Two new books in the former native speaker's library

University of Hawai'i Press has a clearance sale going, so I bought two books--I think they were a dollar each:

• Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning, by J. Marshall Unger
• Family Catastrophe, by Wang Wen-hsing (translated by Susan Wan Dolling)

I have to admit, though, that I haven't had time to read anything except for student writing since the beginning of the semester, so I don't know when I'll get around to reading these. Ah, for those long lost days of my "sabbatical"...

Notes on Chu Yu-hsun (朱宥勳), When They Were Not Writing Novels 【他們沒在寫小說的時候】

朱宥勳 (Chu Yu-hsun). 【他們沒在寫小說的時候：戒嚴台灣小說家群像】When They Were Not Writing Novels: Portraits of Novelists from Taiwan Under Martial Law. 2nd. ed. 大塊文化, 2023.

Note: This isn't going to be a complete discussion of the book--to do that would probably involve writing a post as long as the book itself!

In this very readable collection of essays, Chu Yu-hsun focuses on the socio-political contexts in which nine postwar Taiwan novelists lived and worked. I especially like the anecdotes that Chu includes about the writers' experiences (such as this one about Chung Chao-cheng's "bold" decision about paper that I posted earlier). Because the book doesn't focus as much on their actual novels or their writing processes, I get the funny feeling (as I did with A-chin Hsiau's book) that many of these novelists spent more time on other activities than they did on writing novels. Hualing Nieh Engle (聶華苓), for instance, goes from editing a literary column in Free China Journal (自由中國半月刊) to moving to Iowa on the invitation of Paul Engle to join the Iowa Writer's Workshop, which Engle directed, and eventually developing an international writing program at Iowa. (Where did she find time to write her own novels?!) 

Chung Chao-cheng is depicted as spending a lot of time developing a network of Taiwanese writers and helping them get published. He pops up in other people's chapters, too, for example trying unsuccessfully to get Chen Yingzhen (陳映真) to allow his work to be published in an anthology of Taiwanese nativist writers (Chen wasn't interested because he was a pro-unification Taiwanese leftist--in fact, judging from what Chu has to say, Chen wouldn't even accept being called "Taiwanese"). 

Other writers cross paths in the book, like Lin Haiyin (林海音), who helped Chung Chao-cheng and other Taiwanese writers get opportunities to translate Western works from Japanese. According to Chu (and this is, from what I understand, a dominant narrative), writers who grew up during the Japanese era had a lot of trouble writing and getting published after 1945 because Taiwan's literary scene became dominated by exiled Mainlanders who were more experienced writing in Mandarin and who tended to exclude Taiwanese writers from getting published. Lin Haiyin, who edited the influential literary supplement of the United Daily News (聯合報), worked with Taiwanese writers to get them published, even editing their work for them at times. She had to resign from this position in 1963 due to the "Captain Incident" (船長事件), in which a poem she published got the author and her in trouble when the poem was interpreted as being critical of Chiang Kai-shek. 

The book also touches on some important martial law- and Cold War-era issues, such as the CIA's involvement in Iowa's International Writing Program, the US Information Agency's involvement in the shaping of Taiwan's literature (what Chu's teacher, Chen Jianzhong [陳建忠], has called "unattributed power" [隱蔽權力]), and the relationship between the battle of literary modernism versus nativism and the martial law regime's emphasis on "anti-Communist literature" (反共文學). 

I'm not well-read enough in Taiwanese literary history to evaluate Chu's claims about all of these points, though. I feel I should read some of the books he mentions in his afterword to get a better understanding. I also think I should read Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang's Modernism and Nativist Resistance (1993) and perhaps reread A-chin Hsiau's Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan (2021) to have a better basis for assessing Chu's book. 

One problem I do have with When They Were Not Writing Novels, though, is that Chu doesn't cite sources for a lot of what he writes about. I realize this is not an academic book (probably that's what made it so readable!), but some bibliography at the end where he acknowledges his sources would help a lot in determining what his conclusions are based on. I was also a bit confused by his comment in the afterword to the effect that while most the book's judgements about the authors come from existing research on Taiwanese literature, a small portion are speculative based on Chu's own literary experience ("本書關於作家的種種判斷，大多得益自台灣文學研究的既成果；少部分則是我以自身的文學經驗推想的"). This made me wonder which portions were based on which. I think a more extensive bibliography would go a long way toward reassuring me about Chu's conclusions. In the end, though, I do want to reemphasize that I enjoyed the book, and it makes me want to dive more deeply into Taiwanese literature, if only as an amateur.

An anecdote about writing in postwar Taiwan from【他們沒在寫小說的時候】

Was going to do some writing on my paper this morning, but instead read a chapter from When They Were Not Writing Novels (【他們沒在寫小說的時候】). The first chapter is about Chung Chao-cheng (Zhong Zhaozheng, 鍾肇政), a Taiwanese author who helped other Taiwanese writers get their work published during the martial law period, where Mainlanders more easily got published. There’s an interesting anecdote (which comes from a memoir by Chung) of the time when Chung saw an ad in the newspaper calling for submissions for a writing contest. This was sometime in the 1950s, when Chung was probably in his mid- or late-20s, living in his family home in Longtan, Taoyuan County. Although he was interested in submitting something, he paused when he saw the requirement was to write on grid paper (有格稿紙). When he dug around his house for paper, he found some Japanese-style manuscript paper (原稿用紙, genkō yōshi), so he made what he called a “bold” (大膽) decision to use the Japanese-style paper. 

