scholarly journals Western-Educated Chinese Christian Returnees, Nationalism, and Modernity: Comparison Between the Pre-1949 Era and the Post-1978 Era

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824402199481
Author(s):  
Yuqin Huang
Keyword(s):  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Field Studies ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
The West ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Christianity In China ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Religious Networks ◽  
East West

For more than 100 years, China has seen waves of students and scholars heading overseas and studying in the West as well as the concomitant returning waves. This study draws on information obtained from secondhand documents and firsthand field studies to analyze and compare two returning waves involving the complex dynamics of globalization/indigenization of Christianity in China. The first returning wave began in the early 1900s and lasted until 1950, in which many went overseas because of their connections with Western missionaries. The second returning wave is currently occurring following the study-abroad fever after 1978, in which many were exposed to the proselytizing endeavor of overseas Chinese Christian communities and eventually converted to Christianity before returning to China. The article compares the following themes in relation to these two groups of Christian returnees: their negotiation with their religious identities upon the return, perceptions on the meaning of Christianity to themselves and to China, their transnational religious networks, and potential implications to the glocalization of Christianity in China. Consequently, it involves the following topics that are important throughout the modern Chinese history: modernity/religion paradox, East–West interaction in relation to Christianity, contributions of Western-educated professionals to China, glocalization of Christianity in China, and complex internationalist/nationalist interaction.

Ideologies of English in Asia: an editorial

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (271) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Alexandra Grey ◽  
Loy Lising ◽  
Jinhyun Cho
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The West ◽  
Binary Structure ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Local Perspectives ◽  
East West

Abstract That English has spread in Asia is well-known, but this critical reflection, and the five contributions and book review that we hereby introduce, contribute to rectifying the relative absence in the sociology of language literature of studies approaching language ideologies and practices in specific Asian contexts from local perspectives. We are not alone; our inspections of journal archives show that scholars are increasingly responding to this relative absence in recent years. What this special issue offers is further diversity of both authors and cases, and moreover this special issue draws attention to the immutable, binary structure underlying the various globally-circulating discourses of the East and the West as part of investigating how socially constructed East-West binaries interact with language ideologies about English and other languages. It shifts the attention from fixity – East versus West – to diversity, extending East to Easts and West to Wests as our contributors identify and examine multiple, endogenous “imaginative geograph[ies]” (from Arif Dirlik’s [1996] “Chinese history and the question of Orientalism”, History and Theory 35(4): 97) constructed through various Orientalist ideologies. It founds this approach on a combination of the theory of recursive language ideologies and critical Orientalism scholarship. This is generative of new and useful sociolinguistic analyses. Having laid out this theoretical extension, this editorial then provides an overview of the issue’s contributions, which examine how socially constructed East-West binaries are interacting with language ideologies about English and other languages on sub-national scales in various Asian contexts including in Korea, China, Japan, Tajikistan and Pakistan.

Chiang Kai-shek's March Twentieth Coup d'Etat of 1926

1968 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 585-602 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tien-Wei Wu
Keyword(s):  
Mainland China ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
The West ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Controversial Nature

In his review of Mr. Chiang Yung-ching's Bo-lot'ing yü Wu-Han cheng-ch'üan [Borodin and the Wu-Han Regime], Professor C. Martin Wilbur has said that “the Chung-shun Gunboat Incident of March 20, 1926, is treated hastily and categorically, simply as a plot of the Communists involving Wang Ching-wei. This is, of course, a delicate subject.” Because of the highly controversial nature of the event, as it involved Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists, no serious and scholarly study on the subject has ever been undertaken in either Mainland China or Taiwan. Historians in the West are generally interested in the event because it was pivotal to Chiang's ascendancy, and Chiang's career is a part of modern Chinese history. Except for the study of the Soviet advisers' view on the Incident, a thorough investigation of the various aspects of the event and all the parties concerned is still wanting.

scholarly journals Purloined letters: History and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 691-723 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT BICKERS
Keyword(s):  
Central Core ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Treaty Ports ◽  
Purloined Letters ◽  
China Coast

For John King Fairbank the establishment of the foreign inspectorate of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service was a key symbolic moment in modern Chinese history. His landmark 1953 volume Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast culminates with the 1854 Inspectorate agreement, which, he argued, ‘foreshadowed the eventual compromise between China and the West—a joint Chinese and Western administration of the modern centers of Chinese life and trade in the treaty ports’. Without the CMCS, he implied, there could be no modern China. It was the ‘the institution most thoroughly representative of the whole period’ after the opening of the treaty ports down to 1943, he wrote. By 1986 he was arguing that it was the ‘central core’ of the system. ‘Modernity, however defined, was a Western, not a Chinese, invention’, he claimed, and Sir Robert Hart's Customs Service was its mediator.

