Table Of ContentChinese Culture 2
Kelly Kar Yue Chan
Chi Sum Garfield Lau Editors
Chinese Culture in
the 21st Century
and its Global
Dimensions
Comparative and Interdisciplinary
Perspectives
Chinese Culture
Volume 2
Globality, Connectivity and Modernity
Series Editors
Tze Ki Hon
City University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Hok Yin Chan
City University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
This book series aims to publish monographs and edited volumes that examine how
Chinese culture has been circulated, redeployed and reinterpreted around the world
since the 15th century. In this book series, Chinese culture is understood broadly,
ranging from canonical texts, philosophical/religious systems and aesthetic tastes of
the educated elites to cultural artefacts, festivals and everyday practices of ordinary
people. This broad definition of Chinese culture is to serve two purposes. The first
is to encourage research that views Chinese culture not just as a home-grown
construct serving the Chinese in their native land, but also as a symbol, a site where
diverse meanings can be generated for global conversation and transnational
exchanges. The second is to provide an opportunity to researchers to publish works
that examine how China is used, metaphorically or figuratively, in the recent debates
on modernity and post-modernity. The series welcomes proposals from multiple
disciplines in connection with the study of Chinese culture, including language and
literature, history, philosophy, politics and international relations, media and cultural
studies.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10100
Kelly Kar Yue Chan • Chi Sum Garfield Lau
Editors
Chinese Culture in the 21st
Century and its Global
Dimensions
Comparative and Interdisciplinary
Perspectives
Editors
Kelly Kar Yue Chan Chi Sum Garfield Lau
School of Arts and Social Sciences School of Arts and Social Sciences
The Open University of Hong Kong The Open University of Hong Kong
Kowloon, Hong Kong Kowloon, Hong Kong
ISSN 2662-9755 ISSN 2662-9763 (electronic)
Chinese Culture
ISBN 978-981-15-2742-5 ISBN 978-981-15-2743-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2743-2
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Foreword
This book derives from the international conference “Chinese Culture in the Global
Context” held in The Open University of Hong Kong in March 2019. It is in my
view an essential collection of different views by mainly young scholars and writers
on pressing issues in their society. Right now, China’s massive “One Belt, One
Road” (OBOR) project promotes the most costly Chinese effort ever to create infra-
structure (roads, pipelines, railroads) in countries around the world that would
increase China’s influence, even making some countries almost dependent upon it.
Since Xi Jinping’s support in 2013, the overland trade routes continue to link China
to Europe across Eurasia, while the Indian Ocean provides maritime links. Nobody
in his or her right senses can now suppose China to be “a sleeping giant,” unaware
of scholarship and events within or outside China; indeed, China’s present standing
as an economic powerhouse can be ignored only by ostriches with heads in the sand.
Zhang Dejiang at the Hong Kong Belt and Road Summit in May 2016 outlined
Hong Kong’s economic importance and stressed also Singapore’s valuable role.
Such were some of the foundations of Xi’s version of the “Chinese Dream” or the
great revival of China as a dominant world power. Nor should we forget the prolific
writings of the distinguished economic geographer, Professor Yue-man Yeung,
whose book New Challenges for Development and Modernization: Hong Kong and
the Asia-Pacific Region in the New Millennium (2002) discussed strategies for fur-
ther development in the region.
Chinese Culture in the Global Context is concerned with broader issues of cul-
ture and society; it comprises four parts that reveal the treasures within them. Part I
opens with Chi Sum Garfield Lau’s fascinating account of the development from the
Confucian ideas on the place of Chinese women to the present-day modern woman
and continues with comparisons between women in China and the West and key
artistic treatments such as that by Puccini et al.’s Turandot and Adams/Goodman’s
Nixon in China. There is a conscientious comparison of stream of consciousness as
used by Fei Ming and Virginia Woolf.
