Annual Graduate Student Conference on East Asia, Columbia University, New York

Lyricism is an important characteristic in Chinese poetics for the two basic tenets of the Chinese poetics—“poetry expresses intents” and “poetry traces emotions”— have been discussed since the earliest Chinese canon, the Shangshu 尚書, to the present age. In the later half of the twentieth century, however, the Taiwanese literati could not help but be intensely affected by the Western literary theories and most Taiwanese poets supposed to delete lyricism in poetry specifically according to modernism. Yu Guangzhong 余光中 (1928-), a contemporary poet and literary critic of both classical and modern texts in Taiwan, is my subject in order to examine lyricism in modern poetry as well as the development of this characteristic. Having pondered over these intense arguments as well as new poems, Yu decided to inherit the tradition of lyricism. His poetic criticisms which support the existence of lyricism and its positive functions embrace four critical points: first, this tradition, lyricism, always exists and continually develops in Chinese poetry; second, the musicality, which is very effective in touching listeners/readers, is an important and necessary factor in both classical and modern poetry; third, poetry is a vehicle for sentiment as well as the moral Way (shi yi zai qing/ dao 詩以載情/道), thus, the expressions which manifest in poetry are moderated by the Way; fourth, the conversation between poets and readers—lyricism is not only from a poet’s expression but also in a reader’s response. Through examining Yu’s compositions with his own criticisms, I deeply demonstrate that moderate lyricism which is “gentle and sincere” unceasingly exists and develops in the modern poetry.

Sayaka Chatani

Columbia University

Rethinking "Everyday Resistance" in Colonial Korea: The Case of School Strikes 1937-1940

Historians often attempt to find small “voice” of ordinary people under Japanese colonialism in the official and police records as evidence of everyday forms of “resistance.” They also implicitly or explicitly assume that there is a binary of resistance and collaboration, even though some historians have argued that these two forms were inseparable from each other under Japanese totalitarian mobilization. In this paper, I would like to question the direct voice of “everyday resistance” that these historians have found in the colonial police records. By closely examining the records of school strikes in the Japanese High Police’s reports on thought crimes, Kōtōgaiji Geppō, and the Chōsengun’s reports on the state of ideological movements in Korea, Chōsen Shisō Undō Gaikyō, the paper will show that the motivations behind those school strikes varied, and cannot be reduced to “anti-Japanese” resistance. Instead of treating these records as “direct voice” of ordinary people, the paper calls for attention to the intermediary role played by the Japanese officials who compiled these records, and the risk of ignoring the students’ own motivations if we reduce all of their actions to forms of ‘resistance’ against the colonial authorities.

Dandan Chen

Harvard University

In Response to Constitutional Crisis: Carl Schmitt and Zhang Junmai's Reflection on Weimar Constitution

This paper examines a "global" response to constitutional crises around the world in the twentieth century, with a focus on a comparison between Carl Schmitt, the notorious German political theorist, and Zhang Junmai, the "Father of the Constitution" in Republican China. After the First World War, both Germany and China experienced constitutional crises, which prompted critical thinking and reflection among intellectuals. Through a close comparison between Carl Schmitt's critique on the Weimar Constitution and Zhang's articles on the same topic, this paper investigates the latent similarities between Schmitt and Zhang, which have not been recognized by previous scholarship. In exploring how Zhang and Schmitt simultaneously "invented" similar ideas such as "the political," the "friend-enemy" dichotomy, and the theory of "political decision," I examine how German and Chinese intellectuals endeavored to resolve the constitutional crises in Germany and China in the 1930s through a reflection on the concept of the "political" and the "state." In highlighting how Zhang Junmai combined German political theories and traditional Chinese political thought, and how he called on a true, inner politics (with an emphasis on the theory of politics against the so-called pure theory of law), this paper shows a Chinese constitutionalist's pioneering pursuit for "Chinese identity" on a global stage--an endeavor enabled by both the Weimar Constitution and its critique.

Song Chen

Harvard University

Wrestling with the God’s Identity: Dilemma of the State and Literati over the Lord of Wenchang in Late Imperial China (14th -19th Century)

In his seminal work on Mazu cult, James Watson argues that the shared symbol of the deity has camouflaged diverse interpretations of it among different social groups, and efforts of the late imperial state to bring uniformity to the religious realm failed to penetrate beyond the standardization of symbols and performances. However, religious symbols all have interpretations associated with them by virtue of historical heritage and social consensus. Although the state has the freedom to promote one particular interpretation over another, its manipulative capability is never omnipotent. Alternative interpretations often persist and may seek legitimacy under the state patronage of that religious symbol. Thus, when there exists in society an influential interpretation of a deity which does not fit in with the state’s general ideological position, state patronage of that deity extorts a toll. This paper illustrates such ideological concerns of the state and those of the culturo-political elite in late imperial China through an analysis of the wavering stance of the state towards the Lord of Wenchang from Yuan to Qing and of the evasiveness the Manchu court expressed regarding the deity’s early origin as a serpentine spirit. It also investigates the variety of discursive strategies which the nineteenth-century literati employed to reconcile the deity’s vexing origin and the imperial decision of patronage. This way, the paper aims to unfold the dilemma of the state and of the literati between their own ideological commitments (or pretensions) and their practical political concerns over the appropriation of popular religious symbols.

Hsiao-wen Cheng

University of Washington

Spiritual Journeys and Erotic Encounters: Desire, Storytelling, and Visual Culture in the Song

This paper uses stories about spiritual journeys and erotic encounters with supernatural beings in Yijian zhi and other Song biji writings to examine the diverse expressions of men’s and women’s sexual desires, and to explore how people in the Song relied on storytelling and visual materials to exchange, to circulate, and to accumulate their knowledge about the supernatural. I accentuate the multivocality of storytelling, the ambiguity of sex difference, and the impact that the development of visual culture had made on the construction of the supernatural realm in the Song. Scholars have adopted several different approaches to studying discourses on sexual desire in pre-modern China. For example, Charlotte Furth considers medical writings on women’s sexual desire as a sign of further sex differentiation which present women’s bodies as “passive” and centered on “reproductive functions.” Judith Zeitlin focuses on ghost stories in the Ming and the erotic encounters between male literati and female ghosts and shows how the feminized ghosts became the coporealization of emotions and desires. Yet medical writings, due to its nature, would not tell us much about the aesthetics, the ethics, or even the culture of sexual desire. Moreover, sources from the Song show that ghost stories were told in much more diverse ways than they were in the Ming. Erotic encounters are not necessarily malign, oftentimes depending on whom one has encountered with. Oral, textual, and especially visual sources helped one discern the identity of the other. Various resources at hand provided choices for people to deal with their own supernatural experiences.

Howard Hsueh-Hao Chiang

Princeton University

Formations of Bio-Sexualities in China: How Norms of Truth and the Politics of Life Changed in the Modern World

The mind/body split is arguably one of the most significant developments in the history of Western thought for the comprehension of the universal human subject. This paper examines the implicit role of this philosophical frame in a broader historical process of changing norms of truth in relation to the politics of life over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A decisive feature of this historical process is the normative epistemological contingencies upon which “Westernization” and “modernization” came to represent one another in most parts of the world. This paper focuses on one particular modality of where these multiple historical permutations converge: the formations of bio-sexualities in China. The case studies of Chinese homosexuality, transsexuality, and hermaphroditism demonstrate that the five “mutations” of contemporary biopolitics that Nicolas Rose has recently identified—molecularization, optimization, subjectification, somatic expertise, and economies of vitality—expressed similar epochal significance in the epistemological realm of Chinese bodily experiences of desire starting in the Republican period. If the mind/body split can be viewed as a cultural-intellectual articulation of Western imperialism in the history of the modern world, this paper suggests that inherent in the very project of empire-making resides the seeds to its undoing, as evident in the gradual evaporation of the mind/body gap enabled by the twentieth-century global dominance of Western biomedical advancements. Analyzing these biopolitical issues in a historically-sensitive frame of globalization, this paper also attempts to intervene on the level of reconsidering the theory of Michel Foucault beyond the empirical context of Euro-America.

Chien, Li-kuei

University of London

Making a Deity of One’s Own: Siwei Bodhisattva in Sixth Century Hebei China

This paper presents a fresh approach to study the Buddhist iconography, banjia siwei xiang半跏思惟像, the contemplating image, during its last phase of development in China's Hebei province. This image first appeared in Gandhara in the second century and was transmitted to China at the early fourth century; by the end of the sixth century, it was found throughout Northern China, Korea and Japan. This paper focuses on the period of the mid-sixth century, when it reached its final stage of development and peak of popularity in Hebei. Contemplating bodhisattva figures were usually carved as a sculpture in the round, positioned as a central figure in an iconographical setting. Moreover, an independent identity for this image emerged, which has been the focus of several studies on this icon. These studies have devoted much attention to the textual origins of the image, and have inevitably treated the image merely as an illustration or appendage to the texts. This paper first analyses the formula of the dedicating inscriptions and reveals the ways in which patrons and artisans understood this figure. Second, it examines the uses of the term siwei in Buddhist texts, and reveals the belief this deity might have presented. Third, it illustrates the iconographical development of this image in Northern China and the formation of the belief.

Eunjoo Cho

Yonsei University, Harvard-Yenching Institute

Population control and the governmentality: the Family Planning Project in South Korea

Why does a state regulate its population? Population control seems to be a very natural property of a state. But it is entirely new phenomenon in modern societies. Historically, there has never existed this type of power or politics. This research delves into modern capitalist state and its governmentality through scrutinizing the population regulation by a modern nation-state; the Family Planning Project in South Korea in 1960-70’s. Nowadays, all the nation-state has and supervises various sorts of population policy. A nation-state intervenes, regulates and controls the biological process of the population. Particularly, this paper approaches the childbirth regulation policy. The reason why the research aims at the birthrate policy is this: the childbirth control is very common, strong and essential in late developmental states. I focus on how state, childbirth, family and capitalism combine with each other through the approach to birthrate control. Concretely, this research takes a case of South Korea. South Korea has experienced a rapid change of birthrate; from a TFR (Total Fertility Rate) of 6.0 in 1960 to a below-replacement level of 1.08 in 2003. Starting from 1960’s, the Family Planning Project in South Korea was one of the most successful birthrate control cases; South Korea is now one of the lowest birthrate countries so the policy totally changed to facilitate childbirth. This research approaches why the childbirth policy was in 1970’s Korea so successful; the way and the process how the population control was closely connected with developmental strategy.

Junga Choi and Hansung Kim

Seoul National University, Harvard University

A Colonial Female Subject under Japanese Imperialism: Na Hye-sŏk and the Reception of ‘Nora’ism

Tokyo was the cultural capital of East Asia in the early twentieth century. East Asian intellectuals in the city rapidly imported Western literary trends. Henrik Johan Ibsen’s feminist play A Doll’s House (1879) was one such trend. East Asian male intellectuals regarded Nora, a heroine of A Doll’s House, as a Western and modern individual, free from her family and household. To them, Nora was a dangerous figure capable of threatening the patriarchal family system in East Asia. Among female intellectuals in Tokyo, however, Nora was conceived as an ideal woman autonomous enough to overcome Confucian ideology. I will focus on Na Hye-sŏk, the first colonial Korean feminist among modern women in the 1910s as well as a writer and painter. Due to her colonized status, she was pushed to resist Japanese colonialism along with male Korean intellectuals in Tokyo. Yet the primary purpose of her study in Tokyo was to liberate Korean women from Korean men, not to fight against Japanese colonial rule. Although her dream was challenged by colonial Korean male subjects, she fought determinedly to reveal the Noras in her own country who hoped to live “as human beings.”In this paper, I will examine how Na Hye-sŏk described colonial Korean female subjects in her poem “Nora”, an adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Then, by exploring her struggle against both Japanese and Korean male hegemony, I will contest the idea that conflict existed between colonial female subjection and hegemonic power.

Dajeong Margot Chung

Columbia University

Anti-Communism and the State of Exception, 1948-1950

In 1948 Rhee Syng-man created a nation-state based on ?the state of exception.? Carl Schmitt defines sovereignty as the ?decision on the state of exception.? The state of exception in South Korea was a permanent or semi-permanent state that was directed against the internal. In South Korea, the promulgation of the National Security Law on December 1, 1948 prepared a legal ground for the state of exception. The law nominally singled out communism and set internal boundaries outside which could not be tolerated in the national community. On the other hand, the regime invoked the state of exception in an attempt to discipline what was within the set boundaries and employed techniques of persuasion, the end-goal of which would result in voluntary submission to the state of exception. The state attempted to mobilize the population by constantly alerting it of the immanent dangers in society. The disciplined press incessantly reported on the discoveries of the fifth column in society and the fights against the guerillas in Chiri Mountain and North Korean troops along the 38th line. The neighborhood associations were held in joint responsibility to report on any suspicious movements. The state produced fictionalized enemies such as the ?fantastic female student troops? in the Yosun rebellion and staged showcase trials of alleged North Korean spies.

Christopher Craig

Columbia University

Strange Brew: Confronting Nationality in Japanese Beer Advertising

The Dai Nippon Beer Company (Dai Nippon Biiru Kabushikigaisha) opens its thirty-year history with The Song of Beer (Biiru no uta) and Beer is a Good Thing (Biiru yoi mono) on a page displaying full musical notation and complete lyrics for each. The songs set the tone for the heroic narrative of company success that is the purpose of the publication. Produced at a time in which Dai Nippon had finally secured its place as the dominant producer in the beer industry, the confident and carefree natures of the songs pervade the pages of company history that follow. The story it tells is of a company destined for greatness, which faced minor setbacks and insignificant difficulties on its path to transcendence (made concrete in recent years by government regulation restricting competition and forcing mergers, all to Dai Nippon's great advantage). The narrative is simple. Japan at the turn of the century was a nation of thirsty consumers. Foreign beer companies tried, but failed to slake this thirst for beer in a satisfactory way, and it had been left up to Japanese beer companies, particularly Dai Nippon, to set things right. Using rational techniques of production and distribution, they brought beer to the people, and would continue in this sacred trust in years to come. In fact, the relationship between Japanese beer companies and the consumers of their products had not been as unproblematic as it appears in Dai Nippon's story. In contrast to Saijō's uplifting lyrics, beer producers in the formative years of the industry had a great deal to worry about. Alongside the challenges of mastering the foreign technology, gathering the capital necessary to equip and maintain elaborate and expensive facilities, and carving a share out of the import-dominated market, all of which had been accomplished by the second decade of the industry's existence, beer producers faced a greater difficulty in finding consumers. The nature of the production of the lagers that found early favor among niche groups demanded large factories with high output in order to turn a profit, which in turn required a large consumer base to purchase its products. Yet, this base proved elusive. At the turn of the century, beer remained a fully foreign beverage, identified with the nations of Europe and resident foreigners in Japan. When Japanese people did drink beer, it was the conscious consumption of foreign fare, most often teamed with a meal of exotic foreign foods. Beer companies took aim at these modes of thought, and set out to redefine beer as the basis for a mass-based consumption. A chief weapon in this struggle was newspaper advertising, in which they had already established a notable presence by the turn of the century. Through their increasingly ubiquitous newspapers ads, beer companies undertook a three-pronged attack on the definition of beer that continued over the first quarter of the twentieth century. Taking aim at its national association, in its modes of consumption, and in its assigned gender, Japanese beer companies set out to domesticate beer.