Chu Yu-hsun, the author of When They Were Not Writing Novels, explains that this was a “bold” decision because it symbolizes Chung’s use of his Japanese-era literary foundation to break into the literary world of postwar Taiwan (34-35). Chu points out that writers of Chung’s generation, who were educated in Japanese, had to learn to write in a “foreign language” (Mandarin) before they could even try to write creatively (to say nothing of trying to publish) in Chinese. The different kinds of paper are a material difference but are also symbolic of the writers’ struggle to bring their own resources to the task of writing in a new linguistic, political, and literary environment. 

The other interesting point is that the genkō yōshi Chung used was probably not that different in format from the paper used in postwar Taiwan, but it might have been different enough (maybe the name of the manufacturer was printed on the paper, for instance) that Chung was hesitant to use it. This might symbolize Taiwanese writers' concern about how Mainlander editors might view their writing, where anything that gave away the author's Taiwanese identity could be an excuse for rejection. Chu also mentions that Chung's use of "bold" might be a sign that Chung is reflecting on something that happened 35 years earlier. Chu thinks that the younger Chung probably had more of a sense of despair at the time.

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. 

Todd Sandel, "Linguistic Capital in Taiwan"

Number ten in an occasional series of summaries of articles related to communication practices in Taiwan.

Sandel, T. L. (2003). Linguistic capital in Taiwan: The KMT’s Mandarin language policy and its perceived impact on language practices of bilingual Mandarin and Tai-gi speakers. Language in Society 32(4), 523-551. DOI: 10.10170S0047404503324030

This is an article I came across a long time ago but that I thought I should revisit in relation to the paper I'm working on. Sandel's article goes beyond analyzing language policies in postwar Taiwan or surveying Taiwanese people about their language attitudes to look more closely at how changing language policies and language attitudes are realized in everyday contexts--the choices people make regarding language use and the decisions they make about passing on language practices to the next generation. Together with Donna Ching-Kuei Sandel and his research assistants, Sandel interviews Taiwanese people about their language practices in the home in the context of the schooling they received--specifically the language policies they experienced in school. His focus is on families that use the Tai-gi language (also known by several other names, such as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien, Taiyu, and [problematically] as Minnanhua/Southern Min). 

Sandel divides postwar primary/secondary school language policies in Taiwan into three stages or generations. The first generation he identifies are Taiwanese who went to school between 1945 and 1975, during which they were required to speak only Mandarin and were punished (sometimes physically) for speaking fangyan (topolects--commonly called "dialects"--like Taiwanese, Hakka, or one of the Indigenous languages). Sandel's interviewees typically spoke Taigi at home but were suddenly forced to speak only Mandarin in school. 

Typically, according to his interviewees, they raised their children primarily in Mandarin rather than speaking to them in Taiwanese because they knew the pressures their children would feel at school. This resulted in a generation (the second generation that Sandel identifies) that spoke little Taiwanese. This generation, who went to school from about 1975-1987, were primarily monolingual Mandarin speakers, although Sandel points out that due to changes in language policy, more are now trying to learn to speak Taiwanese.

The third generation that Sandel identifies went to school at a time when the Mandarin-only policy was scrapped. Indeed, although Mandarin is still the language of instruction, students since the 1990s now have courses in "local languages" (also called "mother tongues"); however, the success of those programs has been threatened by the emphasis on learning English and on other factors (see, for instance, the International Journal of Taiwan Studies vol. 5, no. 2 for several articles about language and society in Taiwan). Among the parents of this generation, Sandel finds two different perspectives about whether to teach both Taiwanese and Mandarin in the home. While some parents feel they'll learn both languages naturally, through interaction with family and in the neighborhood, others feel they need to teach their children to speak Taiwanese, especially if they want them to speak without a "mainlander" accent. These different opinions seem to connect to whether the interviewees are primarily located in more rural/"small town" areas or in more urban areas. 

Sandel connects his findings to Bourdieu's discussions of habitus, which Sandel sees as a "product of the whole history of its relations with markets, or, in Taiwan’s situation, with succeeding colonial and ruling governments that defined the values of the language market" (p. 548). At the same time, however, Sandel agrees with Bucholtz, who argues that "one of the problems of Bourdieu’s theory of practice is that its insistence on the unconsciousness of practice 'reflects a general attenuation of agency' (1999:205)" (p. 548). 

In other words, his [Bourdieu's] theory explains why individuals respond to changing market values and unconsciously instantiate the dispositions, or habitus, of Taiwan, but it does not explain how or why individuals can consciously conform to, resist, or moderate a set of dispositions. ... Thus, we also need to consider the situation in Taiwan through the lens of its language ideologies. In doing so, we find evidence that a cluster of concepts is at play on this island, including perceptions of what is “true” or “good” for society, divergent perspectives within society, and individuals’ articulations of beliefs that rationalize or justify language structure and use. (p. 548)

I think Sandel's division of school language policies in postwar Taiwan can be useful to my project; my focus is primarily on writing, but I also need to consider language ideologies and policies regarding spoken language.  

