Discourses of Weakness in Modern China: Historical Diagnoses of the "Sick Man of East Asia." ed. by Iwo Amelung

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 53-55
Author(s):  
Ying-kit Chan
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Modern China

The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s. By Joyce A. Madancy. [Harvard and London: Harvard East Asia Monograph, 2003. 430 pp. $50.00; £32.95. ISBN 0-674-01215-1.]

2005 ◽  
Vol 182 ◽  
pp. 449-450
Author(s):  
Xun Zhou
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Chinese Nationalism ◽  
Opium Trade ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chinese Migration ◽  
Early Republican

Visiting New York's Chinatown, it is surprising to find there a memorial statue of the legendary anti-opium hero, Lin Zexu, instead of the more usual statue of the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen. Perhaps Lin deserves his place in New York's Chinatown: it is generally believed the history of Chinese migration into the New World was a chapter of humiliation, resulting from the evil opium and the opium trade. Until very recently, the conventional wisdom has been that it was the opium trade that ended the house of Qing, and that opium had turned China into a nation of hopeless addicts, smoking themselves to death while their civilization descended into chaos (a view challenged by Dikötter, Laaman and Zhou in Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China).In her book The Troublesome Legacy of Commissoner Lin, Joyce Madancy argues that, like opium, Lin Zexu was turned into a potent symbol of nascent Chinese nationalism (p. 5). Like opium, the legacy of Lin continued well into the 20th century. In his native Fujian, for instance, Lin “came to represent the vitality of elite activism and the complex links between provincial, national, and international interests. Lin Zexu's character and mission embodied the themes and motivations of Fujian's late Qing opium reformers – the righteousness of opium reform, pride in country and province, and a none-too-subtle slap at foreign imperialist greed.” Accordingly, during the late Qing/early Republican anti-opium campaign in Fujian, “reformist elites, and officials presided over the apotheosis of Lin Zexu, whose image loomed, literally and figuratively, over their efforts and shaped the rhetoric and tone of suppression” (p. 5).

Punishing Han Traitors beyond Chinese Borders

2020 ◽  
pp. 50-75
Author(s):  
Yun Xia
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Han Chinese ◽  
Modern China ◽  
The Political ◽  
Chinese Nation ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
War Of Resistance

This chapter investigates the struggle between Nationalists and Communists to punish so-called “hanjin” (literally, traitors to the Han Chinese nation) across the vast canvas of postwar East Asia. Drawing on hitherto unexamined government correspondence, legal codes, edicts, accusations, newspapers and popular literature, this chapter examines how former collaborators were brought to justice in legal and extra-legal ways. It examines the political struggles, and the tensions between justice and nationalism in the crucible of civil war. In so doing it delves into fraught categories of identity after empire, collaboration and nationalism, and postwar commemoration and memory of the so-called War of Resistance against Japan (1931-1945) in China. Ultimately this work forces us to reckon with questions of not just the meaning of “hanjian” but what the persecution of such figures reveals about the imperial roots of Modern China.

scholarly journals Antisyphilitic Mercury Drugs in Early Modern China and Japan

2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 997-1016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Trambaiolo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Corrosive Sublimate ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Mercury Chloride ◽  
Technical Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
China And Japan

Abstract Toxic mercury chloride compounds, including preparations and mixtures of corrosive sublimate (HgCl2) and calomel (Hg2Cl2), were widely used in early modern Chinese and Japanese medicine. Some of these drugs had been manufactured in East Asia for more than a thousand years, while others were produced using newer recipes developed in East Asia after the arrival of syphilis or introduced through contact with European medical knowledge. This paper traces the history of the uses and methods of production of sublimated mercury chloride drugs in early modern East Asia, showing how the Chinese doctor Chen Sicheng’s invention of the drug shengshengru (J. seiseinyū) 生生乳 in the seventeenth century exerted a strong influence over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese doctors’ treatment of syphilis. Japanese doctors’ efforts to produce and use seiseinyū provided a foundation of technical knowledge that was important for their later reception of European-style mercury chloride drugs.

scholarly journals A Brief Discussion on the News Media of Modern Korea

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (7) ◽  
pp. 53
Author(s):  
Kim Yongkyoung
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
News Media ◽  
Korean Peninsula ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Modern China ◽  
The West ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Modernization Process ◽  
East Asia Region ◽  
The 19Th Century

The relationship between the ancient and modern China with the Korean Peninsula can be summed up using the term "fed by the same river", meaning neighbours separated by only a strip of water. Especially with the efforts of both China and Korea, the ancient East Asia region has created a splendid culture and has been the leaders in the world for a long period of time. However, by the end of the 19th century, the Japanese imperialist forces had always tried to 'Conquer the Korean Peninsula,' and, in 1910, the Korean Peninsula finally became a Japanese colony. After entering the modern era, one of the phenomenas manifested in the information flow in East Asia is the rapid development of media in China and Japan due to the increase in newspapers and magazines issued by the West.190 years ago, Chosun Dynasty under the Lee Family had continuously initiated the modernization movement in the Korean Peninsula, through introducing modernization productions from the West, the Qing Dynasty and Japan. In the modernization process, the opposition between "ethnography" and "pro- Japanese Korean" have resulted social conflicts.

