Chinese Communication Studies : Contexts and Comparisons 9780313011894, 9781567506563

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CHINESE COMMUNICATION STUDIES

CHINESE COMMUNICATION STUDIES




Contexts and Comparisons Edited by Xing Lu, Wenshan Jia, and D. Ray Heisey

Advances in Communication and Culture

Ablex Publishing Westport, Connecticut • London

Recent Titles in Advances in Communication and Culture D. Ray Heisey, Series Editor Chinese Perspectives in Rhetoric and Communication D. Ray Heisey, editor Chinese Conflict Management and Resolution Guo-Ming Chen and Ringo Ma, editors

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chinese communication studies : contexts and comparisons / edited by Xing Lu, Wenshan Jia, and D. Ray Heisey. p. cm.—(Advances in communication and culture) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 1–56750–656–9 (alk. paper) 1. Communication and culture—China. I. Lu, Xing, 1956– II. Jia, Wenshan, 1961– III. Heisey, D. Ray. IV. Series. P94.65.C6C48 2002 302.2′0951—dc21 2001053298 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2002 by Xing Lu, Wenshan Jia, and D. Ray Heisey All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001053298 ISBN: 1–56750–656–9 First published in 2002 Ablex Publishing, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.ablexbooks.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Chinese Culture and Communication: Diverse Contexts and Comparison with the West Xing Lu

1

Part I: Chinese Culture and Modernization Chapter 1

Revolution and Us: A Cultural Rendition of Political Movements in Contemporary China Ling Chen

Chapter 2

Culture and Modernization: The Case of the People’s Republic of China Rita Mei-Ching Ng

Chapter 3

17

33

The Problem of the Public: John Dewey’s Theory of Communication and Its Influence on Modern Chinese Communication Changfu Chang

47

CONTENTS

Chapter 4

Chinese Culture and Its (Post)Modern Fate: Three Debates and One Critique Changfu Chang

65

Part II: Chinese Communication in Gender, Family, and Media Contexts Chapter 5

Women and the Rhetorical Tradition in Premodern China: A Preliminary Sketch Mary M. Garrett

Chapter 6

87

Creating a Female Language: Symbolic Transformation Embedded in Nushu Lin-Lee Lee

Chapter 7

101

Hierarchy Is Not Harmony: A View of the Traditional Chinese Family Omar Swartz

Chapter 8

119

Chinese Family Consumer Socialization: A Study of Chinese Urban Adolescents’ Involvement in Family Purchasing Activities Qingwen Dong

Chapter 9

135

Karaoke as a Form of Communication in the Public and Interpersonal Contexts of Taiwan Ringo Ma and Rueyling Chuang

Chapter 10

147

Market and Politics: Hong Kong Press during Sovereignty Transfer Anthony Y. H. Fung and Chin-Chuan Lee

165

Part III: Comparison between Chinese and Western Communication Chapter 11

Humanism and Human Rights: A Comparison between the Occidental and Oriental Traditions Mei-Ling Wang

181 vi

CONTENTS

Chapter 12

Talking Cultures: A Comparative Analysis of Chinese and U.S. American Stories about Human Rights Jing Yin and Bradford ‘J’ Hall

Chapter 13

Comparison of Chinese and American Views on World Opinion: A Rhetorical Study of Media Reports Minmin Wang

Chapter 14

213

Pan Gu’s Paradigm: Chinese Education’s Return to Holistic Communication in Learning Scott C. Hammond and Hongmei Gao

Chapter 15

197

227

Chinese Rhetoric through Chinese Textbooks: Uniquely Chinese? Andy Kirkpatrick

245

Author Index

261

Subject Index

269

About the Editors and Contributors

275

vii

Acknowledgments

Many people have contributed to the quality and completion of this volume. First, I wish to thank Randy Kluver who laid some groundwork for this project, and for professional reasons had to withdraw from the position of the chief editor. I was greatly honored to be invited by D. Ray Heisey and Wenshan Jia to join the editorial team. From the beginning of drafting the book proposal to the end of the editorial process, Professor Heisey patiently guided me through some uncertain issues and offered unconditional support. His passion for Chinese communication studies had been the driving force and source of inspiration for this project. Professor Jia’s proactive role in the editorial process kept me on track in the process. Most importantly, with their expertise and knowledge in Chinese communication studies, Professors Heisey and Jia have offered valuable feedback to contributors to assure the quality of this project. I am grateful to all the contributors who worked conscientiously on their revisions. I appreciate very much their patience and cooperation with me throughout the process. I am very fortunate to have the opportunity to get to know them and have learned so much from their research and insights. I also wish to thank Eric Levy for his confidence in this project and his helpful edito-

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

rial guidance. Thanks are in order to Arlene Belzer for her careful editing of the manuscript. Finally, I am indebted to my husband Li-Cheng Gu and my 10-year-old daughter Wendi Lulu Gu. Their support and understanding were absolutely essential for me to complete the volume. —Xing Lu

x


Introduction
Chinese Culture and Communication: Diverse Contexts and Comparison with the West Xing Lu

Considering that, of every five people in the world, one is Chinese, the significance of studying Chinese communication cannot be overemphasized.1 The ubiquitous presence of the Chinese in the world scene and the economic success of Chinese societies (Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) have captured scholarly attention and imagination in searching for a deepened understanding of China and Chinese societies. The increasing contact between Chinese societies and the West in all spheres of life provides opportunities as well as posing challenges in the intercultural communication between Chinese and Westerners. Needless to say, it is beneficial to human society and world peace to understand similarities and differences between Chinese and Westerners regarding cultural values and communication behaviors. Recent publications have made contributions to Chinese communication studies in specific areas of Chinese civic discourse and Chinese political communication (Heisey, 2000; Kluver & Powers, 1999). This volume adds to the growing research on Chinese communication studies with its unique emphasis on contexts and comparisons through a range of interdisciplinary topics. It aims to continue the academic efforts made by both Chinese and American communication scholars to reach a better understanding of Chinese people and Chinese societies as well as to unravel the misconceptions of Chinese culture and communication. The topics of the study range from value systems to rhetorical strategies, from mindsets to linguistic practices, from traditional cultural influence to the process of modernization.

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In particular, this volume aims to achieve three objectives. The first objective is to reach an understanding of contextual meanings embedded in Chinese culture and communication. Twenty-five years ago, Edward Hall (1976) articulated the significance of context as contributing to meaning. In his words, “the level of context determines everything about the nature of communication and is the function on which all subsequent behavior rests (including symbolic behavior)” (p. 92). In this volume, the contributors examined and analyzed Chinese culture and communication in historical, political, interpersonal, educational, family, gender, and media contexts. The contextual meanings generated from the studies in this volume offer a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of Chinese culture and communication. The second objective is to achieve an understanding of how various factors have contributed to the dynamics and intricacies of Chinese communication. Chapters in this volume present a dialectical process of Chinese communication: preserving traditional values and the desire for modernization, conformation to dominant norms and the resistance to patriarchal discourse, the interplay of political agendas and economic considerations. Indeed, remarkable social and economic changes have taken place in the twentieth century in Chinese societies, which has engendered changes in communication patterns and called for efforts to balance between traditionality and modernity. Many scholars have agreed that culture and communication are interdependent, influencing and illuminating one another (e.g., Carey, 1975; Hall, 1959; Pearce et al., 1984; Yokochi & Hall, 2001). While culture provides scripts and resources for communication and for people to make sense of the world, forms and process of communication can also constitute and transform a culture. The mutual influence between Chinese culture and communication is a recurring theme in this volume. The contributors do not simply treat culture and communication as a cause-effect relationship, but as a dynamic process that is interrelated and shaped by multiple forces. The third objective is to achieve an intercultural understanding through an identification of the barriers and commonalities between Chinese and Western societies in various areas such as human rights issues, pedagogical approaches, and rhetorical styles. Such an understanding serves to challenge assumptions, break down dichotomies, and combat prejudice between Chinese and Westerners. Further, the comparative findings allow the two cultures to “inform, complement, and transform each other through two independent, equally powerful, mutually interactive systems of communication” (Jia, 2000, p. 156). The chapters in this volume demonstrate diverse coverage of Chinese societies, voices of marginalized groups, methodology, and backgrounds of the contributors. They include studies of Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong and range from the rhetoric of women in Chinese history to the consumer behavior of the younger generation in contemporary China. The contributors take multiple approaches, ranging from interpretive to quantitative, from critical to com2

INTRODUCTION

parative, from historical to case analysis. The authors are ethnic Chinese who have lived in China and received at least part of their formal education in Chinese universities as well as non-Chinese who have been long-time researchers on Chinese culture and communication. The cross-cultural and transnational experiences of the authors allow them to view Chinese communication behavior with diverse perspectives and engage in in-depth analyses. Another feature of this volume is the collaborative research between Chinese scholars and between Chinese and American scholars.

CHINESE CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION CONTEXTS Confucianism and Chinese Modernization Chinese culture is well known for its long history and rich tradition. Although there was a diversity of thoughts in ancient China, Confucianism became the most prominent state philosophy and cultural ideology for Chinese people when it was legitimized and institutionalized by Emperor Han Wu (156–87 B. C. E.). Major Confucian moral philosophy includes ren (benevolence), li (rites), and zhong yong (the Middle Way). The Confucian version of a society emphasizes social order through the maintenance of hierarchy in human relationships and conformity to prescribed social norms and rules of conduct. Confucian psychology focuses on dependency and interdependency of family, friends, and community. Confucianism dominated Chinese political ideology and provided archetypal images for Chinese communication behavior for over two thousand years. However, intellectual views on the impact of Confucianism in modern times vary. Chinese intellectuals of the New Culture Movement of May Fourth in 1919 vigorously attacked and blamed all aspects of Confucianism for causing the backwardness of Chinese society. During Mao’s period (1949–1976), Confucianism was considered inimical to Chinese minds and China’s social development. It was severely condemned in the official discourse and completely eliminated in the Chinese education system. Ironically, the cultural force of Confucianism is so deeply rooted in Chinese collective consciousness that it continues to provide sense-making schemes and guiding principles for Chinese behaviors and socialization. For example, Ling Chen argues in the first chapter that the traditional Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven, along with the Confucian norms of conformity and collective mentality, still subconsciously affect the communication behavior of many ordinary Chinese during the times of political turmoil and the process of modernization in Mainland China. Chen provides ample evidence of compliance, conformity, and herd mentality through an examination of popular writings in contemporary China and exemplifies the interconnection between cultural memory and the Chinese mindset in the choice making and sense making pro3

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cess. Chen’s study sheds light on how a traditional culture can reinvent itself and adapt its values to new social and economic goals. In light of the remarkable economic success in some East Asian societies, research indicates that some core values of Confucianism have provided ethnic Chinese and East Asian communities with cultural resources and mentality believed to be conducive to effective human management and economic development (e.g., Tu, 1996). Like the argument made by Max Weber about the critical role of the Protestant ethic in Western capitalism, some scholars believe that Confucian values do not only serve as the motivational drive for Eastern modernization, but also provide normative mechanisms and rhetorical strategies to facilitate the economic growth (e. g., Gold, 1996; King, 1996). Rita Mei-Ching Ng’s study in chapter 2 exemplifies how Confucian values of “paternalistic authority” and “the psychology of dependency” manifest themselves strongly in China’s modernization process. In this case, Confucianism has proved to be an effective persuasive appeal being appropriated by the Chinese government to encourage the quest for material wealth while maintaining the authoritarian position. However, Ng notes that China faces the dilemma of balancing the preservation of Confucian values of respecting authority and hierarchical relationship with the influence of Western individualism as the result of economic reform. She asserts, “the Chinese people will have to embark on another creative transformation, which may involve the flexibility of combining the old with the new values” (p. 67).

Culture Change and Chinese Modernization China remained a traditional and isolated society for over 2,000 years until the influence of the West hit China at the turn of the twentieth century. Unprecedented cultural transformation has taken place in China and Chinese societies triggered by multiple factors such as political/social change of government, Westernization, change in economic structure, and language reforms. Indeed, the modern history of China has been characterized by a dialectical tension of traditionality and modernity, the dilemma of idealism and pragmatism, and now a seeming contradiction of an authoritarian state and market economy. Nevertheless, culture change is pervasive and unprecedented in China. According to Chu and Ju (1993), culture change in China is induced by communication taking place in three areas: (1) Mao’s era of ideological indoctrination, (2) post-Mao rhetoric of economic reform, and (3) the influx of Western influence through media. From this point of view, culture change can be attributed to both internal (by the Chinese themselves) and external (from the West) forces, and communication plays a crucial role in this process. The internal force calling for culture change largely comes from Chinese intellectuals. Ingrained in the Confucian notions of duty and remonstrance to the 4

INTRODUCTION

state affairs, Chinese intellectuals in the modern period felt impelled to participate in the discourse of culture in identifying the cause of China’s problem as well as searching for a path to China’s prosperity. Instead of seeing culture as having both constraining functions and incentive components, Chinese intellectuals hold either a radical view or a conservative outlook regarding the role of traditional Chinese culture. The radical view totally rejects traditional Chinese culture and considers it as the obstacle to modernization. The conservative perspective values traditional Chinese culture and regards it as the resource for the revival of the Chinese spirit, especially in facing the ideological crisis after Mao’s era. Both views are totalistic and unpromising as they fail to see the interrelationship between culture and other social factors. This wrangle over the role of culture is addressed in chapter 4 by Changfu Chang who examines three debates taking place in modern China: the New Culture Movement in the 1910s and 1920s, the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and the 1970s, and the Cultural Discussion in the 1990s. While the first two debates rejected completely the value of Chinese culture, the Cultural Discussion attempted to “rekindle the interest in [Chinese] humanistic tradition” calling for preservation of Chineseness. Despite the ideological differences guiding each debate that affected the process and outcome of communication, Chang observes, the theoretical frameworks all pointed to “a totalistic view of culture,” treating Chinese culture either as the problem or the solution to China’s modernization. This dichotomous way of thinking, according to Chang, has overlooked the reciprocal relationships between culture, society, and personality modeled by Habermas. Chang suggests at the end of his chapter that the Chinese leaders and intellectuals should “move out of this predominant mode of thinking and re-conceptualize Chinese culture in a new framework.” On the other hand, economic reforms and the market economy in contemporary China have generated new ways of thinking and new patterns of communication, which in turn, have transformative effects on Chinese culture. Qingwen Dong, in chapter 8 explores the relationship between culture change and communication behavior in a specific context: Chinese urban adolescents’ consumer behavior as affected by the types of family communication, family structure, self-esteem, personal financial resources, and identification with Western values. He has discovered, through empirical research, that children from families that encourage them to express ideas and take on responsibilities have higher involvement in family purchasing activities than those whose family environment does not provide such open communication. Family of the first type is referred as the “concept-oriented family” and the opposite is regarded as the “social-oriented family.” The cultural norms and communication behaviors of the concept family demonstrate the influence of Western culture that values individualism and freedom of expression. 5

CHINESE COMMUNICATION STUDIES

Chinese Communication Studies: New Perspectives China has a rich and dynamic history of rhetoric and communication. However, this history was not recognized and systematically studied by the West until recent decades (Garrett, 1991; Jensen, 1992; Lu, 1998a; Oliver, 1971). This is largely because Chinese rhetoric is implicit and embedded in works of Chinese philosophy, religion, and historical and literary texts compared with the explicit and overt forms of rhetoric and communication in the West. While Chinese societies are sophisticated in their communicative practices in public and interpersonal settings, there is a lack of codification of these experiences in Chinese communication. Current Chinese communication studies are mostly informative and descriptive, aiming to confirm and legitimize traditional Chinese values and practices. Some chapters in this volume contribute to a new and fresh understanding of Chinese communication studies by engaging in unique historical, critical, and performative perspectives. For example, in chapter 3, Changfu Chang offers an account of John Dewey’s theory of communication, in particular the promotion of baihua wen (vernacular language) and its appeals to Chinese intellectuals in the process and pursuit of Chinese democracy and modernization. Chang believes that Dewey’s emphasis on pragmatism and experimentalism has proved valuable and applicable to the Chinese context. However, the author also suggests that Dewey’s theory on the relationship between language, mind, and democracy remains to be absorbed and actualized by Chinese audiences. Engaged in a critical reflection of the Chinese concept of harmony, Omar Swartz contests in Chapter 7 that the traditional Chinese family hierarchical structure as a way to lead to harmony obscures its oppressive nature. He contends that the hierarchical practices of family structure in the Qing Dynasty discriminated against women and abused children. In fact, the author argues that “the practice of a gendered hierarchy in traditional China posed particular threats to the notion of harmony.” The author cautions the Chinese people to guard against the recurrence of this traditional paternalism in their attempt to discredit the achievements of the Communist Party, which has been instrumental in eliminating such brutal practices since 1949. In chapter 9, entitled “Karaoke as a Form of Communication in the Public and Interpersonal Contexts of Taiwan,” Ringo Ma and Rueyling Chuang inform the reader about the popularity of karaoke in Taiwan through an analysis of three case studies and interviews with karaoke consumers in public and private settings. They discover that as a new means of music performance, karaoke has helped enhance the ethos of speakers in public settings and has served to cultivate close interpersonal relationships. They note that “karaoke has become an important part of life to many people in Taiwan,” and maintain that karaoke, as a modern technology, has actually functioned to preserve traditional collective values in interpersonal relationships. 6

INTRODUCTION

Contestation and Identity Chinese societies have a long history of male domination. The studies on Chinese culture and communication thus far have come mostly from the male perspective or are about men’s rhetoric and communication. Women’s role in the Chinese rhetorical tradition and women’s discursive practices are hardly mentioned in the academic research. Two chapters in this volume will fill this void. The first study, in chapter 5, is by Mary M. Garrett who offers a historical review of the rhetorical tradition contributed by literary women and women holding political power (empresses). A variety of ancient Chinese texts are examined, and characteristics of Chinese women’s rhetoric are identified. It has been a misconception that Chinese women never had power to invent rhetoric. On the contrary, according to Garrett, in Chinese history women produced rhetoric and participated in rhetorical activities in political, religious, and educational settings and negotiated their power and identity in their male-dominated world. Garrett’s work adds a missing piece to the puzzle of Chinese rhetorical tradition. Echoing Garrett on celebrating the rhetorical voice of Chinese women, Lin-Lee Lee in chapter 6 examines the rhetorical practices and symbolic transformation embedded in Nushu (women’s script), a thousand-year-old female language created by rural women in a southern province of China. In this study, the author offers convincing evidence of Nushu discourse and practices, indicating that these village women empowered themselves in the oppressive environment through singing, chanting, and ritualistic engagement of “women communication.” This research demonstrates how oppressed groups find their own voices and resist the dominant discourse by creating their own discursive space. On July 1, 1997, Hong Kong was officially returned to Mainland China by the British government after 100 years of colonization caused by the Opium War. By Deng Xiaoping’s formula of “one nation, two systems,” Hong Kong remains a capitalistic society and with a democratic government after the transfer of its sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China. However, the political relationship with Mainland China and economic demands from the native land require adjustment and formulation of strategies from Hong Kong media. In chapter 10, Anthony Y. H. Fung and Chin-Chuan Lee analyze the role of both the popular and professional press in Hong Kong after the sovereignty transfer. They contend that political power plays a dominant role in media practices and in shaping economic and cultural power. While both media sources experience self-censorship as the result of political pressure, they have also developed strategies for defusing, contesting, and countering some political issues. Their study suggests that the Marxist model of political economy, with its overemphasis on the domination of the economic sphere over the political parameter, does not apply to the current situation in Hong Kong because it fails to take into account the interactions and dialectics of political and economic constraints. 7

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COMPARISON WITH WESTERN CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION Comparative studies between Chinese and Western cultural values and communication behaviors thus far have been characterized primarily by a framework of dichotomy with emphasis on differences. Chinese culture is considered high context while most Western cultures are ranked as low context (Hall, 1976 ). Chinese culture has been characterized as collectivistic, while most Western cultures are believed to be individualistic (Gudykunst & Kim, 1984; Hofstede, 1980; Hui & Triandis, 1986). Most of these studies present either broad assertions without empirical research evidence, or from a positivistic approach, making generalizations about Chinese culture and communication. Such a mode of comparison offers some helpful information about Chinese culture and communication but tends to produce stereotypes and treats culture and communication as a static entity. Only in recent years, research has emerged to challenge these dichotomized ways of generating knowledge and to critically examine the complex nature of Chinese cultural behaviors (e.g., Chang & Holt, 1991; Lu, 1998b). In the study of the history of rhetoric by Western scholars, Chinese rhetoric is characterized by its lack of logic, deprecation of speech, and its audience centered approach (Becker, 1986; Jensen, 1987; Oliver, 1971). By contrast, Western rhetoric features the speaker, has a well-developed logical system, and is interested in a dynamic mode of delivery (Oliver, 1971). These pioneering works on Chinese rhetoric are significant in making initial efforts to recognize the value of Chinese rhetoric. However, their overemphasis on differences tends to create Otherness and reinforces the assumption that Chinese culture is peculiar and that communicating with the Chinese is very difficult, if not impossible. Although subsequent studies of Chinese rhetoric have examined similarities as well as differences and have also indicated an appreciation and appropriation of Chinese rhetoric in facilitating an understanding of Western persuasive practices (Garrett, 1993; Combs, 2000), there is still a lack of research examining specific areas of similarities and differences between the two cultures. Chapters in this volume address some of these needed comparisons: traditions of humanism, perceptions of human rights, the construction of world opinion, and approaches to teaching and learning.

Moral Conflict and Intercultural Ethics The issue of human rights has been the central ideological battle between the United States and China. The United States has condemned China’s human rights record and its harsh treatment of political prisoners, suppression of antigovernment voices, persecution of religious practices, and its crackdown on Falun Gong (Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, 2001). The Chinese 8

INTRODUCTION

government was infuriated by these charges, calling them an “imposition of an American standard” and accused the United States of “using human rights issues as a tool for promoting its hegemony” (Fan, 2001). In his study on Chinese discourse of human rights, John Powers (1999) observes that China and the United States have different perceptions in their reference to human rights. China defines “the concept of human rights in economic and subsistence terms” (p. 244). In this sense, human rights for the Chinese is to meet the basic material needs and to improve the standard of living. For Americans, human rights is understood in political and freedom terms. As cited by Powers (1999), “The UN’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights of 1948 begins with issues of freedom, justice, and dignity of the individual, and emphasizes the individual’s political and civic rights relative to the government” (p. 244). With these two different perceptions concerning the concept of human rights, it is not surprising that the official discourse of the two nations is fraught with accusations and attacks from the American side, as well as resentment and defensiveness from the Chinese side. Two chapters in this volume offer an in-depth examination and analysis on the topic of human rights. In chapter 11, entitled “Humanism and Human Rights: A Comparison between the Occidental and Oriental Traditions,” Mei-Ling Wang traces the humanistic traditions of both Chinese and Western cultures, arguing that the Chinese idea of humanism is largely rooted in the teachings of Confucianism that aims at the well-being of the community. As a result, individual rights are less important than collective goals. By contrast, the Western tradition of humanism is centered on individual rights, which are protected by law. According to Wang, the different definitions of humanism in each culture have caused different moral perceptions of human rights. By the Chinese definition, China has achieved a remarkable record of human rights in terms of raising the standard of living for its people. By American definition, China has violated human rights by persecuting political dissidents and by not allowing freedom of speech. Wang concludes that there is no universal concept of human rights and suggests that researchers should be sensitive to the social, cultural, and linguistic meanings of human rights and should define human rights in broader terms rather than restricting it to the domain of free speech. The different perceptions of human rights by the Chinese and Americans are further examined in Jing Yin and Brad ‘J’Hall’s study in chapter 12. Their data, containing collected stories and media reports from both sides, indicate that people from each culture make sense of their world through their own cultural assumptions. The Chinese perceive attainment of human rights as a process where individual rights should be sacrificed for the prosperity and stability of the state. The Americans, on the other hand, see the core of human rights as individual freedom: human rights are the rights of the individual. The authors acknowledge that these different cultural views, along with the issues of power and competi9

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tion, cause international conflicts. They believe that a good understanding of the sense-making process by cultural groups “provides a better foundation for dialogue and decisions than do quick, often ethnocentric judgments about who is right and good.” A failure to understand the process and complexity will “create stronger walls rather than bridges.” Yin and Hall’s study confirmed Mei-Ling Wang’s observation that human rights issues are rooted in the different traditions of humanism in Chinese and American cultures respectively. A related ideological and cultural difference between China and the West is the perception in constructing world opinion. This is the topic discussed by Minmin Wang in chapter 13. Her chapter examines the rhetorical rules employed by the Chinese and American media in the construction of world opinion. Wang argues that given the Western domination and humiliation in Chinese modern history, the Chinese place national sovereignty as the fundamental principle in the construction of world opinion. The United States, on the other hand, is more concerned with an imposition of global moral norms as a regulating power in their construction of world opinion. The rhetorical rules used by each nation will ultimately serve the purpose of meeting these culturally specific principles. Wang raises the question “What happens when two sides believe that they each hold the correct way?” In an attempt to provide a solution, Wang suggests a replacement of rhetorical rules with communicative rules, which is predicated on “the fifth level of consciousness” that perceives “their [own version] of truth as incomplete.” Such a mindset will allow nations to approach moral differences in such a way that “avoids deadlock.” Moreover, such an endeavor would help “establish a workable consensus of pragmatic and moral viewpoints that accepts each nation’s historical and cultural legacy.”

Similarities in Communication and Rhetorical Styles China in many ways has been Westernized in the twentieth century with the influx of Western scientific thinking, Marxism, and Soviet ideology. In this process, China’s traditional values have lost their appeal and have given way to political ideology. On the other hand, evidence shows that Chinese Confucian thought has also influenced Enlightenment thinkers in the West (Nakamura, 1964). Because of these intercultural interactions and exposure, China and the West may share more similarities than differences. The last two chapters of this volume offer us initial attempts and some insights into this less explored area. Scott C. Hammond and Hongmei Gao begin their chapter 14 by telling the Chinese creation story of the world and then connect this story to Chinese holistic thinking and dialogical learning. The authors find similarities between Chinese and Western traditions regarding the theories of dialogic learning, which promotes creative problem solving and transcendent thinking. The authors make a distinction between “dialectic learning,” which focuses on memoriza10

INTRODUCTION

tion and testing and “dialogue learning,” which emphasizes critical thinking and practical knowledge through a process of interaction and cooperation. The authors point out that while the West has returned to a more dialogic approach to education, Chinese students are still exposed to dialectical learning, which will hinder their ability to compete in the globalized world. Chapter 15 by Andy Kirkpatrick identifies the instruction of rhetoric and composition in contemporary Chinese textbooks and compares them with the advice given in English textbooks. According to the textual evidence provided by Kirkpatrick, the advice given to Chinese students in these texts emphasizes a linear pattern of organization and favors inductive reasoning and direct presentation of argument. These features are similar to the advice given to students in English textbooks for the construction of a persuasive argument. Kirkpatrick’s finding challenges the conventional belief of Chinese rhetoric as circuitous using analogical reasoning. The author concludes that because of these similarities, the perceived problems of English writing by Chinese students should not be attributed to transference from a Chinese writing style to an English one. CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS In conclusion, this volume contributes to the ongoing study of Chinese communication and culture by presenting meanings in various contexts and by comparing them with Western culture and communication. The topics under discussion shed light on how traditional Confucian values can be reinvented and appropriated to meet contemporary social, political, economic, and psychological needs. The findings suggest unequivocally that Chinese communication in various contexts has transformed Chinese culture. Meanwhile, these studies illustrate the dilemma of balancing imported ideas with the desire to maintain indigenous values, and the struggle between self-defined identity and resistance to domestic political/patriarchal pressure (as well as international constraints). The studies in this volume characterize the dialectical nature of the integration of multiple perspectives, provide a balance between contradictions, and demonstrate the contestation between marginalized voices and dominant forces. Furthermore, these studies will not only contribute to our knowledge of Chinese culture and communication, but also to our knowledge of the intercultural relationship between China and other regions and nations in the world. When international conflicts arise such as the recent China–U.S. crisis over the spy plane collision, it is imperative to take into consideration the cultural/linguistic meanings and historical contexts that underlie the discourse of negotiation and interations. Efforts should be made in reaching an empathic understanding rather than engaging in aggression and retaliation. It is important to be open-minded and culturally sensitive in intercultural interactions for the benefit of world peace. 11

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A few years ago, Tu Wei-ming (1994) said “China in transformation is a human drama on the global stage” (p. xxv). As an ethnic Chinese and communication scholar myself, watching the episodes of this drama is both fascinating and nerve-wracking. Chinese culture and communication has embarked on a route of adventure and will create new drama to capture the imagination of the world audience. The story of balancing between tradition and modernization, between globalization and localization, between Eastern and Western values will continue to unfold in China and Chinese societies well into the twenty-first century. It is also my hope that the studies presented in this volume will increase the intellectual curiosity for identifying further contexts and comparisons in Chinese communication studies and to explore diverse approaches in this area of research. Furthermore, these studies will illuminate the construction of Chinese communication theories and reconceptualization of Chinese culture. NOTE 1. According to the recent census report released by the Chinese government, the Chinese population has reached 1,295,330,000 (People’s Daily, March 29, 2001). “The Chinese” here refers to the ethnic Chinese as well as Chinese nationals from regions of Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

REFERENCES Becker, C. (1986). Reasons for the lack of argumentation and debate in the Far East. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 10, 75–92. Carey, J. (1975). A cultural approach to communication. Communication, 2, 1–22. Chang, H. C. & Holt, G. R. (1991). More than relationship: Chinese interaction and the principle of kuan-his. Communication Quarterly, 39, 251–271. Chu, G., & Ju, Y. (1993). The Great Wall in ruins: Communication and cultural change in China. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Combs, S. (2000). Sun-zi and the Art of War: The rhetoric of parsimony. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 86, 276–294. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. (2001). Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U. S. Department of State, February 27. Fan, G. X. (2001). The ulterior motive behind the U. S. human rights report. The People’s Daily, March 3. Garrett, M. (1991). Asian challenge. In Sonja Foss, Karen Foss, and Robert Trapp (Eds.), Contemporary perspectives on rhetoric (pp. 295–306). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. Garrett, M. (1993). Wit, power, and oppositional groups: A case study of “Pure Talk.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 79, 303–318. Gold, T. B. (1996). Civil society in Taiwan: The Confucian dimension. In W. M. Tu (Ed.), Confucian traditions in East Asian modernity: Moral education and 12

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economic culture in Japan and the four mini-dragons (pp. 244–258). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gudykunst, W. B., & Kim, Y. Y. (1984). Communication with strangers. New York: McGraw-Hill. Hall, E. T. (1959). The silent language. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company. Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond culture. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company. Heisey, D. R. (Ed.). (2000). Chinese perspectives in rhetoric and communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Hui, C. H., & Triandis, H. C. (1986). Individualism-collectivism: A study of cross-cultural researchers. Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology, 17, 225–248. Jensen, V. (1987). Rhetorical emphasis of Taoism. Rhetorica, 5, 219–232. Jensen, V. (1992). Values and practices in Asian argumentation. Argumentation and Advocacy, 28, 155–166. Jia, W. S. (2000). Chinese communication scholarship as an expansion of the communication and culture paradigm. In D. R. Heisey (Ed.), Chinese perspectives in rhetoric and communication (pp. 139–164). Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation. King, A. Y. (1996). The transformation of Confucianism in the post-Confucian era: The emergence of rationalistic traditionalism in Hong Kong. In W. M. Tu (Ed.), Confucian traditions in East Asian modernity: Moral education and economic culture in Japan and the four mini-dragons (pp. 265–276). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kluver, R., & Powers, J. H. (Eds.) (1999). Civic discourse, civil society, and Chinese communities. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Lu, X. (1998a). Rhetoric in ancient China, fifth to third century B. C. E.: A comparison with classical Greek rhetoric. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Lu, X. (1998b). An interface between individualistic and collectivistic orientations in Chinese cultural values and social relations. The Howard Journal of Communication, 9, 91–107. Nakamura, H. (1964). Ways of thinking of Eastern peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Oliver, R. (1971). Communication and culture in ancient India and China. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Pearce, W. B., Stanback, M. H., & Kang, K. (1984). Some cross-cultural studies of the reciprocal causal relation between communication and culture. In S. Thomas (Ed.), Communication theory and interpersonal interaction (pp. 3–10). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Powers, J. H. (1999). Civic discourse with the international community: China’s Whitepapers on human rights. In R. Kluver & J. H. Powers (Eds.), Civic discourse, civil society, and Chinese communities (pp. 237–250). Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Tu, W. M. (1994). “Introduction: Cultural perspective.” In W. M. Tu (Ed.), China in transformation (pp. xi-xxv). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 13

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Tu, W. M. (Ed.). (1996). Confucian traditions in East Asian modernity: Moral education and economic culture in Japan and the four mini-dragons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Yokochi, Y., & Hall, B. J. (2001). Exploring the communication/culture connection: A comparison of Japanese and American discourse. In M. J. Collier (Ed.), Constituting cultural difference through discourse (pp.189–214). International and intercultural communication annual (Vol. 23). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

14


Part I
Chinese Culture and Modernization


1
Revolution and Us: A Cultural Rendition of Political Movements in Contemporary China Ling Chen

Ever since the “Liberation” of the 1949 revolution that gave birth to the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese have been exhorted to carry it on. In place of military conflicts, revolution has since taken the form of political campaigns, known as yundong (movement). The decades following the Liberation have seen so many political movements that a term appeared, yundongyuan, referring to those who frequently became targets of campaigns. How have the Chinese made sense of all this and understood what the government has explained to them throughout the years? This chapter presents a cultural members’ view of social-political development in the PRC from popular writings. The aim is not to explain specific events, but rather to understand the symbolic interaction between the cultural mindset and social circumstances. New insights may come from the viewpoint of ordinary Chinese, whose collective unconscious inclination is the ultimate determinant of a particular development of social-political events in China. Whereas it is shaped by sociocultural conditions, “Cultural memory has the ability to transform the new into something malleable enough to enable old ways of doing to still operate. These old ways of doing, in turn, end up reinforcing commitments to far more traditional ways of seeing, and it is these that fuel the daily routines of life” (Dutton, 1998, p. 42). CULTURE: THE CULTIVATOR OF THE REVOLUTION A colleague curious about Chinese culture once asked me, “Is Confucianism the foundation of Chinese culture?” The question is innocent enough, but there

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is no easy answer. Whereas Confucianism is a single influential force in Chinese culture, it is an integral part, a product, of this culture. So is the Chinese revolution. Establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was, like numerous peasant uprisings in history, an outcome of a long-lasting poverty. The Liberation is as much a triumph of communist ideology as it is triumph of a cultural tradition to rebel against a corrupt ruler and carry out a mandate of Heaven. In this sense, although this revolution brought about historic change in a social system and ideology, little has changed in the Chinese belief of cosmic order and revolution. In this view, tian (Heaven), or the supernatural, is the dominant force of the universe, of which earth is a part. For peace and prosperity on earth, there must be balance in the universe while everything moves by Heaven’s law (Xia, 1998). Otherwise, natural disasters and wars strike. The laws are not exact nor explicit, yet clear and mandatory: tianwan huihui, shu er bu lou (Heaven’s net invisible, vast and misses nothing). Everything and everyone has a place, with privileges, duties, and obligations. The ruler enjoys power, status, and wealth, but must protect and provide for its people. The Nationalist government was overthrown for its gross abuse of power and privileges, badly neglecting its duties as the ruler. In the China of the 1940s, the gap between the Haves and the Have-nots grew into a chasm. That most could hardly scrape by could not have been the design of Heaven. That the government had turned a blind eye to people’s extreme sufferings and starvation, in contrast to officials’ excessive luxuries, was not lost on Heaven. The balance was upset; the government lost its mandate. People revolted, resorting to revolution,1 their collective right as a people. The revolution liberated people from the dismal social conditions, as peasant uprisings in the past had, and brought in a new government, which in many ways was analogous to a new dynasty. LEADERS AS THE RULER The revolution has proceeded with much popular involvement by the same cultural tradition that holds the ruler and the ruled in a complementary polarity. Individuals’life stories over the years recount Chinese understanding of the revolution. Cultural mindset is reflected in the special status granted to the government under Chairman Mao and in people’s participation in political movements. The PRC came with the promise of a better life. The popular support of revolutionaries continued into the young republic, partly because of the Land Reform soon to follow in 1950. Millions of peasants became small farmers who now worked their own lands instead of a landlord’s. Although private land ownership lasted only until collectivization of agriculture in 1955, the majority of the population had benefited and come to see the government as actually “people’s.” The national sentiment was generally positive. People were content with what the revolution had given them and happy about life restored to the way it should be. Everything and everyone had a place: People went about 18

