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21594
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yago
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| 72
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https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2016/05/25/renowned-chinese-writer-yang-jiang-dies-at-age-104-2/
|
en
|
Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at age 104
|
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[
"San Diego Union-Tribune",
"Migration Temp"
] |
2016-05-25T00:00:00
|
BEIJING (AP) — Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to an equally famous author, died Wednesday at age 104, state media said.Yang died at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, according to The Paper, a state-owned news website. It said her death had been confirmed by her publisher, […]
|
en
|
San Diego Union-Tribune
|
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2016/05/25/renowned-chinese-writer-yang-jiang-dies-at-age-104-2/
|
BEIJING (AP) — Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to an equally famous author, died Wednesday at age 104, state media said.
Yang died at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, according to The Paper, a state-owned news website. It said her death had been confirmed by her publisher, the People’s Literature Publishing House.
Citing different sources, Hong Kong station Phoenix TV also confirmed Yang’s death, the cause of which was not given.
Born in 1911, Yang became a household name in China for her novels, plays, essays and translated works. She was the first to translate “Don Quixote” into Chinese, and her version is still considered the definitive one by many.
Her death was the top search term on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo on Wednesday, a testimony to her fame and the public adoration she enjoyed.
In a 1981 collection of essays, Yang wrote with a sense of poignancy on the daily lives of Chinese intellectuals during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when scholars and intellectuals were forced to perform hard labor.
Her 2003 essay collection “We Three,” about her family life with her late husband and their daughter, was a best-seller.
Yang was married to Qian Zhongshu, best known for his novel “Fortress Besieged,” and theirs was widely seen as a model union set against the background of China’s turbulent 20th century.
After Qian’s death in 1998, Yang embarked on the task of compiling and editing her husband’s unpublished works and remained prolific herself.
In addition to “We Three,” she published a sequel to her novel “Baptism” at age 103.
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https://www.amazon.com/Chinas-Literary-Cosmopolitans-Zhongshu-Leidensia/dp/9004299963
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Amazon.com
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Enter the characters you see below
Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies.
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21594
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https://www.youtube.com/playlist%3Flist%3DPLhA05Qf-09xBA4RIWytfmD-8Ddf3zS9vN
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en
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Bevor Sie zu YouTube weitergehen
|
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//www.google.com/favicon.ico
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https://consent.youtube.com/m
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21594
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https://librarysearch.adelaide.edu.au/discovery/fulldisplay/alma9928221618201811/61ADELAIDE_INST:UOFA
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https://webofproceedings.org/proceedings_series/article/artId/2031.html
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en
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Study of Female Narration in Yang Jiang's Literary Works
|
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[
"Legend IT Inc",
"Website Building",
"Website Management",
"Website Hosting",
"Search Engine Optimization",
"Social Media Marketing",
"Wechat APPs",
"Android APPs",
"Menu Design",
"Flyer Design"
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Download as PDF
DOI: 10.25236/ssah.2018.067
Author(s)
Xue Han
Corresponding Author
Xue Han
Abstract
As a woman, Yang Jiang has done her job in the trinity role of creation, translation, and literary theory research. She has performed brilliantly in her role as a daughter, wife, and mother and has become the most virtuous wife in the eyes of Qian Zhongshu. How did Yang Jiang succeed in the dilemma of the common cause and family as a modern intellectual woman? After her husband and daughter had left her, what power did support her in the year when she had entered Mi Kui? Texts such as “Our Benevolence” and “Being on the edge of life”, which have both emotional and intellectual qualities, mainly from the feminist perspective interpret the awakening of feminine consciousness embodied in her life practices and creative activities by Yang Jiang and women. The reconstruction of female identity seeks to resolve this doubt.
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https://rct.cuhk.edu.hk/renditions/publications/renditions-journal/no-76-toc/
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No. 76 TOC
|
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https://rct.cuhk.edu.hk/renditions/publications/renditions-journal/no-76-toc/
|
Heart’s Desire: Act I
Translated by Christopher G. Rea
ACT I
(Setting: The parlour of ZHAO ZUYIN’s house, which is furnished in a refined, classical style. The furniture is all rosewood, calligraphic scroll paintings by famous hands adorn the walls, and the tables are laid out with antique porcelains. As the curtain rises, LI JUNYU, wearing a blue qipao, stands in the parlour. WANG SHENG stands to one side.)
LI JUNYU: Is this the Zhao residence?
WANG SHENG: Yes.
LI JUNYU: My surname is Li.
WANG SHENG: Li. OK, I got it.
LI JUNYU: I’m your master’s niece—Li Junyu.
WANG SHENG: I’ve never heard of you.
LI JUNYU: Isn’t this the Zhao residence? Isn’t your master Mr Zhao Zuyin?
WANG SHENG: Knowing his name isn’t going to help you. The master is a famous man—everyone’s heard of him!
LI JUNYU: I’m his niece. I just arrived from Beiping. Your master and mistress wrote me a letter asking me to come.
WANG SHENG: (Shaking his head) The master only has one niece, Third Mistress’s daughter, and her surname is Qian, not Li.
LI JUNYU: I’m your Fifth Mistress’s daughter. My surname’s Li, and I’ve always lived in Beiping.
WANG SHENG: I’ve never heard of any Fifth Mistress! Next you’re going to tell me there’s a Fifth Master!
LI JUNYU: Of course there is! My father was famous too, a great painter.
WANG SHENG: Oh? But he’s not one of us.
LI JUNYU: He recently passed away, and Fifth Mistress long before him. We’ve always lived in Beiping—you’d have no way of knowing. Go ask your master and mistress to come out. They’re expecting me.
WANG SHENG: Didn’t I tell you to wait here? The master and mistress aren’t up yet! I’d really be asking for it to disturb them so early on a Sunday.
LI JUNYU: In that case, help me carry my trunk in.
WANG SHENG: You can’t bring it in here. The weight of it will ruin the carpet.
LI JUNYU: But someone will steal it if I leave it at the door.
WANG SHENG: Don’t you have someone watching it for you?
LI JUNYU: (To offstage) Binru, Binru! We’ll carry it in ourselves.
(Exit LI JUNYU, who then re-enters carrying a trunk and a mesh basket together with CHEN BINRU, who is dressed in an old, tattered, blue Chinese full-length cotton gown. WANG holds CHEN back, but CHEN pushes him aside and places the trunk and the basket in the centre of the parlour. CHEN exits and then re-enters carrying a rush bag and two wooden boards, tied together.)
WANG SHENG: (Stands to the side with his arms crossed) Great, great—a fine world of bandits this has turned into! The gentleman speaks with his mouth, not with his fists.
CHEN BINRU: A rascal like you only understands when fists do the talking!
WANG SHENG: (With his arms crossed in front of his chest) I’m not going to fight you.
CHEN BINRU: You wouldn’t dare!
LI JUNYU: Binru, just ignore him! Everything’s here. (Counts the luggage.)
(Exit WANG SHENG.)
……
We Three: Part I
Translated by Jesse Field
Part I: We Two Grow Old
One night, I had a dream. Zhongshu and I were out on a walk together, talking and laughing, when we came to a place we did not know. The sun had set behind the mountains, and dusk was approaching. Then Zhongshu disappeared into the void. I searched everywhere but could find no trace of him. I called to him, but there was no answer. It was just me, alone, standing there in the wasteland not knowing where Zhongshu had gone. I cried out to him, calling his full name, but my cries just fell into the wilderness without the faintest echo, as if they’d been swallowed. Complete silence added to the blackness of the night, deepening my loneliness and sense of desolation. In the distance, I saw only layer upon layer of dusky dark. I was on a sandy road with a forest to one side. There was a murmuring brook; I couldn’t see how wide it was. When I turned to look back, I saw what appeared to be a cluster of houses. It was an inhabited place, but since I couldn’t see any lights, I thought they must be quite far away. Had Zhongshu gone home on his own? Then I’d better go home too! Just as I was looking for the way back, an old man appeared, pulling an empty rickshaw. I hurried over to bar his way, and sure enough he stopped, but I couldn’t tell him where I wanted to go. In the midst of my desperation, I woke up. Zhongshu lay next to me in bed, sound asleep.
I tossed and turned for the rest of the night, waiting for Zhongshu to wake up; then I told him about what happened in my dream. I reproached him: How could you have abandoned me like that, leaving on your own without a word to me? Zhongshu didn’t try to defend the Zhongshu of my dream. He only consoled me by saying: this is an old person’s dream. He often had it too.
Yes, I’ve had this sort of dream many times. The setting may differ, but the feeling is the same. Most often the two of us emerge from some place, then, in the blink of an eye, he’s gone. I ask after him everywhere, but nobody pays any attention to me. Sometimes I search for him everywhere but end up in a succession of alleys, all with dead ends. Sometimes I am alone in a dimly lit station, waiting for the last train, but the train never comes. In every dream I am lonely and desperate. If only I could find him, I think, we could go home together.
Zhongshu probably remembered my reproach, and caused this dream to be ten thousand miles long.
……
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http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2014/01/fortress-besieged-qian-zhongshu.html
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The Lectern: 'Fortress Besieged' Qian Zhongshu
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Hell is a Chinese family, and the Devil is a Chinese woman. Apocryphal saying If this book had been written by a foreigner, the write...
|
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|
http://thelectern.blogspot.com/favicon.ico
|
http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2014/01/fortress-besieged-qian-zhongshu.html
| ||||
21594
|
yago
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| 85
|
http://english.cctv.com/2016/05/25/VIDEwHGmIzZOt4mBIqvComDd160525.shtml
|
en
|
Celebrated Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at 105
|
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2016-05-25T00:00:00
|
Just a day after we witnessed the first Chinese version of
| null |
Just a day after we witnessed the first Chinese version of “Man of la Mancha” in Beijing, the famous translator of Cervantes’s original story “Don Quixote,” on which the musical is based, has died.
Chinese playwright, author, and translator Yang Jiang died this morning at the age of 105 in Beijing.
|
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21594
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yago
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http://www.csstoday.com/Item/6476.aspx
|
en
|
EU diplomat speaks on his bond with Chinese classics
|
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2019-02-14T00:00:00
| null |
Nicolas Chapuis is currently Ambassador of the European Union to China. A French diplomat and sinologist, Mr. Chapuis was born in Neuilly, France, in 1957. His links with China have continuously strengthened as he developed his diplomatic career. He has been posted to China five times as a French diplomat. He assumed his position as EU Ambassador to China in September 2018.
As a sinologist, he has translated many Chinese literature works into French, including Cinq Essais de Poétique by Qian Zhongshu, Le Bain by Yang Jiang, Le Jardin du Repos by Ba Jin, and a collection of the complete poems of Du Fu. The book Tristes Automnes: Poétique de l’identité dans la Chine ancienne is one of his representative monographs.
With his fluent Chinese and profound knowledge of Chinese classics, Nicolas Chapuis, ambassador of the European Union to China, is both a diplomat and a veritable sinologist. Recently, Nicolas Chapuis (Yu Bai) shared with CSST his links with China and Chinese culture.
CSST: How did you get your Chinese name “Yu Bai”?
Nicolas Chapuis: I chose my Chinese name as a young student. I wanted to have a Chinese name that was anchored in the romantic tradition of China. Yu comes from Yu Dafu, unfortunately, now not so much known by the young generation of Chinese; but in the 1920s and 1930s, he was a major Chinese writer. When I was a young student, his writings impressed me. And I like the sound of “Yu.” It’s not a frequent name. Bai is from Li Bai. So, two Chinese writers I like. I chose only two characters because my French family name is two syllables. I must say that today more people in China know me by my Chinese name, especially because of the book I wrote: Tristes Automnes: Poétique de l’identité dans la Chine ancienne.
CSST: It is said that you wrote Tristes Automnes under the encouragement of Chinese scholar Qian Zhongshu. You also translated the works of Qian and those of his wife Yang Jiang, so could you please share your story with them? What has been their impact on your academic research?
Nicolas Chapuis: In one’s life—I think it is true for everybody—you have encounters that change your life. That is the case with me and Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang. I met Qian Zhongshu in the spring of 1981. I was a very young diplomat—I was 23 years old and he was already almost 71—and we immediately connected. Guan Zhui Bian (note: which translated into English as Limited Views) had just been published, and I was interested by this masterpiece that exposes the missing links between China and the West. Qian was fluent in English, French, German, Italian . . . he was amazing. What he showed in Guan Zhui Bian is that there is no separation between East and West. The gaps are totally arbitrary. You can use Chinese texts to understand Western philosophy, and you can use Western philosophy to understand Chinese texts. That is incredible. Because he concentrated on the human condition—what it means to be human.
He showed that of course there are differences in approaches and perceptions, but culture is global. Many of the things that China thinks are unique to China just do not exist. It is global; it is human.
I asked Qian Zhongshu why in the official history of Chinese culture or philosophy there has been no humanist moment or movement. He said, of course there was. For him, that humanist moment is the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Not Zhu Xi but Su Shi and Huang Tingjian. If you look at the poems and prose of Su and Huang, you will know there was a humanist moment.
So he said to me, in China we never say things like the West does. The West speaks loud, makes great gestures and screams. But China keeps a low key. It is quiet. He said that you need to scratch the surface. If you go below the surface, everything is there.
Of course he was very critical of Confucians, especially of neo-Confucianism, the Zhu Xi School that put order and discipline above creativity in the way you think. He was a very Taoist person; he loved Zhuangzi. He said if you look at Neo-Taoism (Xuanxue) and Zhuangzi, you will see humanist moments. Even Mencius had a humanist strain.
He was a fan of the Song Dynasty. But later on he told me that to understand the Song you have to understand the Tang (618–907). In his Tan Yi Lu (On the Art of Poetry ) he wrote that some Tang writers like Du Fu were Song people. That is very interesting. I love that.
CSST: What qualities of ancient Chinese poetry do you value the most?
Nicolas Chapuis: I like all of it. Chinese poetry as a whole is important. Personally—that is my feeling—I am more of a “Southern School” person. I prefer Chu Ci (The Verses of Chu ) to the Shijing (Classic of Poetry ).
The poetry of the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420–589) is very interesting. Most of the Tang poetry comes from Liu Song of the fifth century. You have all the southern-tone poetry. In Su Shi and Huang Tingjian of the Song, you have the continuity of the southern inspiration, which is very free with an individual sense of poetry. I think it is in poetry that you find human nature. Chinese poetry has always been individual. Poetry is not a political gesture, it is a personal moment.
CSST: You seem to be most interested in the Tang poets Wang Wei and Du Fu.
Nicolas Chapuis: I used to love Wang Wei, who is a great Tang poet and an easy one. But now I am 100 percent on Du Fu. I am translating the complete works of Du Fu. It is a 30-year project.
Du Fu is very difficult; he is difficult to read, to translate, to grasp. I do that because I think Du Fu is like William Shakespeare for Britain or Victor Hugo for France. He is the root of the Chinese heart, like Hugo is the root of French culture, and Shakespeare is the root of British poetry, drama and history. You cannot understand Britain if you have not read Shakespeare. You cannot understand France if you have not read Hugo, and you cannot understand China if you have not read Du Fu. He is the “Saint of Poetry”, and there is a reason for that. At his time Du Fu was not appreciated. It was only in the Song Dynasty that people realized that his works were pure magic.
CSST: How do you balance your identity both as a sinologist and a diplomat?
Nicolas Chapuis: It’s like day and night. I have my job and my second identity. I graduated in Chinese Studies, not in political science nor international studies. That’s my first training. And I happened to be recruited by the French diplomatic service because of my Chinese knowledge. They needed people who knew Chinese language, culture, history, economy . . . So from the beginning there was a link. And then in the French and European foreign services, I have constantly used my Chinese knowledge. That’s why I’m doing my sixth tour in China. So the link between these two identities has always been very strong.
CSST: What is the overall situation of overseas (or French) Sinology research, and what are the new trends?
Nicolas Chapuis: There is a debate in all countries: Is Sinology only about classical China till 1949, or is it just China-watching about the current economy, politics, society and so on? Most scholars who are engaged in classical studies don’t do modern studies or current research. I do both.
My master’s thesis is about Hua Guofeng. And then because I worked with Qian Zhongshu, I began to work on classical China. I went from current China to classical China. I came to realize that you can’t understand modern China if you don’t understand classical China. Many people think it should not be the case, but I think the continuity is very strong. The more I age, the more I’m interested in the Chinese cultural roots. For example, when President Xi Jinping quotes classical sayings in speeches and writings, that puts many China watchers in a difficult position, because they don’t usually identify the references. For me, I can recognise the connections between today and yesterday.
A trend of Sinology is that more and more people are realizing that. Sinology should be global. In my view, there is a need, also a trend, for Sinology to be more horizontal. China as a study object should not be sliced up. The continuity of the object should be taken into account. But the research is still very specialized. People tend to say I do only classical studies, and in classical studies I do only Ming studies . . . You can cross borders of time or topics. For example, to answer the question of China’s rejuvenation and the Chinese Dream, you need to go back in time.
Also in France, a few years ago, the publishing house named Les Belles Lettres started to edit a collection of Chinese-French bilingual books called Bibliothèque Chinoise. This collection includes major classical works of Confucius, Laozi, Du Fu . . . It’s on a par with the Greek-French and Latin-French bilingual collections, which shows that China stands now at the core of Western Humanist Studies.
CSST: As a witness of China’s reform and opening up over the past four decades, what would you say are the greatest changes you have experienced?
Nicolas Chapuis: The biggest change on which everybody would agree, inside and outside China, is that nobody would envision now a future without China playing a leading role. That was not the case 40 years ago.
In that extraordinary process of the revival of China’s impact on the world, what is changing most are perceptions, so much so that the question of “mutual understanding” is more than ever at the forefront.
How do we avoid misperceptions or misunderstandings? How do we make sure that growing interdependence creates more trust and fewer frictions? These are questions which need to be worked out by our social scientists, in China as well as abroad.
CSST: Poetry is an important part of traditional Chinese culture. China is now vigorously promoting traditional refined culture and establishing Confucius Institutes overseas to increase the understanding of Chinese culture. However, misunderstanding still exists. How to address this?
Nicolas Chapuis: What I would say is, to relate to what I said before, that continuity in culture is very important. In Europe people need to know more about the Chinese mindset, and again as Qian Zhongshu, we need to overcome artificial barriers between Western and Chinese culture.
We need to find ways to open dialogue. It is great if the Chinese government can bring possibilities for dialogue, conferences, translation and funding, and open classical studies to Western students.
I am sure many more economists, historians, sociologists and art critics today can come out like Qian Zhongshu did in the 1980s and show to the world that you have high-level people, thinkers, who belong to the world as a whole.
(edited by MA YUHONG)
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https://paper-republic.org/links/letters-from-qian-zhongshu-to-be-auctioned-yang-jiang-threatens-lawsuit/
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en
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Paper Republic Link: Letters from Qian Zhongshu to be auctioned, Yang Jiang Threatens Lawsuit
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[
"Eric Abrahamsen"
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en
|
Paper Republic
| null |
A Beijing auction house says it has no plans to withdraw an acclaimed scholar's letters and manuscripts from sale despite protests from his 102-year-old widow and legal experts.
On June 21, the Sungari International Auction Co Ltd is selling 66 letters Qian Zhongshu wrote to a family friend.
The sale also includes the original copy of "Six Chapters from My Life 'Downunder,'" featuring his wife's memoir of their life in Henan Province during the "cultural revolution (1966-1976)," and letters from his daughter, Qian Yuan, to the friend.
Yang Jiang, the writer's widow, said her husband made some controversial remarks in the letters that it would be inappropriate to publish. He insinuates that two famous literary figures, Lu Xun and Mao Dun, were unfaithful to their wives and that a couple, both famous translators, had not interpreted a Chinese classic well.
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https://chinachannel.lareviewofbooks.org/2020/09/14/qian-zhongzhu-should-win-the-nobel/
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en
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Qian Zhongshu Should Win the Nobel – China Channel
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"Brendan O’Kane"
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2020-09-14T00:00:00
|
Why the postwar novel Fortress Beseiged deserves a re-read – Brendan O’Kane Qian Zhongshu is a tough pitch to win the Nobel prize in literature this year. He’s dead, for starters – traditionally an obstacle to many things, including winning Nobel prizes – and his total creative output consists solely of a few essays, several short stories, and a single novel. On the other hand, that novel, Fortress Besieged, seems to me to be the high-water mark of something significant, if hard to explain, so I’m going to make my best case for it being enough to secure Qian’s place in history. The book takes its title from a French proverb, sets its action in the China of the 1930s, and tracks the misfortunes of Fang Hongjian, a feckless, cowardly student returning from Europe with a mail-order doctorate in Chinese from an American university that exists only in the imagination of a crooked Irishman. It may be one of the most cosmopolitan books ever written; certainly it is, as literary critic C. T. Hsia said, one of the greatest Chinese novels of the 20th century. We meet the protagonist, Fang Hongjian, in the summer of 1937 as he and his fellow Chinese students return to China aboard a French steamer. He livens up the journey by flirting unsuccessfully with two of the female passengers. In Shanghai, which has just fallen under Japanese occupation, Fang renews his acquaintance with one of the young women, a PhD named Miss Su – and promptly falls for her cousin. He clammily courts both women for a time before working up the nerve to break things off with Miss Su, who has been expecting Fang to propose to her. In retaliation, she destroys any chance he might have with her cousin. READ MORE
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en
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/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/cropped-hua-chop-32x32.png
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China Channel
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https://chinachannel.lareviewofbooks.org/2020/09/14/qian-zhongzhu-should-win-the-nobel/
|
Why the postwar novel Fortress Beseiged deserves a re-read – Brendan O’Kane
Qian Zhongshu is a tough pitch to win the Nobel prize in literature this year. He’s dead, for starters – traditionally an obstacle to many things, including winning Nobel prizes – and his total creative output consists solely of a few essays, several short stories, and a single novel. On the other hand, that novel, Fortress Besieged, seems to me to be the high-water mark of something significant, if hard to explain, so I’m going to make my best case for it being enough to secure Qian’s place in history. The book takes its title from a French proverb, sets its action in the China of the 1930s, and tracks the misfortunes of Fang Hongjian, a feckless, cowardly student returning from Europe with a mail-order doctorate in Chinese from an American university that exists only in the imagination of a crooked Irishman. It may be one of the most cosmopolitan books ever written; certainly it is, as literary critic C. T. Hsia said, one of the greatest Chinese novels of the 20th century.
We meet the protagonist, Fang Hongjian, in the summer of 1937 as he and his fellow Chinese students return to China aboard a French steamer. He livens up the journey by flirting unsuccessfully with two of the female passengers. In Shanghai, which has just fallen under Japanese occupation, Fang renews his acquaintance with one of the young women, a PhD named Miss Su – and promptly falls for her cousin. He clammily courts both women for a time before working up the nerve to break things off with Miss Su, who has been expecting Fang to propose to her. In retaliation, she destroys any chance he might have with her cousin.
Shanghai proving a downer, Fang takes a teaching job at Sanlü University, a newly established school in China’s interior, but en route there he and his traveling companions continually encounter hassles and hardships. Once at Sanlü, Fang quickly finds that the other teachers are pompous frauds, backstabbers, and brownnosers. (One of them has a doctorate from the same fake university as Fang and is desperate not to be found out.) Circumstances push Fang into the arms of Sun Roujia, a young English teacher. After Fang’s contract is not renewed for a second year, he marries Sun and they return to Shanghai. There, their relationship (never very strong to begin with) collapses under the weight of their unhappiness.
There’s a lot missing from this summary, of course – in particular, the erudition and humor that make Fortress Besieged so unlike any other Chinese novel of the past century. Raised by Confucians and educated by missionaries, Qian studied at Oxford and the Sorbonne, and drew upon the literary traditions of a half-dozen languages in cracking wise and devising epigrams that have made him legendary to Chinese readers. (Many of these, unfortunately, are blunted in the novel’s sole English translation, a 1970s relic.) He had a keen eye and a sharp pen, and many of his characters still resonate. There’s “Jimmy Zhang,” a Shanghainese comprador who peppers his speech with malaprop English words and insists on being addressed by his English name. There’s Fang Hongjian’s father, a country gentleman who expatiates with classical allusions and hoary clichés. There’s a Cambridge-educated modernist poet who has entitled his unreadable, heavily footnoted magnum opus “Adulterous Smorgasbord,” and a philosopher who claims a personal friendship with Bertrand Russell (“Bertie”) on the strength of a form reply to his fan mail, and tells people that Russell came to him with questions only he could answer. (“This was no idle boast, Heaven knows. Russell had personally asked him when he would be visiting England, and whether or not he had any plans for his visit, and how many lumps of sugar he took in his tea.”) And there’s Fang himself, a gormless fraud and moral coward who at one point tells a lecture audience that the only two Western inventions to have caught on in China are opium and syphilis.
“I talked to Bertie about his marriages and divorces once,” Shenming said. “He said that there’s a saying in English that marriage is like a gilded birdcage. The birds outside want to get in, and the birds inside want to get out, he said, so divorce leads to marriage and marriage leads to divorce and there’s never any end to it.”
“There’s a saying like that in France, too,” Miss Su said. “Only there it’s about a forteresse assiégée – a fortress under siege. The people outside want to storm in, and the people inside are desperate to get out.”
The metaphor (from the French “Le mariage est comme une forteresse assiégée; ceux qui sont dehors veulent y entrer, et ceux qui sont dedans veulent en sortir“) functions on many levels. In Qian’s satire, Fang finds disillusionment and disappointment in wartime Shanghai (full of frauds, phonies, and toadies), the relatively safe interior (where an innkeeper attempts to convince him and his traveling companions that maggots on their dinner are merely “meat sprouts”), the security of an academic career (Sanlü University proves to be a hotbed of petty intrigues), and the prestige of an international education. The image of a fortress under siege also applies to China itself: Fang and his compatriots return to Shanghai just in time to catch the Japanese invasion, and although Qian was much too subtle a writer to foreground the war and occupation – Fang leaves Shanghai to escape a broken heart, not the Japanese – they are a constant presence throughout the novel.
In Qian’s short story ‘Inspiration,’ the spirit of a recently deceased author is confronted in the afterlife by the shades of characters from his novels who charge him with murder and theft for having robbed them of life in his works. It would be hard to make either charge stick in Qian’s case – but as memorable as the characters that populate the first sections of the book are, there’s a definite change of tone about two-thirds of the way through Fortress Besieged, when the focus shifts to Fang Hongjian and Sun Roujia’s unhappy marriage. Here wit gives way to greatness, as the wisecracks and epigrams take a backseat to a heartbreakingly sensitive depiction of a failing relationship.
Qian never completed another novel. The manuscript of a second book, Baihe Xin (literally Lily Heart, inspired by the French expression cœur d’artichaut), was lost when he and his family moved to Beijing in the summer of 1949, and Fortress Besieged remained out of print on both the mainland and Taiwan until the early 1980s. Qian turned his energies to classical scholarship instead, culminating in the monumental Limited Views, a critical overview in Literary Chinese of China’s classical literary tradition viewed through the lens of Qian’s polyglot bibliophilia. (You haven’t lived until you’ve seen someone name-check Susan Sontag in the language of Confucius.) Qian professed to have left his career as a novelist behind him, but a 1985 essay written by his wife, the playwright and translator Yang Jiang, suggests otherwise:
“After Fortress Besieged was reprinted, I asked if he wouldn’t be interested in writing another novel.”
“The interest is there,” he replied, “but my powers have waned over the years. To want to write, when there is no chance of writing, is a lingering regret – but to write something that isn’t any good, once one does have the chance, can only end in remorse. The former at least leaves some room for self-deception; the latter is what the Spanish call ‘el momento de la verdad’ [the moment of truth], and it leaves no room for self-deception, escape, or mercy. Better regret than remorse.”
They don’t give Nobel prizes to dead people; they don’t give Nobel prizes to people who only wrote one novel; and they don’t give Nobel prizes for counterfactuals. Fortress Besieged will have to stand on its own merits, a monument to what might have been. ∎
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https://www.alamy.com/file-chinese-author-and-translator-yang-jiang-the-wife-of-qian-zhongshu-late-chinese-literary-scholar-and-writer-is-pictured-at-an-interview-at-image263328046.html
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|
Chinese author and translator Yang Jiang, the wife of Qian Zhongshu, late Chinese literary scholar and writer, is pictured at an interview at Stock Photo
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Download this stock image: --FILE--Chinese author and translator Yang Jiang, the wife of Qian Zhongshu, late Chinese literary scholar and writer, is pictured at an interview at - W8BHH2 from Alamy's library of millions of high resolution stock photos, illustrations and vectors.
|
en
|
https://www.alamy.com/file-chinese-author-and-translator-yang-jiang-the-wife-of-qian-zhongshu-late-chinese-literary-scholar-and-writer-is-pictured-at-an-interview-at-image263328046.html
|
--FILE--Chinese author and translator Yang Jiang, the wife of Qian Zhongshu, late Chinese literary scholar and writer, is pictured at an interview at her home in Beijing, China, 18 January 2012. State media say renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang has died at age 104. The Paper, a state-owned news website, says Yang died Wednesday (25 May 2016) morning at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing. It says her death was confirmed by her publisher, the People's Literature Publishing House. Hong Kong station Phoenix TV also confirmed Yang's death, the cause of which was not given. Born in 1911, Yang became a household name in China for her novels, plays, essays and translated works. In a 1981 collection of essays, she reflected on the daily lives of Chinese intellectuals during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when scholars and intellectuals were forced to perform hard labor. Yang's translation of "Don Quixote" is considered the definitive Chinese version by many.
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http://english.cssn.cn/whats_new/photo1/201605/t20160526_5662092.shtml
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en
|
Celebrated Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at 105
|
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[
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2016-05-25T00:00:00
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en
| null |
Famous Chinese writer, literary translator and foreign literature researcher Yang Jiang died at the age of 105 in Beijing. [File photo]
Yang Jiang (left), her late husband Qian Zhongshu (right) and their daughter Qian Yuan. [File photo]
Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu, two heavyweights in Chinese cultural circles, were widely known as having the perfect love story. [Photo/Xinhua]
Well-known Chinese writer, literary translator and foreign literature researcher Yang Jiang died at the age of 105 in Beijing on Wednesday morning.
Yang, the wife of late Chinese novelist Qian Zhongshu, enjoyed decades of fame across the country for her literature works such as Six Chapters from My Life 'Downunder'(1981), Baptism(1988), and We Three(2004), which recalls her husband and her daughter Qian Yuan (1937â1997), who died of cancer one year before her father's death. Her translation of the Spanish novel Don Quixote de la Mancha is widely considered the best Chinese version.
Yang Jiang, whose original name was Yang Ji Kang, married Qian Zhongshu, one of the top Chinese litterateurs, in 1935.
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https://books.google.com/books/about/Limited_Views.html%3Fid%3D1RNX8IW2dTEC
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Google Books
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https://books.google.com/
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Search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books.
My library
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http://fionnchu.blogspot.com/2020/05/qian-zhongshus-fortress-besieged-book.html
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Blogtrotter: Qian Zhongshu's "Fortress Besieged": Book Review
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[
"John L. Murphy",
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I like academic satire, and as I was curious recently about Chinese novels in translation worth a go, I found this. Originally published in...
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http://fionnchu.blogspot.com/favicon.ico
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http://fionnchu.blogspot.com/2020/05/qian-zhongshus-fortress-besieged-book.html
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Qian Zhongshu's "Fortress Besieged": Book Review
I like academic satire, and as I was curious recently about Chinese novels in translation worth a go, I found this. Originally published in 1947, it tells of what are at least semi-autobiographical events just before WWII. The Japanese having invaded, flight to the interior brings Fang Hung-chien with his fake diploma and band of similarly suspect colleagues recruited for a dodgy new university inland.
Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao render in this 2004 edition an arch tale in the style of not so much Dickens as Mao claims in his afterword, than certainly early Huxley or Waugh. Weird analogies proliferate. In the first section, as Fang and certain women we will follow throughout the novel return from education in Europe, their creator muses of the onboard fare: "The fish was like the Marine Corps. It apparently had already been on land for several days; the meat was like submarine sailors, having been submerged in water for a long time." (20) In the second section, as the party takes up their occupations at the forlorn institution, the moon appears to feel similar depression. "One side was not yet full, like a face not yet swollen from a slap."(186) These observations are calibrated to the indirect narrative perspective of those peering out around them in this omniscient voice throughout.
As the plot inches on, the pace slows into a domestic tragicomedy of manners. I found this less engaging than the journey of part 2 or the university scenes of part 3. It may be deliberate to slow the events, but Fortress Besieged by its termination made me feel as if I was trapped in a prose castle.
Additionally, many endnotes are needed for a Western reader to get a dim sense of the erudite allusions and cultural references. This does not discredit the original work, but it will effect the reception of this work by those not in the know about a vast amount of Chinese literature and lore.
