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BACS annual conference 2014 @ Newcastle University
Abstracts
1. Terry Ji Ruan (third year PhD candidate in Sociology, University of Kent)
terryukcn@yahoo.com
Weak-strong-weak Pattern and Ritual Social Capital
Guanxi can be roughly translated as personal connections, relationships or networks, which
is also regarded as individuals’ social capital, bringing benefits and resources to the owner.
However, little is known about its use in everyday urban life, especially how people use
guanxi in different contexts, where social ties are closer or looser. This paper explores the
use and meaning, drawing on data from an ethnographic study of the selection of students
for schools where the demand for places exceed supply in two Chinese cities. The study
included participant observation, informal face-to-face interviews with parents, teachers,
headmaster, officials, students, shopkeepers and other insiders, and analysis of key policy
documents. A major reform of school place allocation took place in one of the cities during
the research, so that the impact of changes in formal procedure on the use of guanxi could
be examined. The paper maps the different ways that guanxi is used in this context and
analyses the meaning of guanxi in relation to the theories of social capital and trust.
2. CHEN Chen (Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
jacklyn.chen1025@gmail.com
The decline of “Sheep-giving”(送羊)
“Sheep-giving” has been a traditional custom in some countryside regions of North China,
including south of Hebei, north of Henan and northwest of Shandong, etc. It refers to a duty
on grandchildren by their mother’s parents, who prepare 24 steamed breads in sheep-shape,
visit their married daughters and give their grandchildren this sheep-like bread in June every
year until grandchildren are over 12. Traditionally, “sheep-giving” provides opportunities for
grandparents to visit and stay with young grandchildren, and more importantly strengthens
bonds between married daughters and natal families. In the past, grandparents also bring
their daughter with some spare money in case her life is hard in husband’s family. However,
this significant sentimental and economic exchange custom has declined or even dissolved
in some families, and my research starts from exploring reasons and mechanisms for this
change, especially from a perspective of power relations change in current marriages. Given
that “sheep-giving” is a “gift-giving” by maternal relatives in a patriarchal society, the gift
sender and recipient are usually from similar class and social status. If a daughter marries a
man with higher social economic status, she will deliberately weaken her natal family’s ties
and her parents are also less willing to provide “sheep-giving” in case of inconvenience on
their son-in-law. In current China, more and more women choose to marry high and this
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trend not only fastens the decline of “sheep-giving”, but also changes the traditional ties
and exchange between married daughter and natal family. My research will use in-depth
interview, content analysis and focused group discussion to profoundly examine this
customs change, hoping to provide more understanding on how marriage between different
social economic statuses might affect the power relation and gift exchange in current China.
3. TANG Jie (PhD student, Sheffield University)
Jtang2@sheffield.ac.uk
The cultural landscape of rural settlements along the Shandong section of the Chinese
Grand Canal (1636-2012)
The construction of the Chinese Grand Canal started in 603 linking the fertile plain in the
south to Beijing, thus enabling supplies to the capital and north frontier. The Grand Canal
became the lifeline of imperial China from the fourteenth century onwards, when millions of
piculs of tribute grain were shipped to the capital annually; additionally the canal became a
main trading archery. Tradesmen and boat workers settled near locks and wharfs, thus
forming canal-side villages and towns. The unique location of the Shandong section of the
canal affected both the surrounding rural landscape and traditional life, with people from
various regions settling in the area and forming distinctive cultural environments with
different social habits. However, trade along the canal declined and gradually ceased,
causing unemployment along northern Shandong section, and, ultimately, the depopulation
of the rural settlements. Especially the policies during the People’s Republic of China and the
Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, not only damaged characteristic cultures and lifestyle,
but also the fabric of the villages themselves. While much has now disappeared there are
still remnants of these historic cultures. This paper discusses the methodology of an
investigation of the plight of the Chinese village in the early 21st century, using these specific
case studies. Changes are chronicled by means of interviews with residents, landscape and
typological surveys and investigations of documentary evidence. The initial conclusions are
discussed, and the potential impact they may have on national and regional policy.
4. Letizia Fusini (third-year PhD student, Department of the Languages and Cultures of
China and Inner Asia, SOAS)
263923@soas.ac.uk
Performing Trauma: Gao Xingjian’s Theatre of the Tragic in Global Perspective
The twentieth century has witnessed a revived interest in tragedy, both as a literary genre
and a topic of intellectual criticism. Theorizing a systematic and pervasive return to the
tragic in twentieth-century Euro-American drama, several scholars challenged the generally
accepted claim that tragedy would be incompatible with modernity.
Recently, the works of Gao Xingjian, who was repeatedly associated with European
Absurdist drama, have been indicated as representative of the democratization of the tragic
as theorized by Jean-Marie Domenach (Łabedzka 2008), thus hinting at a possible
reconfiguration of some of Gao’s dramatic works as reflective of a modern tragic
consciousness.
Starting from Łabedzka’s observations, this paper addresses the problem of
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positioning Gao’s (neo)tragic plays within the context of the revival of tragedy in twentiethcentury world theatre. Compared to the widespread tendency to create new tragedies by
combining ancient Greek archetypes and contemporary contents (e.g. Camus, Sartre, Cao
Yu), what is Gao’s individual contribution to the reinvention of tragedy? How did he – in a
more or less conscious way – respond to the call for a modern form of the tragic, as put
forward by Albert Camus in 1955?
In this paper I examine three specific case-studies (The Other Shore; Escape; The
Death Collector) which make use of the tragic as a dramatic mode, and set out to scrutinize
not only the various articulations thereof but also the ways in which said tragic mode can be
deemed as serving the purpose of representing historical and personal trauma(s).
In conclusion, I aim to show that Gao’s usage of the tragic mode employs the device of the
Dionysian sparagmos as a means of conveying the experience of trauma.
5. Dr Deljana Iossifova (School of Environment, Education and Development, University
of Manchester)
deljana.iossifova@manchester.ac.uk
Differentiation and Inequality in urban china: Sanitation infrastructure and practices
This paper addresses closely linked processes of socio-spatial restructuring and sanitation
infrastructure and practices in urban China, where the percentage of residents forced to
defecate in the open has doubled over the past decades. Sanitation is here understood as a
nexus between different spatial scales, social groups and levels of governance and includes
the infrastructure, practices and politics around personal hygiene, urination and defecation.
The paper traces the evolution of sanitation infrastructure, practices and politics in Chinese
cities over the past 150 years. Using observation and in-depth interviews in an ethnographic
approach, it examines sanitation-related experiences and practices among residents of the
contemporary city. The emphasis is placed on correlated aspects of transitory everyday life
in-between different stages of urban development. The paper aims to answer the following
questions: To what extent do advances in sanitation technology and the provision of
sanitation infrastructure contribute to socio-economic/socio-spatial segregation in the
context of urban transformation and redevelopment? How do sanitation infrastructure and
practices shape the long- and short-term life trajectories of urban residents? In this way, the
paper provides an in-depth analysis of changes in sanitation infrastructure and policy in
continuously urbanising China and how they interact and co-evolve with urban residents and
their sanitation-related practices.
6. LIU Feiying (PhD candidate, Lau China Institute, King’s College London)
feiying.liu@kcl.ac.uk
Metamorphosis and Masculinity: Disruption and Reconstruction of Masculinity in Pu
Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi
Metamorphosis narrative, as a gendered phenomenon in Pu Songling’s supernatural fictions,
not only reveals the gender construction in the late imperial China, but also offers a site
where Pu Songling can reconstruct a new definition of masculinity after his undergoing a
disruption of the conventional masculinity by Confucian discourse. With a perspective of
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gender and from the angle of masculinity studies, this article sets out to examine how Pu
Songling attempts to equate the interior masculinity with exterior masculinity and
consequently regards the former as a legitimate form of hegemonic masculinity; how those
supernatural females are deployed in Pu’s metamorphosis narrative as a device to save
those marginalized scholars from a disruption of masculinity yet at the same time betrays an
uncertainty and anxiety around normative gender identities.
7. Dr Cosima Bruno (Senior Lecturer in China Studies, SOAS, University of London)
cb65@soas.ac.uk
The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound
Sound features prominently in art and poetry, although its discussion has rarely been carried
out by using a terminology and methodology that are consonant to sound as audio. Instead,
more commonly, sound in poetry has been described and represented in terms of meter and
prosody, i.e. in abstract and visual terms.
Sound in Chinese poetry can be explored under various rubrics, including: the
traditional combination of poetry with music, the frequent use of onomatopoeia, the
development of music as a poetic theme, musical prosodic features and structures,
recitation and public readings, and, most recently, sound poetry.
While all these modes can bear literary, musical (speech melody, rhythm, etc.) and
theatrical (mimic, gesture, etc.) features, which can be frustratingly complicated to describe
in words, the last rubric of sound poetry can be defined as a genre that has variously
emerged in recent years, though receiving little theorizing behind its creation and even less
scholarly work on it.
I will overview the range of renditions of sound in visual terms and also try defining
tools for notations and signs, which can work as memory aids with information about how to
recite the poem, how to produce its sound.
I will present works by sound artists such as Lin Chih-Wei 林其蔚, Yan Jun 颜峻, Yao
Dajuin 姚大钧, Yao Zhongshan, and Xia Yü 夏宇. I will then analyse how sound is used in
these works and, more generally, what goes on in the poems and how they relate to their
language and tradition.
Problems discussed will include untranslatability, context, performance, non-verbal
accompaniments, and audience interactions.
8. Dr Andrew Law (Lecturer in Town Planning, Newcastle University)
Andrew.law@newcastle.ac.uk
QIN Qianqian (independent scholar)
qinqian2008@hotmail.com
“Debates on place-making and China: the role of heritage in Worlding, cosmopolitanism
and economic roots”?
Longstanding debates on place making in China have featured heavily in contemporary
urban studies (Broudehoux, 2004; 2007; Wu, 2004; Wu and Ma, 2006; Friedman, 2005;
2010; Zhang, 2008; Abrahamson, 2011). Specifically commentators have often discussed the
role of urban growth coalitions in the construction of place, heritage and timescapes.
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Commentators have often focused on Shanghai and the role of 1930s heritage and heritage
imaginaries in the construction of worldliness, cosmopolitanism and economic roots (see
Olds, 1997; Wu, W, 1999; 2004; Pan, 2001; 2005; Law, 2012). However, whilst there has
been much research on cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, a broader look at the role of
heritage in economic place-making has been less well documented in central China.
Exploring the paucity of research in this area, this paper will investigate the role of local
growth coalitions in the cities of Wuhan and Xi’an to examine the ways in which both
material and imaginary heritages have been utilised in the production of economic placemaking strategies. Furthermore, it shall be suggested here, that strikingly, the use of
heritage as a resource for place-making and capital accumulation in these cities shares many
similar features with Shanghai in terms of discourses and imaginaries of globalness
(worlding) and economic roots. In exploring these cities, however, we do not wish to lament
the loss of ‘traditional-indigenous’ heritage, but wish to comment more upon the power of
post-colonial ideas of ‘development’.
9. Jonathan Thomas Ferguson (PhD candidate, Lau China Institute, King’s College
London)
k1206194@kcl.ac.uk
Kang Youwei and “Individualism”
The theme of this paper is Kang Youwei’s relationship to the highly contested
notion/concept of “individualism.” Two interpretations easy to discern in the secondary
literature are Kang Youwei either as merely a collectivist, top-down totalitarian, or else Kang
Youwei as a failed “bourgeois” reformer, subservient to “Western” individualist norms.
While neither interpretation is without a kernel of truth, they can distort an objective
investigation into Kang Youwei’s relationship to individualism. “Individualism” can take
many different forms, in different contexts. The paper locates and interprets one particularly
significant individualist tendency in Kang Youwei: Kang’s vision of a new gender-neutral
public sphere, where women’s sphere of autonomy, in terms of individual liberty and
individual responsibility, is expanded. A certain degree of concern for individual liberty and
responsibility has existed in Chinese tradition, both for women and for men, despite any
countervailing collectivist tendencies. However, Kang expands the circle of concern as
regards being a public agent, from men to women.
Despite this, Kang Youwei’s views on gender are often extremely collectivist; but
although it would be perhaps too simple to call Kang and his thought “individualistic,” it is
undeniable that, to some extent, Kang brings a new form of individualist concern to China.
Finally, the paper proceeds to contextualise Kang’s individualist tendencies within the
context of intercultural communication in a broader sense; the findings of the paper
problematise understandings of individualism that are either excessively culturallyrelativistic, or else Western-centric, either in an anti-Western or purportedly pro-Western
form (i.e. “negative” and “positive” Eurocentrism).
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10. Dr Valerie Pellatt (Senior Lecturer in Interpreting and Translating, Newcastle
University)
Valerie.pellatt@ncl.ac.uk
How paratext of Chinese children's rhymes demonstrates and drives changing ideology
over the twentieth century.
