vol 12 | winter 2017

ORIENTATIONS

VOLUME 12 2016 - 2017

the mcgill east asian studies student journal

Editor-In-Chief MUHAN ZHANG

Editorial Board JEAN-FÉLIX CARON ANNELIESE KLUENDER NORA MURPHY GABRIELLE SAMRA CAROLINE WESLEY EDEL YANG LAUREN GRACE ZEMEL

Design TIANRU CHEN

Orientations is the East Asian Studies Student Journal of McGill University. As a publication run by students for students, we seek to showcase the diverse array of outstanding academic and creative works from both the undergraduate and graduate student community on topics related to East Asia.

Due to the inter-disciplinary nature of East Asian Studies, we accept and publish works from all departments, in both English and French.

Front cover, inside front and back cover images courtesy of Jules Tomi.

Funding for this journal has been generously provided by the AUS Journal Fund and the Dean of Arts Development Fund.

With special thanks to the East Asian Studies Student Association and the Department of East Asian Studies.

ISSN: 2369-8853

CONTENTS

Note to Reader 9

The Stele of King Gwanggaet’o

Context and Implications in Present Day Scholarship Hyewon Jung 10

Pink Embers to Pink Ashes

Revolution as the End of the Homosexual Tradition in China Julian Binder 22

Confucius in the Dutch East Indies

Confucianism in the Chinese Diaspora of the Dutch East Indies in 1900s-10s Ashley Kong 28

Imagining a Modern Palace

Chinese Nationalism and the National Palace Museum in Taiwan Erin Sobat 38

Seoul C’est Loin Jules Tomi 46

Chungking Express, a Search for Lost Time Ruofan Cui 62

Authenticity and Action

Searching for a New Korea in Mnet’s ‘Show Me The Money’ Andrea Chu. 66

Domestic Workers Organize

The Case of Hong Kong and Canada’s Filipino Domestic Workers’ NGOs Marko de Guzman.

74

Modernity at Any Cost

Mapping the Effects of China’s One-Child Policy on Women in the Context of the Urban-Rural Divide Ryan Shah.

88

A Bidirectional Transfer of Learning Between Tonal Languages and Music: An Analysis Marianne Ruelle.

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Recollections of an Editorial Diaspora

A History of Orientations and McGill East Asian Studies Edel Yang.

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Contributors

116

Editorial Board

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NOTE TO READER Dear Reader, If you have picked up this volume, you and I most likely have in common an affiliation – however tenuous or tortured, superficial or passionate – with the ‘geographical and textual site called East Asia’. Having, myself, a rather passionately torturous relation to many aspects of East Asia, I have borrowed this particular qualification from the editor’s note of the first issue of Orientations, published in 1994-1995.

A highly interdisciplinary and eclectic publication from its inception, Orientations has always showcased a wide range of student research in the field of East Asian studies. But perhaps less widely known is how Orientations has also historically been a vibrant site for multi-medic negotiations of personal identity vis-à-vis the east. This year, through our project to re-discover volumes and voices of Orientations in semesters past, I have encountered so many experiences I can recognize as my own and those of my friends, from tales of exploring diasporic Asian identity to summer language exchanges to the discovery of art, music, literature, and films high or low, old and new. It is quite palpable that – as I recently wrote to a friend and fellow editor – “these are our people.”

While Orientations has in recent years focused primarily on publishing academic works, my friends in the EAS and Asian diasporic community at McGill and in Montreal continue to create wonderful, illuminating, and absurd works in such groups and publications as re:asian, Atelier Celadon, the Daily, the Tribune, and more. Regardless of how our own little publication evolves, the wonderful creativity and diversity of Orientations’ contributors and editors has endured, and I am excited for what’s to come.

Muhan Zhang Editor-in-Chief

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THE STELE OF KING GWANGGAET’O Context and Implications in Present Day Scholarship

Hyewon Jung

During the time of King Gwanggaet’o (r. 391 – 412 CE) Koguryo (37 BCE – 668 CE), a militarily oriented kingdom during Korea’s Three Kingdoms period, expanded tremendously.1 According to some sources, the expansion resulted in the conquest of 64 fortresses and 1400 villages, and according to other sources, the number of conquered territory included as many as 128 fortresses, 3 counties and 2800 villages.2 Although the two statistics are debated, scholars agree that King Gwanggaet’o’s reign saw a great and rapid expansion of Koguryo.

This expansion included not only the encroachment into the Korean peninsula, but also ventures towards the north in the famous capture of the Liaodong region from the Later Yan dynasty.

The time of the reign of King Gwanggaet’o was known in China as the 五胡十六國時 代, or the Northern and Southern Dynasties period, in English. The constant conflict between kingdoms in mainland China allowed Koguryo to take advantage of the situation and expand towards the north and west. The political and military conflict between the Later Yan and the Northern Wei dynasties, in particular, allowed Koguryo to annex the Liaodong region without violent warfare as a strategic choice by the Later Yan dynasty.

Keeping in mind these historical contexts within Northern China and with reference to the Stele of King Gwanggaet’o, currently situated in Northern China, this paper will explore the following: The historical background of the

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Stele of King Gwanggaet’o; The relationship Koguryo had with Later Yan and Northern Wei dynasties; The possible reason for the territorial expansion towards the north and the importance of Liaodong; and finally, The importance of the stele in the contemporary historical studies of Japanese, Chinese and Korean geopolitical relations.

The Stele of King Gwanggaet’o King Gwanggaet’o, posthumously named “The Very Greatest King, Broad Expander of Territory, Bringer of Peace and Security, buried in Gukgangsang” or Gukgangsang Gwanggaet’ogyeong p’yongan hot’ae-wang (國岡 上廣開土境平安好太王)3 who ruled Koguryo from 391 to 412 CE, was the nineteenth king of Koguryo.4 The Stele of King Gwanggaet’o was erected two years after King Gwanggaet’o’s death in 414 CE by his son, King Jangsu, to commemorate his father’s achievements in the form of a large tombstone.5 The stele was situated in the capital city of Koguryo, near the modern-day Ji’an district in Jilin province, China.6 An exact replica of the stele also exists in the War Memorial in modern-day Seoul (see appendix A).

The width of the Stele varies between 1.35 to 2 meters on each side, and with a height of 6.39 meters and is the largest stele in Korean history. It has the unique Koguryo stele style of not having a head stone or gae-seok (蓋石) (see Appendix B).7 It has 44 lines of 1802

characters, divided into 3 sections: the first section contains the foundation myth of Koguryo, the introduction of King Gwanggaet’o’s life, and the reason for erecting the stele; the second section describes the conquests of King Gwanggaet’o, and; the third section records the information of the origins of the gravekeepers of the tomb, as they were relocated to the proximity of the tomb from different parts of the kingdom to form a village that would tend the tomb.8 Although originally located in the ancient capital of Koguryo, the stele was forgotten and lost in history after the fall of Koguryo.

According to Young-Soo Suh, the stele that had once represented Koguryo’s prosperity and power was forgotten until it was rediscovered in a chance find by farmers in the late nineteenth century. Several versions of the rubbing of the stele, made since its rediscovery, now exist; however many are subject to controversy and misinterpretation due to the damages done to the stele itself. First of all, the stele has been damaged many times by fire since its rediscovery in the nineteenth century.9 The stele has also been damaged as a result of having been covered in plaster to create copies. These damages and other methods used to make copies, including tracing and rubbing, along with the incomplete nature of most rubbings have led to many controversies and discrepancies.10 Specifically, with a large number of the characters on the stele being illegible, as the full text of the stele is very rare, resulting in much controversy and debate in interpreting various parts of the stele. The controversies in regards to these interpretations will be examined in greater detail in the final section of this paper.

King Gwanggaet’o, was a conqueror and, due to the massive expansion, was bestowed the title “Gwanggaet’o the Great”, or 광개토 대왕 (廣開土大王) by his successors in Korea.

The importance of the Gwanggaet’o conquests can be seen in the devotion of the second section of the stele to the wars and conquests of King Gwanggaet’o. King Gwanggaet’o went to war seven times in his life, in the years 5, 6, 8, 10, 14, 17, and 20 of Yongnak11 (394, 396, 398, 400, 404, 407, 410 CE respectively)

and the stele describes in detail the areas conquered (see appendix C).12 As previously mentioned, the stele tells of the regions conquered

by King Gwanggaet’o is massive, taking into account areas taken not only in the expansion to the north, but also towards the south into the Korean peninsula. The stele further states that this massive conquest was the pride of the Koguryo people as it represented their military might, with his stele serving as a symbol of Koguryo’s national influence.13 The Strategic Region of Liaodong With the expansion of Koguryo during the rule of King Gwanggaet’o, the region of Liaodong is mentioned constantly. To the Kingdom of Koguryo, Liaodong region was an area of great importance in terms of military strategically advantageous region as well as being source of iron, a crucial resource to fabricate weaponry.

Geographically, Liaodong is, as the name, which literally translates to “east of Liao”, suggests, on the east side of the Liao River.

Strategically, by taking this plain, Koguryo would have the natural barrier that is the Liao river to protect itself from foreign invasions.

The natural barrier of the Liao River would defend from foreign invasions as the first line of defense against invaders, with the Amnok River as a second line (see appendix D), thus protecting the Korean peninsula in a double guarded formation.

In terms of resources, Liaodong region was rich in iron. According to Jung-Hoon Shin, Koguryo needed large producers of iron for weaponry in order to prepare its armies in defense against nomadic tribes of Manchuria.14 Koguryo was also in constant battle, either in conquest, protecting borders, or maintaining order within the Korean peninsula by defending Silla against the Wa. As Patricia Ebrey and Anne Walthall explain, Koguryo was founded by the warrior class elites, as were the other kingdoms within the Korean peninsula, and it was imperative for the kingdom to prepare itself for any sudden attack from its enemies.

The Liaodong region provided sufficient

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resources for arms to prepare Koguryo in terms of weaponry. Due to its strategic geographical position and resource rich nature, the Liaodong region was a constant venue of territorial struggle between Chinese and Korean states.

Koguryo’s relations with neighboring states Koguryo at the time of King Gwanggaet’o’s reign was neighbour to three ethnically Steppeoriginating states, which included the Later Yan dynasty (384-409 CE), Northern Wei dynasty (386-534 CE), and Northern Yan dynasty (409-436 CE). King Gwanggaeto’s rapid conquest took place between 394 and 410 CE towards the end of the Later Yan dynasty and the founding of the Northern Yan dynasty.

Since the majority of the conquests described in the stele took place along the borders between Koguryo and the Later Yan dynasty, it is crucial to examine the circumstances between the Koguryo and its neighbours during this period.

Later Yan dynasty was found by Murong Chui, who was a member of the original Murong ruling family of the Former Yan dynasty and established the Later Yan dynasty as the former’s successor state, when he proclaimed himself as emperor in 386 CE.15 The Wei dynasty, meanwhile, was founded by another branch of the Tuoba clan, succeeding the former Dai dynasty, in the same year as the founding of the Later Yan dynasty.16 This period of Chinese history is known to experience rapid rising and falling of different states in different regions of China, as well as constant shifts in the borders due to continuous warfare.

With the hostility from neighbouring states and the instability of maintaining the new dynasty, the two dynasties were “partners rather than rivals”. Prior to 391 CE and the rule of King Gwanggaet’o, Wei dynasty with the support of the Later Yan managed to conquer local tribes and territory and expand its territory even farther into mainland China.17 However, this mutually beneficial cooperation did not last long: in 391 CE when the Wei dynasty refused to pay tributes to the Later Yan dynasty the hostility between the two dynasties began, and from 394 CE, the

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Wei Tuoba decided to expand towards the Northern China region by attacking the Later Yan dynasty.18 The conflict between the Wei and Later Yan dynasties from 394 CE onward allowed Koguryo to enjoy a border region that was less hostile, as strategically, it would be advantageous to focus the military on one side of the border than to face warfare on both sides with two different enemies. According to Shin Jung-Hoon, Koguryo did not have possession of the Liaodong region in 395 CE; however, it did enjoy free passage into Liaodong and nearby regions at the time. At the same time as Koguryo was freely accessing Liaodong, the Later Yan dynasty lost a large battle against the Wei dynasty in 395 CE as recorded in the Wei Shu (魏書, The Book of Wei; see appendix D).

The reign of King Gwanggaet’o, which began in 391 CE, thus coincided with continuous battles between the Wei and Later Yan dynasties. Despite the free passage it enjoyed near the border with the Later Yan dynasty, due to Koguyo’s large size and Later Yan’s decision to mobilize its military efforts towards the conflict against the Northern Wei, Koguryo did not attack the Later Yan dynasty in 395 CE. The reason for the lack of military aggression towards Later Yan is debated among scholars.

One theory is that King Gwanggaet’o strategically attacked Paekche first, the weaker of its bordering neighbours within the Korean peninsula.19 Another theory is that Later Yan did not itself have complete control of the Liaodong region at the time due, as stated above, to its lack of military control of the region, and therefore there was no need for the Koguryo army to involve itself in a battle to take over Liaodong.20 Between the two theories, the first theory seems more logical: there have been no records of the Koguryo forces attacking Later Yan dynasty whereas there are many records of its battle with Paekche.21 Additionally, the fault with the second theory is that it does not concur with Later Yan’s subsequent concession of the Liaodong region to King Gwanggaet’o.

In the year 396 CE, King Gwanggaet’o was crowned Yodong Daebang I-gukwang (遼東帶 方二國王), the king of Liaodong region by the Later Yan dynasty.22 This crowning of the King

Gwanggaet’o as the ruler of Liaodong region may be interpreted in the light of two major elements of local relations: Firstly, the Later Yan dynasty was already at war with the Northern Wei dynasty, and so by bestowing this region and title to the King of Koguryo, the Later Yan dynasty was able to strategically prevent a war on two fronts. Secondly, Koguryo also did not need to involve itself in a war of two fronts, as the peaceful transition of the Liaodong region would have allowed Koguryo to focus mainly on its warfare against Paekche.

As the conflict between the Later Yan dynasty and Northern Wei dynasty carried onward, King Gwanggaet’o continued his conquest towards the north into modern-day Manchuria and Russian coast, as well as towards the south into the Korean peninsula against Silla and Paekche.23 As Bok describes, the total area in which King Gwanggaet’o conquered in his reign is calculated to be 128 fortresses, 3 counties and 2800 villages (see Appendix E).

This rapid expansion may have been possible, as in the case of Liaodong, because Later Yan dynasty was preoccupied with battles against the Northern Wei dynasty.

The relationship between Later Yan dynasty and Koguryo in terms of crowning and bestowing the King of Koguryo the title of King of Liaodong raises few questions. If such a relationship of hierarchical order existed between these two states, why would the stele of King Gwanggaet’o have been such a great symbol of national pride to the people of Koguryo?

Furthermore, if an adversarial relationship existed between their borders, why would King Gwanggaet’o have been called the Great by his Koguryo successors? To answer these questions, further analysis of the reign of King Gwanggaet’o is necessary.

As explained previously, King Gwanggaet’o reigned during the time of turmoil in mainland China. The Northern dynasties were divided and constantly in battle over territory. It was uncommon to witness a lasting dynasty with states being created, destroyed, and recreated by different branches of the various nomadic tribes. Military conflicts took place not only in mainland China, but also within the Korean

peninsula, as the period of the Three Kingdoms of Koguryo, Silla and Paekche resulted in constant warfare within the peninsula. One famous example of the conflict would be when Paekche sided with the Wa (a proto-Japanese state whose exact identity is still debated in modern-day scholarship), and attacked Silla, after which Koguryo helped to defend Silla against the military threat in 391 CE.24 While, as Takashi Hatada argues, the invasion of Silla was a case of Paekche violating international order, Koguryo, by protecting Silla, established its presence as a leading power within the peninsula.

The purpose of the stele was to record the achievements of King Gwanggaet’o, and to use as a medium of propaganda of the regime’s influence and power and therefore the records specifying the regions conquered would have been a crucial testimony to the might of King Gwanggaet’o. By positioning Koguryo as the leading power within the Korean peninsula while also mobilizing a massive expansion campaign, King Gwangget’o established Koguryo as the leading power within the Korean peninsula through military power and influence.

Outside the Korean peninsula, Koguryo’s relationship with the Later Yan dynasty shifted.

King Gwanggaet’o conquered, bit by bit, the Later Yan dynasty’s territory, eventually threatening its capital. In 406 CE, King Gwanggaet’o established a peace treaty with the Later Yan dynasty, in which Koguryo would supply military aid to the Later Yan dynasty to support its war against the Northern Wei dynasty in return for an end to conflicts with the Later Yan at the border. This was also the period that King Gwanggaet’o fully conquered the Liaodong region by militarily eliminating any of the Later Yan dynasty’s control of the region.25 The implications of these crucial changes in local relations are as follows. With the rapid expansion of Koguryo territory by this time and Later Yan dynasty’s ongoing battles against the Northern Wei dynasty, the Later Yan dynasty provided political legitimacy to Koguryo within the Liaodong region through the act of crowning King Gwanggaet’o king of Liaodong in 396 CE as a means to prevent a two-frontier battle by the Later Yan dynasty. While the act

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of crowning King Gwanggaet’o as the King of Liaodong in 396 CE can be seen as a method of pacification, the peace treaty in 406 CE further establishes an alliance between Koguryo and Later Yan dynasty. Through establishing a peace treaty, instead of a bestowment, as done previously, Late Yan dynasty is recognizing Koguryo as an almost equal stand, recognizing Koguryo as a rising power within the geo-political region. Through the absolute conquest of Liaodong region, eliminating the Later Yan dynasty’s influence, King Gwanggaet’o also established and displayed Koguryo’s potential to become a larger and more powerful state.

The relationship between Later Yan dynasty and Koguryo in the beginning of the reign of King Gwanggaet’o was one of subordination and establishment of hierarchy. Later Yan dynasty, through the act of crowning of King Gwanggat’o established the former’s superiority over the latter. However, with the rise of Koguryo’s presence in the Korean peninsula and further conquest into modern-day Manchuria, Later Yan dynasty established a peace treaty, indirectly recognizing Koguryo as a rising power and of similar stance. At the same time, the conquest by Koguryo into the modern-day Manchuria was possible due to the continuous warfare between the Northern Yan and Northern Wei dynasties, and also with Koguryo’s rise as a regional leading power within the Korean peninsula.

Stele of King Gwanggaet’o and modern scholarship The stele of King Gwanggaet’o, as mentioned previously, acted as a tombstone, a record of dynastic achievement, and, to the people of Koguryo a symbol of an era of domestic peace in which no foreigners invaded the original territories of the kingdom. At the same time, modern scholarship has had difficulty interpreting the details on the stele due simply to the damage done either naturally, due to the time between its creation to the present day, or artificially by, for example, using fire to rid the moss that was covering the majority of the engravings of the stele. Other difficulties

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involved in the study of this stele include the following: the lack of clarity in the rubbings of the inscriptions, lack of transcriptions of the text of the stele from the rubbings, and the location of the stele being in a remote, unreachable region. Also, the fact that the stele has been inaccessible to study by foreign scholars until 1985, when the Chinese government authorized the first wave of historians to study the stele, accounts for the lack of research done on the stele and its inscriptions up to this point.26 As can be seen in the partial transcription in the appendix C, many characters have been lost on the stele. This ambiguity of and unfortunate damage to the text has allowed scholarship from different political entities of East Asia in the time since the rediscovery of the stele to openly interpret the texts and utilize them to promote their own national interests. The three political entities involved in such misinterpretations are the Meiji-Japan, Post-Imperial China, and Post-Colonial Korea.

Japan has the earliest record of utilizing the inscriptions for the national interest of the period. The stele of King Gwanggaet’o was, as mentioned in the first section of this paper, a chance find by a Chinese farmer during the late Qing dynasty (1644-1922 CE) during the last nineteenth century. Since then, copies of tracings and rubbings have been made of the stele, for which the most interested party became the Meiji Japan administrators at the time. Hatada describes how Sakao Kagenobu, a Japanese officer investigating Manchuria and China at the time, brought a copy of the inscriptions back to Japan to study it, with specific interest in the part of the inscription mentioning the Wa ethnic group.27 The Japanese government published many studies on the stele inscriptions with emphasis on the existence of the Wa; at the time, the word Wa was believed to represent the ancient Japanese Yamato state, and through liberal interpretation, Japanese scholars were able to argue that the Korean peninsula was territory of Japan during the ancient period, thus justifying its imperialist plan to annex the Korean peninsula.28 Prior to the stele, the annexation of the Korean peninsula was rationalized on the

basis of the idea of the Mimana Japan administration, or mimana nihon fu (任那日本府) mentioned in the Nihon Shoki (日本書紀), published in 720 CE. According to Hatada, the mimana nihon fu was the unaccounted for Japanese government office that was believed to have controlled the Korean peninsula in the ancient times; however he explicitly argues that the mimana nihon fu is what “most Japanese believed […] to be a fact”29 and the Nihon Shoki was also “accepted as a historical fact”30 without solid proof as the idea of mimana nihon fu only exists in Nihon Shoki and no other historical documents. In this circumstance, the stele of King Gwanggaet’o was a great physical evidence of the Japanese presence on the Korean peninsula. “Thus the basis for the view that Japan had controlled Korea moved from an unreliable ancient chronicle to the reliable stele inscription.”31 However, through examination of recent interpretation of the text subjected to this controversy, many scholars have concluded that the Wa were ethnic Japanese pirates based on Kyushu and that the mimana nihon fu, simply, “did not exist.”32 Despite the modern conclusion that mimana nihon fu did not exist and the Wa were not Yamato Japanese, the inscription of the word Wa on the stele of King Gwangget’o was used to rationalize and justify Japanese annexation of the Korean peninsula, on the basis of what was believed to be historical fact based on loose interpretations.

Whereas the Meiji government utilized the stele and its interpretation to rationalize the annexation of Korea in the early twentieth century, the Chinese government’s efforts continue into the present day. The Chinese government argues that the crowning of King Gwanggaet’o by the Later Yan dynasty is proof that Koguryo was not an independent state but a subordinate provincial government of the Later Yan dynasty.33 This interpretation is a result of superficial readings of the inscription and a lack of understanding of the geopolitical background of the Later Yan dynasty and Koguryo at this time. This interpretation has possibly been made on purpose to promote Chinese national superiority over the Korean peninsula as well as Chinese claims over Manchuria. Jin Yufu was a

prominent scholar in this field, and established four large ethnic groups that have occupied the region of Manchuria and northern China, among which he includes the Puyo34 people, “who established the states of Puyo, Koguryo, and Paekche”.35 Furthermore, he attempted to separate the idea of Koguryo and modern-day Korea by establishing the Koryo kingdom as a successor to the state of Silla, therefore separating Koguryo as a political entity from the Korean peninsula.36 This argument can be analyzed from multiple directions. First of all, the historical border and geographies of Koguryo and surrounding areas do not coincide with the modern day political landscape. Jin’s argument, along with others derived from his work, bases itself on the grounds of modern-day political geography and borders. The vast territory conquered by Koguryo during the time of King Gwanggaet’o include many regions of modern day Northeastern China, however that would not justify either North or South Korea’s claim to these regions. The historical borders should be recognized and analyzed as there were historically and not be used as rationalizations for territorial claims in the present day.

The reason for such claim is political with concerns to national and territorial security.

According to Mark E. Byington, the current Chinese government attempts to incorporate Koguryo into Chinese history either as a province of a Chinese dynasty or as a Chinese minority-originated kingdom in order to protect its borders against neighbouring states and prevent any debates regarding its borders. As mentioned in the first section of this paper, the stele of King Gwanggaet’o is indeed situated in modern-day China. As such, the ethnic and historical affiliation of such an artifact may be ambiguous. This ambiguity, however, should be the motive and reasons for further historical research and analysis rather than the politicization of the claim and unreasonable incorporation of a foreign ethnic group into the pool of Chinese historical ethnic minority groups. As Byington argues in his article, the claiming of the Koguryo as an ethnic minority of China or claiming it to be a provincial government of a Chinese dynasty is illogical and “unsupported

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by historical evidence” while only concerning modern day territorial problems.37 Korean scholarship has likewise been actively involved with regards to Koguryo studies, with many Korean articles being published on the stele of King Gwanggaet’o. According to Pankaj Mohan, there are more than one thousand articles related to the stele that have been published in South Korea. However, limitations of these articles remain in the lack of sources and articles translated and published in international journals, and thus making them unavailable to a wider range of scholars.38 Moreover, the geographical location of the stele in China and its remoteness limit the possibility of much needed restorations and further physical studying of the stele. Furthermore, Chinese scholarship often attempts to minimize the achievements of King Gwanggaet’o as well as the rapid expansion of Koguryo into territory that is part of modern-day Chinese territory, in an apparent effort to promote China’s historical and geo-political superiority.39 In order to establish such a narrative, having an instance in which a so-called minor power occupied modern-day Chinese territory would present a history of weakness within Chinese propaganda.

As Bok and Mohan claim in their respective papers, the stele of King Gwanggaet’o is a popular historical artifact in terms of establishing the Korean national identity, however while within Korea the study of the stele is very active, there has been little effort to refute Chinese claims to Koguryo. The most vocal and public criticism of Chinese claims to Koguryo was by North Korean historian, Pak Sihyng, in 1993 during an international conference on Koguryo in China.40 With the continued increase of Chinese claims to Koguryo as part of Chinese political history and of ethnic Koguryo people, which is accepted and recognized by different scholarship to be homogeneous and to be one of the different ethnic Korean groups to the modern Korean people, to be of Chinese minority group, Korean scholarship must become more active in advocating its own scholarly perspectives on Koguryo as major components of Korean national history and identity.

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Conclusion The stele of King Gwanggaet’o is not only a historical artifact, but also an important symbol of Korean national identity. It outlines the life and achievements of King Gwanggaet’o and the socio-political situation in the present day northern Korean peninsula and northeastern China. Despite the damages to the inscriptions, it displays the political and military role Koguryo played in the Korean peninsula as well as the relationship it had with Later Yan dynasty. The stele also marks the first incorporation of the Liaodong region into a Korean kingdom, of which this paper examined two possible strategic importances to Koguryo.

As Mohan claims, the stele was created as a means of royal propaganda, and therefore one must be careful in analyzing the inscriptions.

The damage to the stele moreover allows for many interpretations by the three surrounding countries throughout history and present day for their respective national agendas. This led to, in the case of Meiji Japan, rationalization and justification of the annexation of the Korean peninsula, which remains a bruise on the Korean nation even in the present day, and, likewise, in the case of China, a constant debate on the rightful claim over the ownership of Koguryo history.

The stele of King Gwanggaet’o is significant not only for the information it provides but also due to the present day location and political implications it possesses due to its history, affiliations, and contexts. Despite controversies and debates, scholars must attempt to examine this object free of contemporaneous political affiliations or agendas and instead examine history as history

APPENDIX

Appendix A) Replica of the Stele of King Gwanggaet’o . War Memorial of Korea, Seoul. In War Memorial.

Accessed December 1, 2016. https://www.warmemo.or.kr/newwm/sub03/ sub03_04.jsp.

Appendix B) A stele with a headstone or gae-seok (蓋石) 碑石圖. National Museum of Korea, Seoul. In 碑石圖. Accessed March 09, 2017. http://uigwe.museum.go.kr/dosul/dosu l V i e w ; j s e s s i o n i d = L S 8 p X r G K M Pr K 9 L l mGs8711nhnbjw5h2X2dF3wDwQg2 rRqCpgLKZv!-1882982091?kind=%E B%B9%84%EC%84%9D%EB%8F% 84(%E7%A2%91%E7%9F%B3%E5 %9C%96)&dataType=n&&lmenuType=a_2.

Compared to the stele of King Gwanggaet’o, as seen in the Appendix A, this diagram shows the presence of the headstone on the top of the stele.

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Appendix C) Transcription of part of Stele of King Gwanggaet’o with boxes representing obscured and otherwise illegible characters, from article by Bok, Gi-Dae.

焉其辭曰永樂五年歲在乙未王以稗麗不歸戍人躬率往討過富山負山至鹽水上破 其三部洛六七百營牛馬群羊不可稱數於是旋駕因過襄平道東來□城力城北豊王 備獵遊觀土境田獵而以 六年丙申王躬率水軍討伐殘國軍至□南攻取壹八城臼模盧城各模盧城幹氐利城 □□城閣彌城牟盧城彌沙城古舍蔦城阿旦城古利城□利城雜珍城奧利城句牟城 古須耶羅城莫□□城□□城□而耶羅城瑑城於利城農賣城豆奴城沸城 比利城 彌鄒城也利城大山韓城掃加城敦拔城□□□城婁賣城散那城那旦城細城牟婁城 于婁城蘇灰城燕婁城析支利城巖門□城林城□□□□□□□利城就鄒城□拔 城古牟婁城閏奴城貫奴城彡穰城曾拔城宗古盧城仇天城□□□城逼其國城殘不 服義敢出百殘王威赫怒渡阿利水遺刺迫城殘兵歸宂□便圍城而殘主因逼獻出男 女生口一千人千匹 跪王自誓從今以後永爲奴客太王恩赦先迷之愆錄其後順之誠 於是得五十八城村七百殘主弟幷大臣十人旋師還都 八年戊戌敎遣偏師觀帛愼土谷因便抄得莫斯羅城加太羅谷男女三百餘人自此以 來朝貢論事 九年己亥百殘爲誓與倭和通王巡下平壤而新羅遣使白王云倭人滿其國境潰破城 池以奴客爲民歸王請命太王恩慈矜其忠誠特遣使還告以密計 十年庚子敎遣步騎五萬往救新羅從男居城至新羅城倭滿其中官軍方至倭賊退自 倭背急追至任那加羅從拔城城卽歸服安羅人戍兵拔新羅城鹽城倭寇大潰城內十 九盡拒隨倭 安羅人戍兵新羅城□□其□□□□□□言□□□□□□□□□□□□□□ □□□□□□□□□□□□辭□□□□□□□□□□□殘倭潰□以隨□安 羅人戍兵昔新羅寐錦未有身來論事至國岡上廣開土境好太王□□□□寐錦□ 家僕句請□□□朝貢 十四年甲辰而倭不軌侵入帶方界和通殘兵□石城□連船□□□王窮率往討從 平穰□□□鋒相遇王幢要截盪刺倭寇潰敗斬殺無數 十七年丁未敎遣步騎五萬□□□□□□□□王師四方合戰斬殺蕩盡所穫鎧鉀 一萬餘領軍資器械不可稱數還破沙溝城婁年城□城□□□□城那□城 廾年庚戌東夫餘舊是鄒牟王屬民中叛不貢王躬率往討軍到餘城而餘城國駭服獻 出□□□□□□王恩普覆於是旋還又其慕化隨官來者味仇婁鴨盧卑斯麻鴨盧 偳社婁鴨盧肅斯舍鴨盧□□□鴨盧凡所攻破城六十四村一千四百

Appendix D) Excerpt from Weishu, year 395, from article by Shin, Jung-Hoon.

