旅行，為了轉瞬即逝的希望：試析錢鍾書《圍城》中的旅行書寫

<p>錢鍾書的《圍城》因其獨具一格的行文、諷刺和暗喻而聞名於世，該小說對中日戰爭初期的中國文人進行了辛辣且幽默的嘲諷及批評。然而，截至目前，學界鮮少討論錢鍾書在《圍城》中的旅行書寫。傳統上，旅行往往被視為是一個文化影響、發現他者及自我的過程；極端情形下，旅行甚至是征服的開始。本文認為，錢鍾書通過旅行的情節，揭露了人性的黑暗面，例如自大、虛偽、貪婪和算計，而這些陰暗面的存在無關種族、性別、階級、教育或地區。《圍城》的男主角方鴻漸本就是一個自卑且悲觀的人，經過數次旅行之後&mdash;&mdash;從歐洲到上海、從上海到湖南、從湖南回到上海，他的這些性格特徵愈發明顯。他的一生是由一個接一個的圍城所構成，而從此圍城到彼圍城的旅途給了他短暫的可以喘息的時間和空間，這些旅行也給了他轉瞬即逝的虛假希望，那便是，他在下一站將迎來更好的機遇。</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><p>Famous for its masterful diction, satire, and metaphor, Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged is a sharp, humorous, and sarcastic criticism of Chinese intellectuals at the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War. Until recently, scant attention was paid to Qian’s travel writing in this novel. Travel is traditionally considered a process of cultural influence, the discovery of the other and the self or, radically, the beginning of conquest. This essay argues that Qian adopts the plot of travel to display a bleak picture of humanity, filled with pretentiousness, hypocrisy, greed, and manipulation, the existence of which is not impacted by race, gender, class, education, or region. For the novel’s protagonist Fang Hongjian, his habitual low-esteem and pessimism become more explicit after his several trips from Europe to Shanghai, from Shanghai to Hunan, and from Hunan back to Shanghai. His life consists of besieged fortresses one after another. The journey from here to there gives him temporary space and time for breathing, as well as a false and fleeting hope that he will have better chances in the next stop.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

Innovation Elements in Traditional Chinese Culture

The conflict between traditional Chinese culture and Western cultures has long been one between an archaic, outdated culture and a modern, new culture. Traditional Chinese culture is deemed synonymous with backwardness, decrepitude, and decadence and doomed with the passage of time, particularly since social Darwinism swept across the late Qing Dynasty and captured the spiritual world of Chinese intellectuals. Despite differences in culture types, both traditional Chinese culture and Western culture contribute to innovative buildup. It is of great significance to deeply explore the innovative factors in traditional Chinese culture and to explore both the modernization road and innovation modes with Chinese characteristics. This chapter analyzes and explores the innovative factors and values in Chinese traditional culture from the aspects of traditional modes of thinking, traditional ideas and beliefs, traditional organizations and institutions, and traditional implementations and technologies.

The People’s Algorithms: Social Credits and the Rise of China’s Big (Br)other

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals and political leaders dreamed of a modern nation inhabited by politically aware citizens. For them, this involved the production and circulation of social facts enabling citizens to make sound judgements. This theory of making citizens continued in the socialist era (1949–1978). Yet, it has changed profoundly with the advance of state-guided neoliberalism. Instead of creating enlightened citizens, the new paradigm of governance aims at producing an ecology in which citizens are expected to align their desires and aspirations with the state-sanctioned social order. Focusing on China’s emerging social credit system, this essay illustrates how central planning and neoliberal belief have come together to construct a new social and economic order using numbers, algorithms and credit rating.

The late ascent of Darwin's Descent: exploring human evolution and women's role for a new China, 1927–1965

Darwin's ideas held sway among Chinese intellectuals by the early twentieth century. Yet the usual emphasis was a Spencerism instead of Darwin's original ideas. As a result, translations of The Descent of Man in the early twentieth century quickly fell into oblivion. When the embryologist Zhu Xi (1900–62) eventually decided to give all evolutionary theories a comprehensive examination, he nevertheless found the idea of sexual evolution inadequate, as expressed in his volume Biological Evolution (1958). Only in the 1950s did serious efforts to translate Descent gather momentum, thanks to eugenicist and sociologist Pan Guangdan (1899–1967). Such efforts were not only responses to a renewed interest in Darwinism under the socialist regime, but also expressions that synthesized both scholars’ earlier paths in wrestling with schemes of human evolution and the roles of women in China's survival and renewal. Trained in different scientific and cultural milieus and holding almost oppositional views, the two scholars nevertheless converged in finding new meanings in Darwin's Descent.

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.

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.

Swiss Enchantment

A vast and hyper-centralized Asian empire built on the premise of an alleged cultural homogeneity. A small, federalist Alpine state sustained by the ideal of coexistence of different languages and religions. The differences between China and Switzerland could not be wider, and it is therefore understandable that the Swiss confederacy has been fascinating Chinese intellectuals in both the modern and contemporary era. In the late Qing and early Republican period, Switzerland was mentioned by prominent figures like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, who praised its democracy, and in the 1920s the Swiss political system became a source of inspiration for “provincial patriots” in Hunan or for Chinese federalists such as Chen Jiongming. The present paper intends to survey these political encounters and perceptions, focusing on the transformation of the Swiss institutional model and historical experience into a “political concept”, and on the reasons for its final rejection as an unrealistic utopia unsuited for China.

Modernization of Chinese Philosophical Methodology

The present paper aims to shed light on certain methodological challenges that Chinese intellectuals faced in the process of coming to terms with Marxist thought. Even at the beginning of these processes, i.e., in the first decades of the 20th century, Chinese theorists faced several difficulties regarding the issue of cross-cultural philosophical syntheses. Thus, in their endeavours to adapt Marxism to the specifically Chinese worldview, they sought suitable adaptations of traditional philosophical methodologies that would enable them to fruitfully integrate classical Chinese and modern Marxist discourses. Zhang Dainian 張岱年 (1909–2004) has played a particularly prominent role in this process. Therefore, this paper aims to shed light on his contribution to the establishment of new Chinese and cross-cultural philosophical methodologies. In terms of exploring general philosophical issues, Zhang established a unique philosophical system known as “neo-materialism” in which he attempted to integrate Marxist materialism with some basic approaches of traditional Chinese philosophy. The crucial features that defined this philosophical system were based on his innovative methodology, which is critically presented in this paper.

Adoption of Christian Anthropology by Chinese Intellectuals

In their search for justification in a scriptural text, both Christian and non-Christian Chinese intellectuals in the modern era found the Old Testament a rich and promising source at times of cultural and national crises. In this paper, three major topics will be taken up. First, it will explore the ways in which the Chinese Old Testament and its idea of God were anthropologically interpreted by Chinese intellectuals in light of modern scientism, European and American philosophy, and Chinese traditional culture. Second, it will analyze how the idea of one God was utilized by Chinese intellectuals in their efforts to explain human nature and to promote individual morality. Finally, it will discuss how universal love, which was of special importance in the context of monotheism, was interpreted by Chinese intellectuals. These three topics lead to a common interest or agenda of the time: building up a society of human perfection.