Over the last hundred years, traditional Chinese nursery rhymes (童谣 tongyao) have
continued to be recited by adults and children, and to be published in print. From the
beginning of the twentieth century, the canon of traditional rhymes has been augmented by
modern rhymes (儿歌 erge) aimed at small children. Alongside these two sub-genres,
children’s poetry (童诗 tongshi) has developed, written for older children, and increasingly
written by them. Many of these rhymes and poems carry explicit or implicit ideological
messages of social, political or moral significance, which inevitably have changed according
to contemporary ideological standpoints. In published anthologies it is usual for writers,
commentators and illustrators to contribute paratext: verbal introductions, notes, blurb etc.
and non-verbal book jacket design, font, internal illustrations etc. This paper investigates the
way in which the verbal and non-verbal paratext of Chinese children’s rhymes and poems
has changed over the century. The changes in the nature of paratext reflect socio-economic
and political changes: first from traditional Confucian hierarchy and moral values to the
modern ideals of democracy and science favoured during the New Culture Movement;
second from the liberal modernity of the 1920s and 30s to the Socialism of the 1940s -70s;
third, from hard-line socialist ideology to the new seemingly middle-class Confucianism of
the twenty-first century. The paratexts show how leaders, teachers and parents interpret
and exploit the rhymes and poems to educate and indoctrinate small children in knowledge
and beliefs basic to Chinese society and culture.
11. HUANG Chia-Lin (PhD Candidate, History Department, SOAS)
311681@soas.ac.uk
“Brought into a Wealthy Place”—British Mission Experience and its influence on the
British perception of Formosa, 1865-1895
In 1865 the Foreign Missions Committee of the Presbyterian Church in England sent a
medical missionary, Dr. James L. Maxwell, to Formosa to establish the first Presbyterian
mission on the island. Due to the common resistance and hostility among Han Chinese
population and in order to locate more possible followers among the indigenes, while
stationed in Chinese city, the missionaries conducted both extensive and short trips into the
interior to visit the savage lands, which enabled them to have an outlook into the island and
its inhabitants as a whole. They made detailed observation on various aspects of lands and
different ethnicity groups they encountered during these journeys. As reports of these trips
were regularly sent back to headquarter in Britain and published mostly in church
publications, sometimes newspapers, their understanding of the island was circulated and
transmitted among the British public, which influenced their perception of the island to
different degrees. This paper examines how the British missionaries understood and
interacted with the locals through different mission methods as well as the conflicts caused
by their attempts to convert the locals. By analyzing the documents ranging from missionary
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reports, missionaries’ memoirs, newspapers, officials documents and local gazettes, it
explores how the writing of the missionaries influenced the British perception of the island
as well as how it affected the British and Qing’s policies towards the island.
12. GUO Ting, PhD Candidate, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh
t.guo@ed.ac.uk
Petit-Bourgeois and Cosmopolitan Theology: Investigating the Historical Roots of House
Churches in Shanghai
This paper investigates the historical roots of Protestantism in Shanghai, the most distinctive
cosmopolitan city in mainland China. In contrast to the current scholarship which mainly
focuses on the church-state tensions in China and portrays House Churches (hereafter HC)
as an uncritical disempowered whole or an organisational political weapon, this paper
shows a type of HC that was born out of an active instrumentalisation and appropriation of
its socio-political conditions, which facilitated a unique bourgeois cosmopolitanism that still
remains theologically important, and is referred to herein as “cosmopolitan HC”. Through
the lens of a biographical case, this paper highlights the Protestant root in the Chinese
YMCA and Episcopal Church, St. John’s University, Shanghai, and Union Theological
Seminary (UTS), New York City. Taken altogether as an urban phenomenon, as I contend,
these institutions were part of the global liberal Christianity and activism movement, and
provided a political ideal for patriotism and a haven for personal belonging, a historical root
that is shared by both cosmopolitan HC and the state-sanctioned church—Three Self
Protestant Movement (TSPM). This paper will further explore how this particular historical
legacy shapes a contextual theology which I coin as “cosmopolitan theology”. This notion
will be explained in terms of the quest for composure of the cosmopolitan HC, with
particular attention to how faith is rendered between adaptation and cynicism.
13. TAO Yu, DPhil Candidate, Department of Politics and International Relations,
University of Oxford
yu.tao@politics.ox.ac.uk
Fearing Yesterday Once More: Bonding Social Capital and the Historical Foundations of
Religious Restriction in Contemporary China
Three decades after the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abolished its total ban on
religious beliefs and activities, the restriction on religion remains tight in the world’s most
populous country. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that suggests the atheist official
ideology in China as the main reason, this paper argues that the CCP’s current suspicion of
religious groups has its roots in the two major revolutions which laid foundations for the
political landscape in today’s China. Without making use of the strong bonding social capital
associated with religious groups, the nationalist republicans could have hardly survived and
succeeded in overthrowing the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty in the republican revolution.
Likewise, without collaborating with religious groups, the CCP could have hardly been able
to defeat the KMD regime and the Japanese invaders in the communist revolution. Thanks
to its historical experience of collaborating with and struggling against religious groups
during the revolutionary era, the CCP thoroughly understands the huge organisational
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strength and impressive mobilisation capability associated with the strong bonding social
capital within religious groups. Fearing yesterday once more, it thus insists to maintain tight
restrictions on religious affairs in order to prevent religious groups from launching,
supporting or sponsoring collective actions that may challenge its authoritarian rule.
14. Lik Hang Tsui, DPhil Candidate, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford
likhang.tsui@orinst.ox.ac.uk
Letter Writing and Political Communication in Imperial China: A View from Letters Sent
from a Local Outpost
This paper deals with the epistolary communication between high level officials in imperial
China by studying examples taken from the turbulent period of early Southern Song. Apart
from communicating through bureaucratic channels such as in memorials and imperial
edicts, discussions of policies also figured prominently in formal letters by government
officials. Taking the regional commander and irredentist policymaker Li Gang’s (1083-1140)
correspondence sent to the two Grand Councilors Lü Yihao (1071-1139) and Qin Gui (10901155) in the early 1130s as my main sources, I examine the functions and mechanisms of
letter writing within the imperial bureaucracy of Song China. By tracking how information
flowed between the region Li Gang administered and the central court where the Grand
Councilors were issuing their orders, I transcend the focus of recent scholarship on the
bureaucratic documents of this imperial government and devote more attention to political
communication in letters. I demonstrate how letters exchanged among officials also played
a prominent role in fulfilling needs of political communication and influencing court policies,
such as the strategies for suppressing local rebellions and the allocation of military
resources. I investigate the advantages of writing a letter against using other
communication channels when communicating with top policymakers, especially by
providing an interpretation of Li Gang’s own reflections on the communication channel.
15. ZENG Jinghan (PhD candidate, University of Warwick)
jinghan.zeng@warwick.ac.uk
The Debate on Regime Legitimacy in China: bridging the wide gulf between Western and
Chinese scholarship
This article identifies continuities, new trends and shifts in emphasis in the Chinese elite
debate about political legitimacy by analysing 125 Chinese articles concerning legitimacy
published between 2008 and 2012. It reveals a remarkable cleavage between the
international perceptions of the Chinese state and the pessimistic views among Chinese
intellectuals about the party's ruling. It finds that Chinese scholars often look at Western
theories when dealing with the legitimacy conundrum, and rarely look at Chinese
philosophy. They focus on ideology much more than Western scholars, and they are more
pessimistic about performance legitimacy than the latter.
Moreover, this study finds that the legitimacy concerns and policy suggestions of
scholars vary significantly depending upon their research locations, institutions and funding
sources. This study also finds a distinct rising appeal of social autonomy that runs counter to
the dominant official line. Nowadays, value changes, socioeconomic inequality and
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corruption are considered to be the most perceived threats to legitimacy; ideology, social
justice and governance are the leading prescriptions for the party-state. This result is vastly
different from the previous study, suggesting a fundamental shift in the legitimacy debate
driven by the worsening socioeconomic problems in China. For full content of this paper,
please see Jinghan Zeng, “The Debate on Regime Legitimacy in China: Bridging the Wide Gulf
between Western and Chinese Scholarship, Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 23, No. 88,
July 2014”
16. Dr Toby Lincoln (Lecturer in Chinese Urban History, University of Leicester)
tl99@le.ac.uk
Urbanization and Nature in Twentieth Century Wuxi
The Lower Yangtze Delta has long been China’s most densely urbanized area. Individual
cities have always had their own distinct and developing identities, but urbanization also
spilled over into the countryside, and this phenomenon has accelerated in the twentieth
century. New infrastructure and the development of the natural environment mean that
urbanization has touched the lives of all those living in the fields, factories and workshops of
the region.
This paper explores how urbanization connected the natural environment to the city.
Focusing on Lake Tai, I describe how the expansion of Wuxi City throughout the twentieth
century gradually extended out to the lakeside. I explore how officials, entrepreneurs and
writers have conceptualized the relationship between the city and the countryside, and the
built environment and nature. I argue that lakeside gardens, temples and even the water
itself were gradually incorporated physically and discursively into the identity of Wuxi City.
This process began with the rapid expansion of Wuxi during the Republican period and
continued after 1949. Given the lake’s importance to regional irrigation, water management
remained vital, and it also became a haven for bandits and guerillas during the AntiJapanese War of Resistance. However infrastructure development connected it ever more
closely to the urban area and it came to be crucial to Wuxi’s identity as a tourist city and
place for relaxation. Throughout this process, planners, officials and visitors wrote about
how Wuxi’s proximity to Lake Tai made the city habitable.
17. Ms WU Yanmei (Lector in Chinese, Department of Languages, Information and
Communications, Manchester Metropolitan University)
y.wu@mmu.ac.uk
Teaching Mandarin tones – an innovative approach
Mandarin Chinese has four contrastive lexical tones (Chandrasekaran et al, 2007), and there
exists a great difficulty in acquiring them for speakers whose native language is non-total
(Lin, 1985; Wang, 2006). Often, as a visualisation of Mandarin tones, there tend to be a chart
of pitch/ F0 counters at the beginning of text books, and most CFL (Chinese as a Foreign
Language) teachers tend to teach the tones applying only traditional methods such as asking
their students to imitate. However, many learners find these techniques are not nearly
enough support for producing native like intonations.
This talk/paper aims to introduce and demonstrate easy, simple but effective ways of
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teaching/instructing Mandarin Chinese tones. These innovative methods include: 1)
matching Mandarin tones to English tones (such as Tone 2 sounds like ‘What?’, Tone 3
sounds like ‘Really?’ and Tone 4 sounds like ‘No!’ in English); 2) applying basic music
theory/terms in teaching the tones (such as a Tone 3 followed by a Tone 1 would be ‘dosol’). These tips are derived from the author/speaker’s musical background and eleven years
of TCFL (Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language) experience, and they are proven effective
based on results collected at Manchester Metropolitan University in the past three years.
The study suggests Mandarin tones do not have to be mythical, they can be taught
applying simple instructions and descriptions that are very familiar to the students’ life.
Instead of letting the L1 (first language) interfere, we can take advantage on their L1 and
musical experiences. This does not mean the students will not produce tone errors. In fact,
the students, most likely, will still produce both tonal register errors (too high or too low)
and tonal contour errors. However, despite the existence of tone errors (especially out of
class), further analyses suggested that the fact the learners can easily get the tones right in
class allows/boosts their confidence in speaking in general.
18. Dr CHANG Xiangqun (Research Associate of SOAS China Institute; Director of CCPN
Global; Editor of Journal of China in Comparative Perspective (JCCP); Chief Editor at
the Global China Press, UK)
x.chang@ccpn-global.org
Changing society with a Chinese model of social relationships and reciprocity
- state and villagers’ interaction 1936-2012
Fieldwork in an ordinary Chinese village, even a prosperous one, shows that the fortunes of
villagers are subject to huge rises and falls in line with events in the rest of China. As they
seek ways to cope with change and improve their lives, villagers are constantly maintaining
and managing relationships not only between themselves but also with the state. They
believe that their current economic and political environment, one of free private enterprise
and loosened state control, is in part their own creation, the result of reciprocal influence
and accommodation between themselves and the state over a long period. Fieldwork in
Kaixiangong village, focusing on social support, showed how the majority of villagers’
resource-seeking actions, whether from state or private sources, are rooted in implicit
cultural models and patterns of social relationships, which hold rural society together at the
village level and provide a space in which to negotiate and re-negotiate with the state. This
paper will demonstrate how changing society works in a village setting by presenting an
analysis of these relationships and their dynamic changes using the LSWL model which
embodies the concept of lishang-wanglai – a Chinese model of social relationships and
reciprocity.
19. MIAO Ying (PhD candidate, University of Cambridge)
ym293@cam.ac.uk
Expectations Managed: Middle Class Attitude towards Socio-Political Affairs in China
This paper explores the Chinese middle class’ sense of social injustice, political orientation,
and their willingness to participate in socio-political affairs. Using survey data gathered in
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Ningbo in 2013, this paper finds that the Chinese middle class would not challenge the
status quo, despite agreeing to democratic and egalitarian notions in principle. In depth
interviews further reveal that the middle class do not see themselves as a political entity,
and still look towards the state as the principal vessel for socio-political change.