Language and Linguistics in Pre-Modern China and East Asia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Zhu
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Chinese Philosophy ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Language Studies ◽  
Practical Concern ◽  
Development Of Language ◽  
Correct Understanding ◽  
Chinese Linguistics

Traditional Chinese linguistics grew out of two distinct interests in language: the philosophical reflection on things and their names, and the practical concern for literacy education and the correct understanding of classical works. The former is most typically found in the teachings of such pre-Qin masters as Confucius, Mozi, and Gongsun Long, who lived between the 6th and 3rd centuries bc, the latter in the enormous number of dictionaries, textbooks, and research works which, as a reflection of the fact that most Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic, are centered around the pronunciations, written forms, and meanings of these monosyllabic morphemes, or zi (“characters”) as they are called in Chinese. Apparently, it was the latter, philological, interest that motivated the bulk of the Chinese linguistic tradition, giving rise to such important works as Shuowen Jiezi and Qieyun, and culminating in the scholarship of the Qing Dynasty (1616–1911). But at the bottom, the philosophical concern never ceased to exist: The dominating idea that all things should have their rightful names just as they should occupy their rightful places in the universe, for example, was behind the compilation of Shuowen Jiezi and many other works. Further, the development of philology, or xiaoxue (“basic learning”), was strongly influenced by the study of philosophical thoughts, or daxue (“greater learning”), throughout its history. The picture just presented, in which Chinese philosophy and philology are combined to form a seemingly autonomous tradition, is complicated, however, by the fact that the Indic linguistic tradition started to influence the Chinese in the 2nd century ad, causing remarkable changes in the analyzing techniques (especially regarding character pronunciation), findings, and course of development of language studies in China. Most crucially, scholars began to realize that syllables had internal structures and that the pronunciation of one character could be represented by two others that shared the same initial and final with it respectively. This technique, known as fanqie, laid the basis for the illustrious 7th-century rhyme dictionary Qieyun, the rhyme table Yunjing, and a great many works that followed. These works, besides providing reference for verse composition (and, consequently, for the imperial examinations held to select government officials), proved such an essential tool in the philological study of classical works, that many Qing scholars, at the very height of traditional Chinese linguistics, regarded character pronunciation as central to xiaoxue and indispensable for the understanding of ancient texts. While character pronunciation received overwhelming attention, the studies of character form and meaning continued to develop, though they were frequently influenced by and sometimes combined with the study of character pronunciation, as in the analysis of the relations between Old Chinese sound categories and the phonetic components of Chinese characters and in their application in the exegetical investigation of classical texts. Chinese, with its linguistic tradition, had a profound impact in ancient East Asia. Not only did traditional studies of Japanese, Tangut, and other languages show significant Chinese influence, under which not the least achievement was the invention of the earliest writing systems for these languages, but many scholars from Japan and Korea actually took an active part in the study of Chinese as well, so that the Chinese linguistic tradition would itself be incomplete without the materials and findings these non-Chinese scholars have contributed. On the other hand, some of these scholars, most notably Motoori Norinaga and Fujitani Nariakira in Japan, were able to free themselves from the character-centered Chinese routine and develop rather original linguistic theories.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 298-310
Author(s):  
Fei-Hsien Wang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Knowledge Economy ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Legal Doctrine ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Changing Knowledge

This chapter retraces the curious and crooked journey of copyright in modern China from the translingual transplantation of copyright/hanken/banquan in East Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century to Shanghai booksellers' customary banquan regulation and their private antipiracy policing in the late Qing and early Republican period. It also revisits the fading away of the very term banquan and its associated practices in the communist 1950s. The chapter illustrates how the internationalizing legal doctrine was reshaped and appropriated in China's local contexts as a powerful means for authors and publishers to create new orders of ownership in a changing knowledge economy. Challenging the conventional notion that the Chinese were forced to adopt the alien legal doctrine under foreign pressure reveals that Chinese booksellers and authors, no less than the foreign powers, were zealous in exercising banquan/copyright to justify and exclusively secure the profit their works generated. Copyright was introduced in China at a particular moment when China's cultural market and knowledge world were undergoing an intellectual paradigm shift at the turn of the twentieth century.

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