冬十月辛未 寶燒船夜遁 十一月己卯 帝進軍濟河 乙 酉夕 至參合陂 丙辰 大破之 語在寶傳 生擒陳留王紹 魯陽王倭奴 桂林王道成 濟陰公尹國, 北地王世子鍾葵 安 定王世子羊兒以下文武將吏數千人 器甲輜重 軍資雜材 十餘萬計.

18

Apendix E) Ebrey, Patricia and Walthall, Anne. Map of Koguryo at its largest, Late 5th C. 2013. PreModern East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History, Volume 1: To 1800. Nelson Education, 2013. 104. Print

19

NOTES 1. “Koguryŏ.” Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica, 19 Sep. 2016. academic.eb.com/levels/ collegiate/article/45880. Accessed 20 Nov. 2016.

2. Bok, Gi-Dae. “About a Few Questions on the Research of a Tombstone of the Great King KwangGae-To.” The Journal of Gojoseon & Dangun Studies, 20 (May 2009): 202.

3. “Gwanggaeto the Great of Goguryeo,” New World Encyclopedia, http://www.newworldencyclopedia. org/p/index.php?title=Gwanggaeto_the_Great_ of_Goguryeo&oldid=978044 (accessed March 9, 2017).

4. Hatada, Takashi, and V D. Morris. “An Interpretation of the King Kwanggaet’o Inscription.”

Korean Studies. 3.1 (2011): 1.

5. Suh, Young-Soo. “Review on the History of Studies on the Stele of King Gwanggaet’o.”고구 려발해연구 (高句麗渤海硏究). 1 (1995.12): 150-151.

6. Hatada, 1.

7. Suh, 151.

8. Hatada, 2.

9. According to Suh’s article, the original farmer burned stele to rid of the moss on the stele, and in 1978, the protective structure surrounding the stele burned, resulting in damage in parts of the stele.

10. Hatada, 2-3 11. Yongnak is the era name of King Gwanggaet’o 12. Bok, 202.

13. Ibid, 191.

14. Shin, Jung-Hoon. “The Meaning of Invading Paeryo and Installation Relationship with LaterYan by King Gwanggaeto of Goguryeo.” Joongang Saron Journal of Joong- Ang Historical Studies 37 (2013.6): 10.

15. Graff, David A.. Medieval Chinese Warfare 300900. London and New York: Routledge, 2002: 69.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid, 70.

19. Shin, Jung-Hoon, 16.

20. Park, Se-Yiee. “King Gwanggaeto’s Conquest of the Liaoxi Region and the Relationship between Koguryo and Later Yan.” Chiyeok Kwa Yeoksa The Journal of Korean History 지역과 역사. 36 (2015.4): 45.

21. Lee, Seongje. “The Relationship between Koguryo and the Later Yan at the End of 4th Century: Based on the installation issue of King Gwaggaeto by the Later Yan in 396.” Society for Korean Ancient History (한국고대사학회). 68 (2012.12): 39.

22. Shin, Jung-Hoon, 18.

23. Ebrey, Patricia, and Walthall, Anne. Pre-Modern

20

East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History, Volume 1: To 1800. Nelson Education, 2013: 103.

24. Hatada, 11.

25. Ebrey and Walthall, 103.

26. Prior to 1985, the stele was available to be studied by Chinese scholars; the foreign scholars’ study on the stele began in 1985 with Japanese scholars being authorized to study the stele by the Chinese government.

27. Hatada, 3.

28. Suh, 161.

29. Ibid, 4.

30. Ibid, 5.

31. Ibid, 6.

32. Ibid, 17.

33. Suh, 167-168.

34. The Puyo people are generally understood to be the ancestors of many of later kingdoms implicated in Korean history. Koguryo’s royal family’s ancestry, for instance, can be traced to the Puyo people.

35. Byington, Mark E., and 宣泠 朴. “An Irresoluble Dilemma of Histories Past and Present – Koguryo in Chinese Historiography.” 고구려발해연구 (高句 麗渤海硏究) 18 (2004): 379.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid, 386.

38. Mohan, Pankaj N.. “Studies on Ancient Korean History in the West: Focusing on the Interpretation of material of Three Kingdoms Period in the English Language Scholarship.” Asia Cultural Studies (아시 아 문화 연구). 22 (2011.6): 207-208.

39. Bok, 192 40. Byington, 382

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anchor Primary Source: Stele (epitaph) of King Gwanggaet’o Bok, Gi-Dae. “About a Few Questions on the Research of a Tombstone of the Great King Kwang-Gae-To.” The Journal of Gojoseon & Dangun Studies, 20 (May 2009): 191-209.

Byington, Mark E., and 宣泠 朴. “An Irresoluble Dilemma of Histories Past and Present – Koguryo in Chinese Historiography.” (高句麗渤海硏究) 18 고구려발해연구 (2004): 373-86.

Ebrey, Patricia, and Walthall, Anne.

Pre-Modern East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History, Volume 1: To 1800. Nelson Education, 2013.

Graff, David A.. Medieval Chinese Warfare 300-900. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Hatada, Takashi, and V D. Morris. “An Interpretation of the King Kwanggaet’o Inscription.” Korean Studies. 3.1 (2011): 1-17.

“Koguryŏ.” Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica, 19 Sep. 2016. academic.eb.com/ levels/collegiate/article/45880. Accessed 20 Nov. 2016.

Lee, Seongje. “The Relationship between Koguryo and the Later Yan at the End of 4th Century: Based on the installation issue of King Gwaggaeto by the Later Yan in 396.” Society for Korean Ancient History (한국고대사학회). 68 (2012.12): 35-66.

Mohan, Pankaj N.. “Studies on Ancient Korean History in the West: Focusing on the Interpretation of material of Three Kingdoms Period in the English Language Scholarship.”

Asia Cultural Studies (아시아 문화 연구). 22 (2011.6): 195-220.

New World Encyclopedia contributors, “Gwanggaeto the Great of Goguryeo,” New World Encyclopedia, http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Gwanggaeto_ the_Great_of_Goguryeo&oldid=978044 (accessed March 9, 2017).

No, Tae Don. “Conquest by King Kwanggaet’o and the Formation of the Sovereign Domain of Koguryo.” The Journal of Korean Ancient History 67 (2012.9): 5-26.

Replica of the Stele of King Gwanggaet’o in the War Memorial. Photograph. The War Memorial of Korea, Seoul. The War Memorial of Korea. Web; 1 December 2016 Park, Se-Yiee. “King Gwanggaeto’s Conquest of the Liaoxi Region and the Relationship between Koguryo and Later Yan.” Chiyeok Kwa

Yeoksa The Journal of Korean History 지역과 역 사. 36 (2015.4): 37-62.

Shin, Hyong-Sik. “Koguryeo’s National Place in Korean History.” 先史와 古代(Prehistory and Ancient History) 28 (2008): 5-21.

Shin, Jung-Hoon. “The Meaning of Invading Paeryo and Installation Relationship with Later-Yan by King Gwanggaeto of Goguryeo.”

Joongang Saron Journal of Joong-Ang Historical Studies 37 (2013.6): 5-39.

Suh, Young-Soo. “Review on the History of Studies on the Stele of King Gwanggaet’o.” (高句麗渤海硏究). 1 고구려발해연구 (1995.12): 149-183.

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PINK EMBERS TO PINK ASHES Revolution as the End of the Homosexual Tradition in China Julian Binder

After the Chinese government officially changed its laws regarding “hooliganism” in 1997 - regulations which had applied to homosexual behaviour since the late 1950s - China seemed to be heading on the path towards Western ideas of progress. “‘We all talk about it much more openly than before,” said a young Beijing fashion designer at the time.1 According to former Chinese health official Wan Yanhai, “[t]he Government no longer has a problem with gays … as long as you don’t organize or speak out, you can do what you want.”2 This emergence from a ‘dark age’ for homosexuals in China, one which had engulfed the majority of the twentieth century, lends credence to the theory of an archetypal, traceable narrative of linear ‘progress’ regarding the acceptance of male homosexuality in China:3 a narrative that moves from backwardness to Western modernization and individualism; from militant communism to a neo-liberal, capitalist modus operandi in the Chinese state’s treatment of homosexual individuals, one which mirrors the major changes of the contemporary reform era.4 Yet neat linearity does not follow the reality of homosexuality in Chinese history. Like most historical change, the sluggish progress towards acceptance of homosexuality in modern China is decidedly non-linear.5 Evidence of homosexuality in Chinese society dates from the country’s earliest periods, as part of a long and accepted tradition lasting up until, and including, the late Qing. However a sudden blackout

22

of information concerning homosexual activity occurs after the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, and particularly during the Cultural Revolution, which was accompanied by a marked increase in state crackdowns on homosexual behavior.6 This substantial shift away from recorded homosexual activity, which included the patronage of young boys, or catamites, by elite men (a practice conducted by multiple emperors from a multitude of different dynasties), male prostitution, and the wooing of feminized male performers in theatre productions by these privileged classes, was by no means a fluke of natural “progression.”7 A culture that had initially shocked Western missionaries due to “the perceived ubiquity and deep roots of homosexuality within Chinese culture” suddenly began to inflict stringent policing and punishment on its homosexual population.8 From the late Qing to the Cultural Revolution and beyond, Chinese homosexuals have experienced revolution as a shift away from the legal laxity and social tolerance once afforded to them, and towards increased censorship and a reversal of previously accepted cultural norms.

The legal treatment of homosexuals throughout the late Qing dynasty was a world away from the persecution these individuals would ultimately face during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Though the Manchus took a more conservative approach than did their Ming predecessors to curtail what they

considered to be general rampant libertinism, throughout the Qing dynasty homosexuals remained largely unpoliced from a legal perspective.9 While the practice of homosexuality did face an increase in written regulation by imperial courts during this period, the Qing were highly selective in their enforcement of these laws, mostly trying to curb the excesses and potential dangers they saw in relation to homosexual behavior.10 For example, more complex laws were implemented to punish homosexual rape from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, a practice which proliferated at the time among Qing officials against boys as young as ten - a practice that was well documented in literary depictions by the likes of Li Yu and others.11 While nine of the ten new prohibitions dealt with rape or attempted rape, one referred to consensual acts, which were to be treated “as in the case of military or civil consensual lewdness” with a more lenient punishment than those generally reserved for rape, penalties that included decapitation, among others.12 While it may seem as if the Qing were purposefully targeting homosexual behavior for punishment, scholar M. J. Meijer explains that the Qing code grew to universally condemn and punish all forms of extramarital relations in compliance with the tenets of Confucianism, according to which homosexuality was just one type of infraction.13 Even with these modest changes over the Ming, over time the Manchus embraced the past indulgence of homosexuality between consensual partners at even the highest level: the Qianlong Emperor had a long affair with famous courtier Heshen; the Xianfeng Emperor was involved with theatrical female impersonator Zhu Lianfeng; and even the Tongzhi Emperor courted a young male scholar.14 These affairs were largely without scandal, save for the last due to the Tongzhi Emperor’s public pursuit of said scholar, which in itself further attests to the relative permissibility of homosexuality at the time.15 Following the toppling of the imperial system and the advent of the PRC, homosexuality was seen not only as an emblem of tradition, but was further associated with the past

theatrical performances of gender it had, in part, been correlated with previously.16 In effect, the CCP “removed sexuality from the arena of ‘modernization’” and instead affiliated it with a campaign that endeavored to rid the country of prostitution and other such ‘moral ills’ in order to enforce monogamous marriage.17 This focus on monogamy was especially evident in legislation like the Marriage Law of 1950, which, among other things, elevated the status of women, ended the sale of young women as wives and concubines, and gave women divorce rights. This moral shift toward “modernization” was in accordance with the rigidity and militant collective consciousness the early PRC tried to instill during its collectivization and growth programs in the early years of communist China. The aim of the Marriage Law was to create strong households where husbands and wives would support one another as workers, while raising their children to be loyal students of the nation who would soon join their parents in building up the Chinese nation: “Husband and wife are in duty bound to love, respect … to engage in production, to care for the children, and to strive jointly for the welfare of the family and for the building up of a new society.”18 This ‘building up’ included a focus on the strength of a productive household that had to be anchored by monogamous heterosexual couples and their children, who all worked together to do their part in strengthening the nation. Homosexuality was seen as a distracting and gratuitously indulgent hindrance to this task, an obstacle not only to one’s duty to reproduce, but one which deprioritized the type of family unit that would facilitate efficiency on a familial, and in turn, collective national level.

The importation of Western ideologies in the early twentieth century through the translation of popular and influential works, like Christian missionary tracts and social Darwinist treatises, “introduced a new vocabulary for same sex relationships that labeled them harmful to health and the social order.”19 This permeation of Western ideas and standards, including Christian values that had been diffused through the colonial presence while “stripped of the original religious language,”

23

paralleled the rise of the New Culture movement in its Westernizing attempt to bring China out of its purportedly backward Confucian tradition.20 Ideologically speaking, Mao and the CCP were supported by both Marx and Engels, the latter of whom had written contemptuously of homosexuals by comparing them to ancient Greek pedophiles.21 In fact, the 1956 law criminalizing homosexual acts in China was drawn up around the idea of “hooliganism,” a concept that Marx and Engels had originally used in reference to homosexuals.22 Few records exist today detailing the evolution of how these laws were enforced during the early years of the state, and even during the Cultural Revolution. However, Chinese sociologist and gay rights activist Li Yinhe explores how homosexuality was viewed as a mental disorder throughout this period, wherein those perceived as having even the slightest of gay inclinations were detained and placed in brutal internment camps, where often they were tortured.23 This classification of homosexuality as a mental illness - a departure from its previous legal coding as merely ‘poor’ behaviour exhibited by an individual of otherwise sound moral comportment - is in line with homosexuality’s aforementioned status as a distraction and detractor from the productivity of the individual and, in turn, the family and the nation at large, in the PRC. Up until the collapse of the Qing dynasty following the 1911 revolution, the social consequences of practising homosexuality in Chinese culture were minimal, especially compared to the isolation, shaming, and familial abandonment later experienced by homosexuals in the era of the PRC. Although the Chinese state was inclined to criminalize homosexuality in the interests of maximizing the efficiency and necessary relationships required to strengthen the nation, the major shift toward negative social associations with, and consequences for, homosexuality can be directly tied to Western influence. In classical Chinese society, the terminology used to describe same-sex relations lacked a specific label like “homosexuality;” instead, this sort of behaviour or desire was generally referred to in poetic terms.24 It is crucial to

24

understand that in the late Qing, homosexuality was viewed not as an ‘essence of being’ that defined a part of an individual’s identity, but rather as a type of behaviour.25 As such, homosexuality was a participatory realm that individuals could traverse both to and from with little consequence, while still having intercourse with their wives in order to reproduce even if this was not their ideal sexual preference.26 This view of homosexuality waned in the late Qing precisely due to the rise of a moralizing Western influence diffused through literature and a devout Christian missionary presence.

The twentieth century brought an end to “the fluid conceptions of sexuality of old, which assumed that an individual was capable of enjoying a range of sexual acts, [and] replaced with the ironclad Western dichotomy of heterosexual/homosexual.”27 In the late imperial period, apart from the secrecy and perceived embarrassment involved in being the receptive partner in a male homosexual relationship, homoeroticism and homosexual behaviour was accepted socially, and even celebrated in the male-dominated, homosocial circles of the elite, where it was most documented to have occurred.28 Before the Qing moved toward a more conservative social view, a contemporary nineteenth century writer observed that “it is considered in bad taste not to keep elegant manservants on one’s household staff, and undesirable not to have singing boys around when inviting guests for dinner.”29 The last embers of this widespread culture would vanish with the establishment of the PRC: its first years yielded almost no evidence of recorded homosexual activity or expression in China, save for government examples pointing to “the decline and evil of western civilization.”30 As scholar Yan Fangfu Ruan notes, “in Weinberg and Bell’s 550-page book on homosexuality, Homosexuality: An Annotated Bibliography (1972), not a single study or record of homosexuality in China is listed.”31 However, a fascinating record of the lived social experiences of gay Chinese men in the period following the Cultural Revolution can be gleaned by reading the responses to a 1985 article entitled “Homosexuality: An Unsolved

Puzzle” in To Good Health magazine.32 Around sixty letters were received in reaction to the article, a substantial number considering the strict legal and social prohibitions concerning ‘deviant’ sexuality at the time, which permit the rarest of insights into the tortured social ramifications of what being a gay man in China was like. Many of these self-identified homosexual men were married to women, some admitting that they felt obligated to have children and were terrified of being discovered by their wives or family members. The author of the nineteenth letter wrote to “please keep this in utmost secret. I would not know how to face others if my identity is known;” another wrote that “If this is known by the public my future would be ruined.”33 Letter writers frequently wrote of their painfully clandestine and lonely existences: “The pain that homosexuals suffer most lies not in homosexuality, but in their inability to find suitable lovers. All homosexuals lock their feelings in their hearts. They are so afraid of being discovered that it makes it impossible to live their lives.”34 This inability to couple with a same sex partner often led to a terrible sense of despair; one contributor wrote that he “thought about death many times. When you are young you cannot fall in love and when you are old you will be alone.

Thinking of this makes the future absolutely hopeless.”35 As Fangfu observes, “clearly, the chief source of pain for China’s gay men derives from the fear of societal punishment, including arrest, and possible sentence to labor reform camp or prison.”36 Interestingly, one letter writer critical of homosexuality makes a connection between mental and physical health, and the destruction of “civilization” and the state, which echoes the aforementioned ethos of Maoist doctrine that aimed to fortify the minds and bodies of the Chinese people towards a more efficient service to the state: “The reason that people despise, prohibit, punish and persecute homosexuals is precisely that the behavior is evil, ugly, opposed to human morality, and an insult to human dignity, promotes crime among youth, ruins their mental and physical health, leads to the destruction of our race and civilization.”37 In

the 1980s reform era, homosexuality continued to be seen as a mental illness and a blight to the nation that was to be treated by doctors, while the shame of living as a homosexual without being married to a woman was yet unthinkable.

Fanfgu quotes Kristof, who notes, [W]hen homosexuals are treated for what most Chinese doctors regard as their mental illness, they are sometimes given painful electric shocks to discourage erotic thoughts. An alternative approach is to offer herbal medicines that induce vomiting. In either case, the idea is to stimulate an extremely unpleasant reaction that will be associated thereafter with erotic thoughts and thus reduce the patients’ ardor. Both approaches ... are hailed by doctors in China as remarkably successful in “curing” homosexuality.38 As Western style classifications began to take root ever deeper in Chinese society, particularly after the ‘opening up’ of China that occurred during the economic privatization of the reform era, homosexuality fell into the same patterns of stigmatization that it had in Western countries. Laid bare, the reform era saw no end to the new culture of homosexual shaming, even after an unspeakably brutal decade of Cultural Revolution for gay Chinese men, disrupting a millennium of Chinese social tradition and the previously nuanced perspective on homosexuality in relation to the individual’s identity that China had formerly embraced.

The content and quantity of Chinese cultural depictions of homosexuality through to the twentieth century reflects the cultural bounds within which homosexuality could be comfortably expressed and framed. Based on the aforementioned histories and analyses expounded throughout this paper, the patterns of homosexual depictions in cultural media follow a similar trend of celebration and liberal decadence in the imperial era, moving toward a sudden blackout of references to homosexuality come the Mao period. While there is a long and exhaustive history of literature and art detailing homosexual behaviour throughout the entire

25

imperial era, from poetic musings to graphic sexual descriptions, the most nuanced period to examine is the late Qing. As previously described, the late Qing court became more socially conservative than its predecessors in the face of Western influence and chaotic political upheavals. In Chen Sen’s novel entitled Precious Mirror of Ranking Flowers, a character based of off Qing author Bi Yuan gives what feels like a final defence of same-sex love in the aftermath of the increased regulation of homosexual behaviour and influence of Western thought in the late Qing: I do not comprehend why it is acceptable for a man to love a woman, but it is unacceptable for a man to love a man. Passion is passion whether to a man or a woman. To love a woman but not a man is lust and not passion. To lust is to forget passion. If one treasures passion, he is not lewd.39 In the PRC, media representations of gay people - now classified as mentally ill individuals who obstructed the development of a strong Chinese society - were banned; during the Cultural Revolution, the burning of books that included works depicting homosexuality frequently occurred, while other famous texts were rewritten to be expunged of any reference to homosexuality, including the famous Dream of the Red Chamber.40 During the reform era, the Sinosphere converged in order to exploit this now-taboo cultural topic: mainland, Taiwanese, and even Hong Kong newspapers ruthlessly manipulated the culture of shame and gossip surrounding homosexuality to sell more papers, often emphasizing any criminal associations with gay ties and homosexual activity in tabloid stories.41 In his mid-1980s novel Two Years in the Melting Pot, well-known reporter Z. Liu denied that China had a homosexual population at all after returning from a visit to America, a common sentiment given publicity at the time.42 While censorship of gay-themed media has waned in recent times (alongside other restrictions and changes to Chinese law), these changes are worthy of their own focus as part of the larger economic and political forces

26

that have caused rapid social change in Chinese society over the last two decades.43 Chinese homosexuals, self-identified and not, experienced twentieth-century revolution as a frightening and brutal shift away from centuries of deeply embedded cultural tradition and into a mire of legal, social, and cultural upheaval. For the CCP, tradition was shed in order to move the Chinese people forward towards strength and prosperity by means of socialism. Ironically, gay people, linked to one of the oldest traditions of them all, fell victim to this cultural culling exacerbated by the impact of a moralizing, colonial Western influence.

Even so, the story of China’s homosexual tradition challenges notions of ‘old China’ as backward. The approach to human sexuality as existing on a spectrum, and the notion that behaviour does not define one’s identity, sexual or otherwise, was as progressive as some of the most liberal attitudes recently assumed in leading Western nations. While monogamous same sex coupling was not accepted (particularly in the later years of imperial rule), credit is due to the kind of individual freedom afforded to those who partook in homosexual behaviour.

China’s experience with homosexuality through times of revolution points towards a potential litmus test for those who claim to support a truly equalizing revolution; as radically different as any regime may claim to be, how they treat those wishing to express their most authentic self, their truth, is what sets those seeking national loyalty apart from the destructively oppressive powers of times gone by.

NOTES 1. Faison, Seth. “Door to Tolerance Opens Partway As Gay Life Is Emerging in China.” The New York Times. 1997. Accessed November 21, 2016. http:// www.nytimes.com/1997/09/02/world/door-to-tolerance-opens-partway-as-gay-life-is-emerging-inchina.html.

2. Ibid.

3. Due to a scarcity in sources on the topic of female homosexuality in China during the later twentieth century, particularly in English translation, male homosexuality will be the sole focus of this essay.

4. Ruan, Fangfu, and Molleen Matsumura. 1991.

Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture.

New York: Plenum Press. 120.

5. Lange, Margaret Meek. “Progress.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2011. Accessed November 20, 2016. http://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/progress/.

6. Ibid., 107.

7. Hinsch, Bret. 1990. Passions of the cut sleeve: the male homosexual tradition in China. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 139-40.

10. Ibid.140.

11. Ibid., 145.

12. Ibid., 144.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.,143.

15. Ibid.

16. Mann, Susan. 2011. Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History. New York: Cambridge University Press. 148.

17. Ibid., 151.

18. “New Laws: Marriage and Divorce, May 1950.”

In The Birth of the People’s Republic, 360-61.

19. Mann, 2011, 148.

20. Hinsch, 1990, 167.

21. Kon, Igor. 1995. The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Accessed November 22, 2016.

22. Mann, 2011, 151-152.

23. Mexico, Zachary. 2009. China Underground.

Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press. 202.

24. Hinsch, 1990, 7.

25. Ibid.,167.

26. Ibid., 11.

27. Ibid.,169.

28. Mann, 2011, 142.

29. Hinsch, 1990, 146.

30. Ruan and Molleen 1991, 121.

31. Ibid., 120.

32. Ibid., 121.

33. Ibid., 124.

34. Ibid., 125.

35. Ibid., 126.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., 127.

38. Ibid., 132.

39. Hinsch, 1990.,159.

40. Ibid. 169.

41. Ibid., 170.

42. Ruan and Molleen 1991, 131.

43. Mann, 2011, 183-185.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Faison, Seth. “Door to Tolerance Opens Partway As Gay Life Is Emerging in China.” The New York Times. 1997. Accessed November 21, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/02/ world/door-to-tolerance-opens-partway-asgay-life-is-emerging-in-china.html.

Hinsch, Bret. 1990. Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kon, Igor. 1995. The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Lange, Margaret Meek. “Progress.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2011. Accessed November 20, 2016. http://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/progress/.

Mann, Susan. 2011. Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mexico, Zachary. 2009. China Underground.

Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press.

“New Laws: Marriage and Divorce, May 1950.”

The Birth of the People’s Republic, 360-61.

Ruan, Fangfu, and Molleen Matsumura. 1991.

Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture. New York: Plenum Press.

27

CONFUCIUS IN THE DUTCH EAST INDIES Confucianism in the Chinese Diaspora of the Dutch East Indies in 1900-10s Ashley Kong

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia, was home to over half a million Chinese.1 What accompanied this Chinese presence was the thriving of Confucianism in the area. Chinese communities in the Dutch East Indies ran schools providing education in the Confucian classics, built Confucian temples, and erected epigraphs celebrating Confucius.

A considerable number of English-speaking researchers have investigated Confucianism in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the century, most of which focus on it as a campaign to improve education in the Chinese diasporic community and as a movement of Chinese nation-building.2 In my own research, I have observed that English scholarship tends to emphasize this link between Confucianism and Chinese nation-building, thus marking the beginning of the Confucianist movement in the Dutch East Indies at the early twentieth century, immediately after the Chinese were first exposed to the idea of the nation, imported from the West. This paper, however, seeks to add dimension to this classic interpretation popular in English scholarship by highlighting the fact that the Confucian tradition in the Dutch East Indies Chinese community traces back much further before the early twentieth century. Aside from its political connotations, there is another face of Confucianism as – arguably – a religion that was ardently worshipped, with its rites meticulously followed by the Chinese diaspora. This brings

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about the question of whether it is sensible to mark the start of the Confucianist movement at such a relatively recent date. This paper will examine evidence from before early twentieth century to shed new light to the multi-faceted – political, intellectual, and religious – nature of Confucianism, and, in doing so, to reconsider historical narratives of Confucianism in the Dutch East Indies.

Introduction to Tiong Hoa Hew Koan (THHK), An East-West Hybrid A lot of English scholarship, particularly those published in the United States in the 1960s, has tended to focus on the institutional aspect of the history, such as the founding and closure of schools, education policies tabled by the government at the time, fundraising campaigns, and so on. This section will provide an overview of English-speaking perspectives regarding Confucian education in Indonesia, which are traditionally centred on THHK. Most of the research on the history of Chinese education in Indonesia was conducted in the late-1960s. Suharto’s rise to Indonesian presidency inspired academic interest in the Chinese diasporic communities in the region, particularly after Suharto enforced a rigid assimilation policy over ethnic minorities in the republic. Chinese education in Indonesia came to a halt in 1966 as the Suharto regime ordered the closure of all Chinese-language schools in Indonesia.3 In 1969, new private

Chinese-language schools were opened but were placed under the close supervision of Indonesian government; under this suppressive atmosphere, most Chinese-Indonesian parents opted to enrol their kids into private Christian schools, many of which did not offer Chinese education.4 The most recent development since 1998 is that many Indonesian schools provide multilingual education; in other words, descendents of the Chinese diaspora in Indonesia today tend not to receive education in Chinese exclusively.5 However, this was not the case in the early twentieth century. Confucian institutes were major sources of education for the Chinese community prior to 1908. Among these institutes THHK was the first to adopt modern pedagogy from the West.

History of THHK English-speaking historians Lea E. Williams and Donald Earl Willmott mark the establishment of Tiong Hoa Hew Koan (THHK) as the beginning of the Confucianist movement in the Dutch East Indies, which declared independence from the Netherlands and became the Republic of Indonesia in 1945.

In 1901, Tiong Hoa Hew Koan6 (THHK) was founded in Batavia (now Jakarta), the capital of the Dutch East Indies and where the Chinese population was in the plurality.7 It was the first institution to provide modern schooling for the Chinese community in the Dutch East Indies.

Like many other modernisation initiatives in Asia at the end of the nineteenth century, the founders of THHK took their inspiration from Western pedagogy at the time. Lim Kim Hok, one of the founders of THHK, had received Western Christian education during his youth, although he turned down baptism to instead study Confucian texts.8 He introduced two major reforms in Confucian schooling in the region. First, the Confucian classics were adopted as technical instruments for learning Chinese characters in THHK, while the moralist element of the historical mainland study of the Confucian canon was much downplayed.