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 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 Roger T. Ames, “Thinking through Comparisons"

Ames, Roger T. “Thinking through Comparisons: Analytical and Narrative Methods for Cultural Understanding.” Early China/Ancient Greece : Thinking Through Comparisons, edited by Steven Shankman and Stephen W. Durrant, SUNY, 2002, pp. 93-110.

I think Ames' primary point here is to distinguish the western approach to philosophical inquiry (analysis) from the Chinese approach (narrative). He argues that western approaches to philosophical understanding attempt to define what things are: "the reality behind appearance, the univocal aspect behind the many instances, the literal behind the metaphorical, the root meaning behind the history of a term's usage" (105). He suggests that language is also understood in this way--"words--our repositories of cultural interests--are a currency that on investigation are expected to yield up etymologies that not only reveal their particular historical careers, but more fundamentally bring to light their ostensive root meanings--their essential and literal definitions" (106). [There's a sense in which he does this when writing earlier about the "lineage called Confucianism" and remarks that "[i]n the Chinese language, 'the world' is shijie 世界, literally the succession of 'generational boundaries' conjoining one's own generation to those who have come before and to the generation that will follow this one" (103); my question about mentioning this is whether he's not applying a western kind of analysis to a Chinese term. Do modern Chinese people think of shijie in these terms? What is the value (for today) of this kind of "literal" definition?]

In contrast to the way that western philosophy analyzes its object, Ames argues that "the classical Chinese tradition begins with the assumption that the human being (or better, the human 'becoming') is something that one does rather than what one is; it is how one behaves within the context of the human community rather than some essential endowment that resides within one as a potential to be actualized" (106). [This reminds me of a thought that I had years back when I was looking at Tunghai University's labor education system; I had read an article about it that argued that Labor Education could help students zuo ren 做人--this idea of learning to zuo ren seemed to me to be a kind of rhetorical education in the sense that students were learn a kind of action or way of being as part of a community.] 

One point that Ames makes in the chapter concerns the "porous nature" of Chinese thought (particularly Confucianism, but I think this could be broadened--in fact, he wonders at the end of his essay whether we should be calling that narrative of Chinese thought Confucianism or Chineseness [108]). He suggests that this porousness is what has enabled Chinese thought to absorb and sinocize (sinicize?) outside philosophies such as Buddhism, etc. As part of this, he writes that "any reference to Chinese 'democratic' ideals introduces terrible equivocations: the promotion of seemingly individualistic values in the absence of Western notions of the individual, autonomy, independence, human rights, and so on" (102). This of course makes me immediately wonder what Ames would think of the democratic development of Taiwan (to the extent that Taiwan can be considered a "Chinese" society, which is of course a subject of passionate debate). I'll have to see if he has given his perspectives on this point. 

Some more play with ChatGPT

This evening, my wife and I were playing with ChatGPT to see how it translates from Japanese and Chinese. I remembered that I had once translated a passage about rhetoric from Tseng Yueh-nung, the first president of Tunghai University. It's written in a more literary style (although it is fairly understandable if you read modern Chinese), so I wanted to test ChatGPT on it. Here are the results:

Me: Translate: 希臘羅馬政治即臻全盛，日中則昃。於是道德淪亡，人懷自競之心，挾數任術，以獵取功名而致富貴。雄辯學 (rhetoric)，逐為必修之科。整體教育反失去重心，一時消極與失望，詭詐與荒瑩，籠罩全歐，不可救藥，如是者數百年。

ChatGPT: During the heyday of Greek and Roman politics, the situation in China and Japan was declining. As a result, morality decayed, and people harbored a sense of rivalry, employing any number of schemes to hunt for fame, wealth, and status. The study of rhetoric became a mandatory subject. Overall, education lost its focus, leading to passivity and despair, deceit and confusion, enveloping all of Europe for hundreds of years, with no hope of recovery.

Me (somewhat rudely): 日中則昃 doesn't have anything to do with Japan and China. It's talking about the sun at its zenith declining.

ChatGPT: You are correct, I apologize for the mistake. "日中則昃" is a Chinese idiom that means "the sun is at its zenith and then begins to decline," and it has nothing to do with Japan and China as I previously stated. Here's the corrected translation:

At the height of Greek and Roman politics, the sun was at its zenith and then began to decline, just as the morality of society began to decline. People became competitive, using various means to pursue fame and fortune. The study of eloquence and rhetoric became a required subject. Overall, education lost its focus, leading to a period of passivity and despair, deceit and confusion, that enveloped all of Europe for several hundred years, and seemed irreparable.

I think it did a decent job on the revised translation. It makes the comparison between the sun's decline and the decline of morality in society more obvious with "just as," which is not (I don't think) in the Chinese original (於是 is more like "therefore" or "as a result," not "just as"). So it's taking an implicit comparison and making it explicit. 

We tried ChatGPT with 陋室銘 by 劉禹錫. My wife got a similar kind of situation with the last line, "孔子云：「何陋之有？」", which it translated as something like "What does it matter if it's humble as long as I am at peace?" I generated 10 translations but never got that version. Here's what I got for the last sentence:

1.  Confucius said, "What does it matter if the room is humble?"
2. Confucius said: "What does it matter that the room is simple?"
3. Confucius said, "What does it matter if it's humble?"
4. Confucius said, "How humble it is, yet how significant!" [Hmmm... this one is interesting...]
5. Confucius said, "What humble abodes can also have admirable qualities?" [Hmmm...]
6. Confucius said, "How can a humble abode be considered inferior?"
7. Confucius said, "What does being shabby matter?"
8. Confucius said, "What is humble can also be distinguished."
9. Confucius said, "What does it matter that it is humble?"
10. Confucius said, "What is humble about it?" [I think ChatGPT was getting tired here...]