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daily business with the means to make a living, while the government handled national affairs for the benefit of the people. The nation was in the normal mode by tradition. The government drew up guidelines and stipulations on political, economic, cultural, and social activities for people to follow. People accepted all willingly, looking up toward the leaders as the “savior” that would not do wrong. Alien to the concept of the modern state (Xiao, 1994), the traditional Chinese understanding of state is a people and its ruler. A moral premise in this understanding is the paramount importance of people’s loyalty to their ruler. For most Chinese, particularly the rural population, the People’s Republic was indeed a new dynasty and Chairman Mao a new emperor with a different title. Mao was taken as a rare, ideal ruler to whom people could be loyal and faithful out of heartfelt affection. As a matter of fact, people’s gratitude for Mao and their perception of him were that for a god descending from Heaven. In the words of a farmer from Shandong Province, “Chairman Mao had wealth and greatness written all over his face. He had the look of a real emperor, but he was better than an emperor. No emperor ever saved the poor. Chairman Mao was the savior of the poor from the moment he was born” (Zhang & Sang, 1987, p. 117). For the Chinese to be led by a celestial figure was looked upon as a blessing, a divine sign of many prosperous years to come. Mao’s god-like stature in the eyes of ordinary Chinese comes through in a middle school teacher’s letter from Beijing to colleagues. Comrades: Let me tell you the great news, news greater than heaven. At five minutes past seven in the evening of September 1966, I saw our most most most most dearly beloved leader Chairman Mao! Today I am so happy my heart is about to burst. We’re shouting, “Long live Chairman Mao! Long live! Long live!” We’re jumping! We’re singing! After seeing the Red Sun in Our Hearts, I just ran around like crazy all over Beijing. I so much wanted to tell everyone the great news! I wanted everyone to join me in being happy, jumping, and shouting. (Schoenhals, 1996, p. 148)

A peasant woman from Shanxi province on Mao’s death provides a glimpse of the emotional dependency on Mao. “Everyone was in tears when we watched the Chairman’s funeral. We were all afraid of what it would be like without him” (Zhang & Sang, 1987, p. 126). The acute insecurity and sense of a looming unknown that the Chinese felt at this event was not unlike that of a young child losing an only parent. Many even today believe Mao was one from Heaven to be worshiped as a god, as seen in the Mao craze since the early 1990s.2 Many circulate “tales about people who ha(ve) been ‘saved’ by Mao. There were automobile drivers who walked away uninjured from hideous crashes; street vendors who escaped from robberies; and even survivors of murder attempts who claimed they had been shielded by their Mao pendants. During the summer of 1991 thousands of 19

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destitute peasants in southern China were reported to have purchased Mao talismans after the region was inundated by catastrophic floods” (Schell, 1994, p. 287). That Mao posthumously joined the ranks of the immortal like many ancient deities is due to the traditional cultural force, which explains his enormous summoning powers to massive participation in political movements in earlier times. It is the place of a leader/ruler to be strategic, look toward the future, and take measures to prevent harmful trends in the society. The decision is his for whatever necessary and in what direction. Ordinary people simply follow without question. Irony arises in the government’s efforts to indoctrinate the population into the communist ideology and eradicate the influence of the old China. The top-down massive education and mobilization is reminiscent of the traditional feudalism that it was to stamp out. Its very success is owed to the traditional obedience to authorities. Systematic educational efforts in grass-roots meetings and study groups started in the early 1950s. People studied the principles of Marxism and communism in government documents, decrees, and instructions, applied the principles to daily life and checked their behaviors against the government line. The Three-Anti Movement followed to aim at stopping embezzlement, wastefulness, and bureaucracy in governmental organizations, which were deemed incompatible and harmful to the socialist construction associated with certain social elements such as former Nationalist officials or agents and bureaucratic cadres, many of whom were clerks retained from the Nationalist government. The revolutionary struggle then continued to the Five-Anti Movement, against bribery, tax evasion, skimping on work and cheating on materials, state property scams, and theft of economic information, practiced by some industrialists and businessmen in the private sector. Also becoming targets were individuals who were held to have behaved in selfish manners in schools, factories, or villages, or in ways inconsistent to revolutionary ideas. Those who were tardy at work, broke tools, helped themselves to public properties, or refused to cooperate with others at work, would be criticized and made to self-criticize on the socialist ideological grounds (Alley, 1954). Efforts for education were greatly intensified in political movements like fanyou (antirightist), shejiaosiqing (socialist education and four-cleanups), and the Cultural Revolution. New political movements became as frequent as once every two to three years. Local meetings had become a routine, targeting more people over the years. The intensive indoctrination and frequent political movements resulted in people’s familiarity with government lines. People have learned what is or is not the correct thing to do or say and what would cause trouble with the authorities. Notably throughout the years, particularly in earlier decades, the majority had been participating willingly, often actively, in political movements/cam20

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paigns. In an eagerness to demonstrate loyalty to the party, to raise their own consciousness, or to preempt troubles, many would take initiatives to expand the scope of targets and suspected behaviors, engineering creative, extreme ways to carry out the campaign.3 Motivations for participation in movements are complex, to be discussed later. However, their enthusiasm leaves little doubt about ordinary people’s sincerity to do the right thing. Alley (1954), a nonnative resident, recorded such populace involvement in 1951–1952 in a mine and surrounding rural areas. “Now, everyday, passing through the countryside, I see meetings going on. Peasants who in former times would never have come to meetings, let alone raise their voices at such, can be heard talking in big and small groups everywhere. They have all climbed on the freedom train, freedom that is real, that brings them organized life, land, stock and the means to improve livelihood not as a distant dream, but here and now” (p. 26). The Three-Anti Movement is “a necessary housecleaning to prepare the way for the united drive for projection that will follow. Our first step was to hold two mass meetings on successive nights to consider the mistakes of the past and what they had cost the people” (p. 41). Similarly, a farmer thus described the formation of the people’s commune in their village: Some people thought it an unnecessary measure. . . . But we discussed and made propaganda. The central committee of the Party, of course, had said that we ought to form people’s communes. People’s communes were supposed to be more effective employment of manpower, to give greater possibilities for capital investment; with one we should be maintaining the principle of everyone being paid according to the work he did and be able to give more help to those who got into difficulties. . . . After this propaganda, work, we joined Liu Ling People’s Commune. . . . We became Liu Ling Labor Brigade. (Myrdal, 1965, p. 163)

The tradition was not lost on the young. A “Third Generation,” those born in the late 1940s and 1950s, recalled with deep affection their first, adolescent experience as revolutionaries: On a stormy autumn day, a group of us first-year middle-school pupils turned Red Guards decided to strengthen our revolutionary will and experience the heroic act of on-foot cuanlian (exchanging experiences). Thunders were rolling and lighting flashing over our head; muddy water was flooding under feet, and it was misty and murky ahead. . . . We sang the song of quotation and encouraged each other to press on. Finally we reached the destination, wet all over and shivering in the chill. The warm welcome from the older Red Guard brothers and sisters received us. We were offered dry cloth, dry towel, hot water and hot meal, and were delighted to experience first hand the same warmth and fulfillment of Red Army in the past when they reached the liberated area after a long and exhausting march. Then we were all refreshed with high spirit and ready 21

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to struggle again, stepping on stage to perform revolutionary songs and rebel dances, lost in the thrill and excitement. (Liu et al., 1998, p. 4)

The devotion was not dampened even for those who became targets of a movement and fell in disgrace. Liang (Liang & Shapiro, 1983) illustrates this point in his autobiography describing his father. The senior Liang, a royal newspaper editor, divorced his wife when she was identified as a rightist in the 1950s and, years later, was himself accused of being a capitalist reactionary intellectual. Confronted by his children on this, he explained, The people who criticized me have deep proletarian feelings and a great love for Chairman Mao. . . . I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I should examine myself thoroughly. But as long as I’m faithful to the Party and Chairman Mao, it won’t be long before I mend my errors. . . . You should believe the Party. Believe Chairman Mao. . . . (To his children,) his words sounded like a prayer, a principle kept in his heart to invoke in times of trouble. They have been the keys to his spirit for the past twenty years. But Liang Fang (a daughter) raged. ‘Others don’t believe you! They say you’re a Capitalist, a bloodsucker, a foreigner’s dog!’ Then my father stood up, his face white, his words tumbling out in one breath. ‘It is because I’m none of those things that I believe the Party and Chairman Mao. (pp. 55–56)

Such blind faith and unconditioned loyalty were typically what the traditional Chinese culture would have instilled. COMPLIANCE AND CONFORMITY Underlying the blind loyalty of the Chinese is another cultural force, collectivism associated with the traditional philosophy of personhood, weiren zi de or zuoren zi de (morality of being a person). In this philosophy, a person with de (morality), or a moral person, rigorously upholds the principle of wulun (five role relations), that is, ruler-subject, father-son, brother-brother, husband-wife, and friends, as one’s utmost duties. The Chinese traditional concept of de as private morality explains the lack of a concept of modern state (Liang, 1902–1907). In contrast to the idea of public morality, this configuration leaves no room for either state in the modern sense or individual as an independent, free will agent. There is, instead, a collective of people bound together in the fashion of a big family/clan. To maintain the family, every member must act one’s role, be compliant to the head, and fulfill obligations and duties. The well-being of family is the ultimate purpose in life, including family continuity and prosperity. It is a family duty to keep oneself and one’s family out of harm’s way. One may simply lie low to attract no attention. As a way of being moral, one may take actions to ensure social conformity in others. Compliance to the authority, then, is a moral conduct in the traditional thinking and parallels good family upkeep. It is important to those who genuinely 22

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want to be a good person, and numerous people fit this category. A crematorium worker said of his own father, (H)e is quite a character, honest, good-hearted, broad-minded—a real old Confucian. He joined the revolution in 1946, but he’s still only deputy chairman of his factory’s trade union. Sometimes I tease him: “How long have you worked for the revolution? Thirty-odd years? Nearly forty? Where’s it got you? Men who didn’t join the Party till 1964 are already ministers. You, you’ve wasted your whole life.” He couldn’t care less. . . . Then he goes on about piddling little household chores, or rushes off on his “business.” (Zhang & Sang, 1987, p. 165)

Persons like him adhered to the traditional ideal of personhood and willingly 4 endured hardship to acquire virtue. When they became targets in political movements, they had no resentment for being wronged, but dutifully studied the Party line, self-reflecting and self-criticizing accordingly, striving to make things right in thought and in action. This kind of response reinforces the authority of the government over individuals making a potent example out of the individuals involved. Another illustration is the senior Liang who was identified as a serious example of antiparty and a counterrevolutionary. He was sent to a Mao’s Thought Study class away from home without the weekly leave granted to those with lesser problems. In the restricted site guarded by armed soldiers, his visiting children, found him occupied at a desk. He explained, “I’m just very busy. I’m so sorry not to be with you now, but I want to use every minute to study. Maybe soon I’ll come back on Sundays, and after that I’ll graduate and can be at home all the time” (Liang & Shapiro, 1983, p. 145). Similarly, in a letter to the Politburo of the Party’s Central Committee, Wang Li, a disgraced high-ranking official, begs for a chance of redemption through self-denouncement. “Although the CCP had kept him imprisoned without a trial for fifteen years and during the period did its best to drive him insane with mind-altering drugs, Wang still has no higher wish than to rejoin the Party and to die as a member of the ‘organization’” (Schoenhals, 1996, p. 314). Being a veteran revolutionary, Wang is atypical. His case nevertheless highlights the personal significance of being accepted by the Party. Some are less “virtuous” but still treasure their family. For them, compliance to authority is one common-sense survival strategy. A hairdresser in Chongqing explained it well. (Once) any political movement started our business went through the floor. Of course we weren’t affected by the “three antis,” the “five antis,” the campaign against Hu Feng, and all the rest of it. I tell you, nobody can beat a hairdresser when it comes to spotting political changes. Take the campaign against Hu Feng. All the educated people stopped coming to get their hair done right away. They were like rats, terrified of being noticed, remembered and dragged into the case. If you ask me, that campaign was what started 23

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educated people on the downward slope. Every time there is a movement our business fell off. (Zhang & Sang, 1987, p. 174)

The threat of being noticed and dragged into the case was real. Besides participation in the movement, people stay clear of potentially problematic behaviors to avoid being targets. Compliance could take an extreme form. With tacit encouragement from the top, local levels improvised with ingenious association of behaviors and individuals, deemed inconsistent with the Party line and worthy of criticism. This dark side of the culture may be traced to the belief in reciprocity as part of the cosmic order, a premise of cultural collectivism (Li, 1998). In efforts to win the favor of the superior, the role of the subordinate is overplayed—it is not enough to just comply, but to do more, ingratiating oneself at the expense of fellow citizens.5 In later years, this often occurred with the pretense of raising the consciousness of the targeted party, with the outcome of the latter being disgraced or even persecuted. As early as 1951, things of this nature were happening in study groups. For example, “in the Textile Section, Apprentice Wang was being criticized for breaking tools which he had borrowed without permission and then putting them back in the store without confessing the breakage. . . . No doubt he had made some mistakes, Wang offered, hoping to escape further criticism, but still the array of accusers kept nailing him down relentlessly to specific faults and pressing that he recognize them clearly and resolve to amend his individualistic ways” (Alley, 1954, p. 3). Li Jian’s case, a writer with a brief career (1979–1998), illustrates the conformity demand. Li started out with writings that praised the Chinese society and contradicted the accepted disastrous view of the Cultural Revolution. Li, as a result, was criticized in literary circles for being out of step with time. He changed his view and wrote stories about the extremely negative impact of the Cultural Revolution. He was criticized again for his overly naturalistic descriptions of certain scenes, another deviation from the accepted. This particular controversy drew no official interference. The critics were from different camps each time, liberals and traditionalists respectively, both standing for the conformist tradition in Chinese culture. Even though Li had expressed his true view sincerely—the change of mind actually resulted from numerous thought struggle sessions, according to writer Liu Zhe, who knew Li well (Louie, 1989). The habitual adherence to uniform viewpoints, that the Cultural Revolution was a horrendous mistake and that to describe certain human acts was indecent and unhealthy, had prompted the attack on Li from all sides. The collective mentality for a single, correct, and accepted view of things had not changed much after the Cultural Revolution. There is still a price for independent thinking. However, the end of the Cultural Revolution marked the beginning of a visible change in the Chinese collective consciousness, a point for later dicussion. It is worth noting that the change emerged with popular disillusionment toward 24

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the Party and government brought on by the chaos in the Cultural Revolution. The very disillusionment itself stands as a testament to the traditional, popular reliance on the ruler to take care of things so people could work for a livelihood. People had fulfilled their duties only to discover that their trust in authority had been violated, hence the disillusionment. The traditional collectivistic ideal of everyone working for the benefit of community, the extended family, is still very much a norm rather than the exception in the vast provincial areas in China today. A case in point is a well-known painter, Huang Yongyu, who designs packages for two fine wines, jiugui and xiangquan, the specialty of an area in western Guangxi province, Huang’s hometown area. The hometown area occupies a special place in the Chinese psyche as an anchor point of one’s identity. The wines gained even greater popularity owing to Huang’sdesign. Huang was paid an unheard-of amount of money for his contribution. This incident drew a lot of criticism of Huang from his hometown folks because he shouldn’t have accepted the compensation. Being a Guangxi folk, it was his duty to contribute to the prosperity of his hometown. Huang, his critics exhorted, should have taken pride in the fine product and not taken money for his own personal use. In the words of a local, Huang “shouldn’t have asked for such a high fee for his design. This is because Huang is from western Guangxi, . . . [and] should have supported the economic development of his hometown” (Run & Huang, 1999, p. 7). HERD MENTALITY Also in relation to the traditional cosmic view is the absence of a sense of legality, contributing considerably to the wrongs of past political movements and to today’s corruption. Traditionally, cosmic and social order was to be maintained by divine laws, not explicitly stated but understood. As a result, cultural values have been an important part of the regulatory mechanism in Chinese society, although many, except for the most fundamental and deep-rooted general principles, were undermined under the PRC government. Mechanisms of social control, derived directly from the ruler through personal decrees and instructions, were subject to sudden change (of mind or of dynasty) and were laws only to the commoners. Hence the saying xing bu shang dafu (inquisition does not apply upward to the noble). There was, thus, a secondary class of conduct considered wrong only some of the time and thus could be excused. With respect to certain conducts the Chinese have long developed a herd mentality that laws do not punish the mass (fa bu zezhong). The flip side is if everyone is acting in the same manner, the act and the manner become justifiable. Collective judgment, in this sense, was an independent criterion for what should be applicable mostly to morally dubious or trivial matters. This is partly how corruption has become rampant in China. Since the 1970s, people have seen a few individuals pulling strings and exploiting per25

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sonal connections. This practice allowed them to obtain rare commodities, get urban jobs for their children, secure university admission, and get hold of anything desirable but that was hard to get. Gradually, others followed suit, and everyone learned to seek out personal connections and exchange favors for things unobtainable through formal channels. Before long and aided by Chinese pragmatism, personal relationships became connection relationships, cultivated for the purpose of mutual favors. From here, it took only a little imagination and a slight stretch of what was right to turn personal favors into bribes. Ironically, this all started at the top where the ruling elite resided, those who had the power and connections like no one at the grass-roots level. In a twisted sense, this is another case of the mass answering the call of authority, albeit an implicit and unvoiced call. People simply do what everyone else does. Another apparent manifestation of herd mentality is seen in people’s personal appearance. The past era of “blue sea”—an identical color for everyone—is replaced by colors and style in the street. However, careful observers note that in China “fashion is quite often re-coded to promote collectivist, not individualist, ethos. . . . (F)ashion is not to mark out one’s individuality, but to mark out one’s success” (Dutton, 1998, pp. 273–274). The blue outfit is gone but the uniformity stays on. With some exceptions, the norm is still that when something is considered nice-looking, it is so for everyone and anyone. Choice of wardrobe is, by and large, not based on personal taste or being unique, but a statement of popularity, of one’s being in touch with the common taste. Others’ reaction to one’s dress and cloth is a constant concern, not just in fashion, but in everything a person engages in. The invisible grip of social conformity is still omnipresent, which has started diminishing, very slowly and gradually. THE QUEST FOR PROSPERITY One major cause of the Chinese revolution was China’s poverty and destitution. Longing for prosperity and a good life was at the heart of it all, although the Liberation did not quite deliver this. The nation as a whole was and still is poor and undeveloped. However, many Chinese are enjoying a good time of personal well-being. We can also trace the influence of traditional values in this area. By far the greatest change in recent years is in economic development, a direct result of the government’s open policy since the late 1970s, to which people have simply complied and taken action for implementation—as always. Only this time they have done so with energy and initiative unseen in decades. The reform has unleashed a long-suppressed cultural force. The moral imperative of family continuity is behind the urge to secure material means for this purpose. When the cultural impetus to pursue prosperity and good fortune is finally allowed to follow its natural course, it does so with vigor. This zealous quest is also a manifestation of the herd mentality, rushing to everything others are doing, feng yong er shan (bee swamp onward). This phe26

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nomenon in the past contributed a lot to social situations getting out of control, the Cultural Revolution being a prime example. Such Chinese extremism was hardly new. As observed by Schell (1994): It stemmed in part from the age-old tradition of obedience to a single ruler that the Communists inherited from China’s imperial past. Another part of the phenomenon was rooted in the crisis of identity that has gripped China ever since the fall of the last dynasty in 1911—an event that left the Middle Kingdom vulnerable to manic shifts in political and economic ideology and periodic seizures of blind optimism followed by unalloyed pessimism. Economics happened to be the current focus of China’s ongoing quest for salvation, but the quest for material wealth was being pursued with much the same ardor that had once been reserved for class struggle and mass political movements. (P. 374)

While this observation is largely accurate, it underestimates the endurance of this massive ardor: It has as long a history as Chinese collectivism. Moreover, the past political enthusiasm is not comparable to the current economic craze. In appearance, both were called by the government and answered by the masses. Except that political enthusiasm is not part of the cultural tradition but enthusiasm for family prosperity is, which was diverted in decades after the Liberation or oppressed in decades before that, and was now unleashed by the reform policy. Massive political involvement occurred due to government persuasion, whereas pursuit of family well-being is spontaneous and instinctive. The want of a better life is unmistakably the earliest drive for making money. A peasant boy, who had given up school and come to Beijing to earn money as a popcorn vender, explained it this way: What we want is to make money. We’re poor, and money is what we want. Money stinks, but I sure do want to make some. . . . (O)ur life’s got a lot better since the Center decided to divide the land and contract it out. . . . Get rich and you’re the greatest; be poor and you’re the pits. We had floods the first year. It was terrible. But for that we’d have built ourselves a new house. That’s another reason why I’ve got to earn. My dad said if we have a good harvest this year we’ll build the new house come next spring. Then we’ll be doing even better. My eldest brother’s getting hitched, and it’s about time my second brother fixed himself up with a girlfriend and got engaged. As long as the weather’s all right we’ve got it made. (Zhang & Sang, 1987, p. 6)

The earnings meant a new house for their family of eight and a brother’s marriage. His own marriage will be part of it when the time comes, the effort for the whole family to have a good life. In recent years many observers were stricken by the overwhelming Chinese quest for wealth, contrary to the socialist ideology propagated just a few years ago. For people, however, there is never a doubt about the ultimate goal of revo27

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lution as compatible with the drive for getting rich. A peasant from Shanxi province thus reasons about people’s commune, a revolutionary measure. “In 1958 . . . (p)eople were talking then about a people’s commune. I decided then, at the very beginning, that I would first hear what the Party said and follow it and not argue. Because the Party had always been right before. So I just voted yes for the people’s commune and left it at that” (Myrdal, 1965, p. 91). His decision was based on the increased income he got in two previous measures, (a farmer’s cooperative and a higher agricultural cooperative), when he was reluctant but for the persuasion of the Party secretary. The revolution had brought him a better life and convinced him of its benefit. Twenty years later, a 10,000 yuan household farmwife was equally certain about the revolution and people’s welfare: “Two years before that, there was still all that nonsense about learning from Dazhai. Things only got better after old Deng Xiaoping came to power. If you want to know who’s popular, the ones that the peasants most trust and respect are old Deng and Premier Zhao Ziyang. . . . We really are rich. The Center’s policy is okay—everyone getting rich. What’s the Communist Party for, if not to rescue the poor from their sufferings?” (Zhang & Sang, 1987, pp. 10–13). The value of family prosperity as a product of Chinese sociohistorical conditions can be better understood in the Chinese emphasis on thrift, an important ingredient of prosperity. Historically, there were few times when the Chinese considered themselves affluent. Hard times, natural or manmade, far outnumbered good ones, while people constantly worried about livelihood and survival due to meager material means. The tradition of saving for the rainy day is still the standard practice in China to date. For many the saving mentality has been so much of a daily concern that it has become the purpose of life. Despite the great government efforts to stimulate consumer spending for further economic growth, the savings rate in China is still very high and seems to be getting even higher. There is more reason now that the market mechanism has been introduced to the economy. People have realized that with the opportunity for a better life economic reform shifts the welfare burden to themselves, from basic health care to education to pension that used to be the state’s responsibility (Huang, 1999). This also adds to the motivation for making more money for savings to ensure greater financial security in the future. The market mechanism in the production domain has not been translated into the consumption domain. The Chinese mindset remains that of an agricultural economy, favoring a balanced income and expense, liang ru wei chu (income as base of outgo). A recently circulated anecdote well illustrates this point: Two elderly ladies, one American, one Chinese, meet in heaven after death. The Chinese says, “I had been working hard all my life and finally saved enough to buy a house yesterday.” The American replies, “I had been working hard all my life and finally paid off my mortgage yesterday” (Huang, 1999). 28

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CHANGE OF REVOLUTION AND CULTURE The above humor was first shared between the representatives to the 1998 National Congress. It shows that Chinese are becoming aware of the negative aspects of their own tradition. This itself is an indication of the beginning of an unprecedented change in consciousness. Also illustrated is the catalysis of change, an unprecedented exposure of the Chinese people to the outside world resulting in their self-reflection. Recent years see only the most visible and dramatic of gradual changes (Rosen, 1989). Thanks to the revolution and tireless efforts of Marxist education, a first change to the traditional mindset probably began with the disappearance of unquestioned authority of government officials. Traditional fear and respect for the authorities has been reserved only for top leaders. Anthropologist Potter (1988) reported observing, in Guangdong province, villagers venting their rage on local officials without hesitation. In one instance, brigade leaders, after brief explanations to an angry woman, just “let her sit outside of their office and screamed for several hours” (p. 191). The fact that many officials suddenly fall in disgrace in political movements unwittingly stresses the Communist teaching that cadres are the equals of the masses. In the last year of the Cultural Revolution, people witnessed with disbelief the dramatic event of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, the most revolutionary of all, turning friends into enemies literally overnight. Except for the idolized Mao, the myth of the ruler has dissipated completely. A skepticism and mistrust of the government is now commonplace. People don’t seize the opportunities provided by the reform to pursue happiness and simply ignore other components of the revolution designated by the government. A Chinese person put it in unequivocal terms, Yes, people want to forget the past and politics and get on with their lives. They only want to think about the here and now, hoping that after all these years of being deprived they can get something for themselves. And I say, “Good for them!” Even if it’s just fashion, food, and karaokes, the point is that at last they are thinking about themselves rather than the Party. In a curious way, this may be their first step forward to independence and individualism—a real break with the past. (Schell, 1994, p. 405)

With economic activities came the awakening of the individual.6 By no coincidence is the simultaneous coming of age of the “fourth generation,” those born in the 1960s and 1970s, and the period of the Cultural Revolution (Liu et al., 1998). The heated campus debate on the position/role of self/individual in the early 1980s, started by Pan Xiao, a fourth-generation college student, was an earlier sign of a collective search for the self. It was followed by the cultural-economic phenomena in the late 1980s of Chinese rock-and-roll bands and stars, Chinese as consumers in waves of craze after better and more luxurious goods in the 1990s, and of a private sector of entrepreneurs. Traditional drives for family prosperity are now mixed with incipient capitalist urges to 29

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produce wealth for the sake of production and reproduction. At the turn of this century when the PRC turned fifty, we are witnessing a revolution outliving its usefulness and struggling to remain relevant and a people at the juncture of another unprecedented revolution of cultural consciousness. Is it to be “the end of a five-thousand-year muted history of uniformed wuwo (self-less), and the arrival of a vigorous ziwo (self I)—a person as an individual?” (Liu et al., 1998, p. 165). Can the old revolution reinvent itself and blend into the new? The above discussion might have provided some clues to the answer.

NOTES 1. “Revolution” has meanings other than popular uprising (see Wang, 1994). 2. Mao craze is an economic opportunity for entrepreneurs who had also propelled the fashion of Mao memorabilia (Dutton, 1998; Schell, 1994). 3. Naturally, many opportunists took advantage of the situation for personal gain. A typical example is the story of an unfortunate soul, who had been wrongfully accused several times and never got cleared (Feng Jicai, 1993, reprinted in Schoenhals, 1996). 4. Suffering for higher purposes is a lauded virtue, traditionally presented in the example of scholars enduring years of hardship to acquire knowledge and become a Mandarin, or dethroned royalties suffering unspeakably to restore the glory of a lost kingdom. This teaching has much influence on contemporary Chinese. Many accepted the government rationale for economic underdevelopment—that capitalism exploits and oppresses ordinary people for a handful to be rich. To eliminate capitalist tendencies so socialist construction could proceed without threat was a worthwhile and just cause, even if it meant economic hardship, which was temporary till the class struggle succeeded. People endured hardship at the promise of a brighter future. 5. Although it is not particular to Chinese culture but part of collectivism, it is taken to a new dimension in unique Chinese political movements. 6. This is not to neglect the complex interplay of the dialectics of individualism-collectivism and economic conditions. See Lu (1998) for a discussion on the topic.

REFERENCES Alley, R. (1954). The people have strength. Peking, China: Alley. Dutton, M. (Ed.) (1998). Streetlife China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huang, L. (1999). Ruhe kaiqui xiaofei zi men [How to open the door to Consumption]. Shenzhen Fengcai [Shezhen Glamour], 111, 30–32. Li, Y . (1993/1998). The traditional Chinese view of the cosmos and the practices of daily life. In M. Dutton (Ed.), Streetlife China (pp. 31–40). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liang, H. & Shapiro, J. (1983). Son of the revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Liang, Q. (1902–1907). Xinmingshuo [On new people]. In Xinming Chong Bao. 30

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Liu, M., Li, B., Zhang, Y., Han, J., Han, Y., Gong, Y., & others (1998). Kua shiji de duihua: dishandai yu disidai zhijian de xinling dui bai [Dialogue on the turn of the Century: Heart-to-heart conversation between the Third and the Fourth Generation]. Lanzhou: Gangsu People’s Press. Louie, K. (1989). Between fact and fiction. Sydney: Wild Peony. Lu, X. (1998). An interface between individualistic and collectivistic orientations in Chinese cultural values and social relations. The Howard Journal of Communications, 9, 91–107. Myrdal, J. (1972, trans. 1965). Report from a Chinese village. New York: Vintage Books. Potter, S. H. (1988). The cultural construction of emotion in rural Chinese social life. Ethos, 16, 181–208. Rosen, S. (1989). Value change among post-Mao youth: The evidence from survey data. In P. Link, R. Madsen, & P. G. Pickowicz (Eds.), Unofficial China: Popular culture and thought in the People’s Republic (pp. 193–216). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Run, X., & Huang, H. (1999). Liang ge jiuping jiazhi 1,800 wan [Two wine bottles worth of 180 thousand]. Shenzhen Fengcai [Shezhen Glamour], 109, 6–9. Schell, O. (1994). Mandate of Heaven: A new generation of entrepreneurs, dissidents, bohemians, and technocrats lays claim to China’s future. New York: Simon & Schuster. Schoenhals, M. (Ed.) (1996). China’s cultural revolution, 1966–1969: Not a dinner party. New York: M. E. Sharpe. Wang, G. (1994). To reform a revolution: Under the righteous mandate. In W. M. Tu (Ed.), China in transformation (pp. 71–94). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Xia, Y. (1992/1998). Human rights and Chinese tradition. In M. Dutton (Ed.), Streetlife China (pp. 23–31). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Xiao, X. (1994, May). An early Chinese campaign for Western virtues: A case of casuistic stretching. Paper presented at ICA Annual Conference, Sydney, Australia. Zhang, X., & Sang, Y. (1986/1987 trans.). Chinese lives. London: Macmillan.