Second, instead of integrating Confucian moralist education into language lessons, teachers

of THHK preached Confucian moral teachings to pupils in a similar form to Christian sermons, with such meetings held twice a month.9 Preceding the founding of THHK, there had been other Chinese education institutions providing Confucian schooling in the region.

Chinese Kapitans10 and Majoors11 in the region opened charity schools, usually called Gie Oh12, in their offices, usually called Kong Koan13. A year after THHK was established, a contest was held between THHK and the Gie Oh in Batavia: pupils of the two schools competed against each other on their knowledge in Confucian classics. As it turned out, while the Gie Oh pupils could recite the Confucian classics fluently, they fell short when it came to understanding the meaning of the texts as compared to THHK pupils, who listened to their teachers’ preaching of Confucian moral teachings in colloquial language.14 The Kong Koan thus decided to make THHK its official school and provided generous funding to expand enrolment to pupils from less advantaged backgrounds.15 Before THHK, the Chinese community in the Dutch East Indies often found modern education inaccessible. The government schools run by the colonial administration theoretically did not bar the Chinese from enrolling, but the language of instruction was either Dutch or Malay, erecting a de facto language barrier to Chinese students.16 Language barriers also existed within the Chinese community, as different Gie Ohs adopted different dialects, usually one of the three most spoken in the region: Hokkien, Cantonese, or Hakka; by adopting one over the others would exclude pupils who spoke either of the other two.17 Beginning in 1910, THHK began to offer English language classes, hiring Methodists from the United States to teach in the school.18 There were also some other English teachers who had graduated from the English-speaking colleges in Hong Kong, which was a British colony.19 The Dutch colonial regime was alarmed by the presence of such foreigners in THHK, and sought to constrain its expansion to other parts of the Dutch East Indies. Thus, in 1908, the colonial regime commissioned the

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first Dutch-language school to open enrolment to the Chinese population.20 At this point, THHK as the bastion of the Confucianist movement became highly politicised, as the THHK staged itself as an institution of resistance against Dutch colonial rule. The political aspect of Confucianism in the Dutch East Indies will be further explored in the following section.

Historical significance of THHK As a lot of English-speaking researchers on the subject point out, many measures taken by the Confucianists in the Dutch East Indies were arguably meant to cultivate a distinctive Chinese identity within the Dutch colonial context. In this sense, Confucianism in the Dutch East Indies was very much tied to Chinese nationalism. The problem remained, however, of whether such a Chinese identity was a global or a local one. The Chinese diaspora in the Dutch East Indies was torn between two imperial metropoles: the Chinese ‘homeland’ under the Qing empire for one, and the Dutch colonial empire for the other. The movement also coincided with a period of drastic social and political changes in China. At times, THHK Confucianists sought to strengthen their bond to the Chinese ‘homeland’, and at other times, they collaborated with the Dutch colonial regime. This ambiguity of the community’s political allegiance was salient in the early days of THHK. Since the early days of THHK, the Confucianists had shared very close ties with their Chinese homeland. In 1904, Kang Youwei, a prominent government official in the Qing Empire, made an official visit to the Chinese diasporic communities in parts of the Dutch East Indies, including Batavia and Surabaya.21 Kang belonged to the reformist clique in the Qing court, a clique which made policies to introduce Western technologies and philosophies to China. Some historians, such as Lea E. Williams, attribute the expansion of THHK into a pioneer of modernised Confucian schooling to Kang Youwei’s visit.

This view is not, however, shared by Claudine

30

Salmon, who made a strong case against such a claim by citing that the Confucianists in Surabaya had begun to reform Confucian schooling by starting their own Confucian institutes and adopting Confucius’ birth year as the start of their calendar, instead of the Qing imperial calendar or the Gregorian calendar since 1898.22 Williams argues that the objective of setting up THHK was in part to protest the Dutch colonial regime’s effective disenfranchisement of the Chinese community from the government schooling system.23 THHK represented a new Chinese worldview that seemed to ignore the Dutch presence; indeed, since its founding, THHK had been teaching in Mandarin, the Chinese dialect spoken at the Qing imperial court, thus demonstrating the community’s united endorsement of the Chinese Qing empire over the Dutch.24 It was also a political choice out of considerations for the cultural dynamics within the Chinese community, since adopting whichever one of the three dialects would inevitably upset speakers of the other two.25 Williams interprets this move as indicative that the design of the THHK curriculum was essentially tailored for graduates who wished to work in the Qing Empire but not in the Dutch colonial Empire.26 Such objectives became even more obvious when THHK-Batavia opened the Yale Institute, an English-language school for Chinese students in Batavia. Williams points out that proficiency in English was required at that time if pupils wished to pursue further in modern education in Hong Kong or do business in China, as English had become the lingua franca among traders active in China.27 Modernised Confucianist institutions like THHK served to counterbalance the influence of Christianity in the Chinese diaspora in the Dutch East Indies. (Williams; Salmon) Admittedly, a number the founders of the THHK including Lim came from some form of a Western Christian background. In the modernised rendition of Confucianism pushed by the THHK, Confucius was re-branded, in a way, like Jesus Christ was to Christianity.28 The idea of the Chinese having their distinctive

religion like the Protestant Dutch and Muslim Indonesians was refreshing and boosted their unique sense of identity greatly. Confucianism was presented as an alternative faith that was most natural to the Chinese simply because Confucius was Chinese. The imitation of Christian rites such as sermon and preaching aimed to place Confucianism as a ‘religion’ with the equal standing to Christianity in the region.

Perhaps most important of all was that the Confucian rhetoric created a sense of belonging among the Dutch East Indies Chinese diaspora towards their Chinese ‘homeland,’ both as the home of the sage and with which they shared the same language and traditions. Beyond the diasporic community within the Dutch East Indies, there was also debate over the legitimacy of Qing imperial rule over China. As Wolfgang Franke’s research into the epigraphic materials in Indonesia shows, some Chinese in Asahan, North Sumatra inscribed “Imperial Han” instead of “Imperial Qing,”29 which can be read as a signifier of resistance against Manchu rule over China.30 Surabaya became a hotbed for underground Chinese revolutionaries who sought to overthrow the Manchu-led Qing Empire and restore a Han Chinese-led China.31 The Confucian institutes in Surabaya, which were detached from the THHK stream, used Confucian schooling as a cover for their revolutionary propaganda.32 While the 1911 Revolution went on in China, some Chinese revolutionaries in the Dutch East Indies incited violence against Chinese officers working for the Dutch colonial regime in Semarang as part of the united effort against foreign rule over Chinese communities.33 In 1914, there was public uproar from the Chinese community against the appointment of a new Majoor in Surabaya.34 In spite of such incidents, however, some others in the Chinese community preferred to collaborate with the Dutch colonists and tried to gain greater wealth and power under the colonial regime. Just shortly before the revolts in Semarang, some Chinese communities in the colony, such as those in Batavia, actually demanded greater privilege for their local

Chinese officers, such as immunity in native courts, being treated as Europeans legally, and the right to send their children to European schools; in order to encourage Chinese participation in the colonial regime, the Dutch agreed to these demands.35 During this period, two simultaneous developments of Chinese nationalism can be observed: on the one hand that of pan-Chinese nationalism across China and the Dutch East Indies aspiring to consolidate self-government of the Chinese nation, and on the other hand, Chinese nationalism seeking equality in status and reputation with the Europeans. These nationalisms may appear vastly differents but they both arguably emerged from a similar sense of nationalist pride stemming from a rich and enduring traditional culture. Such origins of emergent Chinese nationalisms are particularly evident in widely propagated Confucian rhetoric and myths of the time, which will be examined in the following section.

Pre-1901 evidence of Confucianism in the Dutch East Indies This section will examine alternative evidence on the ground, including historical artefacts and literature. In comparison to studies of institutional histories presented above, the following analysis of literary samples seem to indicate that the Confucian tradition in the Dutch East Indies had been established well before the founding of THHK in 1901. Moreover, Confucianism was not seen only as an educational doctrine or intellectual paradigm, as various examples of Confucian worship, suggestive of a religious approach to Confucianism, can be found in villages and towns inhabited by Chinese communities in the Dutch East Indies.

The Chinese diaspora in Dutch East Indies celebrated their heritage and expressed pride in their Confucian culture through literature.

Epigraphs, which were typically produced to commemorate or celebrate a remarkable event or person, are great examples of such writings. In these epigraphs, it is shown that Confucianism to the Chinese diaspora in Dutch East Indies was not only an intellectual

31

paradigm they could learn from or romanticized imaginations of nationalism, but also a faith that was ardently worshipped and deeply entrenched in their daily lives.

Examples of Confucian worship As previously stated, while most English scholarship marks the establishment of THHK in 1901 as the beginning of the Confucianist movement in the Dutch East Indies, epigraphs from the region exemplify the Chinese communities’ tendency to trace their own Confucian practice as far back in time as Confucius’s life in the ancient Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BCE).

In an epigraph titled “The Re-construction of the Temple of Literature in Surabaya”, erected in 1906 to commemorate the construction of the Confucian temple in Surabaya, the author presents a global vision in which Confucianism could be the unifying force of the world. The Chinese, as the people that bred Confucius, was thus portrayed to have claimed their rightful place at the apex of the social pyramid: 先五洲而開化者，中國也。居中國而 叢集聖之大成者，尼山夫子也。夫子 生周之季，道大不行於當時，而行於 後世。且不徒華族也，彼歐西異種， 景仰至教，謂能實力奉行者，即可致 世界第一等之富強。而不知果行聖 教，實足以統一天下，而使萬國合同 也，區區富強云乎哉！ The most civilised of all continents is China. The one who lived in China and embodied the best of all sages is Confucius.

Confucius was born at the demise of Zhou, when the way had disappeared; but [the way] was followed by later generations, not only by the Chinese, but also by the Western aliens. When [the way] is being ardently worshipped as if it is a religion, the one nation which puts it in practice would be the most prosperous in the world. When it is faithfully followed even without knowing the effects it will bring, it is enough to unite the world into one; and if it can bring about solidarity among all nations, how would it not bring prosperity!36

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The conclusion to be drawn from this epigraph is that Confucius was not a new figure that had not been introduced to the Chinese in the Dutch East Indies until 1901, but a mythical hero vividly remembered by the diaspora. This notion challenges the narrative that Confucianism in Indonesia began in 1901; indeed these passionate passages seem to suggest the ardent devotion to Confucianism was a cultural tradition that had always existed in the diasporic community.

In the same epigraph, the temple of literature is depicted as not only a classroom or place of learning, but also an exhibition of the glory of Confucius. The sage is not only a role model to learn from, but also a figure to be worshipped. The grandeur of architecture of the temple was presented as a tribute to the sage in the text: 然猶曰，文廟隘而不宏，無以表尊崇 之至，而見親炙之殷。【……】經六 閱月，厥功告成。巍巍峻宇，有階有 庭，有殿有楹，高門五列，大牗六 局。臨斯廟者，舉欣欣然有喜色曰： 而今而後，凡我華人僑居泗水，得以 升其堂，而入其室，瞻仰乎至聖先師 者。 However, some said that the Temple of Literature was too simple and unglamorous that it could not convey respect for the sage, although it did bring about a sense of closeness. […] After six months, reconstruction was finally completed. The exquisite establishment had staircases and courtyards, halls and columns. There are five tall doors and six tall walls. Visitors to this temple happily stated that, “From now on, we Chinese living in Surabaya can hold ceremonies for him, and enter his chamber, and pay our tribute to our greatest sage the teacher.37 Not only in establishments specifically dedicated to the worship of Confucius and Confucian education, Confucius and Confucian values also appeared in epigraphs erected for other types of architecture. The figure of Confucius and his teachings had been

very deeply entrenched in the Chinese culture, and in some contexts Confucianism was fused with other traditions such as Taoism and Buddhism. In an epigraph donated to a Mazu temple in Medan in 1911, the text started with an allusion to the sage: 聖人以神道傳教，能服天下之心；思 王者以國社植基，能壯輿圖之氣。象 懿鑠哉！盛世規模，創於昔時，未嘗 不見於今日也。 The sage preached civilisation through the way of gods, and won the hearts of the world; the aspiring king establishes his nation upon an altar, and such facilitates the expansion of his realms. Such good signs! The golden age began in the past, but it is still visible today.38 The rhetoric on these epigraphs shows deep familiarity with Confucianism. Both epigraphs were written in classical Chinese rather than colloquial language. Such skill could only have been acquired through classical Chinese schooling, which consisted mainly of the study of Confucian classics. For example, the term “國社” (altar) in the second quoted epigraph possibly comes from “The Law of Sacrifices” in Book of Rites, as paragraph 5 of the book reads: 王為群姓立社，曰大社。王自為立 社，曰王社。諸侯為百姓立社，曰 國社。諸侯自立社，曰侯社。大夫以 下，成群立社曰置社。 The king, for all the people, erected an altar to (the spirit of ) the ground, called the Grand altar, and one for himself, called the Royal altar. A feudal prince, for all his people, erected one called the altar of the state, and one for himself called the altar of the prince. Great officers and all below them in association erected such an altar, called the Appointed altar.39 These types of epigraphs were not new to the region. Some were erected well before the founding of THHK in 1901. In the town of Kota Semarang in Central Java, where one of the largest Chinese communities in the Dutch

East Indies was located, the Chinese epigraph had been a long-established tradition. In fact, the town was named after Chinese navigator Zheng He in commemoration of his treasure voyages during the fifteenth century.

Chinese temples built in the nineteenth century might very well serve as examples of pre-THHK Confucianism. Like the epigraph for the Mazu temple in Surabaya, the epigraph for Tay Kak Sie in Kota Semarang erected in 1858 also began with an allusion to Confucian teachings: 侍古聖王，御當先成民，而後致力於 神，故凡通都大邑，莫不有寺、觀、 祠宇，供奉神靈，所以崇祀典而庇人 民也。 Ever since the olden times, every virtuous king would serve the people first, and then the gods; and so in every metropolis and major towns, there must be temples, monasteries, shrines for worshipping the gods, holding ceremonies in order to pray for protection over the people.40 There is a strong humanist bent to this epigraph as it prioritises civil matters over religious ones. It is likely that this idea comes from Confucius’ teachings regarding worship: Confucius maintained that earthly justice should come first, and only after that may worship follow. One of his quotes on this position can be found in the second chapter of The Analects: 子曰：「非其鬼而祭之，諂也。見義 不為，無勇也。」 The Master said: “To worship gods that are not yours, that is toadyism. Not to act when justice commands, that is cowardice.”41 In these temple epigraphs, the gods are hailed as the benevolent and graceful patrons who protect people from danger and yield to people’s needs. However, gratitude to their kindness alone seems inadequate in justifying the people’s praise and worship of the gods.

Confucius’ teachings seem to be the primary justification for worshipping gods: because

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Confucius stressed the importance of following the way of the gods, altars should therefore be set up; because the people need them, temples should therefore be built. This shows that despite having other deities in local folk religion, Confucian teachings still nevertheless served as to govern worship in the Chinese diasporic community in the Dutch East Indies.

Confucianism as a Religion?

The compatibility between Confucianism and folk religions has been a much debated topic. The inclusiveness of Confucianism to other religions almost makes it a non-religion, as the object of faith and worship becomes very difficult to pinpoint. Donald Earl Willmott suggests that such religious eclecticism is a distinctive feature of Chinese culture.42 Meanwhile, Chang-yau Hoon argues that syncretism is an integral part of “Chineseness”.43 Either way, evidence suggests that the Chinese seem indeed to not restrict their worship to any single deity or orthodoxy. Yet, as ChangYau Hoon points out, “traditional rituals and cultural symbols are essential to the definitions of Chineseness.”44 This seems to explain the mention of Confucius in the epigraphs for the Mazu temple and Tay Kak Sie. The Confucian doctrine is the basic protocol governing worship and other social rituals in the Chinese paradigm, but the Chinese do not restrict their worship to a single deity and so they find no contradiction in following Confucianism while worshipping deities other than Confucius.

Conclusion Various authors have attributed different causes to the thriving of Confucianism in the Dutch East Indies in the early twentieth century. Two most popular explanations are the desire for education and the rise of Chinese nationalism. These two explanations tend to define the scope of the movement as an intellectual movement or political awakening, which indeed is evidenced by the institutional history of Confucianism in the region.

However, from a cultural point of view,

34

Confucianism in the Dutch East Indies might not be merely the consequence of a lack of a particular educational resource or specific political condition, but rather a long-established tradition. Confucius was not merely celebrated as a Chinese historical figure; he was ardently worshipped and avidly remembered as a sage (in the religious sense) by the Chinese community. As such, the emphasis on traditional rituals and cultural symbols that is so integral to the Chinese culture could be the explanation to the prominence of Confucianism among the Chinese diaspora in the Dutch East Indies, even before the early twentieth century.

NOTES 1. Figures from 1900. Lea E. Williams, Overseas Chinese Nationalism: The Genesis of the Pan-Chinese movement in Indonesia, 1900-1916 (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960), 9.

2. This view is held by Lea E. Williams and Donald Earl Willmott in particular.

3. Aimee Dawis, “Chinese Education in Indonesia: Recent developments in the post-1998 era,” in Ethnic Chinese in Contemporary Indonesia, ed. Leo Suryadinata Singapore, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asia, 2008), 79.

4. Ibid., 80.

5. Ibid., 81-82.

6. The original term is 中華會館, meaning Chinese association, and which would be transliterated to Zhonghuahuiguan in romanised mandarin.

7. Lea E. Williams, The Origins of the Modern Chinese Movement in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1969), 1.

8. Ibid., 14-15.

9. Ibid., 15-16.

10. Kapitan was more commonly known as Kapitan Cina. Kapitans were usually selected among the Chinese and were assigned to manage Chinese communities in Indonesia on behalf of the Dutch colonial regime.

11. Majoor was a rank in the Dutch military that is roughly equivalent to that of a major in English. The colonial regime of the Dutch East Indies was to a large extent structured like an army, although it also dealt with various aspects of administration which would usually be delegated to the civil service.

12. The original term is 義學, which literally means charity schools. In romanised mandarin it would be transliterated as yixue.

13. The original term is 公館, which in romanised mandarin would be transliterated as gongguan.

14. Ibid., 23.

15. Ibid.

16. Lea E. Williams, Overseas Chinese Nationalism: The Genesis of the Pan-Chinese Movement in Indonesia, 1900-1916 (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960), 37.

17. Ibid.

18. Didi Kwartanada, “The Tiong Hoa Hwee Koan School: a transborder project of modernity in Batavia,” in Chinese Indonesians Reassessed: History, religion and belonging, ed. Siew-min Sai and ChangYau Hoon, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 38.

19. Ibid., 35.

20. Ibid., 39.

21. Claudine Salmon, “Confucianists and ”Revolutionaries in Surabaya,” in Chinese Indonesians: Remembering, Distorting, Forgetting,

ed. Tim Lindsey and Helen Pausacker, Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005), 130.

22. Ibid., 131.

23. Lea E. Williams, The Origins of the Modern Chinese Movement in Indonesia, 18.

24. Lea E. Williams, Overseas Chinese Nationalism: The Genesis of the Pan-Chinese Movement in Indonesia, 1900-1916, 37.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 69.

27. Ibid., 71.

28. Lea E. Williams, The Origins of the Modern Chinese Movement in Indonesia, 13.

29. The original terms in Chinese are 皇漢 and 皇 清.

30. 傅吾康主編；蘇爾夢、蕭國建合編；胡雋 吟、張麗卿助理，《印度尼西亞華文銘刻彙 編》第一冊〔新加坡：南洋學會，1988。〕 ，270頁。 Wolfgang Franke ed., Chinese Epigraphic Materials in Indonesia, collected, annotated, and edited by Wolfgang Franke; in collaboration with Claudine Salmon and Anthony Siu, with the assistance of Hu Chü-yin, Teo Lee Kheng Vol. 1 (Singapore: South Sea Society, 1988), 270.

31. Claudine Salmon, “Confucianists and Revolutionaries in Surabaya,” 139.

32. Ibid., 140.

33. Lea E. Williams, Overseas Chinese Nationalism: The Genesis of the Pan-Chinese Movement in Indonesia, 1900-1916, 133.

34. Ibid., 130.

35. Ibid., 127.

36. 佚名氏，〈重建泗水文廟記〉〔東爪哇泗 水：光緒三十二年(1906)〕，收錄傅吾康主 編；蘇爾夢、蕭國建合編；胡雋吟、張麗卿 助理，《印度尼西亞華文銘刻彙編》第二冊 下〔新加坡：南洋學會，1988。〕，696頁。 Anonymous, “Chongjian Sishuiwenmiao Ji (The Re-construction of the Temple of Literature in Surabaya),” (Surabaya, Eastern Java: 32nd year of the reign of Emperor Guangxu [1906]), in Wolfgang Franke ed., Chinese Epigraphic Materials in Indonesia, collected, annotated, and edited by Wolfgang Franke; in collaboration with Claudine Salmon and Anthony Siu, with the assistance of Hu Chü-yin, Teo Lee Kheng Vol. 2 Pt. 2 (Singapore: South Sea Society, 1988), 696.

37. Ibid.

38. 佚名氏，〈天后宮樂捐碑〉〔北蘇門答臘 棉蘭：宣統三年(1911)〕，收錄傅吾康主編； 蘇爾夢、蕭國建合編；胡雋吟、張麗卿助 理，《印度尼西亞華文銘刻彙編》第一冊〔 新加坡：南洋學會，1988。〕，108頁。 Anonymous, “Tianhougong lejuanbei (Epigraph

35

Gladly Donated to the Mazu Temple),” (Medan, North Sumatra: 3rd year of the reign of Emperor Xuantong [1911]), in Wolfgang Franke ed., Chinese Epigraphic Materials in Indonesia, collected, annotated, and edited by Wolfgang Franke; in collaboration with Claudine Salmon and Anthony Siu, with the assistance of Hu Chü-yin, Teo Lee Kheng Vol. 1 (Singapore: South Sea Society, 1988), 108.

39. Paragraph 5, “The Law of Sacrifices,” Book of Rites, trans. James Legge, available online at http:// ctext.org/liji/ji-fa/zh?en=on 40. 佚名氏，〈重修大覺寺併建功德祠碑記〉 （雅加達：咸豐戊午年(1858)），收錄傅吾康 主編；蘇爾夢、蕭國建合編；胡雋吟、張麗 卿助理，《印度尼西亞華文銘刻彙編》第二 冊上〔新加坡：南洋學會，1988。〕， 369 頁。 Anonymous, “Chongxiu Dajuesi Bingjian Gongdesi Beiji (Epigraph in Commemoration of the Renovation of Tay Kak Sie and Construction of Kong Teck Tze),” (Kota Semarang, Central Java: 8th year of the reign of Emperor Xianfeng [1858]), in Wolfgang Franke ed., Chinese Epigraphic Materials in Indonesia, collected, annotated, and edited by Wolfgang Franke; in collaboration with Claudine Salmon and Anthony Siu, with the assistance of Hu Chü-yin, Teo Lee Kheng Vol. 2 Pt. 1 (Singapore: South Sea Society, 1988), 369.

41. Simon Leys trans., The Analects of Confucius (New York, NY: Norton, 1997), 9.

42. Donald Earl Willmott, The Chinese of Semarang: A Changing Minority Community in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960), 185.

43. Chang-Yau Hoon, “By race, I am Chinese; and by grace, I am Christian: Negotiating Chineseness and Christianity in Indonesia,” in Chinese Indonesians Reassessed: History, religion and belonging, 162.

44. Ibid., 162-163.

36

BIBLIOGRAPHY Dawis, Aimee, “Chinese Education in Indonesia: Recent developments in the post1998 era,” in Ethnic Chinese in Contemporary Indonesia, ed. Leo Suryadinata, Singapore, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asia, 2008.

75-96.

Hoon, Chang-Yau, “By race, I am Chinese; and by grace, I am Christian: Negotiating Chineseness and Christianity in Indonesia,” in Chinese Indonesians Reassessed: History, religion and belonging, ed. Siew-min Sai and ChangYau Hoon, New York, NY: Routledge, 2013.

158-177.

Kwartanada, Didi, “The Tiong Hoa Hwee Koan School: a transborder project of modernity in Batavia,” in Chinese Indonesians Reassessed: History, religion and belonging, ed. Siew-min Sai and Chang-Yau Hoon, New York, NY: Routledge, 2013. 27-44.

Legge, James trans., Book of Rites, trans. James Legge, available online at http://ctext.org/liji/ Leys, Simon trans., The Analects of Confucius, New York, NY: Norton, 1997.

Salmon, Claude, “Confucianists and Revolutionaries in Surabaya (c. 1880- c.

1906),” in Chinese Indonesians: Remembering, Distorting, Forgetting, ed. Tim Lindsey and Helen Pausacker, Singapore, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005.

130-147.

Suryadinata, Leo, “Buddhism and Confucianism in Contemporary Indonesia: Recent Developments,” in Chinese Indonesians: Remembering, Distorting, Forgetting, ed. Tim Lindsey and Helen Pausacker, Singapore, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005. 77-94.

Williams, Lea E., The Origins of the Modern Chinese Movement in Indonesia, Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1969.

Williams, Lea E., Overseas Chinese Nationalism: The Genesis of the PanChinese movement in Indonesia, 19001916, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960.

Willmott, Donald Earl, The Chinese of Semarang: A Changing Minority Community in Indonesia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960. 佚名氏，〈重建泗水文廟記〉〔東爪哇泗 水：光緒三十二年(1906)〕，收錄傅吾康 主編；蘇爾夢、蕭國建合編；胡雋吟、張 麗卿助理，《印度尼西亞華文銘刻彙編》 第二冊下〔新加坡：南洋學會，1988。〕

，696頁。 Anonymous, “Chongjian Sishuiwenmiao Ji (The Re-construction of the Temple of Literature in Surabaya),” (Surabaya, Eastern Java: 32nd year of the reign of Emperor Guangxu [1906]), in Wolfgang Franke ed., Chinese Epigraphic Materials in Indonesia, collected, annotated, and edited by Wolfgang Franke; in collaboration with Claudine Salmon and Anthony Siu, with the assistance of Hu Chü-yin, Teo Lee Kheng Vol. 2 Pt. 2 (Singapore: South Sea Society, 1988), 696. 佚名氏，〈天后宮樂捐碑〉〔棉蘭：宣 統三年(1911)〕，收錄傅吾康主編；蘇爾 夢、蕭國建合編；胡雋吟、張麗卿助理， 《印度尼西亞華文銘刻彙編》第一冊〔新 加坡：南洋學會，1988。〕，108頁。 Anonymous, “Tianhougong lejuanbei (Epigraph Gladly Donated to the Mazu Temple),” (Medan: 3rd year of the reign of Emperor Xuantong [1911]), in Wolfgang Franke ed., Chinese Epigraphic Materials in Indonesia, collected, annotated, and edited by Wolfgang Franke; in collaboration with Claudine Salmon and Anthony Siu, with the assistance of Hu Chü-yin, Teo Lee Kheng Vol. 1 (Singapore: South Sea Society, 1988), 108. 佚名氏，〈重修大覺寺併建功德祠碑記〉 （雅加達：咸豐戊午年(1858)），收錄 傅吾康主編；蘇爾夢、蕭國建合編；胡 雋吟、張麗卿助理，《印度尼西亞華文 銘刻彙編》第二冊上〔新加坡：南洋學 會，1988。〕， 369頁。 Anonymous, “Chongxiu Dajuesi Bingjian Gongdesi Beiji (Epigraph in Commemoration of the Renovation of Tay Kak Sie and Construction of Kong Teck Tze),” (Kota Semarang, Central Java: 8th year of the reign of Emperor Xianfeng [1858]), in Wolfgang Franke ed., Chinese Epigraphic Materials in Indonesia, collected, annotated, and edited by Wolfgang Franke; in collaboration with Claudine Salmon and Anthony Siu, with the assistance of Hu Chüyin, Teo Lee Kheng Vol. 2 Pt. 1 (Singapore: South Sea Society, 1988), 369.

37

IMAGINING A MODERN PALACE Chinese Nationalism and the National Palace Museum in Taiwan Erin Sobat

Introduction In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson identifies museums and their practices as profoundly political institutions tied to the social construction of nation.1 The renowned National Palace Museum is similarly implicated in the formation of the Republic of China in Taiwan, posing both a challenge and an opportunity for studies of the nationalist Kuomintang party (KMT). Now located in Taipei, Taiwan, the museum’s core imperial collection originates from the Forbidden City in Beijing and carries deep historical and symbolic significance. Often viewed as a repository of traditional Chinese culture, the imperial collection has been held up as an indicator of KMT legitimacy.2 Yet the museum institution itself is a product of the modern nation-state and the conscious political desire to present Republican Taiwan as a culturally authentic, historically continuous “China.” In addition, this relationship is further complicated by the problem of “Two Museums,” mirroring the “Two Chinas” that resulted from the Communist takeover of Mainland China through the resumed Chinese Civil War (1946-1950). This fragmentation of the imperial collection has led to the creation of Palace Museums located in both Beijing and Taipei, each of which is tied to the political activities and competing claims to legitimacy of their respective governments.3 Navigating these tensions, this paper will demonstrate that the

38

establishment of the National Palace Museum reflected the goal of presenting a historically representative Chinese state within a modern nationalist context. By emphasizing a collective cultural consciousness in Taiwan, then, state authorities sought to further a clearly nationalist political agenda. This will be explored by examining the historicity and cultural significance of the imperial collection; the role of the “museum as nation” in early Republican China; the promotion of the KMT as caretakers of these cultural treasures; and finally the architectural language of the National Palace Museum site itself as a reflection of its relationship with the Beijing Palace Museum.