What Qian Zhongshu has in common with his Western educators is his disdain for his charges. The protagonist asserts: "The former policy of keeping the masses ignorant prevented the people from getting an education. The current policy of keeping the masses ignorant only allows the people to get a certain kind of education. The uneducated are fooled by others because they're illiterate. The educated are taken in by printed matter like your newspaper propaganda and lecture notes on training cadres because they are literate." (128) Later, Fang agrees that students look down on their masters: they show their elders no mercy, and crave only fairness. The best part of this novel are scenes upending academic status, and the clash of cultures as men and women purporting to be intellectual material for the new college deal with the lower classes on their long march from Shanghai.
However, very little feel of that city or the Japanese threat comes through. The events removed from the battle except for a brief burst of an air raid, the reader gets drawn into an hermetic tale. This novel, after the arrival, journey, and stay at the college, takes in its fourth part the marriage of Fang to Jou-chia, who we met very early on. Their tensions are foreshadowed. "Modern man has two popular myths: that homeliness in a girl is a virtue, so that pretty girls do not have half as much intelligence or honor as ugly girls, and second, that if a man lacks eloquence, he must be virtuous, making deaf-mutes the most sincere and honest people." (207) Finally, the matrimonial ceremonies consummated, we are left with the aftermath of a pairing. "Not detesting each other was already foundation enough for marriage." (293) The tone darkens as the novel illustrates the French proverb of the title: those inside a marriage want to get out, and those looking in cannot wait to enter. (Amazon US 11/9/17)
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https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1960947/death-yang-jiang-marks-end-era-chinese-literature
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en
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The death of Yang Jiang marks the end of an era in Chinese literature
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2016-05-31T23:00:03+08:00
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Renowned scholar and her husband influenced generations with their works, which entertained and enlightened a nation
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en
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https://assets-v2.i-scmp.com/production/favicon.ico
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South China Morning Post
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https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1960947/death-yang-jiang-marks-end-era-chinese-literature
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The death at the age of 104 of the great literary scholar Yang Jiang, widow of the equally brilliant Qian Zhongshu, marks the end of an era in modern Chinese literature. Her passing was announced by the state-run media, an indication of the prestige she was accorded in contemporary China. For foreigners, it may be difficult to appreciate the importance of this literary celebrity couple. For many Chinese, the pair were exemplary intellectuals in the Chinese tradition, an embodiment of public virtue, personal integrity and extreme erudition.
An offbeat sense of humour and understatement permeate most of their writings, in such works of hers as Baptism, We Three and Six Chapters from My Life ‘Downunder’. This is despite their dark subjects concerningthe suffering and persecution that intellectuals had to endure. Their literary and personal struggles have inspired three generations of Chinese readers.
Yang, a playwright, memoirist and translator, was not only well-versed in the Chinese canon, but fluent in several languages. She translated Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a formidable undertaking for which she taught herself Spanish. It is widely regarded as the definitive Chinese version.
The couple met when both were students at Tsinghua University. They married in 1935 and moved to Britain where Qian studied at Oxford University. After their daughter was born, they went to study in Paris before moving back to China in 1938, a year after the Japanese invasion. Their time overseas exposed them to European culture and literature.
During the tumultuous 1940s, Yang unexpectedly found success as a playwright of comedies. Qian also published Fortress Besieged, a satirical novel about Chinese marriages that has become an influential landmark of modern Chinese literature.
During the Cultural Revolution, the couple and their daughter suffered greatly. The experience inspired her later books, which became bestsellers and touched the heart of a nation. In death as in life, Yang again compels the Chinese people to confront their dark past.
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https://www.ksl.com/article/39913659/renowned-chinese-writer-yang-jiang-dies-at-age-104
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en
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Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at age 104
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Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to an equally famous author, died Wednesday at age 104, state media said.
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//img.ksl.com/slc/2951/295162/29516202.png
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https://www.ksl.com/article/39913659/renowned-chinese-writer-yang-jiang-dies-at-age-104
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BEIJING (AP) — Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to an equally famous author, died Wednesday at age 104, state media said.
Yang died at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, according to The Paper, a state-owned news website. It said her death had been confirmed by her publisher, the People's Literature Publishing House.
Citing different sources, Hong Kong station Phoenix TV also confirmed Yang's death, the cause of which was not given.
Born in 1911, Yang became a household name in China for her novels, plays, essays and translated works. She was the first to translate "Don Quixote" into Chinese, and her version is still considered the definitive one by many.
Her death was the top search term on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo on Wednesday, a testimony to her fame and the public adoration she enjoyed.
In a 1981 collection of essays, Yang wrote with a sense of poignancy on the daily lives of Chinese intellectuals during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when scholars and intellectuals were forced to perform hard labor.
Her 2003 essay collection "We Three," about her family life with her late husband and their daughter, was a best-seller.
Yang was married to Qian Zhongshu, best known for his novel "Fortress Besieged," and theirs was widely seen as a model union set against the background of China's turbulent 20th century.
After Qian's death in 1998, Yang embarked on the task of compiling and editing her husband's unpublished works and remained prolific herself.
In addition to "We Three," she published a sequel to her novel "Baptism" at age 103.
Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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https://chinaheritage.net/journal/the-art-of-survival-in-the-age-of-xi-jinping/
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en
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The Art of Survival in the Age of Xi Jinping
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2023-05-04T04:13:03+00:00
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Xi Jinping's Empire of Tedium Chapter XIX, Part I 熬 When I launched China Heritage in December 2016, I offered some tentative advice about how to deal with and survive the Age of Xi
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China Heritage
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https://chinaheritage.net/journal/the-art-of-survival-in-the-age-of-xi-jinping/
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Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium
Chapter XIX, Part I
熬
When I launched China Heritage in December 2016, I offered some tentative advice about how to deal with and survive the Age of Xi Jinping (see Living with Xi Dada’s China — Making Choices and Cutting Deals). Addressing an audience of (mostly younger) academics, I observed that,
on balance it is more than likely that most of you will outlive Xi Jinping’s reign… You are engaged with a Chinese world that, despite the best efforts of the Communist Party, its propaganda organs and twisted party-state education and indoctrination, is open to you. Contact with a living, complex, contradictory China is in many ways easier than ever before; you can join in fellowship with friends, colleagues and mentors in the Chinese world. China is silent, but only superficially, and The Silence will hopefully be coterminous with the tenure of Xi Jinping.
I was still on an unsteady rebound from a bout of cancer and wasn’t sure that I’d see out the first decade of the Xi era. Many people have not been so fortunate and I gravely doubt that I’ll see the end of China’s doleful Chairman of Everything.
Apart from the historical significance significance of today — 4 May China Youth Festival — the day also happens to be my sixty-ninth birthday. What better way to celebrate personal resilience than by sharing with readers two of my favourite aphoristic essays about survival?
***
‘The Art of Survival in the Age of Xi Jinping’, is the first part of a two-part chapter on ‘copium’ in China today. Together they form Chapter XIX in the series Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium. First we offer an essay by Li Ao (李敖, 1935-2018), a gadfly littérateur, composed in 1965. This is followed by a meditation on endurance by the translator and playwright Yang Jiang (楊絳, 1911-2016).
Both of these essays were included in ‘Floating’ 浮, a section in New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices (New York: 1992). In our editorial introduction, Linda Jaivin and I wrote that:
Floating is a feeling of rootlessness, of uncertainty about the future and even the present, of pedaling in thin air.
But exile on home territory is a normal state for the independent mind, the creative artist, and the individualist. These people can feel equally alienated, foreign, and strange whether at home in their birthplace or wandering the world. … [They feel] out of step with their times and live in a state of ‘internal exile.’
For those who remain in China, particularly in difficult and politically oppressive times, we take ‘floating’ to be the art of survival and the maintenance of personal integrity. It is the spiritual alternative to the political ponderousness demanded by Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues in late 1989 when they said that ‘stability crushes all else’ [穩定壓倒一切]. Li Ao, an intellectual who has survived to speak out again and again, reviews historical techniques of self-help in his satirical essay ‘The Art of Survival’. For Yang Jiang, the best defense is to don the ‘cloak of invisibility’.
As we have previously observed, Xi Jinping’s ‘cultural revolution’ shares much in common with the Counter-reform years of 1989-1992, dark years during during which Linda and I compiled New Ghosts, Old Dreams (for more on this, see Prelude to a Restoration). In 2023, old lessons about coping with authoritarianism and the hard-won insights of writers like Li Ao and Yang Jiang are salient once more. We would also note that both writers, one in Taipei, the other in Beijing, only flourished after the death of the autocrats who ruled over them — in the case of Li Ao the demise of Chiang Kai-shek was liberating and only when Mao Zedong ‘went to meet Marx’ could Yang Jiang enjoy a second lease on life.
In the Age of Xi Jinping, the lexicon of survival continues to evolve and traditional expressions share the limelight with neologisms:
明哲保身、潔身自好、難得糊塗、退避三舍、銷聲匿跡、隱姓埋名、避秦時亂、朝隱、隱身、遁世、看破紅塵、遁入空門、削髮披緇、超脫世俗、玩世不恭、冷觀世情、遊戲人間、逍遙、悠哉悠哉、躲入元宇宙、歲月靜好、躺平、内卷、當御宅族、宅家何時了、蝸居、 潤學、冒充陽光開朗孔乙己 …
No doubt Chinese inventiveness will further enrich the thesaurus in the years to come.
***
The rubric for this chapter in Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium is 熬 aó, ‘to stew’, ‘simmer’ or ‘endure’.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
4 May 2023
Youth Day (PRC)
五四青年節
***
Related Material:
Living with Xi Dada’s China — Making Choices and Cutting Deals, 20 July 2017
Li Ao: A Madman’s End, 1 April 2018
More on May Fourth:
May Fourth at Ninety-nine, 4 May 2018
Anniversaries New & Old in 2019 — Remembering 5.4, Accounting for 4.28, 4 May 2019
Mangling May Fourth 2020 in Beijing,
***
The Art of Survival
A User’s Guide
Li Ao
translated by Geremie Barmé with Linda Jaivin
Li Ao’s ‘Art of Survival’ 避禍學 is one science you’d better bone up on if you want to keep your head, stay out of jail, and remain free from the watchful eyes of the authorities.
It’s the art of living in the chaotic world while keeping yourself in one piece. From ancient times there have been periods of turmoil. There are those people who can roll with the punches; some even thrive on chaos. The less fortunate go under; some even end up in exile. These unfortunates fall into one of three categories:
one, those who find their heads no longer attached to their bodies;
two, those who land in jail; and,
three, those who live in perpetual fear of the police.
Of these three types of no-hopers, only the third really concerns us here. The other two categories are already done for, they’re losers, lost souls; let’s just forget about them. The best we can do for them is pray they have more luck in the next life. Better still, get them to pray for themselves.
The third category of people, however, are ideal pupils for my correspondence course in the Art of Survival. My only regret is that I wasn’t born in an earlier age: I could have given the ancients some advice on how to survive. Chinese history is full of fine men who were unjustly persecuted to death. Such a pity, and quite unnecessary, too.
Take, for example, Bo Yi 伯夷 and Shu Qi 叔齊. These two loyal ministers refused to eat the ‘unrighteous grain’ — 不食周粟 — of the Zhou king who conquered their state. Instead they fled to Mount Shouyang 首陽山, where they lived off ferns. What dopes! Didn’t they realize that even the grass they were eating belonged to Zhou? If you ask me, they starved themselves to death for nothing. It wasn’t worth it. Furthermore, such methods are definitely not for modern man.
[Note: See Sima Qian, ‘On Bo Yi’, A New Sinology Reader.]
Then there’s the case of Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 [fourth century]. After the world fell into chaos he changed his name to Tao Qian [陶潛 ‘the hidden’], gave up his government job, and went to live on his neglected farm. Of course, he was lucky in that he had servants and his young sons waiting there for him, as well as a good stash of wine. His contemporary, General Tan Daoji 檀道濟, couldn’t understand why Tao made things so hard for himself. But from our point of view Tao had it easy. Despite the chaos of the world outside he had his fields, servants, dumb kids, wine, dog meat, and chrysanthemums. At least he didn’t have to worry about obtaining a residency permit, nor did he have to fear the local police — or even more endearing characters — coming to knock on his door at night. He was a damn sight better off than people today. Tao Yuanming’s art of survival has no modern application.
The above examples illustrate survival methods of which I cannot approve. Bo Yi and Shu Qi were too extreme, too crude in their approach, whereas Tao Yuanming was too restrained, reclusive, and laid-back. Given his station in life, he was far too passive, too concerned with saving his own skin. He should have come out into the open and done something for the multitudes. Tao Yuanming’s case reminds me of Feng Dao 馮道, a man who called himself the ‘Contented Old Man,’ although everyone else knows him as a turncoat who served the rulers of all the Five Dynasties. Now, Feng could have been like Tao and retired from the world, but he chose to play the shameless old man and work for his enemies. Sometimes, with a well-placed lie, he cleverly saved a town from the barbarians or got them to spare the lives of tens of thousands of people. Despite the historical verdict that he was a traitor, you can’t ignore the fact that he did a great deal of good.
Methods have to change with the times. Today’s survivors would be ill-advised to adopt the ways of Bo Yi and Shu Qi, or even Tao Yuanming. Thus it is necessary to review and reevaluate the details of the Art of Survival for the sake of all those people who, while not in prison, can feel the blade at their throat.
To my mind, the Art of Survival is a body of wisdom that exists in the small fissure between A: selling out body and soul to the tyrants and helping them do their dirty work, and B: having your head removed or being jailed or purged.
The Art of Survival allows for self-preservation and self-expression between these two extremes. From my observations there are fifteen variations of this art all told. They are enumerated below for my comrades’ reference:
Head for the mountains. The Bo Yi and Shu Qi method. No longer practicable.
Take to the sea. Confucius suggested ‘taking a raft into the sea’ [乘桴浮於海] when things go badly. The modern equivalent of this is to hide out in the foreign concessions or to go to the United States. [Note: In the Xi era, this is known as 潤學 rùn xué, ‘the science of escape’.] This is strictly for the inept. You’re beyond the reach of the law, so you don’t have to pay the price for what you say. No points for character.
Hide in the countryside. Tao Yuanming’s method. You live off the land and write poems about flowers and weeds. No longer practicable.
Play mah-jongg. You devote yourself entirely to the 136 tiles of a mah-jongg set. Déclassé.
Practice the martial arts. You put your trust in flying swords and spears that can lop off an enemy’s head at a great distance. Very Ah Q, and déclassé as well.
Drink. Xinling Jun 信陵君 was into that: ‘Xinling enjoyed heady wine, how many heroes has it undone?’
Womanize. The general Cai E 蔡鍔 [of the early republic] went in for this. But there are few women like Xiao Fengxian 小鳳仙 around today. Where are you, great ladies?
Play mad. Sunzi 孫子 and Fan Sui 范雎 both tried this. Unfortunately, today there are psychiatric hospitals. One session of shock treatment and the game’s up.
Ah Q is the protagonist of Lu Xun’s most famous story, ‘The True Story of Ah Q’. He is a Chinese Everyman, proud of his ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and hypersensitive about the scars on his scabby head.
Play stupid. It is hard to convince people you don’t know what’s going on. Of course, it’s even harder to convince them that you do.
Engage in self-mutilation. Yu Rang 豫讓, an assassin in the Spring and Autumn Period, disguised himself by lacquering his body to look like a leper and swallowing ashes to make himself a mute, but he was caught all the same. Gong Zizhen 龔自珍 spoke of ‘illicit ejaculation,’ masturbation behind closed doors.
Feign illness. You pretend to be dizzy all day and say your legs are too weak to carry you. Complain about feeling run-down and having back pains. You’ll seem impotent but only prove to people that you’re also a person of no real substance.
Smile. Joke and laugh your way through the day, avoiding all discussion of politics; if the conversation does touch on politics, laugh it off or swear about it. Never go so far as to cause real trouble. A successful example was Ji Xiaolan 紀曉嵐 [a Qing dynasty writer of ghost stories], while failures end up like Jin Shengtan 金聖嘆 [an exuberant seventeenth-century writer and literary critic who got himself killed].
Put on a mournful face. Look as dour as the master of a mortuary. No one will want to go near you, so of course you can’t get into any trouble.
Go into business. Fan Li 范蠡 [of the Spring and Autumn Period] turned to business when he tired of politics. In his day there was no need to rely on official speculators or tax evasion to make yourself wealthy. Nowadays things aren’t so simple.
Be like the flea. The things about fleas is that when they bite you it itches but it never really hurts, and they jump away immediately after biting, so the person bitten can never be bothered to catch them. The majority of writers today are like this; they squash a few fleas and think they’re heroes.
Well, take your pick. If you want to survive in today’s chaotic world, you can choose one or two of these methods. If you apply them well, you’ll be okay; if you’re careless, however, and you give the game away, it serves you right….
1965
***
Source:
李敖,《避禍學大綱》translated in New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices, New York: Times Books, 1992, pp.438-442
***
[Note: Li Ao failed to take his own advice and he was jailed, first for five years from 1971 to 1976 and again for six months in 1981-1982.]
***
The Cloak of Invisibility
Yang Jiang
translated by Geremie R. Barmé
Mocun is Yang’s husband, the scholar Qian Zhongshu.
— Ed.
Mocun and I have jokingly discussed what type of magical powers we’d like to have if we had a choice. We both decided on the cloak of invisibility. With it we could go traveling together and do as we wished, free from all restrictions. Not that we’d want to do any evil or harm. But quite possibly we’d get carried away and upset some innocent person with our mischievousness. And finally our presence would be detected and we’d have to flee in panic.
‘Heavens, in that case we’d also need the power to travel long distances instantaneously.’
‘And talismans for self-protection.’
The more we thought about it, the more we knew we’d need. In the end we decided to forget about the cloak of invisibility altogether.
But you don’t need supernatural powers to do things that are not allowed in this world of ours. You can find the cloak of invisibility wherever you are. It is a cloak made from a humble, insignificant weave.
If you occupy a lowly station in life, you’re sure to be ‘seen through,’ to be treated as if you were invisible. People don’t think of this cloak as something precious; indeed, they are terrified that once they’ve put it on it will stick to them like a wet shirt and they’ll never get it off.
An old Chinese story tells of the spirit of a dead man who returns home to find his family in mourning. They cannot see him. He speaks, but no one hears his voice. They are seated around a table eating and he eagerly tries to join in, only to find that there is no place set for him.
People of lowly status are like that disembodied spirit. If you are nothing in other people’s eyes, then naturally they will not see you; if they don’t acknowledge your existence in their hearts, they will look straight through you. No matter how mortified you feel or how much you grieve at being slighted or insulted, no one will take the slightest notice of you.
You exist, but you feel totally insubstantial, as if you had never been born. Is not a life so spent no life at all? To don the cloak of invisibility, to proclaim its virtue and to revel in its power, is (so some might say) to play Ah Q; in other words, sour grapes.
Chinese is full of expressions about trying to be ‘a man among men’ or seeking to put yourself ‘above the common herd,’ ‘enjoying the limelight,’ becoming ‘a tall poppy,’ or ‘pushing yourself to the fore’. This is itself proof that most people aren’t happy to be ignored. They resent obscurity, they chafe at it; they do their utmost to cast off the cloak of invisibility and to make themselves the center of attention.
In Anglo-American culture, society is compared to a snake pit. Snakes lie in a tangled heap at the bottom of a pit, each struggling to poke forth its head and thrust upward, squeezing through the mass to get on top. Heads rise to the surface and sink down to the depths again; bodies arch upward and subside; tails become entangled in an inextricable knot:
You’re on top, I’m on the bottom, it’s a life-and-death contest, a ceaseless struggle. Unless you can get your head up and out of the heap, you will spend your whole life buried. Even if you do succeed, you’ll be no better than a dancing bubble of foam on a boundless ocean, sparkling for a single moment in the sunlight. An outstanding person may realize certain ambitions, but the time spent on the crest of that wave is still only an instant. Certainly, that instant may well mark the high point of a life-time, something to be proud of. But are you a ‘good-for-nothing’ if you do not excel? On the other hand, will you be satisfied to spend your days subservient to others?
Heaven gives birth to all creatures, beautiful and ugly, talented and worthless. The fame of one outstanding general is built on the corpses of thousands; how else could a mere soldier become a grand hero? Some of us are born to sit in palanquins, others to carry them; there are the hosts and guests who occupy places of honor, and servants who bring them tea and food. At the banquet table there is a guest of honor and less important guests. In the kitchens a cook tends the stove while the menials add fuel. The talents with which nature has endowed humans are all so different; how can there be such a thing as equality?
People’s ambitions differ vastly as well. In Chapter 26 of The Scholars, Madame Wang enthusiastically describes the magnificent feast and entertainments she has enjoyed in the Sun mansion. She was given the seat of honor, and as she was wearing a veil of giant pearls, the maids on either side of her had to part the pearls so she could sip her honeyed tea. Sancho Panza, on the other hand, declares in Chapter 11 of Don Quixote that he prefers to eat a simple meal of bread and onions in a corner, free from the constraints of table manners and etiquette. Some people yearn to fly high; others are content ‘to drag their tails in the mud‘. Each to his own.
Some people know just what they want out of life, and it is useless to try to persuade them otherwise. If, for instance, they want nothing more than to drag their tails in the mud, it’s best to let them be. Then there are those who never realize their ambitions, who are forever at odds with fate. There is the mediocre fellow and his futile determination to become a ‘man among men’. Ambition is the root of all frustration; and the higher a monkey climbs, the more clearly its shiny red behind can be seen. Blissfully unaware that he is dressed only in the emperor’s new clothes, such a fellow strains to throw off the cloak of invisibility; all he does is reveal his own ugliness and perversity. Many people of moderate ability waste their lives trying to outdo others and still achieve nothing.
It is all so futile.
The ancients said, ‘They are but human, like myself.’ Westerners have a similar notion. Such sayings encourage people to do their best without becoming self-destructive. In Spanish it is said that ‘you are what you do’—a person’s worth is determined by his or her own efforts, not by birth or social position. Perhaps we should add, however, that
‘what you are determines what you can do.’ If you’re a turnip, you should hope to be a juicy and crisp one; if a cabbage, the ideal is to be a solid, full-hearted vegetable. Both of these vegetables are used in daily cooking and make no pretense at being fit to join the lavish offerings in a temple.
A children’s rhyme from my native place goes ‘On the third day of the third month, the shepherd’s purse vies with the peony.’ One would think there was no competition. Once I saw a delicate blue flower in a patch of wild grass, and because it was so small as to be almost invisible I have often wondered if it was what Westerners call a ‘forget-me-not’. But flowers and vegetables growing in the wild have no concept of being (or not being) ‘forgotten’: They just blossom at the behest of the sun-light, the dew, and the rain.
‘Grasses and trees all possess a nature of their own, they wait not for a fair maiden’s hand to pluck them.’
I love the line by the Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo, ‘One can hide in the sea of humanity’; and I admire the philosopher Zhuangzi, who spoke of the sage who ‘drowned on dry land’ [陸沉]. Well may we compare society to a snake pit, yet in the skies above that pit birds fly free; in the ponds beside it fish swim at will. There are people who have always chosen to avoid the snake pit altogether, concealing themselves in the crowd or drowning on dry land. Their aim is to disappear like a drop of water in the sea, to be a wildflower camouflaged in thick grass, free of any aspiration to be a ‘forget-me-not’ or to ‘vie with the peonies,’ at peace in their own niche. If people have no desire to climb to the heights, there is no need to jostle with others, no need to fear a fall. They can retain their innocence, fulfill their original nature, and concentrate on goals that are within their power.
Dressed in this cloak of invisibility, you can achieve things nobody can ever take away. Su Dongpo said, ‘The bright moon that floats between the hills and the clear breeze on the water are all part of the inexhaustible bounty of nature.’ Certainly these things are to be enjoyed, and so too are man’s own creations: The ways of the world and the complexity of human relations are even more delightful and intriguing than the bright moon and the clear breeze. They can be read like a book or enjoyed like a play. No matter how lifelike the descriptions in books or performances onstage may be, they are, after all, only make-believe. The real world is often stranger than fiction, so strange that it leaves us shocked and astounded. It possesses a more vital worth, a more wondrous ability to delight. Only the humble person has the opportunity of observing the reality behind the ways of the world, as opposed to the spectacle of art performed for an audience.
But I’m probably wasting my breath. Those anxious to abandon the cloak of invisibility will hardly be impressed with what I am saying, while those who were unaware of the cloak’s existence will gain nothing from the knowledge of it. In all honesty, donning the cloak of invisibility, be it magical or mundane, has drawbacks and considerable inconveniences.
In The Invisible Man H. G. Wells describes a man who achieved invisibility by scientific means. Yet his invisibility brought him only pain.
When it was cold, for example, he had to stay indoors unless he wanted to go out without any clothes on. When he did get dressed—with shoes, hat and gloves—he appeared to others as a faceless man, and if he went into the street he would cause a fearful panic. Thus he was forced to conceal his face by pulling a hat over his brow, wrapping a scarf around his mouth, and wearing a pair of dark glasses. He covered his nose and cheeks with gauze and sticking plaster. What lengths he had to go to, to conceal his invisibility!
Such are the results of a blind and mechanistic science; they cannot compare with the magical cloak of invisibility. The cloak conceals normal clothing and may be cast aside at will. But the body it disguises is one made of flesh and blood, one that feels both heat and cold, one that can be hurt all too easily. A brick, or a club, or a clumsy foot can be painful enough, but what of the agony one must endure if attacked by a knife or gun, if scalded by water or burnt by fire? If one has not the magical ability to make a timely escape, the only way to ensure safety is to acquire an adamantine body.
The cloak of invisibility has other drawbacks. The human heart it conceals is all too vulnerable, it is sensitive to heat and cold, it cannot withstand rough handling. It is an arduous process to steel oneself to this, to train oneself to be impervious to all manner of attack and insult; and to watch what happens in the world without such training may make the heart burst with indignation, it may break it. In such conditions it is inconceivable to view things like a carefree playgoer. Perhaps one should simply choose not to watch at all. After all, the world is not a variety show.
If Lesage’s Devil upon Two Sticks were to invite me to go abroad with him one night, accompanying him as he lifted up the roofs of houses to peek inside, I would certainly decline. Is it necessary to see and experience everything in order to achieve wisdom? And by seeing and experiencing everything, will you necessarily obtain wisdom? How many lives does one have? The belief that on the basis of the experience of one lifetime you can achieve a unique vision and understand all human life may deservedly win no more than a furtive smile from others.
The cloak of invisibility can be found everywhere. It is no rare or magical treasure. Many people wear it. Are they all blind?
And no matter how you look at it, the cloak of invisibility is better than the emperor’s new clothes.
***
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Qian Zhongshu
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Names Simplified Chinese:钱钟书 or 钱锺书 Traditional Chinese:錢鍾書 Pinyin:Qián Zhōngshū Wade-Giles:Ch'ien Chung-shu Zi:Zheliang (哲良) Mocun (默存)
Qian Zhongshu (November 21, 1910 – December 19, 1998) was a Chinese writer and scholar. He was best known for his novel, Fortress Besieged among general readers.
Life
Born in Wuxi, Qian Zhongshu grew up under the care of his eldest uncle, who did not have a son. Qian was initially named Yangzhi (仰之). When he was one year old, according to a tradition practised in many parts of China, Qian was given a few objects laid out in front of him. He grabbed a book. His uncle then renamed him Zhongshu, literally meaning "being fond of books". His father later also changed his zi to Mocun, literally meaning "to keep silent", in the hope that he would be less talkative.
Although he never did shake his chatty nature, Qian was indeed very fond of books. When he was young, his uncle often brought him along to tea houses at night. There Qian was left alone to read storybooks on folklore and historical events, which he would repeat to his cousins upon returning home.
When Qian was ten, his uncle passed away. He continued living with his widowed aunt, even though their living conditions worsened drastically due to the severed income. At fourteen, Qian left home to attend a school in Suzhou.
Despite failing in Mathematics, Qian was accepted into the Department of Foreign Languages under Tsinghua University in 1929 because of his excellent performance in Chinese and English languages. He met his wife Yang Jiang in Tsinghua and married her in 1935.
In the same year, Qian received government sponsorship to further his studies abroad. Together with his wife, Qian headed for the University of Oxford in Britain. After spending two years at Exeter College, he received a Baccalaureus Litterarum (Bachelor of Literature). He then studied for one more year in the University of Paris in France, where his daughter Qian Ai was born, before returning to China in 1938.
Due to the unstable situation during the second Sino-Japanese War, Qian did not hold any long-term jobs until the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949. However, he wrote extensively during the decade of chaos and uncertainty. His most celebrated novel, Fortress Besieged, and many other shorter works were completed and published during this period.
Missing image
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In 1949, Qian was appointed a professor in his alma mater. Four years later, an administrative adjustment saw the change of Tsinghua into a Science and Technology-based institute, with its Arts branches merged into Peking University (PKU). Qian was relieved of teaching and worked entirely in the Institute of Literary Studies under PKU, where his job was actually translating Mao Zedong's collected works into English.
During the Cultural Revolution, like many other prominent intellectuals of that time, Qian suffered heavy persecution. He was very much stripped of his favorite pastime - reading. However, he saw it through and continued to write. In 1982, he was instated as the deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He then began working on his magnum opus, Guan Zhui Bian (管锥编), which occupied the next decade of his life.
On December 19, 1998, Qian passed away in Beijing due to sickness. The Xinhua News Agency, a mouthpiece for the state, labelled him "an immortal" - a term usually reserved for revolutionary martyrs.
Literary achievements
Qian Zhongshu was one of the most well-known Chinese authors to the Western world. His most famous novel, Fortress Besieged, published in 1947, has been translated into English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and Spanish. His other works include Men-Beasts-Ghosts (人·兽·鬼) and The Marginalia of Life (写在人生边上).
Qian also wrote elaborate notes on Chinese classics, showing his erudition and insight into a comparative study of different cultures. For all of this, literature was not his primary employment, he was the translator for much of Mao Zedong's collected works, which occupied most of the remainder of his active professional life. Only recently have translations of his earlier works become widely available, though Fortress Besieged was adapted into a television mini-series in China in 1990.
Qian's magnum opus is the five-volume Guan Zhui Bian (管锥编), literally the Pipe-Awl Collection, translated into English as Limited Views. Begun in the 1980s and published in its current form in the mid-1990s, it is an extensive collection of short essays on poetics, semiology, literary history and related topics written in an erudite classical style. Qian's command of the cultural traditions of Classical and Modern Chinese, Ancient Greek (in translations), Latin, English, German, French, Italian and Spanish allowed him to construct a towering structure of polyglot and cross-cultural allusions. He took as the basis of this work a range of Chinese classical texts, including the Classic of Poetry, the Tao Te Ching, and the Complete Prose of the Pre-Tang. From neglected details in these works, he found points of connections with works from other literatures.
Qian's wife, Yang Jiang, was also a writer and translator, best known for her translation of Don Quixote into Chinese.
See also
List of Chinese authors
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Yang Jiang, bestselling author who wrote on the pain of living through persecution during Cultural Revolution, dies at 104
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2016-05-25T20:57:18+08:00
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Yang’s works – including her Chinese translation of Spanish classic ‘Don Quixote’ – made her a household name alongside her late husband Qian Zhongshu
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https://assets-v2.i-scmp.com/production/favicon.ico
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South China Morning Post
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https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1954515/yang-jiang-bestselling-author-who-wrote-pain-living
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Her husband Qian was an acclaimed writer, editor, and poet, whose novel Fortress Besieged is considered a masterpiece of 20th-century literature.
Yang was born in Beijing to a wealthy and educated family from Wuxi, Jiangsu province, in 1911.
After graduating from Soochow University in 1932, Yang enrolled in the graduate school of Tsinghua University, where she met and married her husband in 1935.
The pair then studied at Oxford University, where their only daughter, Qian Yuan, was born in 1937. They continued their studies at Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris until 1938, when the family of three set sail for war-torn China.
Yang became a household name for her novels, plays, essays and translated works that appeared before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.
“There’s a way to go if we wanted to,” she wrote of their decision to stay in China in the memoir We Three in 2003.
“We have never been fond of singing or listening to patriotic tunes. But we don’t want to part with the country, humiliated and weak as it is, of our forefathers and families and become second-grade citizens of others.”
As Qian was assigned to translate the works of Mao Zedong, Yang worked as an academic at the Institute of Foreign Literature Study under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
But they were not exempted from political campaigns.
In 1958, they were sent to the outskirts of Beijing to perform labour at steel mills as part of the Great Leap Forward.
As school was halted, Yang, then 47, started learning Spanish from scratch and started translating such classics as Gil Blas and Don Quixote.