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Culture and Modernization: The Case of the People’s Republic of China Rita Mei-Ching Ng

INTRODUCTION According to Walder (2000), the post-Mao economic reforms of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have generated rapid and sustained economic growth and unprecedented rises in real income and living standards, thus transforming what was once a country with one of the world’s most insular economies into a major trading nation. Indeed, the changes have been transformative. In 1978, there were chronic shortages of consumer and producer goods, massive waste, and low quality, not only of goods and services, but of motivation and morale. However, in less than a decade, the livelihood of many Chinese has improved materially. The contrast between mainland China’s record and that of the former Soviet Union could not be more striking. Whereas Russia has struggled for more than a decade with severe recession, financial crisis, and declining living standards, mainland China’s modernization efforts merit high marks, not only compared to the less developed countries (LDCs), but even compared to many of the countries in the developed world. Based on a World Bank report on China issued in 1997, Goldman (1998) wrote that “in just twenty years, the P.R.C. had evolved from a nation in which roughly six out of ten people lived below the international poverty rate of one dollar a day into a nation in which per capita income virtually quadrupled. It had taken the United States nearly fifty years to double its per capita income; it had taken China just a decade” (p. 406). Of course, there are many reasons for the rapid economic growth in the PRC. For instance, its success owes much to its open-door policy and the reformers’

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pragmatic attitude. Unlike the Soviets, the Chinese initiated economic changes with actions rather than with words. Instead of beginning changes with politics, they began changes with economics. With “economics in command,” the focus of the PRC’s economic development is not to achieve larger production units, but to increase the level of technology, production, and management abilities so that the material needs of the people can be fulfilled. Although the PRC’s open-door policy and reformers’ pragmatic attitude played a part in the early success of its modernization efforts, the significance and uniqueness of Chinese culture and tradition should not be ignored. Ogden (1995) notes that China is a several-thousand-year-old culture with its civilization and cultural tradition independent from the rest of the world. Chinese culture, in the form of both traditional values and nationalism, is the glue holding the Chinese together as the PRC is developing at lightning speed. When discussing the influence of culture on economic development, Pye (1985) also points out that culture has a vital quality. It resides in the personality of people who have been socialized to it. Sentiments about change, judgments about utility, expectations as to the form of power all are influenced by cultural predispositions. Though common sense exists in all cultures, it is not the same from culture to culture. Therefore, culture is an important factor that can help us understand different routes of economic development. In the subtleties of cultures are to be found both the values a people seek and the obstacles they must overcome in their modernization efforts. Hofstede (1980) defines culture as “the collective programming of people’s minds,” and there are four dimensions of culture. Among the four cultural dimensions, “individualism-collectivism” is regarded as the one that accounts for much of our behaviors. Specifically, Hofstede (1991) defines individualism and collectivism as follows: “Individualism pertains to societies in which the ties between individuals are loose. . . . Collectivism as its opposite pertains to societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive ingroups, which throughout people’s lifetime continue to protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty” (p. 51). Although people in every culture may have both individualist and collectivist tendencies, relative emphasis is placed toward individualism in the West and collectivism in the East. When tracing the development of individualism or collectivism within a particular culture, Kim, Triandis, Kagitcibasi, Choi, & Yoon (1994) note that liberalism serves as a foundation for individualism in the West while Confucianism serves as the central basis upon which collectivism is entrenched. Liberal philosophy assumes that individuals are rational and able to use reason to make personal choices. In an individualist culture, each person is encouraged to be autonomous, self-directing, and assertive, and to value privacy and freedom of choice. However, a collectivist society like the Chinese supports the basic tenets of Confucianism and emphasizes harmony and order, the acceptance of au34

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thority and hierarchy, and the importance of relationships. For the purpose of this chapter, I will first examine the major Confucian values as they relate to the development process, discuss culture as a factor in the modernization efforts of the PRC, and finally suggest the challenges that the PRC faces as reforms move forward. MAJOR CONFUCIAN VALUES According to Wright and Twitchett (1962), Confucians envisioned man living in a stable and harmonious society. The values implicit in this vision were those of harmony, stability, and hierarchy. For the Confucians, the concept of harmony was identified with the concept of order. The Confucian ideal was one in which rulers were arrayed in a hierarchy of ascending virtue that would awe the masses into correct conduct. Confucius preferred “the rule of man,” and he showed faith in the perfectibility of man through self-cultivation. Man was seen as an agent of transformation who would transform an external, chaotic world into a harmonious order. Confucius believed that the “gentleman” is a member of the moral elite, and moral is an ethical quality. As was recorded in the Analects, Lord Ji Kang asked Confucius about government, saying: “Suppose I were to kill the bad to help the good: how about that?” Confucius replied: “You are here to govern; what need is there to kill? If you desire what is good, the people will be good. The moral power of the gentleman is wind, the moral power of the common man is grass. Under the wind, the grass must bend” (p. 58). Clearly, Confucius not only suggested that gentlemen are fit to rule, but also he implied the difference between ruler and common people. The task of the former was to reign over the latter, whereas the task of the latter was to support the ruler. When discussing the elements of civil society in Chinese tradition, Shils (1996) notes that Confucians considered society to have one major center, with all initiatives and decisions being concentrated in the major center. Although the common people are not altogether outside of society, they are the passive periphery. Under ordinary circumstances, the common people are believed to have no initiative and no voice in any discussions about the society in which they live, but are expected to engage in hard work and obedience to the ruler. The important characteristic of paternalistic authority is that the power and legitimacy of a leader hinge on the followers’ internalization of their “subordinate” roles. Farh and Cheng (2000) define paternalistic authority as a fatherlike leadership style in which clear and strong authority is combined with concern, consideration, and elements of moral leadership. The three elements that characterize paternalistic leadership include authoritarian leadership, benevolent leadership, and moral leadership. Under authoritarian leadership, the major types of leader behaviors consist of asserting authority and control, building a lofty image, and putting down subordinates. However, authoritarian leadership cannot work unless subordinates have been socialized to respect vertical hierar35

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chy and have a dependent mindset. Authoritarianism in the Chinese context is rooted in the paramount value of submission to authority. When both leaders and subordinates play their respective roles, social harmony exists. But when a subordinate is not ready or willing to play his or her role, a leader’s insistence on paternalistic leadership will be futile at best and may lead to strain, disharmony, and even a breakdown of a relationship at the worst. To understand paternalistic leadership in the Chinese context, one must first understand the social structure of the traditional Chinese family. Under the influence of Confucianism, the family has been the basic building block of Chinese society for three millennia. According to Tu (1998), family as a basic unit of society is the locus from which the core values are transmitted. The relationships within the family, differentiated by age, gender, authority, status, and hierarchy, provide a natural environment for individuals to learn the proper way of being human. Confucianism has generated a high ideal for family interaction where members are not only supposed to treat each other with love and respect but also each member is expected to understand and conform to his or her proper role. Within a Chinese family, the vertical bond between father and son is considered paramount and supercedes all other social relations. The grandfather or father is the ruling head and has authority over all the members of the family. His control of the family economy and his power to make financial decisions strengthen his authority. While the model father is expected to be all-powerful, a Chinese child is taught at early age that he has to show respect and concentrate his loyalties to legitimate authority. Farh and Cheng (2000) also suggest that the essence of the father-son relationship is captured in the concept of xiao, translated as “filial piety” and literally meaning “a submission to the will of the father.” Among the Chinese, filial piety is not only a virtue for a perfect man, but also the glue that holds the family together and the cornerstone of an orderly Confucian society. Confucians valued respect for parents and loyalty to superiors. It is believed that the subordinate has the duty to obey (xiao) and fulfill role obligations that signify his or her submission to duty. As human relationships involve a set of defined roles and obligations, it is the duty of all individuals to conform to their roles in order to maintain the harmony of the whole. In the Analects, Duke Jing of Qi asked Confucius about government. Confucius replied: “Let the lord be a lord; the subject a subject; the father a father; the son a son.” The Duke said: “Excellent! If indeed the lord is not a lord, the subject not a subject, the father not a father, the son not a son, I could be sure of nothing anymore—not even of my daily food” (p. 57). Confucian precepts provide a comprehensive social ethic for maintaining a social order that is centered on a clearly delineated status hierarchy. Not only is there a large “power distance,” but also power is unevenly distributed and socially legitimized among individuals in the hierarchy. Based on the traditional concept of wu lun, a set of hierarchical relationships is established—ruler-subject, fa36

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ther-son, husband-wife, older brother–younger brother, and friend-friend. People are expected to accept their positions, dutifully fulfill their roles within it, and not challenge the order. Confucians believed that conformance to social rules and obligations sustain harmony. A subtle, coherent, and strong fabric of social order is essentially constituted by the intersection of hierarchical structure with the social ethic of filial piety. It is worth noting that none of this is codified in law or institutionalized in structures of civil society. Confucians preferred the ethical-moral order that was based upon relationships between people rather than upon laws. With emphasis upon the importance of human relationships, Confucians described a gentleman as someone who would value human harmony and seek interpersonal accommodation. Harmony, as a core element in Confucianism, implies a fundamentally interconnected, embedded perspective. Under the influence of Confucianism, Chinese culture is collectivistic and relational. The core reference for people is not their own egos but the collective, and collective interests take precedence over individual interests. Groups are believed to be more powerful than individuals. Individuals’ opinions should not contradict those of the group, especially those of the group leader. Informal channels of communication operate at the highest efficiency among group members; benefits are shared and distributed to in-group members first. In-group relationships are highly stressed in the Chinese culture. According to Hu Wenzhong and Grove (1991), guanxi is often spoken of as something linking two people who in some way have developed a relationship of mutual dependence. This is a special kind of relationship characterized by implicit rules of obligation and can grow into complex networks that are governed by the unwritten law of reciprocity. In a way, guanxi is a mechanism for coping with China’s highly personalistic and noncodified social order. Enhancing or “pulling” relationships with others has been the Chinese way of attaining desirable social resources and actions from others. Through guanxi, one calls upon others to supply or to assist in gaining access to goods and services. When one gives to another, he or she can expect to receive from that other person in the future. Norms of reciprocity are intense in the Chinese culture. According to Hwang (1987), renqing can be regarded as the derivative of the norm of reciprocity. If one is sympathetic to other people’s feelings or ready to help when they are in need, he or she is considered to be exhibiting renqing. However, the recipient of renqing is expected to pay back the debt of gratitude. In this respect, renqing involves social exchanges and incurs the burden of reciprocity among the Chinese. With this emphasis upon the norm of reciprocity, the Chinese are known to rely heavily upon “guanxi” to solicit favors from others, and they believe in building a network of people that is tied to someone in authority out of indebtedness or obligation. 37

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CULTURE AND MODERNIZATION The Chinese culture is collectivistic and the cultural dimension, like Confucianism, is a way of thinking and a way of life among the Chinese. At first sight, the cultural orientation of the Chinese appears to be at variance with the conditions required for development and modernization. As was noted by Chen (1995), many scholars believed that the Confucian ethic was fundamentally at odds with modernization. For instance, the Confucian ethic does not advocate individualism, which is considered the single major driving force for the restructuring of the environment. Confucian gentlemen are too group oriented and too dependent on guidance. Moreover, Confucians have attached too much importance to human harmony and accommodation rather than to an aggressive personality, which is more capable of mastering the world and conquering nature. The major difference between the East and the West clearly lies in their different emphases on collectivism and individualism. The Protestant ethic is believed to promote individualism that is commensurate with the rational organization of labor. Chen (1995) further points out that a Protestant is someone who believes in his individual efforts and tries to master or transform his environment. While the Protestant ethic views the individual as an isolated entity and as a force reshaping society, the Confucian ethic regards the self as the center of relationships. The self is dignified in a network of human relationships. Confucianism has been criticized as exhorting people to accept or adjust to their environment, and all that the Confucian ethic teaches is how an individual should relate to society in a harmonious way. While Confucianism did not seem to provide the same incentive to foster development that Protestantism provided, it has a number of positive influences on the modernization process. For instance, government leadership is highly valued. Moreover, the Confucian ethic emphasizes not only personal discipline and cultivation but also cooperation and collective strength. Instead of tapping into one’s own energy, an individual will try to mobilize collectively his closest relatives and trusted friends. The Confucian ethic emphasizes a strong sense of duty-consciousness, so a Confucian gentleman is not encouraged to ask “What are my rights?” but is expected to know and carry out his duties and responsibilities China is a complex society with a unique cultural heritage. The Chinese would be the first to admit that they are seeking modernization with Chinese characteristics. While many Chinese organizations have adopted some aspects of the Western approach to development, Chinese modernization will continue to be influenced heavily by the Chinese cultural tradition. In a collectivistic culture, under the influence of Confucianism, the state is accustomed to planning and coordinating economic activities. It not only plays the role of defining collective needs, but it is also responsible for their fulfillment. In the case of the PRC, its success, especially at the early stage of development, has been influ38

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enced by its cultural emphases on paternalistic authority and the people’s positive feelings toward dependency. In many ways, the cultural roots of paternalistic authority are embedded in the Confucian values of government and civil society. Confucians believe that the purpose of a government is to preserve harmony and unity and provide an environment conducive to harmonious, benevolent, and tranquil social relations. The prime tasks of government are the same as those of the family—that is, to provide security, continuity, cohesion, and solidarity. Modeled on the ideal family, public authority in China such as the emperors, presidents, and chairmen, all appear to be bigger than life, just as Chinese fathers are the absolute authority figures. As father figures, the Chinese leaders see themselves as looking after their children. In return, paternalistic authority demands dependency and conformity from the subjects, who are expected to make sacrifices for the collective good. Dependency is thought to be negative in the West, and it is often regarded as an obstacle to modernization. However, in a collectivistic culture like the Chinese, dependency is not only thought of as positive, but it is also considered to be a constructive force in the PRC’s economic development. As Ogden (1995) has stated, “Too much questioning of the government could lead to instability, which could result in a major disruption of economic development” (p. 154). Consistent with this view, Pye (1985) notes that in the contemporary world, late-industrializing countries must have strong and authoritarian institutions if they are to speed up their modernization. He further suggests that another constructive aspect of the psychology of dependency is the building of cooperation and strong bonds among people. When combined with the sentiments of patriotism and group loyalty, dependency is a positive force for development because it allows the leaders to make changes or implement reforms without the fear of losing their constituents’ support. According to Walder (2000), scholars have come to broad agreements about the general direction of modernization: the state’s assets should be privatized; state agencies should withdraw from direct economic management; and government should retreat to the role of providing neutral institutions for enforcing contracts and property rights. However, the PRC has confounded the experts’ expectations of the role played by government at all levels in the management of enterprises and the guidance of local economies. In the modernization efforts of the PRC, the government’s role has not only been very active and multifaceted, but also has evolved continuously during the twenty–year history of reform. Child (2000) illustrates that the PRC’s development aims encompass three key transitions. The first transition consists of transforming mainland China from a predominantly rural society to an industrial society. The Chinese Communist Party survivors of the Long March, particularly Deng Xiaoping, believed that the party state could hold onto its weakened mandate only by 39

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improving the standard of living for the majority of the population. The reforms therefore began in the countryside, where the majority still lived. The second transition, underway since the mid-1980s and still continuing, is the move from a planned economy to a market economy. This signifies a growing role for market forces in an economy where the state continues to play an active role in the direction of key economic sectors and in the governance of their major enterprises. The third transition has not received as much attention as the other two, but it has considerable significance for the science and technology sectors. This transition basically involves fostering business initiatives within the ambit of governmental sponsorship, which provides a precedent for enterprise reform in other parts of the economy. Taken together, the state has played a key role in the transitional economy of the PRC. Rather than embarking on the privatization of state industry at the start of reforms as the Russians did, China’s leaders postponed that process. Instead, they encouraged the expansion of the nonstate sector—foreign joint ventures, Special Economic Zones, and collective, private, and local enterprises. In the late twentieth century, it was the Chinese government rather than foreigners that controlled the zones and the joint enterprises. To attract foreign investments, the government offered special tax benefits, fewer regulations, and less red tape than in the rest of the country; in return, the zones and joint enterprises were to bring in new technology and promote exports. Government leadership in Chinese economic reforms is evident. When discussing East Asian modernity as an alternative model to Western Modernism, Tu (1998) states that government leadership in a market economy is not only necessary but is also desirable. Government that is responsive to public needs, responsible for the welfare of the people, and accountable to society at large is vitally important for the creation and maintenance of order. Under the influence of Confucian traditions, a collectivistic culture like the Chinese clearly provides a favorable context for government leadership in reforms. The Chinese do not think that the concept of paternalistic authority has the same stigma as it does in the West. According to Child (1994), in China, authority has come to be accepted virtually as an end in itself. The authority of the ruler is derived from his position as the upholder of the system. It is the ruler who decides what is lawful, rather than there being any law setting out abstract and generalized rights. Even though the cultural orientation of the Chinese appears to be at variance with the conditions required for open-market transacting, the combination of centralized autocracy with local flexibility has contributed to the success of the PRC’s modernization efforts. In addition, the fact that the Confucian ethic has a strong sense of duty-consciousness has played an important role in facilitating development. In a duty-conscious culture like the Chinese, the relationship of duties and rights is imbalanced in favor of duty. That is, more importance is placed on indi40

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viduals to follow orders or perform duties than to demand or assert individual rights. When economic development is believed to be the central task of the government and leader, the people are expected to be submissive and thereby to carry out their duties. Traditionally, Chinese leaders can demand absolute obedience and unquestioning loyalty in order to ensure national stability, which is the essential condition for modernization. To a large extent, the PRC’s modernization path has been decisively influenced by the Confucian values of preserving order, stability, and unity. Hsu (1995) notes that when Deng Xiaoping made a highly publicized tour of the South in January 1992, he stated that, “while economic development is the central task of government, stability is essential to economic development” (p. 946). China could become the superdragon of Asia if its government was able to provide the necessary stability for the economic takeoff. As has been discussed, Confucianism was oriented toward a family-based, hierarchically organized nature of society. All power and authority were presumed to fall into a proper hierarchy in which superiors and subordinates were clearly defined. It is evident that the PRC has a far stronger institutional structure than most LDCs, which has helped the reformers to organize the economy and carry out centrally mandated policies for economic development. According to Ogden (1995), the Chinese style of leadership and well-developed bureaucracy have created some of the most important ingredients for its rapid economic growth. Unfortunately, “bureaucratism” is simultaneously one of the greatest obstacles to development. The Chinese stress the importance of guanxi (favor exchanges and honoring) and the norms of reciprocity in social and business transactions. This cultural tendency of relying upon personal connections to get things done has contributed to the ongoing and deepening economic corruption. When there are shortages in the economy, bureaucrats are further empowered to offer access to scarce resources, commodities, and services in exchange for favors. Especially when “bureaucratism” is ill-managed, this becomes a major problem. Ogden (1995) suggests that excessive “bureaucratism” has led both to inefficiency and corruption in mainland China. When bureaucrats can set prices and decide which products will be shipped where and when, this leads to the “back door” or the use of personal relationships with other bureaucrats to get what is not available. CHALLENGES The Reform era in the PRC has brought significant changes to its business environment, but this does not mean that the business environment of the PRC has converged with that of the West; in fact, considerable differences persist. In recent years, many foreign firms have not been satisfied with the returns they have obtained from their investment in mainland China. While increasingly tough competition is being offered as one of the main reasons for the disap41

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pointing performance, other explanations being offered include the unreliability of Chinese joint-venture partners and the uncertainty created by unpredictable government actions, such as the imposition of regulatory and tax changes, sometimes retrospectively, at short notice. As Child (2000) points out, whether the logic of efficiency and economic rationality to guide Chinese enterprise reform will be determined by how the concept of a socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics is yet to be interpreted. That is, whether the future direction of enterprise reform will reflect strategic and operational needs rather than a desire to retain political power and control. The PRC’s economic development is unique in that what is appropriate to mainland China may not be appropriate to other developing countries. The PRC may have escaped some of the problems that other countries are experiencing, but the Chinese certainly have their own modernization dilemmas and unresolved problems during the development process. The post-Deng Xiaoping era is witnessing fundamental institutional changes aimed at completing the PRC’s transition to a market economy and a modern industrial society. Although this new phase of reform is guided by mainland China’s long-term development goals, it is also directed at the more immediate need to invigorate a stagnant state enterprise sector. As the competitiveness of the nonstate enterprise surged, only about half of the state industries were able to meet the challenge. The other half of China’s relatively inefficient, obsolete state industries incurred net losses in 1996, up from one-third in 1995. The PRC’s reform efforts of state industry clearly had profound implications for Chinese society and government as well as for the economy. Two of those major implications will be highlighted, as they are relevant to the purpose of this chapter. First, a decline in state industry creates the problem of widespread unemployment. While Chinese reform has produced an economy in transition, it also has brought with it social transformation. A large number of young people from the countryside are trying to find employment in the cities and are not inclined to return to life on the farm. This clearly puts strains on the family. Also, in spite of the fact that the livelihood of the average Chinese has been improved, consumers’ expectations continue to rise. Tisdell (1993) suggests that increases in income inequality, alternations in social status, and changes in economic security have added stress on many individuals. Second, the decline in state industry has caused a substantial loss of state revenue, which has a great impact on the party-state. According to Goldman (1998), because the central government received much of its revenue from state-owned enterprises, this decline meant that it lost a substantial share of its revenue. At the same time, because provincial and local government received less financial support from higher levels, they kept an increasingly larger proportion of tax revenues for local investment. Also, while the growth of the nonstate sector helped improve the livelihood of the majority of the population, 42

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it shifted both political and economic power to local officials. Citing what Vivienne Shue has written, Goldman (1998) describes this development as a thinning of power at the center, counterbalanced by a thickening of power at the local levels. Consistent with this view, Ogden (1995) points out that regional protectionism, in the form of trade barriers to imports from other provinces, is becoming a problem. In fact, this problem originated in the Chinese traditional orientation toward the clan or the family. Each clan or family is distinct and rarely joins forces with other clans and families, which contributes to the rise of different factions. Clearly, while the energy and fluidity generated by the reforms have produced extraordinary economic growth, they also have produced various forces that are potentially destabilizing. Under the influence of paternalistic authority, China is facing the challenge of dealing with the pressures of decentralization and allocating responsibilities among different governmental authorities. With little doubt, culture as a factor in modernization continues to shape the reforms of the PRC. As the economic reforms progress and the PRC becomes increasingly pluralistic, China’s leaders have the great fear of losing their power and authority to rule. As was noted by Goldman (1998), China’s leaders would agree with Confucians in their values of authoritarian rule rather than the Confucian teaching that intellectuals and citizens had the obligation to criticize governmental leaders and officials who might have abused power or engaged in unfair treatment of the population. During the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, the students and intellectuals tried to demand political reforms, while workers and citizens took the opportunity to demand more reforms, such as an end to the corruption, inflation, and disruptions that had accompanied economic reforms. Because they considered these demonstrations to be a fundamental challenge and a threat to both themselves and the party-state, Deng and those in the Chinese leadership concluded that military force had to be used to suppress the demonstrations. Goldman (1998) further suggests that although the military crackdown and subsequent persecution and imprisonment of the demonstration’s leaders revealed how little the paternalistic leadership had changed, the demonstrations that provoked the crackdown made clear how much Chinese society had changed. The opening of the PRC to the outside world and priority being given to economic reforms had led to demands, not just of intellectuals but of workers and ordinary urban residents, to be treated as citizens rather than as obedient party comrades and passive subjects. CONCLUSION While China has been dominated by Marxism for almost half a century, it is important to note that China has had a Confucian tradition for thousands of 43

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years. Culture as a factor in the Chinese modernization efforts cannot be ignored as it plays a significant role in shaping the priorities and expectations of a people when they confront the challenges of modernization. The PRC’s modernization success, especially at its early stage of development, has been influenced by the Confucian emphasis on paternalistic authority and people’s submissivenes. However, when economic development continues, it is no easy task to rely upon authority to deal with the rising problem of diversity, changes in economic security and inequalities, ongoing economic corruption, and complex relationships between centralization and regionalism. The PRC’s modernization may have escaped some of the problems that other countries are experiencing, but it certainly has its own dilemmas and unresolved problems during the development process. As Chinese development progresses, there is a rise in consumer demands or so-called Western capitalism. Of course, the Chinese government proclaims the development to be building up socialism, but the real problem is how to define socialism or capitalism in the Chinese context. Also, the Chinese leadership is increasingly under the pressure of the new middle class in an emerging society. The powerful new rich, represented by the entrepreneurs, the financiers, the bankers, and the investors, is demanding greater participation in legislation and budgetary decisions and the rule of law. The influx of Western ideas has indeed eroded the Confucian precepts of loyalty, filial piety, and the hierarchical relationships. Not only is there the growing influence of individualism in China, but also there is the deterioration of the cultural values of submission to authority among the Chinese. Many Chinese are becoming conscious of their status as members of the state rather than passive subjects. Evidently, when a society develops and changes, its problems can no longer be solved by keeping to traditional values and practices. The rise of new economic and social tensions often requires new and innovative responses for their resolution. In the case of the PRC, the economic transformation is a major event in the late twentieth century. For two decades, Chinese reforms have generated rapid and unprecedented economic growth and rises in income. However, in order to sustain economic progress and living standards, the Chinese people will have to embark on another creative transformation, which may involve the flexibility of combining the old with the new values.

REFERENCES Chen, M. (1995). Asian management system. New York: Routledge. Child, J. (1994). Management in China during the age of reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Child, J. (2000). Management and organizations in China: Key trends and issues. In J. T. Li, A. S. Tsui & E. Weldon (Eds.), Management and organizations in the Chinese context (pp. 33–62). New York: St. Martin’s Press. 44

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Confucius. (1997). The analects of Confucius. (S. Leys, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. Farh, J. L. & Cheng, B. S. (2000). A cultural analysis of paternalistic leadership in Chinese organizations. In J. T. Li, A. S. Tsui & E. Weldon (Eds.), Management and organizations in the Chinese context (pp. 84–127). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Goldman, M. (1998). The post-Mao reform era. In J. K. Fairbank & M. Goldman (Eds.), China: A new history (pp. 406–450). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s consequences: International differences in work related values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Hofstede, G. (1991). Culture and organization: Software of the mind. London: McGraw-Hill. Hsu, I. (1995). The rise of modern China. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hu, Wenzhong, & Grove, C. L. (1991). Encountering the Chinese. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press. Hwang, K. (1987). Face and favor: The Chinese power game. American Journal of Sociology, 92, 944–974. Kim, U., Triandis, H. C., Kagitcibasi, C., Choi, S. C., & Yoon, G. (1994). Individualism and collectivism. Cross-Cultural Research and Methodology Series, 18. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ogden, S. (1995). China’s unresolved issues. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Pye, L. W. (1985). Asian power and politics: The cultural dimension of authority. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Shils, E. (1996). Reflections on civil society and civility in the Chinese intellectual tradition. In W. M. Tu (Ed.), Confucian traditions in East Asian modernity (pp. 38–71). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tisdell, C. (1993). Economic development in the context of China. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Tu, W. M. (1998). A Confucian perspective on the core values of the global community. Paper presented in “Dialogue of Civilizations” Panel at the Asia Center of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Walder, A. G. (2000). China’s transitional economy. In J. T. Li, A. S. Tsui, & E. Weldon (Eds.), Management and organizations in the Chinese context (pp. 63–83). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Wright, A. & Twitchett, D. (1962). Confucian personalities. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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3
The Problem of the Public: John Dewey’s Theory of Communication and Its Influence on Modern Chinese Communication Changfu Chang

Language is a means of communication; human behavior is related and unified through language. It should not be difficult to get students to appreciate this social function of language, and to recognize that without language there would be no communication of behavior and opinions—that, indeed, the very existence of society itself is dependent upon the communication that language makes possible. —John Dewey (1973, p. 295)1

INTRODUCTION In one of his last lectures given to Chinese intellectuals during his twenty-six-month visit from May 1919 to July 1921 in China, Dewey talked much about language and communication, a topic that may seem trivial and less than exciting at a time when China desperately needed a fundamental and quick change in order to survive as a nation among nations. Indeed, the above quoted statement seemed abstract and least fitting in a concluding address that was expected to deal with the question of how China was to build a democratic and modern state. Cognizant of the increasing interest in a radical revolution of the Soviet model among his Chinese audience, Dewey (1973) provided an answer pointing in quite another direction: “[A] real republic on a stable basis must be built through the use of a common written and spoken language, since this is a sine qua non of associated living” (p. 297). With pointed emphasis, language and communication became a priority for modern China. The first thing that China needed, Dewey continued:

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is that in correspondence, and in the publication of books, newspapers, and magazines, as well as in the conduct of transportation and commercial activities, the written language that is closest to the language spoken by the majority of the people should be used. As long as the written language used in these activities is far removed from the language spoken by the majority of the people, any attempt to achieve associated living is doomed to failure. (P. 298)

These words were not reserved for a Chinese audience alone. Indeed, they summarized the way Dewey would address the issue of democracy and modernity both in the East and the West. Just a few years later, Dewey (1927) published The Public and Its Problems, a book that has become increasingly important and widely read in current discourse on the public sphere and communicative praxis. In that work, Dewey formulated what can be called a theory of communication and democracy. Dewey saw a dialectic between individual experience and community life. Dewey argued that to improve the method and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion is the problem of the public. Through communication, individual experiences are shared, knowledge is created, the associated life is formed, and democracy is rendered possible. Whereas recent studies of communication and democracy have sparked a renewed interest in Dewey’s works in the West (e.g., Antonio & Kellner, 1992; Biesta, 1995; Habermas, 1989; Shudson, 1997), unfortunately, his remarkable influence on modern Chinese communication has seldom caught intellectual attention. Perhaps no other American educator or philosopher ever advised so many Chinese students who would become important players in Chinese modern history. And in that sense, perhaps no other American educator or philosopher, as Hu Shi (1962), one of his many gifted students, would state, exerted so much influence in China as Dewey. During his sojourn in China from May 1919 to July 1921, Dewey lectured extensively in Chinese intellectual centers and engaged himself enthusiastically with Chinese intellectuals who were inspired by his thoughts and were looking for ways for China to advance in the modern world. While Dewey addressed a wide range of issues that spellbound an interested audience, the idea of realizing democracy from a perspective of communication always carried a weighty theme. In the Chinese context, what hindered education, and ultimately the realization of democracy and modernity, was also the method of communication: archaic, dead language (wenyan) could not express daily experiences, nor could it make associative living possible. This chapter is an examination of the connection between Dewey’s theory of communication and China’s modern experience. First, it analyzes the cultural and intellectual milieu that prepared Dewey’s presence in China; second, it explores how Dewey’s theory of communication was applied to the debates centering on language and communication; finally, it discusses the widespread criticism of Dewey and his impact on our current understanding of communication and democracy. 48

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THE NEW CULTURE MOVEMENT AND THE BAIHUA MOVEMENT Cultural Crisis and the New Culture Movement The Chinese modern experience began after the humiliating Opium War (1839–1840). The loss of the Opium War and subsequent humiliations by various countries put Chinese intellectuals into a unique position—an unwitting search for modernity. Western intervention and invasion brought the notion to the heart of Chinese intellectuals that a technologically and scientifically advanced China would solve all modern problems. To transplant Western science and technology without fundamental changes in political and cultural institutions would be held as a shortcut. For decades, China witnessed the unprecedented emergence of modern technological advancements, from building modern research universities to developing advanced weaponry. The enthusiasm for science, as Kwok (1965) noted, was co-existent with faith in the Confucian tradition: “It would be a mistake to assume that the Chinese at this time had been completely won over to the spirit and substance of modern scientific civilization. Their faith in the adequacy and vitality of the Confucian doctrinal framework hardly wavered” (p. 35). The deep-seated belief in science and technology for national salvation was shattered near the end of the nineteenth century in the wake of several events. Among those events were the lost war with Japan in 1895 and the witness of inefficient feudal society. Thus, in 1911, under the influence of the West, the over 2,000-year-old Confucian China crumbled and was replaced by the first Republic. The establishment of the Republic, however, did not seem to solve China’s problems. Instead, the situation worsened: Chinese society was plunged into constant restoration and revolution and ultimately into a society of warlordism and factional control. The idea for a more fundamental change from within rather than from without loomed large. The alleged failure of the Republic and the recurrent conflict between the new experience and the cultural tradition led reform-minded intellectuals to launch a relentless attack on Chinese culture. Without a change of Chinese culture, they contended, there could be no talk about the salvation of China, and any reform, political or economic, would be useless. In the mind of Chinese intellectuals, the definition of Chinese culture was largely in the definition of Confucianism. Confucianism was the opposite of a constitutional government and remained the stumbling block in China’s path toward democracy and prosperity. If the Chinese people wanted to build a new state and organize a new society according to the Western model “in order to survive in this world,” Chen Duxiu (1916) proclaimed, the basic task was “to import the foundation of the Western society, that is, the new belief in equality and human rights,” and “to 49

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throw away what is incompatible with the new belief, the new society, and the new state” (p. 2).

The Baihua Movement and Views on the Chinese Language How would Chinese intellectuals start such a cultural reorientation? For them, the starting point was to solve the problem of Chinese language and communication. While doing his Ph.D. work under Dewey, Hu Shi contributed an article entitled “Some Tentative Suggestions for the Reform of Chinese Literature” to the then-liberal journal, Xin qingnian [New Youth]. Hu (1917) argued that wenyan was no longer compatible with the Chinese modern experience and that baihua—the vernacular—should be used to revitalize Chinese language and literature.2 Hu advanced a view that whenever literature flourished it was baihua that was used as the language, and accordingly, it was a historical trend that baihua would replace the classic. At first glance, this thought-provoking and controversial essay was solely devoted to literary matters. Even though Hu connected the use of baihua with the European experience, he didn’t exploit that point. In the following issue, Chen Duxiu, the editor of the journal, published an article entitled “On Literary Revolution.” Chen (1917) immediately stretched language reform to his cultural and social criticism, arguing that literary style influences the culture of a country. In Chen’s view, classical Chinese literature was essentially decorative and useless and nurtured a superficial, hypocritical, and fawning national temperament. Chen opened up this inflammatory essay with a definition of revolution. According to Chen, the “glamorous Europe” was a gift of revolutions. Revolution, which in Europe meant “to change from the old to the new,” is categorically different from changing from one dynasty to another dynasty. Thus, what was later called the Baihua Movement for the purpose of revitalizing Chinese society swept the nation like a wild fire and became one of the most intriguing cultural phenomena in twentieth-century China. In the emotional debate on language and cultural reorientation, Chinese intellectuals in favor of language reform saw language not only as a tool for communication but also as a message of communication. Language as a Tool. If Chinese culture needed to be changed, why should language be changed? Hu (1918) extrapolated the relationship between baihua and new culture, maintaining that any literary revolution, be it in the past or at the present, in the West or in China, was from the area of the form: to demand a liberation of the script and style, “which serve to transport the new thought and new spirit” (p. 138). In Europe it had happened three hundred years before when various vernacular languages replaced Latin in literature, and that was the reason why European culture advanced. Recognizing that arguments for linguistic change might seem to emphasize only issues relating to “the form of writing” 50

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and were thought to be “secondary in terms of their importance,” Hu (1919a) pointed out the intimate relationship between form and content: “The constraint in form impedes the free development of the spirit and the sufficient expression of good ideas” (p. 494). In Hu’s view, if one needed to create a new spirit and new content, the shackles that constrained the spirit should be smashed. Language as a Message. Some intellectuals pointed to the intrinsic connection between classic language and Confucianism, and to what McLuhan (1964) would describe later in his famous dictum “The media is the message” (p. 7). In the history of Chinese writing, Qian Xuantong (1918) argued, Confucianism had been endorsed and the written documents were nothing but doctrines permeated with Confucian thinking. Even if new phrases were created, one could not get correct knowledge with old barbaric characters. The question of authenticity arose when looking for equivalent words to translate Western ideas, whose real meanings would be distorted and tainted with Confucian thought. For example, when modern ethics grounded in the Western idea of individualism and equality was translated into lunlixue, what the Chinese reader learned was the old ethics of Confucianism. “For China not to perish,” Qian (1918) claimed, “the fundamental solution is to abolish Confucianism, but the fundamental of the fundamental solution is to abolish the Chinese writing that recorded the thoughts of Confucianism and crazy words of daoism” (p. 356). In a series of articles, Fu Sinian (e.g., 1919a, 1919b), in concert with Qian, asserted that the stagnancy of the Chinese society was the result not only of the classic literary writing but also the Chinese ideographic character. In his view, if Westerners were still using Egyptian hierographic language or Greek and Latin, Western civilization wouldn’t have advanced to this day. Acknowledging the impossibility of discarding Chinese writing for the time being, Fu suggested “westernization of Chinese language”—using Western sentence structures to convey complicated thoughts.

LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION, AND THE CREATION OF NEW MIND Dewey’s Theory of Language and Communication By the time Dewey arrived in China in May 1919, the literary revolution associated with the Baihua Movement was in full swing. As much as China was interested in Dewey’s new philosophy, Dewey (1920b) himself became enamored with China. “Simply as an intellectual spectacle,” Dewey described, “a scene for study and surmise, there is nothing in the world today—not even Europe in the throes of reconstruction—that equals China. History records no parallel” (p. 381). China provided an excellent opportunity for Dewey to proselytize his thoughts. Not only did Dewey enthusiastically engage in intellectual movement in China by giving lectures and instructions, but at the same 51

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time he contributed his observations to journals in the West or expressed his thoughts in correspondence with his friends as well. To better understand his arguments for Chinese communication, democracy, and modernity, let us take a brief look at Dewey’s views on language and communication. Philosophy of Language and Communication. Dewey’s theory of language and communication evolved from his pragmatic philosophy and his new conceptualization of the human being.3 Following the Darwinian naturalism of James and Mead and situating the human being in the evolutionary process, Dewey regarded the human being not as something that stood alone or aloof from nature and the environment but as a result of the very evolutionary process. Language, which arises from the interaction of organism and environment, forms the capacity to make “instrumental adjustments” to the consequences of actions. In Dewey’s view, language is no longer a tool for communication, but itself embodies the essence of communication. “The heart of language” Dewey (1925/1981) stated: is not “expression” of something antecedent, much less expression of antecedent thought. It is communication: the establishment of cooperation in an activity in which there are partners, and in which the activity of each is modified and regulated by partnership. To fail to understand is to fail to come into agreement in action; to misunderstand is to set up action against cross purposes. (P. 141)

There is no such thing as an antecedent meaning or thought that is isolated from the process of the use of language. In other words, meaning doesn’t exist as the a priori category; it rises, exists, and transforms in the act of communication for coordinated action among human beings. Language has a dual nature. On the one hand, it is a strictly biological mode of behavior to ensure that one individual adapts to his/her environment through communication. On the other hand, it compels the individual to take the standpoint of other individuals in a conjoint undertaking. In this sense, language “presupposes an organized group to which these creatures belong, and from whom they have acquired their habits of speech. It is therefore a relationship, not a particularity” (p. 145). Language becomes a communal activity. Dewey extolled language and communication to the highest level possible: “Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful. That things should be able to pass from the plane of external pushing and pulling to that of revealing themselves to man, and thereby to themselves; and that the fruit of communication should be participation, sharing, is a wonder by the side of which transubstantiation pales” (p. 132). Communication and Democracy and Modernity To situate the human being in the organic environment mediated by language and communication and to see the use of language as communal activity 52

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provided Dewey a new approach to democracy. A traditional approach to democracy would put more emphasis on the function of the legal system, form of government, political system, and so forth. Without denying these aspects, Dewey insisted that the essence of democracy, more than anything else, is communication. A democracy, Dewey (1916/1980) stated succinctly in Democracy and Education, “is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (p. 93). Consequently, for Dewey, there essentially existed two forms of societies with two forms of social life: in one form, and the ideal one, the interests of a group are shared by all its members who enjoy the fullness and freedom in their interaction with each other; the other form, and the undesirable one, is one that “internally and externally sets up barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience.” Dewey continued to make the connection between the communicative aspect of a society and the meaning of democracy: “A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic” (pp. 105–106). In a sociological and political sense, democracy is able to prevent violent disruption for a democratic society: it not only gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, but also cultivates the habits of mind that secure social changes without introducing disorder.

