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china review international
Volume 18 • Number 4 • 2011
Editor Roger T. Ames, University of Hawai‘i
Managing Editor Nicholas S. Hudson, University of Hawai‘i
Corresponding Editors ( Europe) Carine Defoort, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; (China)
An Pingqiu, Peking University; Liu Dong, Tsinghua University
Board of Advisors University of Hawai‘i Center for Chinese Studies Executive Committee
Board of Editors
Peter K. Bol, Harvard University
Cynthia J. Brokaw, Ohio State University
Susan Bush, J. K. Fairbank Center, Harvard
Chang Hao, Ohio State University
Paul A. Cohen, Wellesley College
Pamela Crossley, Dartmouth College
Patricia Ebrey, University of Washington
J. Mark D. Elvin, Australian National
University
Eugene Chen Eoyang, Indiana University
Joseph W. Esherick, University of California,
San Diego
Judith Farquhar, University of North
Carolina
R. Kent Guy, University of Washington
Stevan Harrell, University of Washington
Hsu Cho-yun, University of Pittsburgh
Lin Shuen-fu, University of Michigan
Perry Link, Princeton University
Andrew J. Nathan, Columbia University
Jean C. Oi, Stanford University
Daniel L. Overmyer, University of British
Columbia
Harold D. Roth, Brown University
Thomas G. Rawski, University of Pittsburgh
Vera Schwarcz, Wesleyan University
Helen F. Siu, Yale University
Andrew G. Walder, Stanford University
Robin D. S. Yates, McGill University
Anthony C. Yu, University of Chicago
Yü Ying-shih, Princeton University
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China Review
International
Volume 18
Number 4
2011
A Journal of Reviews of Scholarly Literature in Chinese Studies
features
The Life and Death of an Artisan Community in Modern China (reviewing Jacob
Eyferth, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a Community of
Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920–2000) Reviewed by Pauline
Keating 429
From Secularization to Categorization: A New Paradigm for the Study of Religion in
Modern China (reviewing Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious
Question in Modern China) Reviewed by J. Brooks Jessup 432
A New View of the Huainanzi (reviewing John S. Major, Sarah A. Queen, Andrew S.
Meyer, and Harold D. Roth, translators, The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and
Practice of Government in Early Han China) Reviewed by Nathan Sivin 436
Text and Tombs: A Fragile Relationship (reviewing Wu Hung, The Art of the Yellow
Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs) Reviewed by Armin Selbitschka 444
reviews
Roger Ames, Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary Reviewed by Joel Kupperman
450
Bamo Ayi, Stevan Harrell, and Ma Lunzy, Fieldwork Connections: The Fabric of
Ethnographic Collaboration in China and America Reviewed by Mary Scoggin
452
James Bellacqua, editor, The Future of China–Russia Relations Reviewed by
Emilian Kavalski 456
Kenneth E. Brashier, Ancestral Memory in Ancient China Reviewed by Armin
Selbitschka 459
Published by the
University of
Hawai‘i Center
for Chinese Studies
and University
of Hawai‘i Press
Shana J. Brown, Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese
Historiography Reviewed by Peter Zarrow 464
Wonsuk Chang and Leah Kalmanson, Confucianism in Context: Classic
Philosophy and Contemporary Issues, East Asia and Beyond Reviewed by Wu
Yun 469
Shin-yi Chao, Daoist Ritual, State Religion, and Popular Practices: Zhenwu
Worship from Song to Ming (960–1644) Reviewed by Thomas Michael 473
ii China Review International: Vol. 18, No. 4, 2011
Grace Ai-ling Chou, Confucianism, Colonialism, and the Cold War: Chinese
Cultural Education at Hong Kong’s New Asia College, 1949–1963 Reviewed by
Bernard H. K. Luk 477
Richard R. Cook and David W. Pao, editors, After Imperialism: Christian Identity
in China and the Global Evangelical Movement Reviewed by Franklin J. Woo 482
Andrew S. Erickson, Lyle J. Goldstein, and Carnes Lord, editors, China Goes to Sea:
Maritime Transformation in Comparative Historical Perspective Reviewed by
Jane Kate Leonard 486
Rosemary Foot and Andrew Walter, China, the United States, and Global Order
Reviewed by Steve Chan 496
Li-Ling Hsiao, The Eternal Present of the Past: Illustration, Theater, and Reading in
the Wanli Period, 1573–1619 Reviewed by Anne E. McLaren 498
The Curriculum Specialists at Primary Source, Inc., editors, China in the World:
A History since 1644 Reviewed by Jeremiah Jenne 502
Joan Judge, The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman
Question in China Reviewed by Sherry J. Mou 505
Nicholas Khoo, Collateral Damage: Sino-Soviet Rivalry and the Termination of the
Sino-Vietnamese Alliance Reviewed by Pierre Asselin 508
Y. C. Kong, Huangdi Neijing: A Synopsis with Commentaries Reviewed by John
Welden 510
Joachim Kurtz, The Discovery of Chinese Logic Reviewed by Benjamin A. Elman 513
Wing-Wah Law, Citizenship and Citizenship Education in a Global Age: Politics,
Policies, and Practices in China Reviewed by Yingjie Guo 517
Angela Ki Che Leung and Charlotte Furth, editors, Health and Hygiene in Chinese
East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century Reviewed by
Jia-Chen Fu 520
Danke Li, Echoes of Chongqing: Women in Wartime China Reviewed by Shana
Brown 523
Li Tang, East Syriac Christianity in Mongol-Yuan China Reviewed by Matteo
Nicolini-Zani 525
Xinru Liu, The Silk Road in World History Reviewed by Susan Whitfield 530
Sheldon H. Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature
and Visual Culture Reviewed by Belinda Kong 533
Ma Yuan, translated by Herbert J. Batt, introduction by Yang Xiaobin, Ballad of the
Himalayas: Stories of Tibet Reviewed by Steven J. Venturino 535
Table of Contents iii
R. Keith Schoppa, In a Sea of Bitterness: Refugees during the Sino-Japanese War
Reviewed by Stephen R. MacKinnon 542
Jiang Wu, Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in
Seventeenth-Century China Reviewed by Charles B. Jones 545
Fenggang Yang, Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule
Reviewed by Franklin J. Woo 549
works received 555
Features
The Life and Death of an Artisan Community in Modern China
Jacob Eyferth. Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a
Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920–2000.
Harvard East Asian Monographs 314. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009. 335 pp. 12 halftones, 2 maps, 3 tables, 12 illustrations. Hardcover
$45.00, isbn 978-0-674-03288-0.
© 2013 by University
of Hawai‘i Press
This is a wonderful book. On one level, it is a finely and skillfully constructed
history of a community of traditional artisans in rural China — people whom
modernizing states tend to consign to history’s rubbish bin. Throughout the book,
however, larger arguments related to the nature of revolution in twentieth-century
China are firmly in the foreground. The study is innovative and bold; it sets new
paradigms for research in the fields of modern China’s rural and industrial history.
The author did much of his fieldwork in the mid-1990s while based in Shiyan
village, Jiajiang County, about 150 kilometers south of Sichuan’s provincial capital,
Chengdu. With a lot of help from local people, he has been able to construct a
history that demonstrates the surprising resilience of a community of traditional
craftspeople in the face of vigorous efforts by modernizing state builders to
rationalize and standardize rural industry. Jacob Eyferth shows that neither the
Guomindang state nor the more “aggressively transformative” Maoist state
succeeded in changing “social and technological relations at the point of
production” in Jiajiang (emphasis added, p. 226). State authorities in the 1950s did
put time into mapping and documenting the papermakers’ craft, but made no
further attempt to commandeer it. Only when the post-Mao state dismantled
collectivism and elevated the household as the primary unit of production do we
see the beginnings of an erosion of the social structures and techniques that have
underpinned the handicraft paper industry.
This is not to say that the Maoist state had little impact at the grassroots level
in Jiajiang. In the tradition of China’s nationalist modernizers since the late Qing,
the Communist Party has always been committed to the development of big
industry, the urbanization of industry, and the “agrarianization” of what had
previously been a mixed economy in rural China (p. 9). During land reform, most
rural artisans were classified as “peasants” and pressured to grow their own food.
The Maoist state’s on-and-off “grain first” and local self-sufficiency drives forced
430 China Review International: Vol. 18, No. 4, 2011
papermakers to abandon their workshops, chop back the bamboo forests (defined
as “wasteland” by the government), and try to grow grain. Predictably, the Great
Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution did particular damage to the papermaking
industry, and to the trade that was its lifeblood. The trade had created, over time, a
set of “dense cultural and economic ties” between the paper districts and urban
centers. When the trade declined, “the Jiajiang hills became a periphery” (p. 153).
Periodic relaxations of the self-sufficiency-in-grain policy, however, enabled
the Jiajiang paper industry to survive, even if attenuated and damaged. And
post-Mao decollectivization gave it a new life. The return to pre-1949 ownership
and production arrangements, a soaring demand for paper, access to new tech
nologies (including chemicals), and improved transportation and infrastructure
are all important reasons why the industry recovered and flourished in the 1980s.
Of particular importance, in Eyferth’s argument, was the reactivation of traditional
norms of interhousehold mutual aid and reciprocity — long-established traditions
that had “survived in a permutated form under the collectives” (p. 231). The
restoration of old cooperative practices is what made “the remarkably quick
recovery of the industry possible” (p. 177). Cooperativism was not to last, however;
as papermaking became more strongly based in the household, the long-standing
traditions of mutual obligation, team work, and information sharing among
households began to fall into disuse.
For Eyferth, the reform-era erosion of communalism within Jiajiang society
marks the beginning of the end of the artisan community. He places most of the
blame for this on the state, both the Maoist and post-Mao states. Like modernizing
states almost everywhere, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) state builders
require “direct, unmediated access to the population” and are distrustful of
“historically grown, complex, and therefore opaque structures.” They have aimed
to replace indigenous institutions and structures with a “neat and transparent
order” that is based on a “plan” (p. 223). In the case of the Jiajiang papermakers,
the PRC state saw no value in a communalism that had a long history and local
roots and was defined by a craft, even though such factors made for the economic
success of the paper industry; the Maoists preferred to draw their plan on a blank
sheet of paper. The same blindness persists in the reform era. The new emphasis in
the 1980s on household self-sufficiency and independence flew in the face of the
need for cooperation among papermaking households. Eyferth finds that the “ideal
of small household independence locked people into workshops that were too
small to produce good paper” (p. 178).
At the heart of the study is an analysis of the function of skill in the artisan
community. In Eyferth’s analysis, the Jiajiang papermakers had long constituted a
“community of skills,” a “community of practice” (pp. 67, 222); processes of skill
acquisition and skill sharing were embedded in the webs of mutual dependence
and cooperation that structured the community and gave it its identity. Of pro
found significance, therefore, is the progressive deskilling of the Jiajiang workforce
Features 431
in the PRC era, a deskilling that typically accompanies modern state building and
the expansion of capitalist markets. During land reform in the 1950s, the new state
defined the papermakers as rural people (peasants); in so doing, it was defining
them as unskilled, backward, without quality (suzhi), and, therefore, unqualified
for urban citizenship (the hukou system institutionalizes these assumptions).
Initially the PRC government did judge as valuable the special skills entailed in
the production of handmade paper (there was, and still is, a market for it). But
modernization required that those skills be dug out of their rural setting and
transferred to urban centers. The attempts to transplant handicraft papermaking
and grow it away from the paper districts largely failed; this, says Eyferth, is
because the artisans’ skills “are socially embedded and difficult to reproduce
outside their social setting” (p. 41).
Jacob Eyferth’s book is a fascinating and highly readable local history that is
informed by an impressive knowledge of the techniques of handicraft paper
making developed by Jiajiang artisans (chap. 1). Equally important is the close
attention given to the ways in which kinship and community functioned among
the papermaking families (chap. 2). The author then uses the evidence provided by
his case study to make a broad and bold analysis of the impact of last century’s
nationalist state building on China’s huge rural population. Most of the conclu
sions are pessimistic. Eyferth laments the decline of community in rural Jiajiang
and a deskilling of craftspeople that is both cause and consequence of community
decline. He has no nostalgia for the bureaucratically enforced cooperativism of
the collective era, but regrets the post-Mao state’s close-to-active discouragement
of any homegrown economic cooperation. Interhousehold cooperation that is
not managed by the state rarely gets state support, even when it makes a lot of
economic sense; instead, a “state-backed ideology of household individualism” is
atomizing rural society (p. 216). Most particularly, Eyferth deplores the blindness
of twentieth-century modernizers who assume that rural means backward, who
take it as given that rural people are unskillful, and who, as a consequence, demean
and disenfranchise the several hundred million migrant workers who “build,
enrich and sustain China’s cities” (p. 229). Eyferth’s close study of a rural artisan
community in the Sichuan hill country shows that the modernizers’ assumptions
are seriously wrong. His book deserves to be very widely read.
Pauline Keating
Pauline Keating is a senior lecturer in history, specializing in rural China in the
twentieth century and, specifically, the history of rural cooperatives.
From Secularization to Categorization: A New Paradigm for
the Study of Religion in Modern China
Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer. The Religious Question in Modern
China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. xi, 464 pp. Hardcover
$40.00, isbn 978-0-226-30416-8.
of Hawai‘i Press
Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer’s new book offers an impressive survey of the
complex religious landscape in China from 1898 to the present. The grand scope
of this project is reminiscent of C. K. Yang’s 1961 publication, Religion in Chinese
Society: A Study of Contemporary Social Functions of Religion and Some of their
Historical Factors. Particularly within the last decade, the secularization thesis
advanced in Yang’s classic Weberian study has been buried under an avalanche of
research asserting the continued vitality and relevance of religion in modern
Chinese society and culture. Defying categorization as a volume of essays, a
research monograph, or a textbook, The Religious Question in Modern China offers
a powerful new synthesis of this recent scholarship from two scholars who have
long established themselves as leaders in the field. The book leverages the complimentary strengths of the “anthropologically minded historian” Goossaert in the
social history of Daoism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and
of the “historically minded anthropologist” Palmer in the sociology of cultivation
and redemptive movements during the second half of the twentieth century (p. 5).
However, the authors have also gone to great lengths to integrate meaningfully and
thoughtfully a vast range of scholarship across numerous disciplines and languages
into a highly fluent and coherent historical narrative that, nevertheless, remains
grounded in sociological detail. The result is a valuable and provocative work that
promises to “return religion to the center of modern Chinese history” (p. 4).
In crafting the book’s analytical approach, Goosaert and Palmer have
brought to fruition a discursive turn in the study of modern Chinese religion
that was pioneered by Prasenjit Duara and Rebecca Nedostup, as well as the
authors themselves, and inspired by theorists such as Talal Asad. Accordingly, the
book approaches “religion,” together with its foils, such as “superstition” and “evil
cult,” as new discursive categories that were imported in the twentieth century and
stretched imperfectly across the Chinese religious landscape primarily by the
interventionist programs of the modern secular state. The inherent incompleteness of these state programs, and the consequent instability of their discursive
categories, is signaled by the authors’ designation of “religion” in modern China
as an unresolved question. Within this approach, the secularization process,
which had once been seen by C. K. Yang and others as the inexorable march of
history, is reinterpreted as an ever incomplete “ideological project” (p. 5); the old
secularization thesis becomes displaced from its position as dominant p
aradigm
by a new categorization thesis that has been gaining ground in the field for over a
Features 433
decade. In order to avoid reproducing the official categorization of religion that
they seek to problematize as an object of analysis, the authors adopt an ecological
metaphor to construct a more flexible framework for conceptualizing the Chinese
religious landscape. They conceive the Chinese religion not as an autonomous
system, but rather as part of a larger “social ecology” (p. 13) in which religious
elements constantly interact with each other as well as with the broader social,
political, and economic environment. A major advantage of this loose alternative
framework is that it allows for the incorporation of elements such as martial arts
and qigong, which are excluded from official definitions of religion in China yet
undeniably partake in the shared heritage of Chinese religious traditions and
practices. The central narrative of the book, therefore, traces how the modern
Chinese state’s coercive imposition of “religion,” and other related modernist
discursive categories, resulted in fundamental yet often unintended reconfigurations of the religious elements within China’s social ecology.
This central narrative is firmly established by the seven thematic chapters
included in the first of the book’s two parts, covering roughly from the nineteenth
century into the early decades of the People’s Republic (post-1949). During the late
imperial era, the authors argue, Chinese religion enjoyed a condition of equilibrium within the broader social ecology because the dynastic state itself was underpinned by the same basic cosmological notions and ethical norms that tied all
religious practices, beliefs, and organizations together into “a coherent system”
(p. 20). This equilibrium was permanently disrupted by the impact of the West in
the form of a fundamental discursive shift. Importation of Western categories such
as “religion” and particularly “superstition” around the turn of the twentieth
century facilitated a radical critique of the Chinese religious system, from outside
its shared assumptions, which was soon taken up by the post-dynastic secular
Chinese state in its interventionist programs to refashion Chinese society into a
modern nation. The succession of early Republican, Nationalist, and Communist
regimes prosecuted destructive campaigns against an ill-defined realm of super
stition, while simultaneously recognizing the legitimacy of religions that reformed
themselves along the lines of a “Christian-secular normative model” (p. 89) — centrally organized, socially engaged, ethically oriented, nationally useful. These
state programs resulted in a fundamental bifurcation of the Chinese religious
landscape into, on the one hand, a narrowly circumscribed orthodoxy of five
officially recognized “religions” (Buddhism, Daoism, Catholicism, Protestantism,
and Islam) and, on the other hand, a much larger segment of religious elements in
the social ecology that could not fit the normative model and, therefore, either
faced persecution under the label of “superstition” or reinvented themselves under
other nonreligious rubrics of official legitimacy, such as the martial arts or Chinese
medicine. A particularly noteworthy example of the latter were the massive
redemptive societies with millions of followers that often filled the v acuum left
behind in rural communities by state campaigns to smash local temples and
presented themselves to the state as charitable rather than religious organizations.
Although this pattern of bifurcation within the Chinese religious landscape
emerged under the policies of the Nationalist regime, these policies were largely
continued by the Communist state after 1949, until religious activity was ground
to a halt during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
The six chapters that compose the second part of the book turn to the postMao reform era (1978-present) during which the Communist state has relaxed its
repressive measures and turned increasingly toward a less interventionist, more
managerial role in governing religion. This part of the book opens up the scope
of study to include other polities with significant Chinese populations — Hong
Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Southeast Asia — where the governance of religion
followed trajectories alternative to those of the mainland, into which their influenced has now rebounded during the reform era. On the People’s Republic of
China (PRC) mainland itself, although “religion” has been assigned an increasingly
positive value in official discourse, its legal limitations have continued to be narrowly confined to the five official religions. Nevertheless, the relaxation of government restrictions has, in the countryside, allowed for a revival of local communal
religion riding a wave of temple building and, in the cities, a proliferation of
modern religiosities most saliently represented by body cultivation movements
(e.g., qigong), Confucian revivalism, lay-Buddhist communities, and evangelical
Christianity. These dynamic religious developments in town and country have
unfolded within a growing gray area between the state-sanctioned sphere of
“religion” and its opposite, the newly defined realm of “evil cults” at the other end
of the legal spectrum. Like many of the religious elements that occupy the gray
area, the more politically sensitive “foreign” religions — Tibetan Buddhism, Hui
and Uighur Muslims, Protestants, and Catholics — have benefitted to varying
degrees from expanding international links and the changing geopolitical context
of the PRC’s foreign relations. However, the authors conclude by predicting that
the irrevocably atheist ideology of the Communist state will p
revent it from
formally engaging the new religious developments it has tolerated and, therefore,
continue to guarantee the bifurcation of the Chinese religious landscape into the
“tepid religiosity” of officially regulated religions and the explosive “popular
religiosity” of the distended gray area (p. 400).
This book is provocative in a number of different ways. First, the authors take
clear sides in multiple long-standing scholarly debates — over the existence of a
Chinese religion, the significance of the Western impact, the presence of a Chinese
civil society — and can be critiqued on these grounds. Second, the emphasis of the
central narrative on the role of the modern state and its discursive categories as the
primary agent of change in the Chinese religious landscape reflects a (conscious)
downplaying of certain factors that others have seen as critical, such as transitions
in the market. Recent research has pointed to the expansion of mechanized commercial publishing, for example, as central to the emergence of new forms of
Features 435
religious community in the first half of the twentieth century. From another
perspective, it might also be protested that most of this book is hardly provocative
at all, in that it primarily offers a synthesis of previously published scholarship.
Indeed, it is to the credit of the authors that the book serves so well as a reflection
of the field in its current state that its identifiable weaknesses are usually areas in
which the existing scholarship itself is underdeveloped. For example, the book’s
two chronological focal points are the early Republican era (1912–1937) and the
post-Mao reform era (1978–present), with only limited coverage of the intervening
eight years of war against Japan (1937–1945) and the early decades of the People’s
Republic (1949–1966). This is representative of the current distribution of scholarship in the field. It is telling that in order to discuss these periods as well as they do
(mainly in chapter 6) the authors rely either on work not directly concerned with
religion or on Chinese scholarship. English-language scholarship needs to account
more fully for these critical periods that link the early Republic with contemporary
China. Another underdeveloped area of which this book is representative is the
lack of a strong gender dimension. More research is needed on the ways in which
religious identity and participation were gendered and on the contributions of
religious groups to the changing social norms governing gender roles and relations
in the twentieth century.
These slight shortcomings, many of which would be unavoidable in any study
with such a grand scope, are far outweighed by the immensely valuable contribution that Goossaert and Palmer have made to the field with this book. First of all,
it will serve both the general reader and the academic as a lucid and cutting-edge
introduction to religion in modern China. It has eminent potential for comparative studies of religion in the modern world and is well designed for scholars of
modern China working in other areas to find relevance to their own concerns.
Its impressive breadth of coverage and depth of analysis has much to offer even
specialists in the field of modern Chinese religion, within which it promotes
greater communication and integration across disciplinary and confessional
divisions. The brief content summary given above can hardly do justice to the
wealth of detailed information masterfully woven together here from a sweeping
selection of materials. Advanced students and scholars with research interests in
modern Chinese religion will discover promising leads and an impressive bibliography to consult in pursuing them. Moreover, future scholarship cannot afford to
ignore the central thesis of this book, which bears the force of a growing consensus
that has been in the making for over a decade. The Religious Question in Modern
China is, therefore, destined to become an essential entry point and crucial landmark for the next generation of scholarship on modern Chinese religion.
J. Brooks Jessup
J. Brooks Jessup is an assistant professor of history at the University of Minnesota,
Morris, specializing in urban lay-Buddhist communities in twentieth-century China.
A New View of the Huainanzi
John S. Major, Sarah A. Queen, Andrew S. Meyer, and Harold D. Roth,
translators. The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of
Government in Early Han China. Translations from the Asian Classics.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. xi, 988 pp. Hardcover $75.00.
isbn 978-0-231-14204-5.
of Hawai‘i Press
In 139 b.c.e., Liu An 劉安, king of Huainan, presented The Book of the Master of
Huainan to his nephew, who had recently become the Martial Emperor (Wudi
武帝). Until recently, few historians of philosophy found his writings worth
thinking about. Fung Yu-lan’s massive survey gives the book a mere five pages;
it was “a miscellaneous compilation of all schools of thought, and lacks unity.”
Wing-tsit Chan’s sourcebook accords only three pages to brief extracts from four
chapters, because Liu An’s “ideas are no more than reiteration and elaboration of
Laozi and Zhuangzi.” Benjamin Schwartz’s The World of Thought in Ancient China
cites the Huainanzi a couple of times but does not give it so much as a paragraph
of discussion. A. C. Graham dispenses with the whole period by declaring that
rationality “develops with the controversies of the schools, and dwindles as they
fade after 200 b.c.”1
Scholars now approach the thought of the early Han period more open-
mindedly. The book’s main progenitor, The Springs and Autumns of Master Lü
(Lü shi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋) of a century earlier, is now available in an excellent
scholarly translation. So is the Book of Master Guan (Guanzi 管子), much of which
comes from the Han. An estimable French version of the Huainanzi appeared a
decade ago.2 Sarah Queen’s English translation of the Huainanzi’s main contemporary, Abundant Dew on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu fan lu 春秋繁露),
is nearing completion.
The four who collaborated on this translation have spent a considerable part
of their working lives in study of this book.3 They have provided an introduction
on its historical circumstances, sources, and intellectual affiliations, and a preface
to each chapter that explains its title, summarizes it, outlines its sources, and sums
up its place in the book as a whole.
Just as original as the rendering of the text into English is the translators’
understanding of it. Unlike the historians of philosophy cited above, they have
read the text closely enough to uphold the Huainanzi’s claim to be unprecedented,
carefully structured, and comprehensive. It was designed to be not an encyclopedia or anthology, but rather — as the subtitle puts it — a systematic “guide to the
theory and practice of government.” It grounds governance in the physical universe and the Way, for it was written to prepare a ruler step by step for ideal
emperorship. It borrows more often from The Springs and Autumns of Master Lü
than from the Zhuangzi. What it takes from the latter book and from the Laozi it
Features 437
regularly places in a context that gives it a new meaning. Unlike the Zhuangzi’s
monarch, the Huainanzi’s is neither reluctant to rule nor a minimalist; unlike the
Laozi’s tiny community, the Huainanzi’s is the largest polity conceivable, the Han
empire.
The Springs and Autumns of Master Lü (despite its even greater neglect by
historians until recently) was the most influential of several early writings that
proposed a new kind of monarch: a mystically adept sage whose rituals kept the
cosmic and political spheres in harmony, giving society the balanced dynamism of
nature. The ruler was to be not the ultimate manager but a meditator and high
priest. His subordinates could manage and administer, but only he was so spiritually enlightened that he could respond unerringly to the first stirrings of change.
The Huainanzi develops this idea further.
Major et al. suggest plausibly that this book was initially planned for the
Luminous Emperor (Jingdi 景帝, r. 156–141 b.c.e.), already a patron of the Laozi,
and was meant to hint that the king of Huainan would make a good successor.
Jingdi’s death before the book was finished and his replacement by the teenage
Wudi would have required a change of emphasis. But that is not the whole story.
The translators do not spell out why this unworldly way to think about
emperors made sense to so many intellectuals who were not devotees of mysticism
in government. Rulers shared power with their high officials. But there was no
constitutional bar to keep emperors from misusing or monopolizing authority. Lü
Buwei aimed to persuade them that they could choose a unique, focal role in the
state, and leave policy making to the bureaucrats.4 Master Lü was a rich merchant
turned panjandrum of the Qin state. For the king of Huainan, a member of the
imperial clan a century later, the aim of protecting the state from the unbridled
power of emperors was similar, but the focus was quite different: The Lius are
“uniquely positioned to perpetuate . . . sagely governance extending back to the
farthest roots of Chinese civilization” (p. 790).
This was not a mere matter of clan loyalty. Beginning early in the Han, officials
pressed emperors to solidify central authority by taking back large fiefs they had
given first to comrades and then to relatives. Local rulers fought back to keep
their power. These palace intrigues claimed on both sides not only careers but also
lives. The most effective weapon of the central officials was accusations of rebellion
that in each instance may have been true, may have been trumped up, or may have
resulted from court officials’ hostile spins on what was actually panicked defense
against inexorable aggression by the center. Not only Liu An’s maternal grand
father, but his father’s predecessor as king of Huainan, his father, a number of
uncles and cousins (seven in 154 alone), and a good many other relatives, all died
before him, attacked as rebels.5
We can conclude that Liu presented this book to the Martial Emperor in part
to elicit his nephew’s personal esteem, in part to encourage a priestly rather than
activist style of governance, and in part to convince the august reader that Liu was
anything but a rebel. It failed in the long term to accomplish any of these three
goals. In 122 b.c.e. the king of Huainan was accused of plotting rebellion and
driven to suicide. The translators, with customary prudence, say of the accusations
“how justly, it is now difficult to say” (p. 12).
Quality of Translation
This English version earns for the Huainanzi the widespread recognition as an
epochal classic that it deserves, and at the same time provides a resource for
specialists. The translations are carefully thought out but evocative. Decidedly
difficult Chinese usually becomes comprehensible and limpid English. The last
few lines of the book will give the flavor:
By casting aside limits and boundaries
and by drawing on the pure and the tranquil,
[We have] thereby
unified the world,
brought order to the myriad things,
responded to alterations and transformations,
and comprehended their distinctions and categories.
We have not
followed a path made by a solitary footprint
or adhered to instructions from a single perspective
or allowed ourselves to be entrapped or fettered by things
so that we would not advance or shift according to the age.
Thus
situate [this book] in the narrowest of circumstances6 and nothing will obstruct it;
extend it to the whole world and it will leave no empty spaces.7
Someone with a certain amount of experience in reading classic Chinese can
always find something to question in anyone else’s rendering. Consider, for
instance, in chapter 18, 居智所為, 行智所之, 事智所秉, 動智所由, 謂之道, which
Major and his associates translate “what the wise are at rest, where the wise go in
motion, what the wise wield in affairs, that from which the wise act: this is known
at ‘the Way.’ ” This would be unproblematic if the zhi 智 were the first word in
each of the four phrases, but as it stands the sentence is hard to parse. Wang
Niansun 王念孫 (1744–1832) proposed that 智 is equivalent to 知, which makes for
a less labored interpretation: “When at rest, knowing what to do;8 when in motion,
knowing where to go; in affairs, knowing what to hold on to; and in action, knowing the reason for it: that is what we call the Way.”9 But that understanding requires
emendation, and one can understand the translators’ disinclination to accept it.
Given the frequent corruption of the text, the lack of uniformity in Han
authors’ use of characters, and our inadequate understanding of the period’s
grammar in all its variety, certainty about meaning is often impossible. As exam-
Features 439
ples, compare the translations of chapter titles in this volume and in the French
translation. Of the twenty-one, these eight clearly differ:10
No.
Title
Major et al.
Le Blanc et al.
10
繆稱
Profound Precepts
Fallacious Evaluations
11
齊俗
Integrating Customs
Equivalence of Customs
13
氾論
Boundless Discourses
The Inconstancy of Things
14
詮言
Sayings Explained
Conclusive Discourses
15
兵略
An Overview of the Military
The Use of Arms
18
人間
Among Others
The Human Realm
19
脩務
Cultivating Effort
The Obligation to Cultivate
20
泰族
The Exalted Lineage
The Ultimate Syntheses
There is no point in evaluating every one of these; in some, such as chapter 10,
one cannot be certain which is closer to the drift of the text. This is almost true of
chapter 18, but Major et al. argue convincingly that although “The Human Realm”
does nicely for the corresponding chapter of the Zhuangzi, this one has “left the
internal domain of the mind and nature” and takes up how to deal with the harm
or benefit that others (ren) may bring (p. 717). In chapter 19, the translators read
xiu wu as verb-object. The French version is straightforward, but the English better
reflects the way the chapter uses wu to mean “individual effort.”11 In chapter 20,
“The Exalted Lineage” reflects a double sense that the translators find there: it refers
to all sagely rulers, and to the Han imperial clan as their exemplars. The French
equivalent states the gist of the chapter rather than translating the Chinese title.
A perennial problem in Han texts is what one might call pseudo-causal
diction. Gu 故 often means “therefore,” or “in this way,” but in other instances it
simply marks a change of topic. In such cases, the closest English equivalent is a
change to a new paragraph.
For example, in chapter 1, gu occurs seventy-four times, three of which are
irrelevant. The translators render the remaining seventy-one as “therefore,” “thus,”
or (once) “thereby”; that is, not a single occurrence is left untranslated. Now
“therefore” and “thus” are synonyms only in one unambiguously causal sense,
namely “as a result of that, consequently.” “Therefore” can also mean “for that
reason”; “thus” can mean “in the way just indicated, in the following way, in the
manner now being exemplified.” It thus fits a wider range of gu’s usage. With this
in mind, of the seventy-one pertinent occurrences of gu, I estimate that the English versions fit thirty-seven of them, in six cases one cannot be certain, and
twenty-eight instances are over-translated rather than treated as a mere change of
topic. In chapter 21, of twenty-three relevant occurrences of gu, three are
over-translated.
To sum up, one can raise questions about every complete translation of a
classic, but this one has benefited greatly from the close cooperation of the
translators. Not only have they pooled their knowledge of grammar and diction,
they are more successful than their predecessors in looking at the text’s meaning
in penetrating new ways.
Understanding
One may also ask whether the presuppositions of the translation are likely to
survive the thorough reassessment of Han intellectual history that the archaeological finds of the past generation or so have inspired. Three pertinent questions are
whether The Book of the Master of Huainan is a philosophic work, whether it is
Daoist, and whether it belongs to the mysterious writings of Huang-Lao 黃老,
about which a number of Han personages were enthusiasts. Until recently, the
conventional wisdom replied “yes” to all three questions, but Major et al. take into
account doubts engendered by recent research.
If “philosophic” means merely that the Huainanzi’s contents will interest
modern readers captivated by questions of metaphysics, epistemology, etc., there
is nothing to think twice about. The translators make it clear, however, that the
book was not written for some early analogue of a philosophy department (e.g.,
that delusion of late twentieth-century historians, the “Jixia Academy”),12 but
rather — as the authors clearly say more than once — as a self-study course on
how to be a competent emperor. The authors were not (to use Graham’s term)
“Disputers of the Dao,” setting out propositions that they were prepared to defend
against all comers in some antique proto-colloquium. Like the authors of other
such self-study courses (e.g., Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 in his Chunqiu fan lu), their
hope was not the esteem of professional colleagues but response from their ruler.
In 1970 Sinologists took it for granted that any philosophic classic could be
assigned to one of several “schools” (an undefined and therefore infinitely capacious term). If it is Confucian, it can’t be Daoist; if it is yin-yang or legalist, that
was all one need say. This schema greatly eased writing lectures for survey courses.
A handful of impolite scholars pointed out from time to time that Chinese were
not so simple-minded, but that insight had no impact on the survey courses.
Eventually, about a decade ago, several classicists noticed that the single primary
account by Sima Tan 司馬談 on which this neat taxonomy depended was neither
representative nor even intended to be an impartial analysis. It did not reflect
actual allegiances of the late Warring States and early Han. The legalist and yinyang “schools” survived as librarians’ categories, not as philosophical lineages,
until modern scholars, reading Sima literally, reinvented them. The Huainanzi
drew freely on the whole range of early writings.13
Finally, the Huang-Lao bandwagon came rolling out of the excavation trenches
at Mawangdui 馬王堆, Hunan, when in 1974 Tang Lan 唐兰 claimed that four
manuscripts excavated there were actually the lost Four Classics of the Yellow
Features 441
Emperor (Huangdi si jing 黃帝四经). A few American Sinologists uncritically
gave the doctrine of these “four classics” a clear-cut status in philosophical history
as “Huang-Lao Daoism” — as usual, without defining “Daoism.” They did not
pause over the unmistakable goal of Tang’s exercise: in the last stage of the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution, namely, to assert a politically correct view of what
he called the “struggle between the Confucians and the Legalists in early Han.”14
The Confucians, of course, were the villains.
The bandwagon creaked along until, in the middle 1990s, one specialist after
another acknowledged that these texts cannot be the Four Classics after all.15 In
fact, we cannot reliably identify any excavated text with records of early Yellow
Emperor writings. Some time in the past decade, the bandwagon finally creaked
to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Although two of the four translators of the
Huainanzi, in earlier publications, were confident about what was and was not
Huang-Lao, they no longer speak for it. One of the four assigns the Huainanzi to
“Daoist syncretism,” but the four writing together acknowledge that “a consensus
has begun to emerge that perhaps all along trying to assign the text to one ‘school’
or another was asking the wrong question.”
The right question, they conclude, is to “understand the place of the Huainanzi in Han intellectual life in terms of what the authors . . . chose to say on this
matter.”16 They are not rejecting modern concepts as tools of analysis, but merely
reminding readers that it is foolish to apply them before troubling oneself to
understand what the sources say. The translators’ own understanding of what the
authors said has given us a fresh view of the work that does not confuse it with a
philosophy textbook, a ragbag of quotations, an exemplar of Huang-Lao, or a
member of a Daoist “school.”
Conclusion
The book is designed to be maximally useful to scholars as well as generalists.
Characters and footnotes appear on the page, where those who want them have
them and others can ignore them. The translation is fully and carefully documented. An appendix on key Chinese terms and their translations gives fifty pages
of substantial analysis, with ample attention to variations in the meaning of each
term. It is both comprehensive and dependable. Harold Roth’s concise evaluation
of the text’s history makes a strong case for basing the translation on D. C. Lau’s
Chinese version.17 The book finally offers a bibliography of Huainanzi studies and
translations, and a very detailed index.
The editing and production of this volume reach a high standard. The paper is
of good quality, and the typography is attractive and clear. By today’s standard the
price is extremely reasonable for a scholarly book of nearly a thousand pages.18
There is also The Essential Huainanzi, by the same translators, in the same
series, and from the same publisher. Although this selection is only a bit over a
quarter as long, the hardbound edition costs only fifty cents less. The paperback
(isbn 978-0-231-15981-4), at $24.50, is obviously the point. The complete translation is available only in hardcover.
Nathan Sivin
Nathan Sivin is an emeritus professor of Chinese culture and of the history of science
at the University of Pennsylvania, and an honorary professor of the Chinese Academy
of Sciences. His most recent book is Methodology of the History of Science 科学史
讲演录 (The 2009 Zhu Kezhen Lectures, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Beijing
University Press, 2011).
1. Fung 1952–1957, 1:395; Chan 1963: 305–308; Schwartz 1985; Graham 1989: 75, discussed in
Notes
detail in Sivin 1992. In quotations I update romanization.
2. Knoblock and Riegel 2000, Le Blanc and Mathieu 2003.
3. The title page credits two others, Judson Murray and Michael Puett, for “additional
contributions.” The four translators were involved in every stage of the project.
4. See Lloyd and Sivin 2002: 223–226.
5. Conventional historians have seldom challenged the accusations of rebellion in the
histories, but see the remarkable analysis in Wang Aihe 2000: 173–209, esp. 197–199 and 205. The
detailed account in Vankeerberghen 2001: 55–58, strongly argues that the charges against Liu An
are “highly biased and insubstantial.”
6. I would prefer to translate xunchang 尋常 more literally as “in the most ordinary
circumstances.”
7. P. 867, based on Lau 1992: 21/228/29–31.
8. Or “what one is doing.”
9. Lau 1992: ch. 18, p. 185, l. 26, citing in note 5 Wang Niansun, Du shu za zhi 讀書雜志,
“Huainan nei 淮南内,” 18, 1a–1b; Major et al. 2010: chap. 18.1, p. 720; the second translation is my
own.
10. The French titles are from Le Blanc and Mathieu 2003, my translations.
11. For instance, in section 19.6, pp. 780–783.
12. Sivin 1995, chapter 4, pp. 19–28.
13. The account is Sima’s essay on the teachings of the “six lineages.” See the critical studies
in Csikszentmihalyi and Nylan 2003; Smith 2003; and Sivin 1995: 17–19.
14. Tang Lan 1974: 52.
15. Although Li Xueqin 李學勤 and others posted cautions early, the critical publication
was Qiu Xigui 裘錫圭 1993. Amid much other evidence, Qiu points out the obvious facts that
only one of the four manuscripts mentions Huangdi, and that nothing in any of the four
coincides with the many quotations from Huangdi books in writings before the Six Dynasties. No
one has refuted his argument, but, as usual in Sinology, a certain number of scholars have felt
(and still feel) free to ignore it.
