Contact Zones in China: Multidisciplinary Perspectives 9783110663426, 9783110659375

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
1 A German Missionary in China (1862–1898)
2 Political Terms in Lobscheid’s English- Chinese Dictionary (1866–1869)
3 The Italian Community in ‘Old Shanghai’ (1842–1941)
4 Sino-Italian Encounters in the Late Qing Press (1872–1911)
5 Italian Diplomats in China during the Republican Era (1912–1949)
6 Italians in Beijing (1953–1962)
7 Italians in Soviet-Sponsored International Organizations in China
8 West-German – Chinese Trade Experiences in Historical Perspective
9 Communicating with/via Modern Chinese Philosophy during the 20th Century
10 Contact Zones and/as Combat Zones: Representing the Nanjing Massacre
11 Local, Virtual, and Programmed Contact Zones
Conclusion
Contributors

Citation preview

Contact Zones in China

Contact Zones in China Multidisciplinary Perspectives Edited by Merle Schatz, Laura De Giorgi and Peter Ludes

ISBN 978-3-11-065937-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-066342-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-065953-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020932562 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. Chapter “Italians in Beijing (1953–1962)” © Laura De Giorgi; Chapter “West-German – Chinese Trade Experiences in Historical Perspective” © Giovanni Bernardini © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Photo by Hanny Naibaho on unsplash.com Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Merle Schatz, Laura De Giorgi, and Peter Ludes Introduction 1 Merle Schatz 1 A German Missionary in China (1862–1898)

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Wong Tsz (王子) 2 Political Terms in Lobscheid’s English-Chinese Dictionary (1866–1869) 25 Stefano Piastra 3 The Italian Community in ‘Old Shanghai’ (1842–1941)

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Renata Vinci 4 Sino-Italian Encounters in the Late Qing Press (1872–1911)

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Guido Samarani 5 Italian Diplomats in China During the Republican Era (1912–1949) Laura De Giorgi 6 Italians in Beijing (1953–1962)

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Sofia Graziani 7 Italians in Soviet-Sponsored International Organizations in China Giovanni Bernardini 8 West-German – Chinese Trade Experiences in Historical Perspective 110 Anja M. Rommel 9 Communicating with/via Modern Chinese Philosophy during the 20th Century 121 Tim Trausch 10 Contact Zones and/as Combat Zones: Representing the Nanjing Massacre 134

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Peter Ludes 11 Local, Virtual, and Programmed Contact Zones Merle Schatz, Laura De Giorgi, and Peter Ludes Conclusion 174 Contributors

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Introduction More than 68 million people were forced out of their home countries in 2017 – and more than 70 million in 2018: the highest number ever counted by the United Nations Refugees Agency. In order to survive or evade torture, hunger, mass mutilations or natural catastrophes, they left their historically and naturally pre-given homes and delved into mostly unknown territories, with little safety or living goods. The directions of their escapes were constrained by dangerous routes and by hopes inspired via mobile messages. Such forced contacts between helpseeking refugees and often unwilling host communities characterize the first decades of the 21st century. In a lecture in 2014,1 Mary Louise Pratt, who introduced the concept of the contact zone in 1991 (see below), provided us with more encompassing examples of migrants who move into foreign territories, and remarked that mobility is defined as freedom and progress by those wealthy tourists, business people or scholars who can enjoy their temporary travels and stays. Yet, mobility can be experienced by others as an invasion. Even more important is the fact that unsolicited migration is sanctioned as illegal by host counties and countries, which, nevertheless, exploit the cheap labor of these immigrants. Pratt introduced the concept of contact zones2 in 1991 and elaborated on its potential for “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 1991, 34). Just one year later, Pratt (Pratt 1992, 6) specified that contact zones were “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which people geographically and historically separated come into contact with one another and

1 Pratt, Mary Louise, “The Rough Guide to Geopolitics,” Presented at the 25th Anniversary Chicago Humanities Festival, Journeys, November 2, 2014. https://www.chicagohumanities. org/media/rough-guide-geopolitics-mary-louise-pratt/. (last visit 3. 6. 2019) 2 Our international symposium at the German-Italian Center for European Excellence in the Villa Vigoni in Menaggio, Italy, in May 2017, focused on “Investigating Chinese-European Contact-Zones: Comparative perspectives on the experiences of Italian and German communities in China from the 19th to the 21st Century.” The contributions to this book originated in presentations and discussions at this symposium and were subsequently elaborated upon. Acknowledgements: The editors and authors would like to thank Villa Vigoni, Menaggio, and the Confucius Institutes at Leipzig University and at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice for the financial support to the International Workshop in Menaggio (May 2017) and the following seminars (21.09.2018 Leipzig, 29.04.2019 Venice) related to the research project “Contact Zones in China”. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663426-001

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establish ongoing relations, usually involving coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict.” In Criticism in the Contact Zone (Pratt 1993, 88–89), she draws attention to “differences and hierarchies [. . .] produced in and through contact across [. . .] lines [of differences]. These lines are borderlands, sites of ongoing critical and inventive interaction with the dominant culture, as permeable contact zones across which signification moves in many directions.” Pratt privileges an approach that examines how texts engage with and transgress “official categories.” In their critical review of Pratt’s concept, Rosner and Hall (2004, 98–99) clarify some changes to her concept, referring to far-reaching and enduring institutions like colonialism and slavery as particularly decisive examples of enduring “relations of power,” “relations of domination and sub-domination” and “difference, hierarchy, and unshared or conflicting assumptions.” Changes in the specific nature of relationships imply how to “meet, clash, and grapple with each other [in] conditions of coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict” to “ongoing critical and inventive interaction [by means of] permeable contact [. . .] across which significances move in many directions.” Here “contact zone” is used very broadly. Everyone who in one way or another is interacting with someone else contacts the other in a particular area. Since contact always happens in a real or virtual space, the persons interacting find themselves in such a specific area or zone, for some time. Nevertheless, the critics address the supposed boundedness, stability and homogeneity of groups or cultures that interact, whereas social interaction is often characterized by change and inconsistency. Still, changes do not just develop smoothly and evenly, but differ with regard to speed, place and social organization. Host societies and new groups involved usually do not simply and unconsciously change their attitudes, instead they can sometimes negotiate their positions towards each other. In fact any study of intercultural contacts viewed through the lens of the notion of the “contact zone” needs adapt the concept to specific historical and contingent conditions, where the interaction between the hosts and newcomers is shaped by material and symbolic factors and is subjected to changes over time. In China, intercultural contacts over the last 200 years have developed from local experiences to globalizing local contact zones. Often, only a few individuals, sometimes with their families, were delegated from one state to another, working as missionaries, scholars, soldiers, merchants or diplomats. Therefore, members of both groups met in different social interactions, often learning only the rudiments of the foreign language, acquiring basic cultural and scientific knowledge, or exchanging trade products. These contacts remained more or less peaceful as long as the intruders were not hostile and no danger to the hosts, and could be mostly identified within the locality to which they relate. On the

Introduction

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other side, they also required a non-violent and partially submissive attitude from these strangers in a foreign land, that was strange for them. The locality here also meant that communication regarding these contacts in China either happened on regional levels among the actors involved or within the diplomatic realm. These contacts where shaped strongly by the local Chinese conditions. Glocal development in contrast is characterized by an increasing level of communication about these contacts over mass and network media to people not directly involved with them. Our choice of the term “glocality” (Robertson 1997) refers to cultural perspectives where glocalization describes a form of shifting between forced or natural openness to people of other countries, cultures and habits, in which regional or local habits are preserved and defended. It is important to define and to describe in this context the degrees and forms of personal, social, political, economic changes along selected criteria (see below). During the 19th century, merchants and soldiers from several European countries colonized major parts of China, partly also through the criminal drug trade, veiled as a part of “free trade.” From the First Opium War (1839–1842) onwards, colonialism and imperialism shaped the interactions between Chinese society and most foreigners, at the individual and the community levels. Nevertheless, the experiences of contact between people from different cultural backgrounds cannot be simply contained within the framework of colonialism and its legacy. Nor, after 1949 and the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, were the memory of that period and the Cold War ideological counterpositions the only factors in influencing these encounters. Rather, the concept of “contact zone” can give new insights in understanding the complicated and shifting cultural dynamics in the relationships between Chinese society and migrants and travellers. Pratt’s concept of contact zones emphasized the imperial eyes of colonizers, gazing at those whom they considered inferior, worthy only to be exploited, baptized, “civilized” or excluded from interactions. Concerning more recent globalization processes, Pratt (Pratt 2007) highlights that it has been accompanied by de-globalization, namely processes of isolating and excluding hundreds of millions of people from international markets or international security mechanisms and solidarity. Hubs of globalizing markets and innovative infrastructures weaken peripheral zones and the former rights of their inhabitants. In these zones of exclusion, however, cultural practices emerge distinct from the globally predominant ones. Alternative forms of local production and consumption, new forms of social integration and the formation of identities, values and mentalities, hopes, anxieties and imaginations of transcendence appear. Our case studies intend to enrich our understanding of the contact zones in China – in a crucial period of Chinese and global history:

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As a general trend, in large parts of Asia there was an increasing demand for foreign advisers; this was driven partly by the realization that more functional bureaucracies would help advance a state’s position in the complicated game of international commerce and competition. Especially after the 1550s, rulers in many regions began recruiting experts for commercial, scientific, technological, and military activities. (Sachsenmaier 2018, 164)

Actually, the cases of Italy and Germany’s experiences of knowledge and interaction with China are of specific relevance in investigating the contact zones. As latecomers in 19th-century China, without the same strong geopolitical and military interests in that area of other Western powers and of Japan, until 1949 and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China both Germany’s and Italy’s presence in China was characterized by a weak and unstable imperialism. As a matter of fact, the position of Germans and Italians in China and consequently their interactions with local society can only be partially analyzed from the perspective of a colonial relationship, as could be the case of other foreign communities as the British, the French and the Japanese. Our synopsis of German and Italian experiences in contact zones in China during the past two centuries highlights distinct personal, institutional, political, and economic contexts and configurations. Individual and small group local, virtual, and programmed encounters contributed to sketchy imaginings of Chineseness for specific groups of missionaries, mercenaries, soldiers, and diplomats in the contact zones and in their respective home countries. Yet, personal relations, sufficient language skills and regional expertise had already been the results of previous interest in the imagined China and other particular regions, and of increasing communication with potential hosts and official authorities. Specific German-Chinese or Italian-Chinese, Chinese-Italian and Chinese-German personal accounts, dictionaries and ethnographies teach us that despite all the personal challenges, a strong interest also emerged in informing fellow Europeans beyond the original home countries about highly demanding and challenging Chinese culture, habits, languages, political and economic systems and intentions. Italian and German experiences were shaped by specific mixtures of personal adaptations and official rules, which had to be canonized and respected in the context of increasing Chinese dominion, of hard and soft power. Moreover, most contacts and interactions between Chinese hosts and foreign migrants or settlers establish a divide between the colonial and post-colonial era, discarding a longer chronological perspective, or usually adopting a specific disciplinary approach. One notable exception is the book edited by Andornino and Marinelli (Andornino and Marinelli 2013) dedicated to the Italian experience of contacts with China all along the 20th century, from different perspectives, it is also true that the post-WWII experiences of contact are still too often framed by

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the discourse of the ideological counterposition of the Cold War. Therefore, in the history of the relations between China and the outer world after 1949, the possibility of the emergence of new “contact zones” has remained virtually unconsidered as a useful perspective in understanding these interactions. The few Europeans in China before 1949 were sometimes rather free in their migration and interpretation of Chinese culture. This hardly legitimate prerogative changed after WWII when, more strategic, better planned and politically more organized, China also started exerting greater control over all international contacts within its country. Going beyond physical contacts, we therefore asked our contributors to look at “contact immanent and contact shaping forces” such as social role, political control, or the mass media. In this way new evidence is offered showing how “contact zones” are shaped by social and cultural norms, embodied in actual historical experiences of people with different cultural backgrounds who are interacting and living in a specific space and time.

What makes a “Contact Zone”? Originally, territorially defined social contacts required multisensory experiences. But the increasing spread and prevalence of technical networks of socalled ‘social media’ shape and frame, condition and enforce new types of behavior and identity models. Which dimensions, however, can actually be put into mediated words and visuals, and which dimensions remain beyond explicit words, e.g. selfies? Multisensory experiences are mostly very intense, yet hardly considered by cultural scientists when they focus on written documents. Adapting, suffering, learning, seeing, doing, and sharing constitute personal, immediate forms of social interaction. Previously internalized and embodied behavior patterns in turn reflect social interdependencies and asymmetrical power relations and are questioned in new contact situations. Long-distance, tele-technical communication alone does not mean contact in its full sense, using all the senses. Stephen Greenblatt refers in Marvelous Possessions (1991, 20) to the sensory perceptions of the Other in their first encounter: “When we wonder, we do not yet know if we love or hate the object at which we are marveling; we do not know if we should embrace it or flee from it.” Different emotions are part of the contact experience. Immediate contacts imply but do not continuously involve multisensory experiences. As a consequence, we ask how we can index a “contact zone,” and what distinguishes it from other forms of interactions between different communities and groups. More specifically: what does the special perspective of “contact zone”

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add? More encompassing economic conditions, political and other types of power relations, and legal rules and sanctions shape any particular contact zone in its particular mode, time and space. Yet, do new contact zones also re-shape and endanger the prevailing broader conditions, established power relations, and norms? Our juxtaposition of Italian and German experiences highlights how home country habits endure in the new configurations. German missionaries and scholars contrast with Italian diplomats and soldiers, and later on with merchants, journalists, other experts, and students. We clearly see a rather slow but steady increase in the numbers of these “guest workers,” their establishment of particular services, their conscious reflection of Chinese habits and rules. As Fig. 1 shows, the contact zones in China were historically and spatially located in the coastal cities and in the political and economic centers (especially the well-known “treaty ports” such as Shanghai and the capital cities Nanjing and Beijing) where the interactions between different communities and individuals were more sensitive to political, institutional and technological changes. Moreover, as our timeline (Fig. 2) illustrates, these contacts occurred when important political global

Heilongjiang Harbin

Urumqi Kashgar Jilin

Turpan Xinjiang

Gansu Dunhuang Neimengol Inner Mongolia Jiayuguan

Shenyang Chengde Beijing

Liaoning

Datono Tianjin Hebei

Dalian

Shanxi

Qufu Shandong Qingdao LuoyangHenan jiangsu

Qinghai Xizang

Xi’an

Lanzhou Tibet

kalfeng Anhui Nanjing

Chengdu Hubel Sichuan

Wuhan

Gulyang Lijiang Kunming Yunnan

Hangzhou

Chongqing Changsha

Jiangxl

Zhejiang

Fujian

Guizhou

Hunan

Quanzhou

Gullln Guangdong Guangzhou Xiamen Guangxi Shenzhen

Hainan

Suzhou Shanghai

Hainan

Fig. 1: Map of Italian and German contact zones in China.

Taiwan

Islands of South China Sea

1912

1940-1960 West-GermanChinese trade

1960

1950s Transnational Organizations

1949

1949 Establishment of the People’s Republic of China

1947-? Records of Italians in China

1945 End of the Second World War

1943 End of the Unequal Treaties and of the Foreign Concessions

Nanjing Massacre

1937

1937 Japanese invasion of China. Start of the War of Resistance

1915-1995 Feng Qi

1914-1918 First World War

1912 Birth of the Chinese Republic

1912-1949 Italian Diplomats

1898-1900 Boxer Rebellion

1894-95 First Sino-Japanese War

Fig. 2: Contact zones in China. Italian and German examples. Timeline.

Lobscheid 1855-59 1842-1941 Expat Community Shanghai

1862-1898 John Eitel

1866-69

1856-1860 – Second Opium War

1853-1864 Taiping Rebellion

1839-1842 First Opium War Treaty of Nanjing Hong Kong to the UK

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and domestic events (such as wars and revolutions) affected the shift from the colonial to the post-colonial period in China.

Analytical Pivot Points In this vein, we focus on three major pivot points, namely (1) the space, where different forms of contact take place, (2) the duration of these contacts, and (3) the experiences made by those involved. Taken together, they describe the most relevant characteristics of the different forms of contact. Social and cultural practices in the contact zones can only be partially explained by models of cultural synthesis such as hybridity, because a demarcation of the Self from the Other can result via the intermixtures within the “contact zones.” Taking concrete examples from the variety of contact zones into consideration, we point out how distinct notions and limitations of the broad concept of “contact zone” necessarily emerge as an outcome of its multidisciplinary usage, which implies different sets of data sources, concepts, methods, and theories. The three main aspects, i.e. space, time and experience, are closely interwoven. Depending on the particular situation and phase of the development of a contact, they highlight distinct dimensions of interdependencies, constraints and options, behavior standards and power relations. First, space is basic for delineating a contact zone, condensing communicative, cultural, political, and economic relations, which point beyond immediate territories. As communication necessitates media as well as communicators, we must specify these basic ingredients of any contact zone. Second, time is equally important. The beginning, duration, and end of social contacts require special attention. Historical data such as legal registrations, housing, police, or schooling and work records indicate important contact dimensions. They distinguish typical conditions and modes of contact and how they are formally experienced. Yet informal, increasingly virtual forms of mediated contacts require further attention. For example, one chapter of our book illustrates how ‘Old Shanghai’ (1842–1941), originated on the basis of the Treaty of Nanjing, hosted also a minority group of Italians, from a few dozen in the late 19th century to some hundreds in the 1920s and the 1930s. Some Italians chose their residences and shops so as to cluster in specific urban blocks, aiming at creating a small and divided ethnic space, renamed ‘Shanghai’s Little Italy.’ At the same time, an important portion of Italian migrants in the Pearl of the East was made up of businessmen, plant directors and skilled workers, mainly involved in the silk

Introduction

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sector: in these cases, the work environment needed to be a place of real encounter and exchange. In another chapter, Wong Tsz argues that Hong Kong under British control was itself an important geographical contact zone during the late 19th to early 20th centuries, where multiple actors of different nationalities played a role in producing a new cultural encounter, and where revolutionaries also became active. Third, experiences are constituted by living conditions, options and constraints as well as by embodied habits of perception, communication and interaction. Experiences imply differences, e.g. different threats, to one’s own identity; strangers are experienced as different by the host, whereas a stranger also suffers or enjoys usually quite distinct experiences at the same time with the host. For example, Ernst Eitel’s “disturbance of knowledge” plays an important role in understanding the contradictory dynamics and positionings of “living in the contact zone.” These dynamics show that maintaining boundaries and differences are crucial when negotiating within another cultural context. Laura De Giorgi explains that the “contact zone” in which foreign friends of communist China lived and operated was ideally shaped by the ideology of internationalism with its norms, expectations and values. Yet, it was strongly influenced by shifts in international politics, institutional and spatial arrangements and by ideological fissures, not taking cultural differences and modes of interactions into account.

The Book’s Structure We have arranged our book in two main sections: In the first five chapters we describe a few historical examples which may highlight the long path from first personal encounters via slow learning processes to some shared assumptions in local contact zones. Merle Schatz and Wong Tsz explain how different types of knowledge as part and as a result of encounters are essential when negotiating through new contexts, whereas Stefano Piastra, Renata Vinci and Guido Samarani show in highly detailed ways and with deep cultural understanding historically unique as well as partially enduring contact patterns. Chapters 6 to 11 pinpoint the conflictual interdependency of a common socialist ideology in the Cold War, yet also with the enduring dominance of strict bureaucratic rules in the service of national goals. Such bureaucratic rules governed not only the interactions and segregations of native citizens and potentially disturbing foreigners, but also increasingly the export of goods, services, and people to other parts of the world. Laura De Giorgi, Sofia Graziani and Giovanni Bernardini share a similar time frame in their

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contributions but inquire into very different practical experiences, especially concerning the actors and organizations involved. Anja Rommel and Tim Trausch describe the challenges of Chinese perceptions and expressions that reflect new social, political and intellectual dynamics due to the contact situations. In his chapter, Peter Ludes offers a new typology of local, virtual, and programmed contact zones: Each “migration” of missionaries, military personnel, common citizens or workers implies giving up previous bonds, former constraints and repressions, but also security levels and embodied knowledge of norms and sanctions in the lost or – temporarily – given up home. The degree and intensity of such losses depend on, for example, the size of the contact groups, whether they are mainly constituted by individuals or families, and whether the contact is expected to last for a few months, years, a lifetime or several generations. More particularly, making sense of individual, family, small group, community or more encompassing collective experiences, usually requires narratives of actors in specific places and times, focusing on special challenges. The distinction between local, virtual, and programmed contact zones refers to the mixtures of personal and mediated experiences. In a view back to much slower and delimited times, we account for the trajectories from individual and small group local, territorial, physical, fully sensual interfaces and interbody contacts, via their combination with virtual, mediated, imaginative contact zones to fully programmed and highly steered contact zones in the 21st century. The impact of the duration of contacts in a long-term perspective, the development from local to glocal ones and the constitutive experiences and perceptions of these processes vary significantly with regard to the concrete experiences made in a contact zone, and lead to different prioritizations of habits, memory-formations, power relations, borders, defense institutions, mobility and communication. In our examples of social contact zones, virtual contact zones, cosmopolitan contact zones, transnational contact zones and combat zones, (inter)national ideology and media always play an important role. They form and express patterns of embodied habits and types of knowledge that are closely interwoven with intercultural and transnational interactions. Our inquiries into these contact zones in China illustrate and re-coin Pratt’s concept. The respective foci and modes of analysis highlight either only one of the aspects emphasized above, or describe their complex interconnections, taking into account the local or glocal aspects that shaped the contact over the course of time.

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Bibliography Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hall, Mark and Rosner, Mary. “Pratt and Prattfalls. Revisioning Contact Zones,” in Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies, eds. Andrea Lunsford, Lahoucine Ouzgane. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 2004), 95–110. Marinelli, M. and Andornino, G. eds. Italy’s Encounters with Modern China. Imperial Dreams, Strategic Ambitions. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2013. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone,” in Profession 91 (1991). 33–40. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Criticism in the Contact Zone. Decentering Community and Nation,” in Critical Theory, Cultural Politics, and Latin American Narrative, eds. Steven Bell and Leonard Orr. (Notre Dame, IN, U of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 83–102. Robertson, Roland. “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, eds. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson. (LondonThousand Oaks-New Delhi 1997), 25–44. Sachsenmaier, Dominic. Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled. A SeventeenthCentury Chinese Christian and his Conflicted Worlds. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

Merle Schatz

1 A German Missionary in China (1862–1898) This chapter focuses on the particular historical example of the German missionary Ernst Johannes Eitel (“Ernest John Eitel”) who lived in China from 1862 to 1898. His book Feng Shui, Or, the Rudiments of Natural Science in China (from here on Feng Shui) distinguishes enduring social and cultural differences in local contact zones. Eitel’s previous knowledge and experiences were significantly challenged during his stay in China. This chapter looks at his “local experiences”. Eitel’s curriculum vitae and academic work regarding China demonstrate his insights into Chinese culture and Chinese ways of thinking. He was involved with various aspects of China on different institutional and personal levels. His academic education in Germany induced him to systematically write down his observations regarding Chinese politics and history, people and languages. He compiled a dictionary, wrote a historiography on Hong Kong and an ethnography as well as a historiography on the minority group “Hakka”. It was his desire to not only deeply understand this country he lived in, but also to convey as a mediator a picture of China that explained cultural peculiarities to the European readers. And as one exception among his “China-publications,” the book Feng Shui gives us insights into his own challenges of living within another culture. Eitel approached the “Chinese other” by sticking to his very own “systems of belief and knowledge.” He conceived of “the other” by demarcating the boundaries between Chinese and Europeans, and therefore by keeping and legitimating the distance. This mode of “description and analysis and juxtaposition” delimits chances for understanding, agreements and mergings that need to be considered for my description of the particular processes that constitute this local “contact zone” of a German in China in the second half of the 20th century.

John Eitel’s Life and Work Eitel began his studies at Tubingen University in 1856.1 He was enrolled in the philosophical faculty in the first year, and transferred to the Protestant theological

1 With permission of Hung-yi Chien 簡宏逸, I used information on Eitel’s vita from her paper “Sinologist Ernst Johannes Eitel’s Hakka Studies: A Perspective of Missionary Ethnography” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663426-002

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faculty to complete his bachelor’s degree in 1860. During his studies he also took classes in physical anthropology and psychology. After his university education, Eitel joined the Basel Mission in 1861 to become a missionary. He arrived in Hong Kong in 1862 and was deployed to the missionary station at Lilong 李朗, a rural village in today’s Shenzhen City, where he worked from 1862 to 1865. Due to his engagement to Mary-Ann Winifred Eaton, with whom he had seven children, and his prioritization of his family, he was forced to leave the Basel Mission in 1865. As soon as Eitel terminated his connection with the Basel Mission, he sought out James Legge and John Chalmers to request serving in the British mission. Legge and Chalmers endorsed Eitel’s application and recommended that he minister the Hakka-speaking churches of the Poklo District. In 1875, Eitel was appointed director of Chinese studies by Governor Arthur Edward Kennedy to examine the Chinese competence of British employees, and he also worked as an interpreter and as the governor’s secretary to the Chinese. In 1879, Eitel resigned from the London Missionary Society to focus on serving in the Hong Kong government. Thereafter, he served as inspector of schools until his retirement in 1898, when he then moved to Adelaide, Australia. Eitel became actively involved in education practice and policy and was respected for his academic activities: He was the editor of Notes and Queries on China and Japan and of the China Review. Both journals were platforms for publishing Westerners’ Oriental studies in the late 19th century. Eitel’s first major work in the missionary field “Ethnographical Sketches of the Hakka Chinese” was published in Notes and Queries on China and Japan as a series from Vol. 1, No. 5 (May 1867) to Vol. 3, No. 1 (January 1869). His treatise on the Hakka migration history was published in China Review. Eitel’s book Europe in China: The History of Hongkong from the Beginning to the year 1882 was a significant contribution to the early histories of Hong Kong, and was sometimes even considered to be the first history of Hong Kong: It was by no means his only publication, but its importance was enhanced by the fact that it was heralded by journal articles – one focusing on the history of education in Hong Kong and another couple providing a brief appetizer with a focus on the inconsistent policies and fluctuating circumstances that led to the actual establishment of the British colony. (Sweeting 2008, 89–90)

Beside his interest in history, Eitel also studied Chinese Buddhism and published a handbook on the topic, as well as a Sanskrit-Chinese Encyclopedia of

that was presented at the Joint East Asian Studies (JEAS) Conference 2016, SOAS, London, September 7–9, 2016.

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Buddhism concepts, and additionally, compiled a Cantonese dictionary, published in 1877. Hung-yi Chien explains the importance of missionary ethnography in the late 19th century for Hakka studies in the following decades: Among the writings of missionaries on the Hakka, Ernst Johannes Eitel’s Hakka ethnography and history are particularly important. Eitel was not the first to write about the Hakka, but his studies have had a significant influence on native scholars, especially Lo Hsiang-lin 羅香林, a vanguard of Hakka studies and promoter of Hakka identity in the twentieth century. (Hung-yi Chien 2016, 3)

Even though Eitel’s academic work was rich and important, it has not gained esteem in any similar way to Legges’s work.2 Sweeting (2008, 101) explains that, as a foreigner, and particularly a German in a British colony, Eitel could have irritated numerous contemporaries, especially when he might have appeared to have been acting as more British than the British themselves. Still, Eitel was highly praised for his accurate and extensive studies of the Hakka and Hong Kong’s history. He was recognized as a reliable sinologist who could be consulted on Chinese issues. His book Europe in China. The History of Hongkong from the Beginning to the Year 1882, despite some minor mistakes, was very positively evaluated and includes plenty of diplomatic history. Eitel also focused on Chinese economic and social history by describing commercial relations, the development of trade and industry, the emergence of a Chinese elite in Hong Kong, religious affairs, and trends of education. In connection with the latter, Eitel often attempted to identify trends such as the decline of voluntary schools, the closing of colleges, new educational movements regarding public schools for children and so forth (Eitel 1895, 347; 393). According to Sweeting (2008, 12), Eitel deserves acknowledgement as the first modern historian of education in Hong Kong and for his pioneering work in the fields of female education, early childhood education, teacher education, physical education, technical education and industrial training, and even comparative education. Also noteworthy were his extended observations of society in Hong Kong including, for example, his study of young girls adopted into Chinese families to work as domestic servants (Sweeting 2008, 12).3 Considering the more than 30 years Eitel spent in China, and taking into account the efforts he put into learning, understanding and translating Chinese, in writing ethnographies on the ethnic group

2 James Legge, who also served as a representative of the London Missionary Society in Malacca and Hong Kong (1840–1873), was a Scottish sinologist, missionary, and scholar. He translated classical Chinese texts into English and was later the first Professor of Chinese at Oxford University (1876–1897). 3 Sweeting mentions other academic works that deal with the history of Hong Kong as well.

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“Hakka” in China, it is clear that Eitel had a broad interest in China generally and wanted to inform Europeans about the country. Surprisingly, in his book Feng-Shui: Or, the Rudiments of Natural Science in China, published in 1873, he used a language that was arrogant, disrespectful, sometimes even scurrilous, and that cast a rather negative light on Chinese thinking and Chinese people, and supported notions of Chinese scientific backwardness: Every branch of science in China is but a rudimentary groping after truths with which every school-boy in Europe is familiar; we may conclude, that China as a whole resembles but an over-grown child, on whose intellect has fallen a sudden blight and who grew up since to manhood, to old age, with no more knowledge than that of a precocious baby. (Eitel 1873, 6)

There is a clear contradiction between his often accurate observations on feng shui characteristics, and his indifference regarding “the Chinaman,” “the ordinary Chinaman,” “every Chinaman,” “the Chinese” (Eitel 1873, 13; 19; 21; 44; 79; 81) who to him are “childish, an ignorant mass of the people” (Eitel 1873, 33), and who cheat on themselves with regard to the concepts and terms of feng shui: The common people know all these terms by name, but not understanding their meaning, they regard the terms themselves with a certain reverential awe, supposing them to exercise some mysterious magic influence. [. . .] The geomancer himself knows very well that his predictions are all guesswork, [. . .] yet he comforts himself by thinking, that this compass after all makes money flow if not into the lap of his employers yet certainly into his own pocket. (Eitel 1873, 44)

Eitel follows the unanswered question What is Feng-shui? Sinologues looked through the Chinese Classics for an answer to this question, searched through their Dictionaries, and found none. Merchants asked their compradores and house-boys, What is Feng-shui? but the replies they got were rather obscure and confused [. . .]. (Eitel 1873, 2–3)

His aim is to explain the main characteristics of feng shui and at the same time show that the Chinese had made feng shui a black art, that it is nothing other than natural science (Eitel 1873, 4–5). Eitel’s accurate academic work mentioned above suggests that he wanted to understand China and its people, not only with the aim of demonstrating European superiority, but also out of pure interest. A sense of political, economic and scientific superiority surely formed the framework of Eitel’s work and life within the Chinese societies he encountered. But within this framework, as all his efforts and works show, he became very close to the “cultural neighbor” (on this notion, see below). Can his crude language and low opinion of feng shui be explained by the mainly conventionally top-down behavior of

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pro-colonialists, such as Eitel, who himself “justified colonialism (there is certainly no criticism of it as a system imposed upon non-Europeans) and believed that Anglo Saxon domination was immanent in history”? (Sweeting 2008, 3) Eitel, as we can read on several occasions, was convinced that feng shui was but another name for natural science, which had never been cultivated in China in that technical, dry and matter-of-fact fashion, and which seems to Europeans inseparable from true science (Eitel 1873, 4–5): In Feng-shui we have what may be called, from a Chinese point of view, a complete amalgamation of religion and science. [. . .] from a scientific point of view, but a conglomeration of rough guesses at nature, sublimated by fanciful play with puerile diagrams. [. . .] My readers will probably agree with me in the remark that Feng-shui is the foolish daughter of a wise mother. [. . .] It is based on a materialistic scheme of philosophy, which had studied nature, in a pious and reverential yet in a very superficial and grossly superstitious manner [. . .]. The result, of course, is a farrago of nonsense and childish absurdities. [. . .] What is Feng-shui, then? It is simply the blind gropings of the Chinese mind after a system of natural science, [. . .] trusting almost exclusively in the truth of alleged ancient tradition and in the force of abstract reasoning, naturally left the Chinese mind completely in the dark. (Eitel 1873, 80–84)

What was Eitel’s reason for not juxtaposing assumed European (scientific) superiority with observations in China as a cautious discourse, but rather devaluing the latter in comparison, and thus making it seem ridiculous? How could Eitel on the one hand produce excellent work on Chinese cultures and inform Europeans about it, and on the other hand publish a book, that devalued it by comparing it with European scientific convictions?

Knowledge and Cultural Neighborhood For our research on contact zones of German and Italian communities in China, experiences of the actors involved play a crucial role because their own background, and their expectations alter at local levels new forms of knowledge. Maintaining control over “the right” knowledge is apparently important at least for an individual’s own position. Eitel’s own boundaries become particularly clear when he is challenged to cross them by reacting to new forms of knowledge that shape the “other’s” behavior. Any political or cultural aim, any economic incentive cannot control the fact that people from different regions and cultures in contact have their own limitations with regard to specific situations they face. Therefore, depending on how we look at Feng-Shui, Eitel’s practice of representation and his language usage tell us a lot about him acting in contact with the so-called cultural neighbor.

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A cultural neighborhood4 is characterized by forms of social and spatial organization, such as shared habits and forms of communication, and, crucially, a kind of knowledge of the “other” taken for granted: “Cultural neighbors are aware of and interested in each other, they face each other, get used to each other and develop intimate contact with each other’s differences and similarities” (Gabbert 2014, 15). Knowledge about the “other,” imaginings of it, and the related social and cultural expectations and practices (performance) are important aspects within a cultural neighborhood. Moments of wonder also appear within cultural neighborhoods where the actors have already lived in a long-term relationship, such as Eitel had in China. “Knowledge” and “experience” and the disturbance of one’s supposed knowledge play an important role in order to understand “contact zones.” With respect to the specific situation, different forms of boundaries, whether objective or subjective, real or imagined, can or cannot be transgressed. A flexible handling of cultural knowledge or social conduct always points to boundaries, for example in the form of extreme views of political or scientific opinions, which co-constitute ambivalent behavior modes. Concrete actions and habits can seem indecisive and produce strong counter-reactions, which can, if necessary, include a denial of the other’s knowledge: I say observing this varied and yet harmonious whole, it struck the Chinese observer, that there are, at the basis of this grand scheme of heaven, mathematical principles. (Eitel 1873, 25)

Or its wrongs: There is one great defect in Feng-shui, which our Western physicists have happily long ago discarded. This is the neglect of an experimental but at the same time critical survey of nature in all its details. (Eitel 1873, 83)

Yet it is exactly here that Eitel needs this construction of an essentialist typecast “other” in order to feel safe. The more he can define and distance himself from the “other,” the stronger his own position feels. It is the face of the unknown that we see here, and Eitel used his own knowledge to normalize what he could not understand, to resist what to him seemed to be unclear: What has so often been admired in the natural philosophy of the Greeks, that they made nature live [. . .] is equally so a characteristic of natural science in China. (Eitel 1873, 6)

4 The concept of “cultural neighborhood,” was developed within the framework of a longterm comparative ethnological field research project and published in To Live with Others: Essays on Cultural Neighborhood in Southern Ethiopia (Gabbert and Thubauville, 2010).

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On another occasion he refers to magnetism or electricity while explaining yin and yang: In the first instance it must be understood, that there are in the earth’s crust two different, shall I say magnetic, currents, the one male, the other female. (Eitel 1873, 22) But nature’s breath contains a two-fold element, a male and female, positive and negative, expanding and reverting breath, resembling, as we in modern English would put it, two magnetic currents, or, as the Chinese put it, the azure dragon and the white tiger. (Eitel 1873, 49) Let correct views be spread regarding those continually interchanging forces of nature, heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity and motion. (Eitel 1873, 82)

He then concludes, that the “fires of science will purge away the geomantic dross” (Eitel 1873, 83). To him, his observations only make sense when he describes them according to his own known scientific terms and standards.

Knowledge Diversity vs. Practices of Limitations How is it possible for Eitel to believe that his scientific understanding can replace the mentality or even particular concepts of an entirely different culture? Feng-shui is however, as I take it, but another name for natural science; and I must ask therefore the indulgence of my readers, for my introducing a general outline of Chinese physical science in order to make the system of Feng-shui intelligible. (Eitel 1873:4)

Irreconcilable, untranslatable, and immovable positions form the boundaries that shape the space available to different actors that communicate. It is easier for Eitel to define himself in opposition to the “other.” By doing so he can get close without “giving up the own” that he emphasizes by devaluating the new other. It is in the course of this that Eitel calls feng shui more than 20 times in his book a superstition and a wrong system of belief: But the most prominent ideas and practices which go to make up this system of popular superstition can be followed up to very ancient times. (Eitel 1873, 37) [T]he deepest root of the Feng-shui system grew out of that excessive and superstitious veneration of the spirits of ancestors. (Eitel 1873, 61) [T]he elementary principles of Feng-shui appear to have been practised centuries before Confucius, unconsciously, as it were, by superstitious people. (Eitel 1873, 64)

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[T]his strange medley of superstition, ignorance and philosophy.

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(Eitel 1873, 78)

The system of Feng-shui, therefore, based as it is on human speculation and superstition and not on careful study of nature, is marked for decay and dissolution. (Eitel 1873, 84)

Eitel criticizes feng shui so harshly as if he was insulted by this other system of belief or thought. His behavior is characterized by immense confidence in his own sense of truth, which was typical for Europeans who ventured to the New World and who felt superior to all the peoples they encountered. In his book Europe in China. The History of Hongkong from the Beginning to the year 1882, he comments on the union of Europe and Asia (as represented by China): This union is in process of practical elaboration through the combined forces of commerce, civilisation and Christian education, and particularly through the steady development of Great Britain’s political influence in the East. [. . .] By fifty years’ handling of Hongkong’s Chinese population, Great Britain has shown how readily the Chinese people (apart from Mandarindom) fall in with a firm European regime, and the rapid conversion of a barren rock into one of the wonders and commercial emporiums of the world has demonstrated what Chinese labour, industry and commerce can achieve under British rule. (Eitel 1895, ii; iv; v)

Eitel therefore wonders why most Chinese consider foreigners a threat, punishing them by selling – according to feng shui – bad areas to them: Witness, for instance, the views held by intelligent Chinese with regard to the island of Sha-meen, the foreign concession, so to say, of Canton. It was originally a mud flat in the Canton river in the very worst position Feng-shui knows of. It was conceded to the imperious demand of the foreign powers as the best available place of residence for foreigners, and when it was found that the Canton trade, once so prodigious, would not revive, would not flourish there, in spite of all the efforts of its supporters – when it was discovered that every house built on Sha-meen was overrun as soon as built with white ants, boldly defying coal tar, carbolic acid and all other foreign appliances – when it was noticed that the English Consul, though having a special residence built for him there, would rather live two miles off in the protecting shadow of a Pagoda, – it was a clear triumph of Feng-shui and of Chinese statesmanship. (Eitel 1873, 81)

It is not so much about how much Eitel understood feng shui and what about it were facts or misunderstandings. Rather it is interesting to ask about the differences between his “objective knowledge” and his opinion. Regarding the latter, Eitel experienced a confrontation that made him step back from Chinese thought, judging it negatively, and believing that it could and should be overruled by his own civilization: Powerful, however, as Feng-shui is, it is by no means an insuperable barrier to the introduction of foreign civilisation in China. (Eitel 1873, 81)

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Boundaries, imagined or real, make the own distinguishable from the “other,” or at least claim important differences. Stressing boundaries means therefore to stress distinctions. Without boundaries nothing would be perceptible, as they are the prerequisite of all human knowledge, as every act of knowing also begins with a decisive act: to understand what “the own” is, and what not. The problem is not the boundary, that hardly exists clearly in all instances in an objective manner, rather it is important to see whether and when this boundary is meaningful and necessary. Eitel’s involvement in Chinese institutions, his field research in Hakka regions, his language acquisition, clearly show that the boundaries between Europeans and Chinese who lived in the same regions were not always very clear and strict. Instead they were quite permeable. Eitel was allowed to enter and study all the parts of China he was interested in. His educational background helped him to compile analyses of the Chinese religion, Hong Kong’s history and the Chinese language, etc. But the same “tools” disabled him from describing feng shui in the same way. It was his inner boundary that was stressed as the result of encountering feng shui on the local level. Here a strict demarcation from the “other,” that did not fit in his known world, seemed to be the only logical solution to him. His experiences thus highlight how home country habits can endure in the new configurations. Reading Eitel’s Feng-Shui, we learn that his interest is not only to gain knowledge of the “other,” but also “the practice upon” the “other.” Pressed into his own terms in order to gain access, in order to be able to convey feng shui to Europeans, Eitel exposes his own limits or – in a more general vein – the limits of German modes of thought and habits. Perhaps his conviction of German superiority, which was characteristic for his time, functioned as the basic prerequisite for his contact with conflicting new knowledge models. How else could Eitel have oriented and positioned himself among his fellow strangers in China and towards his readers? Only on the basis of a solid conviction was it possible for him to deal with the “other,” knowing that he and his own world could not be shaken. [. . .] What most matters takes place not ‘out there’ or along the receptive surfaces of the body where the self-encounters the world, but deep within, at the vital, emotional center of the witness. This inward response cannot be marginalized or denied. (Greenblatt 1992, 16–17)

Constructing and emphasizing boundaries was thus of strategic importance for Eitel’s diagnosis of contacts between unequal groups.

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Authority of Written Media Eitel presents his judgments endorsed by the strong authority of the written media, knowing that he was already respected for his academic work on China. In his book, the European reader of his time gets, on the one hand, a quite dense description of important contents of the feng shui system, such as the Yjing 64 hexagram system, the five elements, or yin and yang. But on the other hand, Eitel takes the information out of context and then evaluates and judges according to his own scientific context: The only powerful agent likely to overthrow the almost universal reign of Feng-shui in China I conceive to be the spread of sound views of natural science, the distribution of useful knowledge in China. (Eitel 1873, 68)

The European reader gets both positive and negative information, but without the distinction that the first is collected data and the second is Eitel’s understanding, opinion and struggle in encountering and dealing with other forms of knowledge, that to him are deemed useless. He even argues from a Chinese point of view (Eitel 1873, 78) when he explains that “a doctrine which seems strange to us, [. . .] has nothing unreasonable in itself to a Chinaman” (1873, 19), and positions himself as being someone who can speak on behalf of the cultural neighbor. To give his insights into Chinese culture even more credibility and a foundation, Eitel repeatedly refers more or less concretely to Chinese literature or important Chinese thinkers, that he studied or consulted on the topic: Since my arrival in China I have had a great many practical collisions with Feng-shui, and having for many years collected notes on the subject and studied its literature in all its branches, I now propose to lay the result of my studies before the public. (Eitel 1873, 4)

To underline his broad academic knowledge of the subject, Eitel mentions these authorities repeatedly throughout the book: “The Chinese philosophers” (Eitel 1873, 37; 44); “the teaching of Choo-he and others, who lived under the Sung Dynasty (A.D. 1126–1278)” (Eitel 1873, 10); “Choo-he” (Eitel 1873, 7; 19; 61; 76; 77; 83); “the Commentator to the analects of Confucius” (Eitel 1873, 19); “Confucius” (Eitel 1873, 19; 31; 63; 64; 65; 66); ancient or Chinese “classics” (Eitel 1873, 5; 8; 27; 68; 69; 73); in general “Philosopher” or “Philosophy” (Eitel 1873, 6; 7; 19; 20; 31; 61; 74; 75; 76; 78; 79; 83); “Mencius and Sun-tze” (Eitel 1873, 65); “A distinguished Cantonese scholar, a member of the Imperial College (Eitel 1873, 9); scholar Shu-li-tsih” (Eitel 1873, 67); “‘Memoirs of the Three Kingdoms”’ (Eitel 1873, 71); “history reports” (Eitel 1873, 73); Tseh-king (lit. the canon of the dwellings) (Eitel 1873, 69); “imperial historiographer” (Eitel 1873, 74); literature generally and of poetical literature (Eitel 1873, 74); “one of the oldest classics of the Chinese, the Yih-king” (Eitel 1873, 27; 28; 32; 65; 79).

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He concludes stating, “having thus traced the history and literature of Fengshui down to the present” (Eitel 1873, 78), so that the reader trusts his knowledge and gets the impression that his conclusions are reliable.