Part II concerns Chinese film and the performing arts. Kenny K. K. Ng of the
Academy of Film in the Hong Kong Baptist University opens this part with an essay
on the revived recognition of Fei Mu’s films. Other scholars write on the idea of
v
vi Foreword
brand construction of new year movies, the use of comics and animation, the mod-
ernization of Chinese music in this century, and the fascinating archival presence of
pre-war Hong Kong films. One factor meriting more attention here could be the
Shaw Brothers Studios’ move from China with the advent of Mao’s victory in 1949
to then establish a major presence in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.
Part III explores a little the facts of translation studies in Hong Kong. Indeed, the
Chinese University of Hong Kong had a major presence here because of its transla-
tion department headed by Professor David Pollard and then by Professor Serena
Jin, who is now retired yet still an active writer and impressive translator. A profes-
sor of Chinese here in Vancouver told me very recently how beautifully Serena Jin
writes Chinese. Moreover, Lingnan University and later the CUHK were fortunate
in having Professor Lawrence Wong working there. He has produced the Chinese
Dante, tipped by one Stanford professor as being the Chinese Dante for at least the
next hundred years. This part contains just two chapters, one by Kelly Kar Yue Chan
on the problems of sur-/subtitle translation for Cantonese Opera. My own experi-
ence of such clipped translation was a recent performance of Beijing Opera in
Vancouver. Many of the Chinese Canadians there, like me, depended on the “surti-
tles.” Despite the global presence now of China, my wife and I were treated as VIPs
when we walked into the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, because there were so very few
Westerners there. But my first experience of Cantonese opera was a village perfor-
mance in the New Territories in the 1960s. There were no translations available, but
a young Chinese woman whispered her translations into my ear. This was a decid-
edly pleasurable form of interpretation! The other chapter in this part is by Enid
Lee, writing on the names given to racehorses in Hong Kong. This essay, as infor-
mative as it is amusing, brought back to me fond memories of attending the races in
Shatin and at Happy Valley.
Part IV, the final part again containing two chapters, deals with changing ideas
about language learning in what we now call the Digital Age. Xuying Yu broaches
the concept of the “fevers” in learning on a national scale in China. The first fever
signals a shift from traditional Chinese scholarly method to Western modes involv-
ing scholarship informed by scientific method and specialization, rather than by
following the dictates of political ideologies. The second fever is simply re-ideolog-
icalized scholarship. In the second chapter of this part, Lik Hang Tsui traces the
somewhat “tortuous” path of the history of digitalization in the Chinese Humanities.
Of course, we are still in the midst of digitalized scholarship, learning, and teaching.
Moreover, technological inventions arrive with dizzying frequency, though we are
not yet at the point where the entire contents of the British Library can be down-
loaded onto my “smart” phone. And for this, I am very grateful.
It is in my view salutary to remember that whatever the technology, the control
of this technology by human beings pursuing genuine scholarship is paramount. We
must not allow technology, however powerful it may be as a convenient tool and
influence on our scholarly research and thinking, to lead us into the impasse envis-
Foreword vii
aged in the old caveat: “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” Believe it or
not, that was the subject of a 3-h essay set to students trying for entrance to certain
Cambridge University colleges in 1956!
This book then deserves a wide readership and thoughtful consideration by
scholars in the Humanities and, indeed, in other disciplines.
Vancouver, Canada Andrew Parkin
November 2019
Preface
This volume, Chinese Culture in the 21st Century and Its Global Dimensions:
Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, is a major research output funded
by the research project “Chinese Culture in the Global Context” of the School of
Arts and Social Sciences at The Open University of Hong Kong. The project is
under the Institutional Development Scheme (IDS) funded by a Research Grants
Council (RGC) grant provided by the Government of the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region with the mission to study the rising power of China and the
increasing influence that Chinese culture exerts in both the contemporary setting
and the world of academia.