Lindsey E. DeWitt

UCLA

An Iconographical Comparison of Two Tōdaiji Icons: Daibutsu Lotus Petal engravings and the Nigatsudō Eleven-headed Kannon Mandorla

The construction of the Tōdaiji 東大寺and its great bronze Buddha 大仏 (Jpn: Daibutsu) in the Nara period (710-794) mark an important turning point in Japanese history and religion. The Tōdaiji icons are visual testaments to the reign of Emperor Shōmu 聖武天皇 (r. 724-749) and symbolic expressions of eighth century Japanese Buddhism. The only extant evidence from the original Tōdaiji complex are portions of the lotus petals of the Daibutsu’s pedestal and the mandorla of the Eleven-Headed Kannon statue十一面観音 in the Second Month Hall 二月堂 (Jpn: Nigatsudō), the rest being lost in the sixteenth century to fire. Tōdaiji and its icons have been the focus of scholarly attention for decades now, and although the contributions of extant scholarship have been far-reaching, the significance of the engravings on the only two extant pieces has been largely overlooked. This paper directs specific attention to the engravings, providing an iconographical comparison and a contextual analysis of their significance. Using these two icons as a focal point, I explore the relationship between text and image and the processes whereby Buddhist concepts are manifest in visual form. I argue that not only do the Tōdaiji icons document a radical shift in artistic expression in terms of style and scale; they also create a visual narrative of the transmission of Buddhism to Japan.

Elizabeth Dorris

University of Maryland

The Splendor and Terror of Buddhist Worship in Late Heian Japan: Aspects of Shōgon and the Sublime at Sanjūsangendō

Constructed in 1164, the Rengeōin, popularly known as Sanjūsangendō, enshrines 1001 statues of Senju Kannon. Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa requested the dedication of the temple to the eleven-headed, thousand-armed bodhisattva after experiencing a divine vision of the deity that compelled him to spend the night singing and composing verse. As this account demonstrates, for Heian elite the search for enlightenment often required a willingness to allow one’s mind and body to be overcome. In theorizing the sublime, Edmund Burke asserts that the prospect of surrendering one’s selfhood to something outside of oneself is necessarily accompanied by a fear of the unknown. At Sanjūsangendō the simultaneous fear of and faith in the deity is compounded by the seemingly endless repetition of statuary. The semblance of infinity is another source of the horror that comprises Burke’s sublime. However, multiplicity at Sanjūsangendō is also linked to the salvific potential of Senju Kannon whose present form is visual evidence of the bodhisattva’s plea for 1000 arms and 1000 eyes in order to be better equipped to save all sentient beings. Covered in gold leaf, the statues are a prime example of shōgon, the manifestation of the sacred through an abundance of ornamentation. In this paper, I will argue that the extreme ornamentation and multiplication of the statuary at Sanjūsangendō simultaneously evokes heaven (Pure Land) and hell (realm of hungry ghosts), rapture (shōgon) and terror (sublime), multiplicity and singularity in an attempt to collapse such dualities and lead worshippers to realize the ultimate non-duality of existence.

Patrick Douglass

SAIS, Johns Hopkins University

Public Opinion and Chinese Foreign Policy in the Reform Era

In the years since Deng Xiaoping implemented his policy of reform and opening, the Chinese government has undergone a fundamental transformation in its bureaucratic structure, which has given public opinion new influence over the formation and implementation of foreign policy. This paper seeks to analyze how China’s corporate pluralist system has evolved and how it is likely to make Chinese foreign policy more moderate, better informed, and less erratic than in years past. The paper begins by identifying the actors who play a role in Chinese public opinion—namely the elite, sub-elite, and the general public—and the ways in which they differ in terms of worldview, methods, and degree of influence. It then analyzes the dual role of popular nationalism in the eyes of the Chinese leadership as both a source of regime legitimacy and a constraint on policy options. The paper concludes that, while government sensitivity to public opinion can have negative implications with regard to assertive nationalism, on balance, the U.S. should view the enhanced role of public opinion as a positive development. Despite the warnings of many China-watchers that bottom-up nationalism will lead to a more aggressive foreign policy, Beijing’s recent behavior has not been uncooperative or irrational. Judging by its measured response to recent crises, the government has a strong interest in mitigating expressions of aggressive nationalism, which can be destabilizing and threatens regime survival, in favor of what is often referred to as “pragmatic nationalism”, which places greatest importance on economic development, national unity, independence, and international status.

Maren Ehlers

Princeton University

Guilds of the Blind: Zatō and Goze in Early Modern Echizen

In Tokugawa Japan, a substantial proportion of the blind was organized in guilds which regulated access to alms and occupation in a number of professions that the blind tried to monopolize, such as massage (anma), acupuncture (hari), and musical entertainment (particularly shamisen-playing). Male members of these guilds were commonly known as zatō, whereas female members, who organized units separately from the men, were called goze. Most of these guilds were part of a countrywide and strictly hierarchical organization based in Kyoto, which enjoyed a great degree of legal autonomy and is thus commonly regarded as a status group within the framework of Tokugawa society. But despite this centralized form of organization, the situation of local guilds varied greatly depending on local circumstances. This presentation takes up a conflict of 1815 between the zatō and the goze guild of Ōno, a castle town of a small domain in the interior of Echizen province. At its center was the attempt of the zatō to force the goze to expel a misbehaving member, which met with fierce resistance from the goze. The incident not only highlights the specific relationship that had developed between the two guilds in the local context of Ōno. It also shows the extent to which the zatō, who were justifying their claim against the goze by drawing on the internal law of their status group, nevertheless depended on the administrative structure of the town and reluctant town officials to keep order within the ranks of the blind.

Michael P. Evans

Indiana University

A Tale of Two Parties: Cultural Revolution and Enemy Creation in China's Borderlands

Between 1967 and 1969, China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region was embroiled in a heated battle to rein in members of the Inner Mongolia People’s Revolutionary Party, an alleged counterrevolutionary separatist organization that was believed to have deep roots in Inner Mongolian society. The campaign to eradicate IMPRP influence resulted in purges of countless people, the vast majority of whom were ethnic Mongols. A large number (figures vary) was executed for supposed ties, while even more were tortured or severely injured. Following the end of the Cultural Revolution, China’s new leadership discredited the crusade against the IMPRP as an “unjust case” having no basis in fact and orchestrated by far-left radicals influenced by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. Meanwhile, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a similar campaign was waged from 1968 to 1970 against a similarly-named alleged counterrevolutionary separatist group, the East Turkestan People’s Revolutionary Party. The details of this campaign are fewer, and the Chinese government has never indicated doubt that it indeed existed. However, there are numerous parallels between the groups that are worth investigation and that draw some doubt to the truth of the existence of the ETPRP, not the least of which is the likeness of the names. In this study, I compare and contrast the known details of both cases, and lay out an argument that the ETPRP may very well have been a fabrication.

Pete Faggen

Columbia University

Re INC. arnation: How Tibetan Geluk-pa lamas and Qing emperors used reincarnation to attain political hegemony

The concept of Tibetan reincarnation is often viewed in a religious and metaphysical context. In my paper for the Graduate Student Conference, I want to analyze Tibetan reincarnation from a political and economic standpoint, primarily the relations between the Geluk-pa Tibetan Buddhists (the sect of the Dalai Lama) an the Qing from the mid-17th century to the present. I want to analyze the implications the ?politics of reincarnation? wielded not only in Tibet, as it supplanted hereditary rule, but also with Tibet?s relations with the Qing dynasty. A study of reincarnation not only illuminates political and economic tensions within Tibetan society (sectarian rivalries, power schisms), but how it became a vital method of legitimization outside Tibet's borders in China. Many Chinese emperors sought legitimization to their dynasties and many even claimed to be reincarnates themselves, such as Quibilai Khan in the Mongol Yuan dynasty and the Qianlong Emperor. What about reincarnate lamas appealed to the Chinese dynasties? What role did Tibetan reincarnation play in ruling an empire? One objective is to analyze this vital exchange from the periphery of the Chinese empires, rather than peering out from the imperial center of Beijing to the edges. The periphery, and in this case, rival Tibetan Buddhist sects and their reincarnating lamas, take center stage, namely because reincarnation becomes pervasive, not only inside central Tibet, but outside. The cultural (imperial?) legacy is extensive in that Tibetan Buddhism spread and has survived to this present day. In some cases, Tibetan Buddhism and the system of reincarnation have outlasted Chinese dynasties. Moreover, I also want to analyze Tibetan reincarnation, and the Geluk-pa Buddhists as actors, or imperial agents, if you will. Instead of being acted upon, or victims of an expanding empire, as Tibetans oftentimes are portrayed, reincarnation served as a vital common language, or ideological middle ground, between China and Tibet. If anything, studying the Geluk-pa's ascension to power proves that the Tibetans were anything but inactive.

Meng Fan

Hong Kong Baptist University

Party-Market Corporatism in China: An Introduction to a Proposed Framework

Corporatism has taken its place with liberal-pluralism and Marxism as one of the three main approaches in political science. This article commences by asking why corporatism, this particular political theory can explain China’s situation especially in the transitional era. Recent scholarship has found extensive evidence of corporatism; especially in form of existing state corporatism as well as promising societal corporatism in China. We then argue that established corporatism paradigm loses explanatory power to some degree when applied to contemporary China study. Focusing exclusively on state or societal corporatism has prevented scholars from broader and deeper interpretations of interaction of the state and capital in China as well as the management of the state-media-capital tripartite in practice. Therefore this study attempts a unique interpretation based on the theoretical framework of “party-market corporatism” proposed by we communication scholars from the research of media as it more or less reflects China’s current issue. Four interacting factors are presented as Party-state, market, emerging middle class as well as media professionalism in this modified framework. Moreover, we view this framework more dynamic when it contains one “devolution process” from the Party-state to the State/Party owned Propaganda Instruments and another converse “incorporation process” from the media towards the authority. We will rely on case study in the two most representative cities in China, Shanghai and Beijing, as two extreme subtypes of Corporatism, to highlight its features as well as underlying mechanism within the framework of “party-market corporatism” ideology.

Jennifer Germann

McGill University

The Reality of Disappearing Spaces: Jia Zhangke’s Still Life as an Historical Document

The films of China’s post-1989 filmmakers, often referred to as the Sixth Generation, are set against the rapidly transforming landscapes of reform-era China. These films capture China’s disappearing spaces and act as historical documentation of their existence. However, when film is viewed as a storage site for public memory, questions are raised as to how film’s structure and apparatus mediate our perception of historical reality. The neorealist style employed by Sixth Generation filmmakers offer an impression of reality but, through fictional narrative structures, do not make the explicit truth-claims associated with documentary film. However, through the act of documenting these disappearing spaces, these films necessarily make claims to the truth of their historical existence. These inherent truth-claims are further problematized with the introduction of new digital film technologies. The digital image lacks photographic cinema’s indexical relation to the real and, therefore, can no longer claim to be a direct verification of an external material reality. In the film Still Life (Sanxia haoren, 2006), Jia Zhangke uses digital video to capture the vanishing landscapes along the Yangtze River and offers these scenes as backdrop to his story of dislocation in postsocialist China. This paper seeks to examine, through a close reading of Still Life, how the fictional narrative structure and digital film apparatus function in the documentation of historical reality.

Arunabh Ghosh

Columbia University

A Museum of the People: Investigating Beijing’s Chinese Nationalities Museum & Chinese Ethnic Cultures Park

Walking through Beijing’s Chinese Nationalities Museum, also known as the Chinese Ethnic Cultures Park, one is confronted by a variety of full scale recreations of buildings, dioramas and landscapes depicting China’s 56 ethnic cultures or nationalities. These dioramas contain no inanimate models, but are instead populated by actual people. These ‘performers’ match the ethnic background of the buildings they ‘perform’ in. One is immediately reminded of Franz Boas’ experiments with live human exhibits of the 1890s. The other and perhaps even more sinister impression might be that one is in a zoo, not full of animals, but of other human beings. These are powerful impressions and raise questions of state society relations, particularly in the ways we understand state power, state pedagogy, and nationalism. In this paper I would like to situate the park not only through contemporary materials, but also in the historical context of museums and nation building. The Park, I suggest, is an interesting and distinctive attempt at nation building that not only has antecedents in Chinese history, but also taps into modern discourses of power, hegemony, and utopia in ways that are specifically different from other museums. While it is a recent development, longer trends and practices in the ethnographic depiction of ‘others’ in China can be traced to the Qing [1644-1911], and perhaps even to the much earlier Tang empire [607-918 C.E]. I hope to show that any appraisal of the Park must be accompanied, at least in part, by a greater attention to these contexts.

Jeffrey Gower

University at Buffalo, SUNY

North Korea's Potential Role in the Global Supply Chain: Success (?) at the Gaeseong Industrial Complex

North Korea has experimented with various forms of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) over the past two decades to generate a hard currency stream for the nation through land rents. Early attempts at developing SEZs at Ranjin-Sunbong and Sinuiju did not attract business due to the reluctance of the North Korean government to fully engage in international commerce. Recent SEZs that rely on contractual relations with South Korean companies, however, found success as the North Korean government allowed South Korean manufacturers to operate freely within certain areas. Since 2007, South Korean light manufacturers have built over 80 factories within the Gaeseong Industrial Complex (GIC) SEZ outside of Gaeseong, 45 km inside North Korea. Roadway and rail connections have been re-opened to connect the GIC to Seoul, offering quick product reactions to one of the largest consumer markets in the world. North Korean workers, once thought to be suspect due to lack of skills and knowledge of the market economy, have exceeded initial expectations. The GIC was on track to enter the second of its three proposed phases this year to begin heavier manufacturing. However, ongoing political disruptions have slowed progress at the GIC. This paper looks at North Korea’s role in the progress of the GIC, and the role of the North Korean government in the development of its workforce for South Korean manufacturers.

Scott Gregory

Princeton University

The Uses of the Margins: A Lost Early Edition of the Shuihu zhuan

Vernacular fiction of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) such as The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳) is often associated with the economic and social trends that brought about the late-Ming printing boom, a period when commercial publishers began putting out a wide range of books targeted at newly monied and literate audiences. While it is true that vernacular fiction did reach a larger audience in those decades around the turn of the seventeenth century through the activities of commercial publishers, in actuality the disparate stories that make up The Water Margin coalesced into the form of a discrete book several decades before that explosion of print activity and were published by private and official entities rather than commercial ones. This paper examines two editions that, while no longer extant, are known through various bibliographical records. One is a “private” printing that is said to have circulated among the family of a prominent official of the Jiajing court before being reprinted by a commercial publisher. It was possibly the first printing of The Water Margin. The other is an “official” printing published by the Censorate, the imperial oversight body, that has long been a curiosity among scholars. I will examine the possible function of these editions by placing them in the larger social context of book culture, and through them explore the porous boundaries between the public, the private, and the official in the Ming.