Contact Zone: The Paradox Reality of Being Interacting, translating and communicating are crucial for (a) getting in contact with, and (b) establishing an impression of the “other” which guides a wide variety of contacts. The ability to present “the other’s knowledge” in (academic) writing as a strong authority constitutes an important challenge for responsibility in the process of information dissemination. Eitel’s book offers such an access to “the other’s truths,” especially in his time, when publications by established academics were not questioned but rather perceived as trustworthy. As shown here, Eitel had a great interest in immersing himself in native Chinese culture. By learning Chinese, he had to open himself up to the “other’s” language and he became an accepted mediator between outside and inside China. In Feng-Shui he described the otherness of objects and thoughts to his European audience, knowing that he was esteemed as a respected scholar. His treatise is self-confidently presented as just, as a result of the better standard of European science. Chinese otherness therefore is put into a minor position. Chinese literature, Chinese knowledge, geomantic objects reached him physically, but Eitel explained his observations only in relation to what he already knew in order to confirm what he already believed in. Feng-Shui thus describes his world and not the Chinese one – and not only that: he confirmed his own world as the better one. It seems odd that he was so close to Chinese culture but at this point decided to turn away from it. Spreading European representations while resisting the possibility of receiving alternative symbolic systems is part of Eitel’s way of “dealing with the other,” that in this case he prefers to deny: There is almost no authentic reciprocity in the exchange of representations between Europeans and the peoples of the New World, no equality of giving and receiving. [. . .] and though Christian missionaries obviously intended to give a great gift, it is difficult to avoid a sense that this gift too was a kind of taking possession. (Greenblatt 1992, 120)

By writing in a pejorative way about feng shui, the engagement with and circulation of Chinese knowledge can only be seen as a challenge of communication that also forms typical encounters in a local contact zone: paradoxically, clear demarcation and strong boundaries put Eitel in the position of approaching and openly dealing with the “other’s” knowledge, and welcoming it with interest due to the fact that, within his world, it could not withstand any competition:

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Natural science has never been cultivated in China in that technical, dry and matter-offact fashion, which seems to us inseparable from true science. (Eitel 1873, 5)

To Eitel, feng shui is blind error and a result of ignorance of (European) scientific knowledge. How could the Chinese not see that they followed a false system of belief? This fundamental belief enhanced his and his readers’ conviction that only Western civilization would be able to help the Chinese to develop in the right way. Therefore, sympathetic feelings for the “other” appear under the conviction of their subjugation or powerlessness due to underdevelopment: China, the oldest among ancient peoples, the greatest among great empires, or at least the most populous among all the countries of the world, hoary with old age, heavy, dull, childishly ignorant as regards matters of intellect. (Eitel 1873, 6)

This is where Eitel has to locate the knowledge of the “other.” It is his way of making sense of the experiences he had in China: [W]ith very little actual knowledge of nature they evolved a whole system of natural science from their own inner consciousness and expounded it according to the dogmatic formular of ancient tradition. (Eitel 1873, 5)

He claims to have fully understood it, and then exposes its inadequacies in order to cite his own obvious conception of the correct explanation of what was going on in China. And even though Western science is the only solution he offers, Eitel tells his readers that the Chinese will stick to their old traditions. He therefore keeps them in a place that cannot compete with the West and cannot become a real threat: The fact remains nevertheless, that Feng-shui is at present a power in China. Feng-shui is, moreover, so engrafted upon Chinese social life, it has become so firmly intertwined with every possible event of domestic life (birth, marriage, housebuilding, funerals, etc.) that it cannot be uprooted without a complete overthrow and consequent re-organization of all social forms and habits. (Eitel 1873, 78)

The examples offered by Eitel show that professed knowledge of the “other” does not necessarily mean understanding it. Different concepts needed new forms of explanations, limits of understanding clashed and instead of opening up to new concepts, Eitel either transferred the “other” into his own world, or even negated it through derogatory language, thereby making it insignificant. And at the same time, he promoted the value of the own more, so that he seems to act solely from a superior position. Eitel did not question his own knowledge or experiences, because this was his solution for approaching the “other” as closely as possible without giving up his culture’s superiority. The language used in his book shows us that encounters and communication

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modes which construct particular local contact zones, often go hand in hand with incommensurable positions due to embodied habits and boundaries, that cannot and will not be crossed.

Bibliography Eitel, Ernst Johannes. Hand-book of Chinese Buddhism. London: Trübner, 1870. Eitel, Ernst Johannes. Feng-Shui: Or, the Rudiments of Natural Science in China. London: Trübner. 1873. Eitel, Ernst Johannes. “An Outline History of the Hakkas.” In The China Review, or Notes and Queries on the Far East 2, no. 3 (1873): 160. Eitel, Ernst Johannes. A Chinese Dictionary in the Cantonese Dialect. London: Trübner, 1877. Eitel, Ernst Johannes. Europe in China. The History of Hongkong from the Beginning to the Year 1882. London: Luzac & Company, 1895. Eitel, Ernst Johannes. “Ethnographical Sketches of the Hakka Chinese, Article 1–6.” In Notes and queries: on China and Japan (1867–1869): 1.5–3.1. Gabbert, Echi; Thubauville, Sophia. To Live with Others: Essays on Cultural Neighborhood in Southern Ethiopia. Köln: Köppe, 2010. Gabbert, Echi. “The Global Neighbourhood Concept. A Chance for Cooperative Development or Festina Lente.” In A Delicate Balance. Land Use, Minority Rights and Social Stability in the Horn of Africa, hrsg. v. Mulugeta Ge. Berhe, 14–37. Addis Ababa: Institute for Peace and Security Studies, Addis Ababa University, 2014. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Sweeting, Anthony. “E.J. Eitel’s Europe in China: a reappraisal of the messages and the man.” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society Vol. 48 (2008): 89–109. Sweeting, Anthony. Education in Hong Kong: Pre-1841 to 1941. Fact and Opinion (Materials for a History of Education in Hong Kong). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1990.

Wong Tsz (王子)

2 Political Terms in Lobscheid’s EnglishChinese Dictionary (1866–1869) To know a language, a dictionary is needed. Early European missionaries such as Nicolas Trigault, Matteo Ricci, and Robert Morrison have all edited dictionaries for the understanding of Chinese expressions. The attention of this chapter focuses on the German missionary Wilhelm Lobscheid (羅存德, 1822–1893), who abridged the English-Chinese Dictionary (英華字典, 1866–1869), the first comprehensive bilingual dictionary published in Hong Kong with both Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations. It was also the reference work for the later ChineseEnglish dictionaries (by Inoue Tetsujiro, 1884 and Kingsell, 1899). The dictionaries ultimately played vital roles in transferring the fundamentals of modern political terms and their representations to the late Qing – early Republican Chinese intellectuals, many of whom became the mainstays of the Chinese revolution (1911–1912).

Geographical Contact Zones Previous scholarly works have discussed the geographical reference of contact zones. Mary Louise Pratt defines the contact zone as a liminal space where crosscultural interaction takes place (Pratt 1991, 33–40). As interpreted by Pratt, the contact zone as a constellation enables the spatial and temporal co-presence of subjects separated by geographical and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect (Pratt 1992, 7). The intersection here, using Pratt’s notion, does not imply an equal basis; such processes are in fact governed by inequalities and hierarchies of power, for instance in colonial expansions and power games played between nations. China during late 19th century was inextricably tangled between different power discourses; confronted with industrialized powers, China’s encounters were nothing less than harrowing – once the dominant subject of East Asia became the browbeaten object. China in the late-Qing dynasty was confronted with an identity crisis, for whereas the foreigners, or the “West”, were being regarded as the “preferred other” (Chow 1997, 151), China’s hostility towards the West, or the other, was part of an attempt to define and assert itself. This is however a double-edged sword, for in seeking a cultural identity, or identities, the discourse often turns into a confrontation between China and the West. Whereas the hostilities rose, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663426-003

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mutual understanding was made almost impossible, for although China with its mix of cultures was and has been historically assimilated with, entangled in, and dwelled with foreign influences, the dichotomy between China and the West was unprecedented during late 19th century, a time when the rise of hegemonic Europe disseminated its agenda in the larger world. Jonathan Friedman contextualized the trans-regional and cultural phenomenon as an “identity space,” with polarities of traditionalism, primitivism, modernism and postmodernism (Friedman 1992, 847). China thus finds itself irrevocably and extensively permeated by the West, the impregnable other. Whereas Friedman’s model of an identity space corresponds with the historical shaping and re-shaping of identity, Pratt’s model of the contact zone questions the actual social space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (Pratt 1991, 43). A contact zone “invokes the space and time where subjects previously separated by geography and history are co-present, the point at which their trajectories now intersect” (Pratt 1992, 8). Therefore the cultural co-existence, under Pratt’s model, is never a comatose and politically liberal encounter as here groups come together and “establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict” (Pratt 1992, 8). A contact zone includes a dynamic encounter, as well as the static social space in which interactions occur.

Hong Kong, Missionary, and Contact Zone One of the main foci of Pratt’s contact zone is colonial sites. The imperial colonies were often heavily armed with the strong presence of the sovereign power. To put Pratt’s definition of “contact zone” into the understanding of the encounter between China and the West, the British bridgehead in the Far East, Hong Kong, could be regarded as an important geographical contact zone between China and Europe during the late 19th to early 20th centuries. Much discussion has taken place about how Hong Kong served to be a contact zone during the late Qing – early Republican era between East Asia and the West, including its actors and activities. Thoralf Klein summarizes one of the success stories of the contact zone observed in Hong Kong: Lobscheid’s predecessor, Karl Gützlaff, could be regarded as one positive example of dwelling in the contact zone, how contact zone functions beyond the narrow geographic sense, and how the actors and the cultural mediations took shape (Klein 2015, 238). Klein highlights the linguistic importance of achieving communications and mediations, where languages and rituals could be explained and translated with cultural

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meanings as well as values, the translators and interpreters act as cultural brokers, and “cultural brokerage in this sense depends crucially on the knowledge of languages, but also on a sensitivity for different sets of cultural symbols and practices” (Klein 2015, 238). In the wake of anti-Qing uprisings, Hong Kong was one of the few safe havens accessible to Chinese revolutionists, including Sun Yat-sen. The city being the contact zone, with its multi-lingual and cultural substances, is in Arif Dirlik’s words, not merely a “zone of domination” but also a “zone of mediation” (Dirlik 1997, 118–19). Beyond the geographic zone, this chapter suggests that Lobscheid’s dictionary could be considered as a product of contact zone.

Wilhelm Lobscheid and his Dictionary The German missionary Wilhelm Lobscheid (羅存德, 1822–1893) was born in Gummersbach, Nordrhein-Westfalen. Lobscheid was a member of the Rheinische Mission Gesellschaft (Rhenish Missionary Society, RMG) from 1844, where he also completed his studies in theology and medicine. Lobscheid was fluent in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and with his remarkable talent in language he was appointed as priest and later a missionary to the Far East upon the request of Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff (郭實臘, 1803–1851) (He 2013, 264). On May 22, 1848, Wilhelm Lobscheid arrived in Hong Kong. Lobscheid followed Gützlaff to missionize the locals in Hong Kong and the Canton region. Intensive work took a toll on his health and he was then sent back to Germany in 1851 for treatment (He 2013, 264). Thanks to the personal network he established in Hong Kong, Lobscheid developed greater connections with the English colonial government; he then switched his affiliation to the British Medico Mission in 1851. Lobscheid was later appointed inspector of the British Government School in Hong Kong and, at the same time, he was appointed Medical Agent of the Chinese Evangelization Society (CES). He was the first missionary sent to China by the CES. Yet after the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (太平天國) uprising, Lobscheid was forced to evacuate and he returned to Hong Kong where he continued his medical and missionary works. At the same time, Lobscheid began editing Gützlaff’s translation of the Old Testament and the New Testament (He 2013, 266). In the coming years, Lobscheid served as an interpreter on the USS Powhattan’s voyage to Japan in 1855 to ratify an American-Japanese commercial treaty. Lobscheid soon returned to Canton shortly before the outbreak of the second Opium War; he joined the London Missionary Society (LMS), and was forced to flee again due to the hostility between China and Britain. After the war, the missionaries were allowed to return,

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and in 1857 Lobscheid reported 54 new converts in the Canton Ho-an and Palowai regions (Mason 2017). Lobscheid’s outstanding missionary work has earned him a good reputation; the Bishop of Victoria, George Smith, described his “high character and efficiency.” Yet, Lobscheid received unjust criticism and was forced to resign from the CES in 1857 (Mason 2017). Relieved from missionary work, he returned to Hong Kong and continued working as Government School Supervisor. During his supervision, Lobscheid published a paper titled “A Few Notices on the Extent of Chinese Education and the Government Schools of Hong Kong; with Remarks on the History and Religious Notions of the Inhabitants of this Island” in 1859, providing perceptive insights into the education system in Hong Kong (He 2013, 133–138). In 1870, he left Hong Kong and moved to San Francisco, where he pastored at the St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. Lobscheid then settled in Youngstown, Ohio, and continued his work as a medical doctor and pastor in the 1880s until his death in 1893 (Mason 2017).

A Dictionary as a Product of a Contact Zone Previous discussions on geographic contact zones do not exclude other mediating media, and the dictionary, as the product in this context acts as both the witness to and catalyst between native and extraneous ideas, as they sought to co-exist in late Qing – early Republican China. The significance of Lobscheid’s dictionary as a channel for introducing European political knowledge to China is explored here. Whereas different contact zones interact, Lobscheid’s dictionary retains a central role, and thus by regarding Lobscheid’s dictionary as a product of a contact zone, one sees how new political knowledge was shared, and new contact zones, and their interactions, were made possible as well. The dictionary thus further developed political terms previously non-existant in Chinese diction, and eventually shaped the realm of a democratic community in China. Keith Lawrence Harms’s (2014) application of Mary Louise Pratt’s (1991) notion of contact zones examined Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) in order to claim that a dictionary could be regarded as a product of contact zone that respects language variety, and partakes of language usage in ways that are discrete, unified and uniformly appropriate for commonly-imagined social contexts (Harms 2014, 71–72). By bringing the product and the social context together, the scope of a contact zone moves toward de-politicizing the act of language usage through balanced power relations enacted during bilingual language bridging – incorporating the social relations and actors entangled in the social context.

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Comissioned by the German Akademie der Wissenschaft (Xiong 2014, 47), Lobscheid’s vision in his edition of the English and Chinese Dictionary could be seen in his introduction to Part I of the four volumes: These material signs of the advance of civilisation have all been developed since the appearance of those Dictionaries which have heretofore been published. It needs but to be pointed out that the progress above partially described has given rise to the necessity of the introduction of a great number of words in the Chinese vocabulary, previously unknown to this people, and as in this age of advancement it is impossible to predict where the forward movement in China may end the author has deemed it imperative to translate and explain in this work, all those scientific words which have been added to the English language during the present century for the purpose of denoting terms for those discoveries in the arts and sciences in which the present age has been so prolific. At the same time, the author takes this opportunity of recording the great assistance which he has derived from the Works of his predecessors. These he has perused and compared with great care – selecting from all, such information as after mature deliberation and discussion was deemed the most correct, succinct, and intelligible. The rapid extension of foreign intercourse with China has resulted in the establishment of native institutions for the acquisition of the English language and of foreign sciences. Hence English scientific works will be read, and each year will bring new subjects before the native student for which he will require the equivalent terms in his own language. The author takes this opportunity of stating, that this work, although especially adapted to the student of the Chinese language, is nevertheless intended for the use and convenience of the foreign mercantile community generally. It is so full and complete, and will be offered at such a moderate price, that it is hoped it will become a necessity in every foreign counting house in China. (Lobscheid 1866, 1–2)

Lobscheid’s English-Chinese Dictionary (英華字典) was the most comprehensive dictionary of its kind in the 19th century. Between 1866 and 1869, a total of four volumes of lexicons were edited, including some 50,000 English terms and their equivalent translations in 600,000 Chinese characters. Many of his translations were later adopted by Chinese revolutionists and Lobscheid’s dictionary was later re-edited and published by F. Kingsell in 1899. Fung Kingsell (馮鏡如, 1844?–1913) was a businessman, and owner of the print and stationary shop Kingsell & Co. (文經活版所) in Yamashitacho (山下町), Yokohoma (橫濱), Japan. The shop itself was in fact the regional office of the Revive China Society (興中會, RCS), founded by the statesman Sun Yat-sen in 1894 – the first revolutionists’ organization established against the Qing regime. Fung himself was the head of RCS in Yokohoma, and was Sun Yat-sen’s close friend and key supporter. The RCS was later amalgamated with the Revive the Light Society (RLS, 光復會) and the China Revival Society (CRS, 華興會), renamed as the Chinese United League (CUL, 中國同盟會), the predecessor of the Chinese Nationalist Party (CNP, 中國國民黨).

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During the late 19th century, Lobscheid’s dictionary was in high demand among young Chinese intellectuals and revolutionists. In 1899, Fung joined with Cantonese revolutionist Chan Siu-bak (陳少白), one of the Four Bandits (四大寇)1 and a close friend of Sun, re-edited and published the dictionary in Yokohoma. Fung’s (F. Kingsell) dictionary was largely based on Lobscheid’s version, and the dictionaries are key evidence of how new vocabularies concerning European political thoughts, or democracy were first introduced into Chinese diction and became part of the Chinese nationalist revolution. The revolutionists’ revision of the dictionary also reflected the importance of Lobscheid’s efforts in influencing Chinese understanding of Wwestern political realms.2 To name a few examples: Lobscheid translates ‘Democracy’ as ‘People’s Politics’3 (民政, Government by the people), or ‘Managed by the People’ (衆人 管轄) (Lobscheid 1866, 589); Lobscheid also attempted to separate the term ‘Democracy’ from ‘Government’ – ‘民政’ is therefore also referred to as ‘a democratic Government’ (Lobscheid 1866, 910). In F. Kingsell’s version with the additional explanation: ‘A form of government established by promoting People’s own governance’4 (推民自主之國政) (Kingsell 1899, 319), in short, the modern Chinese term for democracy: ‘民主’. On ‘election’, Lobscheid was the first to give a detailed explanation of the democratic process commonly observed in the West. Lobscheid defines election as ‘the act of choosing (選者、選擇者、挑選者)’ and ‘free will (自主)’. In the sub-entry ‘the election of members of the parliament (選民委官者)’, one observes that the term ‘members of the parliament’ was translated into ‘民委官’, which literally means ‘People-appointed Officials.’5 Lobscheid defines ‘liberty’ as a right ‘權.’ His translations of ‘civil Liberty (法中任行)’ and ‘Liberty of will (自主之權、自操之權)’ (Lobscheid 1866, 1107–1108) combine the concept of right with free will, or in ‘self-control’6 (自主, 自操). Both translations were inherited by F. Kingsell’s version (Kingsell 1899, 588). On the democratic infrastructure of the ‘parliament’, Lobscheid defines it as ‘議士會’ (Assembly of the 1 The Four Bandits (四大寇) are: Sun Yat-sen (孫中山, 1866–1925), Chan Siu-bak (陳少白, 1869–1934), Yau Lit (尢列, 1866–1936), Yeung Hok-ling (楊鶴齡, 1868–1934). They are regarded as some of the earliest representatives of the anti-Qing nationalists. 2 For a detailed discussion of how the translations of political terms in other dictionaries correlate Lobscheid’s edition, see: Wong Tsz, “Decoding the Translations of Political Terms in 19th Century Chinese-English Dictionaries – Lobscheid and his Chinese-English Dictionary,” Comparative Literature: East & West, Volume 1, 2017. 3 My translation. 4 My translation. 5 My translation. 6 My translation.

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Representatives)7 ‘民委員會’ (People’s Committee),8 ‘議士會、民委員會、國大 公會’ (Grand National Assembly).9 To reinforce the historic knowledge of the parliament, the term ‘Panhelenium’ was added and translated to the ‘Greek National Assembly’ (希臘國民會)10 – here one can note how the term ‘國民’ – equivalentto the modern ‘citizen’, is found in a Chinese bilingual dictionary for the first time. F. Kingsell’s inherited Lobscheid’s translation with some elaborations, notably under ‘Election’ in F. Kingsell’s dictionary, ‘the Election of members of the parliament (選擇議會人員)’ (Kingsell 1899, 380), where ‘Parliament’ was translated as ‘議會,’ a term commonly used nowadays as ‘members of the parliament’ or ‘議會人員,’ or in short ‘議員’ in the modern Chinese language.

Conclusion This chapter has shown the significant role of the dictionary as a product of a contact zone and as a way of offering a space for communication, negotiation and mediation of many of the issues raised by politics and history observed in East Asia during the dawn of the Republic of China. On the issue of the multi-lingual contact zone, Pratt, herself a linguist, argues that transculturation might also be used in post-colonial discourse to suggest the prospect of the subdominant culture transferring cultural values to the colonizer, consequently generating a new identity during this complex process (Pratt 1991, 37). Pratt defined the concept of the contact zone rather loosely but it does not propose the existence of any rigid cultural boundaries. Yet she also reminds us that the contact zone brings a prospect of witnessing the mingling of cultural interaction, accommodation and hybridization as well as conflict across borders of different kinds. The terms presented in the examples may bring up the issue of identity; terms such as ‘Chinese,’ ‘democracy’ or ‘liberty’ are not ontologically bound to their references, and like any other political terms and political realms, they are always under constant negotiation, social construction and reconstruction. The labels attached to the terms may to some extent provide categories and definitions, but they may not necessarily reflect the complexity of such negotiations and social construction beneath the surface.

7 My translation. 8 My translation. 9 My translation. 10 My translation.

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Pratt’s contact zone could offer one useful perspective for bringing the discussion to the surface. While this chapter considers Lobscheid’s dictionary a product of a contact zone, it does not exclude the fact that it carries the functionality of a contact zone, proven by all the traces of activities and their actors. If a contact zone allows the subsequent generation of other contact zones, so could Lobscheid’s dictionary. Through the discussions on contact zones, we are able to witness the identification and creations of disciplinary parameters within boundaries, and how they meet the demands of multiculturalism as we know. This chapter serves merely as a small part of such a discussion. Lobscheid’s dictionary, as well as other dictionaries, should not be merely considered in terms of their literary or chronological periods, but also in terms of historically defined contact zones, the moment when different groups within a society contends for the power to interpret the doings and the roles of doers. As suggested previously, the chronological, geographical, and generic parameters of Lobscheid’s contact zone, or any given contact zone, are shaped on the basis of including all necessary materials that are relevant to the objects and subjects being contested. Whereas contact zones’ life spans and timelines vary, literatures of different groups, languages, and their spoken regions can be considered together within the contact zone. This advocates the need to animate future research work on contact zones by considering their actors as a whole. Having said that, the goal of this chapter was to contextualize the discussion of a contact zone in time and space, and suggest how the concept could be projected onto further subjects. After all, it is equally important to note that the use of terms, and the shaping of a contact zone, are strategic and political, rather than a simple and uncritical essentialization of identity.

Bibliography Chow, Rey. “Can One Say No to China?” In New Literary History 28, no. 1 (1997): 147–51. Dirlik, Arif. “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism.” In The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997, 118–19. Friedman, Jonathan. “The Past in the Future: History and the Politics of Identity.” In American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 94, No. 4 (1992): 837–59. Fung, Kingsell. A dictionary of the English and Chinese language, with the merchant and Mandarin pronunciation. Yokohama: Kingsell & Co., 1899. Harms, Keith Lawrence. “Maybe Also A Colony: And Yet Another Critique of the Assessment Community” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2014).

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He, Nan (賀楠). “A Brief Introduction of Wilhelm Lobscheid, a Protestant Missionary in China in the 19th Century (19 世紀來華傳教士羅存德生平概要).” In Journal of East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies(文化交涉) 2 (2013): 261–85. Klein, Thoralf. “How to be a contact zone: the missionary Karl Gutzlaff between nationalism, transnationalism and transculturalism, 1827–1851.” In Becker, J. (ed.) European Missions in Contact Zones: Transformation through Interaction in a (Post-)Colonial World. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015, 219–38. Lobscheid, William. English and Chinese Dictionary: With the Punti and Mandarin Pronunciation, Vol. 1. Hong Kong: Daily Press, 1866. Mason, Laura. “Wilhelm Lobscheid (Luo Cunde, 羅存德) 1822–1893,” Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity, accessed May 2, 2017, http://www.bdcconline.net/en/stories/l/ lobscheid-wilhelm.php. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession, Vol. 91 (1991): 33–40. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Xiong, Ying (熊英). “On W. Lobscheid and his English and Chinese Dictionary (羅存德及其 《英華字典》研究),” (PhD diss., Beijing Foreign Studies University, 2014).

Stefano Piastra

3 The Italian Community in ‘Old Shanghai’ (1842–1941) Introduction The cosmopolitan urban environment of so-called ‘Old Shanghai’ (in Chinese, 老上海 Lao Shanghai), historically encompassed between the Treaty of Nanjing (1842), which closed the First Opium War (1839–1842), and WWII (in 1941, Japanese troops of occupation formally abolished Shanghai’s foreign concessions), has represented, and still represents, a key case-study in the broader context of the geo-historical research concerning foreign presence in China before the rise of communism and the institution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (1949). In fact, Shanghai, more than the other four treaty ports opened to international trade in the early 1840s (Guangzhou, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo), and more than the other coastal cities opened to foreign commerce after the Second Opium War and the Treaty of Tianjin (1858), experienced rapid urban growth and saw a higher degree of interaction between native and foreign people. Moreover, the economic and demographic figures characterized it as one of the biggest metropolises of that time on a world scale. As the core of studies has been focused on the largest Western communities based in the city (British, Americans, French, Russians after 1917 Bolshevik revolution) and the Japanese (the largest foreign community of all), other presences, although significant, have been neglected or ignored in the scientific debate. Subsequently, the origin and development of the Italian group in ‘Old Shanghai’, quite small when compared with other European presences, will be investigated in this chapter. After a discussion of the concept of ‘Old Shanghai’ as a ‘contact zone,’ the essay will deal with the social behaviors and the spatial dynamics of the Italian residents here by outlining two poles. Namely, from one side, the tendency to self-isolation in relation to small businesses, daily routines and social life, and from the other, the push, in some work contexts, to integration and closer relations with other nationalities.

‘Old Shanghai’ as a ‘Contact Zone’ For centuries Shanghai, as a market town located along the Huangpu River in the Yang-tze estuary, was under the jurisdiction of Songjang; its economy was https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663426-004

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based on riverine commerce and it was significant only at the regional level (Cooke Johnson 1994). Although Shanghai played a minor political and economic role in the dynamics of the Empire, since the early 17th century it was characterized by an unusual and peculiar international dimension. In fact, the city was the home-town of the prominent mandarin Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), Matteo Ricci’s follower, whose name was latinized in the West as Paulus Xu: back in Shanghai after the death of his father to observe the Chinese custom of the three years of mourning (1607–1610), he supported the creation and the diffusion here of a Catholic community, involving both local elites and poor and poorly educated people (Piastra 2016). In particular, during this Shanghainese stay, Xu invited to the city an Italian Jesuit, Lazzaro Cattaneo (1560–1640), to preach; after Xu Guangqi’s death, his family continued to support and fund Jesuit activity, allowing the settlement in Shanghai, in the late 1630s, of another Italian Jesuit, Francesco Brancati (1607–1671), who founded a permanent Catholic mission here, still conserved (although deconsecrated) and known as Shanghai’s Lao Tang. The impact of this parish was high in terms both of conversions and the diffusion of the Western humanities in East Asia (Brockey 2007, 110; 114; 136; 335; 382). Unlike other cities in East China in this stage, the activities of the Jesuit missionaries implied a very early introduction of Western culture into a small urban environment like the Shanghai of that time, providing the basis, in a long-term perspective (in fact Christianity in Shanghai even survived the imperial bans and persecutions of the 18th century under the Qing Dynasty), for a city receptive to foreign cultural influences between the middle of the 19th to around the first half of the 20th centuries. The new status of Shanghai as a treaty port, opened to international trade after the Treaty of Nanjing (1842), implied an urban ‘take-off’ and massive migration, both internal and international. The former market town now became in just a few decades a mercantilistic city and a financial hub; new foreign settlements (the so-called concessions) were built in a few years on the basis of a sort of permanent land lease by the Qing Empire to the Western powers. If, according to Mary Louise Pratt (1991), ‘contact zones’ can be identified as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power,” this urban environment, later renamed ‘Old Shanghai,’ fits perfectly to such a definition: a quasi-colonial city (officially, the Chinese Empire was never a colony), formed by the juxtaposition of urban bodies (the original Shanghai, now renamed ‘Chinese City’ or ‘Old City’; the French, British and American concessions, the last two unified since 1863 by the so-called Shanghai´s International Settlement), spatially demarcated, inhabited by different ethnic groups, characterized by different urban styles and

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planning, legally placed, in the case of the Western concessions, under the principle of extra-territoriality (Fig. 1). Although formally separated, the regime of the concessions also allowed the residence of communities (Chinese people included), whose nationalities were different from the one to which a given concession belonged. Moreover, the concessions were physically demarcated, but the borders were highly permeable, both for the international and the Chinese groups. This meant a push for integration between native and foreign peoples: in ‘Old Shanghai’, such a process found spaces and possibilities for interaction that were not available in ‘normal’ colonial cities of the period, or in other Chinese cities which hosted a higher number of concessions (e.g. Tianjin before World War I, which hosted eight foreign concessions), where every foreign settlement was a ‘simulacrum’ of the respective home country. The cosmopolitan spirit of Shanghai in these years, furtherly strengthened by the arrival of new European groups (e.g. Russians after 1917 Revolution), became a sort of a myth in the West: ‘Old Shanghai’ was renamed ‘The Paris of the East’ or ‘The Pearl of the East’, but also, in a darker interpretation of the same myth, ‘The Opium City’ or ‘The Sin City’ (Earnshaw 2008), trivializng the drug and human trafficking prevalent in the city. Another cultural interpretation was also given to this period by the Chinese side, and this is significant in confirming our case-study as a ‘contact zone’ after Pratt: the cultural melting pot of the ‘Old Shanghai’, bridging Eastern and Western elements, with particular regard to fashion and literature, was and is outlined by the term Haipai (海派), that is ‘Shanghai School’ or ‘Shanghai style’ (Kuo 2007, 2–3). Vice versa, the term Jingpai (京派; literally, ‘Beijing style’) assumed the meaning of ‘traditional.’ The two terms represented then and still do now two opposing kinds of Chinese cultures.

Italians in ‘Old Shanghai’: Origin and Development of an Atypical Expat-Community Soon after its opening as a treaty port in 1842, Shanghai started to host a small number of Italians. In this first stage, it was a heterogeneous and disgregated community, as Italian states before unification were politically weak at the international level and without colonial interests in Asia. Most of the community members in this phase were priests and sailors. Regarding the first group, following the footsteps of prominent Italian Jesuits (Michele Ruggieri, Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni, Martino Martini, etc.), in

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China between the 16th and the 18th centuries in the context of the encounter between East and West during the modern era, several Italian Jesuits moved to Shanghai in the framework of the foundation (1847), under the French aegis, of the Catholic settlement of Zikawei (now known as Xujiahui). Located in a suburban area right outside the French concession, it soon became a fundamental center for the diffusion in Asia not only of Catholicism, but also Western humanities and science. Most of the Italian priests based here were from the Campania region in Southern Italy, in particular from Naples, in this period subjects of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Such a regional origin is linked to the influence over the aspirant missionaries of the so-called ‘Chinese College’ (Collegio dei Cinesi), based in Naples and founded in the 18th century by Matteo Ripa, basis for the present-day Oriental University of Naples (Piastra 2013, 8). With regard to Italian sailors in the city, there were dozens, who were former crew members of merchant ships (probably, from Liguria region), now left to their own devices (Ros 1911, 9–10). Overall the situation changed at the end of the 1850s. From the middle of the 19th century, a new silkworm disease, the pèbrine, caused serious damage to the silk sector in France and later in Italy, mainly in the Po plain in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia and in the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont). In order to confine the disease, a profitable trade with Italy of pèbrinefree silkworm eggs experienced a boom. This flow of eggs was mainly from Japan, but in an initial stage East China also hosted several Italian semai (silkworm egg traders) for some months. In China, the main focus of semai was Zhejiang Province (Zanier 1993), but the Shanghai area was also involved as a hub and treaty port. The Italian regions of origin of the semai reflect the geography of Italian silk production at that time, coming as they did from Lombardy (Milan, Brescia, Bergamo, Como, Brianza region) and Piedmont (Turin, Alessandria, Cuneo). In this phase, the presence of semai in ‘Old Shanghai’ was intermittent and discontinuous, and they were not fully enumerable as Shanghainese residents in a strict sense. The attempts to solve the pèbrine crisis, as the main threat to a keyeconomic sector of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia and the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the activity of the Italian silkworm traders in the Far East, had political connections and implications: in 1858, the Kingdom of Sardinia, now leader in the process of the unification of Italy, decided to institute, at the Camillo-Benso, Count of Cavour’s suggestion, a consulate in Shanghai, whose effective opening was postponed to 1860 because of bureaucratic problems and the second Italian War of Independence. Among the aims of such an operation was the effort to give political support and aegis for the activity of semai, and consistent with this was the choice, as first consul of the Kingdom of Sardinia in Shanghai, of James Hogg, an English silk trader (Francioni 2004, 16).

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The rise of the Kingdom of Italy (1861), with Piedmont and Lombardy now parts of the same state, comparable, regarding dimensions and population, with other European countries, strengthened these dynamics. But the presence of an Italian consulate was insufficient to promote Italian interests and trade in East China; in fact, in comparison with other European countries, the absence of a formal commercial treaty between the Kingdom of Italy and the Qing Empire represented a huge obstacle. The issue was solved in 1866, when Italian officer Vittorio Arminjon signed in Beijing the first Sino-Italian Treaty with Chinese plenipotentiaries Tan Tingxiang and Chonghou, ratified in Shanghai one year later. After the 1866 Sino-Italian Treaty, and, in the meantime, gaining benefits from the opening of the Suez canal (1869) (which drastically reduced the time needed to transport goods from Europe to the Far East and vice versa), the Italian community in ‘Old Shanghai,’ from being made up of priests, sailors and, seasonally, semai, experienced a growth of residents (several dozen), and a diversification of their role, broadening to include commercial, diplomatic and military sectors. In particular, after the pèbrine crisis was resolved, Italians exploited their skills and the network of contacts they had developed in the silk sector in East Asia to become instrumental in the settlement and the management of steam silk filatures in Shanghai, owned by British and American investors. In fact, Chinese workers were highly skilled in hand work, but unfamiliar with steam-powered machines, while British and Americans were expert in the supervision of the industrial processing of cotton, but not silk. They thus preferred to externalize the management of their Shanghainese silk filatures to Italians, avoiding the use of French directors (as highly skilled as the Italians, but France at that time was a geopolitical competitor of the Anglo-Saxon countries in the Far East). Lombardy represented the most developed and technologically advanced silk sector in Italy, and since the late 1870s Lombards, in particular from the Milan area, started to count for the majority of Italians in Shanghai, who were usually wealthier and more integrated with the Western community in the city. Through the decades, this group moved (ca. 1890s–1910s) from a managerial to an ownership level, founding their own silk filatures in Shanghai. This silk-based migration flow from Lombardy to ‘Old Shanghai’ during this stage was atypical in the broader context of Italian emigration in this period (Piastra 2017): it involved managers and skilled staff from Lombardy, while the larger proportion of Italian emigration at that time and in subsequent decades consisted of poorly skilled, whose background was the primary sector and from Southern Italy. A second atypical factor concerns gender issues, as this migration flow involved both men (directors of silk filatures), but also women, usually unmarried (the so-called filandine, female supervisors of Chinese female workers). In this period, in Italy, male migration was predominant, and

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women only migrated in the context of family reunification, not for work. A third factor of atypicality was the final destination of this migration: East Asia, where the Kingdom of Italy had no colonies and only slight political influence, while the majority of emigration flows from Italy in that period were directed to Southern or Northern America. The peak of the Italian community in ‘Old Shanghai’ was reached probably in the 1920s–1930s during the Fascist era, with around 200 to 300 official residents. During this phase the Fascist regime made huge investments in the city, appointed Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, as General Consul in Shanghai (1930–1933) and aimed at representing itself as the European ‘natural’ counterpart of Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT (Godley 1973). This phase ended in the late 1930s, after Fascist Italy moved closer to Japan and subsequently signed, in 1940, the Tripartite Pact with Japan and Nazi Germany. Between the end of WWII and the rise of the PRC, almost all Italians in Shanghai left. Just a very few remained for political or family reasons.

Reclusivity as a Reaction to the Minority Report As seen above, the Italian community in ‘Old Shanghai’ was significantly smaller and politically weaker than other European groups; moreover, Italians usually were not familiar with the English language (the lingua franca of Shanghai’s International Settlement) and, unlike other Western communities in the city, their activities did not have the formal support of a foreign concession. As a reaction to a condition of implicit subordination to Anglo-Saxon and French residents, and displaying a significant analogy with Italian migration flows in the USA between the late 19th and the early 20th centuries (La Bella 2018), in several cases the Italian people adopted, from the bottom and almost unknowingly, a strategy of social and spatial reclusivity and self-isolation. For example, social solidarity among Italian expatriates seemed to be deeply established. The city hosted several Italian clubs (Djordjevic 2009; Istituto Italiano di Cultura – Shanghai 2012, nos. 21; 23–24; 34; 38; 48–49; 62), and even humanitarian associations like the Italian Red Cross (Istituto Italiano di Cultura – Shanghai 2012, no. 32), and during the Fascist period all these clubs were put under the political umbrella of Fascism. Moreover, as a reflection of informal mutual help among fellow countrymen, house transfers among Italians have been attested, as in the case of Carlo Bedoni, Lombard silk manager (Piastra 2018, 282), whose house in Shanghai’s French concession in Route Ferguson (presentday Wukang Road), passed, in the early 1940s, to Dino Tirinnanzi, Director of the

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local branch of the Italian Chamber of Commerce (Istituto Italiano di Cultura – Shanghai 2012, nos. 43; 78). On the basis of random and incidental data from memoirs (unfortunately, general and official data are not available in this case, as after the rise of the PRC the archive of the Italian Consulate in Shanghai was intentionally burnt down to cover-up Italian support for Chiang’s regime and Japanese occupation before and during WWII: Bertuccioli 1991), it seems also that, in ‘Old Shanghai’, marriages took place mainly among the Italian people, and in particular among the Italian residents in Shanghai or in Beijing (Piastra 2013, 9), while international or interracial marriages involving Italians were probably rare. Regarding spatial dynamics of reclusivity, in relation to retail markets and Italian shops some Italians chose, for the same reasons, to cluster in specific urban blocks, such as the one located at the crossroads between Nanjing Road (present-day East Nanjing Road) and Sichuan Road in Shanghai’s International Settlement. This was the block that the Italian scholar Giuseppe Ros (1883–1948), and professional interpreter of Chinese language at the Italian Consulate in Shanghai (Piastra and Casacchia 2013), referred to in his works as the ‘Little Italy’ of Shanghai (Fig. 2) (Ros 1911, 24). Such a definition, with an explicit parallelism with the situation of Italian migrants in the USA of those years, underlines the ‘Italianization’ of the space, but the case in Shanghai differs from the American version of a Little Italy as it was not an area of social decay or criminality. A second cluster of Italian shops and services (a restaurant, a hotel, shops, a cultural center, etc.), which arose during the 1920s to 1930s in the context of Fascist penetration into the city, was grouped along Bubbling Well Road (present-day West Nanjing Road) (Fig. 3). From the point of view of identity, the Italian expatriate community, having reached its peak in the 1920s and 1930s, had only one generation born in ‘Old Shanghai’, and was generally characterized by a short/medium-term, and not a life-long expectancy of staying in the city. As a consequence, there are no traces, at least on the basis of the official reports and private memoirs published, of any ‘Italian-Shanghainese’ awareness or self-consciousness, comparable to the Anglo-Saxon concept of ‘Shanghailander’ (Bickers 1998).

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(Quasi-)integration as a Reaction to an International Work Environment Although, in general, it was isolated from a social and a spatial point of view, the Italian community in ‘Old Shanghai’ possessed in the Lombard group (Piastra 2013, 8), whose main business was, as analyzed above, the silk sector, a subcomponent with the highest degree of integration. It was a ‘relative integration’, in the sense that it was not a free choice under the umbrella of humanitarianism or a peer-to-peer interaction based on good will: in fact, the Lombards, in the work environment, were pushed or even forced by circumstances to interact both with the other Western communities and the Chinese population, as the owners of the silk filatures run by Italians were mainly, in a first phase, British or American, and the workers were Chinese. So, the Lombard management of the silk filatures was instrumental in solving technical and management problems and in the mediation between the higher level of the financial world, which owned the silk plants, and the lower level of the working class. It was a sensitive and delicate role, as the social and political conflicts inside the filatures of ‘Old Shanghai,’ in the 1920s to 1930s, were increasing (Piastra 2017, 288), both in the broader context, in the period of the Republic of China (ROC), with the quasi-slavish conditions and child labor in Shanghai cotton and silk filatures, and with the rise of Chinese nationalistic, labor and anti-imperialist movements. This meant, for example, that Lombards employed in the Shanghainese silk filatures had to learn a competent level of technical English to communicate with the owners (as contracts and bureaucratic documents were in English: Piastra 2017, 279), and even, in the case of the female Lombard supervisors, a basic level of Chinese with Shanghainese dialect and pidgin influences, learnt directly ‘on the field’ inside the filatures, to interact, manage and control Chinese female workers (Fig. 4). The travel diary and other handwritten notes by the Lombard filandina Giuseppina Croci (1863–1955), in Shanghai from 1890 to 1895 serving the British-owned and Lombard-managed silk filature EWO (in Chinese, 怡和 Yihe), part of Jardine, Matheson & Co. financial group, highlights these atypical linguistic dynamics (Croci 2011; Cartago and Carsana 2017). At the same time, as a response to the high number of working hours in the plant and the need to guarantee a quick response to work problems, the Lombard staff of the silk filatures in Shanghai had their residences in compounds located very close to the industrial sites, but separated from the Chinese workers (Piastra 2017, 287, note 22). Again, it contributed to the isolation of the Italians in the ‘Old Shanghai’, but this time it was determined by the owners of the filatures, and not

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from the bottom, as a spatial reflection of asymmetrical power in the quasicolonial environment of the city and in order to demarcate separated areas for different social classes and ethnic groups.

Bibliography Bertuccioli, Giuliano. “Per una storia della sinologia italiana: prime note su alcuni sinologhi e interpreti di cinese.” Mondo Cinese 74 (1991): 9–39. Bickers, Robert. “Shanghailanders: The Formation and Identity of the British Settler Community in Shanghai 1843–1937.” Past & Present 159, no. 1 (1998): 161–211. Brockey, Liam Matthew. Journey to the East. The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2007. Cartago, Gabriella and Carsana, Alessia. “Un glossarietto inedito di fine ‘800 tra italiano e pidgin shanghaiese.” In Sguardi sull’Asia e altri scritti in onore di Alessandra Cristina Lavagnino, edited by Clara Bulfoni, Emma Lupano, Bettina Mottura, 263–74. Milan: LED, 2017. Cooke Johnson, Linda. Shanghai. From Market Town to Treaty Port, 1074–1858. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Croci, Giuseppina. Sul bastimento per Shanghai, edited by Pierabruna Bertani. Udine: Forum, 2011. Djordjevic, Nenad. Old Shanghai Clubs and Associations. Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, 2009. Earnshaw, Graham. Tales of Old Shanghai. Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, 2008. Francioni, Andrea. Il “banchetto cinese”. L’Italia fra le treaty powers. Siena: Nuova Immagine, 2004. Godley, Michael R. “Fascismo e nazionalismo cinese: 1931–1938. Note preliminari allo studio dei rapporti italo-cinesi durante il periodo fascista.” Storia Contemporanea 4, no. 4 (1973): 739–77. Istituto Italiano di Cultura – Shanghai. Gli Italiani a Sciangai, 1608–1949. [Thematic map]. Shanghai: Istituto Italiano di Cultura – Shanghai, 2012. Kuo, Jason C. Visual culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s. [no place]: New Academia Pub, 2007. La Bella, Laura. How Italian Immigrants Made America Home. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2018. Liu, Heung Shing and Smith, Karen. Shanghai. A History in Photographs, 1842–Today. Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin Viking, 2010. Piastra, Stefano. Italians in the ‘Old Shanghai’: A Preliminary Contribution. Bologna: University of Bologna, 2013. http://amsacta.unibo.it/3840/. Piastra, Stefano. “Francesco Brancati, Martino Martini and Shanghai’s Lao Tang (Old Church). Mapping, Perception and Cultural Implications of a Place.” In Martino Martini, Man of Dialogue, (Proceedings of the International Conference, Trento, October, 15–17, 2014), edited by Luisa Maria Paternicò, Claudia von Collani, Riccardo Scartezzini, 159–81. Trento: University of Trento, 2016. Piastra, Stefano. “Gli esordi e gli sviluppi dell’emigrazione italiana nella “Vecchia Shanghai”. I nessi tra settore serico, origine lombarda, reti relazionale e familiare.” Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana 10, nos. 3–4 (2017): 271–302.

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Piastra, Stefano, and Casacchia, Giorgio. “L’interesse dell’opera di Giuseppe Ros per gli studi storico-geografici.” Geostorie 21, nos. 1–2 (2013): 49–73. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91 (1991): 33–40. Ros, Giuseppe. Shanghai e la sua colonia italiana. Shanghai: North China Herald, 1911. Zanier, Claudio. Alla ricerca del seme perduto. Sulla via della seta tra scienza e speculazione (1858–1862). Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1993.