Communication and the Transformation of Mind For Chinese reformers, to destroy the spell of Confucianism and to create a new culture was linked with language reform. Baihua served as a tool for the dissemination of new ideas essential for the creation of a new culture. Moreover, it could be developed into a Westernized language or be replaced by a Western language. However, arguments tended to be limited to the functional imperative. Indeed, there seemed to be a lack of emphasis on the communicative aspect of language, for after all, the telos of language is communication. Without such emphasis, the questions of how the mind is transformed and what role language plays on a day-to-day basis are not completely answered. Dewey’s presence in China’s intellectual scene provided that dimension of understanding. That is, the use of baihua was both a means and an end. To argue that baihua is a tool for expressing ideas was correct, but partial, for language is not only a tool: language means communication and by communication we live and an associative life is formed. The emotional issue of Chinese language reform gained theoretical and practical support from Dewey. He gave high regards to the New Culture Movement occasioned by language reform. Dewey accepted Hu’s thesis that the 53

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Baihua Movement embraced Chinese enlightenment. Dewey (1920b) explained to readers in the West what was really going on in China: Those who know what the change from a learned language to the vernacular meant for the transition from medieval to modern Europe will not despise this linguistic sign of social change. It is more important by far than the adoption of a new constitution. Conservatism in China is not native or natural. It is largely the product of an inelastic system of memoriter education. This education has its roots in the use of a dead language as the medium of instruction” (p. 381).

Resonating with the Chinese reformers, Dewey believed that any revolution based on ideas was important. Dewey held that history would show that language reform was “an event of greater importance than the downfall of the Manchu dynasty (P. 381) It appeared that Dewey’s argument for the change of Chinese culture and mind appealed to the rising mood of Chinese intellectuals. Rhetorically, Dewey met less resistance than did the earlier Chinese intellectuals. In advocating new ideas, Chinese intellectuals had to rationalize Western concepts within the framework of the Chinese cultural tradition. When Yan Fu (1853–1921) translated Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics in 1894, he spared no efforts in couching the pagan idea of Darwinism in traditional Chinese terms (Xiao, 1995). By the time Dewey appeared in the Chinese intellectual scene, the patience for Chinese culture had already run out, and the intellectual temper had changed, in Yu’s (1994) terms, from “discovery disguised as interpretation” to “discovery undisguised.” Despite these favorable circumstances, to present an argument from the perspective of language and communication proved to be difficult. Furthermore, the very question of why the Chinese culture and mind should be changed was raised at another level from another perspective. The scale and brutality of World War I and the attendant skepticism toward Western society among Western scholars provided new resistance to the attempt to effect a cultural change based on the Western model. Liang Qichao (1873–1929), a revolutionary or radical reformer around the turn of the twentieth century, began to introduce such skepticism in China after his visit to Europe in the aftermath of the war. In his memoir of that trip, he told the Chinese reader: Since we came to Europe, this pessimistic note has filled our ears. I remember talking with a noted American correspondent by the name of Simon. He asked me, “What are you going to do after you return to China? Are you going to introduce to China some Western culture?” I said, “Of course.” He heaved a sigh and said to me, “Alas, Western culture is already bankrupt.” (Quoted from Schwarcz, 1986, p. 138)

The argument that science and technology was allegedly accountable for the catastrophe in the West and would contribute to the moral corruption in China 54

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fueled the view that, in the modernization process, the Chinese cultural tradition should not be challenged or transformed. In his debate with Dewey, Bland (1921) took the position that the social institutions grown out of Chinese philosophy were “nearer to the truth and therefore morally superior.” Bland maintained that the civilization of China had stood its tests, providing countless generations of people with food, not only for the body but the soul as well. Chinese civilization had been “a school of moral beauty and virtue, of gentleness and wisdom”; it had given to China “a degree of happiness and to the life of her people stability and harmony, never excelled by any other civilization” (p. 503). Bland was not alone in his view. Bertrand Russell, who was at the same time giving invited lectures to interested audiences in China, expressed a similar view: The morality of the West was inferior to that of China. Deeply shocked by the backwardness of Chinese society and the problems confronting Western society, Russell (1922) encouraged Chinese youth to “acquire Western knowledge” but “without acquiring the mechanistic outlook” and to look toward “a new blend of Western skills with the traditional Chinese virtues” (pp. 80–82). Disagreeing with what Bland and Russell had said, Dewey held that for the advancement of China, the Chinese culture and mind should be transformed. This transformation should be from within, not from without. In the essay, “Old China and New,” Dewey (1921a) argued that by the mere introduction of a Western economic system, China could be “saved,” while retaining its old morality, its old set of ideas, its old Confucianism, and its old family system, was the most utopian of sentimental idealism. Dewey presented two arguments. On the one hand, the advancement of Chinese society depended upon a fundamental change of culture and mind, without which any social, economic, and political change was doomed to fail. On the other hand, the introduction of Western economy, technology, as well as constitutional government would contribute to the change of culture and mind in China; one shouldn’t wishfully think that they would coexist harmoniously for “the most important permanent result of all external administrative matters, whether in government or in industry, will be their effect upon the creation of a new mind and a new morale” (p. 446). Accepting intellectual impulses in China and in line with his own thoughts, Dewey saw that the problems of China lay in the poor constitution of the Chinese mind and that priority should be given to the creation of a modern mind. Dewey specifically addressed this concern. “The real problem of the Pacific,” Dewey (1919) wrote, “is the problem of the transformation of the mind of China, of the capacity of the oldest and most complicated civilization of the globe to remake itself into the new forms required by the impact of immense alien forces” (p. 1103). What, then, is the Chinese mind? Or, to ask more generally, what is mind? And how is the Chinese mind to be transformed? These were questions that 55

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were addressed to both Western and Chinese audiences. Revolting against the philosophy of consciousness, Dewey held the mind to be not an independent property separate from the outside world. Mind is the production of language and communication, for, through speech “a person dramatically identifies himself with potential acts and deeds; he plays many roles, not in successive stages of life but in contemporaneously enacted drama. Thus, mind emerges” (Dewey, 1925/1981, p. 135). This relational aspect of language and communication is also what makes consciousness possible. According to Dewey, consciousness in its highest sense is the awareness of the possibilities based on concerted action and “communication is a condition of consciousness” (1925/1981, p.147). Thus, to change mind would be to change the way in which communication performs. To change the Chinese mind would be to change the way in which Chinese people communicate and relate to each other. The Darwinian approach via the influence of early pragmatists such as James and Mead provided Dewey a perspective from which communication was seen playing a crucial role at every level of interaction: from an individual’s adaptation to the environment to an individual’s cooperation with surroundings and fellow human beings. The Chinese mind is the result of adaptation to the Chinese environment. In this sense, the economy, education, the political system, and culture are all a form of communication.

Communication and Democracy in China For most of the early intellectuals who believed that the establishment of a new republic would solve all the problems of China, democracy meant the form of government. But the experience of China failed to attest to that, at least partially. To emphasize exclusively that by establishing a form of government or introducing an economic system a democracy would be achieved, in Dewey’s view, remained a widespread myth. In his Democracy and Education, as mentioned previously, Dewey (1916/1980) addressed this issue specifically from his understanding of communication explicitly making the point that democracy is “more than a form of government” (p. 93). Language should not be conceived of as a tool, a mode of transmission, but an act of communication, through and in which both meaning and mind are formed. Dewey approached the democratic and communicative aspects of language at two levels: on the metaphysical or philosophical level, the essence of language is communication; on the sociological and political level, the essence of language is to enhance communication among people in a society. Since communication was seen as a core in the web of social relationships and also as an umbrella concept that would explain the problems in an undemocratic society, Dewey began to see the fundamental problem in China in the matter of poor and ineffective communication, which in turn would explain 56

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many of China’s social problems or evils. “Communication” therefore offered a unique perspective for Dewey to analyze situations in China, and this approach differentiated Dewey fundamentally from many of his Chinese followers and Western thinkers. To take the lack of public spirit in China for example, discordant as their main approaches were to the problems of China, Dewey and Russell both saw that the lack of public spirit contributed in a significant way to the backwardness of Chinese society. Russell’s nominal advocacy of Chinese virtues was given away to the imperative of empirical evidence. He, too, traced the problem of ethics to the family system. In Russell’s view, China’s inability to produce capable and honest officials had its roots in Chinese ethics, “which lay stress upon a man’s duty to his family rather than to the public.” In Russell’s understanding, an official was expected to keep all his relations supplied with funds and therefore could only be honest at the expense of filial piety. Russell (1922) concluded: “The decay of the family system is a vital condition of progress in China” (p. 61). To discredit the Confucian family system as a defective system of language and communication became the starting point in Dewey’s construction of a new Chinese mind. As noted earlier, in attacking Confucianism and advocating a new culture, Chinese intellectuals such as Chen and Qian centered on a modern concept of individualism. The penetration of Confucian ethics in the relationships among individuals in families, in social organizations, and in day-to-day interactions had allegedly led to the suppression of the individual at various levels. The Baihua Movement was introduced to this scene because baihua could facilitate the expression of new ideas. Dewey agreed with that, but he attributed the problem to communication: The same sort of thing is essentially true of a strong paternalistic family system, in which communication of thought and sharing of feeling are all but impossible between the head of the family on the one hand, and the other members who owe him respect and obedience on the other. The authoritarian state is another example—it is the authoritarian family writ large. (Dewey, 1973, p. 91)

The problem of Confucianism became transformed into the problem of communication. Confucian China’s stress of hierarchy in family-clan-society reflected a crucial barrier to democracy. Subsequently, the refashioning of mind and culture by way of interrogating Confucianism in its hindrance of communication was a prerequisite of China’s modern experience. Dewey once again instructed the Chinese audience with what he had often addressed to the West: “A democratic society depends for its stability and development not on force, but on consensus. In such a society each member is entitled to develop his abilities, pursue his own interests, and seek to achieve his own purposes” (Dewey, 1973, p. 93). 57

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To present his thesis in concrete terms, Dewey provided a holistic analysis from microscopic to macroscopic. Analogous to the family environment was the extraordinary and long-continued density of populations. Dewey (1920a) argued that such a mode of living or environment was accompanied by a lack of creativity and originality and independence, for “the remitting surveillance of their fellows” gave the Chinese “no room to stir about” (p. 373). What was the practical consequence of this phenomenon? The crowded population had bred those habits of mind, which made the Chinese individually so companionably agreeable and attractive and collectively so exasperating to the outsider. By analogy, the concern for “face” and in-group communication outweighed the concern for “facts” and out-group communication, and ultimately, outweighed the concern for social service. DEWEY AND HIS IMPACT: A TENTATIVE CONCLUSION In his celebrated book, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness, Lin (1979) studied three instrumental figures—Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, and Lu Xun—during the New Culture Movement and the later May Fourth Movement. Lin theorized that the totalistic rejection of Chinese culture in Chen, Hu, and Lu was a reflection of a common mentality of the Chinese tradition on the one hand and the violent Cultural Revolution several decades later in Mao’s China on the other (p. 5). Lin argued that Dewey was also responsible for radical and destructive tendencies. A similar thesis was advanced by Berry (1960) in assessing Dewey’s influence in China: Dewey’s advocacy of pragmatism, experimentalism, and transformation of mind and culture caused unnecessary damage to the ingenuity of the Chinese humanistic tradition, and in a final analysis, Dewey’s pragmatism and liberalism provided inspiration to communism (p. 230). More recently, Yu (1994) traced China’s notorious radicalism to the New Culture Movement. How much should Dewey and his influence in China be interpreted along these lines? Nominally, Dewey’s support for the New Culture Movement and his advocacy for a change in Chinese culture and mind appeared to be in line with radical, totalistic, revolutionary, and destructive tendencies haunting China for almost a century. However, an examination of different contexts in which the discourse for a change of culture and mind was articulated will point to a different understanding and, consequently, to a reinterpretation of Dewey and his influence. Without a careful examination of the different contexts, one would fail to see the critical differences in many of the same terms or phrases employed in the discourses by people of different persuasions. One of the issues involves the term revolution. Throughout the twentieth century, China underwent various kinds of revolutions, differing not only in degree but also in kind. One can be seriously mistaken by assuming from the continuity of the term revolution to the continuity of social practice. What is revolution? In Chi58

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nese political discourse, it means to achieve a goal through measures of violence. In Mao’s view, revolution means violent activities and is the tool for overthrowing one class by another class. The mentality of this kind of revolution through violence results in a view of a quick solution to the problems of China and a belief that a revolutionary change can happen overnight. Dewey and his Chinese followers such as Hu Shi (1891–1962) and Jiang Menglin (1886–1964) meant different things when they talked about revolution. They meant revolution in the sense of its uncompromising attitude toward the old custom and tradition. The literary revolution was aimed at recreating a new mind and discovering the self. The idea of revolution was in the traditional enlightenment sense, and this connection was well argued by Schwarcz (1986). From a Kantian point of view, such a definition is antirevolution in a strict sense. As Kant (1784/1991) brilliantly stated: “Revolutions may be able to abolish despotism, profit seeking. But they are unable, by themselves, to reform ways of thinking. New prejudices, like the old ones they replaced, will emerge to enchain, to control the great unthinking mass” (p. 54). Reformers of the Baihua Movement urged China to have a fundamental or revolutionary change, but they nevertheless believed there would be no quick realization or radical revolution by violent means. Anchored in Kantian liberalism, Dewey (1921b) stated very specifically: “China could not be changed without a social transformation based upon a transformation of ideas. The political revolution was a failure, because it was external, formal, touching the mechanism of social action but not affecting conceptions of life, which really control society”(p. 581). The difference between revolution and evolution may shed light here. Hu Shi rigorously advocated an evolutionary “drop-by-drop” improvement of society through the study and solution of specific, practical problems. Li Dazhao (1873–1929), and shortly afterward, Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), argued for an immediate and thoroughgoing sociopolitical transformation after the Soviet model. Influenced by Dewey’s liberalism and not swayed by the change of intellectual climate, Hu discredited the kind of revolution that used violent meanings to change China and regarded such revolution as an evil force. In an article entitled “More Study of Problems and Less Talk of ‘Isms’,” Hu (1919b) urged his fellow intellectuals to shun the high-sounding, all-embracing “isms.” Yu’s (1994) study of the genesis of Chinese radicalism also acknowledged Hu’s “anti-revolutionary” position amidst the frenzy of radical revolution (p. 134). In correspondence with the idea that there cannot be a grand theory from which Chinese problems would be solved immediately once and forever, Dewey’s emphasis on experimentalism remained another practical statement against radical revolution. “The development of science,” Dewey explained, “is not merely a matter of increase in the amount of knowledge available, or even of its nature; much more significant is the change in our method of knowing. . . . I 59

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would say it is the method of induction” (1973, p. 231). What is the difference between the methods of induction and deduction? In Dewey’s view, the method of deduction is more dogmatic, a departure from much-needed experimentalism. Dewey here may be biased against deduction as a way to achieve knowledge. Nevertheless, reading what was going on in China, Dewey had his bias with good reasons. Simply, any abstract theory couldn’t be transplanted into Chinese reality without first and foremost being based on an exploration of concrete issues in China. The implication was clear: one couldn’t “deduce” a solution to China’s problems from a Western imported Marxism, but a solution was possible through a gradual and cumulative change of ideas based on democratic communication. This brings up another important point that further justifies current efforts in constructing Dewey’s theory of communication and examining its implications for future democracy in China. While Dewey’s emphasis on the transformation of the Chinese mind may be read as a proposal for a rejection of Chinese culture and may sound radical, his emphasis on experimentalism and inductive method based on his communicative democracy provides enough dialectic strength against any revolutionary or radical change. This dialectic strength recognizes problems associated with cultural nihilism, a temperament favored by many left-wing intellectuals. In cultural nihilism, an old culture is treated as a totality, completely antagonistic toward a new culture, while a new cultural change can be accomplished in a totalistic fashion without recourse to the history of the old culture. Dewey’s focus on associative living and communication allowed him to avoid this cultural nihilist predilection, and predictably, radical revolutionary tendencies. His dialectic view on the role of habits was a case in point. While the advancement of a society depends upon a constant change of its culture, tradition, customs, habits, and so on, such change is not intended to happen overnight, nor does it start with a brand new idea in a revolutionary manner. Tradition and habits not only serve as the cultural bond for an individual but also form the endless chain of humanity for a society and civilization. The notion that a society can change its culture and tradition suddenly is “magic” (Dewey, 1922/1983, p. 35). Dewey (1927/1984) made this point more explicitly in The Public and Its Problems. Culture and tradition are indispensable for an individual: an individual lives in tradition and by means of which he/she associates with others. “The young have to be brought within the traditions, outlook and interests which characterize a community by means of education: by unremitting instruction and by learning in connection with the phenomena of overt association” (p. 331). Tradition also makes knowledge possible, because knowledge is the function of association and communication and it “depends upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed and sanctioned” (p. 335). How should culture or tradition be changed or transformed? Dewey suggested that changes 60

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be made indirectly by modifying conditions, by an intelligent selecting and weighing of the objects, which engage attention and which influence the fulfillment of desires. What is the implication of Dewey’s theory of communication for China today? After almost a century of incessant revolutions and acts of violence, China seems to be moving toward a path that confirms Dewey’s theory of communication and democracy. Even though there has been no official gesture for a reevaluation of Dewey since a nationwide purge of his influence in the 1950s, Dewey’s influence becomes increasingly visible. The pragmatic approach of Deng Xiaoping signaled a significant step toward “concrete problems” and toward Deweyean experimentalism. More important, the legacy of the radical, violent revolution as a solution to social problems is losing its persuasive power, yielding its way to the Deweyean communicative/pragmatic approach. However, in its glorious path toward democracy and modernity, China still faces an interrogation from Dewey. When he delivered his lectures in China almost eighty years ago, Dewey did not see in the different situation of China any warranty for a new set of rules for democratic pursuit. “[A] habit, a custom, or an institution,” Dewey reiterated his view to his Chinese audience, “is to be judged good when it contributes positively to free intercourse, to unhampered exchange of ideas, to mutual respect and friendship and love—in short, to those modes of behaving which make life richer and more worth living for everybody concerned; and conversely, any custom or institution which impedes progress toward these goals is to be judged bad” (Dewey, 1973, p. 90). How China expands its horizon of these four “modernizations” to embrace democracy, to embrace what Wei Jingsheng (see Nathan, 1985, pp. 14–15) called “the fifth modernization,” remains an urgent, and yet unsettled question. NOTES 1. Dewey’s lectures were given in English and simultaneously translated by his former students into Chinese during his stay in China from May 1919 to July 1921. These lectures in the Chinese version would appear in leading journals or newspapers for a wider readership. Unfortunately, their original English version is no longer available. These lectures, addressed specifically to a Chinese audience, covered a wide range of issues, and would enrich greatly any study of Dewey. For that purpose, a collection of some of these lectures back-translated into English was published in 1973 by the University of Hawaii Press. Some citations are taken from this collection with the understanding that, while the translation cannot be done verbatim, the main idea is reliably translated. 2. For thousands of years, wenyan (classic Chinese or literary Chinese), like Learned Latin, had been the language of written communication, which was quite different from baihua (daily speech, vernacular). 3. Understandably, many of Dewey’s ideas underwent changes, revisions, or reformulation throughout his incredibly long intellectual career, but his fascination with 61

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communication seemed never to have waned. As Alexander (1995) pointed out, Dewey’s (1896/1972) early article, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” provided the basis for his theory of communication, which received special and systematic treatments in Democracy and Education (1916), Experience and Nature (1925), and The Public and Its Problems (1927).

REFERENCES Alexander, T. (1995). John Dewey and the roots of democratic imagination. In L. Langsdorf & A. Smith (Eds.), Recovering pragmatism’s voice: The classical tradition, Rorty, and the philosophy of communication (pp. 131–154). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Antonio, R., & Kellner, D. (1992). Communication, modernity, and democracy in Habermas and Dewey. Symbolic Interaction, 15(3), 277–297. Berry, T. (1960). Dewey’s influence in China. In J. Blewett (Ed.), John Dewey: His thought and influence (pp.199–232). New York: Fordham University Press. Biesta, G. (1995). Pragmatism as a pedagogy of communicative action. In J. Garrison (Ed.), The new scholarship on Dewey (pp. 105–122). Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Bland, J. (1921). Saving China. Asia, 21(6), 449–503. Chen, D. (1916). Xianfa yu kong-jiao [Constitution and Confucianism]. Xin qingnian [New Youth], 2(3), 1–4. Chen, D. (1917). Wenxue geming lun [On literary revolution]. Xin qingnian [New Youth], 2(6), 1–4. Dewey, J. (1896/1972). The reflex arc concept in psychology. In John Dewey: The early works, 1882–1898, volume 5, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1916/1980). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. In John Dewey: The middle works, 1899–1924, volume 9. Dewey, J. (1919). Transforming the mind of China. Asia, 19(11), 1103–1108. Dewey, J. (1920a). What holds China back. Asia, 20(5), 373–377. Dewey, J. (1920b). The sequel of the student revolt. The New Republic, 21(273), 380–382. Dewey, J. (1921a). Old China and new. Asia, 21(5), 445–456. Dewey, J. (1921b). New culture in China. Asia, 21(7), 581–642. Dewey, J. (1922/1983). Human nature and conduct. In John Dewey: The middle works, 1899–1924, volume 14, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1925/1981). Experience and nature. In John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953, volume 1, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1927/1984). The public and its problems. In John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953, volume 2, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1973). John Dewey: Lectures in China, 1919–1920 (R. Clopton & T. Ou, Trans.). Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii. 62

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Fu, S. (1919a). Zenyang zuo baihuawen [How to write an essay in baihua]. Xin cao [New Tide], 1(2), 169–182. Fu, S. (1919b). Hanyu gaiyong pinyin wenxue de chubu tan [Preliminary remarks on changing the Chinese language into phonetic language]. Xin cao [New Tide], 1(3), 393–410. Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Hu, S. (1917). Wenxue gailiang chuyi [Some tentative suggestions for the reform of Chinese literature]. Xin qingnian [New Youth], 2(5), 1–11. Hu, S. (1918). Cangshi ji xu [Preface to the collection of experimental poems in baihua]. Xin qingnian [New Youth], 4(2), 136–142. Hu, S. (1919a). Wo weishenmo yao zuo baihua shi [Why do I want to write baihua poems?]. Xin qingnian [New Youth], 6(5), 488–499. Hu, S. (1919b). Duo yanjiu xie wenti, shao tan dian zhuyi [More study of problems and less talk of “isms”]. Meizhou pinglun [Weekly Critic], July 20, 1919. Hu, S. (1962). John Dewey in China. In C. Moore (Ed.), Philosophy and culture: East and West (pp. 762–769). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Kant, I. (1784/1991). An answer to the question: What is enlightenment? In H. Reiss (Ed.), Kant: Political writings (pp. 54–60). New York: Cambridge University Press. Kwok, D. (1965). Scientism in Chinese thought, 1900–1950. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lin, Y. (1979). The crisis of Chinese consciousness: Radical anti-traditionalism in the May Fourth era. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media. New York: McGraw-Hill. Nathan, A. (1985). Chinese democracy. New York: Alfred Knopf. Qian, X. (1918). Zhongguo jinhuo de wenzi wenti [The issue of the Chinese script in the future]. Xin qingnian [New Youth], 4(4), 350–356. Russell, B. (1922). The problem of China. London: George Allen & Unwin. Schwarcz, V. (1986). The Chinese enlightenment: Intellectuals and legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shudson, M. (1997). Why conversation is not the soul of democracy. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 14, 297–309. Xiao, X. (1995). China encounters Darwinism: A case of intercultural rhetoric. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81(1), 83–99. Yu, Y. (1994). The radicalization of China in the twentieth century. In W. Tu (Ed.), China in transformation (pp. 125–150). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Chinese Culture and Its (Post)Modern Fate: Three Debates and One Critique Changfu Chang

INTRODUCTION One noticeable phenomenon in the cultural history of twentieth-century China is the constant and continuous location and relocation of Chinese culture in connection with various efforts to advance Chinese society. Indeed, modern Chinese history—since the Opium War (1839–1842)—can be written in cultural terms, for not only do social changes often entail cultural changes but the notion of culture is also a direct result of the consciousness of an alien culture (Liu, 1995). Social engineers of modern China often found themselves struggling for a vocabulary to justify their attitudes toward culture. As such, terms as “cultural revolution,” “cultural reconstruction,” and “cultural restoration” became so frequently used (and misused) that it almost liquidated their meanings. While discussions and debates about Chinese culture appeared in virtually every decade in the twentieth century, there were distinct periods that marked watershed points in conceptualizations of Chinese culture and its perceived role in China’s search of modernity. Identifying these watershed points suggests a perspective that would facilitate the understanding of critical issues of culture and modernity. Certainly, among a bewildering number of moments of cultural interests, the New Culture Movement in the 1910s and 1920s, the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and the 1970s, and the Cultural Discussion in the 1990s invite special attention. The New Culture Movement was launched as a conscious effort to advance Chinese society following the frustrating experience of rejuvenating China by

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means of introducing Western science and technology and affecting institutional reform. Chinese intellectuals concluded that unless there was a fundamental change in ideas and the philosophy of life, China’s search for wealth and power would fail. The Cultural Revolution, on the other hand, was the culmination of a series of ideological struggles waged by Mao Zedong, whose obsession with radical culture change led him to believe that without a cultural revolution China would derail from the course of her socialist development. For a lack of hindsight required for a historical analysis, the Cultural Discussion1 in the 1990s was less transparent. As a response to the extremes of the previous cultural orientations, the Cultural Discussion, centering on the role of Chinese culture in market economy and global society, attempted to identify a new alternative model of modernity based on the notion of Zhonghuaxin (Chineseness). Given the primordial nature of a culture in the constitution of the lifeworld context for individuals, to articulate for a cultural change requires a tremendous effort and remarkable persuasive power. Chinese rapid social and political transformations allow no discourses of culture in a set of universal and unchanging terms. Each of the aforementioned cultural events was situated in what Bitzer (1968) termed a rhetorical situation, defined by “a natural context of persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigency” (p. 5). Or, from a social movement perspective, each of the cultural events presented to its articulators a set of rhetorical “problems,” “requirements,” and “constraints” (Simons, 1970). As discourses on culture varied, so did communication strategies. It is obviously beyond the scope of this chapter to deal with even partially, let alone the whole of, the spectrum of issues involved in these cultural events. I shall focus on three questions arising from the perspective of approaching these cultural events simultaneously: (1)What communication patterns do these cultural events present? (2) In what ways do they diverge and converge? (3) How are they flawed from a modern understanding of culture? The following study argues that guided by different theoretical frameworks and ideologies consciously or subconsciously, these cultural events reflected Chinese modern impulses of different periods. In the case of the New Culture Movement, the guiding principle remained one that was grounded in Western enlightenment tradition. In the case of the Cultural Revolution, a Marxist view together with Mao’s idealist and romantic temper, led to a cultural nihilism, and ironically, to a renewed feudal cultural politics. To employ postmodern and postcolonial theories as a counterargument for the imagined pathologies of Chinese modernity and for the renewal of Confucian China registered the gist of the Cultural Discussion. In line with their objectives, these cultural events employed different communication strategies and consequently influenced Chinese understanding of culture and communication. Different as they were, these cultural events all shared a totalistic view of culture. Habermas’ cultural 66

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critique can be employed to move out of this totalistic view and to open up space for cultural integrity and co-existence.

THREE CULTURE MOVEMENTS The New Culture Movement The starting point of the New Culture Movement was the totalistic rejection of Chinese culture from a vantage point of an interpreted Western culture centering on individualism. To respond to the cultural crisis characterized by the moral deficit since China’s encounter with the West, Kang Youwei (1873–1929), who was a major force in the previous reform movement, began to publish a series of over twenty articles in a journal, Bu Ren [Cannot Bear It!], championing a position that Confucianism should serve as key to the moral problem in China. Kang (e.g ., 1913a, 1913b) believed that the building of Confucian temples and services and sermons could stimulate a healthy moral life that would give vitality to the nation. In a manipulative and ironic reading of the West, Kang buttressed his argument with numerous references to the European tradition in which a religious system served as the moral foundation for any move toward modernity. Instead of restoring Confucianism, intellectuals of the New Culture Movement envisioned Confucianism as the very cause of China’s problems. They contended, without a change in Chinese culture, there could be no talk about the salvation of China, and any reform, political or economic, would be useless. The definition of Chinese culture was largely in the definition of Confucianism. In other words, it was Confucian ideas that shaped Chinese society from the relationship of the state to the individual, from the relationship of the family to the individual, and from one individual to another individual. Chen Duxiu (1879–1924) and his associates launched an unwavering assault on Confucianism and an iconoclastic attitude became a trademark for their celebrated journal Xin qingnian [New Youth]. To refute Kang, Chen argued that Confucianism was just the opposite of a constitutional government and remained the stumbling block in China’s path toward democracy and prosperity. To advance Chinese society, the first priority was to cultivate a citizenry grounded in individualism. From the standpoint of Western individualism, intellectuals criticized the structure of traditional Chinese culture and reformulated the relationship between the state and the individual: The individual no longer lived for the state but the other way around. Criticizing traditional nationalism grounded in Confucianism, Gao (1915), for example, challenged, “The main idea of [this kind of the so-called nationalism] is to repress the self for the benefit of the state, and to think that as long as it is beneficial for the state, one can be deprived of all the rights and will not regret” (p. 2). Ultimately, these relationships demanded a new human relationship. Tao (1918) argued 67

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that the cause of all the problems of Chinese society could be explained in the framework of various relationships among individuals: “The corruption of a society lies in inadequate relationships among individuals” (p. 94).

The Cultural Revolution The framework of the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s interpreted Marxism mixed with his oriental “cultural” thinking. The Cultural Revolution was a moment “that profoundly affected nearly every aspect of life for hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens, tore apart the Chinese Communist party, fundamentally altered the organization of the economy, and propelled the People’s Republic of China into deeper international isolation” (Joseph, et al., 1991, p. 9). For many students of Chinese history, the Cultural Revolution started in 1966 and ended in 1976. As a radical ideology, the Cultural Revolution, according to Yu (1996), can be traced to the communist Yan’an era in the 1930s and 1940s. Even though many things associated with the New Culture Movement were abandoned as the Chinese political scene changed to left-wing cultural politics, the interest in cultural reconstruction remained. In fact, the vision of a new China during the difficult days in the border area was accompanied by the vision of a new culture. Mao’s (1940/1967) theorizing of a new culture appeared in his famous essay, “On New Democracy.” Serving for a long time as the guiding principle for Chinese politics and as a theory to differentiate the communist revolution from the old bourgeois revolution, or evolution to be exact, “On New Democracy” spelled out the formation of a new national, scientific, and mass culture that emerged from the ashes of old culture. In this influential work, Mao made a reference to the bourgeois intellectuals who wanted to effect a long, evolutionary rather than a quick, revolutionary transition for China: “The bourgeois die-hards are as hopelessly wrong on the question of culture as on that of political power. . . . So far as the orientation of our national culture is concerned, communist ideology plays the guiding role . . .” (p. 378). Mao argued that to overthrow the national enemy and to accomplish the task of national revolution not only relied on the army of guns but required the army of pens—a cultural army—as well.2

The Cultural Discussion The new interest in culture in the 1990s was in a very different context. It should be noted that a nationwide “culture fever” had already been on the intellectual scene in the 1980s. This culture fever was propelled by Chinese commitment to reform and opening to the outside world and fueled by the unprecedented exposure to Western theories. Reaffirming the critical and dem68

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ocratic spirit of the New Culture Movement, Chinese intellectuals launched a relentless attack on the cultural despotism of the Cultural Revolution and on traditional Chinese culture. The radical attack on Chinese culture was exemplified in the television series, He Shang [River Elegy], a controversial program broadcast nationwide by the China Central Television in 1988. The symbol of Chinese civilization, the Yellow River, became the symbol of the backwardness, the psychological burden. The Chinese cultural superiority became a feeling of tremendous cultural inferiority and a psychological obstacle standing in the course of China’s modernization (Calhoun, 1994). The Cultural Discussion in the 1990s was set against the alleged moral deficit or “the loss of spiritual home” due to the excessive emphasis of economic interest and the neglect of the value and virtue of Chinese culture. The starting point of the rekindled interest in humanistic tradition was persuasive: The moral degradation trapped by economic imperative prompted Chinese intellectuals to look for Confucianism. Although intellectuals, who were concerned about the alleged “moral bankruptcy” caused by economic reform and Western influence, held different views on many issues about contemporary China, they showed an affinity in their disavowal of the Western enlightenment model and in their affection for ousted Chinese culture.3 Rejecting the Western model of enlightenment and modernity, in their controversial and yet representative article, “From Modernity to Chineseness,” Zhang, Zhang, and Wang (1994) situated a modernity in the world of Chineseness. The three authors praised the new conservatism as “a cultural reorientation of the 1990s” that was significantly different from the modernization drive of the 1980s. “Adopting non-Western strategies to ensure political and economic development, social stability, and consensus of social values,” they contended, “[new conservatism] takes a strong critical and negative attitude toward Western Culture” in an effort to “recentralize the Chinese state and nation” (p. 17).

IMPACT ON COMMUNICATION Communication and Democratic Discourse To identify these cultural moments as demarcating points suggests, first of all, the distinctive features in cultural thinking. Like any history of ideas, a later period is always ready to transcend an earlier one. The New Culture Movement, extolling the Western concept of individualism, adopted a radical attitude toward Chinese culture and advocated a path toward modernity through education that emphasized the creation of a new citizenry. To this end, Chinese intellectuals saw language and communication as an indispensable part in this cultural endeavor. They argued that traditional wenyan (the classical Chinese) was neither effective to communicate new ideas nor adequate to nurture a democratic spirit. To create a new culture, the first thing was therefore to replace 69

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wenyan with baihua (the vernacular). Baihua, as a language of communication, could not only express modern ideas needed for cultural reconstruction, but also foster modern human relationships based on equality and democracy. The new concept of equality and democracy influenced the communication pattern they adopted in their advocacy for a cultural change. When Chen (1917) summarized the movement in the words of “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy,” he meant science could be used to dispel superstitious thinking and democracy to form an equal relationship among individuals. This democratic spirit was reflected in the way the debates on culture were performed. Although the issue of culture was quite emotionally attached, the debaters could provide reasoned arguments, refraining from excessive name-calling. They were as belligerent to each other as willing to listen to each other. For example, at Peking University, Confucian scholars and cultural iconoclasts were able to work together to create a democratic, argumentative environment as a community of professors in the 1910s; in controversy on science and philosophy of life in the 1920s, the two sides held each other in high regard in their private life though they engaged in a heated debate.

Communication and Mobilization While also emphasizing the creation of a new culture and a new citizenry, Mao’s theory on cultural revolution rejected the evolutionary model of the New Culture Movement. Mao was geared toward the creation of a collective culture and psychology that could be mobilized politically. In this sense, Mao’s rejection of the New Culture Movement was the rejection of the individualism as Mao identified it as the obstacle toward the realization of a new China. To achieve a revolution in culture through ideological indoctrination, the use of language and the pattern of communication took a radical turn both in content and in style. On the one hand, arguments became formulaic, focusing exceptionally on interpreting the words of political leaders without recourse to reason and rationality. On the other hand, extreme exhortative methods such as big-character posters and mass meetings for efficient mobilization were created and legitimized throughout the movement. This pattern of communication is consistent with the nondemocratic aspect of the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution, perceived from the vantage point of the distant West, presented a rosy, humanistic, and great democratic picture. It was the manifestation of a seemingly more genuine concern over the domination of a culture by a few. The iconoclastic attitude and “critical” spirit could be read as an enlightenment tradition—the ability and courage to say “no” to authority. Without looking into the historical situation, Marxism could also be read along these lines. However, Mao never meant to be democratic in reality, nor did the Cultural Revolution embody that ideal. In the Cul70

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tural Revolution, although leaders, regardless of their ranks, were subjected to criticism, the criticism had to be carried on strictly according to Mao’s ideology. By the same token, although the big-character posters were everywhere, and anyone could write and post, from an ideological point of view, it was “more conformist than any time in history” (Gong, 1996, p. 38) and eliminated “mental space for critical reflection” (Guo, 1999, p. 354). This is what Yu (1996) called “a false consciousness.” As Liu (1996) pointed out, Mao’s revolutionary strategy was based on “mobilizing the support of the broadest masses” by means of both coercion and gaining consent (p. 199).

