A Foreign Infusion: The Forgotten Legacy of Japanese Chadō on Modern Chinese Tea Arts

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Standard Chinese ◽  
Historical Antecedents ◽  
Tea Ceremony ◽  
Regional Custom

This paper traces the historical antecedents and influences on modern Chinese tea arts. What is now commonly known as gongfucha, which has become the standard Chinese tea ceremony, was originally a regional custom from the Chaozhou area of China. Through the twentieth century this custom was first taken up by Taiwanese pioneers, repackaged as an element of quintessential Chinese culture, and then exported back to mainland China since the 1980s. During this process of the reimagination of the Chaozhou practice of gongfucha, foreign elements of the Japanese tea ceremony, especially influences from senchadō, were included. As it becomes adopted throughout China as a new national custom, however, this foreign contribution is obscured and forgotten, and replaced with a national narrative that emphasizes links to the past.

Chinese Muslims in Transregional Spaces of Mainland China, Taiwan, and Beyond in the Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-155
Author(s):  
Wlodzimierz Cieciura
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Chinese Nation ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Chinese Muslims ◽  
History Of

This article examines the modern social history of Chinese Hui Muslims in the context of transregional connections within and beyond the borders of the two modern Chinese nation-states, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan. The article applies Engseng Ho’s concepts for the study of Inter-Asia to the biographical study of several prominent Hui religious professionals and intellectuals. The experiences and personal contributions to the development of modern Chinese Muslim culture of people like Imam Ma Songting are scrutinized, along with political and ideological conflicts over different visions of Chineseness and “Huiness” during the turbulent twentieth century. It is argued that when studying the social history of Chinese Muslims, researchers should not limit themselves to the religious activities of Hui elites that occurred within the confines of the two Chinese nation-states, but should also take into consideration the expansion of those elites’ religious activities abroad and the intensive circulation of knowledge across Inter-Asian spaces in which they participated.

The Chinese school of archaeology

Antiquity ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 87 (337) ◽  
pp. 896-904 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhang Liangren
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Umbilical Cord ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Archaeological Investigation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Chinese Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Chinese School ◽  
Entire Nation ◽  
Cultural Origins ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

In 1959, at a meeting reviewing the 'archaeological achievements of the past 10 years' in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the 'New China (1949-)', the leading archaeologist Yin Da (1906-1983), then director of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), urged all the archaeologists in China "to cooperate fully, so that in the next three or five years, in the entire nation, we can build up a scientific and holistic system out of all cultural remains of all periods; that is to say, to build up a Marxist Chinese archaeological system" (Yin 1959: 123).This call had two keywords in it.One was 'Chinese'. Ever since the early twentieth century, growing nationalism had drum-beaten Chinese archaeologists to search for Chinese cultural origins (Liu & Chen 2001: 317). A particularly urgent matter for archaeologists of the 1950s was to dispel the notion of 'the western origin of Chinese culture' that was current among foreign and native archaeologists during theNationalist Era (1911-1949). To achieve this goal, it was imperative to undertake archaeological investigation systematically so as to prove the autochthonous origins and undisrupted development of Chinese civilisations. The second word, 'Marxist', reflects a process of cutting the umbilical cord of the reborn archaeology of the 'New China' from the 'bourgeois archaeology' of the 'Old China' and swaddling the discipline with the mantle of Marxist theories and models

China and “Modernity”: the Uses of the Study of Chinese History in the Past and the Present

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Zurndorfer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Data ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
The Past

AbstractThe central focus of this paper is the lack of impact Euro-centric theories of development have made on twentieth century historical writing by leading Chinese and Japanese scholars. The author reviews publications by three important historians, Naitō Konan, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, and Yü Ying-shih, all of whom attempt to locate China's first experience with “modernity” prior to nineteenth or twentieth century encounters with the West. Although all three historians differ in their interpretation of the concept “modernity,” they find Chinese culture a central feature in the identification of this concept. Furthermore, all three writers rely upon historical evidence, in particular economic and social data, to counter claims of China's history as a process of linear development.

Wounds of the Past: the Chuanju Performance of Qingtan (Sighing)

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (03) ◽  
pp. 221-237
Author(s):  
Lin Chen
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Assistant Professor ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
The Past ◽  
Deep Wound ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideas ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

In this article Lin Chen seeks to locate the experimental chuanju production Qingtan (Sighing), directed by and starring Tian Mansha, in its special socio-political context. Based on a detailed performance analysis, she explores the aesthetics of the production and how it interweaves different performance cultures while referring continually to the deep wound of the Cultural Revolution, still felt by a significant number of ordinary people in mainland China. But while the production fully intends to present the trauma of the Cultural Revolution, it barely touches the wound of the past that it evokes. This is so because of the pervading presence of the xiqu idea of beauty, current dualistic political discourse, institutional difficulties, and, most of all, the fact that the collective cultural trauma at issue has not yet been properly articulated in Chinese culture and society. Lin Chen is an assistant professor of the Qingdao Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shandong University. She completed her doctorate at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Her research interests include the aesthetic ideas of Leibniz and their far-reaching influence, the aesthetics of performativity, interweaving performance cultures and cultural studies.1

Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth Century China. By Yomi Braester. [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 264+xii pp. ISBN 0-8047-4792-X.]