Jennifer Guest

Columbia University

A wakan experiment: the haishi of Yosa Buson

The work of noted haikai poet and painter Yosa Buson (1716–84) was informed in important ways by texts and models from kanbun literature. This is perhaps most apparent in his unusual mixed-genre long poems, or haishi; ‘Spring Breeze on the Kema Embankment’, in which he explores the theme of nostalgic homecoming through the persona of a young servant girl returning to her home village, ‘Yodo River Songs’, which adopts the persona of a river courtesan bidding farewell to her lover, and ‘Mourning the Old Sage Hokuju’, which laments the death of a friend. In these poems, Buson crosses conventional boundaries of poetic form, creating unified works from linked sequences that combine kanshi couplets and hokku as well as kanbun-flavored prose. His poems were often accompanied by paintings as well – the result is a multimedia experience that melds elements of widely disparate genres together for maximum effect. I will explore some of the many questions suggested by these poems: how does each part of each extended sequence contribute to its overall impact? How do the roles of the various genres differ? What does it mean that Buson chose to use experimental combinations of wabun and kanbun poetic styles to create some his most emotionally resonant work, and what are the implications for how the wakan dynamic functioned in his time?

Gal Gvili

Columbia University

The End of the World or the Beginning of Friendship? Comparing East and West , the case of Su Tong and Aleksandar Hemon

Comparative work of Chinese and Non Asian literature has been subject to criticism in Western academia for a few decades, by scholars of both Chinese studies and Comparative Literature. In contrast, in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, scholarly work that employs western texts and theories in studying Chinese literature has been thriving since the late 1970's. Emerging from this methodological background, this paper argues that comparative discussions can be very relevant to literary studies in general, and to the study of narrative in particular. Drawing upon the various meanings of the Chinese term Tianya 天涯， which literally means the edge of the world, I introduce two works by the contemporary Chinese author Su Tong and the contemporary Bosnian American author, Aleksandar Hemon, as examples of what I term "World Edge Narratives": Narratives constructed on the centrality of spatial practices. Both Su Tong and Aleksandar Hemon undermine the conventional meaning of locality, and place their texts in constant transition between contradicting spaces: country and city, Bosnia and the United States. The incessant border crossing manifested in both texts, thematically as well as structurally, attest, I argue, to the prevalence of the act of story telling and to a new meaning of the connection between space and narrative. As narratives in motion, works that posit movement in space to be the center of the narrating act, world edge narratives not only enhance the power of writerly voice, but also encourage comparative study, redefined as an operation of cultural and historical boundary crossing.

Christopher Hagan

University of Oregon

One World, One Dream? Image building and brand China in the 2008 Beijing Olympics

This project investigates how iconic image from the Beijing Olympics—e.g., logos, venues, and scenes from the Opening and Closing ceremonies—form a visual narrative in which Chinese history and identity are configured to meet the political economic goals of the Central Communist Party. I draw on semiotics and discourse analysis to suggest projected national image (Wang 2003) that are embedded within visual data collected primarily from the Beijing2008 website. Furthermore, I apply current theories in identity politics to these visual data to problematize the social construction of what the nation branding literature refers to as “brand China.” I argue that the symbolic and emotive content of the visual imagery from the Beijing Olympics attempted to position China as a non-threatening, legitimate power in the Western cultural imaginary. Ultimately, I argue that the Party’s lack of political credibility challenges the potential success of its Olympic image building efforts.

Juhee Han

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

A Comparative Study on the Taiping Tianguo and Tonghak Uprising: Innovative Creation of New Kinds of Religion

Two large scale uprisings broke out in East Asia in the 19th Century. One incident is Taiping Tianguo (太平天国) in the late Qing dynasty China, and the other incident is Tonghak (东学) movement in the late Chosun dynasty Korea. During that time, both Qing and Chosun societies were sharing Confucian culture and experiencing internal disorder as well as external threats by foreign aggressions. Facing the same influence of Christianity of foreign origin, the two cases reacted differently to this Western ideological challenge. The Taipings created a new kind of God-worshipping religion by embracing Christianity, whereas the Tonghaks formed a religious thought of Eastern learning (东学) by rejecting Western teaching (西学) of Christianity. This paper is going to be a comparative study on the religious aspects of both the Taiping and Tonghak uprisings. Although a lot of researches have been done for each movement, comparative studies for these two incidents are few. Through the comparative historical approach, I would like to find out the significance of both incidents in regional perspective and the implications for the different outcomes of new religious ideology. All in all, by examining two different cases of reactions, this study will illuminate how the Eastern idea transformed and innovated itself under the circulation of Western idea.

Inhye Han

University of California, San Diego

Spell Chanting and Buddhist Ethics in Medieval Korea

This paper examines ethical attributes of Buddhist spell (-sutra) chanting practice, as opposed to the common misconception of spell recitation as salvational expediency, in the context that Buddhism was received in the seventh century Korean court. Recent studies on the ethical issues of Buddhist spells endeavor to deconstruct the distinction between ethical/karmic and magical/apotropaic, and therefore it has been argued that the debate is based on the false dichotomy. I, however, claim that this approach overlooks the way that Buddhist spell chanting practices reinscribe - as well as inverse – coercive modes of morals of each time. Furthermore, I will trace not only the process that Buddhist ethics refigures indigenous sets of values, but also how it compromises with political and historical conditions. For example, the Buddhist teaching of Tathāgatagarbha (如來藏), or immanence of Buddha nature, was privileged for the sake of court patronage during this period. I will analyze Wonhyo (617~686)’s works, Commentary on the Awakening of Mahāyāna Faith (大乘起信論疏) and Doctrine of the Two Hindrances (二障義) in order to look at specific doctrinal backgrounds that the clergy count on for propagation of spell(-sutra). I will explore the way in which Wonhyo interprets two schools of Mahāyāna Buddhism - Mādhyamaka and Yogācāra – opens up a new hermeneutical horizon whereby spell (-sutra) chanting practices reconstitute ethical terrains of medieval Korea.

SeoKyung Han

Binghamton University

The Birth of Korean Yŏllyŏ

My paper traces who yŏllyŏ or virtuous woman in Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910), by examining the development of the Yŏllyŏ (Virtuous Woman), the third volume of the Samgang haengsil to (Illustrated Conducts of the Three Bonds) and the included biographies. The Yŏllyŏ includes one hundred and ten biographies of wives and daughters-in-law, and the biographies are represented by image and texts, written in literary Chinese and Han’gŭl (Korean script). Many of the biographies came from the Chinese history records of the contemporary Ming or earlier Chinese authorities, and the honorary collections written by certain Chinese erudite scholars. Some biographies were traceable back to the Lienu zhuan [Biographies of (Notable) Women] of Liu Xiang’s (B.C.E. 79-8 C.E.), a royal archivist of Han China, which has been considered as the most notable and oldest Chinese work to enumerate the roles of woman. The biographies of Korean women are found in either history records or individual literary collections, organized mainly during the course of Koryo Korea (918-1392). My paper, by examining primarily the Lienu zhuan biographies included in the Yŏllyŏ, reveals the suggested roles ofyŏllyŏ and the ways in which its definition was organized.

Ryo Hinata-Yamaguchi

University of New South Wales – Australia Defence Force Academy

Strategic planning dilemmas of a failing state – Connections between North Korea’s political economic circumstances to its strategic policy making vis-à-vis East Asian security balance

This paper aims to identify the connections between North Korea’s current domestic circumstances (military, politics, economics, and society) and its strategic planning schema. Specifically, it will look at how the pressing domestic political economic issues in North Korea are constraining its military institution from effectively addressing its external security concerns. Since the end of the Cold War, troubling domestic circumstances in North Korea have forced it into a mediocre cycle, failing to reconfigure itself to find a “win-win” solution to both its internal and external security concerns. The situation is exacerbated with suspicions over the health of Kim Jong-il and the economy which is yet to show any improvement. It would therefore pay to identity the nature of the connection between these endogenous factors to the strategic policy making schema. Indeed, the secretive and “unique” nature of the North Korean regime makes analysis an uphill struggle. However it is possible to speculate by focusing on the underlying strengths and weaknesses of North Korea’s political economy, social processes, military capability and strategic policy making schema. The study will therefore attempt to address the following questions: What are the endogenous constants and variables that influence North Korea’s military effectiveness? How will attempts at economic and political reform impact the military institution? How does North Korea’s defence planning seek to find the most effective and efficient way to manage its capability and achieve its national security ends? Uncovering the answers to these questions will provide better insight of North Korea’s strategic policies towards the changing balance of power in East Asia.

Takuya Hino

Columbia University

The Kinpusen Kanjō Nikki and the cult of Kinpusen in the politics of late Heian Japan (1086-1150)

This paper will examine the Kinpusen Kanjō Nikki (the Record of Initiation Rituals on Kinpusen; hereafter Kanjō nikki) and the cult of Kinpusen during the Insei period, an era associated with the power of abdicated sovereigns in the late Heian Japan (1086-1150). The Kanjō nikki is the valuable record in which Shōkaku (1057-1129), the head monk of Daigoji and the protector-monk (J. gojisō) of the retired Emperor Shirakawa (1053-1129 r.1072-1086), transmitted the Buddhist teachings (denpō kanjō) to Jōkai, the head monk of Kinpusenji in the seventh month of the second year of Kashō (1106). The Kanjō nikki presents the details of the coronation of the Dharma-Transmission on Kinpusen and reveals how the Daigoji’s rituals were transmitted to Kinpusen in the Insei period. Kinpusen became a kenmon under the strong support of the retired Emperor Shirakawa, and independently controlled religious and political affairs on Kinpusen, with the result that they had many battles with Kōfukuji during the time of late Heian Japan (1086-1150). The Kanjō nikki , as a historical document, is definite evidence that the resident monks of Kinpusenji performed rituals to receive the initiation for transmitting the Dharma on Kinpusen, following religious instructions from Daigoji, the temple for the Emperor’s prayer (goganji).

Erumi Honda

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

“Remembering” the War across Generational Boundaries in Nakandakari Hatsu's “Hahatachi onnatachi”

This paper on “Hahatachi onnatachi” (“Mothers and Women,” 1982) by the Okinawan author Nakandakari Hatsu examines how memories of the second World War are transmitted across generational boundaries in postwar Okinawa. I focus on the text's portrayal of how the young generation with no firsthand experience of the war “remember” their elders’experiences. The young generation's lack of experience appears to limit their capacity to imagine what their elders' past was truly like. At the same time, because the young generation has a sense of detachment from the past, to which they have access only through their imagination, they may find it less agonizing to “recall” than the survivors of the war who are burdened by their traumatic experiences. “Hahatachi onnatachi” articulates these limitations and potentials of the young to “recollect” their elders' experiences of the war, portraying interactions among women of three different generations. Pieces of an elderly woman's memory are transmitted to the young protagonist, who has no personal experience of the war, only when she has an almost supernatural experience in which she directly witnesses the old woman's nightmare of the war. After this memory transplant, the young protagonist recognizes the unremitting influence of the war upon the present. Through its portrayal of this memory transplant, the narrative illustrates the challenges that members of the younger generation confront when they “remember” their elders' past.

Johanna Hood

University of Technology, Sydney

Cultivating China's AIDS Hero Pu Cunxin

In my paper, I focus on celebrity mechanisms in the realm of public health activism. I first examines the emergence of this technique of development internationally, and then turns to the rise of “AIDS heroes” in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where, the co-production and consumption of what Richey and Ponte (2008) call ‘aid celebrities’ now occurs. By focusing on one of China’s “AIDS heroes”, the extremely well known actor Pu Cunxin, I explore the orchestration of his rise to prominence and the social meanings of his activism, as set within the controversial and problematic state management of HIV/AIDS in China. Drawing from over 300 articles written on Pu over the past five years, as well as from personal observation during fieldwork in China in 2003-2008, I suggest how we may understand the rise and meaning of his heroic fame within its local context. As I demonstrate, tapping particular literary and cultural discourses on ‘heroism’ as well as the long-standing traditions of exemplary individuals, social responsibility, recognition and philanthropy, better positions any attempt to understand Pu’s popularity and moral mission. His local version of celebrity activism allows these longstanding traditions to be identified and drawn into his persona, yet by engaging the mechanisms of his rise to power demonstrates the changing conceptions of celebrity formation and fame in China. In conclusion I demonstrate how Pu is able to tacitly raise criticism of the inadequate state while concurrently conforming to state visions of celebrity involvement in their affairs. Finally, I illustrate how we may use Pu’s celebrity status, media persona, reportage as well as the popular and literary traditions of heroism from which his present needs to be understood to problematize celebrity scholar Boorstin’s well-referenced understanding of celebrity and claim that “we can make a celebrity, but we can never make a hero” (1972 [1961]: 48).

Xian Huang

Columbia University

Global Market Integration and Government Development Strategy: Foreign Trade and Education Investment in China

In the political economy literature there is a general proposition that one country’s education investment will increase with its economic openness. However, Chinese government’s education investment did not increase in spite of remarkable integration into the global markets during the 1990s. This article attempts to explain why the Chinese case did not agree with the existed literature. The causality behind this problem is a product of institutional design. This article argues that Chinese top-down bureaucratic system and decentralized fiscal arrangement not only institutionally constrain the government officials’ incentives to implement social policies, but also place their attentions elsewhere. Local officials especially those below the county level mostly focus on implementing the policies their higher levels highly appreciate such as GDP growth and family planning rather than education development. As a result, education is usually put far behind economic growth on local governments’ agenda. What is worse, regional disparity in education development has greatly increased in the 1990s because without a national redistributive mechanism the local government’s education investment heavily depended on the level of local economy development. The implications of this article lie on two aspects; one is that Chinese government should mobilize resources to develop education as they have done with the economy in order to improve its performance in the international market; the other one is Chinese government should increase the society’s access to policy-making in order to transform the current supply-led pattern of the education investment and generally the social welfare provision.

Mick Hunter

Princeton University

Searching for the Han ru: a survey of "ru 儒" in the Shiji, Hanshu, and HouHanshu

This paper presents my analysis of the roughly 600 instances of the word ru 儒, a problematic term whose translations include “Confucian,” “classicist,” and “scholar,” in the three earliest dynastic histories, Sima Qian’s 司馬遷(d. c. 100 BCE) Shiji 史記, Ban Gu’s 班固 (32-92 CE) Hanshu 漢書, and Fan Ye’s 范曄(398-445) Hou Hanshu 後漢書. In the course of compiling a list of Han ru for another project, I found that these texts’ use of the word ru repeatedly frustrated my attempts to pinpoint individual ru. In this paper I argue that this difficulty reflects the nature of “ru” in the Han. “>Ru” did not refer to a natural or readily identifiable type of person in the period, nor did an educated person refer to himself as “ru,” an act that was considered arrogant. To the contrary, to be “ru” one had to be judged to be “ru,” and these judgments were not necessarily uncontroversial. Moreover, changes in the distribution and type of ru attributions across the three early histories may reflect historical changes in the identity of ru from the Western Han through the Eastern Han and beyond.