16. These three quotations are from pp. 32, 27, and 32, respectively.
17. Although Le Blanc and Mathieu cite the Lau edition with praise, they translate on the
basis of their own version, based on the well-annotated but textually inferior Liu Wendian version
of 1923.
18. The price is just under eight cents per page; compare those for the nine books reviewed
in Sivin 2010, especially p. 46.
Features 443
References
Chan, Wing-Tsit. 1963. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mark, and Michael Nylan. 2003. “Constructing Lineages and Inventing
Traditions through Exemplary Figures in Early China.” T’oung Pao (Leiden), 89, 1-3: 59–99.
Fung Yu-lan. 1952–1957. A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde. 2 vols. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press (1st ed. of vol. 1, 1937).
Graham, A. C. 1989. Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. La Salle, IL:
Open Court.
Knoblock, John, and Jeffrey Riegel. 2000. The Annals of Lü Buwei. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Lau, D. C. 劉殿爵. 1992. Huainanzi zhuzi suoyin 淮南子逐字索引 (Concordance to the Book of
the Master of Huainan). Hong Kong: Commercial Press.
Le Blanc, Charles, and Rémi Mathieu, editors. 2003. Philosophes taoistes. vol. 2. Huainan zi.
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard. Translated and presented by several
collaborators.
Liu Wendian 劉文典. 1923. Huainan honglie jijie 淮南鴻烈集解 (The vast and luminous book of
[the Master of] Huainan, with collected annotations). Shanghai: Shangwu Yinshuguan.
Lloyd, G. E. R., and Nathan Sivin. 2002. The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early
China and Greece. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Qiu Xigui 裘錫圭. 1993. “Mawangdui bo shu Laozi yi ben juan qian gu yishu bing fei Huangdi si
jing ” 馬王堆帛書老子乙本卷前古佚書并非黃帝四經 (The lost books at the head of
Lao-tzu, version B, in the silk books from Mawangdui are not the Four Classics of the Yellow
Emperor). In Daojia wenhua yanjiu 道家文化研究 (Studies in Daoist culture), ed. Chen
Guying 陳鼓應, 3: 249–255. Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe.
Schwartz, Benjamin I. 1985. The World of Thought in Ancient China. Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press.
Sima Tan司馬談. By 110 b.c.e. Untitled essay on “the main teachings of the six lineages” (liu jia
zhi yao zhi 六家之要指). In Shi ji 史記 (Zhonghua ed.), 130: 3288–3292.
Sivin, Nathan. 1992. “Ruminations on the Tao and Its Disputers.” Philosophy East and West 42,
no. 1: 21–29.
—
——. 1995. “The Myth of the Naturalists.” In Medicine, Philosophy and Religion in Ancient
China: Researches and Reflections, chapter 4. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Aldershot,
UK: Variorum.
—
——. 2010. “Old and New Daoisms.” Religious Studies Review 36, no. 1: 31–50.
Smith, Kidder. 2003. “Sima Tan and the Invention of Daoism, ‘Legalism,’ et cetera.” Journal of
Asian Studies 62, no. 1: 129–156.
Tang Lan 唐兰. 1974. “Huangdi si jing chu tan” 黄帝四经初探 (A preliminary inquiry into the
Four Classics of the Yellow Lord). Wenwu 文物 10: 48–52.
Vankeerberghen, Griet. 2001. The Huainanzi and Liu An’s Claim to Moral Authority. SUNY Series
in Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Wang Aihe. 2000. Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China. Cambridge Studies in Chinese
History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wang Niansun 王念孫. 1812–1831. Du shu za zhi 讀書雜志 (Miscellaneous reading notes). Jinling
Shuju 金陵書局 ed. of 1870–1871.
Text and Tombs: A Fragile Relationship
Wu Hung. The Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011. 272 pp. Hardcover $50.00,
isbn 978-0-8248-3426-5.
of Hawai‘i Press
The Art of the Yellow Springs is an ambitious study of Chinese tombs, dating from
the Neolithic period to Mao Zedong’s mausoleum. Through a holistic perspective,
Wu Hung intends “to push . . . scholarship to the next level by making interpre
tative methods the direct subject of consideration” thereby providing “a genuine
understanding of the art and architecture of Chinese tombs” (p. 14). It is, however,
for the reader to figure out what exactly these “interpretative methods” entail.
Perceiving such a phrase, one cannot help but wonder: Is not interpretation the
ultimate goal of all historical/archaeological research? Yet, delving deeper into the
book, it quickly becomes obvious that he is referring to a modus operandi quite
familiar since at least the publication of his Monumentality in Early Chinese Art
and Architecture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).1 Wu Hung, a
classically trained scholar, prefers to interpret archaeological data exclusively on
the back of written sources. Accepting the latter’s universal validity and, in terms
of reliability, dominance over the former, the author offers many stimulating
thoughts.
The book is organized in three chapters (pp. 17–217) that are preceded by a
short introduction (pp. 7–16) and succeeded by a coda (pp. 219–233). The three
chapters are divided in three or four subchapters; these are arranged in several
sections. Unfortunately, only the titles of chapters and subchapters appear in the
table of contents. Nevertheless, aptly named headings of subchapters and sections
facilitate easy navigation through the author’s arguments. As it has become usual
practice of publishing houses to replace the much more user-friendly and thus
infinitely more desirable footnotes with endnotes, we find the latter appended to
the main text (pp. 234–254). The bibliography (pp. 255–263) follows. A comprehensive index (pp. 264–272) concludes the volume. Divided into three parts — general
index (main concepts, locations of tomb sites, personal names, periods), period
index (tombs of the discussion appear in chronological order), and location index
(tombs of the discussion appear in alphabetical-geographical order) — it is a
valuable tool for browsing through certain subjects. The sheer amount and high
quality of its altogether 230 color and black-and-white illustrations as well as line
drawings certainly contribute to the quality of the book.
As the title “Spatiality” suggests, chapter 1 argues for a tomb to have been “a
special place for the dead” (p. 17) and traces how structure as well as decoration of
Chinese tombs developed accordingly. Wu identifies the desire to provide a space
for the deceased with the invention of the coffin about six thousand years ago. The
concept evolved into wooden burial chambers constructed within the confine-
Features 445
ments of vertical shaft pits (Shang through Han periods) and got even more
elaborate when the chambers were divided into various compartments and people
started to use several nested coffins (Eastern Zhou period). Practices changed,
however, when members of the social elite started to bury their dead in horizontally arranged rock-cut tombs (Western Han) from which horizontally organized
brick-built chamber tombs developed (second century c.e.). These changes were
but manifestations of altered religious beliefs: ancestral worship shifted from
temple to tomb, the traditional dualistic concept of the soul had become obsolete,
death started being viewed as an alternative way to immortality, and the development of an underground bureaucracy. The author concludes “that these ideas all
encouraged people to envision and construct an underground tomb as a houselike, three-dimensional space. Indeed, we may conceptualize the transition from
casket grave to chamber grave as a shift in tomb planning from an ‘object-oriented’
to a ‘space-oriented’ design” (p. 33). He follows up on that thought in the following
subchapter, “A Tripartite Universe” (pp. 34–47). Attempting to provide a “post
humous ‘happy home’ ” (p. 38) by chamber graves, people stopped to evoke the
notion of underground houses solely through burial goods, that is, the different
functions of the aforementioned compartments were realized by sets of objects of
similar usage. Instead, the character of a house was realized by plastically constructed architectural elements as well as two-dimensional murals on most of the
chamber surfaces and smaller scaled carvings in stone. By depicting celestial
phenomena or symbols thereof, chamber tombs became microcosms; at the same
time, illustrations of scenes and human figures — most notably, Xiwangmu, the
Queen Mother of the West — which often get identified with supernatural paradises, became increasingly popular. Judging this variety of representations, Wu
Hung concludes that “the tomb designer provided all the answers he knew to the
implied question of the world beyond death.” He also offers a reason for why this
was the case: “[W]hile a serious inquiry into the ontological status of the afterlife
remained absent in philosophical and religious texts, the scheme of tomb decoration did constantly change” (p. 62). Neither pictorial representations included in
tombs nor individual motifs thereof did portray any particular kind of paradise.
On the other hand, pictures of human beings often located at the center of the
back wall of burial chambers did not relate to otherworldly abodes at all. Instead,
they have to be understood as depictions of the tomb owners representing their
soul. As such, he interprets them to have been extensions of a concept first visible
in tomb number 1 at Mawangdui but allegedly evident in many other burials: the
representation of the soul through an actual empty seat.
Chapter 2 turns toward the matter of materiality. The materials of which
burial goods were made, so Wu Hung argues, were inextricably linked to the
architecture and decoration of Chinese tombs; all three aspects interacted in order
to render a tomb functional. Thus, he seeks to answer the questions as to why
certain materials, colors, and forms were used in the production of burial goods
and how they were physically, as well as visually, manipulated in order to obtain
religious meaning. Invoking a rather popular quote of Confucius recorded in the
Liji, the source for these different features is quickly found. Basically, so-called
spirit articles (mingqi; p. 87) should not have been functioning properly; they also
should have been of inferior quality to real objects, while maintaining a similar
shape. “In the realm of visual representation, this . . . was realized through manipulating a work’s shape, material, colour and decoration” (p. 89). As far as bronze
mingqi are concerned, the author identifies six methods by which it was achieved:
(1) miniaturization; (2) distortion of the form in order to render artifacts unusable,
for example, to cast a lid onto the corpus of a vessel; (3) inferior quality through
reproduction of vessel types in clay; (4) reduction of decor; (5) pairing of inferior
reproductions with real counterparts; and (6) imitation of outdated types. Pottery
mingqi are discussed in a separate section. In Neolithic burials, they stand out as
“prestigious ritual vessels” (p. 92); by the time of the Eastern Zhou, tombs offer
fired ceramic substitutes for actual bronze vessels. The following subchapter deals
with tomb figurines — a special kind of mingqi because of “their representational
functions” (p. 93). These representational purposes are confirmed by yet another
reference to Confucius, who famously opposed the custom of accompanying
the dead with human sacrifices while favoring “straw spirits” (chuling; p. 99). The
Eastern Zhou burial M7 at Changzi, Shanxi, seems to showcase the practical
realization of that notion perfectly as it brought three human victims along with
four wooden figures to light. The symbolic power of the tomb figurines is further
elucidated through the concepts of role, tableau(x),2 framing, miniaturization,
verisimilitude, and magic. The role a figure was to symbolize is discernible by its
physical form or certain attributes. A tableau, for instance, is constituted by figures
of comparable size and function/role that have been found in close proximity. In
Wu’s understanding, framing describes the fact that these tableaux were organized
within the chamber according to their respective roles, thus creating a symbolic
space, that is, the confines of a house, for the stationary soul of the deceased to
reside in. As far as the aspect of miniaturization is concerned, figurines helped to
generate the time and space of a fictional world inhabited by everlasting representations of human beings. Hence, the soul could live “in perpetuity” (p. 115). The
concluding subchapter is devoted to the transformation of the body. Ritual prescriptive texts such as Liji and Yili describe how the corpse is transformed. The
dead body was displayed in the mourning hall, and a banner carrying his name,
thus identifying the corpse, would be produced. From then on, the dead lived on
in the form of his banner. Next, by placing the banner on the buried coffin — Wu
cites the silk cloth found in tomb number 1 at Mawangdui as an archaeological
correlate — the deceased would be transformed from this world to the hereafter.
Another form of transformation was achieved by the extensive use of jade. The
well-known jade suits almost exclusively worn by members of the Western Han
imperial clan, for instance, should prevent the body from decaying. Considering
Features 447
the enduring qualities of jade attested in many texts, people enjoyed eternal life
through “their transformed bodies of jade” (p. 138). Referring to Zoroastrian burial
customs (sixth and seventh centuries c.e.), cremation during the Song period, as
well as customs of the Liao and Jin dynasties, the author picks up on distinctly
later burial practices that were clearly introduced by foreign cultures and anything
but common. Among other customs, he illustrates how life-sized wooden manikins interred during the Liao period were intended to restore the cremated bodies
of some Buddhist monks and members of the social elite by placing the ashes into
the bellies of the figures.
Chapter 3 introduces the concept of temporality. Citing the Thousand Character Essay (Qianzi wen), a sixth-century c.e. text, the author returns to the portrayal
of celestial phenomena. Through murals of, for instance, representations of the
twelve months or the cosmic transformation of the five phases, a background of
endlessly renewing temporal cycles had been provided. In this way, the soul of the
deceased, epitomized by several methods described above, was part of a time
continuum, thus eternally extending its existence. On the other hand, functional
objects contained in the tombs, or lived objects (shengqi), were intended to build
bridges to the times when the dead person was still alive; they “preserve[d] a past
that [had] been abolished” (p. 162) by biological death. Epitaphs were “retro
spective biographies” (p. 173) that connected the deceased to their descendants.
As they were composed posthumously, epitaphs generated a link between the
living and the dead as the bereaved reflected on the achievements of the deceased.
In case of eminent historical or legendary figures illustrated in tombs, the tomb
owners themselves referred to the past. Wu states that “the dead literally became
one of these virtuous men from different times” (p. 182). The fact that burials
sometimes reveal objects obviously older than the rest of the burial goods is
considered to have been “returning to the ancient” ( fugu; p. 188). It was an act of
ancestor worship, so to speak. The book’s final subchapter analyzes journeys
displayed in tombs. We sometimes find real carriages, smaller replicas, or just
pictures thereof in graves, which represent the procession from the mourning hall
to the burial site and the voyage of the soul into the afterlife. Assessing extensive
murals showing scenes of departure on the walls of the passageways of tombs,
especially those dating from the sixth to the eighth centuries c.e., and the fact that
they are located outside of the confinements of the tombs, the author understands
them to have connected the world of the living with the hereafter.
In sum, The Art of the Yellow Springs acquaints its readers with a number of
thought-provoking, sometimes challenging, ideas. Let us consider, for instance,
the so-called spirit seat, that is, the empty seat representing the deceased’s soul.
Relying on the Old Ceremonies of the Han (Han jiu yi) compiled during the first
century c.e., the author reports of an empty seat placed in the royal temple of the
Eastern Han, which supposedly epitomized Emperor Gaozu, the founder of the
Western Han dynasty. Similar arrangements have been found, so he continues, in
tomb number 1 at both Mawangdui and Mancheng. We learn, however, that the
custom was not restricted to “aristocrats, but was shared by low officials and even
commoners during Han and post-Han times” (p. 68). Even though this assertion
is followed by only two further examples, it certainly is an argument well worth
additional research as several Han period burials provide clusters of tableware
resembling set dining tables. Wu Hung’s observations on bronze mingqi outlined
above also add depth to a phenomenon of relative doubtful function (see also
Falkenhausen 2006: 105). The way the author of the Art of the Yellow Springs deals
with this uncertainty, however, is symptomatic for the whole volume: “Without
any textual evidence, we are still unable to fully explain the intentions and regulations behind such arrangements” (p. 96). That the author does not believe in the
primary validity of archaeological evidence is obvious not only by this citation, but
also by his general reliance on written sources to interpret the archaeological
evidence. From an archaeological-methodological point of view — and the book
under review is, after all, a study of archaeological material of which plenty is
available in China — the method needs to be the other way around. It is the archaeologist’s duty to first analyze and interpret his material; only then should he consult textual evidence (if available) to support his interpretation. In case readers
decide to accept, for instance, the author’s claim that Lady Dai’s (Mawangdui
tomb no. 1) many layers of cloth and actual clothing were intended to preserve the
body (pp. 22, 137), they would be mistaken, as it has already been demonstrated
that the ancient Chinese usually did not attempt to preserve corpses (Brown 2002).
In general, singular finds such as Lady Dai’s burial site cannot suffice to explain
broader concept as long as there is not significant corroborating evidence. Moreover, one should be aware of considerable chronological gaps between textual
sources and the actual archaeological phenomena they are expected to elucidate
as well as between the archaeological phenomena themselves. The first aspect is
visible, for instance, in the author’s treatment of the correlation of human sacrifices
and tomb figurines. The Liji as we know it in its transmitted form, that is, the text
that attributes Confucius with condemning human sacrifices in favor of “straw
spirits,” was compiled by the early second century c.e. (Riegel 1993: 295). Yet,
Wu uses the passage to illuminate the findings from a tomb dated by the excavators roughly between the sixth and fourth centuries b.c.e. (Shanxi sheng Kaogu
Yanjiusuo 1984: 528). A lot could have changed in the intellectual history during a
time span of six hundred years. The second aspect becomes apparent when turning
toward the inception of the concept of a tomb as a microcosm. We learn that, for
the first time, cardinal directions were symbolized by a dragon and tiger in a grave
dating from the fifth millennium b.c.e., while the next tomb employing this scheme
dates from the first century b.c.e. (pp. 48–49). Moreover, the book exposes a
picture of neatly fitting, interrelated concepts; this, however, should not be confused with a presentation of a coherent Chinese view of the afterlife. To approach
such a notion, much more of the apparent regional, synchronic, and diachronic
Features 449
differences in the available archaeological material need to be acknowledged and
systematically analyzed. Nevertheless, keeping these reasons for due caution in
mind, the volume provides for rewarding reading that hopefully will stimulate
further research.
Armin Selbitschka
Armin Selbitschka is an assistant professor (Wissenschaftlicher Assistent) at LudwigMaximilians-University, Munich, and is author of Prestigegüter entlang der
Seidenstraße? Archäologische und historische Untersuchungen zu Chinas
Beziehungen zu Kulturen des Tarimbeckens vom zweiten bis frühen fünften
Jahrhundert nach Christus (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010).
Notes
1. For critical reviews of Wu Hung’s methodological approach in this book, see Bagley 1998,
Kesner 1998, and Falkenhausen 1996.
2. Throughout the book, the authors interchangeably uses the variants “tableau”/“tableaux.”
References
Bagley, Robert. 1998. Review of Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture, by
Wu Hung. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 85, no. 1: 221–256.
Brown, Miranda. 2002. “Did the Early Chinese Preserve Corpses? A Reconsideration of Elite
Conceptions of Death. Journal of East Asian Archaeology 4, nos. 1–4: 201–223.
Falkenhausen, Lothar von. 1996. Review of Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture,
by Wu Hung. Early China 21: 183–199.
—
——. 2006. Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (1000–250 b.c.): The Archaeological Evidence.
Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California Los Angeles.
Kesner, Ladislav. 1998. Review of Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture, by
Wu Hung. China Review International 5, no. 1: 35–51.
Riegel, Jeffrey K. 1993. Li chi. In Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, edited by Michael
Loewe. Berkeley: University of California.
Shanxi sheng Kaogu Yanjiusuo. 1984. “Shanxi Changzi xian Dong Zhou mu.” Kaogu Xuebao
4: 503–529.
Reviews
Roger Ames. Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2011. xvii, 332 pp. Paperback $31.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3576-7.
of Hawai‘i Press
Roger Ames has written an important book, from which I have learned, on the
broad cultural context of philosophical elements in Confucianism. Social roles and
their acting out in personal interactions have a central presence in this. Confucian
role ethics looks primarily to the contours of our familiar and social roles for
guidance. “We are . . . the sum of the roles we live in consonance with our fellows”
(p. 122).
The analysis starts with the family: “[F]amily feelings serve as entry points for
developing moral competence” (p. xiv). This process broadens out. Ames sees
friendship “as an open conduit that leads from the security and stability of one’s
own family out into the more uncertain and taxing social, political, and cultural
realm” (p. 114).
This analysis points toward a broader picture of human life and social development than some of those that appeal to many philosophers, especially those
with existentialist leanings. Individualistic approaches have encouraged us to
regard our paths of life as personally chosen without being much affected by our
interactions with other people. Due regard for the roles we play can correct this
simplistic view.
To make this claim, however, is compatible with continuing to pay attention to
individualistic elements in lives. These elements often shape and color our social
interactions and the roles we play.
All of this can be linked to a general point. An insightful book, such as this
one is, can be thought of as shining a light on some aspects of human life. This
effect enables us to notice and see more clearly things that we otherwise might
hardly have paid attention to. The light narrows and intensifies the experience. It,
however, is likely to leave surrounding areas in semidarkness, and perhaps will
prevent us from factoring them into our experience.
Roger Ames focuses on family life and friendship in a very constructive way.
These matters have a crucial role in the personal development of almost all of us.
Books that ought to give them a prominent place and major attention often virtually ignore them. Social roles also are slighted in many accounts of people’s lives.
One factor is that is that much of ethics and moral psychology prefers to focus on
key moments — often moments of decision — in people’s lives, rather than emphasize ongoing and continuous elements.
Reviews 451
All of what Roger Ames brings out is important and valuable. All the same,
some people rebel against their family and upbringing, or in other ways seek to
pursue a path of life quite different from what they started with. This decision, of
course, implies new roles. But in some cases, new roles can be taken up and then
abandoned in the style of a giddy comedy. Not all roles are maintained for long
periods of time.
There is a striking duality in what Roger Ames has to say about roles. He is
talking primarily about the place of roles in Confucianism. This is very apt in that
Confucianism places great emphasis on maintenance of roles related to family or
social order. However, Ames is also shedding light on roles in the life of people in
general — people who may not be considered Confucians in any usual sense.
The roles that people may play at certain moments can owe a great deal to
tradition, the momentary influence of other people, or, more broadly, the power of
suggestion. They also may be mainly the product of obscure impulses. There also is
a division between roles that are very much governed by propriety and roles that
are not. One can see this division in the life of Confucius. Think of the episode
(Analects 17.20) in which a messenger is sent to him in an unworthy cause. Con
fucius first lies and has the messenger told that he is not at home. He is then rude,
playing his zithern and singing loudly as the messenger leaves. This episode might
seem influenced by propriety, but hardly provides an example of what many
people (then or now) would consider propriety.
To turn from Confucius to people in general nowadays: it is probably true that
most of us play different roles in our lives at various moments. This especially is
likely in relation to family or in the context of our professional lives. However, it
would be unusual for such playing of roles to be continuous, and would be unusual
for most people to think most of the time that they were playing some role.
This not very neat picture of occasions of playing roles can become even less
neat if we consider that there is more than one way to play a role. Someone who
assumes the role of an obedient child, or of a patriotic citizen, can overdo it. It
might seem that it is just a role and does not genuinely represent the person. On
the other hand, she or he may firmly accept the values that the role illustrates (or
mimes). In this case, we would consider the role as not so much adopted as it was
an expression at some deep level of the person who plays the role.
A dogmatic sentence in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations states that
“there is no deep underlying structure.” This is certainly true for roles.
Joel Kupperman
Joel Kupperman was educated at the University of Chicago and at King’s College,
Cambridge, and is semiretired from the University of Connecticut after teaching there
for fifty years.
Bamo Ayi, Stevan Harrell, and Ma Lunzy. Fieldwork Connections: The
Fabric of Ethnographic Collaboration in China and America. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2007. xiv, 384 pp. Paperback $30.00,
isbn 978-0-295-98668-5.
of Hawai‘i Press
Fieldwork Connections is a companion piece to Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest
China (Harrell, University of Washington Press, 2001). Certainly without Harrell’s
association this book would not have emerged as the University of Washington
Press volume it is, even though Harrell is only one author, alphabetically patched
between his coauthors Bamo and Ma, trimmed with one additional contributor,
Bamo Qubumo (the first Bamo’s younger sister). The bobbling balances of these
not quite equal credits forms the lining beneath the surface of this piece, while the
fabric displayed on the surface is four overlapping stories woven together chronologically, concentrating on the thirteen years between 1987 and 2000. Geographically, the field research at the heart of this book took place in rural, ethnically
complex patches of Liangshan, in southwestern Sichuan Province. To the extent
that it tells the story of a culture, that culture is called the Nuosu. Each of these
angles is complicated, and that is the main point of this book. Ethnic boundaries
and ways of observing or belonging to the Nuosu are fraught with local and global
political tensions. While most field trips recorded here are travels to globally
remote towns and villages in China, a few destinations target urban America,
including institutions related to the University of Washington, Seattle churches
and houses, and even Harrell’s Washington vacation home. The historical story
related here threads through temporal switchbacks, such as the mountainous route
of the Chengdu Kunming train line as it passes through Liangshan, occasionally
reaching further back in time to make sense of a peculiar commitment or underscore the relevance of a transformation. The stories are carried by the forcefulness
of these four voices, each passionately individualistic, providing a coherent alternate perspective on events and meanings that are distinct enough to reflect significant differences, but concordant enough to present a united front and a successful
collaboration.
The central needle of this tapestry — scrappy, provocative, and thoughtful — is Ma Lunzy, a native Nuosu thrown into this story, and indeed into ethnology
altogether, by circumstances beyond his control. He recounts that at his first
introduction to Steven Harrell at the Liangshan Nationalities Research Institute
in 1991, he ridiculed Harrell’s bald head to his boss in Nuosu language, confident
that Harrell would not catch on, before accepting his assigned duty to assist him.
“Smart or not, I have no choice but to accept your arrangement and lead his horse
on the road” (p. 99). The open acknowledgment of awkward power tensions, and
interest in reevaluating and transforming them, is Ma Lunzy’s primary pretheoretical commitment. His chapters include an account of the inter-ethnic battles that
shaped his education, primarily between Yi (of which Nuosu is a subgroup) and
Reviews 453
Han Chinese. Insult-slinging children in elementary school grew up to be wiser
adults, who knew the epithets to be hollow, but were also embittered by living
realties peppered with injustice and limited opportunities. Ma gives us only a few
glimpses of his own research interests on Nuosu and Yi political culture, but his
discomfort with the burden of explaining a slave-holding social system and a
culture that suffers from continual representations as primitive, dangerous, and
backward is clear. He brings his interest in power dynamics into the peripheral
realms of Harrell’s research whenever it appears, from the rural schoolhouses they
visit to the conflicts that emerge in American and Chinese academic conference
protocol. Ma is keenly interested in producing more balanced relations generally.
He applauds the symmetry in the fact that, when it was Ma’s turn to go to Seattle,
it became Harrell’s turn to “lead the horse” (as it happens, Ma’s Chinese surname
means horse). In this book, however, Ma confines his discussion, for the most part,
to his own contribution to Harrell’s field project and the resulting museum display
that he helped produce in 2000. While decisions about where Harrell can go in
Liangshan and to whom he can speak are not within Ma’s power, Ma is frequently
a key mediator who convinces informants to provide truthful and useful information. In Ma’s view, Harrell earned the right to be trusted with this material because
of his egalitarian views, his objectivity, and his work ethic. Ma arrives at this
position through a candid physical metaphor that highlights the individualized
and bodily nature of this relationship; “[initially] . . . when we ate together I
quietly made sure not to come close to things he had touched. I don’t know what
happened . . . [but later] his appearance not only didn’t scare me anymore, but
became a nice symbol of him, and I would take advantage of times when he wasn’t
paying attention to touch his head jokingly, and felt happy about it” (p. 133). What
had made Ma uneasy was that in the context of Yi experience, bald and eyebrowless Harrell suggested someone with leprosy, a disease with a terrible legacy,
against which other outsider factors, like whiteness, for example, meant little. In
the end and with Ma’s help, this accidental marker worked in Harrell’s favor.
In contrast to the surprise Ma Lunzy exhibits in becoming optimistic about
scholarly exchange work and relations, Bamo Ayi’s sunny expectations seem a
birthright. Bamo describes her background as half-Yi by virtue of her father’s
deliberate efforts to instill ethnic pride as much as his heritage. While she spent
some time in a Nuosu-speaking family home, she grew up primarily in a relatively
privileged cadre community. When she tested into the prestigious Central Nationalities Institute in Beijing for college, she changed her registered name from a Han
version to a Yi version. Her field research seems to have been continually interrupted by cosmopolitan claims on her time, including invitations to participate in
national television programs and other political projects. Nonetheless, she realized
that her real contribution lay in her own talent for scholarship, including command
of voluminous ethnographic data, and especially Yi ritual scriptures. She studied
anthropology in college not to train as an anthropologist, she and her advisor agreed,
but to use anthropological research as a tool to “understand and describe her own
people and culture,” and to promote the position of her ethnic group within the
“politics, economy, culture and life of the multicultural nation” (pp. 11–12).
Bamo’s research success appeared to depend upon riding the coattails of
powerful men, starting with her father and using his connections and intensifying
in her field relations with the preeminent bimo, or ritual specialists, that occupied
the elite position in traditional Yi livelihood. This repeated reality eventually drove
her to ask questions about gender that, it seems, no one else was asking. While she
eagerly accepts it when the bimo tolerate her questions and attempt to legitimate
the conventionally impossible position of a female apprentice, she candidly reveals
the limits of this lip service. At times, it becomes impossible to play the game,
when her status as a woman relegates her to sleeping in the barn, or enables her
to comfort a woman when the ritual requires her to treat her dead husband as a
ghost, who threatens the life of her son (p. 84). Poignantly echoing the words of a
powerful local bimo with whom she worked, she recalls that “the sound of his
laughter out in the wilds, the question he asked, still comes to my ears now and
then: What I’m laughing at is you, laughing at this woman chasing behind the
backside of this old bimo. Why are you doing this? Why?” (p. 88). These reflections
are emphatically not, as an American reader might anticipate, a pivot for a conversion to a Western-style feminism. Her subsequent themes and interests, however,
do become evident through the following chapters.
One theme that Bamo develops could be summarized as being careful what
you ask for. Her informants, requesting and applying rituals to enact curses, cures,
and spirit expulsions, are continually seen as playing with fire, by both asking for
and giving services, gifts, and payment. This vulnerability quickly spreads to Bamo
herself as a sometime assistant, a sometime client, and a continual fieldworker.
When Bamo impulsively arranges to take Harrell to her grandmother’s old home,
she is chastened from all directions: the unexpected advance of poverty at home,
discord between her relatives, and even contradictions in her own family story that
she admits to have flaunted regularly in ignorance. Bamo embraces each of these
embarrassments with good cheer and with that internalized anthropologist’s
mantra: “This, too, is data.” In the end, she suggests, both the right and the burden
of representation are things that are inseparable from the agent that gives voice to
them. Bamo traveled to Seattle to contribute to a project on bilingual education,
but committed her account of this visit in this book to a separate project on American churches. While no theoretical argument is even implicitly suggested, Bamo
demonstrates a range of individuals navigating the available religious ideologies,
settings, and interpersonal relations with sensitivity and a good ethnographic eye.
Christian and Muslim laypeople and officials, in different ways, offer persuasion
and practical pathways to their respective social frameworks. While Bamo notes
rivalries and competition between them, the multireligious mix in Seattle mirrors
the multicultural environment the team has presented from Liangshan.
Reviews 455
When Harrell takes his own turn as narrator, he deliberately keeps his own
voice relatively muted. A feature of his argument here remains, consistent with that
of Ways of Being Ethnic, that complex cultural tensions between ethnic groups in
China are exacerbated by national policy of ethnic labeling. In contrast to the more
distantly academic style of the earlier book, the more personal format here allows
him to give a brief but sharp critique of the Chinese practice of diaocha, quick,
intense “investigations,” which he mercilessly lampoons as backslapping hard
drinking “junkets” even as he himself is sometimes an active participant making
use of forays into business sideshows for his own purpose (pp. 108–109). The
quick and intense style of these “investigations,” ranging from junket-like tours to
the rapid interviewing rounds in villages “dredged up” ostensibly for his benefit
(p. 116), is part of the Chinese environment he has adopted for himself as part of
the anthropological process. He appreciates the high volume of productive outcomes, including artifacts and intangible performances, despite lingering regret
throughout that through this “almost real” fieldwork he can never know any place
or anyone as well as his internal standards dictate he should.
Though the constrictions of approval and permission processes from above,
in concert with protective resistance on the ground, are considerable obstacles to
his work, Harrell does not blame the Chinese system for curtailing his fieldwork
ambitions. His own idealized version of anthropological fieldwork is also forever
deferred by his linguistic challenges (despite the fact that he does learn to use
spoken and written Yi language), constraints on his time from his own professional obligations (Harrell did not begin fieldwork in the PRC until after his own
doctoral students inspired him to do so), and the powerful tug of family and
homesickness. With the significant exception of his fellow researchers, with whom
he shares not only summer camp–style solidarity (pp. 69–71) and long-term
reciprocal commitments, Harrell makes few claims to be participating in a new
public space of interaction, in conferences, in research exchanges, and in steps
toward a long anticipated, mutually collaborative type of fieldwork between the
traditional “subjects” and “objects” of anthropological research. Despite his regrets
and quite possibly his own theoretical values Harrell has contributed to the creation of a postmodern place that includes government agents, tourists, academics,
as well as “locals” both elite and ordinary, junkets and all.
Just when the three friendly colleagues settle into a comfortable groove, Bamo
Qubumo, Bamo Ayi’s sister, breezes in near the end of the book to take her turn in
the spotlight, admiring, haggling, and otherwise procuring materials in the field
with Ma Lunzy in Liangshan. She then storms into Seattle, demanding, deliberating, and leaving no detail uncontested as she leads the assembly of an exhibit of
Liangshan culture, Mountain Patterns, at the Burke Museum. Her struggles to
express and assert herself turn what might have been a relatively pro forma show
of Yi culture into a passionate story of class tensions, gendered performances,
artisan processes, and even a dramatic and terrifying death ritual scene. The
exhibit Mountain Patterns, as Harrell asserts with a cynical edge, was an idealistic
celebration, not a critical academic analysis of Liangshan life or an argument about
the harsh circumstances that have led to the struggles of the people who live there.
They had, he reflectively observes, promoted healers they would never rely upon to
cure their own children, and they let sexist institutions go unchallenged. Harrell,
Bamo, and Ma needed and wanted to put aside the “heartbreak and despair”
(p. 284) in favor of a victory lap, an occasion to dress up an amazing act of cultural
survival in the face of the world that might not notice it otherwise.
In sum, this book is not just a supplement to an ethnography, but also a study
in its own right of how ethnographic projects may work in the future. If you object
to transnational social relations being as important as the cultures themselves,
stick with Ways of Being Ethnic, but you may miss the boat.
Mary Scoggin
Mary Scoggin is a professor of anthropology and Chinese studies at Humboldt State
University, with a research specialty in contemporary Chinese media.
James Bellacqua, editor. The Future of China–Russia Relations. Asia in the
New Millennium Series. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. xii,
360 pp. Hardcover $50.00, isbn 978-0-8131-2563-3.
of Hawai‘i Press
Perhaps few other actors in international life have been so profoundly affected by
the end of the Cold War as Russia and China. On the one hand, for Moscow, the
fall of the Berlin Wall ended its position as the hub of a global superpower reigning over the former Communist bloc. Moreover, the winds of change that swept
through Eastern Europe blew over the ideological bulwarks of the Soviet Union
and crippled the ties that bound its constituent republics together. Thus, within a
few years, from a capital of the mighty juggernaut of the Soviet empire, Moscow
had to adjust quickly to the new position of a much more territorially, economi
cally, and militarily constrained Russian federation. On the other hand, the very
same turbulence of the post-1989 period was propelling China to adopt new roles
and attitudes in international life. The breakup of the Cold War order and the
consistent levels of economic growth allowed Beijing to demonstrate an enhanced
confidence and stature in world politics. At the same time, these developments
backstopped a capacity to fashion the patterns of Asian and international affairs.
The global outreach of Beijing’s external interactions seems to attest both to the
Reviews 457
transformations in and the transformative potential of Chinese foreign policy
attitudes.
It is noteworthy that these dramatic transformations provided the facilitating environment for a fresh start in the bilateral relations between Beijing and
Moscow, seemingly free from the ideological baggage of the Sino-Soviet split.
Thus, the dissolution of the bipolar international system has surprisingly managed
to bridge the differences between Russia and China, and the two actors increas
ingly find themselves formulating joint or mutually supportive positions. In this
respect, thinking about the complexity of these trends and the shifting contexts
of global politics often gravitates toward the realms of fiction and fantasy. On the
one end of the spectrum, some observers interpreted the close ties between Beijing
and Moscow as the foundation of a new strategic alliance against the West. On the
other end, commentators dismissed such amicability as a short-lived marriage of
convenience, which will end as soon as the two partners start encroaching on each
other’s spheres of influence.
Thus, an ungainly but important task is to distinguish between phantoms
and substance in the cacophony of voices claiming insight into the foreign policy
interactions between China and Russia. The volume edited by James Bellacqua
does just this and does it brilliantly. It not only offers a much needed and
extremely erudite reconsideration of the international interactions between
Beijing and Moscow, but also provides a detailed and comprehensive coverage of
the current and likely future trajectories of their relations. In this respect, the
volume makes available a rarely erudite illumination of the patterns and practices
of Russia’s and China’s foreign policies. At the same time, it also radically alters the
dominant frameworks within which the debate on their interactions tends to be
positioned. Thus, it is to Bellacqua’s credit that the collection presents an
extremely knowledgeable, cogent, and discerning rendition of its demanding
topic.
The eleven chapters of the volume are divided into five separate sections
detailing different aspects of Sino-Russian relationship. The first part tackles
directly the strategic partnership signed in April 1996 by the then Russian president Boris Yeltsin and his Chinese counterpart, Jiang Zemin. The contributors to
this part of the volume offer extremely well-researched and dedicated inquiries
into the origin, context, and implications of the strategic partnership. Equally
important, the analyses throw light on both the Russian and the Chinese perceptions of this development. The second part of the volume details the economic and
energy relations between China and Russia. The two chapters included in this
section offer perceptive accounts of the complexities and uncertainties of these
interactions that have evaded other commentators. In this respect, the volume’s
highly readable and captivating account does not recoil from the ambiguities,
controversies, and unintended consequences attending the Sino-Russian economic
exchanges and energy relations.
This framework of analysis is pursued in the third part of the volume, which
details the defense relationship between China and Russia. The section includes
discerning analyses that outline both Moscow’s and Beijing’s perspectives on their
military interactions. The final two parts of the volume detail Sino-Russian relations in different global locales. As the volume points out, a substantial part of
these interactions is being thrashed out in Central Asia. Forming a buffer zone
between the two states and rich in energy resources, the region provides the
testing ground for the evolving relationship between Moscow and Beijing. Yet
both countries have constantly reinforced their predilection for multilateral
solution to regional problems and have been instrumental to the construction
of several regional organizations. The final sections of the volume also include
insightful accounts of the Sino-Russian relations in the Asia-Pacific (especially
with regard to the crisis situation in the Korean peninsula) and two rare accounts
of the Russian and Chinese angle on the bilateral relationship in the context of the
status of Taiwan. What becomes apparent from these examinations is that in all
these contexts, Moscow and Beijing do not always see eye to eye. At the same time,
however, the studies emphasize that despite the vicissitudes and differences of
opinion, “the strategic partnership between Russia and China is likely to survive,
for it is too important for both nations to be cast aside” (p. 281).
In this respect, the volume edited by Bellacqua makes an important and
valuable intervention in both the explanation and understanding of the international relations characterizing the current patterns of Sino-Russian interactions.