Website http://www.virtualshanghai.net/.

Fig. 1: Plan of Shanghai, 1919 map drafted by the Shanghai municipal council. The map shows the ‘Old City’ in the center, close to the Huangpu River; north and northeast of the ‘Old City’ is visible the International Settlement, originated in 1863 after the merging of the British and the American concessions; the French concession is identifiable west of the ‘Old City’ (source: http://www.virtualshanghai.net/).

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Fig. 2: A cluster of Italian shops located at the crossroads between Nanjing Road (present-day East Nanjing Road) and Sichuan Road in Shanghai’s International Settlement, cited by Italian sinologist and diplomat Giuseppe Ros (1883–1948) as the ‘Little Italy’ of Shanghai. Photo dated in the early 20th century (source: Ros 1911).

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Fig. 3: (bottom) A second cluster of Italian ‘places’ (a restaurant, a hotel, shops, a cultural center) in ‘Old Shanghai’ along Bubbling Well Road (present-day West Nanjing Road) in Shanghai’s International Settlement. A reconstruction of a thematic map about Italians in the history of Shanghai (top; the area of the cluster along Bubbling Well Road is apparent) (source: Istituto Italiano di Cultura – Shanghai 2012).

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Fig. 4: Official photo of the interiors of the English-owned steam silk filature EWO (in Chinese, 怡和 Yihe), part of Jardine, Matheson & Co. financial group, based in ‘Old Shanghai’ along the Suzhou Creek in the International Settlement (early 20th century) (source: Liu and Smith 2010). Besides Chinese workers, the photo shows two Westerners, probably a Lombard female supervisor (filandina) and the Lombard director of the plant.

Renata Vinci

4 Sino-Italian Encounters in the Late Qing Press (1872–1911) Contact Zone as a Thinking Device for Italy and China At the beginning of the 1990s, Mary Louise Pratt tried to define the dynamics often established in the form of uneven encounters among different sociocultural entities in terms of space, time and experience, by formulating the model of the contact zone (Pratt 1991, 34). The asymmetry established among the actors operating within the contact zone is an idea that persists throughout the entire corpus of her later elaborations of the notion of the contact zone. In 1992, she re-elaborated this notion as a “space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt 1992, 8), proposing it as synonym of “colonial frontier.” In 1993, she again clarifies how “a contact perspective decenters community to look at how signification works across and through lines of difference and hierarchy” (Pratt 1993, 88). “Power,” as a force contributing to the shaping of unsymmetrical interactions, is therefore one of the key elements of any relation undertaken within the contact zone. However, during the age of its late Imperial crisis, although having to undergo a series of humiliating defeats and “unequal treaties,” China never integrally conformed to the status of a colony. Because of this it was otherwise defined as a “semicolony” or “subcolony” (Shi 2001, 31–2) to stress the restrictions of applying the colony status to China, since this status could not to describe the multi-layered game of power played out not only between China and foreign nations, but even more so by the several foreign powers against each other to exert their own sphere of influence on the Asian giant’s market and politics. Within this geopolitical architecture, Italy was revealed to be a weak competitor in the eyes of Chinese governors, especially when compared to the rest of the Western powers interacting on the Chinese ground. This is also the reason why, as we will see, the Chinese government often assumed a more audacious attitude – an attitude that hardly recurred in any other of its diplomatic relations – when dealing with the Italian delegation. This condition raises the first of a series of questions: although realized within a context of an unequal game of powers, can we really define the encounter between Italy and https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663426-005

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China within the boundaries of the dichotomous relation of “conqueror vs. conquered,” which is implicit in Pratt’s definition of contact zone? Beyond power, “space” is equally relevant to the analysis of any contact zone. In the context of the fluid transmission of knowledge, instruments and know-how that occurred in correspondence with the crisis of the Chinese imperial power, it is not easy to confine the “where” and “how” of this burgeoning exchange between Chinese society, Western material and intellectual culture. This is specifically true when considering the physical boundaries of conventional space as they are traditionally conceived (city, region, country), and it is even more accurate when considering the limited influence that Italy exerted on China, and the confined presence of its expat community in the Qing territory, as demonstrated by the numbers outlined in the following pages. In the perspective of a larger application of conceptual space of the contact zone, we should then consider the modern media that started to take its first steps in China as early as the first decade of the 19th century from the initiative of foreign Christian missions, namely the periodical press. In the late 19th century, newspapers and periodicals had already reached a wide circulation, both in treaty ports and in smaller urban areas. They were configured as a hybrid product originating from Western journalism and nonetheless molded on the basis of needs and interests of the Chinese readers to provide an arena for the plurality of voices that started to emerge in the Chinese public debate.1 For the aforementioned reason, there is no doubt that among those voices, the loudest were those of foreign powers. Thus, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the press in China served as a device that was able to transform the spatial and social dimension of cultural interaction, and it also served as a catalyst for the diffusion of modern ideas, knowledge about contemporary internal affairs, and knowledge about the rest of the world. Therefore, a second answer that the case studies in this chapter try to postulate relates to the physical and spatial features of the Chinese-Italian contact zones. This is achieved by determining whether the concept of a “virtual contact zone” – proposed for contemporary network media, which require a deeper and interactive response (Ludes 2017) – is applicable to the specific case of Sino-Italian interaction.

1 A comprehensive overview on the evolution of the Chinese modern press and of the contribution of the foreign initiative to its development is provided by Roswell S. Britton in her The Chinese Periodical Press 1800–1912 (Britton 1933), while the more recent Italian monography by Laura De Giorgi entitled La rivoluzione d’inchiostro extends the historical perspective up to 1937 (De Giorgi 2001). On the Chinese side, two relevant contributions to the field have been provided by Fang Hanqi (2012) and Ge Gongzhen (2013).

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Finally, considering the periodical press as the main channel and source for this study, which focuses on the perception of the Italian community by the Chinese media and in the eyes of the local readership, we will address the modes of representation or self-presentation operated by several actors of the SinoItalian contact zone. Additionally, we will investigate the dominant voices of the late Imperial printing culture and public debates, including those that contributed to the construction of a public discourse on Italy and Italians. In her study of the Andean visual artists, Pratt elaborated the term “autoethnography,” or “autoethnographic expression,” to describe those texts which cannot be considered authentic in terms of autochthonous self-representation but, “in contrast, involves partly collaborating with and appropriating the idioms of the conqueror” (Pratt 1993, 9). Borrowing her interpretation, we will therefore define what happened in public Chinese debates not as far as self-representation is concerned, but rather where representation of the other is concerned (which, in this precise case study, coincides with the representation of Italy), to identify which kind of idiom was used to represent Italians and Chinese-Italian interactions. Along with a constant parallel enquiry of other local media and historical documents, the core source of this study is represented by a medium that has been described by contemporary scholarship as an authentic “encyclopedia of modern and contemporary history” of China (Zhang 1992, 259): the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao. For its considerable contribution to the formation of a Chinese public sphere and its status as a medium, collocated between tradition and modernity, it represents a privileged source of analysis, and an enormous thesaurus of the most widespread imagery and opinions circulating on different matters in late Imperial society.

A General Overview on the Construction of the Image of Italy from Early Representation to the Shenbao For a long time, Chinese readers relied primarily on second-hand information to shape an image of Western countries, including their populations and cultures. It was only with the first investigative missions abroad that Chinese envoys started to compose first-hand reports about the West. As for Italy, it has been demonstrated that the Chinese ‘image’ of the country was influenced by a variety of sources in different moments of Sino-Italian cultural interaction.

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After the considerable contribution of Jesuit works in the 16th century (as the ones who shaped and embellished an idealized portrait of their native land and the birthplace of the Roman Catholic Church), the European and North American Protestant missionaries of the early 19th century compromised this idyllic portrait of Italy, providing an antithetic description of the inhabitants of the Mediterranean peninsula (Bertuccioli and Masini 2014, 194). The words of Karl F. A. Gützlaff (1803–1851), Richard Quarterman Way (1819–1895), and William Muirhead (1822–1900) contributed to the transmission of various negative features of the Italian national character to Chinese readers.2 It was only from the mid-19th century onwards that more up-to-date and, above all, direct information arrived from the first Chinese travelers who visited Italy themselves. Thus, they contributed to shaping the overall image of Italy in China and adjusted existing knowledge towards a more realistic perception (Casalin 2016, 333–50). During this same time frame, a new medium started to compensate for the lack of current and relatively impartial information about the Western world: the modern press. The early periodicals that appeared in China did not actually share many common features with the Western conception of journalism, as initially they were mostly conceived as collections of essays and treatises gathered into volumes and published regularly every few months. Later, in the second half of the 20th century, foreign entrepreneurs, followed by Chinese locals, began to develop a genuine commercial interest in newspapers and magazine enterprises. In 1872, in the cosmopolitan surroundings of the treaty port of Shanghai, the British businessman Ernest Major (1841–1908) launched the Shenbao newspaper, which passed from an initial daily circulation of 600 copies to around 7,000 to 8,000 in 1897, and eventually reached 30,000 copies in 1919 (Xu and Xu 1988, 73), with an efficient network of sales agents and national circulation in the major Chinese cities. In so doing, the publication obtained wide circulation horizontally, that is to say geographically, as well as vertically, reaching the upper and lower classes of Chinese society. Due to its wide circulation and the prestige it acquired among the Chinese well-educated classes, Shenbao has been considered one of the longest-running and most influential modern Chinese-language newspapers (Mittler 2004, 2), gaining the reputation as “the most important Chinese-language newspaper, at least until 1905, and among the most important until its closure in 1949” (Wagner 2001, 3). This became possible because it represented a great agent 2 Respectively, the three Protestant missionaries are authors, among others works, of the three geographic treaties Wanguo dili quanji 萬國地理全集 (Universal Geography, 1838), Diqiu tushuo 地球圖說 (Illustrated Geography, 1848) and Dili quanzhi 地理全志 (Complete Treatise of Geography, 1853).

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of change in the innovation of the modern Chinese press, both through the use of printing and communication technology as well as the innovative idea of a newspaper as a public instrument.3 The newspaper contributed to the installation of a public debate, proposing itself as “a channel for governors and the governed to learn about each other and communicate” (Mittler 2004, 18), and served as a stage for readers to express their own opinions and ideas. Therefore, today it has become a major source of information for investigations into general opinions and as a barometer of public sentiment on many issues of that time. Although often biased due to being run under a British administration for most of the late-Imperial era, as a commercial paper, Shenbao was also constantly run as an attempt to satisfy the tastes and interests of Chinese readers all while stimulating and promoting the development of modern journalism according to Western traditions.4 The editorial stance of its staff, which was almost entirely composed of Chinese literati who were starting out in careers as journalists, was positioned between a respect for national heritage and a reformist avant-garde. Being conceived for a local Chinese readership, it met the tastes of the general public both in form and content, profiting from the traditional education of its editors and contributors, which stemmed primarily from the experience of passing Imperial examinations. As mentioned above, the modern press, together with the travel literature published by the first Chinese visitors to Italy, moved away from both the eulogistic depiction of Italy made by the 16th century Jesuits and the critical view of the Protestants of the 19th century to give Italy’s representation in China a more realistic and contemporary image. As for the recurring pattern and main features of Italy’s representation for the readers of Shenbao during the four decades analyzed here, the occurrence of systematic phenomena appears with a certain degree of regularity, depending on the topic or main area of representation. Assuming that the image of any subject, and a country in particular, is a multifaceted ensemble of numerous elements, three significant macro-areas emerged concerning the representation of Italy’s national identity. The first was the cultural image of Italy, including art and archaeology, literature, language and education, and history. The second related to Italy’s contributions to the international application of science and technology, including telegraphy,

3 For example, Shenbao was the first newspaper to use telegraphic transmission for a more rapid circulation of news in 1881, when the Shanghai-Tianjin line was launched, while other improvements concerned the application of the most up-to-date printing technology (Reed 2004, 76–7). 4 Barbara Mittler devotes a large section of her study to the different forms of formal and stylistic adaptations to traditional literary tastes (Mittler 2004, 43–86).

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transportation and other inventions and discoveries, as well as a case study on the Milan International Exhibition of 1906. The final macro-area was the direct presence in China represented by several cases of Italian direct intervention in China (i.e. during the Sanmen Bay affair), as well as the micro-events of the life of some Italian citizens in China.5 To prepare newspaper pages, the editorial staff searched autonomously for news, mostly from the foreign press published in China and abroad, or dispatches released by international news agencies, which translated reports into Chinese or commented on some recent events in diplomatic relations between the newly-born Italian government and the Chinese court. As will be shown in what follows, this element represents one of the main influences on the nature of the information conveyed to the Chinese readers, and therefore in the construction of a representation of Italy and Italians in China. Thus, a perception of the Italian community in China was developed by the local readership through the contributions that appeared in the newspaper which selected as the main source of this study. An analysis of this perception will be introduced using selected case studies from the news related to Italian citizens on Chinese soil and the diplomatic dialogue between the Chinese and Italian governments.

Space of Encounter and Representation: Media and Communication in a Non-physical Contact Zone A thorough definition of the word “community” requires a composed socioanthropological elaboration. However, for our purpose of describing the Italian expat community in China and its representation on the Chinese press, it would be sufficient to refer to it using its most basic definition of “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic” (Oxford English Dictionary 2019). In this sense, in the corpus of articles from the Shenbao dealing with the wide range of facets of the representation of Italy, explicit references to

5 This data emerged from the elaboration of a corpus of 2,134 articles related to Italy published between 1872 and 1911 published by Shenbao and are the result of the author’s PhD research: The Image of Italy in late Qing Chinese Press: The Role of the Shenbao 申報 (1872–1911) (Vinci 2017).

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the presence of an Italian community – either in Shanghai or in other Chinese ports – rarely appear. This phenomenon is likely in proportion to the small numbers of Italians in China at the end of the Empire. Unfortunately, a systematic census of Italians living abroad was inaugurated only after 1927, when the National Institute of Statistic was founded. However, according to the records of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the number of Italian expats rose from 16 in 1871, to 143 in 1881, to 188 in 1891, to 273 in 1901, and finally growing exponentially to 1,017 in 1911 (Samarani 2014, 50–2). This testifies that a small population of nationals did exist in more than one city. Tianjin, where the Italian Settlement was established in 1901, was perhaps at one point the most representative setting, but Beijing, Guangzhou and the commercial metropolis of Shanghai also attracted a group of Italians that were mainly merchants, entrepreneurs, and diplomats. In particular, the group of expats in Shanghai displayed a solid internal cohesion and a sense of attachment to their homeland, sharing common activities and events, and organizing cultural associations and sport clubs (Piastra 2013, 8). Nevertheless, none of those events, meetings, or activities were reported in the pages of the Shanghai newspaper within the period considered in this study. Almost the entirety of the foreign population of Shanghai resided in foreign concessions. In 1863, the British and American Concession merged into the International Settlement, while the French Concession remained separate. The small Italian community of Shanghai was mostly distributed in these extraterritorial areas alone; a report by the Shanghai Municipal Council records an overall growth from an initial number of 15 residents in 1865, to 31 in 1885, to 83 in 1895, and then reaching 124 in 1910 within the International Settlement (Henriot, Shi and Auburn 2019, 174). The scale of this phenomenon appears even more evident when compared to other foreign communities. In those same years, the number of Brittons grew from 1,372 in 1865 to 4,465 in 1910; the Americans grew from 378 to 940; the Portuguese grew from 115 to 1,495; the Germans grew from 175 to 811 (Henriot, Shi and Auburn 2019, 174–5). This same proportion was replicated within the boundaries of the French concession, where even fewer Italians resided: 5 in 1895, 12 in 1910 and 55 in 1915 (Henriot, Shi and Auburn 2019, 176). Nevertheless, some illustrious Italian personalities belonging to the small expat community or to the national cultural past were not completely unknown to the Chinese readers, as there are a decent number of references in the pages of the popular Shanghai newspaper. For example, Italian diplomats and their official duties, such as the succession to the General Consuls of Italy’s chair, formal receptions and official meetings, were constantly recorded in bulletins

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concerning contemporary affairs and occupied nearly 20% of the entire corpus of news about Italy. Similarly, some of the most eminent figures of Italian culture that contributed to the Sino-Italian encounter had been publicly celebrated by both foreign and local cultural elites, and were constantly reported on by both foreign language press and the Shenbao. Among those, the life and deeds of Marco Polo and Matteo Ricci were the focus of two of the eight meetings that constituted the series of conferences titled “Noted Men Who Helped China.” These conferences were held by the Protestant missionary and erudite scholar Gilbert Reid (1857–1927) in 1906. During those well-attended conferences, organized in the hall of the International Institute of China (Shangxian tang 尚賢堂), the important contributions of Ricci and Polo to the international dialogue and the diffusion of reciprocal knowledge between China and the West were celebrated in front of a formal delegation composed of eminent members of the Italian diplomatic body, the Italian navy, and the Italian community along with both a Chinese and an international audience (Vinci 2018, 128–32). Shenbao followed Reid’s conferences with great interest and reissued his lectures in the form of elegant essays. However, unlike other foreign newspapers that recorded the most interesting events of city life (the British North China Herald and North China Daily News),6 Shenbao never provided the list of official Italian guests, with the only exception being the General Consul of Italy, Cesare Nerazzini (1849–1912). In the Shenbao, the eulogy in the contribution of the Italian traveler to the circulation of news of the splendor of China in the West and to the beginning of a generalized fascination of the European well-educated class with China was shared for the benefit of those who did not attend the event, and the same was done by the English weekly NCH, which translated Reid’s words into English as follows: Why should the Chinese hold in respect the memory of this Venetian traveller, distinguished, one might say, everywhere, except in China? First because of the help he personally gave to the powerful Emperor Kublai Khan. Minute information was given of all parts of China, to say nothing of other parts of the world. [. . .] Marco Polo was eyes and ears of Kublai Khan, who for many years had ceased his wars of conquest and military marches. [. . .] A second benefit is the favourable introduction which China received to the nations of Europe. Before, China, or rather the Mongol, had been held in dread; now a fairy-hand appeared on the scene. In the introduction there was no slight, ridicule, or contempt. Cathay was made attractive. [. . .] A third benefit was the stimulus imparted to exploration. [. . .] Popes and kings sent their travelling commissioners to the Far East, and century after century the story has been told to the scholars of Europe of this great Chinese people. (NCH April 6, 1906, 32–3)

6 Hereafter NCH and NCDN.

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Likewise, in the press, both English-speaking and Chinese readers were able to find a record of Reid’s sincere appreciation of a forerunner of the intercultural exchange between Chinese and Western culture and knowledge, namely the Italian Matteo Ricci: The main thing to be noticed is the good which Ricci brought to China. His missionary methods differ from those of many since, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. He has been criticised; from another point of view he may be commended. First, he brought European learning into China and brought in a new era of scholarship without breaking with classical learning. [. . .] A second good was in the peaceable way he prosecuted missions. He did not antagonise, he conciliated. He was courteous, affable, large-hearted, broad-minded. He was social, hospitable, friendly, and considerate. He came into a new country and adapted himself to his surroundings. [. . .] He might have begun by preaching what the people would spurn, and might have died a martyr. Perhaps this would have been better, but none the less it is pleasant, in these days of missionary riots, to think that one man, nay, many men, came to China three hundred years ago, who showed sagacity, and made friends, even among the keenest intellectuals of the land. [. . .] Ricci and all his confrères depended, not on political force, but on Truth and Reason. To-day missionaries are protected by foreign governments, and appeal to the treaties and conventions. Then there were no ministers, no consuls, no gunboats. Few knew (as few know now) what was Ricci’s nationality. He was known to be European and a Christian; that was all. (NCH May 4, 1906, 257)

From a different perspective, together with news related to educational and cultural events that involved the Italian community and its cultural heritage, another section of the same newspaper that dealt with the Italian presence on Chinese soil was dedicated to local news and law court reports. In this section, some small crimes committed by Italian citizens were recorded. However, in none of those cases did the Shenbao ever mention the name of the Italian lawbreaker or defendant. For example, we can observe two cases, of the Sicilian silversmith Giuseppe Fidone, banned from Shanghai for stealing valuables from a foreign residence (Shenbao October 3, 1883, 3), and the unemployed Giovanni Besso, accused of stealing some silk ropes from a prostitute’s apartment in a Shanghai brothel (Shenbao April 22, 1906, 17). In both cases, the news reporter referred to the protagonists of the crimes simply as Italians (Yiren 意人 or Yidaliren 意大利人). We are only able to know their identities because of the British press, which often served as the source for local and foreign news (NCH October.10, 1883, 423–25; April 26, 1906, 7), that the Shenbao’s editors translated and synthesized for their own readers. Information that may have been considered irrelevant or even disrespectful to a local audience was frequently omitted in order to avoid publishing readings that may have been upsetting or annoying. From this perspective, we might hypothesize that Chinese transcriptions of the names of the two Italian burglars were not considered relevant.

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Along with omission, misidentification of foreigners associated with the Italian nationality have also been recorded, since even the Shenbao, one of the most representative Chinese newspapers, frequently fell into error when identifying Italian citizens. This mistake occurred in an article published in May 1906 that reported the news of a reckless Italian aviator who had been banned by the local police from flying his aerostatic balloon within the city of Shanghai after giving a demonstration at Zhang Jia Huayuan 張家花園 (the Zhang family’s garden). Unexpectedly and due to poor weather conditions, the pilot had lost control of the balloon and crashed into some local houses during the descent (Shenbao October 5, 1906, 17). The Shenbao provided a vivid yet imprecise account of the whole accident, identifying the pilot as an Italian citizen. However, only from reading the pages of the NCDN, can readers understand that the unlucky aviator was instead the famous American Captain Price (April 20, 1906, 7). Furthermore, similar imprecision also occurred when reporting foreign news coming from Europe. Again, Shenbao regularly misidentified countries and nationalities, as in the example of the Genevan professor Redard (erroneously identified as Italian), who appeared in the Chinese press in an account regarding the latest brilliant inventions after having developed an anesthetic technique for small surgeries using blue light rays (Shenbao October 16, 1907, 26). This confusion surrounding Italian expats in the eyes of Chinese readers may very well be considered proof of the distance between the Italian and Chinese communities in the city of Shanghai, and how rare it was for occasions of physical contact between them. For the Chinese community, it appears that most of the time the press was the only way to know about Italians in Shanghai, and what they were effectively doing in the city.

Italy, a Weak Player in the Balance of Power in Semi-Colonial Late Qing China More explicit evidence of the marginal role of the Italian community in the diplomatic and political chessboard of late Qing China is provided by a series of news related to refusals – sometimes audacious and firm, sometimes more polite – received by Italian diplomatic delegates, when demanding territorial, economic, and cultural benefits. The most symbolic case of disastrous Italian negotiations and the low standing of Italy on the stage of foreign powers is the dispute of Sanmen Bay of 1899, which ended in a humiliating Italian debacle. This key event and climax

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of Italian diplomatic failure has been widely studied by historians, and its reverberation for the image of the Mediterranean country in the Chinese press has been investigated by the author of this chapter in a dedicated study.7 This is not the place to deeply analyze the reasons and dynamics that caused the fiasco of Italian diplomacy in China, but it would be useful to recall the main steps of this historical moment. At a historical juncture when the main foreign countries were obtaining control over several areas of Chinese cities and coasts, the request for a settlement in southern China made by the young Italian government could be considered more of a way to try to affirm its role in the game as a foreign power operating in China, rather than a request corresponding to the basic needs of its national community abroad. As we have said, the community of Italians in China was relatively small, and its interests were mostly concentrated in the field of the silk and cocoon trade, in which Milan represented the main trading center in Europe and the Zhejiang province was the most prolific region in China. Considering the political context in China at that time, it clearly appears that the request was presented at the wrong moment, showing a lack of competence in judging the Chinese socio-political situation by the Minister Plenipotentiary De Martino (1843–?). While he thought that the failure of the One Hundred Days Reform represented a moment of weakness in Chinese politics, in truth he did not realize the climax of the anti-foreign sentiment that the end of the reform movement brought. The result was that the court was determined to reject any claim made by Italy. The most symbolic gesture came when a diplomatic note containing the formal demand presented by Italy was returned unopened, ignoring the protocol at the cost of great humiliation for Italy. The subsequent decision to set a four-day ultimatum to China was also hasty, due to a failure of diplomatic correspondence between the Foreign Minister and De Martino. On May 10, 1899, an initial telegram from Italy instructed De Martino to send the ultimatum, but a second telegram, sent only six hours after the first, gave a counter order, as Canevaro hoped that a British colleague could mediate with the Chinese government. Unfortunately, the two telegrams arrived in the wrong order, and thus were read by De Martino, who sent the ultimatum, causing his recall to Italy and an internal crisis, which then led to the resignation of Canevaro.

7 This study appeared under the title Chinese Public Sentiments about Italy during the Sanmen Bay Affair in the Pages of the Shenbao (Vinci 2016). For detailed historical accounts of this episode, see: Borsa 1961; Samarani and De Giorgi 2011, 22–8; Xiang 2003, 85–101.

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Frequent opinion pieces appeared in the pages of the Shenbao, which revealed how the inconsistency and indecision of the Italian diplomatic arrangements led to a general sense of skepticism, and even to some cases of explicit derision among public opinion: Italians are ridiculous. A recent news from Tokyo, Japan, reported: “Recently the Italian government prepared to build a harbour in Sanmen Bay in Zhejiang province. The cost is 8,000,000 Italian lire, corresponding to 320,000 British pounds.” This is like a Western proverb that says: “the hunter sells a tiger fur at the market while the tiger is still hidden in the deep mountain.” This is very ridiculous. (Shenbao May 3, 1899, 1)

The Italian incompetence was even more evident when compared to the success of other countries that had been able to obtain and exploit territorial concession, as in the case of France, which had accomplished the task of obtaining Guangzhou Bay: Nowadays Italy is a small weak country. Its territory is not very extended, does not have a solid military power, internal finances are not rich, but they still had the courage to hastily claim our soil. [. . .] Moreover, the military power of Italy is not as strong as the one of England, France, Germany, Russia and other big countries. [. . .] Those who want to obtain a jade, first have to eliminate its flawed part and later can get a fine jade. So, using a comparison between France and Italy, France is a pure jade while Italy is the flawed part. (Shenbao November 27, 1899, 1)

These adverse sentiments seemed to be the result of a generally negative opinion of the Italian attempt to gain an area in one of the most prolific areas of the Chinese coast, that was conveyed both to foreign and local readers by the foreign press in China and abroad, and often become the source for news which appeared in the Chinese language press. The following excerpt exemplifies the case of a Shenbao article, reporting the difficult internal situation as one of the reasons for Italy’s weakness and stating the motivation for formally refusing its demands: Some others say that few days ago a Russian paper from Moscow reported that recently in Italy a popular rebellion arose. In the three cities of Palermo, Florence and Lecco the situation is the most drastic. The rebels are numerous. The cause of this rebellion is a contrast with the government. At the moment people and soldiers have faced off more than once. The streets of the city of Milan have been destroyed and already more than half of the Italian population is unsettled by the strike, so this was sufficient to prepare a long-term strategy. This is why they did not insist on the request previously mentioned. (Shenbao June 24, 1899, 1)

However, this last piece of news is not entirely reliable, as it was true that Italy had been shocked by a violent popular outbreak in many cities of the peninsula, mainly during 1898. However, disturbances had ceased before the end of

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that year. As a matter of fact, Russia, together with France, was one of the main opponents of the block of alliances involving the Italian action in China, as Italy was mainly supported by Great Britain, France and Japan (Borsa 1961, 121–4). Thus, we cannot exclude that the Russian paper was over-stressing the precariousness of the Italian situation to dissuade China from granting a foreign concession to Italy. A short quote from a piece of Russian news that appeared in the Italian magazine La civiltà cattolica in 1899 seems to reflect this same sort of prejudice: The Russian humoristic paper Kladdelly Morowa represents China as a fat yellow chicken, with Italy ready to pluck one of her few remaining feathers. Behind, we can see the hooking hands of Great Britain, United States and Japan, ready to grab the unfortunate bird. But Russia is keeping watch on them all, though remaining apart. Naturally, France is faithfully siding with Russia. This is how it paints the world situation at the moment. (La civiltà cattolica 1899, series 17, vol. 5, 745)

More than two decades after this infelicitous experience, another lesser known diplomatic affair testified how Italian diplomats were still stumbling behind other foreign powers, which had managed to obtain less condescending conduct from the Chinese court. Although Shenbao frequently records a general appreciation of the Italian language and the prestigious reputation its teaching had gained abroad, the practical utility of a diffusion of this language in China was still overlooked by the Imperial government. It did not consider it an important and necessary skill in the curriculum of its young translators and diplomats, as Italy was not yet able to gain a prevalent status in the diplomatic game of foreign powers in China. In fact, a series of Shenbao articles shows how the Italian educational system had gained prestige in Japan, where it was described as one of the best models to follow (Shenbao May 3, 1889, 1). This was made possible because of the industrious jurist Alessandro Paternostro (1852–1899), who had founded a Society of Italian Studies in Japan. At the same time, Shenbao readers had also been informed that Italian was taught in some of the important western universities, like Oxford and Cambridge (Shenbao March 25, 1895, 1). Despite this excellent premise, when, in 1910, Italy formally requested the introduction of Italian language teaching at Yixue guan 譯學館 (Translators’ College), the most important language school in Beijing, it received yet another rejection. In this case, the decision of the government was also openly supported by the Shenbao, who stated that since the study of any foreign language does not aim to give privileges to the related country, the Ministry of Education should not proceed on this matter because we fear that other countries may follow this example, so it must refuse strongly. (Shenbao March 29, 1910, 6)

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Approaching this same intercourse through the documents of the Historical Archive of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we can acknowledge that the request of the Italian Plenipotentiary Minister in China, Cesare Vinci, was likely triggered by the Chinese Ministry of Education’s previous rejection of the Italian invitation to send Chinese students to the Commercial University of Milan. While still praising the quality of such institutions, the Minister actually claimed that he was unable to select any student that was prepared enough for the experience.8 If we take the Chinese Ministry of Education’s word, the reason might have been the lack of students proficient in Italian. This may have moved the Italian government to request, in March 1910 (only one month after this exchange), to launch an Italian class in Beijing. As we know, this petition received yet another negative response, supported by the public opinion reflected in the Shenbao editorial piece. However, no political reason for this denial was mentioned in the diplomatic correspondence, as the Chinese reply justified this choice with the fact that Yixue guan was undergoing a general reorganization, which forced the Chinese part to postpone the possibility of opening an Italian class. We know that at that time, Yixue guan had recently been absorbed by the Department of Humanities of the Imperial University of Beijing (Liu 2015, 150), but we have no certain way to confirm whether the opinion expressed on the pages of the Shenbao was also shared by part of the government administration. We only know that Italy had to once again succumb to the iron fist of the Chinese court, a fist that was not nearly as fierce with other Western diplomatic counterparts. For the inauguration of the first chair of Italian language in China, we have to wait several decades. This episode can thus be assumed to be an additional case study that demonstrates the controversial role of the foreign language press in the construction of the image of other countries and Italy in particular. For example, in September 1910, an article in the French periodical L’Écho de Tientsin entitled “Une proposition italienne” published a non-verified report claiming that the Chinese Minister of Education had affirmed that the reason why no Chinese student was sent to the Italian University was that “on a peu de choses à apprendre en Italie” (there is little to learn in Italy).9 This excerpt from the French newspaper was found among official correspondence of the diplomatic legation with the Foreign Ministry, attached by Minister Vinci as proof of the constant defamation

8 “Lettera rossa a S.E. il Conte Vinci dal Waiwupu, Beijing, 28.02.1910,” ASD MAE, Rappresentanze diplomatiche e consolari d’Italia a Pechino, envelope 50, folder 626, 1. 9 “Une proposition italienne,” L’écho de Tientsin, August 22, 1910, 9. A press scrap of this article was attached to the diplomatic correspondence on the invitation of Chinese students to Milan (ASD MAE, Rappresentanze diplomatiche e consolari d’Italia a Pechino, envelope 50, folder 625).

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operated by the local foreign press against Italian initiatives. In this case, a mendacious statement of which we have no proof in the correspondence with the Chinese Ministry of Education preserved among the related diplomatic papers of the Italian Diplomatic Historical Archive was distributed in one of the main French periodicals. This periodical, like other foreign language equivalents, was one of the main sources of the Chinese public discourse. Further cases of hard negotiations and humiliation suffered by Italy on other occasions can be found in the pages of the Shenbao. Another example is provided by an episode of the Italian demand for official recognition of the Italian navy lieutenant Mario Grassi’s contributions to the diffusion of radiotelegraphy in China in 1896, and in the law case against a Chinese employee of the Italian lawyer Giuseppe Domenico Musso (1878–1940) in 1911. As for the first episode, the unceasing work of Italian lieutenant Grassi and his technical team, who had established a wireless telegraphic connection applying the Italian Marconi system in Tianjin for Governor Yuan Shikai (1859–1916) and had organized public demonstrations of the transmission between Italian and Chinese ships in Shanghai, was repeatedly praised in the Shenbao (November 24, 1905, 4; August 24, 1906, 3). Unexpectedly, once his work was concluded, Grassi’s contribution remained unrewarded for approximately one year, until 1907. The reckless attitude of the Chinese government toward Grassi was criticized by the Shenbao, who took the side of the Italian counterpart. A dense and insistent diplomatic correspondence also demonstrated the importance of an official award as formal demonstration of gratitude for Italian technical support. For Italy, obtaining this kind of formal recognition had become “a matter of principle.” To quote the words of the Italian Minister, it was the only way to “save our face, like Chinese say.”10 The second and last example testifies to a sort of direct ostracism of the foreign community and, according to the words of the Italian lawyer Musso reported in the record of the Mixed Court of the International Settlement and published by the NCH, while it only involved a fine of a few dollars, it also “involved a wide question of principle” (June 3, 1911, 641). To briefly summarize the basic steps of this law case, charges were moved against a Chinese citizen who worked as interpreter for the Italian lawyer Musso, who was accused of illegally selling land lottery tickets within the boundaries of the Settlement. The reasons for this dispute were searched for in the Settlement’s legal system, which involved different treatment for different kind of cases, according to the

10 “Ringraziamenti Grassi. Beijing, 23.08.1907,” ASD MAE, Rappresentanze diplomatiche e consolari d’Italia a Pechino, envelope 55, folder 701, 4.

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nationality of the subjects involved. The Mixed Court (Huishen gongxie 會審公 廨) was founded in 1864, next to the individual national diplomatic courts (who dealt with law cases concerning its own nationals) to manage mixed cases involving foreigners and Chinese citizens, with the purpose of restraining the application of the archaic Chinese juridical systems, implicating heavily violent punishments and torture both for defendants and witnesses (Hsu 2003, 252). The new regulation instead established that civil law cases involving Chinese citizens must be judged by Shanghai daotai, while if a foreign subject was involved, he or she had the right to ask for a co-national assessor to assist in court (Stephens 1992, 44–7). The case was eventually solved by Musso himself with the negotiation of a small fine, but a dense correspondence involving the Italian Consul and Plenipotentiary Minister, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and some members of the foreign diplomatic body in Shanghai, highlights the symbolic value of this dispute. Italian Consul Attilio Monaco (1858–1932) himself wrote to the daotai directly asking if he could judge this case together in front of the Italian assessor, being that the subject was a Chinese citizen working for an Italian. Moreover, numerous attempts were made by both the Italian Consul and Minister to persuade the German assessor of the Mixed Court in charge of that case to relinquish his chair to the Italian colleague, because “although the rule established that the three British, French and American assessors alternatively judge a case together with the imperial official, it was a common habit for the assessor of the day to give up his seat to the foreign Consul involved.”11 The firm refusal by the German assessor in charge of this case to step back in favor of the Italian colleague seemed to come, according to the correspondence, straight from the direction of the German government. Similarly, the Shanghai daotai refused to pass the case to the Italian Consular Court, as this option was only allowed for cases concerning Italian citizens and could not be extended to their Chinese employees. Although Musso had also tried to stress the strict relations that habitually connected foreign lawyers and Chinese interpreters, who would often become partners of the law firm, in the end, the lawyer and Italian diplomacy were forced to face yet another small but symbolic defeat. While the latter is just one example of the influence of the stronger foreign communities in China toward the young and weak Italian nation, as shown in the previous pages, at varying degrees of severity, there was a constant experience of embarrassment and humiliation for the image of Italy in China. These

11 “Il Regio Console d’Italia a Shanghai alla Regia Legazione di Pechino, 1 giugno 1911,” ASD MAE, Rappresentanze diplomatiche e consolari d’Italia a Pechino, envelope 17, folder 181.

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examples also demonstrate that to exert their own power on the Chinese territory and society, a direct use of its political and diplomatic strength was not the only instrument for Western countries. The ability to guide and influence local public opinion through the local foreign language press, at that time perceived as an authoritative and reliable source of information by local Chinese language editorial staff, was also a similarly fruitful strategy.

Voices of Representation and Self-Representation of the Italian Imaginary in Late Qing China There is no doubt that the reasons why the voice of the foreign community gained so much influence in shaping the representation of Italy and the Italian community and in orienting Chinese public opinion in its turn is due to the lack of direct communication and propaganda by the Italian diplomatic representatives in China. Compared to other countries like Great Britain, France, Germany and Portugal, Italy never invested its diplomatic delegation in China to build its own channel of communication to the members of the expat community on Chinese soil and to the Chinese audience. Therefore, it never gained a platform in the international public debate, which at that time was thriving in China and involved the upper and educated classes of local society. The only attempt to build a position for Italy in the local media system and to promote Italian culture was by the General Consul of Italy in Tianjin Cesare Poma (1862–1932), who launched the trilingual bulletin Italian Settlement Gazette (also known as Bollettino Italiano dell’Estremo Oriente or Yiguo zujie shibao 義國 租界時報) in 1902. In the space of a few pages, it combined practical information for the convenience of both the Italian and Chinese residents of the concession with cultural content related to the history of the Sino-Italian relations, such as an excerpt of the description of Italy that appeared in the Mingshi (History of the Ming Dynasty).12 However, the one and only Italian magazine ever published in Imperial China was destined for a very short life; only five monthly issues were published, until, by the will of the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, the printing initiative was categorically stopped the same year that it started. From a brief correspondence between Poma, the Italian Plenipotentiary Minister

12 “Notizie sull’Italia/Da Yiguo shiyu 大義國示諭/Early Italians in China, Italy in the Mingshè,” Bollettino Italiano dell’Estremo Oriente, Tianjin, May 8, 1902, no. 4, 2.

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Count Giovanni Gallina (1852–1936), and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Giulio Prinetti (1851–1908), we learn the reason for the strong refusal: It cannot be in any way admitted the publication of periodicals, bulletins etc. etc. by Royal Agents, especially if related to countries in which they reside; therefore, Cav. Poma cannot be allowed to continue under his full responsibility to publish this bulletin, if not in case of absolute exceptions and whenever there would be particular reasons, which I ignore. In this case you [the Plenitpotentiary Minister] would please trace the boundaries that he will not have to cross for any reason.13

This action, undertaken in the opposite direction of the diffused strategy that was adopted by the rest of the foreign powers in China, testifies how much cultural promotion and intercultural dialogue were neglected by the Italian government. This handicap also clearly emerges from the systematic absence of content related to Italian artistic, literary and cultural heritage. Out of a corpus of more than 2,000 articles which emerged during this investigation on the Shenbao, mentions of Italian artistic patrimony can be counted on one hand. Additionally, until 1911, Italian literature is absent from the literary section of the newspaper. The only book by an Italian author translated into Chinese at this time was Yidali can shu 意大利蠶書 (A Book on Italian Silkworms). This translation of Vincenzo Dandolo’s Dell’arte di governare i bachi da seta (On the Art of Breeding Silkworms), written in 1905, was clearly not a work of literature, but a practical handbook in which the Chinese had only commercial interest (Masini 2017, 659). This absence contrasts with the results of the main studies of literary imagology, which focused on the representation of different national characters advanced in the encyclopaedic work of the imagologists Beller and Leerssen. Beller concluded that in international literature, the literary and artistic heritage embody two of the most universally shared traits of the Italian nation (Beller 2007, 194–8), but those were not yet the most recurring elements of the Italian culture in the late Imperial Chinese press. As a general trend, the masterpieces of Italian culture (in essence, the world-famous literary and artistic works) still struggled to attain popularity among the large Chinese public by means of the periodical press, probably due to the lack of cultural promotion by the local diplomatic legation, which was too focused on keeping pace with the political and economic actions of the leading foreign countries acting in China.

13 “Il Ministro degli Affari Esteri Prinetti al Ministro Plenipotenziario a Pechino Gallina, 5 giugno 1902,” ASD MAE, Rappresentanze diplomatiche e consolari d’Italia a Pechino, envelope 19, folder 2.

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The circulation of negative foreign opinions and the poor promotion of the Italian cultural heritage can therefore be interpreted as a lack of direct intervention by Italian interests in this area. In the four decades spanning from 1872 to 1911, we found very few cases in which the Italian diplomatic legation directly communicated with the Chinese audience via the local press. When this was done, it was for the distribution of official documents released by the Italian government. All collected examples can be described as mere bureaucratic communication, rather than a conscious effort to spread Italian cultural heritage or a contribution to building a positive image of the country in China. For example, in 1876, Chinese readers were informed of the reforms applied to the regulation of the Chinese College of Naples (Shenbao May 4, 1876, 2) with a translation of an official decree by the Italian Official Gazette of Reign of Italy. Some years later, readers were invited to participate in the Orientalist Congress of Rome in 1898 (Shenbao September 3, 1898, 3) and take part in the International Exhibition in Milan in 1906 (Shenbao April 10, 1905, 2). There is no evidence, on the contrary, of an Italian effort to promote a positive view of itself and spread Western knowledge or a better understanding of China in the West, as we have seen with the eulogy of the two Italian “noted men who helped China,” Matteo Ricci and Marco Polo, proposed by Gilbert Reid.

What Contact Zone for Chinese and Italians? A perspective of community can give you race, sex, class, or national identity, but you need a perspective of contact to give you the dynamics of race-ism, sex-ism, class-ism, or national-ism. (Pratt 1993, 89)

My brief selection of news about Italy in Shenbao in the late Imperial period explored a miscellanea of news, ranging from diplomatic affairs to law cases, and from language and education to culture and literature. The purpose of this analysis was to attempt to build a general frame of the news and opinion about the Italian presence in China. This was made by taking a selection of reports on events involving Italian residents and the diffusion of news about Italy, in order to collect some examples of the daily struggle that Italy and its population of expats in China were forced to face in everyday life while attempting to gain a safe position in a game where the mediated power was in the hand of other European and Western countries. These countries occupied stronger positions on the Chinese chessboard. On more than one occasion, historical records have shown that Italy appeared as a weak competitor in the eyes of Chinese governors, especially when compared to other foreign countries. This is why

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the Chinese government often adopted a more audacious attitude when dealing with the Italian delegation, as demonstrated by the numerous refusals of Italian requests during the Sanmen Bay affair and other examples previously outlined in this chapter. This idea of general weakness built up not only after a series of diplomatic impasses, the responsibility for which lay only on the shortcoming of Italian diplomacy, but through the strong influence imposed by the opinion of the foreign community, which, with its own press organizations, represented the main source of information for the young local papers. These organizations were able to orient and influence the opinion of the well-educated Chinese class in the treaty ports. Thus, Italy was not a strong force in the construction of solid public opinion in China, and did not recognize the importance of the installation of a cross-cultural contact zone for Italy and China. In the absence of a physical contact space (we have seen how small the Italian community was in comparison to other countries, and how it generally remained confined within the boundaries of extraterritorial settlements), a reciprocal contact and the circulation of knowledge between Italy and China mostly relied on the press. Therefore, if a SinoItalian contact zone could be identified, it was only possible through a nonphysical space, due to the virtual contact of the circulation of knowledge, mostly performed by the means of the periodical press. Although our case studies have shown that it is possible to register the existence of an unequal game of powers in the sense intended by Pratt within this virtual contact zone, it was a game with multiple players, where a multileveled balance of power was in action. Sino-Italian contact, therefore, cannot be described in the terms of a “conqueror vs. conquered” relation, since China always boldly resisted Italian authority. If a prevalent power is to be identified, it was instead an external force that operated in the interest of a third actor: the rest of the Western powers. Moreover, Italy never recognized the importance of projecting its own voice and its own “idiom” to present itself directly to the Chinese audience with no need for external mediation. As we have seen, Italy renounced the only attempt to create and utilize its own media, and immediately ceased what could have represented an advantageous channel to autonomously distribute news from and about Italy. Eventually, all of the presented cases can be interpreted as a mirror reflecting the bigger geopolitical balance of a country struggling to affirm its power in China. This demonstrates the instability and vulnerability of the national image of a country whose global portrait was submitted to larger geopolitical strategies. At the turn of the century, the Italian presence in China was that of a country that could rely on a historically solid cultural exchange with China, but that by the time of Western colonialist endeavors in China, it had forgotten the

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transcultural lesson of the method of “adaptation” that Matteo Ricci had performed a few centuries before.