Communication and Nationalistic Discourse In contrast with previous discourses on culture, intellectuals in favor of revalidating traditional culture framed their arguments in cautious, academic terms. The public sentiment against the radicalism associated with Mao’s cultural theory and the perceived pathologies of the radical modernity of the West seemed a logical source of motivation for re-establishing the credibility and usability of Chinese culture. They proposed to map out the global space for Chinese culture by creating a “neo-Pacific Rim.” This rim, according to Zhang, Zhang, and Wang (1994), consists of four layers, with Mainland Chinese culture as its core and radiating to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao (the second layer), to all overseas Chinese (the third layer), and to East Asians and Southeast Asians under Chinese cultural influence (the fourth and outside layer). In line with their cultural agenda, they upheld the importance of the Chinese language and its role in Chinese communication and modernity. In their view, the Chinese language is not only the best to represent the national essence, but the twenty-first century is also a century that “Chinese language plays an important role” for its humanistic spirit (p. 19). Aware of the aggressive discourse on culture in the New Culture Movement and the Cultural Revolution, neohumanistic intellectuals shunned the overt argumentative and hortatory patterns of communication when articulating their views. They seemed to be more balanced in their articulation of a cultural reconstruction. However, their avoidance of critical issues made them a guardian for the repressed regime. Their creation of a neo–Pacific Rim, for example, was not only ideologically hegemonic and culturally homogeneous but also served the totalitarian state. As Xu (1998) observed, the national subjectivity in the neo–Pacific Rim “obscures the imminent reality of oppression, cruelty, corruption, and gross inequality in China, leaving intellectual critics without the vision or the will to act upon their world as citizen agents, unable to function as a vital force in China’s incomplete project of modernization and democratization” (p. 227). 71

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Connections and Continuities Distinct as they were, these cultural events nevertheless related to each other in many ways within the broad context of modern China. The discontinuities appearing at the surface would be replaced by the continuities at the bottom. The most striking feature of the continuities was the radicalism—either totalistic rejection or totalistic acceptance—in their position. The New Culture Movement connected itself with the Cultural Revolution by its radical rejection of Chinese culture. This radicalism prompted Lin (1979) to argue that the totalistic rejection of Chinese culture was an inspiration of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Mao rejected the enlightenment model in his radical Cultural Revolution; neohumanists struck a similar note. By formulating an alternative modernity and a new mode of knowledge, they actually rejected the Western enlightenment model. The retreat to the neo–Pacific Rim couched in an aura of neohumanism and nationalism was essentially a retreat to that part of Confucianism’s undemocratic tradition that was no longer favored in the modern world (Shao, 1994, 1995; Wang et al., 1995). To look collectively, the radicalism in these three cultural movements shared one flawed conception of culture—a totalistic view of culture. A totalistic view of culture lends itself to two manifestations. In one case, culture is seen as a totality rather than a web of complex relationships; consequently, a change of culture is only allowed in a totalistic fashion. In the other case, one aspect, one realm, or one relationship of culture is defined and overemphasized as the totality of culture; consequently, other relationships, which bear different validity claims and responsibilities, have to be justified or achieved from one relationship. The totalistic rejection of Chinese culture in the New Culture Movement reflected a mentality that was manifested in the Cultural Revolution, albeit in radically different dimensions. From another perspective, the totalistic condemnation of the Western “bourgeois” culture in the Cultural Revolution resonated with the radical attack on Western culture in the Cultural Discussion in the post-1989 era. What was the source of this totalistic attitude? The source was a result of dichotomous thinking. When a dichotomy is created, the world is divided into discrete categories. To accept one category means to reject the other. In the New Culture Movement, the dichotomy between Eastern and Western Cultures, in which Chinese culture was treated as totally ineffective and inadequate in the modern world; in the Cultural Revolution, in addition to the dichotomy between the revolutionary and semifeudal and semicolonial cultures, another dichotomy was also created: Culture was treated as ideology, which belonged to the superstructure, as opposed to economy, the base. To reverse the Marxist model that the change of economic nature will bring forth the change of the ideological nature, the Cultural Revolution stressed the importance of ideologi72

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cal and cultural conformity to transform China. In the Cultural Discussion, Chinese culture was posed as incommensurable with Western culture; to affirm Chinese culture was to affirm a different modernity. The dichotomous and totalistic thinking narrowed the vision of culture and modernity and led to the flawed conception of the relationship between culture and modernity.

CULTURE AND (POST) MODERNITY Modernity: Relationship of Value Spheres According to Habermas (1984, 1987a, 1987b), modernity originates from a modern understanding of the world and from a modern structure of consciousness, in which reason divides itself into a plurality of value spheres. The modern structure of consciousness is situated in a context of formal construction of three worlds—the objective, the social, and the subjective, or the instrumental-cognitive, the practical-moral, and the artistic-aesthetic. Each of these three worlds demands a different form of rationality together with a different form of validity claim. In the instrumental-cognitive sphere, relative to the objective world, a truth claim is required, the criteria being efficiency and success, as characterized in economy and administration. In the practical-moral sphere, relative to the social world, it is righteousness that warrants social action. In the artistic-aesthetic sphere, the concern is whether a particular statement is sincere or not, and consequently sincerity or truthfulness is the issue. Once cultural spheres are differentiated, as each of them follows its own logic in seeking its own validity claim, it does not mean that modernity is secured. These spheres, though separated theoretically and practically, form intricate and complicated relationships in the lifeworld context. In modern society, the relationships among these spheres are both complementary and antagonistic, each contributing on the one hand and posing a threat on the other to the balance of the very concept of modernity. From the standpoint of these relationships, the pathologies of modernity lie in the loss of such a balance with one particular value sphere stretching out to others. In the context of Western society, the problem of modernity and enlightenment or “one of the palpable pathologies” is scientizing. To help break the Western world away from the magic and religious spell, science takes a leading role; with the help of scientific thinking, problems relevant to the state of affairs seek interpretations no longer from some unbeknownst entity. Unfortunately, the blind faith in science and the application of positivist thinking motivates the substitution of technology for enlightened action: Technological control of nature leads to the control and alienation of human beings. The formal-pragmatic level of cultural differentiation provides possibilities for modernity, but it is not sufficient to describe the function and sustaining of modernity. Without reproduction processes that constantly renew modern 73

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structures of the lifeworld, which includes culture, society, and personality, modernity will be endangered and ultimately will shrink to a path of one-sidedness. As the store of knowledge, culture provides resources for participants engaged in communicative action to draw interpretations susceptible to consensus as they come to an understanding about something in the world. Society provides the legitimate orders through which participants regulate their memberships in social groups and thereby secure solidarity. Personality provides acquired competencies that render a subject capable of speech and action and hence able to participate in processes of mutual understanding in a given context and to maintain his/her own identity in the shifting contexts of interaction (Habermas, 1987a, p. 138; 1987b, p. 343). Employing and revising Habermas’ model, problems of Chinese modernity associated with the three cultural events under investigation are put in a new perspective. The Problem of the New Culture Movement The New Culture Movement represented a truly watershed point in the Chinese understanding of and search for modernity. This is not to say that the early efforts in introducing Western science and technology and in reforming political systems were not part of the process toward modernity. Indeed, it is within that context that the meaning of the New Culture Movement existed. The efforts that accompanied the process toward modernity in the West could almost be seen in the discourse in China. The New Culture Movement was surely different in the important sense that proponents argued that China needed a fundamental change in culture via ideas and new character to move in the new direction. In the European context, the web from which modernity wanted to break away was the totality of religion, for under the umbrella of religion, the interpretation of the objective world was imbued with myth and superstition. While Confucianism was not a religion in the Western sense, its power in shaping the Chinese mind and society was similar. Thus, intellectuals of the New Culture Movement rightly started their assault on Confucianism and located Confucian suppression of individualistic thinking as the core issue among many other issues of modernity. Chen (1917) perceptively pointed to this new personality as an economic relation, or in the framework of modernity, social integration. In the ephemeral and agitated mind of Chen, individualism, economics, and ethics were connected. In Chen’s view, The essence of modern life is economics and the fundamental principle of economic production is individual independence, the effect of which has penetrated ethics. Consequently, the independence of the individual in the ethic field and the independence of property in the economic field relate to each other, thus reaffirming the theory [of such integration]. Because of this [integration], social mores and material culture have taken 74

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a great step forward. In China, Confucianists have based their teachings on their ethical norms. Sons and wives possess neither personal individuality nor personal property. . . . This is absolutely not the way to personal independence. (P. 6)

Individualism was also the driving force to translate and devote an entire issue of Xin qingnian to Ibsen’s works. In his reflection on the New Culture Movement, Hu (1925) placed the question of individualism at the heart. Among hundreds of articles published in Xin qingnian, Hu regarded two essays as the most important. The first was his own article entitled “Ibsenism,” published in 1918, and the other was Zhou Zuoren’s “A Humane Literature,” which appeared six months later. In Hu’s appraisal, Zhou’s individualism revolved around the concept of humanism and induced a radical transvaluation of the concept of ren (humane) from its traditional meaning in classical Chinese philosophy. According to Zhou (1918), Humanism was no longer in Confucian terms, “but rather individualism which is a subject-centered human philosophy” (p. 581, Italics mine). Seen from modern Western experience, to locate individualism as a starting point of revitalizing Chinese culture grasped the essence of modernity in the West. In the study of modernity of the West, Habermas (1987b) observed: [T]he principle of subjectivity determines the forms of modern culture. This holds true first of all for objectifying science, which disenchants nature at the same time that it liberates the knowing subject. . . . The moral concept of modern times follows from the recognition of the subjective freedom of individuals. On the one hand, they are founded upon the right of individuals to perceive what they are supposed to do as valid; and on the other hand, they are founded on the demand that each person may pursue the end of his particular welfare only in harmony with the welfare of everyone else. . . . Modern art reveals its essence in Romanticism; and absolute inwardness determines the form and content of Romantic art. (Pp. 17–18)

However, to conceive of modernity solely as the differentiation of different value spheres is not enough. This differentiation is accompanied at the institutional level by the differentiation of science, morality, and art. “By the end of the eighteenth century,” Habermas claimed, “science, morality, and art were even institutionally differentiated as realms of activity in which questions of truth, of justice, and of taste were autonomously elaborated, that is, each under its own specific aspect of validity. And these spheres of knowing were separated off from the spheres of belief, on the one hand, and from those of both legally organized everyday life, on the other” (Habermas, 1987b, p. 19, Italics mine). The flaw of the New Culture Movement is evident at this point. Set against the frustrating experience and repeated failure with modernity, the intellectuals of the New Culture Movement emphasized the importance of cultural transformation, not from a simple introduction of an economic system or constitutional government, but from within—to change the traditional Confucian worldview. 75

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This proved to be a more mature and productive path. But the overemphasis on cultural change created an impression that China’s problems could be solved and modernity achieved only in the realm of culture. Two immediate problems were connected with this ill-fated modernity. One problem was theoretical, that is, the narrowing of the concept of modernity, the realization of which depended on other institutionalized spheres such as the modern political, economic, and legal systems. As Zhu (1999) pointed out, the drawback was that they placed too much emphasis on culture and lapsed into cultural determinism, and their impatience with a change on the systematic level became problematic. Their focus away from the nascent republic due to problems associated with the old tradition led to a perception that ideas could save China and to a situation that was essentially reductionistic. Ironically, they betrayed a temperament against their conscious will: They expected the very act of building a republic would bring an end to all problems in China in a very short time without applying their evolutionary view to the matter, for, like the evolution of ideas, it might also take decades for a republic to meet expectations. The other problem was practical or actual. Without an institutional basis, concrete efforts for cultural change would be impossible, as the history of twentieth-century China unfortunately demonstrated. As Keenan (1974) perceptively pointed out, reformers on the side of Dewey were caught by the chicken-egg dilemma between nonpolitical means of cultural reorientation in education and the political situation in reality. “If changing political forms in 1911 seemed superficial to the reformers,” Keenan observed, “ their own professional development and increased influence on the weak Ministry of Education turned out similarly to be only surface change” (p. 237). Keenan argued that under intolerant, undemocratic political conditions, reform by cultural subversion had led directly into an insoluble dilemma.

The Problem of the Cultural Revolution Mao’s era served as another example of the wrong conceptualizations and consequently failed attempts to achieve modernity. Mao’s persistent obsession with “cultural revolution” together with his early influence from the New Culture Movement showed a genuine effort on Mao’s part for the advancement of Chinese society. In his “On New Democracy,” Mao (1940/1967) elaborated on what constituted a new culture in new social conditions. Mao’s eloquent formulation of a “scientific, national, and mass” culture was set against the feudal, superstitious, and colonial imperialistic culture. From a formal-pragmatic point of view, Mao touched on the major components of a culture that needed to be reoriented in a modern society: the art-aesthetic, the instrumental-cognitive, and the moral-practical. 76

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Unfortunately, Mao’s treatment of culture solely as a form of ideology narrowed modernity to a path of one-sidedness; his tendency to see culture in artistic and propagandistic terms at the expense of empirical aspects made him much like Western postmodernists. Recently scholars have begun to acknowledge that connection (e.g., Guo, 1999). Habermas’ (1987b) debates with Heidegger and Derrida also serve as an illustrative point here. In the case of Heidegger (1962), propositional truth is replaced by truth-as-disclosure, and accordingly, his reading of modernity eliminates the possibility of deciphering the pathologies of modern life in social-theoretical terms and frees their critique from the rigors of concrete historical analysis. In the case of Derrida (1976), any given discourse is only analyzed by rhetorical-literary means; language is disengaged from everyday practical routines; language’s capacity to solve problems disappears behind its world-creating capacity (also see McCarthy, 1987, pp. xii-xiii). Mao’s “world-creating” thinking and disregard of empirical imperatives testifies to his departure from modernity and, to a certain extent, his departure from traditional Marxism. According to the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism, the base—economic system—determines the superstructure, the legal, political, and cultural. Mao’s oriental and romantic idealism had discarded the respect for empirical evidence, a strong point in Marxist dialectical materialism. In fact, Mao reversed that emphasis: Instead of being captivated by a commitment to the development of the base, the economic structure and the primary contradiction upon which the secondary relies, Mao believed that economic success could be achieved through the forming of ideas and through ideological indoctrination as well as political mobilization. What does this mean to modernity? If Mao’s overemphasis on ideology contributed to his dislocation of culture at the formal-pragmatic level, a problem of greater magnitude was presented at the level of reproduction processes. As described previously, modernity is made possible by the existence of reciprocal relationships among culture, society, and personality as separate value spheres. In their comparative study of modernity in social, economic terms, Inkeles and Smith (1974) came to the conclusion that “neither rapid economic growth nor effective government can develop or, if introduced, will be long sustained without the widespread diffusion in the rank and file of the population of those qualities we have identified as those of the modern man” (p. 316). If one examines analytically the reciprocal relationships among culture, society, and personality as separate value spheres of modernity, one can easily see that the lack of socialization process of the individual explains the failure of many of the drives for modernization in Mao’s era. Even though Mao stressed the importance of building a new culture, in comparison with the New Culture Movement, Mao took a U-turn in his conceptualization of modernity. The evolutionary model of the New Culture Movement 77

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was built on the assumption that modernity started with the empowerment of the individual and, thus, individualism was at the center, even at the expense of other spheres. Mao’s point of departure was the categorical denial of individualism and the socialization process. The mobilization model of mass culture eliminated the possibility of socialization for modern talents needed in any modernization efforts. Students of modern China often have difficulty providing a convincing explanation for Mao in this respect. One can still grasp the flaw in ideological and politicized treatment of culture, but to say Mao was a radical ideologist who intentionally moved China’s economy and living standards of the people to fall to a low level betrays the fact that to develop the economy and science had always been Mao’s priority. For instance, when Chinese communists came to power in 1949, they began to outline ambitious plans to thrust China into the company of modern, industrial and scientifically advanced countries, and the four modernizations were first formulated at that time (Lindbeck, 1961, p. 3). The Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s that brought catastrophe to China was motivated by a romantic fever and a genuine determination that China would move forward and catch up with Western countries (see Hsu, 1995). Mao’s motives for such an economic miracle seemed nothing but genuine. Part of the explanation lies in the depriving of the individual the socialization process critical in the constitution of modern talent. From the beginning of the new China, professional scientists were subjected to political pressures designed to remold them ideologically and to direct their scientific efforts to state needs (Suttmeier, 1980; Xu & Fan, 1982). Scientists were made to attend political meetings regularly and to engage in criticism and self-criticism and were criticized for pursuing narrow, specialized research topics, for being excessively preoccupied with publication. During the Great Leap Forward, they were told to “learn from the masses” and were forced to reorient their research activities toward the achievement of politically inspired goals. Mao’s treatment of the modern talent fell exactly into the premodern tradition. Cohen (1974) summarized the “fundamental differences in the kinds of ability valued and the societal roles talent is asked to play” in both premodern and modern society. In premodern China, talent was “occupationally circumscribed, qualitatively homogeneous, and highly moral in constitution”; in modern societies, almost the reverse is true, for talent is “heterogeneous in quality and amoral in make-up” (p. 161).

The Problem of the Cultural Discussion As mentioned previously, even though they had a fundamental difference in their philosophical approaches to modernity, the New Culture Movement and the Cultural Revolution became unexpected bedfellows because of their 78

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totalistic rejection of Chinese culture. At the formal-pragmatic level, the problem was the perceiving of culture as a totality. The differentiation of value spheres of cultural modernity would allow Confucian cultural values to find their own space and validity claims, rather than being thrown away completely. For example, if Chen’s theorizing was true—the Confucian value of respecting parents hindered the economic development and individualistic thinking in the economic and social realms—it did not necessarily warrant a totalistic rejection of that value, for respecting parents could still be—and surely is—a legitimate value in the familial realm. At the level of cultural reproduction processes, the problem was the perceiving of culture as an isolated, unchanging entity. Not only is the notion of the totalistic rejection of culture practically impossible, because one cannot escape the omnipresence of culture, which serves as the bond by which individuals relate to each other. But theoretically, the notion of rejecting culture meets difficulty, too, for it is the culture that provides the meaning and serves the lifeworld context and makes communication for social action possible. The neoconservative intellectuals seemed to be well aware of the problems associated with the preceding cultural movements. Understanding the impact of the new social situation occasioned by the global market economy, they favored the diversity of values, acknowledging that the trend in cultural change was that in the present world market of culture “the discursive structure of ideology and cultural discourse has changed,” and “the diversity of cultural products makes the different options and selections possible” (Zhang et al., 1994, pp. 13–14). This notion of multiculturalism opened up space for different values to coexist, nevertheless, it suffered from two obvious problems: on the one hand, the neohumanists subjected themselves to the nihilism of relativism with the claim that “the multiplicity of cultural values is the result of social market; the traditional and classic value systems have collapsed; the uniform norms have been replaced by multi values” (p. 17). This relativism was very close to turning itself into irrationalism. On the other hand, it had its logical difficulties. Rejecting the Western model of enlightenment and modernity, the authors situated an alternative modernity in the world of Chineseness. Their new modernity embraced three essential elements: neoconservatism, new pragmatism, and new enlightenment, but the question of how these elements should work together was left unanswered. In fact, the authors failed to realize an inherent contradiction embedded in neoenlightenment and neoconservatism. In their notion of neoconservatism, they recentralized the Chinese state and nation, in their words, “striving to put the international position of the state and nation as the focal point of thinking” (Zhang et al., 1994, p. 17). The reemphasis on nation and state was reminiscent of the traditional nationalism associated with collectivist cultural thinking. In 79

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fact, it was the very nationalism that Gao in the New Culture Movement adamantly attacked. This was the nationalism that suppressed individuality and that should be discarded in order to create a new citizenry. However, neoenlightenment reintroduced the individualism that neoconservatism didn’t allow: “Neo-enlightenment strives to sustain the spirit of ‘modernity’ in the last eighty years, continue the dialogue of enlightenment, and uphold individualism” (p. 17). Aside from this blatant contradiction in theorizing and rhetorically motivated self-defense, the authors were clearly leaning toward Chinese cultural tradition and took a position of negating Western culture. From the viewpoint of the reproduction processes of cultural modernity, the New Cultural Discussion formed an ironic link with Maoist cultural theory: the lack of an individual capable of critical and reflective thinking and of transforming that thinking to responsible social action. There is another issue related to cultural reproduction processes that is often neglected by students of these cultural movements. Some scholars have pointed out that the cultural theories of the Cultural Revolution and the Cultural Discussion formed a connection with the postmodern West. The Cultural Revolution gave enthusiasm and guidance to many postmodern thinkers, while the Cultural Discussion was motivated and inspired by popular postcolonial and postmodern theories (Guo, 1999; Xu, 1998; Shao, 1994, 1995). Still, there is a certain kind of risk and ambiguity in this connection, if a critical difference is not taken into account. While the contemporary reflection on “rational technologies and capitalism impulses” is against the tradition of modernity, this reflection or attack is limited to the realm of the academic circle, and is an aesthetic concern that is part of modernity. As some scholars (Huang, 1998; Woodside, 1998) observed, it stems from the idealist orientations of postmodernism in the humanities and from the economic “development fatigue” in the West. In warning about the danger of transplanting postmodernity into China out of the Western context, Woodside (1998) cautioned: “When Lyotard tells us that the first step toward achieving an idea and practice of justice is to recognize ‘the heteromorphous nature of language games’ . . . he runs the risk of imprisoning himself in forms of analytical idealism that only tenured professors, or would-be ones, could afford to love” (p. 130). Habermas (1985) had also pointed out in his critique of postmodern theorists that from the framework of modernity in the West the postmodern West is still the modern West in its economic and political realms; and the autonomous nature of postmodern discourse falls into the schemes of modernity not only in its orientation toward the expressive realm, but also in its rational arguments and reflections embodying reason and rationality. The very effort to argue rationality involves the act of rationality. But this is not the case in China. China’s postmodern discourse doesn’t have a realm of autonomy as it does in the West. It doesn’t really matter whether the postmodernists such as Jameson, Foucault, 80

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Althusser and the like affirmed the Cultural Revolution, for their revolt against capitalism was set against the robust discussion of modernity. With the coming of a new millennium and a new global society, the question of culture and its perceived role in China’s unfinished project of modernity once again confronts Chinese intellectuals. The previous study of three cultural movements of the twentieth century suggests that different theoretical frameworks and ideologies contributed to different understandings of communication, culture, and modernity. These different understandings, however, all shared a totalistic view of culture based on a traditional “either/or” dichotomous thinking. How to move out of this predominant mode of thinking and to reconceptualize Chinese culture in a new framework that recognizes and allows different value spheres without compromising modernization efforts will be both intellectually challenging and practically important. NOTES 1. For a lack of a better term, the author uses “cultural discussion” to loosely indicate the nationwide discussion of cultural issues in major journals such as Dushu [Reading], Ershiyi shiji [Twenty-First Century], Wenyi zhengming [Debates of Literature and Art]. 2. One can say that to change culture via ideology for China’s modernization became a common practice in Mao’s era. Following a series of ideological and political struggles such as the Yan’an Rectification Movement in the 1940s and the Anti-Rightist Campaign in the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution reached a high point in Mao’s indulgence in cultural politics. Granted, a myriad of factors accounted for Mao’s decision to launch the Cultural Revolution; one major reason was the rise of anti-Stalinism, the subsequent liberalization in the Soviet Union, and the “productionist” policies advocated by some of his comrades within the party. Mao became increasingly worried and convinced that these phenomena were the reactivation of older bourgeois elements in the new society and could only be prevented by the Cultural Revolution (Rodzinski, 1988). 3. On different occasions, this new cultural tendency was often referred to as “neohumanism,” “neoconservatism,” or “neoenlightenment.”

REFERENCES Bitzer, L. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1, 1–14. Calhoun, C. (1994). Neither gods nor emperors: Students and the struggle for democracy in China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chen, D. (1917). Kongzi zhi dao yu xiandai shenghuo [Confucianism and modern life]. Xin qingnian [New Youth], 2(3), 2–9. Cohen, P. (1974). Between tradition and modernity: Wang T’ao and reform in late Ch’ing China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 81

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Gao, Y. (1915). Guojia fei renshen zhi guisu [State is not the destiny for individual life]. Xin qingnian [New Youth], 1(4), 1–4. Gong, X. (1996). Wenge ji Mao Zedong de wei jijing zhuyi yishixingtai [The Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong’s pseudo-radicalism ideology], Beijing zhichun [Beijing Spring], 41, 35–42. Guo, J. (1999). Resisting modernity in contemporary China: The Cultural Revolution and postmodernism. Modern China, 25(3), 343–376. Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action, vol. I (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1985). Neoconservative culture criticism in the United States and West Germany: An intellectual movement in two political cultures. In R. Bernstein (Ed.), Habermas and modernity (pp. 78–94). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1987a). The theory of communicative action, vol. II (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1987b). The philosophical discourse of modernity: Twelve lectures (F. Lawrence, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (D. Krell, Trans.). San Francisco: HarperCollins. Hsu, I. (1995). The rise of modern China (5th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Hu, S. (1925). Dao yan [General introduction]. In J. Zao (Ed.), Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi [Compendium of modern Chinese literature] (pp. 2–22). Shanghai, China: Liangyou Press. Huang, P. (1998). Theory and the study of modern Chinese history: Four traps and a question. Modern China, 24(2), 183–208. Inkeles, A & Smith, D. (1974). Becoming modern: Individual change in six developing countries. Boston, MA: Little Brown. Joseph, W., Wong, C., & Zweig, D. (1991). Introduction: New perspectives on the Cultural Revolution. In W. Joseph, C. Wong, & D. Zweig (Eds.), New perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (pp. 9–16). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kang, Y. (1913a). Zhonghua jiuguo lun [On the salvation of China]. Bu ren [Cannot Bear It], 1, 1–3. Kang, Y. (1913b). Yi Kongzi wei guojia pei tianyi [Establishing Confucianism as a national religion in accord with heaven]. Bu ren [Cannot Bear It], 3, 1–4. Keenan, B. (1974). Educational reform and politics in early Republican China. Journal of Asian Studies, 33(2), 225–237. Lin, Y. (1979). The crisis of Chinese consciousness. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Lindbeck, J. (1961). Organization and development of science. In S. Could (Ed.), Sciences in communist China (pp. 1–19). Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science. Liu, K. (1996). “Is there an alternative to (capitalist) globalization? The debate about modernity in China,” Boundary 2, 23(3), 194–218. 82

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Liu, L. (1995). Translingual practice: Literature, national culture, and translated modernity—China, 1900–1937. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mao, Z. (1940/1967). On new democracy. In Selected works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. II (pp. 339–384). Beijing, China: Foreign Languages Press. McCarthy, T. (1987). Introduction. In Philosophical discourse of modernity (pp. v–xvii). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Rodzinski, W. (1988). The People’s Republic of China: A concise political history. New York: Macmillan. Shao, J. (1994). Dongfa zhi wu [The fallacy of orientalism]. Wenyi zhengming [Debates of literature and art], 4, 10–16. Shao, J. (1995). Shijimo de wenhua pianhang [The cultural deviation at the end of the century]. Wenyi zhengming [Debates of literature and art], 1, 24–35. Simons, H. (1970). Requirements, problems, and strategies: A theory of persuasion for social movements. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 56, 1–11. Suttmeier, R. (1980). Science policy and organization. In L. Orleans (Ed.), Science in contemporary China (pp. 25–44). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tao, G. (1918). Xin qingnian zhi xin daode [The new ethics of new youth]. Xin qingnian [New Youth], 4(2), 94–97. Wang, M., Chen, J., & Li, H. (1995). Jingsheng jiayuan hefang gongjian: tanhualu zhiyi [What’s wrong with building the spiritual world together: discussion two]. Dushu [Reading], 7, 55–65. Woodside, A. (1998). Reconciling the Chinese and Western theory worlds in an era of Western development fatigue: A comment. Modern China, 24(2), 121–134. Xu, B. (1998). From modernity to Chineseness: The rise of nativist cultural theory in post-1989 China. Positions, 6(1), 203–237. Xu, L., & Fan, D. (1982). Science and socialist construction in China. New York: M. E. Sharpe. Yu, Y. (1996). Jingtie wenge yitao jie mizuzhuyi huanhun [Watch out for the revival of the stuff of the Cultural Revolution through nationalism]. Retrieved February 15, 2001 from http://www.cnd.org/CR/ZK96/zk96.h28.html#1a. Zhang, F., Zhang, Y., & Wang, Y. (1994). Cong xiandaixing dao zhonghuaxing: xin zhishixing detanxun [From Modernity to Chineseness: Inquiry into a new model of knowledge], Wenyi zhengming [Debates of literature and art], 2, 10–20. Zhou, Z. (1918). Ren de wenxue [A humane literature]. Xin qingnian [New Youth], 5(6), 575–584. Zhu, X. (1999). Wusi yilai de liangge jingsheng “binzhao” [Two intellectual “diseases” since the May Fourth era]. Retrieved February 15, 2001 from http://www.cnd.org/HXWZ/CM99/cm9905a.hz8.1html#3.

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Part II
Chinese Communication in Gender, Family, and Media Contexts


5
Women and the Rhetorical Tradition in Premodern China: A Preliminary Sketch Mary M. Garrett

My wife is by nature addicted to literary and historical writing, and she is good at painting and calligraphy. She does not much care for housework, and after she removes her make-up, in the dim light of the lamp, she chants poetry without ceasing. . . . [After the Ming Dynasty fell in 1644 and we fled south] Dressed in coarse clothing and equipped with dusty cooking ware, she let her hair go uncombed until it startled the swallows, but she was peaceful and tranquil, and poems and essays filled her make-up box, the collection being called Red Chantings. It fully documents her seventeen years in exile. I have nothing of my own to add, except that my wife and I are good friends. She and I are on the wing together, like a pair of wild ducks or geese. My wife’s work is an inspiration for me. —Ding Shangzhao (1621–1700?), preface to his wife Wang Duanshu’s anthology Red Chantings [Yinhongji] (Chang & Saussy, 1999, pp. 765–766)

Researching the history and the cultural productions of Chinese women has become a burgeoning subfield in China studies, and an extraordinary woman such as Wang Duanshu, who worked with and against the gender constraints of the Chinese rhetorical tradition, now is the subject of critical attention. Understanding the gendered construction of rhetorical theories and practices is crucial for the comprehensive treatment of any culture’s rhetorical traditions, and those studying Chinese rhetoric equally need to be cognizant of the relations

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between gender and power, especially since the study of Chinese rhetoric is still at an early stage of research, canonization, and historiography. In what follows I will briefly survey how gender was conceptualized and instantiated in premodern (pre–twentieth century) Chinese culture. Then I will turn to the ways in which the rhetorical tradition incorporated and expressed these gender norms and ideals. Finally, I will discuss how women participated in this rhetorical tradition, negotiated it, took advantage of it, contested it, and attempted to subvert it. First, however, I should note that I define rhetoric here as the ways in which language and other symbol systems were used suasively and, also, the reflections on this process. In the Chinese case this means serious attention must be paid to various forms of poetry, which often was turned to self-justification, political commentary, or philosophical musing as well as aesthetic or personal expression. In traditional Chinese thought, gender is encoded in the most basic cosmological duality, that of yin and yang. Yang is associated with light, heat, activity, growth, strength, hardness, assertiveness, the outside, and the male, while yin is linked with dark, cold, quiescence, decay, weakness, softness, receptivity, the inside, and the female. The concepts gain flexibility by being relational; although the body of a man is yang and that of a woman yin, the upper part of each one’s body is yang in relation to the lower part, and the front is yang in relation to the back. This binary was also used dynamically, to describe basic cyclical alternations, such as day and night and the seasons. At the most abstract level of thought, the interdependence of yin and yang was explicitly acknowledged; both are equally necessary and valuable. In social relations, the yin/yang duality was interpreted to support a doctrine of separate spheres; women, as yin, naturally belonged to the “inside,” the household, while to men fell the activities of the “outside,” the world outside the household. The ideals for men’s and women’s roles, behaviors, and virtues reflected these assignments, ideals that were enunciated and elaborated in the Classics, in conduct books, and in biographies of exemplary men and women, and that were recognized by the state through honorary inscriptions, commemorative arches, and rewards to family members. Men were expected to marry and produce heirs and to carry out ancestor worship at the home altars. But their proper sphere was the “outside,” where they engaged in an occupation as well as contributing to public life. The ultimate goal, realized only by a fraction of the literate elite, was to bring fame to oneself and to one’s lineage by holding office. Writing provided another way to bring renown to one’s family; men who achieved literary distinction were highly esteemed. Women were defined along family lines, as daughter, wife, and mother. Beyond this, their occupations were those that could be done inside, primarily

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weaving, spinning, and sewing. The virtuous woman was chaste, loyal to her married family, self-sacrificing, compliant, and retiring. Women’s role as mother, especially as moral instructor to the children, was honored, and filial piety was to be demonstrated toward mothers as well as fathers. On the strictest interpretation, to the extent that speaking took place “outside” it was not appropriate for women. Writing, as an engagement with and even a display of the self to the outside world, fell under the same dictum. According to the “Inside Rules” chapter of the Book of Rites [Liji], a canonical text from the Han Dynasty (206 B. C. E.–220 C. E.), “The men should not speak of what belongs to the inside (of the house), nor the women of what belongs to the outside. . . . Things spoken inside should not go out, words spoken outside should not come in” (Legge, 1885/1967, pp. 454–455). It is crucial to note here that this objection to women’s participation in rhetorical activities is moral, not pragmatic. The issue is not whether women are capable of engaging in such activities, but whether they should do so; to do so is a violation of their gender roles that calls their character as women into question. Given this moral focus, it is not surprising that even woman’s speech inside the house was prescribed along gender lines; according to the didactic work Precepts for Women [Nujie] of Ban Zhao (female) (c.45–c. 155), “womanly words need be neither clever in debate nor keen in conversation. . . . To choose her words with care; to avoid vulgar language; to speak at appropriate times; and not to weary other (with much conversation) may be called the characteristics of womanly words” (Swan, 1932, p. 86). However, the didactic literature for women from the Han Dynasty did not speak with one voice. What were “appropriate times” for women to speak? A more generous interpretation comes in the Records of Outstanding Women [Lienu zhuan] (edited by Liu Xiang c.30 B. C. E.), a collection of about 125 episodes featuring women protagonists (for a translation see O’Hara, 1971). The criterion for inclusion is not fame; although some of the women were well-known historical figures, others are identified simply as “a mother of the state of Qi.” Rather, the principle of selection is morality; the first five chapters each showcase an incident illustrating a positive moral examplar, such as good mothers and chaste women, and the last consists of negative examples (the depraved). Although Ban Zhao was to proclaim that “womanly words need be neither clever in debate nor keen in conversation,” an entire chapter of Outstanding Women is devoted to “those able in reasoning and understanding (biantong),” women who use their eloquent reasoning to defend themselves or rescue their loved ones, to advise their husbands or to remonstrate with their rulers. But in the other chapters as well, the good woman justifies her ethical choices, upbraids her husband, son, or ruler for moral lapses, and achieves fame for herself and her family by doing so. 89

