Politics of Chinese Language and Culture

The Art of Reading Dragons

Bob Hodge, Kam Louie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134691630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

An innovative text which adopts the tools of cultural studies to provide a fresh approach to the study of Chinese language, culture and society. The book tackles areas such as grammar, language, gender, popular culture, film and the Chinese diaspora and employs the concepts of social semiotics to extend the ideas of language and reading. Covering a range of cultural texts, it will help to break down the boundaries around the ideas and identities of East and West and provide a more relevant analysis of the Chinese and China.

1
How to Read Dragons

The Politics of Understanding Chinese Culture

This book represents the results of a dialogue between Chinese Studies and Cultural Studies to generate new meanings about the two disciplines. China today is vast, complex, dynamic and heterogeneous. Its boundaries, physical and cultural, are unstable, organised by categories that are collapsing into each other, reforming, reconfiguring themselves. Economic, technological and social developments that collectively have been called postmodernism have produced cultural forms in a global culture that is so different from the culture of late capitalism that some have claimed that the previous categories of analysis are no longer applicable. ‘China’ is eagerly leaping into this global world of postmodern culture, while still negotiating the claims of traditional Chinese values and a state socialist system. New technologies are being introduced which may have unpredictable effects on the central discursive forms of contemporary China.

Two hundred years ago Napoleon reputedly called China ‘the sleeping dragon’, in awe at its potential power. Now the ‘dragon’ is well and truly awake. The Asian region is politically and economically the most dynamic part of the contemporary world system. Within this region, China and Chinese culture and society cumulatively represent perhaps the greatest single challenge to Western assumptions of political, cultural and economic superiority. China contains approximately one quarter of the population of the world, and is an indispensable player in the new world system. Mainland China is the largest political unit that has ever existed, and its language and culture are an intrinsic part of that political achievement, one of the most amazing achievements of human culture. And then there is the ‘diaspora’, 55 million overseas Chinese, a larger population than Great Britain with a GNP of $450 billion in 1994, 25 per cent more than the whole of mainland China (Seagrave 1995: 15). Chinese language and culture reach beyond the mainland, and overseas Chinese communities are influential throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Across the boundaries in maps which define the political entity that is ‘China’, the diversity of life within China and the diaspora is changing so rapidly that it would be futile to try to fix its meaning definitively.

At the same time notions of Chineseness are rapidly becoming more fuzzy, as cultural and national identities are called into question. Allen Chun expressed one response in the title of a recent article, ‘Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity’ (1996: 111). The readers we seek, the ‘new generation’ we refer to, are as heterogeneous as this new China in background, identity and purpose. Some may have Chinese origins, recent or remote. Others may be non-Chinese but fascinated with China, committed to live and work in some way that involves close contact with Chinese people and Chinese culture. Many others may be positioned less clearly between China and the West, seeking precisely to extricate themselves from a conditioning that places such absolute boundaries around ideas and identities of ‘East’ and ‘West’, aspiring after more comprehensive forms of knowledge of themselves and their culture that will be more open and critical, less racist and Eurocentric.

In carrying out this task we draw on an exciting new set of approaches to the study of language and culture that have recently emerged in the West. Sometimes these are brought together and labelled ‘Cultural Studies’ but they also exist independently, as a tendency that has in various ways touched and transformed every discipline in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The ideas in this loose confederation of disciplines do not comprise a single new discipline which can be simply applied to this new set of problems, the ‘problem of China’, to produce a definitive new knowledge of China. On the contrary, the task of understanding China, ‘reading the dragon’, is a major challenge for all disciplinary knowledges in the West. The assumptions and ideas in current Western-style Cultural Studies are not exempt from this challenge. They too have a history, formed in an intellectual environment that has been Eurocentric in countless subtle ways. ‘Cultural Studies’ needs to be open to the challenge of understanding China if it is to understand itself.