I looked for some English translations online. This one by Abby Lu notes that "Confucius actually said: ‘What is ugly about the home of a gentleman?’, the latter of which the author cut out of humility." (子曰：君子居之，何陋之有？). See also this translation (an interesting website, by the way!). 

Anyway, I'm getting off-track now, and I should go to bed so I can get back to my book review tomorrow. My book review is coming along well, by the way (thanks for asking); I think I'll be able to get a good draft of it done by Friday. 

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...

Notes on Lien Heng (1878-1936): Taiwan's Search for Identity and Tradition

Wu, Shu-hui. Lien Heng (1878-1936): Taiwan's Search for Identity and Tradition. Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Indiana University, 2005.

This isn't going to be a formal review of Wu's biography of Lien Heng. There are two published reviews that I have found:

• Harrison, Mark. Review of Lien Heng (1878-1836): Taiwan's Search for Identity and Tradition, by Shu-hui Wu. The China Quarterly, vol. 187, 2006, pp. 800-802.  https://doi.org/10.1017/S030574100639042X
• Salát, Gergely. Review of Lien Heng (1878-1836): Taiwan's Search for Identity and Tradition, by Shu-hui Wu. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, vol. 66, no. 3, 2013, pp. 488-489. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43282533

My own thoughts about the book are mixed but generally good. I appreciated how Wu put Lien's life in the context of his times in Taiwan and China. For instance, her discussion of Lien's attitude toward vernacularization of writing relates his perspectives toward both the issue as it was being debated in China (by such people as Hu Shih, Liu Shih-p'ei, and Huang K'an) and how it was being taken up in Taiwan, considering Taiwan's status as a Japanese colony at the time. Lien appears to have viewed pai-hua-wen (白話文, vernacular writing, or "Plain language," as Wu translates it) in Taiwan as combining with the Japanese Kokugo policy to cut off Taiwanese people from their roots. As Wu writes, "Lin Shu and others [in China] promoted classical Chinese to counter the New Culture Movement; Lien Heng called for its preservation to save the Chinese identity in Taiwan" (p. 198). 

Wu also gives a good sense of the social and intellectual circles in which Lien Heng moved. Having lived in Taichung for 16 years, I was particularly interested to read about Lien's trips there. He stayed at Lai Yuan (萊園), Lin Hsien-t'ang's (林獻堂) mansion in Wufeng, during treatment for a stomach problem. Lien and his family also stayed in Taichung for 4 years at Lin Tzu-piao's* mansion, Juei-hsüan (瑞軒), near/at Taichung Park. (The Lins eventually donated it to become Taichung Park, according to Wikipedia.) 

I was also interested in Wu's description of Liang Ch'i-ch'ao's (梁啟超)'s visit to Taiwan in 1911, particularly in how Liang and Lien communicated with each other. According to Wu, the two (and others who were present during Liang's visit) couldn't communicate with each other orally because they spoke different languages (she doesn't use the term "language" to describe Liang's Kwangtungese and Lien's Taiwanese). They didn't even try to use Japanese to communicate, even though Lien had taught himself the language (though I'm not sure if he taught himself spoken Japanese or just written Japanese). Wu writes, curiously, that "[o]bviously, Liang had not learned to speak Japanese, although he had lived in Japan for more than ten years" (p. 109). I'm not sure why that's "obvious," but maybe their lack of interest in speaking Japanese had something to do with nationalism--not wanting to communicate in the colonizer's language.** They communicated with each other by writing notes (and lots of poems!) in classical Chinese. I wonder what that might have looked like... 

The number and topics of poems that Wu mentions Lien and others writing was also interesting to me; it reminded me of something Ron Scollon wrote in a 1997 TESOL Quarterly article on contrastive rhetoric. Discussing the need for a "contrastive poetics" that would take into account genres and the history of genres, Scollon cited Jonathan Spence's comment that some poems from the Tang Dynasty might be comparable to British memos from the twentieth century 

as in each case the functional placement of the text is as an officially placed critique of the policies of authorities in higher positions. Such a comparison would depend on first making a linguistic, cultural, epoch-internal contrast among information, critical, and expressive genres in government and official social contexts. (p. 354)

While the poems of Lien Heng and others mentioned in Wu's book weren't necessarily comparable to governmental memos, they do arguably function in broader ways than people in the US might think of if we generally think of poems in terms of creative literary expression. 