Michelle Hwang

Columbia University

The Anthropologist and the Comfort Women—An Exploration of the Ethics of Research

This paper examines my own conduct and ethics as a Korean-American anthropologist studying Korean Comfort Women. To start off, I grapple with the general issue of why any individual or group who has undergone such painful trauma should consent to become subjected to the lens of, (in this case, anthropological) investigation. What are the practical advantages that can be gleaned from being “researched?” Along with these questions, there are several interesting, and perhaps rather productively reflexive anxieties that inform my research. First, the tension between stirring up old events and memories versus allowing the past to fade away into history; how to best represent the experiences of the Comfort Women without wallowing in the ideology of victimhood and subscribing to any simplistic notions of “giving voice”; and investigating the matter of my personal investment in this project. This is very much a work in progress, but I begin to attempt to address these issues by making explicit my own connections to the past of a colonized Korea as a member of the Korean-American Diaspora.

Alexandre Iliouchine

McGill University

Medical Theory and Praxis in the Laozi Zhongjing

Laozi zhongjing 老子中經 – “The Central Scripture of Laozi” is an early medieval Chinese text dated to ca. 3rd century CE. The Central Scripture is one of the earliest transmitted manuals of Daoist cosmology; it provides a detailed description of the deities who reside both in the outer cosmos and in the inner cosmos of the human body. It describes practices consisting of meditation, visualization, and circulation of qi 氣, with the eventual goal of becoming immortal. However, it also contains passages of purely medical diagnostic nature and offers practices aimed at healing particular diseases and achieving general longevity. This paper will focus on the medical aspect of the text. Since the medical information is scattered throughout the Central Scripture, I will juxtapose and combine passages from different parts of the text in order to construct a map of systematic correspondence between organs, different kinds of qi, and illness symptoms. I will then compare this map to the systematic correspondence of the Huangdi neijing 黃帝內經 – “Yellow Emperor’s Inner Scripture.” Finally, I will provide an overview of the qi circulation practices described by the Central Scripture and show that they are consistent with the aforementioned map of systematic correspondence.

Akiko Ishii

Cornell University

Discourse of science in the 1930s in Japan: Tosaka Jun and the project of enlightenment

My paper examines works of a leftist Japanese thinker, Tosaka Jun (1900-1945), who was politically active in the 1930s. Tosaka elaborates the notion of “science” as a kind of counter-discourse against ultranationalism, which was prevalent in the society at that time. He also advocates mass enlightenment based on this “science.” Since Tosaka clearly shows his sympathy for Soviet socialism, his notion of science tends to be understood in terms of scientific socialism. However, Tosaka’s thought on “science” also suggests a way of looking at the relationship between science and literature, and seeks a common ground between them. Further, Tosaka’s thought on “science” leads us to reconsider the institutional division between science and literature and the idea of “criticism.” In my paper, I will explicate how Tosaka’s thought on “science” developed in the historical context of wartime Japan (1931-1945) and analyze the particular role of the discourse of science in that period.

Paul Allen Jackson

Arizona State University

Is a Cavern a Cavern? Daoist Religious Terminology Re-analyzed

In early Daoist texts, a word appears that is represented by this character: 洞, now pronounced dòng in Modern Standard Chinese (MSC). A glance at most translations will produce a knee-jerk translation of something related or akin to "cave". For example, in the Encyclopedia of Daoism (ed. by Pregadio), 洞天 yields "Grotto-Heavens"; the Dòng Xiān Zhuàn 洞仙傳 returns as "Biographies of the Cavern Immortals"; the 三洞 are the Three Caverns; 洞霄宮 is the Palace of the Cavernous Empyrean; the Tàishàng Dòngyuàn Shénzhōu Jīng 太上洞淵神咒經 may be translated as "The Most High Scripture of Divine Incantations of the Cavernous Abyss" . In Daoist texts, when examining at such phrases as "Sān Dòng 三洞", the scholar should not immediately accept the translation of 洞as "cavern". In addition to presenting a history of the term洞 as a technical Daoist term, this paper offers a diachronic phonological analysis as a new method for the interpretation and translation of Chinese religious terminology.

Har-Ye Kan

Harvard University

The Spatial Story of Chinese Nationalism – Architecture and Urbanism in Shanghai

In the wake of the resurgences of nationalistic fervor after the Tiananmen incident in 1989, academics have sought to untangle the strands of this dynamic and complex construct of nationalism based largely on the discursive meanings embedded in political rhetoric, and forms of civil expression and protests. Besides these overt linguistic devices and manifestations, the understanding and experiences of nationalism are equally conditioned by the public and material reification of feelings, image and thoughts in sculptural and architectural space1. This paper examines how built form, as concretized in the architecture and urbanism can be a means of comprehending the evolution of Chinese nationalism as constructed and conceived by the state and her people. Through a focus on of Shanghai – the Chinese symbol of modernity and cosmopolitanism – this paper shows how Chinese nationalism dating from the Republican era (1911) onwards is reflected and at the same time challenged by the patterned language of communication in its changing faces and forms of architecture and urbanism. As Shanghai prepares to host China’s first World Exposition in 2010, the city once again becomes a crucial site for the spatial representation of nationalism. Like the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, the 1889 Exposition Universalle in Paris, and the 1893 World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, all of which projected their distinct modern characters and left intangible legacies2, the 2010 World Expo at Shanghai will arguably offer an interesting platform in envisioning where a century-long narrative of nationalism will be directed spatially.

Soojeong Kang

London School of Economics

Managing Technology To Achieve Industrialization: The Korean Nylon Producers in the 1960s-1970s

My paper argues that technology was a comprehensive problem to be managed by firms, and analyses such efforts in Korea’s synthetic fiber industry during industrialization. Technology transfer across firms and geographical boundaries requires active and continued efforts, and is neither costless nor rapid. Conceptualization of the process for LDCs has resulted in what is referred in the literature as ‘technological capabilities,’ or the acquisition of capabilities at three stages (production, investment, innovation) to manage technology claim mastery. Such experience applies to the Korean textile industry, which spearheaded Korea’s economic take-off in the 1960s. Within the industry, the technology-intensive part was located upstream with the synthetic fiber producers, not downstream in textile goods production. But surprisingly little has been said on the synthetic fiber industry despite its historical relevance in Korea’s industrialization. The paper compares Korea’s earliest nylon producers to evaluate firm efforts to absorb foreign technology and develop indigenous capabilities. It argues that technology inflows in the synthetic fiber industry confirm the established pattern of technology transfer in Korea, i.e., preference for capital goods imports and technology licensing over FDI. The firms faced tradeoffs between adopting the best technology available versus minimizing dependence on foreign resources, and this resulted in different outcomes across firms. In 1960s-1970s, the firms were also more successful mastering the ‘know-how’ than the ‘knowwhy’ in technology. This research suggests that the synthetic fiber industry is a prime candidate to scrutinize Korea's industrialization, particularly with respect to technology transfer.

MiHye Kim

SIPA, Columbia University

North Korean Defectors: Tragedy or Opportunity? Using savings-led microfinance for resettlement and integration

For the South Korean government, trapped between a “one Korea” nationalist rhetoric and fading longings for reunification, the growing North Korean defector community is an economic burden and a political challenge. Yet their rehabilitation and integration into the free world stand as a test for the two Koreas. Can and will they reunite and become one nation that forges one story together again? Currently, North Koreans residing in South Korea are poor, unemployed, socially marginalized and unable to be fully functioning members of society. Welfare programs and grant aid aimed at promoting their resettlement are ineffective in addressing the unique hardships that North Koreans face in their new environment and thus renders the possibility for reunification ever more dim while simultaneously wasting government spending. This study is an analysis of microfinance as a tool for resettlement, borrowing from India’s model of savings/lending self-help groups linking to banks (NABARD/SHG model). The study examines the history of the microfinance industry in South Korea and the failure of its mainly credit-led models. The situation of North Korean defectors is assessed to determine the feasibility of adopting a savings-led group model wherein groups form and save/lend amongst one another through a democratic process of defining rules and goals together and eventually engaging the private sector through linkage with banks. There is potential for such a model to influence beyond survival to empowerment, proving to South Korea that reunification is possible without major political and economic turmoil. An implementation plan is presented considering situation-specific factors.

Yumi Kim

Columbia University

Selling and Buying Science: Riken Vitamin A and the Popularization of Science in Japan, 1923-1927

In the 1920s Riken Vitamin A mounted an aggressive advertisement campaign in Japan's major daily newspaper, the Yomiuri shinbun, that highlighted the scientific aspects of the product: its vitamin A was the result of painstaking laboratory research. It had garnered recognition in both international and domestic scientific circles. As a nutritional supplement that also had curative medicinal effects, these vitamins tread the fine line between medicine and food, between science and everyday life. In this paper I argue that Riken Vitamin A advertisements functioned as a mechanism for the popularization of science in Japan in the 1920s. They served as the medium through which scientific communities forged links with their various audiences, publics, and consumers. The ads carried out an educative function, teaching potential consumers about vitamins and also evoked the more ineffable aspects of a scientific product, namely its promise to serve as a magical cure-all. Viewers of Riken ads, however, were not passive consumers of science. Many potential consumers brought into their reading of these ads other kinds of knowledge acquired from articles published in the same newspaper. Readers even submitted questions about vitamins to doctors, asking for advice and sometimes even questioning their authority. The increasing premium placed on scientific knowledge therefore did not result solely from the kinds of knowledge produced by scientists. Non-expert consumers who confirmed, contested and appropriated that knowledge in their everyday lives participated in the process through which science gained much of its persuasive power and authority in early twentieth-century Japan.

Chunghao Pio Kuo

New York University

Fish, Eating Power, and Gastronomic Enjoyment in Ming-Qing Jiangnan: A Case Study of Eating Shi-fish

Seafood has long been enjoyed throughout Jiangnan (the lower Yangtze River region). However, of the region’s various aquatic species, some feature unexpected characteristics hidden within history. This paper focuses on one crucial fish—Shi-fish—to widely examine this fish’s significant influences both in politics and in society. I divide my paper into three parts. The first part presents the ecological background of Jiangnan’s Shi-fish, which sheds light on this fish’s original characteristics. The second part explores the evolution of Shi-fish from a common fish to a valuable fish by examining a crucial factor—the tribute system, in which the Shi-fish were sent from Jiangnan to Beijing to facilitate praying to Heaven and to emperor’s ancestors at imperial temple. This tribute system not only endowed Shi-fish with an invisible power that drew people’s attention in Beijing but also intensified educated men’s antagonism toward Beijing. The antagonism concerned Beijing’s neglect of the fact that the tribute system had exacerbated social grievance among ordinary people and educated men based in Jiangnan. In the third part, I explore the processes of enjoying Shi-fish in terms of its culinary characteristics in three regions—Beijing, Jiangnan, and the Pearl River region—to highlight the related discrepancies among different culinary surroundings. This paper’s food study rests on comparisons of social classes to one another, on an examination of the tribute system, and on the cultivation of gastronomic taste.

Stephanie Lin

Columbia University

Recognition and acceptance: A case study of True Buddha School

Recent scholarship on modern Chinese Buddhism has focused largely on what we might call “mainstream” Buddhist organizations such as Tzu-chi Compassion Relief Association and Buddha’s Light Mountain. However, little attention has been paid to the growing popularity of religious groups that represent a departure from the message of “Humanistic Buddhism” and “orthodox Buddhism” emphasized by the aforementioned organizations. I contend that an accurate picture of contemporary Chinese Buddhist practice cannot be represented without attention to groups that exist outside of the mainstream. Furthermore, the boundaries, real or imagined, between the mainstream and the marginalized can illuminate the ways in which orthodoxy and authenticity are continuously being challenged and re-defined in Chinese Buddhism. This paper will focus on True Buddha School (TBS), a worldwide Buddhist organization led by Sheng-yen Lu, a Taiwanese man known by his disciples as “Living Buddha Lian-sheng.” While Lu’s claim that he is a fully enlightened Buddha, as well as his group’s engagement in Daoist and esoteric Buddhist practices leaves it unsurprisingly susceptible to skepticism and/or criticism from other Buddhist groups, what is perhaps more interesting is TBS’ keen awareness of this reality. Drawing from my fieldwork at the New York branch temple of TBS, interviews with TBS and non-TBS followers, and Lu’s writings and lectures, I will investigate how the group’s stated beliefs and practices manifest themselves on the ground, and the ways in which TBS attempts to justify itself as “Buddhist” in the face of attempts by “mainstream” Buddhists to suggest or maintain otherwise.

Chunbao Liu

McGill University

WTO Rules on RTAs and the Problems Associated with Chinese FTAs

The debate on fragmentation of international trade regimes has become particularly pertinent today with East Asian economies. Immediately after entry into the WTO in 2001, China jumped onto the wagon of free trade agreements (FTAs) and is currently implementing or negotiating FTAs with more than 30 countries and regions. The recent development of China’s trade policy has generated a FTA competition among East Asian countries, causing concerns about the integrity of the WTO system. When GATT/WTO permits Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) as exceptions to the obligation of most-favoured-nation obligation, it stipulates conditions for the formation of RTAs. This article seeks to evaluate FTAs involving China under the multilateral rules defined by the WTO. The article finds that the China – ASEAN FTA and the China – Pakistan FTA are inconsistent with the requirements set forth in GATT Article XXIV as they simply cover insubstantial trade in goods. Most of the FTAs go little beyond the WTO in liberalizing trade in services, making them incompatible with GATS Article V. In addition, few FTAs have been notified to the WTO within the timeframe required by the new Transparency Mechanism. The Article then explores Chinese domestic factors which may have influenced the consistency of FTAs with WTO disciplines. It concludes by discussing the implications of China’s approaches to FTAs for the multilateral trading system.

Weijia Liu

Columbia University

Pathos Operates as a Defining Feature in Korean Wave Melodrama and Determines Contemporary Korean Film’s Transnational Popularity

With pathos as one of the defining features of melodrama, Korean melodrama of romance defines the whole Korean film industry and goes transnational in East Asia. Specifically saying, Korean tear-jerking melodrama involving Korean culture of tears and discourse of sorrow has been given a “Han brand”, and recognized as a remarkable component of “Hallyu” (Korean Wave). Based on a film text, I discuss how audiences turn to active consumers of Korean teary melodrama by making sense of the meaning of pathos in the melodrama. I mainly analyze melodramatic revelation of pathos engages audiences in the film in the way that it sets up an emotional link of identity between the fiction and the reality. Crying is more of a negotiating process of the external filmic emotions and audiences’ internal emotions while linking the text and audiences’ real experiences. I propose that appropriate understanding of the audiences’ diversified reception rather than sole emphasis on melodrama’s aesthetic features is helpful for a more objective evaluation of Korean melodrama and its popularity in cross-national audiences.