What emerges from the analyses in this volume is that the very search for validation and substance of the strategic partnership between Beijing and Moscow tends
to confuse the outlook of external observers. Instead, as Bellacqua eloquently
argues, commentators will do best if they were to “dispense with the strategic
partnership formulation altogether” and engage the interactions between China
and Russia “for what they are: a pragmatic relationship that is based on shared
common interests, but is not without its fault lines” (p. 8). This suggestion offers a
stimulating framework for the discussion of Russia’s and China’s bilateral inter
actions that will be welcomed by both students and scholars. At the same time, the
volume’s thoughtful process-tracing of this complex topic of current global politics
provides a compelling perspective on the intricate pattern of relations between
Moscow and Beijing that is bound to attract policy makers and analysts interested
in Russian and Chinese foreign policy.
Emilian Kavalski
Emilian Kavalski is a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the
University of Western Sydney (Australia), specializing in the the security governance
of complexity and the interactions between China, India, and the European Union in
Central Asia.
Reviews 459
Kenneth E. Brashier. Ancestral Memory in Ancient China. HarvardYenching Institute Monograph Series 72. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute, distributed by
Harvard University Press, 2011. xii, 470 pp. Hardcover $39.95, isbn
978-0-674-05607-7.
of Hawai‘i Press
First things first: Ancestral Memory in Ancient China is an excellent account of
ancestral cult as it is depicted in a variety of textual sources. Similar to several
outstanding, albeit sometimes underappreciated1 papers he has published over the
years, Kenneth Brashier continues to delight his readers with a well-balanced,
critical reading of transmitted historiographical, sociophilosophical, as well as
poetical records roughly dating to and dealing with an era spanning from the third
century b.c.e. through third century c.e. By incorporating the occasional divinatory texts excavated from tombs as well as stelae inscriptions, he demonstrates that
ancestral worship was far more than “a simplistic and uninspired exchange of food
for longevity, of prayers for prosperity” (p. 5); centered on “the notion of thoughtfull [sic] ancestors — of ancestors projected from the minds of their descendants”
(p. 4), the study primarily offers the perspective of the bereaved on the post-
mortem fate of their family members.
The book is organized in five parts (pp. 46–345), which are preceded by a
lengthy introduction (pp. 1–45) and succeeded by a short conclusion (pp. 346–
348). All in all, thirty-one sections subdivide the introduction and the five parts.
Their suitably named headings are contained in the table of contents and guide
the reader conveniently through the author’s arguments, a fact still enhanced
by further topical headings used to structure more extensive sections (i.e., pp. 2, 3,
8, 27, 28, 29, and 30). As it has become the usual practice of publishing houses
to replace the much more user-friendly thus infinitely more desirable footnotes
with endnotes, we find the latter appended to the main text (pp. 349–438). The
bibliography (pp. 439–463) follows. The volume is concluded by a brief index
(pp. 465–470), which includes the main concepts and personal names of the
discussion.
The introduction (“The Han Tree of Knowledge”) first paints a picture of
intellectual diversity during the early imperial period before relating the respective
idea systems — in light of recent scholarship, Brashier rightly avoids speaking of
schools, or -isms (e.g., Confucianism, Daoism, etc.) — to one another. Early Chinese thinkers obviously were aware of differing trains of thought as is evident in
numerous recorded debates. The author argues that the goal of intellectual discourse, contrary to Western intellectual history, usually was not the complete
devaluation of an opponent’s arguments, but rather the elevation one’s own teachings from a pool of teachings sharing basic concepts. The latter expressed themselves in several metaphors common to various idea systems. Using the tree,
among other things, as a metaphor, the classicist (Confucian) scholar Liu Xiang
compared teachings deviating from the norm, that is, the stem, to branches. In a
very similar line of reasoning, the syncretic text Huainanzi likened the origin of all
knowledge to the root of a tree from which stem and branches eventually emanate.
By the end of the introduction, Brashier has built a sound basis for all arguments
to come: “[U]nderstanding how differing idea systems were interconnected in
early China explains how the early Chinese themselves related differing beliefs
about the afterlife to one another” (p. 6).
In part 1 (“An Imaginary Yardstick for Ritual Performance”), the author
decided to analyze the rituals involved in ancestor worship by invoking performance theory. We have ample theoretical evidence of how these rituals ideally
should have been carried out from prescriptive texts such as the Liji (Records of
Ritual). According to performance theory, however, actual practice is an essential
part of ritual. Citing anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, Brashier states that “not
only is seeing believing, doing is believing” (p. 53). He continues by developing the
concept of “structured amnesia,” which was central to applied ancestor worship.
Accordingly, ancestors had a half-life: only for a certain amount of time did they
remain in the memory of their descendants. In other words, at some point, the
ancestral tablets of the deceased were eliminated from the ancestral temple and
people ceased to worship them. Before embarking in part 2 on thirteen case
studies analyzing how the concept changed over time, Brashier asks how trust
worthy the aforementioned normative texts were. Conceding that a complex ritual
system as it was constructed, for instance, in the Liji is nowhere to be found in
archaeological evidence — only scattered traces thereof are occasionally visible — he, nevertheless, answers in the affirmative: “Even if they [i.e., the ancestor rituals]
had not been fully implemented, these prescriptive texts still played an important
role, serving as an ongoing baseline, a yardstick from which deviation could be
measured” (p. 99).
In part 2 (“A History of Remembering and Forgetting Imperial Ancestors”),
we learn the full meaning of this citation. Social, psychological, and physical
changes occurring during the period of the establishment of the unified empire
until Cao Cao’s Wei dynasty demanded constant adaptation of the concept of
structured amnesia. Brashier’s chronological case studies demonstrate how too
much deviation from ritual ideal as expressed in the texts caused recurring debates
among scholars. Usually they revolved around the subject of which ancestors
should have been worshiped at the time, or the more general problem of how long
the half-life of an ancestor should have been. A good example is Emperor Wu of
the Western Han dynasty (r. 141–87 b.c.e.), whose ancestral tablet was not removed
from the shrine in due time mainly because of his vast territorial expansion of
the empire. The motive behind this kind of reasoning is obvious; even distant
descendants — mostly those from removed branches of the family tree and especially those who only became part of the family by adoption — wished to legitimize
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their own rule by placing themselves in one line with highly esteemed emperors of
the likes of Wudi. The pragmatic aspect of many adjustments of the concept was
not lost on the author. The fact that it remained a subject of frequent discussion
over the course of roughly six hundred years, however, suggests its relative
importance.
Part 3, “A Spectrum of Interpretations on Afterlife Existences,” introduces yet
another concept which Brashier termed “performative thinking.” The paraphrase
“ ‘I think, therefore they [i.e. the ancestral ghosts] are ’ ” (p. 184) fittingly explains
this rather abstract expression; it also sheds light on the shifted focus of part 3.
While the preceding chapter analyzed the perspective of the descendants on
ancestral ghosts, the author now explores the nature of the latter. All in all, the
written sources portray, so he discloses, five different kinds of relationships
between the living and the dead. First, the ancestors were imagined as real entities
that needed to be sustained by sacrifices. Conversely, they provided for the living.
In the sense of a do ut des (I give, so that you may give) exchange, the spirits
would, for instance, grant a long, healthy life or even harm an adversary. Second,
to some ancient writers, a simple do ut des relation was insufficient. The sacrificer
had to be sincere (cheng) as well as virtuous (de) for the ghosts to react positively.
Third, the sacrificing descendants were mentally connected to the ancestral spirits
who could directly influence the lives of the former. Dreams, for instance, were
the realm where both spheres came in contact with each other. Fourth, special
techniques such as meditation or abstinence from music, fine food, or sexual
encounters helped to visualize the ghosts. Here the performative aspect of thinking
about the ancestors is most perceptible. Fifth, there were also some schools of
thought that neglected the influence of ancestral ghosts on humans. They considered them to have been mere figments of imagination.
As its title, “The Context of Early Chinese Performative Thinking,” suggests,
part 4 investigates why performative thinking was so prominent that classicists
eventually formed fixed rules. Brashier elaborates on six interrelated terms that
explain the interaction of concentration, ritual, and the spirits: mind (xin), that
which is fixed within the mind (zhi), thought (si), qi, spirit (shen), and heaven
(tian). All of these are linked to the cognitive faculties of the human mind and its
ability to bridge the gap between the psychological and physical world. The author
certainly succeeded in demonstrating that performative thinking, that is, the
evocation of ancestor spirits, was but part of a greater discourse. Several passages
from different sources attest to his conclusion that common people as well as
emperors were able to influence the physical world.
Part 5, “The Symbolic Language of Fading Memories,” examines how people
coped with the uncertainty of an existence beyond death. Apparently, they turned
to symbols. Darkness — be it caused by seasonal changes (winter), distance of time
(fading memory), or geographical distance (the far north) — was the symbol of
choice of various early Chinese authors to provide a home for the spirits of the
dead. In contrast, the memory of or, more specifically, the deceased themselves,
however, remained luminous so long as they were properly taken care of. Only the
final section of the book feels a little out of place, since it seeks to determine if the
ancestral ghosts were numinous (zhi). There are no symbols discernible that might
suit the tenor of the chapter. Maybe the respective arguments would have been
more at home in part 3, where different interpretations of spiritual existence in the
afterlife were covered.
In sum — and I am quite happy to repeat myself — Ancestral Memory in
Ancient China is the exquisite and long-awaited comprehensive study of early
Chinese ancestral cult. Kenneth Brashier especially deserves praise for relentlessly
treading every eligible textual path in order to provide the most objective picture
of ancestor worship possible. On a regular basis, passages in favor of his general
argument are accompanied by, of course, fewer passages revealing a different
point of view.2 In this respect, I wholeheartedly disagree with the author who, at
some point, preventively cautions, “One might rightfully question the combination
of such disparate sources” (p. 278). On the contrary, embracing the diversity early
Chinese texts have to offer is the only way to leave generalizing, streamlined
arguments on what the early Chinese thought behind. This way, Brashier managed
to correlate a variety of opinions without pitting them against each other. Nevertheless, given the strong classicistic influence on the transmission history of our
sources and the prevalence of classicistic imperial doctrine by the first century
c.e., a classicistic dominated ancestor cult is hardly surprising. This is particularly
evident in part 2, where readers are introduced to the reasoning of various imperial
courts; part 1, however, explicitly discusses the “unlettered populace” (pp. 89–99).
The way the author resolves the general differences in our present perception of
ancient ancestral cult as practiced in different social strata at this stage of the study
is one of the very few aspects with which I find fault. For all the caution he exercises to present a well-balanced account, a statement like “dividing up beliefs
between lettered and unlettered classes may be misleading. As seen in the Introduction, all genres of discourse were regarded as ultimately united” (p. 98) seems
like trying too hard to fit insufficient evidence into his coherent argument. The
argument, of course, being that all intellectuals shared a common root. Especially
since tangible evidence is missing, we cannot know whether there even was a
discourse among the lower reaches of society. It might well have been the case that
the unlettered populace, or at least parts of it, only superficially followed the
practices of the lettered populace3 without having had intimate knowledge of or
having sincerely cared for its ideological contents. A later statement of the author,
however, suggests that he essentially was aware of this objection himself: “We
lack sufficient evidence from the latter [i.e., the unlettered masses] to know how
they would have reacted to Classicist rationalizations” (p. 228). Missing references
are another matter of critique. Several times the reader is faced with generalizing
claims of varying degrees of importance for the discussion, but is denied the
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respective source(s). We learn, for instance, that “[n]umerous Han inscriptions
and poems vaunt the ideal static longevity of metal and stone” (p. 324), yet search
in vain for the respective reference. Brashier could have easily led his readers to an
essay of his own (1995), thereby considerably substantiating the assertion.4 Particularly in part 2, he also fails to address adequately the underlying cause (or was it
even the main reason?) for constantly adapting the concept of structural amnesia.
Although implicitly or explicitly acknowledging the importance of legitimacy
in the context of ancestral worship a number of times,5 its relation to ancestor
worship has not been expressly explored. It would have been nice for the reader to
know how the author assesses the relationship between politics and religion.
These few minor flaws aside, Ancestral Memory in Ancient China is a superb
study of early Chinese religion and a mandatory read for anybody seriously interested in the subject.
Armin Selbitschka
Armin Selbitschka is an assistant professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-University,
Munich, and is author of Prestigegüter entlang der Seidenstraße? Archäologische
und historische Untersuchungen zu Chinas Beziehungen zu Kulturen des
Tarimbeckens vom zweiten bis frühen fünften Jahrhundert nach Christus
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010).
Notes
1. See, most notably, Brashier 1996. Although the paper gets cited quite regularly, Brashier’s
main argument has not had the impact it deserves so far. Drawn yet again from various contemporary written sources — essentially, the still prevalent view of a divided soul basically stems from
only two texts, namely the Zhao hun (Calling Back the Hun-[Soul]) poem recorded in the Chuci
as well as the Liji — he convincingly demonstrated that the notion of two separate souls in early
China was, at most, held by a minority and was by no means widespread. More important,
Brashier showed that certain groups of contemporaneous people undoubtedly believed that
human beings were animated only by a single soul.
2. See, for instance, the discussion in section 2 where he is proposing that the goal of
intellectual discourse in early China usually was not to destroy the arguments of an opponent. At
the same time, he makes the reader aware of the fact that there also existed agonistic arguments
(“argument is war,” pp. 33–34).
3. Between pages 89 and 99, Brashier pursues the questions of whether the “unlettered
populace” indeed possessed knowledge of prescriptive ritual texts and whether it put the rituals
described therein into practice. Some practices visible in written and archaeological sources, that
is, observation of mourning periods or sacrificial shrines to local heroes seem to indicate that the
unlettered populace at least partially imitated the rituals of the educated elite.
4. Similar situations occur several times throughout the book; in the following, I will
present a few examples. Especially when introducing and dating his primary sources, the reader
wishes to receive more information as he might not know them as well as the author. See, for
instance, his comments on the compilation history of the “Great preface” to the Shijing (p. 238),
or the Guanzi (p. 33) for which a reference to Allyn W. Rickett’s comprehensive study (1985)
would have sufficed. On page 314, Brashier cites Lothar von Falkenhausen and Martin Kern to
make a point, yet only refers to a work of Martin Kern in the respective note (p. 314 n. 118). When
stating that “[t]here are more than a dozen examples” (p. 342) of grave deeds or stele inscriptions
that attest to the numinosity of the hun-soul, one certainly would like to know where exactly to
find these examples.
5. See, for instance, pp. 69–70, 145, and 155.
References
Brashier, Kenneth. 1995. “Longevity like Metal and Stone: The Role of the Mirror in Han Burials.”
T’oung Pao 81: 201–229.
—
——. 1996. “Han Thanatology and the Division of ‘Souls.’ ” Early China 21: 125–158.
Rickett, Allyn W. 1985. Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China: A
Study and Translation. Vols. 1 and 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Shana J. Brown. Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese
Historiography. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011. 232 pp.
Hardcover $48.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3498-2.
of Hawai‘i Press
The study of ancient bronze vessels and of steles ( jinshi 金石) had its first great
flowering in the Northern Song dynasty, as scholars sought to recapture a ritually
pure, pre-Buddhist past. Bronzes in particular promised a kind of access to ancient
ritual (and ultimately to the Way) through their materiality as much as through
their inscriptions. They were also valuable art pieces. A second great flowering
occurred in the late Qing, which, Brown argues, remains relevant today: “Its
influence includes persistent attitudes towards the uses of history, the meaning of
pictorial images and the value of material artifacts, and the complex relationship
between public institutions and private scholars” (p. 9). After all, “In China as
well as in many parts of the world nothing was so modern as antiquity” (p. 9).
With the rise of modern archaeology and the other scholarly disciplines of the
human sciences — particularly anthropology and historical linguistics, as well as
history — jinshi studies are perhaps more ancestor than living presence today. But
certainly jinshi studies fed into the great construction of national identity that took
place in the late Qing and early Republic, not merely providing artifacts for study
but also, through its own scholarly traditions, shaping China’s relationship with the
past. Brown’s work enriches our knowledge of Republican culture, which is still
too often equated with thoroughgoing radicalism, throwing into sharper relief
the sheer variety and volatility of the political and cultural currents of the early
twentieth century.
Brown’s decision to translate jinshi as “antiquarianism” has obvious dis
advantages but captures, I think, something essential. The English connotations
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are of amateur and somewhat fuddy-duddy connoisseurship, of manic collectors,
and of worldviews that might be labeled traditionalist, conservative, and
reactionary — or even decadent. This misses the long use in China of jinshi in the
practice of orthodox scholarship and pursuit of the Way that Brown outlines in her
first chapters. Nonetheless, the term captures “a complex emotional valance . . . the
proud mastery of syntactically difficult documents, as well as a bittersweet longing
for the vanished past they represent” (p. 4). On the one hand, certain scholars
appreciated ancient objects for themselves and enjoyed seeking them out, looking
at them, fondling them, smelling them, and hiding them away where only selected
friends would be allowed access. On the other hand, these objects were also signposts
helping to find roads to understanding the past in a more or less scientific way.
During the rise of modern scholarship in the West, antiquarianism helped
foster archaeology and ancient history, art history, numismatics, philology and
literary studies, and numerous other fields and subfields. In China as well, starting
in the late Qing, knowledge of material artifacts and their ancient inscriptions
informed the emerging discipline of archaeology, revolutionized understanding of
ancient history, rebuilt philology, and ultimately gave Chinese nationalists a new
sense of the roots of their civilization. All this Brown shows convincingly, and she
highlights the relationship between the particular stresses of the late Qing and the
revival and development of jinshi studies. As well, Brown incisively but sympathetically delineates the personalities of collector-scholars such as Wu Dacheng
吳大澂, Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉, and Wang Guowei 王國維. However, a related
argument about the relationship between antiquarianism and political reform is
less convincing (discussed below).
Brown traces the more or less continuous history of jinshi studies to the
Northern Song dynasty. Scholars like Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 displayed a new interest
in the materiality of the past, such as the clothes worn in antiquity and especially
ritual vessels. Song scholars produced new research into the types and uses of
bronzes from much earlier periods. Not least important were their publications
with illustrations of the bronzes in their collections. As Brown emphasizes, these
line-drawn illustrations were deliberately simplified, representing a kind of
political-ritual ideal rather than the actual tarnished and cracked objects. Song
scholars also turned to stele inscriptions as at least a possible source of correction
to texts recorded in literary sources (steles were widely regarded as more reliable,
but it was recognized they could be inaccurate as well).
Jinshi studies declined somewhat in the Yuan and Ming dynasties, but collectors continued to enjoy what might be called its connoisseurship side: aesthetic
rather than historical values. Not unnaturally, early Qing scholars regarded their
predecessors as frivolous. Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 scoured the country, making copies of
steles, whose inscriptions could be used to verify and explain ancient texts. As an
element of the evidential studies (考證學) movement that dominated eighteenthcentury scholarship, jinshi was certainly important, but Brown also points to an
interesting technical problem in the classification of knowledge. Under the four
treasuries system, jinshi studies were divided among stele inscriptions and history
under the history category, pictorial catalogs and types (that is, ritual vessels)
under masters (philosophy), and philology under classics. Jinshi practice mostly
continued to focus on calligraphy and painting, not history.
Nonetheless, a revival of antiquarianism, including new interest in coins and
jades, occurred in the nineteenth century as the statecraft school rose and evidential studies declined. The self-strengthening movement of the 1860s and 1870s
focused on modernization of the military, the economy, and schools. Politically,
Brown claims, “jinshi was at the center of this reformist wave” (p. 34). For this
claim to be convincing, however, it would have to be shown not only that the
leading jinshi scholars were reformers — and reformism defined more precisely — but also that a meaningful connection existed between antiquarianism and
reformism. That antiquarianism could be compatible with reformism (p. 49) is
clearly the case, but could it not also be compatible with conservatism (however
defined)? Brown herself suggests that in the case of the “Taiping generation”
antiquarianism was a form of nostalgia for a world that had been largely destroyed
in the rebellion. In my view, nostalgia may be compatible with reform, but it tends
not be so. The connection between antiquarian circles and the qingliu 清流 faction
at court is easier to show, and while it may be possible to argue that the hawkish
patriotism of the qingliu faction had its reformist side, it undoubtedly had its
conservative side. (These categories, derived from the right-left spectrum of the
French Revolution, are rather difficult to apply to nineteenth-century China, in
any case. Given the widespread acceptance of some kind of reform by the end
of the century, it is only natural that antiquarians can be counted among the
reformers, many of whom, however, had relatively little interest in
antiquarianism.)
It may well be that, as Brown suggests, the epigraphic school (金石畫派)
promoted their claims to ideological authority by using ancient, sometimes
rougher, calligraphic styles. It certainly seems clear that late Qing antiquarianism
was a basis for claims to elite status. As gentry used various means to assert their
political voice, they effectively strove to enlarge the public sphere, and antiquarianism was a part of this process. But it did not entail a particular political program.
Indeed, as Brown shows, reform was a threat to antiquarian studies, which was
increasingly neglected in the new schools and in the reformed civil service examinations. Where it continued to flourish was in the field of historical geography. It
was the antiquarians who could discuss whether ancient steles could confirm
modern territorial claims. Furthermore, by offering more ways to get beyond the
traditional literary accounts of the most ancient past of the sage-kings and the
Three Dynasties, jinshi knowledge remained relevant to nationalist historiography,
even as history writing was increasingly based on evolutionary notions of linear
development.
Reviews 467
At the same time, a life devoted to antiquarianism, or at least as devoted as
official duties and economic circumstances allowed, defined a set of late Qing
scholars. Their passions were shopping, appraising, and, within limits, sharing.
Poorer antiquarians could avoid expensive bronzes and sculptures and buy
cheaper ink stones and oil lamps. Publishing a catalog of one’s collection marked
one as a connoisseur. Brown shows that as publishing technology became more
sophisticated, so did the demands of connoisseurs for three-dimensional and more
realistic representations of real objects. Part of the reason for this may have been a
new historical consciousness that saw artifacts as products of particular places and
times rather than a direct means of reviving the Way. Part of the reason was that as
the market grew, fraud became a major problem, and connoisseurs depended on a
thorough hands-on knowledge of how objects became tarnished and what kinds of
inscriptions could be found on specific kinds of objects.
There were plenty of critics of antiquarianism — I wish Brown had said more
about them — who considered collectors to be trivial-minded dilettantes. The
connoisseurs themselves feared not being taken seriously. But in the absence of
public libraries and museums, only private collections could save antiquities from
destruction (or foreign buyers). By the end of the nineteenth century, at least,
collecting was infused with patriotism. But the collectors themselves were responsible for much destruction: rubbing steles bare, cutting up temple sculptures, and
of course ruining archaeological sites.
Wu Dacheng (1835–1902) was a master of several fields. His knowledge of
ancient scripts allowed him to revise the venerable dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi
說文解字, and he was able to translate several previously impenetrable bronze
inscriptions. Perhaps more importantly, Brown suggests, he broke with traditional
jinshi studies to conduct research on uninscribed antiquities, using jade artifacts
to reconstruct ancient measurement systems. Something like modern archaeology
was beginning to take shape. Chinese archaeology in the twentieth century was
to be invigorated by the discovery of oracle bones, and Brown puts this wellknown story into a new context of evolving and expanding jinshi studies. (The
pithy ritual inscriptions from the Shang dynasty could, Brown argues, justify
political reform by highlighting precedents for institutional change and social
evolution. However, they could also be simply associated with claims to an ancient
national essence, itself available to either revolutionary or conservative interpretation. To confuse matters further, the greatest skeptic of the oracle bones was the
revolutionary and national essence scholar Zhang Binglin 章炳麟, though he was
not alone.)
Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940) was perhaps not the best man to convince scholars
of the authenticity of oracle bones. After the revolution of 1911, his Qing loyalism
put him beyond the political pale for many; his cooperation with Japanese scholars
and collectors put him under further suspicion; and, since his living depended on
his sales of antiquities, not only did he appear unpatriotic, but his authentications
suffered from a clear conflict of interest. Yet there is no doubt of Luo’s reformist
credentials, at least in the educational sphere, during the late Qing. At that time, he
was already collecting various antiquities (including mortuary items that most
scholars avoided) and publishing on his collections. Can it be that his commitment
to antiquarianism helped shape Luo’s antipathy to the Republic? In any case, there
is also no doubt that he was an innovative antiquarian whose massive catalog
publications brought new materials to the attention of scholars, most importantly
hundreds of oracle bones.
As the modern field of archaeology, with its emphasis on the whole ecology of
ancient worlds, began to take shape, Luo had little to contribute to the new historiographical debates of the 1920s. To exaggerate slightly, Luo was interested in
confirming the names of Shang kings; historians were interested in the nature of
Shang society. It was Luo’s younger friend Wang Guowei (1877–1927) who engaged
with the modernist historians on their own terms. Brown suggests that Wang was
the first to use jinshi to practice truly modern historical research. Wang possessed
a good knowledge of Western philosophy, and he was interested in the same
questions as modernist historians about national identity, global comparisons,
and the relationship between the individual and society, but in opposition to the
modernizers of the 1920s, he also sought to preserve Oriental ethics. Wang used an
approach to ancient texts not entirely unlike that of the Qing evidential studies
movement, while supplementing his readings of traditional literary sources with
ancient inscriptions and bamboo books, using the one to confirm and modify the
other. Brown concludes that Wang “effectively transformed antiquarianism into
history” (p. 139). Professional historians and archaeologists of the next generation
were eventually glad to acknowledge their debt to jinshi studies, but Brown points
out that they did so by requiring reading it as a science (or protoscience) like their
own: they forgot that it had also encompassed artistic practices, ritual studies, and,
we may add, classicism. Pastimes points to the twinned aesthetic and scholarly
features of jinshi study’s interest in the past; after a millennium of practice from the
Song through the Qing, it, too, is probably in the past.
Peter Zarrow
Peter Zarrow is a research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica
(Taiwan). His research focuses on late Qing and Republican intellectual and cultural
history. He is the author most recently of After Empire: The Conceptual Transfor
mation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2012).
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Wonsuk Chang and Leah Kalmanson. Confucianism in Context: Classic
Philosophy and Contemporary Issues, East Asia and Beyond. SUNY Series in
Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2010. xi, 243 pp. Hardcover $75.00, isbn 978-1-4384-3191-8.
of Hawai‘i Press
This edited book has as its ambition to represent Confucianism as a world philosophy and a living tradition that is engaging and should significantly influence
people’s lives and important contemporary issues.
An important merit of this book is, as its title entails, to look at Confucianism
in context instead of regarding it as a system of abstract ideas. The context in this
book is both in terms of concrete intellectual history context that helps readers to
better understand what Confucianism as a distinctive way of thinking is, and in
terms of different societal backgrounds in which people lived, are living, or will
possibly live a Confucian way of life.
Roger Ames’s article “What Is Confucianism” presents a very clear picture of
the concrete intellectual context in which Confucianism was born and developed.
It informs us that Confucianism is not a philosophy made out of nothing, but has
its “ancient roots” — a kind of “correlative thinking” — that was already distinctive
in the Shang dynasty and had been the “cultural common sense” (p. 70). It con
tinues to illustrate the concrete ways that Confucianism inherits and branches out
this distinctive way of thinking. In this interpretative context, Ames provides his
distinctive translation of many key Confucian terms with a Confucian vocabulary,
instead of taking Western philosophical categories as direct counterparts for
granted. For example, he proposes to translate 仁 (ren) as “consummate person/
conduct,” 礼 (li) as “propriety in one’s roles and relations,” and 孝 (xiao) as “family
reverence” (p. 68). I understand and agree about his idea to translate and interpret
these key terms in a more authentic Confucian way, but I also notice that some
translations are substantially different from his former translations in other
books,1 and I wonder whether the current translations are more appropriate. Ren
(仁) was formerly translated as “authoritative person/conduct,”2 and in my opinion, it better conveys the “relational” (p. 74) meaning. Also, “consummate person/
conduct” makes ren (仁) harder to distinguish from sheng (圣) — the “sage/sagely
conduct.” As the Analects says, the latter is even far beyond ren (仁) (Analects 6:
30). So, if ren is already consummate, then it may be difficult to express sheng’s
superiority.
Moreover, I think when 孝 (xiao) was formerly translated as “filial piety” or
“filial responsibility,”3 its attribute “filial” more precisely captures the character
of xiao (孝), which is specifically about the feeling/responsibility/virtue from
children toward parents, instead of a general “family feeling” or “family reverence.”
The current translation, “family feeling,” is a general term that can refer to different
kinds of family feelings, such as ci (慈) — “the parental love,” or ti (悌) — “the love
toward older brothers.” In the same way, “family reverence” does not distinguish
children’s love and reverence toward parents from the love and deference toward
one’s older brothers.
This ambiguous interpretation of xiao (孝) is not uncommon in this book. For
example, when John Berthrong tries to argue that Confucian xiao is not a blind
reverence, he uses Confucius’s mockery and criticism of an old man as an example
(p. 14). He might have ignored the background that that old man — Yuan Rang — was actually not an elder to Confucius, but a childhood friend. But even if Yuan
Rang were an elder to Confucius, this example is not appropriate for xiao, because
obviously he is not Confucius’s father.
Furthermore, interpreting xiao (孝) as a more generalized family feeling or
virtue, Lisa Rosenlee holds, “The virtue of filial piety . . . emphasizes the reciprocal
care between parent and child” (p. 181). There might be arguments about reciprocal
care between parent and child in Confucian thought, but this reciprocity consists
of both parental love (ci 慈) (Analects 2: 20) and filial love (xiao 孝). Xiao (孝)
itself is just one aspect. It is also worth noting that Rosenlee’s use of Shun’s example
to illustrate the reciprocity entailed in xiao (孝) is problematic. She says that “the
legend of sage-king Shun who defied his vicious father in marriage yet was still
considered virtuous” illustrates the reciprocity in the way that “if the father is not
ritually affectionate toward the son, the son then ceases to be obligated by his filial
duty toward the father” (p. 184). The example here is obviously from Mencius’s
famous defense of the sage Shun (Mencius 4A: 26). However, a careful reading
of Mencius will inform us that Shun got married without letting his father know
(不告而娶) not because his father treated him inappropriately and he tried to
retaliate in this way, but because he was worried that if he did not get married, his
father would not have heirs, which he considered to be the worst kind of unfilial
act (不孝有三，无后为大). Therefore, Shun’s action does not mean that he
“ceases to be obligated by his filial duty toward the father”; on the contrary, it
exhibits his great filial love for and reverence to his father. For this reason, Mencius
still spoke highly of him in this context.
I understand that to translate xiao (孝) as family feeling/reverence instead of
filial feeling/reverence may make Confucianism more compatible with the modern
way of thinking, but we have to be careful to distinguish what Confucianism really
is from what we wish it were.
Now let us look at the societal context in this book. It is not only in the East
Asian societies — China, Korea, and Japan — where Confucianism traditionally has
been a cultural grammar, but also on non–East Asian cultural soils — such as in
America — that traditionally did not have many Confucian elements.
Even in East Asian societies, this book demonstrates that Confucianism takes
different shapes in China, Korea, and Japan and has its different focuses. For
example, in the very informative article about Confucianism in Japan, Peter Nosco
presents the distinctive development of Confucianism and its interaction with
Buddhism and Shintoism. It tells us of the special stress imposed by Japanese
Reviews 471
Confucianism on the values of loyalty and faithfulness (p. 58). This might explain
why the great Japanese Confucian master Soko is also “the founder of Bushido, the
Way of the Warrior” (p. 58).
If East Asian societies are the conventional context of Confucianism, the
non–East Asian society is more like a conceived or potential context for Confucianism. In this case, the issue is more about whether and how Confucianism can,
or should, extend into societies whose cultures are distinctively different and how
it can positively engage in solving many contemporary issues. It takes creative
work to explore what implications Confucianism can have in these comparatively
new contexts, and this book surely makes its own contributions to this project.
Robert Neville argues that what should be regarded as Confucian “core texts”
can vary in the contemporary situation with respect to societies with different
traditions (p. 149). For example, in the American context, he advocates a modi
fication of Zhuxi’s orthodoxy and claims that the “primary scriptures” (p. 150)
should not only be the Four Books but should also include The Book of Xunzi,
which boasts its emphasis on ritual propriety (li 礼). He explains Xunzi’s relevance
to American pragmatism — especially Pierce’s theory of habits and signs — and
proposes how to recover Confucian ritual propriety (li 礼) on American soil.
In the article about Confucianism and democracy, Sor Hoon Tan also interprets Confucianism with American pragmatists’ theory. To be more precise, she
tries to bridge Confucianism and democracy by Deweyan communitarian con
ception of democracy. Her project is surely interesting and very important, but I
wonder whether the bridge she builds is sturdy enough. In the Deweyan democracy, there is a clear two-level structure — the individual and community. It is true
that for Dewey, the ideal democracy “represents the complete and perfect community” (p. 106). But this community clearly comprises individualized persons. She
quotes Dewey, who says that democracy is “a personal, an individual, way of life.”
Furthermore, “[t]he cause of democracy is the moral cause of the dignity and
worth of [the] individual” (p. 107). However, there is no clear parallel in the Confucian structure, in which the family is conspicuously the crucial level and the
fundamental core. The author herself realizes that “Personal cultivation . . . begins
in the family, where one learns to be a filial son and to be brotherly” (p. 108). In
other words, for Confucianism, one’s role in a family exists prior to one’s role in
the extended community. The importance of familial roles in the Confucian basic
political structure makes the bridge built by a Deweyan individual-community
structure seem oversimplified or at least too hasty.
Nevertheless, the central importance of the family in Confucianism and its
implication are by no means neglected in this book. For example, Rosenlee clearly
points out that “Confucian ethics assumes the priority of the family” (p. 183). Many
authors hold that the Confucian focus on family has its significant implication to
our world today. Ames comments that “in our contemporary era, perhaps the most
profound insight Confucianism has to offer the world today lies in prompting us
to rethink the role of family as the ground and primary site of the moral life and
by extension, of a truly robust democracy” (p. 82). However, there seems an
overemphasis on the role of the family when Rosenlee claims that “the scope of
one’s social relations is also the scope of one’s substantial self . . . the self must
sustain the existing familial relations through which the self first comes into
existence” (p. 183). This claim seems to imply that people who have no familial
relations (whether because of choice or not) lack a “substantial self.” Many people,
especially those who live in a society or community that has a profound religious
background may wonder: What about those people who choose to devote themselves to their calling, even when it means that they have to leave their familial
relations behind? Many religious devotees — for example, Christians or Buddhists — in history, or even nowadays, seem to exhibit a no less great “substantial self,” even
if they choose to minimize or leave aside familial relations. To present the focus of
familial values as the distinctive Confucian character and insist on its importance
is justifiable. However, in the meantime, the overemphasis of it may not be helpful
to promote Confucianism as a world philosophy, especially when it means the
neglect of other cultural claims.
Observing the stress of family values as a double-edged sword, Ames insightfully warns, “Ironically, we might argue that at the same time, inopportune intimacy
in relations is also China’s primary obstacle on its own road to democratization.
With so much investment in intimate and informal familial relationships, the
Confucian tradition has been slow to produce the formal, more ‘objective’ institutions necessary to sustain a Confucian version of democracy” (p. 82).
To conclude, this book is a significant endeavor to introduce Confucianism to
the world and present its great potential to be a world ethics, instead of a parochial
and outdated mode of thinking. Some details of the project, however, are still
questionable.
Wu Yun
Wu Yun specializes in comparative moral and political ethics at the Institute of Arts
and Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China.
Notes
1. For example, Roger T. Ames and David Hall, Thinking through Confucius (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1987) Roger T. Ames, and Henry Rosemont Jr., trans., The Analects
of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998).
2. See, for example, Ames 1998: 48.
3. Ibid, p. 58.
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Shin-yi Chao. Daoist Ritual, State Religion, and Popular Practices: Zhenwu
Worship from Song to Ming (960–1644). Routledge Studies in Daoism.
New York: Routledge, 2011. xvii, 158 pp. Hardcover $130.00, isbn
978-0-415-78066-7.
of Hawai‘i Press
Among the vast pantheon of gods recognized and worshiped throughout Chinese
history, Zhenwu stands indisputably as one of the most important. The earliest
historical records of this god span all the way back to the Western Han (206
b.c.e.–9 c.e.) at the latest. Two thousand years later, Zhenwu temples are still
found throughout virtually all parts of the Chinese world, and his worship con
tinues to thrive. More interesting than the number of temples dedicated to him
are the complex and variegated symbols and values attributed to him by different
traditions at different times. Shin-yi Chao, in her book Daoist Ritual, State Religion, and Popular Practices, has provided the first detailed study of the formative
period in which Zhenwu acceded to his lofty position in the front ranks of Chinese
religion. She attempts to shed light on the human agents behind the formative
history of Zhenwu and to show how the different symbolic values that they attributed to Zhenwu speak to the fluid religious landscapes of Chinese religion.
Chao’s study of Zhenwu focuses on the long period spanning the Song, Yuan,
and Ming dynasties (roughly 960–1644). She demonstrates a remarkable versatility
in her handling of the immense collection of historical records at her disposal,
including “scriptures, liturgical manuals, hagiographic accounts, government
documents, epigraphy, iconography, gazetteers, anecdotes, and popular literature”
(p. 7), and she does a marvelous job of letting these records speak for themselves
by way of her superb translations. Throughout the course of her study, we begin to
perceive the fascinating history lying behind Zhenwu, as he emerged into the
major Daoist god of exorcism, a minor Daoist god of internal alchemy, a source of
political legitimization for the ruling dynasty of the time, and a powerful target of
popular worship, all of which led to his ultimate ascendancy as the central god
of one of the most important holy sites of the Eastern world, Mount Wudang.
Chao’s study begins with a provocative introduction, to which I will return.
Chapter 1 provides a historical examination of the pre-Song images and values
attributed to Zhenwu. Initially associated with the northern constellations of the
night sky, and called by the name Xuanwu before having his name changed to
Zhenwu, he was located in one of the five palaces into which the sky was divided,
according to the five-phase theory that became fully standardized in the Han
dynasty. Soon this image was assimilated as one of the Four (or Five) Animals
serving as directional indicators (p. 19). Chao makes a substantial contribution to
the study of Zhenwu by successfully arguing that he began his career as a cosmological symbol, and it was not until the Tang dynasty that Zhenwu became anthropomorphized, specifically and initially as a Daoist god of exorcism (p. 27). Here,
Chao demonstrates that, at first, Zhenwu was named as one of the four saints,
working under the authority of the north emperor in carrying out exorcisms. It
was not long before Zhenwu was singled out by Daoists and laity alike as a god
of outstanding efficacy in chasing off demons and providing other benefits to
humans, and this led to his receiving individual worship. As Chao writes, “Xuanwu
the exorcist general assimilated Xuanwu the cosmological symbol. From this point
on, his godhead rapidly developed and mutated. Eventually he became a god of
multiple faces that symbolized the interests of the various groups in society”
(p. 28).
In chapter 2, Chao explores the historical documents dating from the Song
(960–1279) that show the growth and spread of Zhenwu throughout virtually all
parts of China. Briefly recalling the results of the previous chapter, Chao states,
“The god’s debut in the Daoist pantheon in the mid-tenth century brought him to
the attention of the public” (p. 29). There are two parts to this chapter; in the first
part, Chao presents a documented history of the construction of Zhenwu temples,
in which she notes their growing geographical distribution throughout the empire.
