The Chinese Historical Review
ISSN: 1547-402X (Print) 2048-7827 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ytcr20
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To cite this article: (2014) BOOK REVIEWS, The Chinese Historical Review, 21:2, 178-192
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1547402X14Z.00000000038
Published online: 17 Nov 2014.
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Date: 25 March 2016, At: 21:12
The Chinese Historical Review, 21. 2, 178–192, November 2014
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YUGEN WANG, Ten Thousand Scrolls: Reading and Writing in the Poetics of
Huang Tingjian and the Late Northern Song. Harvard-Yenching Institute
Monograph Series 76. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011.
300 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 9780674062559
Yugen Wang’s Ten Thousand Scrolls offers a sweeping analysis of the impact of
print technology and the resulting increasing availability of texts on the literary
production and poetic composition of Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–1105), one
of the most renowned poets of the late Northern Song 北宋 dynasty (960–1127). It
is well known that China under the Song experienced a zenith of its intellectual
and literary prosperity and the development of Chinese printing also reached
a watershed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, marked by a significant
proliferation of imprints, yet there had long been a lacuna in scholarship on the
connections between poetic practice and its material aspects. Wang’s new book is
informed by the recent trend to delve into both medieval manuscript culture and
the effects of printing on that culture. He shares especially with Xiaofei Tian and
Christopher M. B. Nugent an interest in examining the paths through which the
material aspects of literary production and consumption traveled to the field of
literary criticism.1 By analyzing the poetic production and criticism of Huang
Tingjian and the group of writers retrospectively designated the Jiangxi School
(Jiangxi shipai 江西詩派) and imbedding them within the ongoing shift in book
culture from manuscript to print, Wang focuses on what he calls ‘‘the interpretive
or hermeneutic responses to printing’’ (p. 4) to explore how increased availability
of imprints changed the ways in which texts were consumed by individual readers
and how that, in turn, changed how writers wrote.
Instead of providing a chronological biography of Huang Tingjian, Wang
structures his book around a two-part thematic narrative to investigate Huang’s
poetics and print culture and their interoperability. The first three chapters are
devoted to a comprehensive study of Huang’s poetics to examine the special
role that ‘‘method’’ (fa 法) played in Huang’s poetics. Chapter 1 discusses the
rediscovery of Du Fu 杜甫 (712–70) in the late eleventh century through printed
collections of Du’s poetry compiled by Northern Song scholars and the process of
elevating Du to the absolute-model. Wang then turns in chapter 2 to probe into
Huang’s conception of poetic method, the method to be understood ‘‘as a guiding
principle, a general system or way of doing things, an ultimate reality or truth’’
1
Xiaofei Tian, Tao Yuanming & Manuscript Culture: The Records of a Dusty Table
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); Christopher M. B. Nugent, Manifest in Words,
Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Asia Center, 2011).
# The Chinese Historical Review 2014
DOI: 10.1179/1547402X14Z.00000000038
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(p. 25). Noticing the heavy borrowing in Huang’s poetics of terminology from
carpentry, Wang cogently argues that, for Huang, ‘‘the idea of methods is not
inherently negative; methods are neutral tools and forces that can be harnessed to
serve other purposes’’ (p. 91). Through an explication of Huang’s metaphor of the
‘‘leopard in the fog,’’ which is also the title of chapter 3, Wang relocates Huang’s
fa in the larger intellectual and cultural contexts in which the concern with fa
emerged and functioned. By showing how Huang changed the nature of the
metaphor by shifting the focus of attention from the result to the process, Wang
forcefully suggests that for Huang the reading and studying of earlier literature is
one of the proper fa as it becomes ‘‘the best place for the mingling of different
values perspectives, and traditions, and the most important and most effective way
of forging new understanding and creating new texts’’ (p. 130).
At the heart of Wang’s study of Huang Tingjian and his poetic practice,
however, are the last two chapters, in which he situates Huang’s poetics in the
larger historical and cultural context of the rapid development of printing and the
enormous effects on Northern Song literati brought up by this development. With
the explosion of printed texts, ‘‘ten thousand scrolls’’ (wanjuan 萬卷), once merely
a symbolic number and a formidable task for private book collectors, became
suddenly realizable. Accordingly, this increasing availability of texts resulted to a
‘‘shift in attitudes toward book collecting and book reading’’ (p. 160) and opened
up for readers and writers of the time ‘‘immense interpretive and compositional
space’’ (p. 18). Within this context, Wang concentrates in chapter 4 on Huang’s
theories and practices of reading and studying books. Noticing an important
material dimension of Huang’s strenuous theoretical efforts to ground poetic
composition in book reading, Wang vividly portrays a shift in Huang’s conception
of the methods of reading—a shift from the breadth to the depth and thoroughness
of reading. This shift, as Wang convincingly argues, represents a ‘‘complex process
of interaction [in which] the material culture of the day penetrated into the
intellectual and literary discourse’’ (p. 33). In chapter 5 Wang extends his
discussion to examine the broad trajectory of that shift and its impact on the
literary and interpretive landscape of the Northern Song. He reconnects back to
the topic of wangjuan by documenting a sense of anxiety expressed by literati such
as Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101) that the wide spread of imprints was destroying the
reading habits and ability of younger generations. Similar anxieties persisted for a
long time and were shared by later intellectuals like Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) and
Li Rihua 李日華 (1565–1635), yet they provided not only ‘‘a valuable frame for
comparison’’ for Huang’s treatment of the topic, but also ‘‘a lens through which
the author’s inner reaction to the epochal encounter between technology and the
intellectual production of knowledge can be viewed in more fruitful ways’’ (p.
