Encountering China S Past

In Michael Sandel the Chinese have found a guide through the ethical dilemmas created by their swift embrace of a market economy—one whose communitarian ideas resonate with China’s own rich, ancient philosophical traditions. This volume explores the connections and tensions revealed in this unlikely episode of Chinese engagement with the West.

This book features articles contributed by leading scholars and scholar-translators in Translation Studies and Chinese Studies from around the world. Written in English, the articles examine the translation of classical Chinese literature, from classics to poetry, from drama to fiction, into a range of Asian and European languages including Japanese, English, French, Czech, and Danish. The collection therefore provides a platform for readers to make comparative and critical readings of scholarship across languages, cultures, disciplines, and genres. With its integration of textual and paratextual materials, this collection of essays is of potential interest to not only academics in the area of Translation Studies, Chinese Studies, Literary Studies and Intercultural Communications, but it may also appeal to communities outside the academia who simply enjoy reading about literature.

The text studies how various Western, Japanese, and Chinese businesses struggled with the persistent dilemma in China of how to retain control over corporate hierachies while adapting to dramatic changes in Chinese society, politics and foreign affairs from 1880-1937.

China is in the midst of unprecedented economic and cultural growth. In the last decade alone, China joined the World Trade Organization, hosted the 2008 Olympics and experienced a remarkable, record-high increase in its foreign currency reserves. As these changes unfold, frequency of contact between the Chinese and Westerners is dramatically increasing in the office, the classroom and the home. With thought-provoking glimpses into history and tradition, Encountering the Chinese provides fundamental information on Chinese cultural norms and values, giving clear context for contemporary social standards. Readers will learn the etiquette necessary to build successful personal and professional relationships with the Chinese both inside and outside the People's Republic of China. This revised edition of Encountering the Chinese also explains how Chinese values are changing rapidly-and why it is more important than ever to keep up. For instance, compliments, once declined out of modesty, are now widely accepted in coastal cities; and some terms of address that were proper to use only a decade ago have grown offensive. Encountering the Chinese provides invaluable insight into the diverse and changing Chinese culture.

This unique book is the first to bring together a group of leading China experts to reflect on their cultural and social encounters while travelling and living in the PRC. Covering nearly a half-century, these stories open a vivid window on a rapidly evolving country and on the zigzag learning curve of the China trippers themselves.

In contrast to the economic and cultural dominance by the south and the east coast over the past several centuries, influence in China in the early Middle Ages was centered in the north and featured a significantly multicultural society. Many events that were profoundly formative for the future of East Asian civilization occurred during this period, although much of this multiculturalism has long been obscured due to the Confucian monopoly of written records. Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages endeavors to expose a number of long-hidden non-Sinitic characteristics and manifestations of heritage, some lasting to this very day. Sanping Chen investigates several foundational aspects of Chinese culture during this period, including the legendary unicorn and the fabled heroine Mulan, to determine the origin and development of the lore. His meticulous research yields surprising results. For instance, he finds that the character Mulan is not of Chinese origin and that Central Asian influences are to be found in language, religion, governance, and other fundamental characteristics of Chinese culture. As Victor Mair writes in the Foreword, "While not everyone will acquiesce in the entirety of Dr. Chen's findings, no reputable scholar can afford to ignore them with impunity." These "foreign"-origin elements were largely the legacy of the Tuoba, whose descendants in fact dominated China's political and cultural stage for nearly a millennium. Long before the Mongols, the Tuoba set a precedent for "using the civilized to rule the civilized" by attracting a large number of sedentary Central Asians to East Asia. This not only added a strong pre-Islamic Iranian layer to the contemporary Sinitic culture but also commenced China's golden age under the cosmopolitan Tang dynasty, whose nominally "Chinese" ruling house is revealed by Chen to be the biological and cultural heir of the Tuoba.

Encountering China addresses the responses of early modern travelers to China who, awed by the wealth and sophistication of the society they encountered, attempted primarily to build bridges, to explore similarities, and to emulate the Chinese, though they were also critical of some local traditions and practices. Contributors engage critically with travelogues, treating them not just as occasional sources of historical information but as primary, literary texts deeply revelatory of the world they describe. Contributors reach back to the earliest European writings available on China in an effort to broaden and nuance our understanding of European contact with the Middle Kingdom in the early modern period. While the primary focus of these essays is the external gaze – European sources about China – contributors also tease out aspects of the Chinese world-view of the time, thus generating a conversation between Chinese literary and historical texts and European ones.

A study of traditional and modernist attitudes toward architecture in China from the 1840s to the present. Built around snatches of discussion overheard in a Beijing design studio, this book explores attitudes toward architecture in China since the opening of the Treaty Ports in the 1840s. Central to the discussion are the concepts of ti and yong, or "essence" and "form," Chinese characters that are used to define the proper arrangement of what should be considered modern and essentially Chinese. Ti and yong have gone through various transformations--for example, from "Chinese learning for essential principles and Western learning for practical application" to "socialist essence and cultural form" and an almost complete reversal to "modern essence and Chinese form." The book opens with a discussion of cultural developments in China in response to the forced opening to the West in the mid-nineteenth century, efforts to reform the Qing dynasty, and the Nationalist and Communist regimes. It then considers the return of overseas-educated Chinese architects and foreign influences on Chinese architecture, four architectural orientations toward tradition and modernity in the 1920s and 1930s, and the controversy over the use of "big roofs" and other sinicizing aspects of Chinese architecture in the 1950s. The book then moves to the hard economic conditions of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, when architecture was almost abandoned, and the beginning of reform and opening up to the outside world in the late 1970s and 1980s. Finally, it looks at the present socialist market economy and Chinese architecture during the still incomplete process of modernization. It closes with a prognosis for the future.