Wu also discusses Lien's bookstore in Taipei in the context of bookstores in Taiwan during the Japanese period. I had not known about the challenges that Taiwanese had importing books from China during that period. To quote some detail from Wu:

The colonial administrators had an extensive network designed to control Taiwanese thought and they exercised this without consulting the constitution of their home government. Especially onerous was the rigid control of the sale of books. When books arrived from China, they were subjected to censorship at the customs house. Those books belonging to restricted categories (chin-shu) were removed from their packages and confiscated. Usually, the loss from each order was around thirty to sixty percent. Worse was that the restriction standards changed constantly. Very often books became illegal after the bookstores had sent in their orders and it was too late to inform the publishers in China because the goods had already been shipped. It took months for the books to travel to Taiwan. Sometimes customs would pull only one or two volumes from a multi-volume set and make the entire collection impossible to sell. The biggest threat to a bookstore owner was the unexpected inspections conducted by the police. The owner would be fined and imprisoned for several days or weeks if he violated the law, even if his store just held books in storage that were on the new banned list. Chiang Wei-shui's store was often monitored by the secret police because of his political and social activities. (pp. 254-255)

A webpage about bookstores in Taiwan mentions that during the Japanese period, there were only about 30 bookstores in colonial Taiwan. Taichung's Central Bookstore (中央書局) was one of those; the Wikipedia article about the store, which opened up in 1927 (around the same time Lien's store opened), says that at that time, it was the first bookstore in Central Taiwan specializing in importing Chinese and Japanese books and magazines and was also the largest Chinese bookstore in Taiwan. It ran into trouble after the Mukden Incident of 1931.

A couple of critiques: Harrison and Salát fault Wu's book for not discussing some personal aspects of Lien's life in more detail--they both comment on his extramarital affairs that Wu only briefly mentions: Salát, to suggest that Wu could present a more well-rounded (and critical) perspective on Lien; Harrison, to suggest that Lien's relationship with a Taiwanese geisha would open more than "a glimpse into Taiwan's rich social world of the period" (p. 802). I agree with both of these points. 

The final section of the book, which summarizes and analyzes Lien's most famous work, The General History of Taiwan (台灣通史), is sometimes hard to follow. While Wu brings in other sources to supplement (and sometimes correct) the narrative that Lien wrote, I found it difficult sometimes to distinguish between Wu's summary of Lien and the additions/corrections she was providing. The section has extensive citations, but it was still not always clear. 

Finally, I have to mention that the book could have used some copyediting; the frequent grammatical issues generally don't cause confusion in terms of meaning, but combined with the many typographical issues  that a copy editor should have caught, they are very distracting. (In one instance, in what might have been an "autocorrect" error, the book mentions the Ch'ing government's "energetic policy of 'signification'" [p. 355], which should read "sinification"--quite a different meaning!) 

Overall, though, I am glad I read this book. Not only did I learn a lot from it, but it has given me some directions for future reading and investigation (such as the history of bookstores and publishing in Taiwan). 

*I admit I cannot find reference to Lin Tzu-piao online, so I'm not sure what character "piao" would be here.

** [Update, 11/4/22: Judging from Joshua Fogel's essay about Liang Qichao and Japan, Liang was able to read Japanese and translated Japanese works (themselves translations of works in Western languages) into Chinese. Fogel writes, intriguingly, that 

For Liang, the Japanese language was little different from Cantonese. Both were rooted, he believed, in an ancient literary language, wenyan, which had served both countries (and Korea and Vietnam, it should be added) for many centuries. The Hewen Han dufa (Reading Japanese the Chinese way), a contemporary work offering easy access to Japanese for readers of Chinese, was an all-important text for Liang. It not only enabled him to gain quick entry into contemporary Japanese writings and translations; it also substantiated the notion that Japanese could be read as if it were a topolect of Chinese. (249-250)

From Joshua A. Fogel, "Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan." Between China and Japan: The Writings of Joshua Fogel, Brill, 2015. 242-252. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004285309_017 

Morgan Chih-tung Huang & Rong-xuan Chu, "A Political Linguistics Analysis of President Tsai Ing-wen’s Apology to Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples"

Number eight in an occasional series of summaries of articles related to communication practices in Taiwan.

黃之棟、朱容萱，2019，「總統道歉的語言學：【蔡英文總統代表政府向原住民族道歉文】的政治語言學分析」《政治科學論叢》，82，81-114。Morgan Chih-tung Huang & Rong-xuan Chu, "Zongtong daoqiande yuyanxue: 'Tsai Ing-wen daibiao zhengfu xiang Yuanzhuminzu daoqianwen' de zhengzhi yuyanxue fenxi" [A Political Linguistics Analysis of President Tsai Ing-wen’s Apology to Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples]. Taiwanese Journal of Political Science 82: 81-114.

This is the article by Huang and Chu that I mentioned in my last posting.  I'm going to summarize this generally, and then I'll comment on a few particularly interesting points that might be expanded on.

Huang and Chu take a political linguistics approach to analyzing Tsai Ing-wen's speech. They identify her speech as an example of a genre of political apologies, which includes historical apologies where the speaker is not the transgressor ("apologizer ≠ transgressor") and the group being apologized to is not necessarily the people who directly suffered the wrongs that are being apologized for (although I assume they would suffer the results of that historical wrongdoing). They contrast these political apologies with interpersonal apologies, in that political (or "national") apologies are not an "expression of remorse" or an "admission of guilt," but are more an assumption of responsibility for actions of the past.  