According to her sources, Song dynasty temples built for Zhenwu were initially
constructed through collaborative projects involving Daoist abbots and government officials in state-sponsored temples, but in the later Song, Chao shows that
the laity also came to collaborate with Daoist priests in building Zhenwu temples.
She writes, “It was the collaborative effort of the local elite and the commoners
under the initiative of the Daoist clergy that was responsible for creating Zhenwu
temples” (p. 46). The second part of the chapter focuses on the records of the
kinds of religious practices carried out for the god, which include the making and
veneration of Zhenwu images and the offerings made to them, the dietary restrictions for followers, congregational gatherings in which scriptures were recited, and
the festival days associated with his worship.
In chapter 3, Chao examines the various positions held by Zhenwu and the
specific roles he fulfilled in relation to the institutionalized Daoist religion of the
Song, Yuan, and Ming. As Chao points out in several places, the Song dynasty
marked the period of the emergence and consolidation of several newly formed
ritual lineages, including the Celestial Heart, the Divine Empyrean, and the Youthful Incipience (p. 77), together with their ritual practices, many of which remain
vibrant to this day. Within these lineages, Zhenwu became solidly placed into the
bureaucratized Daoist heavens wherein gods are placed and ranked in terms of
authority. Zhenwu was particularly identified by his authority and efficacy in the
exorcistic systems generally called Thunder Rites. The larger part of this chapter is
devoted to an examination of Zhenwu’s gradual ascent in the heavenly bureaucracy
in tandem with the evolving techniques employed in the Thunder Rites. Chao
writes, “In the final decades of the Northern Song dynasty, Thunder Rites took a
central position on the imperial religious stage and rose to great significance. . . .
By the end of the twelfth century, the Thunder Rites had become a generic practice
that was accepted by every major school, new or old, of Daoism” (p. 52). In brief,
Reviews 475
the Daoist performance of Thunder Rites depended on calling upon Zhenwu, who
was empowered to summon and dispatch the thunder deities, who, in turn, would
descend to chase off demons. Here, Chao provides a fascinating exploration of the
Daoist liturgical texts that demonstrate the evolving ways in which Daoists would
call upon Zhenwu. In the first stage, the typical method for the performance of
the Thunder Rites emerged as a kind of hybrid ritual technique that borrowed
virtually wholesale from the ritual practices of internal visualization (a practice
developed centuries before and closely identified with Highest Perfection Daoism),
by which the adept visualizes the gestation, growth, and maturity of the Dao in
the body in the form of the great Daoist divinity, Laojun. The new techniques for
the Thunder Rites required that the adept visualize the growth and maturity of
Zhenwu in the body. Chao writes, “The inner-body infant then grows into Zhenwu,
with whom the practitioner merges. . . . In the temporary apotheosis, the adept
proceeds to wield the miraculous powers promised by the Thunder Rites” (p. 55).
In the second stage, the earlier practices intending to transform the Daoist master
into Zhenwu directly were ultimately rejected by virtually all of the Daoist lineages,
primarily because they smacked of spirit possession and tended to blur the line
between local cults and Daoism. Chao writes, “Then as now, ordained Daoists
consciously distinguish themselves from neighborhood spirit mediums. . . . They
are not vessels but colleagues of the Dao” (p. 59). In this stage, which is not strictly
differentiated from the first, Daoist masters “created the meditative techniques
that facilitated an identity-transformation without falling into the trap of divine
possession” (p. 59). In the third and final stage, dated to roughly the late fourteenth
century, Zhenwu’s position in the heavenly bureaucracy had risen about as high as
it could go, and he was even called by the title of “the Perfect Lord Zhenwu, the
holy teacher of the dark heaven at the north apex” (p. 70). As such, it depended
on the Daoist master to go into his presence in order to have him summon the
thunder gods. Chao writes, “[Zhenwu’s] power does not derive from his imposing
presence; instead, it came from the authority attached to his position. . . . It was
through a bureaucratic framework . . . that Zhenwu’s authority was formulated”
(p. 69). In this final stage, then, the Daoist master, through the same process of
internal visualization, perfected his body such that it could ascend to heaven and
petition Zhenwu directly in order to have him dispatch the thunder deities.
Chapter 4, certainly the most colorful, focuses on Mount Wudang, counted to
this day among the most sacred mountains in all of China, and the history of how
it came to be identified as Zhenwu’s most holy site by the fourteenth century. Chao
takes us on a journey through a variety of historical sources that recount the ways
in which the mountain was transformed from a locale primarily identified with
Daoist hermits to the most important pilgrimage site for offering worship to
Zhenwu. Chao pays particular attention to the influence exerted by the Daoist
priests on the various legends of Zhenwu proffered by the court, the cultural elites,
and the popular masses. She shows how the Daoists successfully weaved together
an entire hagiography based on the mountain locales of the life of Zhenwu as he
was transformed from a human into a god, a process marked by the temple constructions throughout the mountain and their associated steles and other records
that identified the places of those events.
Chao’s monograph stands as the first complete English-language study of
the rise of Zhenwu during the most important period of his religious emergence.
Arguably the greatest contribution to the study of Zhenwu, and also to the study
of Chinese religion more generally, is Chao’s ability to bring to light numerous
historical records that might otherwise not receive their proper attention. I believe
scholars of Chinese religious history can use this work as a model of what a topnotch study of historical records can provide to the study of Chinese history. The
only weakness of Chao’s study is that she sets herself two tasks in the introduction.
She writes, “This study aims at a holistic understanding of Zhenwu worship in
relation to the history and society of China” (p. 6). This task is accomplished
through her focused attention on the historical records at her disposal and her
ability to situate them. She continues: “The question at the core of this book is how,
in a given historical context, individuals and institutions shape and reshape the
religious world to which they profess devotion” (pp. 6–7). The issue here is that
Chao tries to orient her critical approach in ways that are mostly foreign to what
we read throughout the rest of the book; she writes that “the conflict among
different social strata and groups allows us to examine the power negotiations that
shaped the religious landscape” (p. 6), but this kind of work would more readily
offer the material for her future work dealing with Chinese religion. In addition,
Chao’s study also opens the door to a deeper discussion of and engagement with
the specifically religious content of the period under question. This is most clearly
seen where she talks about the Daoist character of Zhenwu: the reader would like
to know more about the world of Daoism and how Zhenwu fits into this world in
terms of cosmology and ritual. Again, this is something that Chao is fully capable
of doing, and we await her future work with excitement.
This book will be of great interest to specialists in the field of Chinese religion
and history. It successfully demonstrates the need to attend much more closely to
historical sources, and it points the way to using these records and sources as we
come to gain a much better understanding of the religious and social world of
early imperial China.
Thomas Michael
Thomas Michael is an assistant professor of religion at Boston University, specializing
in early Chinese religion.
Reviews 477
Grace Ai-ling Chou. Confucianism, Colonialism, and the Cold War: Chinese
Cultural Education at Hong Kong’s New Asia College, 1949–1963. Leiden:
Brill Academic Publishers, 2012. x, 253 pp. Hardcover $144.00, isbn
978-90-04-18247-9.
of Hawai‘i Press
This is a significant and readable book. The author is to be congratulated for
choosing an important and hitherto unexplored topic, for her impressive multi
archival research, and for making a signal contribution to the various fields of
study indicated in the title of this valuable monograph.
The main theme of the book is the early history of Hong Kong’s New Asia
College, from its founding by self-exiled Confucian scholars from mainland China
in 1949 as a private college to 1963, when it became one of the foundation colleges
of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a state school of the colonial government.
The author skillfully narrates and reveals the interplay of the motives, strategies,
values, interests, and practices of the main actors in this drama: the founders of
the New Asia College, the representatives of American philanthropy (the YaleChina Association, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Asia Foundation, and the
Ford Foundation) that supported the fledgling institution, and the British colonial
administrators who tried to make the best of the situation in which they found
themselves. What the three parties had in common was what the author calls
“anti-Communism”: each saw the Confucianism embodied by the New Asia
College as a significant factor in the anti-Communist struggle of the Cold War;
they all had different reasons for objecting to Mao Zedong, and each held different
expectations for the role that a Chinese institution of higher education in Hong
Kong should play in that struggle.1 As these expectations sometimes coincided but
more often clashed, the institution evolved into an integral part of the local education system and gradually moved away from its founders’ original vision. The
author successfully demonstrates with her wealth of archival materials how that
process took place. With her invaluable spadework, she has earned a notable place
for her book in the history of 1950s Hong Kong, of the Cold War in East Asia, and
of a Confucian institution in the post–World War II era.
On the other hand, the author has not turned every worthwhile stone for
the expectant reader. The broader context of the New Asia College story should
have been outlined explicitly, even if only in broad strokes, instead of being left
as an implied backdrop. For example, two hot wars that were very much part of
the international tensions in eastern Asia, the Korean War (1950–1953) and the
Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), could not but have been on the minds of all
three sets of actors who tried to shape the development of the New Asia College.
The war in Korea was a major background preoccupation of the U.S.-based
foundations that went looking in 1953 for Chinese partners in East Asia to form an
anti-Communist united front, even if Korea might not have been named specifically in their correspondence about the New Asia College. The Malayan conflict
was a similar preoccupation for colonial officials of the British Far East, not least
because it was a war between Malayan Chinese Communist guerillas and British
Commonwealth forces. And there was a perceived Hong Kong connection, too,
embodied as the Tat Tak College in Hong Kong, a Chinese Communist postsecondary institution that recruited students from South China as well as Southeast
Asia in the aftermath of the World War, until it was closed down by the British
authorities of Hong Kong in 1948. (When Nanyang University was founded in
Singapore in 1956, there were also concerns about a possible Communist “infiltration” [cf. p. 108].) In this book, the Korean War is mentioned in a footnote (p. 70
n. 58) and the Malayan Emergency is not mentioned at all, nor is the Republic of
China (ROC)–United States Mutual Defense Treaty (1954), an outcome of the
Korean War and a major milestone in Sino-American relations and in the Cold War.
The People’s Republic of China in the 1950s was not, of course, short of tumultuous events. The land revolution, the Three-Anti and Five-Anti Campaigns, the
rapid industrialization of the first five-year plan, the Great Leap Forward, and the
anti-rightist campaign, as well as the diplomatic achievements of the Geneva
Conference (1954) and the Bandung Conference (1955) — all could not but have
elicited divergent responses (whether or not expressed for the public record) from
the main actors in the evolving New Asia College drama. Weaving these international and national events into the New Asia College story would have enhanced
the reader’s understanding of the latter.
In Hong Kong, the most significant outcome of the Korean War was that the
economic sanctions against mainland China brought a quick end to the entrepôt
economy of the British colony, immediately adding to the hardship of refugee life,
but soon precipitated the export-led industrialization that would transform Hong
Kong into one of the “Four Little Dragons” (Si Xiao Long) two decades later. With
the rise of industrialism, Hong Kong’s expectations of education and its ability to
resource it quickly changed. Some of the demands that the colonial administrators
made of the New Asia College in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so well reported in
this book, would have been better understood against this background.
Another contextual consideration specific to Hong Kong education and the
New Asia College was the seeking out of self-exiled Confucian scholars by colonial
officials, which had a long history before the events narrated in this book. The
pioneer in such efforts was Governor Cecil Clementi, working in the aftermath of
the Canton–Hong Kong general strike and boycott of 1925–1926; at that time, the
threat perceived by the British had come from the Nationalist Party. Indeed,
British colonial administrators kept up their guard against Nationalist agitation
and influence over Hong Kong schools through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In fact,
the 1953 decision by the Hong Kong Education Department to provide its own
syllabi for Chinese studies, and to encourage local production of Chinese textbooks, was motivated as much by concerns about the Nationalist Party as about
the Communist Party, since the greatest danger to the colonial status quo was
Reviews 479
considered to be racialized nationalism. To assume that there was little ideological
distance between the British colonial officials in Hong Kong and the nationalist
officials in Taiwan, because both were anti-Communist, is to consider at best only
half the picture. The author does hint at British concerns about nationalism (e.g.,
pp. 102, 106, 109), but this point could have been underscored.
While in the 1920s Governor Clementi appealed for the cooperation of the
yilao scholar-officials who had left mainland China after the 1911 revolution, in the
1950s and 1960s, Hong Kong government officials seem to have found Qian Mu’s
interpretation of Chinese history, and his kind of Chinese patriotism, to be the
least threatening among available options. Qian’s books were prescribed for university matriculation examinations in Chinese history, while textbooks written by
Qian’s (New Asia College) students were adopted for the secondary schools. In this
way, the impact of the New Asia College on Hong Kong education and identity
probably reached further and deeper than the author has indicated. She mentioned
the 1920s backdrop in the final postscript of the book (p. 213); a fuller discussion of
the interconnections between cultural heritage and colonial education would have
been helpful for the reader.
Before 1949, it was a common practice for the graduates of Hong Kong’s
Chinese-medium secondary schools to seek a higher education in China, while the
Hong Kong government considered itself to have almost no role to play for such
students. When going to the university on the mainland came to be seen as undesirable by many parents as well as by the Hong Kong government, the latter introduced the Hong Kong Chinese School Certificate Examinations in 1952, to provide
a local official credential for completion of Chinese-medium high school education. Meanwhile, the Nationalist government offered scholarships and other
enticements for Overseas Chinese students to attend universities in Taiwan (cf.
pp. 101–102). At least one of the refugee colleges from the mainland in Hong Kong
continued to be accredited and funded by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan.
Neither of these Nationalist policies was welcome by the colonial authorities,
although there was little they could do about these offshore actions. Such contextual information, not discussed in this book, would be very helpful for the reader.
Another dimension of the education context linked Hong Kong with the
dismantling British Empire. The late 1950s to early 1960s, when the colonial officials
made the decision to federate New Asia and two other “refugee colleges” to form
the Chinese University of Hong Kong, also saw the birth of many new universities
throughout the British Commonwealth, not least in the United Kingdom itself.
One of the best known British midwives for these new universities was John Scott
Fulton, who headed the Fulton Commission, which advised the Hong Kong
government (1962) to establish the Chinese University (CUHK). Fulton himself
was no stranger to the upgrading of colleges to universities in the United Kingdom
and elsewhere — and federation was one of the standard methods. While the
author must have been correct in identifying much of the Commission’s advice or
demands for changes in the New Asia curriculum as battles between two different
cultural conceptions of higher education, some of these recommendations would
just as well have been issues about “academic standards” with little regard to
culture (e.g., p. 181) as discussed in this book.
It is curious that the Fulton Commission is never mentioned by name in the
text of the book (but only in the bibliography). It is even more curious that the two
Chinese members of the Fulton Commission are never identified in the book. One
of them, Li Choh-ming, was a prominent Chinese economist who had left mainland China at about the same time as the New Asia College founders, and was
now established as a University of California, Berkeley, professor. The other one
was a Malayan Chinese scientist. They undoubtedly brought to bear different
understandings of, and aspirations for, Chinese culture from those of the New
Asia founders. In this regard, one may consider at least some of the curricular
disagreements between the New Asia College and the Fulton Commission, not as
manifestations between Chinese and British cultures of higher education, but as
expressions of the plurality of Chinese modernity. (Li later became the first vicechancellor of the CUHK, and remained unnamed in this book.)
Indeed, the cultural baggage of the New Asia College founders was by no
means simple. While Qian Mu and his colleagues might have harked back in their
own minds to the shuyuan ideals of the Song and Ming eras, they had not grown
up in the shuyuan a millennium before their own time. Indeed, their lives as students and teachers or professors all took place in the twentieth century, under the
Republic, and especially under Nationalist rule. Their experiences were with the
“alienated academy,” so poignantly recalled by historian Wen-hsin Yeh (cf. p. 147).
When the full-scale Japanese invasion began in 1937, many universities in
China were dislocated. Qian Mu, Tang Junyi, and other scholars had spent more
than a decade as war refugees before they moved to Hong Kong. Qian Mu must
have sung from personal experience when he wrote the lyrics of the “New Asia
College Song”: “Our hands are empty, we possess nothing. We have traveled far;
yet there is no destination in sight.” So, he appealed to the Mencian faith that
hunger and tribulations toughen one’s body and mind for the great tasks that
heaven will soon assign. His students were reminded to be proud of the “bright
light from five thousand years of history,” while fixing their hearts on “the four
hundred million sons and grandsons of the gods,” among whom “sages would
emerge from the east, the west, the south and the north.” Dangers, hardships, and
deprivation could only stimulate them to a greater and greater outpouring of
courage and love. “In full flush of our youth, we press forward in one another’s
companionship, cherish[ing] our New Asia spirit.” Many of the ideas expressed
here were, indeed, derived from the classics or from Neo-Confucianism, but it
would be difficult to imagine such sentiments of twentieth-century patriotism
coming from a traditionalist (Qian Mu, Xinya Xiao Ge [New Asia College Song];
the reviewer’s translation).
Reviews 481
We need to recognize that it was against the context of the pre-1937 and
wartime universities in China that the New Asia College founders sought to build
their shuyuan revival, amidst the penury and squalor of refugee Hong Kong. A
careful delineation of that context would have provided a deepened critical
appreciation of what they were trying to do in the New Asia College, before (and
even when) they became entangled with the divergent notions of CUHK.
Life in the college’s first rented tenement units on Kweilin Street was very hard
indeed, when faculty and students lived and held classes together in the same
Spartan space, sharing what little resources available, and sleeping each night on
top of their desks. Material conditions for living and learning were much improved
when some years later, with Yale-China Association help, the College moved into
its own premises on Farm Road, and improved yet again when the College began
to receive Hong Kong government funding and eventually moved onto the CUHK
campus in Shatin. In this book, the physical dimension of the early New Asia
College is oddly absent, giving the reader a disembodied impression of the events
and personalities.
For all their devotion to the teachings of the Confucian classics and the
Song interpreters of those classics, the New Asia College founders were at least as
much men of twentieth-century China as they were traditionally minded scholars.
They all had had some measure of modern education, and some of them were
attempting to reformulate Confucian thought in twentieth-century terms. The
New Asia College curriculum that they devised, based on what the author calls
“the traditional Chinese humanities triumvirate of literature, history and philosophy” (p. 161), owes its structure and terminology (and some of its contents as well)
to the Japanese or American inspirations on modern Chinese universities, rather
than to traditional Chinese education. As well as the patriotic sentiments
expressed in the “New Asia College Song”, the dispute between the New Asia
College and the colonial government over whether it had the right to fly the ROC
flag on the ROC National Day, which the author discusses in considerable detail
(pp. 137–148), was indicative of some form of modern nationalism rather than
traditional culturalism.
The final section of the book, “The Meanings of New Asia” (pp. 201–222),
follows the epilogue, as a kind of postscript. It is, in fact, the most fascinating
discussion in the book, in which a number of the gaps noted above in this
review are addressed, albeit all too briefly. One wishes that these afterthoughts
had been worked into the substantive chapters of the book, which would have
greatly enriched them. (One may be allowed to wonder if these afterthoughts
were written in response to some previous reviewer’s critique.) In any event,
one question remains unanswered, indeed unasked: Why was the college
named “New Asia”? What implications did the adoption of this (clearly non
traditional) name have for Confucianism and colonialism in the context of the
Cold War?
If providing the various contexts for the New Asia College story has not been
the forte of this book, let it be reiterated that the book has many undoubted
strengths, not least of which being the multiarchival research. The author has done
painstaking spadework in the Hong Kong archives of CUHK and the colonial
government, as well as in the American archives of the philanthropic organizations, the Public Records Office in Britain (now called the National Archives), and
others. She has unearthed an immense amount of material that document the
Cold War dimension of the help given to the New Asia College in the 1950s, and
the various negotiations between the College and British officials or advisers.
Furthermore, she has woven her wealth of archival resources into a readable and
absorbing account. Students of Hong Kong history and of Chinese education in
the 1950s are indebted for her thought-provoking contribution.
Bernard H. K. Luk
Bernard H. K. Luk is an associate professor of history at York University, Toronto,
who specializes in twentieth-century Hong Kong and South China. In the 1980s, he
was on the faculty of the New Asia College, CUHK.
Note
1. Inter alia, Qian Mu, the founding president of the New Asia College, had been named in
condemnation by Mao in an article published August 14, 1949.
Richard R. Cook and David W. Pao, editors. After Imperialism: Christian
Identity in China and the Global Evangelical Movement. Eugene, OR:
Pickwick Publications, 2011. xvii, 237 pp. Paperback $28.00, isbn
978-1-60899-336-9.
of Hawai‘i Press
The introduction to this volume says that “In May 2008 over a dozen evangelical
scholars, Chinese and Western from the United States, Hong Kong, and Taiwan,
came together to address issues of Christian and evangelical identity. The ‘InterCultural Theological Conversation’ was entitled, ‘Beyond Our Past; Bible, Cultural
Identity, and the Global Evangelical Movement’ ” (p. xi). The conference was
jointly organized by the Evangel Seminary (Hong Kong) and Trinity Evangelical
Divinity School (Deerfield, Illinois). Cosponsors were the China Evangelical
Seminary and the Evangelical Free Church of China, largely of Taiwan and Hong
Kong, respectively.
Of the twelve papers published, six were by Westerners, of which four are
faculty members of the same institution, the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
Reviews 483
(hereafter, simply Trinity). Six were by Chinese, of which two are from the same
Evangelical Seminary, while three are from different theological institutions, all in
Hong Kong. It is the claim of these writers that something new has come to evangelicalism in recent decades: intellectual rigor with interdisciplinary studies and
social and environmental concerns. Much credit goes to publications and organizations such as the Sojourners magazine, founded in 1971 by Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian, and the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), established
in 1993. Both entities have main offices in Washington, DC.
All the papers held firmly to an evangelical faith assumption that Jesus Christ
is the only source for human salvation. A good example of Christian exclusivity is
seen in Ka Lun Leung, of the Alliance Bible Seminary in Hong Kong, who insists
that evangelicals have never accepted religious dialogue. “They maintain, rather,
that Christianity aims to change both the society and the individual. Such change
includes internal religious beliefs as well as external cultural behavior” (p. 30).
Maureen W. Yeung of Evangel Seminary in Hong Kong makes the claim that the
gospel of Jesus honors the Chinese tradition of the veneration of ancestors as an
“in-Christ” activity. Such activity, however, should never be “idolatrous” or seen
as “good works meriting salvation” (pp. 154–174). All the writers make good use of
the social sciences and the work of scholars in the history of religion. One of the
papers (Douglas A. Sweeny of Trinity) even uses such a term as “ecumenical,”
which hitherto had been avoided by evangelicals who did not want to be associated with long-established ecumenical agencies, such as the national councils of
churches, in different countries, or the World Council of Churches, in the global
context. Evangelicalism today, as this book suggests, is also a global movement.
The papers seem to have drawn insights from the Protestant churches in
China in their Christian identity in a postcolonial era, as stated in their aim to be
thoroughly contextualized in the Chinese cultural milieu. The China Christian
Council, organized in 1980, has emphasized not only China’s humiliation under
Western and Japanese imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but
also the particularity of the church in China to be Chinese and also its universality
in being Christian. In an address to the staff of the World Council of Churches in
Geneva in 1983, Bishop Ting said, “if we do not cherish our identity and selfhood
[as Chinese], we will have nothing to give to the Church Universal.”1 Echoing
Ting’s views, Sweeny suggests wishfully that “[p]erhaps Chinese evangelicals will
lead the way in showing their brothers and sisters in God’s family how to contextualize the faith without domesticating it — how to render the faith their own without
repeating the sins of the past and universalizing their social and cultural preferences” (p. 22). In this light, the papers seem to admit the guilt of cultural imperialism of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century missionaries, largely from
Britain and the United States, who foisted their culture, along with the biblical
gospel, on China. An example of such is by Frank Thielman of the Beeson Divinity
School in Birmingham, Alabama. He shows how the Western missionary emphasis
on individualism (which grew out of the Enlightenment) was imposed on commu
nitarian cultures, such as China and other places, where a collective culture is
central. Yet in defense, he claims that the gospel can only be expressed through a
particular culture, and that Western missionaries were no less culture-bound and
the products of their time. Furthermore, Thielman would add that individuals are
important in the Bible in terms of accountability before God for their life and
behavior on earth. He urges that “in our enthusiasm to correct the mistakes of the
past, it is important not to go to the opposite extreme of denying and neglecting
the Bible’s own concern for the salvation of the individual” (p. 153).
With today’s emphasis on the different social and cultural contexts out of
which Christianity is expressed, K. Lawrence Younger Jr. of Trinity underscores
the equal importance of understanding the counterpart contexts of biblical times.
By neglecting the latter, it is too easy to use the text of the Bible as a pretext for
one’s contemporary concerns, which may, or often may not, be according to the
intent of the original writer or group of writers in ancient times. For him, “doing
the theology of the Old Testament starts with a scrupulous assessment of the
‘original context’ that is, a thoroughgoing ‘contextual criticism’ ” (p. 76). On the
other hand, his colleague Robert J. Priest, also of Trinity, stresses the importance of
understanding the cultural context of a recipient country such as China to avoid
the negative results of uninformed evangelism. Such is the case when the dragon
in the book of Revelation is seen as evil to be slain, whereas in China the dragon
has been viewed as royalty and the very origin of the Chinese people, so writes
Priest in his article “Who Am I? Theology and Identity for Children of the
Dragon” (chap. 10).
Two papers on the concept of holy war (in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament) by K. Lawson Younger Jr. and David W. Pao provide an interesting twist on
this intriguing notion, relevant to our time. Both authors are also from Trinity. In
this day of America’s super military power in a world of Pax Americana, amid
Islamic extremism in jihadist terror against infidels, their interpretation of holy
war is both interesting and helpful. Holy war is seen by these two theologians as
God’s perennial contest against human disobedience, sin against neighbors, and all
of God’s creation. That war is God’s war and God’s alone, and not to be claimed by
humans. Even those who claim to be God’s people cannot engage in war in God’s
name, as happened in the dark history of Christianity during the crusades against
the Muslim world of the Middle Ages, set in motion by Pope Urban II in 1095.
President George W. Bush’s referring to his war against terrorism as a “crusade”
was most unfortunate in recalling images of Christian brutality, albeit close to a
thousand years later.
All in all, the twelve papers seem to show a high level of rigorous scholarship
and careful hermeneutics of the Bible, relevant to our time and, first and foremost,
with a firm stance on evangelical conviction. Whether readers agree with their
religious conviction, these writers are enlightened, and their scholarly writings are
Reviews 485
refreshingly encouraging. “This collection of essays,” the editors claim, “arises from
a commitment to the belief that evangelicalism continues to provide the historical
assets and intellectual (hermeneutical and theological) tools for the global church”
(p. xi). As cited by Sweeney, demographers say that the world’s population has
reached 6.6 billion, and “one out of every eight people in the world is an evangelical” (p. 1). Given the broad spectrum of perspectives in all religions, not to mention Christianity, we wonder how well do these writers, however sophisticated but
essentially from only four theological institutions in the United States, Taiwan, and
Hong Kong, are representative of world evangelicalism. Especially in the global
south, where growth of evangelicalism is the greatest, but also with varying levels
of understanding in the developing countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
What these writers describe certainly does not represent “Christian identity in
China,” as the subtitle suggests. The majority of Christian churches in China are
evangelical not in the new sense of developments in recent decades in North
America, but in the older sense of being conservative, apolitical, in dire need of
critical thinking, and in dire need of basic education that can lead to critical
thinking.
A more modest and sobering paper is by Kevin Xiyi Yao, a professor of
theological studies at the China Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong.
He praises the breakthrough in China’s urban churches, where many converts in
recent decades are intellectuals and former democracy and human rights activists
who have, therefore, brought a social dimension into the house churches. He
reminds the conference that true Christianity has always been a minority in
society, no less true in China, and suggests that “it is perhaps unrealistic to expect
China to someday become a new ‘Christendom’ or ‘Christian nation’ ” (p. 72). He
warns that any new triumphalism of the global evangelical movement should not
impose such a medieval model on China. True to the title of the book, After
Imperialism, Yao adds, for his colleagues in the West, Taiwan, and Hong Kong,
“In any case, as we support the Chinese church in it[s] endeavor, let us fully take
its history and context into account, also keeping in mind that the final decision
must be left to the Chinese Christians” (p. 72). (Yao recently joined the faculty of
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.)
Because of its modest posture, Yao’s paper should appear at the very end of the
book, to highlight his position and sound advice as an excellent final word. Most
religious people would like to see what they do hold in common as faith assumptions. The exclusivist nature of many evangelicals who, like Ka Lun Leung, never
accept religious dialogue is a case in point. To me, this self-satisfied possession of
the truth is untenable in an age of religious plurality in a multicultural, globalized
society and world of interaction and interdependence. In general, papers in this
volume indicate that some evangelical Christians do hold a more open-minded
position on the ambiguity of Christian missions in China and their complicity
with Western imperialism.
For such an admission to be a genuine corrective, however, the problem of
religious exclusivism, which undergirded imperialism, must be addressed. Also,
admittedly, even if evangelicals do constitute the majority of Christians in the
world, can a handful of twelve relatively more progressive theologians (four from
the same institution in America) speak for diverse evangelicals in China, let alone
“the Global Evangelical Movement”?
Franklin J. Woo
Franklin J. Woo (retired) is a former chaplain and lecturer in religion at Chung Chi
College, Chinese University of Hong Kong (1965–1976), and director of the China
Program, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States
(1976–1993).
Note
1. K. H. Ting, “Chinese Selfhood and the Church Universal,” China Notes (fall 1984): 314.
(CN is a journal of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, 475 Riverside
Drive, New York, NY 10027.)
Andrew S. Erickson, Lyle J. Goldstein, and Carnes Lord, editors. China
Goes to Sea: Maritime Transformation in Comparative Historical Perspective.
Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009. xxxvi, 485 pp. Hardcover
$49.95, isbn 978-1-59114-242-3.
of Hawai‘i Press
China Goes to Sea: Maritime Transformation in Comparative Historical Perspective
is a provocative work that seeks to assess the prospects for a contemporary
Chinese maritime transformation by examining and comparing the key factors
that have shaped such transformations undertaken by landed empires from
ancient times to the modern period — that is, landed empires that have effected
a shift from a primarily landward strategic orientation to one that preferences
maritime economic and naval power. After a brief introduction, the work is
divided into four sections. The first examines the Persian, Roman, Spartan, and
Ottoman empires; the second analyzes the maritime experience of European
continental states in the age of global communications from the sixteenth to the
twentieth centuries, including France, imperial Russia, Germany, and Soviet
Russia; and the third assesses late imperial China during the Ming and Qing
dynasties (1364–1911) and Mao’s China (1949–1980). These three sections serve as a
prelude to the fourth section, which the editors regard as the most important part
of the book — the assessment of contemporary China’s maritime assets and the
Reviews 487
prospects for a complete maritime transformation, with both commercial and
naval components, in the near future.
Gilbert Sullivan introduces the section on the early Mediterranean world with
an excellent analysis of the multinational character of the Persian maritime enterprise in the late sixth and fifth centuries b.c.e., arguing that the Persians’ tolerant
practicality, built on a foundation of outstanding leadership, coherent political
institutions, and fiscal abundance, enabled them to enlist the nautical skills and
technical infrastructure of their maritime allies (principally, the Phoenician city
states) to overcome maritime challenges and then create a permanent maritime
presence in the eastern Mediterranean to stabilize their seaward frontiers and
profit from maritime trade. The Persians, the author points out, provided the
funds, while their allies did the work — this without losing sight of the geographical imperatives that faced their vast landed empire; thus, Persia was one of the few
states, ancient or modern, that was able to sustain and balance its strategic needs
on both land and sea.
Similarly, Arthur Eckstein’s detailed analysis of Rome’s maritime transformation emphasizes the adaptive practicality of the Roman leadership in the late
Republic in response to the threat of Carthage during the Punic Wars (264–146
b.c.e.) and then, later, to the threat of piracy in the eastern Mediterranean that led
to the creation of the Roman navy. Quick to fund and build fleets of warships to
meet these challenges and exploit the naval resources of allies as a force multiplier,
the Romans soon came to appreciate that naval power and communications
enhanced their rule in those parts of the empire straddling the Mediterranean Sea,
and the navy became an integral, albeit subordinate, part of Roman imperial
power beginning with Octavian’s rule (27 b.c.e.).
The Ottoman Empire (1300–1922) also exploited naval power and communications after completing the conquest of its landed empire in southeastern Europe
and the Middle East, culminating in 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople — a
port city with already existing navigational facilities and infrastructure. Jakub
Grygiel brilliantly outlines the Ottoman maritime transformation that sought,
first, to stabilize and defend the eastern Mediterranean coast and, second, to
maintain its access to the Indian Ocean trade via the Red Sea. It did so, he argues,
at a watershed moment in world history when the Atlantic powers, led by Portugal
in the early sixteenth century, made spectacular innovations in ship design, deep
ocean navigation, and the fortification of ports on the world’s major sea lanes,
enabling them to dominate ocean communications into the twentieth century,
thereby turning the Mediterranean Sea into a strategic and commercial backwater.
In this new global-strategic context, the Ottoman leaders resisted the lure of
seaborne adventures in maritime Asia and the costly naval innovations required to
compete there. Instead, they decided to secure their position on the Mediterranean
with the oared galley, and settled for access to Red Sea ports while devoting their
land forces to internal and landward threats to their diverse empire.
Barry Strauss’s analysis of Sparta’s “meteoric rise and fall” (p. 33) as a naval
power provides an interesting contrast to that of the larger Persian, Roman, and
Ottoman empires. In this case, a small but formidable land power, led by a rigid
military caste committed to the use of an army to maintain internal security and
defend its land frontiers, demonstrated its practicality and versatility by under
taking a program of naval development in order to defeat the Athenian seaborne
empire during the Peloponnesian Wars (431–404 b.c.e.) and dominate the Aegean
and eastern Mediterranean until 394 b.c. It did so by opening its naval service to
brilliant and ambitious non-elites, such as Lysander, in 407 b.c.e., and by drawing
on the naval resources and personnel of its allies. Yet, the author argues, Sparta
could not sustain its maritime power because of the rigidity of its political-
strategic culture and the traditional orientation of its military elite, which
remained wedded to land forces as the foundation of state power.
As a whole, the studies on premodern naval transformations are extremely
well argued to highlight those key factors that shaped the decisions to embark on
programs of naval development. They reveal that the leadership of the early landed
empires never lost sight of the harsh strategic and logistical realities of governing
vast territories. Therefore, these states built their navies not to supplant but to
reinforce their land-based military systems. They made their transformations
quickly in response to discrete challenges, embraced technological improvements
to the traditional oared galley, recruited the naval resources of their allies, and,
then, with the exception of Sparta, gradually adjusted their strategic vision to
embrace naval power, seeing it as a strategic and economic asset in defending and
stabilizing their coastal perimeters.
The second part of the collection evaluates the efforts of European states in
the age of global maritime communications from the sixteenth to the twentieth
centuries — an era that presented a whole new set of strategic-economic issues
related to global trade and overseas empire. James Pritchard’s penetrating analysis
of four periods of fragmented maritime development in France suggests that
although France had the wealth, population, and technological resources to
achieve a naval transformation, little was actually accomplished because it lacked
the necessary internal political and institutional cohesion to sustain naval development, and, moreover, French political, military, and cultural elites did not see its
value. As a result, France failed to develop a unified strategic vision that embraced
and defined the navy’s role within France’s diplomatic and strategic approach to
either its continental neighbors or its overseas commercial and colonial competitors.
Because of this lack of internal focus, Pritchard argues, France pursued the ephemeral image of empire, with its so-called civilizing mission and the scramble for
overseas empire in Africa and Asia, rather than coming to grips with the realities
posed by revolutionary changes in Europe that challenged its continental borders.
Jacob Kipp’s study of the Petrine (1696–1865) and the Modernization (1865–
1917) approaches to maritime transformation in imperial Russia highlights the
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staggering difficulties of undertaking naval development in a vast but economically and technologically backward territorial empire that was strategically and
logistically burdened with four separate and distinct maritime zones: the Baltic,
Black, and Barents Seas and Russia’s Pacific coast. Both approaches treated naval
development as an adjunct to land forces and recognized that sweeping changes in
societal, political, and economic institutions were essential to success, but neither
the Petrine top-down, autocratic approach to mobilizing human and material
resources nor the post–Crimean War modernizers, with their program of capital
liberalization, institutional reforms, and joint state-private partnerships, could
overcome these ultimately insurmountable obstacles. Maritime development, such
as it was, was stopped dead in its tracks when both the Russian Pacific and Baltic
fleets were destroyed by the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905).
The same problems persisted during the Soviet period, according to Milan
Vego’s careful account of the rise and fall of the Soviet navy from 1921 to 1991, and
they intensified during the chaotic conditions surrounding the civil war and the
Stalinist era from 1921 to 1953, during which time the Soviet state failed to create a
navy capable of defending its four maritime coastal zones or contribute to the
World War II effort, much less project Soviet power abroad. During the Cold War,
the Soviets embarked on a costly arms race with the United States in order to offset
the latter’s superiority in conventional and nuclear weapons, missile development,
and strategic communications. Again, as in the past, because of limited economic
resources, the Soviets were forced to make tough choices, and, as a result, their
strategic policy and plans veered from one strategic-military goal to another,
emphasizing first bomber forces, then a large surface navy with aircraft carriers,
then greater emphasis on submarine fleets, followed by an even narrower focus
on nuclear weapons, only to return again to more conventional approaches to
perceived threats. Although the author points out that the Soviets made important
innovations, such as nuclear propulsion of submarines and surface ships, they
continually struggled to play the game of catch-up with the United States until the
arms race bankrupted the government and led to its collapse in 1991.
Holger Herwig’s intriguing study of maritime policy and practice in Germany
from unification (1871) to the end of World War II compares and contrasts Bismarck’s
profoundly realistic defensive policy of “German security without hegemony”
(p. 173) that halted further territorial expansion after 1871 with the wildly expensive
and uncoordinated naval buildup under Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (1888–1914).
Under Bismarck, Herwig argues, imperial Germany maintained cordial diplomatic
ties with its neighbors (except for France) and built a small navy to defend its
Baltic and Black Sea coasts, rather than spend critical resources on a blue-ocean
navy to rival that of Britain. This careful approach enabled Germany to focus on
economic and industrial development and to emerge as an economic colossus by
1900. Yet, this prudent plan, which recognized Germany’s lack of direct access to
global oceanic routes, was thrown to the wind by the wily bureaucratic machinations
of Tirpitz and his “New Course” (p. 176) that began a costly program of naval
development in 1888, which sought to create a huge imperial navy of capital ships
capable of challenging Great Britain at sea. These efforts, which were never coordinated with the army leadership nor with the two-front plan outlined by Alfred von
Schlieffen in the lead-up to World War I, contributed nothing to the German war
effort. Yet, in spite of the failure of the Tirpitz plan, its basic features reemerged in
Hitler’s equally flawed Z plan in the period leading up to World War II.
These excellent analyses of maritime policy and naval development implemented by the European continental states reveal the tragedy of ignoring geographical and logistical realities that would have seemed to demand careful
attention to landward strategic imperatives and the need to evaluate naval power
in this context. Yet, in each case, except for Bismarckian Germany, the leadership
often ignored or discounted these realities, unable to resist the lure of wealth and
power from overseas trade and empire enjoyed by Great Britain and, later, the
United States. Each embraced aspects of the Mahanian model of maritime power
based on large oceangoing fleets, and each entered into expensive naval rivalries
without carefully assessing the role of naval power in a larger unified strategic
vision that took account of the essential role of land forces.
