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Understanding China and the Chinese is of paramount importance in today's world. With China's rapid economic growth and increasing political influence, there has been significant interest in learning the Chinese language around the world. While we constantly hear about China in political and economic terms, we rarely come across a book that explains what Chinese culture or a Chinese person is like today.This book offers a critical overview of Chinese culture intended for college students as well as for general readers interested in the topic. While 'Chinese culture' is often deployed in terms of kung fu, Confucius or calligraphy, this book refers to the traditional and modern experiences out of which contemporary Chinese people have grown. Internationally renowned scholar in China Studies, Professor Qian Suoqiao invites readers to join him on an exciting intellectual journey to critically explore important issues including history, language, governmentality, self-cultivation, aesthetics of life, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, communism, the rise of China and her soft power which contribute to the formation of what we call 'Chinese'.
This book provides a comprehensive examination of the socio-cultural and political context of modern China in terms of its interaction with America and the West, focusing on the influence of the well-known Chinese writer and intellectual Lin Yutang (1895-1976). Offering a unique study of the life and works of Lin Yutang, it highlights his intellectual legacy in modern China and considers how his cross-cultural life and ideas embodied the modern Chinese cultural experience. It notably focuses on Lin’s reputation as an outspoken critic of the infringement of human rights during the rise of the Communist regime in China, but also on his rediscovery of Chinese cultural resources. At a time when China’s cultural contributions are increasingly relevant worldwide, this book contributes to ongoing critical reflections of Chinese modernity, particularly in terms of its intellectual legacies, but also to a renewed understanding of the cross-cultural interactions between China and America and a re-opening the dialogue and search for a new cultural understanding.
Cross-cultural Studies: China and the World, A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Zhang Longxi collects twelve essays by eminent scholars across several disciplines in Chinese and cross-cultural studies to celebrate Zhang Longxi’s scholarly achievements. As a leading scholar from post-Cultural Revolution China, Zhang Longxi’s academic career has set a milestone in cross-cultural studies between China and the world. With an introduction by Qian Suoqiao, and a prologue by Zhang Longxi himself, the volume features masterly essays by Ronald Egan, Torbjörn Lodén, Haun Saussy, Lothar von Falkenhausen, and Hwa Yol Jung among others, which will make significant contributions to Sinological and cross-cultural studies of themselves on the one hand, and demonstrate Zhang Longxi’s friendships and scholarly impact on the other.
Chinese modernity discourses have been dominated by nationalism and revolutionary radicalism in much of the 20th century, but liberal cosmopolitanism has always been an important force in modern Chinese intellectuality, though a much neglected topic in modern Chinese studies. This book is a cross-cultural critique on the problem of the liberal cosmopolitan in modern Chinese intellectuality in light of Lin Yutang’s literary and cultural practices across China and America. It includes comparative reference to other discourses of major literary and intellectual figures such as Zhang Zhidong, Liang Qichao, Gu Hongming, Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Pearl S. Buck, Agnes Smedley and Edgar Snow. It also demonstrates that a liberal cosmopolitan road, which suggests a middling Chinese modernity, is both possible and desirable.
The Chinese essay is arguably China’s most distinctive contribution to modern world literature, and the period of its greatest influence and popularity—the mid-1930s—is the central concern of this book. What Charles Laughlin terms "the literature of leisure" is a modern literary response to the cultural past that manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of short, informal essay writing (xiaopin wen). Laughlin examines the essay both as a widely practiced and influential genre of literary expression and as an important counter-discourse to the revolutionary tradition of New Literature (especially realistic fiction), often viewed as the dominant mode of literature at the time. Aft...
Lin Yutang (1895 1976) was the modern Chinese writer and intellectual best known to the Western world in the twentieth century. Hailed as a “Chinese philosopher,” Lin was the de facto spokesman for China and Chinese culture and played the role of cultural ambassador between China and the United States. This critical volume, representing the best international scholarship on Lin Yutang studies to date, is a first attempt at a comprehensive study on the cross-cultural legacy of Lin s literary practices in and across China and America. The essays collected here, most of which were first presented at the international conference on the cross-cultural legacy of Lin Yutang in China and America held at the City University of Hong Kong in December 2011, offer different perspectives on Lin s cross-cultural legacy.
Americans look to China with fascination and fear, unsure whether the rising Asian power is friend or foe but certain it will play a crucial role in America’s future. This is nothing new, Gordon Chang says. For centuries, Americans have been convinced of China’s importance to their own national destiny. Fateful Ties draws on literature, art, biography, popular culture, and politics to trace America’s long and varied preoccupation with China. China has held a special place in the American imagination from colonial times, when Jamestown settlers pursued a passage to the Pacific and Asia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans plied a profitable trade in Chinese wares, soug...
Examines how people in the Roman past thought about even earlier ruins and material remains-it examines incidents that could be described as 'archaeology in antiquity'.
The crisis of masculinity surfaced and converged with the crisis of the nation in the late Qing, after the doors of China were forced open by Opium Wars. The power of physical aggression increasingly overshadowed literary attainments and became a new imperative of male honor in the late Qing and early Republican China. Afflicted with anxiety and indignation about their increasingly effeminate image as perceived by Western colonial powers, Chinese intellectuals strategically distanced themselves from the old literati and reassessed their positions vis-à-vis violence. In Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, 1890s–1930s, Jun Lei explores the fo...
During the late Qing reform era (1895-1912), women for the first time in Chinese history emerged in public space in collective groups. They assumed new social and educational roles and engaged in intense debates about the place of women in China's present and future. These debates found expression in new media, including periodicals and pictorials, which not only harnessed the power of existing cultural forms but also encouraged experimentation with a variety of new literary genres and styles - works increasingly produced by and for Chinese women. "Different Worlds of Discourse" explores the reform period from three interrelated and comparatively neglected perspectives: the construction of gender roles, the development of literary genres, and the emergence of new forms of print media.