Some memories about Taiwan before I forget them

I've got tons of things that I should be doing right now (as usual), but on the way home from shopping, I caught some of this interview with NPR China correspondent John Ruwitch in which he reflected on his experiences in China since 1992, when he first visited Kunming (this is around 10:29 in the interview). That was about the time I started living in Taiwan, so I started thinking about what I might say about my own memories of those days. I'm at a point in life where I'm constantly worrying about forgetting things, so perhaps I should write down a few impressions before they're washed away.

Ruwitch was talking about the economic growth in China between the first time he was there and 2001, when he returned to report from there, so I'll mention a few impressions about what I saw (or what I think I saw) in Taiwan. (I realize that other people might have seen different things or disagree with me about what I saw, etc., etc. Feel free to add comments to this post or write about your memories on your own blog and send me a link.)

One thing that I often think of and mention about economic change in Taiwan was how it was reflected in the students I was teaching at different times. I remember that when I surveyed night school students in my class in the Foreign Languages & Literature Department in 1993, quite a few of them wrote that their parents were farmers or factory workers. 

Skip ahead to when I was teaching in the 2000s, and I recall more students whose parents were college-educated and/or were in more white-collar jobs. Some of their parents even owned factories, particularly in China. One student told us that her father had retired at the age of 44 after running a business in China. He was one of the 台商 (Taishang, or Taiwanese people running businesses in China). According to the Chinese-language Wikipedia article on Taishang, this was during the third investment peak of Taishang in China. 

One of the social phenomena regarding Taishang was how it complicated marriages. You'd sometimes hear about relatives or relatives' relatives or friends' friends who had gone to China to invest in a business and were living there for years. Somehow, the husbands who went, usually by themselves, would get involved with a local Chinese woman. Sometimes they would even get married. So there they'd have a wife, and in Taiwan, they'd still have a wife (and usually a family). These kinds of situations would also become material for the media to talk about, on the news, talk shows, and TV dramas. Some students in my Freshman English for Non-Majors (FENM) course even used it as material for an English-language play they wrote and performed. When one of the actors said to another, "He has a woman outside" (a direct translation of "他在外面有個女人"), I couldn't resist looking out the window, which got everyone laughing, including the actors. (I guess I had a bit of a mean streak.)

I don't know what has happened recently with the Taishang phenomenon; I've heard that a lot of them have moved to other countries in southeast Asia due to the political issues between China and Taiwan, and also due to the fact that salaries have gone up for Chinese factory workers, I believe. Maybe I should read this book by Shelley Rigger (reviewed in the Taipei Times). 

Anyway, I wanted to write down something of what I remembered from my days in Taiwan. Maybe I'll write a few more of these if I get the urge. 

Finished The Great Exodus from China

I just finished reading Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang's The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan. I can't say I enjoyed the book--it's about trauma, after all--but I appreciated Yang's work on it and especially his generous use of Taiwan scholarship in the process. I've complained elsewhere about English-language books on Taiwan that don't cite Taiwanese scholarship as much as I think they should; I'm glad to see that Yang took that scholarship seriously. (My one complaint is that in his bibliography, the titles of Chinese-language books and articles are only written in pinyin--I'd prefer characters. But perhaps that's an editorial decision that Yang had no control over.)

The book is an interesting combination of archival work, interviews, readings of fiction and non-fiction from the time periods discussed, along with some statistical information (as when Yang argues that the numbers of mainlanders coming to Taiwan during and after the KMT defeat was less than usually assumed). I appreciated the variety of sources he brought to his study. I also appreciate his reflections on his own positionality in relation to his subject. I think it was an important (but probably controversial) move. I'll have to look at some reviews of the book later on to see how reviewers responded to this approach. (I am having trouble accessing NU's library databases right now, so I'll come back to this later.)

What's the next book on my list? I'm not sure right now. Yang's discussion of Long Ying-tai's 《大江大海1949》 makes me want to read that book just to get my own impression of it. We'll see, though... Maybe I want to read something less traumatic!

Update, 9:33 p.m. I found some reviews of the book. Here are a few:

Qian, L. Behind the History and Sociology of Memory: A Review of Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang’s The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan (2021, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Int J Polit Cult Soc 37, 291–298 (2024). https://rdcu.be/eagUR  

Yang, D.MH. A Reply to Licheng Qian’s “Behind the History and Sociology of Memory: A Review of Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang’s The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan (2021, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)”. Int J Polit Cult Soc 37, 299–307 (2024). https://rdcu.be/eagVZ

A couple of quotes from Yang's response to Qian that caught my eye--they expand on the question I had above regarding his discussion of his positionality in relation to his topic:

My family immigrated to Canada from Taiwan when I was a young teenager. Taiwan is located in the strategic contact zones between Chinese, Japanese, and American empires. I learned about my home island’s painful and multilayered history of migration and colonialism belatedly as a graduate student returning from Canada. This history included my family’s anguish and sorrow caused by the arrival of the mainlanders in the mid-twentieth century, a past that my grandparents and parents had kept largely silent. Faced with the complexity and nuances of different but interconnected traumatic experiences on the island, I was absolutely overwhelmed. My [305||306] conflicting emotions of loyalty toward my own victimized family members and the profound empathy that I gradually developed for the hundreds of thousands of waishengren families through my archival research and fieldwork had tormented me. Given my positionality, I did not know how to tell the waishengren story adequately and “objectively.” How should a descendent of the colonized and victimized write about the trauma of the former colonizers and victimizers? (305-306)

...... 

Many are going to be skeptical about the modality, as well as the sincerity of my transformation. The skepticism is understandable. Building empathetic understand-ing and rapprochement among communities, people, and nations holding serious grudges against one another is easier said than done. It is a long and difficult “working through” process where all parties have to be wholeheartedly committed. I have been told in private by a number of colleagues in Taiwan that intellectuals in certain local circles on both ends of the mnemonic divide do not really appreciate what I am doing. A second-generation mainlander professor told his German colleague who was attending one of my talks in Taiwan: “Who does this guy think he is? We don’t need his sympathy!” (306) 

Harrison, H. (2021). [Review of the book The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory and Identity in Modern Taiwan, by Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang]. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 52(2), 306-307. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/803869. 

Yung, K. K. (2023). Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan. International Journal of Taiwan Studies, 6(1), 209–211. https://doi.org/10.1163/24688800-20221258

Gustafsson, K. (2023). [Review of the book The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, by Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang]. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 83(1), 231-235. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jas.2023.a922635.

Rebecca Nedostup talk, “War Being” in Mid-Twentieth Century China and Taiwan

Need to watch this video sometime.

I don't know if it's my computer or their set-up, but the audio is terrible.

[Update 10/31/24: Uh oh...]

Review of A World of Turmoil published

My review of Stephen J. Hartnett's book, A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War, is out in the latest issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs. (Although the issue is dated Fall, 2023, it was published almost a year later!)

While I had a few problems with Hartnett's conclusions and recommendations, I found the book to be a valuable overview of the roles of communication and rhetoric in the history of US-China-Taiwan relations from a Taiwan-sympathetic rhetoric scholar.