The third section of the book begins with Andrew Wilson’s careful study of
the nature and use of Ming naval power that challenges the conventional wisdom
that the Ming state retreated from naval development after the great maritime
expeditions led by Zheng He (1405–1433). He argues, instead, that the navy played
a successful role in Ming military history until the end of the sixteenth century
and included the use of coastal and riverine warfare in the preconquest period, the
dispatch of the flamboyant maritime expeditions to revive Ming overlordship in
maritime Asia, and the successful use of naval power to quell Wokou piracy
(1540–1580) and defeat Japanese forces in Korea during the Imjin War (1592–1598),
even though the state’s primary strategic focus remained centered on its land
frontiers. However, when weakened in the seventeenth century, the Ming were
forced to rely on powerful coastal trading organizations, such as the Fujian-based
Zheng family trading empire that had emerged in spite of Ming restrictions on
maritime trade and shipping.
Overall, Wilson provides a thorough synthesis of Ming naval history, placing
the Zheng He expeditions into a context that sheds light on changing Ming strategic objectives over the course of the dynasty and that also interprets the impact of
momentous political, military, and economic changes at work in China and maritime Asia during the early modern period. However, although the author concedes
that the Ming focus on land frontiers was entirely appropriate given its vast territory, he seems to suggest that this orientation, reinforced by conservative Confucian political elites and ideology, went rather too far, curtailing appropriate state
involvement beyond the coast into maritime Asia, which he sees as a missed
opportunity of sorts.
Reviews 491
This interpretation underplays the shaping influence of the late imperial state’s
long-standing institutional limits on the expansion of state administrative and
fiscal power, the logic of which served to constrain military-political adventures
beyond both China’s land and maritime frontiers. The author also neglects important developments in private Chinese maritime trade and shipping, such as the rise
of the Zheng trading empire that blossomed at the end of the Ming period in spite
of state prohibitions. These developments drew on earlier Song and Yuan maritime
traditions and set the stage for the dynamic expansion of private Chinese coastal
trade as well as overseas trade and shipping with maritime Asia in the Qing period
(1644–1911).
Bruce Elleman’s assessment of Qing maritime policy centers on Qing naval
weakness during the last seventy years of the dynasty (twenty-one out of twentysix pages), when European penetration of East Asia peaked and superior naval
power enabled the British to force the Qing state to alter its system of port management, negotiate trade issues directly with foreign governments, and grant
privileged status to Europeans in its ports and hinterland until 1911. The author
covers long familiar ground on abortive Chinese attempts at military, naval, and
commercial modernization (1839–1911), and he emphasizes the late Qing failure to
accept what he considers to be the obvious strategic and economic need for an
enlarged state-sponsored program of naval engagement in maritime Asia in spite
of the huge strategic, logistical, and fiscal challenges the dynasty faced in the
borderlands and the crippling impact of ethnic conflict, internal rebellion, and
piracy since 1800, the worst of which was the Taiping Rebellion at mid-century.
Overall, the paper does little to explain the reasons for the continuing relevance in
the nineteenth century of a strategic vision that centered on internal security and
land frontiers, even in the face of radically altered power configurations generated
by European penetration of maritime East Asia.
The main weakness of the paper, however, is its neglect of innovations in early
Qing maritime policy and the consequent explosive growth of private Chinese
coastal trade and overseas trade with maritime Asia — all of which have been richly
documented over three decades of scholarship, especially in works by Southeast
Asian specialists and scholars of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since the
1980s. These works reveal that the Qing leadership purposefully fostered private
coastal trade after the pacification of the coast in the 1680s, recognizing that the
long-term security of the region depended on a prosperous maritime economy.
They embraced and collaborated with commercial interests to manage Chinese
and foreign trade in the coastal ports within a well-organized maritime customs
system, centered in each of the four southeast coastal provinces at the port cities of
Shanghai (Jiangsu), Ningbo (Zhejiang), Fuzhou (Fujian), and Guangzhou (Guangdong; see Huang Guosheng, Yapian zhanzheng qiande dongnan sisheng haiguan
[Fuzhou: People’s Press, 2000]); and, moreover, they built a coastal defense fleet
that protected the trade lanes on the southeast coast and the entrance to the Yangzi
River, and guarded the strategic approaches to the capital and Manchu homeland
on the northeast coast. In other words, early Qing stewardship of the coastal
economy provided the necessary conditions for the momentous growth of the
maritime economy that sparked the beginning of the gradual shift of the Chinese
economy from the agricultural heartland to the coast and that prefigured the
PRC’s support of and collaboration with private maritime interests since the 1980s
to expand the regional and global reach of its maritime economy. The neglect of
these issues creates an incomplete picture of late imperial Chinese maritime
history and its legacy for the PRC since the 1980s.
Bernard Cole picks up the story of Chinese maritime development from
liberation in 1949 to the end of the Cold War in 1991, providing a careful analysis
of the very real domestic and foreign threats that the People’s Republic faced while
seeking to consolidate its control of the country and reassert its traditional borders.
He identifies three periods during which China faced different strategic threats.
The first, from 1949 to 1960, centered on the Republic of China’s strikes against the
east coast and offshore islands and the hostile U.S. presence in maritime East Asia
after the outbreak of the Korean War (1950–1953). This, he explains, was a period
when the PRC began the planning and organization of naval institutions within
the framework of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and profited from Soviet
aid, advice, and technology transfers, under the terms of the Sino-Soviet Treaty
(1950).
The second period (1960–1976) witnessed growing conflict with the Soviet
Union after the Sino-Soviet split (1960) and a gradual rapprochement with the
United States in the early 1970s against the backdrop of political chaos unleashed
by the Cultural Revolution (1964–1976). Because of the buildup of Soviet troops on
China’s northern border and other landed threats, such as the war with India
(1962), China’s strategic gaze remained fixed on landward security issues.
Finally, Cole asserts that the PRC made real gains in naval development in the
third period under Deng Xiaoping’s modernization policies (1980–1991), and did
so not in response to a looming strategic maritime threat, but in response to the
state’s dynamic program of private economic and industrial development in the
coastal region and the opening of global markets to Chinese goods. The modernization program, which led to the rapid expansion of Chinese trade and shipping,
highlighted the need not only to develop a blue-ocean navy to herald China’s
dynamic entrance into global maritime commerce, but also to create a Chinese
naval presence on the island perimeter from Taiwan to the more distant Paracel
and Spratly Islands. The author maintains that, in spite of these maritime initiatives, the PRC’s strategic vision remained fixed on land frontiers and ground
forces, not on the coast and the navy.
The final section of the book centers on present-day prospects for a Chinese
maritime transformation and begins with Gabriel Collins and Michael Grubb’s
fascinating account of the astonishing achievements of the Chinese shipbuilding
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industry since 1982 that shows concretely how Deng Xiaoping’s modernization
program revived and transformed the Chinese seafaring tradition after a century
of stagnation. They argue that the keys to this successful enterprise were innovative structural changes in China’s economic and military institutions that enabled
China to create a dynamic shipbuilding industry, merchant marine, and modern
navy in order to project Chinese power and prestige regionally and globally. These
structural changes scaled back state operational involvement in maritime trade
and shipbuilding and opened the way for private interests, domestic and foreign,
to participate in the development of the shipbuilding industry near the major
ports as well as smaller ports in China’s eleven coastal provinces.
The authors highlight the role of two umbrella organizations that spearheaded
the shipbuilding initiative: first, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation, which
directs shipbuilding activities in Shanghai and the four southeastern coastal
provinces, and second, the China State Industrial Corporation for facilities on the
northeast coast. Both organizations used (1) large multipurpose conglomerates,
(2) joint ventures with foreign corporations, and (3) private shipyards to develop
high-tech production processes, such as modular construction and hull fabrication, that produced a range of highly complex and multipurpose vessels, from
fishing boats and passenger ships to container ships and oil and liquid natural gas
tankers. As a result of these efforts, the authors assert, the deadweight tonnage of
Chinese commercial shipping has increased dramatically from 220,000 tons to
over 13 million tons in the last twenty years. The genius of the plan is that strategic
naval construction is also centered at these very same shipbuilding facilities to take
advantage of the rapid pace of technological innovations in the private shipbuilding sector. In other words, the PRC has used the private sector to drive the shipbuilding industry and trigger a dynamic expansion of trade and industry at home
and abroad and, at the same time, create a modern high-tech navy.
Eric McVadon brings his impressive professional experience in naval affairs to
bear on an examination of China’s present naval assets (as of 2009) in order to
determine the strategic priorities and technological capabilities of the PLA’s navy,
which, although not fully mature at this stage, has progressed remarkably in the
past ten years to achieve two strategic goals: first, the rapid takeover of Taiwan in
the event of hostilities, while simultaneously blocking any U.S. attempts to come to
Taiwan’s aid with regionally based naval and land forces. The Chinese have developed four classes of missile-armed submarines, supported by an air- and landbased missile capability and surface craft, to achieve this goal. The second objective
is to support and protect China’s global trade and shipping with a modern blueocean navy that includes longer-range surface combat craft.
The author takes the reader through a dizzying array of possible conflict
scenarios that demonstrate exactly what the PLAN’s naval assets can and cannot
do at this stage (replete with a plethora of acronyms). Yet he moves beyond these
conflict scenarios to suggest that perhaps the overall purpose of Chinese naval
development may, in fact, be the creation of a strong deterrent posture, backed up
by offensive power, that could lead to the peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue,
contribute to good relations with Russia and the United States, solidify China’s
relations with its regional neighbors, and lay the foundation for a larger positive
Chinese role in global affairs.
Andrew Erickson and Lyle Goldstein analyze the lessons learned from an
important recent Chinese government study of the factors that led to the rise of
nine world powers since 1500, including the early maritime powers of Portugal,
Spain, the Netherlands, the later maritime powers — the United Kingdom, Japan,
and the United States — and the European continental states (France, Germany,
and Russia) that strove to develop strong navies. The study, entitled The Rise of the
Great Powers, was undertaken at the behest of Hu Jintao in 2003 to help Chinese
catch up to and overtake the leading modern nations of today, and to rejuvenate
the Chinese state (p. 401). It is important because it captures current Chinese views
about the nature and significance of maritime power in China’s future. A central
thesis of the study holds that national power flows from economic development,
fueled by foreign trade, without which a nation can neither build nor sustain the
costs of a strong navy, nor remain, at the same time, a strong land power. In other
words, economic strength precedes the development of both landed and naval
power.
The Chinese study treats Portugal and Spain as the great nautical innovators
that opened global sea routes to maritime Asia and the New World. According to
the Chinese authors, both were able to embark on these global enterprises because
of internal unity and a shared commitment to the importance of maritime trade
and the need for navigational innovation, and both declined because they squandered their national wealth and power on overseas empire and global overreach
instead of investing in their respective domestic economies. The same fate (with
variations) undermined French, German, Russian, Japanese, and ultimately British
wealth and power. The Chinese authors acknowledge that the United States is
unique in world history for its ability to sustain both ground and naval forces, but
they predict its future decline if it persists in its attempts to establish itself as a land
power in Eurasia.
In contrast to the world powers that fell victim, to one degree or another, to
faulty strategic reasoning and to overweening hubris, the Chinese authors praised
the Netherlands for its single-minded drive for maritime trade, first in Europe and
then overseas, becoming the world’s premier trading power in the seventeenth
century. When the Dutch built a powerful navy to protect their commercial empire
from other European powers, they never lost sight of the primacy of economic
goals. Erickson and Goldstein suggest that this glowing Chinese assessment of the
Dutch may indicate a preference for the deployment of naval power to support and
protect trade abroad and then use the profits for internal social-economic
development.
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Carnes Lord’s masterful summation of the nature of maritime transformations
and the prospects for just such a Chinese transformation achieves the ambitious
goals set out in the introduction of China Goes to Sea. It draws together the general
themes of maritime transformations in the early Mediterranean world that are so
effectively discussed by the authors in the first section of the book. Lord then dissects
the cases of failed maritime transformations in European continental states,
arguing that although various national leaders made strenuous efforts to build and
assert commercial and/or naval power, their efforts failed in the long-run because
of their inability to assess correctly (1) “the brute facts of political and strategic
geography” (p. 434), (2) the resource base required for sustained maritime development, and (3) the potential economic payoff from maritime trade. Leadership
and various bureaucratic-cultural forces also shaped the way that various states
sought to incorporate maritime power into their respective strategic orientations.
Lord then applies the lessons of history to contemporary China, providing a
careful review of Chinese naval history from the Ming dynasty to the 1980s and
the astonishing achievements in the development of Chinese maritime economic
and naval power since the 1980s. He concludes that the Chinese have largely
achieved a maritime transformation, or as he puts it, “China has very likely turned
the corner on a genuine maritime transformation” (pp. 450–451), although its
strategic outlook will likely retain a continentalist dimension, given the vulnerability of its land frontiers and the potential for ethnic conflict within and outside its
landward borders. The author then reflects thoughtfully on how China may use its
power in the future, suggesting that it may use it to strengthen its economy further,
to project its power along the island perimeter in East Asia and throughout maritime Asia, and/or to establish a global network of bases to guarantee its access to
scarce resources.
It is difficult to do justice to this collective examination of the experience of
landed states with maritime transformations and the role of maritime power in
China’s future, even given the work’s neglect of dramatic developments in Chinese
coastal and overseas trade in the late Ming and Qing periods. The excellence of
the whole reflects the excellence of the parts, which derives from the individual
authors’ expertise in maritime history, navigational science and technology, strategic-logistical analysis, and, in many cases, actual naval service experience. The
individual essays stick to the analytical task at hand, the analyses are careful and
balanced, and the prose is clear and economical, which lends stylistic and analytical coherence to the whole work. The maps are excellent, the documentation
abundant, and the research findings and interpretations are extremely important
for specialists and general readers alike.
Jane Kate Leonard
Jane Kate Leonard, professor emerita of history at the University of Akron, is a
specialist in Qing institutions and maritime history.
Rosemary Foot and Andrew Walter. China, the United States, and Global
Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xii, 340 pp.
Hardcover $90.00, isbn 978-0-521-89800-3. Paperback $32.99, isbn
978-0-521-72519-4.
of Hawai‘i Press
This is an admirable book that examines Chinese and U.S. policies toward several
evolving normative frameworks in the world political economy. The authors
present a thorough and balanced assessment of the extent to which Beijing’s and
Washington’s conduct has been consistent with incipient norms in five important
issue areas: the use of force, macroeconomic surveillance, the nonproliferation
of nuclear weapons, climate change, and financial regulation. They also analyze
various sources (domestic, international, and bilateral ties between China and
the United States) that can possibly account for variations in these countries’
approaches to and conformity with global normative standards — which are themselves matters of contest and in flux, just as Chinese and U.S. policies are themselves subject to internal debate and have evolved over time.
This analysis makes at least three very significant contributions to the study
of international relations and foreign policy in general, and to the discourse on
China’s rise and U.S. hegemony in particular. First and refreshingly, the authors
engage in a comparative study of Chinese and U.S. conduct. They, therefore, refrain
from the common tendency for scholars of China to focus just on that country as
the object of their analysis and similarly, for students of American foreign policy to
adopt a U.S.-centered perspective in their analyses. This remark does not imply
that China and the United States are not important, indeed critical, members of
the world community. They clearly are. Rather, my remark is meant to suggest that
the implicit, and sometimes explicit, premise of Chinese uniqueness or American
exceptionalism is unhelpful for advancing empirical understanding or policy
analysis. Foot and Walter should be lauded for taking up the perspective of global
order and for subjecting Beijing and Washington to dispassionate analysis of the
extent to which their respective conduct has met the expectations of pertinent
international stakeholders.
Second, and as just implied, one sometimes encounters in the literature
assertions such as “China is a revisionist power,” “the U.S. is a status-quo power,”
or “Washington provides public goods.” Such claims are rarely substantiated by
careful analysis, but are instead simply asserted as established fact. Foot and Walter
show that the pertinent evidence presents a far more mixed picture. Beijing’s and
Washington’s adherence to international norms has varied across different issue
areas and also over time. For instance, China has changed its views and practices
on nuclear nonproliferation so that they now conform more closely to expectations that have been codified in various arms control or limitation treaties. It has
also increasingly accepted and adopted international banking standards as propagated by money-centered financial institutions located primarily in the United
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States and Western Europe. At the same time, Beijing has resisted international
pressure on it (as a country with a large trade surplus) to appreciate the value of
the renminbi in order to correct international economic imbalances. As for
Washington, it has also resisted attempts by others to pressure it to balance its
budget and to check monetary expansion (policies that have the effect of abetting
inflationary pressure). It has sought to restrain the horizontal proliferation of
nuclear weapons without, however, acknowledging that this consent by the nuclear
have-nots was tied to the promise by the nuclear haves to refrain from vertical
proliferation — and, in fact, to reduce their nuclear armament. On this issue and
other areas such as global conventions to abate the emission of greenhouse gases
and the banning of antipersonnel landmines, the United States has obstructed
emergent international consensus. On some of these issues, such as the International Criminal Court, global warming, and attempts to codify responsibility to
undertake humanitarian intervention, Washington has actually found itself to be
in Beijing’s company. Hence, Foot and Walter deserve much credit for steering us
away from thinking simplistically about whether China or the United States is
necessarily or unambiguously a norm supporter or norm breaker. Compliance
with global norms is often motivated by not only a concern for one’s international
reputation but also by a desire to make foreign strategic gains or to avoid domestic
adjustment costs. The phrase “responsible stakeholder” is often more suitable as a
rhetorical device than an accurate description of actual conduct.
Third, Foot and Walter make clear that global norms are evolving and are also
contested. There are norm makers and norm takers. Usually, the powerful set
agendas and insist on applying the rules they create to constrain others and to shift
onto them the costs of adjustment, while seeking to exempt themselves from being
similarly constrained or burdened with adjustment costs. Washington’s positions
on committing to lowering the emission of greenhouse gases and to macroeconomic adjustment reflect this tendency, as do its inconsistencies on nuclear proliferation (such as when Israel or India violated this norm) and on the prosecution of
war criminals (such as when the United States sought to exempt its own personnel
from international jurisdiction). These remarks do not suggest that China’s record
is beyond reproach, only that Beijing has been less active and prominent as a
leading force in promoting and shaping international norms. When those who are
norm leaders break the norms that they have had a leading role in shaping, this
behavior is especially destructive of those norms. The powerful and the affluent are
also better able to do something about promoting global well-being as articulated
by the idea of common but differentiated responsibility. Moreover, if by norms
one means common expectations of proper conduct, to advance a state-centric
view is ironic. When one asks “whose expectations,” it turns out that these are
often standards and rules held and propagated by the dominant states, international organizations where their voices prevail (e.g., the International Monetary
Fund), or corporations (e.g., money-center banks) located in these states and their
government regulators, rather than people as individuals (i.e., the views of Africans,
Latin Americans, Indians, and Chinese, who constitute, after all, most of the
world’s population).
The authors of China, the United States, and Global Order offer a detailed and
balanced analysis that will have a lasting impact on the discipline. The book should
be read by everyone interested in Chinese and U.S. foreign policy, and the instiutionalization of international normative frameworks.
Steve Chan
Steve Chan is College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado,
specializing in international relations in political science.
Li-Ling Hsiao. The Eternal Present of the Past: Illustration, Theater, and
Reading in the Wanli Period, 1573–1619. China Studies, vol. 12. Leiden: Brill
Academic Publishers, 2007. 347 pp. 107 black-and-white illustrations,
appendix, glossary, and bibliography. Hardcover $161.00, isbn
978-90-04-15643-2.
of Hawai‘i Press
The involvement of the literati class in drama during the late Ming period is a
much studied trend of the era. The Chinese male elite, particularly those located
in Jiangnan, took a keen interest in every aspect of dramatic production. Literati
hired and trained their own drama troupes, composed plays for reading and
performance, and were impassioned critics of the aesthetics and musicality of this
operatic form of drama. Many of these printed dramatic texts contain exquisite
illustrations and mark a high point in the illustrative art of the era. Li-Ling Hsiao’s
The Eternal Present of the Past: Illustration, Theater, and Reading in the Wanli
Period, 1573–1619 is the most comprehensive study to date of illustrations in dramatic texts of the Ming era.1 The author argues strongly for “the intellectual ambition of the medium” of illustration in contrast to those who would see illustration
as merely decorative or aesthetic, or as the result of market competition to attract
readers (pp. 14, 30–31, 37). She believes drama illustrations were “highly self-
conscious and purposeful and fully complicit in the most important intellectual
movements of the day” (p. 36).
Chapter 1 of The Eternal Present of the Past offers a synthesis for the main
arguments of the book. The following chapters deal with the controversy among
drama critics about the performability of the literati play (chap. 2), illustrations in
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printed dramatic texts that adopted the visual imagery of the theatre (chap. 3),
literati understandings of plays as bringing the past into the present through stage
performance and printed renditions (chap. 4), the fruitful dynamic between
illustration and painting (chap. 5), and contemporary notions of reading as a type
of “theatrical experience” (chap. 6). In these chapters, Hsiao translates and discusses a large corpus of paratextual matter in Ming plays and relevant dramatic
criticism. She is seeking to position her chosen dramatic illustrations within the
broadest possible context of Ming literati preoccupations, including their understanding of the relationship between theatrical performance and printed text and
concerns about whether excessive literary refinement detracted from the musicality
and appropriateness of the operatic performance. Hsiao’s erudite discussion is
often stimulating and insightful. However, the individual chapters tend to work as
separate essays, and the synthesis of all these ideas, promised in chapter 1, appears
somewhat elusive when one proceeds in detail through the evidence provided.
Chapter 3 is the most original contribution and adds significantly to our
understanding of the theatricality of a certain type of illustration popular in
dramatic texts of the Ming Wanli period (1573–1620). In this chapter, the reader is
presented with a feast of illustrations from famous Ming plays and a detailed
discussion of the way that these present a mimesis of dramatic performance. Hsiao
argues for several modes by which this act of mimesis was effected: the use of stage
design in illustrations, the use of theatrical gestures, and the inclusion of stage
structures, name boards, curtains, valences, props, and so on. This chapter contains twenty reproductions from the history of Chinese illustrations, beginning
with the Diamond Sutra, to assist the reader to assess the evidence.
While stage trappings can be found in earlier fictional illustrations such as
pinghua (prose tales), chantefables, and novels, it is clear from Hsiao’s study that
the use of theatrical imagery reached a new height in the Wanli era and was one of
the most important illustrative trends of the era. Chapter 3 offers additional insight
into how the poses and gestures of the characters in illustrations provide a mimesis
of stage enactment. Hsiao treats gestures of entering and journeying on stage,
greeting and speaking, crying and rejoicing, serving drinks at banquets, even the
expression of feminine shyness. Some illustrations are even given an onstage
audience, the better to create the illusion of a theatrical experience. Others offer
evidence of particular types of stage (that is, a stage in the market place or a carpet
stage in a private home). This chapter demonstrates through meticulous detail and
analysis the importance of stage-inspired illustrations in printed dramatic texts of
the late Ming.
However, as Hsiao is aware, her chosen category of “performance illustrations” was known before the Wanli era and dominated dramatic illustration for
only a limited period. She notes the “forty-year reign of performance in illustration” after which this illustrative mode gave way to those featuring elaborate
landscapes or flowers and birds, in imitation of popular styles in contemporary
album painting (pp. 31–32). One could infer from this that the performance illustration was one trend among many of the late Ming and simply reflects changing
tastes among the literati, publishers and readers. However, Hsiao insists that the
temporary dominance of “performance illustration” reflects a fierce battle between
two ideological forces in contemporary dramatic theory (as discussed in chap. 2).
It is a war waged, she believes, between those who see drama as literature and
those who see it as performance. According to Hsiao, “performance illustrations”
were “a spearhead in this struggle” (p. 86). The danger here is in placing an ideological weight on drama illustrations that this medium cannot easily support.
The Wanli period was renowned for the sheer proliferation of illustrations in
all sorts of printed publications, including biographies, art albums, portraiture,
and the recirculation of these motifs in arts and crafts, including porcelain. While
Hsiao does draw from time to time on graphic forms of expression beyond those
of her Wanli period dramatic texts, her study would have been more illuminating
if she had followed Hegel in placing her chosen texts within the broad spectrum of
late Ming visual culture. This might well have allowed us to see more clearly the
changing trends in dramatic illustration from the early to the late Ming and better
understand why this took place. The performance illustrations in fictional texts
one finds before the Wanli period, for example, show a clear line of continuity with
the late Ming examples in dramatic texts, but the former were much more artisanal
and stereotypical in nature compared with those of leading drama publishers of
the late Ming.2 This observation points to a strong literati involvement in the
production of dramatic texts and the influence of changing aesthetic standards,
but not necessarily an ideological position on whether drama is primarily a work
of literature or a performance art.
Hsiao tends to neglect artistic motifs that detract from her paradigm of
stage-inspired illustration such as grass, roads, mountains, and so on, which, as far
as we know, were not backdrops to theatrical production in the late Ming.3 Conventional postures and stereotypical histrionic actions were a fixture of Chinese
illustrated fiction for centuries before the late Ming and were not in any way
unique to dramatic illustrations.4 In addition, as Hegel has earlier noted, Chinese
drama differentiated characters by makeup and costume into particular roles such
as old scholar, young woman, and so on, which made the characters readily identifiable. Narrative and dramatic illustrations of the period, on the other hand,
usually provide only sketchy depictions of human faces and do not seek to provide
striking visual differentiation of character roles.5 It would have been helpful if
Hsiao had discussed obvious exceptions to the general prevalence of performance
illustrations in drama such as the edition of the Xixiangji by Min Qiji (1580–after
1661), which Hegel regards as perhaps “the most elaborately printed play” of the
era.6 He notes the illustrations have “the form of a landscape scroll painting”7 with
grotesquely shaped Lake Tai rocks, balustrades, trees, and exotic foliage. How does
this beautiful and prized volume fit into the general argument Hsiao presents
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here?8 In addition, Hsiao’s argument would have been stronger if there was more
evidence for direct literati-author involvement in the commissioning and creating
of illustrations for their own dramatic texts. With few exceptions, such evidence is
wanting, and we know next to nothing of the illustrators’ own intentions, even
their names and backgrounds.
In later chapters, Hsiao provides translations and detailed discussion of the
prefatorial or other paratextual material with which literati playwrights graced
their illustrated dramatic volumes. In these prefaces, literati composers, editors,
and publishers provide what is essentially an apologia for their dedication to the
production of texts considered at best frivolous, or at worst immoral, in line with
the Confucian orthodoxy of the day. Here literati demonstrate much the same
view as earlier writers of popular fiction, such as the Sanguo yanyi, specifically, that
these plays have grave moral import, they help teach the uneducated masses, they
make historical figures come alive in the present, and they fill in gaps in the transmission left out by the official histories. This sort of argument was standard in
paratextual material for fiction, drama, and short stories in the late imperial period
and provided a justification for literati involvement in these pursuits of the Minor
Way as distinct from the classical tradition. It was not necessarily linked specifically to an ideological debate about whether literati involvement in playwriting
had led to a loss of performative attributes, but rather part of a broad discourse
that one could call an apologia for the writing of fiction and drama shared by
literati in general in the Ming period.
While one could take issue with some of the arguments presented in this
volume, Hsiao’s insightful analysis of stage illustrations offers a valuable contribution to our ability to decode and interpret this sort of performance illustration. We
can now see more clearly how publishers and illustrators sought to create a mimesis of stage representation in the printed text and make a better assessment of the
artifice that lies behind this style of representation. The enormous number of illustrations provided (107 in all) will be greatly appreciated by the reader. There is a
useful glossary and lengthy bibliography. This volume will be of significant interest
to those with an interest in Chinese theatrical traditions, the history of art illustration, and the development of print culture in China during the late imperial period.
Anne E. McLaren
Anne E. McLaren is an associate professor at the Asia Institute, University of
Melbourne, Australia. She specializes in Chinese popular narratives and oral
traditions of the late imperial period.
Notes
1. An important earlier study cited by Hsiao is Katherine Carlitz, “Printing as Performance:
Literati Playwright-Publishers of the Late Ming,” in Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial
China, ed. Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005), pp. 267–303. Hsiao also draws on and sometimes contends with Robert Hegel’s Reading
Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
2. The stereotypical nature of this type of earlier performance illustration and its possible
origin in Buddhist sutra illustration is discussed in this author’s Chinese Popular Culture and
Ming Chantefables (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1998), pp. 53–67.
3. Hsiao argues that there may well have been such backdrops but does not provide any
evidence for their prevalence during the Ming wanli period. According to James I. Crump,
theatrical props did not offer elaborate backgrounds but comprised screens, drapes, and items of
furniture (Chinese Theater in the Days of Kubilai Khan [Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press,
1981], pp. 57, 63–66).
4. Hegel notes such conventional scenes as “supplication and submission” in both fictional
and dramatic texts (Reading Illustrated Fiction, p. 225). An important study not cited by Hsiao
that analyzes the conventionality of narrative illustration in the Ming period is Anne Farrer’s
“The Shui-hu Chuan: A Study in the Development of Late Ming Woodblock Illustrations” (PhD
diss., University of London, SOAS, 1984).
5. Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, p. 229.
6. Ibid., p. 197.
7. See illustration provided in Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, p. 199.
8. Hsiao does refer to this edition but limits her discussion to a single illustration contained
within it of a puppet show, where the central characters of the play appear as puppets. This
certainly illustrates her central argument about performance illustrations. However, it begs the
question of how one is to account for the mimesis of a landscape scroll one also finds in this same
volume.
The Curriculum Specialists at Primary Source, Inc., editors. China in the
World: A History since 1644. Boston: Cheng and Tsui, 2009. xvii, 391 pp.
Includes CD-ROM. Paperback $53.99, isbn 978-0-88727-621-7.
of Hawai‘i Press
While few educators deny that understanding China is important for today’s
students, until now most materials on Chinese history and society have primarily
for the postsecondary classroom.
China and the World: A History since 1644 seeks to fill this gap and for the most
part does an admirable job. Twenty chapters divided into five units cover the period
from the Manchu conquest in 1644 down to the present day. The narrative and
pacing of the curriculum are neat and efficient. Each unit and chapter is well structured with separate headings for chapter contents, an organizing idea, key questions,
and a list of terms. While written for secondary students, the compilers and chapter
authors have done a commendable job in not dumbing down important concepts.
Most international China scholars will be satisfied with the tone and content
of the narrative. I qualify “international” China scholars because while the text
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does a fine job of incorporating recent historiography and scholarship on China,
there is little mention about how the narrative presented here departs substantially
from how the same topics are taught in China or are understood by many Chinese.
It is important to learn China’s history, but it is equally necessary to understand
how Chinese see their own past and how it relates to their present and the future.
This is not to say that a textbook written for English-speaking secondary
school students ought pass muster with the PRC Ministry education, but a note or
sidebar explaining alternative interpretations would be useful. For example, most
foreign accounts of the Boxer movement mention that the anti-foreign Boxers also
killed thousands of their own countrymen and women, a decidedly more complicated tale than that taught in PRC schools where it is taught the Boxers were
heroic Chinese patriots protecting their country from foreign imperialists. It is not
always necessary to “teach the controversy,” but considering this interpretation of
the Boxers, as well as other events during China’s “Century of Humiliation,” is
necessary to understanding Chinese nationalism in the present day. A set of
related discussion questions asks students to think about how this event could be
used by the government to promote nationalism. Without some background
about how the Boxers as narrative is constructed and deployed in Chinese
schools, students not from China may not be able to fully appreciate the extent
to which events like the Boxers inform the way many Chinese view the world
today.
A later chapter includes excerpts from a speech given in 1952 by Mao Zedong
on the “liberation” of the Tibetans that does give some insight into the internal
logic of the CCP regarding the status of Tibet. But this is presented as an artifact
of history. Given the ability to include video via the supplementary CD-ROM, the
authors might have considered the inclusion of more recent government statements on the Dalai Lama or clips from the 2008 patriotic viral video “China Stand
Up!” This video serves as a chilling reminder that Tibet is not just a matter of
history or international politics but remains an emotionally charged issue for
many young Chinese.
The accompanying CD-ROM and the structure of each chapter and section
make this an excellent teaching tool for secondary teachers. Each chapter comes
with an array of activities, all of which develop core analytical skills while utilizing
a wide variety of primary sources including texts, maps, photographs, posters, and
video. The lesson plans are thoughtful and engaging and foster a high level of
student interaction with the sources. Introductory essays provide a contextual
framework for students’ exploration of the primary materials. Suggested activities
include mapping exercises, mock negotiations, creative writing assignments,
debates, discussions, and role-playing. All of the activities seem designed to help
students read and appreciate primary sources and to gently wean secondary
students away from textbook memorization to more active forms of engaging with
history.
While the reading level, tone, and pacing of the textbook make it more suitable for the secondary classroom, creative teachers of lower-division undergraduates can adapt some of the primary source activities for their own courses. Many
of the primary texts included here can also be found in standard documentary
collections such as Patricia Ebrey Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook and the
document companion to the popular Jonathan Spence text The Search for Modern
China. The objective of engaging students with primary sources is a worthwhile
goal at all levels.
Specialists in certain topics or eras might long for a touch more nuance when
reading over sections in their specific fields. The collaborative approach to the
book also gives it an uneven feel, with certain chapters clearly superior to others in
their presentation of the material. There are also a few factual and typographical
errors that will no doubt be corrected in subsequent editions. For example, the
fifth member of the standing committee in 1949 was Chen Yun, not Chen Yu, and
at least one howler on the CD-ROM (Document Number 16.7) incorrectly credits
Fang Lizhi with winning the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize. (The award was given to the
Dalai Lama.)
One minor technical issue: the CD-ROM includes several video clips that can
be used in class or as part of student activities. I was unable to view them on my
computer despite having updated software and hardware. I tried it using several
different browsers and after verifying that my Flash software was in fact the most
current available. Nevertheless, in attempting to play the video clips I was told that
I needed to contact Macromedia to update my version of Flash. This may be an
isolated problem, but anytime technology is deployed in the classroom it is imperative that it works on a broad range of operating systems.
I would recommend this book to secondary teachers interested in offering a
course on modern China. The best endorsement that I can make is my jealousy
and my wish that Cheng and Tsui and the editors at Primary Source consider an
edition geared for the postsecondary student featuring more advanced activities, a
narrative that includes historiography as well as history, and suggestions for
article-length secondary works to supplement the core text.
Jeremiah Jenne
Jeremiah Jenne is the associate director for China studies at the IES Abroad Beijing
Center, where he teaches courses on modern Chinese history and contemporary
China. He is also a PhD candidate in Chinese history at the University of California,
Davis.
Reviews 505
Joan Judge. The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman
Question in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. xiii, 400
pp. Hardcover $65.00, isbn 978-0-8047-5589-4.
of Hawai‘i Press
To a feminist historian, reading The Precious Raft of History is a labor of delight. If
one has the patience to finish it, the reward is well worth the effort. The book
presents an interesting case of how difficult it is to come upon a sound theory to
analyze a historical period that is both sociopolitically and intellectually
tumultuous.
The book has a clear structure. In the introduction, Joan Judge sets up four
parameters by which she evaluates views on the Chinese woman question during
the turn of the twentieth-century China: the eternalist, the meliorist, the archeomodernist, and the presentist. The bulk of the book consists of three parts in six
chapters, and, in each part, Judge employs the four parameters to examine one of
the following women’s issues: (1) feminine virtue, (2) female talent, and (3) female
heroism. The conclusion draws an insightful sociopolitical comparison between
the turn of the twentieth century and the turn of the twenty-first century, and it
examines three contemporary cases in terms the author used early in the book to
analyze the former era.
Judge calls the four parameters “chronotypes,” “models or patterns through
which [historical] time [assumed] practical or conceptual significance” (p. 250
n. 37). Or, to put it differently, they represent “various approaches to historical
time” (p. 12). The eternalist view took the classical Chinese feminine virtues as
timeless, inviolable norms that were all that the nation needed to build a new
China. Like Confucianists, the chronotype of the meliorists generally held the past
as key to the present, but they also decried the excessive emphasis on women’s
chastity and embraced new social changes for women, such as public schooling.
The archeomodernists saw recent history as irrelevant and recent Ming-Qing
women of talent as a metonym for cultural degradation; in seeking to remedy past
deficiencies, they appealed both to ancient Chinese glories and to modern Western
achievements. In contrast, the primary concern of the presentists’ chronotype was
to promote a new, heroic national ethos and new “feminine-heroic” possibilities.
Judge explores discourses on women’s lives through a plethora of texts,
including “official documents, didactic materials, new-style textbooks, polemical
essays, women’s journals, and various collections of Chinese and/or Western
women’s life stories” (p. 16). To show how the four chronotypes relate to the three
women’s issues through various texts, Judge examines one single narrative form — women’s biography. In general, Judge makes good cases for how each chronotype
approaches the woman question and the patterns that resulted from their often
opposing views. For example, she explicates the attitudes toward feminine virtue in
part 1 (chaps. 1–2). The eternalists considered female chastity the highest form of
virtue, but the meliorists were very critical of the cult of female chastity, although
acknowledging the value of chastity itself. On the other hand, the archeomodernists and presentists are less reflective on this topic. The former glossed over issues
related to chaste widows but omitted any mention of faithful maidens. The presentists went even further: they either dismissed or ridiculed the “virtuous exemplars”
(pp. 53–54). Similarly, in part 2, Judge focuses on how the archeomodernists and
meliorists differed in their “understandings of the parameters of female talent and
the purpose of female education” (p. 86). In part 3, the main tension lies between
the archeomodernists and presentists in their views on female heroism: the presentists saw it as a distinct female characteristic, independent of other Confucian
moral constraints, while the archeomodernists thought that women’s national roles
should be mediated by their domestic roles (p. 140).
In the conclusion, Judge brings her own theory to test with regard to the
woman question in contemporary China. She discusses three cases and relates
each to one of the four chronotypes. First, in the case of Liu Huifang, the morally
exemplary lead woman character in a 1990s popular television soap opera Aspirations (Kewang), Judge sees a “meliorist commitment to certain principles of the
regime of feminine virtue” (p. 233). Next, Judge believes that Li Xiaojiang, a contemporary feminist, reflects an archeomodernist inclination in her blending of
certain Western feminist ideas and her insistence on the uniqueness of the Chinese
women’s movement (p. 233). The third case involves an art installation entitled
National Shame (Biographies of Exemplary Women) by Wu Weihe and her male
collaborator Bai Chongmin. The artists see China’s past as “a space of failure”
(p. 240) through their presentation of tomb sculptures of female exemplars, representing the presentist approach.
In addition to the engaging discussions, the copious endnote section is a
treasure trove. Additional information found in the notes often further illuminates
the text and makes reading more rewarding. One example is the clarification Judge
provides about the distinction between biological/social mothers who bear/raise
children and metaphorical “mothers” who propel social movements (p. 263 n. 31).