163).
Readers of this book will be rewarded with numerous insights into both Huang
Tingjian’s ideas about poetic methods and the broader historical context of the
Northern Song. For instance, Wang lucidly clarifies that Huang’s poetics radically
departed from the mainstream in classic Chinese poetics, in which composition
had been assumed to be a mimetic process and poetic composition arose as a
spontaneous and unmediated revelation of the poet’s reactions to external stimuli.
Instead, Huang’s poetics demonstrate a clear emphasis on the importance of fa
‘‘beneath the appearance of spontaneity and effortlessness’’ (p. 2), which means for
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Huang ‘‘ways and means of realization and materialization’’ and ‘‘normative
procedures or principles that will make the presumably amorphous process of
poetic composition graspable, describable, and transmissible’’ (p. 9). Wang also
takes note of the abolishment of poetry from the civil service examinations in
1071, a major turning point in the history of Chinese poetry. Huang Tingjian,
attaining his jinshi title in 1067, belongs therefore not only to the last generations
of scholars who needed poetry for their political success, but also to the first
generations who were forced to rethink and reconceptualize the purpose and
meaning of poetics. Nonetheless, Wang could respond to existing secondary
scholarship on this context more substantively to place Huang’s search for fa in
poetic composition within the great intellectual movements in the late Northern
Song. For example, two profound studies by Peter K. Bol and Ari Daniel Levine,
respectively, can provide richer socio-cultural context for Wang’s inquiry;
unfortunately, there is no reference to either of them.2 Although Wang clearly
states that this book is about ‘‘Huang Tingjian’s poetic thought rather than his
composition’’ and thus his examples are ‘‘highly selective’’ (p. 6), readers better
versed in Huang Tingjian’s writings would still expect more quotation of and
elaboration on his essays and letters, since they might reveal more dimensions of
Huang’s ideas and approaches.
Certainly, these minor cavils should by no means detract the distinguished
accomplishment Wang has made in his cogent, ground-breaking study of how one
of the most important poets of his period responded to the burgeoning new
advance of printing in the Northern Song. Wang’s precise analysis and sharply
observed savoring of the interactions between Huang Tingjiang’s poetics with the
material aspects of print technology amount to this book’s most valuable
contribution. The interactions between literary world and print technology in
early modern Chinese history had been long overlooked; I am thus pleased to see
that there is a recent trend of scholarly attention to grapple with such nuances.3
Furthermore, the Harvard University Asia Center deserves much credit for
carrying on the good tradition of its series to insert the original Chinese texts next
to their translations, making this book a joyful reading. In general, Yugen Wang’s
Ten Thousand Scrolls is a well-researched and beautifully argued work and is an
indispensable reading not just for specialists of Chinese poetics and literature or
scholars of Chinese print culture and media, but all interested in intellectual
history in imperial China.
HANG LIN
University of Hamburg
2
Peter K. Bol, ‘‘This Culture of Ours:’’ Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Ari Daniel Levine, Divided by a Common Language:
Factional Conflict in Late Northern Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).
3
See, for example, Yuming He, Home and the World: Editing the ‘‘Glorious Ming’’ in
Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Asia Center, 2013) for an excellent investigation of the interactions between printing,
consumption, and textual editing in the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644).
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MATTHEW W. MOSCA, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of
India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China. Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 2013. 398 pp. $60 (cloth). ISBN 08047-8224-5
Having successfully secured its vast and diverse frontiers by violence and
through administrative maneuvers, the Qing dynasty did not engage itself, like
many other countries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in
seeking and forging alliance with its neighbors in order to achieve supremacy in its
international relationships. As Matthew W. Mosca sees it, the Qing did not seem
to have a ‘‘grand strategy.’’ The reasons for a lack of far-sighted planning in its
international relationships and how the Qing underwent a transition toward
perceiving its neighbors and outsiders to its door in a holistic way are what Mosca
sets to explain in this book.
Mosca’s case to prove the absence of the ‘‘grand strategy’’ is that the Qing
dynasty did not have a grasp of the power scope of the fledgling British empire,
failing to understand that the British in India and the British in China’s coast had
belonged to the same group of the ‘‘barbarians,’’ who were potentially a grave
threat to the Qing. The book starts with the state of the geographic knowledge
about Mughal India in Qing China prior to the mid-eighteenth century, which is
characterized by Mosca as piecemeal and confusing, or ‘‘incommensurable,’’ to use
his own word. Although the Qing conquest of the Junghar empire in Eastern
Turkistan in the 1750s opened new information channels about India, it did not
bring a ‘‘revolution’’ in Qing geographic knowledge about India. At the end of the
eighteenth century when the Qing engaged itself in its last frontier war against the
Gurkhas, its field commanders encountered the British in India for the first time,
realizing that the British in India and the British in China’s southern coast were
from the same country in Europe. Yet, this revelation did not trigger any
fundamental change in the Qing geographic worldview, nor did it influence the
Qing’s overall strategic thinking. In the first decades of the nineteenth century,
intensified British activities on both frontiers of Qing China, the frontier of Tibet
and the coastal frontier, aroused more attention to Britain and British India from
among the Qing officials and scholars. Nevertheless, the Qing again failed to work
out a new strategy with regard to the British empire. The turning point did not
come until the Opium War. It is Wei Yuan who completed the transition from a
‘‘frontier policy’’ to a ‘‘foreign policy,’’ as Wei’s perception of the British empire
broke away from the traditional approach of perceiving different frontiers in
isolation, but viewing the British empire hovering about Qing China’s different
frontiers as one entity.