This paper emphasises the distinction between high levels of middle class support for
political liberty and social justice, and their low levels of realistic expectation for change, or
indeed for any reform that occurs outside of the purview of the state. Their awareness and
empathy towards the limits of government means that middle class expectations towards
government accountability and executive capacity are largely managed. As beneficiaries of
the post-1980s reform, the Chinese middle class' expectations of the state, which remain
primarily economic, are generally met.
Historically, the state’s legitimacy had come from being able to meet the people’s
expectations. Unless these expectations far exceed the capacity of the state to fulfil them,
there would be no legitimacy in dissent. Therefore, how the Chinese state chooses to
address these expectations, and its ability to adapt to any changes, is the key to sustaining
China's socio-political stability.
20. LIN Peiying (PhD candidate, The Louis Freiberg Centre for East Asian Studies, The
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
bibo825@gmail.com
Multi-cultural Buddhism and Diplomatic Relations of Medieval China: Regional Officialdom
during Saichō’s (767 – 822) Visit
This paper consults sources from the Japanese monk Saichō (767 – 822) concerning his study
in southern China in the early ninth century. Saichō’s contact with China illustrates a multicultural Chinese city named Taizhou. His account brings out a fresh perspective of the
dynamics of the interaction between monks and officials, and between China and Japan.
The Tang rulers were apt in manipulating religious sources for their political ends, and one
particularly important figure is Emperor Xuanzong (685-762, r.712-756) known for his
forceful religious policy. As the rebellion of Empress Wei (d. 710) was put down, Xuanzong’s
rise to power began a new phase for the Buddhists, the prosperity of the Kaiyuan era (713 –
741) steadily grew. As an outcome, Xuanzong’s religious policy had encouraged a remarkable
degree of dynastic pride among Chinese Buddhists in the eighth century.
Under this specific historical circumstance of the Tang, Buddhist law (precepts) was
especially needed whenever institutional legitimacy was put into question due to the
recognition of cultural difference. Buddhist precepts, socially speaking, provide a framework
for the interaction between the laity, the officialdom and the monks. During this process,
both cooperation and ethnic tensions between Buddhist monks from different countries are
taken into account.
The current paper starts with the political context and preliminary picture of Saichō’s
contact with Chinese Tiantai masters, who preached on Buddhist precepts in southern
China. The conclusion will be drawn on the mechanism of cultural domestication through
Buddhism in the ninth century.
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21. Dr GAO Hao (University of Sussex)
billgao917@gmail.com
Prelude to the Opium War? British reactions to the ‘Napier Fizzle’ and attitudes towards
China in the mid-1830s
This paper examines public reactions to the ‘Napier Fizzle’ and the discussion about Britain’s
China policy within the British community in China in the mid-1830s. This period has
received much less attention than the Napier incident itself and the immediate causes of the
Opium War. Based on popular publications available in Canton in this period, this paper
investigates the debate over the cause of Napier’s failure, including the ‘show of force’
theory as well as other ‘minor’ voices. It reveals that the prevailing historical interpretation
that 1834 marked the beginning of Britain’s pro-war attitude towards China deserves serious
reconsideration. Since no one at the time could have known that a war would break out in
just a few years, we cannot view it retrospectively and maintain that the Opium War had
become inevitable from this time onwards. Although ‘show of force’ was the most
prominent attitude at the time, the mid-1830s should be considered as a period of confused
thinking with regard to Britain’s China policy, rather than a clear stage in the preparations for
an open war.
[This is a forthcoming article in Historical Research (early view now available).]
22. Dr Paul Bevan (Research Associate, SOAS, University of London)
paul@dufay.com
Not on your Tintype – The Emperor of Japan as seen by William Gropper
A tightening of press censorship by the Japanese authorities followed the Tokyo coup d’etat
of February 1936; the culmination of a series of efforts by the authorities to clamp down on
the press. By this time several Chinese left-wing magazines had also been outlawed in China
but so too had the August 1935 issue of the American magazine Vanity Fair. A cartoon by
William Gropper, depicting the Japanese Emperor in a manner thought to be demeaning,
sparked of a diplomatic incident that saw the magazine banned not only in Japan but also in
China. An immediate apology was sought and although the American government complied
the artist himself was not so forthcoming. In fact the Japanese action was to prompt leftwing artists to produce many more such unfavourable caricatures, notably in the American
magazine China Today which was in turn banned in Japan. Such censorship in Japan had
repercussions in China throughout 1936 as, in an effort to appease the Japanese authorities
the Chinese Government gave into Japanese demands. This paper traces the background to
the increased censorship in East Asia following the Gropper incident. As a result of this
episode Gropper’s caricatures were to become extremely popular in China and together
with the work of other foreign artists, George Grosz, Boris Yefimov and Jack Chen, were
given a prominent position in the Chinese left-wing press following the outbreak of war in
1937.
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23. Rogelio Leal Benavides (PhD Candidate, Lau China Institute)
rogelio.leal@kcl.ac.uk
Political thought, authority, and power in twenty-first century China: A nexus between
ancient and modern principles
It is important to understand China’s modern development in a comprehensive manner as
any major decision taken by the Chinese Communist Party will have significant impact
domestically and abroad. In recent years, the Chinese government has sought better ways to
improve its economic, political, and social practices while trying to enhance the lifestyle of
its citizens. In the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) insisted in taking a different yet
radical path to modernisation by implementing economic reforms to increase the welfare of
the Chinese people. He re-introduced the ancient (Confucian) concept of a xiaokang 小康
society, commonly translated as middle-class or moderately well-off society, yet this model
embraces more than just the economic well-being of the nation. As a result, in a post-Mao
era, the Communist Party has gradually incorporated some aspects of ancient political
thought to contemporary governmental practices. In order for China to continue its constant
and progressive modernisation, a combination of ancient and modern principles is
profoundly required. This study is focused on the continual influence on and relevance of
Confucian political thought to contemporary Chinese Communist Party’s political blueprint.
It will briefly demonstrate how the evolution of Chinese political thought, which deserves
noteworthy analysis, has been shaped by the most prominent pre-Qin thinkers (esp.
Confucius) arguing that their philosophies have influenced contemporary modes of
governance in China. China has been ruled by a number of dynasties and each one has
adopted a specific political system or adapted their governing style to the needs of the
society (or in some cases the needs of the elite/ruler). Nevertheless, modern China is
obliged to maintain and strengthen its own cultural traditions, as opposed to adopting a
foreign model, to continue its constant rise.
24. Professor Charles Kwong (Dept of Translation, Lingnan University, Hong Kong)
charlesk@ln.edu.hk
Wine in the Early Chinese Poetry: from Pre-Qin to Wei-Jin
The present paper is part of a sequence of investigations into the general topic of wine in
Chinese poetry. Briefly, wine takes on various functions and meanings in Chinese literati
culture: as social catalyst and moral corruptor, emotional anesthetic or intensifier, and later
as psychological liberator, artistic inspiration and spiritual transporter.
Wine has been a common motif in Chinese verse since the Classic of Poetry (Shi jing
詩經, 11th-6th cent BC). Mostly associated with ritual, moral and emotive content in pre-Qin
poetry and literature, wine took on connotations of heroism, escape, creativity and
transcendence in Han-Wei-Jin poetry. From stimulating the rational mind to numbing it
chemically, wine can be an aid to merriment and agent of social-emotive bonding if imbibed
in moderation, a disruptor of the moral consciousness and temporary exorcist of grief if
consumed to excess. Wine also became an intensifier of emotions, a stupefying drug
facilitating political and psychological escapism, and a philosophical transporter sending
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one’s spirit to a transcendent plane, including a proven elevation of the creative impulse.
This paper explores the uses and cultural meanings of wine in early classical Chinese
poetry up to Eastern Jin times, not including Tao Qian, China’s first great “wine poet”.
25. Dr HAN Lifeng (Lecturer, School of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Nanjing Normal
University; Research associate, Department of History, SOAS)
lifeng.han@gmail.com
Transcending the Nation: Mountain Pilgrimage in Song China, the Khitan and the Jurchen
during the 10th - 13th Centuries
This paper examines the imperial pilgrimages to Mount Tai in Song China and the Jurchen,
and the worship of the Black Mountain in the Khitan. It aims to demonstrate how these
states competed for the Mandate of Heaven and communicated their ideas of legitimacy
and orthodoxy (zhongtong) through rituals. It particularly scrutinises the imperial feng and
shan pilgrimage to Mount Tai. Mapping it within the historical context at the turn of the
eleventh century, this pilgrimage can be understood as an effort to secure mass
identification with the state and its authority. More importantly, it could be used to establish
Song ownership of Chinese culture in order to compete with the Khitan, who had long
adopted Chinese institutions and ideology and regarded the Black Mountain as the site for
royal sacrifices to Heaven and Earth. After the Song lost the geographical seat of Mount Tai
to the Jurchen as a result of the transition from the Northern Song to the Southern Song, the
identification of Mount Tai with the Chinese and their civilisation, shaped by the imperial
state and the elite, was invoked strongly by in defence of its enduring legitimacy. At the
same time, the Jurchen adopted the state ritual of sacrificing to Mount Tai as part of their
efforts to proclaim their orthodox position in the universe (tianxia).
26. Dr Eric Chia-Hwan Chen (Assistant Professor, National Taipei University of Education)
eric_chen1969@tea.ntue.edu.tw
Images of the English in the Chinese Opium War Literature
Ever since the First Opium War broke out in 1839 a large number of scholars around the
world have had done numerous studies on the causes and effects of the two Opium Wars
(1839-1842, 1856-1860). Their studies offer not only insights into the cultural, diplomatic,
economic, military, political and social differences between England and China, but also the
tremendous influences of the wars on the people of both countries. By comparison, the
literary works completed during and after the Opium Wars seem to have caught far less
attention than it should have deserved. In fact, except for a very small number of literary
works finished by some famous English hands, such as those by Walter Savage Landor,
Thomas Carlyle and Thomas De Quincey, had attracted the attention of a few scholars, not
many scholars had shown interest in studying the generous Chinese literary works about the
Opium Wars.
As the Opium Wars offered the Chinese intellectuals opportunities to see how little they
knew about the English and the fast-changing world, their works about the Opium Wars and
the English tended to reflect their ambivalent images of the devastating enemy. Those
Chinese intellectuals who saw or heard about the suffering of their own countrymen usually
15
depicted the English as beasts or ghosts who thus thought and acted inhumanly; while those
Chinese intellectuals who glimpsed the superiority of the English in science tended to view
the English as a model for the Chinese to improve themselves hereafter. Due to this
phenomenon, the author of this paper wishes to apply the cross-disciplinary methodology of
imagology of comparative literature to examine A-Ying’s three-volume Anthology of Opium
War Literature, which include more than six hundred pieces of poems, essays, novels and
plays, to explore the psychological implications and cultural connotations of the images of
the English as the Other.
27. Dr HUANG Xuelei (Asian Studies, School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
University of Edinburgh)
Xuelei.Huang@ed.ac.uk
The Smell of the Other: China under the Western Nose, 1800–1949
Western images of China have undergone many changes since the beginning of contact
between China and the West. While the Middle Kingdom was an object of admiration in the
times of Marco Polo, in the accounts of nineteenth-century Western missionaries, travellers
and officials, the country was semi-civilized and backward. While the Spanish priest Juan
Gonzalez de Mendoza described the Chinese as ‘marvellous clean’ in his 1585 book on
China, John Barrow, a member of Lord Macartney’s embassy to China in 1793, wrote in 1807
that Chinese people were ‘dirty’ and their bodies and dresses were ‘seldom washed.’ How
did these changes happen? While studies on this topic have focused primarily on the
conceptual and visual levels of Western images of China, this paper looks at the Westerners’
sensory/olfactory experiences of China and the roles of the olfaction in image formation. Its
focal concern is the complicated processes of ‘othering’ and ‘assimilating’ through a lens
beyond the perspective of Orientalism. It asks how the sense of smell worked to ‘other’ (or
not) China and how discourses and concepts worked in tandem with sensory perceptions to
formulate images of China in different times.
28. Pamela Hunt (PhD candidate, SOAS, University of London)
260274@soas.ac.uk
The Liumang Author: Writers, Heroes And Hooligans In Feng Tang’s Beijing Trilogy.
This paper explores the link between writer and rebel in postsocialist China, focusing on the
work of Feng Tang (冯唐, born 1971). He is an author best known for his coming-of-age tales
and his frank depictions of sex; his Beijing Trilogy (1994-2007) tells the story of Qiu Shui in
the early days of economic reform as he progresses through the city’s education system and
eventually becomes a doctor.
At the same time, Qiu also receives a different kind of schooling on the streets,
lusting after women, discovering stories of liumang and heroes of the past, and learning to
write ‘lewd’ literature himself. The postsocialist present of Beijing is interspersed with an
‘alternative’ history of male rebels and virile male writers. As such, drawing on previous
studies of Chinese masculinity in literature, this paper discusses how the sexualized body,
rebellion and the act of writing are all bound together in Feng Tang’s novels, to paint a
picture of male marginality and agency in both past and present.