Chi Hung Lo

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Last words for wives: Husbands' epitaph-writing in the Yuan Dynasty China (1279-1368)

Epitaph, or tomb inscriptions, is a kind of classical Chinese writing David Nivison called “social biography”. In the case of epitaphs for women, in addition to their family background, their good deeds, virtues and contributions to their husbands’ families are emphasized and lauded. Very often such writings were prepared by eminent persons commissioned by their husbands or sons. However, of the several hundred epitaphs dedicated to women in the 60 volumes of Chuan Yuan Wen《全元文》(the complete collection of Yuan prose), a few are written by surviving husbands. The number of such epitaphs is small compared with those written by non family members but the meaning they carry appears to be rather significant. Despite obvious similarities with other epitaphs, these epitaphs are unique in their biographical composition. My paper will discuss this particular group of writings in the Chuan Yuan Wen in terms of husbands’ motivations, writing strategies, wifely duties they chose to emphasize, and sentimental expressions towards their deceased spouses in such “quasi-private” writings during the Yuan.

Weiwei Luo

Washington University School of Law

Social Groups in Qing Law

In this study by examining the Qing law I identify a web of social groups in the Qing dynasty that were semi-autonomous. As coherent unities, they had their own headmen who were chosen from within the groups and put in charge of supervising members of the groups. State laws delegated to the headmen considerable power in punishing the other members in their groups. These groups usually had their own internal rules, and were very often the first and sometimes the only location in the adjudication process an individual would go through if disputes occurred. Thus the groups were autonomous to some extent. At the same time the government regulated the activities of these groups. The laws prescribed the obligations and responsibilities of the members and headmen. The bureaucracy appointed officials to supervise these groups and to take collateral responsibilities for these groups. Their collateral responsibility as an institution encouraged centralization by building a channel of downward supervision. This style of governing through semi-autonomous groups might have strong legacies for modern China. Work units during Mao period were an extreme form. Even while allowing the mushrooming of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) the requirement regarding NGOs' registration with the same level governments was never loosened. Similar to the NGOs, the villages nowadays are self-governing, but there are state laws regulating how the elections are supposed to be carried out.

Michael McCarty

Columbia University

Rewriting the Imjin War through Remonstrance

The Japanese invasion of 1592-97, known as the Imjin War, was catastrophic for Korea, and the magnitude and swiftness of early defeats by the Japanese was a profound shock to Korean soldiers and civilians. This paper examines some of these early defeats from the point of view of four Korean narrative sources: the officially compiled histories Sŏnjo Sillok (1620s) and Sŏnjo Sujŏng Sillok (1657), and the privately written narratives Chingbirok (1604) and Chaejo Pŏnbang Chi (1693). From the outset both the official and private histories targeted the incompetent decisions of top Korean military generals as a way to explain and rationalize the magnitude of these defeats. At the same time, through narrative elaboration, these sources increasingly emphasized and exaggerated the role of minor officials and soldiers who disagreed with their commanders. Allowing these characters to openly criticize their superiors and advocate more reasonable strategies was a way for Korean historians to rationalize the defeats of the Imjin War and retroactively posit a less incompetent military, even though the tragic outcome remained the same. By comparing differences, similarities and outright plagiarism among the above four sources, this paper will examine how the rhetoric of remonstrance was used over time in different ways as a narrative tool to localize blame and exonerate heroes. While grounding remonstrance in the context of traditional East Asian historical discourse, this paper will also raise larger questions about the ability to rewrite the past without altering its flow of events.

Ryan Martin

Columbia University

Architecture, Craft and Construction: Built Space in China

My paper will attempt to conceptualize Chinese architecture as an autonomous category able to be subjected to historical analysis. Though my interests are primarily in domestic space and the location and production of identity, this paper will address the broader problem of how we might begin to conceptualize pre-modern building practice in China so as to rectify a common assumption that Chinese buildings were largely codified in form and served mainly ritual functions.The Chinese term most commonly translated as architecture today, jianzhu 建築, is a loan word from Japanese and did not enter into common usage until the late 19th century. In addition, building practices in China and the objects produced, unlike in Western society where architecture is sometimes held to be the foremost visual art form, were not granted status within the fine arts. Considering these circumstances prohibits us from thinking of Chinese building practice as akin to Western architecture. That said, Chinese building practice has a distinct tradition that can be traced, most notably in the Yingzao Fashi 營造法式 and the Lu Ban jing 魯班經, an early account of Chinese building codes and a carpenters’ manual respectively, and, more importantly, is a space where narratives that work to shape layers of identity might be investigated and compared with other early sources that together shed some light on social practice, identity and daily life in Late Imperial China.

Bryan K. Miller

University of Pennsylvania

Accompaniment and Consumption in Mortuary Offerings: The Functions of Animal Remains in Graves of the Xiongnu Nomadic Elite

Beyond the material identity of mortuary offerings, the ritual significance of those gifts may be further understood by their spatial context within the burial space, the manner of their deposition, and any physical alterations to which the offerings have been subjected. In the case of animal remains for nomad graves of the Xiongnu Empire (3rd cent.BCE – 1st cent.CE), some may be distinctly associated with the functions of either accompaniment or consumption, while others appear to take on both roles. Despite such dual functions of offerings, it is important to separately identify these two meanings so as to understand their dynamic roles in mortuary ritual, relating to all aspects of the deceased, in life and after, as well as the living, who ritually killed and ceremoniously deposited these offerings within the varied sections of the burial plots.

Arthur Mitchell

Yale University

Linguistic Critique in Tanizaki's Chijin no ai

This paper considers how Tanizaki’s modernist novel, Chijin no ai, displaces ideologies associated with the West by means of a narrative strategy that assimilates and examines the everyday social language that engenders these concepts. While the novel is set as a love story, the protagonist’s desires are based in specific fantasies associated with the West that had become popularized through the discourse of mass media and consumer culture during the 1920s. Examples of this discourse would be the language of Hollywood or the language surrounding the newly popular Western-style mode of living, with its connotations of play, theatricality, and Romanticism. Through his satirical portrayal of a protagonist that actively uses this language to apprehend and create the woman of his desires, Tanizaki establishes a linguistic and narrative strategy by which to critique this social language, and explore and relativize the ideologies about the West that it supports. Though Tanizaki’s novel, this paper more broadly investigates the way modernist fiction engages modernization not through its themes and settings but through strategies of language and narrative. It demonstrates how literature, through its linguistic and formal techniques, can challenge ideologies, expose and subvert conventional modes of thought, and embody aspects of modern experience. As a study that focuses on modernism’s critique of modernization, it also shows the ways in which literature can be used as a sophisticated means to explore and understand Japanese modernity.

Aiko Miyatake

Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY

Three Generational Korean American Women’s Stories

The researcher is Japanese who applies qualitative research in the Korean American society in suburban area in New York. Her participants hold three generational women: grandmothers, mothers and daughters. She explores how the different generations share or do not share their life stories such as war experiences, immigrant experiences and school lives. The researcher finds that there are many hidden stories among them even though in one family. For example, young generation does not want to share their school experiences such as discriminations or language difficulties with other generations. The older generation hides their war experiences such as during the World War II and the Korean War. Each generation considers others too much to explore these experiences to the others. Concerning researcher positionality, she explores two distinct aspects. First, as a foreigner, she is an outsider as a non Korean. At the same time, she is also an insider which shares numerous aspects with them. For instance, being an Asian woman, she shares some similar cultural backgrounds with her participants. Secondly, as a fluent Korean and English speaker, she is able to communicate with all the generations in both languages. As a Korean instructor to the teenager female students, as a friend of their mothers, and as a participant-observer for grandmothers who listen to their stories, she takes different roles to the each generation. The researcher investigates the participants’ silence and voices and to explore how their immigrant lives are in the United States.

Xavier Ortells

Columbia University

The ruins of Chinese reform: a visual and critical itinerary

The Great Wall, the wonder and curse that Lu Xun lamented, has opened up to the world. Flows of people and technologies are primary protagonists of the Chinese reform. However, this abrupt and unabashed transformation, as in a domino effect, has also torn down many of the inner walls of its cities. The process of re-urbanization is paving the way for an unprecedented vertical growth. Simultaneously, adjoining laying waste witness the dislocation of historical categories, referents and meanings. Demolition sites become the haunted wreckage of gothic nostalgia. Ominous 'chai' characters tattoo the urban body ready for surgical interventions. And the fragmentary stones of a collapsed past are re-appropriated in trenches of contestation. In this process, urban debris are accommodated as ruins in the transnational dialogue of globalized economy. This paper contextualizes the social significance of the demolition site through the responses of Chinese artists (Dong Dong, Zhang Dali, Ai Wei Wei) and filmmakers (Bing Wang, Ou Ning, Zhan Yuan). A visual route through the way urban ruins have permeated contemporary artistic expression will serve to localize undercurrents in the problematic social evaluation of the reform. This paper understands the reading of the urban landscape and the writing on the urban grid as basic interventions for the citizenry. Transnational ideologic and material transferences shape this process of energetic national construction and ambivalent social response. Finally, this paper analyze the spaces afforded for the re-writing of a present confined between a precocious nostalgic past and an alienated future.

Huiping Pang

UC, Santa Barbara, the Freer-Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution

Denial and Auspiciousness: Snowscape, Climate Change, and Politics in the Middle of Emperor Huizong’s Reign

Painting and other arts were strongly embedded in the unique culture of the court of Emperor Huizong (r. 1100-1125). The scroll painting “Returning Boats on a Snowy River,” with its colophon by Huizong’s colourful Grand Councilor Cai Jing (1046-1126), will be used as a springboard for consideration of a number of issues. For example, painting and calligraphy were used as potent weapons in the struggle for power in the court of an increasingly superstitious emperor. Additionally, art also played a central role in the binary game of ‘auspicious’ and ‘inauspicious’ reporting of natural events (climate, comets, sunspots, snowfalls, droughts) by rival political factions. Cai Jing was a central figure in these practices and his career provides us with an exceptionally rich case study for the relationship between artistic patronage and court politics. The popularity of snow-themed paintings during this era will be related to a significant climatic event which occurred during the closing years of Huizong’s reign: the Little Ice Age. Such conventional seasonal paintings with ‘auspicious’ themes were produced in great numbers as the Northern Song dissolved, helping create an idealized world for the increasingly isolated Huizong, whose empire was crumbling under the social and economic upheaval created by the agricultural disasters of the Little Ice Age. Indeed, the subject parallels some current fears about global warming and catastrophic climate change. Complex new layers of meanings for art and climate are articulated in this study, which draws on various types of Song primary texts not previously considered by scholars.

Lei Ping

New York University

A City Under Construction—Rethinking the Spatial Politics in Postsocialist Shanghai

This paper sets out to investigate concepts such as capital, commodity fetishism and consumerism in postsocialist globalized Shanghai by locating and relocating its urban and spatial politics. From a Marxist social, cultural and historical perspective, this paper attempts to discuss the issue of postsocialist Haussmannization of the urban landscape and social restratification in the city of Shanghai. Two notions of Shanghai urbanism are challenged: first, how nationwide reprivatization has been put into urban planning in Shanghai after 1992, and second, how new class consciousness has emerged in contrast to which did in Mao’s era. The fundamental argument here is that the new wave of consumer frenzy together with deep nostalgic remembrance of the city’s past and present has remapped the urban consciousness and spatial politics in contemporary Shanghai. In the face of current forces this powerful historical mechanism is in the process of unfolding a reconfigured city space in Shanghai. The first part of the paper examines 1) commodity phantasmagoria of the Shanghai modern before 1992, and 2) a historiography of social and spatial stratification in the Republic, socialist and postsocialist eras in Shanghai. The second part of the paper examines 1) the shift of the understanding of capital and reification in the city of postsocialist consumption, and 2) a disappearance and reappearance of the historical centers during the postsocialist Haussmannization and globalization in Shanghai. Through a renewed understanding of these issues, this paper tends to call for a continued discussion on postsocialist urbanism in the city of Shanghai.

Meha Priyadarshini

Columbia University

Traveling Objects: The Chinese Ginger Jar and its Global Iterations

The role of Chinese porcelain in facilitating early modern global trade has been well documented. This paper focuses on one particular porcelain item, the ginger jar, to show how such an object can be used to study non-commercial connections and interactions in the early modern period. The ginger jar stirred the imagination of artists and artisans in Europe and Latin America. Seventeenth century Dutch artists such as William Kalf and Pieter van Roestraten recreated it on their canvases in the baroque style. Two hundred years later it continued to appear in the still life paintings of artists such as Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh and James McNeill Whistler. Potters in Mexico also took inspiration from the ginger jar when they created the chocolatero, an earthenware vessel used to store chocolate in the eighteenth century. The global iterations of the Chinese ginger jar show that these objects were capable of communicating and inspiring aesthetic values, cultural imaginations and ideas of utility. In order to understand how traveling objects were able to facilitate interactions between people, we need to first know the provenance of these objects; only then can we understand how the interpretations differed from the original. However, we have limited knowledge about the origins of the ginger jar. The paper will begin to redress this issue. It will focus especially on the production and function of the ginger jar in China and show that we cannot understand its subsequent representations and reproductions around the world without knowing how and why it was produced in the first place.

Laura Reizman

Columbia University

Locating the Foreign Native: Migrant Brides in South Korean Media

While migrant marriages in Asia have circulated since the 1980's in such countries as Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore, South Korea's involvement in this particular migration flow officially followed in the 1990's with the support of local governments. The years between 2002 and 2007 saw a tripling of the number of marriage immigrants, from approximately 35,000 to 105,000. The 2006 Special Rapporteur's report noted that while marriages to foreigners counted for nearly 14% of all marriages in South Korea, almost 37% of rural marriages were found to be international. As the number of foreign marriages and mixed ethnic families increase yearly, this growing population's effect on the Korean polity has and will become more palpable. For this conference, I would like to focus on the ways in which foreign brides are represented by Korean media and employed as dialectical sites of negotiation and contestation in defining Koreanness. I will focus on a few commercial films that have recently cropped up that touch on this subject directly, or use foreign brides as a backdrop to a generic storyline. Using such films as, Wedding Campaign, and Failan, as well as a couple of TV dramas, I will explore the ways in which foreignness, or more precisely, foreign women turned-Korean-brides, are depicted within contemporary Korean cinema. Through this exploration, I hope to analyze how broader themes such as gender, ethnicity, nationalism, and sexuality have been recontextualized and re-located within Korean popular imagination by the arrival of the female and feminized foreigner.