This is an intricate work. The first two parts of the book are mainly on the
evolution of the Qing geographic knowledge about India. In doing so, it also
discusses the Qing geographic scholarship in general. Starting from Part III, ‘‘The
Age of Transition, 1800–1838,’’ Mosca focuses more on political and diplomatic
histories. In view of that geographic scholarship, a rather obscure division in
Chinese intellectual history, has not gained much attention, this book helps fill a
visible gap, fit to be an essential read for understanding the evolution of Qing
geographic knowledge about India. Meanwhile, Mosca considerably expands the
horizon on another less studied area, the Qing frontiers and foreign relationships
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in the first decades of the nineteenth century prior to the Opium War. While
previous scholarship on this period almost exclusively focuses on the coast, this
book spans several frontiers, interconnecting incidents on the Tibetan frontier, the
northwestern frontier and coastal frontier, to provide a broader backdrop for
understanding the inevitable clash between the Qing and Britain in the Opium
War. Throughout the book, Mosca has made use of a variety of sources, including
Manchu archives, Jesuit documents and other less used materials. His interpretations of these, some of which are difficult to decipher, are often fresh and
insightful.
This work is both innovative and renovative. Despite its significant contributions mentioned above, it in fact corroborates a familiar thesis in the studies of
modern Chinese history; namely, that the Qing failed to understand the new
international order until the Opium War when Qing defeat in the war forced its
elites to reevaluate the dynasty and the Western powers. Previous scholarship has
credited, in general, Lin Zexu and Wei Yuan for spearheading the acquisition of
the knowledge about the West. Not allowing himself to repeat the clichés, Mosca
endeavors to revise the conventional wisdom by pointing to the structure of the
Qing frontier policy as the root cause of the Qing’s slow realization of the potency
of the British empire. According to him, the Qing had treated its frontiers in
‘‘mutual isolation,’’ and this ‘‘localized frontier policy’’ prohibited the Qing from
viewing its foreign relations in a holistic manner. Nevertheless, the book fails to
make his ‘‘frontier policy’’ premise convincing. While he admits that the Qing did
have a coherent frontier agenda before 1757 in wrestling with the Junghar
Mongols, Mosca has not attempted to address how the Qing dynasty shifted from
having a ‘‘grand strategy’’ to treating its frontiers in ‘‘mutual isolation,’’ which
might have involved deliberations, debates, and institutional adjustments. Since
British India had not reached the point to constitute a serious challenge to the Qing
empire until the early nineteenth century, as Mosca recognizes, the fact that the
Qing did not pay sufficient attention to the British in India in the latter part of the
eighteenth century, which constitutes about a half of the book, does not do much
service in proving his central argument. In fact, Mosca states repeatedly that the
Qing stopped acquiring information about India after the conquest of Xinjiang
because India was of little strategic significance at that time. In the second half of
the book that discusses the early nineteenth century, Mosca alludes to the fact that
the Qing had followed a defensive strategy instead of an offensive one in its foreign
relationships. As a defensive strategy should have been based upon considerations
of all parts and aspects of the empire, it is debatable to assert that the Qing failed
to view all its frontiers holistically, and did not possess the capacity to do so.
The core of Mosca’s ‘‘foreign policy’’ is the idea of using the ‘‘barbarians’’ to
check the ‘‘barbarians,’’ put forward by Wei Yuan in Haiguo tuzhi in the 1840s.
As Mosca points out, Wei Yuan’s opinion was not accepted by the court , and it is
not until the 1860s when the Qing dynasty was faced with multiple international
and domestic crises that it started to update and reform its perception, policy, and
apparatus in dealing with the Western powers and its neighbors. However, Mosca
does not take on the crucial 1860s and beyond in this study, giving only a less than
two-page summary of the major developments starting from the 1860s in the
conclusion. As a result, his ‘‘foreign policy’’ assumption ends up with remaining at
conceptual and hypothetical levels.
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Also, readers may hope to see a more complete glossary—many important
names are absent there. There are also regrettable omissions in the bibliography.
YINGCONG DAI
William Paterson University of New Jersey
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Henrietta Harrison, The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese
Catholic Village. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. 270 pp. $26.95
(paper). ISBN 9780520273122
Harrison’s study of one of China’s remote Catholic villages, Dongergou
(translated as ‘‘Cave Gully’’), now a popular pilgrimage site in central Shanxi, is a
thoughtful and compelling consideration of Catholic life in modern China. Léon
Joly, in his 1907 history of Christianity in Asia, states that Christianity did not
take root in China because it failed to become truly Chinese. Henrietta Harrison
argues ‘‘against this framework,’’ suggesting rather that Chinese Christians ‘‘have
over the centuries come to relate increasingly closely to the church as a global
institution’’ (p. 200).
Throughout her analysis of Shanxi Catholicism, Harrison highlights the tension
between Joly’s view and her own, and demonstrates convincingly that local
questions of Christian enculturation in China were often matched by vitriolic
tensions between missionaries and native Chinese as European friars sought to
conform Chinese Catholicism in Shanxi to European expectations. One of the
successes of this important new book is Harrison’s decision to center her study on
a single Catholic village and evaluate the historical vicissitudes that punctuated its
religious and cultural landscape through three centuries of political transformation
and Sino-Western exchange, as Chinese Catholics envisioned their local community vis-à-vis the global Church.