2004 ◽  
Vol 179 ◽  
pp. 813-815
Author(s):  
Chris Berry
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
May Fourth Movement ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
May Fourth ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
The May Fourth Movement

Do not be fooled by the modest, precise, and careful tone of Yomi Braester's prose. In Witness Against History, he makes a powerful contribution to the transformation of scholarship on modern Chinese culture. In recent years, scholars such as Leo Ou-fan Lee and David Der-wei Wang have argued that the focus on the May Fourth movement has been too singular, obscuring important schools and authors that do not fit that agenda. Braester takes this argument home to May Fourth culture and its inheritors in literature and film. This work has been assumed to uphold the standard of modernity as nationalism, realism, rationalism, and humanism. This makes it part of a larger reform or revolution effort to reinsert China into “history,” understood as Hegelian progress. Braester understands the shock of the modern new as trauma, and this is reflected in all the works he has chosen.

Modern Chinese Biographical Writing

1962 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard C. Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Popular Interest ◽  
Enormous Quantity

“Biography,” in the words of Hu Shih, “is the least developed branch of Chinese literature.” This statement would, at first sight, seem to have little justification when we take into account the enormous quantity and wide variety of Chinese biographical literature produced during the past two millennia, and when we consider the voluminous biographical output and the keen popular interest in biography in twentieth-century China.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

Modernism Under Review: Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First World

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.

Collective Memory: Between Values and Historical Knowledge

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-142
Author(s):  
VICTOR BURLACHUK
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Main Element ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

At the end of the twentieth century, questions of a secondary nature suddenly became topical: what do we remember and who owns the memory? Memory as one of the mental characteristics of an individual’s activity is complemented by the concept of collective memory, which requires a different method of analysis than the activity of a separate individual. In the 1970s, a situation arose that gave rise to the so-called "historical politics" or "memory politics." If philosophical studies of memory problems of the 30’s and 40’s of the twentieth century were focused mainly on the peculiarities of perception of the past in the individual and collective consciousness and did not go beyond scientific discussions, then half a century later the situation has changed dramatically. The problem of memory has found its political sound: historians and sociologists, politicians and representatives of the media have entered the discourse on memory. Modern society, including all social, ethnic and family groups, has undergone a profound change in the traditional attitude towards the past, which has been associated with changes in the structure of government. In connection with the discrediting of the Soviet Union, the rapid decline of the Communist Party and its ideology, there was a collapse of Marxism, which provided for a certain model of time and history. The end of the revolutionary idea, a powerful vector that indicated the direction of historical time into the future, inevitably led to a rapid change in perception of the past. Three models of the future, which, according to Pierre Nora, defined the face of the past (the future as a restoration of the past, the future as progress and the future as a revolution) that existed until recently, have now lost their relevance. Today, absolute uncertainty hangs over the future. The inability to predict the future poses certain challenges to the present. The end of any teleology of history imposes on the present a debt of memory. Features of the life of memory, the specifics of its state and functioning directly affect the state of identity, both personal and collective. Distortion of memory, its incorrect work, and its ideological manipulation can give rise to an identity crisis. The memorial phenomenon is a certain political resource in a situation of severe socio-political breaks and changes. In the conditions of the economic crisis and in the absence of a real and clear program for future development, the state often seeks to turn memory into the main element of national consolidation.

Aftershocks

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seva Gunitsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
International System ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sudden Rise ◽  
The World ◽  
National Borders

Over the past century, democracy spread around the world in turbulent bursts of change, sweeping across national borders in dramatic cascades of revolution and reform. This book offers a new global-oriented explanation for this wavelike spread and retreat—not only of democracy but also of its twentieth-century rivals, fascism, and communism. The book argues that waves of regime change are driven by the aftermath of cataclysmic disruptions to the international system. These hegemonic shocks, marked by the sudden rise and fall of great powers, have been essential and often-neglected drivers of domestic transformations. Though rare and fleeting, they not only repeatedly alter the global hierarchy of powerful states but also create unique and powerful opportunities for sweeping national reforms—by triggering military impositions, swiftly changing the incentives of domestic actors, or transforming the basis of political legitimacy itself. As a result, the evolution of modern regimes cannot be fully understood without examining the consequences of clashes between great powers, which repeatedly—and often unsuccessfully—sought to cajole, inspire, and intimidate other states into joining their camps.

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