An innovative text which adopts the tools of cultural studies to provide a fresh approach to the study of Chinese language, culture and society. The book tackles areas such as grammar, language, gender, popular culture, film and the Chinese diaspora and employs the concepts of social semiotics to extend the ideas of language and reading. Covering a range of cultural texts, it will help to break down the boundaries around the ideas and identities of East and West and provide a more relevant analysis of the Chinese and China.

From the perspective of critical cultural sociology, this book delves into the intertwining relations of cultural transformation and social evolution, illuminating contemporary Chinese culture’s landscape and underlying logic since the 1980s. With a special focus on the tensions among politics, economy, and culture itself, this book examines the transitions of Chinese culture from tradition to the modern age. It expounds the cultural differentiation and its effect in contemporary China. Within this framework, the author addresses some key issues and phenomena that figure in the cultural scene of modern China, ranging from the crisis of Chinese cultural identity in the context of globalization, the media culture, and its impacts on everyday life, to the visual culture and social transformation. Offering a panoramic view of Chinese contemporary culture, literature, arts, and society, this title will serve as an essential read for scholars of China studies, Cultural studies, and visual culture, as well as anyone interested in what’s going on in Chinese contemporary culture.

Bringing together 16 articles by renowned scholars from around the globe, this volume offers a multi-dimensional view of comparative and world literature. Drawing on the scope of these scholars’ collective intellects and insights, it connects disparate research contexts to illuminate the multi-dimensional views of related areas as we step into the third decade of the 21st century. The book will be of particular interest to scholars working in comparative literary and cultural studies, and to readers interested in the future of literary studies in a cross-culturized world.

This volume provides the first study of the history of sinology (aka China studies) as charted across several communist states during the Cold War. The People’s Republic of China was created in the first years of the Cold War, with its early history and foreign policy intimately bound up in that larger geopolitical fight. All the seismic changes in China’s geopolitical landscape—from its emergence and close relationship with the Soviet Union, to the Sino–Soviet split and the eventual rapprochement with the United States—resulted in a great deal of interest by journalists, politicians, and scholars. Yet, although scholars across the Soviet Bloc produced an impressive body of work on a range of sinological studies, with rare exceptions most of those scholars and their work remains unknown outside their own intellectual circles. This book redresses this dearth of knowledge of sinological scholarship, providing invaluable and unique glimpses of Soviet Bloc sinologists and their work during the Cold War, including cutting-edge research on lesser-studied communist states such as Poland, Hungary, Mongolia, and others. International in scope, this book is ideal for scholars and researchers of modern history, Chinese studies, sinology, and the Cold War.

In this book Edward McDonald takes a fresh look at issues of language in Chinese studies. He takes the viewpoint of the university student of Chinese with the ultimate goal of becoming 'sinophone': that is, developing a fluency and facility at operating in Chinese-language contexts comparable to their own mother tongue. While the entry point for most potential sinophones is the Chinese language classroom, the kinds of "language" and "culture" on offer there are rarely questioned, and the links between the forms of the language and the situations in which they may be used are rarely drawn. The author’s explorations of Chinese studies illustrate the crucial link between becoming sinophone and developing a sinophone identity – learning Chinese and turning Chinese. Including chapters on: relating text to context in learning Chinese the social and political contexts of language learning myths about Chinese characters language reform and nationalism in modern China critical discourse analysis of popular culture ethnicity and identity in language learning. This book will be invaluable for all Chinese language students and teachers, and those with an interest in Chinese linguistics, linguistic anthropology, critical discourse analysis, and language education. Edward McDonald is currently Lecturer in Chinese at the University of Auckland, and has taught Chinese language, music, linguistics and semiotics at universities in Australia, China, and Singapore.

Mind and Body in Early China critiques Orientalist accounts of early China as a radical "holistic" other, which saw no qualitative difference between mind and body. Drawing on knowledge and techniques from the sciences and digital humanities, Edward Slingerland demonstrates that seeing a difference between mind and body is a psychological universal, and that human sociality would be fundamentally impossible without it. This book has implications for anyone interested in comparative religion, early China, cultural studies, digital humanities, or science-humanities integration.

