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SESSION 4A
Politics (I)
CHAIR:
YU Song, Assoc. Prof.
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
VENUE:
Aula Magnum
4А Politics (I)
LI David, Prof., Collins Professor of the Humanities
University of Oregon
Ethnicity, Class Mobility, and China’s Westward Expansions
Entitled “Ethnicity, Class Mobility, and China’s Westward Expansions,” this paper begins with the puzzle of Chinese ethnic indeterminacy and concludes with a look at how race and class transmute in China’s present “Belt and Road” project. Recalling the historical production of “race” in Capital’s 1st Coming, I retell the tale of how the PRC appropriates a British colonial officer’s classificatory scheme in defining the 56 official Chinese “nationalities.” Then, I look at the “ethnic” and “low class” equation in the pre-Mao and Mao times before scrutinizing the new ethnicization of class in Capital’s 2nd Coming. In this context, “westward expansions” refers to (a) Chinese export economy to the western side of the Pacific, (b) the conversion by Han majority, as the missionary of the capitalist way of life, of the Chinese ethnicities/migrant labor/“low quality people” from the coast to the hinterlands, and (c), the “Belt and Road” enterprise into Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, eventually arriving in Europe, the homeland of Adam Smith and Karl Marx.
YU Song, Assoc. Prof.
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Women’s Participation in Village Governance in China:
Negotiating the “Public” and the “Private”
The Chinese government has adopted reserved seats election to facilitate rural women’s political participation for over a decade. The most popular candidates for the reserved seats are women who fit into gender stereotype and elected women are allocated gendered roles such as family planning, health care and environment sanitation. However, women members’ job performances in the village governments are evaluated to a great extent that how much they have been violating their gender stereotypes. The research draws on the fieldwork conducted in Zhejiang province to examine gender stereotype and gendered roles of politically involved rural women in China. The author argues that institutionalizing gendered roles of women members in the village governments and gender stereotyping rural women are a result of negotiating the public and the private in the Chinese context.
MARTINEZ H. Miguel, Dr.
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Economic Urban Governance of Chinese cities:
Districts, Fiscal Revenues and Capital Investments in Chongqing city
The central government of China organizes and governs cities as administrative territories at three main levels of power: county, prefecture and provincial. Cities in China are fundamentally the amalgamation of nested territories, particularly counties and districts. Changes in territorial configuration of these two territories within cities directly modify economic-administrative capacities of city governments regarding tax revenue collection, land use change, fixed capital investment approval and foreign direct investment regulation. Therefore, when the central government approves rounds of land redistricting in counties and urban districts, it governs the process of spatial urbanization of Chinese cities. This paper analyzes the changes in the territorial configuration of Chongqing city, a massive city at provincial level in Western China. The central government established Chongqing at the same administrative level as Beijing and Shanghai in 1997, in the context of large-scale state-owned enterprises reform and the development of the ‘Three Gorges Dam’. As part of this national-level territorial reform, the central government has continued changing the territorial status of urban districts and counties within Chongqing. The cases of two of these territories, Hechuan and Yubei, show the impact of territorial change over the overall urban process in Chongqing. This paper therefore argues that the process of urbanization in China is fundamentally the economic outcome of territorial administrative change.
CAI Tingjian, Dr.
University of Munich
When Governance Meets Religion in the Era of China’s „New Normal“
In China the legitimacy of governance is now a much discussed topic. The various phenomena involved in the waning of the legitimacy of governance are studied in the political, social, and economic spheres. Nevertheless, despite this fact, in general and for decades, these problems were hidden behind the economic boom. At the same time, along with the moral collapse and vacuum in the system of belief, a booming religious ecology has developed. This was due in part to the waning of communist discourse and in part to a response to the dominance of a market ideology. The net result was an impairment of the Chinese government’s ability to rule. Within the framework of political-religious action the paper will analyze the problem of waning legitimacy because of the absence of a meaning system and the governance strategy regarding the fact of the return of religion.
CAI Liang, Assistant Professor, Dr.
University of Notre Dame, USA
Convict Politics: Elites and Law in Early Chinese Empires
It is an established paradigm to characterize early Chinese empire as a Confucian-legalist state. Under this grand narrative lurk intriguing paradoxes. In the Roman empire, the law was supposed to restrain political power and protect people from arbitrary will of rulers. By contrast, in Chinese sources, law was associated with brutality and exploitation of people by the government. Whereas the rule of law served as the basic principle of modern political thought, why had the mature legal empires of Qin-Han fostered a prominent and enduring intellectual tradition that abominated the law?