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Guido Samarani

5 Italian Diplomats in China during the Republican Era (1912–1949) Introduction As is well known, the Italian presence in China during the Republican period (1912–1949) was centered in certain treaty ports, in particular Tianjin, where there was an Italian Concession, and Shanghai. There was a very marginal presence in Hankou and Canton, while in Peking there was an official Italian presence within the Legation Quarter. From the birth of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 until the last years of the 19th century, Italian consular missions in China were often entrusted to honorary consuls, in many cases people involved in business who had a good knowledge of the locales and already had an established network of relationships in place; for some years consular missions were handled almost exclusively by foreigners, particularly the British and the Germans. At the end of the 19th century it is estimated there were fewer than 200 Italians living in China, many of whom were military personnel or missionaries, the missionary impetus being obviously very close to Italy’s heart.1 There were very few businesses operating in China and there was a minimal presence of Italian ships in Chinese ports, especially given that there was no direct shipping link between the two countries. The launch of the Tianjin concession undoubtedly strengthened Italian plans for developing their own activities and presence in China; nevertheless, it was a few years before the project would take off: it is estimated that in the early years of the 20th century there were probably no more than about fifty Italians in Tianjin, mainly entrepreneurs in the building and engineering sector (Marinelli 2010). Reconstructing the history of the Italian presence in China during the first half of the 20th century, in quantitative and qualitative terms, is the goal of my ongoing research, of which this present contribution is the first step: a rather difficult task considering that the Italian presence in China was always modest compared to that of the European powers such as the United Kingdom, France and Germany. If anything, the main problem is in the gaps and fragmentary nature of the documents and data available, in the dispersion of these in a thousand directions in dozens of archives and libraries, in the blanks that exist in the historical records for certain years and periods that to date have not been completed (see, 1 For Shanghai see Piastra´s and Vinciss chapters in this volume. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663426-006

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for example, the cases at the Historical Archives of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Central State Archive). Nonetheless, it is necessary and important to try to fulfill this task, even if in a limited and partial way, not only because the story of those who lived and worked in China is part of Italy’s historical memory but also inasmuch as the events surrounding those Italians are an integral part of the political, economic, cultural and human events that marked the lives of the foreign communities in China in that historical period and, in particular, of their experiences in term of contact zones in a general context marked by highly asymmetrical relations of power (colonialism) and by boundaries which do not necessarily indicate the end of the contact but are rather a constituent part of it. As my contribution I would like to analyse the main reports and memoirs by selected Italian diplomats during the periods they spent in Republican China, focusing on their experience of work and life and on their views of China and the Chinese. In particular, I will focus on two diplomatic experiences: those of Ambassador Taliani and Ambassador Fenoaltea, who lived and worked in China in two very different but in both cases very important historical moments.

The Italian Presence: Some Statistics It was only in 1926, during the early fascist period, that the National Institute of Statistics (Istituto Centrale di Statistica, Istat) was created as a public research body charged with producing and diffusing data, information and statistical analysis. Before then the work of statistical surveys was entrusted to the Statistics Division of the Ministry of Agriculture, Trade and Industry (Ministero dell’Agricoltura, Commercio e Industria), whose information about Italian expatriates was unreliable because, for instance, “China and Asia” were included under the heading “other countries” together with Oceania. Combining such limited statistics with those included in reports by Italian diplomats on the spot we can say that Italians living in China in the first decade of the 20th century numbered about 1.000; this decreased quickly in the 1920s, touching about 600, due to repatriations that occurred and a parallel ban on emigrations imposed after the outbreak of the First World War. Only in the 1930s did outbound migration recover, clearly connected to fascist colonial policy (Commissariato generale dell’emigrazione 1926, 1534–35 and 1538–39; Sori, 1979). In mid-1927, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs organized a census of Italians living abroad: they recorded that 913 Italians were living in China: 513 were male and 250 female, most of them born in Italy, while 82 were born abroad.

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The geographical areas showing the distribution of Italian presence were based on the jurisdictions of the consular districts across which the Italian diplomatic presence was spread. The largest community was dependent on the Hankou consular district (which included the provinces of Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan, Jiangxi, Henan, Shenxi and Gansu): 323 individuals, of whom 210 were males and 113 females. Then followed Shanghai (which comprised the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Shandong and Anhui): 275 individuals, of whom 174 were males and 101 females; and then Tianjin (which comprised the provinces of Zhili and Shanxi and the city of Peking): 239 in total, made up of 131 males and 108 females. Further afield were the districts of Canton (which covered the provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan): 31 Italians; and Harbin (which oversaw Manchuria): 45 in total. Most of the Italians living in the district of Shanghai resided in the city of Shanghai: they lived usually in the International Settlement or in the French Concession; in Peking 60 of the 239 individuals counted lived within the district of Tianjin (Ministero degli affari esteri 1928). On April 21, 1931, the Seventh General Census of the Italian Population was taken and, for the first time, the Istituto Centrale di Statistica published a specific volume on the colonies and possessions in which estimates were also provided on the foreign and Chinese populations in the Tianjin Italian concession on the day of the survey. The results showed that the total population of the Concession was 6,263, of which 394 were citizens of the Kingdom of Italy, with a strong increase compared to the 239 indicated in 1927 in the entire consular district, including 141 foreigners and 5,725 Chinese and others. The census also revealed that the overwhelming majority of Italians were male (359 out of 394), between the ages of 15 and 29 (83.2%) and that most were unmarried (335 males out of 359, and 22 females out of 35). Their geographic provenance was primarily from the North of Italy (particularly Liguria, Veneto and Lombardy), followed by Central Italy (a significant number from Tuscany), then those from the South and the islands. As far as their employment, setting aside children of less than ten years of age, most were in public administration (90%) with some others active in the industrial, commercial and transport sectors, as well as a dozen religious (Istituto Centrale di Statistica del Regno d’Italia 1935, volume V).

The Diplomatic Presence: Some General Notes In 1902 a few Royal Decrees defined Italy’s consular jurisdiction in China, along the lines already indicated in the preceding pages; in the coming

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years changes and additions were made to what was decided in 1902. In particular, in Peking an Italian Legation was created in 1889, which was ruled over by numerous special envoys and plenipotentiary agents, including the Marquis Giuseppe Salvago Raggi, who had the daunting task of recovering the fortunes of Italian prestige after the failed attempt to gain a commercial and territorial base in China at Sanmun (Sanmen) in Zhejiang province; and Carlo Sforza, who brought a strong dose of Italian dynamism to the Italian operation, thanks also to his excellent relationship with Yuan Shikai. There was also Daniele Varè, who headed the diplomatic mission during the establishment and first acts of the Chiang Kai-shek government and during the difficult years at the start of Japanese aggression in the early 1930s, assisted, for a certain period, by the young Galeazzo Ciano. With the crisis between China and Japan in the second half of 1931 and the beginning of 1932, the greater part of the Italian diplomatic representation transferred to Shanghai, returning to Peking in the mid-thirties, when Vincenzo Lojacono was appointed as the first Italian Ambassador and oversaw the Legation until late 1936/early 1937. Lojacono was succeeded by Giuliano Cora, considered one of Italy’s most brilliant career diplomats, who had already worked in Tokyo and had played an important role at the Washington Conference. He had to deal with the serious crisis in 1937 and then in 1938 was relieved of his post in China, accused of obstructing fascist policy in the Far East. His successor was the Marquis Francesco Maria Taliani, who soon left Peking to set up in Shanghai following the onset of war and also in conjunction with the Italian objective of moving towards a collaboration with Wang Jingwei. Taliani would remain in China until the end of the war and, after December 8, 1943, was interned at Shanghai for having affirmed his loyalty to the king rather than to the regime of Salò. In charge of the important consular districts of Tianjin and Shanghai, we find several prominent figures of the Italian diplomatic service, whose role was sometimes particularly significant. For instance, in Tianjin the first Consul was Cesare Poma, from Biella, son of a cotton manufacturer, who graduated in law and set off himself up for a diplomatic career. After Poma, there were nine other Royal Consuls at Tianjin, the last being Ferruccio Stefenelli who was overtaken, like all the other Italians, by the events following 8 September 1943, when Japanese troops surrounded the Italian area, occupied it and interned all those unwilling to swear allegiance to the new Mussolini government.

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Francesco Maria Taliani: From Ambassador to Prisoner-of-War Francesco Maria Taliani, Marquis of Marchio, was born in Ascoli Piceno in 1887 and died in Rome in 1968. His diplomatic career started in 1912. He first served as an attaché to the Italian Embassy in Berlin and later in Constantinople. Between 1916 and 1917 he worked in St. Petersburg, then in London, Ankara, The Hague. He was appointed ambassador in 1937. In 1938, he was sent to China, where he remained throughout the war. In 1943, he vowed obedience to the Badoglio government and, for this reason, the Japanese interned him in concentration camps in the Shanghai area. He would leave the camps only towards the end of 1945, after the American troops set him free. Nevertheless, as already stated, he remained in China, fulfilling his new unofficial task of protecting Italian interests as much as he could. In mid-1946 he went back to Italy and for some years worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His latest appointment was as ambassador in Madrid from 1951 to 1952. The period during which Taliani arrived in China (September 1938) was marked by the explosive Japanese advance and increasingly difficult Chinese situation. After the fall of Shanghai and Nanjing, in October 1938 the city of Wuhan was occupied by Japanese troops. In his memoirs (Taliani 1949; Taliani 1958), Taliani recalls arriving in Shanghai in autumn 1938, on the Italian ship Biancamano. He had good credentials and Minister Ciano’s strong support. Ciano, who still had in his memory the years spent in China, told Taliani that Italy was actually expecting the Japanese to defeat China before the end of 1938. When Taliani arrived in China not only were relations between China and Italy going through a very difficult phase, but he did not have the opportunity to officially present his credentials to Chiang Kai-shek’s government and, technically speaking, he was not accredited to it. Even after Chiang’s government had moved to Chongqing in 1938, Taliani remained in Shanghai. Relations with Chiang were handled by an Italian legation secretary in Chongqing. To further complicate the situation, there was the Italian diplomatic presence in Manzhouguo. In July 1941, Chongqing broke off diplomatic relations with Rome after the Italian government recognized the Wang Jingwei regime, and Italy quickly saw to the formal accreditation of Taliani to Nanjing by presenting his credentials. With this done, Taliani returned to Shanghai, which remained his main residence until the Italian armistice of September 1943, when he was arrested. Ambassador Taliani played a very important role between 1938 and 1943, especially through his connections with Wang Jingwei, as well as Japanese

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officers in China. In Shanghai, he had often met Wang Jingwei. In his reports to Rome, he tended to stress that the ideological base of the new Chinese government was and would remain anti-Bolshevik, and pointed out that Wang Jingwei had obtained a declaration from Tokyo confirming that Japan would not enter into any political entente with Soviet Russia. To summarize the Chinese situation in the spring of 1940, Taliani emphasized Chiang Kai-shek’s determination not to surrender, and stressed that the Nationalist Chinese would continue the fight, staking everything on Tokyo’s presumed war-weariness. After the establishment of Wang Jingwei’s regime on March 30, 1940, the hopes of the Italian government and pressing for a last-minute entente cordiale between Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei began to fade. On June 10, 1940 Italy declared war on France and Great Britain, thus linking its fortunes in Europe with those of Germany and later on with those of Japan. On November 30th, 1940 Japan extended official recognition to Wang Jingwei’s government, thus opening an avenue for more direct Italian support of the Nanjing-Tokyo relationship. Italy was thus brought steadily closer to tilting fully towards Japan by conferring recognition on the Wang Jingwei government in September 1943 (Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Documenti Diplomatici Italiani, IX Series). In his memoirs, Taliani narrates being arrested on the eve of September 9, 1943, the day after the armistice was signed by the Badoglio government. After spending a hectic day, destroying documents and ciphers, Taliani was brought to a house where he was kept under strict surveillance. He was alone there, except for a very brief period, when he was assisted by a sailor of the Battaglione San Marco, who had temporarily escaped the Japanese round-ups. Of those early days of imprisonment, Taliani especially recalls some of the conversations he had had with Chinese officers who came to visit him, asking him to side with the new Italian regime (Salò Republic, September 23rd, 1943 – April 25, 1945) and cooperate with the Japanese (Taliani 1949, 11–37). However, Taliani once again confirmed his loyalty and obedience to the king. Japanese officers regularly visited the Italian ambassador. They exerted increasing pressure on him, as they hoped he would support Mussolini. He was later on joined by his wife who, up to that time, had been in Beidahe, a resort area situated in Hebei province, in Northern China. After spending a period of time in that house, Taliani received a telegram from Rome and learnt that he had been exempted from his duties. It was then that his real imprisonment began. With his wife and other foreigners, he was put on a truck and taken to a concentration camp very near the airport (very likely the Hongqiao camp), where he remained until the end of February 1944. He was then moved to a new camp in Rubicon Road.

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Most of Taliani’s memoirs report simple details about daily life of his experience of internment (Taliani 1949). Taliani ironically recalls how the food arrived at the camp only after it had been distributed to the British and the Americans. The day started at eight o’clock with the roll call and on it went: shifts in the kitchen, cleaning, hoeing those few inches of soil, trying to add something to the scarce food ration. The evening roll call concluded the day. This is how he remembers those days (Taliani 1949, 264): Usual life. Motionless, I've observed the seasons parade before my window, on the green or burnt landscape of the countryside; and they are also announced by the peasant's foresight, and the changing skies and winds, and the rags hung under the sun, and the yellow bitch in heat and the stench of fertilization. (Translation by the editors)

With Taliani were also some of his more faithful assistants within the embassy, while those who had sided with the Salò Republic had, generally speaking, been left outside the camp. However, some of the Italians who had promised obedience to Mussolini, but whom the Japanese considered untrustworthy, were also in his camp, which he defined as being political. They were not allowed to receive parcels, or to seek the comfort of a priest or a visit from the Red Cross. However, during the last phase of internment, corresponding to the final phases of the war, Taliani recorded partial but decisive changes. He was allowed to take guarded walks with his wife around the adjacent countryside and, when Chinese peasants would approach them to sell their products, the guards did not react as readily and roughly as they had done in the past. A meaningful moment in the diary tells of the arrival of the Swedish consul at the camp on the eve of Germany’s downfall. Sweden had been chosen by the new Italian government as the country that would care for Italian interests and protect Italian citizens during the weeks immediately preceding Japan’s surrender and in the early post-war period. In Taliani’s narration, the end of the war seemed no less humiliating and tragic. He recalls how on August 15, 1945, the Japanese and the Swedish consuls came to announce the liberation. The guards had disappeared and the gate was opened. Huge amounts of food, underwear, blankets, tobacco, soap, and medicines were parachuted into the Anglo-Saxon camps, but the Italians received nothing. They felt ignored, left to themselves, wandering around. The Italian sailors were starving. Taliani tells us that even the former secretary of the Fascist Party and his first assistant had hidden their black shirts. Although he did so to a limited extent, Taliani took care of the serious situation of the colony, but a large number of Italians died during those terrible days in China. In June 1946, Taliani left Shanghai on the ship Eritrea, together with many others who were leaving the tormented city. The ship arrived in Hong Kong and

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then headed for Singapore, where Taliani was made to disembark. He stayed in a hotel while waiting to find a way to reach Europe. All the other passengers remained on board, as it was absolutely forbidden for anybody not to. Taliani’s adventurous trip then continued with stops in Colombo, Karachi, a military base near Bassora, and then Cairo. Finally, he managed to sail to Naples.

Sergio Fenoaltea: Working for New Friendly Relations between Liberated Italy and Chiang Kai-shek’s China Even if it had achieved the status of a co-belligerent nation, Italy was however perceived by the major victorious powers as a defeated enemy country. During the negotiations that would lead to the drafting of the Italian peace treaty, a punitive approach had prevailed and in February 1947 (the signing of the Paris treaty) the Italian Government had been compelled to accept a sort of diktat: territorial losses (Dalmatian territories and the Istria peninsula, African colonies, Dodecanese islands), heavy reparations to pay, severe limitations especially in the military field (Lorenzini 2007, 169). From the end of the war and for more than two years, Italy was thus subject to the armistice terms and to foreign occupation, and foreign troops (basically American) would leave the country only at the end of 1947. Italy’s international status sharply contrasted with the aspirations nurtured by the Italian anti-fascist political class, by the diplomatic corps and by many Italian opinion makers: in their opinion, Italy had to recover the role of a middle-rank power which would exert its influence in the two traditional areas of Italy’s foreign policy: the European continent and the Mediterranean. Thus, the recognition of the nation’s international status and the revision of the most severe clauses of the peace treaty became the main goal of Italy’s foreign policy after the end of the second world war and especially after the signing of the Paris peace treaty in early 1947. In liberated Italy, it was the first De Gasperi government (December 10, 1945 – July 12, 1946) that began the process of normalizing relations with Nationalist China, even if first preliminary steps were taken by the Parri government (June 21, 1945 – December 9, 1945) in which De Gasperi was the Foreign Minister. First negotiations toward reestablishing diplomatic relations were conducted through Moscow, but these proved less fruitful than expected. Consequently, Rome in late 1945 began direct talks with the Chinese government. The first step would be the appointment of a diplomatic mission to China charged with this

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task. A normalization of relations was soon attained, with the accreditation in early 1946 of Enrico Anzilotti to Chongqing as interim chargé d’affaires; he then moved to Nanjing when the Nationalist government returned to its prewar capital. Finally, in summer 1946 the new Italian ambassador, Sergio Fenoaltea, arrived. At the same time China accredited a new ambassador to Rome. Sergio Fenoaltea (1908–1995), a leading political figure, discussed problems with the Chinese foreign minister Wang Shijie and Chinese diplomats’ related to the future of China-Italy relations. Two main problems were raised and discussed during the last months of the war and the first post-war period: first, Italy’s possible entry into the war against Japan; second, the contents of the Italy-China treaty peace within the Paris Peace Conference scheduled for 1947 (Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Fondo “Sergio Fenoaltea”, envelope 110). During the last months of the war, before Japan’s surrender, the problem of Italy’s possible entry into the war against Japan was raised: a participation which was seen basically as symbolic by many countries, including the United States (which in any case seemed in theory to support such a choice), but which was regarded as important by Italy in order to demonstrate its complete break with its past and confirm its firm stand to the democratic and anti-fascist front. Various sources maintain that the US Department of State clearly indicated to the Italian ambassador in Washington, Tarchiani, that Italy’s declaration of war against Japan would surely enhance Italy’s international profile and facilitate Italy’s passage as a co-belligerant country to an ally. It must also be said that such a choice would surely have been welcomed by China, as a further strengthening of the anti-Japanese front (Borzoni 2004, 455–469; Ministero degli Affari, Esteri, Documenti Diplomatici Italiani 1992, X Series, volume 2, document 304 and document 332; Ministero degli Affari, Esteri, Documenti Diplomatici Italiani 1994, X Series, volume 4, document 85 and document 93). At the end, this option did not become concrete. As for the contents of the peace treaty between the two countries within the larger context of the Paris peace treaty (Italian colonial legacy in China, repatriation of the Italians, Italian properties, etc.), after many meetings and talks, within the above-mentioned Paris Peace Treaties of February 1947, a special section (Section V), articles 24, 25 and 26 concerned “Italy’s Special Interests in China.” Article 24, indicated that “Italy renounces in favour of China all benefits and privileges resulting from the provisions of the final Protocol signed at Peking on 7 September, 1901 and all annexes, notes and documents supplementary thereto, and agrees to the abrogation in respect of Italy of the said protocol, annexes, notes and documents. Italy likewise renounces any claim thereunder to an indemnity.” Article 25 stressed that “Italy agrees to the cancellation of the lease from the Chinese Government under which the Italian Concession at Tientsin [Tianjin] was

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granted, and to transfer to the Chinese Government of any property and archives belonging to the municipality of the said Concession”; and Article 26 maintained that “Italy renounces in favor of China the rights accorded to Italy in relation to the International Settlement at Shanghai and Amoy [Xiamen], and agrees to the reversion of the said Settlements to the administration and control of the Chinese Government” (Lorenzini 2007, 169; Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Documenti Diplomatici Italiani 1993, X Series, volume 3, document 372 and document 610).

Conclusion The history of the Italian presence in China during the first half of the 20th century was always modest, especially if compared to that of the European powers such as the United Kingdom, France and Germany. It is, however, important to try to fill such a historical gap not only because the story of those Italians who lived and worked in China is part of the political, economic, cultural and human events that marked the lives of the foreign communities in China in that historical period. But also and in particular it is important because of the relevance of their experiences in terms of contact zones in a general Chinese context marked by colonialism and by a great difference in cultural visions and approaches between foreigners (Italians) and the Chinese people. My contribution aimed to analyze main reports and memoirs by some selected Italian diplomats during the periods they spent in Republican China, focusing on their experience of work and life and on their views of China and the Chinese. In particular, this chapter has dealt with two diplomatic experiences, relating to Ambassador Taliani, who was in China during the Japanese aggression to China in the late 1930s and of the changing in Italian foreign policy towards the Far East and who lived in his last years there experiencing the hell of internment by the Japanese; and of Ambassador Fenoaltea, who lived and worked in China in the post-Second World War years, trying to renew China-Italy friendship in the midst of the civil war and the crisis of Chinese political and territorial unity.

Bibliography Archivio Centrale dello Stato, a cura. Fondo “Sergio Fenoaltea.” Borzoni, Gianluca. Renato Prunas diplomatico (1892–1951), Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004. Commissariato generale dell’emigrazione, a cura. Annuario statistico dell’emigrazione italiana dal 1876 al 1925, Roma: Edizione del Commissariato generale dell’emigrazione, 1926.

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Istituto Centrale di Statistica, a cura. VII Censimento generale della popolazione-21 aprile 1931: Volume V: Colonie e possedimenti, Roma. Istituto Centrale di Statistica, 1935. Lorenzini, Sara. L’Italia e il trattato di pace del 1947, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007. Marinelli, Maurizio, ed. “Italy and China: Two Countries, Multiple Stories”, special issue of Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 15, 4 (September 2010). Ministero degli Affari Esteri, a cura. Censimento degli italiani all’estero alla metà del 1927, Roma: Ministero degli Affari Esteri, 1928. Ministero degli Affari Esteri, a cura anni vari. Documenti Diplomatici Italiani, IX and X Series. Sori, Ercole. L’emigrazione italiana dall’Unità alla Seconda Guerra mondiale, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1979. Taliani, Francesco Maria. E’ morto in Cina, Verona: Mondadori, 1949. Taliani, Francesco Maria. Dopoguerra a Shangai, Milano: Garzanti, 1958.

Laura De Giorgi

6 Italians in Beijing (1953–1962) Before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, treaty ports like Shanghai and colonial outposts such as Hong Kong were certainly typical “contact zones,” characterized by complex social dynamics and cultural negotiations under colonial rule or the specific legal arrangement of the extraterritoriality (Goodman, Goodman 2012; Bickers, Jackson 2016; Brunero, Villalta Puig 2018). Nevertheless, the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 changed both the global and the local context of the encounter between foreigners and China. The Chinese Communist Party was anxious to rid its country of the colonial past and to redefine its relations with the outer world as a socialist nation; this political and ideological shift was destined to shape the cultural and institutional co-presence of groups of different cultures and languages in its territory as a strong State bureaucracy became an important actor in this area. 1949 also changed the geography of contact zones in China. Since Beijing was again the capital city of China, after two decades during which the political centre of the Republic had moved to the South, and it was the seat of political power in a centralized State, it became the main gateway for contacts between the People’s Republic and the outer world. From 1949 on, Beijing hosted most of the foreigners who were allowed to live and work in China, as previous places which had a pivotal role as “contact zones” such as Shanghai and Tianjin lost importance. Mirroring China’s different political relations, within the Socialist bloc, with the West and with the Third world countries respectively, the alien presence in Beijing was essentially made up of the diplomatic communities of the countries which had recognized the PRC, the so-called “foreign friends” and “foreign experts,” students, plus some journalists (Hooper 2017). On the whole, Westerners were just a tiny minority, and moreover as Beverley Hooper has shown, they were actually divided into small communities, whose relationships with the local society were shaped by different institutional factors. If we look at this presence through the lens of the “contact zone” we can actually distinguish several social and cultural spaces of “contact,” partially overlapping but also characterized by specific dynamics and practices.

Note: This research has been funded by the Italian Ministry of Education as part of the National Research Project (PRIN 2017–2020) “Percorsi di avvicinamento fra Europa Occidentale e Repubblica Popolare Cinese negli anni della Guerra Fredda: Italia e Repubblica Federale Tedesca a confronto, 1949–1972” (The rapprochement between Western Europe and the People’s Republic of China during the Cold War: A comparison between Italy and West Germany 1949–1972”) Open Access. © 2020 Laura De Giorgi, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663426-007

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In order to explore this multifaceted contact zone, this chapter will focus on the Italian presence in Beijing during the 1950s and early 1960s, when that small community began to take shape, living in a social space characterized by the presence of individuals from different countries. As Italy had no diplomatic relations with China until 1970, in this period most of the Italians who lived in Beijing were actually supporters of or sympathizers with the revolution. They had gone to the People’s Republic assuming that they would operate within an imagined cultural community, sharing the ideology and values on one side of the Cold War political front. Acting under the ideal of socialist internationalism, which was expected to accommodate cultural differences and allow for crossing boundaries, they moved to Beijing to be engaged with China in the name of shared transnational ideology. However, their presence and lifestyle, as well as their interactions with the Chinese, were closely managed and controlled by the Chinese State, eager to shape their relations with the local community (Brady 2003). They found themselves living in a contact zone made up of multiple social spaces, where cultural negotiations and human interactions were strongly, though differently, shaped by institutional and political factors and socio-cultural power hierarchies.

The Historical Context: Italians in Socialist Beijing Since the early 1950s, after the previous community of Italian missionaries, businessmen and diplomats left China, Italian sojourners in the PRC capital city belonged to mainly three categories: foreign correspondents of the Communist newspaper l’Unità, students or foreign experts (Samarani, De Giorgi 2011; Pini 2011). The background to their presence in China was shaped by the peculiar Italian political landscape during the first decade of the Cold War. In spite of Rome’s strong alliance with the United States, Italian leftist political parties like the Italian Communist Party and the Italian Socialist Party had an important role in the domestic cultural and social arena, and claimed to have a voice in Italian foreign policy, especially towards Socialist countries and the Third World (Samarani, Graziani 2015). Though the opening of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China was hindered by the duty of loyalty to the North Atlantic Treaty, relations with Communist China developed in the framework of so-called people to people’s diplomacy, which also included people of different ideological backgrounds, and of political cooperation among leftist parties. Since 1949 several intellectuals and

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delegations had visited the PRC and Italy hosted Chinese missions to explore opportunities for commercial and cultural exchange (De Giorgi 2014). Living in Beijing was possible only under the umbrella of socialist cooperation. The few Italians who moved to live in the Chinese capital city were members of or sympathizers with the Italian Communist Party or, if not, approved by it (De Giorgi 2015). Their mobility and stay in the People’s Republic actually resulted from cooperative dynamics within the Socialist camp, even after the Sino-Soviet split in 1960 jeopardized the unity of the Communist international front. Amid the social landscape of Westerners present in Beijing, no Italians belonged to that small élite of “foreign friends” who were entitled to a privileged relationship with their hosts, such as Carl Crook, Israel Epstein, Sid Shapiro, George Hatem, Alley Rewi, Gladys Yang, Joan Hinton, Sid Engst, to mention just a few. Many of these people had developed a strong relationship with the Chinese communists before 1949 and later had an important role in the People Republic’s cultural relations with the outer world, being involved in the outward propaganda, cultural diplomacy and friendly relations with the West (Hooper 2017). Unlike them, the Italians in Beijing had no experience with China before 1949 and their stay was to last only a few years. The first Italians who moved to live in Beijing were the journalist Franco Calamandrei, a news correspondent of l’Unità, and his family in autumn 1953. He was the son of Piero Calamandrei, a famous anti-fascist intellectual, jurist and politician, and was married to the Communist comrade and journalist Anna Maria Regard. The couple had a six-year old daughter, Silvia. Leaving from Prague, and travelling through the Soviet Union, they reached Beijing at dawn on October 1st, just in time to attend the great parade for National Day. They lived in Beijing from autumn 1953 to the second half of 1956 (Regard 2010; Calamandrei 2012). At that time, only one other Italian citizen was living in the Chinese capital city, the engineer Spartaco Muratori, who acted as an economic and commercial broker for the Italian businessman Dino Gentili and who also had strong ties with the Italian Communist Party (Capisani 2013; Luti 1994). In 1956, Franco Calamandrei and his family left China for good, and in 1957 a new correspondent for l’Unità Emilio Sarzi Amadè arrived in Bejing with his wife. He remained until 1961. Afterwards, no correspondent of the Communist newspaper would live in China. In the late 1950s, the Italian community began to enlarge, slowly arriving at ten persons. Thanks to the activities of the Centro per lo sviluppo delle relazioni economiche e culturali con la Cina (Centre for the development of economic and cultural relations with China) (Samarani 2014), some Italian students were sent to attend courses in Beijing. In 1957 the first three Italian students of Chinese language arrived in the Chinese capital, to be enrolled at Beijing University.

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They were Filippo Coccia, Edoarda Masi and Renata Pisu (Zuccheri 2010). In the same year, an economic expert from the Italian Communist Party, Giuseppe Regis, and his wife, the sinologist Maria Arena, moved to China. In 1959 a group of Italian experts, mainly working in radio propaganda for international audiences and all members of the Italian Communist Party, started to live there: they were Marisa Musu, her husband Aldo Poeta, Manlio Fiacchi and his wife. In the early 1960s, new supporters arrived (Pini 2011). This small band survived the difficulties in relations between the CCP and ICP after the Sino-Soviet split, and went on to develop during the Cultural Revolution and after the beginning of diplomatic relations between Italy and China in 1970. These three social groups – journalists, experts and students – actually lived in different contexts, which shaped their modes of contact as well as their relationship with Chinese society.

Italian Journalists in the 1950s Beijing Contact Zone The tiny community of Italians in China in the 1950s and early 1960s was mainly composed of members of or sympathizers with the Italian Communist Party. Their presence reflected the political intent to give concrete and durable meaning to the ideal of international cooperation and friendship within the Socialist world. Their experiences were also clearly affected by the dynamics of Chinese relations with the world and by the complex interplay among Cold War ideology, politics and nationalism. In other words, on the one hand they nurtured various normative expectations about their role, persuaded as they were that shared Socialist values would facilitate exchange and interaction, bridging the cultural boundaries between them and their hosts. On the other hand, much to their disappointment, their actual experience was greatly shaped by the limitations imposed by Chinese bureaucratic organization concerning foreigners living in the PRC and by Cold War political and ideological dynamics. In spite of being the main point of encounter between China and the world in the PRC, in the 1950s and 1960s Beijing was not really a cosmopolitan city per se. Since the presence of foreigners was actually confined to certain specific localities and roles within the city, the real social spaces where interactions could take place were shaped by specific rules of work and living and by forms of communication, especially as concerned language (Hooper 2017). The Italians’ experience with China was essentially confined to some physical, social and cultural settings where individuals of different nationalities – Westerners, Asians, Africans –

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interacted with China, contributing to a complex redefinition of individual and group identities. In the experience of the Calamandreis, the contact zone in China was essentially defined by their role as foreign journalists, in spite of their expectation of being comrades with the Chinese. The two journalists were both committed to providing Italian Communist Party and leftist newspapers and magazines with frequent detailed reports about the socialist transformation in China. Franco worked for the Unità as a news correspondent, Maria Teresa wrote for Nuovo Corriere and Paese Sera; both of them contributed to Vie Nuove and Il Contemporaneo. Their writings were products of their life in the contact zone in Beijing as news correspondents, and their political and cultural outlook were certainly shaped by a new awareness of the importance of Asia – and China – for understanding international politics, something that they personally admitted. However, it is also true that their knowledge of China was influenced by the specific features of their life as foreigners in Beijing, in a context where contact was as controlled as possible by the Chinese authorities. Dissatisfaction with the quality of relations and how this reflected on their work was certainly the other side of their experience. Living and working arrangements, and various aspects of their social life, were planned in order to create a distance between them, as foreigners, and local society. In the Chinese capital city, the Calamandrei family lived in the Beifang Hotel, where several other foreign correspondents were hosted. Among them were Alan Winnington of the British Communist newspaper Worker Daily and his wife Esther, Karel and Vlasta Beba, journalists on the Czechoslovakian Rude Prava, and the Australian communist journalist Wilfred Burchett. These colleagues became good friends of the Calamandrei family, supporting each other when needed. Among the Calamandreis’ friends there were also the Jewish Austrian communist journalist Fritz Jensen with his Chinese wife Wang Wu’an and the couple formed by architect Hua Lanlong, educated in France and his French wife, who had just moved back from France to China (Regard 2010). The social life of this community centered on the International Club, the circle that, after 1949, had become a center for the new socialist and cosmopolitan cultural life under Soviet influence. At the Club they met other members of the foreign community, had dinner, danced and watched the Soviet, Chinese and Indian movies which were screened in 1950s Beijing. The Calamandreis were just two individuals in a small cosmopolitan group of leftist intellectuals and journalists whose relationships with local society were carefully managed by Chinese institutions – in spite of their assumed ideological closeness to the host country. Most of their relations with Chinese citizens were limited to people with whom they worked, mainly officers from

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the Foreign Ministry who had to respect specific rules in dealing with foreigners (Brady 2011). Moreover, while they often wandered freely around the city, looking for curios, art objects and handcrafts, and eating Chinese food, their personal and individual knowledge of China was basically sensorial, based on seeing, smelling, listening, often limited to intuitive impressions, their direct intellectual exchange and direct human dialogue being hindered by their ignorance of the Chinese language. Evidently, the linguistic aspect of the interaction was a core element. English and French were the languages commonly used within the small foreign community, but also with Chinese co-workers. Chinese interpreters played a fundamental role as linguistic and cultural mediators in this contact zone. The Calamandreis aspired to developing a less mediated way of experiencing Chinese society, breaking the boundaries imposed on them. For example, they declined the invitation to have their daughter Silvia enrolled in the French Catholic nuns’ school, which was left in activity even when all foreign educational institutions had been closed, in order to provide children of the diplomatic corps in Beijing with a Western education. They insisted in enrolling their daughter Silvia at a Chinese school in central Beijing, an élite primary school attended by children from the party nomenklatura, and eventually they succeeded (Regard 2010). Moreover, they both tried to study Chinese and Maria Teresa also had the idea of teaching Italian to the two interpreters who helped them understand the Chinese Press. However, this was not enough. As journalists the Calamandreis were engaged in intercultural communication between Italy and China but they depended on the necessary linguistic, political and cultural mediation of Chinese personnel and institutions. Knowledge of Chinese affairs depended on translation from the Chinese official Press. As described by Maria Teresa Regard, almost every day some officials visited them to help translate the main articles in the Chinese Press, mainly the People’s Daily, from Chinese to Italian via English or French. At the same time, she was asked to translate editorials from the Unità and the writings and speeches of Togliatti into English to be then translated into Chinese (Regard 2010). Language was also a fundamental limitation in another part of the Calamandreis’ work, that is visits and interviews. In winter 1953, they were taken to visit Shanghai, Hangzhou, Changsha, Shaoshan, and Canton. In the following years, Franco travelled several times throughout China, from the North-East to Mongolia, alone or together with his wife. In 1954, the couple went to Vietnam, where they met the commander Giap. One year later, they visited Tibet. Official visits included factories, agricultural cooperatives and villages, schools, offices, judicial offices, but also museums, artistic spots, monuments and archeological sites; as journalists, they could also conduct interviews and

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participate in meetings. Franco Calamandrei accompanied foreign delegations, as in the case of the British Labour Party’s mission to China in 1954 and he was engaged in organizing the first Italian cultural mission headed by Franco’s father, Piero Calamandrei, in September 1955 (De Giorgi 2017). In all these activities, they had interpreters with them. In a private note during his first trip in 1953, he wrote that the Chinese interpreter was very good, but he often seemed reluctant to offer explanations or answer questions. “Some visits – Franco wrote – were made in absolute silence” (Calamandrei 1953–56). This highly controlled environment was certainly a source of discontent, since Franco Calamandrei and his wife thought that their mission was to introduce socialist China and the Chinese revolution to Italian public opinion. As Italian Communist Party intellectuals, they were aware of the political and ideological meaning of their job in the context of the Cold War and the importance of working in liaison with their hosts. Nevertheless, in their private writings they sometimes complained of the limits and constraints of Chinese officialdom and bureaucracy. They were aware that they were kept at a distance from a more direct knowledge of Chinese affairs, not only because of the language but above all because they were considered aliens in spite of the ideal of socialist internationalism. As fellow Communists, they expected to be part of a transnational community sharing practices, norms and values, where cultural (and national) differences did not count that much. But they soon realized that this was not the case (Calamandrei 2014). Quite revealing are some notes written by Franco, for discussion at a meeting about foreign propaganda with Chinese officials, held apparently in June 1954 (Calamandrei 1953–1956). The Italian journalist remarked that they were Party journalists working for the Party Press in Italy and that they were somehow legitimated to participate actively in the planning of China’s external propaganda, especially towards Western capitalist countries. In sum, they aspired to be identified not only as journalists, but also as political comrades coming to cooperate on an equal footing for the success of socialism in the Cold War. This was explicitly pointed out by Franco Calamandrei in the following note, addressed to his Chinese counterparts: It should be kept in mind that Party journalists are not only interested in what can make news, materials for immediate publication, but all that can provide them with the background and, thanks to a deeper knowledge of the facts, raise their general political understanding. (Translation by the author)

But their complaints and suggestions did not change the mode of interaction. A feeling of disappointment began to loom in the background, as Maria Teresa recorded in her autobiography, due to the rigid bureaucratic rules under which not only the Chinese people, but they too had to live and work. In early Summer 1956, Maria Teresa and their daughter Silvia went back to Italy, where She

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maintained a strong interest in China, translating Chinese literature from English, and happily seizing the opportunity to go back to the People’s Republic in the 1980s (Calamandrei 2012). Her daughter Silvia also went back to China to study in the 1970s. Also, Franco Calamandrei followed his family back to Italy a few weeks later than Maria Teresa, after the Chinese Communist Party Eighth Congress in autumn 1956. He never went back to China and was replaced by Emilio Sarzi Amadè, who came to Beijing with his wife. Sarzi Amadè’s experience was, actually, similar to that of Calamandrei, as the same communication practices and living arrangements shaped his working and living experience. The room for negotiation within the contact zone was further curtailed when the ideological climate radicalized at the end of the 1950s. After his arrival in Bejing in 1957, Sarzi Amadè met Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. During his stay in Beijing, in 1960, he also had the chance to interview the last Manchu Emperor Pu Yi, and from the Chinese capital city he made trips to North Korea and Vietnam. As it had been for Calamandrei, Sarzi Amadè’s sojourn in Beijing enabled him to develop a deep interest in Asia, which he furthered after his return to Italy in 1961. While he was there, the political and ideological conditions were slowly changing. By 1959 the negative effects of tensions in the Socialist world and in China started to be felt. In a long letter addressed to the Italian Communist Party headquarters in Rome, dated May 1960, Sarzi Amadè expressed his concern, describing how the scope for professional interactions was gradually shrinking (Sarzi Amadè 1960). The first issue relates to work and the position of a party organ’s news correspondent (of our country or other capitalist or socialist countries) in this capital city. Here, my three years’ experience has been marked by two different periods. The first stage, including 1957 and 1958, was the best: obviously there was a kind of barrier to any effective understanding of problems, but there were unlimited possibilities of travel anywhere in China and of obtaining meetings and interviews that could help people understand the situation. The positive aspects outweighed the negative. The second stage – more or less the last year, part of 1959 and 1960 – has been characterized by increasing difficulties and negative features: fewer opportunities to make useful trips, fewer opportunities to do good interviews, and some episodes that I am going to describe in this letter. I would like to stress that what I am about to tell is not only a personal opinion, but the general opinion of all news correspondents living in Beijing from all countries. I got the impression that some important change had happened in the [Chinese] attitude toward foreign correspondents and, generally speaking, in information policy when at the beginning of August 1959, I came back from a short trip to Italy. (Translation by the author)

The experience of these Italian Communist journalists’ life in the contact zone was certainly much affected by the sensitivity of their political role. Their expectation of profiting by their ideological commitment and professional identity

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within the contact zone was hindered by the Chinese political policy of keeping strict control over the circulation of information and the process of building China’s image abroad. Their life in China certainly changed their world outlook and enriched their intellectual background: but the contact zone they created in the People’s Republic was subordinate to and shaped by the general political and ideological constraints.

Interaction by Experts and Students: The Multiple Identities within the Contact Zone At the time when Sarzi Amadè was there, the Italian community had begun to enlarge and be more differentiated. Consequently, new patterns of interaction and new social spaces were emerging in Socialist Beijing, making this contact zone more complex than could be assumed if we limited our observation to the experience of foreign correspondents. In the second half of the 1950s, the arrival of students and experts enriched the Italian presence in Beijing. In 1957, Filippo Coccia, Edoarda Masi, and Renata Pisu arrived in the Chinese capital in order to attend courses at Beijing University, thanks to the relations between the Centro Cina and the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign People. Giuseppe Regis, and his wife, the sinologist Maria Arena, also moved to China as experts sent by the Communist Party, and in 1959 some other Italian comrades began to work for Chinese radio. As with the journalists, their life in China was limited by the physical and institutional segregation between foreigners and local people, imposed by Chinese bureaucracy. However, the two groups’ experiences in the contact zone were slightly different, as their interaction with the Chinese – for work and study – was more flexible and maybe productive than it was for foreign correspondents. Italian experts were sent by the Italian Communist Party to cooperate in developing relations with Italy and Chinese foreign relations. Some of them had the task of teaching Italian and economics to Chinese cadres working in foreign trade, as in the case of Regis. Others worked in culture and propaganda, on Beijing international radio (Peking Radio) for example, which in the early 1960s began to broadcast Italian language programs as part of a renewed effort of cultural diplomacy towards Western Europe. The experts worked in Chinese institutions, together with or subordinate to Chinese colleagues, as did the significant number of Soviet experts who had arrived in the PRC some years earlier. Most experts had been living in the recently built Friendship Hotel, a compound in Soviet

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style located in the outskirts of Beijing, which hosted Russian and Western guests coming to help with Chinese industrialization and modernization (Hooper 2017). These international experts’ lives were materially comfortable, but their lifestyle reflected the distance from Chinese society imposed by their hosts and their very limited autonomy in work. Power asymmetry became evident to their eyes, in some cases generating deep dissatisfaction. Marisa Musu was one of these experts; she stayed in China from late 1959 to 1962, and later recalled her experience in her autobiography (Musu 1979). A member of the Italian Communist Party, Marisa Musu had moved to Beijing together with her husband Aldo Poeta and their children. Together with the painter Manlio Fiacchi and his wife, the couple were expected to work at the new Italian section of Peking Radio, the Chinese radio broadcasting station producing international propaganda. Her commitment to work in a Chinese institution as a comrade and expert was damaged, in her perception, by this highly controlled bureaucratic environment. She began to harbour doubts about the meaning and value of the experience for herself and her family from a political and human perspective. In a letter in May 1960 addressed to an important Italian Communist cadre, Marisa Musu and Aldo Poeta identified several factors, e.g., Chinese mistrust of foreigners, and what they perceived as increasing Chinese nationalism (Musu 1960). They had the feeling that the values of international socialist cooperation were in practice subordinated to nationalism and immediate political goals. Musu’s impressions and opinions were due to new difficulties in the relationship between the Italian Communist Party and the Chinese Communist Party, mirroring the effects of ructions in the Socialist camp as well as China’s growing nationalism (Samarani, Graziani 2015). However, the issues at stake were not only political or ideological. The impossibility of forming what she perceived as an “authentic” relation with the Chinese people also weighed in Musu’s discontent. She came to feel a sort of discomfort about her lifestyle as a foreigner in China. For example, the Calamandreis had won their battle to have their daughter enrolled in a Chinese school; by contrast Marisa Musu and her husband failed to get a similar permit and their children were enrolled in the school established by the Democratic Republic of Germany just for Western children. Since this school was far away from the Friendship Hotel, a Chinese government car carried her children to school every morning. She began to realize that the quality of material life offered – and imposed – was higher than what was available to the average Chinese citizen, and a sense of uneasiness began to permeate her approach to China. Material benefits were a kind of wall, a boundary which served to mark their alienage from the local community; inability to cross this boundary was also a sign of the asymmetry of power

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she felt in doing her professional work, as she witnessed how her ideas and suggestions were not listened to by her Chinese colleagues. Eventually, a personal crisis precipitated her decision to leave China well before the date agreed upon at the beginning, against the will of the Party that had sent her (Musu 1979). Others did not share her decision, but preferred to stay, feeling that the experience of being in China and supporting Chinese socialism outweighed this kind of difficulty, which was partly facilitated in some cases by learning the Chinese language. Together with the Regis couple, there were several other people who stayed on, such as Giorgio Zucchetti, who later founded the Association of Sino-Italian Friendship in Rome, and subsequently Primerose Gigliesi, who also worked as a translator. Though their exposure to Chinese culture and society was highly controlled, experts who chose to stay longer in China found that language skills were certainly important in enhancing their agency in the contact zone and opening opportunities for interaction. This was even truer for the Italian students. At least for the first three, Masi, Pisu and Coccia, their experience was the starting point in a lifelong interest in Chinese politics, culture and society which became an important trait of their personal career and identity. Notwithstanding the limitations imposed by authorities, their daily life at the University created a social and cultural space where human interactions could develop – something far more difficult to attain in other contexts. The spatial organization of Chinese universities was designed to confine foreigners to certain specific places, as the campus dormitories and canteen destined for foreigners were not the same as those for Chinese students. There, Italian students lived in an international community of youths from different countries, mainly the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries, but also from Asia and Africa. However, they also had the chance to create personal relationships with Chinese students and professors, in class and outside class, experiencing the social life of the University. This gave them the opportunity to witness the impact of political events of the period – from the Anti-Rightists Campaign and the frenzied period of the Great Leap Forward – as well as rising tensions among the Russians, Polish and Hungarians, and between the Russians and the Chinese, seen through the lens of the small international society living in the University (Masi 1993). The letters sent home by Filippo Coccia offer an interesting perspective on social and cultural dynamics within the small contact zone inside the University, and also on the network of relations linking Italians to other members of the national community, such as journalists and experts (Coccia 2018). Their social contacts with China inside the University compound – “our life is virtually enclosed within the University walls” wrote Coccia in one letter (Coccia 2018, 49) – developed through some fundamental cultural practices, such as learning in class,

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eating at the canteen and sharing leisure time watching films or engaging in sports activities on campus. Moreover, their lifestyle was much closer to that of the local society, as shown by their consumption patterns. They often bought and wore Chinese clothes and shoes, smoked Chinese cigarettes, drank tea and ate Chinese food. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note how other social practices – like drinking at bars, dinners at restaurants downtown, or attendance at official events – were actually confined to relations with other foreigners. Living in this contact zone implied activation of different repertoires of cultural engagement according to the differing contexts and people they shared time with. On the one hand, their lifestyles and attitudes were certainly changed as they sought to overcome the imposed segregation, to cross linguistic barriers and behave according to the cultural codes of the local society. For instance, the Chinese language class, initially planned to be held in French, was actually the most intense area of interaction and adaptation. A close collaborative relationship could be formed with their Chinese teacher and, after a certain degree of language proficiency, with the other students. Moreover, each of them had to teach Italian to certain Chinese students who were deputed to liaise with them. These learning and collaborative activities, later enriched by part-time jobs as translators of literature – an important outcome of this contact zone – were certainly conditioned and controlled by political factors. However, the general perception of these students was that, except for love and sexual relationships, interaction with locals was possible, even though such relations were not always satisfying. Similarly, sharing meals at the Chinese students’ canteen, shopping at Chinese stores and using Chinese goods in daily life were important correctives to their perceived identity as foreigners and Italians. Unlike the news correspondents and experts whose identity was bound up with their profession, the students’ more flexible identity opened up various pathways of interaction, adaptation and even personal transformation. On the other hand, this actively pursued process was matched by the need to preserve some identity features as Westerners and Italians. Such were, for example, the forms of social life that they shared with other Western students, mostly from East European countries, such as drinking with friends in bars and at parties, from which Chinese students were excluded; or some aspects of food culture, like the longing for coffee, cheese or spaghetti when they met or were hosted by Italian experts like the Regis or foreign correspondents like the Sarzi Amadè family. Moreover, the chance to read Italian books, newspapers and magazines – a constant request from home – were important links with the homeland and, indirectly, with their basic cultural identity. An “Italian” identity that could indeed help to create a relationship with the Chinese and other

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foreigners. For example, Italian popular culture (songs or movie stars) well known to other Westerners and to the Chinese were both strong identity markers in the eyes of others, and also used as cues in the search for dialogue and cultural exchange. Lastly, in the students’ case, political comradeship was apparently less important an asset in acting within the contact zone than for experts or journalists like the Calamandreis. For the most mature and intellectual students like Edoarda Masi, sharing the ideological and political commitment to the Communist Party was fundamental for her interaction with local society. But to her dismay, she discovered that her request to participate in meetings of the University branch of the Chinese Communist Party was refused because, in spite of her political convictions, she was a foreigner. The reverse of what she had assumed: ideology and politics proved more a barrier than a bridge within the contact zone in socialist Beijing (Masi 2004).