During Mao’s “Four Clean-ups Movement” in 1964 – launched to cleanse the party of “reactionary” electments – the entire institute left for the countryside except Yang, who was helping Qian finalise the translation of Mao’s essays and poems.
The project had helped keep the family well-fed during the bitter years in 1959-1961 when tens of millions of people starved to death.
But the family wasn’t safe from political persecution for long.
In August 1966, shortly after the Cultural Revolution began, Yang and her husband were publicly denounced by the “revolutionary multitude”.
Their daughter, then a teacher at Beijing Normal University and a Communist Party member, put up a poster to draw a clear demarcation between her and her parents.
“After that she came home, without saying a word, and leaned towards me and started knitting a nightgown and put it on me … I could feel her tears ... and that pained us,” Yang wrote in We Three.
In 1969, Qian Zhongshu was sent off to Henan province for re-education at the May 7 cadre school.
At the train station seeing him off was Yang, Qian Yuan and her husband Deyi.
A year later, when it was Yang’s turn to be sent away, it was just Qian Yuan seeing her off at the station. Deyi had taken his own life just a month earlier.
“Yuan went out of sight as the train departed. I closed my eyes to let my tears flow,” Yang wrote as she recounted the painful farewell.
Yang and her husband returned to Beijing in 1972 and lived with their daughter at Beijing Normal University.
As the Cultural Revolution came to a close after Mao’s death, Yang completed her Chinese translation of Don Quixote in November 1976.
The epic work, spanning eight volumes, became the state gift to Spanish King Juan Carlos I during his official visit to China hosted by Deng Xiaoping in 1978.
Eight years later, in 1986, the King awarded Yang the Medal of King Alfonso X, a top accolade for “the wise”.
In 1988, Yang published the novel Baptism, which depicts the life of intellectuals under ideological indoctrination and is often compared to Fortress Besieged.
“There is no absolute happiness in human life. Happiness always comes with worry and anxiety,” she wrote in We Three.
The memoir, a national bestseller in 2003, was Qian Yuan’s unfinished project.
Qian Yuan had began writing during her spine cancer treatment and completed only the first five chapters before she died in 1997, two months shy of 60.
Yang withheld the news of their daughter’s death from her husband until his passing in 1998.
After her husband’s death, Yang compiled and edited his unpublished works, the most celebrated being We Three.
“This is a long dream of ten thousand miles. The scene was so real that it felt like a dream after waking up. But a dream being a dream, is nothing but a dream,” its opening line reads.
At the age of 96, Yang surprised the world with Reaching the Brink of Life, a philosophic work whose title alludes to her husband’s collection of essays Marginalia to Life.
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en
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Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at age 104
|
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Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to an equally famous author, died Wednesday at age 104, state media said.
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https://www.ksl.com/article/39913659/renowned-chinese-writer-yang-jiang-dies-at-age-104
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BEIJING (AP) — Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to an equally famous author, died Wednesday at age 104, state media said.
Yang died at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, according to The Paper, a state-owned news website. It said her death had been confirmed by her publisher, the People's Literature Publishing House.
Citing different sources, Hong Kong station Phoenix TV also confirmed Yang's death, the cause of which was not given.
Born in 1911, Yang became a household name in China for her novels, plays, essays and translated works. She was the first to translate "Don Quixote" into Chinese, and her version is still considered the definitive one by many.
Her death was the top search term on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo on Wednesday, a testimony to her fame and the public adoration she enjoyed.
In a 1981 collection of essays, Yang wrote with a sense of poignancy on the daily lives of Chinese intellectuals during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when scholars and intellectuals were forced to perform hard labor.
Her 2003 essay collection "We Three," about her family life with her late husband and their daughter, was a best-seller.
Yang was married to Qian Zhongshu, best known for his novel "Fortress Besieged," and theirs was widely seen as a model union set against the background of China's turbulent 20th century.
After Qian's death in 1998, Yang embarked on the task of compiling and editing her husband's unpublished works and remained prolific herself.
In addition to "We Three," she published a sequel to her novel "Baptism" at age 103.
Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Celebrating 100 Years of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang
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Friday, December 10, 2010 UBC Asian Centre Auditorium 1871 West Mall, Vancouver, BC “Life, it’s been said, is one big book…” Come celebrate the centennial anniversary of two of modern China’s most outstanding cultural figures. As scholars and writers, husband and wife, Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998) and Yang Jiang (b. 1911) radically transformed what it meant […]
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https://cdn.ubc.ca/clf/7.0.4/img/favicon.ico
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Department of Asian Studies
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https://asia.ubc.ca/news/celebrating-100-years-of-qian-zhongshu-and-yang-jiang/
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Friday, December 10, 2010
UBC Asian Centre Auditorium
1871 West Mall, Vancouver, BC
“Life, it’s been said, is one big book…”
Come celebrate the centennial anniversary of two of modern China’s most outstanding cultural figures. As scholars and writers, husband and wife, Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998) and Yang Jiang (b. 1911) radically transformed what it meant to be a modern Chinese intellectual. And both their literary careers, it turns out, began with comedy! Join us for an evening of laughter and learning, featuring a reading from a new literary translation, a student performance, and an invited lecture by a distinguished scholar of modern Chinese literature. A catered reception will follow.
EVENING PROGRAM
4:30PM Welcome Remarks, Dr. Gage Averill, UBC Dean of Arts
4:35PM Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, stories and essays by Qian Zhongshu
A reading by Dr. Christopher Rea, UBC Dept. of Asian Studies
4:50PM Heart’s Desire, a comedy of manners by Yang Jiang (excerpts)
Performed by students from the UBC Chinese language program
5:10PM Keynote address: “The Cosmopolitan Imperative: Qian Zhongshu and ‘World Literature’” Dr. Theodore Huters, Professor Emeritus, UCLA Chief Editor, Renditions, Chinese University of Hong Kong
5:50PM Catered reception and book exhibition in the Asian Centre Foyer
See a brief essay on Qian Zhongshu by UBC assistant professor Dr. Christopher Rea:
http://www.thechinabeat.org/?tag=qian-zhongshu
Please RSVP for this free event via e-mail:UBCAsianStudies@gmail.comEvent poster
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21594
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yago
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3
| 28
|
https://emmaluferguson.substack.com/p/we-two-are-old
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en
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Emma's stream of consciousness
|
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[
""
] | null |
[
"Emma"
] |
2023-10-25T12:00:42+00:00
|
Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang's story, told through my translations
|
en
|
https://substackcdn.com/icons/substack/favicon.ico
|
https://emmaluferguson.substack.com/p/we-two-are-old
|
1.
This is the story of a Chinese intellectual ‘power couple’, Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998) and his wife Yang Jiang (1911-2016). Let me tell it as I usually do, alternating between reading and translation.
2.
Qian Zhongshu is rightly called ‘the most learned author of twentieth-century China’. Fluent in English and French, he also read widely in German, Italian, and Latin — all of which languages appear, alongside modern and classical Chinese, throughout his writings. Here is Yang’s recollection of her husband’s proficiency with languages:
The year we were in Paris, Zhongshu threw himself wholeheartedly into reading. In French, he began with the fifteenth-century poet Villon, and worked his way one by one through to the great authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In German he did the same. He read in Chinese and English every day, in French and German every other day, and later squeezed Italian into the roster.
This was a year of joy for Zhongshu, who fiercely loved reading. When we first arrived in France, we read Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary together, and many more of the words were new to him than to me. But by the end of the year, his French was miles ahead of my own.
Qian’s most famous work, 《围城》(Fortress Besieged), is a satirical modernist novel set in wartime China. Fortress Besieged bears strong imprints of the French existentialist, Sartre. The novel’s protagonist, Fang Hongjian, enters into a contentious marriage with Sun Roujia. Though both are well-meaning and good-intentioned, the couple spends much of the novel ribbing each other intentionally, insulting each other unintentionally, and eventually growing physically violent towards one another. The novel ends with Fang Hongjian realising that he is trapped in an unhappy spiral of inescapable conflict.
Reflecting on his failing marriage, Fang Hongjian thinks,
By nature, man was meant to be alone […] When we all get close together, it’s either I offend you or you insult me. People are after all like so many hedgehogs. We’ve got to keep a safe distance away from each other — that’s all there is to it. If we all clump up, I’m sure to prick your flesh, and you’re sure to tear my skin.
Knowing next to nothing about Sartre, I hand over commentary to the Chinese critics Gao Xudong and Dai Bo in this brief translation from their essay on the novel:
The existence of others is a constant threat to one’s subjectivity – I can transform others into the objects of my subjectivity, but they are capable of doing the same to me. Thus, “Hell is other people”, and marriage becomes a pitched battle in which each party involved seeks to dominate the other’s subjectivity – an inescapable fortress besieged.
And indeed, the title of Qian Zhongshu’s novel, Fortress Besieged, comes from a French proverb: ‘Marriage is like a fortress besieged; those outside want to get in, and those inside want to get out’.
3.
From this gloomy view of interpersonal interaction and marriage, one would never guess that Qian Zhongshu himself was happily married. While he was studying at Tsinghua University, he met his life partner Yang Jiang, and they wed in 1935. The couple studied abroad in Oxford and Paris together, and per Yang’s recollection:
Zhongshu and I fought once, on the ship out from China. We had a spat over the pronunciation of the French word bon. I accused him of speaking it with an imperfect accent. He disagreed, and said some really cutting things in reply. I also tried my best to hurt him.
Later I brought the matter to a French woman on the ship who spoke English. She said I was right, and Zhongshu wrong. I had won, but I felt no satisfaction; and of course Zhongshu felt none either, for he had lost.
There is a proverb that goes: “When newlyweds fight on the bow of a ship, they make up on the stern.” We soon grew bored of being on bad terms, and agreed to disagree.
But in the years following this, we never had another fight. Whenever anything important came up, it never took more than a few moments to agree on a course of action. If our opinions differed, we’d compromise — neither of us could be said to have the upper hand.
Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu’s marriage, as you see, could not have been further from Fang Hongjian and Sun Roujia’s in Fortress Besieged. I have been speaking of Yang Jiang as ‘Qian Zhongshu’s wife’, but she was a formidable intellectual in her own right. Already confident in French, English, and German, she taught herself Spanish so that she could translate Don Quixote into Chinese, and her Chinese translation is still considered the definitive one. (Don Quixote is one of the most well-known and -loved works of Western literature in Chinese.) And the couple’s daughter, Qian Yuan, born in 1937, became a professor of English literature at Beijing Normal University.
I am studying Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged for my thesis, and recently, I have been needing some light reading that is still (nominally) related to my research. So I picked up Yang Jiang’s autobiographical essay collection, 《我们仨》(We Three).
I thought We Three would be happy recollections of a family who not only loved and respected one another, but shared an intellectual common ground. What I did not know, and what I very quickly learnt within the first few pages of We Three, was that both Qian Yuan and Qian Zhongshu died within months of each other in 1997 and 1998 respectively, the daughter of spinal cancer and the father of old age. Left behind was the mother, Yang Jiang, who wrote this memoir of family life from the perspective of her new solitude.
What those last years of Qian Zhongshu and Qian Yuan’s lives must have been like for Yang Jiang — running back and forth from hospital to hospital, carrying news of an ailing father to a dying daughter, first by letter and then by word of mouth as both father and daughter grew too weak to write.
Perhaps Yang Jiang would agree with her husband, Qian Zhongshu, that ‘Hell is other people’. But only in the sense that to grow close to others leads to love, and to love leads to grief. The pages of We Three are so filled with pain that I could only take them in short doses.
But what is so poignant to me is that, despite this, We Three evinces an exactly opposite view on subjectivity as Fang Hongjian does in Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged. Yang Jiang construes herself in relation to her husband and daughter. Unlike the protagonists of Fortress Besieged, there is no erosion of subjectivity in her relationship with her family. She exists because she is part of ‘we three’, as does the rest of her family. Her subjectivity is often constructed in terms of ‘we’, not ‘I’.
Yang Jiang’s book is structured thus.
Section One: We Two Are Old.
Section Two: We Three Are Parted.
Section Three: We Three, Remembered Alone.
Section Two, ‘We Three Are Parted’, is the best of the book — a long, surrealist chapter in which Yang Jiang describes the years of her daughter’s and husband’s deaths, 1997 and 1998, as a dream sequence in which she cannot tell the truth from her nightmares, and from which she cannot wake. This sequence was agonising to read and impossible even to attempt to translate. I can only hope that someday I will have the courage, empathy, and strength to do it justice.
So I have only translated the book’s opening essay, ‘We Two Are Old’, which introduces the dream sequence in the second chapter. I have also translated the opening of Section Three: ‘We Three, Remembered Alone’.
4.
One night I had a dream. Zhongshu and I were walking together, talking and laughing, forgetful of time and distance. The sun had set and in the opaque twilight, I turned and Zhongshu was gone.
I searched high and low, but there was no trace of him. I called him, and there was no answer. I, alone, standing in the midst of the deserted fields, not knowing where he had gone. I shouted at the top of my voice: his name, his full name — and my cries fell and were swallowed by the emptiness, which returned not even an echo.
The night grew thicker; the utter silence deepened my loneliness. I strained my eyes through the layers upon layers of darkness. Beneath my feet was a dirt path; beside me there was a wood and running water, but I could not see how wide the stream was, nor a way across it. I turned and through the darkness saw a village, houses and barns, as if there had once been people living there, but very long ago, for there was no sign of light or life.
Had Zhongshu gone on home first? Well, then I had to go home to find him. As I was pondering how best to return, an old man pulling a rickshaw appeared – and I actually managed to hail him. But when I opened my mouth to tell him to take me home, no sound would come.
And then my fear woke me, and Zhongshu was by my side, sleeping soundly.
I tossed and turned half the night till Zhongshu woke and asked me what the matter was. I told him I had had a dream — and I told him what had happened in the dream. I accused him of leaving me, of going off on his own without a word or sound. And, thus awoken, he made no excuses for himself. He said, comfortingly, that it was a dream old people often had. He had had it himself, many times.
That is true, for I have had the same dream since, many times. The same dream — though it happens in different places. We two, walking together, till Zhongshu vanishes in the blink of an eye. I ask everyone around me — ‘Have you seen my husband?’ — and no one replies. Or I seek him, high and low, and every path I find leads nowhere; or I am waiting at the bus stop for a late bus home that never comes. In these dreams, through my fear, I have one blurred impression: If I can find Zhongshu, we can go home.
Perhaps Zhongshu still remembers how I woke him that first night with my complaints. For he has left me to dream a journey of ten thousand miles.
5.
In the following translation from the final section of We Three, ‘We Three, Remembered Alone’, I have paid special attention to Yang Jiang’s use of pronouns. I have made a special distinction between her use of ‘我们仨’ (which I have translated as ‘we three’) and her use of ‘我们三个’ (which I have translated as ‘the three of us’). I believe there is a crucial difference between the two that I have tried my best to preserve in translation.
The apartment at Sanlihe was once my home, because we three lived there. We three are parted, and it is home no more. I am the only one left, and I am old; I am a weary traveller at sunset, with nowhere to go. Meandering at the end of time, what can I do but exclaim: “Life is like a dream”?
And yet though I speak so now, I do not say that my life has been an empty one. I have lived a full life, a life of meaning, because we three lived life together. Or to put it another way, because we three were we three, not one of us lived in vain.
‘We three’ — how ordinary a phrase. Which family has not a husband, a wife, and children? A husband and wife, and children — that makes ‘the three of us’, or ‘the four of us’, or even ‘the five of us’, depending on the family.
This particular ‘three of us’, our particular family, was the simplest of all. We asked nothing of the world and had no quarrel with anyone. All we wanted was to be together and to stay together, each doing what they could to the best of their ability. Zhongshu and I faced all our troubles together and so every burden was lightened. And with our helpmate and companion, Ah Yuan, each sorrow was transformed into a joy, and the smallest of happinesses grew exquisite.
So we were no ordinary ‘we three’.
Now the three of us are parted. The past is past and the dead are gone. What is left — that is, I — can never find them again. All I can do is to revisit the years we spent together — and seek, in this way, a kind of reunion.
|
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21594
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yago
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0
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|
http://www.china.org.cn/chinese/catl/en/2016-05/25/content_38534176.htm
|
en
|
Famous writer and translator Yang Jiang dies at 105
|
http://images.china.cn/site1007/2016-05/25/b8aeedd12cd918af97f601.jpg
|
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2016-05-25T00:00:00
| null |
Famous Chinese playwright, writer and translator Yang Jiang, the widow of Chinese literary giant Qian Zhongshu, died Wednesday morning in Beijing. She was 105.
People's Literature Publishing House has confirmed the news to media but said that Madame Yang requested that her obituary only be issued after her cremation.
Yang Jiang, famous Chinese playwright, writer and translator. [File photo]
Yang Jiang was born Yang Jikang on July 17, 1911 in Beijing. After graduating from Soochow University in 1932, Yang Jiang enrolled in the graduate school of Tsinghua University where she met her husband Qian Zhongshu.
From 1935 to 1938, they went to Oxford University and Panthéon-Sorbonne University for further study and had their daughter Qian Yuan. They returned to China in 1938. Both Yang and Qian went into academics and made important contributions to the development of Chinese culture.
Yang wrote several successful comedies, one of which, "As You Wish It" has been shown on the stage for more than 60 years. She was the first Chinese person to translate a complete Chinese version of "Don Quixote" from the Spanish original, which had sold more than 700,000 copies in China by 2014.
She wrote a memoir called "We Three," which was published in 2003, recalling her husband and her daughter Qian Yuan (1937–1997), who died of cancer one year before her father's death. The book sold more than 1 million copies.
Even as recently as 2014, at the age of 103, Yang published a new novel "After Baptism." All her works were included in a comprehensive collection of 9 volumes and 2.7 million words.
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21594
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https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/636
|
en
|
Interviews with Yang Jiang
|
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2006-06-01T00:00:00+02:00
|
Yang Jiang was born, under her real name of Yang Jikang, in 1911. She is the author of a novel, several plays, and a large number of sanwen. Her first writing dates back to 1933, and her latest work, Women sa (We Three), in which she recalls family memories, appeared in July 2003, and has been highly successful, with 180,000 copies sold within two months. However, for thirty years, from 1949 to 1981, for obvious reasons, Yang Jiang preferred to devote herself entirely to teaching, research—she is also an expert on Chinese and foreign literature—, and translation: she is the translator, most notably, of the Chinese version of Don Quixote. She is now devoting herself to the publication of the work of her husband, the scholar Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998). In France she is best known for her narratives of the Cultural Revolution, published by Christian Bourgois.The two interviews that follow were carried out in 2005. Yang Jiang gave written answers to the questions I had sent her, which explains the slightly abrupt nature of our exchanges, given that it was not possible for me, by the nature of the interviews, to respond spontaneously to her words. If we seem to jump from one subject to another, it is because I had asked her to clarify certain details that I planned to use in my research into her work (« La Figure de l’intellectuel chez Yang Jiang » [“The Intellectual in The Work of Yang Jiang”], which became my doctoral thesis in Chinese Studies, under the direction of Isabelle Rabut, Inalco, Paris, December 2005, 404 pp.). Yet, to me, these words of Yang Jiang are of interest just as they are, since she uses words so sparingly and generally refuses to do interviews. In any case, and I am grateful to her for this, she only allowed these words to be published precisely because she had written them herself.
|
en
|
http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/636
|
“Adversity makes you strong” (written on January 1st 2005)
1Apart from Recovering Footsteps, The Shadow and The Art of Listening, were your other sanwen [prose texts that are not fictional, and not really essays] published at the time, in the 1930s and 1940s?
2Yang Jiang – All my sanwen were first published individually, and then brought together in collections. The publisher Renmin wenxue has just brought out a Collected Works of Yang Jiang in eight volumes: the first four are devoted to my own works, and the other four to my translations. There is also a preface and some biographical information, which I wrote, and to which you can refer.
3Li Jianwu [(1906-1982), a well-known literary critic, playwright and translator, who made available to Chinese readers the works of Flaubert, Stendhal and Molière], in an article written in 1944, referred to your comedy Truth Becomes Falsehood. Do you know where this article was published?
4If I remember correctly Li Jianwu said that Truth Becomes Falsehood would “be a milestone in the history of comedy”. It was probably in some sort of publicity, but I don't remember in which article it appeared.
5The script of your third comedy, Having Fun In This World, seems to have been lost. Did you ever find it again?
6It was the famous Yao Ke who directed it, but the script was unsatisfactory, so I destroyed it myself. I did not want it to survive.
7What is your favourite among all your works?
8I do not have a favourite.
9Is there anything that you regret in your life?
10Not having been able to study literature at Qinghua University, and having instead studied politics at Dongwu University.
11Do you have any religious beliefs?
12I do not practise any religion, but I am not wholly an atheist. I believe in God and in Man, in his ability to do good.
13I have the impression that in your work you are mainly concerned with Man and human morality, rather than criticising society, politics or the system. Is that so?
14Yes.
15You do not take delight in heroism, or in idealism, but at the same time you believe in the power of Man. And that power does not lie in convincing others, or in changing the world, but rather in adapting oneself to people and to situations (in particular unfavourable situations), in order to live better and to serve society as best one can. Am I right?
16Yes. But the most important thing is not to adapt to the demands of society, but to excel oneself. Difficulties are revelatory [of one's true character]; “adversity” makes one strong.
17In at least two of your essays, one comes across the expression “Western humanism”. What in your opinion most distinguishes “Western humanism” from “Eastern humanism”?
18They are identical.
19It is said that the writers whose style is closest to yours are, among foreign writers, Jane Austen, and among Chinese writers, Ling Shuhua. Do you agree?
20No.
21You have mastered several foreign languages and you have extensive knowledge of foreign literatures and cultures. But despite this, you seem to have remained a pure traditional Chinese scholar, of whom very few are to be found nowadays. Am I right?
22Yes, that's true.
23Your philosophy of life is closer to that of the traditional scholars, like Chen Yinge, Lin Yutang—and of course Qian Zhongshu—, and even to that of the scholars of ancient times: Su Dongpo and Tao Yuanming.
24I love Su Dongpo, he is the most humane of all. I also admire Tao Yuanming for his great strength of spirit. I am not sufficiently familiar with the other scholars you mention.
25We know that it was a private tutor, and then his uncle, who taught classical Chinese to Qian Zhongshu. Where did you study the classic texts, and in what circumstances?
26I studied them by myself, which is why I do not feel very qualified on the subject.
27In We Three, you recall that you were registered at the Sorbonne in the 1930s. Do you remember what was to be the subject of your thesis?
28The French novel.
29If at some point in your life, you had had to choose between your work and your family, would you have sacrificed everything to follow your career?
30Fortunately, I was born into a harmonious household, and later the little family that I formed with my husband and daughter was a happy one. I never had any thought of abandoning it. I have never had to choose between my professional activities and my family life.
31What do you see as the meaning of existence?
32To try to be someone of value, not to waste one's life.
33What kind of people do you like best?
34All people, whatever their age or social position. All people are kind.
35And which do you hate the most?
36Those who hate me. I hate them too.
“My way of living is also a product of Confucianism” (written on July 28th 2005)
37I am wondering at present about the things which have influenced your personality: your innate intelligence, the upbringing your parents gave you, the education you received at school, your knowledge of Chinese and Western cultures (in particular those classical), the influence that your teachers and friends have had on you, as well as Qian Zhongshu, and also the experiences you have lived through. My conclusion is that the most important thing has been your innate intelligence.
38Yang Jiang – I do not think that I was a child prodigy, I was just a little better than average. I was lucky enough to be born into a family that did not consider men to be superior to women. As a child I was educated by my father with great care. What he wanted, even if he never expressed it in these words, was for me to know how to think independently and to show iron determination.
39Several well-known personalities in modern Chinese history, who also have extensive knowledge of Western and Chinese cultures, have said that the time they spent living abroad allowed them better to appreciate classical Chinese culture. Do you share this feeling?
40My studies abroad were only a continuation of the studies I had done in China. In the suitcases we took with us [she and Qian Zhongshu], there were above all the Chinese classics. We read them conscientiously every day, without exception. When I was in secondary school, the school accorded more importance to mathematics, physics or English classes, and our Chinese teacher was often badly treated by the pupils. My grounding in classical Chinese is not very solid, and I have always, right up to this day, sought to improve it. I find that those who have no knowledge of any foreign language are often extremists, either on the far Left or ultra conservative.
41You say that you believe in God. When did you begin to believe, and in what circumstances? Is this in some way related to the Qiming school, which you attended, and which was run by foreign missionaries?
42My primary school was run by Catholics, and my university by Christians. But the schools had no influence on my beliefs, and I am not a believer [in the strict sense of the word]. My faith has not been influenced by anybody, it arose and strengthened itself by experience, through reading and rereading, and by long and mature reflection.
43In the thesis I am writing about you, I describe you as a traditional Chinese intellectual, steeped in humanism. This is because I see that in your individual way of being you behave like a Confucian, and like a Taoist where society is concerned. And you have a marked propensity to advocate humanism. Do you agree?
44I almost agree with you. Except that I think my way of living, as well my individual behaviour is Confucian. The book I most admire is the Analects of Confucius. Confucius, to me, is the greatest of the humanists.
45Translated from the French original by Michael Black
46Works of Yang Jiang translated into English:
|
||||||
21594
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|
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7312/dent17008-030/pdf
|
en
|
29. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Literary Marriage
|
https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780231541145/product
|
https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780231541145/product
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2016-04-05T00:00:00
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29. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Literary Marriage was published in The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature on page 231.
|
en
|
/assets/images/ec7d7606b4e2f3f921b5e1700948efb6-favicon.ico
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De Gruyter
|
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7312/dent17008-030/pdf
|
Rea, Christopher. "29. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Literary Marriage". The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, edited by Kirk A. Denton, New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2016, pp. 231-236. https://doi.org/10.7312/dent17008-030
Rea, C. (2016). 29. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Literary Marriage. In K. Denton (Ed.), The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (pp. 231-236). New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/dent17008-030
Rea, C. 2016. 29. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Literary Marriage. In: Denton, K. ed. The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, pp. 231-236. https://doi.org/10.7312/dent17008-030
Rea, Christopher. "29. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Literary Marriage" In The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature edited by Kirk A. Denton, 231-236. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.7312/dent17008-030
Rea C. 29. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Literary Marriage. In: Denton K (ed.) The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press; 2016. p.231-236. https://doi.org/10.7312/dent17008-030
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China’s Literary Cosmopolitans: Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the World of Letters
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Edited by Christopher Rea Reviewed by Inhye Han MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2016) In May 2016, writers, critics, and lay readers in China and the world mourned the passin…
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https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/inhyehan/
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Edited by Christopher Rea
Reviewed by Inhye Han
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2016)
In May 2016, writers, critics, and lay readers in China and the world mourned the passing of the literary master Yang Jiang (1911-2016), a playwright, novelist, and translator who had gained significant fame and popularity in China and other countries. Her husband, Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998), whose depth and breadth of knowledge of literature, philosophy, and history were matched by few scholars, achieved a critical reputation earlier than Yang for his fiction, essays, and monumental works of literary criticism. China’s Literary Cosmopolitans is a timely volume illuminating previously under-examined critical dimensions of Yang’s and Qian’s works. Editor Christopher Rea skillfully reveals the modern and Eurocentric roots of the provincial/cosmopolitan divide, demonstrating the ways in which the Chinese and the cosmopolitan intersect. Rea argues that, while there were multiple forms of cosmopolitan practices in post WWII China—for example, 1950s’ internationalist cosmopolitanism and the Mao period’s prescriptive cosmopolitanism—Yang and Qian introduced yet another type, lifestyle cosmopolitanism. Where literati are concerned, lifestyle cosmopolitanism is characterized by the unity of a person’s texts and character (morals, ethics, etc.). Postcolonial studies scholars have sought to theorize a cosmopolitanism that is not based on the concept of a “citizen of the world,” arguing that cosmopolitanism should be conceptualized not as an idea but as infinite ways of being (Bhabha et al. 2002, 12). This volume is a testament to Yang’s and Qian’s lifestyle cosmopolitanism as the best possible lived embodiment of such infinite ways of being.
Theodore Huters’ chapter on Qian’s Fortress Besieged discerns a cosmopolitan quality of his work with extraordinary acumen. He first surveys the landscape of contemporary debates on cosmopolitanism, which center on the rift between cosmopolitanism as a new ethic following the failure of Enlightenment humanism and cosmopolitanism as rhetoric masking “the depravities of global capitalism and universalism, and the elitism of aesthetic distance” (212). A critical question Huters raises is whether any cosmopolitan pursuit in literary practice could transcend the opposing ends of elitist aloofness and capitalist-colonial drives. Fortress Besieged, Huters argues, offers an answer to that question. The novel’s foremost concern is the issue of taste and aesthetic judgment; yet unlike the British novel of manners, it refuses to provide its readers with solid moral or intellectual grounds for appraising taste. In a somewhat Kantian approach that brackets cognitive concerns (true versus false) and ethical ones (good versus bad) to tackle matters of taste (pleasant versus unpleasant),[1] Huters argues that Qian likewise separates the pleasant from the good, satirizing any attempt to associate better taste with superior morality. Fortress Besieged’s aesthetic stance nevertheless overcomes elitist aloofness, because its story later unbrackets the ethical domain in a radical manner. The text grapples with ethical concerns only to blur the boundary between good and bad and dispel the idea of an unchanging, stable world. Qian thus consciously brackets and unbrackets the aesthetic and ethical domains, creating a literary model that overcomes pitfalls of contemporary cosmopolitan practices.
Carlos Rojas’ “How to Do Things with Words” brilliantly and powerfully probes Yang Jiang’s translations to reveal an extraordinary quality that realizes the best sense of cosmopolitanism. Rojas’ mastery of Spanish and Chinese enables him to identify a critical dimension of Yang Jiang’s rendition of Don Quixote. Yang approaches translation as a practice of transformation that produces meanings not inherent in an original text. Rather than obscuring the inevitable “errors” of translation, Rojas points out, Yang makes use of the error or gap between source and target text as “a space of creative articulation and critical intervention” (91). From this standpoint, a translation practice parallels a perlocutionary act that not only conveys information but also affects listeners. Whereas classic perlocutionary theory proposes a felicity of speech and an actual situation as a condition of words’ real effect on listeners, in Don Quixote “it is precisely infelicity of the speech act that grants it its (imaginary) perlocutionary force” (100). Both “errors” emerging from Yang’s translation and Don Quixote’s own misreading engender unintended yet creative consequences for Yang’s audience and the people whom Don Quixote encounters, respectively. Since this kind of translation and creative misreading focus on difference between how a text is written and read, I would add that Yang’s practice also resonates with Ackbar Abbas’s concept of cosmopolitanism as cultural arbitrage with difference (Abbas 2002: 226). Abbas argues that cosmopolitanism should be reckoned a cultural arbitrageur, as opposed to a universalist arbiter of value. Yang’s translations illustrate this arbitrating role, using meta-textual pun, allusion, and strategic transliteration to produce creative differences between original text and translation. In this chapter, Rojas also highlights a political dimension of translating under an authoritarian party-state regime, pointing to Yang’s choice of genre (picaresque), theme (counter-hegemonic ethos), and philosophy of translation.
Amy Dooling’s “Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies” investigates plays Yang wrote in the 1940s, when Shanghai was occupied by Japan and circumstances were grim and abject. Despite the political urgency of her time, Yang’s works are conspicuously removed from political references, engaging exclusively with the psychology of characters, who are the “new women” of China. Unlike the May Fourth–era literature, Yang’s plays attend to predicaments of new women who fail to attain self-fulfillment despite their defiant assertion of autonomy. All of Yang’s plays whose scripts are extant—Heart’s Desire (1942), Forging the Truth (1943), and Sporting with the World (1944)—fall into the comedy genre centering on the mischievous actions or selfish delusion of new women characters. The plays comically portray the demise of new women in China due to their self-absorbed idealism. Dooling stresses that Yang’s wartime plays are highly critical of individual ambition built on romantic idealism. By examining the intersections of the new woman issue, wartime literature, comic stage plays, and politics, Dooling masterfully illuminates the ingenious literary achievements of Yang’s dramas, although it is unclear how her chapter fits into the overarching cosmopolitan theme of this book.
Jesse Field’s chapter concerns Yang Jiang’s memoir We Three (2003) and her translation of Phaedo (2000), casting light on a distinctive quality of Yang’s cosmopolitanism by drawing on Berlant’s celebrated concept of an intimate public that emerges through shared political experiences. Literature based on those experiences expresses a specific history and simultaneously shapes its audience’s sense of belonging to that history. Despite the centrality of national political events in the emergence of an intimate public, Field boldly argues that an intimate public identity in China’s post-1999 period hinges on a contra-national, cosmopolitan sensibility. Yang’s writings not only recount but also recalibrate thoughts and feelings about the semicolonial Republican period, the Mao era, and the subsequent authoritarian regimes, dispelling [false] dichotomies between the political and the apolitical, the national and the cosmopolitan. Field skillfully demonstrates that Yang’s literary practice has the quality of engaging with the nation and the world simultaneously, thus enabling the constitution of a new intimate public.