16
Recent studies celebrate ‘realms of agency’ in contemporary Chinese fiction. I argue
in this paper that when speaking of agency and rebellion in literature, we must consider
gender. I show how Feng Tang’s persistent linking of literature to the male body leads to a
male-centered take on rebellion, agency and writing. Reflecting a wider trend in
contemporary Chinese fiction, where ‘realms of agency’ exist in Feng Tang’s trilogy, I argue
that they remain wedded to earlier gender stereotypes.
29. Dr Daniel R. Hammond (Lecturer in Chinese Politics and Society, University of
Edinburgh)
daniel.hammond@ed.ac.uk
The Enemy Unseen? The Appearance and Significance of China and the Chinese in the
Fallout series.
This paper explores how China is represented in the popular and critically acclaimed Fallout
series of role playing games. While the games are set in a post-apocalyptic United States of
America an important part of the background and story is China as the main protagonist in
conflicts which led to a nuclear war in 2077. This paper provides an early articulation of
observations and ideas related to how China and the Chinese are represented in the series
and why it matters. The paper argues that the Fallout series is important in two ways. First, it
plays into existing long term patterns of othering China; and second, it builds on and projects
the notion of China as a threat to the West. These two themes are discussed through an
examination of two different aspects of the game. First, the background story to the games
where China initially was an unspoken and unseen enemy which has steadily gained in
significance and detail as the series has developed. Second, the representation of the
Chinese as others in the game, typically as infiltrators, stealth enhanced assassins or
“ghouls”. The paper concludes by situating the discussion of the Fallout series in the wider
context of historical imaginings in games and the literature on China’s rise.
30. Dr Isabella Jackson (University of Aberdeen)
Isabella.jackson@abdn.ac.uk
Habitability in the Treaty Ports: Questioning Shanghai’s status as a ‘model settlement’
This paper explores the assumption, frequently repeated by Shanghai’s foreign residents in
the treaty-port era, that the International Settlement was a model for other urban
administrations on the China coast to follow. The concept of the ‘model settlement’ is
defined in terms of maximised habitability for residents through town planning,
encompassing everything from clean water and sanitation, through electricity and transport
infrastructure, to opportunities for cultural and leisure pursuits. These measures of
habitability were based on a global standard which held western cities, particularly, for
Anglophones, those in Britain and the USA, as the most desirable models for urban
development. Shanghai was commonly identified as the most modern or westernised city in
Asia by this measure, with frequent comparisons made to urban centres in the west. But
how far did other treaty ports really look to practice in the International Settlement at
Shanghai as a model? This paper will attempt to answer this question with particular
reference to the British Municipal Council at Tianjin. In doing so, it critically examines what
17
was seen to entail habitability and tests the relationship between this and views of urban
modernity.
31. Dr KAN Qian (The Open University)
qian.kan@open.ac.uk
Students Engagement with Interactive Computer Marked Assignments (iCMAs) for
Formative Assessment in Beginners’ Languages Modules
This paper reports on a work-in-progress group project which evaluate the effectiveness of
Interactive Computer Marked Assignments (iCMAs) on beginners' language modules at The
Open University (OU). The iCMAs are formative assessment whereby students have to
submit before the end of the module, but their scores do not count towards the final mark.
This paper employs data derived from three sources: i) routine moodle reporting tool which
automatically records the number of attempts, time spent on each iCMA and marks
achieved; ii) a large-scale survey of how iCMAs impact on students’ learning, particularly in
relation to motivation, engagement, retention and attainment; and iii) follow-up interviews
with a sample of current students.
Between the five members of the team, we are able to cover all six beginners’
languages (French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Welsh). This has allowed us to
carry out a preliminary audit of the iCMAs, focusing on the question types and the feedback
given. The findings from this informed the formulation of survey and interview questions.
We hope the project will provide a better understanding of the way students use iCMAs and
allow us to improve the student experience and facilitate the further embedding of iCMAs
into language teaching and learning.
32. HU Lidan (PhD candidate in Chinese Studies, University of Edinburgh)
hulidansue@gmail.com
The Silent Storm: Pema Tseden and His Cinema of Tibetan Trilogy
Born in the Tibetan ethnic region of Amdo, Pema Tseden has emerged as the first Tibetan
filmmaker in Chinese film history. His earliest film, The Silent Holy Stones (2005), ushered in
the birth of Tibetan cinema. Not only as a writer, his film career continued with the release
of his second and third features: The Search (2009) and Old Dog (2011), which comprise his
“Tibetan Trilogy” with The Silent Holy Stones. The divergence from other films related to the
Tibetan region is obviously illustrated in his films, especially in terms of the thematic
concerns and cinematic style.
My paper will talk about his “Tibetan Trilogy” by focusing on the analysis of his
narrative, which is quiet and deceptively simple as well as his documentary style that is
almost ethnographic. All three films, which have a non-professional cast, expound cultural
concerns about contemporary Tibetan life which confronts the inevitable influence from the
outside world. In a manner of reserved demonstration rather than rigid criticism or naïve
optimism, the director adopts a placid form of representation with metaphors as such stone,
TV series, goat, and old dog, etc. The other narrative elements, including traditional Tibetan
play, Tibetan landscape, and music, will also be discussed to show how they get away from a
18
highly exotic representation showcased in other Chinese filmmakers. Pema Tseden’s films
display a unique Tibetan sensibility that points to his dedication to realism.
33. PAN Lu (PhD candidate, KU Leuven)
lu.pan@student.kuleuven.be
British Image of China: A Study on Early English Translation of Sanguozhi Yanyi
The 19th century witnessed a growing interest in Europe towards Chinese traditional novels.
Between the 1820s and the 1920s, nineteen English translations of Sanguozhi Yanyi, the
most well-known Chinese historical novel, were issued in Britain and British colonies.
To make this 14th century's novel intelligible to British readers, most translators
adopted intensive domesticating strategies to detach the text from its linguistic and literary
traditions to meet expectations that prevailed in Britain at the time. The process of
translation thus wielded implicit power in constructing representations of Chinese culture
and at the same time shaped Britain's own imperial subjectivity. This paper takes BrewittTaylor's excerpt “A Deep-laid Plot and a Love Scene” as a paradigmatic case to study this
process and its mechanism. The approach is critical-interpretative and takes its cue from the
polysystem theory.
It’s argued that, Brewitt-Taylor has rendered a translation deeply inscribed with
domestic ideologies and interests, using content-derivative strategies, form-derivative
strategies, and ideological interventions, to transform the original text from a traditional
Chinese historical novel to a romantic drama that would appeal to a massive readership. He
cut all the branches down from the main plot and laid his emphasis solely on characters’
action and dialogue to highlight the dramatic conflict, as the straightforward title suggested - a beauty trap. The translation thus not only consolidated the fixed stereotype of Chinese
literature, but also served as an auxiliary and analogue for British Empire’s cultural agenda.
34. HE Yuan (PhD candidate in Development Studies, University of Cambridge)
yh306@cam.ac.uk
Water Politics and the Wellbeing of Rural Residents in Poverty-stricken Villages of Gansu
Province
Minqin County (民勤县) located in the northwest of Gansu Province and surrounded by the
Tengger Desert and the Badain Jaran Desert in its east, north and west, is listed among
national-level poverty-stricken counties in China. Based on fieldwork conducted in randomly
selected villages administrated under Minqin, this paper evaluates the well-being of local
rural residents, the role water politics plays in shaping their livelihoods, and how people
respond to such impacts through differentiating and adjusting their overall satisfaction
towards the government. Drawing upon theories from Human Development in defining
wellbeing, and the Modernization Theory in relating democracy and development, this
paper challenges their applicability in complicated specific cases. Although non-material
aspects of life are also indispensible parts of "a good life", this research finds out that the
economic factor has been given more weight by respondents in perceiving their wellbeing.
For the area of Minqin, a peasant's revenue from the land is primarily determined by the
supply of water, on which the local government's policies have invited criticism over
19
corruption and unfairness. The same paternalistic governance has proved to be more
successful in the provision of basic needs that can be deployed by the central government,
including education, healthcare, housing, infrastructure and transportation. Rural residents
are able to acknowledge the varied policies that impact their wellbeing, and water politics
has not yet overwhelmed the people's overall satisfaction.
【Note】This paper is part of my on-going PhD research on comparing the well-being of
people in India and China, and its possible implications for the discussion of democracy and
development.
35. TANG Hai (PhD candidate, Dept. of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex)
carahtang@gmail.com
Political Satire in the Chinese Blogosphere: The Case of Wang Xiaofeng
This essay aims to conceptualize the growing use of the blog as a radical practice in an
emerging Chinese public sphere. It is built on the study of a satirical blog (Wang Xiaofeng’s
No Guess, 2006-2011) that is held to be important in the recent history of blogging in China.
Through a combination of analyses, I explore how a Chinese ‘intellectual’ (loosely defined as
educated, urban and middle-class netizen) uses his professional skills, expertise and capital
in a public space, how his blog reshapes the form of China’s political culture, and how the
blogosphere, through such interventions, proceeds in the development of political
communications.
The No Guess blog exemplified in this essay demonstrates that individual opinions
across the blogosphere have implicitly challenged orthodox political discourse.
On the one hand, drawing on the concept of ‘blogging culture’, I argue that blogging
has potentially reconfigured political information around people’s everyday lives, offering
alternative modes of ‘public talk’. This can be seen in the case of Wang Xiaofeng, who uses
satire to make fun of the State, Party leaders, mainstream media, policies and established
ideologies, improving a previously restricted communicative environment towards more
open.
On the other hand, the Chinese blogosphere has arguably created a new type of
individualism – meaning that Chinese bloggers who pursue self-expression simultaneously
engage in political discourse through such self-expression. Through introducing the No Guess
I not only discuss to what extent Wang Xiaofeng’s work is politically powerful, but also, I
argue, it is about the formation of a new internet celebrity.
However, as this essay suggests, political-based expression in China still has to
struggle with ongoing censorship, negotiate an unstable discursive space and thus, can only
enjoy a limited success. Therefore, Wang’s No Guess can only be read as a blog that uses
satire.
36. CHAN Chun Man (Department of Politics and International Studies, University of
Warwick)
chankcm@gmail.com
Competing Views on East Asian Regionalism: A Comparison between China's and Japan's
Approaches since the 1990s
20
Past studies on the East Asian regionalism debate focus on the membership, whether
regionalism should expand to Asia-Pacific states. However, whether China and Japan have
the same view on regionalism in terms of which sector should be integrated and to what
extent regionalism should be centralised are often overlooked. This paper tries to fill the
literature gap by employing qualitative discourse analysis method to analyse the relations
between the changing discourses of domestic norms of regional order, regional strategy, and
immobolism in both states since the 1990s, and the resulting regionalism proposals in
respective official speeches and documents. The analysis shows that despite both states
have no major difference in sectoral integration, as both prioritize economic sectors, and
initiate cooperation in non-traditional security and social sectors in recent years, China is
less keen to promote vertical integration than Japan as Chinese proposals generally favour
low obligation and delegation. Also, since the formation of the East Asia Summit (EAS) in
2005, while China continues to utilise the ASEAN+3 as the major platform to promote
regionalism, Japan has switched to advocate the EAS instead. These show that both states
have different views on the ultimate aim (centralization) and orientation (open and closed)
of East Asian regionalism, which may stagnate East Asian regionalism development in the
future.
37. Dr ZHAO Yanxia (University of Wales Trinity Saint David)
y.zhao@tsd.ac.uk
Why Daoism: What can Daoists Contribute to the Modern Society?
Since 1970s, after the connection between China and the West was re-built by the China
visit of Richard Nixon, China has gradually attracted western world from many aspects.
Among them, Daoism has become the strongest draw for Westerners and has established
itself more and more in the West. Why Daoism can blossom on the Westerner soil? What
makes Daoism accept by the Western Societies? Is it because of, as some claims, Daoism has
increasingly adapted itself to the Western world through repackaged itself to a form that is
more accessible to the Westerners? Or it is actually because of that, as some others states,
the Westerners have developed a dissatisfaction with many traditional western forms of
philosophy and religion and therefore they are eagerly turning to ancient Daoist philosophy?
If that is the case, why can only Daoism be adapted or repackaged to a western accessible
form? And what satisfactions can Daoism contribute to the Westerners? To answer these
questions, not only needs the attribution of Daoism to be examined, but also the special
needs of the western societies. Bearing these in mind, this paper will explore why the
modern western world needs inspiration from Daoism and how can the Daoism satisfy the
needs of the unsteady world, using one sentence, what Contributions Can the Daoism make
to the contemporary societies.