Harrison’s study continues a growing body of new scholarship on the history of
the Christian missions in late imperial to modern China. Whereas Liam Brockey’s
Journey to the East (2008), Paul Mariani’s Church Militant (2011), and Ronnie
Po-chia Hsia’s A Jesuit in the Forbidden City (2012), all center on the important
legacy of Jesuits in China, Harrison’s work on the activities of Franciscans in
Shanxi brings to light the previously marginalized history of the mendicant Orders
that settled in peripheral provinces. Harrison bases the title of her work, The
Missionary’s Curse, on a popular story retold at Dongergou village about a
Franciscan priest who, after a conflict with the Chinese villagers, called them
‘‘Judeans, and [...] prayed to Heaven to punish them with seven years of bad
harvest’’ (p. 116). Similar accounts of Sino-Missionary conflict are woven
throughout the book’s narrative and contextualized within the larger developments of China’s transformation from empire to Communist nation-state. The
Introduction and chapter 1 trace the Jesuit and Franciscan mission history of
Shanxi Catholicism. While Jesuits in Shanxi had ‘‘adapted elements of Christianity
to fit with Confucian philosophy’’ (p. 32), local Catholics ‘‘found their practices
under attack from the new Franciscan missionaries’’ once the Jesuits had gone (p.
37), following their suppression in 1773. This new antagonism, Harrison notes,
led some Shanxi Christians to resist their new Franciscan guests (p. 38).
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In chapter 2, Harrison mentions Barnaba Nanetti, a Franciscan who collected
local stories in Dongergou during and after the Boxer Uprising; based largely on
Nanetti’s records and a remarkable collection of archival materials, Harrison
examines the comparative roles played by European clergy and their native
counterparts. Cultural identities both conflicted and conflated as Chinese
seminarians began to study at Catholic schools in Europe. Despite such intercultural
exchanges, many Italian priests found life in Shanxi unbearable. Harrison explains
how these tensions often were mitigated as both foreign and native priests in Shanxi
benefitted from fees earned from administering sacraments. In chapters 3 and 4,
Harrison considers the violent attacks of the Boxers and how native priests sought to
empower themselves under the Italian missionaries. Using a variety of sources from
Rome’s Propaganda Fide, materials from the Franciscan Curial archive, and
documents held in Taiyuan, chapter 3 recounts how one Chinese priest traveled to
Rome to protest the strict control of Bishop Gabriele Grioglio over the native
Chinese. Grioglio was recalled to Rome, and this priest is still commemorated in
Shanxi as a heroic defender of national agency.
In her account of the Boxer Uprising in Shanxi, the center of anti-Christian
violence in 1900, Harrison focuses her analysis on economic and political conflicts
rather than religious antagonisms. Chinese hostility to foreigners, she suggests, was
largely a resistance to ‘‘European expansion’’ and the meddling pressures of
egotistical missionaries such as Francesco Fogolla, who appealed to Western powers
in Beijing to ‘‘intervene directly in local administration’’ (p. 95). One of the principal
contentions between local Chinese and foreign missionaries was the growing
physical presence of Western-style edifices, such as the imposing monastery built at
Dongergou in the 1880s. This led Governor Cen Chunxuan to lament the ‘‘forest of
churches’’ that had erupted in the province, which resulted in an increasing number
of ‘‘foolish’’ people who converted to Christianity (p. 95). More attention could
have been given to the religious dimensions of this conflict, which were perceived by
both the Boxers and the Christians as a spiritual struggle between the gods of
China’s popular pantheon and the preternatural powers of Christianity. In addition
to the absence of this aspect of the conflict, there are some discrepancies between the
book’s narrative and its sources. Whereas Harrison recounts that Shanxi governor
Yuxian was ‘‘forced to commit suicide’’ after the Uprising (p. 113), extant sources
recall that he was publically beheaded in Lanzhou (see Qin Geping, 2008, p. 323).
The history of Shanxi Catholicism into the 1970s, two decades after the
founding of the People’s Republic of China, is traced in chapters 5 and 6. Here,
Harrison richly examines Shanxi’s political climate after 1949, exploring Catholic
survival once the last foreign missionaries were expelled. Pressures during this time
shifted away from Sino-Western antagonisms to hostilities between China’s new
Communist government and the anti-Communist Chinese Catholics. Harrison
deftly outlines how Shanxi Christians resisted state power, while the state sought
to undermine local religious attachments. The final chapter focuses again on
Dongergou village, and describes its religious re-emergence after the difficult years
of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. During this era of
reconstruction, with China’s growing connection to the outside world, Shanxi’s
Catholics were able to develop ‘‘closer links with the global church’’ (p. 198).
Dongergou remains Catholic after the departure of the Franciscans, and Harrison
provides trenchant insights into how this was accomplished.
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Harrison’s narrative occasionally stretches the interpretive limits of historical
analysis, however, and her accounts of some missionary activities contradict
Catholic opinion in Shanxi. This study persistently attempts to expose ‘‘tension
between the power of the missionaries and the poverty and dependence’’ of the
local Catholics, to the extent that scant merits are ascribed to the Europeans who
lived there. While evidence for these practices may exist in archival sources, they
are more the exception than the rule of Franciscan behavior in Shanxi. For
example, alternate accounts of missionary efforts and attitudes in Shanxi can be
found in Li Yuzhang and Li Yuming’s 2006 commemorative history of the Diocese
of Taiyuan, or in the letters of Franciscan sisters who oversaw the orphanage in
Dongergou, revealing their efforts as less conversion-oriented than concern for the
well-being of the children entrusted to them (FMM Archives, Rome).