As a major research output of this project, this volume investigates the interna-
tionalization of Chinese culture in recent decades and the global dimensions of
Chinese culture from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. It covers a
variety of topics concerning the contemporary significance of Chinese culture in its
philosophical, literary, and artistic manifestations, including literature, film, per-
forming arts, creative media, linguistics, translations, and philosophical ideas.
With the aim to serve as a worthy reference for academics, students, and others
who are interested in the development of Chinese culture on the global stage in the
twenty-first century, this volume consists of four parts that explore the reception of
Chinese culture in different geographical locations and how the global reception of
Chinese culture contrasts with the local Chinese community.
Part I has a focus on the representation of Chinese images and the sense of
Chineseness in China, Asia, and the West. Specifically, the changes and transforma-
tions of various Chinese conceptions and cultural traits, as Chinese art forms travel
along the history line and spread to other places, affect the future development of
these genres and even redefine new Chinese literature. The authors in this part deal
with a specific kind of Chinese images and their comparability against Western
representations on gender voices, cultural identities, and literary ideologies. Chi
Sum Garfield Lau and Fan Wang identify the gendered womanly voices in litera-
ture, while Chih-yuan Mai and Chulaluk Pleumpanya put their emphasis on
Chinese images reflected in operatic genres. The chapters serve well to address the
ix
x Preface
global influences of China and the implications of applying Chinese features to the
Western contexts.
Part II studies some of the major contemporary issues of Chinese culture
through films and performing arts. The global success of the American creative
industries and their popularity gives rise to new forms of Chinese cultural products.
In the digital era of globalization, the equilibrium state of preserving traditional
cultural elements and locality while sustaining marketability is a difficult question
for most of the media productions. The part also presents research topics across
various fields and disciplines which include Chinese cinema (as in Kenny K. K. Ng’s
chapter), comics and animation in Hong Kong (as in Anthony Yat-ming Chan’s
article), musical culture (as in Joseph Yat-wai Wong’s paper), and even linguistic
discourses in early Hong Kong movies (as in Ricky Yiu-ho Sham’s discussions).
These distinctive features certainly pave the way forward to more innovative and
insightful research related to Chinese and Hong Kong cinematic studies.
Part III raises questions on the translatability of Chineseness in the age of glo-
balization. As a language cannot be adequately understood in isolation from the
cultural environment in which it developed, how the uniqueness of cultural ele-
ments can be maintained in the process of translation will be explored. Translation
has always been a flourishing industry in the multilingual world, but its great impact
seems to have been surpassed by computer-aided translations and online translation
platforms in the recent decades. The two chapters in this part discuss rather more
literary aspects of translation which deal with a delicate but significant idea of trans-
ferring Chinese elements embellished with creativity. Kelly Kar Yue Chan works
on the possibility of translating Cantonese opera sur-/subtitles, while Enid Lee dis-
cusses the feasibility of compiling bilingual lists of racehorses in Hong Kong – both
serve to manifest a kind of local flavor in comparison. Scrutinizing the results by a
comparison of the Chinese and Western ways of transferring cultural nuances dis-
played in the text, context, and subtext, it is still far more interesting to fulfill the
transformation by touching on diverse means of cultural mediation than merely
doing equivalent-effect translation.
Part IV explores how the expansion of Chinese culture in the twenty-first cen-
tury and the inexorable integration of cultures under globalization affect language
and teaching in different settings. Other than discussing the challenges in the teach-
ing of Chinese culture in the twenty-first century, digitalization as a new way of
studying and researching Chinese humanities and its impact on the production of
literary and other genres of artifacts recreated has also been investigated. The
authors have focused more on the historical aspects of learning, where they could be
able to discover the relationship between intellectual dedication to the new Western
methods in twentieth-century China and also the novel ways of combining digital
components and disciplines in the humanities. Xuying Yu focuses on the juxtaposi-
tion of Chinese national learning with that of the Western world, while Lik Hang
Tsui serves to share the thorny paths of achieving a new research area of digital
humanities.