38. Mr Mamtimyn Sunuodula (PhD candidate, School of Government and International
Affairs, Durham University)
m.a.sunuodula@durham.ac.uk
Multilingualism and Negotiating Uyghur Identity
The existing research literature on language policy and practice in Xinjiang largely puts the
21
Uyghur and Mandarin Chinese languages in a binary opposing positions in society (Dwyer,
2005; Schluessel, 2007), placing them within the wider context of ethnic tensions that exist
between Uyghur and Han ethnic groups. The other important dimension which has become
increasingly salient in the linguistic market place but rarely researched is the promotion and
role of English across education and society (Feng and Sunuodula, 2009; Sunuodula and
Feng, 2011). Research on multilingualism shows that individual bilingual/multilingual
speakers have complex multi-layered hybrid linguistic identities discursively constructed and
negotiated as they interact with different speech communities (Blackledge and Creese,
2010; Gumperz and Duranti, 2009; Heller, 2010; Martin-Jones et al., 2012). The idea that
individual languages are perceived and practiced independently from one another by
multilingual speakers and extent of the role that language ideology plays in that process has
also been challenged by empirical research conducted in a number of multilingual settings
(Heller and Coupland, 2010; Lamarre et al., 2002; Otsuji and Pennycook, 2010). This
research analyses biographical data from successful Uyghur bilingual/multilingual speakers
and questions the thesis that languages in a multilingual context are merely an extension of
ethnic identity and ethnic relations by examining how different languages are perceived,
studied and practiced by these multilingual speakers.
39. Dr Ivy Maria Lim (National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore)
ivy.lim@nie.edu.sg
Maligned Hero or Deceitful Opportunist? A Reassessment of Hu Zongxian (1512 – 1565)
Although largely responsible for the pacification of the wokou attacks of the late 1550s on
the southeastern coast of China during the Jiajing reign (1522 – 1566) of the Ming dynasty,
Hu Zongxian remains a figure overshadowed by the more famous anti-wokou general Qi
Jiguang in much of Ming historical narratives. Much of this has to do not only with Hu’s own
ignoble fall from grace in 1562 on charges of corruption and abuse of power, but also with
factional politics at the Ming court. This paper thus seeks to reassess Hu Zongxian and his
official career through a variety of sources including his biography in the Mingshi (Ming
History) and a chronological biography written by his eldest son Hu Guiqi and to readdress
the question of whether Hu Zongxian was a hero maligned by his political enemies or if he
was indeed a deceitful opportunist as presented in the official historiography of the Ming
dynasty.
40. Dr Carl Kilcourse (University of Manchester)
carl.kilcourse@manchester.ac.uk
‘Poems of the Inner Palace: Divine Authority and the Treatment of Palace Women in the
Taiping Heavenly Kingdom’
Previous scholarship on the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) has presented Hong Xiuquan (the
Taiping Heavenly King) and his followers as the first modern liberators of Chinese women.
Many historians have suggested that the Taipings’ belief in the spiritual brotherhood of
humankind, which they acquired from translated Christian texts, led them to reject the
patriarchal system that had suppressed Chinese women since antiquity. The Taipings, in
22
other words, were using Christian egalitarianism to challenge Confucian hierarchy and
patriarchy. This paper will problematise these ideas and assumptions by discussing the
Taipings’ theology and carefully examining one of their official publications: the Poems of the
Heavenly Father (1858), a collection of five hundred poems that were written for the women
of Hong’s palace. Whereas previous studies have pointed to the abolition of footbinding as
evidence of the Taipings’ commitment to gender equality, this paper will show that the
judgement was actually the product of Hakka ethnic customs and pragmatic revolutionary
considerations. More importantly, the analysis will confirm that the appointment of ‘female
officials’ (nuguan) was not part of a formal Taiping policy to liberate women from the
constraints of domestic life. The Taipings’ official publications not only told women to accept
the authority of males (fathers, husbands, and sons) unconditionally, but also outlined the
various domestic duties that Hong expected his female officials to perform. The most
noteworthy chores, which were discussed in the Poems of the Heavenly Father, included
grooming the Heavenly King, massaging various parts of his body (including his navel), and
even pulling his carriage. Such duties confirm that the Taipings were not liberating Chinese
women, but simply imposing on them a new form of domestic subservience.
41. Gary Chi-hung Luk (DPhil candidate in Oriental Studies, Oxford University)
chi.luk@sant.ox.ac.uk
The Qing perceptions of and regulations on the “Dan people” and fishermen during the
Sino-British hostilities in 1839-42
Not only the “evil” and “beast-like” “British barbarians”, the Qing authorities also regarded
the Han traitors (hanjian 漢奸) and villains (jianmin 奸民) as the enemies during their
empire-wide anti-opium campaign and war against the British in 1839 to 1842. In the Qing
official eyes, among these hanjian and jianmin many were the “Dan people” (danmin 蛋民)
and fishermen spreading across the China coast and rivers. To eradicate their treacherous
and villainous acts, the Qing state regulated their activities, registered their households and
ships, and to recruit them into the water-militia (shuiyong 水勇). Through these measures
the Qing authorities strived to settle the “Dan” and fishermen in localities and to put them
under the control of the Chinese who settled on land. While these Qing efforts to control
and regulate the “Dan” and fishermen proved largely a failure, they reflect the long-time
discrimination of the Qing authorities, and their Song and Ming predecessors at large,
against the “Dan” people and fishermen. This paper offers a good example of the official
perceptions of and discrimination against some of those living on the “sea-frontier”
(haijiang) in late imperial China.
42. Dr Konstantinos Tsimonis (Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of
London)
kt13@soas.ac.uk
The Communist Youth League and Chinese university students: A case of abortive
adaptation
The Communist Youth League (CYL) has the task of preparing Chinese university students for
party membership as ‘red’ youth, tempering and mobilising them as ‘mass’ youth, and
23
channelling their creativity and skills to economic development as ‘expert’ youth. However,
in the post-communist context, the decline of the party-state’s ability for routine intrusion in
private and social life has rendered this political task more depended on the individual’s
voluntary involvement than ever. This element of conditionality has reshaped the balance
between state and society as the representation of bottom-up articulated demands and
interests is now regarded as a precondition for the regime’s capacity to maintain loyalty and
support. In this context, the League has attempted to adapt its capacity for responsiveness
and representation of Chinese students’ interests by expanding consultation and services
provision.
Based on qualitative and quantitative research conducted in five universities in
Beijing and Zhejiang province, the paper will evaluate the League’s performance on campus
by bringing together the perspectives of ordinary students and CYL cadres. Placing the case
of the League in a wider discussion on ‘authoritarian resilience’, the paper will analyse the
League’s abortive attempts to adapt, as despite relevant initiatives and the centre’s call for
bottom-up representation, students adopt an even more critical stance to both processes
and the degree of responsiveness attained. The paper will then explain that seniority-based
power relations in the localities inhibit cadres’ youth work and their capacity for purposeful,
constituency-oriented action.
43. CHEN I-Hsin (PhD candidate in Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of
Manchester)
i-hsin.chen@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
Revealing universal love through “perfect virtue” and “filial piety”: James Legge’s
interpretation of two principal Ruist notions in his Lunyu
James Legge’s (1815–1897) Chinese Classics remains widely appreciated in international
sinology today. This paper examines Legge’s interpretation of ren and xiao in his Lunyu,
entitled “Confucian Analects” in his Chinese Classics. In the Lunyu, Kongzi (Confucius) (551–
479 BCE) regards ren (benevolence) and xiao (filial piety) as crucial to the prospects of
humanity, relating them to the moral regulation of one’s conduct in family and society. For
Legge, Kongzi should be revered as a religious teacher, who has transmitted ancient Chinese
faith in Tian, Di and Shangdi (designations of the Supreme Being equivalent to Christian God
according to Legge). In Legge’s translation, hence, there is a message of divine love and
transcendence in Kongzi’s teaching on ren and xiao.
Adopting the methodological concept of ‘intertextuality’, I look at how Legge
embodies his Chinese and Western sources in interpreting ren as “perfect virtue”,
specifically focusing on how Legge compares the teaching of Kongzi, Mozi (ca. 470 BCE – ca.
391 BCE) and Jesus Christ on the conception of “universal love”. I also discuss how Legge,
interpreting xiao as “filial piety”, illuminates it as an expression of one’s love for the parents
and devotion to God. Legge maintains that the true meaning of ren and xiao consists in
one’s spiritual love for the divine, enabling one to perfect one’s virtue and will beneficent
actions for others. Highlighting Legge’s correlation between Ruist ethics and Christian
thought, my discussion demonstrates the nuanced intercultural values in Legge’s translation
based on his Sino-Christian vision.
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44. Dr Thomas Jansen (Lecturer in Chinese Studies, University of Wales Trinity Saint
David)
t.jansen@tsd.uwtsd.ac.uk
“Bringing the Gods to Mind: Images and Associational Thought in Chinese Folk Religious
Scriptures”
My paper addresses the question of how sectarian religious groups in late imperial China
taught their members to become ‘religiously fluent’ through the use of “Precious Scrolls”
(baojuan 寶卷). Baojuan do transmit religious, historical and organizational knowledge
relevant to the members of sectarian religious groups. More importantly, however, the texts
teach their users the craft of making their own religious thoughts by actively involving them
in various ritual and rhetorical practices. Building on the work of Mary Carruthers on
monasticism, meditation and rhetoric in medieval Europe, especially her The Craft of
Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge, 1998), I
will first describe the ritual context in which baojuan performances took place. Then I will
analyze the use of mental images and associational thought as rhetorical tools which enable
the participants in baojuan performances to memorize the texts and develop their own
thinking independently. Finally, I will explore the links between the compositional tools used
in baojuan with the techniques of traditional Chinese storytelling in an effort to identify the
roots of the various rhetorical and mnemonic techniques employed in baojuan.
45. Dr Shirley Ye, Lecturer in Asian History, University of Birmingham
s.ye@bham.ac.uk
Nationalist Developmentalism during the Chinese Civil War
This paper looks at attempts to reconstruct China's ports during the Civil War period. During
the war certain ports had been destroyed and rebuilt by Japan, which American surveyors
were later critical of. After the war, some ports had to be substantially rebuilt for China to
re-enter global trade. Infrastructure construction had always been at the heart of the
Nationalist program for a new China, and was one of the primary concerns of Sun Yat-sen's
writing in the period immediately after the 1911 Revolution, writing which continued to be
influential among the Nationalist leadership. However, Sun Yat-sen's thinking, which had
always considered China's future development in an international context, had in mind a
very different international order from the one that took shape in the early post-world war
two years. How did the Nationalists adapt an earlier program to the new post-war world?
How much difference had World War Two really made to Nationalist developmentalism?
And how did planning—both by the Nationalist government, and their foreign advisors and
partners—take account of the Civil War?
46. Dr Joseph Lawson, Lecturer in Modern Chinese History, Newcastle University
Joseph.lawson@ncl.ac.uk
The Guomindang in Upland Southwest China
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Post-1949 Chinese writings on non-Han regions of Southwest China often make one of two
contradictory claims: either the Guomindang (Nationalists) were an oppressive ‘Great Han
chauvinists’ who fostered inter-ethnic conflict; or they “didn’t do anything” (anthropologist
Li Shaoming’s description of the Leibo County Government). Western scholarship has
tended to agree more with the latter, and recent studies relating to non-Han peoples of
China in the Republican period have dealt more with the history of ideas, relationships and
networks, than on changes in the political order with broad impact on communities. This
paper examines the record of the Guomindang in what is now the Liangshan Yi Autonomous
Region. Significant Guomindang activity in this territory began during the War of Resistance
against Japan, when Liangshan became a target for development initiatives related to the
war. These initiatives had an impact on some non-Han communities, but this impact does
not appear to have been detrimental to those communities, and most were unaffected.
After the war, however, the Guomindang government initiated a fierce war on drugs in the
highlands, which culminated in air raids on Nuosu (Yi) villages, and credible reports of
massacres. Communist sources have not been entirely wrong to frame this as ‘oppression’
and argue that it created significant inter-ethnic tension.
47. Dr Tzuli Max Lin (Assistant Professor, Tunghai University, Taiwan)
tzu.max@gmail.com
Cultural diplomacy in Chinese external relations: The Case of EU-China relations
Into the 21 century, China has viewed culture as a significant approach to engage with the
world. This paper aims to trace how Chinese cultural diplomacy leads EU-China relationship
to be effectively towards bilateral cooperation. It will address the cultural interaction
between China and the EU. It also discusses the role of Confucius Institutes in Europe for
delivering Chinese soft power. In contrast to the literature on the China’s external relations,
studies of the cultural dimension are rare. Thus, this paper will utilise EU-China relations as a
case study to deepen the understanding of China’s new cultural diplomacy.
It can be argued that cultural component is the pivotal strategy for the stagnated EUChina relations since the EU failed to lift the arms embargo on China. Both sides have
recognised that mutual trust will bridge the gap between divergent interests. Theoretically,
this paper will utilise Normative Power approach to explore the cultural exchange between
China and the EU. In the result, this paper will illustrate that China views the cultural
approach as same value as economic to integrate China into the world.
48. Dr Elena Barabantseva, Department of Politics, University of Manchester
e.v.barabantseva@manchester.ac.uk
When Borders Lie Within: Marriage Migration and Security on the Sino-Vietnamese
Border.