One manifest strength of Harrison’s study, however, is her ability to weave
together a complex history of Sino-Missionary exchange, exposing both the
successes and challenges of that encounter between two disparate cultures. As
Harrison notes, ‘‘there has been a spectacular growth in the number of Chinese
Christians’’ since the 1980s. She rightly asks what the future may hold for
Christianity in Shanxi as people grow more prosperous and educated (p. 206).
ANTHONY E. CLARK
Whitworth University
SHERMAN COCHRAN AND ANDREW HSIEH, The Lius of Shanghai. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2013. 472 pp., 20 illustrations, 2 maps, 1 family tree.
$39.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-674-07259-6
Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh have written a fascinating book on the
family of Liu Hongsheng (1888–1956), based primarily on more than two
thousand personal letters exchanged among family members over the course of
Liu’s adult life. Liu Hongsheng was an important Republican era entrepreneur
with diversified interests in cement, matches, wharves and transportation, coal,
woolen textiles, and banking.1 He was also politically and socially close to the
highest officials in China’s Nationalist government; in 1949, leaders of the Chinese
Communist Party, including Zhou Enlai, campaigned to keep his businesses and
expertise in China. With Liu’s business empire always in the background, this
volume focuses on the Liu family and how it fared over the turbulent decades of
twentieth-century China.2 Their journeys, trials, loves, and losses form a riveting
narrative.
1
Recent studies of Liu Hongsheng’s business empire include: Kai Yiu Chan, Business
Exchange and Structural Change in Pre-War China: Liu Hongsheng and His Enterprises, 1920–
1937 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006); Sherman Cochran, ‘‘China Match
Company,’’ in Encountering Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China,
1880–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 147–76.
2
The period under the People’s Republic of China has appeared in Sherman Cochran,
‘‘Capitalists Choosing Communist China: The Liu Family of Shanghai, 1948–1950,’’ in
Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China, edited by Jeremy
Brown and Paul G. Pickowicz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 359–85.
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Liu Hongsheng began his illustrious business career when he married Ye Suzhen
in 1907. She was the beautiful daughter of a distinguished merchant family from
Liu’s hometown of Ningbo. The Ye family’s money launched Liu into the business
world. Liu and Ye raised eleven children, eight boys and three girls, all of whom
were sent abroad to study as long as they obeyed three rules: ‘‘(1) to return and live
his or her adult life in China; (2) work for the family business in Shanghai as
needed; and (3) to marry a Chinese—not, under any circumstances, a foreigner’’
(p. 20). The years that the children spent abroad at various prestigious institutions,
including Harvard University, MIT, the Wharton School of Business, Cambridge
University, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, yielded many opportunities
to stray from their promises, which accounts for the lively, ardent, and also
confrontational nature of the letters among the family members. The vicissitudes
of China at war during the 1930s and 1940s also separated them, which—given
the importance of the sons to Liu’s business empire—provided a continuing need
for letter writing.
Working with this voluminous correspondence, Cochran and Hsieh confronted
a challenge in how to organize the material for their readers. They chose an
inspired organization principle: each chapter concentrates on a crisis faced by an
individual family member, and the chapters are presented roughly in chronological
order. Each chapter tells an enthralling story, which kept this reader mesmerized.
To give a few examples, in 1939 Liu sent two sons to England to gain entry into
English society and to qualify to take the entrance examinations for Cambridge
University. Among many captivating details, the two boys took up fox hunting to
meet upper-class English! Another chapter relates how the Second Sino-Japanese
war threw another son into a despair that motivated him, first, to turn to
Christianity, and, then, to the Chinese Communist Party. He clandestinely traveled
to Yan’an and spent a year there, not revealing his membership in the party until
the 1970s. After an advantageous marriage had been arranged for the eldest
daughter with T. V. Soong’s son, her affair with a married man and the resulting
pregnancy provide a frisson of scandal to the family narrative, as do Liu’s own
extramarital affairs to which his wife did not quietly acquiesce, as one might have
expected from an elite Chinese woman.
Cochran situates the Liu saga within the extensive existing historiography on the
Chinese family. He acknowledges that the Lius are not a typical family, which
makes it difficult to generalize to come to broader conclusions. Nevertheless, he
acutely observes the ways in which this family’s story conforms to and also
deviates from earlier scholarship. The patriarchal nature of Chinese families
dominates the book, what Cochran labels as ‘‘father power’’ (p. 2). The Liu family
story reinforces Liu Hongsheng’s patriarchal role, but the heart of the book
paradoxically remains the tensions between Liu and the other members of the
family, describing the strategies each family member exercised to realize his/her
individual will against the father’s attempts to make the decisions he believed will
strengthen the family. Cochran concludes that the atypical wealth of sources from
multiple perspectives within the family available to him from the letters creates a
special case that ‘‘lends credence’’ to multiple interpretations of the patterns of
Chinese family life (pp. 360–61).
The thematic focus on family that Cochran sets up in the preface and returns to
in his conclusion serves him well in shaping the letters and other sources into a
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coherent whole. This theme, however, tends to downplay other compelling issues.
For example, the letters express keenly the racism that two sons and one daughter
experienced during their studies in the US and Britain. Second and Third Sons were
indignant that—because they were Chinese and not Japanese—the English
expected them to be weak and incapable of maintaining their own at sports.
The letters home, however, also reveal their own bias against the more darkskinned Cantonese. The youngest daughter suffered a different racism when she
became acutely uncomfortable with her American host mother’s treatment of her
as an exotic Chinese doll. Another equally nuanced theme is that of nationalism.
