Xianlin Song

Reconstructing the Confucian Ideal in 1980s China: The “Culture Craze” and New Confucianism

In the 1980s, China underwent a period of drastic change. One of the most discussed phenomenon on the cultural front was the “culture craze” (wenhua re 文化熱). Fueled with ammunition from a range of imported “isms,” participants in the cultural debates attempted to map out national and Western cultural territories. Many intellectuals attempted to redefine what is meant by Chinese culture and to rediscover the “national essence” through their study of New Confucianism. This essay examines New Confucianism in the context of the culture craze of the 1980s China. I argue that this seemingly philosophical exercise was principally brought about by cultural and political necessity; that the studies on New Confucianism were intentionally directed toward practical ends; and that the newly created “Confucian discourse” helped to reconstruct and re-imagine the Confucian ideal in post-Mao Chinese society, later serving as a catalyst for the “national studies craze” (guoxue re 國學熱) of the 1990s.

The proletarianisation of academic labour in Australia

ABSTRACT Australian universities over the last 25 years have been unified, internationalised, corporatised and become mass educational providers. This process is replicated globally as a response to rapid mass enrolments and marketisation. In the light of these changes, a corporate and managerial model has been identified, which has been the subject of growing discontent within the academic workforce. However, from a political economy perspective there is a lack of understanding on how and by what means academic labour has been commodified in this process. This paper, using Australia as its case study, argues that the managerial culture has alienated academics from their labour. This has resulted in them losing control over their skills and thus becoming disassociated from the educational purposes of their work. Higher education has been subjected to systemic regulatory governance that has fundamentally transformed the nature of academic labour. We contend that the regulatory state has reached so deep down into the university that academics have effectively become a de-professionalised and proletarianised labour force.

Reconceptualising the ‘Other’ in Australian Universities

Within the context of global mobility, the status of Asian students is defined by mixed temporalities, as all historical differences are mediated by a common narrative of European intellectual thoughts. One of the casualties of this tendency, grounded in a developmentalist construct of Asia and the west, is the way these students are categorised by a variety of ‘anachronistic’ practices as part of a pre-modern world. Such a conceptual framework deems Asian international students automatically remedial, while the education Australian universities ‘sell’ is regarded as ‘universal’, belonging to a higher order of teleology. Through a close examination of the ‘Chinese learner’ paradox, this chapter contextualises the implications for the international newcomer on campus in an environment where there has been a market-based homogenisation. It situates Said’s specific concept of Orientalism within Chakrabarty’s general theory of developmentalism. Rejecting the neoliberal ‘social imaginary’ and notion of ‘universal human history’, this chapter argues that differences in cultural background neither do consequentially assume out of time with contemporary norms, as defined by the technologies of the capitalist market; nor do they imply a ‘positional superiority’ for Australian universities, which acts against the transformative potential of transcultural education both in theory and practice.

Narrative, trauma and memory: Chen Ran's A private life, Tiananmen Square and female embodiment

The Tiananmen Square massacre was a cataclysmic event not only in Chinese history but in the international history of the late twentieth century. Coming at the end of a decade of rapid change and at a time when China signalled its intention to join the global world order, the event deeply scarred the country. It left behind a legacy of trauma, compounded by collective repression, unacknowledged individual loss and pain, cynicism and betrayal, that is still to be addressed. So many young people died in the Square. For Chinese people the sense of “Guo Shang” (“to die young for the country”) still haunts a generation of survivors. All victims and their families still carry a heavy burden: “To go on living is painful” (Lin Mu). In his preface to the recently published The Tiananmen papers Zhang Liang states: “History seems frozen there” (Nathan and Link, 2001, p. xi). Unlike other sites of traumatic human rights abuse in the late twentieth century, traumas that have been revisited in memoirs and campaigns for redress, the state has not allowed any transformation of this experience into public discourse: no campaigns for redress, no recognition of the suffering of Chinese citizens, no reparations, no tribunals, no reflection, no apologies, no healing processes. In this instance, the “truth” of the past has been buried in an amnesiacal fold of history, secretly held in people’s hearts and minds. Although silenced on the macro-level, on the micro-level writers and artists, particularly those who left China after the 1989 turmoil, have begun to revisit this site of trauma, reflecting on the betrayal of the state and the loss of idealism for a generation of youth. In the last decade a number of Chinese writers, living both within China and abroad, have published narratives that address the national and personal trauma that resulted Asian Studies Review June 2006, Vol. 30, pp. 161–173

Australian governments’ policy conundrum: ambivalence on China and certainty on Japan

With the rise of China and it displacing Japan as Australias major trading partner, successive Australian governments have displayed a policy conundrum: where China is regarded with ambivalence, Japan is treated as Australias best friend in Asia with enhanced defence and diplomatic ties. This paper examines the question of how the policy conundrum has arisen in terms of issues concerning trade and human rights and Sino–Japan relations, arguing that the inconsistency in approach is fundamentally ontological rather than one of international security. Through an analysis of respective governments’ positions over the past twenty years, this paper contends that the conundrum of Australian governments’ policy in relation to China comes from deep-seated Eurocentric versions of history that locates the West over and above the rest. In performativity, this policy is two-fold: it prioritises ‘diplomatic trade’ with China over human rights; and it asserts ‘value diplomacy’ in Sino–Japan relations. Japan is depicted as Australias democratic ally and China as the threatening anachronistic other. These two distinctively contradicting positions, one economic growth first and the other ‘value’ first, bespeak an ambivalence and inconsistency that plagues Australian governments’ foreign policy towards China.