Joseph Rome

Columbia University

Westernization and Land Use Policy in Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore?s minister mentor and one of the men most responsible for the city-state?s current success, is also one of the loudest proponents of uniquely Asian values and culture. Yet the state he and his colleagues crafted out of a British colony owes much of its success to imposing Western culture, ideas, and practices onto a diverse yet almost entirely Asian population. Singapore?s experience with land use policy provides a convenient example of this imposition, as well as how a fundamentally anti-democratic government nevertheless achieved economic growth and political stability thanks to relying on what are now orthodox ?Western? models of development. Policies covering everything from the housing market to transportation reflect the critical input of colonial legacy and Western consultants. Singapore?s land use experience shows that much-maligned Western aid agencies like the World Bank can be both competent and effective. Far from misunderstanding local culture, consultants from these organizations have proven that they can work effectively with non-Western counterparts and achieve significant economic progress. Now that typically ?Western? values like rule of law, strength of institutions, and capitalism, as well as a host of other more concrete practices from development agencies to high-rise buildings, have been successfully adopted by at least one non-Western society, in this case Singapore, they should lose their associations with the ?West? altogether. Indeed, theories of modernism have long explored the tensions between desire for modernization and apprehension about Westernization, yet it is time for such tensions to be released.

Chelsea Szendi Schieder

Columbia University

The Children Who Know No War: Generation in the Time of the "Anpo Generation"

Generation was an important political identity for the student participants in the social movements of 1960s Japan, which was ushered in by the demonstrations against the Japan-American Security Treaty—Anpo—in 1960. How was this political identity of “generation” constructed, both by observers outside the student movements and within, and what were the political implications and problems with “generation” as a political identity? In this paper, I surveyed English-language sociological literature on the Japanese student movement from both outside the movement and outside Japan to test how “generation” was used to explain the political unrest of particularly the early 1960s in Japan to an international, and primarily American, audience. I have found that in many cases, the emphasis upon youth or “generation” was used to downplay the student movement and quarantine its concerns from those of the broader Japanese public and Japanese social movements. These Anglophone discussions of Japanese social movements and a rowdy or confused young “generation” also often attribute this confusion to Japan’s “immature” democracy, setting up America’s democracy as “mature”—based on an assumption that the mature modern democratic state has a legitimate monopoly not only on violence, but also on politics. This discourse sets the scene, too, for an ironic switch: America, and the rest of the “mature” Western democratic world would face their own “generational” turmoil in the late 1960s.

Gregory Scott

Columbia University

Secularization and Statecraft: The Buddhist Nationalism of Dài Jìtáo 戴季陶 (1890-1949)

Secularization theory attempts to explain how societies become modernized by describing a progressive differentiation of public spheres, accompanied by the decline of religious influence and its relegation to a separate realm. The development of state powers and religious groups in China during the Republican period (1911-1949), however, suggests that in this case, the two realms of statecraft and religion continued to be closely aligned. The convergence of religious and political concerns can be seen through the work of Dài Jìtáo (1890-1949), a Guomindang party elder and lay Buddhist who sought to meet the national crises of external aggression and internal disintegration through Buddhist means. Dài saw the root of China's crises in the degenerate morals of the people, and sought to propagate Buddhist ethical teachings to reform the citizenry; he saw contemporary statecraft as alienating the people of China's border regions, and sought to unify them through a shared faith; he saw China as one among many Buddhist nations of the world, and sought to raise international support for China by appealing to this common patrimony. The present paper argues that the work of Dài and others indicates that Buddhists of this time actively played a role in the public sphere, and indeed were much more involved in political activities than they had been prior to the twentieth century. It suggests therefore that the relationship between religion and the state in this period of Chinese history may be more complex than that described by secularization theory.

Jae-ho Shin

University of Pennsylvania

Hakata: its subordination and independence in a medieval transnational space

Hakata in the medieval age was a transnational place in two meanings: as a center of international trade, it was where border-crossing people, commodities, and cultures converged; as a hub of the littoral society including Kyushu and western Honshu, it was a marginal space where land-based “national” dominance conflicted with centrifugal, autonomous factors. From the former perspective, Hakata kept its transnationality throughout the whole medieval period; if anything, its cosmopolitan diversity increased as European newcomers came to the city. From the latter perspective, however, its transnationality weakened during the period. Although the early medieval Hakata residents, including even the Chinese merchants, were nominally subordinate to kenmon overlords – religious, military, or noble elites who coruled medieval Japan – for mutual profit, the weakness of the kenmon structure and consequent rise of local warrior clans, and changes in East Asian world order resulted in thorough dependence on the terra-centric power structure which ultimately led to the centripetal national system of Kinsei kokka. These two different transnational attributes and their opposing trajectories in medieval Hakata bespeak the process of incorporating marginality into a nation-state in the long-run. This is one of the characteristics of pre-modern transnationalism which is easy to overlook, but it is critically different from modern transnationalism.

Yayoi Shionoiri

Columbia University

The Crystallization of an Artistic Movement – Investigating the Theoretical Genesis of the Direct Action Mode of Contemporary Art Practice in Post-Anpo Japan

In 1962, a Japanese art magazine, Keishō, organized a symposium to bring together conceptual artists under what later came to be known as the Direct Action mode. This symposium was instrumental in shaping the thinking behind these artists' practices. By focusing on this iconic moment in the crystallization of theories underlying certain artistic practices in 1960s Japan, this research identifies how these artists defined their work and described their goal in inciting individuals to reflect on quotidian life. Artists working in the Direct Action modeattempted to engage the everyday world with their art. In 1960, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, commonly referred to as Anpo in Japan, was ratified by Japan and United States over massive leftist opposition in Japan. During the post-Anpo period, many artists were led to rethink their practices. For example, in 1962, certain members of Hi-Red Center held the Yamanote-sen Event, an interventionist event that directly engaged with the surroundings, where the artists – wearing normal-looking business suits – carried out their enigmatic, performance-like activities in subway cars crowded with commuters. Through an examination of the documentation on Hi-Red Center and its activities, this research finds that the creation of its art – while defined as neither artistic nor political by Hi-Red Center – encompassed elements of both. This paper concludes that such cryptic artistic practice was specific to the zeitgeist, both in terms of its messages, as well as the ephemeral nature of its creative output.

Jonathan Smith

University of Pennsylvania

Old Chinese Xí 習 as ‘Animate’

The word xí 習, from an Old Chinese *zip (or some such), is on numerous occasions associated in early texts with the performance of ritual as well as with learning; generally, it is understood to mean “repeat”, “review” or “habituate”. However, the word is also associated with the flight of birds, a strand of meaning that would account for the component yǔ 羽 ‘wings, feathers’ in the word’s graphical representation. Dai Tong戴侗 in his Liu Shu Gu 六書故 reconciles these two senses in a manner that has by now become conventional: 習，鳥肄飛也。…引之則凡數數扇闔者皆謂之習。 Xí indicates a bird learning to fly. By extension, all acts of repeated spreading and closing are termed xí. This paper argues for an understanding of the etymology of xí more subtle than that of simple “repetition”. The binome *zip-zip from the Shi Jing (習習谷風, Mao #35) is illustrative, as a convincing link to the word’s more familiar senses is here not to be achieved by claiming, as does Schuessler (1987), that the wind comes in “repeated gusts”: rather, the syllable must be treated as centrally onomatopoeic, akin to English “whip”, or indeed, “flap”. In its extended uses, I suggest, the OC word *zip means not to “repeat” or “review” as such, but rather to animate, vivify or inspirit: 學而時習之，不亦說乎？ (Analects 1.1) To learn and then at the proper times act out [this knowledge]—is this not indeed a delight? This perspective complicates a view of the Chinese conception of transference of knowledge and tradition as based on imitation, a clear element of the semantics of words such as xúe 學, xiào 孝, and so forth. Ritual and all learning, while inherited from ages gone by, were not simply to be repeated but instantiated: imbued with new spirit, “flapped” into new life, for the present.

Rona Eun-Kyung Sohn

University of Kansas

Reception Study of a Transnational Film D-War in South Korea: Vacillation between nationalism and transnationalism

In this paper, I explore the discourse on Korean-Hollywood transnational film D-War (aka Dragon Wars), specifically how the South Korean audience’s debate developed, peaked and died down. On August 1, 2007, after the release of D-War in South Korea, the most debated controversy over a single film began. The South Korean audiences’ ideas on D-War are divided into two parts: as it is based on nationalism, as seen by the first segment views is that the film is a source of South Korean pride and a successful blockbuster that South Koreans should support, while the other argues South Koreans should maintain an objective perspective and asserts that it is low quality, making it shameful to the South Korean film industry. The production of “transnational” films in contemporary South Korean cinema is not a new trend. There have been several films co-produced with other countries, especially involving Asian countries. However, in the case of D-War, the fact that the film was produced in conjunction with Hollywood seemed significant to South Korean audiences. They expressed excessive nationalistic feelings toward the film. By researching the discourse surrounding the film, I examine the different responses and the implications for D-War. This study explores the South Korean audiences’ response, which shows vacillation between nationalism and transnationalism. The paper attempts to answer the question that emerges in response to the active transnational film production in the globalized film industry and its meaning for South Korean audiences.

Song, Ui Won

Baekseok University, South Korea

Two Points of View about the Understanding in the Da Xue (大學) : on gewuchiji(格物致知) of Zhu Xi(朱熹) and Jung Yak Yong(丁若鏞)

The deepest philosophical significance of Da Xue lies in gewuchiji(格物致知). This is the matter of ‘how to understand things’. In this paper, I will examine Zhu Xi and Jung Yak Yong’s points of view on gewu(格物). Zhu Xi argues that everybody is born with li(理), the innate ability to understand things. However, he argues that we cannot understand things directly by li. Only after the investigation of things by gewu can our minds understand the nature of things. Zhu Xi observes that gewu has three meanings – ziwu(卽物), qiongli(窮理), zhiji(至極). Qiongli is at the heart of gewu. Understanding cannot be separated from concrete objects, and we should investigate things into the extreme end(極). Zhu Xi interpreted ge(格) as ‘to reach’(至). In contrast, Jung Yak Yong tooked the word ge(格) as meaning ‘to measure’(量度). He interpreted gewu as ‘to measure the fundamentals and ends of things’. He explains that chiji(致知) is the investigation of which comes first and next, according to the nature of things and process of affairs. In conclusion, Zhu Xi tried to understand the nature of universe by investigation of objects through an epistemological leap, guantong(貫通), Jung Yak Yong sought to suggest a method of practicing the virtue according to the nature of universe.

Wayne Soon

Princeton University

Transnational Making of Modern Fujian - Tan Kah Kee and the Ascendancy of the KMT State, 1910s to 1940s

This paper examines the way Overseas Chinese cross physical borders and maintain bridges with their homelands to compete with changing political powers within China proper. I focus on the relations between the homeland and venue societies in Fujian and British Malaya during the Republican period. Through tracing the contestations between Tan Kah Kee (陳嘉庚 1864-1961), a prominent Overseas Hokkien based in British Malaya, and Chen Yi (陳儀 1883-1950), the Kuomintang (KMT) governor of Fujian from 1934 to 1941, I argue that Tan’s transnational politicking in Fujian was contingent on the strength of the KMT state. From the 1920s to 1934, Tan’s investments steadily increased in the province because of a weak Fujian state. However, Chen’s appointment resulted in an unprecedented increase in state penetration in Fujian, particularly in the economic and educational sphere. Chen and his allies created numerous state-owned enterprises to compete with the Overseas Chinese. The education system, which represented enduring investments in social capital by the Overseas Chinese in Fujian, came similarly under siege. Despite several attempts at rapprochements, ultimately the demands of a modernizing KMT state clashed with the Overseas Chinese’s longstanding economic and social interests. Moreover, an active colonial government in Singapore also played a crucial mediating role in their contestations. Through a transnational approach, my study fills the gap of the scholarship on Republican Fujian and complicates the current presentist historiography on both leaders.

Brian Steininger

Yale University

The category of "zoku" in Minamoto Shitagō's Wamyō ruiju shō

The Wamyō ruiju shō (“Categorized Collection of Japanese Terms”) is a reference book combining features of a categorical encyclopedia [leishu] and a Chinese-Japanese character dictionary. It was compiled in the 930s on the order of Emperor Daigō’s daughter Kinshi, because she felt that the encyclopedias and dictionaries then available were inadequate to answering her uncertainties about the “everyday world.” A typical entry in the dictionary will give a heading character, followed by a citation from a Chinese source (often a rhyming dictionary) illustrating that character, and finally a citation from a dictionary or glossary for the kun reading of the heading character. Through comparison with other domestically-produced dictionaries, glossaries, and encyclopedias, we can make some preliminary conclusions about the intended use of Wamyō ruiju shō, and from there consider modes of literacy operative in tenth-century Japan. In this talk, I will focus on the category of zoku (vulgar/common/unorthodox), both as it is used in notes in the text of the dictionary itself, and as it is theorized by Shitagō in his preface to the work, a key early document of Japanese discourse on writing and language. I argue that the “Japanese/Chinese” binary we often perceive organizing Heian literature is destabilized by engagement with contemporaneous ideology.

Lenore Szekely

University of Michigan

Chastity, Suicide, and Li Yu’s (1611-1680?) Search for Professional Authorship Beyond the Patronage System as Reflected in his Paired Soles

Li Yu’s 李漁 Paired Soles(比目魚) is a story of how the love of an actress, Liu Miaogu, conquers death. Miaogu’s staging her own death as a display of resistance and chastity against her sale to a wealthy theater patron may be interpreted as reflecting Li’s multi-faceted response to the production and consumption of drama and theater in seventeenth-century China. Unlike the amateur literati playwrights of previous centuries, who relied on independent wealth or patronage, Li was dependent upon the success of his plays and other writings in the market. Li projects his feelings about being caught between the old patronage system and the new market system in Bimuyu. Miaogu, like Li’s literary productions, is valued for her uniqueness, and commodified via her attempted purchase by the theater patron. The latter represents Li’s discomfort with the patronage system, as he is only interested in the conspicuous display of his wealth and power. The fact that the patron neither truly understands nor appreciates theater is revealed when Miaogu uses her acting skills to mount an impromptu verbal assault on him in front of the spectators he wished to impress, before committing suicide to protect the purity and singularity of her love for a fellow actor. The scene devoted to determining the disposition of the money put up to purchase Miaogu shows Li’s simultaneous desire to protect his intellectual property from piracy and successfully sell his literary productions to as many potential consumers as possible.