The note draws one’s attention to the distinction between the archeomodernist and
presentist mother images depicted in the text. In another case, a succinct phrase in
the endnote highlights the main point of the discussion of an anecdote in the text,
which relates an interesting case in which a chaste woman’s apparition was seen by
the emperor, who was touched by her virtue and thus ordered a shrine erected in
her honor. One hundred years later, some hoodlums carousing with prostitutes in
the shrine were killed by a sudden violent wind — a sign that heaven disapproved
of their desecrating the sacred. The endnote adds that the source includes “several
other examples of the links between sexually pure women and the cosmos” (p. 258
n. 27, my emphasis).
Another strength of the book is the versatile materials Judge employs in her
inquiry. The rich bibliography both attests to the thoroughness of the author’s
scholarship and indicates how far scholarship on Chinese women has gone in the
Reviews 507
last few decades. Primary and secondary sources in Chinese, English, and Japanese
from dynastic histories, local gazetteers, private collections (scholarly essays,
literati jottings), biographical collections, newspapers, magazines, and textbooks
are carefully assembled. Judge examined in great length textbooks and collections
of biographies of women that were popular at least among certain audiences at the
turn of the twentieth century, including, to name just a few, Illustrated Biographies
of Resourceful Women, Past and Present; Chinese Reader for Girls; Newest Ethics
Textbook for Girls and Women; Twelve World Heroines; Ten World Heroines; and
Arrayed Traditions of Foreign Women’s Lives. Judge’s discussions of these texts bring
to life the sense of urgency the authors and compilers must have felt for their time.
The main challenge in reading the book is grasping the definitions of the
chronotypes. Sometimes they get in the way of following through Judge’s otherwise lucid discussions and analyses of the texts and issues. For example, in part 3,
one finds the following statement: “Archeomodernists and presentists tied female
education to heroism in various organs of the mainstream and women’s press”
(p. 203). Who were the said archeomodernists and presentists and what do they
stand for? To have a better grasp of the ensuing discussion, one is driven back to
review the definitions of the chronotypes; upon returning to the discussion, those
definitions seem to become elusive in their relevance to the analysis. If a reader
still needs to go back to the introduction to read the definitions of key terms well
beyond the middle of a book, the terms have not functioned well in facilitating the
analyses. Consequently, the chronotypes become more of a convenient tool rather
than effective modes of inquiry.
However, this obstacle should not be read as a deficiency of the book. Rather,
it shows the difficulty and complexity of theorizing sociohistorical subjects. Instead
of trying to bind all the slippages of history into a neatly wrought, golden-lotus
theory, Judge remains faithful to the spirit of honest intellectual inquiry without
confining herself to the parameters of the “new hermeneutics of historical change”
(p. 12) she set out in the beginning. Her text challenges readers to be active, constantly checking back and forth to verify the historical and authorial positions
and validity. Instead, we should be highly suspicious of a hermeneutics that can
neatly pigeonhole complicated materials, authors, and issues. The book is a sincere
effort to deal with history as a complex web of developments resulting from ideas,
convictions, and actions. It also leads us to consider some fundamental questions
about methodology in social history and possibly other social sciences and in the
humanities: Is it possible to construct a clear-cut theory for social development?
To what extent should such a theory be trusted?
Sherry J. Mou
Sherry J. Mou is an associate professor of Chinese at DePauw University, specializing
in studies of classical Chinese women’s biographies.
Nicholas Khoo. Collateral Damage: Sino-Soviet Rivalry and the Termination
of the Sino-Vietnamese Alliance. New York: Columbia University Press,
2011. x, 267 pp. Hardcover $50.00, isbn 978-0-231-15078-1.
of Hawai‘i Press
The aim of Khoo’s book is to account for the collapse of the Sino-Vietnamese
alliance. Essentially, it seeks to explain how two close allies eventually became
bitter enemies. The explanation, it turns out, is sensible: in aligning itself with the
Soviet Union, “China’s principal enemy,” in the late 1970s, Vietnam earned the
opprobrium of Beijing, and became its “secondary enemy” (p. 4). The alliance
collapsed in dramatic fashion in early 1979 when Beijing launched a war against
Hanoi less to “teach Vietnam a lesson,” as standard accounts of the collapse have
maintained, than to protect China from Soviet encirclement. Khoo’s argument is
based on a neorealist understanding of international relations. Specifically, he
relies on principal enemy theory to explain the strategic thinking of Chinese
leaders on Vietnam. Ideological differences played no part in undermining SinoVietnamese unity. It was, instead, concerns about national security and fear of
Soviet imperialism and expansionism in particular that conditioned Beijing’s
thinking and informed its policies vis-à-vis Vietnam.
Following the onset of the so-called Vietnam War in 1965, Moscow, which
until then had provided only lukewarm support for the Vietnamese national
liberation movement, markedly increased its aid to Hanoi. It even sent sophisticated military hardware, including surface-to-air missiles, and its own technicians
to operate it. In light of the Sino-Soviet dispute then wreaking havoc in the socialist camp, Beijing responded in kind to “compete with the Soviets” (p. 28) and not
lose Hanoi’s constancy to the benefit of Moscow. It also dispatched soldiers of its
own armed forces, whose presence in Vietnam neared 170,000 at one point. For
Khoo, China became deeply involved in the Vietnam War not because of historical
or ideological ties to Vietnam or even hatred of the United States, but to curry
favor with Hanoi and contain Soviet influence in the region.
In 1968, at the height of the Sino-Soviet dispute, Moscow invaded Czechoslovakia. In the aftermath of that event, Beijing considered the Soviet Union, not the
United States, as the “leading imperialist in world politics” (p. 97). The Chinese
became fearful of the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine legitimating Soviet military
intervention in socialist countries, of Soviet encroachment upon their territory,
and of encirclement in particular. That same year, Hanoi opened peace talks
with the United States, a move consistent with Soviet aspirations but contrary to
Chinese ones. Although the Vietnamese were, in fact, using the talks to further
their military objectives — not to negotiate in the traditional sense — Beijing “failed
to appreciate” (p. 64) the tactic. That and other circumstances made Chinese
leaders nervous about the prospect of Vietnamese strategic alignment with
Moscow. To preempt that prospect, Beijing resorted to coercion, recalling all of its
troops in North Vietnam and reducing its military aid to Hanoi. Predictably, such
Reviews 509
measures backfired, pushing the Vietnamese closer to the Soviets and creating an
important fissure in the Sino-Vietnamese relationship.
As Sino-Vietnamese relations deteriorated, Beijing began a dialogue of its own
with the United States. According to Khoo, a desire to “counter the increased
Soviet threat following the declaration of the Brezhnev Doctrine in 1968 and sub
sequent border clashes in 1969” (p. 66) prompted the decision. To be sure, SinoAmerican rapprochement alienated Hanoi, which interpreted China’s behavior as
an act of betrayal, and irrevocably damaged the Sino-Vietnamese partnership.
However, Khoo insists, it did not make the subsequent Sino-Vietnamese conflict,
and the 1979 war in particular, inevitable, as other scholars have suggested.
Increasing cooperation between Moscow and Hanoi following the signing of
the Paris Agreement of 1973 calling for the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from
South Vietnam “led Beijing to hedge against the prospect of a unified Vietnam and
to adopt actions that were antithetical to North Vietnamese interests” (p. 91),
including supporting the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and seizing contested islands
in the South China Sea. Essentially, Chinese leaders feared that a unified Vietnam
under Hanoi’s aegis might become a platform for the spread of Soviet influence in
Southeast Asia. They thus sought to preclude and at a minimum delay Vietnamese
reunification, which only antagonized Hanoi and convinced it to align with the
Soviets. In November 1978, the Vietnamese formalized their alignment with
Moscow by signing the Soviet-Vietnamese Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation.
Two months later, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, by then under Khmer
Rouge control. In Chinese eyes, the treaty and the invasion confirmed that
Moscow, acting through its Vietnamese surrogates, intended to increase its presence and influence in Southeast Asia with a view to encircling and isolating China.
That proved too much for Beijing, which decided to put its foot down and attack
Vietnam, effectively collapsing the Sino-Vietnamese alliance.
The author’s case is convincing. Instead of nurturing its alliance with Vietnam,
Beijing sought instead to undermine Soviet influence in Hanoi. When that failed,
it used diplomatic pressure and other coercive measures to compel Hanoi to
keep its distance from the Soviet Union. The strategy miscarried, alienating the
Vietnamese from the Chinese and pushing the former into the arms of the Soviets.
As he makes his case, Khoo does a good job of addressing alternative interpretations of the rise and fall of the Sino-Vietnamese alliance, and highlighting the
shortcomings inherent in them.
However, the book may oversimplify the relationships Hanoi entertained with
its two biggest allies. Khoo presents the Sino-Soviet competition for Hanoi’s loyalty
as a zero-sum game, wherein a setback for Beijing invariably translated into a
victory for Moscow. Thus, as Sino-Vietnamese relations persistently deteriorated
after the onset of the Vietnam War, Soviet-Vietnamese relations only got better.
That reasoning likely accounts for the failure to address Soviet-Vietnamese differences over and Sino-Vietnamese agreement on the question of whether Hanoi
should negotiate with the United States immediately after the war began. As
previously noted, Moscow substantially increased its assistance to Hanoi after 1965,
improving Soviet-Vietnamese cooperation. However, all was far from well between
the two allies as the Vietnamese, supported by the Chinese, obdurately refused to
even consider the possibility of peace talks with Washington, which the Soviets not
only favored but also tried to facilitate, to no avail until 1968. Similarly, Hanoi’s
decision to launch a major offensive against the South in the spring of 1972, just
weeks before Brezhnev was scheduled to host Nixon, jeopardized détente and
embarrassed the Soviet leadership. “In March 1972, as both Beijing and Moscow
adopted conciliatory policies toward Washington,” Khoo writes, “Hanoi complained about both Chinese and Soviet policy toward the U.S.” (p. 72). Hanoi did
more than complain; it tried to explode détente by dramatically escalating and
trying to win militarily the war in Vietnam. The row over peace talks and over
détente adversely impacted Soviet-Vietnamese relations. Strangely, and conveniently, the author chooses to ignore the difference between Hanoi and Moscow
over both the talks and Soviet-American rapprochement.
Despite that shortcoming, this remains an excellent book and a meaningful
contribution to the history of not just Sino-Vietnamese relations, but of the
Vietnam War and the Sino-Soviet split as well. Both experts and those less versed
in the subject matter will gain much from reading Khoo’s work.
Pierre Asselin
Pierre Asselin is an associate professor of history at Hawaii Pacific University,
specializing in communist policy making in the Vietnam War.
Y. C. Kong. Huangdi Neijing: A Synopsis with Commentaries. Hong Kong:
Chinese University Press, 2010. xlv, 495 pp. Hardcover $69.99, isbn
978-962-996-420-7.
of Hawai‘i Press
Y. C. Kong provides a translation and analysis of the Neijing Zhiyao 內經知要
(Knowing the Essentials of Neijing) by the Ming dynasty physician Li Zhongzi
李中梓 (1588–1655), which reveals much about the intellectual history of Chinese
medicine. Kong provides a meticulous study of these selected passages from the
Huangdi Neijing 黃帝內經 (Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic) that facilitates an
understanding of this seminal text. The copy of the Neijing at Li Zhongzi’s disposal
would have been the one promulgated by the Northern Song dynasty (960–1126),
Reviews 511
based on an authoritative version from the Tang dynasty (618–907), when several
apocryphal chapters were added to what was believed to have been formally
constituted during the Han dynasty (206 b.c.e.–221 c.e.), and which drew from
Warring States (ca. 500–220 b.c.) literature. This fascinating process of transformation and distillation across the centuries is evident in these passages, and historians and clinicians alike will find the narrative intriguing.
Kong states two primary goals: (1) to produce a scholarly English-language
translation of this synopsis of the Neijing, and (2) to reconcile knowledge from
Chinese medical literature with modern scientific medicine. The format of Kong’s
book is very useful toward fulfilling his first goal. The chapters are arranged topically, such as longevity practices, yin-yang theory, or principles of treatment, and
each begins with an exegesis that provides the context and explains the significance of that topic. This is followed by the passages for translation, each of which
begins with the identification of the source followed by the Chinese text with the
English translation. Having these next to each other facilitates the reader’s ability
to make comparisons and provides the transparency essential to a scholarly work.
Kong then provides his explanatory notes to the passage, where he succinctly
discusses and analyzes each selection. These remarks are replete with useful
footnotes that also immediately follow the relevant section for easy reference. The
footnotes provide the justification for many of the author’s translation choices, and
when considered in their entirety, they provide a rich subtext to the work,
although they are repetitive in several instances. In a few sections, additional notes
are provided by Dr. W. F. Pau for a modern clinical perspective.
The only section where there is a problematic translation and the footnotes
fail to provide a justification is section 4.1, “Suwen” (chap. 17), “On the Finer Points
of Pulse-Taking.” This passage from the Neijing describes the three different locations for feeling the pulse on the wrist. It begins with the chi 尺 site (which is most
proximal) and proceeds to explain that the other positions are shang 上 (above or
distal) to that site. For each location on the left and right, a description is given
regarding what organs can be felt wai 外 (exteriorly or with light finger pressure)
and li 裡 (interiorly or with heavier pressure), but Kong also translates these two
terms as proximal and distal. The chart he includes in his notes repeats this
description, and his brief summary of current practices fails to acknowledge the
superficial and deep levels of the pulse.
An error was also found in the footnote to section 8.25, “Lingshu” (chap. 71),
where an herbal prescription requires water that has been specially prepared. Kong
states that Li Zhongzhi refers to it as ganlanshui 甘瀾水 (sweet rippling water), a
term not found elsewhere (p. 414). In fact, the origin of this term is the Shanghan
Lun 傷寒論 (Treatise on Cold Damage) by Zhang Zhongjing 張仲景 (142–220
c.e.) where it is used for bentun 奔豚 (running piglet) syndrome. The medicinal
water is also included in the Tang Ye Ben Cao 湯液本草 (Materia Medica of
Decoction) by Wang Haogu 王好古 (fl. 1298–1308 c.e.).
Regarding his second goal, Kong brings up an important debate in Chinese
medicine, which is directly related to the continuing struggle for meaningful
integration into the authoritative field of modern medicine. The question Kong
poses is, How can we reconcile ancient Chinese medical wisdom with modern
science and demonstrate that traditional practices were evidence-based? The usual
criticism is that Confucian reverence for the classics stagnated intellectual development, resulting in a perpetual process of circular reasoning. By examining
selected passages that were transmitted for centuries and finding descriptions of
pathology consistent with scientifically identified syndromes, Kong convinces the
reader that early Chinese physicians identified these medical conditions through
careful observation and, further, that subsequent generations confirmed the
validity of these findings and, therefore, selectively perpetuated that knowledge.
Yet at the same time, Kong criticizes Chinese medicine as subjective, compared to the quantitative objectivity of modern science, and asserts that doctors
had a hard time passing on acquired clinical knowledge resulting in a low rate of
reproducibility (p. 301). Although many scholars recognize the potential wellspring
of clinical insights Chinese medicine has to offer, most are unwilling to consider
that the Western scientific paradigm may have limitations that impede its ability to
explain phenomena such as pulse diagnosis or acupuncture channel theory. Trying
to explain the Chinese medical paradigm using the Western paradigm is problematic because it forces broad metaphorical concepts into a reductionistic framework, and predictably requires that the former be abandoned in favor of the latter,
so that there is very little left to explain. For example, in section 8.4, “Lingshu”
(chap. 10), which describes the morbid manifestations associated with the conduits, Kong’s rejection of channel theory leaves him unable to explain the correlation between specified pathological conditions and the internal organs, and even
Dr. Pau offers no clarification. Yet the pathways of the conduits described in
section 6.1, “Lingshu” (chap. 10) synchronize perfectly with the list of pathologies.
Once you dismiss the channel system, you lose all rationale for acupuncture point
selection in clinical practice.
The importance of the Neijing to the history and practice of Chinese medicine
is inescapable, for even today practitioners are expected to master the principles
expounded upon therein. Overall, Kong has fulfilled his two goals, and in so
doing, he has made an important contribution to the ongoing process of studying
this classic from which readers will be able to draw both inspiration and clinical
insights.
John Welden
John Welden specializes in the history and practice of Chinese medicine.
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Joachim Kurtz. The Discovery of Chinese Logic. Leiden: Brill Academic
Publishers, 2011. xiv, 471 pp. Appendix, bibliography, index. Hardcover
$221.00, isbn 978-90-04-17338-5.
of Hawai‘i Press
A veteran of the Translating Western Knowledge into Late Imperial China project,
which was organized by Michael Lackner, then at the University of Göttingen,
Joachim Kurtz helped to edit one of the resulting conference volumes, New Terms
for New Ideas: Western Knowledge and Lexical Change in Late Imperial China
(Leiden: E. J. Brill Academic Publishers, 2001). He also helped Lackner to develop
several Internet websites using search engines for Chinese primary texts to explore
systematically the translation into classical Chinese of technical terms in the
modern social and natural sciences from European languages during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Joachim Kurtz’s new book is a pioneering reconsideration of the historical
genealogy of logic as a technical subject in both China and the West from the
seventeenth to the twentieth century. The early chapters focus on the reasons why
logic failed to take hold as a discipline in China when the Jesuits introduced
Aristotelian logic and the syllogism to Chinese literati in the late Ming. His
argument that the Jesuits themselves never made entirely clear the place of logic
as a discipline in their translations of Western learning into Chinese, which were
compiled with the help of Chinese converts, is persuasive. Despite the much
ballyhooed translation of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry into Chinese, we might
add that the Chinese were never convinced that it offered a superior method of
thinking and argumentation to their own, which informed, for example, the
reasoning patterns (wenli 文理) in the infamous eight-legged essays of the Ming
and Qing dynasties.
Although Kurtz is essentially correct here, he has based his own account of
the Jesuits on historical material that others have often presented on both the
translation of Euclid and the failure of Ferdinand Verbiest to gain the Kangxi
emperor’s authorization to print a Jesuit compendium of Western knowledge
known as the Qionglixue (Cursus Philosophicus) for use on the influential Chinese
civil service examinations. To elaborate on Verbiest’s remarkably ambitious efforts
to insinuate the syllogistic method (litui zhi fa 理推之法) into the epistemological
discourses of late imperial Chinese classicism, Kurtz has reviewed many primary
sources that were not available earlier, but in the end he reemphasizes the reasons
the Kangxi emperor gave for rejecting Verbiest’s request “as mere pretext” (pp. 85–
86).
Yet Kurtz takes Verbiest’s own tactics at face value. Why? Because Verbiest’s
appeal to the syllogism was authentic and not just a means to an end, while the
Chinese rejection of the initiative was misguided from the beginning? The Chinese
literati in the Ministry of Rites who advised the emperor on Verbiest’s request
rejected the proposal because they claimed it wrongly focused on the brain and
thus missed the centrality of the heart-mind (xin 心) in all mental deliberations.
Kurtz dismisses this reason as disingenuous and a front for literati intransigence,
which, in part, it surely was. However, when the Kangxi emperor himself weighed
in and proclaimed “the style of this book is absurd and unintelligible” (p. 86; what
others translate as “illogical”), Kurtz sees this as the playing out of a public per
formance at court with no intellectual merit. Verbiest’s gamble “came to naught”
(p. 86).
Why, then, was Verbiest so focused on the syllogism? Was it just a clever ploy
to show the emperor and his Chinese officials the way to God? Was not Verbiest
perhaps convinced from his private audiences with him that the emperor was
intrigued by European forms of reasoning, which the Jesuits claimed informed
their allegedly more advanced expertise in calendrical studies and philosophy?
Why else would Verbiest have been so audacious as to propose a European style
of reasoning for the training and testing of all civil officials? He likely thought
he stood a realistic chance to effect his plan. In other words, if we examine
contemporary Chinese forms of reasoning during the Ming-Qing transition, we
might find that the intellectual context enables us to better understand on what
grounds literati might consider Verbiest’s syllogism as absurd and unintelligible (or
illogical), when compared to their own forms of rhetoric and persuasion. We
might also discover that there were others in China, including perhaps the Kangxi
emperor, who were intrigued by the new forms of rhetoric and reasoning Verbiest
proffered.
Late Ming literati who were known for their literary traditions saw eightlegged essays as reliable mirrors of the rhetorical currents in their times. For them,
the eight-legged essay had transcended its requirement as a formal exercise and
become an important literary genre of prose writing in its own right. It was not
merely an examination requirement but a cultural form that existed inside and
outside the examination compound and was written by all classically literate men.
They exhibited an exaggerated commitment to formal parallelism and thinking by
analogy in their writings. Strict adherence to balanced clauses and balanced pairs
of characters was required throughout the essay, but this feature becomes
particularly rule-like in the Ming framing of the argument by building on the
three major legs of the essay.
As the classical essay’s length requirement increased from the five hundred
characters common in late Ming times to over seven hundred during the midQing, the basic structure of the essay remained unchanged. The form of chain
arguments used in such essays was built around pairs of complementary proposi
tions, which derived their cogency from rich literary traditions that, over the
centuries, had drawn on both the parallel-prose and ancient-style prose traditions
of early and medieval China. Balanced prose presupposed that an argument
should advance via pairs of complementary clauses and sections, which, when
formalized and disciplined by analogies, avoided a wandering, unfocused
Reviews 515
narrative. Accordingly, the eight-legged essay represented an effort to confirm the
vision of the sages in the Four Books and Five Classics from a “double angle of
vision,” which strictly correlated with the parallel syntax of the legs of the examina
tion essay. If the eight-legged essay had such epistemological underpinnings for
the civil examinations that Verbiest sought to dislodge, then it is not unreasonable
to assume that these were also the standards that the Chinese literati used to
evaluate and reject the syllogism for the Kangxi emperor.
A much crisper and less repetitive historical account of the fate of logic in
China from 1600 to 1750 would have allowed Kurtz to present in more depth the
forms of balanced prose writing and reasoning that he occasionally alludes to
as “linked verse” (pp. 160, 183) in the subsequent chapters focused on the late
nineteenth century. He acknowledges these were the mainstay of literati essays and
informed the required eight-legged essay in the civil examinations (p. 364). What
did the early Qing Chinese think made a claim convincing? How did they argue?
What were the terms of their developing arguments before, during, and after the
Jesuit exchange? What was the impact of new classical movements in seventeenthcentury China that stressed precise scholarship and exacting research? Kurtz
addresses these issues only when he discusses, very sympathetically, the late Qing
translators of Western logic (p. 183) who proceeded to discover “Chinese logic” at
home (pp. 314, 327, 337). Ironically, and I should add to his immense credit, Kurtz
takes up all these issues when he describes how late nineteenth-century writers
and translators such as Yan Fu, Wang Guowei, Zhang Binglin, Liang Qichao, and
Hu Shi, each discovered Chinese logic by looking back to these sorts of forms of
linked verse (pp. 160, 183, 366). Better late than never to recognize these traditional
forms of Chinese reasoning.
The later chapters in the book focus on the conceptual limits of Protestant
missionary translations by Joseph Edkins, among others, in the nineteenth century
that, similarly to the Jesuits, failed to convince the Chinese of the overriding value
of logic as an important discipline. Again, Kurtz rightly points out that this was
due less to Chinese resistance than to the vague manner that the English and
American Protestants presented logic in their translations, again with the help of
Chinese converts or those literati who worked in important translation bureaus
with the Christians in the new Qing dynasty institutions, such as the Jiangnan
Arsenal in Shanghai. Hence, the modern Protestants, like their early modern
Jesuits predecessors, never seem to have articulated a persuasive account of logic
as an important discipline in its own right.
Here it is especially useful to see how Chinese forms of classical writing and
reasoning continued to hold sway in the nineteenth century. The Protestants, like
many Chinese, wailed against the debilitating aspects of the eight-legged essay
requirement in civil examinations, for example. Here at least Kurtz does not lose
the opportunity to present what the Chinese saw in such essays and why many
of them were also becoming disenchanted with this essay form in a time when
empirical demonstration and evidential scholarship were increasingly valorized by
the leading literati as better than the airy and speculative essays based on Song
dynasty classical learning (what many call “Neo-Confucianism”). Kurtz helps us
better understand indigenous changes in Chinese forms of arguing at the turn of
the twentieth century.
His focus on the lineage of Western logic as a disciplinary field in Chinese
intellectual history at the end of the book successfully demonstrates that once the
Chinese in the early twentieth century saw for themselves the value of logic as a
cultural possession of their own and not just as a Western discipline, they quickly
appropriated the study of logic, required in modern schools, and successfully
argued that the Chinese had their own logical tradition, which they now contended
was comparable with and equal to the Western and Indian logical traditions. This
remarkable cultural and educational transformation is very ably described in Kurtz’s
book. How much better this exciting conclusion would have been had he earlier
spent more time explaining what late imperial Chinese thought about reason and
persuasion when the Jesuits and Protestants tried, unsuccessfully, to convince
them of the strengths of early modern and modern Western forms of logic.
An issue that Kurtz and others might address in the future is the globalized
association in the twentieth century of logic, philosophy, and science. This issue
was an undercurrent in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries for both Jesuits
and Protestants. In the twentieth century, however, Euro-American educators
universally became convinced that the logical rigor of geometry and the increasing
importance of new forms of hypo-deductive logic had been instrumental in the
rise of modern science in Europe after 1700. Thus, according to this view, the
scientific revolution had required new forms of logic and demonstration, which
the philosophy of science in twentieth-century Euro-America valorized into a
universal truth.
More recently, however, historians of science have challenged this consensus
and have argued that logic and the forms of reasoning themselves were not
sufficient historical or epistemological conditions to produce the breakthroughs
in modern science, medicine, and technology that we were all taught to take
for granted in grade school, including the Chinese since 1911. If we were first to
problematize and then unpack this marriage made in heaven between science and
logic, it would likely help us better evaluate why not only the Chinese but also
Euro-American educators, scientists, and philosophers became so enthralled with
this myth about the logical path to scientific discovery. Since Thomas Kuhn’s work
first challenged this Pollyanna assumption in the 1960s, historians of science such
as Bruno Latour and others have slowly distanced themselves from its conceits,
while many philosophers of science continue to appeal to the priority of forms of
reason and logic for scientific discovery. If those who might follow up on Kurz’s
important book could introduce such larger issues, they would then be able to
globalize the technical triumph of logic in the modern world overall, as well as in
Reviews 517
modern China, especially in departments of philosophy that today almost
universally cater to analytic philosophy.
Despite some minor caveats, Joachim Kurtz’s book is a major contribution
and should be positively evaluated. He is a very promising scholar working on
many important issues in Sino-Western cultural history and someone from whom
we can expect even greater things. If he can be persuaded to think more boldly,
then his accounts in future projects might well become a tour de force for explain
ing intellectual change during the transition from late imperial to modern China.
Benjamin A. Elman
Benjamin A. Elman, professor of East Asian studies and history at Princeton
University, is also the Gordon Wu 1958 Professor of Chinese Studies.
Wing-Wah Law. Citizenship and Citizenship Education in a Global Age:
Politics, Policies, and Practices in China. New York: Peter Lang Publishing,
2011. xx, 259 pp. Paperback €23.20 / £20.90 / us$35.95, isbn
978-1-4331-0801-3.
of Hawai‘i Press
This book, as Wing-Wah Law explains (p. 24), is organized as a broad survey of
citizenship, citizenship education, and social change in China. What is meant by
“China” in the title of the book is primarily the People’s Republic, which is the
subject of four of the book’s eight chapters (chaps. 4–7), although the two pre
ceding chapters focus on the imperial past and the republican period. Two of the
four chapters on the People’s Republic of China provide historical overviews while
the rest include case studies of the Chinese government’s promotion of citizenship
and citizenship education during the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 and the
Shanghai Exposition in 2010. The organization of the book makes it easy for the
reader to follow the text chronologically and thematically.
The historical analysis and case studies in the book speak to three broad
themes where Law believes it has a unique contribution to make: the impact of
globalization on citizenship and citizenship education, the role of cities in the
development of local identities and national citizenship, and the use of international events in promoting citizenship education. Law spells out these themes at
considerable length in the introductory chapter in tandem with a concise literature
review. He proceeds to propose a multileveled multidimensional model that consists
of four dimensions: global, national, local, and personal-social. Each dimension in
this model can intersect with all the others and cover numerous human activities,
ranging from civics to economic, political, social, cultural, and environmental
areas. The preferences, choices, and identifications of citizens depend on their
needs and capacities for involvement on global, national, local, and personal-social
levels.
On the subject of globalization, Law concurs with theorists who no longer
take the nation-state to be the exclusive source of legitimacy for political activity.
He identifies three models of global citizenship education. The first is geared
toward preparing young people for life and work under globalized conditions.
The second is characterized by multiculturalism or cosmopolitanism in that it is
intended to enable the young to adapt to increasingly diverse communities and an
increasingly interdependent world. The third is a multidimensional framework
that encompasses personal, social, spatial, and temporal dimensions. His own
multileveled multidimensional model combines the second and third.
When exploring the local dimension of this model, Law highlights, in parti
cular, the new roles and functions of the city in global competition and nationbuilding and in fostering local identities and promoting national citizenship. In
chapter 6, he analyzes in detail the dynamic and complex formation of multileveled identities and the effects of nation building and globalization on various
domains of citizenship among school students in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Law’s
conclusion is that students’ increasing exposure to the outside world does not
necessarily translate into greater awareness of their localities or a better sense of
global citizenship, as many believe. Much depends on the contents and emphases
in the educational curricula for multileveled citizenship in response to the
demands for education and the contexts of citizenship and civic education. This
conclusion is hard to dispute.
The analysis of citizenship and citizenship education in Shanghai and Hong
Kong is followed by a case study of international events, which are city-based and,
therefore, closely related to the former. The latter centers on two questions that
Law believes have not been answered satisfactorily in the literature on the subject.
One is how and why the Chinese state used the events for political socialization
and as large-scale projects of multileveled-multidimensional citizenship education.
The second question is how and to what extent these international events affected
students’ perceptions of their global, national, local, and personal-social dimensions of citizenship. Law’s finding is that international events reinforced students’
global citizenship and Chinese citizenship by positively affecting their cognitive
emotional attachments to the various levels of a multileveled polity.
As the book undertakes to address these broad themes over a long span of
time, it has a lot of ground to cover. Few authors writing on the subject in English
are better equipped than is Law to handle such a daunting challenge. He has
written extensively on citizenship education in China and authored some of the
best work on citizenship education in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taiwan. This
book builds on his previous work and brings together strands of his arguments.
Reviews 519
The result is probably the most comprehensive, systematic, and informative account
of citizenship, citizenship education, and social change in China. It is not hard to
agree with James Banks, author of the foreword of the book, that Law demonstrates
with historical and social science data and argues convincingly that this conceptual
model is reasonable and theoretically rich. Law certainly leaves one with little
doubt that citizenship and citizenship education are complex, contextual, multiple,
and “continually reinvented through intertwined interactions among different
actors” (p. 207). This recognition and his multileveled multidimensional model of
citizenship and citizenship education will no doubt be appreciated in the field.
Perhaps the broad scope of this little book is both a strength and weakness.
While the breadth of its subject may appeal to a broad range of readers, it affects
the depth of the analysis to a large extent. What is more, the structure of the book
looks less than perfect at times. This is obviously the case with chapters 2–5, the
length of which can hardly be justified. It is not exactly clear either what these four
chapters (about half of the book) are meant to do. On the one hand, all these
chapters purport to provide historical analysis to demonstrate the multileveled
multidimensional model of citizenship and citizenship education; on the other
hand, chapters 2–3 outline the “historical background for understanding citizen
ship and citizenship education in post–1949 China” (p. 24). Quite often, the
historical survey took precedence over analysis.
Another result of the breadth of the subject is the adoption of a rather broad
definition of citizenship. Following Dimitrov and Boyadjieva, Law uses citizenship
to refer to a “system of values, efforts and institutionalised practices required for
creating and maintaining conditions for living together in a complex society”
(p. 4). This definition is not only broad but makes no reference to universalistic
rights and obligations at a specified level of equality. It thus differs fundamentally
from citizenship as conceived by Marshal, Turner, Janoski, Bottomore, and others,
which are grounded in the guarantee of legal and political protections from raw
coercive power and involve active capacities to influence politics. Due, in part, to
this definition of citizenship, a major social change in China is elided in the book,
that is, the transformation of subjects and comrades into citizens. As Merle Gold
man observes, a growing sense of rights consciousness and the struggle for rights,
particularly political rights, are what turn subjects and comrades into citizens.
That being said, this book will be exceptionally valuable to readers with a
general interest in citizenship and citizenship education in China, including
undergraduates, postgraduates, and academics who teach China studies or
citizenship and citizenship education in other countries. The in-depth case studies
in chapters 6 and 7 will be of great interest to specialists.
Yingjie Guo
Yingjie Guo is an associate professor in Chinese studies at the University of
Technology, Sydney. His research is related to nationalism, citizenship, and the
politics of class analysis in contemporary China.
Angela Ki Che Leung and Charlotte Furth, editors. Health and Hygiene in
Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 352 pp. Hardcover $84.95, isbn
978-0-8223-4815-3. Paperback $23.95, isbn 978-0-8223-4826-9.
of Hawai‘i Press
In his thoughtful summation of the collection of essays contained in the recently
published collection edited by Angela Ki Che Leung and Charlotte Furth, Warwick
Anderson observes that the relative ambiguity or perhaps even marginality of
China’s role in the “colonial drama of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” may
complicate any straightforward analysis of the Chinese experiences of the medical
dimensions of imperialism. He points out that while the contributors to this
collection have revealed in various ways and to varying degrees “other late styles of
colonialism, other ways to fashion colonial and protonational subjects, differing (at
least in degree) from those familiar in African and South Asian histories” (p. 274),
they have done so without explicitly presuming or invoking a nation-state
framework.
Instead, the collected essays, all of which broach medical topics at the
intersections of power, culture, and science in diverse geographical regions — Manchuria, Taiwan, Jiangnan in the lower Yangzi delta, and the Pearl River
delta — help recast the social study of medicine as a complex interchange between
global systems and local adaptations. Each of these places constitutes one China
in the midst of many Chinas. Though none were centers of Chinese state power,
each location experienced distinct, if nonetheless related, forms of imperial and
national rule, be it under the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the Japanese (1895–1945),
or the communist and republican regimes succeeding these empires. As Charlotte
Furth argues, “The very different regimes of empire engaged here — dynastic or
colonial — do not produce an overarching narrative of imperialism as the shaper of
colonial medicine; nor do the various localities examined easily stand in for China
as a whole” (p. 2).
This absence of any clear identification with one state or political regime and
the lack of an overarching narrative of imperialism serve as both strength and
weakness for the collection. In terms of strength, the many case studies presented
here reveal how pluralistic the ideologies of modern medical science were over the
course of the twentieth century. Moreover, these contributors demonstrate the
importance of indigenous and local knowledge systems and practices in coloring
interactions with colonial, national, and transnational power centers.
Angela Ki Che Leung draws the reader deep into the nexus of classical
Chinese medical thought and examines the evolution of the idea of chuanran — a
term that has come to stand as the standard translation for the biomedical notion
of “contagion” or “the communication of disease from one person to another by
bodily contact” (p. 26). Leung argues persuasively that the term has encapsulated
Reviews 521
many layers of meaning throughout China’s long imperial history. Although the
word ran has long expressed basic modes of the spread of disease, the specific
combination of chuanran emerged only in the tenth century and eventually
eclipsed the other older terms containing ran. Its subsequent ascendancy had
important consequences for the conceptualization of the spread of disease. As
Leung explains,
Among its many layers of meaning, transmission by contact — in particular, direct
physical contact with the sick not necessarily related by blood — probably became
most significant. It conveyed the sick body as a dangerous body producing
contaminating breath, bodily fluids, and excrement, and as a lascivious sexual
body polluting its sexual partners and producing sick infants. The sick body was
dangerous even after its death, as it would pollute the environment, provoking an
epidemic qi and contaminating not only its progeny or relatives by the process of
zhu [i.e., person-to-person transmission], but also strangers in contact with the
emanating qi. (p. 43)
Some of the implications of this infection-contagion set of meanings for
chuanran, which were largely considered distinct and pertained to different kinds
of diseases, is illuminated in Sean Hsiang-lin Lei’s essay. Lei points out that the
Manchurian plague marked the beginning of “the process of constructing,
instituting, and thereby coping with a new category of disease — chuanranbing
(infectious disease),” (p. 74) one that combined the two predominant meanings of
chuanran and drew legitimacy through its recognition by the state. Moreover, by
maintaining a comparative perspective between the Hong Kong plague (1894)
and the Manchurian plague (1910), Lei further demonstrates how the skillful
construction of chuanranbing was complemented by a coeval scientific
construction of the pneumonic plague via germ theory. In other words, these two
processes were interrelated and with very immediate effects for state building.
This adoption of infectious disease as a key project for state building and a
prerequisite for participation within the emerging global surveillance of infectious
diseases continues to shape local and global forms of medical knowledge. More
recent experiences with SARS in China and Taiwan resonate with Lei’s arguments
about the Manchurian plague of the early twentieth century. Marta E. Hanson
examines the divergent media accounts about the role of Chinese medicine in
treating SARS in mainland China. Western media outlets largely ignored the fact
that more than half of SARS patients in mainland hospitals were treated by doctors
trained in traditional Chinese medicine. Hanson draws upon this “media
blindfold” (p. 231) to elucidate the complex ways in which the past is embedded
in the present. Indeed, contrary to the expectation that the constitution of
chaunranbing as a new category of disease effectively replaced older conceptions
correlating the spread of disease to the relationship between climates and con
stitutions, Hanson sees this latter understanding persisting at present in the
clinical medical practice within mainland China. She argues, “This persistence
of older concepts is a form of resistance to the teleological assumptions of the
inevitability of their modern equivalents” (p. 250).
Her observation finds fruitful affirmation in the work of several of her
cocontributors: Yu Xinzhong’s piece on transformation of the treatment of human
excrement from “an essentially agricultural issue to a concern of urban public
health” (p. 51), with its attendant reconceptualizations of what constituted
cleanliness in Shanghai from late imperial times into the period of Japanese
occupation; Wu Chia-Ling’s fascinating discussion of the rationale of Taiwanese
women not to seek out modern, cosmopolitan midwives trained as part of the
Japanese project of scientific colonialism; and Ruth Rogaski’s exploration of the
surfeit of meanings generated by vaccination drives in Manchuria during the
Japanese occupation. Each of these authors challenges the rigidity of binaries such
as traditional/modern, colonizer/colonized, and indigenous/scientific and push us
to consider more fully the complexities of the history of hygiene and public health
in East Asia.
Nonetheless, for as powerful and persuasive as many of these essays are in
recasting our attention away from any single state or political regime and pushing
us to reconsider any single overarching narrative of imperialism or globalization,
the desire for more explicit linkages between these various Chinas, not to mention
the relationships between early twentieth-century imperialism and early twentyfirst-century globalization, persists. How might the germ governance measures
regulating people’s mobility between and within state borders, which were
established in the wake of the SARS outbreak in 2003 and examined in the essay by
Tseng Yen-fen and Wu Chia-Ling, reinvoke early twentieth-century notions of
sovereignty? Does the associated material culture of high-tech, temperature-taking
machines, for example, also serve as a “vehicle for the expression of power, fear,
and hope” (p. 132) for a locality negotiating the tricky paths intertwining it to the
rest of the world?