Because they're writing for a political science audience, Huang and Chu go to some length explaining the differences between a linguistic approach to studying apology speeches and a political science approach. Important to the distinction between a linguistic approach and a political science approach is the view in linguistics that the language used in the speech act reflects the way that the speech act is framed and the often unstated assumptions of the speaker. They systematically analyze what was said through the speech's use of illocutionary devices (such as the use of language showing that this was an apology and not just an expression of regret for the other's suffering), the use of pronouns to clarify the relationships between the part(ies) apologizing and those being apologized to, and the parties or points that are left out of the speech (importantly, they argue, Tsai focuses on speaking on behalf of the government rather than the [Han] people of Taiwan, so that the non-Indigenous society of Taiwan is absent from the speech). They also argue that Tsai's framing of the apology risks recolonizing Taiwan's history despite her attempt to decolonize it The speech, they argue, is based on a Han historical perspective that both generally ignores pre-Han Taiwan (here they allude to Lien Heng's famous dictum, 台灣固無史也) and because it relegates Indigenous peoples to a passive role in relation to the colonial governments that controlled Taiwan over the past 400 years.

The article analyzes the speech acts in Tsai's apology in depth, so if you read Chinese, I recommend reading this. For the rest of this post, I want to highlight a couple of points that Huang and Chu make. One is in response to a question I asked in my last posting, where I was wondering about the Mandarin words Tsai was using that Chu and Huang had translated as "will." In this paper, they point out that Tsai uses "會" several times in that "will" capacity, such as when she says,「我會以總統的身分，親自擔任召集人」(In my role as president, I will personally serve as convener [of the Indigenous Transitional Justice Committee].) So that answers that question.

The other point I want to mention is their discussion of Tsai's use of the Atayal (泰雅族) terms balay and sbalay, which she translates as "truth" (真相) and "reconciliation" (和解). Chu and Huang observe that after the apology section of her speech, Tsai raises the issue of truth and reconciliation by introducing these two Indigenous concepts. They argue that the effects of this are that it (re)frames the apology in terms of reconciliation. The problem here, they argue, is that reconciliation is then assumed to be the goal for the Indigenous audience as well as that of the non-Indigenous listeners, so that the apology itself becomes secondary to the (hope for) reconciliation. As Chu and Huang point out, "reconciliation" might not actually be the goal of the apology process for the Indigenous audience, but Tsai's redefinition of apology in terms of truth and reconciliation doesn't leave them much room for their own possible expectation for the fixing of responsibility and consideration of compensation. 

Chu and Huang don't go into this much, but to me what's especially interesting about this whole issue is Tsai's use of Atayal concepts to introduce truth and reconciliation. One would assume that she could have just used the Chinese terms 真相 and 和解, since they've often been used in the contexts of transitional justice for 2-28 and the White Terror. In fact, as Chu and Huang suggest, Tsai goes out of her way to frame truth and reconciliation as an Indigenous practice in her speech. They quote the following (my translation):

In Indigenous culture, when one party offends another person in the tribe and there is a desire for reconciliation, the elders will bring the perpetrator and the victim together. Bringing them together isn't for a direct apology, but rather to enable the parties to honestly speak out their own mental journey (心路歷程). After this process of speaking the truth, the elders will ask everyone to drink together to let the past really be past. This is Sbalay. (p. 94) 

But is it? As Da-Wei Kuan and Guy C. Charlton (2020) argue in another context, 

If we perceive sbalay as a ritual process, then every action within the process could be viewed as “texts.” To interpret these texts, it is an [sic] important to fully grasp the meaning of sbalay. Yet “meaning” is not denoted by the ritual process itself but is given by the social and spatial “contexts” surrounding these actions that give these texts meanings. Were it not for these social and spatial contexts, the ritual itself becomes detached, meaningless, and decontextualized. (p. 232)

Tsai focuses on the process but ignores the social and spatial contexts that Kuan and Charlton emphasize. In fact, in their other article, Huang and Chu (2021) observe that the apology ceremony was held in the Presidential building, which used to be the offices of the Japanese Government-General during the Japanese colonial period. As one of their interviewees wonders about this context, "Why do you [President Tsai] ask the Taiwanese aborigines to go to the perpetrator’s home to accept your apology?" (p. 94). Even worse, Huang and Chu point out that some Indigenous attendees felt that they were being "summoned" to an audience with "the emperor," demonstrating that "the government doesn’t understand aboriginal ceremonies" (p. 95). Finally, they argue that Tsai simultaneously plays the roles of apologizer (perpetrator), elder/mediator, and (in her role as a descendent of a Paiwan grandmother) victim. I'm not sure about the last of these since they point out in both articles that she never referred to her own Indigenous heritage in the speech, but I agree that it was odd for the representative of the perpetrators to also play the role of the elder/mediator. As Huang and Chu (2021) note, "from the perspective of Taiwanese aborigines (Kisasa and Lo, 2016a, 2016b), such a suggestive priest/clergyperson image implied that Tsai was located at the top of the power structure, commanding forgiveness and reconciliation between the two parties" (p. 95).

All of the above suggests some of the dangers accompanying colonizers' adoption of the rhetoric or cultural practices of the colonized when attempting to apologize for past (or present) transgressions. That said, I would love to hear from people more knowledgeable about Indigenous rhetoric (particularly Taiwanese Indigenous rhetoric) about this topic. I am admittedly not anything near an expert on this, so I'm eager to get feedback on my summary/analysis/interpretation of these articles and topics!