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu, eds. Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire, University of Hawai'i Press, 2023.

This book showed up out of the middle of nowhere. I saw that there was an interview with the editors on the New Books Network, but before listening to the interview, I ordered the book. (To be honest, I still haven't listened to the interview. But I'll get around to it sooner or later!)

In my somewhat foggy state of mind, I think I was attracted to the word "persuasion" in the title and the term "pan-Asian rhetoric" in the book's summary. Paging through the book, I was surprised to see a chapter on Li Xianglan (李香蘭), who is also known as Yamaguchi Yoshiko (山口 淑子) or Shirley Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi was someone I had forgotten that I had heard of before--the other day I stumbled onto her movie, China Nights (「支那の夜」), also known as Shanghai Nights (「上海之夜」) on YouTube. I ended up watching the whole movie even though it was 98% Japanese with no subtitles. (Needless to say, I didn't get a lot out of the dialogue.) The Wikipedia article about Li Xianglan (zh) reminded me that she had also played an Indigenous girl in a movie made in Taiwan called Sayon's Bell (「サヨンの鐘」). A 2011 post by Darryl Sterk from the anthropological blog Savage Minds introduces a recent "anti-aboriginal romance film" named Finding Sayun (【不一樣的月光：尋找沙韻】) that critiques the representation of Indigenous people in the original film.* 

Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading that chapter to find out more about Yamaguchi and Sayon's Bell, which I've also found a copy of on YouTube: 

I also found this 10-minute preview of Finding Sayun: 

* I think my title punctuation is a mess in this paragraph--apologies!

A new (old) book in the former native speaker's library

I got back last Saturday from Yokohama, where I had a great experience talking to a small but very interested audience about George H. Kerr, his process(es) of writing what eventually became Formosa Betrayed, how Taiwanese students at Kansas State University used Kerr's book in their "battle of the pens" with pro-KMT students, and the translations of the book into Chinese. (Some of this is discussed in my 2014 conference paper, "Formosa Translated.") 

While I was there, I also got a chance to talk with my friends Su Yao-tsung, Hidekazu Sensui, and Yukari Yoshihara about a project we're working on related to Kerr. (More details forthcoming.) I also had a lot of conversations with Su about Kerr, the writing of Formosa Betrayed and his other works, the February 28 Incident, the Taiwan independence movement in Japan and the United States, and the Cold War context of Kerr's teaching and writing about Taiwan. 

He also suggested a topic that I might work on researching related to that last point, so I decided to look up some books written about Taiwan during the 1950s. I just got one of them in the mail, Geraldine Fitch's (infamous) Formosa Beachhead (which is also available online). 

Fitch, who died in 1976 at the age of 84, was described in the New York Times obituary as "a consultant editor to The Free China Review and other English‐language publications in Taipei, Taiwan." 

Judging from a quick skim of the book, Formosa Beachhead is less about Taiwan than it is about China and the United States' policies towards China (and Nationalist China in particular). It'll be interesting to read in more detail.

There are a couple of contemporaneous reviews of the book, including the following:

• W. Macmahon Ball, in Pacific Affairs (concludes that "[t]he book should win enthusiastic readers in some sections of the Middle West and in Formosa")
• Karl A. Wittfogel, in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (a not-surprisingly glowing review by the professional ex-Communist)

I need to go home to find George H. Kerr's review of the book, but he was not as kind as these two were.

Need to watch: Fareed Zakaria's CNN special about "Taiwan: Unfinished Business"

I saw an ad for this Fareed Zakaria special on Taiwan, but I wasn't able to see it when it was on CNN, so I'm recording it and will watch it later.

I saw that some people on Twitter criticized the title, wondering whose "unfinished business" it was--the CCP's? One poster (Isla Island) wrote, "'Unfinished business' parrots Beijing's propaganda that its planned invasion & annexation of Taiwan is part of a 'unfinished Chinese civil war'."

I thought the title was interesting in light of the fact that one of the early titles for George H. Kerr's Formosa Betrayed was The Formosan Affair: Unfinished Business on the Pacific Frontier--and then just The Formosan Affair: Unfinished Business. Evidently that title was considered by Houghton Mifflin to be a bit too dry, which is why we ended up with Formosa Betrayed (I really think an exclamation point would go well at the end of that: Formosa Betrayed!). 

Anyway, I'm curious to see what Zakaria has to say. Will it be better than John Oliver's masterful piece on Taiwan, in which he compares it to the "Stanley Cup": "different people keep passing it around and and carving their names on it"? We'll see...

[Update, 3/14: I liked John Oliver's version better.]

Mark Mancall oral history recording

I was about to email Mark Mancall to ask him a question about George Kerr, but I was saddened to find out that he passed away in 2020. Dr. Mancall was a brilliant and thoughtful man--I had a chance to talk to him once back in 2017.

Linked to the obituary is an oral history interview of Mancall. I'm listening to it now where he's talking about his experience studying with John King Fairbank. At around 10 minutes, he talks about how when he was student teaching at Harvard, Fairbank would stand in the back of the classroom and imitate him! Fairbank also made Mancall chop wood. (Beginning to sound like Mr. Miyagi...)

Question re: "The China Tiffin Club of San Francisco and Bay Area"

I love to run into these kinds of puzzles, but this one has me stumped. I came across a letter written by John H. Falge from The China Tiffin Club of San Francisco and Bay Area, thanking George Kerr for speaking at the Club on Feb. 23, 1950. (A funny part of his praise of the talk: "The points you developed stood out prominently because the talk was just the right length.") 

I'm guessing that Falge is the same person buried at Arlington National Cemetery.  He was evidently in the Navy during WWI, according to these documents that mention him. (In fact, here's a picture of him and his fellow officers of the USS. Wadsworth.) 

Anyway, my point is not so much to find out more about Commander Falge as it is to find out about the China Tiffin Club of San Francisco and Bay Area. Right now Google gives me only one result for "China Tiffin Club of San Francisco," and it's for a 1954-1955 membership directory. To quote the description (in case this page disappears):

From inside front cover: "A purely social Tiffin Club where former residents of the Orient meet to renew old friendships, made 'somewhere east of Suez' and cherished forever."Contains: List of officers Introduction Members List of guest speakers 1952-1955 Constitution and by-laws List of other similar clubsFrom a meeting announcement in the 1/22/1959 Daily Independent Journal newspaper, San Rafael, CA:"Members of the club are 'old China hands,' who meet each month to renew old friendships, eat Chinese food and hear informal talks on the Orient..."

My question is, what is a Tiffin Club (purely social or otherwise)? 

[Update, 11/8/23: Well, to answer my own question, when I looked up "Tiffin" on Wikipedia, I found out that it's a kind of small mid-afternoon meal or snack, kind of like British teatime. the article says this about the etymology of the term:

In the British Raj, tiffin was used to denote the British custom of afternoon tea that had been supplanted by the Indian practice of having a light meal at that hour.^[4] It is derived from "tiffing", an English colloquial term meaning to take a little drink. By 1867 it had become naturalised among Anglo-Indians in northern British India to mean luncheon.^[5]

So my guess is that the China Tiffin Club is/was a kind of a lunch club whose members were "former residents of the Orient," as mentioned above. Question answered!]