Conclusion: Italian Sojourners in a Multifaceted Socialist Contact Zone This overview of the different experiences of these groups of Italian sojourners forging lives in Cold War Beijing highlights the interplay of different factors in shaping and structuring the interactions between them – as foreigners – and the local society. Maybe paradoxically, it became evident that ideology and politics played a role more in maintaining boundaries than in weakening them within this socialist contact zone. Beijing as a contact zone was mainly designed by the legacy of the colonial period and the Cold War framework. Chinese political and ideological concerns contributed to preserving and building new physical, social and cultural boundaries between foreigners – Italians included – and local society, under the pretense of respecting different lifestyles. Chinese bureaucracy exerted a more or less visible control over daily life and work routines and over the local mobility of aliens within the city. The upshot was that the distance between “them” and “us” continued to pervade most human interactions in this context. For the Italians who moved to China in order to witness and support its Socialist transformation for ideological reasons and who were sympathizers with the revolution, this was perceived as conflicting with the ideals of Socialist cooperation among fellow comrades, and proved a source of disappointment and uneasiness.

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The institutional cultural practices governing individuals and communities with different cultural backgrounds changed according to the system of social and cultural power. Consequently, the contact zone was not a homogeneous social space, but characterized by different possibilities of institutionalized socialization. Language dictated the possibility/impossibility of crossing boundaries but also involved the emergence of a third zone where at least a partial encounter could be managed (as by the use of other languages, like English and French). But even in this third zone, language was never a neutral tool of communication: it reflected complex meanings and identities. Ignorance of the Chinese language cramped opportunities of interaction within the contact zone, and helped the Chinese to keep control – especially over the journalists, who were perceived as the most powerful channels of knowledge and understanding about China abroad. For those of them who did not know Chinese, communicating in English and French (the languages of old imperialism) was the only choice, a choice that, in contrast with the new ideological stance of the Chinese government, still echoed the old cultural hierarchies (and distances) of the colonial era. In other words, language confined even the Italian communist journalists to their identity as foreigners, implicitly still suggesting their ties to erstwhile Western colonialism in China, in spite of their ideological adherence to socialism. In this perspective, only by learning the local language and using it in daily life could one go beyond this third zone with all its ambiguities. Italian students, apparently less powerful in the social and cultural hierarchy, were at an advantage in expanding and creating a new terrain of cultural encounter, since they learnt Chinese and began to use it in everyday communication. Unlike other groups, in their classroom and living habits, students were able to adjust their identity and cope with the cultural distance imposed on them as foreigners in a more productive way. Actually, it was not only a linguistic issue, but connected to lifestyle – the way of living, using objects, dress codes, food habits and tastes. More than the other groups, they could play with multiple identities and use various cultural resources, enabling them to live and produce a contact zone where, in spite of the political and ideological restraints of the Cold War, new cultural encounters could, at least partially, be contrived.

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Bibliography Bickers, Robert and Jackson Isabella, eds. Treaty Ports in Modern China. Law, land and power. Routledge: New York, 2016. Brady Anne-Marie. Making the Foreign Serve China. Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic. Rowman and Littlefield: Buffalo, 2003. Brunero, Donna and Villalta Puig Stephanie, eds. Life in Treaty Port China and Japan, Palgrave McMillan: New York, 2018. Calamandrei, Silvia. “Un inviato dell’Unità nella Cina dei primi anni Cinquanta”, Memoria Web, Trimestrale dell’Archivio Storico del Senato della Repubblica, 5 (new series), March 2014, 1–8. Calamandrei, Silvia. Maria Teresa Regard, Ali&No, Perugia, 2012. Calamandrei, Franco. Appunti 1953–1956, Archivio Storico del Senato della Repubblica, Fondo famiglia Calamandrei Regard, Serie 4, Sottoserie 3, UA 1 Capisani, Lorenzo M. “Dino Gentili, la Comet e il dialogo commerciale fra Italia e Cina (1952–1958)”, Studi Storici, 2, 2013, 419–448. Coccia Filippo. Lettere dalla Cina. A cura di Lucia Battaglia e Giorgio Trentin, Aracne: Roma, 2018. De Giorgi Laura. “Alle radici della diplomazia culturale cinese: l’interesse per l’Europa occidentale negli anni Cinquanta”, in La Cina di Mao, l’Italia e l’Europa negli anni della Guerra Fredda, a cura di Carla Meneguzzi Rostagni e Guido Samarani, Il Mulino: Bologna, 2014, 119–146. De Giorgi Laura. “Chinese Brush, Western Canvas: The Travels of Italian Artists and Writers and the Making of China’s Cultural International Image in mid-1950s”, Modern Asia Studies, 2017, vol. 51, 170–193. De Giorgi Laura. “Shenghuo zai shehuizhuyi youyi qianxian: dui 1950 niandai zhi 1960 niandai chu Yidali zai Hua lujuzhe jingli de chu pingu”, Lengzhan niandai de Yidali-Ouzhou yu Zhongguo guoji xueshu yandaohui zhuangao, Shijie zhizhi chubanshe, vol. 19/20, Summer-Winter 2015, Beijing, 31–46. Goodman, Bryna, and Goodman David (eds.). Twentieth Century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday, and the World, Routledge: New York, 2012. Hooper Beverley. Foreigners under Mao. Western Lives in China 1949–1976, Hong Kong University Press: Hong Kong, 2017. “Intervista a Edoarda Masi,” Kamen, 23, 2004. Luti, Giorgio. Fra politica e impresa. Vita di Dino Gentili, Passigli: Firenze 1994. Marinelli Maurizio, Andornino Giovanni (eds.). Italy’s Encounters with Modern China. Imperial Dreams, Strategic Ambitions, Palgrave McMillan: New York, 2014. Masi, Edoarda. Ritorno a Pechino, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1993. Musu, Marisa. 1960, Fondazione Gramsci, Archivi Partito Comunista Italiano, Estero, mf. 0474, fascicolo Cina, 1960, 0957–0964. Musu, Marisa. La ragazza di via Orazio. Vita di una comunista irrequieta. Edited by Ennio Polito, Mursia: Milano, 1979. Pini, Filippo Maria. Italia e Cina. Sessanta anni fra passato e futuro, L’Asino d’oro: Roma, 2011. Regard Maria Teresa. Notebooks 1953–1956, Archivio Storico del Senato della Repubblica, Fondo famiglia Calamandrei Regard, Serie 4, Sottoserie 3, UA 2. Regard, Maria Teresa. Autobiografia: 1924–2000, Franco Angeli: Milano, 2010, 101–103.

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Samarani Guido, De Giorgi Laura. Lontane, vicine. Le relazioni fra Cina e Italia nel Novecento, Carocci: Roma, 2011. Samarani Guido, Meneguzzi Carla e Graziani Sofia (eds.). Roads to Reconciliation: People’s Republic of China, Western Europe and Italy During the Cold War, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari: Venezia, 2018. Samarani, Guido e Graziani Sofia. “Yidali Gongchandang yu Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo: zhengzhi lianxi yu jiaoliu (1949–1965),” Lengzhan niandai de Yidali-Ouzhou yu Zhongguo guoji xueshu yandaohui zhuangao, Shijie zhizhi chubanshe, vol. 19/20, Summer-Winter 2015, Beijing, 5–29. Samarani, Guido, “History and Memory. Italian Communists’ Views of the Chinese Communist Party and the PRC During the Early Cold War”, in Europe and China in the Cold War. Exchanges Beyond the Bloc Logic and the Sino-Soviet Split, edited by Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl, Marco Wyss and Valeria Zanier, Brill: Leiden and Boston, 2018, 134–150. Sarzi Amadé Emilio. 1960, Fondazione Gramsci, Archivi del Partito Comunista Italiano, Estero, 0474, fascicolo Cina (Archives of the Italian Communist Party), 0945–0948. Zuccheri, Serena. “I primi studenti italiani nella RPC”, Sulla via del Catai, 4, 5. Numero speciale. Pechino chiama Roma. Quaranta anni di relazioni diplomatiche tra Italia e Cina, 2010, 39–48.

Sofia Graziani

7 Italians in Soviet-Sponsored International Organizations in China Introduction This chapter examines Sino-Italian contacts developed within Soviet-sponsored international organizations, such as the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and the World Federation of Trade Union (WFTU), in the political and ideological framework of the early Cold War. It looks at these organizations as avenues of Sino-Italian exchanges and political dialogue at a time when diplomatic relations between the two countries had not yet been established. Recent research has shown that, despite being highly dependent on the Soviet Union, ‘front organisations’ did represent a place where people from countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain could come together and also meet representatives of the Third World, especially in the case of transnational events linked to the Soviet campaign for peace like, for instance, the biannual ‘World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace and Friendship’ (Koivunen 2011 and Volland 2008, among the others). These events contributed to shaping the world of socialism, and fostered connections in a complicated Cold War context. In her essay on women contacts, Laura De Giorgi (2017) highlights the role of international womens’ organizations in facilitating interactions and the establishment of a dialogue between China and Italy at that time. In previous studies, I myself have examined youth organizations and initiatives as providing privileged spaces for Sino-European interactions, thus helping to connect people who had otherwise little experience of one another (Graziani 2018, 2019). Building on and further extending previous analysis, this essay attempts to document some of the contacts and exchanges made possible thanks to Italian and Chinese participation in both the WFDY and the WFTU, and to highlight the key role of political and ideological factors in shaping the dynamics of contacts and the understanding of the Other. The chapter takes the concept of the ‘contact zone’ and links it with transnationalism, intending the latter in the sense of different nationalities coming together at the same location (Dirlik 2004). At the same time, it takes ‘contact zone’ to denote both a co-presence within geographical space as well as a social metaphor to indicate interconnections and circulation of ideas. This article suggests that these organizations can be understood as “pro-

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grammed” contact zones in which bilateral and private encounters took place and socio-political dialogue was developed. Yet, contacts within this institutional framework were heavily influenced by ideological factors and tensions originating from the Sino-Soviet dispute and the crisis of the World Communist Movement. In fact, in the early 1960s international ‘front’ organisations developed into the outposts of the political struggle between the Chinese and Soviet Communist Parties. The first part of the essay introduces the role of youth groups and trade unions in the context of Sino-Italian unconventional diplomacy in the 1950s and early 1960s, while the second part attempts to explore left-wing world federations and events as transnational programmed contact zones within which Italians had the opportunity to engage with China. At the same time, it shows how in the late 1950s/ early 1960s contacts within these organizations were hindered by emerging divergences resulting from the Sino-Soviet dispute and China’s increased ideological radicalism.

Informal Diplomacy Between Italy and Socialist China in the 1950s and Early 1960s: The Role of Youth Groups and Trade Union Studies have shown that since 1949 until the early 1960s, in the absence of diplomatic relations, exchanges between Italy and China were developed by a series of economic, political and cultural actors interested in opening spaces of dialogue between the two countries. The development of informal relations was made possible thanks to individual visits, delegation exchanges and, more generally, to the activities carried out within the framework of what came to be known as the ‘unconventional diplomacy among political parties’, in which the Italian Communist Party (PCI) – together with the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) – played a key role (Samarani and De Giorgi 2011; Meneguzzi and Samarani 2014; Samarani, Meneguzzi and Graziani 2018). Party-affiliated youth groups contributed to the development of contacts beyond conventional diplomatic channels (Graziani 2017). For instance, the PCI’s junior partner, the Italian Communist Youth Federation (FGCI) provided a channel for PCI-CCP contacts and Sino-Italian interactions since the early 1950s when the 28-year-old, anti-fascist partisan, Ugo Pecchioli, then member of the National Secretariat of the FGCI, was sent to Beijing to attend the 2nd National Congress of the New Democratic Youth League (the forerunner of the Communist Youth

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League). Pecchioli then spent almost a month in China (June 20–July 18) and travelled across the country, visiting important cities (i.e. Mukden [Shenyang], Fushun, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Shanghai) (Gongqingtuan zhongyang guoji lianluobu 2000, 9; Pecchioli 1953). Early contact between Italy and China was also made possible through a network of mass organizations somehow ‘collateral’ to the PCI, and more generally to the political parties of the Italian left. Some of these organizations were able to send delegations to China at that time, especially on the occasion of annual celebrations. It is the case of trade union delegations which were particularly numerous at that time. According to data collected so far, from 1950 to 1966 Italian trade union representatives visited China almost every year to participate in the May 1st labour celebration. One such instance was the 1954 visit to China made by an Italian labour union delegation guided by Bruno Trentin, and composed of members of both the PCI and the Italian Socialist Party1 A year later, a delegation composed by Mario Didò (a member of the Italian Socialist Party who would later become national secretary of the Italian General Confederation of Labor - CGIL), Luciano Lama (a member of the PCI and national secretary of the CGIL starting in 1961 and General Secretary of the CGIL from 1970 to 1986) and Giovanni Parodi (then member of the PCI and general secretary FIOM) visited the People’s Republic of China (PRC) at the invitation of the Chinese trade unions (CGIL historical archives, Fondo Didò). In 1957 another delegation guided by Mario Montagnana was invited to China on the occasion of May 1st celebrations. Among the other delegations sent to China in the following years up until the launching of the Cultural Revolution, it is worth mentioning the one led by Francisconi Doro that visited the country in 1964 and also met with the then Mayor of Beijing, Peng Zhen. The PRC also sent delegations to Italy at that time. A case in point is the delegation led by Liu Ningyi, the leader of the All China Federation of Trade Union, who attended the IV National Congress of the CGIL held in Rome in 1956 (Renmin ribao, February 17, 1956). All these delegations and exchanges were important in establishing links and opening spaces of interactios and knowledge between the two countries.

1 «Comunicazione di Bruno Trentin alla Segreteria del PCI» 1/7/1954, Fondazione Gramsci, Archivi PCI, Partiti esteri, mf. 0424, Cina, 1954, p. 0429. The other members of the 1954 delegation were D’Angelo Luigi, Manacorda Mario Alighiero, Alini Walter and Dosio Andrea.

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Sino-Italian Contacts and Socio-Political Dialogue within the Context of International ‘Front’ Organizations Sino-Italian contacts were also created and developed within international leftwing coordination bodies, such as the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the International Union of Students, the World Federation of Trade Unions, the Women’s International Democratic Federation, and the World Peace Council. At a time of relative international isolation for the PRC and intense cold war, these organizations provided a crucial window for China’s international exposure beyond the Soviet bloc, representing privileged avenues for projecting its new and peaceful image and developing exchanges between the newly established PRC, on the one hand, and Western political groups and individual representatives on the other (Cao 1999, 1). Similar to the International Union of Students (IUS), the WFDY was born out of the desire for peace soon after the end of the Second World War. It was officially founded in London in 1945 with the aim of establishing international youth cooperation for the cause of freedom, democracy and equality. However, after 1947, the communists consolidated their control over the organisation, which eventually became subordinated to the Soviet propaganda machine. Thus, the WFDY soon developed into a Soviet-dependent ‘front organisation’ with a partisan character, and the non-communist groups quickly withdrew from the organization (Cornell 1965, 73–95). By the early 1950s, the WFDY had become a large organisation with a transnational character: its membership grew from 30 million young people representing sixty-five countries in 1945 to 83 million young people from 90 countries in 1953 (WFDY 1953, 291). As the Soviets managed to control the WFDY fully, all members of the Secretariat were communists, with Italians and French – as representatives of the largest communist parties in Western Europe – taking on a prominent role in key bodies. At the same time, China’s weight in the WFDY gradually increased after the end of the Korean War when, at the Third World Youth Congress (Bucharest), the Chinese delegates entered the Secretariat as part of a broader attempt to increase the organization representativeness at a time of increasing attention towards anti-colonialist movements in the Third World (Qian 2009, 95–106). One year later, in August 1954, the PRC hosted the WFDY Council. Making the PRC the host was a choice that was mainly due to recent developments in national liberation movements in colonial countries and to the Geneva Conference on Korea and Indochina, which had recently brought Asian countries to the centre of world attention and had greatly enhanced the international standing of the

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‘new China’ (Gongqingtuan Zhongyang guoji lianluobu 2009, 36–37). This meeting involved not only plenary sessions but also mass rallies and get-togethers, calling for peace and the easing of international tension, the strengthening of the world youth’s struggle and unity against colonialism for national independence and the improvement of the living conditions of the youth of newly independent countries in the Third World. The Italian communist Bruno Bernini, then President of the WFDY, addressed the question of the specific characteristics of the youth in colonial and semicolonial countries, a point then elaborated upon by the Chinese delegate Liu Daosheng (WFDY 1954, 18–20). In the opening speech entitled ‘Chinese youth and world youth forever friends,’ Hu Yaobang defined the topic under discussion (i.e. the youth movement in colonial countries) as ‘extremely important and urgent,’ and renewed his call to achieve unity among the youth who wanted a peaceful future. Three years later, in 1957, at the Fourth Congress of the WFDY, Hu Yaobang stressed the principle of ‘seeking common ground while accepting existing differences’ as the basis of peaceful cooperation among the WFDY, the youth with different political opinions and various national youth groups (Hu Yaobang 1957). The activities of the WFDY provided many foreign youth leaders with opportunities for developing contacts with the leaders of China’s youth and visiting Communist China. For instance, as early as 1950, one year after the Chinese communists’ seizure of power, Enrico Boccara, an Italian anti-fascist partisan, member of the executive committee of the WFDY, travelled across China as the head of an international delegation that visited the PRC to honor the success of the revolution (Boccara 1951). The Italian journalist Tutino Saverio also participated in the delegation, having the opportunity to travel to China for the first time. Large-scale transnational get-togethers sponsored by the WFDY and the IUS, such as the World Youth Festivals, were also important in providing opportunities to increase Sino-Western contacts. According to Qian Liren’s recollection, the PRC used these meetings to expand contacts with representatives from every part of the world, and numerous foreign delegations were invited to China after each convention. For example, 452 young people from thirty-four countries visited China in 1953 after the World Youth Festival in the same year (Qian 2005, 55). Yet, of particular importance for the expansion of friendship with youths from capitalist countries was the 1957 festival held in Moscow. The event was, indeed, attended by 34,000 young people from 131 countries and saw the participation of an unprecedented number of non-communist Westerners (Koivunen 2009, 52; WFDY 1957, 25). The PRC participated with a 1,222-member delegation, which was particularly active in establishing contacts with the representatives of various national organisations (Zhu Liang 2012, 18–21; Gongqingtuan zhongyang guoji lianluobu 2009, 44–47). The Moscow Festival, which was attended

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by 2,000 Italians, provided the opportunity for a Sino-Italian bilateral meeting which involved Renzo Trivelli, the Secretary of the Italian Communist Youth Federation since 1956, and the leader of the Socialist Youth Movement Emo Egoli, with whom Chinese established early contacts (L’Unità and PCI Archives). Both Chinese and Italians were represented in the leading organs of the WFDY with Italian communists holding the presidency for almost a decade: Enrico Berlinguer (1950–1953) was followed by Bruno Bernini (1953–1959) as president of the organization. Holding such a position, both men worked side by side with the leaders of China’s youth, including Wu Xueqian and Qian Liren, who in the early 1950s served as deputy director and director of China’s Communist Youth League (CYL) International Liaison Department respectively, as well as the national secretary of China’s CYL, Hu Yaobang, who became vice-president of the WFDY in 1953.2 Although during his mandate as President of the WFDY Enrico Berlinguer never visited Communist China, his successor Bruno Bernini did so twice in the early and mid-1950s (1954, 1956) at a time when, finding itself internationally isolated as a consequence of the Korean War, the PRC was taking advantage of the activities organized by the international youth organizations to gain international understanding and support (Graziani 2018 and 2019). As an antifascist partisan from Livorno, Bernini joined the PCI in 1943. With World War II at an end, he became a member of the National Secretariat of the Youth Front, and in 1950, a leading member of the reorganized FGCI. In 1953, after the death of Stalin, he was appointed president of the WFDY and from that point until 1959, under the instruction of Togliatti himself, he strove to bring the organization out of isolationism, attempting to make it more opened and representative of different political forces, not necessarily communist. This was a difficult task ultimately aimed at overcoming international tension and military blocs, which required strong mediation skills (Bruno Bernini’s Archival Fund, ISTORECO, autobiographical manuscript). It should be noted that in the mid-1950s, especially after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – which sanctioned the thesis of the plurality and diversity of the roads to socialism and opened up new opportunities

2 Qian Liren worked in Budapest (at the WFDY headquarter) as secretary from August 1953 until August 1956 while Wu Xueqian was the Chinese representative within the WFDY in the period 1949–1950 and would hold the position of deputy-director and then director of the CYL International Liaison Department (tuan zhongyang guoji lianluobu) until 1958, playing an important role in China’s youth external work and in the activities organized by the WFDY in the following years (Gongqingtuan zhongyang guoji lianluobu 2009, 35; 94; Zhu Liang 2012, 123–124).

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for Communist party autonomy – the PCI’s leaders started to feel that «‘the strongest communist party in the capitalist world’ could become itself an international political subject» (Höbel 2005, 516). With a perspective aimed at overcoming military blocs, and firmly anchored in the strategy of peaceful coexistence, Italian Communists tried to formulate their own political agenda. In particular, Palmiro Togliatti elaborated a new original conception based on ‘polycentrism,’ which implied a re-assessment of the traditional leadership role of the Soviet Union within the Communist movement and also led to the PCI’s interest and action towards the extra-European world and what came to be known as the ‘nonaligned’ movement (Galeazzi 2011). Thus, in the mid-1950s the PRC’s search for a more autonomous role internationally intertwined with Italian Communists’ desire to carve out their own space of action vis-à-vis the USSR. It is in this context that Hu Yaobang and especially Qian Liren (who was based in Budapest) worked side by side with the President Bruno Bernini. Since his appointment as President of the WFDY in 1953, under the instruction of Togliatti himself, Bruno Bernini strove to make the WFDY representative of different political groups in the world (not necessarily Communist) with the ultimate aim of overcoming international tension and military blocs. Bernini was well aware that such a dialogue and collaboration in the struggle for peace against colonialism, aggression and violence, required the WFDY to overcome any ‘partisan’ political notion. These ideas towards a more open and pluralistic organization, while encountering resistance from Soviet leaders, were supported by the Chinese as suggested in Bernini’s memoirs. In 1954, during a meeting he had with Zhou Enlai Bernini was first reassured that China fully supported the WFDY’s policy of openness. Later, in the autumn of 1956, when Bernini returned to China as part of a joint international youth delegation, he also met Mao Zedong, who also expressed his support for the renewal of the WFDY, stating that a federation that was a rough copy of the Cominform had no reason to exist. Working side by side with Chinese representatives also gave Bernini the opportunity to gain more knowledge of China’s approach to and conception of international relations at a time when – as he wrote in his memoirs – during meetings with different leaders of the Socialist countries he could perceive emerging drives towards national autonomy, despite the Soviet leaders’ continued rally-call for the USSR to take the leading role. It was during a visit to Korea where he went in 1954 as head of a youth delegation that he would learn from the Chinese Liu Xiyuan,3 who accompanied him, what he

3 Liu Xiyuan in 1952 had been deputy head of the youth department of the political office of the People’s Liberation Army.

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would define as, “a conception of friendship and internationalism, heavily anchored to the respect for the principles of autonomy and national sovereignty”, a notion that Bernini appreciated and with which he could fully identify (Bernini’s autobiographical manuscript, 85–86). Conversations with Chinese leaders also covered the theme of the Italian Communists’ policy, revealing interest in the ICP’s historical experience of the united front among the youth in Italy,4 and touched upon issues relating to the current political debate at that time, including the theme of nuclear war and the end of civilization. As is known, this question would become a crucial point of divergence between Moscow and Beijing later in 1957 when, at the Moscow conference, Mao expressed his reservations about the policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ being promoted by the new Soviet leadership, pointing instead to the possibility of war and causing strong reactions after the meeting (Shen and Xia 2009). Disagreements on this theme would intensify over the next decade not just with the Soviet leadership, but also with important protagonists of other Communist parties in Europe. Of all the party leaders, Togliatti was certainly a strong supporter of the need for peace (Agosti 2003, 416–17). Interestingly, according to Bernini’s memoirs, Zhou Enlai told him that the «safeguarding of peace assumed a new importance in the atomic era» but also pointed out that such a war would not necessarily and inevitably mark the end of humanity and of socialism, thus leaving the question open for further discussion (autobiographical manuscript, 87). Bernini’s memoirs therefore suggest that the theme of war and peace was an issue over which divergences might have existed, albeit still hidden, well before 1957. After the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party held in 1956, divergences started to develop between Chinese and Soviet representatives within both the IUS and the WFDY and clearly emerged on the theme of peace at a IUS meeting held in Beijing as early as September 1958 (Gongqingtuan Zhongyang guoji lianluobu 2008, 99–100). The meeting was attended by more than 200 delegates, three from Italy (Beijing Municipal Archives, 102–001–00021). Yet, Bernini personally witnessed emerging disagreements between Chinese and Soviet representatives over issues such as the priorities of the youth of the Third World as early as 1954. Chinese and Soviet positions on the colonial issue and national independence movements would indeed soon result in open antagonism and conflict, when, in the early 1960s, the Chinese emphasised an active struggle for

4 Indeed, Togliatti had played an important role in reorienting the communist movement in the mid-1930s, pushing forward a new strategy based on ‘popular fronts’ against fascism and linking communism with anti-fascism (Agosti 2003, 191–197).

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national liberation and attacked the Soviet representatives for prioritising disarmament as a way to achieve national independence and to remove imperialist and neo-colonialist dominance (Cornell 1965, 97–135). Consequently, the SinoSoviet dispute and the crisis of the world communist movement would lead the PRC to withdraw its delegates within international youth organizations in 1966 (Gongqingtuan Zhongyang guoji lianluobu 2008 and 2009). Political and ideological factors would also influence the debate unfolding within the WFTU. Born in October 1945 soon after the Second World War, the World Federation of Trade Union witnessed a brief life of trade-union unity. In fact, an internal conflict soon emerged between Western non-communist trade union federations and Communist-led union federations in both socialist and capitalist countries. Four years later, influential non-communist unions had walked out the Federation to create the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (Carew 1984; Devinatz 2013). This had the consequence of making the WFTU a communist front organization where a very high percentage of the membership would be from Soviet Russia and other Soviet bloc countries.5 In 1949, at the time of the split, the WFTU comprised delegates from various national and international organizations obedient to Moscow, the CGIL, in which both socialists and communists participated, being among them. At the Second Trade Union Congress held in Milan in July 1949, attended by delegations from more than 60 countries, the Italian Giuseppe Di Vittorio was elected President. Since then up until the 1960s Italians would occupy this position (Agostino Novella would become President in the late 1950s, followed by Renato Bitossi). Both Di Vittorio and Novella6 had the opportunity to work side by side with the Chinese delegates within the WFTU leading organs, in particular Liu Changsheng, then vice-president of the All China Federation of Trade Union and secretary of the WFTU, Zhu Xuefan, who in the 1950s was both vice-president of the All China Federation of Trade Union and member of the general council of the WFTU (Gao 2011), and Liu Ningyi who was both the vice-president of the WFTU as well as a member of its Executive Committee.7 Participation in the WFTU allowed the establishment of early contacts between Chinese and Italian trade union leaders: for instance, Liu Ningyi who in 1956 travelled to Italy together with Liu Changsheng to attend the IV National

5 Directory of the World Federation of Trade Union, 1955, p. 1, avilable online at https://babel. hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112068944070;view=1up;seq=13 6 Before becoming President of the WFTU, Novella was in both the General Council and the Executive Committee of the Federation 7 Directory of the World Federation of Trade Union, 1955, pp. 4–5, 9, avilable online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112068944070;view=1up;seq=13

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Congress of the CGIL (Renmin ribao, February 17, 1956), had already visited Rome as early as 1948, soon before the birth of the People’s Republic of China, to attend the meeting of the executive committee of the WFTU (Liu 1996, 121–123). Since the late 1950s ideological and political disputes within the international communist movement heavely influenced the WFTU as well as conversations and debate during bilateral meetings between Italian and Chinese trade unionists as the report of the Italian delegation that travelled to China in the early 1960s shows (Note di Francisconi su visita in Cina, 1964, Archivio Novella, Fondazione Gramsci, Roma). Private meetings often touched upon delicate political issues linked to the Sino-Soviet ideological dispute that also dominated international meetings at that time. Yet, the question of the autonomy of the WFTU from political parties was another key theme at the centre of discussion at that time; a theme supported by Italians and also by the Chinese delegates, even though since 1960 this support appeared to be highly instrumental in the light of the Sino-Soviet dispute. The Sino-Soviet controversy and split eventually led the Chinese to attack the WFTU and to withdraw their representatives in the mid-1960s. In fact, serious contrasts especially over the issue of the peace and the policy of peaceful coexistence, whose validity had just been reaffirmed by the PCI and its leader Togliatti (Hobel 2005, 523), emerged at the WFTU General Council held in Beijing at the beginning of June 1960, posing difficulties also for the Italian delegation. The 1960 WFTU meeting is indeed considered a crucial moment in the development of Sino-Soviet relations (Yan 2007). The Beijing WFTU meeting was attended by 123 delegates from more than 50 countries. Italians included Luigi Grassi, member of the WFTU secretariat and a member of the Italian Communist Party, and Giuseppe Casadei, member of the WFTU secretariat and member of the Italian Socialist Party. Besides, the Communists Agostino Novella and Luciano Romagnoli and the Socialist Vittorio Foa participated as representatives of the Italian trade union confederation.8 Besides Liu Ningyi, Liu Changsheng was among the members of the Chinese delegation and played an important role in the struggle against the revisionists within the international workers movement (Liu Xiao et al. 1979, 19). Italians in Beijing had to cope with a particularly delicate situation due to contrasts and divergences of opinions among the delegates. A Chinese internal document sent to the Shanghai Federation of Trade Union at that time, used the term ‘chaos’ (hunluan) to describe the situation among foreign guests in terms of thought and ideology: “there is distance between them [foreign guests] and us

8 “Guanyu jiedai shijie gonglian dishiyi ci lishi huiyi waibing de zongjihua, mingdan, richengbiao, zhuyishixiang, zongjie deng wenjian,” Shanghai Municipal Archives, C1–2–3468.

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with regard to peace, our army, coexistence, and the issue of opposing imperialism and modern revisionism.”9 Problems had already emerged before the beginning of the work of the General Council when the Chinese critiques were clearly expressed in a meeting between the CCP leaders (including Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping) and the Italian delegation.10 Novella later reported that divergences occurred on the contents of the WFTU report to be approved at the General Council in Beijing: the Chinese delegates not only criticized the possibility of avoiding the war, the policy of disarmament but also expressed their reserve on the policy of Western aid to developing countries. They wanted a statement on the inevitability of the war be added in the text of the report of the WFTU. During a private meeting with Novella, the President of the Chinese Federation of Trade Union, Liu Ningyi, expressed all his disagreement with the content of the Report. Novella had many other meetings with the Chinese delegates: in one of this occasion he complained about the Chinese position and was indirectly accused of protecting revisionism. The Chinese line had indeed just emerged at the meeting of the Peace Council held in Stockolm where the Chinese delegates attacked the policy of peaceful coexistence and did not vote the final resolution.11 The cases examined above suggest that international left-wing organizations provided the institutional framework for developing Sino-Italian contacts in the early and mid-1950s. Yet, with the crisis of the world communist movement since the late 1950s, political issues and ideological disputes became central and those same organizations ceased to provide a platform for dialogue. The essay has attempted to shed light on the implications of the Sino-Soviet split and on the difficulties in finding a common space of dialogue as Sino– Soviet relations were deteriorating, and the Italian Communist Party leadership was torn between its search for autonomy and alignment with Moscow.

Archives Beijing Municipal Archives Shanghai Municipal Archives

9 “Guanyu shijie gonglian dishiyici lishi huiyi waibing qingkuang,” July 7, 1960, Shanghai Municipal Archives, C1–2–3468. 10 Fondazione Gramsci, Archivi PCI, Verbali direzione, June 24 1960, mf. 024, Intervento di Novella. 11 Fondazione Gramsci, Archivi PCI, Verbali direzione, June 24, 1960, mf.024, Intervento di Spano.

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Fondazione Gramsci, Italian Communist Party Archives and Novella Archives ISTORECO, Livorno, Fondo Bernini CGIL Historical Archives, Rome, Fondo Didò.

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Giovanni Bernardini

8 West-German – Chinese Trade Experiences in Historical Perspective Nearly 30 years on from its first formulation, the contact zone paradigm is still being debated and refined as its first formulator, Mary Louise Pratt, dialogues with her most constructive critics. Though originally proposed as a research tool in the field of literacy and literary theories, it has proved versatile, thought-provoking and generally popular in many other walks of the humanities, and indeed wherever the notion of “culture” is amenable to problemanalysis (Hong 2001, 259–83; Giffard 2016, 29–41). Without any claim to exhaustiveness in what is potentially an infinite topic, my chapter sets out to assess the contact zone paradigm in a field where it has not yet been seriously applied: economic history in its broadest sense. I will attempt this by means of a case study that dates back to the post-colonial era, but which I will try to frame in a longer-term analysis: the negotiations between the Federal Republic of Germany and the People’s Republic of China in the years following 1949, their aim being to promote and regulate trade between the two countries, despite the geopolitical impediments and the unfavourable ideological climate caused by the Cold War.

Contact Zones and Economic History Although recent economic research seems intent chiefly on defining and quantifying the negative effect of cultural factors on economic exchange, viewing them as mere “biases” or “barriers” (Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales 2004, 1–25; Kónya 2006, 494–507), many other disciplines agree that conflict and cultural contamination have always been an intrinsic component of economic action (Spillman 2006, 1047–71). Since prehistoric times that component has affected much more than the purely material side to the exchange of goods and services; it has played a powerful part in producing social meanings and relations within the societies

Note: This research has been funded by the Italian Ministry of Education as part of the National Research Project (PRIN 2017–2020) “Percorsi di avvicinamento fra Europa Occidentale e Repubblica Popolare Cinese negli anni della Guerra Fredda: Italia e Repubblica Federale Tedesca a confronto, 1949–1972” (The rapprochement between Western Europe and the People’s Republic of China during the Cold War: A comparison between Italy and West Germany 1949–1972”) Open Access. © 2020 Giovanni Bernardini, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663426-009

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involved. The contact zone paradigm seems highly suited to identifying certain cultural factors at play in economic exchange. In the first place, it counters the stereotype of communities closed within their own process of self-definition, opposed to which it focuses on the relational side, which distinguishes and affects every stage of their development.1 Contact zones are places of comparison and negotiation, factors that have been typical parameters of economic exchange from the era of barter down to present-day e-commerce. If one accepts the anthropological definition of “culture” to include a human group’s typical material, and not just social or spiritual, manifestations, one comes to see the material need for economic exchange among social groups as one of the contact-shaping forces, found at all periods and latitudes, that have opened and still open the door to comparison and cultural contamination. Although historians often consider such a knock-on effect involuntary and unpredictable in its consequences, it is equally true to say that the gradual emergence of social professionals in charge of economic exchange has often endowed them with sensitivity to the cultural factors involved: whether it be in facilitating new contact, or channelling it along previously established routes, or even restricting it to the minimum degree possible. Again, as economic activities have grown specialised and refined, greater weight has attached to expertise and the technical language needed in economic exchanges, a proper lingua franca making for prompter understanding among people handling economic contacts. Another basic feature of the contact zone paradigm makes it peculiarly suitable for historical investigation of economic exchanges: the space factor. The physical space in which cultures meet and clash immediately leads us to the places designed for economic exchange among geographically and historically separated human communities, symbolised by that universal and traditional phenomenon, the market (Hahn 2018, 1–19). Market systems involving precise locations, codified roles and customs, and periodic recurrence, have long been recognized “as key factors in the development and integration of many complex societies”, regardless of their geographical or historical distance (Minc 2006, 82–3). The model continues to this day in far from symbolic form via international trade-fairs. Yet recent centuries have tried to make the contact zone model less spontaneous, less episodic and more institutionalized and regulated, and this has greatly affected economic relations between separate human communities. The reasons for this change lie in the global extent of such transactions, as well as the increasing complexity and bureaucracy prevailing in the societies involved. In particular, the age of empires and

1 For this and other references to Mary Louise Pratt’s formulation, the reader is referred to the introduction to the present volume.

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colonies introduced an economic space dimension that was heavily conditioned by power dynamics between dominant and subordinate parties, centre and periphery, as well as by the idea of extraterritorial status. All this established an insurmountable hierarchy among the actors in play, including the right to limit or even deny subordinates all access or contact. However, studies on specific cases over the years have shown that deliberate and objective obstacles failed to prevent spatial proximity from generating distinct contact zones which had a lasting effect on all the communities involved, extending well beyond the immediately concerned territories (Larrier 2004, 96–107; Raj 2011, 55–82).

“The Face of the West”: Germany’s Economic Presence in China For many reasons which it is here impossible to enlarge on, China remained for centuries a land of experiment and consolidation for special foreign (mainly western) enclaves. Economic reasons were by no means the only driving force behind the process, but they did play a predominant role (Feuerwerker 1983, 192–93; Nield 2015, ix–xi). The 19th century saw the rise of that peculiar model, the “concession”: a space that the imperial authorities “conceded” to western powers within built-up areas. Although based on the strict legal principle of extraterritoriality and separation from the local population, the concessions became a place from which foreign influence radiated across the surrounding territory and even permanently altered China’s political, economic, social and urban profile. The peculiar condition obtaining in some of these territories, where concessions included as many as nine different foreign powers in one and the same area, eventually made them something quite different from mere colonies. “Hyper-colonies”, say some, Foucaultian “heterotopias” claim others: be that as it may, the concessions were places where inequality of power relations did not prevent “the intersection and juxtaposition of practices and representations” among foreign powers or between them and the native population (Marinelli 2009, 399–405). The concessions experience had a decisive influence on SinoGerman relations, albeit for unimaginable reasons. First, Germany made her economic and cultural presence felt in China somewhat later than other imperial powers. This was no doubt due to the fact that German unification only occurred in 1871, so that her governing authorities had difficulty in muscling in on the French and above all the British in China. As a result, German non-state actors initially enjoyed less governmental protection than their competitors – a fact which actually prompted them to experiment more freely with original and

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flexible strategies for penetrating Chinese society (Leutner and Mühlhahn 2001, 9–14). In the economic field their efforts were crowned with marked success, coinciding as they did with the phase of history (the last quarter of the 19th century) when Germany took the lead in the so-called Second Industrial Revolution. This meant that German firms’ production of avantgarde goods and services was matched by a widespread desire for modernization on the part of the Chinese elites. This gave rise to flexible, scheduled, locally circumscribed contact zones and to a limited number of interlocutors chosen by either side. Such zones proliferated in the large cities and around the German companies’ commercial and representative offices, the number of which went from 7 in 1855 to 122 in 1901 (Kirby 1984, 11–15). On a material plane such results gave German economic and technological power a broad and lasting influence in Chinese culture of the time, illustrated by pioneering achievements like construction of the first electric tramway in Beijing in 1899, the first high-voltage power line in the country, massive exports of military equipment and also of common daily objects such as telephones, pointer telegraphs, water meters and synthetic dyes for textiles. All this certainly met with approval by the German government though it couched this in terms less threatening to Chinese sovereignty than were adopted by the main European competitors. The trend was to change quite substantially at the turn of the century when Germany’s political authorities decided to emulate the other European powers by formally taking possession of extra-European areas to add to their Empire (Berghahn 1996, 5). In China, this took the form of obtaining concessions from the imperial power at Hankou, Tianjin and in the Kiautschou Bay, by coercion or political pretext (chiefly connected with suppressing the Boxer Rebellion). In this, Germany lagged decades behind France, Great Britain and the United States. Despite the overt objective of combining territorial with economic penetration, there was much talk in the German economic world even at the time about not increasing German influence in China by “cannons” but by cultural means, promoting the image of the Reich as an example of a modern power that posed no threat to Chinese sovereignty (Machetzki 1991, 401–408). As it was, the Chinese reaction to Berlin’s imperial and territorial new turn was to cool the official welcome even to the German economic presence. The situation would worsen further in 1912 when the leaders of the newborn Republic showed marked intolerance to the concessions system and to the political and military presence of westerners (Tanner 2010, 133). The German experience of concessions was anyway short-lived since Germany forfeited control of them upon losing the First World War. Surprisingly, that setback proved no impediment but a competitive advantage in the medium term. The fledgling Weimar Republic’s interest in China’s market and resources, and the latter’s interest in German’s

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economic and technological potential (remaining roughly intact despite the defeat) were too great to be ignored by the two sides. What is more, restrictions imposed to Germany by the Versailles Treaty on any new extra-European expansion enabled China for the first time to base relations with a European country “upon both the principle and practice of equality and mutual benefit” (Kirby 1997, 443–44). The relationship between the two countries was quick to recover and overtake the pre-war position. Many comparative analyses see that relationship as “the most successful of the Republican period,” raising China “into the very centre of global power politics.” The inadmissibility of any active support by the German state prevented their forming a “business system” based on “triple integration through the market, through imperial politics and through the articulation of interests” despite which German trade with China prospered from the mid-1920s on (Osterhammel 1986, 302). This was no doubt due to the “versatility of Chinese diplomacy in pursuing broadly consistent goals through an extraordinarily diverse set of relationships within a short span of years”; but also to the ingenuity shown by German companies and consortiums in going in for “informal arrangements with the Chinese on local, provincial and even central government level,” rather than formal treaties of the traditional kind. The strategy at the time largely involved sending military and economic “advisers” to China, often with the backing of the public power but above all endowed with the flexibility of the private sector (Martin 1981). In bilateral Sino-German relations the model of contact zone that began to prevail was less linked to any stable, lasting physical presence, or coercion and inequality of power relations, and based more on equality: a virtual, flexible model depending on personal skill and technique, and on the experience of the mediators involved. As a result, by the mid-Thirties China had become Germany’s third commercial partner and the third recipient of German direct investments abroad, thanks to the involvement of the country’s leading firms. The consequences of this trend were not confined to the economic sphere: thanks to her industrial, technological and commercial potential, once more Germany became again a source of inspiration to those wishing to modernize China. That inspiration continued even when the Nazi regime came to power: some of the Guomindang were attracted by its ability to combine social conservatism with an industrial and technological spirit of modernization – something they wished to emulate in republican China. One may thus safely maintain that the pattern of material exchange forming between the two countries, favoured by the German state’s need to toe a discreet line devoid of any classic imperialistic designs, made German culturally and ideologically the main foreign influence in China from the mid-Twenties on, such as to become “the face of the West in China during the ‘Nanjing decade’ (1927–1937)” (Kirby 1984, 20). Politics

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eventually queered the pitch from 1937 when the Hitler regime chose to prioritise relations with Japan which was now openly at war with China. The Berlin authorities gradually withdrew all advisers, broke off collaboration over munitions and eventually sought to re-route economic interests towards the Manzhouguo puppet state. The German economic world put up some resistance, as objective operating conditions enabled it to do, trusting that the experience gained in previous decades would make the Chinese market potential more attractive than other alternatives (Leitz 2004, 130). Thus, economic cooperation was never completely interrupted between the German private sector and the Chinese nationalist government, at least until the 1941 declaration of war.

