Reviews

A Soprano’s Triumphant Journey

Brian Haman

Brian Haman reviews Journey to the West by Melanie Ho

Opera travels well. Its stories are the stories of our collective humanity – love, loss, revenge, strife, rebellion, rejuvenation, absurdity, tragedy – and its archetypes not only define cultures but also connect them. In many respects, we can no longer speak in essentializing ways about Western opera or Chinese opera, but rather must address the world of opera and global operatic voices.

But what of its performers? What does it mean to think and feel and dream and sing in a language not one’s own, on a foreign stage, in a foreign land, under a foreign sky? For people and cultures in transit, the self is understood as neither fixed nor certain, but mutable and contingent. If you are a Western reader, then imagine for a moment boarding a plane to Shanghai with little cultural knowledge of China and virtually no ability to speak or understand Mandarin. In the absence of familiar salves of continent, city, country and society, the architecture of music imbues the opera singer with a familiar sense of movement, balance and scale within unfamiliar surroundings.

Essays

Why Xi Jinping’s China is Legalist, Not Confucian

Sam Crane

The philosophical basis of China’s “New Era” – Sam Crane

Jiang Shigong, a law professor at Peking University, thinks Xi Jinping is the epitome of the new Confucian-Marxist leader. In a recent article – an explication of Xi’s speech at the 19th Party Congress last October – Jiang takes the edge off of Xi’s Leninism by making numerous passing references to a variety of classical Chinese philosophical concepts, including “the unity of heaven and man” (天人合一); “Learning of the Heart” (心学); and “when the Way prevails, the world is shared by all” (大道之行, 天下为公), among others.

However, just like Xi, Jiang largely ignores the Legalist tradition of Chinese thought, which arguably has much greater relevance to the current emphasis on Party building and political centralization in the People’s Republic of China.

Dispatches

Gay in Beijing

Julien

Notes from the Rainbow Underground – Julien

Somehow, someway, I became the only foreigner to join Purple, the officially “unofficial” LGBTQ organization of Tsinghua University and the greater Wudaokou area. To commemorate the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) on May 17, Purple planned to hand out rainbow flags in front of the main cafeteria on campus. When IDAHO came, the event lasted less than five minutes before students were escorted away by campus security. I watched the flood of messages in our WeChat group as people scurried to come up with a Plan B. Yet no one felt the shut-down of Plan A was out of the ordinary. In fact, it was expected.

Chinese Corner

Mother Tongue

Gina Anne Tam

Cantonese is no mere “variant” of Mandarin – Gina Tam

In May, a packet of supplementary information promoting Mandarin in the classroom was sent to schools in Hong Kong. This collection of new research on effective language pedagogy included an explosive piece by Song Xinqiao, a consultant at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Research and Development of Mandarin Education, in which he claimed that it was incorrect to call Cantonese the “mother tongue” of Hong Kongers.

He premised his argument on a selective interpretation of the UNESCO definition of “mother tongue.” According to UNESCO, Song reasoned, “the mother tongue does not only belong to a person but an ethnic group”; Cantonese does not denote an ethnicity, but only a “Chinese dialect,” and therefore should not be called a “mother tongue.” Rather, Cantonese is one “variant of Mandarin,” which Song claims for the Chinese ethnic group as a whole. For Song, this was not up for debate – it was scientific fact. Chinese is an ethnic group, represented by Mandarin. Cantonese is not.

Reviews

End of Empire

Emily Walz

Emily Walz reviews Imperial Twilight by Stephen R. Platt

The outlines of the Opium War are familiar to many: from centuries ago, the Chinese had tea. The British, with their superior navy, wanted to trade opium for it. The meeting of these two sides brought about a literal trade war in the 1830s, forcing a treaty from China that allowed the opium trade to flourish and allowed foreigners to live in port cities like Shanghai. This series of events beget the reluctant “opening” of China, and set a pattern in which foreign powers would use violence to wrest concessions from China. Historian Stephen R. Platt’s newest work, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age, is the story of how Britain came to believe it could “demand peace by force of arms,” as read the inscription on one medal designed to commemorate what would become the first of two so-called Opium Wars.