Notes on Xing Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Xing Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication. University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

I finished reading this last Friday, but it has been a busy week. As I mentioned before, there were a couple of negative reviews of this book. One the things that one of them complained about was Lu's use of her own personal experience, especially in the first chapter, "My Family Caught in the Cultural Revolution." Howard Goldblatt calls the first chapter "a nearly fatal distraction" and defends his arguably "churlish" response to Lu's reminiscences by arguing that

(1) [i]n the quarter century and more since the Cultural Revolution ended, with the death of Mao and the convenient indictment of the Gang of Four, dozens of memoirs (with "J'accuse" in evidence far more than "mea culpa") have appeared in English, along with numerous scholarly and journalistic works on the GPCR; one more may be of some psychological benefit to the author, but it essentially duplicates what others have already written, often with more power and evocative effect than the chapter of the book under review. (2) As I stated earlier, the inclusion of a personal memoir in a work of scholarship invests the entire project with an undesirable patchwork quality. (p. 170).

While it's true that there are already a lot of Cultural Revolution memoirs (many of which are cited by Lu), it's my feeling that Goldblatt is a bit off in his evaluation, largely due to what I'd say is a misunderstanding of the book's primary audience. Goldblatt characterizes Lu's audiences as "linguists interested in the study of rhetorical symbols and their impact on national citizenries, and those interested in China's modern history, such as scholars and 'China watchers'" (pp. 170-1), ignoring the obvious audience of rhetoricians, many of whom might be more focused on Western rhetorical traditions and practices and might not have read those "dozens of memoirs" that he mentions. Furthermore, different disciplines have different standards for the inclusion of personal experience in scholarship. While not all books in rhetorical studies include chapters on the author's related experiences, it's not unheard of, and it can sometimes be seen by scholars in the field as an important way of demonstrating the author's positionality in relation to their topic. In fact, a review of the book in Argumentation and Advocacy suggests that Lu's memories "give the book a human quality and make Lu's own feelings toward her subject clear" (p. 116), and a review in Rhetoric & Public Affairs argues that the "experiential context drives Lu's inquiry and indeed sets this work apart from (and above) other scholarly treatments of the period" (p. 506). 

I find myself more in agreement with one of the critiques by Michael Schoenhals: he argues that Lu's adoption of both the weak and strong forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the former being that language influences thought and the latter, that language determines thought) is not particularly helpfully used in explicating the rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution. As Schoenhals suggests, Lu's book seems to ask readers simply to accept that the Chinese people of that period lost their ability to think for themselves because of the language used in political slogans, wall posters, revolutionary songs, etc. For instance, Lu argues that "the use of violent language leads to violent action" (p. 89). While I'm inclined to believe her (particularly in the aftermath of January 6, 2021), I feel as though Lu is counting on us to believe her rather than explaining to us how/why this could happen. Her example of the persecution and murder of Bian Zhongyun, a high school principal in Beijing, shows a correlation between the violent rhetoric and her torture and murder by the Red Guards (p. 89), but as the old saying goes, correlation ≠ causation. Did the violent language in the posters cause the Red Guards to torture and kill Bian? How do you prove that? I'm not sure what kind of evidence I would want to see, however. (And I'm not sure Schoenhals is, either.) Perhaps I should look at some of Lu's other sources, such as her citation of Hannah Arendt on "the banality of evil." It might be that bringing in some of the other theorists that she cites in her literature review, like Burke, McGee, or Wander, would better support her argument here. (She does this later in her discussion of political ritual, where she cites Rowland and Frank on "rhetorical violence [that] often leads to societal violence" [qtd in Lu, p. 146].) 

One interesting point about the idea that people lost their ability to think for themselves is that Lu also gives examples of people who were still able to think for themselves. For instance, one of her interviewees says, "I never knew what other people thought about the [political] rituals and bizarre things going on during the Cultural Revolution. I considered some of them problematic and foolish, but I never dared to say so. I couldn't speak my mind and I didn't trust what other people said, as I was afraid of being betrayed or persecuted" (qtd. in Lu, p. 150). This raises a question about whether most people had no "inner thoughts" or whether there were many people who were just afraid to express their inner thoughts. 

I also have to agree that at times, the book seemed more descriptive than analytical. For instance, there's a description of a "big character poster" (dazibao) at a barbershop:

The cornerstone of the Cultural Revolution was the shared political understanding that everything deemed proletarian was moral and ethical while everything deemed nonproletarian was evil and harmful. This formula could even be applied to a person's hairstyle. Hairstyles considered bourgeois or revisionist were regarded as harmful to society and strictly prohibited. Liang (1998) recounts the following example of a wall poster seen in front of a barbershop: '"Only heroes can quell tigers and leopards I wild bears never daunt the brave' [Mao's poem]. For the cause of the Cultural Revolution, this shop will not cut hair that parts from behind, or in the middle, or that is less than one inch short, as these hair styles are nonproletarian. The shop does not provide hair oil, gel, or cream. The shop does not provide hair blowing or temple shaving services for male comrades, nor perms or curling hair services for female comrades" (125). The practice of starting a poster with one of Mao's poem was a common feature of poster writing, employed both as a stylistic device and as a justification to legitimize the action. (p. 78)

I think this description of the wall poster could have been enhanced by an analysis of how the poem was being used. Why was that particular poem chosen to head the poster? How did it legitimize the actions of the barber? (And if there's no connection, that might also be interesting to discuss, since it might signal how randomly quotations from Mao were being used in the big character posters.)

Ben Krueger, author of the Argumentation and Advocacy review, notes a failure in Lu's comparative approach: "Her comparisons of the Cultural Revolution's rhetoric to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union seem particularly pedestrian" (p. 117). I have to agree with this, too. There are gestures toward comparison with other rhetorics, such as Lu's discussion of militaristic terms, where she notes that "Lakoff and Johnson (1980) discussed the use of war metaphors by U.S. presidents to distort realities and constitute a license for policy change" (p. 91), but the comparisons often don't go beyond this kind of quick reference. 

There were several places in the conclusion where she makes predictions that, from the perspective of 2023, I could only respond to in the margins with "Oh well..." In her last paragraph, Lu writes that "one thing is certain [about China's future]: the age of ideological totalitarianism is over" (p. 205). I see that there is now a new preface to the paperback edition, written in 2020, in which she expresses concern that younger Chinese will not learn about the Cultural Revolution and that "such rhetoric of polarization, dehumanization, and violence in the name of morality and justice will be evoked, escalated, and manipulated again in China or elsewhere in the world on a similar scale" (p. xii). She also notes the chilling language of Trump during the 2016 election, which she says reminded her of the Cultural Revolution.  

