Bart Dessein

President of the European Association for Chinese Studies

Jiří Stavovčík

Vice-Rector for International Relations

Petr Bilík

Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts for External Relations

The relevant analysis usually does not cross the binary boundaries in even representative works on the phonology of modern Chinese. When it does, it is not very convincing, as it is often based on too small a sample of linguistic data. At the same time, the rhythm of the Chinese sentence, which is usually performed more in higher units, i.e., segments, colons, and sentences, combined with the so-called seven degrees of prominence, only allows for the realization of many functional concepts in Chinese, including actualization. More than eighty years ago, Oldřich Švarný (1920–2011), the most influential representative of Olomouc sinology after its renewal in 1993, became interested in this issue. More than fifty years ago, he began publishing on this topic. During his studies, Švarný noticed that when connecting syllables and binaries into higher pronunciation units, a significant reduction in the quality of the tonal course of the individual syllables appears, which helps to provide a rhythm to the Chinese text. Therefore, this paper will attempt to confirm his assumptions using a sample represented by a short anecdote realized at different speech rates by a native speaker of the pronunciation standard of modern Chinese, i.e., Pekinese. It will also quantify Švarný’s assumption that two-thirds of the syllables reduce their tonal course. This finding may indicate that Chinese is currently being transformed from a tonal to a melodic accent language.

YSA candidate #01: Philipp RENNINGER, Harvard University

Title of talk: A “New Era” of Chinese Law? On Sinomarxist Legal Theory and Xi Jinping Thought

Abstract:

Sino-Marxism has officially been described as a sinicized and modernized “Marxism with Chinese characteristics”. In this significantly modified form, Marxist legal theory and practice are still authoritative for Chinese state organs, the Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”), China’s population, and Chinese academia. The influence of Sinomarxism is not limited to juristic schools and approaches explicitly propagating a “Marxist jurisprudence with Chinese characteristics”. Rather, it yields far-reaching implications for both (Chinese) positive law and legal studies, especially in public law. Sino-Marxism has canonized its most important elements both in the Chinese Constitution and in the CCP Statute. Enumerated are Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Important Thought of Three Represents, and the Scientific Outlook on Development. Its newest element, Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, was included in the CCP Statute in 2017 and the Constitution in 2018. Xi pursues a four-pronged comprehensive strategy and propagates twelve socialist core values in order to create and ensure a “new normal” in China. This shall contribute to the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and thus realize Xi’s China Dream. Despite claiming to lead China into a new era, Xi Jinping continues and develops the four basic paradigms of traditional Sino-Marxism: First, Sino-Marxism conceptualizes both law and (legal) science as subordinate to practice. Enacting, interpreting, and analyzing the law (as part of the superstructure) must “seek truth from facts”. This is due to the base-superstructure-theory, the core element of (historical) materialism. Second, the practice that law must abide by is the actual one. The actuality criterion merges the base-superstructure model and dialectics into dialectical materialism. However, the actual situation in China – as expressed by the so-called main contradiction in Chinese society – is exclusively determined by the CCP. Third, SinoMarxism propagates an integrated “politics and law” concept. It considers law (and legal studies) as intrinsically interwoven with, and subordinate to, politics. Both the political system and all policies in China can ultimately be drawn back to CCP as the exclusive ruling party exercising all-embracing party leadership. Following this subordination of law and science to facts, actuality, and party politics, Sino-Marxism demands both legal norms and legal studies to “emanate from political realism”, “repel abstract and void idealism”, and “be born out of political power”. This cumulates in a

factualist positivism of power undermining the normativity and autonomy of (Chinese) law and jurisprudence.

YSA candidate #02, Keru CAI, University of Oxford

Title of talk: Lu Xun’s Cannibalization of Russian Intertexts: The Heteromodal Realism of “Diary of a Madman”

Abstract:

Lu Xun’s Cannibalization of Russian Intertexts: The Heteromodal Realism of “Diary of a Madman” Though Lu Xun has long been considered a foundational writer of realism in modern China, critics have complicated this designation and pointed out his modernist or symbolist proclivities. I propose to reconsider the nature of Lu Xun’s groundbreaking formal innovation in Kuangren riji (“Diary of a Madman” 1918) by enlarging the scope of inquiry beyond the text itself to scrutinize its main Russian intertexts—Nikolai Gogol’s 1835 Zapiski sumasshedshego (“Diary of a Madman”) and Leonid Andreev’s 1904 Krasny smekh (Red Laugh). I close-read these three texts to demonstrate how Lu Xun appropriated themes, images, and narrative techniques. To understand the formally slippery nature of Lu Xun’s story (is it realist or not?), we must interrogate the formally slippery nature of his Russian models (in what ways are they realist or not?). To intervene in longstanding discussions about the nature of realism in modern China, as well as in recent debates about so-called peripheral realisms, I redefine the realism of what is often considered the first modern Chinese short story. The cannibalism thematized in Lu Xun’s story, I contend, becomes a metaliterary figure for his practice of intertextuality. Examining the elements he cannibalizes from his two Russian intertexts, which have historically defied straightforward categorizations such as realism, I argue that Lu Xun’s resulting narrative is a heteromodal realism, capable of encompassing many modes of narration from a plurality of literary movements. I coin this term as an analogue to Mikhail Bakhtin’s principle of the heteroglossic nature of language and the novel, which omnivorously absorbs a multitude of speech registers and styles. My claim is not about language or the novel, but about a mode like realism. In the early twentieth century, Chinese writers were so enthusiastically intertextual, so omnivorously translating and absorbing different Western literary movements at the same time, that whatever forms realism takes in Chinese literature is necessarily informed by a broad spectrum of realist and non-realist, indigenous and foreign, highbrow and lowbrow modes of writing. What I designate as heteromodality in Lu Xun’s realism results from the heterochronic nature of Chinese importation of Western literary ideas, the simultaneous reception of what were originally successive historical periods. The air at the time was thick with newly translated “isms” (zhuyi), from romanticism to naturalism to modernism to symbolism to futurism, and so on. The