Dragons at the Gate: Sinology and the Study of Chinese Culture

There is a new awareness of the importance of China in the West. The signs seem good: an end to the dark ages of Western ignorance of China, as rapid a change as anyone could hope for. Presidents and Prime Ministers make pilgrimages to Beijing, and China is respected as a major political and economic force, reported in all the main media. The study of Chinese in schools and universities has increased dramatically over the past two decades in the USA and Australia, though not so much in the UK, supported by governments who see the urgency of the need.

This book is written out of the conviction that all this is not nearly enough, in scale or quality. To understand this huge phenomenon is not something that can be handed over to a few specialists. It is everyone’s business. Our goal, Utopian though it may sound, is to make this kind of understanding, in different forms and at different levels, available to everyone in every contemporary English-speaking nation, as a basic right of citizenship. What is needed is not just a doubling or trebling of the numbers who study Chinese and China, but a quantum leap in numbers, a Gestalt shift in approach.

The core problem here is the continuing hold of traditional methods of studying China. There are more departments of Chinese or Asian Studies, with more undergraduates studying in them, more students in schools learning Chinese and other Asian languages, but the numbers involved are still totally inadequate, and the assumptions behind most of these programmes are profoundly limiting. They set up a curriculum that is often narrowly language or literature-based, demanding and exclusive. In the past, when this was the only way that Chinese could have any presence in universities, this form of curriculum was the best way of maintaining some level of interest in China and Chinese. Today, it is precisely these assumptions that are holding Chinese Studies back from being the broad, flexible and inclusive form of studies that would be even more viable and attractive if only it could find its place.

In the past, Western ‘experts’ on China were mainly Europeans trained in the ‘Sinological’ tradition. Sinology (from Sinae, the Chinese, logos, the study of) in the nineteenth century was an elitist pursuit, run by the few Westerners who understood enough of the language to seem qualified to pronounce with authority what the mysterious mind of the East really thought. Their assumptions and practices developed over a long period in specific political contexts, situated in host societies with long and deeply embedded histories of xenophobia and ignorance about all things Chinese. Governments in the West have continued in the main to establish and instruct Asian language departments with the express purpose of meeting ‘the demands of commerce and diplomacy’ (Barrett 1989: 119). As a result, academic Sinologists have often felt pressured to be more ‘practical’ while by inclination they prefer to be more esoterically scholarly. In reality, Sinologists were a very small minority of the population, and they were situated in environments which were not conducive to interacting with ordinary Chinese people on an everyday basis. Their understanding of the language and culture therefore tended to concentrate on the classical past. Although some of them, such as the first Oxford Professor of Chinese, James Legge, were excellent scholars, in practice they often had to rely on ethnic Chinese experts such as Wang Tao in their work.

Given their background, European Sinologists who dominated departments in Western universities between 1850 and 1980 tended to value above all linguistic competence in older forms of the language. They provided the kind of understanding of China that their societies and times demanded and felt was sufficient. They felt no need to make this knowledge widely available. In their view, only a small elite could or should know it, in order to carry the tradition to a new elite. All this historical and ideological baggage is unhelpful and possibly harmful to Chinese Studies outside China if it is to become a major presence in the curriculum, as part of a sea-change in Western societies. Old-style Chinese Studies multiplied by ten or a hundred would not meet the new needs, and old-style Chinese Studies would strongly resist any such expansion, on ideological and pedagogical grounds.

In contrast, we want knowledge about China to circulate as freely and widely as possible. The ‘China’ we seek to understand is not a single oppressive object out there, remote in time and space, protected by layer upon layer of specialist knowledge. We are interested in how meanings are generated in and about China in many sites, functioning as part of its language and culture in the broadest sense. We try to insert these processes in a wider politics as the key to their understanding, the reason for their importance.

To illustrate what is at stake for a politics and practice of reading in our strategy for ‘reading dragons’, we will contrast two ways of reading: ‘Sinological’ and ‘cultural studies’. First, there is a warning built into the inverted commas around the two approaches. Tidy-minded readers might want us to define what we mean by these two terms before we then go on to apply them. We want to work in the other direction, starting with definitions which are fuzzy and inclusive but which allow the exploration of concrete instances to begin, allowing the full complexity and heterogeneity of the terms to emerge slowly as the work continues.