Despite all of these criticisms (or complaints), I did learn a lot from this book, and reading it also made me reflect on what was going on in Taiwan during the same time period. Some of the rhetorical features of the Cultural Revolution, such as the violent, ugly language, the attempts at brainwashing, and the use of political ritual, deification of the leader, etc., were similar in Taiwan during the martial law period. Like Mao, Chiang Kai-shek was called by such epithets as "the nation's savior, the helmsman of the era, the great man of the world" (民族的救星、時代的舵手、世界的偉人). And as I mentioned a couple of years ago in relation to Li Ang's story, "Auntie Tiger," there was a "feeling of fear and conspiracy in the air during that time." So was Taiwan's martial law period different from the Cultural Revolution in kind or just in degree? How might the rhetorics of these periods be compared?

Next up: A-Chin Hsiau's Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan, which might give me some insight on how Taiwan moved from Chinese Nationalism to Taiwanese Nationalism. 

Next up on my reading list

Taking a second look at the reading list that ChatGPT created for me (discussed here), I realized that not only did ChatGPT not actually work through the entire list of comparative rhetoric sources that I had provided, but that it also "lied" about how it had organized things. For instance, while it says it "started with some articles that introduce the concept of comparative rhetoric and translingual approaches to meaning-making, such as Cushman's "Translingual and Decolonial Approaches to Meaning Making" and Cousins' "Self-reflexivity and the Labor of Translation," it actually listed Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics first, followed by Rhetoric in Modern Japan, and then Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Hmmph.

Anyway, I've decided that after reading Culp's Articulating Citizenship, I'll read Xing Lu's Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, at least in part to get a sense of what was going on "across the pond" (from Taiwan) during the time period I'm working in. Lu's book got mixed reviews, but I'm going to try to read it with an open mind. (Michael Schoenhals described himself as "profoundly bored by what has to count as one of this century’s least successful works, so far, on a most important topic"(quite a judgement on a book published in 2004!)--at least Howard Goldblatt admitted that some might find some of his own objections to the book "churlish"!) I'm hoping this book is better than a book on language and politics in Taiwan that I never finished reading because, toward the end, I felt I was just reading a list of examples without much analysis (a "taxonomy" of language examples, basically). Wish me luck!

Notes on Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship

Culp, Robert. Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912-1940. Harvard University Asia Center, 2007.

I'm not sure where I first heard of this book, but it turned out to be very useful for thinking about my own project on Taiwan in at least two ways. One way was expected--Culp takes a close look at some of the secondary school language textbooks used in China during the period under investigation, which was something I wanted to see in order to think about how I am discussing elementary-level language textbooks in Taiwan. Culp notes a change from the earlier Republican era production of textbooks, which allowed for a range of political and social perspectives to be presented, to the post-1927 period, during which 

the Nationalist government quickly promulgated regulations requiring submission of textbooks for approval. ... Detailed curriculum standards coupled with regular review of textbooks and increasing institutional oversight led to a progressive standardization of textbooks over the course of the Nanjing decade. (p. 50)

The earlier textbooks, as Culp points out, included readings on social issues from a variety of perspectives, such as "Zhou Zuoren's descriptions of utopian socialism, Cai Yuanpei's anarchist writings on integrating work and study, Hu Shi's calls for individual autonomy, and empirical analyses of social inequalities" (p. 140). This range of perspectives was replaced after 1927 by "readings that celebrated the Nationalist Party, called for party and state guidance in gradual processes of social leveling and reform, and promoted an ideal of young people's dedicating themselves to national development and social service" (p. 148).

Culp also includes examples of student writings published in student publications to show how they were taking up the ideas expressed in their textbooks during those different periods. I'm having less success finding student writings for my project, though I have come across some. Hopefully, I'll be able to find some more examples as I continue to work on this.

The other way in which the book is useful is that it reminds me of the necessity to connect what the KMT  was doing with education in martial law era Taiwan with what it had developed in Republican China. What did the Nationalists bring over to Taiwan in terms of their literacy and civic education beliefs and practices, and how did they adapt that to the context of postwar Taiwan? How much and in what ways did they see the Taiwanese students as similar to and different from the students on the mainland? 

These are some of my thoughts about the book right now--here are a few reviews of the book that I came across, if you want more detail about Culp's arguments:

• Borthwick, Sally. Review of Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1945. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 69 no. 2, 2009, p. 443-450. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/jas.0.0028. 
• Liu, Jennifer. Review of Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1942. China Review International, vol. 18 no. 2, 2011, p. 179-182. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cri.2011.0047.
• Tsin, Michael. ROBERT CULP. Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, number 291.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center. 2007. Pp. xvi, 382. $49.50., The American Historical Review, Volume 113, Issue 5, December 2008, Pages 1500–1501, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.113.5.1500 
• Weston, Timothy. Review of Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1942. The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 68, no. 1, 2009, pp. 260–61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20619685. Accessed 28 July 2023.

Notes on Mary Garrett & Xiaosui Xiao, "The Rhetorical Situation Revisited"

Garrett, Mary, and Xiaosui Xiao. "The Rhetorical Situation Revisited." Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 2, 1993, pp. 30-40. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3885923

Somehow they managed to spell Garrett's name wrong in the article, spelling it Garret instead, which makes it tough to see how many times the article has been cited because you have to look it up both with her name written correctly and with it misspelled. Anyway, it seems this article has been undercited, which is a shame because I think it's a very useful contribution to the discussion of rhetorical situations. I read it a long time ago, but I'm revisiting it myself because I thought it might be good for my comparative rhetoric course. 

Garrett and Xiao are using the case of the Qing Dynasty's response to the Opium Wars to add to the discussion of rhetorical situations. As I mentioned in my "Formosa Translated" paper, the rhetorical situation, as first conceptualized by Lloyd Bitzer, saw rhetorical acts as emerging from a rhetor's recognition of an exigence--an outside event or situation--that called for action in the form of speech. As Richard Vatz saw it, however, the exigence was not coming from outside but was actually created by the rhetor. In either case, however, the rhetor--the speaker--was the main focus of the rhetorical act and the actor in the rhetorical situation.

Garrett and Xiao argue that the audience and what they call the "discourse tradition" have more of a role in the rhetorical situation than the speaker does. According to them, 

The audience is ... the pivotal element which connects the rhetorical exigency (the audience's unsolved questions), the constraints (the audience's expectations), and the rhetor (as a member of the audience). With this shift the debate over the facticity of the exigency loses much of its force since the important question becomes whether the audience accepts that an exigency exists. (p. 39)

In terms of the discourse tradition, they argue that how (or if) an exigency is perceived by the audience is largely dependent on "what audiences will accept as the appropriate forms of discourses, the proper styles, and the right modes of argumentation in relation to certain topics and contexts" (p. 37). These in turn are conditioned (if not determined) by the how similar issues have been addressed in the past. In the case of the Qing response to the Opium Wars, Garrett and Xiao argue that the discourse tradition regarding foreign relations, which consisted mainly of viewing foreigners as barbarians that needed to be managed or sinicized, resulted in a delay in the Qing court's recognition that the Western incursion on China was "unprecedented." While some literati-officials did try to warn the government of the seriousness of the situation, most officials saw it in terms of previous Chinese-foreign relations. 