Christopher Rea’s chapter, “The Institutional Mindset,” demonstrates that Qian and Yang set an example by using the institutions of marriage and the academy to practice the values of authenticity, independence, and devotion throughout politically tumultuous periods. Qian and Yang frequently tackled problematic issues in the concepts and praxis of marriage and the academy in their writings as well, examining the institutions’ ambivalent nature as both refuge and bondage. Their work and their lifestyle, Rea argues, exemplify how the two writers distanced themselves from social institutions, including the nation, and circumvented the “obsession with China.” However, owing to their belonging to those same institutions, both writers were unable to entirely free themselves from the related state-imposed ideology and cultural practices, and their ambivalence toward this conundrum conditioned their vision of cosmopolitanism and its limits. Despite a few instances in which they acquiesced to nationalist practices, Qian and Yang demonstrated the ways in which powerless individuals can deflect institutional power without leaving institutions and how one can escape the nation without leaving it. That is to say, within their institutional belonging and mindset, they managed to manipulate nationalist state apparatuses to their own ends, rather than being subjected to them, opening up a new dimension of cosmopolitanism. Rea’s chapter constitutes a convincing argument for his coining of the term “lifestyle cosmopolitanism” to categorize the through-line of Qian’s and Yang’s marriage, scholarship, and writings.
Ronald Egan’s “Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution,” highlights the striking depth and breadth of Qian’s 1979 Guanzhui bian.[2] Guanzhui bian, a five-volume compendium for which Qian consulted and quoted sources in six different languages, glosses nearly the entire corpus of “classic” Chinese literature and philosophy and their counterparts in the Western tradition. Although the compendium’s exegetical practice may appear to be apolitical, Egan’s analysis uncovers Qian’s hidden criticism of literary modes prescribed by the CCP; Qian’s groundbreaking engagements with the classics went against the Mao era’s condemnation of virtually everything traditional. Qian’s Guanzhui bian, Egan argues, epitomizes a cosmopolitan practice of “striking a connection” (datong) between Chinese and Western writing, a feat that only a few scholars thoroughly versed in both cultures could do. This kind of China-West trans-critique is radical in that it refutes the hegemonic idea of Qian’s time that China was feudal, backward, and incommensurable with the West.
In “Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction,” Judith Armory argues that Yang Jiang’s Taking a Bath (1987) is thematically intertwined with eighteenth-century British novels, especially the works of Jane Austen and Henry Fielding. She bases her comparison on three pieces of evidence. First, Yang Jiang herself wrote criticism on Fielding and Austen in 1957 and 1982, respectively. Second, Fielding viewed the novel genre as a comic epic, which, in Amory’s view, is an apt classification for Taking a Bath as well. Third, Fielding and Austen wrote novels not only to provide cathartic experiences for their readers but also to urge them to seek more virtuous lives, as seen in their shared recurring theme of the self-refinement of an honorable individual. In the same vein, Taking a Bath grapples with the intricate dynamics between falsehood and honesty, self-deception and self-knowledge, and state-coerced reformation versus self-reformation. One question that arises from Amory’s analysis is whether Yang’s meditation on the subject of self-reformation in Taking a Bath is solely due to her appreciation of eighteenth-century British novels. In his later chapter, Huters casts doubt on criticism that asserts a strong affinity between the British novel of manners and Qian’s Fortress Besieged. I would likewise contend that perceived thematic and generic similarities between Austen/Fielding and Yang provide a weak basis on which to claim that the former decisively influences the latter. After all, the eighteenth-century British novel of manners is only one of many genres that satirizes the absurdities of a given society and motivates readers to live a more ethical life. I believe that Taking a Bath is cosmopolitan not because of British writers’ impact on Yang, but, in part, because the theme of self-refinement toward a more virtuous life is prevalent around the world long before the eighteenth century (most notably in Yang’s case, self refinement/self cultivation is a key concept from the Confucian tradition).
Wendy Larson’s chapter “Pleasures of Lying Low” examines Yang Jiang’s novels Taking a Bath and Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School (1981), which depict life under the authoritarian CCP regime. Larson contends that Chinese intellectuals, including Yang, neither resisted nor collaborated with the Mao regime, but mostly accommodated to its regulations. Comparable to Amory’s argument, Larson points to similarities between the Western comedy of manners and Yang’s two novels and argues that “[Yang’s] insistence on using the comedy of manners betrays her unquestioned embrace of the detached and objective literary cosmopolitan ideal” (156). In her other literary and critical works, however, Yang hardly seems to assume that any literary cosmopolitan ideal could be objective. More important, even similarities in terms of tone, style, and theme fail to prove what Larson avers to be Yang’s “insistence on using the comedy of manners.” In the absence of significant examples of intertextual references or allusions, such affinities are likely to be coincidental. Furthermore, the kind of cosmopolitanism that Yang (and Qian) created does not stem simply from their firsthand experiences abroad and command of foreign languages and Western forms and styles of literature. Larson further claims, “They [Chinese critics favorable to Yang Jiang] admire her move away from a narrow ethnic focus on Chinese qualities and toward a universal emphasis on humanity in general, and away from politics toward art” (154). Whereas Larson conflates the cosmopolitan and the universal, I believe that the two should be distinguished, because the cosmopolitan represents a middle ground for holding a critical tension between the universal and the particular. Furthermore, I would argue that Yang’s work is a powerful counterexample to the Eurocentric and false notion that ethnic concerns are parochial. Yang instead reconfigures the dichotomy between the provincial and the cosmopolitan, demonstrating that literature and politics are not two contending poles a writer and intellectual must choose between. Larson’s chapter provides much food for thought, although her somewhat narrow view of the “the detached and objective literary cosmopolitan ideal” sits uneasily with the volume’s stance toward the Eurocentric roots of the provincial/cosmopolitan divide and stress on the multiple forms of cosmopolitan practices in post WWII China.
Yugen Wang’s chapter differs from the others in its focus on Qian’s relationship to the classical Chinese literary tradition, rather than his intertextual engagement with foreign texts and traditions. Although the author superbly explicates the ingenious qualities of Qian’s exegeses, he does not consider, except briefly in his conclusion, how a Chinese writer-scholar’s glossing of Chinese classics could be a cosmopolitan practice. Wang misses (or perhaps only gestures towards) an opportunity here, for one could indeed claim that the exegesis of classical Chinese texts during the Mao era was a way of being abroad at home, i.e., a cosmopolitan practice. As most of the contributors to this volume show, cosmopolitanism is more a way of being, a lifestyle, or a socio-cultural intervention than a fixed idea, more of a practice than a proposition or static position. Under Mao’s authoritarian regime, in which virtually everything associated with “traditional” values was deprecated, to embrace premodern poetry and delve into its unarticulated meanings was a gesture countering a prescriptive way of being an intellectual-scholar and a pioneering way “of being different beings simultaneously” (Bhabha et al. 2002: 11).
To conclude, this edited volume makes a crucial contribution to the fields of Chinese studies and literary studies by offering a new model for theorizing cosmopolitanism outside a Eurocentric paradigm, built on meticulous analyses of Qian’s and Yang’s works. As Ackbar Abbas has argued, cosmopolitan practice should no longer be “simply a matter of behaving well or even of an openness to otherness. … not … a universalist arbiter of value, but … an arbitrageur/ arbitrageuse. This is arbitrage with a difference” (2002: 226). Rather than striving to emulate putative universals, Qian and Yang made use of them to engender productive differences and incorporate them into their society under authoritarian restrictions. As readers or critics this should inspire us to articulate the kinds of differences Qian’s and Yang’s cultural arbitrage brings about, rather than assessing their degree of openness toward foreign ideas and discourses. Most chapters from this volume indeed identify what those differences are, demonstrating how Yang’s and Qian’s literary and critical practices produced a new cultural dimension of cosmopolitan. China’s Literary Cosmopolitanism will be an indispensable text for scholars seeking to investigate the relationship between the provincial and the cosmopolitan, the particular and the universal, literature and politics, and the nation and the world.
Inhye Han ifinahan@ewha.ac.kr
Humanities Korea Research Professor
Ewha Womans University
References
Abbas, Ackbar. 2002. “Cosmopolitan de-scriptions: Shanghai and Hong Kong.” In Carol Breckenridge, ed., Cosmopolitanism. Durham: Duke University Press, 209-228.
Karatani Kojin. 1998. “Uses of Aesthetics: After Orientalism.” Boundary 2 25 (2): 145-160.
Bhabha, Homi, Carol Breckenridge, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sheldon Pollock. 2002. “Cosmopolitanisms.” In Cosmopolitanism, edited by Carol Breckenridge, 1-14. Durham: Duke University Press.
Breckenridge, Carol, ed. 2002. Cosmopolitanism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Notes:
[1] Karatani 1998, 148—149
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CHINA’S LITERARY COSMOPOLITANS: Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the World of Letters | Edited by Christopher Rea
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Richard King
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Pacific Affairs (UBC Journal)
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https://pacificaffairs.ubc.ca/book-reviews/chinas-literary-cosmopolitans-qian-zhongshu-yang-jiang-and-the-world-of-letters-edited-by-christopher-rea/
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Sinica Leidensia, v.125. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015. x, 263 pp. US$142.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-04-29996-2.
Qian Zhongshu, fiction writer, literary critic, and antiquarian, and his wife Yang Jiang, playwright, translator, memoirist and fiction writer, were the power couple of late republican Chinese intelligentsia. Both were born in the last months of the empire; they married in their early twenties after meeting as students at Qinghua University in Beijing. They were grounded in Chinese scholarly traditions before leaving for Europe, studying in Oxford and Paris, and they became literary celebrities after their return to China in 1938, Yang first as a dramatist writing comedies in wartime Shanghai, and Qian with the success of his novel Weicheng (Fortress Besieged) in 1947. Declining opportunities to teach overseas, they remained in China following communist victory in 1949, suffering the strictures common to the established intellectuals in the Mao era, working in relative obscurity as translators, while Qian conducted his research on Chinese literature and philosophy. They returned to something like their former prominence after the Cultural Revolution, with Yang publishing a celebrated memoir of their “cadre school” incarceration in 1981 and her only novel, Xizao (Taking a Bath), in 1988. Following Qian Zhongshu’s death in 1998, Yang Jiang wrote extensively about their lives together and with their daughter, continuing her creative work well into her eleventh decade.
This collection of essays by a distinguished group of scholars has its origins in a 2010 symposium hosted by Christopher Rea to celebrate the lives of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang. The book presents Qin and Yang as Chinese cosmopolitans, who wrote in China on Chinese subjects with a perspective informed by their sensitivity to the culture of Western Europe, particularly, as Judith Amory observes, that of the eighteenth-century novel. They were, like all intellectuals in the Mao-era People’s Republic, employed by the state, Qian working on the English version of Mao’s Selected Works and Yang translating European picaresque novels from English, French, and Spanish, but they managed to keep their distance from the turmoil of their times. Wendy Larson suggests that Yang Jiang’s later writings “present the ideal of a detached, cosmopolitan, and universal creative intellectual who imagines himself or herself not so much part of political society as floating in … the ‘autonomy of the aesthetic sphere.’” (135) References to the moment in their Mao-era works are private and oblique: Yugen Wang, in his chapter on Qian Zhongshu’s poetry, written in classical Chinese, quotes a poem written in 1957, on the eve of the Anti-rightist campaign and the Great Leap, which ends with elegantly haunting lines anticipating the trouble to come: “From distant skies comes the muffled roll of thunder./ Falling leaves tumble about in the air; the winds gusting every which way;/ Cooing mountain doves suddenly fall silent; the storm approaches” (47). Through much of the Cultural Revolution, Qian was as aloof as could be managed from the upheaval around him, writing critical essays on premodern Chinese literature and philosophy, the Guanshi bian (literally “Tube and Awl Collection,” also translated as “Limited Views”), analyzed here by Ronald Egan.
Their determined detachment from politics, even while they were undergoing (entirely unsuccessful) socialist re-education in their cadre-school, is recorded by Yang Jiang in her celebrated 1981 work Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School (Ganxiao liu ji). The memoir is modelled on the Qing dynasty memoir Six Chapters of a Floating Life, whose author Shen Fu recorded his love for his wife in vignettes of their time together. Like Shen Fu’s, Yang’s memoir takes delight in small things—clandestine meetings with her husband, a relationship with a dog—and its restraint is remarkable, given that it was written at a time when other memoirists from the intellectual class, also returning from a decade and more of ostracism, were bitterly cataloguing the abuses they had suffered at the hands of red guards and opportunistic colleagues.
For all the variety of their literary output, Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang will likely be remembered most fondly for their single novels, Qian’s Fortress Besieged and Yang’s Taking a Bath, written forty years apart. Qian’s novel is set in the chaos of late republican China and Yang’s in the decade that followed it, the early years of the People’s Republic. Both concern the misadventures of intellectual classes in their natural habitats, the college and the research institute. In Qian’s novel, a returned student with a fraudulent degree finds a position in a dubious college in the interior, and in Yang’s, colleagues at a research institute connive and betray to maintain their status and employment. The influence of the European novel of manners is noted here, though surprisingly not that of the eighteenth-century Chinese comic masterwork Rulin waishsi (Unofficial history of the scholars), which covers much of the same terrain for the late imperial period. In his chapter on Qian Zhongshu, T.D. Huters finds possible inspiration for Fortress Besieged closer to hand, for its author at least, in the satirical novels of Evelyn Waugh, popular while Qian and Yang were at Oxford; Huters further notes a similarity to Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, written a decade after Fortress Besieged, and similarly set amongst the lecturing fraternity. Qian and Yang’s novels share the territory of the contemporary Anglo-American university novel, of which Lucky Jim is an early example and the novels of David Lodge the best-known examples from the late twentieth century: Chinese and Western authors alike offer tales of inadequacy and pretention, shabby romance and petty jealousy, in a genre that veers from farce to black humour and always has time to expose the vaingloriousness of scholars.
Fortress Besieged and Taking a Bath are available in English; those wishing to read more of Yang Jiang in translation can refer to a special edition of Renditions (no. 76, 2011) released to coincide with the author’s hundredth birthday.
There is more to appreciate in this collection, including chapters on Yang Jiang’s plays and translations, and another on her family memoir We Three (Women sa). China’s Literary Cosmopolitans offers both a valuable introduction to two outstanding cultural figures, and innovative scholarship on aspects of their work which have previously received less scholarly attention.
Richard King
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
pp. 131-133
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Yang Jiang dies at 104 (7)
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2016-06-03T00:00:00
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And more on remembering Yang Jiang from China Daily here: Source: China Daily (6/1/16) She followed her heart By Yang Yang (China Daily) Yang Jiang will long be remembered for her witty writing an…
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MCLC Resource Center
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https://u.osu.edu/mclc/2016/06/03/yang-jiang-dies-at-104-7/
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And more on remembering Yang Jiang from China Daily here: http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/culture/2016-05/26/content_25478972.htm–Kirk
Source: China Daily (6/1/16)
She followed her heart
By Yang Yang (China Daily)
Yang Jiang will long be remembered for her witty writing and popular translations, but her independent outlook may be her greatest legacy, Yang Yang reports.
Among all the apartments in the 19 three-story buildings near Yuyuantan Park in Beijing, only one has maintained its original look, with neither interior decoration nor the balcony being enclosed with glass.
The apartment in Nanshagou Community, where the famed Chinese writer and translator Yang Jiang lived until her death on May 25 at the age of 104, is typical of her modesty. The space is almost unadorned-whitewalls, cement flooring, an old-fashioned sofa and desks worn by years of use.
Yang and her equally famous husband, Qian Zhongshu, moved into the unit in 1977, just after the “cultural revolution” (1966-76). But Yang lived there alone for nearly two decades after the deaths of Qian and their only daughter, Qian Yuan. While the couple had become household names in the 1980s, they were always indifferent to fame or wealth, and few reporters or readers managed to visit them.
Well-known for her subtle and witty writing style, Yang wrote her first play in 1941. A prolific writer, she became famous for her novels, essays, plays and translated works. Her most popular novel, Baptism, was translated into English, French and Italian. It depicts a group of intellectuals from the old society adjusting to a new one in the early 1950s.
Yang never stopped writing. At 94, she started writing a book Walking onto the Brink of Life to reflect on her life, which won China’s top book award in 2007. At 100, she was still writing articles for newspapers.
Qian Zhongshu, meanwhile, was a renowned scholar and author of the best-selling novel Fortress Besieged.
Obviously, Yang did not live a simple life because she was poor. In 2001, on behalf of her family she set up a scholarship fund at Tsinghua University, where the couple had studied and worked, to encourage students, especially those from poor families, to read. They donated all their royalties, which totaled more than 24 million yuan ($3.7 million) over the years.
Chen Pingyuan, a professor at Peking University, remembers a woman whose achievements had come despite the turmoils of the collapse of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), China’s civil war and the “cultural revolution”.
In an article mourning Yang’s death, he writes that “the older generations had experienced much fiercer waves, but many of them stood up. They read books out of interest, were led by their hearts, and never followed the stream. Although they had to compromise to some extent, they kept their honesty,which is not really easy”.
Born Yang Jikang in 1911, the year China’s feudal empire collapsed, she faced tough years before and after the founding of New China.Whether living in poverty or affluence, however, Yang always followed her heart, living a simple and honest life.
Yang was raised in a family of open-minded intellectuals. Her father, Yang Yinhang, a renowned wit and intellect from Wuxi, Jiangsu province, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a master’s degree in law. The fourth daughter in the family, she and her sisters were all sent by her father to good schools to receive a Western-style education. Later she would adopt the pen name Yang Jiang.
Like her father, Yang Jiang turned out to be a person of spirit, good at both Chinese and English. She had long known what she wanted – to study arts at Tsinghua University.
“Initially I chose arts because I was determined to read good novels from home and abroad to understand the art of fiction writing, so that I could write good fiction,” she wrote in the preface to The Complete Collection of Yang Jiang.
Her happy marriage with Qian Zhongshu was another example of her free thinking and independence- the two bookworms met in 1932 at Tsinghua by coincidence and quickly fell in love. Their love never weakened. After getting married, in 1935 the couple went to Britain and studied at Oxford University, returning to China three years later.
By 1952, the couple was working in the Institute of Foreign Literature under China Academy of Social Sciences.
At that time, women in China started to wear Lenin-style clothes－gray double-breasted shirts and long trousers,with a leather belt fastened around the waist, a symbol of the equality of the working class. Yang, however, still wore a slim qipao, took a rickshaw and held a parasol over her head.
During the “cultural revolution” (1966-76), many intellectuals were forced to “disclose” each other’s “guilt”. Yang, already denounced as a “devil”, was put on stage to face her husband’s accusers. “It’s not the truth! It’s not the truth!” she repeated, stamping her foot, recalled Ye Tingfang, researcher at the Institute of Foreign Literature at China Academy of Social Sciences, where the couple worked.
In the late 1960s, intellectuals at the institute were sent to the countryside to work, and Qian and Yang, almost 60, were among them.
Yang later compiled her stories of that time into a book, Six Chapters of My Life “Downunder”.
Lu Jiande, deputy director of the institute, says that unlike other memoirs of the time, Yang’s contains no complaint or anger. It was a difficult time for intellectuals, but he admires Yang for her positive attitude.
Yang spent her leisure time writing, and when Qian passed by, she would give him the work to read. Then, the couple would often sit, chatting and laughing, though there were plenty of serious moments, too.
During this time, their son-in-law committed suicide. In Six Chapters, Yang captures the event in a single sentence, but the sadness fills the page.
After Yang’s translation of Le Sage’s Gil Blas into Chinese was well-received in 1956, she was picked to translate Don Quixote from Spanish. She began to learn the language in 1959, at the age of 48.
“They neither lowered their heads when things went against them, nor appeared arrogant when they rose to fame,” remembers Peking University’s Chen.
“Such people deserve our younger generations’ respect.”
Contact the writer at yangyangs@chinadaily.com.
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https://paper-republic.org/links/letters-from-qian-zhongshu-to-be-auctioned-yang-jiang-threatens-lawsuit/
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Paper Republic Link: Letters from Qian Zhongshu to be auctioned, Yang Jiang Threatens Lawsuit
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Paper Republic
| null |
A Beijing auction house says it has no plans to withdraw an acclaimed scholar's letters and manuscripts from sale despite protests from his 102-year-old widow and legal experts.
On June 21, the Sungari International Auction Co Ltd is selling 66 letters Qian Zhongshu wrote to a family friend.
The sale also includes the original copy of "Six Chapters from My Life 'Downunder,'" featuring his wife's memoir of their life in Henan Province during the "cultural revolution (1966-1976)," and letters from his daughter, Qian Yuan, to the friend.
Yang Jiang, the writer's widow, said her husband made some controversial remarks in the letters that it would be inappropriate to publish. He insinuates that two famous literary figures, Lu Xun and Mao Dun, were unfaithful to their wives and that a couple, both famous translators, had not interpreted a Chinese classic well.
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https://www.facebook.com/ChinaGlobalTVNetwork/videos/video-shows-late-author-yang-jiang-launching-scholarship-program/1220859897954828/
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Renowned Chinese playwright, author, and translator Yang Jiang passed away in Beijing on Wednesday morning, at the age of 105. A video shot in 2001 shows...
|
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""
] | null |
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Renowned Chinese playwright, author, and translator Yang Jiang passed away in Beijing on Wednesday morning, at the age of 105. A video shot in 2001 shows...
|
de
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https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yT/r/aGT3gskzWBf.ico
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https://www.facebook.com/ChinaGlobalTVNetwork/videos/video-shows-late-author-yang-jiang-launching-scholarship-program/1220859897954828/
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https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2284543/
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Yang Jiang
|
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Yang Jiang. Writer: Mo ying. Yang Jiang was born on 17 July 1911 in Beijing, China. She was a writer, known for Mo ying (1957), Jin mei ren (1959) and Zu zhou (2005). She was married to Zhong-Shu Qian. She died on 25 May 2016 in Beijing, China.
|
en
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IMDb
|
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2284543/
|
Yang Jiang was born on 17 July 1911 in Beijing, China. She was a writer, known for Mo ying (1957), Jin mei ren (1959) and Zu zhou (2005). She was married to Zhong-Shu Qian. She died on 25 May 2016 in Beijing, China.
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https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/info/1245/4187.htm
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Tenth Anniversary of Famous Chinese Scholar and Writer Qian Zhongshuâs Death
|
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The year 2008 marks the tenth anniversary of the death of famous Chinese literary scholar and writer Qian Zhongshu, who died on December 19, 1998. An exhibition which focuses on Qianâs life and achievements, a forum, and memorial activities were recently held at Tsinghua University to honor his memory.
| null |
By Li Han
Staff Writer of the Tsinghua News Center
The year 2008 marks the tenth anniversary of the death of famous Chinese literary scholar and writer Qian Zhongshu, who died on December 19, 1998. An exhibition which focuses on Qian’s life and achievements, a forum, and memorial activities were recently held at Tsinghua University to honor his memory.
Born in Wuxi on November 21, 1910, Qian Zhongshu was known for his rapier wit and formidable erudition. To the general public, he is best known for his satiric novel Fortress Besieged.
Though he failed mathematics, Qian was accepted by Tsinghua University’s Department of Foreign Languages in 1929 based on his excellent performance in Chinese and English. At Tsinghua, Qian got a well rounded education. He came to know many prominent scholars who appreciated his talent and encouraged his creative efforts. He spent much time exploring the diverse book collection in Tsianghua’s large library. His explorations informed his writing and erudition throughout his career. He probably began his lifelong habit of collecting quotations and keeping detailed reading notes at this time. He also met his future wife Yang Jiang when they were students. She became a successful playwright and translator. They married in 1935.
Later Qian received government sponsorship to further his studies abroad. Qian studied for two years at Exeter College where he received a B.Litt. Later he studied at the University of Paris for a year before returning to China in 1938. From 1949 to 1953, Qian was a Tsinghua University professor. While Guan Zhui Bian established his academic fame, his novel Fortress Besieged established his public reputation and fame. Fortress Besieged was reprinted in 1980 and once again became a best-seller. The novel was adapted as a TV serial in 1990.
Qian died on December 19, 1998 in Beijing. In accordance with their will, Yang Jiang donated funds from their estate to establish the Philobiblon Scholarship at Tsinghua University in 2001.
(Photo by Guo Haijun)
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https://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/people/arts/asian-lit/qian-zhongshu
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en
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Qian Zhongshu
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Qian Zhongshu or Ch'ien Chung-shu, 1910–98, Chinese writer and scholar, grad. Tsinghua Univ., Beijing (1933). After attending Oxford and the Sorbonne, he returned (1939) to China and taught at several institutions of higher education including his
|
en
|
/themes/ip/favicon.ico
|
InfoPlease
|
https://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/people/arts/asian-lit/qian-zhongshu
|
Qian Zhongshu or Ch'ien Chung-shu, 1910–98, Chinese writer and scholar, grad. Tsinghua Univ., Beijing (1933). After attending Oxford and the Sorbonne, he returned (1939) to China and taught at several institutions of higher education including his alma mater and also worked in the foreign languages division of the National Library, Nanjing. During the Cultural Revolution he and his wife were sent to the countryside for “reeducation” and he worked as a janitor. Afterward he returned to scholarly pursuits and was vice president (1982–93) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where he served as an adviser until his death. Qian's most famous and popular work is his sole novel, Weicheng (1947; tr. Fortress Besieged, 2004). Set in the 1930s, it is the tale of a feckless Chinese teacher's life, loves, and dreadful marriage. He also wrote a book of short stories (1946; tr. with essays from 1941 as Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays, 2011). Seven additional essays on art and literature were translated as Patchwork (2014). His scholarly work culminated in the notes and short essays on literary history, poetics, and related subjects in Guanzhui bian (4 vol., 1979; selections tr. as Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters, 1998). Among his untranslated works are Tanyilu [reflections on appreciation] (1948, rev. ed. 1983) and Songshi xuanzhu [selected and annotated Sung poetry] (1958).
His wife, Yang Jiang, 1911–2016, b. Yang Jikang, was a writer, translator, and scholar known for her fiction, memoirs, plays, and essays. Her most famous translation is the definitive Chinese version of Cervantes' Don Quixote. Gan xiao liu ji (1981; tr. Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder,” 1984) details her life as an agricultural worker during the Cultural Revolution.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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https://www.coursehero.com/file/39098892/Fortress-Besiegeddocx/
|
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https://medium.com/%40DaphneLaffer/the-best-way-for-couples-to-get-along-301383eec972
|
en
|
The Best Way for Couples to Get Along
|
https://miro.medium.com/v2/da:true/resize:fit:1200/0*gdBZDEWiwOCdSQoV
|
https://miro.medium.com/v2/da:true/resize:fit:1200/0*gdBZDEWiwOCdSQoV
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2024-05-01T14:11:44.196000+00:00
|
Many people believe that the best scenario for a marriage is mutual love and compatibility, allowing the couple to proceed smoothly together. However, in reality, love doesn’t care about who you are…
|
en
|
https://miro.medium.com/v2/5d8de952517e8160e40ef9841c781cdc14a5db313057fa3c3de41c6f5b494b19
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Medium
|
https://medium.com/@DaphneLaffer/the-best-way-for-couples-to-get-along-301383eec972
|
Many people believe that the best scenario for a marriage is mutual love and compatibility, allowing the couple to proceed smoothly together.
However, in reality, love doesn’t care about who you are or where you come from. When love strikes, it strikes.
Young girls often dream of finding their prince charming, but in reality, happiness can still be found without a prince. After all, life is not a fairy tale.
Yang Jiang believes that the most important aspect of a marriage is the emotional connection and understanding between the couple. Mutual understanding allows for appreciation, attraction, support, and encouragement, fostering a harmonious relationship. Social status and background are not crucial.
She emphasizes the importance of cultivating a friendship between spouses, enabling them to support each other consciously and journey through life happily.
Why is it essential for a couple to become friends to achieve happiness?
Because being together is about being attracted to each other’s shining points. Friends don’t demand too much from each other, and even if they do, it’s within reasonable limits, maintaining a specific distance.
Many couples find that the sweetness in their relationship fades over time because they fail…
|
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https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/renowned-chinese-writer-yang-jiang-dies-at-age-104-116052500678_1.html
|
en
|
Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at age 104
|
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2016-05-25T15:28:45+05:30
|
Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to an equally famous author, died today at the age of 104 years, state media said.
Yang died at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, according to The Paper, a state-owned news website. It said her death had been confirmed by her publisher, the People's Literature Publishing House.
Citing different sources, Hong Kong station Phoenix TV also confirmed Yang's death, the cause of which was not given.
Born in 1911, Yang became a household name in China for her novels, plays, essays and translated works. She was the first to translate "Don Quixote" into Chinese, and her version is still considered the definitive one by many.
Her death was the top search term on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo today, a testimony to her fame and the public adoration she enjoyed.
In a 1981 collection of essays, Yang wrote with a sense of poignancy on the daily lives of Chinese intellectuals during the chaos of ...
|
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|
https://www.business-standard.com/favicon.ico
|
https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/renowned-chinese-writer-yang-jiang-dies-at-age-104-116052500678_1.html
| ||||||
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| 87
|
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/25/books/the-re-education-of-a-stinking-intellectual.html
|
en
|
EDUCATION OF A 'STINKING INTELLECTUAL'
|
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] | null |
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"Judith Shapiro"
] |
1984-11-25T00:00:00
|
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|
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|
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/25/books/the-re-education-of-a-stinking-intellectual.html
|
Judith Shapiro is the co-author, with Liang Heng, of ''Son of the Revolution'' and ''Intellectual Freedom in China After Mao.'' SIX CHAPTERS FROM MY LIFE ''DOWNUNDER''
By Yang Jiang. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. Introduced by Jonathan Spence. 111 pp. Seattle: University of Washington Press. $10.95.
In richness, moral urgency and drama, there can be few events of history with greater literary potential than the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Yang Jiang's ''Six Chapters from My Life 'Downunder,' '' her slender account of being sent ''down'' for two years to a re- education school in the countryside, is one of the few memoirs of the period and all the more precious for that.
Even as the Chinese Government condemns the Cultural Revolution as a 10-year disaster, it has curtailed the ''wound literature'' that began appearing when post-Mao China was at its most liberal in 1978-79. It has done so partly out of fear that a deep examination of Mao's role in the revolution would lead to a questioning of the legitimacy of the Communist Party itself (although responsibility lies at least as much with the Chinese people). The party may also believe the Chinese have been so bruised that dwelling on the past could lead to a crippling national despair.
The party's position has combined with a deeply felt reluctance on the part of many Chinese to speak of their personal tragedies. The Chinese have a tradition of pride in their ability to bear suffering (the so-called ''eat bitterness spirit''), and they share a feudal obedience to authority so profound that their understanding of democracy often implies simply the right to make constructive suggestions to those in power. One of the Cultural Revolution's best-learned lessons was the danger of thinking and speaking of injustices about which little can be done. It is true too that few seek sympathy when most potential listeners could match every sad tale with one of their own, the suicide of a parent for the murder of a sister, the humiliation of a beloved teacher for the burning of a pile of rare books and paintings, a lost education and physical hardships for a guilty memory and a sense of having been used.
Educated in Western literature at Oxford University and in Paris, Yang Jiang returned to China with her eminent husband, the writer and critic Qian Zhongshu, in the 1930's. Both became attached to the Literature Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China's most prestigious think tank. Her memoir covers the two years the already elderly couple spent at separate but nearby re-education schools in rural Henan Province and concentrates on the details of her daily life, such as digging a well, standing guard over a vegetable plot, being befriended by a puppy and managing to find ways of seeing her husband, stationed with the men's ''platoon'' an hour's walk away.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
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|
||||||
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| 26
|
http://english.eastday.com/Culture/u1ai8547496.html
|
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|
Celebrated Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at 105
|
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2016-05-25T00:00:00
|
Celebrated Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at 105-Well-known Chinese writer, literary translator and foreign literature researcher Yang Jiang died atthe age of 105 in Beijing on Wednesday morning.
| null | ||||||||
21594
|
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2
| 73
|
https://www.meetup.com/meetup-group-mandarin/events/300232467/
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en
|
China Book Club: ‘Fortress Besieged’ by Qian Zhongshu , Tue, Aug 27, 2024, 8:00 PM
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A fortress besieged is a metaphor for marriage: everybody out wants in, and everybody in wants out. Considered one of the masterpieces of twentieth century literature, it i
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https://meetup.com/meetup-group-mandarin/events/300232467/
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A fortress besieged is a metaphor for marriage: everybody out wants in, and everybody in wants out. Considered one of the masterpieces of twentieth century literature, it is littered with memorable quotes and witty observations.