We begin by looking at two images of dragons. The first is embroidered on a silk robe from the Qing dynasty of the nineteenth century, currently displayed in the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Arts in Durham, England. The second comes from a mug, made in China and bought in Sydney, Australia, for $A2.50 in 1993.

The first kind of image is at home in museums or the private collections of rich connoisseurs: precious, rare, exotic, hand-made in a foreign court over 100 years ago, apparently untouched by the taint of modern life or Western influence. From a Sinological point of view, this object can be seen to carry the mysterious essence of the real China; it is beautiful in itself and yet quaint and mysterious to ignorant Westerners, in need of expert (Sinological) interpretation. The circle in the centre, for instance, is the disk traditionally associated with dragons. Scholars dispute whether it represents a pearl, the moon, the earth or cosmos, but the masses would hardly know or bother. This dragon has five claws, again a coded meaning, signifying that it is an imperial dragon (and hence, from this point of view, more truly Chinese). Commoners’ dragons had only four claws. The pleasure of this kind of textual interpretation is limited to scholars, who can have the vicarious pleasure of living in an exotic world of emperors and their courts, in which the centre was privileged, and its domination over all systems of meaning was complete. Nostalgia for the imperial regime is part of the meaning that Sinologists clung to and which they sought to preserve, under the pretext that they were preserving the essence of China itself.

In contrast, the image reproduced on the mug is mass-produced, cheap, designed as much for export as for home consumption, a familiar and functional shape for anyone who buys it in the West. At the time of writing it is difficult to estimate how many mugs of tea or coffee this one has contained, on how many pleasurable occasions, embedded in the informal practices and routines of everyday life. Of course, a Sinologist might say, this mug tells us less than nothing about China, now or in the past.

Figure1.1 Dragon embroidered on a silk robe from the Qing dynasty, currently displayed in the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Arts in Durham, England

But the mug’s design draws as much on tradition as the embroidered dragon. There is no easily available ‘authentic version’ to demonstrate the superiority of the imperial design. Attentive eyes can see the energy of the two dragons on the mug, the clouds they fly amongst and the waves they hover above. The disc is easier to identify than the one in the embroidery, with its smiling face on a shape like a new moon, trailing strange clouds. This mug represents two dragons, not one as on the robe. This is a common icono-graphical form with dragons, where two of them play with or fight over the ‘pearl’, like yin and yang in the dualist universe of traditional China. The Qing dynasty did not invent the meaning of dragons, they appropriated a meaning whose origins are lost in the deep past, part of a common heritage of Chinese people.

All this meaning is a bonus. At $A2.50 this mug was bargain enough. It and many others like it have entered houses and homes in Western countries, bearing an unobtrusive, rich set of meanings that are not kept in a few museums, visited only by dedicated visitors or school parties, but freely circulating and in general use. In order to understand either image, it’s true, you need background, both specific and generic. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) found that people need a kind of ‘cultural capital’, which he argued is distributed along class lines, in order to be able to appreciate and enjoy museums. The same is true for Chinese mugs. This ‘capital’ is not a set of specific facts about China or dragons, but a generic orientation, which can be developed equally well with everyday and accessible objects. Not every school class can go to Durham’s Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art, but all children can take a closer look at mugs and other things that they have bought cheaply in local markets, or watch a Chinese New Year parade. China has left the museums of the West and taken to the market place.

Figure1.2 Mug costing $A2.50, made in China, illustrated with two dragons playing with ‘dragon pearl’

Not every commodity from China bears such traces of Chineseness, but global trade has made China part of everyday life and culture in the West. Western consumer goods have similarly found a place in Chinese life. This mug is a signifier of that new global reality, as well as a bearer of signs of Chinese culture and tradition. Neither meaning is closed or unambiguous, or politically innocent. Both have a latent politics. What we call the Sinological reading of the mug despises the contemporary, the commercial, defending the interests of a now irrelevant empire, thereby sustaining the status of their modern Western supporters. It is a politics of cultural separatism. A pluralistic reading such as we have sketched is politically inclusive. It situates the reading of the object in the life of the two societies and in their interaction. The openness of the reading it encourages is an invitation to cross-cultural collaboration, a move towards mutual understanding.