It wasn't until after the second Opium War that more officials started to argue that the Western powers were not content to be allowed to trade and be treated like like tribute states. Garrett and Xiao quote official Li Hongzhang, who wrote that "[t]he Westerners ... profess peace and friendship, but what they really want is to seize and possess China. If one country creates trouble with us, others will stir up conflict. This is a truly unprecedented situation [ch[u]angju] in the past several thousand years" (p. 35). This recognition led to self-strengthening movements of various types in response to the newly recognized situation.

However, it's not entirely clear from the authors' discussion what exactly changed that allowed the officials to recognize a different exigency than the one that had originally been shaped by the discourse tradition. There are a few possibilities, judging from the article. One is that the "open-minded Prince Gong ... [who] was the earliest member of the royal family to acknowledge the changing situation of China" (p. 35). He helped to create what Garrett and Xiao call a "proto-Foreign Office" (the Zongli Yamen), whose officials helped change the perception of what was going on. There were also other "[s]igns of dynastic decline" happening that suggested serious problems in Qing China. Even so, the authors point out that there was a debate between the self-strengtheners and the more traditional Neo-Confucian scholar-officials regarding how to respond to the "unprecedented situation." While the self-strengtheners called for changes in administrative practices and study of Western knowledge, the Neo-Confucians stressed moral cultivation as an answer to the problems facing China. 

One question I'm having here is similar to the "classic" question regarding discourse communities--how strong are the boundaries that contain the members of the discourse community or the discourse tradition? Do changes in the discourse tradition or the discourse community have to be occasioned by attacks from the "outside" (such as the Western incursions on China in the mid-1800s)? In the case of China, this probably also involves the debate over the "response to the West" thesis of historians like John King Fairbank. (See this essay for a summary of some of the debate.) In terms of the rhetorical situation, how does a rhetor, as a member of the audience (as Garrett and Xiao posit it) step outside of the discourse tradition to propose a new way of seeing (or creating) the exigency? 

Another question that I'm thinking about, in light of what I've been reading about decolonizing comparative rhetoric, is whether the "rhetorical situation" (however it's construed) is a universal concept that can be used to discuss rhetorical practices in non-Western cultures without fear of imposition of Western concepts on non-Western contexts. And how does the concept of discourse traditions fit into this, in the case of Garrett and Xiao's discussion? Is it also a universally applicable concept? One idea that comes to mind here is if there are variations in how strong discourse traditions are in different cultures or contexts. (This might dangerously lead to generalizations about "conservative" cultures as opposed to cultures more open to change.) Also, in the authors' discussion of discourse traditions, topoi figure in as a "key element"--is the concept of topoi universal (whereas the actual topoi themselves might vary according to context or culture)? I'm inclined to think that these three concepts (rhetorical situations, discourse traditions, and topoi) could be considered important parts of rhetorical practices in most contexts, while the forms that they take or the meaning of them might vary. 

One final thought is that I wish Jenny Edbauer's 2005 essay on rhetorical ecologies had engaged this article. In their conclusion, Garrett and Xiao point out that "viewed diachronically, the rhetorical situation is an ever-changing spiral of interactions among entities and groups which shift roles and shape each other even when in opposition" (pp. 39-40). This does not seem far from Edbauer's argument.

Notes on Xiaoye You, Genre Networks and Empire

You, Xiaoye. Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China. Southern Illinois University Press, 2023. 

This book will be, I imagine, a challenging read for people in rhetorical studies (and even comparative rhetoric) who are not familiar with historical and literary (and rhetorical) scholarship on early imperial China. You focuses mostly on the Han dynasty, but also necessarily brings in the Qin and the pre-imperial kingdoms of the Zhou, Shang, and Xia. He's also discussing genres that scholars in rhetorical studies rarely address. In fact, as I mentioned recently and long ago, some comparative rhetoricians have advised against casting a broader net when identifying what counts as "rhetoric" in a particular setting. Fortunately, You seems to have ignored this advice. 

But saying that this book will be a challenging read doesn't mean it shouldn't be read. I found it full of interesting ideas about ancient Chinese conceptions of what people were doing when they engaged in debate or tried to persuade rulers toward particular courses of action--all political work, where the decision-making process involved imbricated genres and "multimodal" presentations that sometimes included music, food, and wine as modes of communication/persuasion. This suggests seeing rhetoric very broadly, including interpreting what is usually just seen as a "setting" or "context" for rhetoric as an active participant in the rhetorical process--part of the "genre networks" of You's title. He makes the point that studying genre networks provides insights into Chinese (and other) rhetorical practices that are not offered by studies of individual texts (p. 170).

The term 文體經緯, which he translates as "genre networks," indirectly comes from Liu Xie's (劉勰) Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (文心雕龍), although it's not clear that Liu used this term (I found both文體 and 經緯 here, but not together). You uses but doesn't dwell on Liu's discussion of genres; at times he criticizes it for its overly literary approach that tends to "deprive[] texts of much of their sociohistorical agency" (p. 145). Relatedly, he also suggests that Liu's conception of "genres" is too fixed on text types. You seems to prefer Sima Qian's (司馬遷) approach, which "emplaced discourses in unfolding events featuring genres as key actors mediating and shaping the events through genre networks" (p. 15). 

Although he criticizes Liu Xie for seeing genres as fixed text types, in some cases, You (helpfully) outlines and illustrates the patterns of some of the genres he’s discussing, such as the 詔 (zhao) edicts (p. 55) and answers to court exam questions (p. 64). These patterns, or moves, help to make the genres identifiable as text types, but at the same time, You shows how they are embedded in and vary with the sociopolitical situations where they're used. For instance, he describes the general form and tone of the commentaries submitted to the emperor, but then he points out how a particular text both conformed to and flouted the rules (or common understandings) regarding commentaries. The author, Gu Yong (You writes his name as 穀永, but I believe it's 谷永), follows the "rules" by couching his criticisms of the current ruler in "historical anecdotes and the Confucian classics" (p. 65), but he then "offers scathing criticisms" of the emperor with a "candidness [that] was almost unmatched among his peers" (p. 66). Then, like his peers, Gu concludes with a typified (indirect) plea: "I said what I am not supposed to say in my counsel, so I should be put to death ten thousand times" (p. 66)--in this case, however, Gu's use of this set phrase was much closer to the truth: You notes that Gu was demoted and barely avoided execution for his candidness (pp. 66-7).

He also examines the rhetorics of gender and the gendered rhetorics of the period, particularly in the Inner Court, which is where "the imperial consorts and their support staff" lived (p. 76). (For an interesting discussion of what becoming an imperial consort was like, see this article from the South China Morning Post--it's more focused on the Qing Dynasty, though, so not everything applies to earlier dynasties.) As You writes, men tried to control women in the Inner Court with a two-pronged approach: by "framing gender relations with the yin-yang theory" and by blaming women in the royal family for "natural anomalies, disasters, and social woes" (p. 75). Because court histories of the period were written by men, women's perspectives are underrepresented, but You is able to point out how elite women like Empress Dowagers Ma (馬皇太后) and Deng (登皇太后) used their literacy to rule the Inner Court and govern relations between the royal family and the state. He also shows how Ban Zhao (班昭) finished the Han Shu (漢書) after the death of her brother, Ban Gu (班固), and wrote Lessons for Women (女戒). You argues that although she seemed to conform "to elite men's expectations of women, Ban was subversive. She argued for women's education, took the instruction of women from the hands of men, and conceptualized a rhetorically savvy woman" (p. 93). 