After 1949: Shielding Trade from the “Cold War” The new World War and its aftermath hampered the resumption of bilateral relations. In May 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) came into being, amputated from its eastern half which remained under Soviet occupation and was shortly to become the German Democratic Republic. A few months later, the civil war in China ended in a victory for the communists and the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), allied to the Soviet Union. That the FRG and the PRC belonged to rival political camps in a nascent Cold War scenario added a new kind of obstacle to the revival of pre-war economic cooperation: ideology. To set up normal bilateral relations or even attain mutual recognition was impossible, largely because each country was whole-heartedly bent on integrating into its respective geopolitical bloc. The FRG and the PRC were totally bound up in their regional priorities (reunification in Bonn’s case; national sovereignty for the Beijing regime, as well as the Taiwan issue). This, and their very geographical separation, ruled out any political interest or concern for one another. But whereas politically the most logical conclusion was to accept that official relations were out of the question, it was also true that no direct bones of contention existed; for example, towards the Taiwan nationalist government Bonn abstained from according official recognition, despite pressure from the United States. The political climate worsened markedly in 1950 when China’s armed intervention in the Korean War drove the United States to place an even more stringent embargo on her than on the USSR, and to urge the allies to follow suit (Cain 1995, 42). The German government was among the first to come into line: it could hardly do otherwise, since the status of US-controlled occupation continued, and would only officially be lifted in the mid-1950s. Not surprisingly in such a political situation, the initiative for any

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new German overtures devolved on the chief players of the previous phase. Companies and businessmen who had gained experience with China began off their own bat to sound out the new Beijing leaders for signs of readiness to reopen the traditional avenues of exchange, except where prohibitions debarred certain categories of goods and technologies (Stahnke 1972, 139–40). The first Chinese reaction was more encouraging than might have been expected from their often-reiterated solidarity with the socialist bloc. The basic reason for favouring contacts with Germany was the same as in previous decades: what German manufacturers had to offer the Chinese in their bid for modernization was distinctly better quality than the Soviets could provide. There was another motive, which the West Germans detected quite clearly: the new Chinese leaders were keen to diversify their imports, so as to prevent exclusive dependence on Moscow from turning into total economic, political and cultural subordination (Bernardini 2017, 97). Given the understandable lack of official government support, the German economic groups with an interest in trading with the entire socialist galaxy got together and in 1952 organized themselves into an OstAusschuss der Deutschen Wirtschaft (Eastern Committee of German Economy, OADW from now on). The new body undertook to represent the interests of the German economy in advising the government in Bonn; and to promote “useful, effective and increasing relations” with the East, aimed at the conclusion of legally binding agreements with state-owned national economies even in the absence of diplomatic recognition (Jüngerkes 2012, 131; Spaulding 1996, 115). Soon the OADW received endorsement from the Ministry of the Economy as “the sole representative of the German economy in trade with the East.” China now belonged to that area, given her apparent progression towards full-scale sovietisation. A special Working Group for China was set up within the OADW, representing all the main firms that had done business there in previous decades (including Siemens, Bayer, BASF, Otto Wolf, AEG and the Deutsche Bank). The OADW’s goal was not just to build up the turnover with China, but to work for cultural renewal lest the country slavishly imitate a sluggish Soviet model; it also sought to spur a long-term liberal evolution by keeping China in constant contact with the “free world” (Bernardini 2017, 92). In pursuit of these goals the OADW leaders pressed for immediate engagement in direct contact, before the trade restrictions imposed by politics turned into outright “economic warfare”. The method chosen was to keep as low a profile as possible and avoid politicizing economic exchanges; to create discreet temporary zones for negotiation in which timing counted for more than venue, and all parties involved were motivated to keep dialogue technical and avoid the limelight of politics proper, involvement of which would clearly prove a handicap. The OADW made clever use of its own status as being private and “non-governmental” enough not to alarm

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the politicians in Washington and Bonn, but at the same time sufficiently “quasigovernmental” to reassure the Chinese that business was serious, and to suggest formal parity with the interlocutors from two state corporations, the China Import and Export Corporation and the Council for the Promotion of International Trade (Stahnke 1972, 140). When it came to negotiating a framework trade agreement between the parties, this occurred, understandably, at places like international trade fairs where technical outweighed political factors, and above all at unusual venues screened from the public gaze, such as the Chinese delegation to East Berlin (which German industrialists could visit without any apparent political impediment), or the Beijing Embassy at Geneva, on neutral territory. Negotiations soon brought concrete results, which clearly suited both sides. As early as 1953 a draft trade agreement was drawn up on the basis of barter transactions, which meant that a total amount of exchanges was fixed, that both sides should draw up a list of desired import and export goods, and that they would trade accordingly (Ching 2006, 205). Still more important to the German way of thinking was the drafting of an agreed procedure for exchange and payment of goods, as well as rules to standardize them, lack of which had greatly marred previous transactions. When technical agreement was reached, political interference once again set the clock back. The Chinese top brass seemed to be leveraging the positive result as a stepping-stone towards official recognition between the two countries, proposing for example that the two central banks be involved. For its part, the German Federal Republic had reached a delicate moment in the mid-1950s, poised to regain full sovereignty over its foreign policy; it could not afford the slightest symbolic gesture to mar its loyalty to NATO. When the Chinese invited the OADW to send its delegates to Beijing to sign the trade agreement, Bonn put its foot down, since that might well be construed as a step towards official recognition (Jüngerkes 2012, 142). Only by intense lobbying and a guarantee that it had no intention of holding any political brief did the OADW manage to overcome the Adenauer government’s opposition. In the end a German economic delegation was given permission to travel to China in September 1957 and sign the accord. At the delegates’ own insistence, the trip maintained a low profile. They declined all the Chinese attempts to increase political visibility – including an invitation to attend the 1st October anniversary of the People’s Republic – without detriment to negotiations. The commercial treaty was eventually signed on the September 27, 1957, out of the limelight of western media, thanks to the sui generis, non-governmental standing of the German signatories. All in all, the terms and the build-up of negotiations had created a zone of interaction which both the Germans and in the end the Chinese had every interest in protecting from political interference. Clear

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proof of this came one year later when the agreement expired and the Chinese authorities seemed unconcerned about renewing it. Worrying though the Germans found this, bilateral trade actually suffered no ill effects, but went on in the following years under the rules and procedures established by the original agreement. Evidently these had proved satisfactory to the Chinese counterparts although the official recognition between the FRG and the PRC took place only in October 1972, as a consequence of the changing international conditions

Conclusion Although the importance of the 1957 treaty should not be overstated, it does stand out in the history of relations between the German and Chinese areas for at least two reasons. The first is that it connected ipso facto to past relations that had produced important and lasting results at a time when the purely economic angle outweighed considerations of territory and empire, and more generally it bypassed political interference: at the time the German industrialists begged their government not to jeopardise continuation of “ninety years of successful business with China” (Bernardini 2017, 100). The success of the negotiations bore them out, even though the world and the two countries had changed drastically since the pioneering days of the late 19th century. The second is that the agreement paved the way for a policy that not only made the FRG the PRC’s first economic partner outside the Soviet bloc in the following decade, but continued to give German economic and technological power top place in the new China’s cultural panorama, as it had enjoyed with the previous regime (Stahnke 1972, 148). Without presuming to carry this summary analysis down to our present day, it is fair to consider how much the present situation owes to that model of contact and negotiation, since Germany is still one of the CPR’s chief commercial partners, playing an important cultural role in the country by virtue of her quality exports and investments (high technology and innovation), even though her political leverage over the Asian giant has remained extremely limited.

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Nield, Robert. China’s Foreign Places. The Foreign Presence in China in the Treaty Port Era, 1840–1943. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015. Osterhammel, Jürgen. “Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis.” In Imperialism and After. Continuities and Discontinuities, edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel, 290–314. New York: Harper Collins Publisher, 1986 Raj, Kapil. “The historical anatomy of a contact zone: Calcutta in the eighteenth century.” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 48, no. 1 (2011): 55–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/001946461004800103 Spillman, Lyn. “Enriching Exchange. Cultural Dimensions of Markets.” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 58, no. 4 (2006): 1047–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15367150.1999.tb03407.x Stahnke, Arthur A. “The Political Context of Sino-West German Trade.” In China’s Trade with the West. A Political and Economic Analysis, edited by Arthur A. Stahnke, 135–173. New York: Praeger, 1972. Tanner, Harold M. China: A History. Vol. II: From the Great Qing Empire Through the People’s Republic of China. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2010.

Anja M. Rommel

9 Communicating with/via Modern Chinese Philosophy during the 20th Century This contribution targets the discussion of the contact zone, in which the European concepts of science and knowledge, rooted in their Greek-Roman tradition of thought, meet the philosophical work of Feng Qi 冯契(1915–1995) as one particular variation of so-called ‘Modern Chinese Philosophies,’ emerging from the discourse-historical settings of the Republican Era (1912–1949). By affiliating the three pivot points of a contact zone, space, duration and experience, this chapter describes the discourse-historical dynamics, their central moments and developments along the construction of the Chinese modernity and introduces the concept of wisdom by Feng in the sense of an onto-epistemological system, not just embodying, but also acting on his perceived life-world. To mark a beginning rather than an end, this contribution will conclude by discussing methodological implications concerning dilemmas that occur in the action of contact as well as the methodological handling of contact zones. Despite the support of Homi Bhabha’s and Pratt’s understandings of cultures – referred to in the introduction of this book – as “open, heterogeneous, dynamic spaces of negotiation and adaption where actors embody multilayered characteristics,” this chapter argues that the targeted European-Chinese contact zone of modern Chinese philosophies is marked by ruptures and frictions, rather than a harmonious interaction of the diagnosed dichotomies, and of facing the need to communicate with each other rather than freely doing so. In line with this book’s aims, this chapter investigates the historical and textual modes of modern Chinese philosophies as a Chinese-European contact zone, discussing Feng’s work as an attempt to grasp the complexity of one of the most transformative centuries in Chinese history and therefore as a philosophical/political/cultural translation of his life-worldly experiences. Feng’s writings mirror the identitary challenge of the communication between past and present, East (Chinese) and West; an urgency that becomes the cultural imperative of the discourse-historical dynamics in China since the late 19th century (Heubel 2016, 25). While the work of Feng is representative of the generation of Chinese intellectuals that already aimed for the synthesis of the diagnosed binaries, it must be noted that it was primarily the initial perception of differences and secondarily the aim for common ground which pushed the academic discussions forward. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663426-010

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The Emergence of Modern Chinese Philosophy After the experiences of the Opium War (1839–1842) and the Taiping-Rebellion (1850–1864), the Chinese response to the Western intrusion at the end of the 19th century was gathered under the Self-Strengthening Movement (c. 1860–1894), which centred on the acquisition of Western arms and technologies to counter the foreign encroachment. Discourse-historically, the European concept of science regarding. the scientific worldview, pre-assuming the existence of an objective truth, entered the game of Chinese thought during the second half of the century and changed it, and may even have opened up the game for Chinese modern thought, interrelated with the process of modernization, feeding off the contact between East and West. A multitude of contrasting ideas emerged as the raw material for modern Chinese philosophy, whose first protagonists like Zhang Binglin 章炳麟 (1868–1936), Wang Guowei 王国维 (1877–1927), Liang Qichao 梁 启超 (1873–1929) or Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培(1868–1940) were marked by the experience of the transition from literati to intellectual (Fung 2010, 4–18). Even though the late Qing thinkers, confronted with the necessity to question and search for an understanding of Chinese identity, aimed to remain faithful to the Empire, they were aware of the need for governmental change, linked to the necessity “to borrow from the Occident its scientific spirit, its spirit of organization, whatever made for strength and material greatness” (O. Brière 1965, 17). The intensive application of the concept of science, serving as a symbol for the call for liberation, quickly became a banner for cultural and social reform and the legitimizing foundation for modern states, which supported the argument of the conditionality of the East-West communication with the Chinese modernization process. After the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) the encounter with Western knowledge initiated the implementation of major institutional changes, that reached its peak in the abolition of civil service examinations in 1905 and saw, by the turn of the 20th century, the beginning of the professionalization of knowledge. Professional journals and disciplinary-based universities and the institutional frames for the discipline of “Chinese Philosophy” (Zhongguo zhexue 中国哲学)1 were being established, firstly, at the Peking University through the genesis of its zhexue xi 哲学系 (philosophical department). After the demise of the monarchical system and after the founding of the Republic in 1912, academic reforms (1912, 1915 and

1 Even though the etymological background of this final translation as a quasi-equivalent for the western term of “philosophy” is not discussed here, it can be indicated that the term zhexue also contains “historically-embedded normative connotations which are independent of meanings associated with modern Western notions of ‘philosophy.’” (Makeham 2012, 4).

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1923), based on the academic systems of Japan, Europe, and the United States, were being put into effect (Wang 2009, 142–143). Bypassing the etymological discussion about the term “Chinese Philosophy”, as well as its concrete implementation as an academic discipline, the following are some remarks about the formal processes of its creation gathered by John Makeham in his enriching work, Learning to Emulate the Wise: The Genesis of Chinese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline in Twentieth Century China (2012): (1) the understanding and practice of “philosophy” in China constituted a new reading of it, opening new philosophical possibilities; (2) within the process of bibliographic categorization, Western categories may not be abandoned but displaced Chinese categories, compromising their influence; (3) due to its professionalization, streams of Chinese philosophy out of the mainstream academy could be developed; (4) Chinese, Western and Indian philosophy were all considered to be legitimate philosophies, at least on paper, referring to the subjects offered at the Philosophical Department of Peking University between 1914 and 1923 (Makeham 2012, 15). Reflecting on the transition from imperial to industrial China, it can be noted that the European-Chinese contact zone of modern Chinese philosophy brings forth an academic landscape which is, on the one side, characterized by the communication or rather a clash of discourse-historical realms enabling an era of pluralistic worldviews. On the other side, Chinese modernization came with a bipolarization of the newly born intellectuals into the camp of Westernizers and the camp of conservatives. The former aimed at the decline of the old culture to overcome a diagnosed backwardness, identifying the different stage of development as the main difference between Eastern and Western cultures and imagining Chinese progress as following the footsteps of European Enlightenment modernity. For finding its own place within the global civilization, the latter, supporters of sinicization, did not appear anti-Western, but more pro-Chinese by emphasizing the singularity of Chinese values, the advance of Chinese politics and culture while acknowledging their lag in the field of technology and economics (Yu 2010, 153; He 2002, 8–15). The historical experiences of the first Chinese intellectuals appropriated their handling of Western intrusion, in which the humiliating encounter with Western imperialism seemingly aggravated Chinese cosmopolitan worldviews. Joseph Levenson even argues that “Chinese intellectuals turned to tradition not so much out of confidence in its intellectual validity as from an emotional need to get even with the West to assuage the wounds to their cultural pride that they suffered in their encounters with the West” (1958, xiii–xix). The relationship between China and the West was marked by a versus in the sense of a cultural and intellectual dualism, nourished by the search for self-identification that correlated with the understanding of national culture. With regard to the thinkers

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transgressing the Late Qing period, it must be noted that the majority inherited the moral aspirations of Confucian tradition, for whose realization the new technologies and institutions within “Western knowledge” were supposed to be adopted (Metzger 1977, 191–235). In connection to this seemingly sublime position, the emergence of the academic discipline of modern Chinese philosophy can instead be seen as a cultural-political product of continuous negotiations and translation efforts, rather than “a simple case of the blanket inscription of Western philosophy upon a Chinese tabula rasa”. Nor was the process by which Western models of knowledge categorization were introduced into China a passive one in which the ‘foreign’ was imposed on by the ‘native’ (Makeham 2012, 2–3). Marked by the singular expertise of traditional Chinese learning and Western philosophies like Kant, Hegel, Marx, Bergson, Russell and Dewey, the transitioning intellectuals of the humanities undoubtedly enabled an academic dialogue between Chinese and Western teachings in the span of 30 years between the fall of the Qing dynasty and the beginning of industrial modernization. Nevertheless, the alternative perspective, that centers on an ambiguity in the negotiations of Chinese-Western academia, namely that the Chinese philosophical protagonists were embedded in Western academia and could therefore be considered a new Western school of philosophy with Chinese origins, is valuable (Li 1997, 150). Following the argument that the discourse-historical application of polarizations, articulated in the logic of China and the West as cultural/political/intellectual dualisms that intensifies separating strategies, energizing hierarchical structures – despite their intent of broader mutual understandings – the reading of the institutionalization at the beginning of the 20th century as a classification of knowledge, changes drastically into a classified confirmation of an unequal cultural relationship between China and the West (Wang 2009, 153–54). Emerging out of the transition from Empire to Republic, the New Culture Movement (1915–1921) as another major discourse-historical moment constituted the breeding ground for thinkers like Chen Duxiu 陈独秀(1879–1942), Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) or Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893–1988). These protagonists as the second generation of new intellectuals generated works which continued to question the cultural requirements for China’s modernization, nourished by the collective cultural, societal, political and economic concern of their authors. In her contribution The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (1986), Vera Schwarcz discusses the experience of disillusionment with political revolutions as the driving force for the Chinese Enlightenment, particularly articulated in the May Fourth movement and its critique of Chinese attachment to tradition, and after the disappointment with the Republican Revolution in 1911. She writes:

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“Their efforts to create a new culture in the period from 1915–1921 grew directly out of their realization that institutional reform is quite impotent to challenge longentrenched world views. Horrified to discover that the emperor worship mentality – marked by a longing to submit to familiar ceremonial politics – was alive and well long after there was no longer a son of Heaven on the throne in Beijing, May Fourth intellectuals began to probe more deeply into the reasons for China’s prolonged adherence to the ethic of self-submission” (Schwarcz 1986, 297). The conditionality of Chinese modernization and the Chinese discoursehistorical developments remains apparent and constitutes a continuation of the Chinese non-separation of scholarship and the realms of politics. The prioritization of the corporate good of the Chinese people correlating with the consciousness of a necessary change without negating the country gives Chinese writings a quasi-political moment, where the central role of moral cultivation within a process of socio-political action is interrelated with the concern for the outer, socio-political world (Wang 2001, 101–103; Hao 1987, 17). The long relationship between Western and Chinese cultures correlated with the emerging reflections on modernity and science and concepts of knowledge as conflicting cultural characteristics remain the fundamental marks of difference. To display this practice of differentiation, the following quote from Liang Shuming’s The Cultures of the East and West and Their Philosophies (1921) serves as a philosophical exemplification: “When Westerners talk about knowledge and principles, they see it necessary to proceed on firm ground, one step at a time. In developing theories, they vigilantly avoid making even a tiny hair of a mistake. When Chinese talk about knowledge and principles, they make the subject more and more mystical until it becomes too mysterious to understand, and unless they can talk like this, they are seen as lacking in ability. If we compare this with the West, we can see not only a lack of theory, but also a strongly developed “spirit of non-theory.” This “spirit of non-theory” is the spirit of metaphysics” (Liang 2001, 114–115). This described relation, or nonrelation reaches a new level of academic attention and translation, after a polarizing lecture by Zhang Junmai aka. Carson Chang (1886–1969) at the Tsinghua University in Peking in 1923,2 which triggered the discourse-historical moment

2 Zhang Junmai 张君劢, February 14, 1923: “Science cannot solve the problems of life. The great philosophers of history are those who have tried to find a solution to the problems of life. Among us there has been a series of philosophers, from Confucius and Mencius to the Sung and Ming neo-Confucian literati, who have produced the great spiritual civilization of China.” Ting Wenjiang 丁文江, April 12, 1923: “The object of science is to eliminate personal subjective prejudices and to search for the truth which is general and universal. [. . .] Science is all-sufficient, not so much in its subject matter as in the manner of procedure.” (O. Brière 1965, 29–31)

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known as “the debate between metaphysics and science” as the summit of the collision of epistemological systems, deriving from the theory of cultural difference.

Introducing the Concept of Wisdom by Feng Qi (1915–1995) Aside from Peking University’s role in establishing the earliest Philosophy Department, Tsinghua University was also known for its philosophical efforts, assembled under the so-called Tsinghua school of thought. According to one of its protagonists, Feng Youlan 冯友兰 (1895–1990), the intellectual line of the University of Peking was marked by its focus on historical studies and scholarship with an idealistic tendency, expressed by Kantian and Hegelian features, while the Tsinghua school tried to discuss philosophical problems by using logical analysis with a trend of realism (Yu 2016, 120). This is the matrix out of which the work of Feng emerged. As a follow-up to the quarrel between metaphysicians and scientists in 1923, Feng propagates the synthesis of both knowledge systems and highlights their relation and necessary communication with each other as one of the main challenges, but also particularities of modern Chinese philosophies. With his final thesis – published in the Philosophical Review under the title “wisdom” in 1947 – Feng centered the concept of wisdom as a metaphysical category, holding the potential to expand the realms of scientific knowledge. His philosophical attempt at an “expanded epistemology” (guangyi renshi lun 广义认识论) aimed to expand the possibilities of perceiving ourselves and the world, driven by the previously described discourse-historical dynamics in the process of Chinese modernization. Feng had already clarified his affiliation to this discourse-historical approach at the very beginning of his 11-volume Collected Works (2015) by describing “A Problem Pressing for Solution in Our Times.” To find answers to his leading question “Where is China heading to?”, Feng highlighted the conflict between the past and present, Chinese and Western, which developed with the focus on reforming before 1949 and the focus on constructing after, embedded in the discussion about the “Chinese modernization” (Feng 2016/1, 3–4). This central conflict and. the challenge of dealing with it, becomes a characteristic of modern Chinese philosophy, whose negation of a discussion with Western knowledge implies the negation of reform. Sticking to Edmund Fung’s classification, Feng being born between 1895 and 1920 makes him a representative of the third generation of Chinese intellectuals, marked by a high degree of political involvement entangled with their war experience

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(Fung 2010, 9), and leading to an alternate understanding of philosophy. Instead of an understanding based on an isolated exploration of the relations between humans and the world, it became an ally to political purposes and “the practical tasks of the moment” (Knight 1996, 296). Thus, Feng’s concept of wisdom cannot be handled as just an extension of knowledge in the sense of a container of information, but becomes more graspable as a practical tutorial for epistemological transformations, a thinking- and working method: a moral practice in the sense of a process of virtuous action with the intention of establishing a living environmental configuration. According to Feng, philosophy constitutes a summary of the history of philosophy, while the history of philosophy constitutes the development of philosophy, which needs to be orientated towards its ideal to change worlds. This implies a continuous self-critique and systematic reflection as an obligation and challenge for the development of Chinese philosophy, which is tied to the assumption of an objective understanding of its history (Feng 2016/1, 17). Since philosophy cannot be separated from history, the so-called traditional concepts need to be critically pushed forward and re-invented, not just by actualizing them to the current, but also orientating them towards the future setting of China. The perception of the world is interrelated with the perception of the self, whose cultivation towards wisdom includes the handling of a multitude of perspectives, which continuously communicate with each other, creating joints to break with them to create them. His concept of wisdom assembles various discourse-historical perspectives to synthesingly while unifyingly navigate them along his saying: “no important school should be bypassed and yet everyone should be transcended” (Feng 2016/9, 561). As navigators through his philosophy, Feng formulated the following four main questions, in which he intended to create a dialogue between Chinese discourse-history and European philosophies: (1) Can objective reality be captured by sensation/sensual perception? (2) How does theoretical thinking grasp general/universal knowledge? (3) Is logical thinking capable of grasping concrete truth? (4) How is the ideal personality or the free personality to be cultivated? (Feng 2016/1, 1). The discussion of these leading questions unfolds in his “Three Discourses on Wisdom” (Zhihui shuo san pian 智慧三篇), containing the volumes “Knowing the World and Knowing the Self” (Renshi shijie he renshi ziji 认识世界 和认识自己), “The Dialectics of Logical Thinking” (Luoji siwei de bianzhengfa 逻 辑思维的辨证法) and “Human Freedom and Truth, Good and Beauty” (Ren de ziyou he zhen shan mei 人的自由和真，善，美) as the first three of the Feng Qi wenji, confusingly carrying the English label Collected Works, without containing any further English text fragments. Along these philosophical guidelines, it already shows that the conceptual fixations of “knowledge” and “wisdom” in the

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sense of state of beings, do not constitute Feng’s main interest, and Feng does not provide clear definitions of either. But since certain indications can be uncovered, how did Feng technically specify his focused concepts? Following the opposition of phenomenon and noumenon, introduced by Kant and later by Hegel, Feng attributes his wisdom to the realm of “the graspable through language” (ming yan zhi yu 名言之域) in the sense of the Relative, in which subject and object appear dichotomized and his knowledge to the realm of “the non-graspable through language” (chao yan zhi yu 超言之域) in the sense of the Absolute (Yang 2002, 441–442). Zhishi (知识), that Feng discusses under the term of yijian (意见), in the sense of an opinion in his early works, which constitutes the opposite of non-knowledge and assembles general knowledge, scientific knowledge and subjective thinking. “Knowing” means the application of expressions and concepts via analysis and abstraction with the aim of differentiating the world. Zhihui (智慧) passes zhishi by constituting a philosophical principle, an order that leans towards the relation of heaven to human nature via synthesis and unification with the aim of the perception of DAO (道) and the cultivation of a moral self (Feng 2016/1, 333–334). This described cultivation aims for the emergence of the free personality along with the experience of the “leap from knowledge to wisdom”, which Feng depicts as a passage through four worlds (worlds of the actual, facts, possible, values), constituting his multilayered world order (Yang 2002, 451; Rošker 2008, 275). The brief reference to Feng by Tongqi Lin in the framework of his elaboration of “Recent trends in China since Mao” within the “Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy” (2018) summarizes his efforts as follows: He tries to graft part of the epistemology of Kant and of Russell’s logical positivism in a dialectical materialism and historical materialism of Marx and Engels and interpret them with the Chinese traditional thinking on “human nature” (xing 性) and “heaven’s way” (tiandao 天道). (Lin 2012, 589)

In alignment with the previous reflections on the European-Chinese contact zone of modern Chinese philosophies, Feng’s writings continue with the application of binary oppositions, while propagating a pluralistic discourse for the sake of Chinese modernity, subsumed under his onto-epistemological process of the transformation from knowledge to wisdom. He feeds the primacy of dichotomies by reproducing the seemingly comfortable practice of establishing binary constellations by applying the comparative method, exemplified in his contrasts of dialectical logic versus formal logic or monism of Qi versus atomism (Feng 2016/4, 6). But while making use of epistemological differentiation, Feng’s pursued transformations (Non-knowledge into knowledge, knowledge into wisdom) are simultaneously targeted on the formation of unities. He targets the unity of dialectics, epistemology and logic, the unity of the real, the good and the beautiful as well

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as the unity of knowledge, emotion and meaning, assembled in his “free personality” (Fang 2014, 141). With regard to the aspects of space and duration, as two pivot points of the analysis of contact zones, it is important to not only locate Feng’s writings within its socio-political settings, but also follow their discourse-historically development through time. While the early Feng, situated in the Republican Era (1912–1949) describes wisdom as a primarily metaphysical dimension, picking up the poles of the debate from 1923 with the intention of enlarging the understanding of epistemology as a theory of knowledge, targeting the unification of the men and the heaven’s DAO, the later Feng, situated in the context of the post-Mao era (1976–1989) conceptually emphasises the practice-based components of his wisdom, aligned with questioning of the sinicization of Marxism (Gu 2015, 317–326; Wang 2001, 204). During the 1980s, the defeat of the Culture Revolution starts to be digested and the official Marxist ideology loses its influence after the initiation of economic and social reforms after 1978. Confronted with the resulting vacuums, Chinese thinkers addressed the challenge of generating alternative concepts for Chinese commonwealth, fostering the formulation of reflexive “selfawareness” within the process of crisis (Lin and Galikowski 1999, 189). Feng holds on to his conviction till the end of his life, even though his writings nevertheless break with orthodox teachings – so-called Marxist and others – by adding a focus on self-development associated with the personal will and therefore pushing towards the individual and its autonomy (Rošker 2008, 291). The discussion of materialistic and idealistic issues in the context of ontology and epistemology is synchronized with the access to Marxist writings, even though it must be noted, that the Chinese academics themselves studied the works abroad, outside of their mother tongues and imported them at the end of the Qing-dynasty. While the work of Marx/Engels was mostly perceived in the shadow of anarchist streams at the beginning, the status of Marxist-Leninist teachings changed in the 1920s and 1930s due to the broad reception of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, and it being turned into a method and future vision (Fogel 1987, 2; 5). With regard to his rejected separation of theoretical and practical terms, Feng’s writings constitute an instruction manual for (self-)cultivation towards wisdom, which is intertwined with his demand for popularization of the so-called “free personality” (ziyou de renge 自由的人格). His concept of the free personality as a translation of his idea of “the wise/the sage” is marked by the feature of all/All-inclusion, that does not just uncover his affiliation to Marxist logics. Furthermore, this demand correlates for instance with the position of Wang Yangming 王阳明 (1472–1529), that everybody has the capacity to become wise. This means that Feng’s concept of the free personality simultaneously reacts to the desideratum within Confucian teachings by breaking with the model of the noble as a sacred personality and

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serving the minority and taking up principles like free will towards freedom, which have also often been undermined within (classical) Chinese ethics due to their emphasis on education and (navigated) cultivation (Fang 2014, 145). It becomes more and more apparent that Feng’s concept of wisdom is an emergent product of the conflict between positivistic/scientific and humanistic/ metaphysical approaches, as Chinese and non-Chinese researchers tend to read it. But it can also not be reduced to a simple differentiation of practice between the Chinese and Western in the sense of the Self and the Other or the present and past. His attempt to grasp life-wordily changes and their complexity in the context of the most transformative centuries in Chinese history compromises the relation to a defined Other, which consequently also needs to be identified as hypertransformative. In connection to the discussion of Feng’s work as a Chinese-European contact zone itself, the indicated aspect of processuality in the sense of a rhythm emerges besides the necessity to elaborate the settings of the cultural contact. Feng highlights the processual aspects of his concept of wisdom by focussing on his philosophical demand of “the leap from knowledge to wisdom” (zhuan shi cheng zhi 转识成智) as a moral practice following the logic of the “transformation from theory to method and theory to moral” (hua lilun wei fangfa, hua lilun wei dexing 化理论为方法，化理论为德性). This in turn recognizes the implied impossibility to determinate the epistemological dimensions as closed but re-actualizing entities. After describing the discourse-historical constellations as the background of the Chinese modernization and introducing Feng’s expanded epistemology as an example of Chinese writings of the 20th century, the analysis aims to raise questions about the methodological approach(es), which initially holds the possibility of contact. Researchers in the field of Chinese discourse-history like Fung suggest a methodological crossing of a broader intellectualhistorical with an individual-centred analysis, that has partly been realized in this essay, in which “ideas are explored not in the realm of conceptualization, but in the domain of human consciousness as related to cultural and political backgrounds” (Fung 2010, 18). This approach, which reproduces the binary of text and context, does not seem sufficient since modern Chinese philosophies and the concept of wisdom by Feng are more than just the addition of two entities, but are more an emerging third product as a multiplication of the diagnosed cultural, intellectual, political dualisms, moving within his translation efforts. As with the processuality within his work, it is the enduring concern of contacting that needs to be accessed methodologically. The question of the “how” regarding the act of “contacting” needs to be considered as a central aspect within the studies of contact zones.

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Reflecting on the methodological implications for contacting Feng’s writings, an arrangement of his positions in the sense of argumentative “states of being” will not be able to grasp the leap from knowledge to wisdom as a discourse-historical movement, seemingly transcending the classical understandings of time and space. Alternatively, his writings are penetrated by moments in the sense of (temporary) beings, and their duration in the sense of becomings, that do not highlight the constellation of the actors involved within the contact zone, but their enduring interplay. Convinced that the development of knowledge resembles an ascending helix structure, Feng himself applied historical and logical methods to grasp the movement of conflicting views within the history of philosophy and the scientific comparative method with the aim of uncovering the particularities of Chinese philosophy (Guo 2018, 105). With regard to the synthesis of methods, the practice of dual distinctions does not imply an absolute separation, but are two sides of the same coin. Even though Feng focusses on the interplay of identified binary oppositions with the intention of life-worthy creation, this example of the study of Chinese writings of the 20th century, which embodies the challenging contact with “the West”, experiencing, documenting/translating and thereby composing the political, cultural and social dynamics of Chinas past, present and future, displays how the application of dichotomies like East|West, Them|Us can mark the beginning, but not the end of contact. To respond to the initial question of ‘Whither China?’ as the central issue of the time, Feng converged Chinese and Western cultures into an act of cultural translation through the perspective of theoretical construction, articulating in his “leap from knowledge to wisdom” a moral practice. He assembled various perspectives to respond to the challenge of drafting Chinese modernities, bound to the discourse-historical dynamics of the 20th century with the goal of the synthesis of scientism and humanism.

Conclusion Feng’s work may hold the methodological key for transcultural encounters, creating a contact zone, which enriches the solely exhibiting of difference, since his cultural understanding, embedded in the context of Chinese perpetual systems, is marked by motion, multiperspectivity, permeability, subverting the primacy of matter, being and binary difference. The construction of identity and difference is not one of the Inner and Outer, but dissolves itself in reference to the Inner, meaning the Inner of culture, which constitutes itself, without causing a new difference (Kramer 2008/2011, 157–73; 2015, 156). In the case of Chinese modernization,

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correlating with the East-West-communication, it shows that not only the intrusion of foreign cultures onto Chinese ground raised its issues, but the logic of the necessity of self-transformation connected “cultural interactions using a common language of being modern” (Fung 2010, 13). With modernity as a common frame of reference, modern Chinese writings embody the capacity of transcultural and transpositional communication; transcultural in the sense that Eastern and Western sources are circulating with and within each other under the premise of reciprocal learning and transformational dynamics; transpositional in the sense that a paradox wandering through conflicting ideological positions is to be sought (Heubel 2016, 109). These characteristics demand a methodology enabling a reading as ongoing interactions, which need to be discussed with a focus on their processuality, while necessarily implying a reflection on the culturally translating role of the researchers, who aim to access modern Chinese philosophies as contact zones. But first and foremost, the asymmetric dialogue between China and Europe within the construction of modernity needs to be overcome by pushing the study of Chinese writings of the 20th century forward, because “there might be better models for human beings living in modern times than today’s liberal democratic form of politics. But we will only be able to discover them if we adopt a perspective beyond the experience of Western modernity and its paradigms” (Bai 2012, 7).

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Herausforderung der Geisteswissenschaften, edited by Heeg, Günther, Denzel, Markus A., 157–173. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008, 2011. Knight, Nick. Li Da and Marxist Philosophy in China. Boulder, Colo [e.a.]: Westview Press, 1996. Hao Chang. Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning (1890–1911). Berkeley, Calif. [e.a.]: University of California Press, 1987. He Ping. China’s Search for Modernity: Cultural Discourse in the Late 20th Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Heubel, Fabian. Chinesische Gegenwartsphilosophie zur Einführung (Introduction to Chinese Contemporary Philosophy), Hamburg: Junius-Verlag, 2016. Levenson, Joseph R. Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: The Problem of Intellectual Continuity. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958. Li You-Zheng. Epistemological Problems of the Comparative Humanities: A semiotic/Chinese Perspective. Frankfurt am Main [e.a.]: Lang, 1997. Liang Shuming, Andrew Covlin, and Jinmei Yuan. “The Cultures of the East and West and Their Philosophies.” In Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 1, no. 1 (2001): 107–27. Lin Min, and Maria Galikowski. The Search for Modernity: Chinese Intellectuals and Cultural Discourse in the Post-Mao Era. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Lin Tongqi. “Philosophy: Recent Trends in China since Mao” In Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, edited by Cua, Antonio S., 588–598. New York [e.a.]: Routledge, 2012. Makeham, John. Learning to Emulate the Wise: The Genesis of Chinese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China. The Formation and Development of Academic Disciplines in Twentieth-Century China Series. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2012. Metzger, Thomas A. Escape from Predicament. Studies of the East Asian Institute. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. O. Brière, S.J. Fifty Years of Chinese Philosophy, 1898–1948. New York: Praeger, 1965. Rošker, Jana S. Searching for the Way: Theory of Knowledge in Pre-Modern and Modern China. Ch. 23 „The epistemology of Chinese „Marxism“: Feng Qi’s transformation of knowledge into wisdom“, 275–296. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2008. Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986. Wang Hui. The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity. London: Verso Books, 2009. Wang, Edward Q. Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany, NY: New York Press, 2001. Yang Guorong. „Transforming Knowledge Into Wisdom: A Contemporary Chinese Philosopher’s Investigation.” Philosophy East and West 52, no. 4 (2002): 441–458. Yu Keping. “‘Westernization’ vs. ‘Sinicization’: An Ineffaceable Paradox within China’s Modernization Process” In Culture and Social Transformations in Reform Era China, edited by Cao Tianyu, Zhong Xueping, and Liao Kebin, 153–195. Leiden, Bosten: Brill, 2010. Yu Zhenhua. “Feng, Qi, Collected Works of Feng Qi, 2nd, Expanded Ed.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 16, no. 1 (2017): 119–24.

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10 Contact Zones and/as Combat Zones: Representing the Nanjing Massacre In her often-quoted introduction of the concept, Mary Louise Pratt defines contact zones as the “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (1991, 34). This particular choice of words is involuntarily reminiscent of problematic notions of cultural communities such as Kulturkreis or Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. While Pratt herself is wary of the idea of cultures and communities forming discrete entities, the metaphor of the “contact zone” to a certain degree implies the (previously) separated, homogenous entities the notion intends to challenge. As Joseph Harris pointed out, this conceptualization of contact zones “evoke[s] images of war and oppression” (1995, 33), and Pratt herself has first and foremost imagined the concept regarding “contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (1991, 34). Although the concept is also intended to encompass what Pratt calls “the joys of the contact zone” (“exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation, mutual understanding, and new wisdom”) (1991, 39), it is largely built on the assumption of conflicting communities, which, despite claims to the opposite, still seem to be drawn along the lines of national, ethnic, or religious borders. This chapter attempts to encourage discussion about whether the very idea of “contact zones” operates with an underlying notion of conflict or combat zones, what consequences this would imply for its application, and what alternative conceptualizations there might be. Rather than taking as a starting point presupposed cultures forming a contact zone, we could conceive of contact zones as the discursive spaces emerging in processes of drawing lines, of representing self and other, and of negotiating and reassembling these lines. Focusing on Lu Chuan’s 陆川 controversial 2009 war drama Nanjing! Nanjing! 南京！南京！(known internationally as City of Life and Death), this essay examines the multiple contact/combat zones surrounding its representation of the Nanjing Massacre – intellectual and popular reception, historicity and artistic imagination, mainstream and art house cinema, perpetrators and victims, national consciousness and transnational narration – as well as the aesthetic and narrative strategies employed by the film to move beyond such binaries. The Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), also referred to as the War of Resistance or Anti-Japanese War (kangri zhanzheng 抗日战争), marks a crucial stage in the institutionalized narrative of China’s liberation from colonial rule and the founding https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663426-011

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myth of the People’s Republic of China. Constantly reproduced in history (text) books, literary and filmic adaptations, etc., the war as historical event is ultimately inseparable from its representation (see Kramer 2014). The hegemonic narrative patterns emerging in the process of this recurring invocation of a national myth lead to the establishment of basic normative structures, (re)assembling the social by creating references for and patterns of shared identity through a dynamic of integration and demarcation. The emerging order, however, exists only as a temporary phenomenon linked to broader socioeconomic, cultural, and media arrangements, political interests, and currently valid notions of (historical) truth(s). Each time the conceived borders of integration and demarcation are transgressed, the established order is contested and reassembled (and vice versa). In 2009, lines in the discursive battlefields of history were tested when director Lu Chuan’s Nanjing! Nanjing! (referred to as Nanjing in the following), set against the backdrop of the War of Resistance, managed to stir up controversy over the adoption of a Japanese character’s point of view on the sensitive issue of the Nanjing Massacre (Nanjing datusha 南京大屠杀).1 Rather than Pratt’s (1991) classical example of a text produced in a perceived contact zone, we will examine the contact zones opened up in and by (i.e. in the reception and meaning-making of) a text. The focus is thus not just on Nanjing as the potential product of an assumedly given contact zone, but on the contact zones that emerge as a product of Nanjing, and at the same time always relate back to previous experiences, knowledge, discourses, etc. Instead of discarding the valuable concept, or merely inverting it, this is an attempt at further translating it into a dynamic process. It will allow the framing of contact zones themselves as dynamic discursive effects.

Nanjing! Nanjing! Two main plot lines run through Lu Chuan’s film on the Nanjing Massacre, the first depicting the will and determination of the people to put up resistance against the Japanese soldiers, the other focusing on the crisis of conscience suffered by a young Japanese soldier named Kadokawa. Nanjing, the nation’s capital at the time, has been abandoned by the Chinese government and the military in a last-minute retreat, leaving only civilians and a handful of soldiers behind. A group of soldiers that has remained in the city, among them Lu Jianxiong

1 Also referred to as “Rape of Nanjing.” The best-known, if contested, English-language study on the Nanjing Massacre is Chang, 1998.