This paper examines the Chinese local government’s changing perspectives on ethnic
marriage and border control in the particular context of the Sino-Vietnamese border. As the
ambiguous space of ‘Zomia’ (to borrow from James Scott) gives way to a rigidly and clearly
delimited Sino-Vietnamese borderland, the binary forms of classification replace earlier fluid
identifications, and the room for diverse social and cultural expressions becomes restricted.
This dynamic context sets the scene for border communities and their long-standing
26
tradition of ethnic marriages straddling the borders of China and its southern neighbouring
states. In order to understand how and why the status of the earlier accepted forms of
undocumented ethnic marriages has recently changed from ‘common’ (shish) to ‘illegal’
(feifa) marriages, I look at how the securitisation of marriage migration in Asia, concerns
about population security and particular formulations of anti-trafficking campaigns come
into play in forceful ways to set the conditions for the state dominant perceptions of ethnic
marriages.
49. Dr Joanne Smith Finley, School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University
j.smithfinley@ncl.ac.uk
Redistribution of Wealth or Consolidation of Majority Han Power? The ‘National Partner
Assistance Programme’ in Xinjiang.
Following the 2009 ethnic riots in Xinjiang, senior leaders met in Beijing in March 2010 to
call for an East-West collaboration in which richer provinces and municipalities would act as
donors and investors to build Xinjiang into a ‘moderately well-off society’. Officials were
sent to the region to study how to improve residents’ livelihoods and ‘promote ethnic
equality and unity’. . The ‘national partner assistance programme’, involving 19 provinces
and municipalities in China proper, is expected to provide financial support, training and
education to Xinjiang’s least developed southern oases. Yet so far only one aspect of this
policy received local approval: the increase in minimum monthly wages. Other initiatives are
widely perceived as intended to benefit Han migrants, who are desperate to expand into
new spaces. Local Uyghurs claim the programme has done little to assist people in Xinjiang,
but rather speeds the process of ‘giving away what belongs to us’ –the region’s natural
resources. After key posts in the Khotän city government were filled by Han officials from
Beijing in 2011, local fears of increased corruption and land speculation also escalated. This
paper assesses whether the ‘national partner assistance programme’ represents a genuine
desire from the centre for spatial (and ethnic) redistribution of wealth, or rather the
consolidation of majority group power on the north-western periphery.
50. Dr Tsering Topgyal, Department of Political Science and International Studies,
University of Birmingham
t.topgyal@bham.ac.uk
Tibet in Sino-South Asian Relations: Indian and Nepalese treatment of Tibetan at a time of
China’s rise.
The rise of China and its greater assertiveness is provoking complex responses from
neighbouring Asian states. Some states are clearly band-wagoning with China, while others
are engaging in various shades of balancing through strengthening formal and informal
alignment with America and other Asian states and internal military build-ups, including
hedging strategies designed to profit from China’s economic opportunities while preserving
the security benefits of America’s ‘pivot’ to Asia and institutional enmeshment. By
examining the handling of the Tibet issue by India and Nepal, this paper will show two
different responses from South Asia to China’s rise. While Nepal’s policy towards the
Tibetans over the decades since 1959 represents a slide from anti-Communist balancing to
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band-wagoning, India’s handling of the Tibet issue reflects a hedging strategy geared
towards preventing the Tibetans in exile from upsetting ties with Beijing in ways contrary to
Indian interests, while refusing to curtail the political activities of the Tibetan exiles, in some
ways fostering the Tibetan exile polity. These divergent policies from Kathmandu and New
Delhi are partly products of the different degrees of pressure that China is putting on them
on the Tibet issue on account of their different levels of capabilities, options and resistance
towards Chinese.
51. Dr David Tobin, Department of Politics, University of Glasgow
david.tobin@glasgow.ac.uk
Worrying About Ethnicity: Towards a New Generation of China Dreams?
China’s leading thinkers and policymakers are now asking how they can avoid domestic
insecurity derailing China’s rise to global superpower status. The insecurity is most notably
related to the increasingly violent challenges to CCP ethnic minority policies in Xinjiang and
Tibet. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) explains that ethnic unity (minzu tuanjie) is a
“zero-sum political struggle of life or death” for the Chinese nation. Unusually frank debates
amongst scholars at Beijing’s elite universities are for the first time being publicised on the
State Ethnic Affairs Commission (SEAC) website as an “exploration of a Second generation of
ethnic policies. This paper will analyse China’s ethnic minority policy debates which centre
on arguments about whether China should be a multi-ethnic state or a mono-ethnic nationstate. The inter-generational policy debate is ostensibly between proponents of the First
generation of ethnic minority policies who wish to maintain China as a multi-ethnic state of
56 different minzu groups and the Second generation who seek to transform China into a
mono-ethnic race-state (guozu). This paper will analyse the Second generation of minzu
policies debate not as an institutional or geopolitical struggle but as an ideational struggle to
articulate the future and the identity of the Chinese nation. The paper will explore how the
two generations conceptualise the dangers of majority ethnic chauvinism and minority
ethnic nationalism in constructing the future of China.
52. CHEN Yu-Hsiang (PhD candidate, University of Edinburgh)
S0974781@sms.ed.ac.uk
CHIEN Ko-Kang (PhD candidate, University of Edinburgh)
S1252962@sms.ed.ac.uk
The Sunflower Movement and Young Generations in Taiwan
The Sunflower Movement was a protest movement driven by a coalition of students and
civic groups between 18th March and 10th April 2014 in Taiwan. It was sparked by the
passing of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA, a bill would reduce the trade
restrictions in service sectors between China and Taiwan) by the ruling party at the
legislature without clause-by-clause review. During the 24 days, the activists occupied the
Legislative Yuan (parliament), stormed the Executive Yuan (government headquarters),
rallied in Ketagalan Boulevard (leading to the Presidential Office) and held grass-root
citizens’ forums. The activists demanded that the government should withdraw the deal
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from the Legislative Yuan, legislate an oversight mechanism for all cross-strait agreements,
review the CSSTA under the oversight act and call for Citizens’ Constitutional Assembly. Polls
showed that the movement was generally popular (about 50% of the population approved
it) and gained strong support among young generations (over 70% among 20-39 years old
supported it). In order to elucidate the origins of its popularity, we will situate this
movement in current Taiwan’s socio-economic context and recent developments of the
cross-strait relations. Furthermore, we will address the differences of conceptions of
democracy, national identities, social values and accesses to information between
generations by asking the question how the young were more willing to participate and to
support this movement. The answers may help us to underpin the understanding of the
social trends in Taiwan.
53. CHEN Zhiting (PhD student, Department of Political Science and International
Studies, University of Birmingham)
ZXC322@bham.ac.uk
State Ownership in China, Past Present and Future — A Critical Analysis of State-Owned
Enterprises
This paper examines the development of the centrally administrated state-owned
enterprises in China since the “reform and opening up” in 1978. It starts with a review of the
state-owned enterprises, identifying problems and difficulties. In the past, China’s stateowned enterprises were seen as a remnant of the old planned economy, mentality
inefficient, loss-making enterprises with redundant employees. Now some of these SOEs
have become leading global actors. Centrally administrated state owned enterprises are the
top in their industry, enjoying the support from the government in terms of preferential
policies and subsidies. As the pioneer of economic construction, they are shouldered with
heavy tasks, responsible for achieving both the political and the economic goals, ensuring
the superiority of state-ownership in the markets. Following that, the paper provides an
analysis of the State Assets Supervision and Administration Committee (SASAC), which is a
central level government institution, authorized by the State Council. The SASAC is both the
investor and the supervisor and can be described as a quasi-governmental body because it is
responsible for market regulation and control. Its responsibility includes monitoring
financing situation, mergers and acquisitions, and managerial appointments. This paper
argues that after years of reform, joining the WTO, competing in a free market world, large
enterprises, namely centrally administrated SOEs in China are still in absolute leading
position. In other words, the Chinese government will maintain its visible hand in market
activities and the SOEs will hold the dominant role in China’s economic development and
will also develop its strength domestically and internationally.
54. Robert Emerton (Doctoral Student, SPIRE, RISS, Keele University)
r.h.emerton@keele.ac.uk
The Goddess of Democracy: Postmodern Protest and Tiananmen Square
Throughout the 1989 protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square ('Tiananmen') and in the years
immediately following their violent end there was much commentary within English-
29
language sources on the relationship between a 'democracy movement' led by students and
dissident intellectuals, and senior members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) said to be
supportive of reform. This relationship was understood as being part of a legacy of uniquely
Chinese secretive political manoeuvring, and alleged factional infighting within the military
and CCP was taken to support the inevitability of the triumph of 'prodemocracy efforts'
within that country. Such a state of affairs did not however come to pass; whilst protest
movements in Europe produced a recodification of state power, the CCP consolidated its
hold through the expansion of its pre-1989 programme of reforms. Academic accounts
subsequently emerged that sought to explain the failure of Tiananmen by redefining the
nature of the protests through a dissolution of values and identities:
The student’s demands are taken to be 'vague'; their understandings of 'democracy' are
questioned; they are said to use 'performative' protest strategies linked to 'postmodern
aesthetics', whilst the contrast with events in Europe is explained through the absence of
'civil society' structures, and continued CCP rule is explained through a 'values vacuum'
amongst the Chinese citizenry.
I examine this conceptual lineage with reference to changing representations of the
‘Goddess of Democracy’ statue built by art students during the protests and its connection
to a wider ‘counter-culture’.
55. Angela Becher (PhD Candidate, Department of China and Inner Asia, SOAS, University
of London)
326639@soas.ac.uk
XL, L, M, S: Miniaturizations of Skyscrapers in Chinese Contemporary Art
Few building types have the power to inspire the imagination of the human being like the
skyscraper. While high-rise buildings satisfy practical needs for inner-city space, they also
seem to eulogize height as the essence of urbanity, wealth and sophistication. This paper
scrutinizes how the skyscraper is imagined in contemporary Chinese visual art, with a focus
on artworks that represent the high-rise building in miniaturized form. These
miniaturizations are surprisingly common and can be found across different media, including
photography, video and installation art. While they downscale the skyscraper to model size,
they giganticize the beholder and hence create an intensity that can “test the relation
between materiality and meaning” (Stewart, 1993). Based on a semiological perspective, the
paper is conceptualized as a reading of how the artistically imagined high-rise connects to its
urban referent and how art can attribute meaning to buildings by disentangling the cultural
narrative that inhabits the hidden spaces of architecture. Through a number of visual
examples it will be shown that artists use the miniaturization to enact a distant perspective
through which they negotiate issues of identity, progress and memory that are distilled in
the contemporary Chinese skyscraper.
30
56. Dr HUANG Fei (Junior Professor of Chinese Studies, Eberhard Karls University,
Tübingen)
Faye712@gmail.com
Picturesque Southwest Frontier: The Making of An Imperial Landscape in 18 th Century
China
In present-day northeastern Yunnan, the Qing empire in the eighteenth century overthrew
indigenous regimes to gain control over the area’s rich copper deposits, and then created
new cities and landscapes both physically and in literary representations. After Qing officials
had built walled cities and established governing institutions, several key local literatiofficials identified a set of eight or ten best views in the vicinity of the walled cities of
northeastern Yunnan. Regardless of the actual locations of these scenic spots, the
descriptions of best views follow existed literary appreciation, in a certain way leave the
impression of a “civilized” Han Chinese world where used to be the wild frontier. Besides,
the selecting of best views is not only a way of representation but also as a part of everyday
social life. The basis for the selection of best views in the context of geographical
descriptions in the local gazetteers reflected the economic attention in daily life of
northeastern Yunnan related to copper business. In addition, the selecting the best views
was also drawn from an indigenous repertoire of meaning. Making the best views as an
imperial landscape therefore is not simply imposed by literati-officials but more than an ongoing cultural process whereby they appropriated to internal formats and engaged to their
external surrounding and encountering in the eighteenth Chinese Southwest frontier.
57. CAO Yifan (PhD Candidate, Beijing Normal University)
evendancing@163.com
Dissatisfactions with the Past: on Three Cases of Old Factory Renewal in Shanghai
China has been through an unstop fever of factory renewal. After a long disturbance,
abandoned factories try to retrieve the center part of urban life. They became art parks,
shopping malls and CBDs, while still keeping the old figure. Those unchanged-yetchanged urban landscape symbolize the relation of a city or a nation to its past, and the
boundary between ideological narrative and everyday life. Moreover, this transition and
reproduction of urban space may change the historiography of Chinese socialism. Focusing
on three well-known cases of factory renewal—“M50”,”Factory of 1933”, and “Oriental
Fashion Centre”— I would modify this view in the sense that the fabric of city is not only
always in process of changing, and not only is this change normally visible, but even when it
is not, it becomes part of collective memory both informally and in the written and rewritten
official and unofficial histories of a political life.