The time period he has chosen to study also allows You to look into the early years of how Confucianism (the word is arguably anachronistic) was being used and taking shape in the court, along with other belief systems. The Han dynasty came after the Qin, which had been led by Qin Shihuang, famous for burning books and executing scholars, so Confucianism wasn't the rigid doctrine that many people (at least Westerners) imagine today. You points out, for instance, that while disputations and counsel often relied on the Four Books (along with other sources, including recently translated Buddhist texts), the literati used the texts to argue to make varying points. This led me to wonder if perhaps You’s observations about the malleability of the Confucian (and other) classics during debates and discussions in the Han court had to do with the fact that the meanings of the classics hadn’t been subjected to the kinds of commentary and interpretation that came later with, for instance, Zhu Xi’s (朱熹) commentaries that I understand became authoritative (or orthodoxy) in later centuries. (Wikipedia says that Zhu Xi’s commentaries were considered unorthodox in his time, but that later they became “the basis of civil service examinations up until 1905.”). I guess that would be something to explore (I'm sure it has been explored already).

You's conclusions about the limitations of decolonizing comparative rhetorics based on his study represent an attempt to show how his study speaks to current concerns in the field that I've been reading about as part of the seminar I attended a couple of weeks ago, so it's good to see another perspective on concepts like epistemic delinking. As You argues, it's important not to ignore the fact that decentering Western epistemologies by exploring "indigenous modes of representation" needs to take into consideration the possibility that "these ways may have been employed to establish ethnic, racial, gendered, colonial, and aesthetic hierarchies in a specific society or culture" (p. 172). Further, You argues,

a full epistemic delinking is not only impossible but also unproductive for actuating a more equal and just academic and social future. Complete delinking is impossible because of the interlocking nature of cultures, of rhetorical traditions, and of academic discourses, which developed historically by engaging and learning from one another. It is unproductive because an aggressive version of epistemic delinking could encourage nationalism, isolationism, racism, and xenophobia, as seen in the foreign policy debates in the Han dynasty, during the Cold War era, and now in the struggles of de-Westernization. (p. 172)

I think this is going to be a controversial conclusion (though I agree with it to an extent), and I wish You had said a bit more about it since it seems to be an important point. His book seems to me to be doing some delinking work by taking ancient Chinese thought systems and rhetorical practices largely on their terms, though at times he does make brief comparisons to Western thought and rhetoric, and his discussion of "genre networks" is clearly hybridizing Chinese and Western theories about genre. Is this perhaps a model for balancing epistemic delinking with some kind of engagement?

And on that I will end... for now...

Notes on Bo Wang, "Comparative Rhetoric, Postcolonial Studies, and Transnational Feminisms"

Wang, Bo. "Comparative Rhetoric, Postcolonial Studies, and Transnational Feminisms: A Geopolitical Approach." Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 3, 2013, pp. 226-242 DOI:10.1080/02773945.2013.792692

This is another potential article for my undergraduate comparative rhetoric class because, like Mao, Wang discusses an approach to comparative rhetoric and then applies it to an example. In this case, rather than applying her recommendations to one particular text, Wang looks at a whole body of work--the women's journals published in China in the early twentieth century. 

One of the issues that Wang starts out critiquing is the tendency to view non-Western rhetorics through a Western lens. She also mentions the problem of not having enough knowledge of the other culture. Later, she quotes Rey Chow, who points to the danger of Westerners having a lot of information at hand about their own cultures and not as much about the other cultures, which "enable[s] their studies [about their own cultures] to become ever more nuanced and refined," while their studies of other traditions amount to "a crude lumping together of other histories, cultures, and languages with scant regard to exactly the same kinds of details an internal dynamics of thought that, theoretically speaking, should be part of the study of any tradition" (qtd. in Wang 232). This results in a Western view that not surprisingly argues that the other cultures aren't as subtle or developed as the West is. This isn't just a problem of accessibility to information, I don't think; I think that Chow and Wang are suggesting a sort of "ignorant confidence" on the parts of those doing research with inadequate preparation. [It's something that I worry about in my own work, which is probably why I'm taking so long to work on my research...]

Wang calls for "a new and more contemporary engagement with transnational spaces, hybrid identities, and subjectivities grounded in differences related to gender, class, race, and culture" (228). Specifically, she points out that "most scholarship in comparative rhetoric still focuses on canonical texts by elite male authors" (230). [This had me worrying again about my own attention to "canonical" writers--(mostly) male writers who are already discussed a lot in fields such as comparative literature and other disciplines. As I mentioned in my notes on the book about Yang Kui, I felt like his wife, Ye Tao, who was by many accounts a powerful public speaker, kind of disappeared into the background. I feel like I should learn more about her, as well as about other women rhetors in Taiwan. (I have a book about Xie Xuehong 謝雪紅, for instance, that I have been meaning to read for a long time. Maybe I should add that to my list.)]

[The two women I mentioned in the previous paragraph are relatively canonical, however. Wang mentions Roberta Binkley's study that pointed out that women prophets were silenced; this made me think of the Dutch missionary Candidius' discussion of the women prophets or "priestesses" in Sinkan, Formosa. These priestesses, called Inibs, performed religious ceremonies that Candidius describes and seemed to have had the power 

to prophesy good or evil, whether it will be rain, or whether fine and beautiful weather may be expected. They judge concerning unclean places, and banish evil spirits or devils; for, as they say, many evil spirits or devils dwell amongst the people, and these spirits the Inibs banish with much noise and clamour. They also carry hatchets in their hands, and chase the devil till he jumps into the water and is drowned. (Campbell 25)

Of course, one of Candidius' tasks as a missionary was to silence the priestesses, which is accomplished, as his fellow missionary, Rev. Junius, reports:

The priestesses, who were so great an obstacle to our work, have now lost all power, and are treated with contempt, on account of the many falsehoods they formerly promulgated. They are not allowed to enter any houses except their own, and are thus prevented from practising their former idolatry. (Campbell 186)

It might be necessary to think about the roles of these priestesses and how they were silenced in the interests of the patriarchal religion that the missionaries were promulgating. And also to keep in mind who's doing the writing here--it's not the Sinkandians.]

Wang points to the importance of considering in comparative rhetoric "not only what but also how we are reading" (230). She warns about the risks of "reifying the cultural, social, and material conditions of the texts we examine and homogenizing the theories and practices of particular rhetorics" (230). 