It follows the feckless Fang Hongjian, who is returning home to China after running out of money while studying abroad. Despite enjoying financial support from his family, Fang has neglected his studies and bought a fake degree.
On board the Vicomte de Bragelonne, he meets the pretty and unmarried Su Wenwan. He also meets the tanned and voluptuous Miss Pao, whom Fang pursues with some success during the voyage. When the boat reaches Hong Kong, Miss Pao disembarks into the embrace of her fiancé, and Fang realizes he has been used. This is just the beginning.
It has been argued in the LA Review of Books that Qian Zhongshu was Nobel Prize material for this novel alone. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-monument-to-what-might-have-been-qian-zhongshus-fortress-besieged/
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Western Intercultural Marriage In Modern And Contemporary China (From 1840 To The 21st Century) : Rozenberg Quarterly
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The History And Context Of Chinese-Western Intercultural Marriage In Modern And Contemporary China (From 1840 To The 21st Century)
9 comments
1.1 Brief Introduction
It is now becoming more and more common to see Chinese-Western intercultural couples in China and other countries. In the era of the global village, intercultural marriage between different races and nationalities is frequent. It brings happiness, but also sorrow, as there are both understandings and misunderstandings, as well as conflicts and integrations. With the reform of China and the continuous development, and improvement of China’s reputation internationally, many aspects of intercultural marriage have changed from ancient to contemporary times in China. Although marriage is a very private affair for the individuals who participate in it, it also reflects and connects with many complex factors such as economic development, culture differences, political backgrounds and transition of traditions, in both China and the Western world. As a result, an ordinary marriage between a Chinese person and a Westerner is actually an episode in a sociological grand narrative.
This paper reviews the history of Chinese-Western marriage in modern China from 1840 to 1949, and it reveals the history of the earliest Chinese marriages to Westerners at the beginning of China’s opening up. More Chinese men married Western wives at first, while later unions between Chinese wives and Western husbands outnumbered these. Four types of CWIMs in modern China were studied. Both Western and Chinese governments’ policies and attitudes towards Chinese-Western marriages in this period were also studied. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, from 1949 to 1978, for reasons of ideology, China was isolated from Western countries, but it still kept diplomatic relations with Socialist Countries, such as the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. Consequently, more Chinese citizens married citizens of ex-Soviet and Eastern European Socialist Countries. Chinese people who married foreigners were usually either overseasstudents, or embassy and consulate or foreign trade staff. Since the economic reformation in the 1980s, China broke the blockade of Western countries, and also adjusted its own policies to open the country. Since then, international marriages have been increasing. Finally, this chapter discusses the economic, political and cultural contexts of intercultural marriage between Chinese and Westerners in the contemporary era.
1.2 Chinese-Western Intermarriage in Modern China: 1840–1949
In ancient China, there are three special forms of intercultural/interracial marriages. First, people living in a country subjected to war often married members of the winning side. For instance, in the Western Han Dynasty, Su Wu was detained by Xiongnu for nineteen years, and married and had children with the Xiongnu people. In the meantime, his friend Li Ling also married the daughter of Xiongnu’s King[i]; In the Eastern Han Dynasty, Cai Wenji was captured by Xiongnu and married Zuo Xian Wang and they had two children.[ii] The second example is the He Qin (allied marriage) between royal families in need of certain political or diplomatic relationships. The (He Qin) allied marriage is very typical and representative within the Han and Tang Dynasties. The third example is the intercultural/interracial marriages between residents of border areas and those in big cities. As to the former two ways of intercultural/ interracial marriage in Chinese history, the first one happened much more in relation to the common people plundered by the victorious nation, while the second one was an outer form of political alliance. The direct reason for the political allied marriage was to eliminate foreign invasion and keep peace. In that case, when the second form went smoothly, the first form inevitably ceased, however, when the first form increased, the second form failed due to the war.
In modern China, intercultural marriages are very different from the ancient forms. The Industrial Revolution and developments in technology have accelerated people’s lifestyles and broadened their visions. The industrial age broke through the restrictions on human living standards imposed by the Agricultural age, and it has given rise to a transformation in human social life, modes of thinking, behaviour patterns and many other aspects. All these changes have had profound effects on means of human communication, association and contact. With the increase in productive powers of the community and the development of technologies, new systems and orders have been transformed and reconstructed in many aspects of the human world, such as in the fields of economy, trade, markets, politics, society, and even conventional social behaviour. New political systems were widely established in many countries in the world at the time. Theories of natural rights, the social contract and the people’s sovereignty had been developing in Capitalist countries, thus free competition and free trade were the main themes of the modern era. The He Qin (allied marriages) in both ancient China and ancient Europe lost the basis of their existence. At the same time, frequent wars, increased trade, international business and more developed transportation systems had all been involving more and more countries and people, leading to people being able to associate with others with greater convenience and freedom than ever before. In comparison to previous times in history, great changes had also taken place in relation to international marriages in the world generally as well as in modern China.
1.2.1 Four Types of Chinese-Western Intermarriage in Modern China
Established by Manchu, the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) reigned over the greatest territories of any of the Chinese Empires in history. It included numerous races, all related to Chinese civilisations from ancient times, and it made China a unitary multinational state with the largest territory for the first time[iii]. In terms of internal affairs, the Qing Dynasty regime was relatively enlightened and managed state affairs in a prudent way. Although ethnic discrimination and oppression did exist, intermarriage between different races was not restricted or interfered with. The only exception was the prohibition on marriage between Manchu and Han Chinese. For more than 300 years of the Qing Dynasty, intermarriage between different races, other than Han and Manchu, within China was very common. The royal family of the Qing dynasty maintained frequent He Qin marriages with the upper class of Mongolia, and they sent their princesses and aristocratic ladies to marry the Mongolian kings and dukes[iv]. For example, Qing Taizu had married his third daughter to Borjigin Suomuruoling and Qing Tai Zong married his eldest daughter, Gulun princess to Borjigin Bandi. In the meantime, the sons of the royal family of Qing had taken the daughters of Mongolian kings and dukes as empresses and imperial concubines[v].
Nevertheless, apart from intermarriage with people at border regions and between adjacent neighbouring countries, intermarriage between Chinese and more distant westerners was rare before 1840. The reason was that the essential characteristics of foreign policy of the Qing Dynasty were concerned with closing China away from the outside world, and maintaining things as they were. In this way it refused such progress. The Qing Government closed the country in 1716 keeping only four trading ports, and a stricter code was implemented in 1757 leaving only one trading port, Guangzhou.[vi]
This was determined by the basic conditions governing social, political, economic and cultural status of that time. In the middle period of the Qing Dynasty, a policy of trade restriction was implemented; only one port in Guangzhou was retained for external trade on the sea, and Kyakhta was kept for external trade with foreign countries on land. Foreign merchants were only permitted to contact business organisations designated by the Qing government for trade matters. The Qing government also restricted the activities of foreign merchants and the quantity of import and export goods [vii]. In addition, before the middle 19th century, Europeans were not permitted to travel in China freely. By closing China from the outside world, imposing a policy of restricting trade and foreigners from entering the country China lost opportunities for external trade, and from the perspective of transnational marriage, it broke off economic and cultural communication between China and foreign countries and increased the distance between China and the rest of the world, which resulted in the limitation of Chinese people’s foresight[viii], and provided no opportunities for marriage with Westerners.
In the late Qing Dynasty (1840-1912), the Opium War opened the doors of China. China’s defeat in the Opium War and the conclusion of the Treaty of Nanking had enormous consequences, as from then on China had lost its independence leading to significant changes within its society[ix]. The War was the birth of a Semi-Colonial and Semi-Feudal Society, and China was afterwards gradually reduced to a semicolonial and semi-feudal society. The word “Youli (Travel)” first appeared in the official documents of the Qing Dynasty after the Tianjin Treaty was signed between the Qing government and Britain in 1858. As regulated by Article 9 of this Treaty, British people were allowed to travel to and trade at various places inland with certain permits[x]. Particularly worthy of note was that, during the second Opium War, Britain, France and the USA all signed the Tianjin Treaty with the Qing government successively, but only Britain defined the concept of “Travel (You Li)” of Westerners in the Treaty with the Qing government. In this way it can be observed that the Tianjin Treaty between Britain and the Qing government started European travel within inland China[xi]. Along with more and more Westerners coming into China, the policies of the Qing government became more open. A great many foreigners poured in leading to a gradual increase in intermarriage between Chinese and foreigners.
In December of 1850 the Taiping Rebellion, led by Hong Xiuquan, happened in China lasting from 1850 t0 1864, when the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was instated.[xii] The Taiping Rebels considered themselves Christian and believed in God and Jesus, therefore they considered Western countries their “brothers” and “friends”, and even fantasised that the Western powers could help them overthrow the Qing Government in the name of God[xiii]. With this diplomatic aim, Taiping Rebels had been seeking opportunities to associate with Western powers actively from the beginning. In 1853, Yang Xiuqing, Dong King of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, said in his imperial mandated breve to British Envoy, Sir George Bonham: “You British people come to China from ten thousands miles away to pay allegiance to our Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, not only the officers and soldiers of our Celestial Empire will welcome you warmly, but also God and Jesus will also praise and reward your loyalty. Notice is hereby given that you British chieftain can bring your nationals to enter and leave China freely. You are free to come and go at your pleasure, and you can suit your own convenience to do your business and trade as usual whether you assist our heavenly soldiers to exterminate the evil enemies (Qing Government) or not. We ardently anticipate that the British can help and be dutiful to our Heavenly King together with us, to build up our establishment and great deeds in order to repay the great obligations of God.[xiv]”
Later, Western powers helped the Qing government to suppress the Taiping army, but the leaders of the Taiping Rebels still believed that “Westerners and we both believe in God, and our religion is the same, therefore they are not hypocritical and don’t have bad intentions. We hold the same religion, and our friendship with Westerners is as good as with family members.[xv]” Against this background, the areas of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom were opened to Westerners, and many Westerners came to China leading to greater possibilities of Chinese-Western intermarriages. In addition, one of the most remarkable transformations in Taiping Rebel areas occurred in its gender policies and marriage system. Because of the Christian belief that people are “all God’s children ”[xvi], the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom operated a series of policies to achieve equality between men and women. Firstly, women were permitted to take the same exams as men to act as officials in government, and “women officials” were established in Taiping areas[xvii]. This surely changed the traditional role of Chinese women who had hitherto no political status and represented great progress in gender relations in feudal China. Secondly, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom opposed and abolished women’s footbinding and living in widowhood[xviii]. Mercenary marriage and concubinage were also prohibited, and monogamy was advocated as normal practice[xix]. Marriages were required to be registered in civil departments, through which couples could acquire their marriage certificate. The earliest modern marriage certificate, the “He Hui” certificate appeared for its first time in modern Chinese history in Taiping areas[xx]. All of these policies and reforms that took place in Taiping areas paved the way for greater opportunities for foreigners to enter China, increased association between Chinese people and foreigners, and ultimately intercultural marriages.
The Second Opium War broke out in 1856 and lasted until 1860 when China was defeated again[xxi]. The Qing Government began to recognise its weaknesses and the strengths of Western countries, and consequently began to send Chinese students to study in the USA and Europe in 1871, during which many students married foreign wives. In the meantime, the Qing government began to establish diplomatic relations with more and more foreign countries, and some of the Chinese diplomats involved also married foreign wives in foreign countries. Since its initial opening, China has been compelled to open up further to the greater world. This has increased business and trade, foreign affairs, overseas study and even “Selling Piglets (labour output)”[xxii], leading to transnational marriages becoming more common and the corresponding legal documents required being established successively. The earliest legal documents were Regulations upon Marriages between Chinese and German People in 1888, and Relevant Notes between China and Italy in 1889[xxiii], which stated clearly that “Within the territory of China, if Chinese women are going to marry foreigners, the foreign men must report to local officials to obtain legal permission. And the Chinese women marrying foreigners should be supervised by their husbands[xxiv]. If the Chinese men are going to marry foreigners, the foreign women should also follow the example of being supervised by their husbands.”；If there was involvement in legal cases before or after marriage, and if the female suspect hoping to escape the law by marrying into foreign countries was found out, they would be transferred to be judged by Chinese local officials[xxv]. Besides male superiority to females both in China and in Western countries, these treaties were basically equal.
In 1894, the first war between Meiji Japan and Qing China in modern times was fought. The cause of this war was that both China and Japan contested the control of Korea[xxvi]. Japan and China both increased political instability in Korea by intervening militarily. As the suzerain of Korea, China came at the invitation of the Korean king with the intention of retaining its traditional suzerian-triburary relationship, while Japan came bent on war with the intention of preventing the Russian annexation of the Korean Peninsula[xxvii], and more importantly, destroying the traditional Eastern Asian Tributary System[xxviii] which removed China from the centre and replaced it with the Japan-Centric East Asia International System, in order to achieve its further plan of invading China and expanding in Asia, which accorded with the Japan Meiji Government’s consistent schema[xxix]. The war ended with the defeat of China’s Qing in April of 1895. The war intensified the semifeudal and semicolonial nature of society in China, and the humiliating defeat of China sparked an unprecedented public outcry leading to the Wu Xu Reform movement in 1895 after the Qing Government signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki. A thousand or more candidates from all eighteen provinces including Taiwan who had assembled in Beijing for the Imperial Examination, captained by Kang Youwei[xxx], signed a strongly-worded petition opposing the ceding of Taiwan. This was called the “Gong Che Shang Shu” affair within Wu Xu period of reform (1895-1898)[xxxi].
The main aim of Wu Xu was to spark constitutional reform and modernisation, strengthen China and protect its people, and it was also very much concerned with women’s and marriage issues because marriage and the family was the foundation of the Chinese feudal society which badly needed reform. The new regime firstly emancipated Chinese women to a great extent in modern China. New and anti-traditional marriage issues were widely discussed publicly in newspapers and periodicals in the Wu Xu reform period for the first time[xxxii]. Reformists introduced the “new images” of the Western woman in contrast to the “old” images of the Chinese woman, and they criticised and argued against the Chinese feudal code of ethics and customs that affected marriages in a comprehensive and profound way, such as Baoban Hunyin (arranged marriage), Cong Yi Er Zhong (be faithful to one’s husband to the very end), Nan Nv Da Fang (the chastity value) and Rigorous Preventions between Males and Females and concubinage. They also condemned the traditional gender order which caused Chinese women and young people to be physically and emotionally abused when they encountered marriage choices. Cases demonstrating the freedoms existing in marriage in Western countries and Japan were widely reported[xxxiii]. During the Wuxu Period, the member of famous reform group, Tang Caichang, published his revolutionary “Tong Zhong Shuo (Theories of Miscegenation)”, in which they advocated intermarriage between Chinese and Westerners and the implementation of intermarriage to improve the Chinese race. This book presented a rare theory for China at the end of the 18th Century, and it was the first time in China that interracial and intercultural marriages were discussed against a wider context addressing such a momentous topic as the future of the Chinese nation. This could be seen as the first time that that the Chinese systematically thought and studied interracial and intercultural marriages between Chinese and Westerners.
The Wu Xu movement produced a more acceptable condition for intercultural marriages at that time. Another contribution of Wu Xu reformists was the development of women’s education, and it was an initial and important step for women’s emancipation. Women’s education was strongly promoted in this era; many women colleges were established, and women’s legal right to have the same education as men was also gradually but effectively protected in the legislation of that time. The old feudal concepts discriminating against women, such as “Nvzi Wu Cai Bian Shi De (Innocence is the virtue for women)” and “San Cong Si De (the three obediences and the four virtues)” were gradually eroded, which paved the way for women’s education[xxxiv]. (Although Ningbo Zhuduqiao Women College, the first women college in China, was established in 1844 by Miss M.Aldersey, and after that some other women colleges were established in China, they were all missionary schools founded by Westerners. Only since the WuXu period, has the women’s college been properly established by the Chinese).[xxxv] More importantly, Chinese women also acquired the right to study abroad equal to Chinese men in the WuXu period. Chinese women’s education abroad was a key process that led to Chinese women challenging their feudal families and traditional society, and it was an epoch-making event in modern China. It had an extraordinary meaning as it implied that Chinese women began to escape from the feudal family’s dominion and to be free from the oppression of patriarchy, with their subordinate position being changed gradually. Along with Chinese male students, Chinese women students began to pursue their loves freely and some of them married foreigners.
After the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, the Qing Dynasty was overthrown, and the Republic of China was established. Since then, the social vogue has been more open and enlightened. The old marriage system was shaken and gradually eroded and monogamy was widely advocated and accepted. Freedom in marriage, divorce and remarriage caused strong and deep repercussions in Chinese society[xxxvi]. “Independent marital choice” and “Freedom in choosing spouses” were the main themes of this period. The new ideas around marriage incited young men and women to resist the feudal code of ethics[xxxvii], what was more, living together in a sexual relationship when not legally married became fashionable after the Xinhai Revolution.[xxxviii]
The May 4th Movement in 1919 was the next landmark in modern Chinese history, and it also signalled a new epoch in Chinese women’s emancipation.[xxxix]It could be considered as the watershed between new and old in modern China. As a major issue relating to happiness and freedom of the individual, marriage and marriage culture attracted much attention once again in China at the time.[xl] The New Culture Movement along with the May 4th Movement created an upheaval in the old feudal order of human relationships, and brought the principle of liberation of the personality, and equal rights for Chinese people. Chinese disenchantment continually rebelled against the old forms of marriage. The momentum of marriage transformation in this period exceeded that in Wuxu period, Xinhai period and early years of the Republic of China, (ROC) and it formed the pinnacle of marriage reform in modern China.[xli]With the introduction of western cultures and philosophies into China, the concept of absolute marriage freedom became more deeply rooted among its people. “Singleness, marriage, divorce, remarriage, and cohabitation should be absolutely free.”[xlii] “Making match by parents’ order and on the matchmaker’s word” was discarded, divorce and remarriage rates increased, and the emphasis on the chastity value started to fade in this period.[xliii] The ideas of Feminism came to the fore. More people had further opportunities to go abroad, and the government of ROC did not restrict its people from going abroad and indeed sent more students, workers and business to foreign countries, in turn leading to more Chinese-Western intercultural marriages. In 1946, with the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War (CCW), a surge in mobility of the population occurred again, and many Chinese refugees fleed to Western countries opening another door for CWIM.
With the transformations brought about by the two Opium wars, the Taiping Rebels, the Wuxu Reform, the Xinhai Revolution and the May 4th Movement, CCW became more frequent in modern China, and Chinese society gradually entered a new stage. The feudal and traditional values and concepts of marriage and the family have undergone unprecedented changes, and the Western marriage system and concept have been accepted by more and more Chinese. This was an important transition and omen for the transformation from traditional to modern marriage.[xliv] This transition and transformation broke through the restraints of the Chinese feudal family, and played a vital role in promoting social culture, emancipating people from rigid formalism and increasing the number of intermarriages between Chinese and Westerners, which produced far-reaching effects on Chinese society.
There were three types of intercultural marriage between Chinese and foreigners in modern China. The first type was the most important one: overseas intercultural marriage between Chinese diplomatic envoys and Chinese students studying abroad. The second type was foreigners in China married to Chinese, including those intercultural marriages that happened in Zu Jie (foreign concessions), and the third type was of Chinese labourers who were sent to Western countries on a large scale from modern China. I will describe the three types one by one.
A. The first type of intercultural marriage between Chinese and foreigners in this period was the overseas marriage of Chinese diplomatic envoys and Chinese students who were studying abroad.
Between the Late Qing dynasty and the First World War, following several defeats in wars with Western countries, the Qing government tried to seek a way to save its regime, and sending students to study abroad formed a major component of its plan. Many Chinese students that went abroad to Europe and the USA married Western women. There is a long history of Chinese students studying in western countries, which can be dated back to as early as 1871. From the mid to late 19th century, especially from 1871 to 1875, the Qing government dispatched the first large scale group of Chinese students abroad to study in Western countries.[xlv] From 1872 to 1875, with the leadership of the “Westernisation group” including Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang and Rong Hong,, the Qing Government had successively sent four groups of 120 children to study in America. Among them, more than 50 entered Harvard, Yale, Columbia, MIT and other renowned universities.[xlvi] In their memorials to the throne, Li Hongzhang and Zeng Guofan said that sending children to study in America is “an initiative deed in China which has never happened before”.[xlvii] As it had never happened before, the Qing government adopted a very serious attitude towards it. Its plan was to select brilliant children from different provinces, 30 a year and 120 in four years, and then to send them in different groups to study abroad. After 15 years, they would return to China. At that time, they would be about 30 so they would be in the prime of their lives and could serve the country well.[xlviii]
Those students dispatched abroad were mostly male. When they reached western countries, as the first batch of Chinese to make contact with western land at that time, which entailed a totally different culture, society, set of customs and conceptualisation for male and female compared to China they experienced an unprecedented ideological shock. Chinese students abroad were attracted by the liveliness and romance of the Western female. One of the first Chinese students studying abroad to marry a Western wife was Yung Wing, who studied in the USA, and married an American woman, Miss Kellogg, of Hartford, who died in 1886.[xlix] Yung Wing probably was the first Chinese to go to study in the USA during the Qing dynasty, and he obtained a degree from Yale University. Yung Wing was born at Nanping, Xiangshan County (currently Zhuhai City) in 1828. In 1854, after Yung Wing graduated from Yale College, he came back to China with a dream that, through Western education, China might be regenerated, and become enlightened and powerful. From then on, he devoted his life to a series of reforms in China.
Another case was Kai Ho, who married a British woman. Kai Ho (1859–1914) was a Hong Kong Chinese barrister, physician and essayist in Colonial Hong Kong. He played a key role in the relationship between the Hong Kong Chinese community and the British colonial government. He is mostly remembered as one of the main supporters and teachers of student Sun Yat-sen. In 1887, he opened the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, which later became the basis from which the Hong Kong University was established in 1910. He married his British wife, Alice Walkden (1852–1884), in England in 1881 and returned to Hong Kong after his studies. Alice gave birth to a daughter, but died of typhoid fever in Hong Kong in 1884.[li] He later established Alice Ho Miu Ling Nethersole Hospital in her memory.[lii]
As well as Chinese-Western intercultural marriages of Chinese students who studied overseas, in the late Qing Dynasty, many diplomats of the Qing government married Western wives. With the increasing contact with Western countries, the Qing government began to establish diplomatic relations with more and more foreign countries, leading to marriages between Chinese diplomats and foreign wives in foreign countries. One case was that of Chen Jitong, who was from Houguan (today’s Fuzhou), Fujian province. He studied at Fujian Chuanzheng Xuetang Fujian, (Ship-building and Navigation Academy) in his early years. In 1873, he became envoy to Europe for the first time, and two years later, took office in the France and Germany legation. He had been councillor of legation in Germany, France, Belgium and Denmark, and deputy envoy of legation in France, living in Paris and elsewhere in Europe for nearly 20 years.[liii] He was one of the first modern Chinese people to venture into the greater world. He was also the first appointed official of the Qing government to dare to bridge the gap between Chinese and foreigners and, in marrying a Westerner thereby attracting the disapproval of his countrymen, can be rated as another pioneer for intermarriage between Chinese and Westerners in modern China.
The Qing government lost the Sino-Japanese war in 1895. Like previous wars, this war intensified the semifeudal and semicolonial nature of society in China, and the humiliating defeat of China sparked an unprecedented public outcry leading to the Wu Xu Reform movement in 1895 after which the Qing Government signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Wu Xu reform concerned women and marriage issues very much because marriage and the family was the foundation of Chinese feudal society and needed to be transformed and reformed. With this new ethos, even the leader of Wu Xu reform, Kang Youwei, married two foreign wives, one American Chinese named He Zhanli[liv], the other Japanese named Ichioka Tsuruko.[lv] In addition, women began to have the same rights as men in terms of studying in college and studying abroad. The government began to send female students to foreign countries. The first group of women students (of 20 women) was sent to Japan in 1905[lvi], and the first group of women students was sent to the USA in 1907. Since then, more Chinese women students were sent to Europe, the USA and Japan.[lvii] Independent and free marriage was the first pursuit of Chinese women students who studied abroad. Many women were pressing for the end of arranged marriages, and those who had an arranged marital engagement required their families to dissolve it, those who had not arranged engagements in China naturally began to choose their love partners freely. It was very common for Chinese women to love another man in foreign countries, and some of them married local foreign men and settled there.[lviii]
During the Wu Xu Period, the reform group Tang Caichang published “Tong Zhong Shuo (Theories of Miscegenation)”, in which he advocated intermarriage between Chinese and Westerners and the implementation of intermarriage to improve the Chinese race. In the tenth argument listed in his article, he particularly quoted the transnational marriage of Chen Jitong, mentioned above, as an example to indicate that intermarriage with foreigners was not only expected but also possible to be implemented. He said in his article, “Feng Yi and Chen Jitong both married Western women. Those Western at that time did not despise intermarriage with people from a weak country as China, how can you people give aggressive expressions and indignation to intermarriage?”[lix] From these words we can see his admiration for the non-typical phenomenon of Chinese marrying Western women. In Zeng Pu’s famous novel Nie Hai Hua, the author also gave emphasis to describing the duel for possession of Chen Jitong between his French wife and English mistress. At the time when scholar-bureaucrats in the late Qing Dynasty were mostly ignorant of the outside world, and regarded Westerners as Deviants, Chen was bold and reckless to marry a Western female; moreover, when Chinese people were subjected to every kind of discrimination by European and American countries, and Chinese men still had the “pigtail”, there were still Western women who disregarded racial prejudice and adored Chen. (Note: in the plot about Chen Jitong in Nie Hai Hua by Zeng Pu, he was named “Chen Jidong” in the book). Chen Jitong married a French lady Miss Lai Mayi who later played a major role in Chinese women’s education, Wu Xu reform, the establishment of the first public schools for girls and the Chinese women’s newspaper[lx], and also had an English female doctor Shao Shuang who “admired his talent and followed him to China”, and gave birth to one son. This was similar to The Life of Chen Jitong (Chen Jitong Zhuan) by Shen Yuqing. In this book, it was also described that “he was skillful at shooting and riding horses. Where he was several meters from the horse, with one leap he can get on the horse; and when he used a gun to shoot a flying bird, he rarely missed it.”[lxi] The following photo shows Chen’s wife while she was staying with Empress Dowager CiXi.
Like Chen Jitong, Yu Geng and his son, two diplomats, also took advantage of close connections. Yu Geng, whose wife was French, was generally known as a talent among the “Eight Banners”[lxii], and was an excellent tribute student during the Guangxu Period. First, he handed in a memorial to the throne against Ying Han, the governor of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. He held the position of Shaoqing in Taipusi, and then was sent on a diplomatic mission to Japan and France. He had two sons and two daughters, the elder son Xinlin, the younger son Xunlin, the elder daughter Delin, and the second one Ronglin. They all lived in Europe for many years with their parents, received a Western education, and had a good mastery of English and French. Yu Ronglin even learned Ballet in France.[lxiii] According to his youngerst child, Yu Geng had four children with his French wife Louisa Pierson:
My father, Lord Ku Keng, made a widower by the death of his first wife, married Louise Pierson of Boston, who gave him four children, two sons and two daughters, of whom I am the youngest. Princess Der Ling, my eldest sister…[lxiv]
During the two opium wars, China had been sending students to study overseas. After the Sino-Japan War, China continued to send students to Western countries, and more to Japan. More Chinese students also married foreigners. At the transition between Qing and the Republic of China, especially after the loss of the Sino-Japanese War in 1984, China began to learn from Japan. Many young men went there including Yang Erhe, Wu Dingchang, Jiang Baili, Fang Zong’ao, Yin Rugeng, Guo Muoruo, Tian Han, Tao Jingsun, Su Buqing and Lu Xun whose two bothers both married Japanese women. In 1904, the Qing government constituted the “Concise Statute of Studying in Western Countries”[lxv], and from then on, the number of Chinese students sent to Western countries increased. Chinese students who studied in western countries in the late Qing Dynasty had noticed the progressive development of Western women’s rights “in western countries, women were the same as men, they started studying when they were young, they learned painting and calligraphy, mathematics and astronomy, star images and geography, maps, classics of mountains and oceans, and got the essence of knowledge, even men in China can not match those females”.[lxvi] The New Record of Travelling around the Earth(Huanyou Diqiu Xin Lu) was the first book to record what he experienced as a participator in World Exposition, The author Li Gui on his journeys through Western countries saw the development of Western women’s rights for himself and expressed regret that women still could not study in the same as men in the China of the late Qing Dynasty, “According to western custom, female and male were of the same importance, the female can go to school the same as the male, so women can propose important suggestions and participate in important affairs”[lxvii], Mr. Zhong Shuhe praised this comment as a “declaration for equal women’s rights on a grand scale for the first time” in modern China.[lxviii]
After the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, the Republic of China was established but the Beiyang government kept the Qing’s policy of sending Chinse students to study in Western countries. With the funds of Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program[lxix] many students obtained opportunities to go abroad. The number of self-supporting and self-funding students also increased markedly. According to records, from 1913 to 1914, 1024 students were sent to Japan and 205 students were sent to Europe. In 1916, the number of students studying abroad on government funds was 1397. In 1917, 1170 students were sent to America, among them 200 students obtained government funds, 600 students were self-funded, and 370 students relied on the funds of Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program More intercultural marriages occurred.[lxx] After the May 4th Movement in 1919, the program of Work-for-Study in France became popular. From 1916 to 1917, more than 1600 students went to France for the Work-for-Study program. Many of the most important torchbearers for the People’s Republic of China went to France in this period, such as Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Wang Ruofei, Chen Yi, Wu Yuzhang, Li Lisan, Nie Rongzhen andXiao San.[lxxi] Some of them married Western wives, for example Xiao San and Li Lisan.[lxxii] After World War I, France had lost a great number of men, so many Chinese students there could find a French wife easily, for example, He Siyuan and Zhang Daofan.[lxxiii]
In this period, the Chinese overseas knew more about Western society and gender orders. Evaluating the foreign female as the “Other” was common among Chinese males who studied abroad in the same period. For example, Lin Jinxian who toured to study in Western countries saw Western women were not as conservative as Chinese women, and he claimed that “western women were naturally with great affection”.[lxxiv] The gulf between new and old concepts first resulted in severe mental shock for the Chinese male. Mr. Qian Zhongshu, for instance, drew a subtle metaphor at the beginning of China’s opening:
“If doors and windows were widely open, it cannot say for sure that the old and weak inside the room will not catch a cold; if doors and windows were firmly closed, it was afraid that too many people inside the room may cause suffocation; if doors and windows were half open, maybe the effect will be like between refusal and consent in dating someone.” [lxxv]
Even relatively westernised Chinese like Hu Shi complimented the liveliness and openness of the western female on the one hand, but on the other said that the “female in China was in a higher status than the female in Western countries”.[lxxvi] In addition, the European female was healthy, beautiful and with white skin, and the discipline between male and female was not so strict, so the first outside temptation for students studying abroad was Western feminine charm. “As far as I saw and heard, there were a lot of students indulged in sexual desire.”[lxxvii] Some Chinese male students also married Western wives. When Jiang Liangfu was staying abroad, he was imperceptibly influenced by what he saw and heard. He wrote in his book Travel in Europe (Ou Xing San Ji), that:
“Most of our students studying abroad were people younger than 24 or 25, some of them were college graduates of China, some even did not go to college, all their cultural insights such as knowledge and view points were shallow and their moral characters were not mature. Once they moved to European and American countries with orders, laws and full of temptations, everything was too impressive to keep their mind tranquil, in such unrestrained and far-ranging places, how can they control themselves?” [lxxviii]
When they returned from abroad, students made reference to the Western countries, and initiated “Natural Feet Movement” and “Natural Breast Movement” for Chinese women.[lxxix] One famous scholar Hu Shi went to study in the USA, where he became acquainted with Miss Williams in America, and later wrote in his diary that “Since I have known my friend Miss Williams, I have greatly changed my opinion on females and social relations between males and females.”[lxxx] “The lady had such profound insight that no ordinary female could hold a candle to her. I knew many women, but only she had such a degree of thought and knowledge, courage and enthusiasm in one person.”[lxxxi] Zhang Zipin, who studied in Japan, also remarked that “I not only recognised the beauty of Japanese females at this age, but also was amazed by the development of female education and primary school education in Japan.”[lxxxii]
After the October Revolution, “learning from Russia” became popular, and Chinese students began to study in Russia. Jiang Jingguo, Li Lisan, Xiao San, Wang Bingnan and many others married Russian and German women. Some of these Western wives regarded China as their home since then, and obeyed Chinese notions of womanhood in their focus on assisting their husbands and teaching their children. At the fiftieth birthday of Jiang Fangliang, for example, her father-in-law Chiang Kai-shek gave her four Chinese characters, meaning virtuousness and piousness, to encourage her.[lxxxiii]；With the further development of women’s education after the Wu Xu movement and the establishment of the Republic of China, more women went to study in Western countries in the 1920s and 1930s. For example, Qian Xiuling, who was fondly called by them “the Chinese mom of Belgium”, was one famous example. Qian Xiuling went to study in Belgium in 1929, and she obtained her PhD degree in Chemistry from the University of Leuven. She had traveled to Belgium with her brother and her fiancé. She broke up the relationship with her Chinese fiancé after they had lived together for a while, and fell in love with a Belgian man and married him. The happiness of the couple is clear in Picture 4.8. Even at that time, Belgian people rarely saw intercultural lovers; so many passerbys stared at this couple:
Historical records show that many famous Chinese men including scholars and scientists who had studied and worked in Western countries married Western women and, according to these, more Chinese men married Western women than the converse. Examples include Lu Zhengxiang[lxxxiv], Li Jinfa[lxxxv], Zhang Daofan[lxxxvi], He Siyuan[lxxxvii], Yan Yangchu[lxxxviii], Huie Kin[lxxxix], Liao Shangguo[xc], Yang Xianyi[xci], Li Fengbai[xcii] and Lin Fengmian[xciii]. There are also some other famous Chinese male intellectuals who married Western wives, such as: Dr. Xu Zhongnian (1904-1981, French linguist, writer); Wang Linyi (Sculptor); Zhang Fengju (1895-1996), a great Translator and Professor in Peking University, and Chang Shuhong (1904-1994), Chinese painter; He was the director of Dunhuang Art Research Academy, and he devoted his whole life to the preservation of the artworks at Dunhuang.[xciv] There were also many Chinese male scientists who married Western wives in this period, for example, Ye Zhupei[xcv], Xu Jinghua[xcvi], Qiu Fazu[xcvii], Bobby Kno-Seng Lim[xcviii], Huang Kun[xcix], Du Chengrong[c], Tiam Hock Franking[ci] and Liu Fu-Chi[cii].