This paper attempts to explore those puzzles. Officials and nobilities of Qin-Han dynasties exercised their power. But their strength was easily bent by the law sanctioned by the violence and monopolized by the bureaucracy. The tension between law and elites created a unique phenomenon of convict politics in Chinese history. According to philosophical teachings and political agenda proposed by various early Chinese thinkers, convicts were supposed to be treated as social death, being isolated from the society and politics. In real politics, convicts with minor offenses served as assistants to administrators in local government. In central court, former convicts were an active political force, occupying important positions. Furthermore, commoners, officials, and nobilities easily fell into victims of the law and became those condemned. This paper will examine the distinct characteristics of the nature of law revealed by convict politics and its indication concerning the power relations between state and people.
4B Language
SESSION 4B
Language (III)
CHAIR:
WOODS Paul, Dr.,
Oxford Centre for Mission Studies
VENUE:
Yaitseto Hall
WOODS Paul, Dr.
Oxford Centre for Mission Studies
The Chinese Transitive Verb 打 Da3 as A Radial Category
This paper examines the Chinese verb 打 (da3, to hit) using cognitive linguistics. Prototypically, this is a transitive verb whose object is a concrete, count noun, examples being 打球 (da3qiu2) and 打人 (da3ren2), hit a ball and hit a person, a classic agent-patient relationship with transfer of energy. Collocations such as 打听 (da3ting1, hit-hear), 打气 (da3qi4, hit-air), 打电话 (da3dian4hua4, hit-electric-speech), and 打招呼 (da3zhao1hu, hit-greet) represent non-prototypical transitivity and intransitivity. These show the verb to be a radial category (Lakoff, 1987) containing sub-categories produced by extensions from the central transitive sense. Adapting Langacker’s (1990) transitivity theory and action chain idea suggests that chainings from prototypical transitive da3 produce non-prototypical transitives with abstract objects and verbs, as well as non-transitive uses. The article thus examines a specific transitive verb as well as the complex nature of transitivity in verb-object collocations.
CHEN, Ping-Hsueh
Université Grenoble-Alpes
The French Causative Lexicon and its Equivalents in Chinese:
Corpus, Methodology, Results
This paper aims to show how Chinese expresses the causality conveyed in the French lexicon. To do this, we will start from the Scale of compactness (Dixon, 2000), which ranks the causative mechanisms from the most compact to the least compact, namely: causative verbs (eng: walk, melt, fr: causer, provoquer); causative morphemes (eng: lie / lay; fr: simplifier, moderniser); complex predicate (fr: faire + V inf) and causative periphrasis (eng: make somebody cry; fr: forcerqqn à + V inf). This ranking is an effective filter for the study of causality in languages (cf. Novakova, 2015: 106-107). We applied it to the analysis of French causative mechanisms function in comparison with Chinese. Our contrastive study, based on a parallel corpus (French → Chinese), shows that Chinese has four ways to express causality conveyed in the French lexicon, namely: causative verbs (引起 yǐnqǐ, lead to, 造成 zàochéng, cause, etc.); suffixed verbs with 化 huà (强化 qiánghuà, intensify, etc.); light verbs+ V2/adj. (打断 dǎ duàn, lit. hit, break, interrupt, etc.) and causative periphrasis (causative V1 + non-causative V2: 使 shǐ, make + V2, 让 ràng, let + V2, etc.). Following the results, we will propose a range of Chinese functional equivalents of French causative verbs and constructions.
BERTULESSI Chiara, PhD Candidate
University of Milan
Critical Analysis of Chinese Lexicographical Discourse:
A Case Study of ‘zhuyi 主义’ Entries in the Xiandai hanyu cidian 现代汉语词典
Modern Chinese lexicography is considered one of the key research areas in the field of Chinese linguistics.
This paper adopts the theoretical perspective of the critical analysis of lexicographical discourse (Hornscheidt 2008; Rodriguez Barcia 2012; Chen W. 2016) to carry out a diachronic analysis of the lexicographical treatment of selected ‘-zhuyi 主义’ (-ism) entries in the 1973, 1996 and 2016 editions of the Xiandai hanyu cidian, one of the most authoritative monolingual dictionaries of modern Chinese.
The aim of this paper is to discuss whether the selected entries have been subject to revisions that reflect the ideological shifts occurred in the PRC, in particular since 1978 and the launch of the 'reform and opening-up' policy. Specific attention will be given to the inclusion (or exclusion) of entries from the wordlist and to those linguistic items in the definitions that contribute to present certain meanings as neutral or conventional.
