating the translation in between the international and the national, alterity and self-same, and God and the secular.
Journal Article
Divide to Unite
Under the “revolution paradigm” of existing Chinese historiography, Han Chinese intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are viewed as either supporting or resisting monarchical rule in Qing China (1644–1912). This article examines the implications of Guangdong intellectual Ou Jujia’s (1870–1912) magnum opus, New Guangdong, for late Qing politics. New Guangdong called for Guangdong’s independence from the Qing so that it could later reunite with other provinces as a federated China. Although Ou Jujia’s attempts to launch an independence movement had remained marginal to the reformist and revolutionary visions of governance and national unity, he embedded provincial consciousness in the modern, Western-inspired language of federalism. By suggesting that Guangdong could become a unique model province of a reformed China, Ou Jujia defined the “province” as the basic unit of Chinese federalism and made it central to discussions of China’s future in the 1900s.
Journal Article
Cold War Sewing Machines: Production and Consumption in 1950s China and Japan
With the “consumption turn” in the humanities and the social sciences, a phenomenon evident in English-language scholarship from the 1980s onward, production ceased to command the attention it had once received from historians. A recent (2012) study of the sewing machine in modern Japan by Harvard historian Andrew Gordon demonstrates the effects: what could feasibly have been published under the title “Making Machinists” was instead marketed as “Fabricating Consumers.” What does it mean to talk about consumers in 1950s Japan, a time and place of hard work, thrift, and restraint? For Gordon an important premise was the role of women in the postwar economy. This provides a point of departure from which to explore the ideologies and practices of production and consumption across the Cold War dividing line between “consumerist” and “productionist” regimes in East Asia. The Cold War was a time of sharp differences between the two societies, but also a time of shared preoccupations with productivity and national growth. In their different political contexts, Japanese and Chinese women were acting out many of the same roles.
Journal Article
Research on Chinese urban form: retrospect and prospect
In the last 10 years, research on Chinese urban form has grown rapidly both in China itself and in other parts of the world. At the same time Chinese cities have undergone unprecedented growth and transformation, presenting great challenges for the comprehension and management of urban landscape change. In planning future urban morphological research during this period of exceptional flux, an important first step is to take stock of past research, especially that of the recent past. Hitherto research on Chinese urban form across a range of disciplines, including architectural history, urban planning, archaeology and urban geography, has tended to be descriptive and has contained scant comparison, either of findings or methods, with that on towns and cities in other parts of the world. Future research on Chinese urban form can benefit from exploring the efficacy of urban morphological concepts and methods that have been developed and applied elsewhere in the world, especially Europe.
Journal Article