B. Foreigners in China marrying Chinese, including intercultural marriages in Zu Jie (foreign concessions)
From an examination of available historical sources, there were only a few cases pf Westerners marrying Chinese in mainland China in modern times. The earliest formal interracial marriage between a local Chinese individual and a Westerner in modern China occurred in March 1862. An American Huaer (Frederick Townsend Ward) married Yang Zhangmei, daughter of Comprador Yang in Shanghai, who was very famous in the first year of the Tongzhi Period.[ciii] The second representative case of interracial marriage was between the American F. L. Hawks Pott, principal of Saint John’s University and Huang Su’e. They married in 1888. Huang Su’e was the daughter of Huang Guangcai, a Chinese priest of the Church of England, who later became the chief principal of Shanghai St. Mary’s Hall.[civ] The most famous interracial marriage in Shanghai was between the Jewish merchant Hardoon and Luo Jialin, in the Autumn of 1886. Luo Jialin herself was mixed race and was born in Jiumudi, Shanghai (between Street Luxiangyuan and Street Dajing). Her father Louis Luo was French while her mother, Shen, was from Minxian, Fujian Province.[cv] The third representative case was that of Cheng Xiuqi. In 1903, it was reported in the newpaper, Zhong Wai Daily, that a female missionary from Norway was doing missionary work round HuoZhou, Shanxi Province. She went on to marry Cheng Xiuqi, one of her believers, based on free courtship and changed her name to Yu Ying. Afterwards they went to Britain together and she gave birth to one daughter, before long they returned to China and set up Jie Yan Ju (Opium Rehabilitation Station) in Haizibian, Jin Cheng.[cvi] Shanxi province was always a closed and conservative area in China, but at that time it was even possible for Chinese-Western marriage to happen in such an area, there were also more intercultural marriages in other areas of China.
While there were only a few cases of this type of international marriages, intercultural marriages between local Chinese and Westerners in China was more common to see in Zu Jie (foreign concessions). These intercultural marriages were very representative, not only because Zu Jie had different laws from those generally applied in Chinese territories but also because its special and mixed cultures there. China was gradually becoming a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society in the 19th century, and many districts in cities including Shanghai were classed as leased territories of the western powers. In the modern leased territories where Chinese and foreigners lived together, there were some interracial marriages, a few of which were formal but many were informal (not registered but existed as de facto-marriages). In the following section, Shanghai will be taken as an example of international marriages between local Chinese and Westerners in China as it was most famous for Zu Jie.
At present, the earliest thesis recording intermarriage between Chinese and foreigners in Shanghai settlements was Sino-American Miscegenation in Shanghai written by Herbert Day Lamson in 1936. This thesis utilised marriage registration files from 1897 to 1909 from the American consulate in Shanghai and studied intermarriage between Chinese and Americans at that time in Shanghai.[cvii] According to the population records of the consulate, during the three decades from 1879 to 1909, there were 34 cases of interracial marriages between American husbands and Asian wives, among whom were 8 Japanese women and the rest comprised 26 Chinese women. There was no case of a Western wife married to an Asian husband. Of the 26 cases in 1930, there was less than one case of intermarriage each year. The jobs of the 34 Americans marrying Asian women are listed as follows: 11 seamen, 2 policemen, 2 sailors, 3 customs officers, 1 engineer, 1 missionary and 14 with indeterminate jobs.[cviii] During the 8 years from 1910 to 1918, there were 202 marriages on the records of the US consulate in Shanghai, among which there were 18 Asian wives including 6 Japanese, 1 Philippine, and 11 Chinese. From 1920 to 1922, there were 217 cases of registered marriages, while from 1930 to 1932, there were 236 cases. In these 6 years, there were 453 cases in all, among which only one was an American white woman with an Asian man, a Philippine in that case. There were 10 cases with Chinese or Japanese women, the proportion of which went down in comparison to previous years. The reason might be that in these registered marriages the number of white women increased. During this period, the Russian population and the prevalence of Russian women increased rapidly in the French concession and the International Settlement. For these American white men, especially those with low incomes such as seamen, sailors and customs officers, Russian women were more popular than Chinese or Japanese women. Most of the Russians in Shanghai were of low economic status, which increased the possibility of marriage between Russian women and Western white men from the lower classes. These Russian women sang or danced in the night clubs, and to some extent interacted more with the white men than did Asian women, which also increased their chances of marriage with white men.[cix]
There were materials about 9 cases of interracial marriages in the Shanghai Archive relating to the English, among which 2 were between Chinese men and Western women (one couple got divorced less than a year after their marriage), and the other 7 were all between Western men, mostly English, and Chinese or Korean women (one divorced).[cx] H. A. Martin, British Irish, married Ms. Tan of Guangdong who lived in Shanghai. The date of their marriage was not clear, but she gave birth to a son, Martin, in 1909, and lived at 214, Huashan Road. AnnaM. Meyer, a German, married Li Amei on the same day. In 1911 they had a daughter and lived in 20, Lane 148, Guba Road. Limbach, a German, married Ms. Gao in Qingdao. The date of their marriage was not clear, but they had a son in 1913. In 1915 they moved to Shanghai, and Limbach later became a professor of Tongji University. Isaiah Fansler was an American who was first a seaman stationed in China. He married Tang Yushu, a Chinese woman in 1939. Yao Runde, a Chinese man, married a Swiss woman in Switzerland. They married in 1944 and later they returned to Shanghai. In 1945, they divorced. Francisco Garcia, an Englishman, had a wife named Wang Aizhen, a native of Ningbo. The date of their marriage was not clear, and they lived on Route Lafayette. In 1946 they had a son and in 1947 they divorced. Charles A lverton Lamson, an American, married Li Quanxiang, a Korean woman. In 1946, they married in Shanghai, and lived on Daming Road. In 1947 they divorced. Rolf Smion, stateless, held an alien resident certificate and was a dentist. He married Song Aili from Haiyan, Zhejiang Province in 1947, and lived on Zhaofeng Road. Tan Boying, a Chinese man, married a German woman, H. Schenke, the date of their marriage was not certain. They had a son and a daughter, and lived on Yuyuan Road.[cxi]
Judging by the evidence of transnational marriages and cohabitation in the Shanghai concessions, at the end of the 19th century the phenomenon of more Chinese men marrying Western wives was being replaced by a phenomenon of more Chinese women marrying Western husbands. Among those foreigners in Shanghai, there were many single without families, who had a lot of opportunities for contact with Chinese women. This would inevitably result in many informal marital relations between Western white men and Chinese women. Not only in the early days of Shanghai but also in the Ningbo concessions, there had already been examples of Westerners in Shanghai, who had a children with their Chinese maids. For the English, it was very common to have a Chinese concubine. In 1857, Herder, a translator in Britain’s Ningbo consulate then and later Inspector General, lived with a Ningbo woman, A Yao. They lived together for 8 years in all. In 1858 or 1859, 1862 and 1865 they had three children who were then sent to Britain by Herder. Of humble origins, A Yao was a respectable woman. Her union with Herder transpired through introduction by compradors or other others. Xun He, a colleague of Herder, bought a Chinese girl as a concubine soon after he came to China. Another colleague of Herder in Britain’s Ningbo consulate, Meadows also had a Chinese wife.[cxii]
According to Bruner, John King Fairbank, and Richard J. Smith, one of the necessary conditions of high-class life for Westerners in China was to have a Chinese woman. This kind of woman was actually a walking commodity, which could be bought or sold by any foreign merchants.[cxiii] “At that time, the price for a foreigner to have a Chinese concubine was about 40 silver dollars” according to Herder.[cxiv] Powell, an American who lived in Shanghai temporarily, described the situation of formal or informal interracial marriages in Shanghai as “Shanghai could be considered as a city of men”. Nine out of ten foreigners in Shanghai were bachelors, and therefore many friendly relationships developed and resulted in numerous international marriages, which even the American Marine Corps quartered at Shanghai took part in. “Once I asked a chaplain of the Marine Corps whether these marriages were happy or not. He answered ‘just like other marriages’. I became to wonder if his answer had a little irony in it.”[cxv] For the foreigners in modern Shanghai, especially those single Western businessmen, it was very common to have informal marital relations with Chinese women. According to Bruner, foreign businessmen could easily buy Chinese women in China, and therefore many of them were registered single on the household registration form. These churchmen did not deal with commodities and had no comprador, and as a result they quickly brought their wives to China as well.[cxvi] But why are there so few materials documenting these events? The story of Herder’s diary easily demonstrates the reason. Although the diary was published, Herder deleted all the contents about his cohabitation with A Yao in Ningbo while he reorganised his diary which was left with a large gap. Afterwards, Herder was reluctant to discuss this experience and he never admitted that he was the father of the three mixed-race children in public, despite the fact that he always looked after them financially and loved them very much.[cxvii]
In general, there were not many interracial marriages between the Chinese and the Western whites in modern Shanghai. According to Xiong, it was estimated that after being opened as a commercial port between 1843 and 1949, there were no more than 100 cases of formal marriage between the Chinese and Westerners in Shanghai over 106 years. Judging from the aspect of time, there was a tendency towards a gradual increase from far to near. Maybe this was related to the increase in foreign settlers, or the increasing communication between different races.[cxviii] For a long time, English settlers in Shanghai resolutely were opposed to marriage with the Chinese. In 1908, the English envoy in China sent out a confidential document, harshly condemning marriages with the Chinese and threatening to expel the violators of this rule from the English circle forever.[cxix] According to research by English scholar Robert Bickers, before 1927, policemen in the English police station, Shanghai Municipal Council, were prohibited from marrying the Chinese. In 1927, the general inspector of the station stated that transnational marriages did not meet the interests of the police force.[cxx] In 1937, the president of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation said that marriage between foreigners and local Chinese mixed race people was absolutely intolerable. If anyone did this they would be formally fired by John Swire & Sons Group and other big companies.[cxxi] The community of English residents in Shanghai had a harsher restriction upon English women as they believed it was treacherous for noble English women to marry humble Chinese men. One English man wrote in his letter to his sister that “if you dared to have an affair with Asian men in Shanghai, you would never stay here well.”[cxxii] In the middle of the 1930s, the Department of the Far East under the English Foreign Ministry tried its best to persuade those English women who had an intention to marry Chinese men not to do so. In the official book, it warned that marrying Chinese men may cause loss of British nationality, which meant that those British women who married Chinese men would no longer be protected by British law in China.[cxxiii] Compared with the upper-class British residents, the restrictions upon the lower classes on marriage were looser, and there were some instances of marriage between lower-class British and Chinese. In 1927, policeman Parker in Shanghai Municipal Council applied to marry a Chinese woman. After the committee’s examination, the woman’s parents were believed to have high status, and the marriage was permitted. However this policeman lost any prospect of future promotion. In 1934, relevant departments in Shanghai issued martial certificates to 6 Chinese women all of whom had British husbands.[cxxiv] Therefore, it could be noticed that before wider contact was opened up between the Chinese and Westerners, both sides sought to protect their long cultural traditions of which they were very proud. After the Opium Wars, despite the Chinese defeat on the battlefield, their deep sense of cultural superiority was not lost. Equally, Westerners from Britain, France, the USA and other countries living in Shanghai also claimed to be the superior races on a cultural level. Compared to the British, the Americans had a more tolerant attitude towards marriages with the Chinese, but they also basically opposed it.[cxxv] Therefore, in general, both sides rejected marriage with each other.[cxxvi]
In respect of transnational marriages in the modern Shanghai concessions, if it is said that there was not a high rate of Western men marrying Chinese women aside form a small number of cases, then it was quite rare to see examples of Western women marrying Chinese men. This was because if an American woman married or just was engaged to a Chinese man, the general reaction of other Americans was to question why she wanted to marry a Chinese man, and ask whether she could not find a more appropriate husband in the USA, regardless of how well-educated the Chinese man was. Other Americans would claim it would be unfair for their children.[cxxvii] However, the situation was quite the opposite to that of transnational marriages among the Chinese in America. At that time in America, nearly all of the transnational marriages relating to the Chinese were exclusively between Chinese men and Western women. In 1876, there had already been 4 or 5 cases of Chinese men marrying American wives in San Francisco. In 1885, there were 10 families of Chinese husbands and American wives there. From 1908 to 1912, there were 10 marriages of white women marrying Chinese men in New York, without a single case of marriage between an American man and a Chinese woman.[cxxviii] Mr. Wu Jingchao who researched this issue asked,
“Has there been any American man marrying a Chinese wife? In the materials I have collected, there has never been such a case. Of course, we know there were many cases of foreign men marrying Chinese women, but all of these happened in China rather than America. Only several years before, a Chinese woman, being an actress in some Hollywood movie company, fell in love with an American man who never married her. Later he said to others that I could be friends with the Chinese woman. As for marrying her, it was impossible. Even if I would, my mother would definitely disapprove and my friends may also oppose.”[cxxix]
In Shanghai, intercultural marriages were between Western men and Chinese women, while in America such marriages were between Chinese men and Western women.[cxxx] Although the trends seemed diametric opposites, they reflected the same truth that if the migrants only took a tiny proportion in comparison with the natives it was men who first broke through interracial marriage restrictions. It mirrored the situation at the end of the Qing Dynasty when it was mostly Chinese men, especially those who had experience of staying in Western countries, who married western wives.[cxxxi]
C. Chinese labour workers who were sent to Western countries on a large scale in modern China.
Besides overseas study, overseas trade dealing and working abroad also become important ways leading to Chinese marrying Westerners in their countries. “Open up the Northeast of China”, “Moving to the West”, and “Sailing to Southeast Asia” are three great migrations of population in Chinese modern history. In the past, from the cultural perspective, the Chinese nation was an agricultural one, whose primary characteristics were sticking to one’s land and living a peaceful family life.[cxxxii] Indeed, great courage was required before they decided to explore and strive in the new world. As the old saying goes, it is better to be a dog in peace than to be a man in turmoil. The Chinese nation emphasises harmony between men and nature and a peaceful life, therefore, the Chinese would generally not leave their hometown without special reasons, such as extreme life pressures or war.[cxxxiii]
At the demise of the federal dynasties in Chinese history, the common people and the fallen nobles of the previous dynasties started to drift abroad to Southeast Asia to escape the conflict. Due to its geological closeness, Southeast Asia became the migration destination and shelter of Chinese migrants. The drifting population would come to Southeast Asia despite the long distance to strive to make a living, this period was called “Sailing to Southeast Asia” in Chinese history.[cxxxiv] Besides the Southeast Asian countries that were comparatively close to china, the Chinese also moved to western countries for the sake of employment.[cxxxv] Apart from working as labourers, the Chinese also did business in Western countries.[cxxxvi] Among them many achieved huge success in their businesses, surprising the white people in mainstream society who later looked at them with new eyes.[cxxxvii] These Chinese stayed there because of their businesses, and some of them married local people.
In the 1840s and 1850s, a large amount of Chinese migrants began to travel to the American West to seek gold, where they also assisted in building railways. Chinese migrants first appeared in 1848 when they found gold in California prompting others to join the Gold Rush. The earliest Chinese migrants came from Guangdong province, and were peasants from different villages who sailed to “Gold Mountain” after borrowing money or selling themselves to human traffickers as cheap labour. The “Gold Mountain” referred to California in America. According to historical records, in February, 1848, that is, two months after the discovery of gold mines in California, two Chinese men and a woman sailed across the Pacific Ocean from Canton to San Francisco in California in the ship, the American Eagle, becoming the earliest Chinese migrants to land and stay at “Gold Mountain”. Two years later, different groups of Chinese came successively, among whom most quickly went to the gold mine, Sutter’s Mill, to seek gold, and a few gathered in Dupont Street and Sacramento Street at that time in San Francisco. Later “China Town” gradually evolved from this. In 1865, the number of Chinese migrants amounted to 50,000, 90% of whom were young men. They then came to the “Gold Mountain” to build railways instead of seeking gold.[cxxxviii] Many Chinese men could not find Chinese wives in the USA at that time, so it prompted some of them to find local wives; many of them married African American women.[cxxxix]
A similar movement of Chinese labourers happened in Europe, albeit with some differences. In 1914, World War I had taken place, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of European labourers. Consequently, during the War, a great number of Chinese labourers were sent to Europe to supplement the work force of these countries.[cxl] In respect of France some margin studies found that many Chinese male labourers married French women at that time. Dr. Xu Guoqi showed that many French women married Chinese labourers during the First World War.[cxli] During the War, 140,000 Chinese labourers came to Europe to help the Allied war effort, 96,000 of them were allocated to the British army, and 37,000 were depatched to France. Many French men had died at war, so the French women welcomed Chinese men, and more than 3,000 Chinese labourers married French women at that time.[cxlii] Although Chinese male labourers were maltreated and beaten, and were not allowed to leave the camp, they still “managed to escape at night, for one night… Also there were problems with French women”.[cxliii] “Some Chinese male labourers formed attachments with French women and oft times children were born. At a later date they returned to China with their French wives and children. The exact number is not known, but French sources quote about 30,000,[cxliv] which appears excessive.”[cxlv]
With regard to Russia, as early as the 1860s, it had speeded up developing its territories in the far east, and built cities, roads, ports, railways and communication lines, in the process recruiting many foreign labourers, of which Chinese labours made up the greatest number.[cxlvi] From 1891 onwards, Russia recruited Chinese labourers to build the Siberian Railway.[cxlvii] Russia suffered great losses in the War, and lacked labourers as a result, so it continued its policy of recruiting Chinese labourers.[cxlviii] Between 1915 and 1916, Russia reached a high tide in recruiting Chinese labourers. In 1917, the October Revolution occurred in Russia, and Tsarist Russia was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. About 200,000 Bielorussians went into exile to China because of the threat of the Russian 1917 Revolution, and many Bielorussians settled down in China and even married Chinese.[cxlix] At that time, there were 230,000 Chinese labour workers in Russia, who participated in the revolution to “protect soviet” as Chinese labour troops. Many Chinese labour workers in Russia at the time married Russian women, and this became commonplace among Chinese labour workers.[cl]
Besides those working as labourers, the Chinese also did business in Western countries. For example, in America, in 1870, the Chinese prospered in business although Chinese vegetable venders still sold their goods on the San Francisco streets carrying a horizontal stick on their shoulders. The laundries in downtown areas were mainly occupied by Chinese laundrettes. Many Chinese began to work in industries of quantity production, mainly in the four industries of shoemaking, fur textile, tobacco, and clothes-making. Until 1870, the number of Chinese workers amounted to half of the total numbers working in the key four industries in this city. Their employers were mostly Chinese as well. Until the 1970s, there were about 5000 Chinese businessmen in San Francisco.[cli] Among them many achieved great success in their business, surprising the Westerners around them and changing their perception of them.[clii] In Australia, many Chinese men also came to settle there for business reasons (See picture 4.11). These Chinese stayed there because of their businesses, and some of them married local people.
D. Intercultural marriages and Migration caused by the Chinese Civil War
Civil wars create refugees who flee across international borders to safer havens.[cliv] The Chinese Civil War (CCW), from 1945 to 1949, was fought between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It was one of the bloodiest and most violent wars in the modern world, and 6 million soldiers and civillians were killed.[clv] The end of the CCW produced a large wave of refugees from China to Western countries, such as the USA. Of all the Chinese migrants that moved to foreign countries, the refugees created by the CCW were the greatest in number. It was a very intense and sudden event in modern Chinese history. These departing groups were quite different from the peasant labourers who had pioneered the initial Chinese migration to the USA. These refugees included members of the intellegentsia, the upper classes, and families of wealth. There were also a number of Chinese students studying in the USA who were afraid of returning to China because of the changes in the political system. Many of them were subsequently granted immigrant status.[clvi] These sudden and numerous fleeing Chinese people became the protagonists of CWIM in this period. As stated by Fink, the most important functional factors imposed by civil wars are spreading refugees into other States, presenting ethnic, linguistic or religious confreres in the destination countries, and sharing ideologies or alliances between the participants and potential patrons.[clvii] By these means, these groups of Chinese people had opportunities to marry Americans, resulting in some CWIMs during this period.
1.2.2 Government Intervention in Both China and Western Countries
Although it emerged as a social entity during this period, marriage between Chinese and foreigners also encountered opposition from the outside world, both from Western and Chinese governments. Westerners held racial biases against the Chinese, and so they set up various obstacles inhibiting marriage between the two cultures. Where Chinese men married foreign women, western countries tended to object to and discriminate against them. This could be seen as a miniature playing out of the male-dominated world, that is, men tried to prevent women of their race from marrying outward. This section will look at governmental intervention and the role that governments played in the CWIM of both China and the West in modern times.
For Western countries, in the 19th century, the ideology and government policies of Great Britain and the USA took a repellent or, at least, inhibitory attitude towards interracial marriages in their own realms.[clviii] For example in the USA, from the middle and late period of the 19th century and the first two or three decades of the 20th century, there were about 11 states in the USA prohibiting marriages between Americans and Chinese, including Arizona, California, Missouri, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Virginia. For some of these States, especially those in the south, they were always hostile towards people of colour, whether black or yellow. For those States in the west, such as California, where there were many Chinese immigrants, there had been movements against Chinese labourers and they were hostile to the Chinese. As we can see from Figure 4.8, there were almost no Chinese women in Chinatown, San Francisco in the 19th century. The early Chinese arrivals in USA were primarily young males, but the abounding prejudice and discrimination at that time in the USA forced the majority into segregated Chinatowns where opportunities for contact with non-Chinese females were extremely limited. Californian miscegenation laws were implemented from 1850 and these prohibited marriage between Caucasians and Asians, Filipinos, Indians, and Negroes. These laws were no overturned until 1948.[clix] Even in the 1930s, Chinatowns in the USA were still seen as a ‘man’s town’ or a ‘bachelors’ society’.[clx] In 1878, the California State Council approved an amendment prohibiting the Chinese from marrying whites. In 1880, Californian Civil Law prescribed that marriage certificates were not allowed for whites with blacks, Mulattos or Mongolians. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Law prohibited marriage between Chinese and whites. This was first issued in California and later spread around the whole USA, becoming a national law. In 1922, the Cable Law restricted and prohibited marriage between Americans and Asian migrants, and it warned that they would lose their civil rights if they married Asians.[clxi] In addition, a female‘s citizenship was not linked to her husband’s, and this was mainly in order to prevent Chinese women from immigrating to the USA by marrying Chinese men who were born in America. Because of these regulations amongst other factors, most of the Chinese American men in the USA at that time did not have a wife. According to the data of Los Angeles from 1924 to 1933, only 23.7% of Chinese men there had non-Chinese wives, and at that time the male-to-female ratio among Chinese Americans was 9:2, so most Chinese men did not have a wife.
The situation was similar for other Asian people in relation to marriage. The Japanese had followed the Chinese in coming to America, and, in the early days, they had a very low intermarriage ratio. According to the data of Los Angeles from 1924 to 1933, only 3% married Japanese men had non-Japanese wives. The Japanese in America also suffered under the discriminatory laws and from the social discrimination encouraged by them. In 1923, the organisation, “Native Daughters of the Golden West” warned white women that “these days, some Japanese men with a good family background are found to peek at our young women, and they want to marry them.” The president of the California Control Society even thought that the Japanese intended to conquer the USA with intermarriages as a key component of their plan.[clxii] Because of this cultural background, the American white people in China at that time always held an objective attitude toward marriage with people of Asian colouring. Some English scholars once tried to discuss this question from a sociological respect. In 1982, some Japanese wrote to Spencer, the famous English scholar, and asked about his attitude towards interracial marriage. In his reply, Spencer talked about his opinions and mentioned that the US prohibited the entrance of Chinese. He approved of this on the basis that if the US allowed the Chinese to come and go at their will, there would only be two options for them. One was that in the US there would be two separate classes, the white and the yellow, and they would not intermarry. The other was interracial marriage which would lead to many undesirable hybrids. In his view, no matter which way it would be, the result was not favourable.[clxiii] Spencer’s attitude had great influence, and well into the 1920s and 1930s, many westerners were of this opinion.
Australia provided another example. Western colonists considered the Chinese as different from them and believed they would be unable to integrate into white society for cultural, biological, language and racial reasons. The Australian Colonial government also implemented policies to impose race boundaries between whites and Chinese.[clxiv] These policies were not only confined to the political sphere but were extended to interracial intimate relationships. As stated by McClintock, they “gave social sanction to the middle class fixation with boundary sanitation, in particular with the sanitation of sexual boundaries”.[clxv] White women’s bodies and sexuality were considered by policy makers as very threatening and destabilising to the established boundary order.[clxvi] As McClintock suggested, white women were seen as “the central transmitter of racial and hence cultural contagion”, and so they must be blockaded from men from other races.[clxvii] The intimacy between white women and non-white men brought great anxieties for the colonial government. The anxieties and indignation could be seen at the very early stages of 1850. Early debates of the 1850s on Chinese migration to Australia were particularly concerned about the possibility of the ‘destruction of the white race’ through sexual relations between Chinese men and white women, although there were only one or two cases of marriages between Chinese men and white women in Australia at that time.[clxviii]
Western countries not only constrained Chinese-Western marriages in their own realms, but they also wantonly interfered with and obstructed Chinese-Western marriages in China, and they demonstrated their powers in attitudes on intercultural marriages. In 1899, an American priestess and doctor in Guangdong married a Chinese man, Lan Ziying, which unexpectedly caused a big stir. Two American people in Guangzhou wrote to the American Embassy to suggest a doctor check whether the woman was suffering from a psychiatric disorder. This is a clear example of racial prejudice. The American consul in Guangzhou did not interfere as “there has been no obstruction for a foreign woman to get married with a Chinese.” (However, in some States of America, there were laws prohibiting marriage between whites and Chinese).[clxix] In 1911, some Western women eagerly asked the British consul in Chengdu to intervene in the marriage between a British women, Helen, and Hu Jizeng in Sichuan. They said that Hu already had a wife, and had committed bigamy within Western terms. The British consul negotiated with Wang Renwen, Sichuan Vice Governor, and asked him to punish Hu according to the law. Wang said that under Chinese law, having two wives was not a crime. Finally the British Embassy in China realised they could not prevent the marriage but warned Helen: “If you don’t have a divorce and return home, it will be regarded that you give up your British nationality”. However, using Chinese terms, she said, “I would like to be his concubine even till death”. Unexpectedly, the angry envoy replied, “Britain would never permit you to be a concubine. If you are a whore, you are not permitted to stay in China.[clxx]” , In judging the case, Ta Kung Pao commented:
“The marriage between Hu-He and Hu is a case based on their personal love which is not related to the third party. Now the British envoy says it will get involved as a matter of international affairs and force them to have a divorce. He has insisted that women from a great power are reluctant to marry men from a poor country while women in poor countries can be wife, concubine or even nothing to men from a great power. How pathetic it is!”[clxxi]
Later, he also commented, “the law should take people’s feelings into account, and the law is formed by nature. It is well-known that the British culture is famous for kindness around the world and wins respect from all countries. Therefore, most of the British people should be clement, and the British envoy would never like to see all of the Hu families die because of his plan. Maybe he also had to interfere in this affair”.[clxxii] Although this was to whitewash the British envoy’s deeds, it also indicated the real power behind powerful language.
For the Chinese, the Qing government had no intention of interfering with transnational marriages at first, and they let them be. The earliest legal documents of regulations on marriage between Chinese and Germans in 1888, and Chinese and Italians in 1889 basically made them equal to previous forms of marriage, and the Qing government did not intend to interfere too much. Later on, as there were more cases of this kind of marriage, some problems did arise, and the Qing government had to pay attention to them. In 1908, Li Fang, magistrate in the Da Li Yuan (Supreme Court) of the Qing government, asked for a divorce with his English wife from Shuntianfuyin Yamen (the chief executive who was in charge of Beijing’s government affairs and security in the Qing Dynasty). It was the first case of divorce between a Chinese and a foreigner. Li Fang wrote his request in his written complaint to Shuntianyinfu:
I am Li Fang, a magistrate of the Supreme Court. I asked my family servant Li Xing to apply to the higher authorities for consideration of my case on behalf of me. Humbly I am from Chang Le county of Guangdong province, and I have studied in the UK since I was young. I married my British wife Paierli in 1899, and I brought her back to China when I graduated in 1905. Now because she has failed in her obligations to the family as a wife and she is a dissolute woman, she has gone back to the UK on her own since 1908. She has not returned, and she even wrote a letter to tell me that she would not return to China. We indeed are willing to divorce. In order to provide adequate documents and grounds of justification, I attached the capital officers’ imprinted letter as well as Paerli’s letter in her own writing for your reference. Would you please check them and also request the Foreign Minister to consult with the British legation to proceed. I humbly beg you to approve it for my convenience.[clxxiii]
This was an unprecedented case in China, of a man offering the excuse that his wife did not adhere to wifehood. After the divorce, the reports in the Chinese papers were quite amusing and it was used as a warning to those wanting to marry Western women.[clxxiv] In March 1909, the Qing government enacted and issued the Nationality Law which followed a principle based upon the paternal line.[clxxv] As there was a growing tendency for transnational marriages to be especially admired and followed by the young overseas Chinese students, the fashion of marrying Westerners was gradually being formed in China.[clxxvi]
Confronting this situation, at the beginning of 1910, the Qing government held a discussion about interracial marriages between Chinese and foreigners. It considered that as the exchange between various countries became more and more frequent, theoretically speaking, interracial marriages between Chinese and foreigners should not be prohibited, but should be restricted. It prescribed that future marriages between Chinese and foreigners should first be reported to the government. If one was a diplomatic official or officer, one was not allowed to marry a foreigner without permission. In the same year, the Qing Government also acceded to a request of the Imperial Educational Ministry and declared that overseas students should not marry foreigners. There were several reasons for this. First, during their studies, overseas students should not be burdened by a family in case it affected their studies. Second, economically speaking, foreign women were considered basically extravagant, while overseas students had only a limited amount of money, and would not have a good balance between study and life if they married foreigners. Third, if overseas students married foreign women, they would be less likely to return and contribute to China’s progress despite achieving academic success, so this would not profit the Qing government.[clxxvii]
This situation happened again in the Republic of China (ROC) era. Because those who engaged in intercultural marriages were usually of the Chinese elite, especially students studying abroad, the educational officials in ROC became very worried that their money might be lost to another country because of intercultural marriage. The ROC government believed that once they became husbands or wives of foreigners, they would not serve China any more. In July 1918, towards the end of World War I, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China issued an order to restrict marriages between overseas students and foreigners. However, as they were too far away to control, its effectiveness was doubted.[clxxviii]
4.2.3 Summary and Discussion of CWIMs in Modern China
In summary, historic changes occurred through the opening-up of China at the end of the 19th century. The opening-up was the result of the advances made by Western powers in terms of guns and boats, and it brought closer contacts between the Chinese and Westerners for the first time after thousands of years. From the perspective of and the two nations, various battles between the two sides were mostly temporarily ended with compromises and concessions by the Chinese. It could be said that the Chinese endured much abuse and hardship during these years. It was against this major background that the earliest transnational marriages between Chinese and Westerners took place. I would like to summarise the characteristics, elements and the significance of Chinese-Western intermarriages in modern China.