This collection of essays provides much food for thought and will prove a
valuable resource for scholars working on the histories of hygiene, public health,
and medicine in and outside of Chinese East Asia.
Jia-Chen Fu
Jia-Chen Fu is an assistant professor of history at Case Western Reserve University,
specializing in histories of health and the body in Republican China.
Reviews 523
Danke Li. Echoes of Chongqing: Women in Wartime China. Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 2010. 232 pp. 19 photographs. Hardcover $70.00,
isbn 978-0-252-03489-3. Paperback $25.00, isbn 978-0-252-07674-9.
of Hawai‘i Press
The Chinese war of resistance against Japan officially began in the summer of 1937,
although frequent fighting, colonial incursion, economic disputes and strikes, and
diplomatic sparring had characterized Sino-Japanese relations for decades. Beginning in July 1937, the war moved to a very active tense. Shanghai was quickly
conquered, the capital of Nanjing succumbed a few months later, and thousands of
civilians fell prey to murder, torture, and rape by soldiers of the imperial Japanese
army. The Chinese government retreated to Wuhan. After destroying Yellow River
levees to try to prevent further Japanese success (and drowning civilians in the
process) in the summer of 1938, the government retreated for a final time up the
Yangtze River to the Sichuan city of Chongqing.
Chongqing remained the wartime capital for seven years. The influx of officials, army personnel, and foreign diplomats and staff was dwarfed by the number
of civilian refugees who flocked to the city — not only individuals, but entire
hospitals, universities, and other institutions made the trek to the picturesque city,
stacked like bricks on narrow terraces above the river. They carried their books
and equipment up the stairs that served as the city’s throughways and turned a
sleepy river town into the hub of China’s government, economic, academic, and
artistic life. Thanks to opaque fogs that hampered Japanese bombing, the Nationalist government remained there in relative safety until the end of the war. Arguably,
Chongqing’s survival made Chinese victory possible. Given these momentous
consequences, what made it possible for Chongqing to survive?
As Danke Li argues, to understand Chongqing’s endurance, we need to rediscover the accomplishments of the women of the city. As Li writes, “collectively,
women as a social group were indispensable during the war; without their sacrifices and contributions China would not have been able to sustain the eight years
of bitter war” (p. 8). Working within a network of government-sponsored organizations that sought to tap the energies of native female residents (“Chongqingese”)
and refugees (xiajiang or down-river newcomers), women contributed extensively
to the war effort. They brought gifts to soldiers and their families, established
social groups to safeguard civilians and promote their welfare, and bolstered
wartime economic efforts. Indeed, the war created important opportunities for
women to join the government and its sponsored organizations, within which
women “seriously practiced politics” for virtually the first time in the history of the
Republic (p. 9).
But not all of the contributions of women to the war effort were made through
the framework of official relief organizations. Indeed, Danke Li argues that the
success of women in “innovating and managing everyday survival” (p. 8) was just
as significant to the survival of Chongqing and the nation as a whole. Even a
teenage xiajiang woman who became a prostitute in order to help her family is
rendered a heroic figure (p. 32). “Ordinary women were the unsung heroes who
witnessed and endured much more of the war’s detrimental harm than did many
men and never received any recognition,” Li contends (p. 32). She hopes that oral
history accounts by these women can provide an alternative to the “gendered
discourse” (p. 5) of some scholarship, where the men are heroic actors and the
women are tragic victims. In contrast, Li argues that a mother “routinely running
for air shelters with her children and going out to salvage edibles expanded a
mother’s sphere and blurred the boundary between domestic and public spheres”
(p. 36). Even in their most intimate domestic moments, women were political
actors, heroic survivors, and contributors to national victory. The personal was
political, indeed.
Li’s book is divided into three main categories of experience: gender and
social roles, economic impact, and political impact. Across these thematic categories, all the book’s histories share the quality of dramatic personal experience. In
several cases, the women Li interviewed came to their wartime experiences already
tempered by privation. Some grew up in lower-income families where only boys
were educated, or fed dinner, for that matter (p. 39). For these women, basic
personal goals, such as receiving an education, were accomplished only at tremendous emotional and physical cost. Other women endured beatings to protect
underground Communist friends (p. 59) or survived placement in orphanages
where girls were raped by administrators (p. 67). The accounts of women’s work
experiences offer an interesting Chinese counterpoint to Rosie the Riveter.
These accounts are finely textured and deeply affecting. They support Li’s
contention that personal survival was both heroic and necessary to national
survival. Yet as a body of narratives, they are tonally similar to the speaking-
bitterness accounts that were a dominant trope in the early years of the People’s
Republic, when peasants and laborers were encouraged to document the hardships
of their lives prior to 1949 in order to justify Communist economic and social
reorganization. Tellingly, most of the narratives of Echoes of Chongqing end circa
1945. However, several mention that life did not necessarily get easier following the
end of the war, and one discloses that her missionary education made her and her
friends targets of the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution (p. 45).
A more serious limitation of these accounts is their narrow political focus. Li
promises to help “move the study of twentieth-century Chinese history in general
and China’s War of Resistance in particular beyond the dichotomy of CCP versus
GMD” (p. 9), but on the whole, the book contributes less to this worthy goal than
one might hope. As Li’s excellent introduction explains, the Nationalist government encouraged participation in government-sponsored women’s groups. Yet Li’s
interviews were conducted largely in and around Chongqing, excluding female
participants who may have later emigrated to Taiwan or Hong Kong, and her
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accounts of women’s forays into political life almost exclusively document women
of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). If they acknowledge membership in
government-sponsored organizations, this is described as an early and brief
prelude before joining the Communists. Their life histories are a valuable addition
to a literature that still focuses on men’s participation in politics, but do not collapse our received CCP-GMD dichotomies.
This book is a valuable resource for English-language students seeking a
firsthand and female perspective to understand the lived experience of the war.
But by remaining focused on women whose experiences mirror official narratives
and political allegiances, the selection of accounts is not as broad as we may wish.
Several studies of wartime historiography indicate that national narratives of
struggle and survival can shape personal memory in powerful ways. By placing
personal experience front and center, Danke Li celebrates her worthy female
heroines, but we must still consider how their wartime memories may have
been colored by postwar experiences and the historical discourse of the People’s
Republic of China.
Shana Brown
Shana Brown is an associate professor of history at the University of Hawai‘i at
Mānoa. Her current research includes the history of modern Chinese women as
artists and collectors.
Li Tang. East Syriac Christianity in Mongol-Yuan China. Orientalia Biblica
et Christiana, vol. 18. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011. xvii, 169 pp.
Hardcover €58.00, isbn 978-3-447-06580-1.
of Hawai‘i Press
It is a great pleasure to have in our hands a volume entirely devoted to East Syriac
Christianity in Mongol-Yuan China. This subject has been quite neglected so far.
Historical research on Christianity in China commonly focuses on Catholic, and
mainly Jesuit, missions in the late Ming–early Qing period or the Protestant
missionary endeavors in modern China. From the perspective of theological or
religious studies, research on the history of East Syriac Christianity is still a small
discipline in the academic world. As the author appropriately remarks in the
preface to the book, “the historical and theological attention given to this subject
weighs far less than the impact, which Syrian Christianity has had in history and
the rich cultural-religious relics and heritage it has left behind” (p. xv).
In the last twenty years, however, research on East Syriac Christianity in
Central and Eastern Asia has grown in academic circles both in the West and in
the East (China and Japan). Quite a few publications (monographs, collections of
essays, and articles) in this relatively new field of research have come out in various
languages. Even more significant is the fact that these publications have resulted in
a new approach, one based, to a great degree, on the sources and with a broader
philological foundation. Scholars involved in this research are trying to work more
concordantly through long-term collaborations. They have come to be increasingly
aware of the particularly important role of fruitful interdisciplinary exchange
among scholars from all over the world, which can bring together the results of
different disciplines, such as religious and church history, philology, archaeology,
theology, and others.
With her scholarly expertise, editorial endeavors, and organizational
enterprises, Li Tang, the author of the volume under review, is one of the scholars
who, in the last few years, have contributed a great deal to develop this new
approach in research on East Syriac Christianity in Asia. In this respect, we
would like to mention at least her contribution to the organization of the second
international Research on the Church of the East in China and Central Asia
conference, which took place in Salzburg (Austria) in 2006. The conference proceedings were later published in a volume coedited by her and Dietmar W.
Winkler.1
On the basis of her expertise in different fields — notably, her knowledge of
several different ancient languages, Chinese, Syriac, Turkic, Mongolian — Li Tang
with this book offers us a comprehensive reconstruction of the history of East
Syriac Christianity in Mongol-Yuan China (twelfth–fourteenth centuries) within
its political, social, economic, cultural, and religious environment. It deals with the
relevant historical background, the ethnic Christian groups involved, philological
and theological studies of the East Syriac Christian inscriptions, the migrations of
Christian populations, Mongol religious policies, as well as missionary activities in
the Mongolian plains and in China. In its comprehensive approach to the subject,
this book can be ranged with groundbreaking works, like those by Paul Pelliot and
Jean Dauvillier.2
When I first opened the book, what I appreciated very much was the effort to
use the term “East Syriac” or “East Syrian” Christianity instead of the inappropriate, even though for a long time commonly used, term “Nestorian” Christianity.
Although the author explicitly says that “the term ‘Nestorian’ is only used with
restraint and is written in quotation marks . . . when the use of the term is deemed
unavoidable” (preface, p. xvii), when I read the book more carefully, I nevertheless
found that the term is still used several times, even when it could be avoided. In
more than one case, it is not put in quotation marks.
Generally speaking, I consider that the best points of the book are two. Its first
merit, as said already, is that it gathers together many previously scattered materi-
Reviews 527
als and specific studies in different disciplines; in this way it succeeds in reconstructing a comprehensive history of East Syriac Christianity in Yuan China. It
shows how widely and solidly Christianity spread in inner Asia and China proper
during the Mongol period, and it provides evidence that Christianity exercised a
strong influence on the Mongol society — this is Li Tang’s often repeated conclusion (see pp. 48, 51, 57, 85, 93, 98, 128–129, 144). Christianity was prevalent among
Turkic-speaking peoples in Yuan China, handed down from generation to generation within family clans, while it won only a small number of Mongol and Chinese
converts.
The second merit of Li Tang’s work is that it relies first and foremost on
primary sources, particularly literary sources, such as Chinese historical chronicles, Arabic travelogues, Syriac ecclesiastical documents, and epigraphical sources.
A relevant point in this regard is the author’s “new attempt to decipher the Nestorian [sic] multi-lingual inscriptions and to give an English translation of both
Chinese and Syro-Turkic part of the epitaph[s]” (p. 60). Some new attempts of
interpretation of the original Syriac and Turkic terms hidden behind the Chinese
phonetic translations of individual Christians’ personal names and ecclesiastical
titles are a valuable contribution to the philological study of these unique documents. They are the most appreciated result of Li Tang’s mastery of several Central
and East Asian languages.
What I consider the most valuable part in her book, however, is the careful
study of a section of the fourteenth-century Chinese gazetteer Zhishun Zhenjiang
zhi 至順鎮江志 (The Annals of Zhenjiang of the Zhishun Period), compiled by Yu
Xilu 俞希魯. Through an analysis and translation of a footnote composed by Liang
Xiang 梁相 and then inserted in The Annals, Li Tang has provided solid proof that
in the thirteenth–fourteenth centuries East Syriac Christian communities were still
connected — at least ideally — with the church in Samarkand in Central Asia (see
pp. 133–138). Similarly valuable is the interpretation and translation of the passage
about Mar Sargis and the building of seven monasteries in Zhenjiang by Sargis.3
In this regard, I dare to suggest a possible solution for the passage that speaks
about a certain “Mar Šlihā from the country of Fo 佛” (p. 138). Instead of thinking
of “India, or the land of the Uighur, or any Buddhist-influenced areas in China”
(p. 138 n. 529), I would suggest that this could be simply a miswritten character
instead of the similar Fu 拂, this being the first character of the geographical term
Fulin 拂林 (rūm), by which the Chinese sources named the lands once under the
control of the eastern Roman Empire. Thanks to the same expertise in dealing
with Yuan historical sources, such as Yuanshi 元史 (History of the Yuan) or
Yuandianzhang 元典章 (The Constitution of the Yuan), the author was able to
reconstruct an outline of the Christian population and distribution in Yuan China.
Biographies of individual Christians and genealogical charts of a few prominent
Christian families belonging to the Kerait and Öngüt tribes are offered as well (see
pp. 97ff.).
After reading the volume, nevertheless, I note some omissions. Some issues
would have benefited from a fuller treatment. To mention just one example, the
author reserves only a brief mention to the Christian site of Fangshan 房山 near
Khanbalic (Peking), the place where the Christian Monastery of the Cross
(十字寺) stood (see p. 108). Recent studies have contributed to a better understanding of the history of the site, but Li Tang does not take them into con
sideration.4 This leads me to a second remark, concerning the references. The
bibliography includes sources published up to 2006, with only one reference to a
Chinese book published in China in 2009; I suppose that this is due to the deadline for the submission of the manuscript to the publishing house. However, it is a
pity that possible references to quite a large number of significant publications
after 2006 have not been included. One is also astonished to find in the bibli
ography only one reference to Niu Ruji 牛汝极, who, both in China and abroad,
is considered to be an expert in the field of Syro-Turkic inscriptions of the
thirteenth–fourteenth centuries and has published widely on the subject.5 No
reference at all is given to the important fieldwork in Inner Mongolia by Tjalling
Halbertsma.6
To have this volume published by Harrassowitz in the series Orientalia Biblica
et Christiana is of great value. From this prestigious publishing house, we would
have expected, however, more careful editing. Regrettably, in the book we found
several misprints, cases of a wrong use of italics (e.g., pp. 113–114, 121, 134, 136),
and, at the end of the book, a very poor and incomplete index. Several entries are
missing, and some of them are definitively incomplete. For example, I accidentally
looked in the index for the entry darughachi — the name for a provincial governor
in the Mongol state administration, a position held also by Christians — and I
found only one reference to a single page (p. 95). This was not the only occurrence — as I had suspected — and not even the main one. Moreover, in the book, the term
is always (except once) written “darughachi”; in the index, it has only one h
(darughaci).
I know that complete consistency in transliteration is a utopian task and an
impossible goal, particularly when dealing with such a large number of different
languages as Turkic, Mongolian, Syriac, Persian, Chinese, and others; further
more, the author was perfectly aware of it, since in the preface she remarks that
consistency is “hard to claim or maintain” (p. xvii). I was, nevertheless, surprised
to find the name of the first known Christian missionary in China 阿羅本
always rendered as “Alopen,” while it should be “Aluoben” according to the pinyin
system of transliteration of Chinese words she chose to use throughout the whole
book.
Nevertheless, the book is a unique collection of hidden treasures for all those
who wish to know more about the fascinating and mostly neglected story of East
Syriac Christianity in its diffusion along the Silk Road and into China. Even
though written for scholars, the book is easy to read. It encourages the reader to
Reviews 529
delve further into the discovery of particular pages of the Christian history in
Yuan China.
Matteo Nicolini-Zani
Matteo Nicolini-Zani (matteo@monasterodibose.it) graduated in Chinese language
and literature from the Department of East Asian Studies of the University Ca’
Foscari, Venice, in 1999. He is a Christian monk in the Monastery of Bose. His
research focuses on the history and literature of Christianity in China. In addition to
numerous articles, he has published a book: La via radiosa per l’oriente: I testi e la
storia del primo incontro del cristianesimo con il mondo culturale e religioso
cinese (Magnano: Edizioni Qiqajon-Comunità di Bose, 2006).
Notes
1. Dietmar W. Winkler and Li Tang, eds., Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters:
Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia, Orientalia-patristica-oecumenica 1
(Münster: Lit, 2009). See my review to this volume in Catholic Historical Review 97, no. 3 (2011):
616–618. See also the proceedings of the first international conference Research on the Church of
the East in China and Central Asia (Salzburg, 2003), to which Li Tang contributed as well:
Roman Malek and Peter Hofrichter, eds., Jingjiao: The Church of the East in China and Central
Asia, Collectanea Serica (Sankt Augustin: Institut Monumenta Serica, 2006).
2. Paul Pelliot, Recherches sur les chrétiens d’Asie Centrale et d’Éxtrême-Orient. 1: En marge
de Jean du Plan Carpin; 2: Guillaume de Rubrouck; 3: Màr Yabhalàhâ, Rabbân Sàumâ et les princes
Öngüt chétiens, Œuvres posthumes de Paul Pelliot (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1973); Jean
Dauvillier, Histoire et institutions des Églises orientales au Moyen Age, Collected Studies Series 173
(London: Variorum Reprints, 1983).
3. About this see also Yin Xiaoping, “On the Christians in Jiangnan during the Yuan
Dynasty according to The Gazetteer of Zhenjiang of the Zhishun Period,” in Winkler and Tang,
Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters, pp. 305–319.
4. See, for example, Xu Pingfang 徐苹芳, “Beijing Fangshan shizi si yelikewen shike” 北京
房山十字寺也里可温石刻 (Yelikewen [Christian] Stone Inscription at the Monastery of the
Cross in Fangshan, Beijing),” Zhongguo wenhua 中国文化 (Chinese Culture) 7 (1992): 184–189;
Marco Guglielminotti Trivel, “Tempio della Croce–Fangshan–Pechino. Documentazione
preliminare delle fonti epigrafiche in situ,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 71, no. 2 (2005):
431–460; Pier Giorgio Borbone, “I blocchi con croci e iscrizione siriaca da Fangshan,” Orientalia
Christiana Periodica 72, no. 1 (2006): 67–187; Pierre Marsone, “When Was the Temple of the
Cross at Fangshan a ‘Christian Temple’?” in Winkler and Tang, Hidden Treasures and Intercultural
Encounters, pp. 215–223.
5. A bibliography compiled just in 2006 listed already ten entries by Niu Ruji (see “Pre
liminary Bibliography on the Church of the East in China and Central Asia,” in Jingjiao, ed.
Roman Malek and Peter Hofrichter [Sankt Augustin: Institut Monumenta Serica, 2006], pp. 624–
625). In 2011, his publications doubled. I would like to mention two of his last books: Shizi
lianhua: Zhongguo Yuandai xuliya wen jingjiao beiming wenxian yanjiu 十字蓮花：中國元代敘
利亞文景教碑銘文獻研究 (The Cross-Lotus: A Study on Nestorian Inscriptions and Documents
from the Yuan Dynasty in China) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2008); La Croix-Lotus:
Inscriptions et manuscrits nestoriens en écriture syriaque découverts en Chine (XIIIe–XIVe siècles)
(Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2010).
6. Tjalling Halbertsma, De verloren lotuskruisen: Een zoektocht naar de steden, graven en
kerken van vroege christenen in China (Haarlem: Altamira-Becht 2002); “Some Notes on Past and
Present Field Research on Gravestones and Related Stone Material of the Church of the East in
Inner Mongolia, China,” in Jingjiao, pp. 303–319; Early Christian Remains of Inner Mongolia:
Discovery, Reconstruction, and Appropriation (Leiden: Brill, 2008); “Some Field Notes and Images
of Stone Material from Graves of the Church of the East in Inner Mongolia, China,” Monumenta
Serica 53 (2005): 113–244; “Some Field Notes and Images of Stone Sculptures Found at Nestorian
Sites in Inner Mongolia,” in Winkler and Tang, Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters,
pp. 51–69.
Xinru Liu. The Silk Road in World History. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010. x, 168 pp. Hardcover $74.00, isbn 978-0-19-516174-8. Paperback
$19.95, isbn 978-0-19-533810-2.
of Hawai‘i Press
The editors of Oxford World History, in which this volume is published, hope
that the series will emphasize “the connectedness and interactions of all kinds
. . . involving people, places and processes . . . make comparisons and find
similarities” (p. x). The Silk Road might be considered an ideal subject for this
treatment, being a thread we weave to connect the history of the interactions of the
peoples of the Afro-Eurasian continents. However, as this book shows, it is also an
immense challenge.
Xinru Liu tells a broadly chronological story using the predominant narrative —
the development of long-distance trade routes to Rome following the Chinese
expansion westward. Von Richtofen’s choice of the term “Silk Roads” in the late
nineteenth century to describe a network of cross continental trade routes might
have been thought to make this narrative inevitable, but early studies concentrated
as much on trade between Rome and India as on China’s role. It was only in the
late twentieth century that “the Silk Road” became a common term linked to Han
China’s expansion west into the Taklamakan kingdoms. This cannot be unrelated
the rise of China and the debate about the decline of the West. Indeed, Liu also
starts with this ubiquitous dichotomy, presenting the Silk Road as a link that
“brought East and West together” (p. 1), instigated by the Chinese Han empire.
Some scholars have started to challenge the dichotomous view and argue
instead for the importance of the routes between Central Asia and India, notably de
la Vaissière in his work on the Sogdian mercantile network.1 Liu does not address
this view. Her chapter on the Kushan empire, which follows that on China and
Rome, mainly discusses the transmission of Buddhism rather than Kushan’s pivotal
Reviews 531
role in bringing the stability that enabled their northern neighbors, the Sogdians,
to ply their trade across the Pamir, Karakorum, and Hindu Kush. Although the
paucity of the archaeological evidence of Indian textiles has almost certainly
skewed the scholarship in this area, from what we know, India was likely both a
producer and consumer in the textile trade, as were Central Asian Kingdoms and
cities such as Khotan and Bukhara. The latter, along with the role of the Byzantine
Empire and the Islamic caliphate in the development of the silk industry outside
China, are discussed, but the fact they appear at different parts of the narrative
does not help the reader in making comparisons and finding similarities.
After these three chapters, the book continues with an account of the trade
routes under the Islamic caliphate and, finally, the Mongol empire, before coming
to a rather abrupt end, when “the sea routes . . . overshadowed and then replaced
the Eurasian land routes” (p. 126).
Liu’s concentration through the book on the land routes is problematic. For
example, her map on pages 70–71 of trading ports and religious sites shows no
Indian seaports. Yet there is considerable evidence that the bulk of the silk reach
ing Rome traveled via such seaports, the Kushans enabling the connecting land
routes. Moreover, the map also reinforces her assertion that Buddhism spread
primarily by land routes. Archaeologists mapping the concentrations of Buddhist
sites near seaports could legitimately contest this point.
Although it would be unrealistic to expect a short introductory text to discuss
all the latest scholarly debates, some are now well established, and it is disappoint
ing that they are not incorporated into the narrative. Moreover, a statement of the
choices Liu made to define the Silk Road would have been useful, if only to alert
the unwary reader of the plurality of opinions and the embryonic nature of
scholarship in this area.
In mitigation, any short history is almost bound to be open to this sort of
criticism. The Silk Road, however, offers an opportunity to avoid this by presenting
the history through themes rather than by chronology. Indeed, this is what the
editors seem to be expecting. There is a suggestion of this approach at the begin
ning, where Liu frames the book by the relationship at the boundaries of what
has been called “Inner Eurasia” and “Outer Eurasia,” between pastoralists and
sedentary peoples, but this initiative is not pursued. Because of her chronological
approach, her brief discussions of the interactions between the Chinese and
various neighbors, first the Xiongnu (pp. 3ff.) and then the Qidan Liao (pp. 110–
111) are found far apart. The former is described as initially one of “constant
conflict” (p. 3). However, she goes on to discuss the various means both sides
sought to bring periods of peace, including marriage alliances and diplomacy,
rather undermining this simplistic characterization. She later describes the
relationship between the Liao and the Chinese as “complicated” with periods of
peace and war (p. 110). Unfortunately, there is no reference between the two
discussions; this is, again, a missed opportunity to make comparisons.
The relationship between the states of the Silk Road and mercantile activity is
another theme that remains unexploited. For example, Liu could have compared
the role of the Sogdians and that of the Islamic states in encouraging and support
ing mercantile activity, for example, by establishing caravanserai and having locally
based agents to assist merchants en route. Again, the two discussions are given in
different sections with no reference to each other. Of course, such comparisons
run the risk of being facile and even misleading, but there is sufficient secondary
scholarship on these topics to avoid this outcome.
Numerous other themes are left tantalizingly unexplored: the role of trade and
religion, urbanization, and technological development, among others. Instead, Liu
is forced by her chosen approach to struggle to decide which events and which
places and peoples to highlight in a history covering over 1500 years and involving
hundreds of political entities. Her familiarity with the Chinese sources shows as
these sections are the more confident and assured historical summaries in her
book. By contrast, the history of the western areas is more uneven: for example,
she devotes four pages to an account of Petra (pp. 24–27) — one important Silk
Road city among hundreds, while barely giving a mention to Balkh.
The aims of this series are to be applauded, but the demands are considerable.
Thomas Allsen has shown how much can be achieved by a comparative explora
tion of one theme across Eurasian history — but, in fairness, I am not sure the
state of scholarship and understanding of the Silk Road is sufficient for anyone to
produce an entirely satisfactory volume covering multiple themes.2 It is to be
hoped that this volume, being a short and accessible history, will encourage
students to work in this area so that a new generation can build on our still very
limited understanding.
Susan Whitfield
Susan Whitfield is a historian specializing in the history of Central Asia and the
eastern Silk Road, and is the director of the International Dunhuang Project, the
British Library.
Notes
1. Etienne de la Vassière, Sogdian Traders: A History (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers,
2005).
2. Thomas T. Allsen, The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Reviews 533
Sheldon H. Lu. Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in
Literature and Visual Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007.
xiii, 264 pp. Paperback, isbn 978-0-8248-3177-6.
of Hawai‘i Press
In Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics, Sheldon Lu brings together an
impressive range of essays that probe China’s experiences of globalization from the
late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, with particular focus on what he
calls “global biopolitics” — the myriad ways in which globalization is “felt personally in the everyday life of individuals” through the “politics of the body, the
psyche, and affects” (p. 2). The book comprises nine central chapters organized
chronologically and divided along genre lines. Part 1, the section with the longest
historical reach, looks at literature and contains discussions on Wang Tao’s late
Qing classical tales of transnational and interracial romance (chap. 1), Yu Dafu’s
and Zhang Xianliang’s narrative fictions of frustrated male desire (chap. 2), and the
recent rise of highly sexualized “body writing” by female novelists such as Mian
Mian and Wei Hui (chap. 3). Part 2 turns to contemporary art and explores the
body performances of Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan (chap. 4) as well as the
installations on global war and violence by Qin Yufen and Cai Guo-Qiang (chap.
5). By moving from works produced or performed within the mainland to those in
the diaspora, this section begins to shift the book’s emphasis from a nation-based
to a diasporic model of Chinese cultural practice. Part 3 further expands on this
transnational frame by situating a number of recent mainland films and television
dramas in relation to Hollywood and Hong Kong cinematic representations of
China as a nation-state (chap. 6), the East German cinema of “postsocialist nostalgia” (chap. 7), and a Taiwanese documentary’s use of local dialects for imagining
cultural and national identity (chap. 8). Part 4 comes full circle by returning our
attention to contemporary People’s Republic of China (PRC) via mass media that
variously respond to the destruction and reconstruction of urban space (chap. 9).
The wide geographical compass of Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics
is by now a hallmark of Lu’s work, and he effectively demonstrates here that pre
occupation with China’s global status constitutes a significant theme for cultural
producers both within and outside the PRC. The interdisciplinary breadth here
also admirably showcases how a cross-genre study can offer synthetic insights into
discourses of nation, modernity, and globalization. By spanning the realms of
literature (both classical and popular) and visual culture broadly defined (art,
photography, video, television, and film of both artistic and commercial stripes),
this book marks a key place in the growing corpus of recent scholarship on transnational cultural Chineseness, since other studies tend to concentrate predominantly on either literature (Tsu and Wang 2010; Tsu 2011) or visual culture (Lu
2001; Shih 2007). For the most part, Lu takes pains to avoid reducing cultural
politics to geographical location or aligning cultural agency too easily with the
diaspora. In his conception of sinophone cinema, for instance, he emphasizes that
“Greater China is not necessarily a monolithic, colonial, oppressive geopolitical
entity,” nor is “[s]inophone cultural production from the margins an inherently
postcolonial, counterhegemonic discourse” (p. 163). Instead, Lu’s analyses typically
move across mainland and diasporic contexts in order to highlight thematic
continuities and cultural networks as well as common constraints of capitalist
production and mass consumption facing both those inside the PRC (such as the
“beauty writers” of chap. 3 and Zhang Yimou in chap. 8) and those without (such
as the New York–based artist Cai Guo-Qiang in chap. 5). Thus, when he asserts
that globalization “could be repressive or liberating” and exhorts us to evaluate the
“power relations embedded in each and every instance of transnational interaction”
before assigning roles of victim and agent (p. 4), he speaks to assumptions underpinning gendered as well as geopolitical identities. Nonetheless, in the area of film,
Lu grants Hong Kong a certain privilege, perceiving it as the only site of cultural
production that bears “the possibility of a thoroughly transnational ethos” (p. 125).
To my mind, Lu’s foremost contribution to this scholarship is his insistence on
matters of biopolitics in relation to globalization. As he argues in the introductory
chapter,
Globalization is the ineluctable human condition of our time. But globalization is
not just the physical circulation of goods, commodities, industries, hardware, and
capital across national boundaries. It must be felt personally in the everyday life of
individuals. At a deeper level, the process involves the structure of feelings and
the politics of the body, the psyche, and affects. . . . The entry of contemporary
China into the picture contributes to a vast and significant expansion of the
regime of global capitalism and its attendant biopolitical manifestations. (p. 2)
This last observation pinpoints the bilateral importance of Lu’s argument, for not
only does he read China’s globalization through the theoretical lens of biopolitics,
but he extends the geopolitical scope of biopolitical theories to take seriously
issues raised by a globalizing China. In this respect, Chinese Modernity and Global
Biopolitics joins the ranks of several recent studies in the social sciences that
likewise borrow Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower to interrogate the communist government’s policies on population control, the rural blood economy, and
other aspects of life management in contemporary China (Anagnost 2011; Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005). Lu’s most incisive discussion within this context is his
chapter on Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan — body artists whose performances, as
Lu persuasively argues, “rehearse the production and policing of the biopolitical
body, question the modern procedures of the subjectification of the individual,
and contest the laws and taboos of the socialist sovereign state” (p. 72). Lu makes
a powerful case for why a biopolitical perspective is indispensible to our understanding of these artists’ intense and unrelenting exhibition of the naked body in
public space, whether inside the PRC or abroad. In turn, by interpreting these
artists as biopolitical agents, Lu foregrounds the significance of Chinese cultural
practice for our theorizing of both national and transnational biopower today.
Reviews 535
Pursuing this biopolitical paradigm further — and further refining accounts of
its applicability to different media and categories of life — might yield invaluable
answers to other questions. For example, how does the conceptual content of the
term “biopolitics” change when the object of analysis shifts from a literary or
visual representation of bodies to, say, the actual performance of a human body? If,
as Lu proposes, biopolitics encompasses the techniques of governing and tactics of
enacting not just bodily life but also “the psyche” and “libidinal economies,” what
exactly constitutes the bios of desires and affects, and what differentiates the
biopolitics of the body from that of the mind? Lu’s capacious engagement with
diverse cultural forms and practices fruitfully broadens the horizon of biopolitical
criticism, permitting us to chart these new lines of inquiry for China and beyond.
Belinda Kong
Belinda Kong is an associate professor of Asian studies and English at Bowdoin
College with research specialization in transnational Asian American literature and
Chinese diaspora fiction.
References
Anagnost, Ann S. 2011. “Strange Circulations.” In Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of
Life and Death, edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, pp. 213–237. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Greenhalgh, Susan, and Edwin A. Winckler, eds. 2005. Governing China’s Population: From
Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng, ed. 2001. China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Shih, Shu-mei. 2007. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Tsu, Jing. 2011. Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tsu, Jing, and David Der-wei Wang, eds. 2010. Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays. Leiden:
Brill Academic Publishers.
Ma Yuan. Ballad of the Himalayas: Stories of Tibet. Translated by Herbert J.
Batt. Introduction by Yang Xiaobin. Portland, ME: MerwinAsia, 2011. xiv,
315 pp. Hardcover $50.00, isbn 978-0-9832991-9-6. Paperback $24.95, isbn
978-0-9832991-8-9.
of Hawai‘i Press
This long overdue collection of stories by a major writer should be read by anyone,
China specialist or not, who appreciates good literature. Ma Yuan’s work offers the
simple yet detailed observations of Hemingway, the humor and poignancy of
Salinger, the stylistic coherence of Woolf, and the playfully serious and formal
irony of Borges or Cortázar.
Ma Yuan is a Chinese writer probably best known for writing about Tibet,
although he also wrote fiction set elsewhere.1 He was born in northeast China in
1953, sent to work in a factory and in the country during the Cultural Revolution,
and eventually graduated from Liaoning University in 1983. After graduation, Ma
moved to Lhasa, where he lived for eight years, worked with Tibetan Radio, and
began to write fiction. He published novels and stories from 1984 to 1989; he then
moved in new directions as a screenwriter, essayist, and teacher. This volume
presents eight of Ma’s Tibetan stories, masterfully translated by Herbert J. Batt. The
stories include “Vagabond Spirit,” “The Black Road,” “The Numismatologist,” “The
Master,” “A Fiction,” “The Spell of the Gangdise Mountains,” “Three Ways to Fold a
Paper Hawk,” and “Ballad of the Himalayas.” The book also includes an introduction by Yang Xiaobin and an afterword by Batt. Unfortunately, the volume does
not include the Chinese titles and original publication dates of the stories.2
Ma Yuan’s fiction was central to the busy Chinese literary scene of the 1980s.
The middle of that decade has been identified with the predominance of rootsseeking literature, in which writers ambivalently sought to wrestle an authentic
and modern Chinese identity from the nation’s turbulent past and its present
effects.3 Root-seeking literature was followed by avant-garde writing, with its
suspicion of history and culture and its seemingly purposeless narrators. For writers
of this type of literature, any new Chinese identity cannot simply be imagined or
willed into being from the past because subjectivity itself has been transformed by
the complications and contradictions of modern history. Storytelling, therefore,
becomes part of an identity, not simply a means of representing an identity that
is already present. Narrators and characters are not content to simply rely on
representation to tell their stories, but self-consciously exploit the techniques
and conventions of literature in order to expose the constructed nature of real
life.
For Ma, roots-seeking and avant-garde literature come together in the colonial
context of China’s presence in Tibet. In fact, colonial fiction has always blurred the
boundary between these two kinds of writing, broadly speaking, combining
questions of cultural heritage with critiques of identity. Consider Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness, Kipling’s Kim, Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, or Coetzee’s Foe as examples.
All feature characters who experience confusion in their identities, and their
uncertainties are intimately linked to the forms their stories take.
Ma’s experiences as a Chinese man in Lhasa — and his imagination as a
writer — reflect the colonial encounter on a very human and individually psychological level, as well as any metaphorical levels that readers might identify. The
stories showcase a remarkably sensitive observer-creator of and participant in
relationships that are simultaneously unequal, symbiotic, exploitative, compassionate, tragic, and life-affirming. Ma’s stories develop new forms for articulating a
Reviews 537
consciousness emerging, for good as well as for ill, in a colonial context. Of course,
these are not the direct accounts of colonized people or cultures, but of the colonial resident outsider who recognizes that writing about his interactions in China’s
Tibet sets in motion any number of powerful metaphors, stereotypes, and prejudices. It is tempting and sometimes well-meaning to reduce the Tibet-China
relationship to one in which the component parts map easily onto oppositions
between the spiritual and the material, or between traditional Tibetan life and
Chinese modernization. Furthermore, it may be possible to feel that Ma’s stories
are patronizing colonialist allegories — the narrator as a personification of China in
Tibet, or the leper village as an allegory for Tibet. Yet if this were all that the stories
reflected, we would be left with rather thin narratives. Instead, Ma creates worlds
in which important allegorical implications never stray far from the individual
lives and experiences of narrators and characters. It all comes down to the questions, “What did I just see?” or “What just happened?” and how a writer goes
about responding to these questions.
Consider the opening to “The Black Road,” which I believe is the best story to
read first in the volume:
Nobody is more prone to fantasy than the eyewitness to a murder. That’s why
somebody with the luck I’ve had usually gives inconsistent testimony, until at last
they turn their whole statement inside out. It’s not from cowardice or lack of
nerve. The facts are never real. From firm faith to wavering belief, then on to
delirium, then to groundless fabrication. First you disbelieve your eyes, then you
start to disbelieve yourself. I can tell you my own experience. (p. 26)
What does the story begin to suggest about the narrator’s experience? What issues
are set in motion by the phrase “[t]he facts are never real”? Does this suggest that
nothing is true, that nothing really happens in Ma’s story? Just the opposite. This
narrator is exploring and describing the condition of having to account for some
experience, of having to bring the experience to someone else. An “eyewitness to a
murder” is called to testify in his fiction, and his statements must somehow negotiate the interests of various judges, or readers. Kafka, of course, is known for writing of the complicated path from experience to narrative. In Ma’s case, a general
concern with believing your own eyes merges with the difficulties of testifying to
other people. “Inconsistent testimony” is the charge leveled against those who
cannot seem to keep their stories straight, yet this story explores how the inconsistencies emerge from at least two sources. First, there is the use that others make of
the story, the interpretations that others impose on the events as told. Maurice
Blanchot’s “The Madness of the Day” (La folie du jour) is another example of this
type. Second, there is the deceptively simple recognition that events mean one
thing when experienced and another when remembered or described. Julio
Cortázar’s “Blow-Up” (Las babas del diablo) offers another example of this, featuring a photographer who confronts entirely new feelings when he revisits a picture
in detail — and in hindsight. Ma’s story is filled with similar provocative images,
including, in fact, a Japanese camera, which makes sense as a factual detail as well
as an allegorical reminder of Japan’s colonial presence in northeast China.
“The Black Road” addresses other allegorical issues, such as whether China’s
presence in Tibet is even recognized as colonial or detrimental: “As far as the
police are concerned this murder never happened” (p. 26) — as far as much of the
international community is concerned, there has been no Tibetan cultural genocide. And yet, Ma seems to emphasize that while it is impossible to ignore the
sociopolitical context of these stories, it is only through individual experiences that
human events, however broad, make sense. “From firm faith to wavering belief,
then on to delirium, then to groundless fabrication” — this is a line that stands to
describe the nature of experience itself as much as an individual Chinese writer’s
feelings about Tibet.4
The story concludes with the narrator admitting, “I had a dream that I can’t
explain that repeats itself over and over. I just can’t work out whether it’s real”
(p. 40). Yet, despite a reader’s temptation to interpret this as an admission that
nothing really happened, nothing matters, or even that ambiguity is the point of
the story, I would suggest the ending reasserts the complex fate of very real events.
The story shows that terrible things do happen, but certainty over relating them
and having them understood is hard to come by. Ma’s work has been described as
absurdist, without plot, or fragmented, yet the stories in this volume remain true
to the depiction, not just of facts, but of the perception and memory of intensely
transformative events. Reading Ma’s stories benefits from an appreciation of
Hemingway’s or Woolf ’s modernist experiments, in which fictional techniques are
employed as extensions of experience, not simply replacements for that experience. Notice how the penultimate section of “The Black Road” illustrates this by
turning the reader into a witness of facts. In this section, which is not narrated, but
set out like a script, we find the following:
Scene V: The rider of the chestnut, fleeing, looks back.