The History of the Imperial Collection As Jeannette Elliott and David Shambaugh have noted, “the history of the imperial art collection mirrors the turbulent history of China itself.”4 Comprised primarily of artworks collected by emperors of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), the collection was housed in the Forbidden City of Beijing and other imperial sites such as the Summer Palace. This included masterful paintings, hand scrolls, jade carvings, bronze vessels, and other pieces reflecting the refined tastes of successive rulers, which altogether represented several thousand years of Chinese material culture as appreciated through an elite lens.5 Following the Chinese Revolution of 1911, various competing successors to the Qing were

faced with the question of how best to deal with the imperial palace and its contents, which had been the site of monarchical authority for generations.6 Although young emperor Pu-yi (1906-67) formally abdicated the throne in February 1912, he continued to live in the palace for another fourteen years and the imperial collection remained the de facto property of his household.7 The artworks in the Forbidden City became the national property of the Chinese public in 1924, when the warlord Feng Yu-hsiang (1882-1948) finally expelled Pu-yi from the palace. This was followed by the official inauguration of a Palace Museum on October 10, 1925, which became a National Day symbolizing the end of monarchy and succession of the Republic.8 In 1928, the museum came under direct KMT supervision when nationalist troops under the leadership of General Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) reached Beijing and established a formal museum board of directors.9 The most prized elements of the collection were moved southward from Beijing as early as 1933 in efforts to escape destruction by the invading Imperial Japanese Army. These works would go through multiple harrowing relocations over the following decade-and-a-half alongside shifts in KMT power, although a significant number remained in the Forbidden City.10 By 1948, the continued success of the Communists in the Chinese Civil War (19461950) prompted the KMT to evacuate the mainland and relocate to Taiwan, which they had seized following the Japanese surrender to the Allies in 1945.11 This also involved the transport of several thousand crates of cultural treasures including artifacts from the National Central Museum and Central Library. The immigrant collection was then stored in a series of caves outside of Taichung until the current museum building was completed in 1965.12 Much has been made of the tenacity of Palace Museum staff who accompanied the collection through these trials and tradition holds that not a single object was lost or damaged in the moves. Some of the curators involved have even claimed that it was the “divine aura” of the collection and the spiritual protection

of Heaven that allowed for the survival of its contents.13 Furthermore, the modern museum was formally christened in honour of the centenary of the birth of Sun Yat-sen, the symbolic Father of the Chinese Republic, as mandated

by Chiang Kai-shek. The KMT government was heavily involved in the museum’s activities via the Ministry of Culture, with the Director appointed directly by the President of Taiwan14—a practice that has been continued under the current Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government. The impressive scope of state efforts to maintain and control these historical artifacts underscores the cultural and political significance of the imperial collection and the museum in which it has ultimately been housed.

The Historicity of the Imperial Collection In order to evaluate the role of the National Palace Museum in the construction of a nationalist state in Taiwan, we must first understand the cultural significance of the imperial collection. Central to this analysis is the historicity of the collection, both in terms of its literal patrimony and in the context of archaic Chinese traditions. According to Rubie Watson, parts of the collection dating from the ancient Shang dynasty (ca. 1600-1050 B.C.E.), including bronze ritual vessels and oracle bones used in divination, served as “a link to the very core of Chinese civilization itself.”15 Even beyond a material connection to this heritage, however, over centuries these objects came to symbolize the political and moral authority of the ruling emperor. Dynastic succession in China was repeatedly marked by an appropriation of the imperial palace and its art by a new ruler, particularly during the Ming Dynasty when re-established Han rulers sought to associate themselves personally with the collection of past emperors.16 Possession of the collection therefore became a symbol of sovereignty associated with the cosmic authority of the emperor. In this way, these objects played an “archaic function” that transcended their linear history and provided a means of conferring legitimacy through perceived continuity with,

39

or deference to, the past.17 This can be further connected to an imperial worldview that postulated an unaltered continuity in Chinese rule and sought to emulate the tradition of past ancestors; as such, the collection served as “a concrete reminder of the links that bound each ruling group to the Shang dynasty.”18 Thus, the importance of the Chinese imperial collection is found not only in the artistic character of the pieces, but also in their role as cultural objects conferring real political power.

Figure 1. Square Gui bronze ritual vessel, Late Shang to Early Western Zhou Dynasty (ca. 1100-1000 B.C.E.).

National Palace Museum collection, Taipei.

The Museum as Nation Also central to this discussion is the role of the museum as a modernizing institution in nationalist China. Yi-chih Huang notes, “The founding of a national museum is a part of the ideological and cultural construction of national identity.”19 Similarly, according to Tamara Hamlish, the process of museum formation as demonstrated in nineteenth century Europe and America is one of both nationalization and democratization.20 For both authors, this is because the manipulation and presentation of artifacts in a museum setting provides an opportunity for state authorities to canonize a national narrative, therefore allowing for the conscious construction of an idealized historical identity. At the same time, the shift from “private” to “public” art collections encompasses a process whereby the citizens of the state, at least in some limited sense, gain increased authority

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over or access to what had previously been the purview of only a privileged elite. Here, museums can be read as sites of transaction between the visitor and the state, where individuals are exposed to the spiritual wealth of the nation in return for, perhaps by necessity, an intensified attachment to the state.21 In this way, the modern, Western-style museum can function as both site and symbol of state cultural authority, in turn revealing a certain political power via the ability to assemble and display artworks. Hamlish also notes the particular importance of national public art museums for governments seeking to cultivate international connections by demonstrating adherence to Western models of cultural appreciation, echoing the KMT’s diplomatic orientations towards the United States.22 This conception of a national museum is significant to the transition from monarchy to republic in early modern China. Huang categorizes the initial establishment of the Beijing Palace Museum as part of the founding history of Republican China,23 while others have likewise described it as a “nationalizing project” that brought the hidden collection of the Forbidden City into the public domain.24 This also occurred within a complicated transition from imperial to national visual culture following the revolution, perhaps best framed by the contradiction between the noble power of China’s “visual past” and its new identity as a republican nation-state.25 Such tension is exemplified by the struggle of the early nationalists to define the position of first the imperial palace, and later the Palace Museum, within Republican China.

Ironically, this shift necessitated both the preservation and adaptation of traditional cultural representations for the establishment of a modern Chinese nation.26 In the context of the Beijing Palace Museum, this involved an accommodation between modern and traditional frameworks of understanding, with Western symbols and rituals finding expression through distinctively Chinese narratives. For example, early museum exhibits presented visitors with a “carefully constructed tale” equating the fate of the imperial collection to that of the

nation, which was depicted as under threat by various enemies of the republic.27 Rather than a process of exchange whereby visitors shared in the cultural wealth of the nation, this narrative emphasized a call to arms for the defense of state stability. The Beijing Palace Museum therefore grew out of a microcosm of early twentieth century nationalist forces, most notably an encounter between the archaic function of the imperial collection and the civic institutions of the modern nation. Here, the very formation of the Beijing Palace Museum during the 1920s was tied to wider processes of nation-building and cultural construction by republican nationalists.

The Imperial Collection, KMT Legitimacy, and Chinese Identity This process of cultural imagination also continued following the division of the mainland between the nationalist and Communist regimes and the full KMT evacuation to Taiwan by 1949. In particular, the National Palace Museum played an important role in Taiwanese cultural policies that promoted the government-in-exile as both trusted caretaker and legitimate inheritor of China’s past.

Generally, KMT party leaders styled themselves as protectors of the imperial art collection and consciously linked KMT rule to “the party’s ability to possess and guard” this unchanging core of objects.28 As outlined above, this suggests an “archaic survival” of the symbolic, cosmological power of the collection and its association with legitimate political authority.29 In fact, both rival governments repeatedly cited possession of portions of the imperial collection as evidence of a mandate to rule all of China.30 However, the KMT was particularly effective at presenting a narrative of having “rescued” these objects from Communist hands.

While it is perhaps not surprising that this epic journey of thousands of priceless artworks found popular appeal, accounts in numerous museum publications, magazines, and other media were presented with a distinctly nationalist flavour. Both KMT officials and museum staff explicitly documented their efforts “to

save China’s priceless art from the rapacious designs of Chinese warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist ideologues.”31 In addition, many museum staff insisted that they had saved the Chinese national treasures from gong fei, or “Communist bandits.”32 Similar to early nationalist presentations of the Beijing Palace Museum, then, officials in Taiwan clearly associated risks to the imperial collection with threats to the Republic as a whole.

This stimulated a certain “sense of urgency to protect the collection [from the Communists], lest traditional Chinese culture be annihilated completely.”33 Similarly, the National Palace Museum played an explicit role in nationalist KMT cultural policies in Taiwan. Jane Ju describes the “cultural engineering” of the Taiwanese population following the KMT takeover in order to eliminate all traces of the Japanese occupation that had lasted from 1895-1945.34 This included prohibition of the Japanese language and other customs as well as the “rediscovery” of Taiwan’s historical links with China.

Such political efforts were aided by educational and outreach programs at the National Palace Museum, which organized tours for local schoolchildren, developed in-services for teachers, and printed textbook reproductions of canonical Chinese objects deemed key to comprehending the nation’s past.35 Female museum guides were even required to wear the qipao—a modernized form of traditional Chinese dress— in addition to having a background in Chinese art and history. Tellingly, however, they were also expected to speak fluent English.36 These practices continued from the early republican re-contextualization of ancient material culture within the modern Chinese nation-state. In this way, the National Palace Museum promoted a collective cultural memory and “Chinese” consciousness-raising among the Taiwanese people, which in turn aided the KMT government in establishing an imagined national community on the island.37 The Problem of “Two Museums” The problem of “Two Chinas” in East

41

Asia arose largely due to the escalation of the Cold War and the outbreak of the Korean War (1950-1953), which led the United States to recognize the KMT in Taiwan as the legitimate government of China rather than the Communists on the mainland.38 This reinforced the need to identify Taiwan politically and culturally within a historical “China,” further complicated by the legacies of a half-century of Japanese occupation of the island. On a smaller scale, this political dynamic was mirrored by the existence of two Chinese imperial art collections—a result of the post-war evacuation of the core collection to Taiwan and the formation of separate museums in Taipei and Beijing by the mid-1960s. The naming of these institutions subtly reflected the ideological differences between the two Chinas, with the National Palace Museum in Taipei replicating the title of the Beijing Palace Museum except for the addition of guoli, or “national.”

Perhaps the most striking Republican achievement in this context is the architectural design of the National Palace Museum itself.

Conceived by Huang Bao-yu and completed in 1965, this building made explicit reference to the political tension between the two imperial museums.39 According to Watson, the National Palace Museum in Taipei “can be seen as a shrine to China’s high culture and to the Kuomintang Party that became the self-appointed guardians of that culture.”40 This is evident in its strategic location among the suburbs of Shilin, which was the neighbourhood of numerous elite residences—including that of Chiang Kai-shek—in addition to political embassies and the international Songshan Airport. The museum site was therefore easily accessible to tourists, off-duty service-people, and foreign dignitaries alike. Similarly to the formation of the Beijing Palace Museum in the 1920s, however, the design of the National Palace Museum faced the challenge of marrying Chinese traditions and modern Republican ideals while also avoiding pure imitation of the Communist-controlled Forbidden City.42 To resolve this, Huang Bao-yu instead sought to create an emotional connection between the two museums by subtly but dramatically

42

shifting the proportions and colour schemes of the Beijing Palace Museum, for example by using blue roof tiles instead of yellow and light brown walls instead of red.43 By recreating the spatial atmosphere of the Beijing site he developed an architectural analogy for standing before the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City, itself an arresting structure traditionally associated with the highest political authority in China.44 This design strategy also extended to the interior exhibition spaces of the National Palace Museum, which were modelled on the ancient imperial configuration of the Ming Tang plan.45 Here, the building was arranged around a main rectangular lobby with one exhibition hall located at each corner. This helped orient visitors towards the center of the site, which in the context of the imperial palace was traditionally associated with the emperor as the highest political and cultural authority of the state.

This symbolic significance was strengthened in the National Palace Museum through the presence of ancient imperial objects such as Shang dynasty bronze vessels in the central lobby.46

Figure 2. The Ming Tang plan of the National Palace Museum. Chao Qing Fu, New Architecture of Chinese Classical Style (Taipei: Nantian Press, 1993), 55.

Finally, this republican political program is clear from the resemblance of the National

Palace Museum layout to that of the Sun Yatsen Mausoleum in Nanjing. Similarly to his analogy for the Meridian Gate, Huang Bao-yu sought to establish the museum site as a symbolic “other” for the mainland mausoleum.

Both locations therefore display identical statues of the nationalist leader and demonstrate formal similarities with the traditional organization of imperial burial sites (most notably the monumental staircases leading up to their entrances).47 This design also necessitated a slow, ceremonial approach that was thought to raise the historical consciousness of visitors and further elevate the near-spiritual experience of touring the museum. In this way, individual interactions with the physical space can be read as a kind of nationalized ritual experience. This recalls Hamlish’s reading of the museum as a site of cultural transaction with the state, where the institution itself becomes a national narrative presented to the public.48 The National Palace Museum therefore suggests an extreme of what Anderson might call “the museumizing imagination,” where the museum can now be understood as an imagined community that both defines, and is defined by, the nation-state in its own right.

Figure 3. Front and aerial views of the National Palace Museum and Sun Yat-Sen Mausoleum sites, 1965. Chao Qing Fu, New Architecture of Chinese Classical Style (Taipei: Nantian Press, 1993), 141.

Conclusion The National Palace Museum exists in tension with the Beijing Palace Museum much as the Republic of China in Taiwan is in tension with the mainland People’s Republic of China. Notably, studying the formation of this unique museum allows us to better understand the development of the imagined community that is the modern Chinese nation-state in Taiwan. In particular, the association of the extant imperial art collection with traditional political authority underscored the conversion of these artifacts into a public museum as part of a process of national identity formation in early twentieth century China. Furthermore, the safe transport of a majority of this collection to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War became a hallmark of nationalist KMT rhetoric. By developing a Western-style museum institution to formally display and promote these artifacts, KMT officials sought to canonize a narrative where the Republic of China served as the legitimate cultural and political successor to an ancient Chinese legacy. This construction of a modern Chinese identity was further reflected in the architectural organization of the National Palace Museum vis-à-vis the Beijing Palace Museum and the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum.

In this way, the National Palace Museum played a significant role in the articulation and promotion of a collective Chinese identity in Taiwan during the mid-twentieth century.

Today, this national consciousness is being challenged by the growing “Taiwanism” of a new generation, which has pushed the museum to increase the representation of popular and indigenous Taiwanese art in its programs and exhibitions.49 Nevertheless, it is clear that this institution helped to establish the state as “guardian of a generalized national Tradition” under KMT rule.50 As a site of nationalized ritual transaction between individuals and the state, then, the National Palace Museum functioned uniquely as both an “imagined” and “imagining” institution in Taiwan.

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NOTES 1. Benedict Anderson, “Census, Map, Museum,” Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 178.

Museums constitute one case study in Anderson’s wider thesis, in which he suggests that “nations” are socially constructed communities imagined by members who perceive themselves to be part of a larger, sovereign group.

2. Jane C. Ju, “Chinese Art, the National Palace Museum, and Cold War Politics,” Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Brzyski (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 116.

3. Yi-chih Huang, “National Glory and Traumatism: National/Cultural Identity Construction of National Palace Museum in Taiwan,” National Identities 14, no. 3 (2012), 211.

4. Jeannette S. Elliott and David L. Shambaugh, The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 145.

5. Lin-sheng Chang, “The National Palace Museum: A History of the Collection,” Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), 3.

6. Ibid.

7. Rubie Watson, “Palaces, Museums, and Squares: Chinese National Spaces. “Museum Anthropology 19, no. 2 (1995), 7. Rumours abounded of the sale of ancient treasures from the collection, either by errant servants or in order to support the household’s activities when the government’s allowance proved inconsistent.

8. Huang, 213.

9. Watson, “Palaces, Museums, and Squares,” 7. The museum board began to seek out and purchase back many of the works that had been sold off by Pu-yi’s household.

8. This process was non-linear but was roughly characterized by movement in KMT power centers from North to South China.

11. Elliott, 97. This was despite the fact that the Allies considered Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to have remained formally under Japanese military occupation until the 1952 Treaty of San Francisco.

12. Ibid., 105. A small exhibition gallery was constructed at Taichung in 1957 with US funding, largely to allow for visiting foreign scholars to study the collection.

13. Huang, 218.

14. Chieh-ching Tien, “The Formation and Impact of Museum Clusters: Two Case Studies in Taiwan,” Museum Management and Curatorship 25, no. 1 (2010), 75.

15. Rubie Watson, “Tales of Two ‘Chinese’ History Museums: Taipei and Hong Kong,” Curator: The

44

Museum Journal 41, no. 3 (1998), 167.

16. Elliott, 145. In slight contrast, the “outsider” Manchu emperors of the Qing Dynasty collected Chinese artifacts as a way of demonstrating their respect towards this culture.

17. Tamara Hamlish, “Preserving the Palace: Museums and the Making of Nationalism(s) in Twentieth-Century China,” Museum Anthropology 19, no. 2 (1995), 24.

18. Watson, “Tales of Two ‘Chinese’ History Museums,” 167.

19. Huang, 211.

20. Hamlish, 20-21. Of course, this process was also tied to European-style imperialism and the looting of colonial treasures.

21. Ibid., 21.

22. Ibid.

23. Huang, 212.

24. Chang, 3.

25. Watson, “Tales of Two ‘Chinese’ History Museums,” 168.

26. Hamlish, 22.

27. Ibid.

28. Watson, “Tales of Two ‘Chinese’ History Museums,” 171.

29. Hamlish, 20.

30. Thomas Lawton, “Foreword: The Saga of China’s Imperial Collections,” The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures, viii.

31. Watson, “Tales of Two ‘Chinese’ History Museums,” 171.

32. Elliott, 146. In reality, Communist officials displayed a genuine desire to preserve the material heritage of the Forbidden City.

33. Ju, 121. This was particularly true among displaced former mainlanders in Taiwan.

34. Ibid., 116.

35. Ibid., 128.

36. Ibid.

37. Anderson, “Introduction,” 6.

38. Elliott, 97. This was accompanied by substantial economic, military and cultural aid, including funding for the display and promotion of the imperial collection in Taiwan.

39. Ju, 126. This was similarly achieved with significant US financial backing.

40. Watson, “Palaces, Museums, and Squares,” 11.

41. Ju, 127.

42. Huang, 214.

43. Ju, 126.

44. Huang, 215.

45. Ibid., 216.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., 217. This burial site formula consisted of a central axis with a front gate; sacrificial passage (here the monumental staircase); worship hall (here the

main museum building); and burial chamber (here the museum storage vaults).

48. Hamlish, 28.

49. Cheng-Sheng Tu, “A Message from the Director: Five Goals for the New Century,” The National Palace Museum Newsletter 33, no. 1 (January– March, 2001).

50. Anderson, 180-81.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.

Elliott, Jeannette S., and David L. Shambaugh.

The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures.

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007.

Chang, Lin-sheng. “The National Palace Museum: A History of the Collection.” In Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei, ed. Wen Fong et al., 3-26. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996.

Fu, Chao Qing. New Architecture of Chinese Classical Style. Taipei: Nantian Press, 1993.

Hamlish, Tamara. “Preserving the Palace: Museums and the Making of Nationalism(s) in Twentieth-Century China.” Museum Anthropology 19, no. 2 (1995): 20-30.

Huang, Yi-chih.

“National Glory and Traumatism: National/Cultural Identity Construction of National Palace Museum in Taiwan.” National Identities 14, no. 3 (2012): 211-25.

Ju, Jane C. “Chinese Art, the National Palace Museum, and Cold War Politics.” In Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Brzyski, 115-134. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Tien, Chieh-ching. “The Formation and Impact of Museum Clusters: Two Case Studies in Taiwan.” Museum Management and Curatorship 25, no. 1 (2010): 69-85.

Tu, Cheng-sheng. “A Message from the Director: Five Goals for the New Century.” The National Palace Museum Newsletter 33, no. 1 (January–March, 2001).

Watson, Rubie. “Palaces, Museums, and Squares: Chinese National Spaces.” Museum Anthropology 19, no. 2 (1995): 7-19.

Watson, Rubie. “Tales of Two ‘Chinese’ History Museums: Taipei and Hong Kong. “Curator: The Museum Journal 41, no. 3 (1998): 167-77.

45

SEOUL C’EST LOIN

Jules Tomi

This project stems from various inspirations crossing many fields from cinema to sociology, and all of which have in common the fact that they are telling a story about Korea. First, there was the movie Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Then a sociology book titled South Korea under Compressed Modernity, by Chang Kyung Sup. Coréennes by Chris Marker, and finally the 청량리淸凉里(Cheongnyangni) series by photographer Park Sung Jin. An unquestionably class-oriented as well as a highly stylized film, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance tells the story of a young factory worker who has to indulge in crime in order to be able to afford health care for his sister. South Korea under Compressed Modernity is looking to set up a sociological framework for analyzing the peculiarities of South Korea’s economic development and modernization process and suggests that their ‘compressed’ nature, that is the pace at which South Korea industrialized, is directly responsible for various crisis tendencies across diverse social, economic, and political realms. Coréennes is a photographic and literary récit de voyage that captures the French filmmaker-photographer-writer’s journey to then-economically-booming North Korea, in 1958. The 청량리淸凉里 series, finally, is a recent photographic portrait of a rapidly changing neighborhood known for its red-light district in the center of Seoul.

Taking a two months trip to Korea last summer, I wanted to capture scenes from an “ordinary modernity”, depictions of “post

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industrial melancholy” through portraits, “glimpsed at” moments and pictures of “still life”. Through my pictures I adopt the gaze of a random bystander. Standing at the intersection of ethnographic research, journalism and narration, my series offers reflections on contemporary Korea.

The sentence “Séoul, c’est loin”, however, is not aimed at the white world. It is, rather, an attempt at making sense of the vertiginous emotions felt by whoever has once undertaken the trip from the countryside to the metropolis, alongside the canola fields that have, too, now, here and there, been colonized by housing projects. The shock that is contained within that sentence isn’t culturally located, it refers to all forms of modernity. And, similarly, the distance that it assesses cannot be expressed in miles or kilometers. The highways, the buildings and their height, at the bottom of which we get lost, are what I’m referring to. The anonymity, too, and, necessarily, the alienation, that spreads from Sinchon to Sincheon. The ‘’idols’’ we have been inebriated by and as Georg Simmel would put it, the effects of the big city on the mind of the individual To come up with unchangeable truths was not the task I had assigned to myself. I was, simply and sincerely, seeking to offer images, and perhaps symbols. The draft of an attempt at telling stories. But when facing those idols, however unmistakably misleading, unfolding before my eyes and proudly upheld, in most places I was setting foot in, from Garak to

Dongdaemun, as the symbol of a nation’s rejuvenation, I might just have, in fact, lost myself in idols. Avenues not large enough to prevent building from rusting, I have seen the buildings’ blood, if there be such a thing.

And if modernity be, at the same time a disease and the salvation of our souls, forgive them, for they know not what they do ; and truthfully neither do I. Softly, as stupor keeps our eyes open, our full mouths shut themselves.

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Ce projet est le fruit d’inspirations diverses, qui s’étendent du cinéma à la sociologie, à la littérature, à la photographie, mais qui ont toutes en commun de raconter une histoire au sujet de la Corée. Au commencement se trouvait Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), son caractère effrontément esthétique et ses relents de presque fin de lutte des classes. Et puis il y a eu le sociologue Chang Kyung-sup et son ouvrage South Korea Under Compressed Modernity. Chris Marker, avec Coréennes. Et le photographe Park Sung-jin et sa série 청량리 역(Cheongnyangni).

Sur fond de lutte ouvrière, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance est un film qui raconte l’histoire d’un travailleur d’usine forcé de verser dans le crime afin de pouvoir offrir des soins à sa sœur malade. Chang, dans son livre, cherche quant à lui à caractériser la modernité et le développement économique sud-coréen et suggère que leur nature « comprimée », c’est à dire la vitesse à laquelle a été parcouru le chemin de l’industrialisation, est directement responsable de nombreuses crises qui traversent les champs politiques, économiques et sociaux. Coréennes, est un récit de voyage photographique et littéraire qui rend compte du voyage de Chris Marker en Corée du Nord, alors en plein essor économique, à la fin des années 50. 청 량리, finalement, est un récent portrait photographique d’un quartier du centre de Séoul – célèbre pour ses maisons closes – désormais

guetté par la gentrification. À l’occasion d’un voyage de deux mois en Corée, j’ai cherché à capter des scènes d’une « modernité ordinaire ». Des avatars d’une mélancolie post-industrielle. À travers mes photos, j’adopte la posture du passant, je cherche son regard banal. À mi-chemin entre la recherche ethnographique, le journalisme et le récit, ce projet propose des questionnements au sujet de la Corée contemporaine. « Corée du Nord ou du Sud ? », m’ont souvent demandé « les gens ». J’ai répondu que ça n’avait pas d’importance.

Pyongyang, aussi, c’est loin. De nos consciences et de nos certitudes.

Et quand je dis « Séoul, c’est loin », je ne m’adresse pas au monde blanc. J’essaie de rendre compte de l’ivresse vertigineuse susceptible de clouer sur place quiconque ayant effectué le voyage de la campagne à la grande ville, le long des champs de colza ; que parsèment ici et là les grands ensembles. La stupeur qu’une telle affirmation exprime n’est pas culturelle, elle concerne toutes les formes de modernité.

Et de même, la distance qu’une telle affirmation mesure n’est pas kilométrique. Je parle de la hauteur des autoroutes, du règne de l’anonymat de Sinchon à Sincheon. Des « idoles », finalement, celles qui nous ont confondus et rendu ivres, et peut-être, comme dirait Georg Simmel, de l’influence de la société urbaine sur le psychisme du citadin.

Je ne cherchais pas la vérité. Je cherchais, le plus sincèrement possible, à offrir des images.

Esquisser la tentative d’une histoire. Et je me suis peut-être confondu en idoles, à l’instar de celles que j’apercevais au loin - à la gare, au marché, à Dongdaemun, sur les hauteurs de Changsin-dong - élevées en symboles du renouveau de leur nation et dont la tromperie me paraissait évidente. Il était possible d’apercevoir la rouille ; en dépit de la largeur des boulevards, le sang des bâtiments.

Si la modernité est une maladie et le salut de l’âme, pardonnez-leur - et à moi aussi. la vérité est que nous ne savons pas ce que nous faisons. Et, dans la stupeur, nos bouches pleines se closent.

Jules Tomi

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Jules Tomi is a photographer living in Montreal. His photos work to provide a perspective into the brevity of a passing moment, exploring the depths of sociology through the captured banality of beauty and everyday life.

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Jules Tomi est un photographe et vit à Montréal. Son travail propose une perspective qui se veut à la fois ethnographique, narrative et journalistique. Adoptant la posture du passant, il cherche, à travers des.

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i. 고덕i (high virtue) ii. Petit Prince iii. Passage iv. Nouvelle Frontière (South Korea Elderly poverty rate highest among OECD countries, report says) v. 핑크 비지니스 vi. Family Nucleation vii. Les sombres feux du passé viii. Fatigue ii ix. Untitled i x. 고덕ii (high virtue) xi. Nouvelle Frontière (defamiliation) xii. Nouvelle Frontière (아파트) xiii. The typology of social differences (maybe it doesn’t matter) xiv. Untitled ii xv. Park Yeong-jin xvi. 한국 (Corée)

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CHUNGKING EXPRESS, a Search for Lost Time

Ruofan Cui

Out of focus, a smudged canvas pulls the view of the audience from one barely legible scene of dense, disorienting urban life to the next. An unfamiliar song builds to a crescendo in the background, and without a moment’s notice, the camera cuts to a title card, and then two still shots of brutal concrete buildings, unrecognizable by any stretch of the reasonable imagination. Two characters stand out from the chaos, a blond wigged lady, and a police officer giving chase, his voiceover mysteriously orders the scene “Everyday we brush past so many other people. People we may never meet or people who may become close friends.”1 Thus, in unnavigable fashion, one is introduced to Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express, a blink and you’ll miss it world whose characters tread through life against the push and pull of unceasing action, driving always forward its current of time. Yet, while the forward movement of time, and the change that accompanies its flow, appear in the film, as in real life, inevitable, the characters at the centre of the film invariably stand in opposition to the conditions of their environment, stubbornly trying to slow down or capture, fleeting moments in their lives.

Their protest illustrates the diegetic portrayal of time in Chungking Express, a juxtaposition of the city, always in flux, in the midst of transition from one regime to the next, the past to the unknown, against its reflective inhabitants, often unprepared for the coming change.

The film tells in two parts the story of two police officers, both having recently ended their

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long-term relationships, both at the onset, trapped in stasis, and unready to move onto the next phase of their lives. It is about how both rediscover love in unconventional ways, and the ending to both arcs leave the new romances unresolved. The first story centers on He Qiwu who vows to fall in love with the first woman he meets in a bar. As it turns out, the woman is the blond wigged lady from the opening sequence, a drug dealer whose story is told concurrent to his own, and who he pursues for one night as the new object of his affection. The second arc, joined to the first by proximity rather than narrative, both protagonists are regulars at the Midnight Express Café, revolves around the budding affections of Faye, the owner’s niece, for another cop 663. Both stories feature protagonists trapped in stasis, unwilling to move on with their lives, and the eventual change as new romances develop, does not resolve existing tensions but instead breeds new uncertainties.

In Chungking Express, multiple visual motifs juxtapose the city in flux in opposition to the individual, trapped in time. Prominently, this is evident in 663’s story through the contrast between his mindset, “I like to stay in one place”, he says, as Faye tells him of her dream to go to California, and the types of transit which surround him. The first, is an escalator visible from outside his window. Thus, even in his place of habitation, 663 is reminded of the people in constant motion, going from point A to B, bottom of the escalator to top. Second, planes repeatedly appear in 663’s story, from

the toy planes he plays with in his apartment to his ex-girlfriend who was an airline stewardess. Notably, both these types of transit involve forward movement, travel from one place to another, despite the physical stillness of its passengers. The people who travel by escalator and by plane, do not reach their destination by moving their own bodies, but rather, by submitting to the greater force of the machine which carries them. Therefore, while they move across space, they do not navigate the space they occupy, and it is instead the passage of time which brings them to their destination.

