Shaobo Xie

Chinese Beginnings of Cosmopolitanism: A Genealogical Critique of Tianxia Guan

Thanks to the ongoing process of globalization, the world is confronted with a dismaying antinomy: on the one hand we see increasing conversation, understanding, acceptance, and mutual respect emerging between peoples and cultures, whereas on the other there is no end of wars going on at different levels of human life as well as various forms of xenophobia, hostility toward cultural and ethnic others, us-versus-them feelings, and ethnocentric arrogance. It is in response to such a global present that there is a growing interest in cosmopolitanism and in turning to various cultural pasts for cosmopolitan legacies. While the discourse of…

Translation and the politics of the universal

This paper is about why the present world has to rethink the problem of universality, why translation plays so pre-eminent a role in restaging the universal and how to translate the universal across linguistic or cultural boundaries to the satisfaction of all concerned. The author argues that, confronted with issues of eco-environmental crisis, uneven geographical development, injustice and human rights, the world needs to begin with new beginnings, redefining modernity and its coordinates. The first step towards imagining new beginnings is, by way of translation, to turn the concept of universality into a political space of (re)negotiation between the local and global, the hegemonic and the subaltern, and the West and the rest, so as to reflect or represent different ways of being human, different political legacies and different cultural traditions in the globally shared concepts of development, democracy and happiness.

Anxieties of modernity: A semiotic analysis of globalization images in China

Abstract The images of globalization one encounters in China today signify the anguished anxiety of the Chinese for modernity. This article proposes a four-level model of semiotic analysis for interpreting ubiquitous images of globalization in China. The author argues that every image of globalization encountered in China signifies to viewers at the following levels: first, transmission of the informational message; second, signaling of the desire of consumerism; third, pointing to the presence of TNC (transnational capital); fourth, speaking to the Chinese drive for modernity. While the first level is where one locates neutral, self-evident information, all of the other levels deal with ideology or ideological symbolism; hence, the terms for the following analysis: the informational, the consumerism-symbolic, the TNC-symbolic, and the CAM-symbolic (Chinese Anxiety for Modernity).