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These women were speaking from, and justifying themselves within, the ideals of Confucianism (rujia), but it was precisely their commitment to this stance and the failure of those around them to maintain it that permitted them to speak so forcefully. This licensing of reproach actually gave women quite a bit of latitude to speak up, to the point that even “Emperor Yang of the Sui (581–618) was bombarded with suggestions for self-improvement by his wife, a former princess of the Later Liang Dynasty (558–589)” (Spade, 1979, p. 32). The historical records also preserve cases reminiscent of those in Outstanding Women, in the sense that they report women speaking to rescue themselves, or more often, a family member, from injustice. Waltner (1997) notes that all but one of the petitions to the emperor preserved in Zhao Shijie’s (1628) collection Women’s History from the Past to the Present [Gujin nushi] are by wives pleading for the husband’s life (p. 235). Perhaps the most ingenious defense came from the famous poet Cai Yan, who was captured in 192 C. E. by northern nomads, and although already a widow, was forced to marry again. After she was ransomed and returned to China in 206 she was then given in marriage to Dong Si. When the ruler Cao Cao accused Dong Si of capital crimes, Cai Yan saved his life by asking Cao Cao whether she would be given yet another husband. The charges requiring defense were not always purely legal; when Huarui Furen was captured in 961 and questioned by Emperor Taizu as to why her husband, Prince Meng Xu of Shu, surrendered, she defended him from the implication of cowardice by composing a poem charging his troops with betraying him. Although these instances would seem to suggest considerable freedom of speech for “the good woman speaking well,” other, more material conditions mitigated against women’s participation in rhetorical activities. Despite the theoretical equality of yin and yang, in daily life women had much less access to cultural resources, little entrée to institutional, social, and economic sources of power, and many fewer degrees of freedom than men did. Marriage was exogamous and patrilocal, so that women were cut off from their own families, and visits to their natal families were discouraged. Women’s rights to inheritance, rights to property, and ability to get a divorce were all much more restricted than those of men—when they existed at all. Men exercised great legal power over their wives and children and received reduced penalties for beating or killing them. The institution of concubinage further reduced a woman’s influence over her husband. Patrilineal inheritance translated into great concern with women’s chastity and corresponding restrictions on their movements, perhaps expressed most egregiously in the practice of foot-binding, which began sometime during the Song Dynasty (960–1278). Most important for rhetoric in the sense of civic discourse, only men could take the examinations that were the gateway to civil service and political power and thus to the major arenas for political speaking and writing. 90

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With all these restrictions in mind, it is hardly surprising that women do not figure much in the records of rhetorical activities. It should be noted, though, that most Chinese people, both men and women, did not participate in rhetorical activities that required literacy and cultural capital. A vast divide separated the men as well as the women of a peasant family from the women in a gentry or elite family. Women of the privileged class were more likely to receive some education, especially since they were usually held responsible for the early or continuing education of their children. They also had relatively more resources, time, and social support to pursue learning and to compose. These status differences are signaled in the naming practices of the different social levels. A peasant farmer had only a surname (xing) and a personal name (ming), and his wife took his surname, being referred to simply as “Wife of X.” Women of the educated classes were referred to by their natal surname, as well as their personal names, and they also took or were accorded the same range of courtesy names (zi) and sobriquets or literary names (hao) as were their male literati counterparts. However, even elite women came to the rhetorical sphere with distinct disadvantages. On the whole, they tended to have less formal training, less worldly experience, fewer opportunities, and less economic, social, and legal power than men. In addition, the gender ideology weighed heavily against their participation in most rhetorical activities. Most genres of writing were, by default, already gendered male, in the sense that it was assumed they were authored by a man who was talking about male subjects and concerns, from a male subject position. There is one significant situation in which women were allowed to participate in political rhetoric and that is when an empress ruled as regent. A female regency was accepted as a temporary expedient when the ruler was incapacitated by illness or was suddenly removed or when the heir was too young. Female regents, like the emperor himself, issued edicts (zhao) (although not decrees [zhi]), held councils on state policy, and sat in judgment on proposals and petitions. As such they were, in a sense, both the ultimate audience and the ultimate speaker. The degree of actual power they wielded varied tremendously. An astute and ruthless regent could exercise control for decades by solidifying her power base, dominating the heir, and replacing him should he prove uncooperative. A number of female regents acted as de facto emperors until their deaths. However, a female regent, unlike the emperor, did not appear in public, and when she held court she sat behind a curtain or a screen, thereby preserving the “inside/outside” distinction. Temporary exigencies aside, the consorts of a reigning emperor were generally discouraged from involving themselves in political matters, although many did. The one striking exception to this generalization is the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1126). As Chung (1981) points out, during this period memorials to 91

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the throne on the subject of selecting the empress “discussed the necessity of educating the women selected since principal consorts had to assist the emperor in affairs of state.” Among the desired qualities were good family, feminine virtue, correct behavior, and “the capability of holding extensive discussions with ministers—in assisting the emperor in his rule, she had to be able to discuss matters of state with officials” (pp. 24–25). Ling (1985) notes that “Empress Liu, the wife of Zhen Zong, and Empress Cao, the wife of Emperor Ren Zong, were versed in the classics of history and could read the memorials without difficulty, and analyse and make decisions on the cases” (p. 148). The Northern Song was an exceptional period; generally the position of empress was much more circumscribed, due to the very justified fear of her usurping imperial privileges and enriching her natal clan. For this reason, the power of female regents was highly contested and varied historically. From Song times on, regents were described as issuing their edicts “with” (tong) the heir or incapacitated emperor. The Ming Emperor Taizu (r. 1368–1398) went so far as to prohibit female regents, a ruling that held from the first year of his reign until the end of the Ming Dynasty in 1644. A related, though less visible phenomenon is that of palace women acting as ghostwriters for the emperor. Palace women were brought inside the imperial residence to tutor the women of the court and manage the women’s quarters, and they sometimes worked their way into more powerful positions. Perhaps the best known is Shangguan Wan’er (664–710), who drafted edicts and acted as personal secretary to the Tang Empress Wu and continued to produce official documents while a consort of Wu’s successor, the Emperor Zhongzong; she also left a collection of her own writings. Similarly, Han Lanying “acted as a ghost writer for the Yu-lin Prince [of the Qi Dynasty] who occupied the throne from 493–494” (Spade, 1979, p. 27). However, this ghostwriting was never an institutionalized or even an approved practice. Such were the norms and customary roles for women as rhetors, at least so far as the moralizing literature is concerned. Of course, as didactic literature these works held up ideals, not descriptions of the range of actual practices. Women who were not of the privileged class could hardly hope to approach these standards. But the tirades of moralists in every generation also attest that women of the elite class often deliberately chose not to conform to them. They appeared in public, traveled, had social relations with men who were not family members, earned their living outside of the family structure, studied with male teachers, and circulated their own writings. Of course, women themselves varied in their desire to speak and be heard, to write and be read, and their husbands, fathers, and fathers-in-law varied in their tolerance for and support of their endeavors. This tolerance and support also varied historically. It is especially important not to read back the position of women in late imperial China onto the earlier periods, when women enjoyed much more free92

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dom, power, and privilege. Roughly speaking, the position of women, especially elite women, worsened from the Song Dynasty on, with the rise of neo-Confucianism and its more oppressive strictures for women. For instance, Ban Zhao, the author of the Precepts for Women mentioned earlier, came from a politically well-connected family and received an excellent education at a time when very few people were literate. After her father and elder brother died before finishing their History of the Han Dynasty [Han shu], the emperor asked her to move into the palace and complete it, which she did. She was a teacher to the palace women and to the Empress Lu, who reigned as regent from 106 to her death in 121, and Ban Zhao advised the empress during her regency. She also tutored the renowned (male) scholar Ma Rong (79–166). According to her biography she wrote argumentative pieces, commentaries, essays, and treatises, and two of her petitions to the throne still survive. Another striking example is Xie Daoyuan (c.342–405), who also belonged to a highly accomplished family. Although she is remembered now as an outstanding poet, she was praised in her biography (in the History of the Jin Dynasty [Jin shu]) for her erudition and intelligence as well as her prowess at debate and philosophical discussion. Like the moral exemplars of the Records of Outstanding Women, she outargued rebel soldiers and saved her grandchild’s life. An anecdote from her biography describes her negotiation of gender boundaries. “Once Ningzhi’s [Xie’s husband’s] younger brother Xianzhi was having a discourse with his guests, and was on the verge of losing the argument when Daoyun sent a maidservant to Xianzhi, saying ‘I would like to break the siege for the young master.’ She then hid behind a green silk screen and extended Xianshi’s original argument. None of the guests could defeat her” (Lee, 1994, p. 37). Late in her life, when a local literatus asked to converse with her, she still retained the curtain but met him without any of her male relatives present. Her biographers tell us that she answered his philosophical questions “logically, without hesitation,” and afterward both pronounced themselves heartened by this meeting of true spirits (Fang 646/1974, pp. 2516–2517). Other examples of women crossing what later became much more rigid gender boundaries are scattered throughout the dynastic histories and other records. For instance, the poet Xu Hui (627–650), who was installed as a “Lady of Talents” (cairen) at the court of Tang Taizong, wrote a memorial criticizing the emperor’s military policy that was received favorably. Moving to Buddhist homiletics, we find such phenomena as the daughter of Liu Jia of the Liu Song Dynasty, for whom “her family built a high lecture platform fitted with screens so that she could lecture to large assemblies of people” (Spade, 1979, p. 25). Gentry women of the Song Dynasty were notable for their high level of education, and it was not unusual for such a woman as Lady Guo “to petition the emperor repeatedly to confer honorable titles on her deceased husband” (Ling, 1985, p. 147). 93

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It was not until the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) that the slogan that “a lack of talent is virtue in a woman” gained currency. But Ko (1994) and others (Ebrey, 1993; Mann, 1997; Widmer, 1989) have uncovered interesting and important qualifications to this generalization, pointing to the rise in late imperial China of women’s literary societies, the emergence of “talented women” sections in local gazetteers, and the increasing value of a woman’s education and capabilities in the marriage market. In fact, it is in late imperial times that families began financing the publication of their female relative’s writings. Although most of these were collections of rather insipid poetry, there were occasionally such writers as Gu Ruopu (1592–c.1681), “a prolific essayist on statecraft and economics” (Ko, 1994, p. 139). In addition, the new ideal of “companionate marriage” encouraged educated women to act as helpmates to their male relatives in their rhetorical activities. For instance, Wang Duanshu (1621–c.1706) wrote many of her husband’s letters, petitions, and other documents, and Cai Wan (1695–1755) helped her husband, a high-ranking official, write his official papers. Even the didactic literature was contested. Ban Zhao’s Precepts for Women met with some resistance during its own time. The History of the Later Han [Hou Han shu] notes that her own sister-in-law, Cao Fengsheng, also a talented woman, wrote a text “objecting” (nan) to the Precepts. The Precepts, although occasionally anthologized with other moralizing texts for women, did not reach its full popularity until the Ming-Qing period. It was at this late period, when the ideological controls on women were very tight, that a commentator on the 1879 edition found the idea that Ban Zhao’s sister-in-law argued against the Precepts incomprehensible “What could be objected to in the Precepts for Women?!” he exclaimed, and solved the “problem” by positing that the passage was due to textual corruption. The Records of Outstanding Women, on the other hand, was very popular through the ages, perhaps because it embedded its morals in dramatic and often lurid stories, stories that lent themselves to illustration on walls and screens as well as on the printed page. The text was reissued, edited, and expanded many times through the centuries. However, by the late Ming Dynasty, “tales of filiality, suicide, self-sacrifice, and the cult of women’s purity progressively displaced the Learned Instructresses of the Lienu zhuan and early lienu stories” (Raphals, 1998, p. 257). How did women who wished to challenge the prevailing gender norms of the rhetorical tradition do so? One approach was simply to appropriate the masculine genres, stance, and voice. Li Qingzhao (1084–c.1151) was one of the few women who used poetry to express and argue for her political views. As one biographer put it, “her shi poems of political satire were strictly confined to the norm, both in form and contents. It is impossible to detect in these poems any trace of the gentley [sic], delicate sentiments which permeate her ci [lyric] po94

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etry. In other words, a reader, versed in classical poetry, would have taken her shi poems to have been written by a man” (Ling, 1985, p. 159). When women succeeded in this literary masquerade they were often lauded as “female scholars” or other forms of “honorary men.” Some few went further. There are scattered historical notices of women who passed as men, succeeded at the examinations, and held office until their discovery. This theme was reworked in several Ming and Qing dramas, some authored by women, although the most well known, Female Examination Graduate [Nu zhuangyuan], was written by a man, Xu Wei (1521–1593). The limits of such gender trespass have been succinctly summarized by Dorothy Ko, who remarks that “[i]nstead of challenging the ideology of separate spheres by mixing and redefining gender roles, these heroines encouraged their female readers to aspire to be more like men. No one wrote a play called Male Daughter-in-law admonishing men to emulate the sacrificial housewife. Not only were male concerns in the public domain deemed superior, the theoretical separateness of male and female worlds was reinforced” (1994, p. 140). The religious life might seem to offer a more promising alternative, since Buddhist and Daoist nuns in many respects stepped outside the conventional gender roles. By taking vows of chastity, living outside the home, and redefining their family ties (for instance, by taking religious names), Buddhist nuns reshaped their gender roles and expectations, although they did not escape them completely. Unfortunately, there are very few records of these women, the primary one being Baochang’s Lives of the Nuns [Biqiuni zhuan] (for translations, see Tsai, 1994; Li, 1981). This work features noteworthy nuns from c.335 to its date of compilation, c.516. These nuns were notable according to Buddhist standards; they were unusually pious, extremely skilled at mediation, steeped in the scriptures, or made extraordinary sacrifices to demonstrate their faith. The factuality of these biographies is questionable on some points, but they reveal the much greater range of rhetorical practices that nuns were at least imagined to engage in. In theory, nuns had some time and resources for study and some freedom to travel, although in reality nuns were less well supported than monks, and subject to their supervision as well. Nuns were forbidden to teach monks, but they could and did teach and preach to other nuns and lay devotees, both male and female, and famous nuns drew disciples. When they spoke they addressed their audiences directly, not from behind a screen. Some nuns were famous for their preaching and were said to attract audiences of hundreds, while others were renowned for their scriptural exegesis. Miaozhi, for example, was asked by Emperor Wu of the Qi (483–493) to lecture on Buddhist texts. “As she began and carried out the lectures, several times the emperor personally attended, asking questions without limit. Miaozhi made connections and distinctions, from the first neither losing a point nor being stumped. The emperor praised her again and again, and the 95

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four groups [monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen] very respectfully acknowledged her learning” (Tsai, 1994, p. 73). In some instances such erudite and eloquent nuns became close to members of the royal house, counseling the ruler on spiritual issues and, sometimes, worldly politics as well. For instance, the nun Sengji (c.329–397) is described as “eloquent in discussing state affairs with the emperor [Kangdi, r.343–345], who treated her with great respect” (Li, 1981, p. 39). There is no evidence of any distinctive style for the rhetorical activities of these women; rather, they were evaluated according to the same standards as were the monks. When challenged, they had to respond intelligently and immediately—hesitation was a sign of confusion, and silence an admission of defeat. Occasionally we get a glimpse of these early nuns as engaging in that most masculine of activities, disputation. One of the disciplines of nun Jingxings was described in passing as “a very intelligent and accomplished nun who was extraordinarily competent in disputation [bian]” (Tsai, 1994, p. 99). The nun Dan Hui attained much of her spiritual realization on her own, but without certification by a recognized teacher her achievement was subject to attack. “Various well-known masters of Buddhism at the time tried to test her ability through argument, but none of them could defeat her” (Li, 1981, p. 121). Records of nuns after the sixth century are sparse, and even when their writings are mentioned, the texts themselves are usually lost. One exception is the recently rediscovered Collected Sayings [Yulu] of Zhiyuan Xinggang (1597–1654), a woman who became a recognized Chan master. Like the nuns noted for their preaching, she “appears to have been a charismatic and eloquent teacher, and people came from all over to listen to her sermons and dharma talks” (Grant, 1996, p. 63). She, too, had to demonstrate and defend her spiritual attainments through disputation. “Xinggang’s biographers make mention of the many ‘men of letters, scholars of the brush and knowers of the world’ as well as Buddhist monks, who came not to sing her praises but to engage Master Xinggang in philosophical debate. Ultimately, they were forced to ‘sheathe their swords and put away their knives’ and suddenly found themselves stuttering and feeling foolish” (p. 64). Zhiyuan Xinggang, like the earlier Buddhist nuns, succeeded in a masculine rhetorical tradition by conforming to its standards, not by reworking them or speaking “in a different voice.” She, too, was labeled an “honorary man” (zhangfu) (Grant, 1996, pp. 72–73), through her achievements, again reinforcing the superiority of the masculine. There is one area in which some women worked actively and publicly to raise the status of women and that is in the maneuvers of empresses, especially regents, seeking to consolidate and extend their power. Their concerns may have been more personal and even self-serving than ideological, but they are still very illuminating of the limitations of the gender system. No empress attempted to question or overturn the gender system, even though she herself 96

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might have been ruling the empire. However, several of them attempted to equalize the role of male and female by manipulating the rituals that legitimated and celebrated the imperial power. For example, when the Tang Emperor Gaozong (r.650–683) performed the momentous feng and shan sacrifices, “[a]lthough there was no precedent whatsoever for the participation of women in the ceremonies, the empress [Wu, then his consort], defying all tradition, planned to play a major role in order to lend legitimacy to her status as equal partner with the emperor, and she led a second procession of the imperial consorts and women related to the imperial class” (Twitchett & Wechsler, 1979, p. 259). Similarly, the Song Empress Dowager Liu performed the ancestral worship at the imperial temple with the emperor and did the springtime plowing ritual with him. No doubt to forestall such tactics, the Qing authorities decreed that when a female regent ruled, the princes were to perform the ancestral worship, and such ceremonies as the springtime plowing were “temporarily suspended.” The Empress Wu went furthest in endeavoring to raise the status of women, as is discussed in detail by Paul (1989). The empress began governing as regent in 660, and in 690 went so far as to declare herself emperor. During her long rule she pioneered several innovations; she set up ancestral temples for her mother’s clan, and for her own mother in particular, and she pronounced that the mourning period for the mother should be the same as that for the father. She also sponsored the writing of biographies of famous women which, unfortunately, are now lost. An astute rhetorician, Empress Wu drew on all the resources of Confucianism and Buddhism to legitimize her position and, eventually, her self-declared ascension as emperor. Capitalizing on the Confucian veneration of the mother, she styled herself “Holy Mother, Divine and August Empress.” She also identified herself as both a Boddhisattva and a Cakravartin; the former is a Buddha who reincarnates to aid sentient beings and may appear as either male or female, the latter is the Buddhist ruler who ushers in an era of universal peace. However, in 690, when she moved from acting as regent to declaring herself sovereign and establishing a new dynasty, she changed her title from “August Empress” (huanghou) to the traditional “August Emperor” (huangdi). She dispensed with the screen when holding court and, like Empress Lu of the Han, appeared frequently in public. Despite the considerable accomplishments of her long reign, Chinese historians of the premodern period reviled Empress Wu, and her attempts at elevating the position of women were all quickly undone. Empress Wu shows the possibilities and, arguably, the limit conditions for changing the terms under which women participated in the rhetorical tradition. Acting on what must have been deeply felt personal beliefs, she flew in the face of tradition and acted to elevate the status of women. But she did not address the gender roles that still discouraged women from speaking, writing, and acting as 97

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men were permitted to; she violated them herself, but she did not attempt to rework the gender code in ways that would justify her violations. Because gender was deeply embedded in the premodern Chinese cosmology and this conceptual framework pervaded Chinese thought, questioning the existence or the characterization of yin and yang would have been an act of cultural revision that would have been truly revolutionary. This word “revolution” brings us to the modern period in Chinese history, beginning in the late nineteenth century. The first few decades of the twentieth century witnessed changes that expanded the rhetorical opportunities open to women, as well as nonliterati men; the gradual abandonment of the classical language in favor of the vernacular (baihua), the ending of the exclusionary imperial examination system in 1905, the growth of the popular press (newspapers, circulars, journals), and an increasing commitment to universal education. One of the revolutionary ideas of the era was gender equality, and during the 1911 revolution some women joined in as speakers, organizers, and activists. There appeared feminist journals written by and for women, on women’s political and social issues, the first being the Zhongguo nubao [Chinese Women] of the revolutionary martyr, writer, and charismatic public speaker Qiu Jin. (Perhaps the most poignant rhetorical production of the 1911 revolution was the patriotic and nationalist manifesto of the Shanghai prostitutes, dedicating themselves to service of the cause, which is translated in Ono, 1978, pp. 78–79). Later improvements in women’s legal, social, and economic status also enabled wider access to rhetorical activities: among these were the marriage laws of 1950, which outlawed concubinage and bigamy, granted women the right to divorce and to remarriage, and gave women (and men) freedom of choice in marriage; the legal safeguarding of women’s rights to own, inherit, and dispose of property; the freedom to travel; and the admission of women to university education. Of course, just as these reforms have advanced slowly and unevenly against deeply ingrained patriarchal patterns, so too did the engagement of Chinese women in rhetorical activities. As Larson (1998) notes, in modern and even contemporary Mainland China, “literature and culture have continued to retain some of their traditional masculine prestige. Thus women writers constantly negotiate a fine line between writing as a man and thereby claiming their own share of the tradition, and writing as a woman and thereby perhaps producing a modern subjectivity but at the risk of demeaning their labor” (p. 206). The gender norms of the traditional period have not lost all their power; “[p]aradoxically, the liberatory socialist position, which imposed a nongendered standard secretly gendered as male, corresponded in at least one way to the Confucian doctrine of separate spheres” (p. 6). Despite its overly ambitious scope, this chapter has only begun to explore how Chinese women interacted with the rhetorical norms and practices of their 98

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culture. Many historical materials still have not been scrutinized with an eye to the rhetorical activities of women; for instance, the records of religious Daoism await such attention. Popular writings, drama, and novels also have been barely mined as sources for reconstructing norms, attitudes, and expectations. These fictional sources pose special challenges of interpretation, given that characters in them may represent unrealized ideals, culturally repressed desires, or comedic stereotypes. However, careful readings of such popular materials, as well as further recovery and reconsideration of nonfictional materials, promise great rewards for understanding the interactions between gender and rhetoric in traditional China.

REFERENCES Baochang (c.516/1924–32). Biqiuni zhuan. In Takakusu Junjiro et al. (Eds. and comps), Taisho shinshu daizokyo. 85 vols. Tokyo: Taisho Issaikyo Kankokei, 1924–32. Chang, K., & Saussy, H. (Eds.). (1999). Women writers of traditional China: An anthology of poetry and criticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chung, P. (1981). Palace women in the Northern Sung 960–1126. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Ebrey, P. (1993). The inner quarters: Marriage and the lives of Chinese women in the Sung period. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fang, X. et al. (646/1974). Jinshu. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Grant, B. (1996). Female holder of the lineage: Linji Chan master Zhiyuan Xinggang. Late Imperial China, 17(2), 51–76. Ko, D. (1994). Teachers of the inner chambers: Women and culture in seventeenth-century China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Larson, W. (1998). Women and writing in modern China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lee, L. X. H. (1994). The virtue of yin: Studies on Chinese women. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Legge, J. (Trans.) (1885/1967). Li chi: Book of rites. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1967. Li, J. H. (1981). Biographies of Buddhist nuns: Pao-chang’s Pi-chiu-ni-chuan. Osaka: Tohokai, 1981. Ling, C. (1985). Li Qingzhao: The moulding of her spirit and personality. In A. Gerstlacher (Ed.), Women and literature in China (pp. 141–164). Bochum, West Germany: Studienverlag Brockmeyer. Mann, S. (1997). Precious records: Women in China’s long eighteenth century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. O’Hara, A. (1971). The position of women in early China. Taipei: Mei Ya Publications. Ono, K. (1978/1989). Chinese women in a century of revolution, 1850–1950. (J. Fogel, Ed. and Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Paul, D. (1989). Empress Wu and the historians: A tyrant and saint of classical China. In N. Falk & R. Gross (Eds.), Unspoken worlds: Women’s religious lives in non-Western culture (pp. 145–154). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. 99

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Raphals, L. (1998). Sharing the light: Representations of women and virtue in early China. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Spade, B. (1979). The education of women in China during the Southern Dynasties. Journal of Asian Studies, 1,15–41. Swan, N. (1932). Pan Chao: Foremost woman scholar of China. New York: Russell and Russell. Tsai, D. (1994). Lives of the nuns: Biographies of Chinese Buddhist nuns from the fourth to the sixth centuries. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Twitchett, D., & Wechsler, H. (1979). Kao-tsung (reign 649–83) and the empress Wu: The inheritor and the usurper. In D. Twitchett (Ed.), The Cambridge history of China. Vol. 3. Sui and T’ang China, 589–906, Part 1 (pp. 242–279). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waltner, A. (1997). Writing her way out of trouble: Li Yuying in history and fiction. In E. Widmer & K. Chang (Eds.), Writing women in late imperial China (pp. 221–241). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Widmer, E. (1989). The epistolary world of female talent in seventeenth-century China. Late Imperial China, 10, 1–43.

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6
Creating a Female Language: Symbolic Transformation Embedded in Nushu Lin-Lee Lee

“Men dare to leave home to brave life in the outside world. But we women are no less courageous. We can create a language they can’t understand” —Quinn, 1991.

Imagine the situation of an oppressed group of illiterate and uneducated persons, most of whom are unable to walk, all of whom are confined to their homes, who lack any financial resources, religious authority, or political power, and whose only means to slightly improved status is based on accidents of biology. Imagine, then, that this group creates its own oral and written language that is transmitted over a thousand years from one generation to another, a language that transforms their place of confinement into a secret, special space in which a literature is written and jointly performed, a literature that enables these oppressed women to form a community of equals in which they can express their true feelings, create symbolic mobility, and write autobiographies for themselves in a culture that frequently treats them as interchangeable “flowers.”1 In 1958, a village woman from Shangjiangxu, Jiangyong, southern Hunan Province of China, visited a relative in Beijing and spoke a language that was unintelligible to others, an event that led to the recovery of Nushu or “Women’s Script,” an allegedly thousand-year-old female language sung and chanted by rural women over their needlework. The discovery of Nushu in the 1980s by Chinese scholars attracted other scholars who endeavored to decipher the cul-

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tural significance of Nushu.2 Most of them examined Nushu from sociological and anthropological perspectives (Gong, 1986a, 1986b, 1991; H. Huang, 1986; X. Huang, 1986; S. Xiao, 1986; Xie, 1991a, Xie 1991b, 1994; Zhao, 1992; Zhao & Gong, 1990; Zhao, Cheng, & Chang, 1994). Some scholars investigated Nushu‘s distinct linguistic functions (Chiang, 1991; Shi, Bai, & Zhao, 1994; Zan, 1994), and others alluded to Nushu‘s literary aspects (Chen, 1986; Liu & Hu, 1994; Silber, 1992, 1994, 1995; Tsai, 1993; Zhao & Gong, 1990; Zhao, Cheng, & Chang, 1994). None of these studies treated Nushu from a rhetorical perspective; my study is the first attempt to do so. Although opposed to Western forms of rhetorical practice, most studies in Chinese rhetoric do not take up the issue of gender. Jensen (1987, 1992), Garrett (1993a, 1993b, 1997), Lu (1993–1994), Lu & Frank (1993), Oliver (1969), X. Xiao (1996), and others’ contributions to the field of Chinese rhetoric tended to emphasize masculine forms of speech. Yet any analysis of the rhetoric of Asian women indicates that there is a rich repertoire awaiting explanation. Many communication scholars in the West, such as Campbell (1973, 1980, 1986, 1991), Dow (1992), Tonn & Kuhn (1993), and others shed light on women’s discourses in many aspects. Most of their work concentrated on the women’s liberation movements through which various women rhetors skillfully utilized rhetoric to meet their intended goals. Yet the dearth of scholarship on international forms of suasive discourse suggests a Eurocentric bias that overlooks other women’s discourse that may expand feminist rhetorical theory. The situations under which women of Shangjiangxu, southern Hunan Province, China lived suggest how an unusual suasive discourse, Nushu, came into being. This chapter adds a new voice to the existing scholarship and attempts to facilitate our understandings of non-Western female rhetoric.3 The secondary sources from which I have surveyed have approximately translated available 243 scripts from original Nushu to Hanzi, or “Standard Chinese.” In this chapter, I rely on 14 representative Nushu scripts of 10 extant genres translated by Chiang (1991) from Nushu to Hanzi and from Hanzi to English.4 I first describe the historical context in which Nushu was developed, including geography, religion, and cultural norms, particularly those related to the status of women. I use Kenneth Burke’s concept of symbolic transformation to analyze Nushu‘s rhetorical effects. Ultimately, I propose that Nushu, which emerged out of the oppressive circumstances of women’s lives, became a symbolic means through which women created a symbolic space in which they transformed the social constraints into their opportunities, a symbolic voice in which they could express their true feelings clearly and directly to cry out against the Confucian principles that condemn women to inferiority, ignorance, and dependence, and a symbolic ritual sisterhood in which a sisterhood 102

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of equals listened, responded, and joined them in creating a discourse that reflected a distinctive women’s culture.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Scholars asserted that Nushu was widely practiced in Shangjiangxu Township, Jiangyong County, southern Hunan Province of China, for more than one thousand years. Shangjiangxu sits along the Xiao River, which later merges with the Xiang River and flows north into the Yangtze River. The known Nushu area, with a rice-farming economy and a population of roughly twenty thousand, was surrounded by mountains on three sides and therefore isolated. Shangjiangxu embraced both the Han majority and the Yao minority ethnic communities, and the two cultures were intertwined in the people’s daily practices. Some features were consistent with Han Confucian ideology, such as the patriarchal lineage system, wet rice agriculture, and the Han attire, but other cultural practices, like the worship of the Yao deity, hunting and gathering practices, Yao legends in embroidery design, and the marriage residence pattern, suggested Yao origins (Chiang, 1991, pp. 27, 35–37; Silber, 1995, p. 42). The combination of Han and Yao cultures generated distinctive ethical norms for the people of Shangjiangxu. Prior to 1949, the dominant religion in Shangjiangxu was Taoism. Taoist priests presided over funerals and religious rituals to exorcise illness. Taoist festivals were associated with Yao goddesses, such as Panhu, Gupo, Hwapo, Guanyin, Mazu, Qixinggu, and Furenma.5 In addition, several important occasions for encouraging the practice of Nushu, included Nuer Jie, or “women’s days”; Douniu Jie, or “woman’s bullfighting day”; Chuiliang Jie, or “cooling days”; and the ghost festival.6 Celebrated and designed exclusively for women by women, these festivals provided settings for performing Nushu. Despite some religious elements that celebrated women, the lives of women were profoundly controlled, and the conditions under which they lived were quite oppressive. The culture of Shangjiangxu was a Confucian patriarchal system, in which men had a higher social status, and women were omitted from the genealogies of their natal families. Liu & Hu (1994) and Silber (1992, 1994, 1995) addressed that like many Chinese women, women in Shangjiangxu were ruled by the Chinese “cult of womanhood”—the three obediences and the four virtues of Confucianism. Three obediences instructed a woman to obey male figures—father before marriage, husband after marriage, and son after the death of her husband; the four virtues advised her to be faithful, diligent, cautious in speech, and modest in manner. An ideal woman was the one who remained private and apart from the public realm. According to Fan (1996), a double bind sanctioned by Confucianism was imposed on women of Shangjiangxu: “Women should marry only once; men could have many wives” 103

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(p. 102). Given the cultural norms, a woman’s status could be slightly improved by bearing sons to her husband’s family. Literacy was not available to most Chinese women in the past, except for some rare women of the gentry who were educated by their fathers, brothers, or husbands. Garrett (1997) argued that becoming a Buddhist nun was another institutionalized venue, in which Chinese women could reshape their gender roles and expectations and eventually influence rhetorically; however, this religious pursuit was not popular among women of Shangjiangxu. Lack of literacy disempowered women politically and prevented them from engaging in activities outside the domestic realm. The cultural norms deprived women of educational opportunities and located them as subordinates to their male counterparts (Liu & Hu, 1994, p. 314; Silber, 1992, p. 58). In addition, the foot-binding custom physically limited these women (Liu & Hu, 1994, pp. 316–317).7 H. Chiu (1994) stated, “Staying at home with their feet bound, they lived out their lives as second-class citizens dependent first on their families and then on their husbands” (p. 50). Foot binding along with the confinement embedded in Confucian principles limited their mobility, excluded them from contacts with the outside world, and restricted them to household chores and embroidery. Ritual sisterhood greatly affected the social relations of women in Shangjiangxu. There were two formalized non-kin sisterhood: (1) tongnian, or “same year,” or laotong, or “old same,” involving two girls of the same age and (2) jiebai zimei, or “sworn or ritual sisters,” found between two or more girls of different ages. This sisterhood, usually initiated at a young age with similar socioeconomic background, could last after marriage or possibly terminate due to the loss of contact caused by the marriage. Sometimes ritual sisterhood as evidenced in Nushu might be formed among older women after marriage. Unlike other formalized relationships (husband/wife, father/son, elder/younger brother, ruler/minister, teacher/student) in Confucian ideology, the ritual sisterhood was the only non-hierarchical dyad grounded in sameness and equality (Silber, 1995, p. 88). The most abundant portion of Nushu consisted of Sanzhaoshu, or “Marriage Congratulation or Wedding Text.” Sanzhaoshu, usually in the forms of books made of cloth, handkerchiefs, and fans, were produced during the month before the wedding when all the bride’s ritual sisters spent the nights in her upstairs loft. Sanzhaoshu played an important role in the distinctive marriage customs. A wedding ceremony in Shangjiangxu lasted for three days. On the third day before the wedding, all the village women and girls skilled at singing laments gathered at the bride’s home. The bride sang about her sorrow for leaving home, and those singing with her alternately repeated her lines and persuaded her to face the misery in marriage. On the second day, all other friends, relatives, and the wedding band from the groom’s family arrived and watched the bride and bridesmaids singing farewell lamentations. On the day before the wedding, fe104

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male relatives came to look over the bride’s needlework and all the Sanzhaoshu. Sanzhaoshu was delivered to the bride in her marital home on the third day after the marriage and was to be shared among the females of her marital home. Unlike other wedding discourse full of congratulations, Sanzhaoshu narrated the departure scene, the relationship of the author to the bride, the bride’s new role, and instructions for how the bride should deal with the transition. Silber (1994) stated, “Sanzhaoshu . . . constitutes just one of many ritualized wedding practices that negotiated the conflicts engendered by village exogamous marriage” (p. 60). Sanzhaoshu, dealing with the possible disruption of relationships affected by marriage, addressed triple audiences—the bride, all the women of her natal home, and the women of her marital home. For the bride herself, Sanzhaoshu renegotiated her relationships with the writers of the texts as they were affected by her marriage. The second audience, all the females of her natal home, used Sanzhaoshu to persuade the bride to face the hardships in marriage and to reflect the bride’s prestige. Direct address to in-laws by the second audience permeated Sanzhaoshu, including exhortations to forgive the shortcomings of the bride and her insufficient dowry or a combination of apology for and praise of her natal family’s reputation. For the third audience, the women of the bride’s marital home, Sanzhaoshu represented the bride’s social value since the quality of the texts reflected the quality of her people. The ritualistic process of performing Sanzhaoshu functioned in two ways. First, it commemorated a woman’s life before marriage and helped her to make a transition to the marriage life. Second, it functioned as the bride’s letter of introduction to her marital home with praise of her natal family and her sworn sisterhood. NUSHU Readers may find Hanzi a helpful and pragmatic way to understand Nushu. Hanzi, or “standard Chinese characters,” the official language in China known as Mandarin, was created by men for men. As Garrett (1999) described, “Most of the surviving written materials are records of, by, and for the elite of Chinese society, the 5 to 10% of the population that was literate and could afford books. These materials concentrate on issues of concern to this well-off, educated, male elite: statecraft, ethics, ritual, and, history, all filtered through the perspective of enacting and maintaining a Confucian society” (p. 60). Chiang (1991) and Garrett (1997, 1999) argued that Hanzi literacy was accessible to some women of the gentry, and women of the laboring and peasant classes were excluded from Hanzi education. Nushu assimilates to Hanzi in grammar usage, sentence structure, and other semantic functions but differs from Hanzi in both its written and oral forms.8 Composed, carried, and practiced exclusively by female rhetors, Nushu, adapting the ideographic features from syntactic Hanzi, is a phonetic language writ105

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ten in a mosquito or diamond-shaped pattern, from upper right to lower left, as opposed to the square space occupied by a Hanzi graph. For instance, pen is written as“ ” in Hanzi, whereas it is written as “ ” in Nushu. Nushu graphs are so drastic and distinctive from Hanzi and any local language spoken in Jiangyong that they would not be easily recognizable and readable to anyone in the Hanzi system unless carefully examined. Unlike Hanzi’s written presentation, Nushu involved participatory oral performance. The presentation of Nushu incorporated singing and chanting, integrating both forms into one unifying act. Nushu was delivered in a context in which reading/chanting/singing was a social event. Chanting Nushu was neither a silent nor a solitary activity but invited responses from readers and audiences. Hanzi recorded government records, educational materials, genealogies, birthdates for engagements, wedding announcements, and ancestral plaques at funerals; Nushu narrated the life events of rural women, such as autobiographies, biographies, consolation letters and responses, prayers, and so on. Men’s formal instruction in Hanzi strengthened Confucian values, whereas Nushu satisfied women’s psychological needs through oral instructions. Hanzi symbolized men’s control over women and reinforced the socially accepted oppressions; Nushu, as an outlet, reflected and responded to these oppressions. Allegedly, the development of Nushu language was most likely to be initiated 1,000 years ago, and just who were the creators of Nushu has been disputed and remained unknown.9 Nushu is no longer practiced as a unique female language in Hunan Province today. The demise of Nushu was attributed to five factors: Taoist belief in the afterlife, the implementation of the New Marriage Law in 1950, the institution of communes in 1958 and women’s entry into the workforce, the “Destroying the Four Olds” campaign of the Cultural Revolution, and the impact of television. Fortunately, the rediscovery of Nushu in 1980s gained some attention from Chinese government and scholars, and that enabled some Nushu scripts to be written and survived.10 Although it was created and practiced exclusively by women for women, Nushu was accessible to men. That is, men could hear it and understand it if carefully examined.11 Most men showed little interest in Nushu or in the oral performance associated with it (Chiang, 1991, p. 1; McLaren, 1996, p. 394; Xie, 1991a, p. 1859). Some men ignored Nushu in the belief that Nushu had no impact on the dominant literacy and treated it as a trivial feminine activity, like embroidery (Silber, 1992, p. 58). Others felt that the emotional expression intrinsic to the reading and chanting of Nushu contradicted masculine behavior (Chen, 1986, p. 52). Generally, men did not prevent women from implementing Nushu, nor did they regard its practice as a threat to their position of power. Just as Hanzi excluded women from the men’s world, Nushu segregated men from women’s special space. 106

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SYMBOLIC TRANSFORMATION EMBEDDED IN NUSHU Symbolic transformations effected when material change is impossible are, perhaps, the most dramatic examples of symbolic action, the point at which symbols become a kind of reality. The satisfaction that is made possible through joint creation and performance of a special kind of symbolic action enables participants to endure the constrained conditions of their lives. The view of symbolic action is echoed in Language as Symbolic Action. There Burke (1966) wrote: “As for poetics pure and simple: I would take this motivational dimension to involve the sheer exercise of ‘symbolicity’ (or ‘symbolic action’) for its own sake, purely for love of the art.” He notes that sheer symbolicity is not really possible; complications inevitably arise: “Even if you would write a drama, for instance, simply for the satisfaction of writing a drama, you must write your drama about something. . . . And even though your drama is still motivated poetically by the love of the exercising for its own sake, it becomes so interwoven with the problems you symbolically resolve, people tend to see these problems as the motivating source of your activity” (p. 29). These comments imply a close relationship between literature and symbolic action. Nushu, as an example, reiterates Burke’s rhetorical notions of symbolic transformation in many aspects. I argue that Nushu can be understood as a beautiful example of Burke’s symbolic transformation by analyzing how the village women used Nushu to create a symbolic space, a symbolic voice, and a symbolic sisterhood of equals. Ultimately, I shed light on how the symbolic transformation allowed the rural women to alleviate the pain, to validate each individual’s identity, to create a distinct atypical communication mode, and to invite participatory performance through the creation of literacy.