The contrast between the stillness of 663 as opposed to the people in transit around him then, may be read as not only an opposition to moving across space, but more importantly as a resistance of the inevitable change, of moving from point A to point B, brought on by accession to the forward motion of time. A similar resistance is found in He Qiwu’s story where the motif of expiration dates directly points toward the inevitability of change brought by time. In his moment of triumph, he asks to encapsulate a memory, wondering if memories also have expiration dates, for if they do, he wishes his would last ten thousand years.

Not only do the characters of Chungking Express, 663 and Qiwu, voice their resistance to the forward flow of time, but Wong Kar-Wai also demonstrates this through contrasting the cinematography of three time images featuring these characters, to that of the rest of the film. As a whole, the Hong Kong of Chungking Express is framed as constantly in motion, which itself is then mirrored in a camera always in motion, creating an effect of disorienting the audience, as one would be disoriented, when occupying the congested urban space themselves. However, at key moments in the character’s lives, the camera steadies, and the image on screen itself slows or comes to a stop. After Qiwu hears the blond wigged lady’s recording, wishing him a happy birthday, his voiceover asks if memories can be encapsulated, and at precisely this moment both the camera and the image freeze, portraying on screen, time as Qiwu wants to experience it, as opposed to its usual forward current. This break from the real

world experience of time is notably repeated twice in 663’s story. The first, after his break up with the airline stewardess shows a still frame with him and Faye in the background, moving in slow motion, in contrast to people walking the streets of Hong Kong in fast motion.

The second, after Faye stands up their date, brings 663 to the foreground, placing a coin in the jukebox in slow motion as fast motion people surround him in the background of the California Bar. For Wong Kar-Wai images such as these are “a way of ‘trapping time’, to ‘change’ and ‘play with time’, to do to time what you can’t do to it in real life”2. Specifically speaking, they are a way for Wong to preserve time in film, in contrast to the impossibility of preserving time in real life, for in life, “even this desire to preserve is problematic, Abbas writes that in the very ‘act of looking… the more you try to make the world hold still in a reflective gaze, the more it moves under you”3.

The diegetic portrayal of time in Chungking Express, is thereby, marked in contrast between the unstoppable forward motion of time, which brings with it the inevitability of change, and the stubborn resistance of its characters, captured by Wong Kar-Wai’s use of time images.

The opposition of the two “depict conditions of lostness in the characters – loss of identity, failure of communication, impossibility of reconciliation and the inability to hold onto time”4. Through this contrast Wong is able to make both a personal and political statement about our experience of time. On a personal level the audience is privileged with a perspective on the characters lostness. We witness on screen, the attempt and ultimate inability of the characters to hold onto time, in contrast, cinematically, to the regular forward flow of time in the film. On a political level, the lostness experienced by Qiwu and 663 parallels the situation of Hong Kong at the time of the film’s release in 1994, one where the experience of time and the change it brings is metaphorically representable by the image of a still body that accedes to the movement of a plane in flight. No matter how much one resists movement within the plane, ultimately they remain caught in its transit from one point to the next. Thus, the time

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images which mark the character’s resistance to the flow of time, can also be read to represent Hong Kong’s resistance to the inevitability of its own change, as it faces an impending transfer in regime from colonial Britain to the mainland PRC. Accordingly, “these are conditions that infuse Wong’s images of Hong Kong with a sense of nostalgia, a kind of sentimental yearning for a history that has disappeared too quickly”5.

Therefore, it is noteworthy to further consider the external implications of resisting change brought on by time within the context of Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express. Hong Kong, as portrayed in Chungking Express is itself, a city in constant flux, one that has become a melting pot for Chinese and other immigrant diaspora. Visually this is represented first, in the constant movement of the camera to disorient the viewer, and affect in him a semblance of the fast-pace of movement experienced by the characters, and to which Qiwu and 663 resist.

Second, this flux is evident in the disorienting use of language, as in the first conversation between Qiwu and the blond wig lady, Qiwu cycles through Cantonese, Japanese, English, and finally Mandarin, in order to communicate. As Vivian Lee argues, this is a symptom of Hong Kong’s historical condition of migration and “in some Hong Kong films the migrant embodies the dual sense of movement ‘beyond’ and movement ‘within’, that is, their diasporic consciousness is both refined and redefined by ambivalence towards movement”6. Thus, again the portrayal of time in Chungking Express, highlights in the personal sense, the tragedy of the ambivalence toward movement, in relation to the change brought on by time, in its characters such as Qiwu and 663 in a fast-paced city in flux. Both stubbornly hold onto their stasis, visually as well as narratively resisting movement to a new phase of their lives. Both are ultimately unsuccessful for holding still in time, is merely to refuse to navigate the space around which the vessel still moves. However, more importantly, if we apply their resistance to the forward flow of time, to the situation in Hong Kong, of a broader yearning for its own past, and resistance to its own unknown future

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in 1994, it becomes evident that in resisting the flow of time, the Hong Kong of Chungking Express, resists something fundamental to itself, and its own history. Thus, the inability to preserve time which Wong Kar-Wai communicates to us through the use of time images, is perhaps rooted in some level, in the inability of Hong Kong, a city that has thrived because of flux and migration, to resist the coming change, for to resist flux and instead seek stillness in time, is for Hong Kong, to resist a fundamental condition for its own being.

The juxtaposition of the city in flux, to the resistance of its inhabitants such as Qiwu and 663 illustrates the portrayal of time in Chungking Express. That is, time is always moving forward, and brings with it inevitable change. Qiwu and 663 may try to slow down and preserve key moments in their lives, conveyed to us visually through Wong Kar-Wai’s use of time images, however, ultimately as a plane transits its passengers, regardless of the movement of their own bodies, the more you hold the world still in reflective gaze, the more it moves under you. Time may fracture and freeze in film, as it does in Chungking Express, but all this reaffirms the strength of its current, and the nostalgia it breeds, as each of us reflect on our own experiences, lost forever in its forward flow.

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Chungking Express, directed by Kar-Wai Wong (1994; Hong-Kong: Rolling Thunder Pictures, 2002), DVD. 2. Janice Tong, “Chungking Express: Time and Its Displacements.” in Chinese Films in Focus, Ed. Chris Berry (London: BFI, 2003), 50.

3. Tong, Chungking Express: Time and Its Displacements, 50.

4. Tong, Chungking Express: Time and Its Displacements, 53.

5. Tong, Chungking Express: Time and Its Displacements, 53.

6. Vivian P.Y. Lee, “14. The Hong Kong New Wave: A Critical Reappraisal.” in The Chinese Cinema Book, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) 132.

Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1997.

Chungking Express. Directed by Kar-Wai Wong. 1994. Hong-Kong: Rolling Thunder Pictures, 2002. DVD. Lee, Vivian P.Y. “14. “The Hong Kong New Wave: A Critical Reappraisal.” in The Chinese Cinema Book, edited by Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, 131-140. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Tong, Janice. “Chungking Express: Time and Its Displacements.” Chinese Films in Focus, edited by Chris Berry, 47-55. London: BFI, 2003.

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AUTHENTICITY AND ACTION Searching for a New Korea in Mnet’s ‘Show Me The Money’ Andrea Chu

South Korea’s entertainment industry has mastered a formula that has proven to effectively produce artists and idol groups that reap millions in profit from both domestic and international audiences each year. The music industry in Korea is largely dominated by pop music, although recently hip hop has emerged as a competitive force in the digital charts, growing at a rapid rate. A large part of this growth can be attributed to the inception of the music competition reality TV show “Show Me The Money”, which since its first season in 2012, has continued with 5 successive seasons, each increasing in popularity. This show has provided intersectionality between pop music, mainstream TV entertainment, and the more obscure hip hop community. Through a visual analysis of the first two episodes of “Show Me The Money 4”, my paper aims to display the complex relationship between the borrowed counterculture of African American rap and Korea’s dominant mainstream entertainment culture. In criticizing itself self-consciously, the show portrays the political power of countercultures and showcases a trend where Korean youth appropriate these ideas of self-determination and freedom to express their thoughts through the consumption and production of rap.

The format of SMTM is mainly to narrow down the contestants to the point that they can separate them into small teams, which then compete against each other. There are four teams, with each team headed by what the show calls “producers”, two or three established

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members of the hip hop community to act as mentors for the contestants and help them produce tracks, which are then distributed digitally in addition to being performed on the show itself. Each team is associated with a record label company, which in the fourth season, contained representatives from hip-hop labels such as Hi-Lite Records, Brand New Music, AOMG, and YG Entertainment. In the first two episodes, the contestants are put through two rounds of initial audition stages, where they are judged first by a single judge and then all of the producing teams together if they make it through the first round. After the audition phase, the rappers are typically paired head to head, and then compete as teams. The show is aired on Mnet, a youth-oriented pop music channel. This allows the show to not only show more inflammatory content, but also reaches a wider base of mainstream music enthusiasts.

The importance of TV as a medium for showcasing the Korean hip-hop community and popularizing hip-hop music is significant in terms of the history of Korean music television programs. In K-pop music, the mediation of broadcasting has had a tremendous impact on its popularity, as the emphasis on strong visual elements within the industry has “effectively formed and transformed the nature and identity” of idols.1 The origin of popular music broadcasting can be traced to the late 1960s, when youth-oriented TV music shows were first launched, which presented pop sounds that catered to “urban youth who had cultivated

their taste for Western pop”.2 Interestingly, the American influence on standard pop allowed it to be viewed as “healthy” and “classy” by broadcasting elites across the media.3 By the 1980s, television was such a dominant influence on popular music that it was defined as part of television entertainment. In comparison to the record business, television served to define the identity of popular music itself and the two began to be conflated as one form of entertainment. In this way, what constituted the mainstream in popular music was determined through the denotation of certain types of music as suitable for television broadcast.4 A general trend in the expansion of popular music broadcasting also resulted in the founding of the cable which SMTM airs on, Mnet, in 1995. During this time, Mnet along with KMTV introduced music videos and stage shows to the Korean music industry. The current state of K-pop can be attributed to these developments, as the television format placed great emphasis on the visual spectacle of dance and eye-catching music video sequences, leading to the refinement of ‘idol pop’ which dominates Korean pop today.5 The relationship between television entertainment and music is only becoming closer, as more reality television and audition type shows are being released each year. Reality programs have been instrumental in the production of idols, with dominant idol groups such as TWICE and WINNER emerging through the shows “Sixteen” and “WIN: Who Is Next”, respectively. On the contrary, television has also been actively reclaimed as a medium through contest-type shows such as “Immortal Masterpiece” and “I Am A Singer”, which focus on the “sheer quality of the performances and the performer’s singing abilities rather on their appearances and dances moves as commercialized in popular music”.6 SMTM deviates from both contexts by applying both methods in its production, through commentary as well as strategies within the show. Additionally, as the first hip-hop focused music show, it aims to confirm its uniqueness and originality as differing from other shows of its kind. In an early part of the first episode of SMTM 4, producers from previous seasons

provide commentary which serve to imply that Korean hip hop has already fully integrated into the mainstream. Yang Dong-Geun states that “To be a part of SMTM is to become a part of Korea’s hip hop history”, amongst other producers which praised the show’s ability to help bring hip-hop and rap culture to the forefront.

This idea of SMTM being an unquestionable supporter of hip-hop culture is then criticized later in the show through the biting rap verses of the contestants.

The show not only presents itself as a way for an ordinary person to become a celebrity, but also focuses on the quality and authenticity of rap and digitally distributes the tracks produced on the show. SMTM is similar to other audition shows such as Britain’s “Pop Idol” in that it displays the reality of manufacture of celebrity, charting the path of the unknown rapper into stardom status through mentoring, practicing, and fashioning of appearance.7 The diverse range of contestants and their sheer numbers are highlighted in the beginning segment of the first episode, as the camera pans in a bird’s eye view over the stadium and cuts to many shots of people with a large range of ages, social background and gender. In this way, through the normality of the contestants, the viewer is also able to associate themselves with the contestant, which potentially causes an “invocation of the audience’s own aspirations (or fantasies) of success and stardom”.8 However, most of them are quickly eliminated and the show focuses on either prolific rappers active in the underground scene or company-trained idols as the only real contenders for the win. In this way, it contrasts with the Western audition show image which highlights the ordinariness of the person as the basis for contemporary celebrity. However, in both contexts, the top contestants do achieve an “autonomous existence outside of the televisual text itself ” as they do produce tracks and gain popularity on the show which propels their music career even after the show is over.9 Thus, they become hybrid media stars, both TV personalities and music stars.

Celebrity as an idea is one that is frequently visited by SMTM, both through the

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enticement of reaching fame and the participation of existing K-pop idols as contestants. In the first two episodes, the show places a large focus on the presence of ‘idol rappers’ auditioning for SMTM, who are company-trained idols active within the mainstream pop music industry. Deeply embedded in the mainstream, idol group music is a “pattern that shapes the production of Korean popular music itself ”.10 The idols are recognized as diligent workers by the rest of Korean society, and bear the burden of unfair contract practices that are “tolerated for the enhancement of Korea’s national prestige through K-pop”.11 The show makes clear this common conception, but by broadcasting verses of rap that mock idols as “dogs” who are “chained by a leash”, implying their restrictions imposed on them as idols by their company.

This is due to the fact that they represent the complete antithesis of hip-hop’s free-spirited and rebellious image, and act as the establishment in conflict with the hip-hop community. The presence of many idol rappers at the auditions sparked contestants to spout disses at idols, such as “I’m here to rip apart those with connections”, “Overhyped like cookies manufactured in Korea”, “To those with cheap eardrums, idol music” and “As soon as he comes out, Song Minho will fall like dominos”. The last lyric can be read as a criticism regarding the winner of the previous season, Bobby, who was a member of the idol group iKON, active under YG Entertainment. The participation of another prolific YG idol in season 4, Mino of WINNER, resulted in many participants critiquing the show’s production, stating that despite its claims, SMTM did not truly support hip-hop but instead was another construction of the popular music establishment, and placed unfair favor on contestants with connections.

This represents just one of the examples in which SMTM gestures at a conflict between the marginal subculture and mainstream. The idol Ravi from VIXX receives considerable screen time in the first episode as well, and it is obvious that the viewer is prompted into mocking him as well, his excessive winking and “idol” gestures highlighted as cringe-worthy as they are juxtaposed with clips of glares of contempt

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from other contestants. SMTM departs from other media which generally elevates idols as celebrity, and instead, Ravi is portrayed as being scoffed at and looked down upon by the hip-hop community. Other elements of artists active in pop music being regarded as “unauthentic” surround the figure of Zico, a judge on SMTM 4, who is also a member of the idol group Block B. The show inserts Internet news headlines of the controversy regarding Zico’s qualifications as a producer, and also displays a clip of one of the contestants, Blacknut rapping a critique at Zico during the first round of auditions, where each of the judges goes around the stadium, bestowing necklaces on the contestants who are worthy of continuing on to the next round. He raps, “Who are you to judge me / Honestly, I think that you’re worse than me / But when you’re holding the necklace in your hands / The story changes, please take good care of me”. The statement demonstrates the hip-hop community’s feelings against artists who dabble in both mainstream music and hip-hop, associating mainstream success with lack of skill. In this way, celebrity is conflated with authority, the combination of these figures acting as the ‘Other’ which the subculture actively attempts to dismantle.

Additionally, it confronts the power dynamics inherent in television programs, signifying the type of dishonest social exchange required to achieve success and critiquing the structure and fabrications of the mainstream entertainment industry. However, in broadcasting Blacknut’s critique, SMTM is showing a self-awareness to this problem and confronts it directly, exhibiting how they are different and that they are operating as a program which intends to present the most “real” angle. The show features the stereotypical rebellious and honest nature of the subculture through these devices which tap into youth consciousness, citing rap as a way to express your true feelings and self. However, ironically, although SMTM seems to be celebrating notions of non-conformity and ‘staying true to oneself ’ through youthful rebellion, through the career success that these celebrity rappers such as Jay Park and Zico have gained as a result of their fame, SMTM is inadvertently

sending a contradictory message that argues that success in Korea’s entertainment industry is only found through conventional means.

During the second round, Tablo, another one of the judges, remarks, “SMTM has become such an interesting situation, idols come out to be rappers, and rapper come out to be idols”, referring to the conflicting dynamic of seeking validity at the same time as fame.

The essence of reality TV is the implication that the subjects’ “real self ” is being displayed for all to see, which ends up having an “exaggerated emphasis, then, on the concept of the real self and the ideology of individualism that underpins it”.12 In SMTM 4, authenticity is conflated with value, which is both true for the contestants’ performances and the perceived authenticity of the show itself. In most of the audition clips, the contestants are filmed facing the judges, which puts the viewer in a third-person perspective which transform the act of judging into a spectacle to be watched.

However, some of the contestants choose to face the camera when rapping, which suddenly situates the viewer in the role of the judge, creating a complex dialectic where the viewer is shuffled in and out of these two roles, causing a self-consciousness of the mediation of television. This affects the perceived authenticity of the actions on the screen, which render it as “another mask which appears in the name of “reality”, instead of the natural and uncontrolled emotions and actions of the TV subjects.13 An interview clip with Mino also confronts this interaction, where he states, in regards to being an idol, that “I said that I’ve been wearing a mask … While I am in WINNER, I am a celebrity, right now, it’s just me”. In this way, a sense that the ‘truth’ about a celebrity being ‘revealed’ through the reality TV show is presented, even though it is clear to any initiated viewer that the show is full of acting.

Two figures are emphasized during the audition rounds to represent the distinction between underground and mainstream, each conveying a different message. P-Type is introduced with inserted text flashing on the screen, “Korea’s hip-hop scene master craftsman!

Korean rhyme master, P-Type”. The show goes

on for about 5 minutes establishing the importance of P-Type as a figure in the underground rap community, with judges San-E and Palo Alto acknowledging his authority with phrases such as, “In the hip-hop scene, you can’t leave him out” and “I think he’s like an educational book for Korean hip-hop”. P-Type himself also asserts that he has “15 years of experience”. This is coupled with scenes showing other contestants fawning over him while lining up, asking him for photographs and autographs. He is identified as a figure who is looking to attack the program for having “producers that don’t know hip-hop”, as an authority coming from the underground. Both the producers and contestants are portrayed to respect P-Type as an influential and established figure who was significant in the development of hip-hop in Korea. He states, “It’s funny, [the contestants] enjoy cursing left and right, and are rappers that do whatever they want, how did they get them to line up in this broad space and think of making them rap without a beat? I think it’s really unsightly”. This statement follows with many of the other declarations that SMTM is making, including the fact that rappers are free-spirited, non-conformists but in this competition’s context, they are suppressed in the same disciplinary manner that they experience in other areas of their lives. However, P-Type does not pass the second round, which reflects the idea that Korean hip-hop has evolved and improved since their early days.

Basick is the other figure who represents the underground, but experiences a much different run through the competition than P-Type, going on to eventually become the season’s winner. He is described as a hot rookie in the underground hip-hop scene in 2008, but later left the scene as he had to support his family financially, and joined a company. He states, “The people I really loved at the time were the people most against me doing what I really wanted to do; So I thought, if I just give this up, many people around me will be happy”. His honorable sacrifice for the good of his family in following a traditional and stable path is reflective of what is expected of many Korean youth. He cites his return to hip-hop

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as partially due to a jealousy that his old crew members were starting to make a name for themselves, but also that he just “kept wanting to rap”. Basick is portrayed as a pure lover of rap, with no connection to the rest of the music industry and a simple passion for hip-hop. He is also aware of his position, rapping, “I always keep it real but I’m still unknown”. His story is represented as the ideal success story, with the genuineness of a talented rapper emerging from the underground after experiencing the harshness of Korea’s working life and choosing his own path as a result of his virtuous passion for rap. In this way, Basick becoming the winner of the season is extremely significant as he embodies both an upstanding citizen aligned with the ethics of Korean society and also a raw, non-manufactured talent in rap which is highly regarded by the rest of the community. I find that the role in which Basick plays is the most overt indication of the message that SMTM is trying to convey to its audience.

Despite many underground rappers thriving after entering the mainstream market, the authenticity attributed to the underground scene might be connected to the young age of the scene itself as well as the idea that appropriating American influence as well as the English language makes rap closer to its roots, and thus more authentic. Within America, a similar dialogue regarding race is brought up in the discussion of hip-hop, where “the base assumptions surrounding hip hop and racial authenticity have always been that black identity is, by default, legitimate, while white identity is either suspect or invalid”.14 In the Korean context, rappers seek to claim authenticity by appropriating American culture and seeking “affinities with the black experience through styles of dress, knowledge of music, and local experiences”.15 The liberal use of English in many of the raps on this show display the choice to move into English on “pragmatic, aesthetic, or commercial grounds” but mainly it seems that they are using English in an attempt to be closer to ‘authentic’ rap.16 However, hip hoppers in America believe that authenticity is derived from truthfulness to oneself and that the most important aspect is that one does not

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misrepresent who they are.17 In this way, a tension is created between the desire to adhere to the principles of the original cultural dictate and “a process of localization that makes such an expression of staying true to oneself dependent on local contexts, languages, cultures, and understandings of the real”.18 This is interesting when considering what one of the producers on SMTM states, that for many contestants, the hip hop aesthetic and attitude “doesn’t feel natural” or that “the clothes doesn’t suit them”.

However, it comes as no surprise that he culturally expressive aspects of American hip-hop are attractive to Korean youth.19 However, the obsession with American rap is treading a fine line, as over-appropriation of American themes contributes to the struggle for Korea to find their own hip-hop identity in the global age.

For Korea, the authenticity of their own counter-cultural identity is integral to the political impact hip hop could have on their society.

Just as American hip-hop has transformed from the marginal to mainstream, maintaining its sociopolitical critique of the lives of marginalized communities, Korean hip-hop music has the potential to develop similarly to mobilize Korean youth who are dissatisfied with the state of society. American hip-hop has its roots in the African-American music tradition of using song to protest against social injustice, which is used to enable youth to create their own cultural space within the city. Music is a large part of a nation’s cultural production, thus hip-hop can be viewed as an example of confrontational political action.20 SMTM and hip-hop’s effect on Korean youth similarly unites young people of “different socioeconomic backgrounds and geographic locations”.21 The unity is not only due to a mutual understanding of hip hop music’s elements, but the shared sense of marginality and oppression, both real and imagined.22 This unity is very powerful if harnessed correctly, as American hip-hop has also shown the “potential for a united voice to be used to advance political agendas”.23 In placing hip-hop into the Korean context, the racial and social difficulties of African-Americans cannot be applied, however, Korean hip-hop finds meaning in the local problems. For Korean youth,

the stress of a high pressure society due to a competitive education system combined with mandatory conscription create themes which are commonly present in lyrics. The language choices made in these lyrics are reflect the idea that they are social agents who force the public to begin to think about these problems.24 Through Korea’s modernization, a new unique national identity was developed, but as “one that redefined and sharpened class distinctions based on educational background and achievement”.25 As a result, a new generation, which grew up consuming American culture through media, began to question and criticize the validity of the status quo which was accepted thus far by the older generation. Seo Taiji and the Boys, one of the earliest Korean hip-hop bands, released the song “Kyosil Idea” in 1994, which criticizes the dehumanizing educational system. Although criticism against the existing structure is common in SMTM, this song surprised the nation because this was the first song to “criticize such basic social institutions so powerfully”.26 In this way, this song can be regarded as the first momentum in Korean hiphop to act as a tool of sociopolitical critique.

The relationship between the American influenced rap culture and Korea’s mainstream entertainment structure is presented as a form of potential political force for Korea’s youth to harness. Mnet’s reality music audition show “Show Me The Money” presents an interesting discourse which places it in both the marginal and mainstream simultaneously. As the first hip-hop focused music show, it takes on the identity of both popular music shows and a representative of the hip-hop subculture. In supporting the growth of the community, it conflates the viewer with contestant which leads more people to be interested in the genre.

It attempts to assert its uniqueness and originality, broadcasting social critiques through the medium of the rap lyric. In many ways, “Show Me The Money” communicates radical ideas, challenging the establishment and ideas surrounding authenticity, which incite emotion in the viewer, making it more than just a TV show. The competition which hip hop poses to the K-pop hegemony in both local and

international contexts is not only beneficial for the advancement of both genres but also for the improvement of Korean society.

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NOTES 1. Lee, Jung-yup. “Broadcasting Media and Popular Music: Institution, Technologies, and Power.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music. By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 35 2. Lee, Jung-yup. “Broadcasting Media and Popular Music: Institution, Technologies, and Power.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music. By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 38-39 3. Lee, Jung-yup. “Broadcasting Media and Popular Music: Institution, Technologies, and Power.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music. By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 38 4. Lee, Jung-yup. “Broadcasting Media and Popular Music: Institution, Technologies, and Power.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music. By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 40-41 5. Lee, Jung-yup. “Broadcasting Media and Popular Music: Institution, Technologies, and Power.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music. By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 41-42 6. Lee, Jung-yup. “Broadcasting Media and Popular Music: Institution, Technologies, and Power.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music. By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 43 7. Holmes, Su. “Reality Goes Pop!: Reality TV, Popular Music, and Narratives of Stardom in Pop Idol.” Television & New Media. 5.2 (2004): 149.

Print.

8. Holmes, Su. “Reality Goes Pop!: Reality TV, Popular Music, and Narratives of Stardom in Pop Idol.” Television & New Media. 5.2 (2004): 156.

Print.

9. Holmes, Su. “Reality Goes Pop!: Reality TV, Popular Music, and Narratives of Stardom in Pop Idol.” Television & New Media. 5.2 (2004): 150151. Print.

10. Lee, Dong-yeun. “Who’s Afraid of Korean Idols?: Five Keywords for Understanding Korean Idol Pop.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music.

By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 172.

11. Lee, Dong-yeun. “Who’s Afraid of Korean Idols?: Five Keywords for Understanding Korean Idol Pop.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music.

By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 175.

12. Holmes, Su. “Reality Goes Pop!: Reality TV, Popular Music, and Narratives of Stardom in Pop

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Idol.” Television & New Media. 5.2 (2004): 160.

Print.

13. Lee, Dong-yeun. “Who’s Afraid of Korean Idols?: Five Keywords for Understanding Korean Idol Pop.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music.

By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 177.

14. Harrison, Anthony Kwame. “Racial Authenticity in Rap Music and Hip Hop.” Sociology Compass 2.6 (2008): 1783. Print.

15. Harrison, Anthony Kwame. “Racial Authenticity in Rap Music and Hip Hop.” Sociology Compass 2.6 (2008): 1791. Print.

16. Pennycook, Alastair. “Language, Localization, and the Real: Hip-Hop and the Global Spread of Authenticity.” Journal of Language, Identity & Education 6.2 (2007): 112. Print.

17. Harrison, Anthony Kwame. “Racial Authenticity in Rap Music and Hip Hop.” Sociology Compass 2.6 (2008): 1794. Print.

18. Pennycook, Alastair. “Language, Localization, and the Real: Hip-Hop and the Global Spread of Authenticity.” Journal of Language, Identity & Education 6.2 (2007): 103. Print.

19. Yang, Jaeyoung. “Korean Black Music and Its Culture: Soul, Funk, and Hip-Hop.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music. By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017.

105.

20. Stapleton, K R. “From the Margins to Mainstream: the Political Power of Hip-Hop.” Media Culture and Society. 20.2 (1998): 219-221.

Print.

21. Stapleton, K R. “From the Margins to Mainstream: the Political Power of Hip-Hop.” Media Culture and Society. 20.2 (1998): 231. Print.

22. Motley, Carol M., and Geraldine Rosa Henderson. “The Global Hip-hop Diaspora: Understanding the Culture.” Journal of Business Research 61.3 (2008): 245. Web. 23. Motley, Carol M., and Geraldine Rosa Henderson. “The Global Hip-hop Diaspora: Understanding the Culture.” Journal of Business Research 61.3 (2008): 247. Web. 24. Pennycook, Alastair. “Language, Localization, and the Real: Hip-Hop and the Global Spread of Authenticity.” Journal of Language, Identity & Education 6.2 (2007): 106-113. Print.

25. Jung, Eun-young. “Seo Taiji Syndrome: Rise of Korean Youth and Cultural Transformation through Global Pop Music Styles in the Early 1990s.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music. By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 144.

26. Jung, Eun-young. “Seo Taiji Syndrome: Rise of Korean Youth and Cultural Transformation through

Global Pop Music Styles in the Early 1990s.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music. By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 146

BIBLIOGRAPHY Harrison, Anthony Kwame.

“Racial Authenticity in Rap Music and Hip Hop.” Sociology Compass 2.6 (2008): 1783-800. Print.

Holmes, Su. “Reality Goes Pop!: Reality TV, Popular Music, and Narratives of Stardom in Pop Idol.” Television & New Media. 5.2 (2004): 147-172. Print.

Jung, Eun-young. “Seo Taiji Syndrome: Rise of Korean Youth and Cultural Transformation through Global Pop Music Styles in the Early 1990s.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music. By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 143-54.

Kyung Hyun-ju. Show Me The Money 4. CJ E&M and Mnet, 2015.

Lee, Dong-yeun. “Who’s Afraid of Korean Idols?: Five Keywords for Understanding Korean Idol Pop.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music. By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 169-80.

Lee, Jung-yup. “Broadcasting Media and Popular Music: Institution, Technologies, and Power.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music. By Hyun-joon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 35-45.

Motley, Carol M., and Geraldine Rosa Henderson. “The Global Hip-hop Diaspora: Understanding the Culture.” Journal of Business Research 61.3 (2008): 243-53. Web. Pennycook, Alastair. “Language, Localization, and the Real: Hip-Hop and the Global Spread of Authenticity.” Journal of Language, Identity & Education 6.2 (2007): 101-15. Print.

