Social changes through the lens of language: A big data study of Chinese modal verbs

Leech’s corpus-based comparison of English modal verbs from 1961 to 1992 showed the steep decline of all modal verbs together, which he ascribed to continuing changes towards a more equal and less authority-driven society. This study inspired many diachronic and synchronic studies, mostly on English modal verbs and largely assuming the correlation between the use of modal verbs and power relations. Yet, there are continuing debates on sampling design and the choices of corpora. In addition, this hypothesis has not been attested in any other language with comparable corpus size or examined with longitudinal studies. This study tracks the use of Chinese modal verbs from 1901 to 2009, covering the historical events of the New Culture Movement, the establishment of the PRC, the implementation of simplified characters and the completion and finalization of simplification of the Chinese writing system. We found that the usage of modal verbs did rise and fall during the last century, and for more complex reasons. We also demonstrated that our longitudinal end-to-end approach produces convincing analysis on English modal verbs that reconciles conflicting results in the literature adopting Leech’s point-to-point approach.

Lu Xun and N. V. Gogol: the unexplored field of poetry

Russian literature has had a massive impact upon the creative path of Lu Xun. The researchers of his prose (including sinologist and translator L. Z. Ėĭdlin, literary scholar L. D. Pozdneeva, writer and literary scholar Feng Xue Feng, and others.) oftentimes compared his texts with the works of Russian writers. Despite the fact that Lu Xun wrote poetry throughout his life, his poetic legacy is poorly studied. Comparative analysis is conducted on the poetry of Lu Xun and N. V. Gogol. It is noted that the poetry of both authors reflects their philosophical and cultural views. The similarity of the authors lies in the fact that each used the versification that is traditional for their culture. The content and shape of Gogol’s poetry is based on the Slavic folklore and Orthodox faith, while Lu Xun is one of the initiators of the “New Culture Movement” and is considered an innovator in the Chinese literature. He wrote prose and poetry not in Wenyan (classical Chinese), which was understood by the elite of Chinese society alone, but in Baihua (written vernacular Chinese), the new Chinese literary language. Therefore, Lu Xun made a considerable contribution to the creation of new poetry, and many Chinese literary scholars (Chang Tsao, 1962-2010, Zhu Ziqing, 1898-1948) consider him the founder of the modern versification in China. The article establishes the similarities and differences between the Russian syllabic-accentual verse poems and Chinese new poetry.

Characteristics of Chinese Traditional Sports Culture: From the Standpoint of Chinese Traditional Culture

Influenced by the three schools of thought of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism in Chinese traditional culture, the Chinese sports culture has apparent differences compared to its counterpart in the West. Chinese traditional sports culture pursues “the cultivation of human mind” and “the identity of human and nature,” achieves moral and spiritual satisfaction and then “harmony,” and does not advocate competition and physical confrontation. The Western sports culture is characterized by “competition” and pursues the spirit of transcendence to itself and nature. In the process of the formation of Chinese traditional culture, the sports culture contained in it has been suppressed. The formation of the social atmosphere of “emphasizing literature and light martial arts,” the decline of the group of “chivalrous men,” the criticism of traditional martial arts in the May Fourth New Culture Movement, and the contemporary sports system of China all, to a certain extent, restrained the healthy development of sports culture. How to further improve, cultivate and disseminate sports culture is a problem that Chinese sports scholars and governors should address.

Research on Wang Xiaobo’s Humanitarian Enlightenment

In the 20th century of China, The enlightenment spirit was obviously active twice, once in the May 4th, 1919 when the New Culture Movement happen, and once in the 1980s. The core of the spirit of enlightenment is a kind of humanitarianism, which emphasizes rationality and freedom. And the core of Wang Xiaobo’s spiritual exactly is consistent with Humanitarian enlightenment, so the discussion of Wang Xiaobo’s ideological value can be summarized from the perspective of Humanitarian enlightenment: advocating science and rationality, advocating freedom and human rights, and the pursuit the true interest in life.

Is “New Culture” a Proper Translation of Xin wenhua?

For several decades, we have been witnessing a profound renewal in our understanding of the “New Culture Movement”. However, the aptness of “new culture” as a proper translation for xin wenhua 新文化 has almost never been discussed. The present paper argues that uniformly translating xin as “new” and wenhua as “culture” tends to blur the picture instead of making it clearer, for by so doing one unconsciously endorses the narrative of radical Chinese intellectuals while silencing other voices. Furthermore, the article puts forward the idea that terms such as wenhua 文化 encompassed a “multiplicity of potential readings” that have much to do with the transformation of Chinese language at the beginning of the 20th century, and with the emergence of a new conceptual repertoire. In their attempts to appropriate xin wenhua and turn it into a seemingly coherent movement with an agenda, Chinese intellectuals were fighting a war over the topic of “civilization/culture”, but also, and perhaps primarily education. Yet, by employing the term “culture” in academic writing today, we tend to produce a historical dissonance for their use of this term is not our own: we thus fall into the trap of semantic transparency, and forget that the concept of “culture” has a problematic history in both China and the West. By questioning the use of wenhua with regard to the May Fourth Movement, I provide evidence that the accepted translation of culture can be problematic if one does not clearly spell out the meaning located behind it, as the Chinese wenhua often did not mean “Chinese culture” in our modern, all too modern, anthropological sense.

May Fourth and Translation

The May 4th Movement in 1919 – and more broadly the so-called New Culture movement in the 1910s and 1920s, – a landmark in the history of China, was marked by a great wave of translations, without precedent other than the one inspired by the Buddhist faith more than 1000 years before. This volume, which includes five papers presented at the conference 4 May 1919: History in Motion (Université de Mons, Belgium, 2-4 May 2019), seeks to define and measure, in all its dimensions and complexity (from tragic theatre to revolutionary novels to literary journals), the impact of this intense translation effort in the early years of Republican China.

Reforming the Relations of the Sexes: Zhou Zuoren’s Translation and Imitation of William Blake’s Poems about Love and Sexuality

This article probes into the motivation behind Zhou Zuoren’s (1885-1967) translation and imitation of the English poet William Blake’s (1757-1827) poems about love and sexuality in the May Fourth era. It situates Zhou’s approach to Blake’s poems in the contemporary context of the New Culture Movement and traces the Japanese and English sources that informed Zhou’s reading of Blake. By analyzing Zhou’s selective use of his foreign sources and his calculated translation of Blake’s poems, it argues that Zhou’s appropriation of Blake was driven by his agenda for unfettered sexuality, free love, and women’s emancipation, i.e. the reform of the relations of the sexes in China. This study goes on to investigate Zhou’s reference to and imitation of Blake in the controversy over a young poet’s writing of love poems in 1922. It further contends that Zhou’s concern for sex relations was part and parcel of his vision of modern Chinese poetry, which resonates with his earlier and far-reaching proposal for a literature of humanity that profited from Blake’s theory of the unity of body and soul.