Wang argues for taking a "geopolitical approach" that "links cultural specificities with larger geopolitical forces and networks" (233). She argues that such an approach, tied to a concern with "how we read rather than what we read," can "allow us to rethink history, identity, and the nature of theoretical investigation in our field and to write new narratives that complicate our understanding of non-Western rhetorical traditions" (233-4). [One question I have here, and that's informed by the example she gives at the end of the essay, concerns the contrast between how we read and what we read: it seems to me that her selection of the women's journals and their articles is stressing the what as much as the how--if we don't pay attention to what we read, wouldn't that just lead to more readings of canonical works? What am I missing here in her contrast between the two?]

Wang goes on to argue for "a shift away from the study of discrete national rhetorics" and a need to "focus on the negotiation and exchanges through which rhetorical genres, concepts, and strategies come into being: the economics of knowledge, social relations, power, and the symbolic actions that engender rhetoric" (235). [How do we shift away from "discrete national rhetorics?" I guess I'm wondering what a national rhetoric is, for that matter. When Wang examines the writing of early twentieth-century Chinese women, is that a discrete (national) group? Or is the fact that the women writers write about women's issues in other countries and bring in translingual references to A Doll's House (238) a sign that this is a more transnational rhetoric, not just the rhetoric of a discrete national group? She mentions "the strategic force of hybridity in forming nüquanzhuyi discourse" (238), so that might be shifting away from national rhetorics.]

She concludes that her study "shows the interconnectedness of rhetorical works and larger networks, and often texts must be reinterpreted within every-changing cultural, historical, and scholarly contexts" (239). I think that one of the values of this study, too, is that it's looking at a body of work rather than just one rhetorical performance. That, and this quote, reminds me of Jenny Edbauer's article on rhetorical ecologies--going beyond the idea of discrete rhetorical situations that are being responded to.

Notes on LuMing Mao's "Writing the Other into Histories of Rhetoric"

Mao, LuMing. “Writing the Other into Histories of Rhetoric: Theorizing the Art of Recontextualization.” Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, edited by Michelle Ballif, Southern Illinois UP, 2013, pp. 41–57.

This might be a good article to have students read in an undergraduate comparative rhetoric course. (Like the one I'm supposed to be planning right now!) It asks important methodological (and ethical) questions about representing the rhetoric(s) of "the other" (or "the others"). Then it introduces some concepts and practices that might be helpful in answering those methodological and ethical questions and presents an approach to "the art of recontextualization" for representing other rhetorics. And it ends with an example of Mao's own analysis of the rhetoric of the Daodejing. 

Mao begins with some questions that I thought should be highlighted in a comparative rhetoric class:

What right ... do scholars have to represent this or that particular culture and its rhetorics? From what vantage point do they position themselves, and how does their position in turn shape and influence the outcomes of their studies? Why do we often encounter, in the accounts of the other, the privileging of facts over experiences or of logic over other modes of thinking? (42)

The first question is one that I often ask myself. Unfortunately, I'm not sure I've come up with any satisfying answer. Mao cites Linda Alcoff's "much cited" article "The Problem of Speaking for Others" to provide a four-step strategy for thinking about your own relation to the "others" you are speaking for or about. Fortunately, she seems to reject the idea of simply giving up on speaking for others (an option that I have been tempted to take over these long years); she suggests the need to question your reasons for speaking, to think about your own status and position in relation to who you are representing, to accept accountability for what you say, and to consider the consequences of what you have said "on the discursive and material context" (Mao 45). 

In arguing for "interdependence and interconnectivity" as important principles for representing rhetorics, Mao uses Bakhtin's concept of answerability to posit that "each act of contextualization represents a response to preceding acts of contextualization and further anticipates a response from similar future acts" (46). (I have to admit that I asked in the margin if it was necessary to contextualize the use of Bakhtin here. That is, should we take the ideas of dialogism and answerability as universally applicable? I'm not asking this to be a smart-aleck...) 

Mao argues for the importance of examining one's own context and its influence on how they're representing others; in addition, the context of the "other" needs to be examined, and it should not be assumed that the "other" is unified or speaks with one voice. He argues for "cultivating a processual mode of representation--where we continuously trouble our own modes of thinking and learn to listen to the voice and claim of the other" (47). 

Mao tries to show how this art of recontextualization would work in looking at the rhetoric of the Daodejing. He contextualizes the classic by pointing to Daoism "as a direct challenge to Confucianism and Legalism of its time, but also because the Daoist sensibilities have permeated Chinese culture and its thought patterns" and have "unexpected affinities with postmodern views" (48-9). He shows how different terms/concepts in the Daodejing interconnect with each other in a "discursive field" to create a rhetoric that can "challenge and subvert Confucian ideology" and Legalism (54). He also points out the tension between people's individual "Daos" and "the social and political pressure to codify one of them as the Dao for everyone else to follow" (54). Mao argues that this latter pressure was "driven by the rhetorical exigencies of the time [during the Han dynasty] and spurred on by political ambition" (55). (Here I wonder if we have moved from the Daodejing notion of the Dao into the Dao of the Confucians? As Lloyd and Sivin say in The Way and the Word, "in the hands of Confucius and those who followed him it [Dao] took on normative meanings" [200].)  

Mao ends by seeing how this discussion of the Dao might be applied to our current situation, focusing on the rise of "cultural nationalism" in China, in which (as he puts it), there is pressure for only one Dao ("read as the state ideology or the law of the land"), and Chinese citizens' more individual Daos are suppressed. 

One final question I have is in regards to the "processual mode of representation" that Mao raises earlier--I'm not sure I see that in this example. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place, or I'm not sure what to look for. What should this "processual mode" look like? Should we be bringing ourselves into the text and reflection on our own positions in relation to the texts or rhetorics that we are studying? 

Notes on Eric Hayot, “Vanishing Horizons"

Hayot, Eric. “Vanishing Horizons: Problems in the Comparison of China and the West.” A Companion to Comparative Literature, edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, John Wiley and Sons, 2011, pp. 88-107.

Hayot gives a different perspective on comparability or incommensurability from those of Lloyd and Ames. While Lloyd argues for the importance of paying attention to the contexts of debates/arguments in different cultures and the questions the interlocutors were trying to answer, and Ames argues that the modes of argumentation differ between ancient China and classical Greece (along with the assumptions, as Lloyd also suggests), Hayot focuses on the contexts for comparison of China and the West. 

Like Escobar and Dussel, Hayot focuses (first) on modernity--the European Enlightenment and colonial expansion--as the driving force for making comparisons. Like Lyon, Hayot argues that the process of making comparisons entails "a theory of comparison, of comparability, that is an act of philosophy and an act of practice" (88). The Jesuits who went to China, he writes, tried to argue that the Chinese (as Confucians) were "theological and philosophical cousins to the Catholic tradition" (92), and so they tried to show how Confucian beliefs and language presaged Christianity. After the Rites Controversy and subsequent banning of Christian missions from China by the Kangxi emperor, the next major context for comparisons between the West and China took the form of "the secular universals appropriate to the renewed disciplines of the European Enlightenment" (93). This secular universalism put non-Western cultures in a historical relation with the "modern" West (as Dussel also suggests), where the cultures that the Europeans encountered (and usually colonized) were cast as "pre-modern." 