4C Society
SESSION 4C
Society (II)
CHAIR:
ZHANG Yinbai, PhD Student
Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
VENUE:
Hall 1
JIA Xintong, PhD Student, City, University of London
Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
The Road Ahead: Victoria’s Secret goes to China
and the market of commercial sexism in the era of postfeminism
Victoria’s Secret, an American retailer of women’s lingerie, is known for its promotion of the hyper-femininity catering for the assumed to be heterosexual women. Since 2016, there have been increasing traditional Chinese symbols employed in its product design. This article focuses on the stage of Victoria’s Secret and aims to elaborate its selling of sexuality, the promotion of hyper-femininity, and its current strategy of exploring the Chinese market. First, I shall argue the sexualised representation of the lingerie models demonstrates the contradictory nature of postfeminist discourse. Can the representation of hyper-femininity be seen as a ‘women’s success’ or a retro-sexism in the era of postfeminism? Second, the shift from an ‘Asian type’ representation of Chinese model Liu Wen to a hyper-white representation of He Sui exemplifies the dynamic constructions of female beauty from a western gaze to the east. I shall explore the ways in which postfeminism marks a racialised and hetero-sexualised modernisation of femininity. Finally, the collision and fusion of Chinese traditional culture and western popular culture on the stage of Victoria’s Secret raise questions about the transnational issues involved the gendered, racialised, and nationalised power relations.
YANG Fan, PhD Candidate
University of Amsterdam
Post-feminism in Mainland China:
A Transnational Discursive Analysis and Cinematic Representation of Chick Flicks
Much of the research on post-feminist culture has been conducted in the Western context. This article tracks down female-oriented popular culture in contemporary China, which resembles Western post-feminism yet is designated as consumerist pseudo-feminism. A discursive study of consumerist pseudo-feminism is conducted within the transnational framework, in which the local history of consumerism, individualism, the rise of middle-class, women’s studies movement and its appropriation to the market economy are scrutinized. By probing into a different engagement with the local feminisms, this article points out various distinctions of consumerist pseudo-feminism in contrast to post-feminism and proposes its potential conceptualization. Based on this theoretical framework, chick flicks as a popular cinematic subgenre are analyzed. Through close-reading, this article reveals the cinematic representations of consumerist pseudo-feminism in the following three aspects: middle-class women’s fantasy of urban space, the rhetoric of freedom of choice in the narrative of women’s empowerment and the norm of feminine masquerade.
ZHANG Yinbai, PhD Student
Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
The Me too Movement in Social Welfare Organizations in China:
Feminist Solidarity and Beyond
Feminist movements are viewed as sensitive issues by the Chinese government since they have the nature of collective actions. However, the ongoing Me Too movement in the social welfare organizations have been exceptional and quite tolerated by the Chinese government. The research uses a case study approach and social media as a research setting to examine how the Me Too movement in social welfare organizations establishes feminist solidarity and brings the concept of gender equality to the public spheres. Meanwhile, through reviewing victims and offenders’ testimonies as well as the government’s attitudes towards Me Too movements in different circles, we examine the power relations between the victims and the perpetrators, and between the social welfare organizations and the state. The findings suggest that feminist solidarity as the supporting system and social media as the liberating platform have empowered marginalized individuals and forged a Chinese nascent feminist campaign.
LIU Chang, PhD Candidate
Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University
Sexualizing Madonna in Post-Mao China
Madonna’s music was not easily available in China during the 1990s, yet she achieved great popularity in a different ideological and media environment, which makes it an interesting case for the studies of the construction of star image. I will begin by recounting the exhibition of nude oil paintings in Beijing in the late 1980s and consider Chinese mass’s growing interest in nudity and their sexual awakening in post-Mao China. Then, I move on to the release of Madonna’s 1992 album Erotica and discuss how Madonna’s hyper sexualized star image benefited from China’s body craze which evolved into China’s Madonna craze. Drawing on close analysis of visual and textual materials from underground publications of Madonna photo-books, biographies, and pirate audio-visual products, I will argue, the sexualization of Madonna in post-Mao China is a response to the repression of gender differences and sexuality during Mao and Deng’s China.
4D Teaching
SESSION 4D
Teaching Chinese as a second language (I)
CHAIR:
STIRPE Luca, Assoc. Prof.
"G. d'Annunzio" University of Chieti-Pescara
VENUE:
Conference Hall
STIRPE Luca, Assoc. Prof.