Approaches and Social Classes:
As discussed above in terms of historical records, there were four approaches for Chinese to marry Westerners in modern history. Simply speaking, these marriages happened between Chinese-in-China and Westerners-in-China, and between Chinese-in-West and Westerners-in-West. But in fact these approaches are themselves contained within the following categories: 1) Chinese students and diplomats studying abroad marrying Westerners; 2) Foreigners marrying Chinese in foreign concessions in China; 3) Chinese labourers working in Western countries marrying local Westerners; 4) Chinese refugees fleeing to Western countries due to the Chinese Civil War. It was obvious to see that CWIM in modern China was the result of freer contacts between Chinese and Westerners, of which Chinese spouses usually met their Western spouses freely and naturally through their studying, working and daily lives. Compared with other approaches to meeting and selecting spouses including certain purposive and high-tech approaches in the contemporary world, free association with Westerners is the most obvious characteristic of CWIMs.
The features of social class were also tightly related to the approaches in CWIMs in modern times. Diplomats and students sent to foreign countries almost all had high social status. According to the Chinese Social Stratefication model,[clxxix] these people usually belonged to Cadre and Quasi-Cadre, or were Capitalists. The majority of the students were government-paid ,thus even if some students studying abroad might not come from a wealthy family, their status as ‘students’ or ‘intelligentsia’ divided them from the common people, as they were sponsored and cultivated as ‘the pillars of China’ by the Qing or ROC governments. Some other students were self-funded (especially in the ROC period) and they were from wealthy families. The reason why they had the opportunities to contact and marry Westerners largely depended on their social statuses. These Chinese were the elite in modern China, and they were the first group of people who formally associated with and studied the Western world, thus they had more chances and were more open and cosmopolitan than the majority of ordinary Chinese people in China. To some extent they were less constrained and more accepting of intercultural marriages, as they had more privileges in powers and ways of dealing with their marital affairs than ordinary Chinese people. Similarly, the fourth type of CWIM in modern China consisted of the Chinese refugees who had fled because of CCW. These people were almost all intellegentsia, upper class, and from wealthy families, because only they had the economic capability of travelling to avoid war. Their associations and marriages with Western countries and Westners also represented the social class attributes in CWIMs. In other words, Chinese spouses from the first and forth channels had the power to choose their CWIMs and migration destinations. The third group of Chinese spouses who married Westeners in foreign countries were almost all labour workers in modern China, and the majority of them were male. They belonged to the peseant working classes. They left their homes to make a living in a remote Western country. Their choices in intercultural marriages with Westeners came about through free association with Westerners. Moreover, they left China, and they needed to have a wife and family to fulfill the basic physiological needs and more importantly, the need to continue their family ties that were significantly standardised in traditional Chinese culture. To some extent, they had no alternative but to choose intercultural marriage. The foreign concession’s situation was quite special, as it was a kind of “a state within a state”, and a large amount of Westerners came into Zu Jie and associated with the Chinese freely. The culture in Zu Jie was more international than other parts of China of that time, and it created a social mode for free contacts between Chinese and Westerners. In summary, no matter which type of CWIM one belonged to in modern China, the majority of CWIMs were formed on the basis of free association and free love. This approach is very different from the arranged marriage which was the dominant marriage mode of traditional Chinese society. In this sense, CWIMs in modern China initiated the mode of free love and the freedom to select one’s own spouse. In addition, upper class Chinese obtained more choices and capabilities than lower class Chinese in marriage and choosing intercultural marriages.
Government Roles in CWIMs:
Both Chinese and Western governments, but especially Western governments, were unwilling to encourage their people to marry Westerners/Chinese. Both Chinese and Western countries revolted against intercultural intermarriage. The Chinese attitude was marked by trepidation towards Westerners, and Westerners tended towards being disdaining towards marriage between their people and the Chinese. The CWIMs were strongly influenced and even interfered with by governmental power. Indeed, even the inertia of a negative attitude from both governments could still affect the people’s choice in intercultural marriage. Regardless of capitalist and industrialised Western countries or the feudal China of modern times, the government agency still dominated and infiltrated the private spheres of the family and marriage. Western governments particularly, ascribed to themselves a superiority over the Chinese in culture and race. As discussed previously, Chinese Exclusion Acts operated in many places in Western countries for a long time. As stated by Bagnall, interracial relationships between Chinese and Westerners (especially between Chinese men and Western women) were not common, but Western governments still spent much time and energy discussing them, because “their potential dangers and possible social outcomes as well as the mere possibility of their presence were all destablishing and threatening to the established order and social hierarchies” of Western or Western colonial life.[clxxx] Therefore, according to the previous historical analysis, Western governments openly and wantonly interfered with CWIMs, especially marriages between Chinese men and Western women. This interference actually revealed the Western will in controlling its citizens’ bodies, especially in relation to women. The male-dominated government displayed its strong patriarchal intentions in controlling women’s bodies.
According to Foucault, biopower is a system of relations in which “phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species” enter “into the order of power and knowledge.”[clxxxi], and for Foucault, biopower “exerts a positive influence on life, which endeavours to administer, optimise and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.”[clxxxii] In his work ‘The History of Sexuality’, biopower was defined as a new-style power. The initial form of biopower is manifested as a perceptive power, and in fact it is the ‘anatomo-politics of the human body’.[clxxxiii] Foucault attributed power to the body and endowed the body with political and philosophical implications grounded at an ideological level. According to his findings, people in the classical period had already discovered that the body was the object and target of power, and he pointed out that “this body is operated, shaped, and regulated. The body is submissive, cooperative, and it has becoming dexterous and strong.”[clxxxiv] Quoting Julien Offroy de La Mettrie’s point of view from her work ‘L’Homme Machine’, Foucault considered that the organismic analogy made between human body and automaton is not a simple metaphor, the human body is also the political doll and miniature manipulated by power.[clxxxv] The human body is related to the political domain directly; a power relation directly controls the body, regulates it, and forces it to complete certain tasks. The political controls on the human body are based on a complex interrelation which is closely related to the instrumentalising of the human body. The human body is endowed with power and a dominance relationship as productive forces, and in the meantime it is brought into an affiliation system.
When discussing Lee Kuan Yew’s government’s regulations on birth control, Heng and Devan used Foucault’s theory of biopower to analyse how a patriarchal state agency manipulated ‘National Crisis Exposition’ to legalise its act of controlling the female body.[clxxxvi] Ong also adopted a similar concept to discuss the Malysian state agency’s controlling on Islamic women’s reproduction.[clxxxvii] Kung used a similar theory to discuss the States’ controls on Vietnamese women of both Taiwan and Vietnam governments.[clxxxviii] In this study on CWIMs in modern China, the Chinese and Western governments’, but especially the latter’s, desire to control the human body was profoundly manistified in controlling women’s bodies. Western governments tried and legalised control of Western women’s as well as Chinese men’s bodies, by mandating usage modes of their bodies. At the same time, when threatened by intercultural marriage, Western governments strengthened the state authority and race boundaries by means of legislating discriminating laws towards Chinese men and promoting the argument that reproduction was a national obligation. Complexities of nationalism and culture were connected in CWIMs. Both Chinese and Western males hold the same horizons in state agencies, implying that the state agency was masculinised. Therefore, it could be observed that the infiltration of governmental power into private domains, and the political and social significance of race discrimination among patriarchal countries were also represented in CWIMs.
Shift in CWIM Gender Ratios:
After reviewing the history of Chinese Western intercultural marriage in modern China, we can see that there was a very peculiar phenomenon of intermarriage between Chinese and foreigners at that time; Chinese men marrying foreign women was relatively common, but few Chinese females married foreign males. More famous Chinese males married Western women than they did Chinese women, although this situation changed very quickly after a few years of the Opening, especially with the establishment of the Republic of China. However, it must be noted that during the period in which, in general, more Chinese men married Western women, more Chinese women married Westerners in Zu Jie such as Shanghai. The situation of more Chinese men marrying Western women lasted for a period of time, but it became a very uncommon phenomenon later in the history of Chinese intercultural marriage. This deserves discussions as it is the most distinctive characteristic of modern Chinese-Western intercultural marriage.
Several reasons could be suggested for the transition: 1) The early students sent to foreign countries were all Chinese men, and no women would have had such opportunities, so naturally, Chinese men had more opportunities to make contacts with Western women. At the same time, all those Chinese men who first came into contact with the West were noble personages with prominent social status which could make up for the weakness of the nation and the country.[clxxxix] 2) Although the WuXu movement helped women obtain equal rights to go to college and study abroad in the same way as men, the feudal system still affected the Chinese strongly, and the long-time absence of women’s education resulted in most women being illiterate.[cxc] This gap would take time to close, so the trend of fewer women traveling abroad continued. 3) Women were restricted by the Chinese traditional gendered culture and by its patriarchy, while men had more freedom to make choices about their lives. The restrictions of traditional culture upon Chinese women were greater than those on men. Women in China were still conservative, and the patrilineal culture required women to be more obedient and conservative, whereas Chinese men were free of this kind of restrain. 4) The greater proportion of Chinese men marrying Western ladies could also be explained as a kind of special phenomenon resulting from the special context whereby there were insufficient local Western men, as happened in the First World War. 5) The situation in Zu Jie was very different from that of greater China in that era, because more Western men came to Zu Jie as government officers and soldiers. A reason more Chinese women married Western men could be that the Westernised culture dominated in Zu Jie, and the power of traditional Chinese culture and family values were greatly weakened, leading to the gradual formation of a mixed and international culture in Zu Jie, which meant that Chinese women in Zu Jie had much fewer constraints in terms of sex and marriage choices. They could marry Westerners without considering traditional family pressures.
This kind of Zu Jie culture actually continued until now in Shanghai, and one of its most distinct examples can be observed in the fact that today’s Shanghai women are very interested in marrying Western men and foreigners, and even give priority to Western men when they are considering relationships and marriage.[cxci] In summary, at first Chinese men married Western women to a far greater extend than the converse at the beginning of China’s Opening, but the situation changed very quickly and much more Chinese women married Western men later on. It was only in special situations that many Chinese men could marry Western wives. Western countries had more severe policies concerned with restraining Western women from marrying Chinese men. Chinese men were particularly discriminated against by policies in this setting. Traditionally, research has focused on the inferior position of Chinese women, to the neglect of the difficulties imposed on Chinese men which led to the placing of them in very negative emasculated and effeminate positions. This phenomenon merits further discussion and analysis from the perspective of masculinities and sex hegemony in future studies.
Significance of Freedom of Choice:
The marriages occurring between the people of China and those from other countries at this period were the result of free choice on both sides. Compared with the prevailing marriages arranged by parents in China at that time, they could be regarded as the earliest models of free marriages. In China. The Chinese people who married foreigners at that time were those who had the chance to make contact with foreigners. Besides this factor, they usually had special experiences and statuses which dissociated them from mainstream Chinese culture, and, consequently, these transnational marriages were tolerated by public opinion of society in general. For example, Qian Xiuling’s case mentioned earlier was an example which represented the significance of free choice. Qian Xiuling broke her engagement with her Chinese fiancé and associated with a Belgian man. Qian’s case of CWIM represented that Chinese women were beginning to have the courage to decide their own marriages, which indicated the progress of Chinese society and the gradual breaking down of traditional shackles on Chinese women. Compared with the CWIMs later in today’s Contemporary China, CWIMs in earlier modern China had less clearly defined patterns and were less deliberately sought out. Chinese people who married Westerners in
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Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at age 104
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2016-05-25T11:15:31+00:00
|
BEIJING (AP) — Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to an equally famous author, died Wednesday at age 104, state media said.
|
en
|
/apple-touch-icon.png
|
AP News
|
https://apnews.com/obituaries-60719a7dec914628ba324d57477f0c94
|
BEIJING (AP) — Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to an equally famous author, died Wednesday at age 104, state media said.
Yang died at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, according to The Paper, a state-owned news website. It said her death had been confirmed by her publisher, the People’s Literature Publishing House.
Citing different sources, Hong Kong station Phoenix TV also confirmed Yang’s death, the cause of which was not given.
Born in 1911, Yang became a household name in China for her novels, plays, essays and translated works. She was the first to translate “Don Quixote” into Chinese, and her version is still considered the definitive one by many.
Her death was the top search term on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo on Wednesday, a testimony to her fame and the public adoration she enjoyed.
In a 1981 collection of essays, Yang wrote with a sense of poignancy on the daily lives of Chinese intellectuals during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when scholars and intellectuals were forced to perform hard labor.
Her 2003 essay collection “We Three,” about her family life with her late husband and their daughter, was a best-seller.
Yang was married to Qian Zhongshu, best known for his novel “Fortress Besieged,” and theirs was widely seen as a model union set against the background of China’s turbulent 20th century.
After Qian’s death in 1998, Yang embarked on the task of compiling and editing her husband’s unpublished works and remained prolific herself.
In addition to “We Three,” she published a sequel to her novel “Baptism” at age 103.
|
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21594
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yago
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3
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https://www.academia.edu/37242485/_Allegorizing_the_existential_crisis_in_modern_China_Qian_Zhongshu_s_philosophical_novel_Fortress_Besieged_
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en
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"Allegorizing the existential crisis in modern China: Qian Zhongshu’s philosophical novel Fortress Besieged”
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2018-08-15T00:00:00
|
With a special focus on the interconnection between literature and philosophy in modern Chinese literature, this paper analyzes the novel Fortress Besieged (1947) written by Qian Zhongshu, a polyglot scholar in East-West comparative literature and
|
https://www.academia.edu/37242485/_Allegorizing_the_existential_crisis_in_modern_China_Qian_Zhongshu_s_philosophical_novel_Fortress_Besieged_
|
Modern Chinese fiction dealing with cultural others can be taken as a lens through which to reread the cosmopolitan theory. At stake in the debate between communitarianism and liberalism are the viability of single cultural membership and its validity. Lao She’s Self-Sacrifice (1934) and Dr. Wen (1936-1937) question the viability of global cultural membership. For Lao She, cultural hotchpotch—as suggested by Salman Rushdie—is not an option. These novellas dramatize the dialectic between the global and the local at a crossroads of Chinese nationalism and Western imperialism. Lao She's representation of Dr. Mao and Dr. Wen also pose challenging questions for his contemporaries and for twenty-first-century readers alike: Can one ever refuse to be defined by the local, either by birth or by acculturation? What are the implications and consequences if one so chooses?
Eileen Chang has been described by critics as an unapologetically introspective and sentimental but largely apolitical writer. When most other writers of her time were concentrating on the grand and the abstract in exploring the May Fourth modernist spirit, Eileen Chang’s approach to her writing poignantly laid bare an intense interest in the modern relationships between men and women, between an individual and the collective. Contrary to popular interpretation, this paper argues that there is a strong political and subversive dimension to Chang’s writings that has hitherto been glided over or ignored completely. Specifically, this paper suggests that recurring themes of abortive parent-child relationships, the dilapidated household, and disillusioned sexual unions throughout Chang’s work not only intertwines references to her own private life and love affairs, but reflects a larger sociopolitical history anchored in the rise of a national eugenics movement at the bedrock of Chinese modernity. The parallel narratives of The Golden Cangue (1943) and The Rouge of The North (1967) engage intimately in a social critique of the Chinese state’s propagation of eugenic practices related to reproduction. These stories unveil Eileen Chang at her best in uncovering, even allegorically, the relationship between the feminine and the sociopolitical changes besetting contemporary China. She limns a fictional world where Chinese modernity has engendered its own reflection in the image of the monstrous, embittered woman suffering from psychological and bodily decay and grapples with the corporeal manifestation of the malaise of social and marital relations in modern China.
Hong Shen is best known as one of the founding fathers of spoken drama (huaju), and his plays and his roles as a dramatist have been widely acknowledged. In this essay, Xuelei Huang traces Hong’s personal life and reveals his ambiguous identities, multiple roles, and border-crossing activities. Drawing for source material mainly from the Republican-era popular print press, especially tabloid newspapers (xiaobao), fan magazines, and pictorials, she examines the image of Hong as reflected through the lens of popular journalism, focusing mainly on three aspects: his whereabouts, his circles of friends, and his family and personal life. This examination reveals that Hong Shen navigated various fields that crossed boundaries between old and new, left and right, and elite and popular, and his particular experiences and characteristics were common traits of Chinese intellectuals of the Republican period. The popular press sheds light on the gray area of Hong’s life and many facets of this image have been erased in later master historical narratives or narratives of the history of drama. An intimate look at Hong’s personal life also invites us to rethink the validity of conventional politically motivated groupings and the complex nature of the Republican-era cultural field.
A foreign saying on marriage became widely known in China through Qian Zhongshu’s 1947 novel Fortress Besieged. As the novelist tells us, this saying has its source in both English and French literature, and in its different versions, marriage is either likened to a besieged fortress or a bird cage. This paper examines the origin and transmission of the saying in Greek, Arabic and Syriac sources, and argues that this saying originated in the so-called literature of the Christianized Socratic-Cynic philosophy, which once flourished in Syria. It became popular in the Byzantine and Arabic world after having been included into several famous Greek and Arabic gnomologies. Then it was introduced into modern languages, developed into different versions, finally came to China and became a household word among Chinese people.
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Jiang
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Yang Jiang
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2005-09-09T05:40:52+00:00
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en
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Jiang
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Chinese writer (1911–2016)
For the city in Guangdong, see Yangjiang. For other uses, see Yangjiang (disambiguation).
Yang JiangTraditional Chinese楊絳Simplified Chinese杨绛
TranscriptionsStandard MandarinHanyu PinyinYáng JiàngWade–GilesYang Chiang
Yang JikangTraditional Chinese楊季康Simplified Chinese杨季康
TranscriptionsStandard MandarinHanyu PinyinYáng Jìkāng
Yang Jiang (Chinese: 杨绛; Wade–Giles: Yang Chiang; 17 July 1911 – 25 May 2016) was a Chinese playwright, author, and translator. She wrote several successful comedies, and was the first Chinese person to produce a complete Chinese version of Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote.[1]
Biography
[edit]
She was born in Beijing as Yang Jikang,[2] and grew up in the Jiangnan region. After graduating from Soochow University in 1932, Yang Jiang enrolled in the graduate school of Tsinghua University. There she met Qian Zhongshu. They married in 1935. During 1935–1938, they went abroad to England for further study at Oxford University. In England, Yang gave birth to their daughter Qian Yuan (錢瑗) in 1937. They later studied at Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris, France.[2] They often spoke French and English to each other throughout their lives in China.[3]
They returned to China in 1938.[2] Living in Shanghai, she wrote four stage plays: two comedies of manners, Heart's Desire (1943) and Forging the Truth (1944), one farce, Sporting with the World (1947), and the tragedy Windswept Blossoms (1947). After 1949, she taught at the Tsinghua University and made a scholarly study of western literature at Peking University and the Academy of Science. She published this work in 1979 in a compendium: Spring Mud. As authors, literary researchers, and translators, Yang and Qian both made important contributions to the development of Chinese literary culture.[4]
Yang also translated into Chinese three major European works of picaresque fiction: Lazarillo de Tormes (1951), Gil Blas (1956) and Don Quixote (1978).[5] Her Chinese translation of Don Quixote is, as of 2016, still considered the definitive version.[3] After deeming several English and French translations unsuitable, she taught herself Spanish. “If I wanted to be faithful to the original, I had to translate directly from the original,” she wrote in 2002. Ms. Yang had completed almost seven out of eight volumes of the translation when Red Guard student militants confiscated the manuscript from her home in Beijing. “I worked with every ounce of energy I could muster, gouging at the earth with a spade, but the only result was a solitary scratch on the surface,” Ms. Yang wrote. “The youngsters around me had quite a laugh over that.” As the Cultural Revolution subsided, Ms. Yang returned to Beijing to work on “Don Quixote.” The nearly completed draft that had been confiscated by Red Guards is said to have been discovered in a pile of scrap paper and returned to Ms. Yang. Published in 1978, it remains widely regarded as the definitive translation of “Don Quixote” in China.[6]
She was also awarded the Civil Order of Alfonso X, the Wise for this by King Juan Carlos in October 1986.[7] Her sister Yang Bi (楊必) (1922–1968) was also a translator.
Her experience doing "reform through labor" in a "cadre school" in Henan from 1969 to 1972, where she was "sent down" with her husband during the Cultural Revolution, inspired her to write Six Chapters from My Life 'Downunder' (1981).[8] This is the book that made her name as a writer in the post-Mao period.[9][10] In connection with this memoir, she also wrote Soon to Have Tea (將飲茶) (aka Toward Oblivion), which was published in 1983.[11]
In 1988, she published her only novel Baptism (洗澡), which was always connected with Fortress Besieged (圍城), a masterpiece of her husband.[12] Her 2003 memoir We Three (我們仨), recalled memories of her husband and her daughter Qian Yuan, who died of cancer one year before her father's death in 1998. At the age of 96, she published Reaching the Brink of Life (走到人生邊上), a philosophic work whose title in Chinese clearly alludes to her late husband's collection of essays Marginalia to Life (寫在人生邊上).[2]
She turned 100 in July 2011.[13] The novella After the Baptism (洗澡之後), a coda to Baptism, appeared in 2014. On 25 May 2016, Yang died at the age of 104 at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing.[3]
Contradicting a Chinese saying that it is impossible for a woman to be both a chaste wife and gifted scholar or talented artist, Qian once described Yang as “the most chaste wife and talented girl” in China.
Works
[edit]
Plays
[edit]
Heart's Desire (稱心如意) (1943).
Forging the Truth (弄真成假) (1944).
Sporting with the World (游戏人间) (1945).
Windswept Blossoms (风絮) (1947).
Novels
[edit]
Baptism (洗澡)(1988)
After the Bath (洗澡之後)(2014)
Essays
[edit]
Six Chapters from My Life 'Downunder' (幹校六記) (1981)
About to Drink Tea (將飲茶) (1987)
We Three (我們仨) (2003)
Her 2003 essay collection “We Three,” about her family life with her late husband and their daughter, was a national bestseller. Yang Jiang's daughter Qian Yuan gave the name of this book We Three. She has written the outline for it, but unfortunately died after five days in 1997. Yang withheld the news of their daughter's death from her husband Qian Zhongshu until his passing in 1998. After her husband's death, Yang compiled and edited his unpublished works, the most celebrated being We Three.[14] The opening line for We three is:
“This is a long dream of ten thousand miles. The scene was so real that it felt like a dream after waking up. But a dream being a dream, is nothing but a dream.”
“There is no absolute happiness in human life. Happiness always comes with worry and anxiety,”
Reaching the Brink of Life (走到人生邊上) (2007)
At the age of 96, Yang surprised the world with Reaching the Brink of Life, a philosophic work whose title alludes to her husband's collection of essays Marginalia to Life.[14] Reaching the Brink of Life is a self-reckoning that may well be Yang's most personal book. The first half of the book is structured as a self-dialogue about life, death, and the afterlife; the second part contains an assortment of family anecdotes and reading notes—the fragments of a life. What emerges from its pages is not merely the predictable inward turn toward self-consolation of a learned person facing death; in Yang's declaration of faith and her insistence that the afterlife be 'fair' is an affirmation of personal metaphysics in a nation that has long promoted collectivism while discouraging religion and ‘superstition'.[5]
"Body and soul is a twisted. Together with good evil."
Translation work
[edit]
Gil Blas
Don Quixote
Lazarillo de Tormes
Phaedo
See also
[edit]
List of centenarians (authors, poets and journalists)
References
[edit]
Further reading
[edit]
Literary works by Yang Jiang in English translation
Yang Jiang, tran. Howard Goldblatt (1988). Six Chapters from My Life "Downunder". University of Washington Press. ISBN 9780295966441.
Yang Jiang, tran. Geremie Barme (1989). Lost in the Crowd: A Cultural Revolution Memoir. McPhee Gribble. ISBN 9780869140970.
Yang Jiang, tran. Judith M. Amory and Yaohua Shi (2007). Baptism. Hong Kong University Press. ISBN 9789622098312.
Yang Jiang, ed. Christopher Rea (2011). "Renditions Magazine: Special issue on Yang Jiang". Renditions: A Chinese-English Translation Magazine = Yizong. Hong Kong University Press. ISSN 0377-3515.
Studies of Yang Jiang's life and works
Swislocki, Mark (2016) [First published 2003]. "Yang Jiang". In Lily Xiao Hong Lee; A. D. Stefanowska (eds.). Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women. Vol. 2: The Twentieth Century (1912-2000). Routledge. pp. 618–622. ISBN 978-1-315-49924-6.
Jesse Field (2012). Writing Lives in China: The Case of Yang Jiang. University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. hdl:11299/133367.
Christopher Rea, ed. (2015). China's Literary Cosmopolitans: Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang and the World of Letters. Brill. ISBN 9789004299962.
Media related to Yang Jiang at Wikimedia Commons
|
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https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/872830.shtml
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âManuscripts of Qian Zhongshuâ
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Qian Zhongshu
Inset: The first three volumes of Foreign Language Notes, a part of the larger series Manuscripts of Qian Zhongshu Photos: Courtesy of The Commercial Press
Through works like A Town Besieged and The Marginalia of Life, the late literature master Qian Zhongshu (1910-98) managed to leave an indelible footprint on modern Chinese literature. While many admire the wisdom embedded in his masterpieces, few know how this writer came to be such a master. Now, with the publication of 211 of his notebooks containing a total of more than 35,000 pages of his personal thoughts, we may finally get a chance to see the tip of the iceberg of his genius.
An avid reader who spent more time reading than actually writing, Qian took notes on and made comments about every book he read. Proficient in multiple foreign languages - English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Spanish and Greek - he was able to read books from all over the globe that ranged from philosophy, linguistics, psychology and anthropology to literature.
These copious notes have been kept safe by Qian's wife Yang Jiang, also an influential writer in China in her own right. In 2000, Yang reached an agreement with The Commercial Press to photocopy and publish these notes in book form. Titled Manuscripts of Qian Zhongshu, the first part of this huge series Notes in Ronganguan, consisting of three volumes, was published in 2003, while the second 20 volume set, Chinese Language Notes, was published in 2011.
As for the remaining portion of Qian's notes, the largest and most valuable section that records his thoughts on his readings in foreign languages, these are set to be published in a set of 50 volumes titled Foreign Language Notes, the first three volumes of which were already published in June.
Keeping a record
"Many people say Qian was gifted with an extraordinary memory. However, he didn't believe he was all that incredible. He merely loved reading, not just reading, but also taking notes. He wouldn't read something just one or two times, but three or four times, constantly adding new things to his notes. That's the real reason why he never forgot all those books he read," Yang, now 104 years old, wrote in the preface of Manuscripts.
As a youth, Qian attended Tsinghua University in China as well as Oxford University over in England. After coming back to China, he returned to Tsinghua to teach literature. According to Yang, his habit of taking notes developed while he was reading in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
Since the books in the library couldn't be removed from the premises nor could any marks be made on the books themselves, Qian decided to write his thoughts down in notebooks while he was reading.
Of course this method meant it took nearly twice the time than usual to get through a single book. Yang explains in the preface that countless books were constantly coming in and out of their home over the years, with only these books of notes Qian's only form of permanent storage. "These notes are already 'useless' to him, but for those who study foreign literature and Qian's works, are they really that useless?" Yang wrote.
These notes cover the books that Qian read from the 1930s all throughout to the near end of the 20th century when he passed away. An inseparable part of his life, his passion for literature, languages and knowledge are all preserved in these writings.
Massive undertaking
Although outliving both her daughter and her husband has been painful for Yang, this has not stopped her from taking on the job of passing on Qian's work after his death. However, she realized that this was a task she could not accomplish on her own. Brought in by Yang, German sinologist Monika Motsch, the translator of the German version of A Town Besieged, was among the first group of people to get a chance to see Qian's grand work.
Motsch first saw Qian's notes in 1999 when, half a year after his death, Yang invited Motsch to help arrange and catalog all of the late author's notes.
"The writings in Foreign Language Notes are an unprecedented 'world of miracles.' They don't separate China and the world, but connect them together like the Great Wall," Motsch wrote in the introduction to Manuscripts.
Arranging such a massive amount of material seemed nearly impossible at first. Both Motsch and her husband Richard Motsch, who between the two of them speak six languages, were both involved in organizing all the notebooks.
In the end they chose to rearrange these notes into six parts: The first four parts according to chronological order, the fifth part consisting of scattered pages of notes and the sixth covering personal journal entries.
The three volumes published in June, cover the notes Qian took from 1935 to 1938 while he was studying in Europe. According to Monika Motsch, Qian took notes in English about books on literature, philosophy, art history and psychology during his first year studying overseas. These notes cover works from famous writers such as Richard Aldington, T.S Elliot, Owen Beburd, George Santayana, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Later, French literature begins to appear in his notes, covering authors such as Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Saint Beuve and Alphonse Daubet.
"The excerpts that Mr. Qian has written are unexpected and fresh, even to us Europeans. We grew up with the works of these Western writers, so are already familiar with them. Still we were very impressed by the wisdom of his views," Motsch wrote.
In this age of high technological convenience, a time when people are even gradually forgetting how to write by hand, Qian's huge handwritten work that he kept at throughout his entire life is the perfect inspiration to get modern people to reflect.
"The knowledge he pursued assiduously for his entire life should be a useful heritage for those who study his works and Chinese and foreign literature. I will do all I can to preserve these notes and diaries that he left for those who pursue knowledge," Yang wrote.
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A New History of Laughter in China: An Interview with Christopher Rea (Part Two) — Pop Junctions
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[
"Henry Jenkins"
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2015-12-14T16:59:20-08:00
|
Part of what brought us together was your recognition of some parallels between what I had written in What Made Pistachio Nuts? about the “new humor” in the American context in the early 20th century and the kinds of developments your book documents. So, could you say a bit more about the similari
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en
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https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/592880808419c27d193683ef/a6264250-915f-48eb-a1c8-eab9abc6ef70/favicon.ico?format=100w
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Henry Jenkins
|
http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2015/12/a-new-history-of-laughter-in-china-an-interview-with-christopher-rhea-part-two.html
|
Part of what brought us together was your recognition of some parallels between what I had written in What Made Pistachio Nuts? about the “new humor” in the American context in the early 20th century and the kinds of developments your book documents. So, could you say a bit more about the similarities and differences in terms of what was happening around jokes in American and China during this period? Ah, the “new humor”—same marketing strategy! In both cases, there’s this sense that the modern era calls for a new comedic sensibility. I see a lot of parallels, including in timing. Some jokes stand the test of time and are endlessly circulated. But, even as they make new conquests, jokes seem to have a built-in obsolescence factor. So we promise that this “new” one isn’t stale—actually, it just has to be new to you.
One major similarity is an increase in the volume of published jokes by several orders of magnitude. You have a rising tide of publications that lifts all literary boats, including humor’s humble sloops and dinghies. Writing jokes and amusing “filler” material for various periodicals became a means of livelihood. One writer, Zheng Yimei, was known to his colleagues as the Fill-in-the-Blank King, bubai dawang.
Another is that the rise of the periodical press overlapped with the popularity of a vaudeville culture of variety amusements. The Chinese word for magazine—zazhi, or “assorted records”—resonates with the new focus on miscellany in literary culture, and the choose-your-own-adventure ethos of the new amusement halls springing up in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore in the 1910s and 1920s. Funhouse mirror, floor one. Magicians, floor two. Comedians, floor three.
Finally, joke books, live performances, comic strips, slapstick films, and other forms of amusement became cheaper in the early twentieth century thanks in part to technological advances and urbanization, which created economies of scale. As it became cheaper, humor became more democratic.
As for differences, the main one was language. A new vernacular style of writing was just taking hold in the 1910s and 1920s, so you have humor collections appearing both in a written vernacular close to everyday speech, and in classical-style literary Chinese. The actual content of the jokes was not terribly different, though my impression—having not done a rigorous quantitative comparison—is that you find more puns in Chinese, a language of homophones.
Much of the debate about jokes in America had to do with their ties to a new commercial culture where the desire to make people laugh was divorced from the desire for moral instruction or critical commentary (or so the discourse of the period argued). Are these same criticisms directed against Chinese humorists and jokesters of this period? Why or why not?
