When Environmental History Goes Public in China

This article starts out from looking at what is missing from environmental history in China today, and then goes on to ask a particular set of questions: How does one interpret environmental history with the public? How does one present environmental history in public space? How does one engage with an environmentally conscious public? And ultimately, is it possible to establish public environmental history as a new mode of knowledge? In answer to these questions, it focuses on relationships, including the relationships between nature and culture, the environment and people, and history and memory. Using the dredging history of West Lake in Hangzhou as an illustrative case, it explores nature as material culture, calls attention to the rhetorical power of nature, and argues that environmental history should be interpreted and presented as public memory.

Cultural China 2020: The Contemporary China Centre Review

Cultural China is a unique annual publication for up-to-date, informed, and accessible commentary about Chinese and Sinophone languages, cultural practices, politics and production, and their critical analysis. It builds on the University of Westminster’s Contemporary China Centre Blog, providing additional reflective introductory pieces to contextualise each of the eight chapters. The articles in this Review speak to the turbulent year that was 2020 as it unfolded across Cultural China. Thematically, they range from celebrity culture, fashion and beauty, to religion and spirituality, via language politics, heritage, and music. Pieces on representations of China in Britain and the Westminster Chinese Visual Arts Project reflect our particular location and home. Many of the articles in this book focus on the People’s Republic of China, but they also draw attention to the multiple Chinese and Sinophone cultural practices that exist within, across, and beyond national borders. The Review is distinctive in its cultural studies-based approach and contributes a much-needed critical perspective from the Humanities to the study of Cultural China. It aims to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and debate about the social, cultural, political, and historical dynamics that inform life in Cultural China today, offering academics, activists, practitioners, and politicians a key reference with which to situate current events in and relating to Cultural China in a wider context.

“So Many Mothers, So Little Love”: Discourse of Motherly Love and Parental Governance in 2019 Hong Kong Protests

This paper focuses on Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s discourse of motherly love during the 2019 mass protests, examining it in relation to the politicization of Confucianism taking place in China today. This politicization results from a new cult of personality centered on President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan which reinforces patriarchal authoritarianism and familial nationalism through an explicit emphasis on Confucianism and traditional values. Through this process, authoritarian power has been reconfigured and legitimized as Confucian duty, with the result that political leaders are made to appear firm but benevolent parents while the protestors are cast in the role of children requiring discipline. Lam’s discourse of motherly love is further complicated by the fact that she is the first woman to assume such a leadership role in modern Chinese history, which further illuminates Hong Kong’s struggle against both patriarchal authoritarianism and the gendered legacy of coloniality.

Wielka sztuka niewielkiego narodu: Polska na tle kontaktów literackich Chin z Europą Środkowo-Wschodnią

In 2020, Wydawnictwo Akademickie Dialog published the Polish version of Chiny i Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia. Historia kontaktów literackich (China and Central and Eastern Europe. The History of Literary Contacts) by Chinese literary scholars: Ding Chao and Song Binghui. The book is part of the series Historia Kontaktów Literackich między Chinami a Zagranicą (The History of China’s Foreign Literary Contacts) which aims to become a comprehensive description of China’s cultural exchange with other countries. Volume 17 is devoted to China’s relationships with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia. In this group, Poland occupies one of the central positions due to, among other, a high interest in Polish history among Chinese intellectual elite of the early twentieth century and among the reformers of Chinese literature in that period. The article discusses the sources of the popularity of Polish themes in the formative period of modern Chinese literature and the reception of Polish literature in China today. It also attempts to familiarise the readers with the themes studied by the researchers, the goals they set for themselves and the methods they used to achieve them, and presents the benefits of publishing the book in Polish.

Can Pop Culture Allay Resentment? Japan’s Influence in China Today

In China, despite the traumatic collective memory relating to militaristic Japan during World War II, an increasing number of Chinese young adults have developed an obsession with Japanese culture, due to its export of anime, movies, pop music, and other popular culture. Based on interviews with 40 Chinese and Japanese young adults, this work examines how contemporary pop culture and historical war memories related to Japan influenced Chinese young adults, who had to reconcile their contradictory sentiments toward the Japanese government, people, and culture. The success of Japanese pop culture in China also shows how the allegedly apolitical, virtual sphere of entertainment has helped build Japan’s soft power through shaping a cool image of Japan in Asia and worldwide.

Dramatizing Chinese Intellectuals of the Republican Era in Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek: Encoding Nostalgia in a Comedy of Ideas

Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek, one of the most influential Chinese plays to have garnered attention in recent years, serves as a reminder of the importance of campus theatre in the formation and development of modern Chinese spoken drama from the early twentieth century onwards. As an old-fashioned high comedy that features witty dialogues and conveys philosophical and political ideas, it stands in opposition to such other forms of theatre in China today as the extravagant, propagandistic ‘main melody’ plays, as well as the experimental theatre of images. This article argues that the play’s focus on Chinese intellectuals of the Republican era and their ideas encodes nostalgia both in its dramatic content and theatrical form: the former encodes nostalgia for the Republican era through a nuanced representation of Chinese intellectuals of that period, while the latter encodes nostalgia for orthodox spoken drama (huaju) in the form of a comedy of ideas. Yuan Li (first author) is Professor of English in the Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. She has published extensively on contemporary Chinese and Anglo-Irish drama, theatre, and cinema. Tim Beaumont (corresponding author) is Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Languages at Shenzhen University. His research is primarily philosophical, and it is currently focused on the relationship between nineteenth-century liberal nationalism and contemporary multiculturalism.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a brief history of the English language in China. At the end of the 1970s, as China was emerging from the political maelstrom of the Cultural Revolution, English was spoken by only a relative handful of academics, foreigners, translators, and interpreters. English became a required subject when university entrance examinations were reinstated in 1978, and foreign language education began to take off again in the early 1980s at the beginning of the “reform and opening up” (gaige kaifang) period, a time when the socialist ethos of state, economy, and society was gradually dismantled in favor of a model of explosive economic growth and private individualism. Ultimately, the prominence of English in China today is the result of historical relations of colonialism and power that forged its global presence and the hierarchical ordering of linguistic inequality. The chapter then presents an overview of contemporary speech practices and English language learning in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang. It also considers two of the concepts that Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin pioneered: heteroglossia and the chronotope.