Stapleton, K R. “From the Margins to Mainstream: the Political Power of Hip-Hop.” Media Culture and Society. 20.2 (1998): 219234. Print.

Yang, Jaeyoung. “Korean Black Music and Its Culture: Soul, Funk, and Hip-Hop.” Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music. By Hyunjoon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 95-106.

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DOMESTIC WORKERS ORGANIZE The Case of Hong Kong and Canada’s Filipino Domestic Workers’ NGOs Marko de Guzman

Introduction This paper compares the extent to which two similar pro-migrant organizations, namely the Mission for Migrant Workers in Hong Kong and INTERCEDE (International Coalition to End Domestics’ Exploitation for the Rights of Domestic Workers) in Canada, succeed or fail in their goal of a collective action and migrant mobilization of domestic workers. Social movement scholarship has illustrated the burgeoning of pro-domestic worker non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Hong Kong. These NGOs are reported to be successful in their efforts to mobilize domestic workers.1 Hence, this paper asks the question: why are NGOs advocating for the rights of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong much more successful in mobilizing domestic workers in comparison to similar NGOs in Canada?

The Puzzle and the Argument Successful pro-migrant NGOs effectively mobilize workers to demand their rights.

However, this paper maintains that this normative claim must be tested. Building on the social movement scholarship, this paper argues that NGOs advocating for the rights of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong and Canada face similar struggles in fighting for the migrant rights. This paper believes that domestic workers social movement is more successful in Hong Kong because migrants NGOs, like

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the Mission for Migrant Workers, have greater political opportunities. Their close proximity to the Philippines also becomes their organizational strength and they effectively build broad-based and inter-ethic coalitions due to their wide-ranging framing of migrant issues as everyone’s business. Pro-migrant NGOs like INTERCEDE in Canada are less successful because the entire country sees migrants in economic terms, thus migrants lack political opportunities to make their voices be heard.

The Structure and Method This paper begins by reviewing the three theoretical frameworks: political process theory, resource mobilization theory, and framing processes that intertwined to explain the successful mobilization of an NGO. Then, it explores the international political economy of Filipino immigration by examining the role and the effect of the immigration policy decision of the Philippine state, Hong Kong, and Canada to Filipino domestic workers (FDWs).

It is based on a qualitative and comparative case study of two pro-migrant community organizations from Hong Kong and Canada to examine the extent to which different resisting/ organizing strategies are successful or not. A case study is chosen because it showcases the complexities of NGO mobilizing and organizing. The Mission for Migrant Workers in Hong Kong and the INTERCEDE (International Coalition to End Domestics’ Exploitation) in

Canada are chosen because they are both the pioneers and model of domestic workers’ activism. They both have spearheaded campaigns allowing other pro-migrant NGOs aspiring to follow their lead.

Literature Review This section begins with a review of the political process theory and resource mobilization theory that serve as the paper’s analytical framework in examining to what extent migrant NGOs in Hong Kong and in Canada are successful in their goal of political change.

Then, it pays attention to the role of the labour-sending state, the Philippines, and the role of labour-receiving states, Hong Kong and Canada in their ‘making’ of Filipina domestic workers.

Theoretical Frameworks: Political Process, Resource Mobilization, Framing Process This study employs political process, resource mobilization, and framing process theories of social movements to guide the analysis.

Briefly, political process theory deals with exogenous factors affecting the social movement2, while resource mobilization examines the effective gathering and utilizing of resources such as human, symbolic/discourse, and financial for mobilization.3 Framing process deals specifically with the symbolic/discourse resources that help a movement to gain adherents and mobilize people.4 Charles Tilly, who pioneered Political process theory (PPT), wrote in Mobilization to Revolution that the level of mobilization and collective action depends on the interaction between three vital components: interests, organization, and political opportunity.

David McAdam (1982) crystallizes the work of Charles Tilly and concludes three factors that influence the movements in the United States that include political opportunities, indigenous organizational strength, and cognitive liberation.5 Tilly’s resource mobilization theory (RMT) explains that the effectiveness of NGOs’ social movement is also dependent on

resources such as funding, supporters, attention of the media, alliances with those in power, and a refined organizational structure.6 John D. McCarthy and Mayer Zald coined this theory to account for resources acquired by social movement actors.7 International Political Economy of Filipino Labour Migration One needs to consider the immigration policy choices of the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Canada to understand the conditions faced by domestic workers in both countries. This section of the review also demonstrates the collective identity. Lastly, it presents the literature review by adopting the conceptual framework of Glenda Lopez Wui (2011) who argues for the existence of national (the Philippines) and transnational (Hong Kong and Canada) interacting sites that are seen as two sites of contention.8 The Philippines as a Labour Brokerage: Force Migration?

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) and United Nations International Research and Training Institute or the Advancement of Women (UN-INSTRAW) identify push factors that explain why the Philippines send its citizens to work abroad.

They include: the existence of structural adjustment policies, widespread poverty, inequality, lack of opportunities, lack of social advancement, low wages, high unemployment and lack of upward mobility.9 In fact, the Philippine state plays a major role in institutionalizing the exportation of migrant labourers through laws, national discourses, and policies. Robyn Rodriguez argues that the Philippines, under the 1946 Marcos regime, officially became a labour broker. It begun when Marcos implemented a neoliberal policy of Export-Oriented Industrialization10 that was heavily promoted by the IMF and IBRD/World Bank, to solve the balance of payments deficit problem of the country.

During his dictatorship, he institutionalized

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labour export with the Presidential Decree 442 that formed the Overseas Employment Development Board (OEDB), the Bureau of Employment Services (BES), and the National Seaman’s Board (NSB), which served as a promoter, regulator, and supervisors of private recruitment and placement agencies.11 The Rhetoric of National Heroes of Development Deniz Kandiyoti (1991) argues that elements of national identity and cultural differences are articulated as the state’s forms of control over women.12 In the Philippines, migration is highly gendered and feminized.

The government controls its citizens by crafting the discourse of national heroes. Filipino men and women are heroes because they work abroad and are expected to send their remittances that serve as a development strategy of the country to economically grow. In return, the Philippine state actively “sells” this marketing strategy of industrious workers to the rest of developed countries in their bilateral agreements.13 Filipino domestic workers are particularly marketed as docile, accepting, unthreatening, and speak good English.14 In comparison, the Indonesian government follows this same rhetoric and markets its female labourers as “cheaper and more docile.”15 As a result of this competitive niche marketing strategy of the Philippine state, Filipino migrants are obliged to send remittances.

The Inception of Domestic Work in Hong Kong: Right on Time with Marcos’ Export Policy In 2010, the International Labour Office stated that one in every thirteen women workers in the world is a domestic worker. That same year men and women accounted for 52.6 million domestic workers.16 In Hong Kong, there were 330 000 local and migrant domestic workers in the year 2012. From this number, Filipinos make up 155 969 workers, while there are 149 236 Indonesian domestic workers.17 The other nationalities with smaller numbers

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include women from Thailand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India who are there for a one or two-year work contract.18 These Filipino women migrants find themselves in Hong Kong at the same time Marcos implemented his export-oriented policy. When the People’s Republic of China implemented its open-door policy in 1978, Hong Kong was transformed from a labour-intensive, export-oriented-manufacturing industry to a service-oriented industry. Many industries and corporations relocated their production there allowing local women to be employed in managerial and professional positions. This has created a demand for domestic workers who will take care of left-behind children.19 Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region houses multi-national corporations and has various sets of institutions, laws, and networks.

Canada’s (Live in) Caregiver Program: Answer to Care Sector Labour Shortage Canada’s flexible labour market favours in different ways. This flexibility of labour market actually is the pull factor of migrants to Canada. Other pull factors include enhanced living standard and economic opportunities, better future for the family, curiosity, travel, desire to learn a new culture and Canada’s good reputation.20 In the 1960s, the focus of immigration policy was predicated on a selection process based on the correction of occupational imbalances, according to points system with the goal of meeting short-term labour market needs.21 The live-In Caregiver Program (LCP) was enacted in Canada in 1992 as a solution to the shortage of women working reproductive sector such as in the care of children, the elderly, the disabled or sick, and domestic workers. However, the Foreign Domestic Movement has existed since 1981 employing British and Caribbean women. Under the LCP, women can conditionally immigrate to Canada by working as live-in caregivers for a period of continuous twenty-four months.22 Since 2014, the program was modified giving caregivers a choice to live on their own. The recent changes also ended the direct

pathways for applying towards a permanent residency. Now, caregivers must apply for permanent residency under one of two pathways: caring for children, or having high medical needs.23 Important criteria of these programs include a minimum of two years of Canadian work experience as a home children provider or a registered nurse, registered psychiatric nurse, licensed practical nurse, nurse aide, orderly, patient service associate, home support worker or other similar occupation with a work permit.

Workers are accepted to this pathway only if they have completed a one-year Canadian post-secondary credential or equivalent foreign credential (CIC).24 Analysis 1. The Mission for Migrant Workers or the Mission The Mission for Migrant Workers (MFMW or the Mission) was founded through the joined efforts of the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, Resource Centre for Philippine Concerns, Holy Carpenter Anglican Church and religious and lay persons from the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Hong Kong on March 3, 1981 to respond to the maltreatment and abuses encountered by domestic workers.25 The founding of the Mission illustrates the role of the religious institutions in taking care of migrants. The Mission follows an approach they call Crisis Intervention Prevention through Migrant Empowerment (CIPME), where migrant members offer psychological, employment, legal counselling.

1.1. Political Opportunities in Hong Kong: Political Environment, Unions, and The Church a) Political Environment According to Koopmans, mobilization is “mediated by the available opportunities and constraints set by the political environments in which mobilizing groups operate.”26 Hence, this section examines the access to the power structure, alignment and coalition of ruling elites (unions, churches, international institutions), and the formal government structures or

legislations that make social movements possible to exert its influence in the public sphere.

Starting with the governance structure in Hong Kong, it is apparent that the democratic context of Hong Kong allows a relative tolerance of contentious politics, which facilitates the emergence of the public sphere. NGOs like the Mission establish their political action in this territory because they are encouraged by the Hong Kong administration. In other words, they take advantage of this situation and embed themselves as active members of the civil society. Momentous events in Hong Kong history led to the robust participation of the civil society, which include the negotiations conducted in 1982-84 for the Joint Declaration that contains the blueprint of British turnover of the administration of Hong Kong back to China in 1997, the introduction of electoral politics in the 1980s, and the 1989 Tiananmen crisis where students demonstrators died in the hand of the government forces.27 Institutional frameworks also guarantee civil liberties, political advocacy and expression in the Hong Kong’s under the Basic Law. Lastly, the Hong Kong government uses its permissive economic and press freedom policies to differentiate itself to the mainland cities, which serves the administration to bolster its economic goal of attracting investors in the territory. b) Aligning and Building Coalitions with Unions Another important political opportunity is the alignment and coalition of the Mission and other migrant NGOs in Hong Kong with influential allies like the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU). The HKCTU is one of the largest trade union centres in the territory that campaigns for the legislation of minimum wage for all workers.28 Wui interviews the Chief Executive of HKCTU, Elizabeth Tang, who argues, “Excluding the migrant workers from their advocacy and not doing anything about improving their labor conditions will also not help improve the situation of the locals.”29 This union backup is significantly important particularly because there is a traditional anti-migrant stance of local workers

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and trade unionists against foreign workers.30 HKCTU shows solidarity with the Mission and other migrant organizations in ensuring that migrant workers were with them during rallies and demonstrations.31 The Mission gains access to power structure by aligning with this prominent union, hence fueling their work toward unionization. c) Political Opportunities Coming from Christian Churches Aside from political environment and alignment with a union, the Mission and other migrant organizations in Hong Kong trace their foundation to the work of Christian churches. This historical link gives the NGO a certain credibility in terms of face value, particularly because in the beginning these churches had the mission of upholding the dignity of the poor and the marginalized migrant workers. In fact, Christian churches pioneered the formation of pro-migrant NGOs and activists in the territory by helping in the foundation of the first two organizations in the territory: The Mission for Migrant Workers and Asian Migrant Centre. The National Council of Churches in the Philippines (NCCP), the Resource Centre for Philippine Concerns, the Anglican Holy Carpenter Church, and the religious and lay persons from the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Hong Kong helped to found the Mission in 1981.32 Both Protestant and Catholic churches frame their involvement with migrant issues based on the Christian duty to protect human rights. This is according to the Christian doctrine that human dignity and self-worth is inherent to all human beings because we are created in God’s likeness and image.33 These churches also made use of this theology to make themselves relevant to the needs of the poor people of Asia by institutionalizing their presence in the region. The protestant churches formed the Christian Conference of Asia in 1959, while the Roman Catholic Church formed the Federation of Asian Bishops Conference in 1972.34

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1.2. Organizational Strength: Proximity to the Philippines To better address the issues Filipino domestic workers confront in Hong Kong, NGOs like the Mission and the Asian Migrant Centre maintain close links with civil society groups back in the Philippines. Improvement of policies the Philippine government imposes on Filipino migrants in Hong Kong and around the world are debated and decided in the country, thus these NGOs made a conscious decision to make demands to the Philippine government on behalf of migrants. Their demands may include the improvement of the regulation of recruitment fees, increase of on-site services provided by the Philippine embassy in Hong Kong, and the enactment of a reintegration program for returning migrants to the Philippines who finish their contract in Hong Kong.35 The Mission and other Filipino NGOs also consider that domestic workers are forced to migrate in Hong Kong because of poverty and unemployment in the Philippines. They do not agree that migration is a viable development strategy for the economic growth of the Philippines.36 They make these advocacies and protest known to the Philippine embassy in Hong Kong, however, they also realize that political action can become more effective if social pressure is coming from civil society in the Philippines. These NGOs in the Philippines have a better understanding of the nuances and the local political terrain, so they can effectively and efficiently bargain with the state for implementation of migrant related policies and legislations.

An example of this transnational collaboration includes the partnership of the Mission with Migrant International, an alliance of different migrant Filipino organizations based in various countries that has a secretariat office in the Philippines, in the ratification of Republic Act 8042 or the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipino Act of 1995 that protects and promotes the welfare of migrant workers and their families.37 Another example is the passage of the Absentee Voting Act of 2003 that was a campaign advocated by Filipino NGOs in Hong Kong in close coordination with NGOs

in the Philippines.38 Aside from NGOs in the Philippines, the Mission is also closely allied with Bayan Muna (Country First) and Gabriella Women’s Party, two of the left-leaning national democratic party lists in the Philippines that often advocate for migrants and women’s rights and protection.39 What explains this divide is the fact the founders of the Mission and the AMC was involved with these two left-leaning parties. Hence, the activism these NGOs pursue mirrors the involvement of their founders in the contentious politics of the Philippines.40 This situation has created a flow of mobilizing strategies and campaigns from transnational (Hong Kong) to national (Philippines) sites of contention.

1.3. Effective Framing Process: Essential for Broad-based and Inter-Ethnic Coalition In Hong Kong, immigrant voices are heard in the public sphere because migrant issues are framed to represent not just the problems of one ethnic group, instead, the claim of better-working conditions for domestic workers is articulated by almost, if not, all ethnic groups who work as domestic workers. Thus, the fight and the struggles resonate more widely within the territory. These ethnic groups build a coalition with the leadership of Filipino NGOs like the Mission. Together, they become a powerful coalition that cannot be ignored in domestic politics of the Hong Kong administration.

One possible reason why the Hong Kong government listens to these migrant NGOs is the close proximity of each migrant to one another.

Hong Kong is definitely much smaller in terms of size compared to Canada. Migrant domestic workers of various ethnicity also see each other every Sunday during their day off where they congregate at Victoria Park.41 This temporal space becomes an opportunity for activists to educate workers of their rights. It helps the Mission in recruiting activists and providing services to migrants.

Another striking example in Hong Kong is the inter-ethnic collaboration instead of competition among ethnic based NGOs. In fact, the Mission was instrumental in founding organizations and unions because it sees collaboration

and creation of association/community organizations/unions as a form of migrant empowerment. They include the founding of Association of Indonesian Migrant Workers in Hong Kong (ATKI), the Asian Migrants Coordinating Board (AMCB), a coalition of grassroots organizations of various nationalities in Hong Kong. The latter groups the United Filipinos in Hong Kong (UNIFIL), ATKI, Filipino Migrant Workers Union (FMWU), Far East Overseas Nepalese Association (Feona), Association of Sri Lankans in Hong Kong (ASL), and Friends of Thai as its member organizations.42 The Mission is also instrumental in the formation of the International Migrants Alliance (IMA), an alliance of 112 migrants’ organizations from different regions of the world in 2008.43 These organizations trusted the Mission because of the know-how skills on mobilization and organizing of its activists and the common goal of migrant rights. These skills give legitimacy and credibility to the work the Mission does among the general public and to Hong Kong residents.

The Mission also helped in the creation of a migrant shelter house called the Bethune House. In this place, workers organized and mobilized for rallies and demonstrations. The Bethune House has become their headquarters.

Constable (2009) describes it as “no doubt the most important avenue through which domestic workers of various nationalities, but especially Filipinos and Indonesians, are exposed to political and labor activism”.44 In conclusion, by framing the migrant issue in a broader sense that encompasses shared experiences of other ethnic groups, the Mission was able to expand its networks and helps others to form associations and unions.

2. INTERCEDE TORONTO, CANADA Series of events led to the creation of INTERCEDE (International Coalition to End Domestics’ Exploitation for the Rights of Domestic Workers) in 1979. First, there was a publication by the Advisory Council on the Status of Women entitled Problems of Immigrant Women in the Canadian Labour Force that documented the exploitation domestic workers experienced. Then, the Committee to Advance

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the Status of Housework followed this publication with a public forum on A View from the Kitchen: Immigrant Women Speak out on the Value of Housework. There, there was a workshop on domestic workers that inspired women from the Caribbean, the Philippines, and Great Britain to form INTERCEDE ((International Coalition to End Domestics’ Exploitation for the Rights of Domestic Workers). It was a coalition of fifty groups, with a main goal to lobby for effective legislative change on immigration policy.45 2.1. Political Opportunities: Reforming DWM, Coalition, and Leadership a) Reformation of the Domestic Workers’ Movement (DWM) In 1981, there was the very first Canadian National Conference on Immigrant Women attended by Immigration Minister Lloyd Axworthy who promised to reform immigration policy, while delegates passed a unanimous resolution for the abolition of the temporary work permit system. The Minister appointed a Task Force on Immigration Practices and Procedures for the reformation of the immigration policy. INTERCEDE mobilized and prepared its recommendation. In June 1981, 25-member delegation from Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Vancouver met with Minister Axworthy to recommend that the government allow domestic workers to apply for permanent residence in Canada.46 Domestic workers from the Caribbean, the Philippines, and Great Britain rallied in a cold November 22, 1981, in front of the immigration office. While this policy was what INTERCEDE wanted, they protested the clause that restricts permanent residency application to those who have had an opportunity to take formal childcare or housekeeping training. For INTERCEDE, “the result will be that a ‘select few’ from the UK and northern Europe are granted landed status, while the thousands of domestic workers from the Caribbean and the Philippines won’t have a change.”47

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b) Coalition and Filipino Domestic Workers as Leaders The Filipino domestic workers took leadership and organized an ad hoc Committee for Landed Status, and partnered with the International Association of Filipino Patriots in holding the very first demonstration of domestic workers on record in Canada in 1981. They cornered Minister Axworthy in a high-class Toronto fund-raising dinner to hand him thousands of signed protest letters.

Four days later, on November 26, the Minister announced the changes granting domestic workers the right to apply for permanent residency.48 Since 1981, there was a flourishing of domestic workers’ associations modelled on the work of INTERCEDE. They include the Women’s Centre of British Columbia (PWC), Community Alliance for Social Justice (CASJ), Filipino Women’s Organization of Quebec (PINAY), West Coast Domestic Workers’ Association (WCDWA), and the Philippine Women’s Centre attest to the systematic vulnerability of FDWs.49 The Foreign Domestic Movement was changed to Live-In Caregiver Program in 1992 due to reports of abuses these organizations documented from the domestic workers they have helped. From 1992 onward, the ability of migrant NGOs to collective action is restricted due to various reasons explained below.

2.2. Hindrance to Organizational Strength: Nature of Civil Society and Lack of Support a) Civil Society as Charitable Organizations Additionally, migrant NGOs, in general, are marginalized from political processes due to the nature of civil society in Canada. The underlying model of Canadian civil society remains entrenched in a 19th-century view of charity where NGOs and civil organizations provide welfare services to the poor and the marginalized. These NGOs are primarily supported by private philanthropy. The role of the government is to ensure accountability and transparency on spending of these donations, but also increases the value of tax credit so people are more inclined to donate to NGOs. However, this charity-based notion of civil society and the

private nature of donation giving that render the third sector invisible in public policy. b) Absence of Widespread Support from the Broader Filipino Community Another organizational weakness of migrant/domestic workers’ NGOs in Canada is the lack of widespread support from the broader Filipino community. Unlike in Hong Kong where Filipinos are very supportive of activism, in Canada, small group of activists, along with the help of academics, non-Filipino human rights, and church-based groups are the ones who mobilize and do the work.

Philip Kelly notes that one explanation for this is the fact that Filipino associational life in Canada follows a transnational manner; they are based on hometown, home province, and even alumni associations. Moreover, live-in caregiver issues are considered as sectoral concern instead of “Filipino” issue everyone should be involved with. This issue once again reaffirms that Filipino community in Canada, as it is in Hong Kong is not unified, coherent, nor homogeneous.

2.3. Framing Immigration in Economic Terms: Hindrance to Collective Action The Canadian government changed its framing of immigration policy in economic terms expecting and supporting immigration mainly when it is aligned with economic concerns by 1990s. In this neoliberal framing, migrants are commodified as cheap and disposable labourers undermining their agency as social and political actors. This was aligned with the government’s Five Year Plan for immigration that aimed to increase total immigration from 200 000 in 1900 to 250 000 in 1992 to handle the economic recession of that time.51 From then onward, immigrants accepted with landed permanent resident status must be able to contribute to the economy. Each year for the past 25 years, Canada has admitted 250 000 permanent residents.52 This became a hindrance for domestic workers’ collective action as they become one among three other groups of temporary foreign workers under the TFWs.

a) Canada: Fostering a Multicultural View of Diversity?

Canada also prides itself as multicultural and accepting of diversity, and immigrants.

The country promotes integration while enabling minority groups to maintain their cultural practices. Yet, a “Campaign to Stop the Expulsion of Melca Salvador” led by PINAY Montreal in 1999 put the value of multiculturalism into question. Melca Salvador was a domestic worker who was ordered for deportation because she was not able to complete the 24 months’ requirement under the Live-In Caregiver program. Salvador’s employer fired her because she got pregnant, which affected her marketability to find another employer.

In February 1999, she applied for ministerial exemption on humanitarian grounds to remain in Canada. William Sloan, Salvador’s lawyer put forwards the argument that: “Melca’s child, Richard, is a Canadian citizen, and as a result, he has all the rights accorded to a Canadian citizen... If you deport Richard’s mother one of these two basic rights would be violated, either the right to live in Canada if deported along with his mother, or the right to security of the person if he stays in Canada because he would be separated from his mother, the only parent he has ever known.”53 Still, the government rejected her request because caregivers are not allowed to bring their families to Canada or to become pregnant during the two-year required period because it impedes their ability to attend to their employer’s need.54 Additionally Richard, her child, was denied access to health care because her mom’s employment authorization ran out.55 Thus, PINAY pushed for its campaign with the goal of reforming the LCP through Salvador’s case.

It gained global attention because community members and supporters organized through research on Live-In Caregivers, letter-writing campaigns, media outreach, raising legal funds, organizing demonstrations, and distributing information.56 In May 2001, the Department of Citizenship and Immigration awarded

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Salvador an open visa, which gave her the possibility to apply for permanent residency after a year. Her case shows the limit of Canada’s multiculturalism where it still reinforces hierarchical categories of differences.57 Conclusion: Human Rights vs. State’s Sovereignty In conclusion, this paper argues that domestic worker NGOs in Hong Kong are a more successful in the social movement than those in Canada. The Mission and AMC in Hong Kong have had more political opportunity, conducive political environment for civil society organizing, alliances with a union, support of Christian churches, and inter-ethnic and broad-based coalition. While in Canada, NGOs like the INTERCEDE had a good start in their mobilization as they have successfully influenced the reformation of the Foreign Domestic Movement. However, this has changed in the 1990s until present due to the framing of the Canadian state of migrants in terms of their economic contribution, framing of civil society as charitable organizations, lack of support from the broader Filipino community, and the unquestioned and predominant notion of Canada as multicultural country.

Limitation This paper has limitations such as the lack of analysis of corporate donors or corporate sectors that also influence the managerial functioning of NGOs in Hong Kong and Canada.

Scholars should look at how corporate donors strengthens or weakens the collective action of pro-migrant NGOs. Another limitation is the need for an in-depth analysis of the involvement of Christian churches in founding migrant NGOs in Hong Kong and their general involvement in Canada.

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NOTES 1. Ma Wui, Glenda Lopez, and Dina Delias, “Examining the Struggles for Domestic Workers: Hong Kong and the Philippines as Interacting Sites of Activism,” Philippine Political Science Journal. no.

3 (2015), 1-19.

2. Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 36.

3. Ibid, 20.

4. Adelyn. Lim,”Transnational Organising and Feminist Politics of Difference and Solidarity: The Mobilisation of Domestic Workers in Hong Kong,” Asian Studies Review. 40, no. 1 (2015) 72.

5. McAdam, 37.

6. Ibid, 21.

7. Ibid., 23 8. Wui, 6.

9. International Organization for Migration (IOM) and United Nations International Research and Training Institute or the Advancement of Women (UN-INSTRAW), “Gender, Migration, and Remittances,” https://www.iom.int/sites/default/ files/about-iom/Gender-migration-remittancesinfosheet.pdf (accessed November 20, 2016) 10. Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, “Migrants for Export How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World,” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, xii, http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=548071(accessed November 20, 2016) 11. Ibid, 13.

12. Deniz Kandiyoti, “Identity and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” Millennium - Journal of International Studies 20, no. 3 (1991), 429.

13. Christina Siracusa, and Kristel Acacio,“State Migrant Exporting Schemes and Their Implications for the Rise of Illicit Migration: A Comparison of Spain and the Philippines” Journal of International Migration and Immigration 5.2 (2004), 321.

14. Thelma Castro De Jesus, “The Filipino Women Domestic Workers in Montréal: An Exploratory Study of Their Life and Work,” Montreal: School of Social Work, McGill University (1990), 10.

15. Hsiao-Chuan Hsia, “The making of a transnational grassroots migrant movement in Hong Kong: A case study of the Asian Migrants’ Coordinating Committee,” Critical Asian Studies 41 (2009).

111-119.

16. Hsiao-Chuan Hsia, “The making of a transnational grassroots migrant movement in Hong Kong: A case study of the Asian Migrants’ Coordinating Committee,” Critical Asian Studies 41 (2009).

111-119.

17. Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department,

“Hong Kong annual digest of statistics Hong Kong: Census and Statistics Department,” http://www.statistics.gov.hk/pub/B10100032013AN13B0100.pdf (accessed November 23, 2016).

18. N Constable, “Telling Tales of Migrant Workers in Hong Kong: Transformations of Faith, Life Scripts, and Activism,” Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 11, no. 3 (2010) 312.

19. Lim, 72.

20. De Jesus, 15.

21. Louise Langevin, “Trafficking in Women in Canada: A Critical Analysis of the Legal Framework Governing Immigrant Live‐in Caregivers,” International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice 31, no. 2 (2007) 199.

22. Ibid., 193.

23. Ibid., 192.

24. Daiva K. Stasiulis and Abigail B. Bakan, Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 158.

25. Ma Wui and Glenda Lopez, “Transnational Activism for Migrant Workers: Examining the Struggles for Domestic Workers in Hong Kong,” National University of Singapore: PhD dissertation (2011) 105, http://scholarbank.nus.edu.sg/ handle/10635/34649 26. Rudd Koopmans, “Migrant Mobilization and Political Opportunities: Variation Among German Cities and a Comparison with the United Kingdom and the Netherlands,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30, no. 3 (2004), 451.

27. Wai-man Lam and Irene L.K. Tong, “Civil Society and NGOs” Contemporary Hong Kong politics: governance in the post-1997 era (2007), 21, http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord. aspx?p=677231 28. Wui, 82.

29. Ibid., 99.

30. Mine Eder, “The Constraints on Labour Internationalism: Contradictions and Prospects” in Global Unions: Theory and Strategies of Organized Labour in the Global Political Economy, ed. J. Harrod and R. O’Brien (New York: Routledge, 2002),167.

31. Ibid., 196.

32. Wui and Delia, 196.

33. Christian Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 96.

34. S. Wesley Ariarajah, “The Ecumenical Movement in Asia in the context of Asian SocioPolitical Realities,” In Christian Theology in Asia, ed.

S. C. H. Kim, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 227.

35. Wui, 141.

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36. Nicola Piper, “Temporary Migration and Political Remittances: The Role of Organisational Networks in the Transnationalisation of Human Rights,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 8 (2009): 216, doi:10.1163/156805809X12553326569678.

37. Wui, 146.

38. Ibid., 146.

39. Ibid., 137.

40. Ibid., 137.

41. Jason Wordie, Streets: Exploring Hong Kong Island (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2002), 152.

42. Hsia, 119.

43. Wui, 94.

44. Constable, 151.

45. R. Ramirez, “Domestic Workers Organize!”

Ruth Roach and Pierson and Marjorie Griffin Cohen, Canadian Women’s Issues. Vol. 1, Strong Voices (1982): 90.