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(played by Liu Ye 刘烨), his comrade Shunzi, and a young boy called Xiao Douzi, puts up resistance against the invading force, but ultimately has to capitulate after Japanese reinforcements arrive. The capital falls into the hands of the Japanese who systematically carry out executions of the POWs and massacre the civilian population. Together with their compatriots, Lu and Xiao Douzi are marched off to the shore to be executed. Shunzi and Xiao Douzi turn out to be the only survivors of their group. A community of foreigners witnessing the atrocities carried out by the Japanese, with German National Socialist Party member and head of the local Siemens factory John Rabe at the forefront, succeeds in creating a safety zone for Chinese civilians. At one point, the Japanese authorities issue a demand for one hundred Chinese women to be handed over to them for a period of three weeks to ‘entertain’ their troops. In return, they promise to provide the safety zone with the supplies necessary to make it through the approaching winter. As Rabe passes on the demands with tears in his eyes, Jiang Xiangjun, a former prostitute, is the first to volunteer, followed by many other women raising their arms, willing to make the sacrifice that will guarantee the integrity of the safety zone. Rabe’s secretary, Mr Tang, fearing for the safety of his family and himself once Rabe is forced to leave Nanjing, makes a deal with the Japanese and informs them that there are still Chinese soldiers hiding in the safety zone. This, however, does not save the lives of his daughter and sister, who die at the hands of enemy soldiers later on. In the end, Mr Tang gives up his chance to leave Nanjing with his wife and Rabe, and decides to stay behind. Tang is immediately led away to an execution ground, but personally prevails over his executioners by telling them that his wife is pregnant again just before he is shot dead. Miss Jiang, a Chinese member of the safety zone, also has the opportunity to display her courage towards the end of the film. About to deport a group of men, the Japanese give in to the committee’s pleading to spare the lives of those who have a family member present. Although each person is allowed to claim only one family member, Miss Jiang is determined to save as many as possible of those who have no one to claim them. Among those is Shunzi, survivor of the previous mass execution. As she comes forward again, Miss Jiang is discovered by a Japanese commander, who announces with some glee that she will spend the rest of her days entertaining the Japanese troops. When she is being marched away, she passes by Kadokawa, looks him in the eyes and says: “shoot me.” He does as she wishes. Throughout the film, the young, shy, and inexperienced Kadokawa is witness to the suffering and pain his comrades inflict on the local population and is deeply affected by it. After having his first sexual experience with a Japanese

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‘comfort woman’ named Yuriko, he immediately falls in love with her and is convinced that she is going to be his wife. When he goes to visit her again later, Kadokawa learns that Yuriko has moved on with the troops to the front, where she has died. The film ends with Kadokawa freeing two Chinese prisoners, Shunzi and Xiao Douzi, after which he commits suicide. For scholars Chen Xihe and Liu Fan, Nanjing is proof of the undisputable fact that the Chinese blockbuster film is merging with mainstream culture (zhuliu wenhua 主流文化) and mainstream ideology (zhuliu yishixingtai 主流意识形 态): “Nanjing! Nanjing! [. . .] belongs to the ‘major revolutionary historical subject matter’ repeatedly confirmed by China’s ideological apparatus; its connection to mainstream ideology and mainstream culture does not have to be pointed out” (Chen and Liu 2009, 49). In addition to its subject matter, a few more facts hint at Nanjing’s compliance with the mainstream. Nanjing is a Hong Kong-Mainland co-production, the mainland co-producer and distributor being the state-run China Film Group Corporation (Zhongguo dianying jituan gongsi 中国电影集团公司), responsible for productions such as The Founding of a Republic (Jianguo daye 建国大业, 2009) and Confucius (Kongzi 孔子, 2010). Furthermore, the film was given the honor of being chosen as one of ten films to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China in 2009. The history of Nanjing’s production and reception, however, is more complex than that and marked by mixed messages. First of all, the film had considerable trouble passing the Chinese censors. It took six months to approve the original script and another six months to approve the final cut. When released after slight alterations,2 fierce protests almost led to the film’s being withdrawn from cinemas. This was only averted by the intervention of chief of propaganda Li Changchun 李长春 speaking out in favour of the film. Nanjing received further backing from the mainstream media, who labelled the film “patriotic” (aiguo 爱国), and also as a result of compulsory screenings in primary schools all over the country (Wong 2009, n.p.; Yan 2009, 31). The ambivalence underlying Nanjing’s production and reception is also revealed by the fact that it was initially nominated in several categories of the 2009 Huabiao Award (huabiao jiang 华表奖), the official Chinese film prize administered by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (guojia guangbo dianying dianshi zongju 国家广播电影电视总局), only to be revoked from all nomination lists shortly before the ceremony (The Hollywood Reporter 2009, n.p.). 2 According to the director, the alterations were not substantive: “a scene of Japanese soldiers beheading Chinese, one of a woman strapped to a chair to be raped, a conversation between a Japanese commander and a Chinese prisoner that revealed compassion on the part of the commander” (Wong 2009, n.p.).

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The uproar provoked by Nanjing can be viewed in the context of two overlapping areas of discontent that share the common banner of “betrayal of the nation.” Firstly, Sino-Japanese relations, and the issue of Japanese war crimes in particular, are wound up in conflicting interests and needs. Due to the changing political agenda, China and Japan were once again seeking a close and friendly relationship in the 1970s. This new-found friendship was influenced by the issue of history in two contradictory respects: while shared history served as a cohesive factor,3 the past also constituted a disruptive element that evoked discontent on both sides. The first major rupture in Sino-Japanese relations after the 1970s occurred in 1982, when – as the outcome of an ideological shift to the right and a new sense of Japanese power (Dirlik 1991, 55) – revisions to Japanese school textbooks that had been approved by the Ministry of Education led to a public outcry in China (as well as in Japan). The revisions concerned the Japanese actions in China after 1931, most importantly the Nanjing Massacre, which was blamed on the resistance put up by Chinese troops (Dirlik 1991, 32–36). The Nanjing Massacre has been described as “a highly sensitive event to Chinese people, causing anger when doubted and contempt when misconstrued” (Eykholt 2000, 11). The veil of silence that covered the Massacre for decades after it occurred, the Chinese government’s renunciation of reparations, and the reluctance to pursue Japanese war criminals were diametrically opposed to domestic and international voices that have demanded the adoption of a more aggressive stance towards Japan’s wartime guilt (Eykholt 2000, 12). In 1985, the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II, students in Beijing staged a demonstration against militarist groups in Japan, showing that the government’s soft policy approach did not necessarily comply with voices in society (Dirlik 1991, 42; Eykholt 2000, 36). This was but one in a string of incidents that has brought to light the contradictory interests involved in the subject. State actors, eager to foster economic development, adopted a balanced approach towards Japan, while trying to monopolize the issue of war crimes and restricting access to primary documents, which fuelled the tension produced by the contradiction between the government’s view and the view of those who felt denied the opportunity to come to terms with their past. Secondly, regarding the cultural (entertainment) sphere, there are repeated cases of audiences closely monitoring artists and unwilling to accept what is perceived as the work of “traitors to China” (hanjian 汉奸). Apart from market

3 The close historical relationship between China and Japan is continually emphasized by both sides. In discussions of the issue, in many cases, there is mention of slogans such as “separated by a strip of water” or “2000 years of friendship” (Dirlik 1991, 46).

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demands and interferences in form of state censorship, China’s diverse and heterogeneous audiences can well constitute another constraining factor for artists. In fact, audiences, still commonly considered to be the recipients of cultural production, who might be assumed to sympathize with the artist rather than the censor, may prove to be stricter than state censors.4 In the words of Richard Kurt Kraus: “No one should mistake the public as merely passive. China has not yet fully become a nation of docile couch potatoes [. . .], and the public can sometimes enforce rules that the Party forgets” (Kraus 2004, 114). Also set in China during the War of Resistance, Ang Lee’s (Li An 李安) Lust, Caution (Se, jie 色·戒, 2007) tells the story of a young woman named Wang Jiazhi, who becomes involved with a theatre troupe staging patriotic plays in order to raise money for the anti-Japanese resistance. Deciding that they have to make a greater contribution to the resistance, the group plots the assassination of a high-ranking Chinese collaborator, Mr Yi. Chosen to deceive Mr Yi, Wang Jiazhi develops feelings for him which do not allow her to go through with the plan. She warns him about the plot and, at the last minute, he escapes the attempt on his life. Lust, Caution gave rise to a broad debate and was attacked by left wing groups as a “traitor film” (hanjian dianying 汉奸电影), the director being stigmatized as someone “seeking fame and wealth by betraying his country” (maiguo qiurong 卖 国求荣) (Yan 2009, 31–33).5 The adoption of a Japanese perspective on the Nanjing Massacre, the use of a positive Japanese character in one of the leading roles, and the film’s ‘unrealistic’ ending were the main reasons for the fierce debate provoked by Nanjing. During his promotional tour in April 2009, director Lu Chuan had direct experience of a divided audience, one part being deeply moved by the film’s cry for peace, the other deeply offended by it. After a screening in Hangzhou on April 17, some members of the audience stood up to show their respect for the Japanese actors and actresses, while others started to swear and shout slogans against Japanese imperialism. In Changsha a short time later, Lu Chuan was interviewed by two television reporters who used a trenchant tone when asking him questions and cast serious doubt on his abilities as a director: “You are not capable of objectivity, you are not an American director.” “The Japanese soldiers are all devils, you are

4 Kraus offers the example of the first on-screen kiss that was shown in Chinese cinemas after the Cultural Revolution (Wenhua Dageming 文化大革命), which resulted in thousands of angry letters addressed to the director, inducing him to complain that “audiences have become more puritanically leftist than the censors” (2004, 114). 5 Audience interference in the arts is anything but a new phenomenon. In the tense atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution, when restrictions on the arts reached a peak, protests from individual viewers could, in extreme cases, suffice to have a film banned (Shao 1988, 206).

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glorifying them. You are a traitor” (Lu 2009, 7). Amongst other things, the film was accused of bringing back the spirit of militarism and exonerating the Japanese aggressors from any charges (Yan 2009, 31). Severe criticism, in particular attacks against the director and his film on Chinese websites, including death threats, almost succeeded in stopping the film’s release (Landreth 2009, n.p.; Wong 2009, n.p.). Underneath the anger and frustration lies the idea that an artist has to be loyal to the people.6 As a Chinese experience, in which Chinese people were the victims, as a ‘Chinese wound’ in other words, the Nanjing Massacre would have to be narrated from a Chinese point of view, as any other version would mean a betrayal of the nation and the people.

Intellectual and Popular Reception, Historicity and Artistic Imagination “No matter how sophisticated it is, art always appeals to people through emotions rather than reason” (Rong 1990, 135). A 2009 symposium held by the Shanghai University Center for Creation and Criticism of Film, Television and Literature (Shanghai daxue yingshi yu wenxue chuangzuo piping zhongxin 上海 大学影视与文学创作批评中心) tried to explain the diverging opinions on Nanjing via the ability to distinguish between emotion and reason, which the participating scholars claimed to be linked to different capabilities of the public and intellectuals regarding the reception of art. Broadly speaking, the film was well-received by most cultural workers and intellectuals, who approved of Lu Chuan’s sense of responsibility towards the nation, the people, and history, whereas opinions voiced on the World Wide Web tended to criticize the director’s point of view (Zhang 2009, 40). Professor Chen Xihe has emphasized that the Nanjing Massacre is a Chinese tragedy, which requires a Chinese narrative and an identification with the Chinese side: “By exceeding a nationalist perspective and reflecting on the war, the film requires its audience not to identify with the Chinese people, but with a Japanese, because the Japanese person in this film obviously has a sense of remorse. This is difficult for the audience to accept and thus creates a dilemma [for them] when watching the film” (Zhang 2009, 41). He added that if the film had been solely for intellectuals, this dilemma would not exist, since this sort of audience is able to move beyond the emotional

6 On being a loyal artist to the people see, for example, Wu 1990; Wu, Kramer, and Kramer 2002.

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level and reflect on the film from a rational perspective. This basic distinction emerged as a kind of consensus among intellectuals. Ge Ying, for example, has linked the controversy over the film to the nation’s “quality” (suzhi 素质), and therefore clearly agrees with his colleagues’ elitist line of argument: “Today, China’s total economic output has already surpassed Japan’s. If the people’s suzhi could also rise to such a high level, we would be able to forgive the crimes committed against us during the war. This is the [true] manner of a great nation” (Zhang 2009, 44). This notion of an elite perspective is partially reflected in the experiences made by the director himself on his promotional tour through China. After returning to Beijing, the film crew started a tour around colleges and universities. The first stop was Peking University (Beijing daxue 北京大学). According to his own account, Lu Chuan, prepared for the worst after his experiences at several locations in China, was determined to answer and explain everything patiently, no matter how fierce the tone of the students might become, but to the director’s surprise, once the screening was over, the students did not hesitate to applause enthusiastically. Although, afterwards, some light criticism was uttered, it was always a frank and honest exchange. Exchange with university students in general has been described by the filmmaker as very smooth and harmonious (Lu 2009, 8–9). A central role in the reception of Nanjing was ascribed to its narrative point of view and the film consumption psychology of the audience – from which the intellectuals discussing the matter clearly exclude themselves, deepening the perceived lines between a popular and an intellectual reception of the film. Shi Chuan, Chen Xihe, and Ge Hongbing have all agreed that while the film’s multi-perspective narrative marks a breakthrough in the traditional narrative pattern of Chinese films on the Sino-Japanese War, it is also responsible for creating a dilemma for people watching the film. After taking a closer look at Nanjing’s adoption of a Japanese perspective, with special regard to the film’s ending, we will return to the topic of film consumption psychology and elaborate on one possible explanation for the way the film was received. As an unusual protagonist and main catalyst of the anger and dissatisfaction triggered by Nanjing, the character of Kadokawa, his psychology, mental state, and particularly his role in the film’s controversial conclusion, have been extensively discussed by Chinese scholars. “Awakening” (juexing 觉醒) is the key term for a group of writers sympathetic to the film, such as Xu Jinjuan and Guo Jing. Like most authors writing on the subject, Xu Jinjuan is concerned with the question as to whether or not the sudden awakening experienced by Kadokawa when confronted with so much human torment is comprehensible and realistic (Xu 2009, 38). He concludes that, judging from the first-hand material gathered by the director, Japanese soldiers such as Kadokawa actually did exist. There were

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soldiers who simply broke down in face of the unspeakable horror unfolding in front of them, whose human nature recovered bit by bit. Guo Jing, who praises the film for its profound depiction of the evil of war and its yearning for peace, also argues from the perspective of Kadokawa’s awakening and the salvation of his soul (Guo J. 2009). The author states that as far as Kadokawa is concerned, war should be a matter between soldiers and not something in which women are to be involved. This is why he does not see Yuriko as a low-ranking comfort woman, but as his equal and deserving of his respect. Similarly, he complies with Miss Jiang’s desperate request to shoot her, to free her from the agony she faces, because she is not an enemy soldier, but an innocent victim of the war, who deserves to be spared humiliation and has the right to die in dignity. This act frees Kadokawa from the collision of the collective will with his individual will; it represents the first step towards the salvation of his soul. The final step, Guo Jing continues, is his suicide, through which his soul can be born again. Guo Songmin is also interested in the credibility and plausibility of Kadokawa’s awakening, but argues from a historical and cultural perspective to explain why this almost “perfect” (wanmei 完美) character, who even releases two Chinese prisoners before he accomplishes the salvation of his soul by committing suicide, is utterly contrived in its essence and not founded in historicity, but only in the subjective thought of the director (Guo S. 2009, 60). In reference to American anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s influential 1946 study The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture,7 Guo points out that in their actions, the Japanese – a “shame culture” – primarily consider how they will be judged by the collective to which they belong, while ethics and morality do not play a paramount role in their decision-making. As soon as the individual moves outside the boundary of the group, any cohesive force is lost, because evaluation by people outside the group will not have any meaning. The mechanism of this cultural mentality is what the author also sees reflected in the atrocities of the Japanese military in Nanjing. For Guo, Kadokawa’s decision to end his life is diametrically opposed to the true significance of and rationale behind suicide in the minds of Japanese people. The distinct phenomenon of suicide in Japanese culture is rooted in the Bushido (The Way of the Warrior), where it is presented as a way to cast off shame. Numerous Japanese soldiers

7 This study, written for the US Office of War Information after World War II in order to shed light on Japanese culture and behavior, followed and promoted the anthropological distinction between cultures relying on shame and cultures relying on guilt. Shame cultures are those relying heavily on external sanctions in controlling behavior, whereas guilt cultures rely on an internalized conviction of sin (Benedict 1997, 222–27).

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committed suicide at the end of World War II, but this was essentially because they had been defeated, and not because of their conscience. The author concludes: “From this point of view, Kadokawa’s suicide has nothing to do with “The Way of the Warrior” – Lu Chuan just does not understand the Japanese!” (Guo S. 2009, 60). In the view of Yan Hao, taking up the ambitious task of re-examining the Nanjing Massacre deserves encouragement and praise, since the truth about it is hidden deep in the fog of history (Yan 2009). Unfortunately, he goes on to say, this praiseworthy ambition is rendered meaningless by the film’s unwise narrative choice. The film’s biggest flaw, according to Yan Hao, is located precisely in Lu Chuan’s proud decision to adopt a Japanese soldier’s perspective. Even the most unbiased spectator cannot but wonder how Kadokawa, one small cog in the gigantic Japanese war machine, is able to engage in such deep introspection about war all by himself. Lu Chuan himself has stated that his advantage over other directors working on the subject was that he had read a lot of Japanese soldiers’ diaries. The character of Kadokawa is constructed from single parts of these diaries, the majority of which have not been subjected to any censorship, which renders them the most authentic accounts of the mental attitudes of Japanese soldiers during the Massacre. However, as the author points out, in all this vast amount of first-hand material, we do not find any character resembling the penitent Kadokawa. On the contrary, the majority of the Japanese soldiers in Nanjing seemed to pass through an initial stage of panic and fear, gradually became accustomed to the killing, and then finally reached the point where they were so completely numb that they carried out ruthless acts of brutality without compunction. Yan Hao thus accuses the director, who once said in an interview that truth is his bottom line, of being highly unfaithful to history. While its representation of German communities in the Nanjing Massacre, largely reduced to the role of John Rabe as a saviour of Chinese civilians and “Oskar Schindler of China,” is compliant with the unity of historical reality, hegemonic discourse, and myth, Nanjing parts with the assumption of a conceived relationship between historic event and narration when it grants the role of saviour and martyr to a member of the Japanese community. As shown above, the role of Kadokawa and his suicide in particular have received special attention in discussions of the film. No matter how different the conclusions the authors arrive at, at least two common denominators can be identified in their approaches. First of all, evaluation is based on the criteria of historicity and realism. Secondly, the film is discussed almost exclusively in terms of content. The two points are closely intertwined, if not even mutually dependent.

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Due to a lingering influence of leftist ideology in Chinese film studies, film form has for a long time attracted little attention beyond its political and sociological interpretation (Luo 1990, 126).8 If the layer of stylistic devices and their interplay with content is included, an alternative reading of the end sequence emerges, which in turn throws a different light on the issues of historicity and realism. Kadokawa allows the prisoners to go free and shoots himself. This is clearly what happens on screen. But how is the scene staged and shot, and how does this relate to the rest of the film? What is its function in the overall system of film form? The final moments appear to be detached from the rest of the film. All of a sudden, we find ourselves in a field of dandelion clocks situated within a spacious flat area surrounded by trees – a stark contrast in setting compared to the ruins of Nanjing that have dominated the picture over the previous two hours. In the midst of this calm and scenic environment (almost no sound is to be heard) two prisoners are marched off and finally set free by Kadokawa. Most importantly, the end sequence is highly interesting and telling in terms of cinematography. Unlike the rest of the overall rather gloomy film, the lighting has an air of brightness, which, underlined by the dust of the dandelion clocks floating through the air, gives the ending a surreal, dream-like quality. In this reading, the ending becomes a symbol for the pursuit of peace and harmony. Consequently, the question as to whether it is plausible for a Japanese soldier in Nanjing to commit suicide after suffering a crisis of conscience does not arise in the first place, as the signs and images no longer silently claim a direct connection to a ‘historical truth.’ If ‘the truth’ about the Nanjing Massacre does exist, we are unable to grasp it, to separate it from its narrativizations, discourses, and myths. No film, documentary, or any other text will fulfill the task of delivering ‘the truth’ about any historical event – not least because they contribute to its status as an event in the first place. When the boundaries between (filmic) reality and imagination/dream are blurred, the relationship between historical fact and fiction, perhaps, is not the right question to pose. With the character of Kadokawa, and in this final sequence in particular, Nanjing renounces pretending to point to an anaesthetic reality.

Mainstream and Art House Cinema Following David Bordwell’s work on feature film narration (1985, in particular 156–66, 205–13, and 228–33), it can be said that Nanjing portrays characteristics 8 On the prevalence of content over form see also Hu 2003.

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of both classical and art film narration. One of the very first characteristics of classical Hollywood cinema listed by Bordwell touches upon the central problem and misunderstanding regarding Nanjing’s popular reception: “The most ‘specified’ character is usually the protagonist, who becomes the principal causal agent, the target of any narrational restriction, and the chief object of audience identification” (1985, 157). In the case of Nanjing, the protagonist (if there is one in the film) and the chief object of audience identification are not the same character, but split. This deviation from viewing expectations accustomed to mainstream storytelling contributed to create readings of the film as Japanese remorse or sympathy for the Japanese. Bordwell summed up the situation neatly when he pointed out that “[t]he spectator comes to a classical film very well prepared” (1985, 164),9 and in a world where cinema is dominated by mainstream blockbusters, a classical film is precisely what audiences were expecting to find in Nanjing. Judging from the way the film was treated in the media, viewers were ill-prepared when they went to see Nanjing. Although Nanjing deviates from the basic formula of classical Hollywood cinema and shows characteristics typical of art film narration, this does not mean that it is not a commercial film. The director himself declared frankly: “I don’t worry about Nanjing! Nanjing!’s box office receipts, because it is a commercial picture” (Xu 2009, 38). Two weeks prior to the film’s release, a huge marketing campaign was launched that allegedly cost almost RMB20 million, more than ten percent of the production costs. Lu Chuan and his crew also went on a marathon publicity-tour of the big cities critical to the box office. Furthermore, opening ceremonies of the film were repeatedly broadcast on television by the production companies involved (Xu 2009, 38). The massive publicity campaign and the misleading associations it produced – such as a poll offered by China Central Television’s (Zhongguo zhongyang dianshitai 中国中央电视台) online blog for Nanjing, which asked users to choose their favorite film on the Sino-Japanese War from a selection of old propaganda films (CCTV.com 2009) – did not evoke the feeling that Nanjing would be much different from any other run-of-the-mill mainstream blockbuster.10 Building on previous knowledge and the impressions gained from selected bits of information, viewers will project certain hypotheses based on the logic of transtextual motivation, the most important forms of which are recognizing the

9 The same thought is also reflected in Bordwell and Thompson 2004, 68–9. 10 Zhou Xiaoling shares this assumption that audiences had different expectations when they went to the cinema to see the film, because of the massive advertising campaign prior to the film’s release (see Zhang 2009, 44).

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recurrence of a star’s persona and generic conventions.11 Such hypotheses are based on intrinsic as well as extrinsic information. Take the example of Liu Ye’s character, Lu Jianxiong: Lu enters the stage early on in the plot, he puts up a heroic fight against the Japanese and appears to be the central character among the Chinese soldiers, who, by implication, would be synonymous with the film’s protagonist (intrinsic type of information). Liu Ye himself is a well-known actor and was billed as the star of the film in advertisement campaigns (extrinsic type of information). This made it quite safe to assume that Lu is the protagonist and that he will survive until the end. Confidence in the invisible rule book on cinematic conventions is further shaken when one of the ‘enemy’ soldiers turns out to be the protagonist in at least one of the film’s main story lines. Audiences are asked to follow this character, whose human traits alone would render him relatable, but who is difficult to identify with regarding the history of what he represents in his uniform, namely the kind of “Japanese Devil” (Riben guizi 日本鬼 子) that people have historically and culturally learned to see as the enemy figure with a fixed place in an established narrative order. A strong identification with the Chinese people, nourished by cultural learning in the form of the constant reiteration of basic narrative patterns addressing national boundaries (Chinese and Japanese, ‘us’ and the enemy, i.e. binary patterns that work according to a logic of integration and demarcation, and in turn continue to produce this logic) that have (seemingly) become normative structures, turned out to be an obstacle to the acceptance of a central positive Japanese character. In addition, the commercial operations surrounding the film, the treatment it received in the media and, at least to a certain extent, its actual box office success, as well as the resulting anticipation of an entertaining, one-dimensional mainstream blockbuster hindered the acceptance of cinematic characteristics commonly ascribed to the so-called art film and a multi-dimensional reading of the film.

11 Transtextual motivation, in the words of Kristin Thompson, “involves any appeal to conventions of other artworks [. . .]. In effect, the work introduces a device that is not motivated adequately within its own terms, but that depends on our recognition of the device from past experience. In film, types of transtextual motivation most commonly depend on our knowledge of usage within the same genre, our knowledge of the star, or our knowledge of similar conventions in other art-forms” (Thompson 1988, 18–19, quotation on p. 19; see also Bordwell 1985, 164).

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Perpetrators and Victims, National Consciousness and Transnational Narration It was not until the 1980s that the Nanjing Massacre, previously almost purged from Chinese historiography for various political reasons, again became a topic of discussion in the PRC. This development was reflected in Chinese cinema, where the Nanjing Massacre, unlike the War of Resistance that has provided generation after generation of filmmakers with subject matter, first emerged as a theme in 1987, followed by two more productions in 1995.12 In line with efforts to prove via photographs, filmed material, and testimonials by survivors that the Massacre had actually occurred – a direct answer to the 1982 Japanese textbook revisions – Massacre in Nanjing (Tucheng xuezheng 屠城血证, 1987), as well as the later Hong Kong production Black Sun: The Nanjing Massacre (Hei taiyang: Nanjing datusha 黑太阳：南京大屠杀, 1995), reveal a preoccupation with the need to establish a counterbalance to the denial of the Massacre by Japanese right-wing militarists. Don’t Cry, Nanking (Nanjing datusha 南京大屠杀, 1995) by Wu Ziniu 吴子牛 breaks with this pattern to a certain extent and is closer to Nanjing in its “function as a more general denouncement of war and the brutality man is capable of” (Berry 2001, 99). Compared to previous cinematic depictions and hegemonic narratives of the Nanjing Massacre, Lu Chuan’s film is daring in at least two regards: its depiction of resistance on the part of Chinese soldiers and civilians, and its adoption of a ‘transnational narration’. Discussing the commonalities of the above-mentioned films, Michael Berry omits one of the most striking common traits of the three very different takes on the Nanjing Massacre – perhaps simply because it is regarded as common sense.13 None of the three films shows the Chinese people putting up resistance against the invaders, but all of them, albeit in different ways, heighten a feeling of victimization. In the words of director Wu Ziniu: “The Rape of Nanjing is China’s national shame, the Chinese people were slaughtered without putting up any kind of resistance” (Berry 2001, 97). This deep-rooted impression is challenged on-screen for

12 Here I follow Michael Berry’s (2001) account of these three cinematic versions of the Nanjing Massacre in order to show where Nanjing either contrasts with them, or takes certain developments further. 13 The commonalities between the three films which are pointed out, however, largely apply to Nanjing as well: in all films, the International Safety Zone is incorporated as a major element in the respective plot. Every film also features positive Japanese characters. Finally, in each instalment, the death toll of 300,000 is stated at the end in the form of subtitled captions (Berry 2001, 102–103). In Nanjing, the death toll is stated in an opening title, which dedicates the film to the 300,000 who died during the Nanjing Massacre.

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the first time by Nanjing. Lu Chuan once stated that the main motivation for his project was to erect a monument for the Chinese people, “to bring the Chinese people back to the place in history they deserve in this period” (Sina.com.cn 2009b, n.p.). During the process of working on the film, he came to realize that the Chinese people’s impression of the Nanjing Massacre is limited to the aspects of the victims’ death toll and the role of John Rabe, and completely fails to acknowledge another crucial aspect, namely the people’s unyielding resistance during the Japanese killing spree. The fact that resistance against the Japanese army had been a neglected subject of the Nanjing Massacre has to do with the fear that any kind of resistance might be read as a pretext for the violent excesses. In this respect, right-wing Japanese historiography of the Massacre added a great deal to the necessity of establishing a counterbalance, in which any signs of resistance were purged from historical memory.14 Apart from the fact that it is almost impossible to imagine how resistance against the invading Japanese army could ever justify the large-scale murder of unarmed soldiers and civilians, this anxiety undoubtedly had an influence on the way the Nanjing Massacre was written down in history. In hegemonic Chinese historiography of the Nanjing Massacre, the roles of perpetrator and victim were institutionalized. To the degree to which “Chinese historiography remains captive to a cultural and national need to present China as a victim” (Eykholt 2000, 12) and to which victimization is played up as a political tool, it runs the risk of overshadowing alternative narratives. Nanjing goes beyond the depiction of Chinese people as victims by showing scenes of collaboration between Chinese and Japanese, and, more importantly, the courage demonstrated by people who put up resistance against the invading forces.15 The remaining soldiers around Lu Jianxiong who engage in a skirmish with the invading Japanese troops; the Chinese women who sacrifice themselves in order to secure the survival of the safety zone; Miss Jiang, who puts her own life at risk to save others; Mr Tang, who, after selling out his comrades to the Japanese in order

14 As pointed out before, public school textbooks edited by the Japanese Ministry of Education were in fact blaming the Massacre on the resistance of the enemy (Dirlik 1991, 34; Eykholt 2000, 28). 15 In prior portrayals of the War of Resistance in general, however, the resistance of the Chinese people against the Japanese has, of course, been an almost indispensable element. Furthermore, as is the case in Nanjing, the active role of women in the resistance was often a topic in Mao-era films on the subject. The difference lies in the fact that invasion and resistance in these films had a close connection with family relationships, especially because, in many narratives, the Communists came to be the new family for young women who were formerly helpless, oppressed, or alone (see Weakland 1971).

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to save himself and his family, finally renounces his opportunity to leave Nanjing and faces his opponents: all these characters display a spirit of sacrifice and bravery when confronted with a militarily superior opponent. While addressing this perceived historical amnesia, the film does not tone down or legitimize the Japanese actions in Nanjing. It does not spare the viewer shocking images of unarmed soldiers and civilians being brutally slaughtered, shot down in their hundreds, burned, or buried alive; images of decapitated bodies, of women being raped, or of a child thrown out of a window. What the film does is attempt to reintroduce a ‘lost chapter’ into historiography of the Nanjing Massacre, underlining not only the inseparability of history, historiography, and media representation, but also memory culture’s reliance on a dynamic of (systematically) remembering and forgetting. While it may deviate from a hegemonic mode of historiography, Nanjing’s depiction of resistance against the invading forces appears to be in line with recent developments stemming from a new sense of economic power and changing political needs within the Chinese state, such as the display of (military) strength when it comes to commemorating the Nanjing Massacre and other memorial days. Where earlier online media representation on the occasion of the Memorial Day of the Nanjing Massacre seemed to rely more on archive material and put stronger visual emphasis on images of the Massacre itself, more recent representations have added emphasis on the commemorative events and their recurring key visuals such as marching soldiers in uniform carrying arrangements of yellow chrysanthemums (see, for example, the respective online portals of sina.com.cn). The emerging visual focus on soldiers can be read as adding a narrative of military strength to the narrative of the civilian victims, which remains central to the commemoration and is perpetually reaffirmed with the recurring official Chinese death toll of 300,000. These visual and narrative shifts display parallels to cinematic representations of the Nanjing Massacre, with examples from the late 20th century showing more reliance on archive material and operating under the pressure to prove that the Massacre happened in the first place (as a counter to right-wing voices from Japan), and later representations adding images/narratives of resistance and strength. The latter also match with the displays of military power that have come to accompany celebrations of the National Day of the PRC, and can be connected to China’s rise as a global player in the economy and on the political stage. These different, yet connected media representations could be regarded as another “contact zone” – however, they too have to be considered not as formerly discrete entities, but as already always involved in multiple processes of exchange with their (discursive, social, political, cultural, and media) environments.

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As far as the film’s plot and point of view are concerned, the final outcome is a far cry from the filmmaker’s original vision.16 Lu Chuan’s generation was taught that the Japanese are but devils, and this has shaped his image of the Japanese for a long time. Nevertheless, after going through the process of studying Japanese newspapers and soldiers’ diaries, Lu Chuan came to the realization that the Japanese soldiers were simply men wearing uniforms and that the Nanjing Massacre ultimately consisted of people killing people. There are a number of key scenes which reflect this insight. Early in the film, a group of Japanese soldiers is advancing towards the inner city of Nanjing. One of them discovers a pile of boxes filled with beverages and hastily starts opening one of the bottles, eager to take a drink, only to be advised by his superior to stop for it could be a trap. The soldier waits for his superior to go by and then starts drinking from the bottle anyway. Kadokawa comes along, asking him how it tastes. After being assured that it is delicious, Kadokawa and his comrades join the soldier in thirstily grabbing bottles from the box. The scene is daring and unusual in so far as it portrays the Japanese simply as people in uniforms, human beings who feel thirst and need to drink just as everyone else does. The sight of the soldiers secretly satisfying a basic need by taking a drink, despite the danger of a trap, might almost provoke a smile and create sympathy with the characters on screen who, at this stage of the plot, do not yet have blood on their hands. After this follows a scene which suggests that the “Japanese Devils,” as they have been and are sometimes still referred to, are also capable of basic human emotions such as fear and anxiety. As the very same soldiers open the door to a church, they find themselves facing a huge crowd of Chinese soldiers, civilians, women, children, and old people raising their hands in a sign of surrender. The Japanese, the invading force, appear insecure, almost frightened; their eyes are panicstricken as the camera moves in circles around them. Searching the church for hidden enemy soldiers, Kadokawa fires a few shots at a closed door behind which, as it turns out, a group of young women has been hiding. Seeing their lifeless bodies and realizing what he has just done, Kadokawa stumbles, saying “I didn’t mean to,” and finally suffers a breakdown. One of the film’s stylistic strategies is its use of juxtaposition. This device was used excessively in Massacre in Nanjing, albeit in an entirely different fashion and to different effect. Exemplary for such use of contrasting images to create an emotional punch in Massacre in Nanjing is a scene depicting the mass execution of wounded Chinese soldiers: “To draw attention to this scene, Luo

16 Lu Chuan has stated in an interview that he basically rewrote the script completely on set, except for one scene (Bian 2009, 11).

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draws on a virtual arsenal of cinematic techniques as the soldiers are being gunned down: slow motion, removal of all sound and background music to highlight the images, periodic stills, and random insertions of ghostly black and white negative snapshots” (Berry 2001, 89). In order to intensify the feeling of victimization, the mass shooting of the POWs is juxtaposed with images of laughing Japanese soldiers. Compare this to a similar scene in Nanjing: the captive Chinese soldiers are rounded up and marched off to the shore. Filmed from a slightly elevated position in a most prosaic manner, we witness what looks like hundreds of unarmed Chinese prisoners being mown down by Japanese machine guns in a matter of seconds. No close-ups, no slow-motion, none of the typical stylistic devices of drama are employed to add anything artificial to the scene. The execution of a second group of POWs, however, deviates even more from the drama manual and cinematic conventions. This time, the deaths of the Chinese soldiers, among them our assumed hero and protagonist Lu Jianxiong, are not depicted on screen at all; we merely see Japanese machine guns firing as the screen slowly fades to black. Again, there are no dramatic slow-motion images of the victims as they are hit by bullets; instead, we are confronted with an image of the machine doing the killing, which impacts strongly on the imagination. Rather than juxtaposing the slaughter of Chinese people with images of Japanese soldiers enjoying the killing, Nanjing juxtaposes it with scenes portraying the Japanese as human beings, thus making the scenes of carnage all the more terrifying, and going beyond the unsatisfying and simplistic explanation that they were devils. In one scene, we see Japanese soldiers having fun, talking about what Japanese dishes they would like to eat right now and venting their feelings of homesickness. While dialogue expressing feelings of homesickness appears regularly in films about soldiers who find themselves fighting a war in another country, these scenes are usually not granted to ‘the enemy’. In the next scene, we once again find the Japanese soldiers slaughtering unarmed human beings. The quintessential message of Nanjing is perhaps best captured in the way it goes beyond the sacrifice of young men on the battlefield to depict the suffering of civilians, in particular the female population. Not only does the relationship between Kadokawa and Yuriko effectively deepen Kadokawa’s characterization as shy, inexperienced, and simple-hearted, it also carries the horrors Chinese women had to endure during the occupation beyond national boundaries by offering the audience a glimpse of the lives of Japanese women who had come to China for the single purpose of ‘entertaining’ their troops. The everyday routine of Japanese ‘comfort women’ is well-captured in Kadokawa’s second visit to Yuriko. When he enters the room, she lies back and spreads her legs. But instead of just dropping by to have sex with her as she expects, Kadokawa is bringing

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her a bag of New Year’s presents, including candy from Japan, which makes her happy and also makes her smile in a way that she has not done in a long time. Upon realizing that she has neglected her ‘duty’ for a moment, she suddenly apologizes and lies down again, saying “Please go ahead.” Both Massacre in Nanjing and Black Sun featured Japanese characters who have a certain positive quality, and Don’t Cry, Nanking tells the story of a Chinese-Japanese couple’s struggle to stay together and stay alive during the Massacre, even going so far as to introduce a Japanese character who is sharing the fate of the Chinese people. There are at least three reasons why Nanjing still evoked such an outrage over its depiction of a Japanese character: first of all, unlike previous cases, in which these characters were either civilians or played only small supporting roles, Nanjing has an enemy soldier fighting with his conscience as a central character, and, for much of the film, allows the viewer to experience the Massacre from his perspective. Secondly, in contrast to films such as Don’t Cry, Nanking by ‘Fifth Generation’ director Wu Ziniu, or the graphic Hong Kong shocker Black Sun, Nanjing was produced and advertised as a blockbuster, had a large-scale cinema release, was financially successful, and reached far more people in a short period of time. Thirdly, the role of the World Wide Web, where large parts of the controversy unfolded, has to be stressed as an ideal forum for (anonymously) venting discontent. By providing different perspectives – without making claims about their generalizability – Nanjing does something that is rare in film and historiography: it narrates the self and the other beyond the (national) lines of ‘us’ and the enemy, victims and perpetrators, etc. The significance of this polyphonic, multiperspective narration is explained in Yang Daqing’s remarks about the capacity to transcend nationality in the writing of history: Indispensable as it is, the distinction between the perpetrator and the victim is not without problems. Because it simplifies a complex, multifaceted event, reducing it to black and white, such a binary prism is inadequate for understanding the historical process, which necessarily includes shades of gray. For instance, the fact that more than a few Chinese collaborators assisted Japanese troops in sorting out Chinese soldiers in the Safety Zone demonstrates that the perpetrator-victim distinction is not always drawn along purely national lines. (Yang 2000, 158)

Once intended as a monument for the Chinese people, Lu Chuan’s film became much more than that. At a higher level of abstraction, Nanjing is not a simple tale of bad vs. good, perpetrator vs. victim, or Japanese vs. Chinese, but a humanist anti-war film concerned with the destructive effects that war has on everybody involved in it. The Nanjing Massacre is taken as a point of departure, making it possible to re-examine this chapter with patriotic overtones in a way

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that, in the eyes of the director, is faithful to history. The opening title, which reads “Dedicated to the 300,000 victims of the Nanjing Massacre” and scenes such as the mass execution of disarmed soldiers showing their resistance by shouting “Long live China” and “China will not perish” are signs of a collective Chinese perspective. From this starting point, however, the perspective is broadened to reach more general conclusions. The director has accomplished his vision of a film that reflects on war and explores the relationship between war and human beings from above the binary structures that have dominated previous cinematic representations of the Nanjing Massacre and the War of Resistance. War, as Lu Chuan has realized and brought onto the screen, does not distinguish between winners and losers (Bian 2009, 10; Wong 2009, n.p.). Yang Daqing argues that nation-centered views of history continue to prevail in both China and Japan and that a common historical understanding has become both desirable and timely (2000, 164). Nanjing is, in this regard, participating in a process that reads “overcoming a narrow victim consciousness by becoming a true humanist” (Yang 2000, 167). At the same time, it has revealed the difficulties and obstacles that are inherent in trying to examine hightension, conflict-laden historical-political circumstances from an alternative and/or higher angle.

Conclusion The case of Nanjing illustrates how a text dealing with a sensitive, politically charged subject that is linked to expectations of a certain kind of fidelity, and interwoven with historically and culturally grown normative narrative structures demanding identification with the victimized nation and people, is able to renegotiate the social memory of history. By going beyond a binary perspective and focusing on the devastating effects of war on mankind through diverse individual points of view, the film transgresses national boundaries on a narrative level. It not only links the Nanjing Massacre to the War of Resistance, and exceeds a national perspective by further linking it to World War II, but also conveys a general humanist message, creating new reference points for the negotiation of history, discourse, myth, and metaphor. It has presented a narration of the Nanjing Massacre as not only a ‘Chinese wound’, but as the human catastrophe that war is. Nanjing looks at its subject not from the perspective of one single nation, or one people, but from a human (multi-)perspective, in which ethnic or national boundaries are not the main concern. It both continues and discontinues the perpetual reference loops of the narrativizations and

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symbols of the Nanjing Massacre and the War of Resistance. While Nanjing may introduce cracks into institutionalized narratives of the Nanjing Massacre, and partly dissolves the alleged unity of sign and reality, it is very much in tune with the narrative of taking the moral high ground of being able to forgive, but never to forget, as it is currently practiced by the hegemonic memory culture of the PRC (see Kramer 2014). In its yearning for peace and by linking the Nanjing Massacre with a global culture of remembering, it further proves to be in line with the rhetoric of a “harmonious society” (hexie shehui 和谐社会) – as well as with the “Chinese dream” (Zhongguo meng 中国梦), its follow-up slogan with global aspirations, which at the time had not yet been coined –, yet was still subject to censorship, mixed messages from state actors, and much heated debate on the World Wide Web. Since narratives of the War of Resistance and the Nanjing Massacre form an essential part of the memory culture of the PRC, and as the notion of truth is so essential to the debate on the Nanjing Massacre that it enters every realm in which this atrocity is dealt with, the film’s ultimate dissolution of historical event and narration met with resistance. As a complex text as well as in its actual social effects, Nanjing has opened up a multitude of what we may call zones of contact, conflict, and combat – the discursive ‘battlefields’ of history, social memory, and representation. At the same time, in a fashion somewhat similar to what Pratt has called “the joys of the contact zone”, it delivers potential for reassembling the social and redrawing binary discursive orders of self and other. Unlike Pratt’s example of the conquered subject mirroring back an image to the oppressors that they themselves often suppress – what is then called “the dynamics of language, writing, and representation in contact zones” (Pratt 1991, 35) –, Nanjing depicts images which the imagined community of the victim party itself had suppressed, and includes the historic victimizer in its polyphonic, multi-perspective imagination.

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Shao Mujun. “Chinese Film Amidst the Tide of Reform.” In Cinema and Cultural Identity: Reflections on Films from Japan, India, and China, edited by Wimal Dissanayake, 199–208. Lanham [et al.]: University Press of America, 1988. Sina.com.cn. “Lu Chuan: zuida yexin jiu shi ba Nanjing fangdao Riben qu” 陆川：最大野心就 是把《南京》放到日本去 [Lu Chuan: Greatest Ambition is to get Nanjing to Japan] (2009a). http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2009-04-25/17492491247.shtml. Sina.com.cn. “Lu Chuan: Nanjing bu shi ‘aiguozhuyi touji’” 陆川： 《南京》不 是‘爱国主义投机’ [Lu Chuan: Nanjing is no “Gamble with Patriotism”] (2009b). http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/ c/2009-04-24/05432488795.shtml. The Hollywood Reporter (online edition) “Q&A: Lu Chuan” (2009). http://www.hollywoodre porter.com/news/qampa-lu-chuan-88752. Thompson, Kristin. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. Princeton, New Jersey [et al.]: Princeton University Press, 1988. Weakland, John H. “Chinese Film Images of Invasion and Resistance.” The China Quarterly 47 (1971): 439–470. Wong, Edward. “Showing the Glimmer of Humanity Amid the Atrocities of War.” The New York Times (online edition) (2009). http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/world/asia/23lu chuan.html. Wu Yigong. “To Be a Loyal Artist to the People.” In Chinese Film Theory: A Guide to the New Era, edited by George S. Semsel, Xia Hong, and Hou Jianping, 179–187. New York [et al.]: Praeger, 1990. Wu Yigong, Hu-Chong Kramer, and Stefan Kramer. “Wu Yigong: Der Film muss dem Volk dienen.” In Bilder aus dem Reich des Drachen: Chinesische Filmregisseure im Gespräch, edited by Hu-Chong Kramer and Stefan Kramer, 107–116. Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 2002. Xu Jinjuan 徐金娟. “Renxing, kangzheng he xiwang – tan guoqing xianli pian Nanjing! Nanjing!” 人性, 抗争和希望 – 谈国庆献礼片《南京!南京!》[Humanity, Resistance and Hope – On the Film Nanjing! Nanjing! as a Contribution to China’s National Day]. Dianying pingjie 电影评介 [Film Review] 17 (2009): 38, 45. Yan Hao 颜浩. “Cuowei de shijiao yu biandiao de qimeng – lun Nanjing! Nanjing! de lishi xushi” 错位的视角与变调的启蒙 – 论《南京!南京!》的历史叙事 [Dislocated Perspective and Modified Enlightenment – On the Historical Narrative of Nanjing! Nanjing!]. Lilun yu chuangzuo 理论与创作 [Criticism and Creation] 4 (2009): 31–35. Yang Daqing. “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre: Reflections on Historical Inquiry.” In The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, edited by Joshua A. Fogel, 133–179. Berkeley [et al.]: University of California Press, 2000. Zhang Jiyue 张霁月. “‘Nanjing! Nanjing! de chuangzuo yu jieshou’ yantaohui zongshu” “《南京!南京!》的创作与接受” 研讨会综述 [A Summary of the Symposium on “The Creation and Reception of Nanjing! Nanjing!”]. Shanghai daxue xuebao (shehui kexue ban) 上海大学学报(社会科学版) [Journal of Shanghai University (Social Sciences Edition)] 16, no. 5 (2009): 40–47.

