Drawing on the notion of the "impact of globalization onAsia," I propose a paper that examines the relationship between Hollywood's cinematic presentation of China and Chinese and the efforts of China's Nationalist (Guomindang) government during the
Nanjing Decade (1927-1937) to influence such imagery in pursuit of its larger diplomatic agenda that was intent upon garnering international respect and equality for China.
Queues, opium, bound feet, crime, intrigue, poverty, and exotic inscrutability, among other traits, appeared regularly in American films with Chinese themes during much of the first half of the twentieth century.Over the years movie audiences were treated to and, to an extent, came to expect productions that represented China and its people in this way.
Thus, motion pictures visually contributed to the blurring between fact and fiction about China during a time when that nation was determined to present an image of itself as a modern, prosperous, enlightened, and strong country.And, to Chinese eyes, movies represented a more pernicious purveyor of such images than previous mediums because, as the film industry extended its reach around the globe in the early decades of the twentieth century, these portrayals increasingly were able to reach an audience far larger than any
earlier medium.
The proposed paper will provide an overview of the events surrounding a number of specific American productions - the protests, discussions, and, when achieved, the resolutions.It will also consider China's legislative and diplomatic efforts to either dissuade, eliminate or promote certain images in pursuit of its own agenda.Together these will reveal a Chinese desire to halt the screen ridicule of the nation and its people and encourage a more genuine, if not inflated, portrait in its place.Additionally, it will be made clear that these actions were inextricably linked to the over-arching Chinese efforts of the period to gain international equality, understanding, and respect.
Japanese Cultural Nationalism in a Mobile Global Asia--Roy Starrs, Otago University
Over the past century Japan has occupied a somewhat unique position within Asia as both a major globalizing power and as a major recipient of Western-sponsored globalization.Furthermore, the country has experienced pendulum-like swings between these active and passive roles at various points throughout its modern history.During the boom years of the 1980s, for instance, its role as “active globalizer” (even within the US itself) seemed permanently foregrounded, but during the post-bubble economic doldrums of the 1990s the island nation seemed almost to reassume its mid-nineteenth-century role as a passive victim of globalization.As might be expected, perceptions of both extraordinary national achievement and of a subsequent national decline have led in some quarters to a revival of nationalism, especially of a “gentle” nostalgic cultural nationalism that emphasizes Japanese cultural superiority and uniqueness but seems untainted by prewar militarism.
On the other hand, Japan today, like other parts of Asia and the world, is subject to an unprecedented level of pressure to “liberalize” B its economic, political, and cultural institutions and to open itself to international economic and cultural interchange, and to an ever-increasing flow of migrant peoples --in other words, to the now seemingly irresistible forces of globalization. One might question, then, whether the recent Japanese nationalist revival represents the wave of the future or merely the last gasp of a dying old-world order, the order of autonomous nation-states and national cultures?
In an attempt to answer this and related questions, this paper will present a summary of some of the principal findings, arguments, and conclusions of research on these issues conducted by an international group of Japan scholars and contained in three books I have recently edited: Asian Nationalism in an Age of Globalization (London: Routledge Curzon, 2001), Nations Under Siege: Globalization and Nationalism in Asia (New York: Palgrave, 2002), and Japanese Cultural Nationalism at Home and in the Asia Pacific (London: Global Oriental, 2003).Building on the research findings presented in these books, I will attempt both an historical overview of the issues and a theoretical prognosis of how they might further develop in the 21st century.
A Region in Motion: Singapore and the Making of (Chinese) Social and Business Networks in Modern Asia--Hong Liu, National University of Singapore(contact at chsliuh@nus.edu.sg)
Since its inception in the immediate post-World War II era, the intellectual and mythological foundation of Asian Studies has been built upon two interconnected pillars, namely, the supremacy of the nation-state and the rigid sub-regional division (South, Southeast, Central and East Asia). Very little attention, both empirically and conceptually, has been given to the role of transnational and supra-regional networks in the overall configurations of Asian region.
This paper is a modest attempt to redress the balance by interrogating the nature and characteristics of transnational/cross-regional business networks and their ramifications for an understanding of modern Asia. I will use the case of Singapore in the making of Asian regional (Chinese) social and business networks over the last half century to highlight the mobility of the region and multi-dimensionality of the network-state interactions. The paper will examine the transnationality of the Chinese society in postwar Singapore whereby many of its social organizations and business activities were founded and geared toward regional networking. After a brief survey of the nature and structure of the Singapore entrepot economy, this paper examines two closely related issues: the first is a dual process undertaken by Chinese voluntary associations in the late 1940s and early 1950s by which a gradual detachment from the PRC and a localization/regionalization drive took place. It will then look at the efforts to (re)construct Singapore as a center of regional business networking by focusing the country’s connections with China and Malaysia from the late 1950s to the 1970s. Finally, I will discuss the dynamics and mechanisms behind Singapore’s drive in building itself as one of the major institutionalized nexuses of the emerging global Chinese business networks at the closing decades of the 20th century. This paper concludes with the implications of the Singapore case for modern Chinese transnationalism and the reconfigurations of the Asian region. It also argues that while the existing premise of Asian Studies still has some valid claims for an understanding of the rapidly changing region, analytical tools such as network and the reworked conception of the state/region need to be forcefully brought into the discourses about Asia as a cultural construct and an arena of scholarly imaginations.