Symbolic Space—“Upstairs” The refusal to conform to the traditional mode of literacy revealed women’s eagerness to create an alternative symbolic space. Burke’s symbolic transformation helps to decipher the utopian space derived from practicing Nushu. This utopian sphere provided a therapeutic function to meet the psychological exigencies of participants and allowed them to dissociate from the constraints in the environment. Similar to Virginia Woolf’s notion of “creating a separate woman’s room,” Nushu practitioners underscored their own separate, special space and symbolically transformed “upstairs” from a constraint into an opportunity. Located above the main floor, upstairs meant to segregate women from men to ensure women’s purity before marriage and to deprive them of opportunities for education, religious authority, and politics. The “upstairs,” the area of the house in which women were confined, was symbolically transformed into their own territory where men were not allowed to enter and where female relatives or ritual sisters gathered to do needlework, chatted, and, most important, 107

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shared similar experiences, which were understood in the community of equals created by their ritual sisterhood. As described in one Marriage Congratulation, “In the old days [before marriage] we would sit upstairs and console one another when we had troubles” (Chiang, 1991, p. 348). After the marriage of one sworn sister, “upstairs” remained for the remaining ritual sisters as an intimate location in which they expressed their innermost feelings; for the departing sister, upstairs symbolized separation from her familiar social group. An unknown writer described in this way, “I go upstairs and cry. Without you by my side I am sad” (Chiang, 1991, p. 346). Nianglou, or “upstairs for women,”12 became a sacred and secretive place where Nushu was produced: “I go upstairs and think of writing a letter to you” (Chiang, 1991, p. 345). In Prayer to a Dead Cousin, “upstairs” allowed the author symbolically to resurrect her deceased cousin in her dream: “I went to sleep with a troubled heart. Suddenly I saw you coming to my upstairs” (Chiang, 1991, p. 427). On the following day an artificial “flower tower” was burned as a memorial;13 it symbolically consoled the living as it commemorated the dead. Nushu enabled these rural oppressed women to turn upstairs into a separate, special space in which they expressed their inner thoughts and feelings freely, a space in which they taught each other to read and write their own language, and a space in which they were treated equally, listened to, understood, and consoled with respect and reasoning.

Symbolic Voice The unequal treatment assigned to gender deprived women of equal status and submerged them in subordination to patriarchal principles. Chinese women appeared worthless, powerless, pitiable, and dependent. Folksong before Marriage described the life of a daughter at her natal home, showing that a woman’s status before marriage was not as harsh as that revealed in Folksong after the Marriage, which portrayed the wife’s status as a domestic servant who performed the household chores under the eyes of her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law (Chiang, 1991, pp. 82–87). Similarly, an unknown author wrote, “A girl leaves her home and she is unwanted” (Chiang, 1991, p. 86). Deprived of equal status in comparison with men and with other female relatives in their marital families, married women were treated as servants who were expected to listen to others and to whom no one listened. Nushu attempted to resist gender inequality as revealed in one Marriage Congratulation: “If I were a son, I could carry on my father’s name. . . . I am angry for being a useless woman. We should not abandon our mother’s home” (Chiang, 1991, pp. 347, 352). A plea to “listen to me” permeated many Nushu discourses. The rhetors deliberately expressed their eagerness to be heard and called on audiences to listen to them. “Please read it carefully and listen to my words. . . . I write to urge you. Please listen to me,” wrote an unknown writer (Chiang, 1991, 108

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pp. 347–348). Similarly, Hu Cizhu said, “I speak the truth. Listen to me” in her Consolation Letter (Chiang, 1991, p. 378). Likewise, in her Invitation to Become Ritual Sisters, Yi Nianhwa noted, “I write to you. Please listen to me” (Chiang, 1991, p. 394), and the receiver, He Xijing, responded, “I write to console you. Listen to me” (Chiang, 1991, p. 402). In her Autobiography, Zhou Shuoqi described the dissatisfaction with the male support group and the eagerness to seek support from her ritual sisters to vent her sorrows (Chiang, 1991, pp. 357–362). Their intended audiences, ritual sisters, helped to relieve their pain by listening to them. When the traditional support system no longer satisfied their needs, a new rhetoric—Nushu—was created to meet the psychological exigencies that they faced. In contrast to cultural norms that instructed women not to speak in public, Nushu, as an outlet, became a symbolic voice through which women spoke and were heard. This symbolic voice relieved the oppressions of their lives with help from their ritual sisterhood to enable women to create their own language, to strengthen the social bond with ritual sisters, and to rewrite the conventional image of women as pitiable, powerless, dependent, and useless.

Symbolic Sisterhood of Equals The establishment of ritual sisterhood through writing Nushu undoubtedly facilitated its popularity and reinforced the social bond of ritual sisterhood. The strong ritual sisterhood embedded in Nushu appeared to be a more important female support system for women than the biological one. “We ritual sisters are just like biological sisters,” wrote an unknown writer (Chiang, 1991, p. 392). The strong ritual sisterhood offered important aids to these women in two ways. First, the sisterhood provided a strong support system, which was not limited to consolation through writing and singing but extended to actual support, such as concern for each other’s well-being and visits to each other on occasions of misfortune. For example, in Consolation Letter, Hu Cizhu wrote, “First I want to console you. Second I want to invite you to spend Mid-Autumn with me. Stay with me for a few days, and we will talk and forget our troubles” (Chiang, 1991, p. 378). In one Marriage Congratulation, an anonymous author said, “I am your younger sister, and I write to ask you whether you are all right” (Chiang, 1991, p. 345). Second, the strong sisterhood generated friendship among ritual sisters and thus provided an outlet to vent anger and express inner feelings. “There is no way to vent my grief. . . . I have no way to vent my anger. . . . I can vent my grief at your home. That’s why we are ritual sisters,” were expressions used by Nushu rhetors (Chiang, 1991, pp. 383, 392). The need to vent their anger was obvious, and the opportunity for communication created through writing alleviated their despair symbolically and consoled them psychologically. 109

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Despite having husband and children, married women in Nushu indicated that neither husband nor children satisfied their needs or understood their feelings. Yet the strong sisterhood provided a symbolic relationship of equals apart from the existing relationship of nonequals. As Tang Baozhen stated, “I depend on my ritual sisters, the young girls” (Chiang, 1991, p. 383). The symbolic relationship of equals tied the village women closely together, enabled them to support each other through the hardships of life, and allowed them to temporarily escape from the social oppression. Put differently, Nushu granted these village women a better social status in sharp contrast to the existing reality of their everyday lives. The social status of equality was symbolically enacted while chanting Nushu with sworn sisters.

RHETORICAL EFFECT OF NUSHU Alleviation of Pain The crying associated with writing Nushu was a salient aspect in healing women’s feelings of oppression, and reference to it commonly appeared at the beginning of Nushu. For example, “I cry as I write,” said Hu Cizhu in Consolation Letters and Replies (Chiang, 1991, p. 375). Similarly, “I cry as I write to tell the hardship of my family,” wrote Zhou Shuoqi in her Autobiography (Chiang, 1991, p. 357). By the same token, Yi Nianhwa noted in Letter of Vituperation, “I am sad and cry as I write” (Chiang, 1991, p. 418). Furthermore, Prayer to a Dead Cousin employed the same strategy: “I write a prayer to you, cousin. I cry when I think of you” (Chiang, 1991, p. 427). Crying aroused by writing Nushu voiced women’s suppressed feelings, soothed their pain, and healed their wounds; it provided women with a legitimate channel through which to vent their anger in public. Put differently, writing Nushu empowered women to transform crying, a traditional and private female expression, into a socially acceptable public action. Unable to change their external environment, the rural women created a legitimate outlet, which not only allowed them to jointly perform Nushu in public sphere but also alleviate their pain from the oppressive environment. Validation of their Own Identity. Interestingly, ritual sisters addressed each other as [ ], or “rational sisters,” which literally means sisters with understanding [ ] and rationality [ ], an odd and unusual usage for women in Chinese. Rationality and understanding, gendered terms associated with men, were seldom used to characterize women. Yet the term “rational sisters” recurred frequently in Nushu. In Invitation to Become Ritual Sisters, Yi Nianhua wrote, “You pity me, rational sister. . . . We are like natural sisters born of the same mother. I want to console you. Listen to me, rational sister” (Chiang, 1991, p. 402). Similarly, Tang Baozhen and Hu Cizhu of Consolation Letters and Replies referred to one another as rational sister: “Listen to me, ra110

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tional sister. . . . I am known for being reasonable. . . . You, rational sister, pity me” (Chiang, 1991, pp. 378–393). Opposing Confucianism, which portrayed women as ignorant and emotional, the term “rational sisters” conveyed the notion that women were capable of treating each other as fully developed human beings who were sensible, logical, and understanding. These rural women validated themselves by using Nushu as an outlet to transform the conditions of their lives. They jointly created an alternative language, in which they established a female culture separate from that of men and turned themselves into their own educators. Through creating their own language, Nushu-educated rural women and enabled them to narrate their lives and feelings through writing and chanting. In their new educational system, they empowered themselves to become literate, which, accordingly, upgraded their social status from illiterate women in Hanzi to literate women in Nushu, from people incapable of writing and reading to ones capable of recording their own history. These women were symbolically transformed into writers, performers, educators, and historians of their own.

Atypical Chinese Communication Mode Since societal norms discouraged women from speaking in public, Chinese women tended to argue passively, speak ambiguously and indirectly, and reason emotionally. These village women used their own rhetoric to break through the confining traditional modes of communication. Different from vague and indirect language in traditional literature, the vernacular Nushu was written in a straightforward and clear style. Purposes were stated clearly and directly. For instance, Hu Cizhu distinctly proclaimed her intentions to avoid misunderstandings in Consolation Letters: “First I want to console you. Second I want to invite you to spend mid-summer with me” (Chiang, 1991, p. 378). Likewise, the unknown author in Marriage Congratulation clearly asserted her purpose at the beginning of the booklet: “I present the letter to your noble home. This is the third day after your wedding. I am your younger sister, and I want to ask you whether you are all right” (Chiang, 1991, p. 345). Nushu rhetors demonstrated an unconventional style; they argued logically and justified their arguments with evidence. A statement usually was followed by reasons as evidenced in Consolation Letters: “You should not be sad because he lived long. He died in his sixties. You should not worry because your children are all worried” (Chiang, 1991, p. 379). Direct utterance of the authors’ aim was a significant characteristic in Nushu. Yi Nianhwa, for example, wrote a Letter of Vituperation to criticize her daughters-in-law for mistreating her daughter: “I will tell you so you understand why I trouble myself. If you disagree, you can tell me. You treated my daughter badly. She did not understand why” (Chiang, 1991, p. 419). In addi111

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tion, some Nushu rhetors deliberately accused their husbands of the corrupt behaviors. Tang Baozhen asserted, “Several months after he [father-in-law] died, I got angry at my husband. I don’t know what he was thinking. He squandered our money and didn’t care for the family. Our son and daughter were ill. Yet he did not care” (Chiang, 1991, p. 387). By blaming her husband and taking a dominant position, the rhetor diverged from communication norms for women. Nushu portrayed a distinct discourse opposed to the traditional female literature. Unlike traditional female literature’s elegant and poetic descriptions, Nushu employed ordinary objects from the rhetors’ environment to expand the boundaries of literature. Nushu practitioners used farming objects, animals, and plants to portray their surroundings and, accordingly, connected literature with their daily lives. Traditional female literature relied heavily on descriptions of scenery and the abstract feelings of women of the gentry, whereas Nushu was devoted to recording the misery of working-class women such as catastrophes, deaths of husbands and sons, low farm productivity, and miserable fates. For instance, Nushu rhetors diverged from the conventional rules for writing a typical Marriage Congratulation in Hanzi. Traditionally, Marriage Congratulation is replete with congratulations and expressions of good will. Except for a very small segment regarding the happiness of marriage, Sanzhaoshu focused on lamentation of the hardships to be faced and an anticipation of a depressing married life. In addition, apart from traditional female literature accessible only to women of the gentry, Nushu embraced participants from the lower class by allowing women with little or no formal education to jointly create Nushu.

Participatory Performance Nushu deemphasized traditional Chinese mode of the top-down suasive discourse by encouraging the active participation from the audiences. Nushu altered the rhetorical practice from a written, static, and passive mode into an oral, fluid, and participatory performance. Silber (1995) depicted this kind of performance: “Text [Nushu] is more than words on a page, more even than words off the page. . . . Literature happens in relationships between text and audience and, just as important, between readers and each other” (p. 192). The flow of reading Nushu included immediate utterances expressing the emotions of the readers and their audiences; it was expected to be interrupted by laughter, sobbing, or emotional outbursts from all the participants. Different from traditional story telling with little involvement from audiences, Nushu created and required a participatory enactment, in which texts could only be obtained and completed through the engagement of both rhetors and audiences. Revising and expanding the oral tradition from a fixed text to a flexible, vivid, and responsive discourse, Nushu redefined roles for both rhetors and audiences. 112

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Nushu authorship was shared among the participants, who played the multiple roles of readers, chanters, listeners, and writers. Accordingly, the relationship among participants was modified from a fixed top-down relationship, in which a rhetor dominated passive audiences, into an open parallel relationship, in which rhetors and audiences equally shared in creating an act together. Discourse was created only through the enactment of all participants. CONCLUSION Unable to alter the Confucian constraints under which they lived, the village women of Shangjiangxu, Jiangyong, Hunan of China created their own Nushu culture to protest against inequality. Nushu, written on fans, handkerchiefs, and books made of cloth, was a means for bound feet to walk and for thoughts to travel from one woman to another; it symbolically transformed the constraints under which they lived into opportunities. Through creating their own language and writing their own scripts, the village women of Shangjiangxu established a community of equals in which they expressed their feelings freely, created symbolic mobility, reasoned logically, and were heard and understood. Nushu as a discourse amends Western notions of discourse, particularly women’s liberation rhetoric at the turn of the twentieth century. Women’s liberation rhetoric in the West challenges democratic values, whereas Nushu in China confirms democratic values. Whereas Western rhetorical practice supports women in the West to seek better equality, Nushu has the following features: (1) it encourages Shangjiangxu women of China to validate one another for mutual psychological satisfaction; (2) it alleviates the pain of the Confucian oppressions; (3) it assumes equality among participants; (4) it transmits compassion to rhetors and audiences; (5) it provides participatory performance in which participants acted out their despair and frustration; and (6) it creates a living poetry through which a utopia is shown. Nushu challenges Chinese rhetorical practice, in which women always listened to men, from emperor to men of their lives; Nushu provides an outlet for women to listen to sisterhood of equals. More important, Nushu precisely prospers democratic and egalitarian values out of rhetorical practice. Nushu refutes the internal and silent transformation instructed in Confucianism; instead, Nushu legitimizes its own communal performance through appropriate female holidays, religious worships of goddesses, women’s needlework, and marriage customs. Nushu is powerful and distinctive precisely because it is an egalitarian rhetorical practice that challenges the rhetor/audience models of conventional Western practice and traditional Chinese practice. Nushu is also powerful because it denies and refutes a common thesis shared about rhetoric in the West and in the East: That rhetoric cannot flourish outside of a democracy. Clearly, here is an instance of rhetoric of resistance in which persuasive discourse moved audiences that were confined. Or alternatively, Nushu could be an odd 113

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vindication of this “democracy” thesis: Even in the most oppressive conditions, the democratic/egalitarian values of rhetorical practice will out. It suggests that rhetoric can function as a symbolic means for muted groups as in the case of Nushu rhetors to resist the existing social constraints and redefine themselves. Nushu helps us to witness a beautiful exemplar of Burke’s symbolic transformation, and, more important, it entails an integration of Western rhetoric with that of the East. Due to the recent definition of globalization of rhetoric, the enactment of Nushu deservedly belongs to the root of rhetoric in the East as well as in the West.

NOTES 1. Lee (1998) argued that a Chinese man had multiple names during the dynastic periods as a process of acquiring more and more rights and identities through birth, marriage, schooling, and career, whereas a Chinese woman became nameless after marriage; she was often addressed to kin as a wife of X family or a daughter from the Y family (p. 283). Nushu revealed that women were often addressed as “flower,” rather than “daughter” or their given names. 2. Gong’s two-month field trip in 1985 was the first attempt to record Nushu with three living Nushu writers who were able to chant, recite, write, and read Nushu. 3. Nushu, which I examine, is generated by rural, lower class women in a small village of Hunan Province of China and is thus inappropriate to assume a similar application to other subcultures across Chinese communities. 4. The ten genres consist of Folksongs and Folktales, Marriage Congratulations, Autobiographies, Narratives of Local Events and Historical Events, Consolation Letters and Replies, Invitations to Become Ritual Sisters and Replies, Admonitory Texts, Letters of Vituperation, Biographies, and Prayers. These genres are taken from Chiang’s dissertation for the comparison of English and Chinese translation pp. 82–83, 85, 87, and 345–431. 5. These goddesses were believed to protect women and children, or bring about fertility. In Nushu, particularly in prayers, women transferred their allegiance from male gods to female goddesses to whom they turned for comfort and help. 6. Women’s Day and Bullfighting Day occurred on January 15 and April 8 of the lunar calendar when single or newly married women gathered to cook, eat, sing, and have fun. Cooling Day took place in June and July when local women gathered at the coolest house of one of the women. July 15, the ghost festival, took place when married women visited their natal homes for the protection of themselves and their natal families. Writing and chanting Nushu were essential in women’s holidays (Chiang, 1991, p. 80; Gong, 1991, p. 19; X. Huang, 1986, p. 126; Silber, 1995, pp. 59–60; Xie, 1991a vol. 3, p. 1891; Zhao, 1992, p. 81). 7. In Qing Dynasty, foot binding was practiced among women as one criterion for marriageability. The smaller a girl’s feet, the better her marriageability. 8. Close analysis of Nushu indicates that one Nushu graph represents one syllable and the extension of one syllable may refer to multiple words. Only 23 percent of the existing Nushu graphs resembles those of Hanzi. 114

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9. See Chiang, 1991, pp. 109–111; Gong, 1991, pp. 21–22; Tsai, 1993, pp. 20–21; Xie, 1991a vol. 1, p. 5. The archeological and ethnographic judgments alluded to the development of Nushu based on different legends. Some indicated that an anonymous talented woman in Shangjiangxu created Nushu about one thousand years ago. Others referred to Hu Yuxiu, a Song concubine. After she lost favor with the emperor and experienced the lonely court life, her brother, a learned court official, taught her Nushu to express complaints to her family. She later taught all the female relatives to use this secretive language to share her misery. All of the available sources suggested that Nushu as a female discourse was used strategically to record women’s life events. 10. According to the Taoist belief in the afterlife, many Nushu were burned and buried on the deaths of Nushu writers, their sworn sisters, or their husbands so they could continue practicing Nushu in the afterlife. The New Marriage Law was issued in 1950 and helped to terminate foot-binding and altered other oppressive circumstances that fostered Nushu. The institution of communes in 1958 allowed women to move out of the domestic realm and contact others. It encouraged women to abandon embroidery and needlework and, consequently, weakened the demand for practicing Nushu. The “Destroying the Four Olds” campaign attacked old culture, old ideas, old habits, and old customs, which included the practice of Nushu. In 1988, television entered the villages and replaced the traditional forms of folkdancing, storytelling, chanting, and so on. It tended to dilute rural culture. In the 1990s, the Chinese government sponsored some scholarly Nushu conferences to stimulate interests from scholars and people alike; many sessions to learn Nushu were also available in Jiangyong area. All Nushu writers were dead and the submerged form of rhetoric to survive social force and technology becomes slim. 11. Silber argued that men could understand Nushu because its phonetic aspect allowed them to understand while hearing it; Chiang discovered that a local male teacher was said to have been able to write it (Silber, 1994, p. 47; Chiang, 1991, p. 109). Zhao and Gong (1990) during their field trips, learned of an elderly man who could read Nushu with his spouse’s help (p. 9). 12. Nianglou, or “upstairs for women,” was named as such because the place was occupied by women. 13. According to Jiangyong customs, when a young woman died before marriage, she was thought to be discontented and prone to return to bring death to other girls. Therefore, prayers were written to be sung in the ritual burning of the flower tower made of paper for the dead girl’s amusement.

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Hierarchy Is Not Harmony: A View of the Traditional Chinese Family Omar Swartz

The traditional Chinese family, from the time of Confucius until the Nationalist Republic, was, according to Fung (1948), “one of the most complex and well-organized in the world” (p. 21). The “rational justification” for this social system and its “ethical significance” can be found in Confucianism (p. 21). For example, the Confucian notion of hierarchy, grounded (in part) in the “rectification of names,” meant that “things in actual fact should be made to accord with the implication attached to them by names” (p. 41). When Confucius was asked what was the correct principle of government, he replied: “Let the ruler be ruler, the minister minister, the father father, and the son son” (quoted in Fung, 1948, p. 41). Each of the above social categories had a function that was assumed to reflect the “proper” way that society was structured. If people embodied their social roles in their “correct” form, then society was well served. In this sense, hierarchy was considered to lead to harmony, as every subject would know his or her place vis-à-vis the family and the state. Society would thus be smoothly administered. In the words of Fung (1948), “Every name in the social relationships implies certain responsibilities and duties. Ruler, minister, father, and son are all the names of such social relationships, and the individuals bearing these names must fulfill their responsibilities and duties accordingly” (p. 42). In the family context, sovereign fathers were obligated to be strict disciplinarians. To be lenient toward one’s wife or child was to invite disorder in the family by allowing corruption to take root. Disorder (luan), above all else, was an evil to be avoided in Chinese society. Preventing luan was a central objective

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of the family system. The father, as family sovereign, wielded absolute authority in guarding against luan. He could harshly punish his wife and children with full societal approval. As sons grew older, they were encouraged to develop family subunits within the father’s household. Over this group, the father was the patriarch. Such extended families often became clans. As Hucker (1978) notes, “Such lineages kept genealogical registers so that everyone knew his standing in the kin hierarchy, and the elders were expected to mediate family disputes” (p. 16). The traditional Chinese family was, in some sense, a major problem in China. In stating this, I am not being disrespectful of another culture. I recognize, for instance, that under the influence of Chinese Legalistic philosophy, the Chinese considered it important for a sovereign to be autocratic. This was good for people and for the state. For example, Han Fei Tzu, an important theorist of the Legalist tradition, argued that a ruler must inflict punishment before people committed a wrong. For Han, preemptive punishment prevented greater offenses from occurring. By preventing major disruptions, and by diligently punishing the smallest transgressions of authority, political order remained strong and the people remained uncorrupted (p. 150). The same rationale was true in the family context. Fathers needed to severely punish their wives and their children to protect their morality and the morality of the family unit. The traditional family exerted a pervasive normative influence on Chinese life. Nevertheless, it is a legitimate academic exercise to criticize those elements of any culture that hurt people, regardless of how the people in power in that culture viewed the situation. For the Qing Chinese to believe that “beating is caring; cursing is love” (an absurd statement if taken literally) does not obligate me to defer to their wisdom in organizing family life. The “rejection of cruelty” is not exclusively a Western value. This chapter argues that, within the context of the traditional Chinese family, hierarchy did not lead to “harmony.” “Harmony,” in this context, means a state in which families could live together in a condition of mutual respect, equal reciprocity, and codignity. While some threats to family harmony are universal—as in “pride, passion, jealousy, and greed” (Ocko, 1990, p. 212)—the practice of a gendered hierarchy in traditional China posed particular threats to the notion of harmony that this chapter promotes as an important social goal for every society. In other words, harmony (as defined by this chapter) is based on justice and justice is based on equality. Justice cannot exist in any divided society, no matter if that division is based on gender, racial, or class lines. In any society, peace, prosperity, and stability all come from equality. Such equality should be the aim of all social and legal systems (although, in fact, it may be the aim of few). As a bumper sticker popular in the United States during the period of the Central American wars of the 1980s, reads: “If you want peace, work for justice.” This 120

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is not a “Western” notion that this chapter is forcing on China’s past. In the many decades of struggle before 1949, the Chinese themselves recognized this principle (see Snow, 1968). Lu (1985a), for example, commented that “[b]ecause the hierarchy handed down since ancient times has estranged men [sic] from each other, they cannot feel each other’s pain” (p. 157). After reviewing the theory of hierarchy, as found in the work of Weaver and Burke, this chapter analyzes the hierarchical practices of Qing culture (the Qing dynasty lasted from 1644–1911), paying special attention to the marginalization of the feminine and to the criminalization of jian (illicit sex). This marginalization was significantly alleviated by changes established by the 1911 and 1949 revolutions. Footbinding, for example, was abandoned after 1911, and full equality between the sexes came after 1949, under Mao’s slogan that “women hold up half the sky.”

THE THEORY OF HIERARCHY This chapter’s discussion of hierarchy is grounded in the views of Weaver and Burke. When parts of this chapter were presented at the University of Maryland, a student observed that the ideas of Burke and Weaver were formulated in a Western context and represent Western values/ideas of people and society. According to her, using these thinkers to analyze a different culture was an “oppressive” act. Within days of her remark, similar comments were made in a class in gender and law at Duke University. The class had been discussing female genital mutilation (FGM) in developing world countries. Legal scholars Obiora (1997) and Gunning (1991/1992) have criticized Western feminists who condemn the practice of FGM. They compare Western critics of FGM to imperialism and colonialism. This issue of “cultural imperialism” had arisen in the legal literature following the well-publicized case of In Re Fauzya (1996). A 19-year-old female citizen of Togo was granted political asylum in the United States on the grounds that she would have been forced to undergo FGM if she were to return home. The argument that it is “cultural imperialism” to criticize another culture for practices that cause pain, suffering, and dehumanization, is misplaced. All communication is grounded in subjectivism. I will always be a “Western scholar,” and Burke and Weaver will always be “Western” theorists. While we have our cultural limitations, that does not make our observations useless in achieving critical goals. My goal in this chapter is to remind people of one significant harmful practice that was traditionally found in China, that of gendered hierarchies in the family. Chinese society clearly improved when it redescribed its family relationships in the twentieth century to embrace more gender equality. With “reform” there may be a tendency to romanticize a precommunist era and to accept as “normal” the inequalities of the past that were rightly condemned by Maoism. 121

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As Burke and Weaver explain, hierarchy has an important function to play in many societies. From our day-to-day practical living to the legal relationships that codify such lives, we find ourselves positioned vis-à-vis other people. Many of these relationships involve degrees of inequality, even within our purely social relationships (see Ng & Bradac, 1993). Our awareness of being positioned in various hierarchies is instantaneous upon the establishment of our relationships. Common awareness that these relations exist and that they have not been extinguished by proposed egalitarian societies (like that of revolutionary China), has led scholars such as Burke and Weaver to argue that hierarchy is part-and-parcel of the human experience. In Burke’s view, hierarchy is a part of the human linguistic experience (i.e., a part of human symbol use and a precondition of rhetoric). In Weaver’s view it is something even more metaphysically fundamental—such as a condition implicit in the structure of nature itself. Burke and Weaver, both philosophers of rhetoric and literature, represent opposite ends of the political spectrum (Burke was a socialist and Weaver was a conservative), but both recognize the inevitability of hierarchy and the function it plays in human society. Weaver’s position is the more extreme of the two and represents a proposition supported by political and cultural conservatives. For Weaver (1984): Rational society is a mirror of the logos, and this means that it has a formal structure which enables apprehension. The preservation of society is therefore directly linked with the recovery of true knowledge. If society is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain. (P. 35)

For Weaver, there is a standard of truth, and that is the logos. In this context, “logos” refers to a Platonic view of rationality, implying some “correct” moral position that has an a priori presence in the world. Weaver uses the metaphor of the “mirror.” The good society is one that accurately “mirrors” the proper moral reality (for a critique and refutation of the “mirror” metaphor in philosophical discourse, see Rorty, 1979, 1982). Societal truth, for Weaver, becomes mirrored in this rationality. From this “grounding,” political and social truth can be deduced by logic, and it can be represented in hierarchical principles. Society, in other words, has a correct structure, one that can be logically deduced from first principles outside of human contingencies. Weaver thus searches for a “formal structure” of human community life which constitutes a “natural” arrangement. Our “apprehension” is determined by how clearly we can perceive that structure, and by how well we can study it and learn it—it is a form of accommodation to the constraints of nature (but see Freire, 1990). Thus, humans do not invent society, implies Weaver, they perceive their “proper” place within it. Our institutions—our government, our police, our schools, our marriages—must be designed to reflect their conceptual essences. While Weaver is 122

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not writing about China, his ideas of society, and of the role of people within it, are similar to the experiences of people within the Qing system, which practiced a “legalized differentiation according to rank, relationship, and specific circumstances [which were] deliberately, systematically, and conspicuously enshrined” in its legal system (Bodde, 1980, p. 137). While Burke (1969) does not agree with the implied social engineering of Weaver’s position, he does indicate that “the hierarchic principle is indigenous to all well-rounded human thinking” (p. 141). Burke attributes this condition to the “rhetorical appeal of dialectical symmetry” (p. 141). In other words: “The hierarchic principle itself is inevitable in systematic thought. It is embodied in the mere process of growth, which is synonymous with the class divisions of youth and age, stronger and weaker, male and female, or the stages of learning, from apprentice to journeyman to master” (p. 141). Unlike Weaver, Burke warns that the apparent “naturalness” of grades often serves to reinforce the protection of privilege. He writes, “Though in its essence purely developmental, the series is readily transformed into rigid social classifications, and these interfere with the very process of development that was its reason for being” (p. 141). The results of this division, according to Burke, are “mystifications that cloak the state of division, since the ‘universal’ principle by which the most distinguished rank in the hierarchy enjoys, in the realm of worldly property, [is] its special privileges” (p. 141). In short, hierarchy creates the “Other” and the “Other” is mysterious, and that mystery often serves as a foundation upon which one class of people build a justification for the oppression of another class. Here is where we find the practice of rhetoric, as well as its abuses. As Burke (1969) explains, various forms of class consciousness are cemented by identification, and “[i]dentification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division. If men [sic] were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity” (p. 22). In addition, Burke (1973) goes on to note that “[i]t may be that people, in their human frailty, require an enemy [or “Other”] as well as a goal” (p. 219). This chapter accepts Burke’s caution of hierarchy and rejects Weaver’s conservative view of society. In particular, Weaver’s theory of hierarchy serves to justify the practice of gendered hierarchies in traditional China, as well as socially regressive practices in general. We must not forget that Weaver (1984) is credited with inspiring the modern conservative movement in the United States (Foss, Foss, & Trapp, 1991, p. 59). Theory has practical implications, and that is why a review of both Burke and Weaver are important in this chapter. The critique of any practice, such as the critique of traditional Chinese gendered hierarchies cannot be divorced from both theory and politics. In the following section, the above theoretical insights will be used as a critical tool to unpack and to understand the paternalism of gendered hierarchy in the traditional Chinese family.