31
58. Dr ZHANG Shihai (Department of Chinese language and literature, South China
Normal University; Confucius Institute, Lancaster University)
s.zhang1@lancaster.ac.uk; zhangsh@scut.edu.cn
Traditional Chinese Ethical Culture and Morpheme Order in Coordinate Compound Nouns
Referring to Persons
Characteristics of language structure can reflect some characteristics of ethnic culture. This
paper explores the relation between traditional Chinese ethnical culture and morpheme
order in Chinese coordinate compound nouns. I analyses the composite structure of 110
coordinate compound nouns referring to persons or organizations from Modern Chinese
Dictionary (5th edition) in order to confirm the principles of the morpheme order. The results
are as follows: 1) There are 75 in 77 words where there is an ethical relation. Their
morphemes are combined according to the principle of ethics except the two words
‘banji’(class-grade) and ‘cunzhen’(village-town). 2) There are 33 words where there is no
ethical relation, whose morphemes are combined on the basis of prosody. They
demonstrate that ethical principle is crucial to morpheme order of coordinate compound
nouns referring to persons or organizations, which is one of traditional Chinese ethical
culture influences on word internal structure profoundly. At the same time, morpheme
order in Chinese coordinate compound nouns referring to persons or organizations can
manifest China as an ethical and political society.
59. Dr Sophia Woodman (Dept. of Sociology, School of Social and Political Science,
University of Edinburgh)
sophia.woodman@ed.ac.uk
Translocal lives: practices of mobile citizenship in China
In an era of increasing internal mobility, how do Chinese people cope with the fact that
formal citizenship remains a sedentary relationship that fixes their entitlements in the
location of their hukou household registration? According to current estimates, more than
200 million people have migrated away from their place of hukou registration, either on a
temporary or permanent basis, so many are facing this reality. This paper identifies
strategies internal migrants adopt to manage translocal citizenship, focusing on how they
maintain their local citizenship in their places of origin and relocate their citizenship in their
places of settlement, and considers how this varies depending on a range of factors,
including migrants’ socio-economic status, occupations, gender and life course stage. As well
as the much-studied rural-to-urban migrants, the paper incorporates experiences of interurban and inter-rural migrants. This inclusive approach promises to generate a more
comprehensive conception of mobile citizenship than has previously been put forward,
while also contributing to broader theorizing on the overall dynamics of change in
citizenship frameworks and practices. As well as outlining the regulatory context for
translocal lives, the paper examines how the local state and its agents identify, govern, or
ignore different types of migrants in practice. While the paper draws on the extensive
literature on internal migration in China, it also includes material from preliminary
interviews and ethnographic observation in Tianjin Municipality. It adopts the lens of
32
translocality to highlight the specific material linkages and processes of discursive and
physical boundary-making involved in internal migration in China.
60. Dr TONG Zhifeng (Department of Social Work, Zhejiang University of Finance &
Economics, China; Visiting fellow at Durham University)
zhifeng.tong@durham.ac.uk
Prof. LI Zhanrong (Department of Law, Zhejiang University of Finance & Economics,
China)
lizhanrong@zufe.edu.cn
Rural China’s water policy development and challenges
This research shows the development and challenges of rural China’s water policy from 1973
to the present. In terms of policy context and practice, two stages will be addressed: (1)
Before mid-1990s, rural water pollution problem appears but be left in the basket; (2) After
mid-1990s, rural water pollution is becoming serious a few of professional policy for rural
pollution governance implements. For instance, Pesticides Management Regulation in
People’s Republic of China in 2001.This paper consider the implications of rural water policy
challenges in three areas: (1)There is trend that more and more industry contaminant and
urban domestic pollutant are moving to rural China; (2) compared with unban water
pollution governance, the fees of rural governance supported by Financial fund is rare;(3)
professional rural water pollution policy is absent. There have been some achievements,
such as the measures of making great efforts to promote ecological progress in the report to
the Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The paper conclude that
multilateral efforts to ameliorate rural China’s water problems may be successful in
increasing government spending, implementing specific water policy and improving public
participation.
61. Dr Cesarino Loredana (Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”)
loredana.cesarino@gmail.com
Textual manipulations in the Quan Tangshi 全唐詩: the case of the courtesan Liu Caichun
劉采春
In China, before the development of the printing culture, the books were written, circulated,
transmitted and preserved in handwritten copies. As a consequence, during their long
transmission process, many texts have been altered both by casual mistake or by intentional
intervention and reinterpretation of contents made by copyists and editors of literary
collections. As suggested by Christopher Nugent, “this is nowhere more true than in a
manuscript-based literary culture like the Tang (618-907) in which each reproduction had to
be done by hand and depended on the unreliable tools of the eyes, ears, mouth, and
memory. Textual reproduction resulted in textual change, whether intentional or otherwise,
and created a very different kind of text from what we find in later print-based literary
cultures.”
Starting from this assumption, this paper will discuss the reliability of the Quan
Tangshi 全唐詩 (1707, Complete Tang Poems), an anthology which has been regarded as
33
Tang poetical canon since its publication, by exploring some of the textual manipulations
that affected the collections of Tang poetry edited from the early Song 宋 (960-1279)
dynasty onward, which were used as primary sources by Qing compilers.
To better understand the extent to which the altered information collected in Song and Ming
sources influenced the vision of Tang poetry transmitted by the Quan Tangshi, this paper will
analyse the case of the courtesan Liu Caichun 劉采春 collected therein by using some
significant passages extracted from the Yunxi youyi 雲溪友議 by Fan Shu 范摅 (875-888),
the Rongzhai suibi 容齋隨筆 by Hong Mai 洪迈 (1123-1202), the Tangshi Jishi 唐詩紀事 by
Ji Yougong 計有功, the Tangying tongqian 唐音統籤 by Hu Zhenheng 胡震亨 (1569-1644),
the Mingyuan shigui 名媛詩歸 by Zhong Xing 鍾惺 (1574-1624) and other important
collections of Tang poetry published between the 10th and the 16th century.
62. SHI Jie (PhD candidate, School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University)
j.shi5@newcastle.ac.uk
Reinvention of Modern Chinese-ness: Xiandai Zazhi and Chinese Tradition
This paper attempts to investigate the literary and cultural practices concerning Chinese
tradition in Xiandai zazhi. I argue that, situated in the 1930s in China, this journal did not
understand tradition in an essentialist way as the Westerners did, but embraced it as a
natural constituent of modern Chinese-ness. In this sense, Chinese-ness became a modern
construct with tradition as an element of it.
Proclaiming to be contemporaneous with the West, Shi Zhecun (the chief editor) and
his friends translated the contemporary West into China to keep Chinese readers reliably
informed of a cosmopolitan West. However, when introducing Imagism, they became silent
on its connection with Chinese tradition. It is understandable that the journal’s reputation
could be risked on an explicit appropriation of Chinese tradition as iconoclasm had been the
dominant discourse ever since the May Fourth era. More importantly, in Xiandai zazhi
tradition was not understood as the antiquity which was essential in shaping a traditional
China but as a natural element in modern Chinese-ness.
In an Editorial Commentary Shi Zhecun responded to a reader’s criticism of the
poems published in Xiandai zazhi by explaining that modern poems were expressions of the
emotions of modern people who lived a modern life. Xiandai zazhi, in which poems with
traditional Chinese features were published, and which actively engaged in the Polemics
over “Zhuangzi and Wenxuan” and Familiar Essay, did reveal a strategy of reinventing
Modern Chinese-ness by corresponding to the modern world while being open-minded
toward tradition.
63. QIAO Si (PhD student, Lau China Institute, King’s College London)
si.qiao@kcl.ac.uk
The correspondence between Tiny times (Xiao Shidai) and Chinese Dream (Zhongguo
Meng) – the discussion of Guo Jingming’s literary practice
In March of 2013, president Xi Jinping began promoting the phrase of Chinese Dream
(Zhongguo Meng) as a slogan describing a set of new ideals in China. Chinese Dream was
soon interpreted as an academic discourse from the angle of history and modernity.
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Afterwards, on 16 December, Guo Jingming was awarded as “The Pioneer of Seeking Chinese
Dream” by the newspaper of Southern Weekly (Nanfang Zhoumo) as the roles of a Post-80s
writer and a successful cultural entrepreneur. This case typically indicates the interaction
among different institutions and the dynamic among diverse forms of capital in the literary
production field of contemporary China. How far could Guo’ s literary practice correspond to
the connotation of Chinese Dream? How far could a Post-80s writer get involved in the social
reality of contemporary China under the circumstance of post-socialist modernity? These are
two questions I try to explore in present paper. I will mainly focus on the thematic analysis of
all of Guo’s published works, especially his recent fiction Tiny Times (Xiao Shidai), in which
Guo sketched the image of Shanghai as an abstract and replaceable symbol of commercial
logic, and the dramatic conflict between this cruel logic and the vulnerable Only Child (Du
Sheng Zinv) resisting to grow up. Quite different from the extant research implying Guo’s
literary creation is just popular literature and best seller, I argue his writings reflected both
the uniqueness and limits of the view of history and society of his generation, and Guo could
continue his journey of “seeking Chinese Dream” based on this foundation.
64. HAGIWARA Hiroko (Professor of Economics, School of Economics , University of
Hyogo, Kobe, Japan)
hagiwara@econ.u-hyogo.ac.jp
Economic Growth, Excess Capacity and Investment in China
China has experienced high economic growth for more than 30 years. However an excess
production capacity has become a large concern in China since 2008. The main factor that
affects China’s economic growth is investment, which has a dual nature- investment
spending in demand side and increasing production capacity in supply side.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamic role of investment in China’s
economic growth. Based on revised Harrod model, we analyse the investment decision in a
dynamic context. Estimating the “required” marginal capital-output ratio for entrepreneurial
equilibrium (the warranted growth), we examine the actual growth rate of GDP and growth
rate of investment.
China’s (actual) marginal capital–output ratio has exceeded the required marginal
capital-output ratio since 2008. In this situation, investment growth rate and the economic
growth rate decrease, which lead to increasing of the marginal capital-output ratio that
causes the cumulative process. To stop the cumulative process, effective demand including
investment should be augmented.
65. Malcolm McNeill (PhD Candidate, SOAS, University of London)
Malcolm.mcneill@soas.ac.uk
Speaking for Icons: Inscriptions on Buddhas and Patriarchs, and the Discourse Record of
Yanqi Guangwen 偃溪廣聞 (1189-1263)
This paper presents a case study of inscriptions on figure paintings of Chan Buddhist
(Japanese: Zen) figural subjects, made by the 13th century abbot Yanqi Guangwen (1189–
1263 CE). Close examination of extant inscribed images reveals visual and verbal dialogues
between the master’s calligraphy and painted depictions of historic Chan exemplars.
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Inscriptions both animate these icons and appropriate their spiritual efficacy, by employing a
calligraphic voice that quotes and comments on hagiographic dialogues.
I intend to illustrate the projection of clerical authority onto the Chan pantheon,
through an exploration of the functions of inscriptions in mediating the viewer’s relationship
to the iconic subject. This will be examined through analysis of the rhetoric and structure of
inscribed verse, demarking the relationship of Yanqi’s compositions to iconic subjects’
representation in Chan hagiographic narratives, and through an examination of the visual
and spatial relationship between calligraphic and painted forms. The reception of these
various mechanisms for the appropriation and projection of identity and power will be
illustrated through Yanqi’s representation in literati authored prefaces to his Discourse
Records, yulu 語錄, compiled in 1259 CE.
In conclusion, this paper argues that Yanqi’s verse inscriptions on paintings create a
potent composite of iconography and exegesis: integrating immediate verbal expression
within the simulated presence of past Patriarchs in painting. This overlay of visual and verbal
media creates a dynamic relationship between the Chan pantheon and the inscribing abbot:
conflating the authority and presence of past and present masters in a single object.
66. Dr XI Zhenyan (Sichuan University; University of Turku).
zhenyanxi@gmail.com
A Comparative Study of Soft Power between Two Political Actors: EU and China
Since the 21st century, the competition of human society has greatly changed. Soft power
has increasingly become a dynamic force of competition of hard power.
Both EU and China, possessing the soft power tools—culture, education and diplomacy —
need to make friends and influence people. China as an emerging power is playing a more
and more important role on the world stage, trying very hard to spread its soft power to the
world ; while EU as a political actor is exerting its soft power on the world, employing this
exclusive way to influence the world.
The construction of China's soft power has just started, and the negative impact
brought by the imbalance of soft and hard strength development is emerging gradually.
Therefore, there are still a lot of concerns about China's soft power from international and
domestic society. While EU's soft power still has a strong influence on the world stage
although it is still on the process of economic crisis. This paper explores the hidden power
behind the system of cultural soft factors deeply from the angle of politics, observing the
similarities and differences of soft power between China and EU, and systematically analyzes
the advantages and disadvantages of the resources, formation, development, the status quo
of their soft power. Furthermore, the influence of their soft power on the world stage and in
what way they would enhance it in the future also would be discussed.