The two sons who were sent to Britain were horrified when their father asked them
to become British citizens in order to protect the family businesses when Japan
took over Shanghai. Although they ‘‘unanimously and passionately’’ refused Liu’s
proposal (p. 57), both sons later went against their father’s wishes and cooperated
with Japanese authorities during the Second Sino-Japanese War. At the war’s end,
the sons were accused of treason, and Liu frantically called on all of his contacts in
Chongqing to protect them, only to discover that Second Son had already ‘‘found
their own protector in General Dai Li, the head of the Nationalist government
security forces’’ by inviting Li to live in his home on Li’s arrival in Shanghai (p.
262). Political loyalties were malleable, mediated by an invitation to enjoy the
comforts of home in post-war Shanghai.
The richness and complexity of the story of the Lius of Shanghai make one wish
that Cochran and Hsieh had published the treasure trove of letters instead of
weaving a story out of the letters, which are nonetheless extensively quoted in the
book. Audiences of readers who are not specialists in the history of twentiethcentury China, however, will be delighted that Cochran made this decision. The
book is an engrossing story of modern China that readers at all levels of familiarity
with China will enjoy and gain knowledge.
GEORGIA A. MICKEY
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
BARBARA MITTLER, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural
Revolution Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. xvi,
486 pp. 100 illustrations. $59.95 (cloth). ISBN 9780674065819
Early in the course of Dai Sijie’s bittersweet first novel, Balzac et la Petite
Tailleuse chinoise (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress), two city boys newly
sent down to the countryside in the Cultural Revolution rustications play their
peasant hosts a Mozart sonata. Suspicious, the village head demands to know the
name of the piece, and is told it is called ‘‘Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao.’’
The subterfuge works: ‘‘as if he had heard something miraculous, the headman’s
menacing look softened. He crinkled up his eyes in a wide, beatific smile. ‘Mozart
thinks of Mao all the time,’ he said.’’1 So, we learn, the Cultural Revolution may
1
Dai Sijie, Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise (Paris: Gallimard, 2000); translated from the
French by Ina Rilke as Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (New York: Anchor 2001), quote
at pp. 5–6.
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not be the reported cultural wasteland: the music of Mozart is acceptable (as, later,
will the boys’ retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo) if it can somehow be
incorporated into the mythology of the age, which has at its heart the sacred image
of the Great Leader.
A more complex and erudite (though by no means opposed) reading of the
cultural world of the Cultural Revolution can be found in Barbara Mittler’s A
Continuous Revolution, a bold and exciting work of scholarship that complements
the political history of the period by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael
Schoenhals released in 2006 by the same publisher.2 With the ‘‘making sense’’ in
her subtitle, Professor Mittler alerts us to her approach: the three major sections
deal with different sensual stimuli: ‘‘Ears—Sounds’’, ‘‘Mouth—Words’’, and
‘‘Eyes—Images’’, the five senses being completed, somewhat less persuasively, by
the Introduction ‘‘Nose—Smells’’, and Conclusion ‘‘Hands— Touch’’. The author
deploys a mighty array of source material—documents from the Cultural
Revolution period, scholarship, memoir, artworks in numerous genres, and other
artifacts from popular culture. Much more of this material than is contained in the
book can be found at the companion website (go to ,http://projects.zo.uniheidelberg.de/. and click on Continuous Revolution, A), in a colorful and tuneful
archive that is worth a visit in its own right, and greatly enhances the pleasure of
reading the book. A further resource is provided in the words of subjects
interviewed for this project and identified by their professions (most from
education, the arts, and the media). Quotations from them provide richly detailed
insights into the Cultural Revolution as a lived experience and the imprint it left on
them; they also remind those of us who conduct interviews of the fallibility of
memory and our suggestibility to received truths constantly repeated.
The Introduction quotes Wang Ban, who grew up in the Cultural Revolution,
describing a sensual experience of colors and sounds, ‘‘a life that was aesthetically
driven, ritualistic, and theatrical’’ (p. 6); Professor Mittler’s project is to explore
the relationship between artistic products and aesthetic experience. Throughout,
two propositions resurface: first, that the culture was neither as innovative and
nationalistic as its proponents claimed, nor the barren desert that the ruling
Communist Party declared it to have been in the early 1980s; and, secondly, that it
was not an aberration, but rather it was both the culmination of a longer process
of cultural revolution and the foundation of much that has come since.
Within the sense-themed sections there are discursive essays which analyze
particular cultural products and then contextualize them. The ‘‘Ears—Sounds’’
section begins by refuting the truism that there was no music in the Cultural
Revolution, and certainly nothing from the Western classical tradition. In fact,
despite the rhetoric of xenophobia, the dominant musical sound, what Professor
Mittler calls ‘‘pentatonic romanticism,’’ was derived from Western classical
traditions, and permeates the scores for the operas and ballets that were the most
celebrated products of Cultural Revolution artistic endeavor. They had been
adapted from previous works through a process of ‘‘wielding [or perhaps
‘weeding’] through the old to create the new’’ (p. 53), and were declared ‘‘model
2
Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2006).