The Partially Opened Door: Limitations on Economic Change in China in the 1860s

1978 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon R. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Time Perspective ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Limited Time ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Historical Coverage ◽  
Do So

The economic impact of the West on China has long been a subject of debate among students of Chinese history. Despite numerous books and articles, however, a consensus has yet to emerge. Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that the more analytical contributions to the debate have been too sweeping in their historical coverage, while those with a more limited time perspective have been insufficiently rigorous in their analysis. The aim of this paper is to renew this debate, but to do so by a method that will, hopefully, avoid the pitfalls of the past. Specifically, I intend to employ an explicitly theoretical framework to examine the facts of a particular period—the 1860s. This decade is especially important since it immediately followed the expanded opening of China by the Treaty of Tientsin in 1860. The analytical framework employed—economic theory—is applicable to any period in modern Chinese history, but as the data examined are drawn mostly from the 1860s, my conclusions, strictly speaking, are applicable only to that decade. For reasons discussed below, however, I strongly believe these conclusions to be applicable to the entire period from 1860 to 1895.

Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience. By Charles A. Laughlin. [Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. 334 pp. £16.95. IBSN: 0822329719.]

2004 ◽  
Vol 179 ◽  
pp. 845-848
Author(s):  
Perry Link
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
The West ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
Chinese Tradition ◽  
Sturm Und Drang ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Duke University ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Language Literature

From early times, Chinese culture has taken language, literature, history, morality, governance, and cosmology to be shades on a spectrum and not easily separable. Twentieth-century “literary reportage” (baogaowenxue), despite some foreign influences in its origins, very much continued this Chinese tradition. Its purpose, in the minds of its creators and readers, was to enter the sturm und drang of modern Chinese history – to expose social ills, re-organize society, resist invaders, and so on.The topic has not been well studied, either in China or the West. Yin-hwa Chou and Thomas Moran have written good dissertations on it, and T.A. Hsia, Paul Pickowicz and others have published insightfully on related areas. But no one has published the full-length study that the field needs, and it is disappointing that Charles Laughlin's new book also falls short.

A Palace of Her Own: Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) and the Reconstruction of the Wanchun Yuan

NAN Nü ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-74
Author(s):  
Ying-chen Peng
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Reconstruction Project ◽  
The One ◽  
Continuous Power ◽  
Heaven And Earth

Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) is one of the most significant and controversial political figures in modern Chinese history, yet her comprehensive engagement with court art, a symbolic realm of sovereignty in China, remains understudied and is therefore deserving of close analysis. To examine her patronage of art, this paper scrutinizes Cixi’s involvement in the Wanchun yuan (Garden of ten thousand springs) reconstruction project and argues that it not only exemplifies her strategy of asserting political power through art but also provides a rare glimpse of how a patron’s creation and decoration of space can be read as a self-portrait.The author contends that, on the one hand, Cixi utilized the location and scale of her own palace the Tiandi yijiachun (Spring united between Heaven and Earth) as a symbol of her continuous power struggle with Qing imperial tradition; and, on the other hand, that the palace’s layout and interior décor also suggest Cixi’s feminine and religious identities.

Values and intergroup perceptions of East Germans and West Germans in 1998 1This research was supported by a grant from the German Research Society (We 1106/3-1).

1999 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 263-272
Author(s):  
Jörg Doll ◽  
Michael Dick
Keyword(s):  
Research Society ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Perceived Similarity ◽  
The West ◽  
Need For Uniqueness ◽  
German Research ◽  
East German ◽  
Experimental Group ◽  
East West

The studies reported here focus on similarities and dissimilarities between the terminal value hierarchies ( Rokeach, 1973 ) ascribed to different groups ( Schwartz & Struch, 1990 ). In Study 1, n = 65 East Germans and n = 110 West Germans mutually assess the respective ingroup and outgroup. In this intra-German comparison the West Germans, with a mean intraindividual correlation of rho = 0.609, perceive a significantly greater East-West similarity between the group-related value hierarchies than the East Germans, with a mean rho = 0.400. Study 2 gives East German subjects either a Swiss (n = 58) or Polish (n = 59) frame of reference in the comparison between the categories German and East German. Whereas the Swiss frame of reference should arouse a need for uniqueness, the Polish frame of reference should arouse a need for similarity. In accordance with expectations, the Swiss frame of reference significantly reduces the correlative similarity between German and East German from a mean rho = 0.703 in a control group (n = 59) to a mean rho = 0.518 in the experimental group. Contrary to expectations, the Polish frame of reference does not lead to an increase in perceived similarity (mean rho = 0.712).

The Enlightenment Turns to China: The International Flow of Concepts and Their Geographic Dispersion

Cultura ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Chien-shou CHEN
Keyword(s):  
Joint Production ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
International Flow ◽  
Geographic Dispersion ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article attempts to strip away the Eurocentrism of the Enlightenment, to reconsider how this concept that originated in Europe was transmitted to China. This is thus an attempt to treat the Enlightenment in terms of its global, worldwide significance. Coming from this perspective, the Enlightenment can be viewed as a history of the exchange and interweaving of concepts, a history of translation and quotation, and thus a history of the joint production of knowledge. We must reconsider the dimensions of both time and space in examining the global Enlightenment project. As a concept, the Enlightenment for the most part has been molded by historical actors acting in local circumstances. It is not a concept shaped and brought into being solely from textual sources originating in Europe. As a concept, the Enlightenment enabled historical actors in specific localities to begin to engage in globalized thinking, and to find a place for their individual circumstances within the global setting. This article follows such a line of thought, to discuss the conceptual history of the Enlightenment in China, giving special emphasis to the processes of formation and translation of this concept within the overall flow of modern Chinese history.

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