Shiho Takai

Columbia University

For Whom Does the Hototogisu Cry: Exploration of Poetic image of Hototogisu and keijō style in Shinsen Manyōshū

Shinsen Manyōshū consists of two volumes that are often said to have been compiled by Sugawara no Michizane, in the late-ninth-to-early-tenth century, the time between Manyōshū and Kokinshū. The volumes are made of pairs of juxtaposed Japanese poems (waka) and Sino-Japanese poems (kanshi) on the same theme, and are ordered into five sections – four according to seasons, followed by one of love poems. However, some of the poems in the seasonal sections are love-related, and some of the love poems are seasonal. Hototogisu (cuckoo bird) is among the popular themes in the entire anthology, and is associated both with summer and love. In fact, Hototogisu was a very popular theme in the world of waka from the time of Manyōshū and remained popular in Kokinshū; the poetic convention of hototogisu was already well established in the world of waka by the time of Shinsen Manyōshū. However, it was not a popular poetic theme in the world of kanshi before Shinsen Manyōshū, despite the popularity of the bird as a theme in Chinese poetry composed in China. The use of Hototogisu in Shinsen Manyōshū is an interesting mixture of the Hototogisu poetic conventions of China and Japan, plus conventions relating to love poems and kanshi, among other things. In this paper, I will compare how the juxtaposition of two genres, waka andkanshi, mutually influenced each other to broaden the use of hototogisu and the meaning of love poems in Shinsen Manyōshū.

Wayne Wei Yu, Tan

Harvard University

When Nomads Wrote: An Investigation of the Khitan Language and Scripts

In 907 A.D., a group of nomadic people called the Khitans overthrew the Tang dynasty and established the Liao Dynasty. This signaled the age of conquest dynasties in northern China, ending with the fall of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. The Khitans did one important thing that caught on with the Tangut and Jurchen conquest dynasties – they invented their own scripts. These scripts known as the Khitan Large and Small scripts continue to intrigue modern scholars as they remain largely undeciphered. First, why did the Khitans invent the scripts? Second, what is the scripts’ significance for today’s linguists and historians? This paper argues that the Khitan language was written with the Khitan scripts in court documents to supplant Chinese language and scripts as the new iconic language of political dominance. Facility with the scripts was a privileged knowledge closely guarded within Khitan ruling clans. Using textual sources, I introduce a comparative method for reconstructing the Khitan language encoded in the scripts. I examine Janhunen’s (2003)1 classification of the Khitan language as a Para-Mongolic language and argue against the conventional dendritic model for language descent. In the Khitans’ context, cross-linguistic lexical similarities are better explained by areal contacts. This has new implications for understanding genetic affiliations of languages in Eurasia where geographical boundaries are fluid and speakers have had an extended history of violent conquests and intercultural assimilations.

Ori Tavor

University of Pennsylvania

The Ritual Bond: Sacrifice and the Mythical Birth of the Zhou People

This paper will deal with what can be considered the first attempt to formulate a ritual theory in ancient China, which comes in a form of an ode. This ode, called "The Birth of the People" (shengmin, 生民) appears in the Book of Odes (Shijing,詩經) and contains a mythical narrative, describing the unusual birth of Houji (后稷), the first ancestor of the Zhou people, as a result of ritual activities conducted by Houji's mother Jiang Yuan and directed toward the deity Shangdi (上帝). I will argue that former interpretations of this ode were highly influenced by later reformulation of this myth, written in the Han dynasty. Using modern theories of ritual, myth and sacrifice, advocated by French scholars in the 20^th century, I will offer a different reading of this myth, analyzing it as an attempt to legitimize and give a theoretical basis to certain rituals by way of connecting them to various deities and cultural heroes. Houji, the father of the Zhou and the initiator, as well as the victim, of the sacrifice, is depicted in the ode as the crucial link between them and Shangdi. By reciting this myth, in a form of a religious hymn, during the performance of the agrarian fertility sacrifices initiated by Houji, the Zhou people acknowledge his value and in the same time renew and reinforce the bond between them and their god.

Cindi Textor

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Haunted by Words: Language and Identity in Kim Sŏk-pŏm's Mandogi yūrei kitan (The Legend of the Ghost of Mandogi)

One major theme in the study of zainichi Koreans (the Korean diaspora in Japan) has been the link between language and identity. This was especially true in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the second generation zainichi (many of whom spoke only Japanese) were reaching adulthood, and when zainichi authors such as Ri Kaisei began to discuss the significance of Koreans writing in Japanese.It is in this climate that Kim Sŏk-pŏm's 1971 novel, Mandogi yūrei kitan (The Legend of the Ghost of Mandogi) was published. On its surface, Mandogi is a historical novel set during the Cheju Massacre of 1948, but it has also been read as an allegory for zainichi existence in the present. In this paper, I go one step further and read the novel as Kim's reaction to the notion that language, words, names, and so on, are equipped to define one's identity. After a brief discussion of of the Cheju Massacre and its implications in the histories of both Korea and Japan, I explore a few ways in which the novel rejects dichotomies like “Japanese versus Korean,” and in doing so, points to the very inability of language or names to define identity. Drawing from the numerous names used to refer to the novel's protagonist and their inability to adequately describe him, from the use of Buddhist rhetoric to critique language, and from the lack of stability and trustworthiness in the narrative itself, I argue that Kim uses Mandogi to resist attempts to pigeonhole him, or the zainichi population in general, through language.

Bonnie Tilland

University of Washington

Intimate Public Spaces and Alternative Sociality in Recent South Korean Television Dramas

As Korean TV dramas since the early 2000s (the beginning of the Hallyu, or “Korean Wave” phenomenon across Asia) have been consciously produced with both domestic and international viewers in mind, producers have sought out increasingly exotic foreign filming locations, idyllic rural Korean sites, and historical reconstructions to suit all tastes, defining the nation in the space between urban and rural, Korea and other, past and present. In addition to more obvious changes in variety of locales or production values, subtle changes in portrayals of social relationships are visible through the shifting of spatial relationships or the unfolding of plots in the intimate sphere of home or the public space of work in recent TV dramas. Many of the most popular “trendy dramas” (dramas set in the contemporary moment with plots revolving around romantic and family relationships) play with notions of femininity and masculinity in the workplace or in family life. I argue in this paper that the introduction of various kinds of gender bending in mainstream Korea television dramas brings into relief shifting perspectives on changing family values and alternative social configurations in South Korea. By investigating ways in which the Korean “family values” of these dramas are constructed, this research has the potential to contribute to understandings of subjectivity amidst rapid social change, as well as practices of national and global citizenship through media consumption and production.

Yuri Tokinoya

Columbia University

The Lady Chatterley Trial and Sakaguchi Ango’s Critiques

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover by Itō Sei was published by Oyama Shoten in 1950, the book sold approximately 200,000 copies within two months, aided by an atmosphere of sexual liberation in occupied Japan. Soon after, however, it was confiscated by the Tokyo police and the author indicted for obscenity charges by the Tokyo prosecutor’s office. The Lady Chatterley trial lasted for six years, with the Supreme Court finally convicting the author and the publisher guilty in 1957. This trial gained much public attention and concern, for it brought to the forefront critical issues surrounding the gag law, the right of free speech, and the definition of obscenity in literary works. The Lady Chatterley trial engendered much interest among contemporary novelists and critics, and some of them actually sat in the public gallery to view the trial’s proceedings. Sakaguchi Ango, one of the most prominent novelists and critics of postwar Japan, was one such individual. He recorded the first and the last trial sessions as a journalist and continued to write about the case in a series of essays, typified by Chippokena ono (The Small Ax, 1951). Through an analysis of Sakaguchi’s critiques regarding the Lady Chatterley trial, my paper seeks to reveal his interpretation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his attitude towards censorship, and his sense of responsibility as a writer.

Daniel Trambaiolo

Princeton University

Imagining Chinese Medical Traditions from Song to Ming

Throughout the history of Chinese medicine, literate practitioners have sought to attract patients and promote their practices in part by reference to traditions inherited from earlier generations. This paper attempts to analyse this issue in the context of one of Chinese medicine's most creative periods, from the late Northern Song to the beginning of the Ming Dynasty (c.1100-1400). During this period, government promotion of medicine combined with the literati's continuing fascination with medicine gave birth to new concepts of the body and disease, new therapeutic strategies, specializations within medicine (including women's and children's medicine), and a flourishing medical print industry. Despite these novelties, doctors continued to stress the continuities between their own practice and that of past tradition, whether that continuity was with the antiquity of the medical classics or with recent lineages of medical teaching. By comparing doctors' explicit statements on the nature of medical tradition with their own medical descriptions and prescriptions, I argue on the one hand that discourses of tradition are indispensable to our understanding of Chinese medical history, but on the other hand that the complexities of medical practice place limits on the degree to which medical practice has ever been determined by tradition alone.

Hsuan-Li Wang

Columbia University

Ceremonial/Vulgar Customs: Confucius says: "Look for the lost ceremonial in the vulgar."-- On the Dialectics and Dialogues between Confucianism and Religion

Since Zhou Dynasty, Confucians have been the reformer-inheritors of the ceremonial, with which they conduct behaviors and coordinate relations in the hierarchical order. The religious activities of worshipping gods and ancestors constitute the major part of the Confucian rites, and the inquiries into the meanings and values behind them have formed the cosmology, the ethical and moral doctrines and the views of gods and ghosts in Confucianism. The essay will research how Confucianism separated itself from the original religious tradition by ethicize/de-religionize the ceremonial rites and how it interacts with the common religious customs in the two-way dialectical process of the ceremonial education’s transforming the customs and the customs’ popularizing/ re-religionizing the Confucian rites. With the temporal-spatial différance, the ceremonial have been gradually localized and compounded with Taoist and Buddhist rituals and therefore formed the “ceremonial customs” performed repeatedly by the ordinary people in their religious living of the compound of the three teachings. It is by means of the ceremonial education and through the ceremonial customs that Confucianism has been able to take roots, have great influences and establish the fundamental structure in Chinese culture and living aesthetics. After the modernization of East Asia, the ceremonial customs have been condemned as the vulgar. However, based on the above analysis, the essay will suggest that the ceremonial customs constitute the very field where the dialogues between Confucianism and religion have happened and could be continued and provide profound resources for rebuilding the lost meanings of Confucian rites nowadays.

Sixiang Wang

Columbia University

Early Ming-Chosŏn Relations and the Poems of Kwŏn Kŭn

In 1396, Kwŏn Kŭn (權近 1352-1409), an important figure in the early Chosŏn Dynasty (朝鮮1392-1910), lead a high-profile envoy mission to Ming China (明1368-1644) with the task of resolving a diplomatic misunderstanding caused by a diplomatic document drafted by Chŏng Tojŏn (鄭道傳 d. 1398) in 1396 that the Ming Emperor had found objectionable. The Ming Emperor demanded his extradition. Chŏng Tojŏn, however was an important member of the Chosŏn and King T'aejo (太祖 r. 1392-1398) was unwilling to give him. Instead, Kwŏn Kŭn volunteered to go to Nanjing to help resolve the matter. During his stay in Nanjing, Kwŏn composed twenty-four verses at the command of the Emperor. Sino-Korean relations during this period has often been studied under the framework of the “Chinese World Order.” This paper will aim to show, through the examination of Kwŏn's poems and contextualizing them in their historical context, that the early relationship between Chosŏn Korea and Ming China, far from fitting a stable configuration of suzerian-tributary relations, needed to be contested and negotiated. Though classical poetry was only one facet of how Chosŏn-Ming relations were negotatied, the poetry of Kwŏn Kŭn articulated a particular vision of Korea's relationship vis-a-vis China, appealing to a larger cultural imaginary rooted in a classical tradition common to both countries.

Matt Waters

Columbia University

Absence as Object: Xu Bing and Critical Practice

My paper uses a brief quote from Jacques Derrida’s essay Force and Signification as a tool to elaborate on aspects of Xu Bing’s artistic practices. Characterization of Xu Bing’s art presents a challenge to the critic, but my paper nevertheless puts forward three foundational elements which can be traced through much of his work: participatory interaction, “pure absence” and a highly meticulous conception of play. These self-styled elements are explained and developed with brief references to some of Xu Bing’s better-known works. Finally, my paper explores its exegetical limits in a discussion of Xu Bing’s Wu Street project, a work which directly confronts contemporary conventions of art criticism and is frequently construed as a meta-critical enterprise.

Madeleine S. Wilcox

University of Pennsylvania

Time, Revolution and Subjectivity in the film New Women

The rise of the “New Woman" has been intricate part of the Chinese modernization project during the first half of the Twentieth century and the subject of works in nearly every type of popular medium of the era, from plays and novellas to film. Many leading reformers and writers have offered up visions for the role of women in their changing society. The 1935 film New Women, the last film of the silent screen star Ruan Lingyu, was a major contributor to the “New Woman” debate and the development of the larger revolutionary discourse. The conventional reading of the film, and in particular its climatic death scene, has underscored the failure of the bourgeois female and the rise of a new model proletariat woman. However, a closer look at the film reveals the schism between the two female figures should not be considered as quite so rigid and essential. Emphasizing the importance of temporality, this paper will first examine how a Marxist dialectic is presented through the use of montage, and then go on to highlight the ways in which the subjectivity of the film undercuts the rigidity of class distinctions to argue for a more inclusive form of progressivism and revolution. Based on this reinterpretation, New Women can not only be considered as part of the emerging Bildungsroman tradition in Chinese literature and film but also can help to define the limitations and possibilities for the new class revolutionary women.

Steven Wills

Columbia University

Who’s Got the Right? — Firefighters and Status Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Edo

Edo’s townsman firefighting brigade, the machibikeshi kumiai, was established in 1718 as one of the many reforms associated with the Kyōhō period (1716-1736), and by the end of the eighteenth century these commoners had asserted themselves as the core of the city’s firefighting institution. The fire brigade drew its membership from Edo’s large pool of day laborers, men of relatively low social status who relied on the patronage of the city’s elites—both military and commoner—for their livelihood. Rather than receiving salaries for protecting neighborhoods from fire, they earned exclusive rights to perform a wide range of odd jobs in the areas they served. However, the terms of their relationships with neighborhood officials, and even within their own ranks, were not always clear, and disputes frequently developed over issues such as territory, promotion, and even how to define the “work” performed by firemen. While the townsmen firefighters were notorious for engaging in all sorts of street violence, behavior that has already drawn the attention of historians, their non-violent methods for addressing grievances and negotiating settlements are less well understood. In this paper, I examine an 1844 dispute involving the foremen and laborers of the fire brigade’s Sixth Division, officials from the neighborhoods they served, and the bakufu administrators in charge of the brigade. This case reveals that even the firefighters’ marginal status brought privileges that were the source of their livelihood, yet the extent of those privileges could be contested or renegotiated at any time.