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APPLICATION TO GENDERED HIERARCHY IN THE TRADITIONAL CHINESE FAMILY A clear example of the process of hierarchy and oppression that Burke warns about can be found in Chinese legal and social culture prior to 1949. The family in traditional China was synecdochic of the state. In other words, the family was understood to be a “part” of the whole of Chinese society—a representative slice of the ideology and structure of the state itself. This can be contrasted to the role that the family plays in contemporary U.S. society. In the United States, a rigid distinction has been made between the “private” and the “public” spheres. To a significant extent, as compared to most other societies in the world, the U.S. family is an entity distinct from the control of the government (see, for example, the reasoning of Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965). By studying the Chinese family, as manifested during the Qing Dynasty, we gain a clearer understanding of how the Qing State constituted itself as an ideological force and how its legal system reflected that conceptualization and structure. Based in part on its foundation in Confucianism, the Qing State was dependent upon the family to retain stability. In general, the Qing system can be summarized as follows: Confucian society was family-centered, hierarchic and patriarchal. Since the highest goals of Confucianism were social order and harmony, the ideology emphasized proper behavior between the basic “three relationships”: husband–wife, father–son, ruler–subject. These relations were unequal (the husband, father, and ruler being superior) and demanded that the inferior offer unquestioning obedience and loyalty to the superior; theoretically, the superior in return was supposed to exercise benign paternalism and look after the moral and physical welfare of the inferior (Vohra, 1991, p. 5).

As suggested in this quote, the line was blurred between the family and the state—at least from the point of view of a child or a wife who finds him/herself under the domination of a tyrannical father or husband. These victims took little consolation in the fact that the father/husband was expected to practice a “Confucian beneficence,” as was the emperor himself. Here is where ideology and lived experience separated. As Bodde (1980) explains “[T]here [was] a second side to the Confucian coin of hierarchy: Confucian particularism, when coupled with Confucian humanitarianism, leads to special legal provisions concerning weaker members of society” (p. 138). But as Bray (1997) notes, “In reality the authority of the patriarch was often exercised as tyranny, and many men treated their women not as partners but as slaves” (p. 96). Children were treated no better. A late-Ming instruction guide for family governance cautions “sovereign” fathers to avoid leniency and to avoid indulgence toward treating his children (cited in Ebrey, 1993, p. 161). To indulge children and to be lenient toward their innocent transgressions would be to invite trouble, “to bend the bamboo shoot,” and, ultimately, to destroy the 124

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family’s future by corrupting the child’s character, hence bringing disrepute to the family line (p. 161). This rationale of firmness toward those who suffer a “legalized inequality” is similarly expressed in classical Chinese advice given to the emperor on how to rule. For example, Han reasoned that “if the authority imposes heavy punishments, then all evils will be stopped” (p. 175). Han also states that “if order and strength result from enforcing the law; weakness and disorder will result from disregarding the law” (p. 173). Clearly, the law of the state and the law of the family were intended to be used to instill fear and to keep people from acting out of “order.” The Confucian concept of renzheng (“benevolent governing”) is not always a useful way to appreciate imperial political practice. While it may have had a strategic importance in governing the state (i.e., it served a propagandistic/managerial function), in practice it codified the “proper” relationship among classes of people based on the inherent traits of one to rule and the other to serve. In Qing China, both the state and the family existed to freeze the status quo, “not to distribute justice” (Vohra, 1991, p. 5). The force of the law’s example started with children in the family. If children were ruled well, then the subjects of the empire were ruled well. A person subjected to the rule of a tyrannical patriarch, like a person who fell into disfavor with the state by transgressing its hierarchical injunctions (i.e., its rigid “morality”), would have nowhere to turn and no one from whom he or she could seek relief. This person would be lost in his or her own country. Of this hapless group, the more fortunate ones might become “brothers of the green woods.” These were people described by Van Gulik (1976) as those forced to live by their wits in an underground economy (p. xi). It is easy to imagine how the countryside of China was filled with such “bandits” and the cities filled with prostitutes, because patriarchs forced their children out of normal civil society (see Hucker, 1978, p. 17). Outside of the most egregious of circumstances, the state stood clearly behind the father. The emperor would tolerate no questioning or unsettling of the hierarchy, on which his authority to rule was singularly established. Some legal limitation, however, was placed on the father by law. As Ocko (1990) points out: “Parental authority was supreme rather than absolute” (p. 216). In this respect, Qing family law differs from Qing slavery law. As Meijer (1980) writes, true slavery in China consisted of an entirely different class of people: “Even though the wife may be obliged to perform heavy labor for the husband, her essential function is still that of a wife and bearer of children, and even when children are completely under the domination of the father they are nevertheless brought up to freedom and not to servility” (p. 328). In short, the family and the state were each governed by its own “sovereign.” The patriarchic head of the family was a shadow of the actual emperor, and the 125

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emperor himself was a shadow of the heavenly government and of the “just will of heaven.” Here we see an obvious exemplification of Weaver’s philosophy of hierarchy. Ocko writes, “it was a central tenant in Chinese sociopolitical thinking that hierarchically ordered families were harmonious and strong and made for an ordered empire” (p. 212). Within the state ideology of “family order,” disorder was a serious threat to the legitimacy of the imperial system. Disintegrating families reflected poorly on the influence of local magistrates whose job was to keep people quiet (i.e., to avoid litigation and complaints) so the emperor could “do nothing” (wuwei) and rely on li (or “rites”). Thus, we see an example of the historical predilection of the Chinese against litigation. As Macauley (1999) explains, “Minding one’s own business was the legal ideal par excellence” (p. 118). Therefore, people who encouraged litigation were inherently suspect because they “minded other people’s business” (p. 118). Thus framed, family disintegration (and perhaps its subsequent litigation) frustrated an essential imperial goal—to create a self-regulating society, one in which the emperor could literally “do nothing” and yet rule over a prosperous and stable society. Yet, while “prosperity” and “stability” are worthy political aspirations for a society, they should not be seen as ends in themselves. “Prosperity” often means prosperity for a few at the expense of the many, and “stability” is often a euphemism for the government protection of an entrenched small class of prosperous people (Swartz, 1998). What we often understand to be the “law” is a reflection, in part, of these ancient “imperial” goals. The “do-nothing” philosophy of the emperor, along with li ( “rites” or “ritual”), served to support and to reinforce the existing status quo. Li, ritualistic subservience to this status quo (Esherick & Wasserstrom, 1994), brings order to the community by reaffirming that society’s social distinctions. These distinctions, while serving to isolate people politically, also connect them socially by inculcating a moral sense of how to behave. In an important sense, li constitutes a method of Chinese self-regulation, helping people to act in a “Chinese” manner throughout a variety of circumstances. Li is an important example of why Chinese society is characterized as being one of “high context.” One “end” of such ritualistic expression is the appearance of “harmony” (see Grimes, 1990). An important part of this “harmony” in the Qing state was control over the wife or over women (or the feminine) more generally. This was important in traditional Chinese thought because woman created lineage and provided for ancestors. In other words, the reproductive capacity of women created the “subjects” of the state as well as the “objects” of the family. The word “objects” is used here because the Qing family system was an impersonal system that objectified relationships (i.e., turned women and children into objects). At the systemic level, the Chinese family was often devoid of love and mutuality, and was based on ideology (Confucianism) and on the economy of exploitation. It 126

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is difficult to appreciate what can arguably be seen as the “twisted” priorities of the traditional Chinese patriarch. Ocko (1990) describes one telling situation in which “[d]eath at the hands of his own father was the price one benighted son paid when he provoked his parent by tolerating his wife’s adultery and thereby confusing the line of descent” (p. 217). The above is not meant to suggest that genuine affection did not, or could not, exist between fathers and their families in ancient China. The point is that marriages were first and foremost contracts between families, entered into for economic reasons, which utilized women and children as generators of cultural, if not actual, capital. Even if some women benefited from this institution, or if a mutuality of affection flourished within particular relationships (as it surely must have), this does not alter the generally abusive characteristics of the family environment. Although some women may have enjoyed their position in the hierarchy, we should realize that oppressed people often adopt a “slave mentality.” In other words, some victims come to love the institutions that exert a crushing weight upon them. The priorities of the father in the above situation can be understood by exploring what was valued in the Chinese system of the day. Under Confucianism, little emphasis of value seems to be placed on the Chinese people themselves with regard to family and state matters. This sentiment is reflected in, among other places, Lu’s (1985b) writing. He noted that “Confucius devised outstanding methods of governing the state, but these were thought up to rule the people for the sake of those in authority; there was nothing of any value to the people” (p. 188). Specifically, as Ocko (1990) notes, “Maintaining the line of descent was the principal purpose of marriage” (p. 220). This rationale justified, among other things, the unconscionable concubine system, which sacrificed “marital harmony,” and further undercut the dignity and status of women. The justification for the concubine, as well as her ultimate worth, was her “potential for contributing a male descendent” (Ocko, 1990, p. 220). She was, in short, a baby machine, responsible for the perpetuation of her husband’s seed. Within such an epistemology, a “women’s adultery was such an affront to the purity of the descent line that even if the husband eschewed the punitive measures at his disposal and condoned it, in theory the state would not” (Ocko, 1990, p. 222). Once again, for the victim, the family was almost indistinguishable from the state, and by transgressing the family, one found him or herself as an enemy of the state. Women were not the only people to suffer from the Qing’s conflation of sex with the reproduction of a male offspring. The Qing’s preoccupation with descent, and the power of patriarchy, created a culture of gross homophobia within the legal system (Sommer, 1997). This homophobia, like the misogyny in which it is rooted, is an expression of the Chinese preoccupation with the 127

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male economy of sex. Such an economy, in the creation of the homosexual identity, reflects the patriarchal concern with control over “access to females” and is intimately related to the inequality of the wife in the heterosexual family. As Sommer (1997) writes, “Sexual relations between men in the late imperial era should not be seen as constitutive of a stable homosexual identity, but as acts that profoundly destabilized the gendered social hierarchy by treating some men (the penetrated) like women” (p. 140). Because women could be treated so poorly, men who acted liked women could be similarly displaced. The Chinese fear of homosexuality was less of the physical act of sex, than of a symbolic transformation of the male into female, threatening male supremacy and the gendered roles that supported its economy. If a man can be “womanized” through sodomy, then there is nothing so sacred about being male in the first place. Thus, the justification for male superiority is made less clear. The focus in the Qing Code on jian (illicit sex) is concern for the power of the phallus—when and how it can be used and its transformative powers (i.e., its power to “corrupt” and its power to create lineage). The proper use of the phallus, both in proscriptions of jian and in “normal” family relations, becomes the standard for an entire area of legal reasoning and cultural understandings. Specifically, the Qing Code emphasized a disapproval of “corrupt” sexuality, and it criminalized most forms of sexual contact, even those that occurred within heterosexual relationships. Marriage, in short, invested the economy of sex with a dangerous seriousness (e.g., the death penalty for adultery). While there obviously needed to be codes against rape, the Qing Code’s ostensible concern, the focus in the Qing Code is more on punishing “degradation” than violence. This serves, in the end, not to protect women, but to punish them, as well as to punish men who willingly femininize themselves. As Sommer (1997) writes, “[P]ollution and humiliation were more important than battery to defining the crime of anal penetration” (p. 145). What the Qing Code defines as “illicit sex” was punished by extreme forms of punishment—banishment, military slavery, decapitation, strangulation, etc. This punishment represents state violence against people committing ideological crimes—what the West rhetorically calls “crimes against nature”—with “nature” being defined in this case by the needs and peculiarities of the patrimony practiced by the Qing State. This is a form of what Foucault (1990) calls “bio-politics” (p. 141). Such politics act “as factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting their influence on the respective forces of both these movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony” (p. 141). As discussed in this chapter, implicit in hierarchy is difference. This “difference” is often rhetorical and politicized, as Weaver, Burke, and this analysis have suggested. In other words: 128

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The hierarchic principle is not complete in the social realm, for instance, in the mere arrangement whereby each rank is overlord to its underlings and underling to its overlords. It is complete only when each rank accepts the principle of gradation itself, and in thus “universalizing” the principle, makes a spiritual reversal of the ranks just as meaningful as their actual material arrangement. (Burke, 1969, p. 138)

Hierarchy, in short, implies a gradation that a legal culture or society must recognize in order for the system to work. We see this difference clearly with the weighing of penalties for jian. Sommer (1997) notes that, in the case of rape, “The law did not define rape from the victim’s point of view, but rather in terms of a loss of status inflicted on the victim by the experience of forced penetration outside of a legitimate context” (p. 149). The issue then becomes: What is a “legitimate context?” Sommer’s answer is that “[a] woman [is] legitimately penetrable, but she ha[s] to reserve that penetrability for her husband” (p. 154). Men, on the other hand, could not be penetrated at all. Men “were but the penetrates, subjects rather than the objects of action” (p. 154). Within this subject/object differentiation we find the ultimate subjugation of woman. Such subject/object differentiation smuggles into a culture a hidden morality. In the duality of such characterization, the relationship between the sexes takes on a combative tone. Male and female become paired in antagonistic symbiosis. Politically, this leads to the male being positioned over the female. China is not the only place historically where the hierarchy of society penalizes the woman and the feminine. In the West, for example, a similar social experience occurred in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The French “Family–State Compact,” like that of the Qing Code, penalized sexual acts and improprieties, particularly those of women, that were “connected with the disposition of lineage property” (Hanky, 1989). As Hanky explains, the Family–State Compact was “designed to bring family formation under parental (that is, patriarchal) control in the first instance and under the magisterial control of the Parliament of Paris in the second” (p. 8). Here, as in Qing society, we find the conflating of the family and the state. Under this French legislation, “sexual misdeeds were treated as public misdemeanors that dishonored families” (p. 25). Here we also find that the penalizing gaze of discipline fell primarily on women (for a description of the power of the gaze in the enforcement of cultural norms, see Foucault, 1975). Only women were deemed to have violated this public trust thrust upon them, and “female incarceration could be quite long—ten years, fifteen years, life” (p. 25). Similar to the Qing system, “women executed the civil task which touched the public interest—the reproduction of families over generations” (p. 25). In short, “female conduct, seemingly private and familial, actually was defined as public conduct that warranted prosecution if faulty” (p. 25). Under legislation such as this, women suffered all the burdens of maintaining a society, but they could not partake in its benefits. This was particularly accentuated in China. As Boulding (1992) ar129

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gues, “The suffering of working-class women in China was more severe than anywhere else in the world” (p. 287). Simply, Chinese women during the Qing period did not yet “hold up” any portion of the sky.

CONCLUSION As suggested earlier in this chapter, my critique of gendered hierarchies in Qing China is intended to highlight one important benefit that China gained as a result of its communist revolution, which helped end the brutality of the traditional family. As such, this chapter is a response to the trend in some modern scholarship on China to overlook or to deny the benefits and accomplishments of the Maoist period (e.g., Kluver & Powers, 1999). More specifically, there is a tendency in some scholarship to be apologetic of “Chinese cultural elitism” (see Swartz, 2001). This phenomenon, which can be contrasted with Maoist egalitarianism, exists among the younger generation of college-educated Chinese scientists and scholars. As these students experience the benefits of a Western ideology and culture, they sometimes lose a historical perspective on China’s development. Thus, they fail to appreciate how their opportunities have been made possible by the gains made since 1949 in health care, education, national autonomy, and in the modernization of the Chinese cultural identity. Even if the pre-reform system was in other respects rife with abuse (e.g., Evans, 1978), its egalitarian ideology made life better for China in the area of gender relationships. The brutality of the Chinese system was self-evident to many of the people who lived through the period of the Qing Dynasty, and who ultimately struggled to destroy it. In the Taiping Rebellion alone, during the years of 1850 and 1865, approximately 20 million Chinese were killed by the Qing in its suppression (Wolfe, 1969, p. 120). But it was women who particularly suffered due to Qing paternalism. One striking passage from Bray (1997) indicates how strongly women suffered due to Qing patriarchy: “Peasant mothers taught their daughters lengthy songs of despair that were part of the wedding ceremony. Torn from the mother, aunts and sisters, the young woman felt as if she had died and was making the descent into hell” (p. 147). To highlight this claim, Bray quotes from E. Johnson: The analogy of the wedding process with death is made explicit: the bride describes herself as being prepared for death and the wedding process as the crossing of the yellow river that is the boundary between this life and the next. She appeals for justice, citing her valuable and unrecognized contributions she had made to her family. Her language is bitter and unrestrained, and she even curses the matchmaker and her future husband’s family. (P. 147) 130

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(A graphic representation of this aspect of Chinese Qing culture can be seen at the beginning of the film, Yellow Earth, directed by Chen in 1993, where, in a traditional Chinese wedding, the bride acts as if she were at her own funeral. As the Bray quote and Yellow Earth illustrate, women were so degraded during the Qing period by their husbands, that marriage for many was akin to a living death or “hell” which women would avoid if cultural alternatives existed. Such alternatives largely did not exist, and the lives of these women can be described as nothing less than tragic). While modern Western institutions of marriage may not be all that they claim (e.g., French, 1988), the above passages, describing the experience of marriage as “death,” should strike in many compassionate readers an empathic chord. Women were treated by the Qing as “belonging to other people” (Ocko, 1990, p. 219), and they suffered the most cruel indignities. If a society can treat its wives and daughters so cruelly, how much more cruelly can they treat other people who fall outside of the privileged hierarchy, people not related to them by kinship? Unfortunately, it is easy to overlook this point in the period of Chinese history that precedes the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and of the short-lived Nationalist Republic that replaced it.

REFERENCES The author would like to thank Linda Crumley, Judit Szerdahelyi, and Rui Zhao for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Bodde, D. (1980). Age, youth, and infirmity in the law of Ch’ing China. In J. A. Cohen, R. R. Edwards, & F. M. C. Chen (Eds.), Essays on China’s legal tradition (pp. 137–169). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Boulding, E. (1992). The underside of history, vol. 2. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Bray, F. (1997). Technology and gender: Fabrics of power in late imperial China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Burke, K. (1969). A rhetoric of motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Burke, K. (1973). Philosophy of literary form. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chen, K. G. (Director). (1993). Yellow earth [film]. Ebrey, P. (Ed.). (1993). Chinese civilization and society: A sourcebook. New York: Free Press. Esherick, J. W., & Wasserstrom, J. M. (1994). Acting out democracy: Political theater in modern China. In J. M. Wasserstrom, & E. J. Perry (Eds.), Popular protest & political culture in modern China (pp. 32–69). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Evans, L. (1978). China after Mao. New York: Monad Press. Foss, S. K., Foss, K. A., & Trapp, R. (1991). Contemporary perspectives on rhetoric. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Foucault, M. (1975). The birth of a clinic. New York: Vintage Books. 131

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Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: An introduction. New York: Vintage Books. Freire, P. (1990). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. French, M. (1988). The women’s room. New York: Ballantine Books. Fung, Y. L. (1948). A short history of Chinese philosophy. New York: The Free Press. Grimes, R. L. (1990). Ritual criticism: Case studies in its practice, essays on its theory. Columbia, SC: South Carolina University Press. Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (1965). Gunning, I. R. (1991/1992). Arrogant perception, world-traveling, and multicultural feminism: The case of female genital surgeries. Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 23, 189–248. Han, F. The works of Han Fei Tzu, selected and translated by Chang, W. Unpublished manuscript. Hanky, S. (1989). Engendering the state: Family formation and state building in early modern France. French Historical Studies, 16, 4–27. Hucker, C. O. (1978). China to 1850: A short history. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. In Re Fauzya Kasinga. U.S. Department of Justice Board of Immigration Appeals, File A73 476 695 (1996). Kluver, R. & Powers, J. (Eds.) (1999). Civic discourse, civil society, and Chinese communities. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Lu, X. (1985a). Selected works of Lu Xun, Vol. 2. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Lu, X. (1985b). Selected works of Lu Xun, Vol. 4. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Macauley, M. (1999). Social power and legal culture: Litigation masters in late imperial China. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Meijer, M. J. (1980). Slavery at the end of the Ch’ing dynasty. In J. A. Cohn, R. R. Edwards, & F. M. Chen (Eds.), Essays in China’s legal tradition (pp. 327–354). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ng, S. H., & Bradac, J. J. (1993). Power in language: Verbal communication and social influence. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Obiora, L. A. (1997). Bridges and barricades: Rethinking polemics and intransigence in the campaign against female circumcision, Case Western Reserve Law Review, 47, 275–378. Ocko, J. (1990). Hierarchy and harmony: Family conflict as seen in Ch’ing legal cases. In K. C. Liu (Ed.), Orthodoxy in late imperial China (pp. 212–230). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rorty, R. (1982). Consequences of pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Snow, E. (1968). Red star over China. New York: Grove Press. Sommer, M. (1997). The penetrated male in late imperial China. Modern China, 23, 140–180. Swartz, O. (1998). The rise of rhetoric and its intersection with contemporary critical thought. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 132

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Swartz, O. (2001). Review of the book Civic discourse, civil society, and Chinese communities. Southern Communication Journal, 66, pp. 174–175. Van Gulik, R. (1976). Preface Celebrated cases of Judge Dee. (pp. i–xxiii). New York: Dover. Vohra, R. (1991). China: The search for social justice and democracy. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Weaver, R. (1984). Ideas have consequences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolfe, E. R. (1969). Peasant wars of the twentieth century. New York: Harper Colophon Books.

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Chinese Family Consumer Socialization: A Study of Chinese Urban Adolescents’ Involvement in Family Purchasing Activities Qingwen Dong

INTRODUCTION Consumer socialization studies contribute to a better understanding of family consumption behaviors, intergenerational influences, and the impact of social trends on consumer behaviors (Ward, 1974; Moschis, 1979, 1985, 1987; Beatty & Talpade, 1994). Since much of consumer socialization takes place within the family (Hafstrom, Chae, & Chung, 1992), family becomes critical in shaping children’s consumption behaviors. Families are more involved in the developmental socialization process in which children’s initial sense of self develops and in which basic identities, motivations, values and beliefs are shaped (Gecas, 1990). Family communication plays an important role in teaching and learning of consumer values and beliefs within the family. Previous family communication studies found that there are two major types of families: One stresses deference to parental authority, and avoidance of controversy (social-oriented family) and the other encourages children to express ideas openly, to analyze all sides of an issue, and to be able to challenge the views of others (concept-oriented family) (Moschis, 1985). In these studies family communication patterns and family type influencing consumer involvement have been investigated in Western families. However, studies about how family communication patterns and family type influence consumer learning among non-Western consumers are rarely found in the consumer behavior literature. The study of how self-esteem, family types, and mass media influencing consumer learning is hardly found.

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This study is designed to fill in the gap in the consumer behavior literature by investigating how family type (social-oriented family vs. concept-oriented family), family structure (single-child family) and personal characteristics (e.g., self-esteem) may affect Chinese urban adolescents in their consumer socialization process. A better understanding of the impact of personal characteristics and external environments on Chinese urban adolescents’ involvement in consumer activities will help scholars and experts explain and predict consumer behaviors in the country with the largest economic potential in the world. The study focuses on a neglected aspect of consumer socialization research. It takes China for an example to explore the adolescents’ role and involvements in family purchasing activities. This study takes an interdisciplinary theoretical approach to look at Chinese adolescents’ consumer socialization. It employs social cognitive learning theory, social exchange theory, and the economic development perspectives as theoretical frameworks to examine and analyze Chinese adolescent consumer socialization variables. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986, 1994) helps explain how human behaviors are learned through an interaction of personal and environmental factors. The earlier theoretical approach was designated as social learning theory (Bandura, 1977). Social cognitive theory emphasizes both social origins or social contexts and cognitive development or individuals’ mental processes. The theory takes a broader and integrative look at how human behaviors are shaped, developed, and modified. The theory lays out the theoretical foundation for the model with a focus on both internal factors (e.g., self-esteem) and external factors (e.g., family type). According to the theory, human behaviors such as consumer behaviors can be observed through an analysis of an interaction between internal and external factors. The theory suggests that consumer behaviors such as involvement in family purchasing activities can be observed through an analysis of influences of family type, family structure, self-esteem, personal financial resources, and identification with Western values. Social cognitive theory also helps explain why people learn consumer values and behaviors from their parents. The family communication patterns or family type play a crucial role in shaping adolescents’ consumer values and consumer behaviors. If parents encourage their children to express their opinions openly and view all sides of issues, children are more likely to get involved in family purchasing decisions. If parents emphasize deference and conformity, children are less likely to get involved in family decisions. According to social cognitive theory, adolescents can learn consumer values and behaviors from television. This is because television produces models for viewers. Through observational learning, viewers receive vicarious reinforcement. The viewers tend to imitate the behaviors of those TV 136

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models who get rewarded and avoid behaviors of other TV models who are punished. Social exchange theory is a social reinforcement-based theory (Shaw & Costanzo, 1982). The theory focuses on human behaviors development from reward and punishment perspective. Homans (1954) said that the more benefits one can obtain through social exchanges, the more likely the exchanges will continue. Emerson (1981) advanced the theory by offering a theory called power dependency. He said that an exchange relation is balanced when two actors equally depend on each other and the relationship is unbalanced when one actor is more dependent than the other. Social exchange theory helps explain the relationship between parents and the children in terms of consumer socialization. When children have the resources that the parents depend on, the children are more likely to have power over their parents. For example, when an adolescent is the only child in the family, parents are more likely to give higher status to him/her. As a result, the adolescent is more likely to have more power in the family decision-making. The social exchange theory helps define the parent-child relationship as well as explain adolescent consumer behaviors in China. The economic development perspective suggests that economic development and consumer behaviors are highly correlated. Since 1979 when the Chinese economic reform started, Chinese consumer behaviors have been greatly changed. Before the reform, China had a central planning economy. Production and consumption activities of consumer goods were strictly controlled by the government. The concepts of “consumer” and “consumption” were very vague terms and people were hardly aware of them. Consumption activities were quite limited. Today’s market economy helps shape Chinese consumer values and develop consumer behaviors. There are two major factors which play important roles in shaping consumer values and behaviors. They are independent businesses and changes in mass media. The first factor, independent business, has replaced or is replacing the state-run business. The development of independent business in China helps change Chinese people’s consumption values and behaviors. For example, it provides consumers with more and more consumer information about goods and services; it also provides more and more consumer goods and services available in the market. The second factor is changes in mass media. For decades, Chinese mass media served as a propaganda tool for the government. Today, more and more mass media organizations are asked to partially support themselves rather than being fully funded and controlled by the government. To get financial resources and to attract audiences/readers, advertisements and consumption themes are being introduced into Chinese mass media. In the meantime, American television has penetrated into the Chinese market. The Chinese people have easy access to American media programs. Many Ameri137

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can television programs and movies are shown in Chinese television networks and theaters. American medium messages reflect the Western life style and consumer values, which are expected to have a great influence on Chinese people’s consumer value and consumer behaviors. People’s exposure to American mass media may affect Chinese consumers to learn Western consumer values, ideals, and behaviors. The economic development perspective helps explain how market economy creates a consumption world in which Chinese consumer values and behaviors are shaped. A previous study (Tse, Belk, & Zhou, 1989) showed that there is a correlation between economic growth and pursuit of hedonistic value in consumption. Tse and his colleagues found that consumers have more hedonistic value in the societies with well developed economy than the consumers in the societies with less developed economy. In short, social cognitive theory, social exchange theory, and economic development perspective help shape the theoretical framework for the current study. The framework serves as guidelines for hypothesis development of Chinese adolescent consumer socialization.

HYPOTHESES Family Characteristics and Involvement Family Structure. This concept is conceptually defined as the distribution of resources and the opportunity to gain the resources within family. It is assumed that by being a single-child in the family, a child can have more resources than those who are not the single-child in the family. According to social exchange theory, the more resources (which are valued by others) one has, the more power one will gain. The single-child family is more likely to provide its child more power in family decisions than the non–single-child family. Therefore, it is hypothesized: H1: The adolescents who are from single-child families are more likely to be involved in the family purchasing activities than those who are not.

Family Type. Family type is used as an independent variable in the study. Two types of families are social-oriented family and concept-oriented family (Chaffee, McLeod, & Wackman, 1971). In the social-oriented family, children are taught to respect their parents and authorities. Traditional values are emphasized in this type of family. Children are encouraged not to criticize other’s opinions. Therefore, it is assumed that (1) children in this type of family are less likely to get involved in family purchasing activities; (2) children in this type of family are less likely to identify with Western values. 138

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In concept-oriented families, however, expressing opinions openly is stressed. Children are encouraged to question, to see all sides of an issue, argue for the truth and to be critical. Therefore, it is assumed that (1) children in this type of family are more likely to get involved in the family purchasing activities; (2) children in this type of family are more likely to identify with Western values. Therefore, it is hypothesized: H2: The adolescents who are from concept-oriented families are more likely to be involved in family purchasing activities than those who are not. H3: The adolescents who are from concept-oriented families are more likely to identify with Western values than those who are not. H4: The adolescents who are from social-oriented families are less likely to be involved in family purchasing activities than those who are not. H5: The adolescents who are from social-oriented families are less likely to identify with Western values than those who are not.

Personal Characteristics and Involvement Identification with Western Values. Consumer motivation comes from their perception of getting reward or avoiding punishment. Under the current economic reform, the Chinese adolescents may perceive values of freedom, competition and individualism very important to themselves. In this study, we believe that the Chinese adolescents who identify with Western values will express their motivation to participate in family purchasing decisions, to be independent, and to be ambitious. They will not defer to their parents’ decision in family purchasing decisions. Instead, they will want to become the decision-maker. Therefore, it is hypothesized: H6: The adolescents who identify with Western values are more likely to be involved in family purchasing activities than those who do not.

Self-esteem. Self-esteem refers to people’s perceptions of themselves positively or negatively. Self-esteem is both cause and consequence of our social interaction. For instance, self-esteem can help actors to perform effectively and it can also be enhanced through social interaction. According to Gecas (1986), self-esteem carries motivational properties. Gecas said that people’s self-esteem can motivate them to perceive themselves as efficacious and to experience themselves as real and powerful. According to self-esteem theory, It is assumed that Chinese adolescents who have high self-esteem will be more likely to get involved in family purchasing activities. Therefore, it is hypothesized: H7: The adolescents who have high self-esteem are more likely to be involved in family purchasing activities than those who do not. 139

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Personal Financial Resources. The resources are defined as money which adolescents earn after school. According to social exchange theory, the more resources one has that are valued by others, the more power one will gain. This study proposes that the more money one makes, the more power one has and the more influence one will have in family consumption decision making. Therefore, it is hypothesized: H8: The adolescents who have more financial resources are more likely to be involved in family purchasing activities than those who do not.

Exposure to American Television According to Bandura’s (1977, 1986) social learning theory, people pick up values and behaviors through observational learning or modeling. American television programs convey Western affluent lifestyles and consumer values and they likely play an important socializing role in influencing Chinese adolescents to identify with Western values and develop their Western consumer values and consumer behaviors. Therefore, it is hypothesized: H9: The adolescents who have been exposed to American television programs are more likely to identify with Western values than those who have not.

In short, nine hypotheses are proposed based on the theoretical framework developed earlier. These hypotheses are tested by a random survey of 429 Chinese high school students. The following is a discussion of methodology for hypothesis testing. METHODOLOGY The survey was conducted in Beijing, the capital of the People’s Republic of China. The study was designed to investigate how Chinese adolescents are socialized into family purchasing activities. The predictors in the study include family characteristics, adolescent characteristics, economic development, and American mass media influence. Demographic variables such as gender, age, and education were also measured. The subjects were chosen from four high schools based on a simple random selection. The sampling frame is a list of all the high schools in Beijing. Random procedures were also used to choose classes of students within each school to avoid selection bias. All of the four schools are public schools.1 Grade levels of the subjects are from nine to twelve. The reason for choosing these grade levels is that these adolescents are in a formative stage of development and are “undergoing an identity crisis period” (Erikson, 1968). They are undergoing a period of experimentation about their selves. This experimentation can be viewed as part of the process of iden140

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tity formation. This period of uncertainty during which they are becoming socialized as consumers makes students in these grade levels appropriate subjects for this study. The sample should represent major characteristics of urban Chinese adolescents because (1) the subjects are randomly chose, and (2) under the current economic reform, many urban areas in China are similar to Beijing. The major cities share similarities in economic, social, cultural, and political environments. Therefore, the survey results of these Beijing adolescents are expected to reflect the Chinese urban adolescents across the country. The questionnaires were administered to classes by the researcher with assistance from teachers.2 The students filled out the questionnaires in their classrooms during one class period (45 minutes). A brief introduction about the survey procedure was given to the subjects before they started answering the questions. A debriefing followed immediately after the survey to explain the project. Of the 450 questionnaires distributed, 429 were completed and useable, including 157 junior high and 272 senior high respondents. The average age was l5.6. Male students consisted of 49.4 percent of the respondents and 50.6 percent were female students. All survey measures were pretested. Most of the measurements are adapted from other researchers’ instruments. The survey instruments were developed originally in English. However, since the native language of the respondents is Chinese, the instruments had to be translated from English into standard Chinese. The translation procedure included two steps. First, the instruments were translated into Chinese (via Nanjixing computer software program) by a Ph.D. candidate whose major is American literature. Then the Chinese version was translated back into English for meaning checks by another graduate student. The results of the comparison of the two English versions (the original English questionnaire and the English questionnaire translated from the Chinese) showed that the two versions had some wording differences but no major changes in meaning. Therefore, only few refinements to the questionnaire were made after the procedure. During the instrument translation, the cultural difference between the American and the Chinese was given certain consideration. For example, when we translated the words describing Western values, we gave great attention to the cultural differences. For instance, the word “individualism” could be translated into different Chinese terms, such as “ge ren zhu yi,” “zi shi qi li,” and “bu kao ta ren.” However, in Chinese culture “ge ren zhu yi” carries a negative meaning while “zi shi qi li” carries a positive meaning. If “individualism” was translated into either “ge ren zhu yi” or “zi shi qi li,” it could lead to a biased answer. Therefore, within the Chinese culture and language “bu kao ta ren” best approximates the concept of individualism as used in the United States. 141

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The pretest of the instrument was conducted among ten high school students in Beijing. It was done by a Chinese high school teacher who helped find students similar to the sample population. The completed pretest questionnaires were then checked by the principal investigator. There were no major changes made to the questionnaires as a result of the pretest. RESULTS Hypothesis One stated that “The adolescents who are from single-child families are more likely to be involved in the family purchasing activities than those who are not.” A t-test analysis was conducted to test this hypothesis. The finding supported Hypothesis One. Regression analysis was conducted to test the remaining hypotheses. Hypothesis Two stated that “The adolescents who are from concept-oriented families are more likely to be involved in the family purchasing activities than those who are not.” The finding supported Hypothesis Two (Beta=0.08; t=4.19). However, Hypothesis Four, “The adolescents who are from social-oriented families are less likely to be involved in the family purchasing activities than those who are not” was not supported by the data. Self-esteem also affects the Chinese adolescents’ family purchasing involvement. The findings supported Hypothesis Seven (Beta=0.11; t=3.34), which stated that “The adolescents who have high self-esteem are more likely to be involved in the family purchasing activities than those who do not.” The result of the analysis also showed a significant impact of personal financial resources on the family purchasing involvement (Beta=0.01; t=2.21). The result supported Hypothesis Eight which said that “The adolescents who have more financial resources are more likely to be involved in family purchasing activities than those who do not.” However, identification with Western values had little influence on the Chinese adolescents’ family purchasing involvement (t=1.32). Hypothesis Six which stated “The adolescents who identify with Western values are more likely to be involved in family purchasing activities than those who do not” was not supported by the data. The findings showed that the concept-oriented family had a significant influence on Chinese adolescents’ identification with Western values (Beta=0.13; t=5.22; p