Governing Asian international students: the policy and practice of essentialising ‘critical thinking’

ABSTRACT Migration flows have shaped Australian higher education since the colonial era. In the last two decades, Asian mobility has literally changed the face of Australian campuses. Government policies and university regulations have, paradoxically, moved to reinforce a Western-centric curriculum and pedagogy. This paper investigates this paradox by examining how Asian international students in Australia are governed by a homogenised educational process via a regulatory state that is underpinned by both neoliberal and post-colonial ideologies. The paper argues that ‘critical thinking’ is used both as a totem pole to attract Asian students and a governmental yardstick to measure their academic performance.

Understanding China: Challenges to Australian Governments

In the 21st Century world of politics, the importance of China as a strategic partner to Australia is arguably indisputable. However, many scholars have noted that successive Australian governments appear to demonstrate very limited understanding of China itself, reading China through a Western lens coloured by the racial and ideological past, to the detriment of national interest (Pan and Walker in New perspectives on cross-cultural engagement. Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, 2015; Fitzgerald 2013; McCarthy and Gao in Australia and China in the 21st century: Challenges and ideas in cross-cultural engagement, Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, 2015). This chapter probes into the Australia-China relationship from ‘a consciously dialogical angle’, which reflects on itself as well as the other (Pan and Walker in New perspectives on cross-cultural engagement. Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, 2015, p. 4). Through an analysis of Howard’s Human Rights dialogue, Rudd’s misreading of China-Australia via the trope of friendship, and Abbott’s insensitivity towards Chinese history in relation to Japan, it offers a transcultural reading of Australia-China relations of the past two decades. It argues that underpinned by ‘an unreflective form of social knowledge’ (Pan in New perspectives on cross-cultural engagement. Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, 2015, p. 310) successive Australian governments have shared a similar policy framework in their approaches to China because they read the Chinese present as but the Western past in an economic disguise, where communism is akin to feudalism and will come asunder due to market forces (He in J Asian Surv 54:247–272, 2014, p. 253). Within such framework lies the dichotomy of the rising China as ‘opportunity’ or ‘threat’ (White in Quarterly Essay. Black Inc., Collingwood, 2010; Wesley in There goes the neighbourhood. UNSW Press, Sydney, 2011), and a certain unthinkability that China can be read on its own terms not through a Western superiority framing (Seth in Postcolonial theory and the critique of international relations, Routledge, London, pp. 1–13, 2013, p. 2), where an idealised democratic West is assumed against the Chinese ‘authoritarian’ other (Vukovich in China and orientalism: Western knowledge production and the P.R.C. Routledge, New York, 2012, p. 149), in which China’s complex civilisations and its distinctive civility is imagined ‘as yet’ modern (Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000).

China in Australia: The Discourses of Changst

Abstract China matters significantly to contemporary Australia in terms of trade relations, capital movements, education and global order. Australian public discourse on China, however, inhabits two conflicting parallel universes, one a narrative of economic complementarity, the other of fear and anxiety. The spectre of the rise of China haunts Australian society in and among these two spheres: one in which China’s economic rise is to be encouraged as a sign of it joining the capitalist world system, and the other in which China’s ascent is regarded as a threat to be contained. The paper examines this problematic discourse, calling it Changst [China angst], arguing that it is permeated with a developmentalist logic (Chakrabarty, 2000) that misreads China through the homogenising history of both capitalism and Eurocentrism. This reading of China as but a copy of Western capitalism evokes anxiety because its distinctive forms of capital flow disrupt the comforting teleology. Equally, when Chinese society, including its education system, is perceived as not-yet modern, this induces fear of cultural contamination from the outpouring of Chinese international students. The exploration of this anxiety is conducted via six Australian case studies, showing how China’s engagement with Australia produces intense but unwarranted angst.

Post‐Mao new poetry in the light of deconstruction

Post‐Mao Chinese new poetry may still be highly controversial in terms of its poetic experiments and the undecidablity of its position in literary history. However, its attempts to destabilise previous concepts and meanings of Chinese language have undoubtedly made a tremendous impact upon Chinese poetry, and indeed contemporary Chinese culture. In so far as the challenges to the stability of meaning are concerned, the poetic experiments of the new poets offer themselves as practical instances which in a way could be said to parallel deconstruction theory in the postmodern West This paper looks at the poetry of the Obscure poets and Third Generation poets from the perspective of the critique of conceptuality as advanced by Jacques Derrida. It examines specifically the intertextual relations which we can discover between a body of postmodern theory and the poetic practices of post‐Mao poets in contemporary China, and in so doing offers an insight into the reading of Chinese new poetry. The paper argues tha...