Our perception of the Others is based on our conception of ourselves. In theory the Others should be different. If necessary, we alter their images to accommodate the apperception of ourselves. Thus Chinesia, an amalgamation of facts and fiction, was created. In order to avoid previous repetition of stereotypes and prejudices, the present study re-examines the parameters which created Chinesia and traces its development to the end of the 18th century. It discusses the reports of the European seafarers and trade embassies to China and analyzes the situation of the Jesuit missionaries and their European publications on China. These helped to develop a wondrous China during Baroque and early Enlightenment which, however, gradually became offensive to Christian pride. After Christian Wolff was dismissed from the University of Halle and banished from Prussia for eulogizing Confucianism, China was steadily downgraded, particularly by the historicists who were re-evaluating the position of Europe in World History. The white race was perceived as superior to all other races (David Hume and Kant); consequently, the complexion of the Chinese became increasingly yellower. It darkened from the Meerschaum hue (Lichtenberg) to the color of dried orange peels (Gobineau) toward the end of the 19th century. Finally, the Chinese were considered to be too stupid to have created the Chinese culture. The literary works of these periods reflect this development. The literary study begins with the analysis of European dramatization of the Manchu Conquest of China and its subsequent fictional Christianization. Then the Jesuit plays with Chinese themes are discussed, for the first time in literary history. Also analyzed is the reception of the Chinese Orphan motive in European literature which was the turning point in downgrading China, and subsequently Montesquieu's impact on Albrecht von Haller's novel "Usong" is examined. Thereafter, the study scrutinizes the contradictory positions of Herder and von Seckendorff (or Goethe, for that matter) in Weimar. The book concludes with a concise analysis of the 'eschatological sinism' of Hegel, Marx and Weber to indicate the development of the later centuries.

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Language and Culture represents the first English anthology that delves into the fascinating and thought-provoking relationship between the Chinese language and culture, exploring various macro and micro perspectives. Chinese culture boasts a history of ten thousand years, while the Chinese language’s recorded history spans at least three thousand years, dating back to the Shang dynasty oracle bone inscriptions (OBI). This handbook is comprised of 17 chapters from 18 scholars including Victor Mair and William S-Y. Wang. Many chapters approach their respective topics with a comprehensive and historical outlook. Certain extensive subjects are addressed in multiple chapters, complementing one another. These topics include: The languages and peoples of China, and the southern Chinese dialects Mandarin’s evolution into a national language and its related writing reforms Language as a propaganda tool in the Cultural Revolution and in contemporary China Chinese idioms and colloquialisms This book offers an approachable exploration of the subject, appealing to both specialists and enthusiasts of the Chinese language and culture.

Combining anatomies of textual examples with broader contextual considerations related with the social, political and economic developments of post-Mao China, Xiaoping Wang intends to explore newly emerging social and cultural trends in contemporary China, and find the truth content of Chinese society and culture in the age of global capitalism. Through in-depth textual analyses covering a variety of media, ranging from fiction, poetry, film to theoretical works as well as cultural phenomena which mirror social and cultural occurrences and reflect the present ideological proclivities of the Chinese society, this study offers timely interpretations of China in the age of globalization, its political inclinations, social fashions and cultural tendencies, and provides thought-provoking messages of China’s socio-economic and political reality.

This study explores the evidence for Chinese writing in the late Neolithic (3500-2000 BCE) and early Bronze Age (2000-1250 BCE) periods. Chinese writing is often said to have begun with little incubation during the late Shang period (c. 1300-1045 BCE) in the middle-lower Yellow River Valley area as a sudden independent invention. This explanation runs counter to evidence from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Mesoamerica that shows that independent developments of writing generally undergo a protracted evolution. It also ignores archaeological data from the Chinese Neolithic and early Bronze Age that reveals the existence of signs comparable to Shang characters. Paola Demattè takes this data into account to address the issue of what writing is, and when, why, and how it develops, by employing a theory of writing that does not privilege language as a prime mover. It focuses instead on visual systems of communication as well as ideological and socio-economic developments as key elements that promote the eventual development of writing. To understand the processes that led to primary developments of writing, The Origins of Chinese Writing draws from the latest research on the early writing systems of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Mesoamerica, and other forms of protowriting. The result is a novel and inclusive theoretical approach to the archaeological evidence, grammatological data, and textual sources, an approach that demonstrates that Chinese writing emerged out of a long process that began in the Late Neolithic and continued during the Early Bronze Age.