heteromodality (or hetero-ism) of Chinese realism also characterizes the work of other early twentieth century writers such as Mao Dun, Ding Ling, Lao She, and Ba Jin. Scholarship on modern Chinese realism has tended to focus on its moments of epistemic crisis or formal deformation.1 Rather than evaluate the purported limitations of modern Chinese realism, I ask how writers wielded the fecund resources newly within their reach to invent provocative mimetic ways of depicting unprecedented objects of representation. Lu Xun parlays a position of supposed disadvantage (as a writer on the periphery or semiperiphery of hegemonic national cultures) into one of daring innovation precisely because his “belatedness” as a realist writer gives him simultaneous access to a diverse array of models to select from and combine. More broadly, my theorization of heteromodal realism can inform how scholars articulate the nature of peripheral realisms elsewhere around the world, in places where writers were able to make formal innovations thanks precisely to their peripherality, their temporal and spatial dislocation from the geographic cores where literary realism first arose.

YSA candidate #03, Charlotte Chun Lam YIU, University of Michigan

Title of talk: Order within Chaos: Reexamining Spatial and Relational Disorder in Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅

Abstract:

This paper takes issue with the predominant view on the early modern Chinese novel, Jin Ping Mei in secondary scholarship: that the domestic space and human relations portrayed in the novel are essentially disorderly and incestuous in a dystopian sense. I trace the origin of this view to Andrew Plaks’s seminal work, the Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel: Ssu ta ch'i-shu, and outline how Plaks’s paradigm of disorder and incest have been reproduced in different forms and approaches to this day. As I piece together the architectural constructions, spatial arrangements, and characters’ routines and movements in Jin Ping Mei, I detail and discuss the triangulation of three distinct spatial orders and allocations, namely the ritual-hierarchical Confucian order, the urban-commercial use of residence, and the guest-entertaining, pleasure-oriented garden, that are constantly contesting, negotiating, and interacting with one another. Together, these three orders and allocations form the veneer of spatial and relational disorder. Behind this veneer, nonetheless, is that fact that each of the orders generates its own spatial principles and creates its own routes and routines for the characters to follow or deviate from. What I would like to reveal ultimately is that Plaks’s paradigm of disorder, however influential, stems purely from a Neo-Confucianist perspective, and should thus be applicable to only part of the complex inner workings of the narrative world in Jin Ping Mei. The order(s) with the chaos are always present if we look carefully enough.

Eight years ago, in my book The Uyghur Lobby: Global Networks, Coalitions and Strategies of the World Uyghur Congress (Routledge, 2014), I talked about how some Uyghur diasporic organizations have been lent notable legitimacy by liberal democracies and international governmental organizations to advance their causes for the Uyghur people back in China. At that time, I observed that these activists and their organizations could no longer be considered merely splintered members of a far-flung diaspora locked in a one-sided struggle with Beijing. They used their hard-won legitimacy as legal migrants and asylum seekers to influence politics in their host countries, which expanded the Uyghur conflict into nations around the world. At that time, I also argued that whether the Uyghur lobby was capable of influencing politics in their host countries, or even in China, was less important than the fact that Uyghur groups were able to successfully use the issue to raise their visibility.

Eight years later, the Uyghur issue has not only gained international visibility but has also affected the democratic West’s negotiation and politics with China. However, in non-democratic states, there is varied state attention and local responses to the Uyghur issue. In this keynote speech, I wish to revisit the legitimacy issue of the Uyghur cause for self-determination and survey the uneven international responses to it, from states to individuals.

Biography

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is a Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Chen serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science (Springer, SSCI). Formerly, Chen was chair of the Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and editor-in-chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). Chen’s research and teaching are multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, spanning political sciences, ethnic studies, sociology and Chinese studies. Her research interests include China’s soft power, Belt and Road Initiatives, ethnic conflict in Xinjiang and its international implications, theories of collective action, globalization and glocalization.

The "Taiwan Lecture on Chinese Studies"  is sponsored by Center for Chinese Studies,  National Central Library.

Denise Ho – Becoming the Song profiles the gay Hong Kong singer and human rights activist Denise Ho. Drawing on unprecedented, years-long access, the film explores her remarkable journey from commercial Cantopop superstar to outspoken political activist, an artist who has put her life and career on the line in support of the determined struggle of Hong Kong citizens to maintain their identity and freedom.

Awards: Official Selection – Frameline (San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival), Singapore International Film Festival, the Filmex Festival in Tokyo, the Athena Festival in New York, and others.

Introduction by Prof. Andrea Riemenschnitter, University of Zurich