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works’’ (yangbanxi) in the mid-1960s. The analysis of the visual, vocal, dramatic,
and musical aspects of the operas, their origins in, and development from, earlier
operatic conventions, and the source of their continued hold on the Chinese
audience, is some of the finest writing in this book, and goes well beyond anything
I have read to date (or written myself) on these much-studied texts. In the
pentatonic romanticism of the opera and ballet scores, Mozart was, the author
concludes, ‘‘denied but copied’’ (p. 93), as those in charge of Cultural Revolution
(including the musician-turned-Culture Minister Yu Huiyong) perpetuated the
styles they purported (like the village head in Dai Sijie’s novel quoted above) to
condemn. In a second essay on sounds, Professor Mittler looks at the persistence of
the words and music of songs associated with the Cultural Revolution, and their
resurfacing, for example in the singing of the Internationale by the occupiers of
Tian’anmen Square in 1989, and the incorporation of snatches of Maoist anthems
by the contemporary composer Tan Dun.
For all the restrictions on reading materials, the Cultural Revolution is seen in
‘‘Mouth—Words,’’ paradoxically, as a time of heightened interest in the written
word, both the forbidden texts widely available to intellectuals and shared by
rusticated urbanites, and officially published material. Two very different kinds of
document studied here locate the writings of the Cultural Revolution in a long
tradition of instructional texts: first, successive reinventions of the Three Character
Classic from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries demonstrate the abiding
emphasis placed on Confucian values of obedience and industry, and respect for
education, even at times when the sage himself was under attack as a malign
influence in a modern society. And, secondly, to demonstrate the way that Mao’s
Quotations (yulu) became as canonical as the Confucian Analects (lunyu) had
been, Professor Mittler selects the passage from the constantly read article ‘‘The
Foolish Old Man Who Moved the Mountains’’ that appeared in the ‘‘Little Red
Book’’ and traces the story from the Liezi to Mao, and then forward to tales of
models for emulation for their embracing of the qualities of ‘‘self-reliance and hard
struggle’’ embodied in the legendary Foolish Old Man. Here, as elsewhere in this
book, we see the power of repetition and reappropriation, where texts and images
are reinforced by further texts and images about them (stories about communist
youths who study state-sponsored exemplars who in turn studied the Foolish Old
Man). Later memoirists testify to the power of recitation and repetition in their
own internalization of the Maoist canon, which becomes, the author concludes,
quoting the Italian historian Emilio Gentile, a ‘‘sacralised ideology’’ (p. 253). Into
the present century, the symbols of this ideology remain available to advertisers,
satirists, and other popular culture artists, their importance, though not necessarily
their meaning, assured by their repeated use.
In ‘‘Eyes—Images’’, Cultural Revolution posters are seen as ‘‘mirrors of faith’’
presenting the picture of an ideal socialist world. Eight images of Mao, the most
important subject of the posters, are selected and analyzed, with an emphasis on
the standardization of the image, the face invariably red, bright, and shining (hong,
guang, liang) no matter what the painter’s style or the context in which Mao was
placed. Again, the ubiquity of Mao images for such a protracted period means that
his hold persists; as the artist Yu Youhan declares, ‘‘If we reject Mao, we reject a
part of ourselves’’ (p. 301). Mao, nowadays perhaps more human and less god, is
an icon open for use by parodists and social commentators, among others, as ‘‘a
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discursive space where different, sometimes antithetical strategies are negotiated,
sometimes simultaneously’’ (p. 326). A final chapter looks at comic-books,
including retellings of classic tales and versions of operas and films; differing
illustrated versions of the tale Sun Wukong Thrice Defeats the White-Boned
Demon are studied for their allegorical implications and as a reflection of official
regulation.
As the author admits in her conclusion, the Cultural Revolution is not easily
summarized. Clearly, it is the visual images, the music, and certain selected sacred
or mythological texts (rather than, for example, novels or short stories) that have
become imbedded in the popular imagination, so that, whatever the individual
may remember from, or feel about the Cultural Revolution, it will not go away. In
this detailed, challenging, and ultimately very rewarding work of scholarship,
Professor Mittler has succeeded in her stated intention to ‘‘complicate our view of
this intensely complex and immensely important period in Chinese history’’ (p. 5).
RICHARD KING
University of Victoria
QIN SHAO, Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013. 326 pp. $79 (cloth).
ISBN 978-1-4422-1131-5
Outside Shanghai’s Xiaonanmen subway stop, between the south gate of the old
Chinese wall and ‘‘Cool Docks,’’ a new development along the banks of the
Huangpu River, is a half-demolished zone that has, for years, lain frozen in time.
The buildings were initially razed as part of the mass urban transformation that
occurred in preparation for Expo 2010. Before reconstruction began, however, the
project was halted in the midst of the global financial crises, and since then a
community of homes, gardens, businesses, and schools has learnt to live amidst the
rubble. When the bulldozers restarted, the spread of glossy new high-rises, which
will eventually replace this old neighborhood, hit an obstacle once more as ‘‘nail
houses,’’ home to stubborn residents that refused to move, persistently stood in the
way.
The nexus between relocation, destruction, and development is one of the most
contentious in contemporary China. Qin Shao’s book makes a critical contribution
to the topic. Though her argument, at times, veers into the polemical (her use of
the word ‘‘domicide’’ for the destruction of a home in the title gives a sense of the
tone), Shanghai Gone nevertheless adds a crucial voice, by focusing on the stories
from below.
The book is organized around fascinating character sketches, rich in detail. Shao
tells of Zhou Youlan, an occupant of one of the earliest ‘‘nail houses.’’ Outraged
over the unfair compensation on offer and reluctant to move from a home she
enjoyed, Zhou gave up her life as a kindergarten teacher to devote herself entirely
to petitioning her case. ‘‘I stood there and watched […] in silence,’’ she says
recounting the demolition of her home.