67. WANG Lu (PhD candidate, School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University)
l.wang28@ncl.ac.uk
Modeng or Xiandai? A Different Approach to Modernity - A study on the Magazine Xifeng
in China (1936-1949)
The urban popular culture in Republican China, as one representation and feature of
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modernity, is often discussed with the term modeng (摩登 transliteration of modern), as it
carries a batch of imaginations of the modern western world. In many of the studies on the
new urban culture in China, for example, in the illuminating book Shanghai Modern by Lee
Ou-fan (Harvard University Press, 1999), modeng is often used as a representative or even a
synonym to the concept of modern, stressing on a “novel and fashionable” aspect. Based on
a study on Xifeng (西风 West Wind, 1936-1949), a widely-circulated magazine, this paper
looks into different elements in the modern urban culture expressed in the Chinese term
xiandai (现代 translation of modern), if the image of modeng is already stereotyped.
Featuring translated articles from popular publications in the western countries, Xifeng is
also based in Shanghai, showing a modern ethos among the newly emerging middle-class
urbanites. Through an investigation on the translated articles and Chinese writing in this
magazine, the paper discussed modernity from the perspective of a modern mentality,
which is an attitude and outlook towards one’s everyday life practices, established through
the process of translation. In such as discussion, the meanings of xiandai and modeng will be
redefined, in a context of modernity in the 1930s-40s China.
68. JIANG Yanpeng (PhD candidate, School of Geography, University of Leeds)
gyypj@leeds.ac.uk
New urban growth coalition and neoliberal urban growth in China, the case study of
Hongqiao project
China emerged from central controlled planning economy to become more integrated into
the regional and global economy since the 1980s. City has become driving force of economic
growth, then booming of urbanization and industrialization driven by market-oriented
institutional arrangement and inward of foreign investment has fuelled economic and urban
growth. Urban sprawl and urban change in contemporary China can be characterised as
government-led in the context of competitive urbanism. Mega urban projects are becoming
an increasingly common form of urban development in peri-urban areas, urban growth
coalition emerged with Chinese characteristics in post-socialism which dominated by
entrepreneurial government, which are beginning to receive academic attention, the
majority of studies focus on the issue of applicable of urban regime theory and have a
limited capacity to fully explain what mechanism of urban growth coalition and what the
role of participants among urban growth coalition in China.
This paper examines case study of Hongqiao project in Shanghai at which was and is the
largest city in China, to examine mechanism of urban coalition in contemporary China. .
Firstly we investigate the question of the reasons of emerging of urban growth coalition and
what new features of urban growth coalitions in Hongqiao case. Secondly we examine what
mechanism of urban growth coalition and what role of main participant involved in
Hongqiao project and ask who benefit and lost most in the project. We ultimately ask how
urban growth coalition promotes economic and urban growth in China context. Drawing
upon comparison its main features of coalition in western context, it can be concluded that
wider theoretical discussions about the consequences and role of urban growth coalition for
neoliberal urban restructuring.
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69. Keisha Brown (PhD candidate, University of Southern California)
Keishabr@usc.edu
CCP Propaganda Media and Representations of Blackness in Maoist China
Within the hegemonic context of Cold War politics, Sino-Black relations created hybrid
spaces to articulate the change in societies splintered by modernity and demands for social
transformation. Shifting from the diasporic approaches of Afro-Asian studies, Sino-Black
relations is a framework that highlights the political and cultural aspects of relations
between African-Americans and Chinese people from 1949 to 1972. My research uses the
framework of Sino-Black relations to analyze the multiple ways that race, as a lens for
understanding the “other”, shaped the representation of Blackness in the Chinese context.
Delving into this cultural and sociopolitical intersection, my work asserts that
representations of African-Americans were framed as “oppressed peoples” in the CCP
foreign relations narratives. While this narrative had a certain political efficacy, it also
limited representations of American Blacks in the Chinese context in ways that could
reinforce racial stereotypes. The depictions of African-Americans also highlights some of the
underlying racist tropes within the CCP’s stance supporting unification among colored
peoples globally. As such, calls for solidarity with U.S. Blacks by Mao counters some existing
Chinese attitudes of empathy and inferiority towards U.S. Blacks resulting in tensions and
complications within these transracial and transnational interactions. This paper will
present a series of Cultural Revolution era style posters to highlight how the Chinese
sociocultural context, the CCP foreign relations policy towards African Americans, as well as
the performativity of Blackness by Black Americans in the PRC shaped the consciousness in
China about the plight of American Blacks.
70. Emily Williams (Doctoral Candidate, Birkbeck College, University of London; Research
Assistant, China Poster Collection, University of Westminster)
emilyrwilliams@hotmail.com
Consuming Mao’s China: British visitors and their objects
As part of my larger PhD project on British engagements with Cultural Revolution objects,
this paper will investigate those British individuals who lived in and travelled to China in the
1960s and 1970s, and through an exploration of the objects they brought back with them,
will try to add complexity to the narrative surrounding these ‘souvenirs’. Whilst often
remembered for its destruction of antiquities and the shutting down of cultural institutions,
the Cultural Revolution also produced a profusion of material and visual culture, ranging
from posters and Chairman Mao badges, to decorative daily items such as mugs and basins,
and many visitors brought back substantial collections of these items.
This paper will start to unpick some of the different ways people engaged with material
culture. For some people, it was a crucial source of information in this deeply confusing
time. With politics rapidly changing, posters, dazibao and other items gave some insight into
current developments. For some, objects were purchased and at times collected for more
explicitly ideological reasons: to show support for or learn from the political and cultural
developments at the time. But this paper will argue that much of the engagement with
Cultural Revolution material culture had less to do with ideological allegiance, and more to
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do with a far more common capitalist trait: consumption. Ironically, in this anti-capitalist,
anti-consumerist decade, one of the politically-safe activities was shopping, and thus we can
see the purchase and collection of these objects as consumption-as-leisure. This paper will
explore the implications of this idea when thinking about foreigners in China and the
material culture of the Cultural Revolution more broadly.
71. Dr Heather Inwood (Lecturer in Chinese Cultural Studies, University of Manchester)
heather.inwood@manchester.ac.uk
Sleeptalking for Losers: Confronting the ‘China Dream’ in Chinese Popular Fiction
Since Xi Jinping revealed his “China dream” (Zhongguo meng) slogan in his inaugural address
to the nation in March 2013, China’s cultural scenes have been spurred into a collective
exploration of what such a dream might mean for contemporary literature and art. Leading a
clamour of voices on the topic, Mo Yan declared in January 2014 that “Literature and art are
an important element of the China dream…without them, the dream would be incomplete.”
According to the cultural studies scholar Zhang Yiwu, the China dream has great inspirational
potential for young people in particular, but is currently under threat from an insidious
“culture of complaints” (baoyuan wenhua) or attitude of pessimism about the possibility of
achieving success in life.
After outlining the broader discursive context of the “China dream” in contemporary
Chinese culture, this paper focuses in on lesser-known literary representations of individual
“China dreams”, many of which present Xi Jinping’s slogan in a more complicated light.
While state-approved dreams focus on financial security and tangible life goals, dreams in
online popular fiction often tend toward the egotistical, fantastical and perverse. By
contrasting official discourse of the China dream and online discourse surrounding the
concept “YY”, a term used to describe culture that blurs the boundaries between realizable
dreams and fantasy, I consider what popular fiction can contribute to our understanding of
the multiple China dreams in existence today and what chances of success their authordreamers deem them to have.
72. Dr Hilary Chung (Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, School of Cultures
Languages and Linguistics, University of Auckland)
h.chung@auckland.ac.nz
Explorations of second person narrative in the poetic prose of Yang Lian
This paper draws on the work of Monika Fludernik as a starting point to analyse the use of
the second person narrative voice in the poetic prose of the poet Yang Lian who was exiled
in New Zealand in the 1990s. Fludernik posits an analysis of the second person narrative in
fiction which blurs Stanzel’s narratological dichotomy of teller and reflector narrative modes,
introducing the potential for a range of combinations of what she calls homo- and
heterocommunicative narration.
Fludernik particularly emphasises how the subversive effects of much second person
fiction derive from a concentration on the communicative level, while at the same time
being accompanied by a “deliberate ambiguity about the existential circumstances of the
'interlocutors' and a refusal to provide a diegetic function of the narrator.”
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In a series of prose pieces written in Chinese which contemplate the local
environment, Yang Lian used the second person narrative mode to develop a poetics of
exile. The seemingly autodiegetic prose ranges across the homo- and heterocommunicative
spectrum seeking readership at a time when the author’s work was banned in China and
without potential readership in Chinese at the time of writing. The interdeterminacy of the
addressee function is key to the poetics of the text, whereby the reader finds him/herself
addressed but cannot delimit the reference to a specific narrative level. This paper also
considers the narrative consequences of the translation of the text into English.
73. Dr HIRONO Miwa (RCUK Research Fellow, School of Politics and International
Relations; Deputy Director, Institute of Asia and Pacific Studies, University of
Nottingham)
Miwa.Hirono@nottingham.ac.uk
Multiculturalism and the politics of recognition: China’s global cooperation in nontraditional security and its implication for China’s rise
This paper discusses analytical challenges of China’s rise and proposes new questions about
China’s rise, by drawing upon the literature of multiculturalism and that of the politics of
recognition. Despite the fact that states now co-exist within the international society in
which states are supposed to share some common values, sociological discussion, or the
implications of sociological studies in terms of China’s rise, has been neglected in the
literature. One of the representative sociological discussions that matter to our analysis of
China’s rise is those of multiculturalism and the politics of recognition. This is because the
key question for these studies is ‘how different cultures can co-reside in a society’, which is
also a key question for China’s rise vis-à-vis the dominant international liberal order. This
paper therefore reviews the sociological studies of multiculturalism and the politics of
recognition and examines the applicability and implication of these bodies of literature for
the study of China’s rise. Particular empirical attention will be paid to China’s global
cooperation in non-traditional security, such as peacekeeping, humanitarian and postdisaster assistance, and anti-piracy operations.
74. Nguyen Huong Minh (SOAS, University of London)
suezie.nguyen@gmail.com
The role of elections in nondemocratic regimes: Taiwan and Singapore
While it is widely accepted that elections constitute the very basic principle of democracy,
the electoral process in non-democratic regimes tend to be dismissed as a mere facade that
aims to superficially legitimize the autocratic rule. The proper understanding of the role of
such elections, however, can significantly contribute to the study of the nature of the
nondemocratic regime itself as well as its future prospects.
During the martial law period, the Kuomintang (KMT) dominated the political
administration of Taiwan as a single party. Under the temporary provisions that were
supposed to remain in effect until the mainland was recovered by the nationalist troops,
the elections to Legislative Yuan and the National Assembly were suspended. On the other
hand, the variety of local level elections had been introduced since the early 1950 and
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proved to be fairly competitive in a time. Gradually, these regularly held local elections
contributed to the mounting pressures for the expansion of elections at national level and
eventually led to full democratization of Taiwan.
In Singapore, the People’s Action Party has been continuously in power since 1963.
The voting process itself is free of rigging, yet the competitiveness and fairness of the
elections are being called into question in many regards. The assessment by the Economist
Intelligence Unit every year concludes Singapore is a hybrid regime, still not reaching
even the lower standards of democracy.
The aim of the paper is to examine the role of the elections in nondemocratic
regimes and their impact on the regime transformation and/or transition. Taiwan will serve
as a case of successful democratization, whereas Singapore will rather demonstrate the
resilience and adaptability of autocrats who are able to use the elections for their own
benefits.
75. James Cummings (PhD candidate, ESRC Doctoral Training Centre, Sociology and Social
Policy, Newcastle University)
j.r.cummings@ncl.ac.uk
It’s Hainanese for Bitch: Negotiating ‘Peripherality’, ‘Modernity’ and Non-heterosexual
Identities in Hainan
China’s arduous search for a sense of post-socialist ‘modernity’ has redrawn the fields of
gender and sexuality and in contemporary China an awkward mix of yearnings from worldly
cosmopolitanism and reified patriotism shapes the contours of emergent gendered and
sexual identifications. These discursive shifts have enabled some same-sex attracted people
to position themselves within post-socialist frameworks of cultural citizenship, claiming
identities characterised by ‘modernity’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ while appropriating
nationalist rhetoric to claim belonging and legitimacy as ‘good citizens’ of postsocialist
China. But what does such an Identity Politics mean for those who are unable to frame their
identities within discourses of national modernity? Those who reside in China’s ‘peripheral’
regions, labelled ‘uncivilised’ and ‘backwards’, which in their very existence as ‘vestiges of
tradition and conservatism’ serve to confer the modernity of the centre?
This paper draws upon my research into the lives of same-sex attracted people in
Hainan and explores how discourses of modernity, peripherality, region and nation shape
the ways that they understand themselves and others as sexual subjects. Hainan has
historically been constructed as ‘peripheral’ and ‘backwards’, yet since the early 1980 has
been subject to multiple ‘modernisation’ initiatives; popular understandings of the region
thus oscillate between an impoverished island and a middle-class vacation playground.
These competing discourses of ‘place’ inform the construction of sexual identities in the
region and serve as the fields within which same-sex attracted people lay claim to belonging
and to the legitimacy of their identity constructions. Sexuality thus becomes as site at which
certain notions of ‘place’ in Hainan are constantly negotiated, performed, deployed and
subverted and unequal relations between the islands ‘native’ and Mainland migrant
populations are maintained and contested.