Lily Wong

University of California, Santa Barbara

Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan: The Shaw Brothers’ Soft-Core Imaginations of a Chinese Utopia

Once second in production only to Hollywood, the Shaw Brothers’ success have been argued to be their construction of a “Chinese utopia”— an idealized nonplace marketed to feed Chinese diaspora and also win over global visibility. Notions of “utopia” provokes questions of transnational historical writing, shifting into a metaphysical domain its boundaries no longer fit under geo-political limits nor does it necessarily follow progressive history. Interestingly, a good portion of the Shaw Brothers’ inventory is soft-core porn, a genre seen as in itself a “utopian” medium to negotiate simulated desires. Many of these softcore productions allude to ancient courtesan folklore, giving rise various levels of negotiations— Produced in sensualized form and set in ancient China, this orgasmic wholeness (while fetishizing imaginations of “China”) is simulated elsewhere; as in turn “realities” of the Chinese nation-state is obscured. By alluding to ancient courtesan folklores in particular, the films join in with the thrusts between detteritorializing and retteritorializing desires the ambiguious “courtesan” figure brings to the cultural imaginary. I’ll focus specifically on Intimate Confessions of A Chinese Courtesan (1972), a marketing success which led to the making of its sequel Lust for Love of a Chinese Courtesan (1984), two films respectively marking the high and low points of the Shaw empire. By comparing the two films, I aim to historicize how the Shaw Brothers’ soft-core production (like the courtesans portrayed) performs a flexible “Chinese signifier,” a fantasized medium which holds tight to imaginations of a nation while titillating transnational desires in transformation.

Qiong Yang

The Ohio State University

The Exit of Poets: Reconstruction of Ideal Personality of Intellectuals in 1940s~1950s China

When examining the cultural choices of a nation-state at its turning points, what we might take into consideration is what it actually chose to adopt. However, what the culture chose to forget or neglect, whether deliberately or not, worth paying attention to. These are the secret areas of a nation-state: what it would rather not expose to others. During the 1940s to early 1950s, there was an important event among the many poets staying in Chongqing, China: the "Poets' Festival". The date of this event was Duanwu , in commemoration of the great poet Qu Yuan. Intellectuals, not only poets, joined it and wrote articles, discussing the idea personality of Chinese literati. Qu Yuan was set as the cultural hero, so the discussion was actually in the form of questing what kind of person Qu Yuan was. Various opinions were published; the central issue was to whom Qu Yuan was loyal to: the emperor, or his people in Chu (楚), or the broader "China"? Surprisingly or not, this event was forgotten at once when the People's Republic was established, both by the power and by the literati themselves. The fist part of this paper makes a historical description of the event, using some rarely mentioned old materials; then I examine why the event was totally forgotten, and why poets were left alone in the People's Republic period.

Zhiyi Yang

Princeton University

Peony and Plum: Su Shi's Flora Connoisseurship and the Transition of Aesthetic Ideals

Peony and plum, the representative flora beauties in China, arguably also represent the intellectual zeitgeist of Tang and Song respectively, as literati in both dynasties agreed with alacrity. If peony had an overwhelming sensuous appeal, it nevertheless failed to find a legitimate voice in the intrinsically Confucian moralistic value system, for its very sensuousness and its accompanied artificiality. Plum, on the contrary, was reputed as the recluse's companion and celebrated for its moral symbolism. The present essay aims to discuss the antipodal aesthetic ideals and their different implications in the dialogue between man and nature-namely, the interplay of human nature, humanized nature, and the inhuman nature-through the case study of Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037-1101). Attracted by peony at his youth in Hangzhou, Su condemned its sensuousness, even though he silmultaneously justified its attraction in the Buddhist dialectics of form/beauty and emptiness. Yet since the beginning of his exile, plum ascended in a symbolic system to be his alter-ego. Hence ironically, a plant which needs most human attendance like peony could not find its legitimate discourse, hence remains silent, as a mere object; while plum, whose beauty is perceived as autonomous and self-sufficient, would be identified as an eloquent alter ego of the perceiving subject, appropriated into the cultural system of significance. It reveals a dilemma of the aesthetics of nature, that whenever nature is aestheticized, even for its eccentricity or autonomy, the human conquest of it has already begun.

Christina Yi

Columbia University

Between the Literal and the Literary: An Examination of the In-Between in Kim Sa-ryang’s “Tenma”

Although Kim Sa-ryang currently enjoys a posthumous reputation in South Korea as an “anti-Japanese” writer, his literary works slip between the cracks of colonial identity, maneuvering deftly in that space between “anti” and “Japanese.” Born in Pyongyang in 1914, Kim grew up under the shadow of Japan’s strict military rule and lived to see its end. His short story “Tenma,” which was first published in the Japanese magazine Bungei shunju in 1940, is remarkable for the way it explores the contradictions and inconsistencies of Japan’s late imperialist policies. This paper examines how Kim’s depiction of the would-be collaborator Genryū deconstructs the boundaries of colonial space, revealing in its stead an ambivalent, unstable sphere of double-consciousness. Drawing upon M.M. Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and polyphony, I center the focus of my analysis on Genryū’s in-between nature, as represented by the various categories of Japanese imperial subject, collaborator, madman/fool, and spy. By problematizing the reading of the story as strictly “resistance literature,” I hope to prove the need for a more nuanced examination of the ways in which colonial discourse simultaneously shapes, disrupts, and reflects identity formation.

Dan-ju Claire Yu

UC Riverside

“Mozart Is Thinking of Chairman Mao”: Cultural Translation in Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

In Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie explains migrant writers’ “double perspective”(19) as both insiders and outsiders in the worlds they describe. Through redescription, migrant writers reconstruct and negotiate the homeland that is both being remembered and imagined. Dai Sijie, a Chinese writer who moved in France in 1984, represents precise such double perspective as a migrant writer. Dai won immediate fame with his novel, Balzac et La Tailleuse Chinoise when it was first published in 2000. This semi-autobiographical novel delineates Dai Sijie’s teenage years in the backward countryside during Cultural Revolution. Two years later, Dai adapted his own novel into a film, which won him international attention as a French filmmaker. Dai’s identity as a migrant writer who writes about his memories and experiences of his youth to audiences in his current residing country poses interesting question on cultural translation. On the one hand, Balzac articulates experiences of Cultural Revolution through an autobiographical air of expression; on the other hand, such memories are reiterated with a light-hearted, nostalgic and almost orientalist point of view. The gap between historical reality and personal memories parallel the problems between experiences and expression. Balzac shows Dai’s identity as a migrant writer who has to constantly struggles and negotiates between his home country, China and current country, France. This essay traces the process of translation in ideas and memories through the “re-education” of the female protagonist and argues that Dai, as a migrant author, negotiates his identity through subversion and reiteration of Maoist ideology.

Huiwen (Helen) Zhang

Yale University

From cursed moment to blessed resurrection: The Miracle at Zhao Pass

My paper explores a single text by Feng Zhi (1905-1993) that appropriates the canon of European literature to refashion the turning-point in one of the most popular Chinese legends – the legend of Wu Zixu (526-484 B.C.) – from a cursed moment into a blessed resurrection. Exploiting the ancient Wu Zixu-legend in a fresh manner, Feng Zhi transplanted the canon of European literature to Chinese classical soil in hopes of “a Chinese Renaissance” or even “a resurrection of China." Since, however, his mutual translation of the European and the Chinese canons requires a profound knowledge of both, Feng Zhi’s manifestation of “the noblest traditions” could only lead to a sublime failure. Although a cult text of the Chinese elite, Feng Zhi’s lyrical novel Wu Zixu (1943) remained otherwise inaccessible to both Chinese and Western audiences and became an ironical confirmation of Georg Brandes’s epigram (1899): “Truly, the work of art is a fortress, not an open city.” A close reading, however, of Feng Zhi’s metamorphosis of the wonder in Zhaoguan – one of many metamorphoses in Wu Zixu – may open this fortress: It reveals Feng Zhi’s unique understanding and creative reception of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Selige Sehnsucht, Novalis’ Hymnen an die Nacht, Rilke’s Sonnette an Orpheus, among other European classics, thereby illustrating one moment of his transformation of the vengeance of an exiled minister from Chu into a modern odyssey – a homeward journey of China’s lost generation in wartime (1937-1949).

Dewen Zhang

SUNY Stony Brook

Wu Jufang and Guangdong Children's Home and Schools: A Case Study of Women's Orphan Relief Work during the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945

The early period of the Second Sino-Japanese war witnessed an upsurge of Chinese nationalism. Chinese women were an integral part of the renewed patriotic movement. They were active both in the front as well as in the back. Many of them served in the front as soldiers, radio operators, nurses and war journalists. Those in the rear took an equal part contributing to the national efforts by encouraging their sons or husbands to the front, making clothes for the army, fund-raising for the war of resistance, and taking care of the elder and the orphaned. Women's work during the years of the war was inseparable for the final survival of the nation. Their efforts kept the army in the front fed, clothed and informed; their activities helped maintaining a sense of normal life in the back; and they kept these two parts of the nation informed with each other and thus maintained a sense of home and nation for Chinese people. This paper explores one aspect of women's war activities by addressing the important but often ignored issue of women's orphan relief work during the Second Sino-Japanese War, through examining Ms. Wu Jufang's role as the president of Guangdong Children's Home and Schools, through which she rescued, fed and offered education for more than 20,000 orphans of war. Drawing o materials of memoirs, personal accounts, diaries, war journals, this essay explores both the theoretical as well as the material contents of history: the relationship between Chinese nationalism and women's activities, and strategies Ms. Wu Jufang and her team of orphan relief adopted for surviving the war years.

Ling Zhang

The University of Chicago

Collecting the Ashes of Time: Temporality and Materiality of the Ephemeral Industrial Ruins in Wang Bing’s Documentary West of the Tracks (Tie Xi Qu, 2002)

With its mobility and vitality, immediacy and spontaneity, digital video appears in recent years to be a new and vigorous medium to depict and represent industrial ruins. One of the most outstanding examples of this new medium is Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing’s nine-hour long documentary West of the Tracks (2002), which records the slow demise of several factories in the industrial area Tiexi (“west of the tracks”) District, in Shenyang, a heavy industry base in Northeast China. Although not at the same stage of ruination, the various industrial structures, rusty machinery, and idling workers all evoke an atmosphere of obsolescence, and their materiality has eroded or transformed over time. Consequently, the overlayering of temporalities (the past, the present and the future) and materiality of the industrial ruins in West of the Tracks are inseparable and interdependent. With their disfigured and dysfunctional forms, and the disconcerting uncanniness they evoke, the industrial ruins seem to undermine the social order, blur clear-cut temporal boundaries, and release energy and creativity. Nonetheless, the physical resistance of industrial ruins is ephemeral and doomed to failure, as their destiny of being demolished or transformed into industrial museums, residential neighborhoods, and commercial districts is inevitable, even if they are have not yet matured and decayed enough. The multiple layers, stages and aspects of the evolution of industrial ruins converge under the gaze of the digital camera and the filmmaker’s presence, becoming standardized and immortalized in West of the Tracks. By bearing witness to the slow death and demolition of the factories, West of the Tracks achieves a status of ruin/relic in stabilizing and immortalizing ruins through digital image, transcending time and materiality.

Mi Zhao

Ohio State University

“Firewood Courtyard” in Urbanization

Qingdao was a German colony from 1897 to 1914. Not being an indigenous city, its urbanization actually was carried out by the colonial government, and over time the urbanization has waxed and waned. This paper attempts to take a microscopic perspective from the vicissitudes of a local community, “Firewood Courtyard”, to explore the role of the immigrant community in urbanization. The primary data are based on documents from oral history interviews from 2003-2008. As a colonial city, dualism is a birthmark that is reflected in its spatial, commercial and social structures. “Firewood Courtyard” is located on the border between colonist and native settlements and it also functions as a racial border. Hybridism is another characteristic of this community that is mirrored in its architectural design, environment, and life pattern. A new round of urbanization has been launched from the 1980s. This community again serves as a bridge for new immigrants, but racial border is replaced by class border. After a short time of economic boom it was turned down by the new urban plan, but appeared in corners of the city as a hallmark of good taste and good memories. It was also rebuilt in the nostalgia writings of intellectuals. Since the summer of 2008 it has been refurbished as a heritage project. Now it bridges past and present in a material and symbolic way.

Fang Zhou

Georgia Institute of Technology

Understanding “Public Sphere” and “Civil Society” in the Chinese Context

In addressing the issues of whether China ever had developed a form of “public sphere” or “civil society”, it is critical to separate these two terms and define “public sphere” and “civil society” in the context that Jurgen Habermas interpreted them. The public sphere contrasts with the private sphere in that in it is a spatial place where feelings are articulated, distributed, and negotiated by the collective community. Habermas pointed out that this concept of a public sphere existed in England since the 18^th century where coffee houses in London became the centers of literary criticism, which eventually led to economic and political discussions. It not only became a place for self-expression, it would become a platform or venue for public opinions and discussions. Under the capitalist system, the new bourgeois public sphere merged the public economic institutions with the private personal feelings to comprise a group of individuals who would debate, discuss and regulate civil society through constructive criticism. Civil society is made up of voluntary civic and social organizations and institutions that form the basis for a functioning society rather than a state-controlled system that used force. ¹ Habermas viewed the public sphere as a necessary condition, or precursor to the emergence of civil society. The public sphere had to exist first, before civil society could come into form. In China’s case, a similar notion of the “public sphere”, known as gong certainly existed, but unlike Europe, this Chinese gong never developed into a similar model of civil society. Often times, “public sphere” and “civil society” are lumped together, and are expressed in interconnected terms, but the reality is these two terms do not mean the same thing, and are essentially two different concepts. To examine China as a case study, it is important to interpret these two terms in a Chinese context, and not apply the same definitions, ideals, and standards of the Eurocentric model suggested by Habermas. The China-centered approach suggested examining China’s historical developments from China’s unique perspective, instead of applying Western notions and terms to describe China. Philip Huang’s third realm model is an excellent example of the need to interpret China’s history through the Sinocentric viewpoint. The two terms “public sphere” and “civil society” have two different meanings, and should not be linked together. Only by separating these two concepts, and understanding them in the Chinese context would it be appropriate to interpret, analyze and critique Chinese history and Chinese society accurately.

Yanfei Zhu

Ohio State University

Yunnanese image of True Body Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara: Other than China

The early twentieth century witnessed scholars’ rising interest in some art treasures attributed to Yunnan, China. Lying on the southwestern borderline of nowadays’ China, Yunnan has from time to time been demarcated away from and back to the territory of the central empire. The most frequently cited examples are three painting scrolls and a number of similar bronze image of Guanyin or Avalokitesvara from the kingdom of Dali (938-1253), one of the most famous regimes of Yunnan’s autonomy. Rather than re-examining the sources of the stylistic influences, which already has been exhaustively analyzed by previous scholars, this paper will argue, with the concentration on the repeated appearances of the Guanyin image of certain type, that these image manifest the psyche of the Yunnanaese rulers (maybe also its people) of that time. In this paper, stylistic analyses are selectively adopted to prove that the Yunanese imagery was derived from South or Southeast Asian prototypes rather than Chinese ones. Inscriptions on the bronze sculptures and the explanatory texts on the paintings, as well as the composition and arrangement of the paintings, are scrutinized in order to show the purposefulness of some choices made by the artists and the patrons, the Yunanese kings. All the above approaches will contribute to the tentative conclusion that the either hidden or open agenda of the patrons was that they were after a unique identity differentiating their kingdom from, not only Han China, but all other surrounding regimes.