Scene VI: The lone rider of the second white horse, a black dog behind him,
recedes farther and farther into the distance. (p. 39)
Here, we are asked simply to witness the details of the story. As an example of the
subtle and precise cinematic descriptions that appear throughout Ma’s stories (and
also rather like Hemingway’s work), there are no explicit cues to how something is
said or even seen. Instead, the truth of this section — how it really appears to us as
we read and as we remember the story — is up to us and our responses. This truth
is like Ma’s response to his subject matter throughout the stories in this volume.
Significant things happen — there are facts — the words on the page — but the facts
alone are not what make the story meaningful.
“The Numismatologist” reminds us of Ma’s fascination with identity as formed
by circulation — of culture, history, objects, and conversation. The numismatologist
in the story, as a coin expert, allows Ma to consider how the face value of an object
is derived from social circumstances. Identity, for example, whether Tibetan,
Reviews 539
Chinese, or otherwise, is determined not only by what something is, but also by
how it is circulated. A coin has its intrinsic value, the value of its silver, for example, but its real value is established by the system to which it belongs, and that
system can change over time. Ma’s story seems fascinated by the logic of circulated
value and recognizes its effect on lives in China’s Tibet. Coins, therefore, serve as
images of storytelling itself, as the main character recognizes that “each coin has a
tale of its own” (p. 66) and tries to exploit the values added to objects, people, and
stories as they come to be viewed as exotic, rare, or special — in other words, as
they come to be treated as money. Ma’s stories tend to feature thoughtfully extended
metaphors, and “The Numismatologist” accordingly considers several complications of circulation, including the gradual contamination of items that circulate
and the danger of contagion they pose. Objects, people, and stories cannot remain
pure if they acquire the value that circulation adds, and this contamination (the
dirty coins and diseased suits, and consider also the leprosy that is central to
“A Fiction”) provokes fear and paranoia among those who would prefer to see
value circulate without mutual influence.
Provocatively, “Vagabond Spirit” asks the central question, “What’s scary
about coins?” and proceeds to explore the intersection of value, fiction, and history. Here the importance is not so much on any particular story, but on the ability
to fabricate new stories, like Scheherazade in “One Thousand and One Nights.”
Ma’s narrators frantically, happily, casually, or cleverly recognize the need for stories
and storytelling: As the narrator says in “The Spell of the Gangdise Mountains,”
“What, you want another ‘and then,’ Dear Reader?” (p. 255), storytelling keeps
identities alive. The characters of “Vagabond Spirit” are not satisfied with any
single coin, no matter how historical, but with the possibility of obtaining a mold
to make new coins. The predicament, however — at once an aspect of plot and of
symbolism — is that it takes two sides of the mold to make those new coins.
In “The Master,” an elderly painter strives to finish his masterpiece before he is
overcome by a creeping petrification, progressing up his body from his feet. The
image resonates with Ma’s interest in art, the artist, and the journey from personal
artistic expression to national tradition. “A Fiction” is probably the story most
likely to be called classic Ma Yuan, and it is also the object of some rather heavyhanded interpretation, including Batt’s translator’s note. Yet enduring interest in
the story may be based less on what it represents or symbolizes and more on the
exploration of representation itself as both our greatest attraction and our biggest
threat. That is, as readers, we want to hear stories, and as narrators we want to tell
them, yet how do we square the attempt to be true or sincere with the use of madeup forms? Plato’s Republic, of course, considers this problem in the allegory of the
cave, which “A Fiction” explicitly references, as does “Ballad of the Himalayas.”
“The Spell of the Gangdise Mountains” is an outstanding story that is long,
challenging, and genuinely funny. It unfolds through several narrators and concerns events ranging from hunting and Tibetan sky burials to an abominable
snowman and one character’s fixation on owning a truck. Yet at the story’s thematic
center is the relationship between myth and ideology. Ma plays with the expectation that readers (Chinese and otherwise) will see the world view of Tibetans as
inherently different from their own world views, when the truth is we all must face
the ways in which myth and ideology support our lives and identities. A paragraph
of sociology-speak that includes the statement “their everyday life is indistinguishable from myth” is called out by the narrator for being a “long-winded harangue.”
While he asks the reader to “please forgive the sophistry,” he knows that the
remarks still stand, that the jury cannot disregard what has already been spoken,
and that people inevitably live with truths they know to be fictions (p. 207). Even
materialist notions of false consciousness are specifically explored in this story, as
the main characters, named for “action” and “knowledge,” try to unify their sense
of what they see and what they are told. The narrator’s wrap-up of the plot — for
the benefit of a reader always asking “and then?” — ends the story with the sagacious wry humor characteristic of Ma’s stories.
“Three Ways to Fold a Paper Hawk” revisits the imagery of painting and the
critique of what it means for something to represent something else. This story is
remarkably sad in spots, involving the story of an old woman who starves herself
in order to feed stray dogs, and offers a very poignant example of Ma’s mingling of
self-consciousness and pathos. When the narrator concludes the story with his
own literary criticism of two tales he has heard, we are confronted again with the
relationship between what is authentic and what is true, which runs throughout
Ma’s work: “I know maybe Luo Hao’s version of the story is more down to earth,
more authentic, but Liu Yu’s version brings out the meaning better” (p. 280). The
final story in this collection, “Ballad of the Himalayas,” ends the volume with a
virtuoso choreography of images involving seeing, not seeing, and ignoring. The
story’s narrators and characters see things from a variety of shifting perspectives,
they see others in the act of seeing, and at times they find their sight cut off or
obscured, either because of others or through their own actions. Like the man who
escapes Plato’s darkened cave only to return for the benefit of his fellow prisoners,
the narrator explains at one point that “coming inside out of the piercing light, I
couldn’t see” (p. 291). Ma’s story follows the intense attraction of the shadow-
stories in the cave, the enlightenment of the true sunlight, and the human imperative of having to always shift between the two situations.
Hebert J. Batt’s achievement in bringing these stories to English readers
should be recognized and rewarded by attracting a very broad readership. As
Henry Y. H. Zhao has written, it would be a shame if these stories were read only
by those with an interest in specialized sociological matters. To be sure, Ma’s
Tibetan stories are intimately part of the Chinese literary scene of the 1980s, but
they can be that while also being stories with enduring interest for readers of all
sorts. Batt’s translations in this volume, some of which improve even on his own
earlier published versions, produce texts that, to an English ear, are delightful,
Reviews 541
forceful, and memorable.5 Ballad of the Himalayas is not only a truly essential text
for scholars of modern Chinese literature, but an enjoyable and stimulating collection of brilliantly accomplished fiction for any reader.
Steven J. Venturino
Steven J. Venturino is a Chicago-based independent scholar and educator. His most
recent publication is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
(2013).
Notes
1. The stories of Tibet in this volume can be distinguished from and related to several other
categories of literature, including fiction written in the Tibetan language, fiction written by
Tibetans (in any language), and fiction written about Tibet. Interested readers should consider
the following sources for an elaboration of these distinctions: Tsering Shakya, “Language,
Literature, and Representation in Tibet,” in Tales of Tibet: Sky Burials, Prayer Wheels, and Wind
Horses, ed. and trans. Herbert J. Batt (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), pp. xi–xxiii;
Tsering Shakya, “The Waterfall and Fragrant Flowers: The Development of Tibetan Literature
Since 1950,” Mānoa 12, no. 2: 28–40; and Steven J. Venturino, “Where Is Tibet in World Literature?” World Literature Today 78, no. 1: 51–56. For an invaluable discussion of Ma Yuan’s work
specifically, see Henry Y. H. Zhao, “Ma Yuan the Chinese Fabricator,” World Literature Today 69,
no. 2: 312–316.
2. For a list of English translations of Ma Yuan’s work, see Kirk Denton’s bibliography,
available at http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/bib4.htm. Two other excellent translations currently available
include the heartbreaking “Mistakes” (set in Liaoning rather than Tibet), by Helen Wang, in The
Lost Boat: Avant-Garde Fiction from China, ed. Henry Y. H. Zhao (London: Wellsweep, 1993),
pp. 29–42; and the delightful and very brief “Little Zhaxi and His Load of Wonderful Thoughts,”
by R. Tyler Cotton, available at his website, rainboomstudio.wordpress.com.
3. See Jing Wang’s High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); as well as Wang’s concise, informative introduction to her edited volume China’s Avant-Garde Fiction: An Anthology (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1998); and see Henry Y. H. Zhao’s introduction to his edited volume The Lost
Boat: Avant-Garde Fiction from China (London: Wellsweep Press, 1993).
4. In a footnote to this story, the translator informs us that “the black road” is “a Chinese
expression for the world of crime” (p. 31), and this helps to explain the circumstances of the
characters’ behavior. A reader might also consider, however, that “the black road,” as an image
important to Native Americans (and likely of interest to Ma Yuan), refers to the path of misery
and unsatisfied desires that people must walk when they stray from spirituality and toward greed.
5. There are some odd details for critics to quibble over productively. In “Vagabond Spirit,”
for example, is it French or German (or European) that the tall woman speaks, and should it be
pointed out that she “doesn’t speak Tibetan” rather than Chinese?
R. Keith Schoppa. In a Sea of Bitterness: Refugees during the Sino-Japanese
War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 346 pp. Hardcover
$35.00, isbn 978-0-674-05988-7.
of Hawai‘i Press
There is a debate about the impact of the great war of 1937–1945 on Chinese society
emerging from studies that have appeared over the last decade. The Sino-Japanese
War has become a growth industry for PhD dissertations, conferences, edited
books, and monographs like the one under review. There is a center for the study
of the war at Oxford led by Rana Mitter that is dedicated to examining the war in a
multidimensional way. Recently, Joseph Esherick devoted an entire graduate
seminar at University of California San Diego to the year 1943.
The long pause after the pioneering work on the war by Lloyd Eastman and
Ch’i Hsi-sheng in the 1970s and 1980s has ended. Eastman’s influential assessment
of the war’s impact and its importance, later enshrined in the Fairbank-edited
Cambridge History of Modern China series, is now being seriously challenged.
Eastman saw the war chiefly in negative terms: besides the absolute chaos and
utter destruction of the war, Chiang Kaishek’s mismanagement of the war, widespread corruption, and military failures led to the disintegration of the state and
the creation of the vacuum that was filled by the Communists.
Keith Schoppa’s new book, In a Sea of Bitterness, builds on a lifetime of
research into the social history of Zhejiang province. Schoppa knows the province
well, with his narrative moving effortlessly in geographical terms from north to
south and east to west (coast into the interior). The detailed maps are superb and
helpful (one wishes also for a glossary of Chinese terms and names as well as a
bibliography). The narrative itself is built on a mountain of data that statistically
records refugee movement back and forth across the province. Interjected between
the charts and statistics are personal stories of the miseries endured by refugee
families. Most notably and referenced throughout the book are the experiences of
the family of the famous artist and cartoonist Feng Zikai.
Schoppa’s focus is on the refugee experience of the Zhejiang population. The
book is structured topically. The narrative runs back and forth chronologically
across the war period with each topic. The opening chapter describes the mounting scale of the refugee crisis in Zhejiang as the Japanese ruthlessly bombed and
then invaded region after region. The Doolittle raid and use of airfields in particular brought heavy retribution in terms of death and destruction during the spring
and summer of 1943. The second chapter tells the story of inadequate government
attempts at refugee relief. And worse still was the woeful absence of significant
private philanthropic efforts by merchant, clan, and place-name associations of the
traditional nature that David Rowe and Bryna Goodman have written about.
Chapter 3 seemed to this reviewer to be the heart of the book in terms of its larger
themes. It is a moving portrayal drawn from detailed diary accounts of the suffering
and movement of artist Feng Zikai and his family. Well known from the transla-
Reviews 543
tion by Geramie Barme, Schoppa embellishes the account in An Artistic Exile
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Basic themes emerge about the
refugee experience: the importance of place (localism), pragmatism, and family
associations in a kind of local collective suffering. These findings clash with the
paradigms offered in recent scholarship that emphasize, in the midst of war, a
widespread rise in nationalist sentiment that transformed institutions.
The remaining two thirds of the book flesh out the Feng Zikai story for the
province as a whole. Schoppa chronicles the terrible kidnapping of civilians and
mistreatment of women. There is a chapter on how the provincial government
was forced to move repeatedly ever deeper into the hinterland and away from the
richer coastal cities. Local revenues as well as subsidies from Chongqing dropped
in the face of increasingly overwhelming demands of resources. The governor,
Huang Shaohung, emerges as one of the few government figures painted in a
positive light. Schoppa chronicles the strategies adopted by refugees to avoid
Japanese depredations by moving in and out of their cherished homes. Educational
institutions were in shambles, moving inland as well while trying valiantly to serve
the moving population in what the author calls “guerrilla education.”1
Three finely crafted chapters present in excruciating detail the depressing
economic picture of the boom and bust cycle, which involves wanton profiteering as
well as desperate treading and smuggling across Japanese lines. Adding to the chaos
and desperation of the economic picture are the scorched earth policies employed
by both the Japanese conquerors and retreating Chinese troops. The latter were
attempting to leave nothing of value under Japanese occupation. Particularly sad
was the story of the preemptive destruction of the just completed Quzhou Airbase.
Schoppa, again in revisionist mode, argues that the celebrated patriotic relocation
of important industrial capital to the hinterland was almost nonexistent in the
Zhejiang case.
In the conclusion, Schoppa turns to the well-known ideas of Arthur Kleinman
and colleagues in social anthropology as a way to emphasize his point about the
importance of loss of place and social identity as keys to understanding the Chinese
wartime refugee experience. Pushing away from contemporary individualist views
of the refugee’s posttraumatic crises in journals such as Refugee Studies, he sees the
Chinese less focused on the self. Their bereavement and disorientation revolved
around loss of ancestral homes, that is, the social context of family, clan, and
locality. The idea that rising nationalism or institutional transformation was a
major mode of coping and surviving in the Zhejiang is refuted, to be given second
place at best. Schoppa strongly suggests that this may well be the case for other
regions of war-torn China as well.
In the context of recent scholarship on the wartime experience, Schoppa
has thrown down the gauntlet. There can be no disputing the fact that for most
Chinese survivors, the war was a nightmare, a devastatingly negative experience
from which they barely survived. The question is how to interpret the meaning of
the war for the surviving population in terms of the decades that followed. Did the
war experience leave the glass half empty or half full as history? Victimization of
the population by both Japanese and Chinese combatants was profound — and this
has been a major theme running from the pioneering work of Lloyd Eastman to
the popular work of Iris Chang to this scholarly treatment of Zhejiang. The war
destroyed the old way of life, and that is where Schoppa puts the emphasis. He sees
the impact of wartime nationalist propaganda (Guomindang or Communist) or
governmental attempts at institutional building as feeble and unimportant.
Is another view possible — even in Zhejiang? One sees in the emergence of the
port of Wenzhou as a commercial center for smuggling a glimpse of its future as
the epicenter of Wild West capitalism in post-Mao People’s Republic of China. The
rise of Wenzhou in the twentieth century seems connected to its World War II
transformation. Possibly the destruction and displacement of the war period laid a
foundation for the fundamental transformation of Chinese society that followed.
The forced rustification of Hangzhou/Ningbo/Shaoxing elites changed their nature
of social relationships after the war. There is also the question of the other half of
the Zhejiang social history picture that Schoppa did not study. What was life like
in occupied Zhejiang under the Japanese and puppet forces? There is also little in
the book on the operation of the press in wartime Zhejiang, although Schoppa
makes excellent use of the Dongnan ribao.
Schoppa mines skillfully the diaries, memoirs, local histories, and abundant
newspaper accounts in order to highlight the suffering of families on the run,
notably that of Feng Zikai. At the same time, out of the narrative there are positive
quixotic figures that emerge, such as the embattled governor, Huang Shaohong,
struggling to save and rebuild economic, educational, and health institutions. In
the chapter on education, the resilience and ingenuity of the five middle school
leaders is impressive.
Recent work on the war has taught us that the regional variety of the wartime
experience was considerable. Steeped in propaganda, Chongqing and Yan’an
represented one extreme. Living in occupied Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou was
quite a different experience. Shandong and the northeastern provinces represented
yet another kind of contrast, with forced labor playing a greater part of the story.
Schoppa implies broader meaning for his study of Zhejiang. The study of wartime
China’s social history is still in its infancy. We need more excellent regional studies
like In a Sea of Bitterness to fill out the picture and come closer to resolving the
kind of challenging questions that Schoppa raises.
Stephen R. MacKinnon
Stephen R. MacKinnon is a recently retired professor of modern Chinese history at
Arizona State University. He has published monographs and edited volumes on the
Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945, including Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the
Making of Modern China (Berkeley, 2008).
Note
1. Title of chapter 8.
Reviews 545
Jiang Wu. Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in
Seventeenth-Century China. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xxii,
457 pp. Hardcover $74.00, isbn 978-0-19-533357-2. Paperback $24.95, isbn
978-0-199-89556-4.
of Hawai‘i Press
Jiang Wu’s groundbreaking work Enlightenment in Dispute goes a long way toward
augmenting our understanding of Buddhism in the Qing dynasty, and will quickly
become an indispensable classic in Buddhist studies. The book is divided into four
parts. Wu first gives an account of the rise of Chan Buddhism in the seventeenth
century, and then in parts 2 and 3 narrates two controversies that drew in monks
and literati throughout the empire and even provoked the intervention of the
emperor. Finally, in part 4, Wu draws out the larger implications of the Chan
revival and the polemics that arose from it.
Part 1, consisting of the first three chapters, sets the scene by describing Chan’s
rise and vicissitudes through several centuries, ending with the interactions of
Chan and Neo-Confucianism that made the late Ming revival possible. After
noting a distinct lack of monastic activity and publication, Wu describes the social
and political conditions beginning during the Wanli reign that paved the way for
the revival.
Part 2, “The Principle of Chan,” narrates the history of the first controversy. In
the 1620s, Hanyue Fazang 漢月法藏 (1573–1635) wrote his Wuzong yuan 五宗源
to argue that the Chan transmission required more than symbolic acts such as
beating, shouting, and stylized performances of Chan encounters. They needed to
demonstrate a grasp of the “principle of Chan” or, more particularly, the principle
of transmitting the master’s lineage, whether Linji or Caodong. Many readers took
this as a direct criticism of Miyun Yuanwu 密雲圓悟 (1566–1642), Hanyue’s
master, and the ill will generated by this transgression of normal master-disciple
relations endured for three generations.
In chapter 5, Wu argues that the ensuing polemical exchanges matter because
they exposed a deeper question: How does one publicly verify the private experience of enlightenment? What criteria does one apply? In appealing to the principle
of the Chan lineages, Hanyue thus attempted a solution to this problem. One
could, indeed, grasp the mind of Chan subjectively; the principle, on the other
hand, could be tested, and could be symbolized by the passing on of insignia, the
“robe and bowl” (pp. 137–139). While Hanyue wanted to posit an understanding of
a Chan principle as an objective standard, Miyun and his partisans rejected any
such theorizing about Chan enlightenment, believing it to be transcendental and
beyond objectification (p. 161). In the end, the Yongzheng emperor, regarding
himself a qualified Chan teacher, ended the debate (chap. 6).
Part 3, “Lineage Matters,” presents the second controversy over whether
there was only one Chan monk named Daowu 道悟 in the Tang dynasty or two.
raditional Chan genealogies listed only one, Tianhuang Daowu 天皇道悟 (chart
T
on p. 189), while the new theory said there was another, Tianwang Daowu 天王
道悟. This move transferred all known Fayan and Yunmen monks into the Linji
lineage (chart on p. 189). This entailed a radical recasting of Chan genealogy that
affected the affiliation of many living monks in the late Ming. It became a controversy in 1620, but intensified with the publication of Feiyin Tongrong’s 費隱通容
(1593–1662) Wudeng yantong 五燈嚴統. This work promoted the two-Daowu
theory and put forth a strict definition of dharma transmission that accepted only
face-to-face transmission and rejected transmission by proxy (dàifù 代付) and
transmission by remote succession (yáosì 遙嗣), both tactics that monks used to
obtain transmission from better known but inaccessible masters.
Chapter 8 describes a lawsuit brought against Feiyin in 1654 by some Caodong
monks before local magistrates, and here Wu utilizes newly discovered materials,
including Feiyin’s arrest warrant and petitions from literati. Chapter 9 offers the
lawsuit’s aftermath, summarizing polemical writings and research pieces that
appeared until the end of the seventeenth century. As Wu notes, the controversy
played in three contexts invoking three kinds of authority: Chan lineage records,
secular legal authority, and literati textual expertise.
It is in part 4, “Critical Analysis,” where the real scope of this book’s contributions and originality become evident. In chapter 10, “Explaining the Rise and Fall
of Chan Buddhism,” Wu presents his major thesis:
Because both the literati and Chan clergy shared a common interest in Chan texts
and attempted to reshape the Chan tradition jointly, it can be said that they
created in concert various kinds of Chan textual communities in which an
iconoclastic type of Chan was brought into reality out of the imagination of Chan
textual ideals. However, because some practices, such as spontaneous beating and
shouting and strict dharma transmission, were mere ideals, Chan monks could
not sustain them in the routinized monastic reality. Thus, Chan rose on the high
tide of Wang Yangming’s movement and fell at the juncture of the intellectual
transition in the early eighteenth century. (p. 246)
Thus, Wu identifies a process in which both the literati and monks colluded in
reinventing Chan, based on a romanticized reading of ancient texts. The result was
an attempt to operationalize a Chan monastic system based on spontaneity, the
performance of Chan encounter scenarios, training by beating and shouting, and
organized around Chan lineages reconstructed through the methods of evidential
research. However, Wu argues that this reinvented tradition, built on a nostalgic
ideal, was unsustainable as a quotidian reality.
In chapter 11, Wu describes three enduring legacies of the seventeenth-century
Buddhist revival. First, it was not a restoration of Buddhism after a decline, but an
expansion that transgressed boundaries of law and custom. Second, the use of
dharma transmission led to translocal monastic networking on an unprecedented
scale. Third, this networking engendered a nationally shared set of common values
Reviews 547
that helped integrate Chinese Buddhist monasticism. Behind the Chan rhetoric,
there were other, less visible, moves to build institutions by revising monastic
codes, renovating rituals, and rationalizing procedures (p. 270). Many of these
reforms are still in force today. Put simply, Chan Buddhism led the way for the
renovation of Buddhism in general. As Wu puts it:
[T]he rise of Chan Buddhism was not only meaningful for the Chan tradition
only. Rather, because Chan Buddhism had the advantageous position in Chinese
society and culture, it served as a unique linkage between the monastic world and
the secular society and among the various Buddhist traditions. Therefore, Chan
rhetoric has a special place in the history of Chinese Buddhism, and to some
extent it became a survival strategy for Chinese Buddhists in several critical
moments of history. (p. 273)
Wu also puts forth a new understanding of what a Buddhist revival actually entails.
As stated above, they do not follow upon declines, and therefore do not restore
Buddhism to a former state of glory. Rather, revivals expand Buddhism beyond the
normal boundaries within which it operates into areas of life from which it is
normally restricted. This is why revivals do not last; they are too dependent upon
specific enabling social and cultural circumstances. Three forces normally limit the
scope and duration of a Buddhist revival. First, the imperial household watches to
make sure that Buddhism does not develop real power through alliances with the
gentry. This is why, Wu says, the Yongzheng emperor acted to segregate the Confucian class and Buddhist monks into their proper, separate spheres. Second, the
literati see Buddhist monasteries as arenas for their local activism and so actively
fight trends toward monastic networking, since translocal networks would take the
monasteries out of their oversight. Third, conservative Confucian literati always
see Buddhism as a distraction from their proper function and so, like the Dongling
Academy 東林書院, generally try to persuade their brethren away from it. These
three factors, rising in power as a revival persists, eventually act to bring Buddhism back within its normal boundaries (p. 279).
Finally, Wu extrapolates from the revival of the late seventeenth century to
discern patterns common to Buddhist revivals from the Northern Song to the late
Qing, which he says tend to proceed in the following four stages. (1) The initial
impetus for Buddhist revivals comes from the literati during times when weakened
central government loosens its grip on local activity. As a literati-driven movement, it emphasizes publishing and doctrinal learning. (2) In response to literati
interest, an appealing style of teaching takes hold, dominated by doctrinal studies
and Chan. Wu notes that at this stage (late sixteenth century), the Four Eminent
Monks occupied center stage. (3) Chan monks consequently become ascendant
and take over as leaders of the revival as literati interest begins to wane, as happened in the first decades of the seventeenth century. (4) In the end conservative
forces mobilize to quell the revival. Revivals end when the cultural and social
moment changes (p. 281). Wu predicts that, when the government of the People’s
Republic loosens its grasp on local power, another Buddhist revival will take place
(p. 285).
This is a work of great breadth, which will be useful to scholars on a number
of levels. As Wu says, the book offers a great deal of detail about monasteries, texts,
lay Buddhists, and eminent monks not generally available before, and while this
much information can seem overwhelming, it can serve as an orientation and
handbook for those who wish to pursue individual avenues of inquiry in the future
(p. viii). The analytic chapters at the end blaze new trails in the interpretation of
late Ming and early Qing Buddhism, and will provide grist for much discussion
moving forward.
I do have occasional quibbles with the interpretations. For example, on page
273, Wu makes a dubious statement. Following his own four-stage pattern for
Buddhist revivals, he states that the Four Eminent Monks of the late Ming were
involved in a stage 2–type activity, and devoted themselves to scholastic
publication, while their early seventeenth-century successors pursued the program of Chan practice, dharma transmission, and institutional restoration
more typical of stage 3. However, when we look at the Four Eminent Monks, we
see that Yunqi Zhuhong 雲棲祩宏 (1535–1615) was quite active in ritual reform,
revising and enforcing monastic codes, and so on. Another of the four monks,
Ouyi Zhixu 藕益智旭 (1599–1655), was mainly active in the early to mid-
seventeenth century and thus contemporary with the protagonists of Wu’s book
such as Miyun Yuanwu and Hanyue Fazang. This generalization should be
reexamined.
Since part of his argument is that Buddhist revivals are expansions beyond
Buddhism’s normal boundaries and not recoveries after a period of decline, it
seems important to note that Wu seems to contradict himself when considering
the state of Buddhism in China prior to the revival, that is, in the mid-Ming
period. On page 12, and in various places in part 1, he seeks to show that Buddhism
“suffered serious spiritual and institutional decline during the hundred years
between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries,” whereas in the book’s
conclusion, he adduces much contemporary evidence to show that Buddhism was
not in decline during this time (pp. 278–279). I hope that he revisits this issue in
future publications to clarify his interpretation.
One other minor quibble has to do with the book’s production values.
Throughout the book, romanized Chinese terms are incorrectly hyphenated. This
should not be a big problem, but it happens not once or twice but perhaps seventy
to a hundred times. Like a pebble in the shoe, this problem becomes more of a
distraction as one reads.
On the whole, though, I judge that Enlightenment in Dispute opens new doors
in our understanding of Chinese Buddhism, and it will quickly become part of
Reviews 549
the essential library of scholars in the field. Wu is to be congratulated on this
achievement.
Charles B. Jones
Charles B. Jones received a PhD in the history of religions, with an emphasis on East
Asian Buddhism in 1996 from the University of Virginia. He has published on the
history of Buddhism in Taiwan, Pure Land Buddhism, late Ming gentry Buddhism,
and Jesuit-Confucian controversies. He is currently an associate professor and
associate dean for graduate studies at the Catholic University of America,
Washington, DC.
Fenggang Yang. Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist
Rule. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xv, 245 pp. Paperback
$24.95, isbn 978-0-19-973564-8.
of Hawai‘i Press
In his first book, Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, and
Adhesive Identities (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999),1
Fenggang Yang writes with fascinated interest in Christianity and the excitement
of a newly baptized Christian in 1992. His exposure to the Christian faith came
from his experiencing at the evangelical Chinese Christian Church of Greater
Washington, DC, its sense of “a big family caring for each other.”1A decade or more
later, he writes more generally as an established sociology professor at Indiana’s
Purdue University about religion in China under Communist rule. Yang has been
on Purdue’s faculty since 2002 and is also the director of its Center on Religion and
Chinese Society.
As an academic, Yang makes no reference to his personal religion since he
believes that scientific work should be value-free (p. 29). He looks at religion in
China under the determined opposition and constraints of an avowedly atheistic
Communist government. How, under such adverse conditions, can religion not
only survive, but flourish, especially since the economic reforms beginning in the
late 1970s? This is his project of inquiry. Religion in China attempts to understand
its “survival and revival under Communist rule” and come up with some sociological theories through empirical research. Yang says this scholarly task has been
neglected by China specialists in the world and also is “underdeveloped in China
today” (p. 63).
The author builds on the theories of European sociological giants such as
Max Weber (1864–1920) and Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), but also adapts their
work to the Chinese situation by improving on these theories, which originated in
Western contexts. A case in point is Weber’s notion of secularization of society
being concomitant with the decline of religion, which Yang sees as not happening
in China under Marxist-Maoist rule. Another is that while appropriating the
Durkheimian insight that religion is socially conditioned, he finds Durkheim’s
one-religion-in-one-society at odds with a China where “multiple religions have
coexisted for thousands of years” (p. 33). Yang comes up with the term “oligopoly”
for a society that has a number of selected religious options, however determined
and limited. Here, the millennial syncretic nature of Chinese religions with Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism interact and influence each other, which can be
useful in seeing Yang’s oligopoly as hybridization of religious values in a globalized
world. In referring to his earlier work on Chinese Christians, Yang claims that his
research has shown that Chinese Christians in the United States, Hong Kong,
Taiwan, and even mainland China can be labeled “Confucian Christians,” a hybrid.2
For his theorizing, Yang uses both political and economic perspectives. The
political is the ongoing, sustained atheistic position of Chinese Marxism. He gives
three aspects: (1) hard-nosed atheism, which he designates as “militant,” (2) a more
open-ended atheism he calls “enlightened,” and (3) an even more compromising
atheism, which he sees as “mild.” These different aspects are seen in different
periods of China’s five decades of Communism with any one aspect as overriding,
depending on the particular period and situation. If the social order is stable, the
religious policy of the Communist Party is more lax, leaning toward the enlightened form of atheism. Under threat from within or without to the Chinese social
order, atheism would be more militant, as happened in the period immediately
following Communist rule and during subsequent periods of social unrest. Periodically, however, the religious policy oscillates between militant and enlightened
or even mild, responding to the domestic situation or external threat, not unlike
the tightening or loosening of a balloon, in consolidating control or liberalization
of power toward the people, respectively.
Yang tells about the long debates by the Communist authorities over the
question of religion being the opium of the people, a notion which was finally seen
in its original context. Marx was not against either opium or religion as such, but
only against the injustices of a society which made them necessary to cope with
the sighs and suffering of the voiceless oppressed.3 We need to note the role play by
religious people in clarifying this issue. Such persons can be found in Bishop K. H.
Ting, who served on the National People’s Congress, and Zhao Fusan (a former
Anglican priest), who was deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, now an exile in the United States since the June 4, 1989, Beijing massacre.
For two years he debated and won over a Marxist colleague’s negative description
of religion as opium in a dictionary of religion.4 Yang shares the view that oppres-
Reviews 551
sive social conditions, not religion, need to be changed. “Marxist atheism,” he
writes, “opposes declaring war against religion, but holds that we must gradually
eliminate the alienating natural and social forces that oppress people through
social reforms and development” (p. 62).
In an economic perspective, Yang uses the market economy as an analogy of
religion under Communist rule. A militant atheistic period would allow no choice
(as during the extreme period of the Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976) or the state
offering of only a few religious options for the people, such as the five officially
recognized religions of Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, Islam, and Protestantism.
Yang devotes an entire chapter, “The Shortage Economy of Religion under Communism” (pp. 123–158), to the limited choice of religion in the People’s Republic.
With few choices other than these government-sanctioned religions, the people
would accept what is offered, by being “red.” Or they can refuse with their own
version of what is authentic and go underground, by being “black.” Some will
come up with their own way of satisfying their religious demands and end up with
ambiguous forms of religiosities, which Yang calls “gray.” These categories are
explained in detail in the chapter “The Red, Black, and Gray Markets of Religion”
(pp. 85–122).
Though somewhat homespun, using unsophisticated language, Yang’s sociological theories for understanding religious survival and revival in China under
Communist rule are, nevertheless, helpful. In his theorizing, he uses simple words — a pleasant change from sociological generalizations that employ the jargon of the
discipline. Social scientists create constructs and ideal types. They are rigorously
scientific in the German sense of wissenschaftlich and, in their own way, Teutonize
and systematize obvious facts. However, what is noteworthy are what commonsensical, untrained people often overlook.
Yang tells how during the reforms from the late 1970s, religion in not only
both the red and black categories survived and flourished, but also the gray cate
gory with all forms of popular or folk religions, many under the rubric of cultural
and ethnic particularities. Examples of such are the Ma Tzu female protector of
seafaring folks, which originated in Fujian Province, but revived by Taiwanese
business people where local authorities encouraged such cultural particularities for
the sake of promoting tourism and commerce. An ethnic similarity is found in the
Wong Tai Sin (Huang Daxian) temples in China, established by Hong Kong
Cantonese in Guangdong province. In this gray market, Yang gives a wealth of
information and data regarding what, according to his classifications, are quasi- or
pseudo-religions. These include seven different types of breath-control movements, qigong (气功). All, however, were banned in 1999 after the 10,000-strong
organized Falun Gong adherents descended on the government’s Zhongnanhai
headquarters, pleading for recognition as a religion in April. According to Yang,
for survival, today qigong-like exercises go by other names, strictly limited to
physical health, with no reference to religion.
It is interesting that Yang sees established religions such as Christianity,
Buddhism, and Islam as (in his own uncomplicated use of terms) “full,” while
popular or folk religions are “semi.” Civil religion (such as the conventional altruistic mores of American culture, veneration of ancestors in China, and patron saints
of labor guilds) is for Yang a quasi-religion. Atheism and Communism, including
fetishism, are for him pseudo-religions. Besides these classifications, religion for
Yang is defined as “a unified system of beliefs and practices of life and the world
relative to the supernatural that unite the believers or followers into a social
organization of moral community” (p. 36). In this definition Yang leans heavily
toward theism or transcendence, system, and organization, somewhat similar to
that of the Chinese government, which relegates popular religions to the category
of superstition and backwardness.
However, an even broader, all-encompassing definition of “religion” can be
found in philosopher/theologian Paul Tillich’s (1886–1965) “ultimate concern,”
translated into Chinese as zui zhong de quan hua, 最终的关怀. For Tillich, one’s
ultimate concern is virtually his or her religion.5 This inclusive definition will find
many of Yang’s pseudo- and quasi-religions falling short of being ultimate concerns. Communist atheism, although a negation of theism, is nevertheless theistic,
and it certainly requires total commitment and faith. It tolerates no alternative to
its monopoly of people’s devotion.
Yang’s sociological categories tell little about the nature of religion, religiosity,
or (what I would prefer) the religious impulse. His seeing religion as analogous to
a market economy, however, tends to reduce it to a commodity, despite Yang’s
disclaimer that he has “no intention, implicit or explicit, of equating the religious
economy with the materialist economy” (p. 21). A more profound analysis of the
religious impulse as some trait inherent in humans, presumably the only animal
that can contemplate their finitude and mortality, can be found in the work of
Marcel Gauchet (1946–), a leading French thinker, historian, and atheist.6
Gauchet’s project is a bold speculative attempt to construct an intellectual
framework of humankind’s destiny in the world, where religion or the religious
impulse (my term) never ceases to find expression, one way or another. Building
on the insights of Max Weber but going way beyond him, Gauchet sees religion in
pristine societies as animistic and pantheistic, with gods appearing anywhere and
everywhere, constraining human freedom. This religion, however, evolved into
monotheism as mature Christianity (“full” for Yang) with a wholly other transcendent God, outside the realm of humans, where their collective life had become
centered in the emerged state. Gauchet’s alarming thesis is that monotheism, as
maturated into Christianity, is “a religion for departing from religion”; it is an
“end” of religion (Gauchet, p. 4) and the beginning of true human autonomy for
humans to work out their purpose and destiny in the world, largely on their own.
The transcendent God is inscrutable, yet essentially knowable, but only provisionally, since life is only interpretation — and also heresy. The incarnation of Christ
Reviews 553
mandated or condemned humans to seek life’s meaning within the earthly abode
to answer the question “What is the use of having lived if you must disappear
without a trace?” The religious impulse is the angst and “daily throbbing pain that
no sacred opiate can blot out: the merciless contradictory desire inherent in the
very reality of being a [human] subject” (Gauchet, p. 207). Though Gauchet may
be an atheist, his view of religion, religiosity, or the religious impulse as a quality
innate in human beings is much more plausible and profound than Yang’s market
supply and demand entity that is external to human needs and wants.
It is Gauchet’s speculation that monotheism (namely Christianity) has made
God transcendent, the wholly other, unreachable by humans, but nevertheless
whose ways and will can be discernable to certain degrees, but not with certitude.
Humans are destined to find meaning “within the framework of this life” (p. 85) as
best they can. As Max Weber suggested in his classic The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), when the seriousness of the Puritan sense of calling left the monastic cells, the spirit of capitalism
is one manifestation of autonomous humans working out their salvation within
the secularity of a world, freed of religious constraints. He was truly prescient in
seeing the Puritan restlessness and Eros in the disenchanted world as entering into
an “iron-cage” of mechanized modernity that will not cease “until the last ton of
fossilized coal [or fuel] is burnt” (Weber, p. 181). “In the United States,” he adds,
“the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to
become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the
character of sport” (Weber, p. 182).
Franklin J. Woo
Franklin J. Woo (retired) was a chaplain and lecturer in religion at Chung Chi
College, Chinese University of Hong Kong (1965–1976), and director of the China
Program, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States
(1976–1993).
Notes
1. Reviewed in China Review International 7, no. 2 (fall 2000). In this study of Chinese
Christians in America, Yang finds the churches to be a social mechanism whereby Chinese can
selectively adapt to American ways and also selectively keep their Chinese traditions. “Selective
appropriation” is a notion proposed by Harvard scholar Harvey Cox, who claims that “selective
appropriation (which also entails selective leaving out) has gone on throughout the history of
Christianity and every other religion.” See his “Jesus and Generation X” in Jesus at 2000, ed.
Marcus J. Borg (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 98–99.
2. Council of Foreign Relations, session 1, “China’s Dynamic Religious Landscape,” a
symposium with speakers Brian Grim, Mayfair Yang, and Fenggang Yang, with Terrill Lautz as
presider, June 11, 2008, New York City. Yang tells how Christianity (like Buddhism from India)
has accommodated, adapted, and integrated with Chinese culture.
3. “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and protest against
real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world,
and the soul of soulless condition. It is the opium of the people” (p. 54) in The Marx-Engels
Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978).
4. “An Evening Meeting with Zhao Fusan, Deputy Director of the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences (Yenching Hotel, Beijing, April 24, 1985),” China Notes (spring and summer 1985):
346–349. (CN was a publication of the National Council Churches of Christ in the USA).
5. L. Scott Smith, “What Is Faith? An Analysis of Tillich’s ‘Ultimate Concern,’ ” Quolibet
Journal 5, no. 4 (October 2003).
6. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
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China Review International publishes reviews of recent scholarly literature and
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