46. Ibid., 91.

47. Ibid., 92.

48. Denise L. Spitzer and Sara Torres, “GenderBased Barriers to Settlement and Integration for Live-in-Caregivers: A Review of the Literature,” Toronto, Ont: CERIS - The Ontario Metropolis Centre (2008), 21, http://www.deslibris.ca/ID/216178 (accessed November 23, 2016).

49. Denise L. Spitzer and Sara Torres, “GenderBased Barriers to Settlement and Integration for Live-in-Caregivers: A Review of the Literature,” Toronto, Ont: CERIS - The Ontario Metropolis Centre (2008), 21, http://www.deslibris.ca/ID/216178 (accessed November 23, 2016).

50. P. Kelly, “Transnational and Political Participation among Filipinos in Canada,” In Goldring, Luin, and Sailaja Krishnamurti. Organizing the Transnational: Labour, Politics, and Social Change (Vancouver [B.C.]: UBC Press, 2007),230.

51. J. Dench, “Canadian Council for Refugees: A Hundred Years of Immigration to Canada 1900-1999 (Part 2).” http://ccrweb.ca/en/hundred-years-immigration-canada-part-2 (accessed November 30, 2016) 52. D. Hiebert, “What’s So Special About Canada?

Understanding the Resilience of Immigration and Multiculturalism,” Transatlantic Council on Migration: Migration Policy Institute (2016), pg. 5, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/ whats-so-special-about-canada-understanding-resilience-immigration-and-multiculturalism (accessed Novermber 30, 2016).

53. P. Hwang, “Racism, Sexism, and Canadian immigration” http://www.coloursofresistance. org/524/racism-sexism-and-canadian-immigration/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

54. Bakan and Stasiulis, 164.

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55. Ibid., 165.

56. Ibid, 166.

57. A Shachar, “On Citizenship and Multicultural Vulnerability,” Political Theory 28, no. 1 (2000), 64.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ariarajah, S. Wesley. 2008. “The Ecumenical Movement in Asia in the context of Asian Socio-Political Realities.” In Christian Theology in Asia, edited by S. C. H. Kim, 227–250.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Print.

Constable N. 2010. “Telling Tales of Migrant Workers in Hong Kong: Transformations of Faith, Life Scripts, and Activism”. Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. 11, no. 3: 311-329.

Print.

De Jesus, Thelma Castro. 1990. “The Filipino Women Domestic Workers in Montréal: An Exploratory Study of Their Life and Work”.

Montreal: School of Social Work, McGill University. Print.

Dench, J. “Canadian Council for Refugees: A Hundred Years of Immigration to Canada 1900-1999 (Part 2).” Retrieved November 30, 2016 from http://ccrweb.ca/en/ hundred-years-immigration-canada-part-2 Eder, Mine. 2002. “The Constraints on Labour Internationalism: Contradictions and Prospects.” In Global Unions: Theory and Strategies of Organized Labour in the Global Political Economy, edited by J. Harrod and R. O’Brien, 167–185. New York: Routledge.

Print.

Hiebert, D. 2016. “What’s So Special About Canada? Understanding the Resilience of Immigration and Multiculturalism.

Transatlantic Council on Migration: Migration Policy Institute. Retrieved on Novermber 30, 2016 at http://www.migrationpolicy.org/ research/whats-so-special-about-canada-understanding-resilience-immigration-and-multiculturalism Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department.

(2013). “Hong Kong annual digest of statistics Hong Kong: Census and Statistics Department.” Retrieved November 23, 2016 from http://www.statistics.gov.hk/pub/ B10100032013AN13B0100.pdf Hsia, Hsiao-Chuan. 2009. “The making of a transnational grassroots migrant movement in Hong Kong: A case study of the Asian Migrants’ Coordinating Committee.” Critical Asian Studies 41(1): 113–41.

Hwang P. “Racism, Sexism, and Canadian immigration.” Retrieved on November 20, 2016 from http://www.coloursofresistance.org/524/ racism-sexism-and-canadian-immigration/ International Organization for Migration (IOM) and United Nations International Research and Training Institute or the

Advancement of Women (UN-INSTRAW).

2007. “Gender, Migration, and Remittances.”

Retrieved November 20, 2016 from https:// www.iom.int/sites/default/files/about-iom/ Gender-migration-remittances-infosheet.pdf.

International Labour Office. 2013. “Domestic Workers Across the World; Global and Regional Statistics and the Extent of Legal Protection.”

Retrieved November 23, 2016 from http:// www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_173363.pdf Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1991. “Identity and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation”.

Millennium - Journal of International Studies.

20, no. 3: 429-443. Print.

Kelly, P. 2007. “Transnational and Political Participation among Filipinos in Canada.”

In Goldring, Luin, and Sailaja Krishnamurti.

Organizing the Transnational: Labour, Politics, and Social Change. Vancouver [B.C.]: UBC Press <http://www.deslibris.ca/ID/420112>.

Koopmans, Ruud.

2004.

“Migrant Mobilization and Political Opportunities: Variation Among German Cities and a Comparison with the United Kingdom and the Netherlands”. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 30, no. 3: 449-470.

Lam, Wai-man. And Irene L.K. Tong. 2007.

“Civil Society and NGOs” In Contemporary Hong Kong politics: governance in the post1997 era. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007. http://public.eblib.com/choice/ publicfullrecord.aspx?p=677231 Langevin, Louise and Belleau, Marie-Claire.

2000. “Trafficking in Women in Canada: A Critical Analysis of the Legal Framework Governing Immigrant Live-in Caregivers and Mail-Order Brides”. Faculty of Law. Université Laval. Laval, Québec. Status of Women Canada. Print.

Langevin, Louise. 2007. “Trafficking in Women in Canada: A Critical Analysis of the Legal Framework Governing Immigrant Live‐in Caregivers”. International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice. 31, no. 2: 191-209.

Lim, Adelyn. 2015. “Transnational Organising and Feminist Politics of Difference and Solidarity: The Mobilisation of Domestic Workers in Hong Kong”. Asian Studies Review.

40, no. 1: 70-88.

McAdam, Doug. 1999. “Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 19301970.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Print.

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Nobles, M. 2000. “Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Print.

Piper, Nicola.

2009.

“Temporary Migration and Political Remittances: The Role of Organisational Networks in the Transnationalisation of Human Rights.”

European Journal of East Asian Studies 8 (2): 215–243. doi:10.1163/1568058 09X12553326569678.

Ramirez, R. 1982.

“Domestic Workers Organize!” In Ruth Roach and Pierson and Marjorie Griffin Cohen, Canadian Women’s Issues. Vol. 1, Strong Voices, 89-91. Print.

Rodriguez, Robyn M. 2002. “Migrant Heroes: Nationalism, Citizenship and the Politics of Filipino Migrant Labor”. Citizenship Studies. 6, no. 3: 341-356.

Rodriguez, Robyn Magalit.

2010. “Migrants for Export How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. <http://public.eblib.com/ choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=548071>.

Shachar, A. 2000. “On Citizenship and Multicultural Vulnerability”. Political Theory.

28, no. 1: 64-89.

Siracusa, Christina, and Kristel Acacio. 2004.

“State Migrant Exporting Schemes and Their Implications for the Rise of Illicit Migration: A Comparison of Spain and the Philippines.”

Journal of International Migration and Immigration. 5.2: 321-342. Print.

Smith, Christian. 1991. “The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Print.

Spitzer, Denise L., and Sara Torres. 2008.

“Gender-Based Barriers to Settlement and Integration for Live-in-Caregivers: A Review of the Literature.” Toronto, Ont: CERIS - The Ontario Metropolis Centre. <http://www.deslibris.ca/ID/216178>.

Stasiulis, Daiva K., and Abigail B. Bakan. 2003.

“Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System.” Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Print.

Wordie, Jason. 2002. “Streets: Exploring Hong Kong Island.” Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Print.

Wui, Ma. Glenda Lopez, and Dina Delias.

2015. “Examining the Struggles for Domestic Workers: Hong Kong and the Philippines as Interacting Sites of Activism”. Philippine Political Science Journal. no. 3: 1-19. Print.

Wui, Ma. Glenda Lopez. 2011. “Transnational Activism for Migrant Workers: Examining

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the Struggles for Domestic Workers in Hong Kong”. National University of Singapore: PhD dissertation. Retrieved November 18, 2016 at http://scholarbank.nus.edu.sg/ handle/10635/34649

MODERNITY AT ANY COST Mapping the Effects of China’s One-Child Policy on Women in the Context of the Urban-Rural Divide Ryan Shah

Introduced in 1980 by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the one-child policy was the government’s attempt at slowing the growth of a massive population. As the name suggests, the policy mandated that families have no more than one-child, though there were exceptions to the rule.1 Enforcement of the one-child policy was a dynamic, heterogeneous process with penalties for violation that ranged from fines to forced abortions, sterilizations and infanticide. Though the policy was portrayed as a means to advance gender equity, it had an ostensibly gendered effect. The gender discrepancy in the rate of contraceptive operations, for instance, is staggering. Over 95 percent of the over 800,000,000 operations performed from 1971 to 2001 were performed on women.2 Literature on the topic quite uniformly notes the immense psychological and physical suffering of women that was the product of the onechild policy. Chinese reproductive health activists have contended that, under the auspices of the one-child policy, women’s health was considered far less important than the achievement of population targets.3 Far from a blanket regulation, however, the one-child policy was implemented quite unevenly across a plethora of dimensions. This paper will attempt to locate the contours of this impact within China’s vast urban-rural divide. Inequality in China has manifested quite strongly across the urban-rural axis featuring more affluent cities and a less affluent countryside. The intersection of one’s position on the urban-rural dimension and

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one’s gender provides an interesting basis for research in the context of the unambiguously gendered one-child policy. This paper therefore seeks to determine how the impact of the one-child policy on women was altered by the different social conditions that exist across the urban-rural divide. Consulting the relevant body of literature provides us ample evidence to support the conclusion that the one-child policy had a disproportionately adverse impact on rural women compared to urban women.

Though women in both contexts were robbed of their bodily autonomy, those in rural areas were subject to physical trauma in far greater numbers. Rural women in China experienced the one-child policy as a manifestation of violence that targeted their intersecting class and gender identities whereas the one-child policy precipitated a noticeable increase in the status of urban women, in certain cases. In view of the potent evidence that supports this thesis, however, we must be careful not to fall victim to dichotomizing urban-rural narratives by homogenizing the experience of rural or urban women. Despite the contours of the urban-rural divide, which the state violence of the onechild policy largely followed, we see that, for women, there was no singular urban or rural experience of the one-child policy. The impact of the one-child policy followed an uneven, contingent gradient that had neither a wholly positive or wholly negative effect on rural or urban women. Rather, as this paper will assert, the one-child policy had a complex impact on

the lives of rural and urban women that defies perfect categorization across the rural-urban dimension.

Context of the Urban-Rural Divide The urban-rural divide, which took form during the Maoist period and became crystallized with Deng Xiaoping’s marketization of China, is a central feature of Chinese society.

The increase in income, education and quality of life that has benefitted Chinese cities since the initiation of Deng’s free market reforms in 1978 has had a blunted impact on China’s vast rural areas. Indeed, though the Deng reforms have reduced the number of rural residents living in poverty, they have been a source of continual disadvantage to many. The dismantling and de-funding of rural education and healthcare systems have, for instance, aided the acceleration of coastal capitalist development while harming the material livelihood of many living in rural China.4 Apart from material inequalities between China’s urban and rural areas, we see that the divide is also reproduced in popular discourse. Though, for Mao, the rural peasantry represented the forward-looking standard bearers of revolution, Deng-era discourse emphasized an essential rural-urban divide in which the backwards countryside lagged behind the nation’s urbane advance towards progress.5 This discourse is manifest in contemporary attitudes insofar as “many if not most urbanites continue to regard villagers…as uncultured, backward, and, in general, less civilized than urbanites,”6 presenting a clear attitudinal dimension to the material inequality that separates urban and rural China. This notion legitimized many Deng-era policies that explicitly favoured urbanites. Indeed, the one-child policy was quite unambiguously targeted at reproductive regulation in rural areas.7 Though urbanites were broadly in keeping with the reproductive norms extolled by the one-child policy,8 peasant fertility norms, which favoured larger families, were perceived as “remnants of traditional ‘feudal” culture by the CCP.”9 It is within this milieu of Chinese neoliberal modernity that CCP ‘experts’ reasoned that the rural

population was “large in quantity and low in quality,”10 presenting the reason and justification for a policy that targeted China’s rural dwellers for reproductive regulation.

The Rural Dimension of the One-Child Policy When confronting the substantive impacts of the one-child policy on rural women, we see that in broad strokes the one-child policy produced horrific amounts of suffering for countless women whose reproductive capacities were targeted by the state. Though the policy robbed all women that it targeted of their bodily autonomy, it was largely rural women whose bodies became the objects of violence and coercion.

Though the sociocultural constraints of rural China vary by geography, they tend to favour larger families when compared to urban family norms.11 The tradition of sons providing for their parents in old age is rooted in both rural tradition and a practical response to the absence of old-age care administered by the state.12 By virtue of its mitigation of family size, the onechild policy hampered this traditional family institution – with a decisively gendered effect.

This tension between state family planning policy and rural reproductive norms became manifest in egregious violence directed towards female bodies. This violence ranged from forced sterilizations and forced abortions at the hands of the state to female infanticide and domestic abuse at the hands of family members. This violence has been comprehensively catalogued by Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winckler in Governing China’s Population. This work will serve to guide the discussion within this section.

The disturbingly widespread government tactic of forced sterilization aimed at rural women, which was part and parcel of the onechild policy, accompanied a discourse where villagers were likened to oxen or pigs to be “spayed.”13 In certain cases, “[r]ural women were taken by force, placed in cages and transported to quasi-public operating areas, where one after another they had their tubes tied or IUDs inserted without anaesthetics.”14 Though

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the ubiquitously coercive nature of the onechild policy makes it difficult to chart what portion of the over 100 million sterilizations that took place between 1980 and 2001 were indeed forced, we can discern broadly from village ethnographies that the countless rural women who were forcibly sterilized at the behest of party cadres often became “chronically ill, suffering a nagging pain that…impaired family relations and quality of life.”15 When women in rural areas became pregnant with their second or third child, we can chart a similarly violent pattern of late-term abortions, induced by cadre coercion, which severely impaired the physical and mental health of the victims.16 In addition to violence aimed directly at women’s reproductive capacities, we see that the one-child policy precipitated disturbing quantities of female infanticide and sex-selective abortions, generating devastating consequences for rural women. The one-child policy led to a horrifyingly sharp rise in infant deaths, as “parents desperate for sons revived older practices of drowning or otherwise disposing of their infant daughters.”17 Under the auspices of the one-child policy, giving birth to a girl precluded one from giving birth to a boy, thus patriarchal social norms that explicitly valued male lives over female lives created a situation for many rural women where giving birth to a girl brought “shame, humiliation, social ostracism, and bullying.”18 The disturbing reality observed by Greenhalgh and Winckler is that many rural women who gave birth to single daughters were at risk of domestic abuse and abandonment by their family.19 The potent social norms favouring sons over daughters and the coercive power of the one-child policy have coalesced to substantially increase female infanticide, almost exclusively in rural areas.”20 Of the girls born between 1980 and 2000, an estimated 8.5 million (4% of the total) were the victims of infanticide,21 a direct consequence of the one-child policy. The spread of ultrasounds machines in rural China since the mid-1980s “introduced a modern, high tech way to ease the conflict between state fertility norms and peasant desires for sons.”22 Though the introduction of ultrasounds machines led to a

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decrease in female infanticide, it did so because it provided the opportunity for sex selective abortion of female foetuses. Not only does this gender selectivity compound the ethically perilous consequences of the one-child policy, but because the sex of foetuses can only be detected in the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy, abortions had to be carried out at a stage that puts women’s long term health at risk, even in areas where proper facilities exist.23 The prevalence of these late-term, sex selective abortions thus generated lasting physical trauma for women who can hardly be said to have consented to such a procedure.24 The above information substantially evidences the notion that the onechild policy’s effect on rural women was replete with violence of which rural female bodies were the targets.

Though suffering at the hands of the agents of the one-child policy was indeed extremely prevalent in rural areas, it is important to recognize that the policy’s impact was blunted thanks to the resourcefulness and resilience of many rural women and their families. As Nie Jing-bao has noted: “grassroots resistance to the national birth control policy is overwhelming.”25 Rural resistance to the one child policy took on a dynamic form, and it included violence and threats against party cadres, evasion of enforcement via deception and village-level organized defiance.26 One particularly crafty method for evading state violence was the deception of rural cadres by timing a pregnancy around autumn, thus allowing the pregnancy to be hidden under warm, padded clothing.

Though this was not always an effective method of avoiding cadre detection, it allowed many women to resist state coercion.27 Adding further nuance to our understanding of the onechild policy’s impact, it should be noted that the expansion of facilities catering to women’s reproductive health (as their bodies were the ostensible targets of such a policy) necessarily led to an increase in access to reproductive health resources. For example, the introduction of mandatory gynaecological exams in the early 1990s, though an infringement on female bodily autonomy, produced benefits for rural women who would have otherwise lacked

access to such medical resources.

Context of the Urban-Rural Divide We can broadly contrast the one-child policy’s impact on rural women with its impact on urban women. First and foremost, by virtue of family norms that favoured smaller families, the one-child policy had a highly mitigated impact on urban women when compared to rural women. In the year 1980 for example, 63% of urban Shanghai families had one or fewer children whereas this was the case for only 43% of rural Shanghai families.28 Though encroachment on female bodily autonomy is always deplorable, we see that, in the case of urban China, the one-child policy generated several consequences that were favourable for women. The prevalence of single daughter families in urban China, which was accelerated by one-child policy, has had a sizable impact on the status of women.29 Vanessa Fong notes that, though single son families or son/daughter families provide the basis for the reproduction of the system of patrilineal kinship, whereby males hold familial authority, single daughter families provide the basis for its disruption.30 This system tied into an expectation that sons ought to provide for their parents in their old age which was the impetus for the investment of more resources in male rather than female children.31 The prevalence of single daughter families accelerated by the one-child policy disrupted the practicality of this norm and created new incentives to invest attention and resources in one’s daughter. Young girls in this context were “socialized to value educational and career success and provided the resources with which to achieve [these goals]” because there were “no brothers to compete for their parent’s attention and resources.”32 This was largely a practical consideration as the oldage support of said parents was tied to their daughters earning power.33 Additionally, we see that lower fertility in Chinese cities, which the one-child policy patently contributed to, aided the status of women in two core ways. First, “because of the paid work that their low fertility enabled them to do” and, second, because

this “paid work enabled women to provide their own parents with financial support in old age” disrupting the norms of patriarchal kinship.34 These two forces were accelerated by the extra attention and resources directed towards singleton daughters mentioned above, leading to an appreciable increase in the status of many urban women, directly tied to the one-child policy. Though urban Chinese society remains deeply gendered, and the above improvements in the status of women have been largely out of reach for lower social classes,35 the demographic change precipitated by the one-child policy has proved advantageous for many urban, middle-class women.

Though the regulation of reproductive functions that disproportionately impacted female bodies yielded immense suffering for countless rural-dwelling women as a consequence of the intersection of gendered cultural constraints and a coercive family planning regime, it also must be noted that, unless qualified, this realization has the capacity to reproduce problematic discourse surrounding China’s urban-rural divide. The perception of China’s rural population as “small-minded, feudal peasants,” which was the ideational milieu within which the one-child policy was created, is very much present in an understanding of the policy that positions rural-dwellers as the hopeless objects of state policies of control.36 This classist strand of thinking is also found in the perception that urbanites were uniformly able to adapt to the policy. Despite the fact that the violence of the one-child policy was concentrated on rural women and largely interwoven into the urban-rural dichotomy of Deng-era modernity discourse, it is important not to discount the suffering of the urban women who were nonetheless coerced into forced abortions. Nie Jing-Bao’s qualitative interviews of the urban victims of forced abortion are a grim reminder of the breadth of the one-child policy’s impact on women. The lateterm surgical abortions performed on women without their consent in Chinese cities have left many women with lasting psychological and physical trauma – many describe a lasting feeling of “pain and bitterness” after forced

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abortions.37 Beyond the material horror caused by a non-consensual abortion, one city dweller noted that the doctor performing her abortion was verbally abusive during the process, crystalizing her psychological trauma and permanently impacting her mental health.38 The sheer prevalence of abortions in China’s urban centers, both before and after the implementation of the one-child policy, makes it impossible to chart the exact number of abortions that were indeed forced. The testimony of the survivors of this violence nonetheless provides us an undisputable record of the suffering urban women faced at the hands of the one-child policy.

Conclusion – Towards a Complex Understanding on Chinese Family Planning Policy To conclude, it is worth contrasting the heterogeneous implementation and impact of the one-child policy with its homogenizing, universalizing goals. Though the one-child policy was intended to be a modernizing force, a component of a larger utopian project that would usher in modernity based on the urban model, we see that the policy’s implementation and consequences were highly uneven. As noted by this paper, the policy’s decisively gendered impact largely followed the contours of the urban-rural divide by expanding urban-rural inequality across a multitude of dimensions.

As a consequence of the cleavage between rural family norms and those of the state, rural women’s bodies became the targets of gratuitous violence that has generated lasting trauma.

Conversely, the one child policy, through its propagation of one daughter families in urban centres has had a role in disrupting patriarchal norms and providing young urban women with more opportunities and resources. This paper concluded with a reflection on these findings that stressed the importance of acknowledging the nuance of such a policy’s impact on women in China in a way that moves past the urban-rural dichotomy. Though we may roughly sketch the way female bodies have been affected by the one child-policy across the urban-rural axis, it is important that this remains a rough sketch. It

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is vital that we contest dichotomizing narratives that separate “helpless peasants” from “empowered urbanites” and recognize the agency that women have in contesting patriarchal control of their bodies. Though the one-child policy manifested in very different experiences for rural and urban women, it is imperative that we understand that these experiences remain nuanced, plural and complex.

NOTES 1. Penny Kane, The Second Billion (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1987), 92.

2. Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winckler, Governing China’s Population (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005), 256.

3. Ibid, 259.

4. Martin Whyte, “The Paradoxes of Urban-rural Inequality in Contemporary China” in One Country, Two Societies, ed. Martin Whyte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 14.

5. Greenhalgh and Winckler, Governing China’s Population, 249.

6. Martin Whyte, “The Paradoxes of Urban-rural Inequality in Contemporary China” in One Country, Two Societies, ed. Martin Whyte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 16.

7. Susan Greenhalgh, Just One-child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China (University of California Press: Los Angeles, 2008), 32.

8. Ibid, 32.

9. Greenhalgh and Winckler, Governing China’s Population, 256.

10. Ibid, 249.

11. Ibid, 250.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid, 252.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid, 261.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid, 268.

18. Ibid, 269.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid..,272.

23. Ibid, p. 273.

24. Ibid.

25. Nie Jing-Bao, Behind the Silence (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006), 181.

26. Tyrene White, “Domination, Resistance and Accommodation in China’s One-Child Campaign,” in Chinese Society, ed. Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden (London: Routledge Press, 2000), 109.

27. Ibid, 110.

28. Penny Kane, The Second Billion (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1987), 92.

29. Vanessa Fong, “China’s One-Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 4(2012): 1098.

30. Ibid, 1101.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winckler,

Governing China’s Population (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005), 256.

34. Vanessa Fong, “China’s One-Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 4(2012): 1102.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid, 252.

37. Nie Jing-Bao, Behind the Silence (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006), 181.

38. Ibid, 142.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Fong, Vanessa. “China’s One-Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters.”

American Anthropologist 104 (2002): 1098-1109.

Greenhalgh, Susan and Edwin Winckler.

Governing China’s Population. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Greenhalgh, Susan. Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008.

Jing-Bao, Nie. Behind the Silence. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2006.

Kane, Penny. The Second Billion. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1987.

White, Tyrene.

“Domination, Resistance and Accommodation in China’s One-Child Campaign.” In Chinese Society, 102-19. Edited

by Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden, London: Routledge Press, 2000.

Whyte, Martin. “The Paradoxes of Urban-rural Inequality in Contemporary China.” In One Country, Two Societies, 1-25. Edited by Martin Whyte. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2010.

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A BIDIRECTIONAL TRANSFER OF LEARNING BETWEEN TONAL LANGUAGES AND MUSIC An Analysis Marianne Ruelle

Enrolling children in music classes1 and Chinese language classes has been a popular phenomenon in recent year.2 Many are convinced that learning a tone language, one in which variations in pitch accents alter the word definition3, promotes perfect pitch. Some also maintain that musical training helps cognitive development. In an effort to characterize the relationship between both fields, many researchers are interested in studying the transfer of learning between language and music.4 Perkins and Salomon allude to a positive transfer of learning: a scenario where musical education ameliorates language abilities, and vice versa.5 Current research in neuroscience further shows this positive transfer of learning between language and music.6 However, others still maintain that language and music are completely separate entities.7 Through a comprehensive review of the current literature, this paper aims to first define the relationship and transfer of learning between tone languages and music, and then uncover the reasons behind tone language speakers’ musical advantages. Indeed, tone language speakers with no musical training process and differentiate pitch similarly to professional musicians, for language and music depend on overlapping brain networks.

Music and language share common properties despite hailing from different disciplines.

Music is defined as an art form in which vocal and/or instrumental sounds are combine.8 On the other hand, language is the method of human communication, which consists of

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using words in an organized and structured way.9 Older theories affirm that the left hemisphere of the brain processes musical information, while the right hemisphere processes linguistic information.10 However, contemporary researchers have challenged this theory by showing that language and music share many common features and thus should have similar processing systems. Both are forms of communication and expression, and each has a set of rules and memorized representations.11 In both cases, notes and words act as building blocks to create complex structures, such as melodies and sentences. For tone languages, pitch accents alter the word definition. For example, changing the tone of “shi” alters the meaning of the word from “ten” to “market”. This reliance on pitch is analogous to music, as a change in pitch can transform a note from Do to Re. In music, pitch governs melody whereas in a tone language, pitch governs word meaning. With these comparisons, one can speculate that a positive transfer of learning can occur between both fields.

Recent research has verified that musicians do demonstrate an advantage in a myriad of language abilities.12 Specifically, musicians show enhancements in long-term verbal memory span13, voice pitch discrimination14, proficiency in a foreign language15 and phonological awareness16, which is an individual’s awareness of the sound structure of words. To account for these advantages, Patel developed a model to determine how and why musical training

leads to benefits in speech processing. He suggested that five conditions must be met for musical training to drive an adaptive plasticity in speech processing networks.17 He termed it the “OPERA” hypothesis (Overlap, Precision, Emotion, Repetition, Attention); when these five aspects are present, speech-processing networks are adaptive to change. In other words, certain brain structures can reorganize themselves by changing neural pathways, thereby creating new connections between neurons.18 This plasticity then engages these networks “to function with higher precision than needed for ordinary speech communication”.19 Since music and speech share these systems, musical training benefits speech processing by enhancing the manner in which it is encoded in the brain. With this OPERA framework, Patel nonetheless does not specify whether this transfer of learning is unidirectional. This ambiguity allows for speculation about whether the reverse relationship is true and whether a bidirectional positive transfer of learning between music and language, and more specifically, tone languages, is existent.

Tone language speakers communicate melodically. Tones are critically important, as these pitch variations will change the meaning of a certain word or syllable. Mandarin consists of four tones, while Cantonese has six with very similar pitch heights.20 Foreigners who do not speak the language are not accustomed to listening to pitch variations and have a hard time distinguishing the different pronunciations.

For example, the word “ma” spoken in a high and level tone signifies “mother” in Mandarin.

But, when “ma” is spoken at a lower pitch, the word means “horse”. Since tone languages retain a certain degree of musicality due to the importance of pitch, tone language speakers may have a musical advantage.

By identifying these precise musical advantages, Bidelman, Hutka and Moreno discovered that tone language speakers exhibit improved performance in pitch and melody discrimination.21 The researchers found that English-speaking non-musicians were relatively disadvantaged in terms of determining changes in pitch. The superiority of

native English-speaking musicians and native Cantonese non-musicians extended to the realms of melody discrimination and pitch recollection, where they achieved better scores.

That is, their accuracy was superior. When analyzing this greater proficiency, Bidelman et al. reached the conclusion that Cantonesespeaking participants assess musical pitch with similar accuracy to musicians.22 After thorough statistical analysis, they concluded that their results were significant, leading the researchers to confirm an association between tonal languages and music abilities. Thus, one can confirm that Patel’s OPERA hypothesis, mentioned previously, is bidirectional; the positive transfer of learning between music and language goes both ways.

Further evidence of this positive transfer of learning between tone languages and music is shown through a high presence of perfect pitch among non-musician tone-language speaker.23 When an individual can identify or produce a musical note without the presence of a reference note, they are deemed to have perfect pitch24, an endowment exceptionally rare in our population. This ability is present with an estimated occurrence of less than 1 in 10,000 in the overall population.25 In spite of this rarity, when examining students in an American music conservatory, Deustch et al. found that performance level on a test of absolute pitch was considerably greater among those who were native tone-language speakers.26 Deutsch, Henthorn and Dolson also challenge the premise that the ability is usually only present in musicians27 with evidence that tone language speakers, even if they are non-musicians, are much more likely to develop perfect pitch during speech acquisition.28 With these results, one can further confirm that tone language speakers display improved performance in pitch discrimination.

Bidelman, Henthorn, Dolson and Deustch’s research confirm a relationship between tonal languages and music. Tone language speakers have heightened skills in various aspects of music, the most important of them being pitch discrimination. However, these researchers have admitted to limitations to their findings.29 Tone language speakers

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differentiate pitch like musicians, but why this is so is still unclear. The researchers did not conclude whether the advantages were due to pre-existing differences, cultural, environmental, or neural.

