The emergence of labour camps in Shandong province, 1942-1950

This article analyses the emergence of labour camps in the CCP base area of Shandong province from 1942 to 1950. By using original archival material, it provides a detailed understanding of the concrete workings of the penal system in a specific region, thus giving flesh and bone to the more general story of the prison in China. It also shows that in response to military instability, organizational problems and scarce resources, the local CCP in Shandong abandoned the idea of using prisons (jiansuo) to confine convicts much earlier than the Yan'an authorities, moving towards a system of mobile labour teams and camps dispersed throughout the countryside which displayed many of the key hallmarks of the post-1949 laogai. Local authorities continued to place faith in a penal philosophy of reformation (ganhua) which was shared by nationalists and communists, but shifted the moral space where reformation should be carried out from the prison to the labour camp, thus introducing a major break in the history of confinement in 20th-century China.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Paris Offscreen: Chinese Tourists in Cinematic Paris

This article examines from a European-Asian perspective the relationship between media representations and the tourist’s imagination. We use the case of Chinese tourists in Paris to investigate how these non-European tourists imagine Europe, and how these imaginations are being realized, challenged, and modified during concrete tourist experiences. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with tourists and field observations, this paper shows how the Chinese tourist imagination of Europe is strongly influenced by popular representations from the media. More in particular, the Chinese tourist experience of Paris as it turns out is characterised by an on-going negotiation between media-inspired fantasies and personal experiences of the ‘real’ Paris. As a result of this, the way the Chinese imagined Europe before their visitis reinforced, but also challenged. Chinese tourists tend to develop a hybrid perspective: they learn to re-appreciate Paris in its complexity, while at the same time re-constituting their own cultural identity vis-à-vis the European Other

China in the 21st Century: on Borrowing, Translation, and Mixed Economies

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.Chinoiserie—the European appropriation of “China”—has counterparts in Zhongxi hebi and nalai zhuyi. Part I, “Translating Literatures,” shows that creative translation and borrowing are indigenous to modern China. From the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, when foreign novels were regarded as a primary requirement for social and cultural rebirth, modern Chinese literature was inseparable from the introduction of world literature into China. The pioneers of modern Chinese literature were all professional translators. Lu Xun’s “hard translation” was specifically intended to introduce a change in Chinese characteristics. Esperanto was proposed at Peking University to replace written Chinese, and moves were made to institute a language for science, technology, and democratization. From the 1920s to 1966 under various forms of self-styled Marxisms, literature first from the Eastern Bloc and then from the Third World was translated. After 1978, the Chinese diaspora have written in both adopted languages and Chinese, and the majority of writers within the PRC have drawn on indigenous and cosmopolitan traditions. Part II, “Translating Political Economies,” shows that just as languages and literatures are selectively appropriated through processes of transculturation, so also are economic and political systems. These are the result of concrete historical processes, and labels like capitalism and socialism are not easily translated between countries with very different cultures and histories. When modernizing, democratizing, or liberalizing indigenous institutions, each country has to respond effectively to specific challenges, so political institutions are gradually developed rather than rationally designed.We argue that previous ideological debates between forms of capitalism and socialism are less urgent today than degrees of government as China’s financial and commodity markets take a leading role in the global economy. Neoliberal governments worldwide want less governance, letting the market regulate goods and services. Whether China liberalizes politically or merely neoliberalizes economically, whether liberal democracies give up on demands for equality in the face of neoliberal regimes, will be the key issues of our time. Ultimately we have choices and freedoms, and these should not be limited to the consumer choice and market freedoms of neoliberalism, in China or the west

Disavowing 'the' prison

This chapter confronts the idea of ‘the’ prison, that is, prison as a fixed entity. However hard we, that is, prison scholars including ourselves, seek to deconstruct and critique specific aspects of confinement, there is a tendency to slip into a default position that envisions the prison as something given and pre-understood. When it comes to prison our imagination seems to clog up. It is the political solution to its own failure, and the preferred metaphor for its own representation

The Qur'an and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Fiction

How is it possible to comprehend and assess the impact of the Qur’an on the literary expressions of Chinese Muslims (Hui) when the first full ‘translations’ of the Qur’an in Chinese made by non-Muslims from Japanese and English appeared only in 1927 and 1931, and by a Muslim from Arabic in 1932? But perhaps the fact that such a translation appeared so late in the history of the Muslim community in China, who have had a continuous presence since the ninth-century, is the best starting point. For it would be possible to address the relationship between the sacred text (as well as language) and identity among minority groups in a different way. This paper looks at the ways in which the Qur’an is imagined then embodied in literary texts authored by two prize-winning Chinese Muslim authors: Huo Da (b. 1945) and Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948). While Huo Da, who does not have access to the Arabic language, alludes to the Chinese Qur’an in her novel, The Muslim’s Funeral (1982), transforming the its teachings into ritual performances of alterity through injecting Arabic and Persian words for religious rituals into her narrative of a Muslim family’s fortunes at the turn of the twentieth century, Zhang Chengzhi, who learned Arabic as an adult and travelled widely in the Muslim world, involves himself in reconstructing the history of the spread and persecution of the Jahriyya Sufi sect (an off-shoot of the Naqshabandiyya) in China between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in his only historical novel, A History of the Soul (1991), and in education reform in Muslim communities, inventing an identity for Chinese Muslims based on direct knowledge of the sacred text and tradition and informed by the history of Islam not in China alone but in the global Islamic world, especially Arabic Islamic history