The Semiotics of Chinese Culture

Perhaps the single most powerful and enabling assumption in the various developments that make up the field of Cultural Studies is its redefinition of ‘language’, making it an object so comprehensive that it comes to cover almost the same ground as culture itself. Language of course has always been recognised as important in understanding different cultures, but in the ‘linguistic turn’ that Cultural Studies has taken, it becomes possible to say that culture itself is a language or set of languages, made up of different kinds of text, circulating under various constraints.

Such a claim is only credible because of the redefinition of language that goes under the name of semiotics, particularly in the form of semiotics known as social semiotics. Social semiotics as developed in Hodge and Kress (1988), provides the basic framework for the rest of this book, so we will take some time here to explain some of its key terms and principles. But readers should not suppose that this is a new and separate sub-discipline within Cultural Studies. It’s more like a particular route through the same territory, with well-marked roads leading off it to other sites of interest in the same broad domain. It has particular advantages for our purposes in this book, which is concerned with the interrelations of Chinese language, culture and politics. Social semiotics extends the concept of language further than most other approaches in Cultural Studies, and provides powerful methods of analysing details of language and texts, including aspects of grammar and syntax, which immediately present as problems to non-Chinese in their first encounter with the language and culture.

Semiotics itself is basically a simple concept. It refers to the study of all sign systems, all the media and means by which humans and other animals communicate or have communicated with each other. Verbal languages like English or Chinese are semiotic systems that have been extensively studied. Other sign systems that are crucial in social life have not been so systematically studied, although members of a culture need to acquire the full range of sign systems in order to cope with the various demands made on them by others. We call all these systems ‘languages’, which together make up the repertoire of ways by which people make sense of themselves and the actions and objects they are immersed in: their culture.

There is one seemingly large problem with this approach: the word ‘language’ itself This is part of the English language, referring basically to the spoken and written forms. We don’t want to rewrite English, even if we could. So we continue to use the word in its usual sense, as well as in its extended semiotic sense. We write of ‘language and culture’, which ought to be nonsense for us, if language and culture cover more or less the same territory. But we do not see this as a problem in practice. The context makes it clear how we are using the word. It is only a problem in theory, in a theory we don’t agree with, which aims at a purity of meaning which is not the normal condition of language.

In spite of its obviousness, the core idea of semiotics as applied to Western culture initially met with resistance in Western academic circles. The Western curriculum in the humanities and social sciences is highly word-centred. Most academics are trained as experts in words and the use of verbal resources. Relatively small departments of art history existed for the study of visual texts, and the mass media were difficult to ignore completely, but basically the experts on the word who dominated the curriculum felt no need to go outside verbal language. Semiotics was a challenge to the basis of their expertise.

Chinese culture challenges these assumptions. Even classical Sinology is more semiotic than Western disciplines because Chinese culture is more overtly semiotic than the Western system of codes. Painting and writing are interrelated in Chinese culture. The word for ‘write’

(xie), for instance, can also mean ‘to paint’; ‘painting from life’ is xiesheng

and ‘freehand brushwork in painting’ is xieyi

. Texts combine words and pictures more typically than is the case in Western culture. Thus, Chinese paintings inevitably incorporate the artists’ calligraphy as part of the creative process. Chinese culture is strongly visual and semiotically promiscuous, and the study of Chinese needs to be semiotically broader than the study of European languages has been.

Our example of the two dragons illustrates something of the scope of social semiotics. A mug and a robe can be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Series editor’s foreword
• Preface
• 1. How to Read Dragons: the politics of understanding Chinese culture
• 2. Reading style: interacting the Chinese way
• 3. Writing and the ideological machine: Chinese characters and the construction of gender
• 4. Grammar as ideology: critical linguistics and the politics of syntax
• 5. Living with double-think: ambiguity in discourse and grammar
• 6. The cult of the hero: masculinity and popular culture
• 7. Breaking the square: film and representations of China
• Bibliography
• Index