Chinese 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 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore 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.