Rong-Xuan Chu & Chih-Tung Huang, "The day after the apology: A critical discourse analysis of President Tsai’s national apology to Taiwan’s indigenous peoples"

Number seven in an occasional series of summaries of articles related to communication practices in Taiwan. 

Chu, R.-X., & Huang, C.-T. (2021). The day after the apology: A critical discourse analysis of President Tsai’s national apology to Taiwan’s indigenous peoples. Discourse Studies, 23(1), 84-101, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445620942875

I want to start this by saying that this post will primarily focus on the article--I'm not, at this point, going to get into a larger discussion of what the Tsai administration has done in terms of reconciliation with or reparations to the Indigenous people since the time of her apology. 

Rong-Xuan Chu, according to her bio at the bottom of the article, is an applied linguist; Chih-Tung Huang, according to his bio, is an Indigenous scholar who is interested in ethnic/indigenous policy. This article focuses on the August 1, 2016 official apology given by Taiwan's president on behalf of the R.O.C. government to the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan for the R.O.C.'s role in the oppression of the Indigenous people. It analyzes the language of Tsai's apology speech, including her uses of the verb "apologize," the modal verb "will," and pronouns "I," "we," and "they." They explain that she directly apologizes instead of expressing "regret" (a term that is usually seen as not being an apology, as they point out, and as Hang Zhang observed in an article on the Hainan Island plane incident of 2001). 

However, they also argue that her use of "will," a modal that can refer to both future and present actions, weakens the commitment to change because it "allow[s] for a certain degree of ambiguity and doubt regarding her determination to uphold the reconciliation" (p. 90). They also argue that "will" can in places denote "capacity or power," which suggests that "Tsai viewed her government as the power holder who could influence the success or failure of the reconciliation" (p. 91). 

It's at this point where I wish the authors had specified which Mandarin modal verb(s) Tsai was using that meant "will." Are all the wills in English translating the same word in Chinese? The authors published an article in Chinese in 2019 on Tsai's apology speech, which I guess I'll have to read at some point to answer this to my satisfaction.

They also look at the pronouns used in the speech, noting that Tsai seems to separate Indigenous people from the rest of Taiwan's society by using "they" to refer to them while using the second-person plural to refer to the government and (presumably non-Indigenous) Taiwanese citizens. 

In discussing the political context of the apology, they observe (among other things), the KMT response in the form of a Q&A with Hung Hsiu-chu, former KMT chairperson, who said, “I wonder whether she [President Tsai] deliberately wants to use the aboriginal conception of Taiwan’s history to exclude the Han/Chinese nationality from the history and even to achieve de-sinicisation” (p. 92, translated by the authors--in a video of her comments, Hung says, 「要懷疑她是不是想用這個，故意用這個所謂的原住民史觀來排斥這個漢民族的史觀，甚至去中國化的一個史觀，結果形成一個另外一個史觀？我覺得，不能講說我們懷疑她的這個動機跟用心，但是難免會讓人家打上問號」。 I'd add that her use of 所謂的--"so-called"--in describing the Indigenous historical perspective seems dismissive either of Tsai's conception of that perspective or of the perspective itself.)  

The authors go on to argue that the whole apology ceremony received mixed reviews from the public--and, especially important, from the Indigenous recipients of the apology. While some appreciated it, there were several complaints. The venue, which was the President's mansion, was criticized as requiring the victims "to go to the perpetrator's home to accept [the] apology" (p. 94), and the staging of the apology, the authors argue, resembled an emperor summoning Indigenous subjects to an audience. 

In the end, Chu and Huang argue that "the apology did not seem to bring comfort to the indigenous peoples, rather it reawakened the long-simmering conflict between the Taiwanese government and the indigenous population over historically unresolved disputes" (p. 96). They conclude, however, that it was an important first step. 

There are other points brought up in the article that make it worth a second reading. I'm not as familiar with CDA (critical discourse analysis) to evaluate the authors' success with this approach or whether the article is making a theoretical contribution to CDA. I'll leave that to others. (Feel free to comment!)

Summer writing project (Day Forty-Five): Current events and my project

Since yesterday, there's been a lot of discussion on Twitter about one particular "idiom" (chengyu) in Xi Jinping's speech on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party--the line where he says that the enemies of China will find themselves crashing into a steel wall formed by the bodies of 1.4 billion Chinese; he uses the phrase 头破血流, which literally means "head break blood flow." The question in the tweets I've been reading, though, is whether this phrase is supposed to be taken literally (someone, whose tweet I unfortunately can't find now, compared it to idioms like "raining cats and dogs"). Frankie Huang suggests we should take it in the spirit of the famous ST:TNG episode where Picard tries to figure out the allegorical language of the Tamarian ship captain; that is, the broken and bleeding heads are not meant to be taken literally. She goes on, in fact, to suggest that taking the phrase literally is actually a purposeful act of misunderstanding driven by a bias against Xi or, more generally, China. 

This has made me think again about my reaction to some of the postwar Taiwan elementary textbook passages I've been reading, and whether I'm reading too much into them. I mentioned the "urban warfare" lesson in a 1946 fourth-grade reader that struck me (and my wife) as pretty violent, and this all started with a lesson from 1956 that I translated years ago about Yan Haiwen, a Chinese pilot who kills himself rather than being taken by the enemy soldiers. But I'm starting to rethink my response what I'd consider the graphic violence of these stories. Going back to 头破血流, a thread by Chenchen Zhang arguing that the emotional valence (if I'm using that term correctly) of the language of Xi's speech and, I guess, Chinese nationalistic discourse in general, is more important to think about than one four-character chengyu. 