How could they destroy my 35 square-meter apartment in the city with
double balconies and give me a smaller one in the suburbs? Why should my
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living space be reduced while everyone else’s seems to have increased? What
kind of housing reform is this for me? (p. 56)
In another chapter Shao concentrates on the ancestral home of He Yiding, a threestory shikumen located downtown, in what is now one of the wealthiest pockets of
the city. The He family lost their home twice, first in 1966 as part of the Cultural
Revolution and then again in 1998, only six years after they were allowed to
return. The second time the property was seized it was converted into a high-end
restaurant as part of the luxurious development of Xintiandi. Still other chapters
revolve around the performative campaign over unfair compensation at ‘‘East
Eight Lots’’ in the Jing’an District; the efforts to preserve ‘‘Lincoln Lane,’’ a
historic neighborhood in the Hongkou District; and the colorful, self-educated
lawyer Shi Lin who has become an expert on housing and relocation. ‘‘The most
important inequality at the beginning of the housing reform was in knowledge
capital,’’ he states, summing up one of the themes of the book. ‘‘Ordinary people
simply didn’t understand government policy and their own rights; they were being
hopelessly manipulated by government and developers’’ (p. 209).
Embedded in these tales is a profound exploration into some of the tensions that
underlie contemporary China’s high-speed urbanization. Qin Shao devotes a long
section, for example, to the history and role of the petition system. In it she
describes the residents with housing complaints who gather by tacit agreement on
Wednesday mornings at Shanghai’s main petition office in People’s Square. She
also tells of the ‘‘petition specialists’’ who have been going to the office for over a
decade, as well as the sub-culture of ‘‘event petitioners’’ who ritually travel to
Beijing to plead their case during holidays and celebrations. In the end, Shao sees
the petition system much like some have grown to view the social media platform
Weibo, not as a radical teasing open of the system, but instead as a pressure valve
that surreptitiously contributes to the power of the authoritarian regime.
Qin Shao also writes insightfully on how the long boom in property prices has
fueled the growth and culture around urban development. She describes how,
during the early years of the millennium, when prices started to skyrocket, media
advertorials with titles such as ‘‘Demolition and Relocation is Gold’’ offered
residents tips on how to best profit from the vast urban change. This is the attitude
of amateur lawyer Shi Lin who sees in relocation an opportunity to set up financial
freedom for life. His advice to his clients is captured by a single formulation: ‘‘time
z land equals money.’’
This long-running jackpot has led, not surprisingly, to some very shady deals
between developers and the district governments with whom they work. Shanghai
Gone recounts some of these in revealing detail. The chapter on Xintiandi, for
example, denounces the partnership between Vincent Lo’s Shui On group and the
Luwan District government for their deceptive dealings with the He family. Shao
condemns the project for betraying its original vision of adaptive re-use, which
would have allowed small traditional businesses to coexist with expensive shops
and restaurants. She argues with convincing detail that nothing of the area that
originally inspired famed architect Benjamin Woods remains. Even more
disturbing is the chapter on ‘‘Lincoln Lane,’’ which chronicles the lies, deceit,
and ultimately illegal practices of the Hongkou District government. By zooming
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in on these particular struggles, Shanghai Gone makes clear how important the
micro-politics of local government is to the shaping of Chinese cities.
Taken together, the stories compiled in Shanghai Gone amount to a fierce
critique of the city-making practices in contemporary China. Relocation and
development, as Shao admits, is a nuanced and complex issue. Yet, while she
mentions that some residents living with shared kitchens, chamber pots, no
running water, and coal stoves have happily traded in their old homes for modern
apartments in the suburbs, these are treated as minor exceptions. Her discussion of
Xintiandi has no place for the positive impact the project has had on urbanism in
China, and the book fails to address the (related) fact that Shanghai, especially
compared with other cities in China, has done a fairly good job at preserving the
legacy of its the urban fabric, or the uncomfortable truth that urban growth has
always entailed destruction. (Haussman, for example, made Paris with a battleaxe.)
These omissions are understandable since the focus of Shanghai Gone is on the
many gross injustices that have occurred in the recent reconstruction of Shanghai.
Qin Shao recounts outrageous acts of corruption, harassment and abuse by the
demolition office, all of which are compounded by the lack of an independent
judiciary. Her book, as other reviewers have noted, paints a frustrating, depressing
tale about contemporary urbanization.
Read as a whole, however, Shanghai Gone has a hopeful side. Much of the book
concentrates on residents’ use of the media and legal system to protest their forced
relocation. Though these campaigns are, for the most part, ultimately unsuccessful, they have succeeded in increasing the level of freedom in the city. Shanghai
citizens have engaged the press, convincing them to cover their stories of injustice
and corruption. They have used the law to demand transparency and in so doing
have uncovered uncomfortable truths about the process of urban development. In
the end they have contributed to a widespread grassroots activity that is working
collectively to undermine the authoritarianism of Communist China. At a
superficial level, Shanghai Gone is a familiar diatribe against the top down forces
that are remaking the contemporary city. What makes the book so important,
however, is that it focuses, as well, on the powerful changes that are being led from
below.
Today in Shanghai ‘‘nail houses’’ have more power than ever. The disputes over
housing in the Xiaonanmen area are proving exceedingly difficult to resolve and
developments using the raze-and-replace model are now often deemed too costly
and troublesome to pursue. Due to the bottom-up resistance of residents such as
Zhou Youlan, He Yiding, and Shi Lin, it is becoming increasingly likely that,
in Shanghai at least, the era of large-scale demolition and widespread forced
relocation is coming to an end.
ANNA GREENSPAN
New York University, Shanghai