"G. d'Annunzio" University of Chieti-Pescara
Chinese Literature as a Language-Teaching Tool
Chinese Textbooks used in Italian universities generally show little concern for transmitting knowledge of the deep mechanisms of the Chinese language, such as polisemy, homophony, ideographicity as well as its isolating and monosyllabic nature. Such a trend seems particulary dangerous in the currrent day panorama of language learning, in which the so-called ‘character amnesia’ (tibi wangzi 提笔忘字) is leading Chinese native speakers to a new form of analphabetism. This is mostly due to the increasing disregard for paper and pen shown by recent generations in China, a direct consequence of the fatal and apparently irreversible fascination for digital technologies. With increasing frequency, young Chinese people encounter problems with character identification and writing (Tian 2017, Lin 2010). The reason for this phenomenon can be ascribed to a subtle process of mutual conditioning between mind and technology, a process which through touchscreen and input-based digitization systems (like the ones which employ pinyin), is leading to a phonetic transcription of the Chinese language (Tan et al. 2013).
I believe that an important tool to contend this ‘amnesia’ can be found in literary texts, especially the ancient ones, which can become a precious and virtually inexhaustible source for understanding the distinctive characteristics of the Chinese language at a profound level. Far from proposing an ‘ideal textbook’, my paper aims to show the potential of juxtaposing grammatical and communicative teaching with material taken from literature.
Chinese late-imperial detective fiction, for instance, proves to be very useful in this regard, because of its universally recognized appeal. In these stories, many crimes are resolved by means of enigmas, riddles and conundrums which are built on the very characteristics of the Chinese language, such as polisemy, homophony etc. My examples are taken from a late-Ming collection of detective short stories titled Criminal Cases Brilliantly Judged and [Solved] with Perspicacity by the Officials of the August Ming Dynasty (Huang Ming zhusi lianming qipan gong’an 皇明諸司廉明奇判公案), dated 1598.
STRUCHALINA Galina,
Candidate of Philological Sciences
Belgorod State University
“Call Hua Tuo”. Medical Topics
in the Chinese Language Classes of Sinology Students
The article describes the three-year experience of conducting an experimental one-semester course “Medicine and Health. Traditional Chinese Medicine” for sinology students. Along with the traditional forms of classes, the course includes first aid practical classes and translation practice in the clinic of traditional Chinese medicine, the development and implementation of case study scenarios, joint seminars with medical students, thematic audio-visual translation and dubbing in Chinese.
VARRIANO Valeria, Assoc. Prof
University of Naples L’ Orientale
How Can Millennials Memorize Chinese Characters?
As everyone knows, one of the difficulties in learning the Chinese language originates from its logographic writing system. We agree with scholars such as Frost, Katz and Bentin, stating that Chinese is a deep orthographic system, where the correspondence between orthography and phonology is arbitrary. Its phonetic knowledge derives from the so-called "mental dictionary/mental lexicon", that is, a "deposit" in our mind where we store any information concerning words and which will then be useful to recognize them (Frost 1987).
In a logographic writing system, the reader could realize the pronunciation of a character whether accessing to the phonological information associated with the word linked to the character (so it might be a post-lexical process, once the mental unit corresponding to the character has been identified), or using some phonological information, which is specified in the phonetic radical or root in most Chinese characters.
Several studies seem to show that when learning Chinese as a FL, its access code for the mental dictionary is phonological, not visual. The phonological code should therefore be a compulsory way to reach the mental dictionary. The phonological code might help to keep the information (related to that word) in the working memory, thus allowing the understanding of the related text. Phonological awareness and verbal working memory are therefore essential factors in the character encoding. This work aims to introduce an ideal textbook in teaching Chinese to millennials at university and high school level, where the considerations above are taken into account and where educational ludic and musical activities, based on the Gardnerian concept of multiple intelligences, are proposed. Such hypotheses also arise from field experiments which will be briefly mentioned.
CHIATYAKOVA Agniya, Dr.
Novosibirsk State Pedagogic University
Solving Hieroglyphic Riddles-Puzzles
as a Method of Teaching Written Chinese and Idiomatic Expressions
Hieroglyphic writing forms the integral part of studying the Chinese language. The author suggests to support teaching the Chinese language and culture with solving various hieroglyphic riddles and puzzles. Relative to the difficulty, the author outlines the following levels: 1) simple riddles, i.e., hieroglyphs-images, where a real object is used instead of one of the hieroglyphic signs. 2) mid-level riddles, where one or several hieroglyphs-images form a word, 3) difficult riddles: several hieroglyphs-images form a chengyu or a well-wishing expression, and 4) riddles based on emoji and smileys. When solving such hieroglyphic riddles and puzzles one should always take into consideration culture pattern. 1) Use of the ‘phonic similarity’ principle; 2) The generated puzzles can be based on objects representing traditional Chinese culture, such as: Mahjong tiles, the ruyi (wish sceptre), etc. 3) often full variants of hieroglyphs writing are used here. Solving riddles and puzzles supports in better understanding features of the Chinese culture; as well as represents one of the most efficient ways of learning hieroglyphic characters.
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