I think with Yan Haiwen, I understood this on a certain level when I wrote about it in my dissertation (and in this paper, if I ever finish it)--I thought about this story in terms of Suzanne Keen's theory of strategic empathizing, where student readers were taught to admire and identify with the feelings and motivations of people like Yan Haiwen. In this case (and perhaps in the case of the urban warfare story), it's perhaps important to turn away from the horror I feel reading about the violence and to the feelings that the writers are trying to evoke from readers. 

That all said, however, I'm resisting the idea that there's one "right" way to read these stories (or the chengyu in question in Xi's speech). Different readers will interpret these texts differently, depending on their positionality. A non-native speaker of Mandarin, for instance, might be properly accused of reading 头破血流 too literally, and it might be said that since I'm not the primary audience for this speech, I don't have the right to interpret it. On the other hand, in our globalized world of instantaneous worldwide communication and immediate translation, it seems to me a bit naïve to think that there's only one audience for any big speech like this. After all, this part of the speech is also serving as a warning to the enemy, so in that sense it's at least partly addressing that potential enemy.* And as Bessie tweeted in response to Frankie Huang's post, for a Taiwanese person, it's hard to assume "good faith" on the part of the speaker when Taiwan is under constant threat of violent annexation by that same speaker. So interpretation also has a lot to do with how you see yourself in relation to the speaker. (I'm sure I'm not saying anything new here.) Even in postwar Taiwan, stories like those of Yan Haiwen might be read differently by Taiwanese students as opposed to Mainlander students. (Unfortunately, I'm not sure how I would be able to test this at this point. One thing I'm constantly looking for is stories of people's experiences of schooling at that time.)

Anyway, this is what looking through Twitter got me thinking about today. It's useful to think about this, and it gives me another perspective on what I've been working on, but it also reminds me of my own place or position in this project I'm working on (and possibly why it's taking me so long to finish it!). 

*Then again, when my son is playing dangerously on the stairs, I sometimes tell him to be careful or he'll fall down the stairs and break his neck. That's pretty graphic...

For future reading, once I get finished grading

• "Three new essays on the Chinese script and a new twist to the old problem of censorship in Chinese studies"

In which my translingual aphasia leads me to explore the origins of the term 五金行

Earlier this evening (or yesterday evening, depending on when I finish this), I was talking with someone who mentioned a store on the corner of a main street in a nearby town. I thought I knew which store it was, but instead of saying the word "hardware," I said, "Is it a five..." before I stopped myself. I wasn't thinking "five and dime"--actually I was trying to say "五金行" in English. (A more-or-less literal translation of "五金行" would be "five metals store.")

About an hour ago, I started to reflect on this and got to wondering what was wrong with me the origins of the term 五金行 were. First I checked the Chinese Wikipedia, but that didn't tell me much, though it did cite an article that's no longer available but evidently discussed a Ye Chengzhong (葉澄衷), who was known as the "hardware king" in late Qing Shanghai.This discovery led me to an English Wikipedia entry about Ye Chengzhong (!). This article links to a 2011 Xinhua News story about Ye, which tells about how he became the hardware king:

According to the book "The Century-Old Famous Factories and Stores in Shanghai" (1987), an American business man once hired Ye's boat for a ride in 1862. But he left behind a briefcase full of cash and valuables.

Ye waited for a long time for the owner to return the briefcase. When he did, he was greatly touched by Ye's honest. The American businessman helped him open the city's first hardware shop on Daming Road in Hongkou District, selling much-needed tools and suppliers to sailors and military personnel at premium prices.

As the hardware business boomed, Ye expanded into many areas, including finance, commerce, industry, shipping and education, and made important contributions before he died in 1899.

But this story, inspiring as it might be, didn't bring me any closer to finding out the origins of the term 五金行. And interestingly, according to Sherman Cochran's book Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880-1937 (University of California P, 2000), Ye's hardware store was called "Shunji Imports" (順記洋貨號)--no five metals mentioned there.

I went on to find an entry in the Chinese Yahoo! Knowledge where someone had asked why "five metal stores" were called that ("為什麼賣五金的地方要叫五金行"). According to a somewhat lengthy response to the question, the five metals are gold, silver, copper, iron, and tin (金、銀、銅、鐵、錫). The respondent goes on to say that metals that were most resistant to oxidation were the earliest to be discovered by humans and used for weapons and tools. The writer goes on to suggest a relationship between the five metals and the five elements: metal, wood, water, fire, and earth (金、木、水、火、土). Those of you interested in reading more about the five elements (or five phases), can check out Wikipedia for an introduction to Wu Xing (though I make no guarantees about its accuracy or readability).

This was all getting a little too abstract for me, though (especially since it's after 1 a.m.!), but I'm at least temporarily satisfied that even if I don't have a date for the earliest usage of 五金行, at least I have a little information on the term, which seems to be using some ancient terminology for modern purposes. An article in a 1922 issue of The Scientific Monthly also notes this interesting, ummm... element:

And that's where we'll end for now. I've exhausted most my options, including my old copy of Endymion Wilkinson. But I'm open to suggestions!