Peter Ludes

11 Local, Virtual, and Programmed Contact Zones Introduction: Embodied Habits All human beings develop characteristic, unquestioned personality traits and behavior patterns, which embody and express long-term social figurations and interdependencies across generations, in particular asymmetrical power relations beyond immediate social and local spheres. Fundamental are, for example, social belonging, spatial conduct, time awareness, non-verbal and verbal communication, eating habits, the ranking of persons, objects, situations, threats, anxieties, rhythms of movements and developments and levels of education. They constitute “the complex interplay of nationality, ethnicity, class, gender” (Kramer and Samarani 2016, 5; cp. Kramer and Ludes 2010), which shape implicit or explicit rules of competition, cooperation, fight, or war. ‘Contact zone’ refers to a broader approach towards studying the spatial, temporal, geographic, economic, political and bodily interactions that exist between people of culturally diverse backgrounds during encounters with one another. We consider the construction and representation of ‘contact zone’ as a result of a chain of several interlocking translation processes, the ‘cultural translation’, which refers to ‘navigation’ through different values, norms, ideas, perceptions, interpretations, practices, and institutional arrangements across different socio-cultural contexts. (Kramer and Samarani 2016, 2; cp., e.g., von Racknitz 2013 and Zhao 2014)

In these terms, the notion of “contact,” however, appears as rather neutral and peaceful, avoiding reference to extreme threats before migrating to or while living within so-called contact zones, at least for certain groups of people, often the weaker ones. Moreover, each “emigration” of missionaries, military personnel, common citizens or workers implies giving up some previous bonds and sometimes not only former constraints and repression, but also security levels and embodied knowledge of norms and sanctions at (the lost or – temporarily – given up) home. Of course, this depends heavily on, for example, the size of the contact groups, whether they are mainly constituted by individuals or families, and whether the contact is expected to last only for a few months, or years or a lifetime. More particularly, making sense of individual, family, small group, community or more encompassing collective experiences usually requires narratives of actors in specific places and times, focusing on special issues.

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The concepts, which I propose – especially the distinction between local, virtual, and programmed contact zones – refer to experiences, which constitute basic dimensions of superiority and subordination. In particular cases, like for military personnel or missionaries (see Samarani in this volume), such hierarchies, however, hardly adapt very strongly to the new environment. Furthermore, in general, conventions of (self-) control emerge via experiences, anxieties, threats, attractions and more or less explicit motives, demands, and constraints mainly transformed into embodied habits during childhood and youth. These interdependencies and interactivities are never limited to isolated individually perceivable settings, even if they are experienced as such. Families, groups, unobservable communities or societies shape and point beyond these individual and clearly situated characteristics. Of course, there are further dimensions to be considered as, for example, by Trausch (in this volume): Or limited temporary contact zones, which, for example, provide infrastructures for sustainable contacts via economic relations (cp. Bernardini, 2017). They can be quite conflictual, as highlighted by Eckstein and Reinfandt: ‘[T]he space of colonial encounters, the space in which people geographically and historically separated came into contact with each other and established ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’ [. . .] contact zones in which local histories and global designs are perpetually (re)negotiated in intricate ways [. . .] paradigmatic phenomena of global modernity. (2017, 10; 13)

For [i]nteractions increasingly take place in what Mary Louise Pratt refers to as ‘contact zones,’ often virtual ones, between speakers of different origins. The contact zone is a challenge to the established sociolinguistic notion of a speech community [. . .] Today, language has been deterritorialised, as diasporic communities interact with one another in contact zones. Contact zones are different in different places and of course change over time. (Simpson 2016, 14)

But sustainable traits of embodied habits in contact zones imply that in certain situations, reason exercises little or no persuasive force when vying against the combined powers of rage, fear, and prejudice, which together forge innumerable hateful ways of knowing the world that have their own internalized systems, self-sustaining logics, and justifications. (Miller 1994, 407 f)

As soon as people migrate to cultural settings far away from their original home areas, their former experiences and actions are questioned. This necessity to give up, repress, or hide former habits depends on their age, the rigidity of their formerly embodied habits and the strictness of demands in the new zone. It is conditioned by the major causes for migration, for example, whether as

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potential victims of (civil) wars, ethnic, religious, political repression, or extinction, and extreme poverty. The financing of and suffering during more or less voluntary or forced escapes in contrast to clearly and professionally organized transfers, in which groups and with what resources, are decisive. Professional moves as missionaries, soldiers, scientists, students, or journalists certainly shape contact zones tremendously different from those of forced migration. In this line, Osterhammel (Osterhammel 2009, ch. 4) distinguished causes and motives for – often forced – migrations of different sizes, scopes, lengths, and cultural adaptations (as well as some returns of migrants into their home countries) in the 19th century. In the 20th century, movies, radio, press, and (satellite) TV framed imaginations of (better) living conditions in other parts of the world. Print and broadcast media also induced imaginaries of different cultural norms, political rights, and economic chances. In the 21st century, international and interactive network communication increasingly dominate, (mental) migrations often occur or “take place” in virtual contact zones. Contemporary generations live amid a dominance of physical contact zones and emerging virtual ones (interspersed in and competing with physical territories or living grounds). This diagnosis requires the focus of culture and media studies on embodied habits and local contact zones (in section 2) and new types of (distorted) perceptions in increasingly virtualized contact zones (in section 3). Section 4 will draw a few conclusions from this synopsis of long-term continuities and recent discontinuities for contemporary and sometimes professionally or politically programmed contact zones.

Local Contact Zones Human beings make sense of their worlds and of themselves via their senses and their imaginations. Such a making of sense may switch between clearly articulated verbal messages, gestures, mimics and vague yet sometimes strong (remembrances of) sights, sounds, tastes, smells, or touches. Immediate experiences prepare and frame individual imaginations and widely spread presentations in mass and network media. Thereby, they appear as inevitably shared collective modes of orientation and communication. They coordinate interactions in space and time and allow for “common sense” horizons for aspirations and actions, namely embodied habits, which often remain beyond conscious awareness.

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Fuchs (Fuchs 2016, 219–221) argues: Embodied knowledge may also be conceived [. . .] in that it cannot be explained or verbalized explicitly. [. . .] A major reason for this is that the forms of knowing how are based on intermodal and sensorimotor gestalt units, that means, they integrate different sense modalities and bodily movements into a holistic experience . . . In contrast, verbal articulation may only explicate single strands out of this undetermined-manifold clew of holistic experience. Thus, it is able to class these strands into a general context and to render them available to communication – yet at the price of losing the immediacy and unity of intuitive experience. [. . .] Habits formed through repetition and practice are activated of their own accord; well-rehearsed sequences of movements have been incorporated, thus becoming a bodily capacity – like the upright gait, speaking or writing, using instruments like a bicycle, a typewriter or a piano.

In summary: Embodied knowledge is the foundation of our familiarity with the world and with other people. It is a knowledge and skill which is realized in perceiving and reacting on situations, without needing targeted attention or memory. The subject of knowing is itself embodied: It finds these knowings and skills not inside, but only in its practical engagement with the world. In contrast, representational, symbol-based forms of knowledge – knowing that – arise from an indirect, secondary relation to the world which the human mind is capable of by taking a distance from objects and situation and representing them as such. This presupposes, however, that the world is already disclosed to us via the medium of the body which has acquainted itself with the world from birth on. (Fuchs 2016, 226)

Therefore, I suggest the concept of ‘embodied habits’ (in contrast to embodied knowledge), which implies more clearly unconscious conduct rather than reflected knowledge. Personal, face-to-face or better: body-to-body communication shapes cognition and cooperation also for mediated relations. The innate and trained skills of requesting, informing, and sharing prepare and frame communication for basic and elaborate pattern recognition, co-orientation, and co-ordination. Via this combination of cognition and communication, a shared world (view) can be constituted. Only a basically shared world view can contribute to shared commonalities and horizons. In short, “there are universals of language because people all over the world have similar communicative jobs to get done and similar cognitive and social tools with which to do them” (Tomasello 2008, 315). Moreover, “human beings are the only animal species that conceptualizes the world in terms of different potential perspectives on one and the same entity” (ibid., 344). These “different potential perspectives” allow for empathy and for successful migration into and survival in contact zones. They allow also for the exercise or defense of power privileges. “To foster the new economy” the PRC,

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is designing measures to commercialize public data while legalizing disruptive competition brought by cyber giants in hitherto regulated social service sectors, including education, health care, and ride hailing. Above all, it is making a dangerous balancing act when prioritizing technology, innovation, and structural reforms on the one hand, and trying to contain disruptive impact on the already delicate labor and social relations on the other. The complex, evolving, and contingent bonds between the state and capital generate pushback, conflicts, and power drifts. (Hong 2017, 1768)

With cheaper ICTs and wider spread communicative competencies, formerly excluded groups of people sometimes can gain access to this particular new type of power (base). ICTs are potentially global but organized in quite different ways in distinct societies (like, for example, China, Germany, or Italy). Power and CounterPower are usually conflictual and conditioned by a variety of historical forces. Thereby, the spatial, temporal, geographic, economic, political and bodily interactions are re-figured. Living in contact zones requires learning by seeing, showing, and doing and adaptations via all senses and deep-rooted perception modes. Immediate and mediated processes of communication are always conditioned, shaped, and transformed by symbolically generalized and often institutionalized media of communication, especially power, money, (family) love, (religious) belief, or (specified criteria for) truth (via methodologically controlled “scientific” perceptions) – and condition and frame them. They are performed within environments characterized by material objects, perceived via and in terms of longterm means of (dis-) orientation like time, space, thing, proximity, ranking, beauty, or alternatives. The enormous increase of web experiences, which function as (self-) evaluations and identity-formation sources, impacts on what we perceive as real and reliable. This “Internet of Perceptions” (Ludes, 2017a) gains ever more importance – at the cost of previously immediate multi-sensory experiences and expressions. It has become an inevitable dimension of the technical networks and becomes part of a new infrastructure. As section 4 will show, TV reviews of China and Germany (see, for example, Ludes 2012; 2016 or Ludes and Hao, 2014) present those social actors, situations, relations, and observable processes, which are considered as attention-worthy by the corresponding deciders. Mass-disseminated observations and presentations become collective routines. Thereby they call for widely shared “adequate” perceptions and actions in the “corresponding” culture, within the context of enduring habits. Such perceptions function much deeper than conscious arguments or decisions; they are usually embodied and form a close mix of sensual experiences, associations and only very limited verbalizations. For example, eating habits and disgust

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of certain smells constitute such deeply internalized conduct, limiting the closeness of contacts or acceptance of otherness. Rifkin (Rifkin 2014, 195) highlights three interlocking Internets: “a Communication Internet, an Energy Internet, and a Logistics Internet” linking together to “a single interactive system – the Internet of Things.” He neglects, however, that the very basis of human perceptions is radically transformed by the enormous increase of perceptions via networked data, which are usually seen, already less heard. The anesthesia, amputation, or repression of the other senses shifts previous sensual perceptions and their particular competencies so finely condensed in proverbs like: to sniff it out, to be touched by, to get a taste of, which have played decisive roles in local contact zones. The concentration of mono- or bi-sensual perceptions via screens, whose formats and data are organized and owned by very few (in China state-controlled) companies erodes certainties previously grounding cognitive, aesthetic, moral convictions and decisions as well as shared social spheres and contact zones. The following section will discuss these perception shifts in terms of the most basic components of human sense-making and mediated narratives, namely of who, what, when, where, how, and why. For eons of human development, humans perceived their environment and themselves only via their biologically given senses. The industrialization and mediatization of perceptions accelerated since the 19th century, for example, via movies, radio, TV, and the Internet as mass media. Thereby new kinds of orientations, identity models, and habits came into being, which have complemented and partially replaced the immediate ones.

Virtual Contact Zones Traditional and sustainable modes of narratives center on actors, topics, places, specifications in time, the modes of and reasons for actions or processes. Basic questions to be answered are: Who, what, where, when, how, and why? (Ludes, 2018). (1) Who am I? And: Who are significant others? At first glance, one might assume that at least the first years of a baby and very young child are beyond media impacts. But increasingly, parents vanish who are mainly learning from their own parents, teachers, religious guidance, and neighbors rather than via print, broadcast and network media. For all mass media have picked up and pinpointed traditional, unmediated actor-event relationships and have transformed them into particular media formats. These transformations suspend previous

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meanings. During the first years after the invention and marketing of “new” media, they often penetrate from (media) rich strata to a more general public and market. This enlargement of the scopes of newer media ensembles and their shares in everyday time budgets has entered wide-spread imaginations and aspirations, fears and anxieties, hopes and routines. For example: We now know that the boundary between what is Chinese and what is ‘foreign’ is increasingly permeable, mobile, and subject to negotiation. This requires us to pay attention to the ongoing and constantly changing politics of boundaries as this plays out for various parties, whether it be the Chinese government, foreign governments and their media, or diasporic Chinese individuals and enterprises. More specifically, it involves tracking the partnerships – however qualified or negotiated they may be – between different media institutions both inside and outside China. It also involves mapping the emerging and shifting overlap between hitherto discrete symbolic spaces, with the purpose of revealing both the expanding sphere of influence of Chinese state media and the possible shrinkage of diasporic and foreign media’s capacity to project voices that are independent of China. (Sun 2014, 1907)

The cultural force of pre-given family and legally prescribed educational institutions receded gradually: Parents, siblings, and teachers no longer embody the historical rights of showing first, with unique authority, unquestionably and without alternatives how the world was, is, and should be. No human behavior or action has remained untouched or fundamentally unchanged from media impacts: from sleeping to waking up, eating or drinking, obeying and contradicting, support or resistance, love and hate, cognition and misperceptions, moral judgments and immoral vices, in general “acceptable, good or civilized” conduct vs. “unacceptable, bad, uncivilized or simply impossible” behavior. Answers to questions like “Who am I and what can I take for granted?” therefore will arise anew in shifting provinces of meaning, mixing in unprecedented ways. Yet, after such threats, personality and conduct networks emerge, with more innovative mobile technical means of communication. “Who am I?” is a very particular question. “Who are we?” “And they?” are questions equally pertinent (especially in contact zones). Yet the very act of questioning is already a conscious social action which constitutes only minor shares of human activities, when we consider human lives from pre-birth to death, in their various shades of awareness. Our languages provide quite different repertories of expressing, distinguishing or explaining multimodal perceptions. In our inner streams of half- or much less verbalized graduations of awareness, seeing calls for more words and attention for daily experiences than other sensory peaks. The latter, however, can sometimes gain high attention for usually shorter periods of time.

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Yet, it is “obvious,” it must be heard of, tasted, sniffed out, and grasped that the beginning of the 21st century is not adequately described as an “Internet or Digital Age,” given the limited “senses” of this technical determinism. And the call for “evidence” in terms of obviousness, postulated in Max Weber’s interpretive sociology is clearly biased in terms of the dominant sense making sense. Human understanding of “we” vs. “they,” however, is constituted by several senses, which reach out in different ways. Are insights gained in terms of very particular sense priorities adequate for theories of the competition of senses for sense-making? This question should also be pertinent for Chinese-European contact zones. In principle, the most recent mass media and especially the network and social media for mass self-communication technically could allow for a functional democratization of perceptions. Yet, as numerous studies have “shown,” most powerful people remain beyond the scrutiny of journalists and general “public” spheres as well as followers in social media. The emphasis on individual actors and on oneself has increased in a decades-long process of individualization. This trend is marketed, for example, via I-phones or selfies, which often highlight the specialty of the consumer’s choice, yet neglect economic, political, and cultural dependencies. Such “I-dentities” distort factual networks of powerful actors well beyond sight and grasp. (2) “What” is at stake? – This equally fundamental challenge requires specifications of the distinct environments as well as of the materiality of the means of communicative relations. Human beings start their lives within other human beings, their mothers, surrounded by liquids, which combine nature and nurture, habitat and sources for habitus. This multi-sensory life-world is completely taken for granted like first glances, sound perceptions, tastes, smell, touches and balances, conveying certainties or anxieties. Already in this first phase of individual human development, experiences are conditioned by motions and emotions and shaped by perceptions of oneself and of others, first the mother. Sound variations or movements are interlinked with chemical processes in the womb. Impressions of objects combine several senses. In some sense, human beings need the possibility to grasp something in order to understand. The globally increasing social interdependencies, however, are constituted by ever higher numbers of actors, material objects, and digitized, virtual presentations. High tech lacks human touch as a natural basis for perceptions. Technical networks pick up, condense, and highlight traditional perception modes and add new dimensions. The short-term orientation of “seeing is believing” re-confirms the distortions of what is pre-given and what might be changed – to such a degree that these impressions appear as common sense. (3) When: Reliable human interaction requires a close coordination of the time horizons of the persons or institutions involved. Only insofar as the

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partners, competitors, or enemies in interaction rely on shared measurements and usually internalized acceptance of/submission to schedules, will activities go hand in hand or one after the other in ways which contribute to this interaction. The criteria for such a communicative success vary tremendously, yet whether in mythological rituals, master-servant or division of labor and information relationships – the synchronization of time horizons and actual intervals of activities is basic for social relations. This synchronization via the long-term mechanization of time measurements and their institutionalization for almost all activities has become ever more predominant. Mass media have confirmed these social habits, due to strict program schedules, gathering millions of people at very specific times in front of the radio or TV sets. Like, for example, church tower tolls and clocks before, but domesticated, news and other shows conditioned their viewers to strict adherence. This complementarity to industrial clockwork or shopping hours has been supplemented and partially superseded via more individualized real time interactions, which are coordinated in wider frames and scopes. Insofar as these shifts occur for various cohorts, the individualized or group-specific awareness and submission to more general time constraints transform. This new fluidity of time perceptions gains importance beyond daily, weekly, or monthly horizons. Basing interaction on shared experiences and evidences from the past and considering them as stable patterns for at least a few personality or situational traits for a foreseeable future partially fades out. Yet some very strict and rigid short-, mid- and/or long-term coordination is mandatory for all instrumental activities and processes. This multitude of time horizons and degrees of awareness has added new threats to the reliability of interaction. Although the time measurement instruments have been integrated into many everyday devices, from cars to the kitchen, in personal computers and mobile smart phones (“smarties”), their very ubiquity does not automatically imply a corresponding submission. In contrast to traditional public clocks, which were clearly administered by church, state, school, or mass media authorities, the increase in the numbers and the miniaturization of clocks contributes to individual feelings of being a master of these tiny, individual times. Moreover, the divergence of individually perceivable small changes and societal long-term processes is usually re-confirmed by all kinds of up to the second news, entertainment, selfies, or likes. This multiplication of the timings of experiences and narratives disrupts previously taken for granted and shared common time horizons, linear histories, and standardized intervals. (4) Where do these perception shifts mainly occur? In contrast to Castells’ (1996–1998) theory of new flows of space and time, social co-orientation and

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coordination require reliable times and stable places commonly known and taken for granted. Such reliability and certainty are scarce in newly entered contact zones. But the need to tread on safe ground and find good grounds for actions is inevitable, day by day. Only on these ways can we stand together and understand. And when we fall, we must try to reach new ground. Yet, in contrast to such mundane perceptions, mediated ones introduce strange mixes of (distorting) imaginaries of safely flying and falling, of the immateriality of objects and of social conditions. “No sense of place” (Meyrowitz 1985) was already characteristic of para-social TV experiences, suspending immediate presences in “medium regions.” This transformation of the spatial and social dimension of human identities and actions has been enhanced and accelerated via network media, which involve deeper, interactively, for more time than TV, and also when one is mobile. In this sense, contemporary “virtual contact zones” only allude to previously taken for granted experiences. But corresponding and probably necessary illusions of safe and clearly defined territorial spaces continue. (5) How can the sequences of actions, interactions, and interdependencies in short-, mid-, and long-term social relations be experienced in typically repeatable and reliable ways under conditions of uncertainties of perceptions? And how are they presented in traditional print and broadcast in contrast to currently dominating web media? Usually, all kinds of media presentations, whether traditional oral narratives, stories in print, broadcast, on websites, or in social forums condense sequences of action and experience units to those which are considered as publicly narrative-worthy, gaining attention and appreciation. This perception mode has been accelerated via ever faster technical means of (distorted) perceptions, dis-/orientation, and mis-/communication. Therefore “how?” can no longer be answered clearly. Mass and network mediated multimodal narratives tremendously increase audio-visual and textual presentations of actor-event sequences, beyond press, radio, or TV accounts. But this multiplication of (the mediated presentations of) causal sequences, imagined connotations, or correlations implies a lack of transparency. The increase of complexities and decrease of accountability and clear reliability undermines traditional perceptions of “obvious” time sequences and corresponding patterns of perceptions. The shift from the Latin alphabet and Italian or German to Chinese signs and sound variations probably characterizes a particular challenge for migrants and limits contact opportunities already on a basic pre-verbal and the verbal level. (6) Why something occurs, is done, has developed are questions not always posed in broadcast programs or web streams. This traditional (journalistic) question has been partially replaced or pushed away by zapping, “like” or

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“dislike,” “forward” or not. The everyday perceptions of small group interactions in short phases of time, usually below a day’s focus, are only loosely connected to individual, group, or societal narratives of communities of belonging, of past sufferings and future goals. We-group identities share what is considered as common sense of how to perceive the world and oneself. They require terms of action sequences and social development patterns, which are structured by perceptions of driving forces and impediments. Yet, such forces are usually beyond individual and small group experiences as well as beyond mass and network mediated narratives. The latter thereby re-confirm short-term individualistic actor-event relations at the cost of more complex networks of (mis-) perceptions. Concluding my sketches of embodied habits and local contact zones and a red thread of (distorted) perceptions in virtual contact zones, it is finally time to illustrate a few contemporary and intentionally programmed contact zones.

Programmed Contact Zones Most social coordination and synchronization function below explicit awareness and rational choices and require co-orientations, which rely on similarly patterned perception modes and (descriptive or explanatory) shared narratives. These basic similarities are constituted by – The combination of a historically new but limited repertory of sources for perceptions, i.e., personal environments, mediated presentations and corresponding involvements – The common formats of situation-specific experiences and the presentations of narratives in print, broadcast, or web media – The more general presentation and interpretation modes of narratives with the components outlined above, i.e. along the narrative thread of who, what, when, where, how, and why. These continuous long-term characteristics are currently transformed via new combinations of traditional elements as well as newly available and widely disseminated channels, sites, and forums, their rhythms, formats, and scopes of communication. Yet, for most members of currently living generations, TV programs have gained a special importance for “obvious” distinctions of “nationality, ethnicity, class, gender.” I will outline only two issues, namely actors and topics and illustrate them by TV program centennial reviews in China and

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Germany. To think in terms of centennials is highlighted in the 13th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development of the PRC: To finish building a moderately prosperous society in all respects by the time the CPC celebrates its centenary in 2021 and to turn the People’s Republic of China into a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious by the time it celebrates its centenary in 2049. (Central Committee 2015, 13)

A few general embodied habits grounding TV and web experiences must be summarized first: Actors: Individual childhood creates basic (mis-)trust, re-presented and questioned time and again in all media formats and cultures. Due to this basic pattern, the dominant types and presentations of actors can be detected easily in various media and cultures. For example, actors are usually and obviously more active than their surrounding individuals, groups or crowds. Yet this pattern is already historically specific. In traditional societies, birth privileges of “aristocracies” provided them with “God-given” rights for initiating or impeding most actions or letting them be controlled – until further commands – via subservient executors. Nowadays ever more important activities do not require easily observable physical movements like corresponding gestures or mimics. To that degree, new mixtures of significant others, from personal encounters to mass and networked mediated ones, emerge, including mere screen presentations, formats, and algorithms. Topics: Similar perception shifts accelerate the topics of stories, i.e. the goals actors intend to reach, the problems they intend to understand or solve, the conventions or norms they observe. In contrast to the perception of (types of) individual actors, however, topics are significantly more varied and less observable or re-presentable. They do not resemble things but are perceivable only via imaginations. This perception mode is in principle also characteristic of the identification and classification of material objects: they are not perceived as such, but identified in terms of characteristic patterns like size, color or shape. They are categorized as dangerous or not, in one’s personal reach and as emitting sounds or smell. This human pattern recognition and stereotyping presupposes previous identification classes, which are taken for granted (until further doubts). All mass and network media have developed categories that orientate the readers, viewers, listeners, or users concerning the major topics and narrative patterns. The centennial reviews of CCTV and of the German (second) public service television station Das Zweite illustrate the “Key Audio-Visual Narratives,” which were consciously produced and programmed to enhance some shared national understanding of the most important events of the past century. Both reviews show clear separations of we-groups vs. the others, in national and class terms;

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worlds of dominant men, mainly soldiers and political leaders; wars and violence as major topics, history as a sequence of exceptional events. For China, they can be summarized as existential threats for the survival of the state in the first half of the 20th century, extreme violence and suffering, mutilations and rape, extinction of traditional populations or forced movements across thousands of miles. In contrast, the People’s Republic of China is shown as the rise of the whole nation, in particular economic growth, social and military safety due to the leadership of the Communist Party. These Key Audio-Visual Narratives can be summarized as: from wars to peace, from poverty to prosperity, from humiliation to pride, from a divided country to a united one. They not only portray gradual balances, but leap forward – until the big leap forward on the global scene: as the major competitor of the United States in the TV annual reviews of the beginning of the 21st century. Another long-term trend is the presentation of the relations between the rulers and the ruled as a harmonious one (see Schneider 2012; for a few particularities of Chinese social developments see already Weber 1920; more particularly Herrmann-Pillath 2016, Kramer 2011, Ludes 2016, Maddison 2008, Mennell 2003, Stebbins 2009, Vogel 2011, Wang 2008 and Zhang 2016). For Germany, the Key Audio-Visual Narratives are very different until the end of World War II: The First World War is shown as a seemingly inevitable sequence of steps towards an abyss, headed by hardly competent political rulers and military leaders, within the contexts of colonization, industrialization, and nationalistic illusions. Although Germany is portrayed as the most irresponsible and guilty nation of the first half of the 20th century, especially in terms of its political, military, and industrial leaders, the whole tone is more that of destiny and catastrophe than of controllable social processes. In contrast, the fifties to seventies of the Federal Republic of Germany are portrayed as economic miracle, at times threatened by wars in other parts of the world and fundamentally endangered in the Cuban missile crisis and after the building of the Berlin wall. The subtext of clear economic, cultural, political progress until the fall of the Berlin wall, November 9, 1989, is: The Cold War can always become hot and Germany would be in the center of tank battles and nuclear disaster. The fifties and sixties were narrated as mainly beyond German hegemonic illusions, yet in the sports and the economic spheres German world championships became possible. Concepts of “undeserved collective guilt” – in contrast to “deserved prosperity” – became signatures of the second half of the 20th century, silently preparing Germany for a more important role in the European Union and beyond. These widely disseminated narratives point beyond personal experiences and foreshadow the more intense and interactive mediated habits and distorted perceptions of internationalizing networking communication processes and

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interdependencies. In general, we can conclude here that since the 19th century, there has been a continuous though not steady increase (often in leaps or counter-waves) of – physical contacts across borders, which since the second half of the 20th century have been supplemented by – tele-audio-visual perceptions and correspondingly induced habits. Contemporary contact zones shift to increasingly international multimodal and interactive networks. The Five-Year Plan for 2016 to 2020 clearly propagates the following: We will strengthen the development of the mainstream media to improve its guidance on public communication and strengthen its credibility, influence, and communicative effectiveness. Based on advanced technology and content enrichment, we will work for indepth integration between traditional and emerging media in terms of content, channels, platforms, operations, and management while also establishing a new-style media communications system based on cooperation between content creators, media platforms, and end-user hardware providers, so as to create new forms of mainstream media and new mediums for communication. We will optimize the structure of the media and regulate communication. (Central Committee 2015, 193, my emphasis)

Nations still remain “desti-nations,” communities of experiences and “fate” across generations, destined to continue as economic, political and cultural survival units. Yet, there have been tremendous upheavals of state control or functions. (See, for example, for recent developments Hameiri, 2016 and Kennedy, 2017). Therefore, virtually interactive contact zones remain dominated by physical ones: Hard power prefigures soft power (Nye 2011), and personal contacts prepare more meaningful understandings than mere mediated approaches. This preponderance and mutual enhancement or impediment gain even more importance in the coming decades. As Sánchez (2017, 163f; 175) argues, [t]he zone is a rich, suggestive construct applied to a whole series of interacting spheres: political, military (combat or occupation zones), economic (free-trade), meteorological (climate zones), geographic (meridians, time zones) and anatomic (zones of the body). As a contingent phenomenon, the zone creates liminality on the threshold, thus combining separating and uniting forces. The border transforms into a transcultural contact zone. Transit zones at border crossings (customs, airports, airplanes, boats, etc.) stimulate transgressions . . . contact, to employ medical images, entails fear of infection, epidemics, and contamination by strangers (cf. the ostentatiously protective clothing of immigration officers). Hence, it can connote complication and lead to turbulence: the more contact, the more trouble. . . . the BRICS remain a huge, dizzying, and troubled contact zone in persistent negotiation, a BRICScape. (Sánchez 2017, 175)

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Acknowledgements: Personal discussions with the computer scientist Professor Otthein Herzog (who offered most valuable advice on an earlier draft), Bremen and Tongji, Shanghai, and the humanities scholar Professor Stefan Kramer, Cologne and Fudan, Shanghai, were helpful for my distant learning of contact zones in China. Section 3 is based on Ludes, 2018, ch. 3. The empirical data referred to in section 4 were analyzed as part of a DFG-project headed by Otthein Herzog and myself, from 2008 to 2012. For video examples see, http://memo. phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/index.php?id=23782, author’s Cologne Media Lecture, December 15th, 2015.

Bibliography Bernardini, Giovanni. “Principled Pragmatism: The Eastern Committee of German Economy and West German-Chinese relations during the early Cold War. 1949–1958.” Modern Asian Studies 51 (2017): 78–106. Castells, Manuel. The Information Age. Economy, Society and Culture. Three Volumes. Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 1996–98. Castells, Manuel. The Impact of the Internet on Society: A Global Perspective. In: Ch@nge. 19 Key Essays on How Internet is Changing our Lives. BBVA: Spain, 2013. Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. The 13th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China (2016–2020). Translated by Compilation and Translation Bureau: Beijing, 2015. Eckstein, Lars and Christoph Reinfandt. Luhmann in da Contact Zone. Towards a Postcolonial Critique of Sociological Systems Theory. University of Potsdam, 2017. http://nbnresolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-103298. Fuchs, Thomas. “Embodied knowledge – embodied memory.” In Analytic and Continental Philosophy. Methods and Perspectives. Proceedings of the 37th International Wittgenstein Symposium, edited by S. Rinofner-Kreidl and H. Wiltsche, 215–229. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. Hameiri, Shahar. “Rising powers and state transformation: The case of China.” European Journal of International Relations, 22(1) (2016), 72–98. Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten. “Fei Xiaotong’s Comparative Theory of Chinese Culture: Its Relevance for Contemporary Cross-disciplinary Research on Chinese Collectivism‘.” The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 34 (1) (2016): 25–57. Hong Yu: “Reading the 13th Five-Year Plan: Reflections on China’s ICT Policy.” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017): 1755–1774. Kennedy, Loraine. “State restructuring and emerging patterns of subnational policy-making and governance in China and India.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. 35, no 1 (2017): 6–24. Kramer, Stefan. “Substantiation of China’s Postnational Self-Construction: The Olympic Opening Ceremony in Beijing.” In Kramer, Stefan and Ludes, Peter (Eds.), Networks of Culture. Volume 2 of The World Language of Key Visuals. Munster: Lit, 2010, 225–236.

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Merle Schatz, Laura De Giorgi, and Peter Ludes

Conclusion In many societies, intercultural contacts have developed from local experiences to globalizing local contact zones. In a long-term perspective, we can also observe this for the case studies included in this book. Often, only a few individuals, sometimes with their families, were delegated from one state to another. They could come as missionaries, scholars, soldiers, merchants or diplomats. During the 19th century, merchants and soldiers from several European countries imposed their presence in major parts of China and as colonizers were apparently in a hegemonic position to shape the modalities of contact with the Chinese. Nevertheless, they often found themselves entrapped in a challenging communicative environment, which definitively influenced the contact zones produced by their arrival. In the course of the 20th century, these contact zones continued to change and expand both culturally, socially and geographically, reflecting the impact of globalizing economic and technological forces in China and in the world and affecting the modes and experiences of contact, often quite radically Though our anthology focuses on just some specific examples of the contact zones in China in the last two centuries, we have detected a few characteristic patterns of the development from individual via small group local contacts to globalizing virtual and programmed contact zones. From a general perspective, these examples suggest the necessity of illustrating and updating distinct development patterns of contact zones: Local experiences in their specific personal, institutional, political or economic Chinese contexts have shown that we are able to construct the detailed interrelatedness of (personal) encounters and an increasing urgency to inform Europeans about these encounters. For example, the experiences of Italian journalists, students and experts in Beijing, from 1953 to 1962, Italians in Soviet-sponsored international organizations in China and West-German – Chinese trade experiences characterize the shift from individual encounters to contacts organized by political and economic organizations. Moreover, these physical, territorial interactions have required, for example, dictionaries as well as treatises on various aspects of Chinese culture, science, politics, commerce, and media. Thereby, the close interplay of personal relations, language skills, specified expertise, and formal and informal rules can be exemplified. These personal relations, language skills and regional expertises are already the result of interest in the hosts and of increasing communication with them. Dictionaries, as much as ethnographies, such as those, for example, that John Eitel produced, teach us that despite all personal challenges there was a strong interest in informing fellow Europeans about Chinese culture, habits, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663426-013

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languages, political and economic systems and intentions. We learn by comparing our examples that contact is not simply happening, that it is a challenging personal as well as highly regulated process for all actors involved. Our historical examples highlight the long path from first personal encounters via slow learning processes to some shared assumptions in local contact zones. The local experiences of these foreigners in China in the 19th and early 20th century exemplify the often latent or tacit patterns of social encounters, individually or of groups, with certain cultural boundedness, stability and homogeneity. Our case studies show that local production and consumption, local social integration and the formation or maintenance of identities, of personal values and mentalities, hopes and anxieties always are part of the communication, interdependence, and interaction of these rather small groups of newcomers in very particular geographical regions of China. The institutional frame also influences their economic, social or political lives. The juxtaposition of these specific and limited experiences also suggests that home country habits endure in the new configurations and that boundaries often are built up, maintained and defended because they are most important for negotiating and positioning within new configurations. For example, only partially integrated as foreign parts of established institutions, companies or parties, Italian or German newcomers communicated from very particular perspectives; yet, they deemed their specific perspectives to allow the possibility for generalizable “knowledge” about “the Chinese” people, language, culture, or political intentions. Our examples show a few of the main difficulties of communication between foreigners with their special Chinese hosts, authorities, neighbors, or clients, within the given and changing institutional frames and expectations, and also the reactions of the Chinese they interacted with in the shared space they lived in. Depending on the particular situation and phase of development, distinct interdependencies, constraints and options, behavior standards and power relations become evident. We cannot look at contact zones as a stable phenomenon. Multilayered forms of interactions involve interests, experiences and presupposed “knowledge” of the people in contact, who often stick to their very own beliefs and thereby shape the proximity or mode of contacts. Inner boundaries and personal abilities always play a role on both sides. Contacting means distinguishing clearly one from another, intellectually and culturally distancing the individual and collective self from the other(s). Contact zones can be understood as spatial units, such as cities with multilingual neighborhoods and peculiar (hybrid) standards of behavior and habits. Piastra’s chapter about the Italian community in Shanghai, for example, confirms that cities’ peculiar “contact zones” provide foreign residents with a colonial

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environment, outlining on the one hand the tendency to self-isolation by small business owners and employees, in their daily routines and social lives, and on the other hand, the push, in some work contexts, to integration and closer relations with other national, regional, and social groupings. Similar experiences of Italian diplomats are discussed by Samarani. Quasi-integration and bridges between Eastern and Western elements are part of the communication process in the city context, as language and communication are crucial for getting in contact with each other at first hand. In this perspective Schatz’s and Wong Tsz’s papers show how new forms and spaces of contact can be valued as very specific contact zones. Moreover, contact and the communication of assumptions, topic preferences, the everyday advice of professional information passing between foreigners and their Chinese hosts also relied on the more generally disseminated information in the press. These mediated contact zones can re-shape and even endanger the prevailing and established power relations, the official and tacit norms. As Vinci argues, newspapers and periodicals were configured as hybrid products originating from Western journalism and nonetheless molded on the basis of needs and interests of the Chinese readers to provide an arena to the plurality of voices that started to emerge within Chinese public debates. Even in the colonial age, the concept of contact zones is dynamic. The historically distinct political, economic and cultural conditions for foreigners have shaped social experiences marked by highly asymmetrical relations of power (colonialism) and by boundaries which not necessarily indicated the end of the contact but rather a constituent part of it. Later, the conflictual interdependency of a common socialist ideology in the period of the Cold War co-existed with the enduring dominance of strict bureaucratic rules in the clear service of China’s national goals. Such bureaucratic rules governed not only the interactions and segregations of native citizens and potentially disturbing foreigners, but increasingly also the export of goods, services, and people to other parts of the world. International political developments influenced China’s relations with other countries and China also initiated more strategic, better planned and politically more organized international contacts within its country. This political and ideological shift continues to shape the cultural and institutional co-presence of groups from different cultures and languages on its territory: China’s very strong and authoritative and almost all-encompassing bureaucracy became the decisive actor in all areas. The foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 also changed the spatial dimensions of contact zones in China. Since Beijing again became the capital and the seat of political power for a violently centralizing state, it became the main gateway for contacts between the People’s Republic and the outer

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world. From 1949 on, Beijing hosted most of the foreigners who were allowed to live and work in China, and the places where several contact zones were institutionally created. The forms of contact were limited by the physical and institutional segregation between foreigners and local people, imposed by Chinese bureaucracy. Dissatisfaction with the limited scope and intensity of personal and social relations at work or in study contexts conditioned all experiences in sporadic “contact zones.” Along with local and national cultural norms and sanctions, ideologies and politics played a major role in establishing and maintaining boundaries within this socialist contact zone. Nevertheless, new types of contact zones clearly marked as “glocal” emerged in transnational cooperation, as Graziani’s and Bernardini’s chapters show: a complicated interplay between ideology and pragmatism, structural frameworks and human agency, making the inner dynamics unpredictable. Finally, the contacts with people from other countries in growing encounters between China and the world also influenced intellectual developments and disputes about modernization and the questioning of established traditional knowledge. Chinese values were questioned. Rommel’s study of Feng Qi elaborates this perspective of a clash of mentalities and discourse conventions, leading to a few constituencies in an era of competing worldviews: discursive spaces representing previously unquestioned definitions and delimitations of “self vs. other,” and the negotiating and reassembling of these fundamental categories. Such contact zones operate with an underlying notion of conflict or combat, as Trausch argues, as a product of political and cultural events and their mediated forms. Experiences, supposed knowledge, and rules for discourses form the discursive ‘battlefields’ of history, social memory, and representation. “Pratt defined cultures in contact by adapting the concept of ‘languages in contact’ to the heterogeneous genre of travel literature. Cultural contact zones are zones of cultural translation in (post)colonial space.” (Sánchez 2017, 164) Beyond the historical case studies offered in our anthology, it is worth noting how new and enduring risks of innovative and professionally organized contact zones characterize the Belt and Road Initiative, which can be thought of as a complex interplay of several multilayered contact zones between China, most of Asia, Europe, and Africa. These contacts necessitate clear rules for the number and constituencies of distinct groups of Chinese professionals sent abroad, like, for example, construction workers, engineers, transport, communication and security experts, making the world’s most all-encompassing contact zone throughout history, namely the belt and road. This new silk road not only builds new physical and dis-/information highways and sea routes, but also routers which organize work, family life, political rules, police, anti-terrorist and military security zones

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and cultural enclaves along these routes: for ever more people, over longer periods of time, and aimed across generations. Ever more transcultural and transnational contact zones emerge. Co-constituted, enabled and forcefully driven by dis-/information and ex-/communication technologies, more fluid and only partially territorialized contact zones are inhabited by local members, distinguished in terms and experiences of particular generations, ethnic groups, religions, social classes and strata or lifestyles. Our examples of contact zones show when, where, how, and why very particular individuals and small groups experienced their contacts in China and how they tried to make sense of them for a potentially broader public. In order to uncover some – often ambivalent and little formalized – patterns regarding the development of contact zones, scholars from the fields of Chinese studies, Contemporary History, Culture and Media Sciences, Geography, History of Modern and Contemporary China, and Sociology contributed to this book. Within Chinese Studies these detailed descriptions on the one hand can give us more insights into the history of foreigners’ contact situation in China, but might also offer new distinctions of different types and phases of those contacts with very specific and detailed examples.

Bibliography Pratt, Mary Louise. “Globalización, Desmodernización, y el Retorno de los Monstruos.” Revista de História 156 (2007), 13–29. Sánchez, Yvette. “The Contingency of Cultural Negotiations in Cross-Border Networks: The BRICS Case,” In Chaos in the Contact Zone: Unpredictability, Improvisation and the Struggle for Control in Cultural Encounters, edited by Stephanie Wodianka, Christoph Behrens, 159–77. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017.

Contributors Giovanni Bernardini, M.A. in Political Sciences (University of Florence 2001), Ph.D. in History of International Relations (University of Florence 2005) is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. Senior Research Fellow at the Ca’ Foscari University (2017–2018) and at the Italian-German Historical Institute in Trento (2011–2017). Adjunct Professor at the Universities of Bologna (2012–2017) and Trento (2012–2016). Visiting Fellow at the Center for American Studies, University of Heidelberg (2015). Sofia Graziani is Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Trento, Italy. She has worked extensively on the history of the Chinese Communist Youth League, China-Italy relations and China’s soft power with a focus on the role of volunteering in Chinese strategies in Africa. She co-edited the special issue (in Chinese) Essays from the International Symposium on ItalyEurope and China during the Cold War Years (in “Lengzhan guojishi yanjiu”, Cold War International History Studies, 19/20, Summer/Winter 2015, 1–118) and the volume Roads to Reconciliation: People’s Republic of China, Western Europe and Italy during the Cold War Period, Venezia, Edizioni Ca’Foscari, 2018. Laura De Giorgi, M.A. in Chinese Language and Literature (Ca’ Foscari University 1991), Ph. D. in History of Modern and Contemporary Asia and Africa (University of Cagliari 1997), Professor of Chinese Modern and Contemporary History, Department of Asian and North African Studies of Ca’ Foscari University. She has worked as a researcher in Chinese studies at Ca’ Foscari University since 2002. Peter Ludes, Dr. phil. (Trier 1978), Ph.D. (1983 Brandeis) and postdoctoral degree (Habilitation 1987 Wuppertal) in sociology; former Research Fellow, then Professor of Culture and Media Studies (Siegen University, 1987–2002) and Mass Communication (Jacobs University Bremen, 2002–2017). Since 2018, Visiting Professor for comparative cultures research in the Department of Chinese Studies of the University of Cologne. http://chinastudien.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/ 37210.html Stefano Piastra, M.A. in Cultural Heritage Management (2002), Specialization Degree in Didactics of Geography (2004), Ph.D. in Environmental Quality and Regional Development (University of Bologna, 2008), served as Associate Professor of Historical Geography at Fudan University, Shanghai, Institute of Historical Geography (2011–2014), and in the same period taught as Adjunct Professor at Tongji University, Shanghai, IESD-UNEP. Since 2015 he is based at the University of Bologna, Department of Education, as Associate Professor of Geography. Anja M. Rommel, M.A. in Chinese Studies, Media and Communications Studies and Business Studies at the University of Leipzig (2014), worked at the Department of East Asian studies at the University of Cologne within the frame of the DFG, German Research Foundation’s priority program “China’s Third Modernity: In-Between-Moments and the Apparatus Media.” In her PhD research, she focuses on the writings of the modern Chinese philosopher Feng Qi. Guido Samarani since 2000 is Professor of History and Institutions of Asia (China) at the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, where he had https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663426-014

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worked as a researcher and later as associate professor. He is the Director of the Marco Polo Centre for Global Europe-Asia Connections and Guest Professor at the Research Center for the Study of China’s Modern and Contemporary History, Zhejiang University, PRC. Merle Schatz, M.A. in Chinese Studies, Mongolian Studies and Japanese Studies (Goettingen University), PhD candidate and later associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale). Ph.D. in Linguistics and Cultural Studies of Central Asia: Mongolian Studies (Bonn University 2014). Since 2012 lecturer at Leipzig University, Department of Chinese Studies, and since 2014 also lecturer at the Department of East Asian Studies (Chinese Studies), University of Cologne. Tim Trausch, Dr. phil. (Cologne 2017), is a research associate at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Cologne. Since 2017 he is a research fellow in the DFG Priority Programme “Aesthetic Temporalities.” Wong Tsz is a musician, musicologist and linguist. He is a member of the Graduate School of Humanities Gottingen (GSGG) and associate of the Centre for Modern East Asian Studies (CEMEAS) Gottingen. His research foci include historical linguistics, translations, cultural studies, music and visual media. Renata Vinci, M.A. in Linguistics and Intercultural Communication (University for Foreigners of Siena 2011), Ph.D. in Asia and Africa Civilizations (Sapienza University of Rome 2017). Since 2017 she is a postdoctoral research fellow in Chinese Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Culture of Roma Tre University of Rome.