China's loss in the two Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century confirmed for the West (and for many Chinese) that it needed to modernize. But the tiyong 體用 formulation of Zhang Zhidong became emblematic for how China would use Western learning (for "use") "effectively ceded the ground of the practical or the functional to modernity and its cultural others, while retaining for China a set of values that could subtend those practices and functions" (96). Hayot argues that this approach left the "non-Western or non-modern" with "something of the status of an aesthetic object" (96), since all practicality (science, etc.) was left to the modern West. From the western perspective, argues Hayot, 

the truly East Asian is therefore relegated to the realm of the pre-modern, and thus the realm of culture (including science and medicine) that developed prior to the East Asian encounter with Europe from the seventeenth century onward. Beyond the temporal and comparative boundary established by that encounter, "contamination" with the West renders suspect the nature or quality of East Asian authenticity, and reifies it as much as possible in the realm of culture--though reifying in this way is, as I have suggested, a very modern thing to do. (96-7)

[Rey Chow made a similar point about Chinese Studies as a discipline back in 1998: "Within the field of Chinese studies, ... the dead and the living are separated by what amounts to an entangled class and race boundary: High culture, that which is presumed to be ethnically pure, belongs with the inscrutable dead; low culture, that which is left over from the contaminating contacts with the foreign, belongs with those who happen to be alive and who can still, unfortunately, speak and write" (17). Her argument goes beyond what Hayot is saying here about modernist perspectives on East Asia by bringing in another boundary between "high" and "low" culture.]

Hayot moves on to discuss "the metaphor problem," where it has been posited that one feature of Chinese poetry is the absence of metaphors (see what I did there?). By lack of metaphor, Hayot writes, "When Chinese poetry compares, Yu argued, the comparisons it makes do not create new 'worlds' of meaning, or establish quasi-metaphysical equivalences between the known and the unknown" (97). He cites Yu, Stephen Owen,  James J. Y. Liu, and Francois Jullien, who seem to see the lack of metaphor in Chinese poetry as "a positive feature of the Chinese aesthetic" (98). But as he says, citing Zhang Longxi, this "affirm[ation of] the two-worlds thesis of East/West comparison" suggests that the language of figures cannot be translated (98), just as some in rhetoric suggest that Chinese rhetorical terminology cannot or should not be translated. [Here Hayot seems to be arguing against something akin to what Ames and Lloyd are cautioning us about.]

Hayot's final section involves "the authenticity problem," which brings back modernity to some extent. The "authenticity problem" seems to come up partly in response to the postcolonial critiques that came after Said's Orientalism, and it concerns some of the modern Western authors' use of China or Chinese material as, it is argued, a metaphor or a figure rather than as a real reference. This is something that, Hayot argues, the West seems to be able to get away with (for example, with Pound or Brecht). Chinese writers, on the other hand, are not given the same freedom to use Western material figuratively. Here Hayot gives an example that I'm not sure works, when he argues that "Chinese figurations of the West end up looking like failures of imitation or failures of understanding – like, that is, intellectual and circumstantial failures rather than ontological ones" (102). His example is from a criticism by Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang of Taiwanese modernists whose writing, she says, was more imitative and lacked "the essential modernist spirit of experimentation and innovation" (qtd. in Hayot 102). I'm not sure I understand the connection between Chang's critique of the Taiwanese modernists' use of modernist stylistic devices (she's speaking specifically of their adaptation of stream-of-consciousness) rather than references to the West. So I'm not entirely sure that the contrasting examples of "the authenticity problem" are comparable. 

Finally, I'd cite Hayot's quotation of something Rey Chow wrote in 1993 that Hayot feels (in 2011) hasn't been considered enough outside of comparative literature: "How, in spite of and perhaps because of the fact that [East Asia] remained 'territorially independent,' it offers even better illustrations of how imperialism works--i.e., how imperialism as ideological domination succeeds best without physical coercion, without actually capturing the body and the land" (qtd in Hayot 103). There's been a lot of discussion about the US as an imperialist power and English as a form of linguistic imperialism. I think Xiaoye You's book, Writing in the Devil's Tongue, is one book outside of comparative literature that makes the point that at different points in modern Chinese history, Western imperialism was ideologically and linguistically dominant. [By the way, Hayot's insertion of "East Asia" doesn't seem to be considering that Taiwan and Korea were both colonized by Japan (along with Manchukuo, for that matter).]

OK--I'm sure I've left a lot out of this, but I need to get some sleep. And I think I'm actually falling behind in the readings, but I will probably take the weekend off. As usual, I'd appreciate any comments or questions about my notes!

Two new books in the former native speaker's library; writing plans

I received my copies of Xiaoye You's Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China and Hsin-I Cheng and Hsin-i Sydney Yueh's (eds.) Resistance in the Era of Nationalisms: Performing Identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong, so that's exciting. You's book promises to take a "decolonial and transnational approach" to the study of rhetoric in ancient China, so I think I'll be bumping that book to the front of my readings in preparation for the "Decolonizing Comparative Global Rhetorics" RSA Summer Institute seminar I mentioned I'll be participating in this May. 

But first I want to finish reading Yang Tsui's (楊翠) 《永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作》(蔚藍文化， 2016), after which I'll write some notes here about that. It's quite a moving (and sometimes frustrating) biography of Yang Kui (or Yang K'uei, if you prefer), and it has me thinking a lot about Yang as rhetor and rhetorician. I'll try writing up something about Yang Tsui's depiction of him in that light.

Another new(ish) book in the former native speaker's collection

I had a chance to got to Brattle Book Shop this afternoon, and after searching through their outside book racks finally came across something that interested me enough to want to buy it. 

According to several sources, The Silent Traveller in London was published in 1938, but this copy says "First published 1939." This copy wasn't in great shape, with some tears on the dust jacket that I'll have to fix, but it was only $5. The plates inside the book look good--nothing missing. (Someone else has helpfully posted scans of the plates.)

I found an interesting article about the author, Chiang Yee (蔣彞), that was published a few years back. There's another good article about Chiang here on the Victoria and Albert Museum's website.

Winter break begins

I have a few weeks off from teaching now that I've turned my grades in, and I have to make sure that I use that time wisely. (So far I've been spending a bit too much time catching up on crime movies from the 1940s that are on my DVR.) I have a small writing project--a book review--that will require me to reread a book that I finished over a year ago. I'm hoping to get that done during the vacation.

I'm looking forward to two other books that are coming out in the spring:

• Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China by Xiaoye You (SIUP)
• Resistance in the Era of Nationalisms: Performing Identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong edited by Hsin-I Cheng and Hsin-i Sydney Yueh (MSUP)

If you look up You's book on Amazon, you'll get an excerpt from the introduction of the book (underneath "About the author"). I'm very interested to read what he has to say about the concept of wenti jingwei (文體經緯), which he translates as "genre networks."

There isn't much information about Cheng and Yueh's book yet. Hopefully a table of contents will show up on the Michigan State UP website soon...