With respect to the documentation, this paper relies on primarily materials such as archive, minutes of meetings of various Chinese social and business organizations, oral history interviews and contemporaneous newspapers in both Chinese and English.
Ethnicity and Nationalism in Republican China: The 1937 West Hunan“Resist Japan Abolish Military Land Rents” Uprising--Edward McCord, The George Washington University (contact at mccord@gwu.edu)
With the outbreak of war between China and Japan in 1937, Chinese nationalists urged their compatriots to put aside internal differences to focus attention on confronting the Japanese threat.This paper examines one specific local response to this patriotic appeal in the mountainous border zone of West Hunan and shows how in some cases the anti-Japanese struggle didn’t bring an end to internal conflicts but gave them new shape and meaning.The focus of this paper is a 1937 West Hunan ethnic Miao uprising that, in the context of the outbreak of the war with Japan, recast itself as an anti-Japanese movement.
The original goal of this uprising was the abolition of rents from an anachronistic military land system (tuntian), originally imposed on the Miao people of West Hunan in the early nineteenth century.With the fall of the Qing, this system not only persisted but its onerous rents were transformed into a resource for autonomous warlord power.As a result, while beginning as a protest against these rents, the uprising also provoked and took advantage of a multi-layered struggle over this resource involving local, regional, provincial, and even central interests.The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War gave uprising leaders an opportunity to ally themselves with central state-builders who sought more direct control over Hunan’s provincial government.Thus, uprising leaders rededicated their forces as “Resist-Japan” armies and noted that only the obstinacy of the provincial government over the issue of tuntian rents prevented their departure for the front.The failure of the provincial governor to deal successfully with the uprising then enabled the central government to replace him with a more amenable governor.This governor fulfilled his side of the “bargain” by reforming tuntian rents along the lines of the regular land tax system.Uprising forces thereupon accepted reorganization into the national army and were sent to the anti-Japanese front.Thus, in the end, the West Hunan’s Miao not only achieved the end of the tuntian system but the redefinition of their uprising from an act of rebellion to a patriotic mobilization.At the same time, the central government advanced its own state-building objectives--weakening provincial autonomy while strengthening the administrative integration of an area long-isolated from provincial or central government
Chair: Francisca Cho, Georgetown University
Maps of the Shanhaijing: A Comprehensive Survey of the World--Masako Nakagawa, Villanova University(contact at masako.nakagawa@villanova.edu)
Replete with sacred mountains and rivers, deities, mythical creatures, plants, minerals, foreign peoples and lands, the Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas) is an ancient comprehensive survey of the world as it appeared to the ancient Chinese people.Generally, the date of composition is placed somewhere between 300 B.C. and 250 AD.Compiled and assembled by different authors over several centuries, it has endured much interpolation and text rearrangements before reaching its present form.The title of the Shanhaijing first appeared in Sima Qian’s (c. 145-c. 86 B.C.) Shihji (records of a Historian, The Palace Edition, 123, p. 3179). The Shanhaijing has always been linked to illustrations or maps no longer extant.It is even possible that some maps or illustrations existed prior to the text and inspired its composition. Guo Pu (276-326) himself referred to such pictures and wrote the Shanhaijing tuzan(Appraisals of the Shanhaijing of mythical
creatures).Several other sets of illustrations have been mentioned since Guo Pu’s time. The oldest extant illustrations can be found in the third edition of Wang Chongquing’s Shanhaijingshihyi (Shanhaijing with Explanatory Comments, 1597).
My paper works will work toward recreating the original maps of the Shanhaijing, taking two approaches, one geographical and the other mythological.
"Teaching ‘Japan in the World’," Laura Neitzel, New York University
"Teaching Asian Buddhism, " Michael Barnhart, Kingsborough Community
College
"Films on Asian America," Sue Gronewold, Kean University
"Teaching ‘Gender in Contemporary East Asia’" Aya Ezawa, Swarthmore College,
"Interpreting the Yang Guifei in China and Japan," Fay Beauchamp,
Community College of Philadelphia
"Listening for women's voices in pre-modern Asian texts," Paula
Berggren, Baruch College of CUNY
Global Mobility and Formal Fluidity: Fictions of Desai, Roy, and Lakhsmi-- P.S. Chauhan, Arcadia University (contact at chauhanp@comcast.ne)
I propose to argue that the contemporary Indian authors of English, criss-crossing regional cultures and national boundaries, have brought into being a new kind of fiction, one where personal relations escape predictable patterns, the form becomes terribly fluid, and the language is frozen as a medley of various versions of English and other tongues. The global mobility of their characters and the migration of their imagination to the West are giving birth to a novel whose narrative forms and mythologies are new to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the novel. I hope to be able to demonstrate my thesis by a quick analysis of a work each by Desai, Vijay Lakshmi, and Arundhati Roy, a woman writer of Kerala, the author of The God of Little Things.