Research in neuroscience shows that tonal language speakers’ advantages in music are mostly due to a large neural sharing in the processing of music and speech. Neuroimaging studies reveal a large overlap in the neural responses to vocal and musical stimuli. For example, in response to music and speech, large areas were activated in overlapping portions of the posterior auditory cortex.30 More specifically, a multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA), a technique that uses algorithms to sort neuroimaging data, shows that the patterns of activation between speech and music are very similar.31 This overlap points to a neural relationship between both domains, resulting from overlapping brain networks. Furthermore, recent research shows that tone language experience sensitizes auditory brain mechanisms to detect subtle pitch changes.32 In Bidelman and Chung’s findings, both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers demonstrated advantages in pitch discrimination, with Cantonese speakers displaying heightened sensitivity to pitch changes.33 These results are not surprising. More intricate than the standard Chinese, the Cantonese language contains six phonetic tones. Mandarin only contains four. Moreover, Cantonese tones have similar pitch heights, which further explains why Cantonese participants would perform the best on a test of pitch discrimination. These results thus justify that such an intimate relationship between tonal languages and music is due to a neural association.

Critical to mention when analyzing this relationship is the importance of being a native tonal-language speaker in order to fully experience advantages in music. There is a difference between being a native speaker and being a proficient speaker. A native language is that which a person has learned from birth or within the critical period for speech acquisition.35 On the other hand, if one learns a language after this critical period, one can become proficient,

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but will not be native as the language was studied later. Recent findings from Krishnan et al. suggest that native language experience shapes the processing of pitch in the auditory cortex.36 These researchers also found that tone language experience enhances neural representations for pitch mostly during the critical period for speech acquisition, which is during the first few years of life.37 It is hence not surprising to see that native tone-language speakers have a better advantage in pitch discrimination than others who have learned a tonal language later in life. Krishnan’s findings also provide further evidence that tone language speakers’ advantage in music is neural: if one is native in a tonal language, processing of pitch in the auditory cortex will be enhanced in such a way that it increases the ability to discriminate pitch.38 Others are convinced that tonal language speakers’ advantages in music have a cultural explanation. In Amy Chua’s memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Chua), the author coins the term “Tiger Mom” to define a strict and authoritarian mother who raises her children with a traditional Chinese approach.

According to Chua and various other tone-language speakers, Asian parents are more strict disciplinarians than their Western counterparts.

An example of this rigor is the importance of instilling rigorous musical training in Asian children. As a result, Chua remarks that these speakers of a tonal language are then better musicians due to increased training caused by superior parental and professional pressures. However, her argument rests on a faulty premise: that all Western parents are “typical Western overscheduling soccer mom[s]”39 with lax parenting styles. This stereotype is fallacious. Many different parenting styles exist and not all Western parents are permissive, as Chua claims in her memoir. Furthermore, this concept of “Tiger Mom” implies that children will be successful musicians only if they are subject to authoritarian parents. Many children with lax parents have grown up to become exceptional musicians. In other words, parental pressure does not always correlate with successful performance. While cultural differences may affect tonal language speakers’ musical

advantage, it is also accounted for by the neural association between language and music.

Taken together, the findings presented in this paper suggest an association between music and tonal languages that can be re-conceptualized as a bidirectional relationship. While musical training leads to increased language abilities, the reverse relationship is also true as tone language speakers present with enhanced abilities to discriminate melodies and pitch.

This relationship, due to a large neural overlap between language and music, is evidence of a positive transfer of learning between these two fields. These findings offer much promise for future research to characterize the specific nature of the shared neural mechanisms between both faculties. They also open the way for new research on the effects of introducing East Asian languages and/or musical training in early infancy. More broadly, understanding the relationship between language and music will pave the way for future studies to treat language disorders such as specific language impairment (SLI).40 With further research, we might be able to instill tonal language classes, such as Mandarin, Cantonese or Vietnamese, in order to improve musical skills.

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NOTES 1. Sima Anvari, Relations among Musical Skills, Phonological Processing, and Early Reading Ability in Preschool Children (Hamilton, ON: Journal od Experimental Child Psychology), 111.

2. G. Shao, “Chinese as Second Language Growing in Popularity,” 2015 3. Gang Peng, Temporal and Tonal Aspects of Chinese Syllables: A Corpus-Based Comparative Study of Mandarin and Cantonese (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006), 135.

4. A.D. Patel, “Language, Music, Syntax and the Brain,” in Nature Neurosci 6.7 (2003): 674.

5. D. Perkins and G Salomon, “Transfer of Learning,” International Encyclopedia of Education, (1992): 2.

6. Patel, “Why Would Musical Training Benefit the Neural Encoding of Speech? The Opera Hypothesis,” Front Psychol 2 (2011): 142.

7. Erin McMullen, Jenny R. Saffran, “Music and Language: A Developmental Comparison,” Musical Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 21.3, (2004): 289.

8. Andrew Kania, “The Philosophy of Music,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014.

9. A.L. Gorin, “Adaptive Acquisition of Language,” Computer Speech & Language 5.2 (1991): 101.

10. L. Jancke, “The Relationship between Music and Language,” Front Psychol 3 (2012): 123.

11. R. A. Miranda and M.T. Ullman, “Double Dissociation between Rules and Memory in Music: An Event-Related Potential Study,” Neuroimage, 38.2 (2007): 331.

12. Ibid., 133.

13. Mireille Besson, Julie Chobert, Celine Marie, “Transfer of Training between Music and Speech: Common Processing, Attention, and Memory,” Frontiers in Psychology 2 (2011): 94.

14. Gavin M. Bidelman, Ananthanarayan Krishnan, “Effects of Reverberation on Brainstem Representation of Speech in Musicians and NonMusicians,” Brain Research, 1355 (2010): 112.

15. C. Marques, et al., “Musicians Detect Pitch Violation in a Foreign Language Better Than Nonmusicians: Behavioral and Electrophysical Evidence,” J Cogn Neurosci, 19.1 (2007): 1453.

16. Sima Anvari, Relations among Musical Skills, Phonological Processing, and Early Reading Ability in Preschool Children (Hamilton, ON: Journal od Experimental Child Psychology), 111.

17. Patel, “Why Would Musical Training Benefit the Neural Encoding of Speech? The Opera Hypothesis,” Front Psychol 2 (2011): 142 18. S. Moreno and G.M. Bidelman, “Examining Neural Plasticity and Cognitive Benefit through the

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Unique Lens of Musical Training,” Hear Res, 308 (2014): 84.

19. Patel, “Why Would Musical Training Benefit the Neural Encoding of Speech? The Opera Hypothesis,” Front Psychol 2 (2011): 142 20. Gang Peng, Temporal and Tonal Aspects of Chinese Syllables: A Corpus-Based Comparative Study of Mandarin and Cantonese (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006), 135.

21. G.M. Bidelman, S. Hutka, and S. Moreno, “Tone-Language Speakers and Musicians Share Enhanced Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities for Musical Pitch: Evidence for Bidirectionality between the Domains of Language and Music,” PLoS One, 8.4 (2013): 5.

22. Ibid., 5.

23. D. Deutsch, et al., “Absolute Pitch among Students in an American Music Conservatory: Association with Tone Language Fluency,” J Acoust Soc Am, 125.4 (2009) 398.

24. Diana Deutsch, Trevor Henthorn, Mark Dolson, “Absolute Pitch, Speech, and Tone Language: Some Experiments and a Proposed Framework,” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21.3 (2004): 343.

25. Diana Deutsch, Trevor Henthorn, Mark Dolson, “Absolute Pitch, Speech, and Tone Language: Some Experiments and a Proposed Framework,” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21.3 (2004): 339.

26. D. Deutsch, et al., “Absolute Pitch among Students in an American Music Conservatory: Association with Tone Language Fluency,” J Acoust Soc Am, 125.4 (2009) 398.

27. Annie H. Takeuchi and Stewart H. Hulse, “Absolute Pitch,” Psychological Bulletin, 113.2 (1993): 345-61.

28. Diana Deutsch, Trevor Henthorn, Mark Dolson, “Absolute Pitch, Speech, and Tone Language: Some Experiments and a Proposed Framework,” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21.3 (2004): 339.

29. G.M. Bidelman, S. Hutka, and S. Moreno, “Tone-Language Speakers and Musicians Share Enhanced Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities for Musical Pitch: Evidence for Bidirectionality between the Domains of Language and Music,” PLoS One, 8.4 (2013): 9.

30. Isabelle Peretz, et al., “Neural Overlap in Processing Music and Speech,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 370.1664 (2015): 4.

31. Ibid., 4.

32. G.M. Bidelman and W.L. Chung, “ToneLanguage Speakers Show Hemispheric Specialization and Differential Cortical Processing of Contour and

Interval Cues for Pitch,” Neuroscience, 305 (2015): 384.

33. Ibid., 389.

34. Gang Peng, Temporal and Tonal Aspects of Chinese Syllables: A Corpus-Based Comparative Study of Mandarin and Cantonese (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006), 134.

35. Patricia K. Kuhl, “Early Language Learning and Literacy: Neuroscience Implications for Education,” Mind, brain and education, 5.3 (2011): 129.

36. Ananthanarayan Krishnan, et al., “Language Experience Enhances Early Cortical Pitch Dependent Responses,” Journal of Neurolinguistics, 33 (2015): 128.

37. Ibid., 128.

38. Ibid., 129.

39. Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 13.

40. S. Jentschke, et al., “Children with Specific Language Impairment Also Show Impairment of Music-Syntactic Processing,” J Cogn Neurosci, 20.11 (2008): 1940.

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Chua, Amy. 2011. Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother. 1st ed. New York: Penguin Press.

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MCMULLEN, ERIN and JENNY R. SAFFRAN. 2004. “Music And Language: A Developmental Comparison”. Music Perception 21 (3): 289-311. doi:10.1525/ mp.2004.21.3.289.

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Patel, Aniruddh D. 2011. “Why Would Musical Training Benefit The Neural Encoding Of Speech? The OPERA Hypothesis”.

Frontiers In Psychology 2: 142. doi:10.3389/ fpsyg.2011.00142. References Peng, Gang. 2006. “Temporal And Tonal Aspects Of Chinese Syllables: A CorpusBased Comparative Study Of Mandarin And Cantonese”. Journal Of Chinese Linguistics, 135-154.

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Takeuchi, Annie and Stewart Hulse. 1993.

“Absolute Pitch”. Psychological Bulletin 113.2: 345-61.

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RECOLLECTIONS OF AN EDITORIAL DIASPORA A History of Orientations and McGill East Asian Studies

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McGill library’s collection of East Asian Studies student journals lies in the East Asian Studies sector of the McLennan library in the form of a single yellow hard-cover volume with misshapen pages. Open this tome and a variety of journals varying in size, material, and design is revealed, each bearing the title Orientations: Transcultural Perspectives on Asia. Our journey into the institutional past of McGill’s East Asian Studies department as well as the legacy of Montreal’s active student culture begins with this vintage collection.

A series of student journals such as this one is paraphernalia for both a collective and an individual history. Compared to other departmental journals such as the History department’s Historical Discourses, Orientations has a much shorter and much more tenuous history, with only thirteen issues published in the past two decades. Orientations is additionally unique in its highly varied and ever oscillating content throughout the years.

This journal was founded under the title of Orientations as early as 1994 by three East Asian Studies students under the advisory of several department professors and for the sole purpose of presenting students’ academic works. This original Orientations, however, was only published once; following a four-year gap, Orientations was revived in 1999 by a new team of students.

These students shifted the publication away from a purely academic focus to instead re-imagine it as a magazine featuring inspired discourses both within and beyond the scope of academia.

With a strong new focus on political activism and Asian diasporic identity, Orientations quickly rose as an intellectual and creative site for McGill students as well as Montreal’s activists, artists, and writers. After a decade in this format, the journal gradually eliminated its non-academic focus to become, once more, the annual academic publication we have today.

Flipping through the journals was, for me, a joyful and eye-opening experience. The early issues gave space to radical writing and experimental visual art within student and magazine production. Presenting all kinds of creative practice in addition to the academic backbone from manga translation to the innovative design concepts, so many elements came together to make the journal the material body of a remarkable institutional past. Above all, the journal is so clearly embedded with the collective memory of people who passed through its pages. Writers, artists, academicians, and activists who’s early work in this little student publication can still oftentimes be traced to their ongoing activities in cultural and academic institutions around the world.

In the following series of interviews, the 2016-2017 editorial board went back to Orientations’ roots to catch up with the key individuals who have been involved in issues past and uncover the history of the journal.

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THOMAS LAMARRE ON THE FIRST ISSUE

Thomas Lamarre is a James McGill Professor in East Asian Studies and Associate in Communications Studies whose research interests center on the history of media, thought, and material culture in Japan.

Professor Lamarre served as part of the faculty advisory board of the inaugural Orientations in 1994-1995.

Could you share your memories of how the journal was founded in 1994-1995?

TL: Yes. I remember that it was founded in 1994 by a couple of East Asian Studies students who had strong interests in newly blooming EAS subjects and [would’ve liked] to have a platform for students to present their academic works. It derived from the idea that since EAS was an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field, making a journal would facilitate dialogues both within and outside of the field and benefit the department.

The title they gave to the journal was very interesting: Orientations. It may have raised a few eyebrows as it appears to parody Edward Said’s Orientalism.

TL: [The title] indeed referred to Said’s Orientalism, but students were thinking about making use of it in a different context: the name they picked up suggested a new orientation which was quite different from the old trend in academia. If you looked at Harvard’s East Asian Studies journal at that time, it would be everything that the students don’t want to do.

So what was it that [the founding students] didn’t want to do?

TL: Institutional history, translational studies (translating texts from Chinese and Japanese to English), or pure linguistic studies, [analyzing] Chinese or Japanese as the linguistic “others.” All those they didn’t want to do. If you look at the first issue of Orientations, you [will find] Nigel Daly’s essay on biopolitics—I believe he was a student of Professor Yates—which was a very new perspective on East Asian Studies at that time. McGill offered class on this and we still have it as one of the graduate seminars.

Does that mean that McGill was a pioneer in EAS at that time?

TL: Yes. I think that McGill always pioneers in the East Asian Studies student program.

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ANGELY PACIS ON THE REVIVAL

Angely Pacis (B.A., ’00) is an Ontario-based lawyer working in the areas of immigration, constitutional and aboriginal law. Angely is one of the co-founders of Orientations’ 1999 revival issue and worked on the journal until 2000.

How did you and co-founder, Christine M. Stecura, come up the idea of founding the journal in 1999?

AP: Our idea of having an EAS journal came into being after a language exchange trip to China in summer of 1998. It was the first time that we [had] stepped foot onto the land of Asia, and we were enormously swept by the gigantic Asian heritage. We all touched on Asian topics in school, but it was the real experience in China that stimulated thoughts on culture, identity, etc. so we decided to start a journal. There was actually a personal account of this trip in the first issue.

Did you know there was an East Asian Studies journal already when you started working on this idea?

AP: Not at the beginning; it was only after we set off to do our journal that we found out there was an old EAS journal which had stopped for a couple of years. We picked up the name “Orientations” and named our issue as the “revival” issue.

The revival issues were so diverse in both content and format; there are research papers, discussion papers, photo essays, interviews, and personal accounts, covering a range of topics from politics to arts. How did the editorial board come up with the idea of doing a journal like this?

AP: We found out about the old Orientations and we wanted to do something a bit different – we never intended to do a purely academic journal; we wanted something intellectual, but grounded in reality and [that would] ultimately have an impact on the real world. We wanted to talk about something real, something happening, especially after the trip to Asia. We wanted to do something in between an academic journal and a pure magazine. […] It was really a kind of intellectual, highbrow, academic-inspired news magazine that we wanted to do.

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I also noted the new subtitle for the revival issue: “Transcultural Perspectives on Asia,” which we have kept through the years. Was this also something unique you added to the journal?

AP: The journal came out of an intense exchange of multiple perspectives: how we [as members of the Asian diaspora] view ourselves, how white people view us, how we view Asia, and how Asian people view us […] all of those things [were] going on. We had all read Said’s Orientalism – we discussed it all [the time] during our trip in China.

The journal was a site for us to reposition our quests and to reflect on our experience of being both the subject and object of the “Orient.” [Our experiences] inspired the idea of the journal in all different ways. It was really the transcultural perspectives that we were interested in, not [any] singular “Eastern” or “Western” perspective.

How did the editors look for submissions?

AP: We were enthusiastic about journalism, and a lot of articles were actually written by ourselves and our friends. We experimented on a lot of things, like reaching out to people for interviews. It was really a lot of fun.

Did you keep up with what became of Orientations after you left?

AP: I stayed for two issues, and when I was there Orientations had more focus on socio-political topics. I think after I left, Orientations became more focused on art-related topics, and also more creative. Have you seen the later issues by Daniel [Ho] and Geoffrey [Han]? Those are really mind-blowing journals, and those people are very creative.

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MARK STEINBERG ON THE CONTRIBUTIONS AND COLLABORATIONS

Marc Steinberg (B.A. ’99, MA ’02, PhD ’09 Brown) is an Associate Professor of film studies in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University whose research expertise includes animation, Japanese cinema, media theory, and material culture. Marc was both editor and contributor on the 2001 to 2002 issues of Orientations.

What was Orientations like when you got involved in it?

MS: The back-story of my involvement is that I was kind of a studious kid and didn’t get involved in many extracurricular activities, but Alvin Chung, who was […] a PhD student at McGill East Asian Studies, had an article in the volume 2 issue in which only two-thirds or three-quarters of his article was published, and it actually ends in the middle of a sentence. So Alvin, who was sort of upset about this, came to me and said – Marc maybe you should get involved, it seems a little bit touch and go, you know my article got cut off and so – it was a really small thing but that was sort of the start of my involvement. I ended up becoming really close friends with most of the people on the editorial board.

We became essentially a network of editors but [also] a network of friends, I would count most of the people in the 2001 issue friends. It was done as a collective activity, so all of us would get together, we would canvas for material, and we mostly tried to get contributions from EAS or English Cultural studies or any of our personal networks on campus. We would put up posters saying please […] send your contributions but most [of the submissions] came from personal networks or [from people] just having seen the poster around the East Asian Studies department which was then on McTavish. The entire department was housed in one building, and a lot of our classes and offices were there. I think now maybe [East Asian studies] classes are a bit more dispersed because of changes at McGill and the move to the new building, but because people came into that area we could put up posters and assume that a lot of people would know about it.

What was the organizational structure of the journal at the time? I noticed that many editors were also contributors, conducting interviews and so on – the organizational structure seems to have been more of an editorial collective at the time.

MS: Yes, I think – because [the journal] was sort of more small-scale and informal we tried to draw from people that we knew. […] As you can see a lot of the stuff that we published was in fact just our own writings; we asked our friends to contribute, and ultimately we gathered contributions that way.

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You can especially see that in the 2002 issue [featuring] one of the earlier films shot by Yung Chang, who later went on to make fairly well-known documentary films, produced in fact by my friend in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Daniel Cross, who is a major documentary film producer in Montreal. At the time, [Yung Chang] was making a short film called Fish Market, and, partially through his connection with Daniel Ho, he was induced into this issue Similarly, Alice Ming Wai Jim, who is actually also a professor at Concordia in Art History had an interview with famous video artist, Gary Hill [in this issue].

We were trying to get content that could attract people. One of our aims was actually to have this on bookshelves [â&#x20AC;Ś] to get it onto the shelves of a magazine shop so people would actually pick it up as a magazine [and buy it]. One of Danielâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s projects was to get an ISBN number which would get it circulated and collected by libraries. [We just wanted] to get it out there, to get people to read it.

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So regarding the aim of Orientations, could you speak on how this affected the various kinds of content you published at the time?

MS: Why we picked the types of things we did and why its not just academic but [more of ] a magazine, is that we were aiming to push it towards cultural criticism – but readable; or not just a bunch of academic articles but also people interviewing artists or filmmakers and that kind of thing. It was more about putting it into peoples’ hands which is why we ended up going with a funny humorous weirdo cover for [the 2002 issue].

It was a big debate actually on what cover to use, which became acrimonious at times: whether to use the red and black aesthetics that we’d been using since then or to do something more pop and fun. And the debate was also about what does Asia look like or what is the image of Asia. [This] was the time of Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love and [Zhang Yimou’s] Raise the Red Lantern. Red was being associated with Asia which is why I think [we wanted] to break out of the red and black aesthetics. I think [that this] is sort of a visual representation of what this journal project was – to offer different perspectives on what Asia was.

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On the topic of the tagline “Transcultural Perspectives on Asia” – what did this mean for the editorial team who came after Angely and Christine?

MS: When you read the editorial collective’s note, Asia and the Asian diaspora was really important, so not only was it a journal about what was happening in Asia but also about diaspora and we really wanted to include people who were Asian-American or Asian-Canadian and their experiences and be able to write that. I was looking over [the 2002 issue] myself last night and one of my personal favourites was Rhea Wong’s kind of polemic My Yellow Feminism, Or Perspectives of an Educated, Westernized, Politicized Asian American Woman who refuses to be Anyone’s China Doll, which is a great really argumentative piece that I think works well in the array of stuff [we published].

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DANIEL SZEHIN HO ON THE MIND-BLOWING ISSUE

Daniel Szehin Ho (B.A. ’01, M.A. ’06) is one of the editors and founders of Randian (randian-online.com), an online magazine focusing on independent critique and reviews of contemporary art. Daniel was involved in six issues of Orientations over nine years and editor-in-chief for the 2005 issue.

The issues you worked on are very aesthetically pleasing with more conscious and professional designs. Was there any specific impetus behind such design?

DH: I don’t know; maybe I was just into that, but even the two issues before Geoffrey Han took over already had conscious cover designs.

For the issue of 2003, early on that year we’d already started thinking about the design.

We looked for designers in Concordia but couldn’t find anyone until Geoffrey came back. Geoffrey was involved previously in the journal, and then he left Montreal for a while. He came back [around 2003], and he was just interested in doing a crazy issue; he said: “Could we swing a budget to do something special?” and I said “Why not, let’s do something [special].” Once we got a budget of around 2000-3000 thousand dollars, we decided that [we had] something to play with. We sold bubble tea five to six times in the Leacock Building for fundraising, and the journal was printed in Hong Kong; Geoffrey was the one who contacted the printing house in Hong Kong because he had worked with them.

The issues published under you and Geoffrey – in particular the 2003 issue – had a much more obvious focus on art, film, and media compared to the earlier revival issues. Was that a conscious shift in focus and subjects?

DH: Well, I don’t think it was completely conscious. At times, it’s just a matter of the group of people that got together and the interests we had, as well as the network we brought with us. I think at the time there was a new professor dealing with contemporary art history in China, so that might have something to do with it. Maybe the design encouraged particular types of essays, too; instead of an art-focus, I’d say there was a modern/contemporary focus.

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In any case, Orientations was definitely quite unique while you were there, but this kind of form and content wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t sustained after you left; the journal has since become more centered on academics, which is not necessarily a bad thing at all.

How would you consider the legacy of the people making this journal?

DH: Well, people come and go [but] the journal will always continue. When new people come in, they bring in new ideas;[â&#x20AC;Ś]when Angely and Christine left, we simply continued on their model. When you have a bunch of mobilized people focusing on [the journal] for a couple of years, you get the best and the most sustained ideas, and I think Orientations will always continue on that legacy from issue to issue.

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Interviews conducted by Edel Yang and Hera Chan.

Additional text by Edel Yang.

Edited by Muhan Zhang.

Images from Orientations issues 1994-2005.

Special thanks to: Macy Zheng, Lauren Grace Zemel, Marc Steinberg, Angely Pacis, Thomas Lamarre, Daniel Szehin Ho, Hera Chan, Alvin Chung, Jean-Felix Caron, Brian Bergstrom, Tracey Cui, Xin Qin, and Wen Lee Soo.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Hyewon Jung is a fourth year double major student in East Asian Studies and Political Science.

Her main interests are in comparing Korean history and political events with neighbouring countries of the time, mainly in Chinese history.

Julian Binder is a North American Studies Major, and East Asian Studies minor in his third year at McGill. Currently on exchange in Hong Kong exploring the region that fascinates and inspires him, Julian has a keen interest in those on the margins of societies around the world, especially women and LGBTQ folk. Apart from investigating homosexuality in China, Julian is a North American Studies research assistant who has examined the peculiar power and advancement of the African-Americans and women who held the prominent role of postmaster in the time before, after, and during the American Civil War. Apart from academic interests, Julian is a music producer and songwriter.

Ashley Kong (BA’17) is a History and Political Science student at McGill University. Being part of the overseas Chinese community herself, she is interested in the study of the Chinese diaspora. Her paper looks into Confucianism in the former Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.

Erin Sobat is a fifth-year student in History and East Asian studies at McGill University with a particular interest in cultural and museum histories. He has previously researched the origins of Lord Strathcona’s Japanese art collection at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal through the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI). Erin is also active in student politics at McGill and beyond. In his free time, he enjoys exploring Montreal’s food, music, and art scenes.

Jules Tomi is a photographer living in Montreal. His photos work to provide a perspective into the brevity of a passing moment, exploring the depths of sociology through the captured banality of beauty and everyday life.

Jules Tomi est un photographe et vit à Montréal. Son travail propose une perspective qui se veut à la fois ethnographique, narrative et journalistique. Adoptant la posture du passant, il cherche, à travers des représentations du quotidien, à témoigner de sa compréhension de certain faits sociaux.

Ruofan Cui is a U3 political science and history major with a personal passion for film studies.

His academic interests converge in the study of narrative and the mutual reinforcement between culture and social outcomes, likewise social outcomes and culture subsequently produced. In his free time he likes discussing film, literature, and pop culture, analyzing the influence of the invisible hand of ideology.

Andrea Chu is a third year student double majoring in East Asian Studies and Art History.

Although her recent academic interests mainly concern the emerging contemporary Chinese art market, she also enjoys indulging in Korean and Japanese popular media culture in her spare time.

She is currently on exchange studying in Hyogo, Japan.

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Marko de Guzman is a third year Honours Political Science and International Development Studies student. The intersectionality of international labour migration, poverty alleviation, and development is what constitutes his Bachelorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree at McGill. He is the Co-President of McGill Students for Oxfam-Quebec and the VP Internal for McGill Filipino Asian Association, which keep him busy when he is not occupied with his studies.

Ryan Shah is a third year Joint Honours Political Science and International Development Studies student. At McGill, he has had the opportunity to build on his interest in critical history, emphasizing the global south in his studies. He is Editor-in-Chief of the McGill Left Review and the Vice President Events of the Political Science Studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Association.

Marianne Ruelle is a U3 pre-medical student pursuing a B.Sc. in Anatomy & Cell Biology with a minor in East Asian Language. Her other interests include classical music, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and world cuisine. In the future, she hopes to further her interest in Chinese culture through the lens of medicine.

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ORIENTATIONS EDITORIAL BOARD 2016-2017

Jean-Félix Caron is a third year East Asian Studies Major and Sexual Diversity Minor student.

As his field of predilection is early Chinese history, he is currently studying Mandarin Chinese for which he was awarded the 2016 Li Ka Shing Intensive Chinese-Language Study award. Apart from Chinese history, he is engaged in contemporary queer topics and activism, for he believes that in 2017, everything is queer.

Tianru Chen designed this volume of Orientations.

Anneliese Kluender is a third year History, Political Science, and East Asian Studies student. The focuses of her studies are both the United States and East Asia, more specifically South Korea.

While at McGill, she has had the privilege of serving as an editor for the McGill Undergraduate Pre-Law Review as well as the Orientations journal.

Nora Murphy is a U2 student in International Development and East Asian Studies. Her interests include travelling, learning new languages, and exploring around Montreal and beyond. This is her first time editing for the journal and through this publication she hopes others are able to learn more about East Asian and become inspired to get involved.

Gabrielle Samra is a U3 undergraduate student at McGill University who is currently completing her Honours Liberal Arts major while minoring in East Asian Languages and Literature. Aside from working as an editor for Orientations, McGill’s East Asian Studies Student Journal, she is also on the editorial board for Canons and The Channel, McGill’s Religious Studies Journal and English Undergraduate Journal, respectively. Her research interests include the evolution of the literary Satan as well as the literary history of cannibalism. In general, Gabrielle is interested in a wide variety of topics spanning across the board of the humanities; when she is not writing, she enjoys reading any book she can possibly get her hands on.

Caroline Wesley is a third-year Joint Honours student pursuing a BA in Political Science and International Development Studies with a Minor in East Asian Language and Literature. Her research interests focus on foreign relations, human rights, and public policy, specifically in East Asia and developing areas. Impassioned by diplomacy and representing Canada’s interests abroad, Caroline has worked for Global Affairs Canada, the U.S. State Department, and will begin working at the UN this fall. An avid consumer of books and dog-related media, she has a near-encyclopedic knowledge of dog breeds and is enthused by astronomy and Asian street foods.

Yuqing (Edel) Yang is an international student in her last year, pursuing an Art History major and Philosophy and East Asian Studies minors. Previously educated in China under a distinctively different curriculum, she worked to refresh her knowledge and thinking at McGill. In spite of being deeply devoted to academic pursuits, she also tapped into journalism, creative writing, and visual arts practice to fulfill her extracurricular interests.

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Lauren Grace Zemel is a third year student originally from sunny South Florida. Her focus lies in Chinese and Korean language study as well as premodern Japanese Korean socio-cultural relations, the combination of the two leading towards an East Asian Studies major. She is an avid reader and writer, often committing free time to developing a jack-of-all-trades skill set. Currently, her skill development of choice is working on school editing.

Muhan Zhang is a student of Art History and East Asian Studies. She is haunted by an imagined Chinese homeland that daily recedes farther and farther into the smoggy distance. She speaks non-accented English, broken Mandarin Chinese, mediocre French, and unintelligible Japanese.

Apart from Orientations, she has also worked on McGillâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Canvas journal and the inter-university feminist publication, Yiara Magazine. She is very proud to have worked with such a wonderful group of creative, passionate, and dedicated editors and contributors this year.

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