In What Made Pistachio Nuts? you describe religious figures and members of the middle class decrying a new cultural force that would see any situation “thrown into the cauldron and cooked into some fashion of mirth.” Chinese critics voiced similar objections. One in the 1930s reminded advocates of “the so-called humor” that “laughter is like tobacco and alcohol: a little is a stimulant, but too much is narcotic.” China had just woken up from its dynastic lethargy—and now humor was putting it back to sleep.
Moral instruction (wen yi zai dao) and personal expression (shi yan zhi) are the two main writerly impulses—so says traditional Chinese literary theory. Either you set the world straight or you vent your own feelings. The moralists of the modern age weren’t just old fogies satirizing modern women in short skirts; you also have progressivists mocking their peers for wallowing in nostalgia for the glory days of the Ming dynasty instead of making revolution in the streets. So, yes, you see the same antagonism toward a new entertainment culture of pictorial magazines, comic strips, amusement halls, and movies. I would add that the “serious-minded” critics also often envied the entertainers’ commercial success.
There are many references here to “western jokes” being popular in China during this period and you also describe various ways Chinese jokes and other humor got exchanged across a diasporic community in the early 20th century. How might we understand humor and laughter as part of a larger set of cross-cultural exchanges during this period? It’s often said that humor is one of the hardest forms of cultural production to translate across national and linguistic barriers. So, what survived and what got lost through these exchanges?
“Laugh, and the world does not usually laugh with you, because the world generally fails to see just what there is to laugh about.” T.K. Chuan, an American-educated writer, also claimed that “it is not laughter that brings men together.” But he did so in an English-language Shanghai weekly, The China Critic, which played handmaiden to a humor craze in the 1930s, translating jokes back and forth with a Chinese-language humor magazine called The Analects Fortnightly. His colleague Lin Yutang, one of modern China’s most influential humorists, was more optimistic. On the eve of WWII, he facetiously suggested that if each nation were to send a representative humorist to a Peace Conference, all war plans would collapse because each would claim that it was all his own country’s fault.
Chinese humor was as internationalized as the Chinese press itself. Chinese humorists drew from any sources they could get their hands on. They read Tokyo Puck, Russian satirical plays, American comic strips like Mutt & Jeff (figure below) and Bringing Up Father, London’s Punch magazine. They translated Mark Twain and modeled magazines on The New Yorker. One Beijing-based periodical reprinted Chinese cartoons with translated French captions. Playwrights wrote comedies of manners channeling Wilde and Shaw. Filmmakers adapted Lady Windemere’s Fan and replicated gags from Buster Keaton.
A Chinese version of Mutt & Jeff in Shanghai’s Eastern Times Illustrated (ca. 1910s). Having cooled down on a hot day by strapping a block of ice to his head, A. Mutt is beaten by a sweaty companion when he dons gloves.
As for “western jokes,” that was often a lazy marketing device like “new jokes.” In the 1920s, one writer claimed that Chinese jokesters were cribbing from old dynastic joke collections, changing the names to foreign names, and passing them off as “western jokes.” But you do have lots of translation and bilingual humor, literary and pictorial (figure below).
Vermin make their home in the newly-established Republic, spoiling the fruit of earlier labors. From Shanghai’s The True Record (Mar. 1913)
My impression is that pictorial humor traveled wider and translated more easily than wordplay, but even still, China—then as now—had some remarkably talented translators who were able to bridge the language gap.
You have very interesting things to say in the book about the reception of slapstick comedies by Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin in China and the ways they intersected with local slapstick traditions. Most of us know little to nothing about silent film comedy in China. Can you give us some glimpses into what was happening in Chinese cinema during this period and how it connected with the other kinds of humor you discuss?
The earliest extant Chinese film we have today is a slapstick comedy called Laborer’s Love (aka, Romance of a Fruit Peddler, 1922) (figure below). That’s pretty late in terms of film history, global or Chinese. But it’s no accident that it’s a comedy, which were then popular worldwide, or that it’s so fascinated with trick photography and gadgets. As Xinyu Dong has shown, the film was responding to American films made just a year earlier, like Buster Keaton’s The Haunted House (1921), which also features a staircase that turns into a slide.
I show that trick camerawork in films like Laborer’s Love—such as a frame showing two images of a character dreaming of himself—can also be found in contemporaneous portrait photography. You could go to a studio and sit for a photograph in which you appear to be pouring yourself tea, driving yourself in a car, or begging yourself for money, thanks to the miracle of double exposure (figures below).
Trick photographs using double exposure, ca. 1910s-1920s. The top one (with watermark) is printed on a postcard. The bottom one features a teenaged Puyi, the recently-deposed last emperor of the Qing dynasty.
These novelty photographs had been around since the 19th century, but their reception in China was unique. For example, in the Confucian Analects the Master twice advises that it is better to ask of oneself (qiu ji) than to ask of others—so they called the money-begging photo a “self-beseeching photo” (qiu ji tu). It’s a consumer product that’s at once allegorical, playful, and ironic.
Lloyd and Chaplin were extremely popular in China. Their films screened regularly, and they were both written about extensively in movie magazines (figure below). The handsome, friendly Lonesome Luke character was especially popular; Dong points out that the Laborer in Laborer’s Love even puts on Luke-style glasses at one point. Lloyd’s popularity plummeted in 1929 due to the Chinatown stereotypes in his first talkie, Welcome Danger (1929). Wisely, he apologized, and the brouhaha died down.
Harold Lloyd on the cover of the first issue of Shanghai’s The Motion Picture Review (Jan. 1920)
Chaplin was revered as an “artist” and inspired local imitators as early as 1922 (figure below). His short visit to Shanghai in 1936 was a sensation. And by then, the Chinese film industry had been stable for about a decade, and you had actors specializing in comic roles, like the skinny Han Langen, who often paired with Liu Jiqun or Yin Xiucen as a Chinese Laurel and Hardy. Unfortunately, the 1937 Japanese invasion of Shanghai, where China’s film industry was centered, disrupted production for almost a decade.
The King of Comedy Visits Shanghai (1922), a Chinese production starring a British expatriate
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Yearender: Top 10 cultural events from 2016
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2016-12-15T00:00:00
| null |
10. Great masters that passed away
Peking Opera master Mei Baojiu dies at 82
Mei Baojiu, a Peking Opera master, died at the age of 82 on April 25 in Beijing. He had been hospitalized since March 31 after falling into a coma following a bronchial spasm.
Mei Baojiu was the ninth son of Mei Lanfang (1894-1961), who is considered the most outstanding Peking Opera artist of all time and is credited with bringing Peking Opera to the United States and Europe in the 1930s.
Related:
Peking Opera master Mei Baojiu dies at 82
Mei Baojiu: A lifetime of promoting Peking Opera
Celebrated Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at 104
Chinese writer and translator Yang Jiang died on May 25 in Beijing at 104. As the longest-living Chinese woman writer, she was known for her modest, subtle and witty writing style.
Yang became a household name in China for her novels, essays, plays and translated works.
Her most popular novel, Baptism, depicting a group of intellectuals adjusting to a new society in the early 1950s, has been translated into French and English.
She was married to Qian Zhongshu, a renowned scholar and author of the best-selling novel Fortress Besieged.
Related: Remembering Yang Jiang
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|
The Three Of Us (Chinese Edition)
|
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[
"Yang Jiang"
] |
2013-08-22T00:00:00
|
The Three Of Us (Chinese Edition) by Yang Jiang - ISBN 10: 7500240007 - ISBN 13: 9787500240006 - China Braille Publishing House - 2013 - Softcover
|
en
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https://www.abebooks.com/9787500240006/Three-Chinese-Edition-Yang-Jiang-7500240007/plp
|
Synopsis
It is divided into two parts. In the first part, Yang Jiang, wife of Qian Zhongshu, in her consistent writing style, depicts the life of last few years when the whole family lived together. The second part tells ups and downs of her family in 63 years from she and Qian going to study in England in 1935, to their daughter being born in Oxford, and to the death of Qian in 1998. They had covered half of the earth and went through half century. They experienced war, diseases, political storm, and life and death. But no matter what, they sticked together as a family.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
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https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/985149.shtml
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Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at 104
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A photo of Yang Jiang taken in 2009 Photo: CFP
Yang Jiang, a well-known Chinese writer, translator and scholar of foreign literature, passed away at 1:10 am on Wednesday at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, the China Academy of Social Sciences confirmed to the Xinhua News Agency. July 17 would have marked Yang's 105 birthday.
A life well lived
Proficient in English, French and Spanish, Yang made a name for herself in the field of translation. She was the first Chinese to translate Don Quixote into Chinese in full from its original Spanish. She also translated Lazarillo del Tormes from Spanish and Alain-René Lesage's Gil Blas from its original French. Her translation of Don Quixote has been generally accepted as the best version to date and has sold more than 700,000 copies.
As a writer, the collection of her works We Three and her novel Baptism have been translated into numerous languages and sold around the world.
Yang enrolled in Tsinghua University to study foreign literature in 1932 where she met her future husband Qian Zhongshu (1910-98). Later famous for his novel Fortress Besieged (1947), Qian is considered one of China's greatest writers and used to refer to Yang as the "greatest wife and smartest woman" in his articles.
After their marriage in 1935, the couple went overseas to study at the University of Oxford and the University of Paris, during which time they had a daughter Qian Yuan.
After returning to China in 1938, she worked as a Spanish professor at Tsinghua University. In 1953, she was appointed as a research fellow of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
In 1983 she published a memoir Six Chapters from My Life "Downunder" which recorded her family's life working on farms during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).
After both her husband's and daughter's deaths in the late 1990s, Yang disappeared from public life to concentrate on her writing. In 2004 she published another memoir at age 92, We Three, which recalled her life with her husband and daughter, who had passed away from cancer a year before Qian.
At 96, she published a new work Reaching the Brink of Life (2008).
In addition to her writing, Yang also spent years organizing massive quantities of Qian's manuscripts, which were published in a 20-volume collection in 2011.
She was also heavily involved in charity. In 2001, she donated millions of yuan earned from her and her husband's writings to fund a scholarship at Tsinghua University to help underprivileged students finish their studies.
Controversy
Although Yang is seen as one of China's greatest translators, she has also faced criticism concerning her approach to translation.
Dong Yansheng, a professor of Spanish at the Beijing Foreign Studies University who produced his own translation of Don Quixote 14 years after Yang's translation, slammed Yang's approach.
Dong even used Yang's version of Don Quixote as teaching material in his classes to show students what not to do by pointing out what he felt were incorrect or inappropriate translations.
With his translation weighing in around 839,000 characters versus Yang's roughly 720,000, Dong believed Yang inappropriately deleted too much of the original.
Who will take the baton?
Recent years have been tough on translation as Yang's passing is merely the field's most recent loss.
Cao Ying, who translated a collection of the works of Tolstoy and was the first Chinese to translate Sholokhov's works, passed away in October at the age of 93.
Ji Xianlin, a world famous litterateur, linguist, translator and historian who was proficient in 11 languages, passed away in 2009 at the age of 98.
With the passing of these great masters, the question of finding qualified successors has become important. While translators of modern works are somewhat plentiful, who will carry the baton for older, classical literature?
Yang thoroughly understood life and death... Now she has left the chaos of the world, all we can do is keep reading Yang and Qian's works and be inspired.
Zhang Yiwu, professor at Peking University
Her reserved and frank attitude was based on a confidence that said, "my husband and I are awesome. We don't need to brag about it, but we don't need to be self-deprecating either."
Zhang Jiawei, writer
Newspaper headline: Life in translation
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http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2015/12/a-new-history-of-laughter-in-china-an-interview-with-christopher-rea-part-three.html
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en
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A New History of Laughter in China: An Interview with Christopher Rea (Part Three) — Pop Junctions
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[
"Henry Jenkins"
] |
2015-12-15T13:54:24-08:00
|
You draw some interesting connections between humor and other culture practices, such as amusement parks, fun house mirrors, photographic manipulations, and games, many of which speak to technological shifts in perception impacting China and the rest of the world during this period. To what degree w
|
en
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https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/592880808419c27d193683ef/a6264250-915f-48eb-a1c8-eab9abc6ef70/favicon.ico?format=100w
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Henry Jenkins
|
http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2015/12/a-new-history-of-laughter-in-china-an-interview-with-christopher-rea-part-three.html
|
You draw some interesting connections between humor and other culture practices, such as amusement parks, fun house mirrors, photographic manipulations, and games, many of which speak to technological shifts in perception impacting China and the rest of the world during this period. To what degree were such devices a means of responding to the emergence of modern mass media and modernity more generally? To a great degree, I believe. During the late Qing dynasty, especially during the 1900s, you have a lot of futuristic novels that include looking devices, like the “character-examination lens,” which is a kind of moral X-ray. These writers found China’s present to be unwatchable and preferred to look ahead. In the book I include one 1909 cartoon showing a hand-held X-ray device revealing that the only thing in an elected representative’s heart is money. This 1909 “allegorical illustration” from Shanghai’s Illustration Daily uses binoculars to represent Chinese and foreigners’ tendency to view each other as either larger or smaller than life (figure below).
In the 1910s, you have the ha-ha mirror, as they called it, being installed in front of big-city amusement halls (figure below) to draw in passersby. And in 1920s films you have plenty of glasses, binoculars, windows, mirrors, lenses, and other optical devices. Not all of this play was comedic—some illustrations of flying machines from the 1880s are more fantastical than anything else—but I do see irreverence being connected to this modern mode of positive exploration, unconstrained by past ways of doing things.
Postcard of Shanghai’s Great World amusement hall (est. 1917)
To what degree did these comic genres survive the Second World War and especially the rise of Communism and the Cultural Revolution?
Big question, which I hope to answer in a future book called The Unfinished Comedy. In 1957, the prominent filmmaker Lü Ban made a film, Unfinished Comedies, in which a pair of slapstick film stars from the Republican era—Han Langen and Yin Xiucen, playing themselves (figure below)—reunite in New China. In the film, they make a trio of film comedies, only to be berated at the advance screenings by a censor called Comrade Bludgeon. Unfinished Comedies was never released and the political backlash ruined Lü Ban’s career, but fortunately the film survives, and with it the comedian’s cri de coeur.
To me, the film expresses the resilience of modern China’s comedians in trying circumstances…which are pretty much the only circumstances they’ve ever known. Each era had different constraints and opportunities, including the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), the Civil War (1945-49), the early Mao era, (1949-65), and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). The early Mao era, for example, ushered in a new period of didactic comedy, in which satire and eulogistic comedy were the only two modes explicitly endorsed by the Party-state. Nowadays, the government censorship apparatus is more active, and by some accounts more effective, than ever before. But all of the comic genres survive in some form, even as new genres and terminology continue to appear.
Near the end, you talk a bit about forms of internet humor in China, which you connect back to earlier examples of “crowdsourcing” jokes for Chinese publications. To what degree were the styles of humor you identify a popular or grassroots phenomenon as opposed to one reserved to the literary elites? To what degree do you see contemporary web culture as introducing a new “age of irreverence” into China? Well, people who could read and write were in the minority in China at the turn of the twentieth century. I did come across a few joke books compiled by scribes working with illiterate comic performers. But with the exception of amusement halls, photographs, and films, most of the types of humor I discuss are written, and thus were to some degree products of “elite” culture.
Of course, the Chinese literary sphere had its own pecking order. Most of what I would consider to be the best humor writers of the Republican era were scholars of the Chinese tradition as well as multilingual and cosmopolitan—writers like Lao She, Zhou Zuoren, and Qian Zhongshu. The “humor movement” of the 1930s was an elite one that ended up getting some traction in popular culture, and it’s the moment scholars know best. I make a point of also spending some time with the hacks, the amateur enthusiasts, and the entrepreneurs.
You once talked about “Web -10.0,” referring to earlier iterations of participatory culture—people using mini presses to publish ‘zines in the 1850s, amateurs staffing their own radio stations in the 1920s, and so on. An entrepreneurial ethos also developed in China ca. 1890s-1930s, which involved a lot of sharing. Tabloids, literary journals, cartooning magazines, and small film companies shared labor—moonlighting was the norm—and content, like jokes.
Xu Zhuodai, who became one of Shanghai’s most popular comic writers, founded a slapstick film company in 1925 with a second-hand camera and a bunch of buddies from his theater troupe (figure below). He called their opportunistic, shoestring approach to the business “cigarette butt-pickup-ism.” Wu Jianren, one of the most prolific joke-writers of the 1900s, claimed that people in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia kept retelling his jokes. So he republished his favorites. Cartoonists were even more welcoming of new talent, and solicited contributions from readers.
A still from Cupid’s Fertilizer (1925), produced by Xu Zhuodai’s Happy Film Co.
My impression is that, as a whole, Republican Chinese humor, while relentlessly exploratory, was still nowhere near as egalitarian as contemporary web culture, if only because of the breadth and speed of access today. I’ve written before about online video spoofs known as e’gao or kuso, which became popular in the mid-2000s, and generated the most famous comic Chinese meme, the Grass Mud Horse.
I do think that the web has facilitated a new virtual age of irreverence in China (figure below). But the authorities have a chokehold on print publishing and mass media, so, at the moment, we’re hearing much less laughter out of China than we should.
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https://apnews.com/general-news-f328fbbe1c804b75bfdba89d7f16a656
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en
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Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at age 104
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2016-05-25T07:39:39+00:00
|
Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to an equally famous author, has died at age 104.
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en
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/apple-touch-icon.png
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AP News
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https://apnews.com/general-news-f328fbbe1c804b75bfdba89d7f16a656
|
BEIJING (AP) — Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to an equally famous author, died Wednesday at age 104, state media said.
Yang died at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, according to The Paper, a state-owned news website. It said her death had been confirmed by her publisher, the People’s Literature Publishing House.
Citing different sources, Hong Kong station Phoenix TV also confirmed Yang’s death, the cause of which was not given.
Born in 1911, Yang became a household name in China for her novels, plays, essays and translated works. She was the first to translate “Don Quixote” into Chinese, and her version is still considered the definitive one by many.
Her death was the top search term on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo on Wednesday, a testimony to her fame and the public adoration she enjoyed.
In a 1981 collection of essays, Yang wrote with a sense of poignancy on the daily lives of Chinese intellectuals during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when scholars and intellectuals were forced to perform hard labor.
Her 2003 essay collection “We Three,” about her family life with her late husband and their daughter, was a best-seller.
Yang was married to Qian Zhongshu, best known for his novel “Fortress Besieged,” and theirs was widely seen as a model union set against the background of China’s turbulent 20th century.
After Qian’s death in 1998, Yang embarked on the task of compiling and editing her husband’s unpublished works and remained prolific herself.
In addition to “We Three,” she published a sequel to her novel “Baptism” at age 103.
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https://chinachannel.lareviewofbooks.org/2020/09/14/qian-zhongzhu-should-win-the-nobel/
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Qian Zhongshu Should Win the Nobel – China Channel
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[
"Brendan O’Kane"
] |
2020-09-14T00:00:00
|
Why the postwar novel Fortress Beseiged deserves a re-read – Brendan O’Kane Qian Zhongshu is a tough pitch to win the Nobel prize in literature this year. He’s dead, for starters – traditionally an obstacle to many things, including winning Nobel prizes – and his total creative output consists solely of a few essays, several short stories, and a single novel. On the other hand, that novel, Fortress Besieged, seems to me to be the high-water mark of something significant, if hard to explain, so I’m going to make my best case for it being enough to secure Qian’s place in history. The book takes its title from a French proverb, sets its action in the China of the 1930s, and tracks the misfortunes of Fang Hongjian, a feckless, cowardly student returning from Europe with a mail-order doctorate in Chinese from an American university that exists only in the imagination of a crooked Irishman. It may be one of the most cosmopolitan books ever written; certainly it is, as literary critic C. T. Hsia said, one of the greatest Chinese novels of the 20th century. We meet the protagonist, Fang Hongjian, in the summer of 1937 as he and his fellow Chinese students return to China aboard a French steamer. He livens up the journey by flirting unsuccessfully with two of the female passengers. In Shanghai, which has just fallen under Japanese occupation, Fang renews his acquaintance with one of the young women, a PhD named Miss Su – and promptly falls for her cousin. He clammily courts both women for a time before working up the nerve to break things off with Miss Su, who has been expecting Fang to propose to her. In retaliation, she destroys any chance he might have with her cousin. READ MORE
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China Channel
|
https://chinachannel.lareviewofbooks.org/2020/09/14/qian-zhongzhu-should-win-the-nobel/
|
Why the postwar novel Fortress Beseiged deserves a re-read – Brendan O’Kane
Qian Zhongshu is a tough pitch to win the Nobel prize in literature this year. He’s dead, for starters – traditionally an obstacle to many things, including winning Nobel prizes – and his total creative output consists solely of a few essays, several short stories, and a single novel. On the other hand, that novel, Fortress Besieged, seems to me to be the high-water mark of something significant, if hard to explain, so I’m going to make my best case for it being enough to secure Qian’s place in history. The book takes its title from a French proverb, sets its action in the China of the 1930s, and tracks the misfortunes of Fang Hongjian, a feckless, cowardly student returning from Europe with a mail-order doctorate in Chinese from an American university that exists only in the imagination of a crooked Irishman. It may be one of the most cosmopolitan books ever written; certainly it is, as literary critic C. T. Hsia said, one of the greatest Chinese novels of the 20th century.
We meet the protagonist, Fang Hongjian, in the summer of 1937 as he and his fellow Chinese students return to China aboard a French steamer. He livens up the journey by flirting unsuccessfully with two of the female passengers. In Shanghai, which has just fallen under Japanese occupation, Fang renews his acquaintance with one of the young women, a PhD named Miss Su – and promptly falls for her cousin. He clammily courts both women for a time before working up the nerve to break things off with Miss Su, who has been expecting Fang to propose to her. In retaliation, she destroys any chance he might have with her cousin.
Shanghai proving a downer, Fang takes a teaching job at Sanlü University, a newly established school in China’s interior, but en route there he and his traveling companions continually encounter hassles and hardships. Once at Sanlü, Fang quickly finds that the other teachers are pompous frauds, backstabbers, and brownnosers. (One of them has a doctorate from the same fake university as Fang and is desperate not to be found out.) Circumstances push Fang into the arms of Sun Roujia, a young English teacher. After Fang’s contract is not renewed for a second year, he marries Sun and they return to Shanghai. There, their relationship (never very strong to begin with) collapses under the weight of their unhappiness.
There’s a lot missing from this summary, of course – in particular, the erudition and humor that make Fortress Besieged so unlike any other Chinese novel of the past century. Raised by Confucians and educated by missionaries, Qian studied at Oxford and the Sorbonne, and drew upon the literary traditions of a half-dozen languages in cracking wise and devising epigrams that have made him legendary to Chinese readers. (Many of these, unfortunately, are blunted in the novel’s sole English translation, a 1970s relic.) He had a keen eye and a sharp pen, and many of his characters still resonate. There’s “Jimmy Zhang,” a Shanghainese comprador who peppers his speech with malaprop English words and insists on being addressed by his English name. There’s Fang Hongjian’s father, a country gentleman who expatiates with classical allusions and hoary clichés. There’s a Cambridge-educated modernist poet who has entitled his unreadable, heavily footnoted magnum opus “Adulterous Smorgasbord,” and a philosopher who claims a personal friendship with Bertrand Russell (“Bertie”) on the strength of a form reply to his fan mail, and tells people that Russell came to him with questions only he could answer. (“This was no idle boast, Heaven knows. Russell had personally asked him when he would be visiting England, and whether or not he had any plans for his visit, and how many lumps of sugar he took in his tea.”) And there’s Fang himself, a gormless fraud and moral coward who at one point tells a lecture audience that the only two Western inventions to have caught on in China are opium and syphilis.
“I talked to Bertie about his marriages and divorces once,” Shenming said. “He said that there’s a saying in English that marriage is like a gilded birdcage. The birds outside want to get in, and the birds inside want to get out, he said, so divorce leads to marriage and marriage leads to divorce and there’s never any end to it.”
“There’s a saying like that in France, too,” Miss Su said. “Only there it’s about a forteresse assiégée – a fortress under siege. The people outside want to storm in, and the people inside are desperate to get out.”
The metaphor (from the French “Le mariage est comme une forteresse assiégée; ceux qui sont dehors veulent y entrer, et ceux qui sont dedans veulent en sortir“) functions on many levels. In Qian’s satire, Fang finds disillusionment and disappointment in wartime Shanghai (full of frauds, phonies, and toadies), the relatively safe interior (where an innkeeper attempts to convince him and his traveling companions that maggots on their dinner are merely “meat sprouts”), the security of an academic career (Sanlü University proves to be a hotbed of petty intrigues), and the prestige of an international education. The image of a fortress under siege also applies to China itself: Fang and his compatriots return to Shanghai just in time to catch the Japanese invasion, and although Qian was much too subtle a writer to foreground the war and occupation – Fang leaves Shanghai to escape a broken heart, not the Japanese – they are a constant presence throughout the novel.
In Qian’s short story ‘Inspiration,’ the spirit of a recently deceased author is confronted in the afterlife by the shades of characters from his novels who charge him with murder and theft for having robbed them of life in his works. It would be hard to make either charge stick in Qian’s case – but as memorable as the characters that populate the first sections of the book are, there’s a definite change of tone about two-thirds of the way through Fortress Besieged, when the focus shifts to Fang Hongjian and Sun Roujia’s unhappy marriage. Here wit gives way to greatness, as the wisecracks and epigrams take a backseat to a heartbreakingly sensitive depiction of a failing relationship.
Qian never completed another novel. The manuscript of a second book, Baihe Xin (literally Lily Heart, inspired by the French expression cœur d’artichaut), was lost when he and his family moved to Beijing in the summer of 1949, and Fortress Besieged remained out of print on both the mainland and Taiwan until the early 1980s. Qian turned his energies to classical scholarship instead, culminating in the monumental Limited Views, a critical overview in Literary Chinese of China’s classical literary tradition viewed through the lens of Qian’s polyglot bibliophilia. (You haven’t lived until you’ve seen someone name-check Susan Sontag in the language of Confucius.) Qian professed to have left his career as a novelist behind him, but a 1985 essay written by his wife, the playwright and translator Yang Jiang, suggests otherwise:
“After Fortress Besieged was reprinted, I asked if he wouldn’t be interested in writing another novel.”
“The interest is there,” he replied, “but my powers have waned over the years. To want to write, when there is no chance of writing, is a lingering regret – but to write something that isn’t any good, once one does have the chance, can only end in remorse. The former at least leaves some room for self-deception; the latter is what the Spanish call ‘el momento de la verdad’ [the moment of truth], and it leaves no room for self-deception, escape, or mercy. Better regret than remorse.”
They don’t give Nobel prizes to dead people; they don’t give Nobel prizes to people who only wrote one novel; and they don’t give Nobel prizes for counterfactuals. Fortress Besieged will have to stand on its own merits, a monument to what might have been. ∎
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Why Scholar-Writers Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu are Important to China Today
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Memo #48 - In this set of interviews, Dr. Wendy Larson (Oregon), Dr. Theodore Huters (UCLA), and Dr. Christopher Rea (UBC) talk about two of modern China’s most famous scholar-writers, Qian Zhongshu (錢鍾書) (1910-1998) and Yang Jiang (楊絳) (b. 1911). They discuss why this husband-wife pair and their writings are important to China today.
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Memo #48 (Video)
In this set of interviews, Dr. Wendy Larson (Oregon), Dr. Theodore Huters (UCLA), and Dr. Christopher Rea (UBC) talk about two of modern China’s most famous scholar-writers, Qian Zhongshu (錢鍾書) (1910-1998) and Yang Jiang (楊絳) (b. 1911). They discuss why this husband-wife pair and their writings are important to China today.
Together, Qian and Yang represent a cultural ideal of intellectual integrity, having maintained an extraordinary breadth of humanistic vision through trying circumstances. Like many modern Chinese intellectuals, they worked through war and political campaigns, but two qualities distinguish them from their peers. One was sheer talent, as manifested in Qian’s essays, fiction, and critical works, and in Yang’s stage plays, fiction, essays, translations, and memoirs. Another was their joint devotion to literature and family, which helped them maintain admirable psychological insulation from contemporary politics. Their literary vision was not just Chinese, but cosmopolitan.
Qian Zhongshu (錢鍾書) became recognized in China as a brilliant writer and critic, especially for his novel, Fortress Besieged (1947) and his work of criticism Limited Views (1979-80). Yang Jiang (楊絳) is unique in that she continued to write into her nineties (she is now 99), launching a new career as a memoirist after Qian’s death. As Dr. Larson mentions, Yang and Qian shared a close, egalitarian relationship while each developing a distinctive literary style.
Dr. Huters and Dr. Rea point out that Qian considered the Nobel Prize to be an overrated, even meaningless, cultural honour, and that he would be bemused, if unsurprised, by the official Chinese reaction to Liu Xiaobo winning the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.
In December 2010, UBC Asian Studies hosted a conference to mark Qian Zhongshu (錢鍾書) and Yang Jiang’s (楊絳) centennial. A new translation of Qian’s Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts came out the same month.
Part 1 – Yang Jiang (楊絳), a unique writer in contemporary China
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrqIIeX6XjM[/youtube]
Part 2 – The book, Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder”
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_dazSBSCXY[/youtube]
Part 3 – The relationship between Yang Jiang (楊絳) and her husband, Qian Zhongshu (錢鍾書)
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yuU6_sz_lU[/youtube]
Part 4 – The significance of Qian Zhongshu (錢鍾書)
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hvr7fPo5gs[/youtube]
Part 5 – How would Qian Zhongshu (錢鍾書) respond to Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) winning the Nobel Peace Prize?
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjP3DXsT8A8[/youtube]
Part 6 – Translating Qian Zhongshu’s (錢鍾書) work
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8wawbJ-NjA[/youtube]
Links:
‘Life, it’s been said, is one big book…’: One hundred years of Qian Zhongshu, The China Beat, November 2010 (Dr. Rea on Qian Zhongshu)
China’s Nobel Prize Complex, circa 1946, The Star, December 2010
Related Memos:
The “Directed Public” of China’s Public Intellectuals by Timothy Cheek (Memo #13)
China’s Directed Public Receives Nobel Peace Prize by Timothy Cheek (Memo #28)
A Critical Introduction to Mao by Timothy Cheek (Memo #34 – Video)
Interview with Dai Qing, the Environmentalist Activist, Investigative Journalist, and Writer by Alison Bailey (Memo #39 – Video)
Our other Memos about China
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Tsinghua Alumna and Celebrated Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at 105
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Well-known Chinese writer, literary translator and foreign literature researcher Yang Jiang died at the age of 105 in Beijing on Wednesday morning. On the evening of May 25th, groups of Tsinghua students gathered in front of the old library to express their mourning of the pass of Yang Jiang.
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Well-known Chinese writer, literary translator and foreign literature researcher Yang Jiang died at the age of 105 in Beijing on Wednesday morning. On the evening of May 25th, groups of Tsinghua students gathered in front of the old library to express their mourning of the pass of Yang Jiang.
Yang, the wife of late Chinese novelist Qian Zhongshu, enjoyed decades of fame across the country for her literature works such as Six Chapters from My Life 'Downunder' (1981), Baptism (1988), and We Three (2004), which recalls her husband and her daughter Qian Yuan (1937–1997), who died of cancer one year before her father's death. Her translation of the Spanish novel Don Quixote de la Mancha is widely considered the best Chinese version.
Yang Jiang, whose original name was Yang Ji Kang, was born in Beijing and grew up in Suzhou, East China's Jiangsu province. She got her master's degree in foreign languages and literature at Tsinghua University, where she met her husband Qian Zhongshu, whose later work, the satirical novel Fortress Besieged is famous around the world.
The couple married in 1935 and during 1935–1938, they went to Oxford and University of London for further study. They returned to China in 1938 and both of them went into academia and made important contributions to the development of Chinese culture.
Yang and Qian were known having the perfect love story in Chinese literary circles. Qian once commented that Yang was 'the most virtuous wife and most talented lady'. Apart from her own achievements in literature, she made a great contribution to Qian's works after his death. More than 70,000 letters and drafts by her husband were collected by her for the publication Qian Zhong Shu's Manuscript Collection in 2003.
Yang loved reading and encouraged the younger generation to read more books. She made a donation and set up the 'Love Reading' scholarship at Tsinghua in the name of her family after her husband and daughter passed away.
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https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/3/75164/Accomplished-literary-talent-and-cultural-icon,--Yang-Jiang,-dies-at-104
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Accomplished literary talent and cultural icon, Yang Jiang, dies at 104
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Accomplished author, essayist and translator, Yang Jiang, a cultural icon known for her prolific output, as well as her unadorned, elegant p...
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The Standard
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https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/3/75164/Accomplished-literary-talent-and-cultural-icon,--Yang-Jiang,-dies-at-104
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Accomplished author, essayist and translator, Yang Jiang, a cultural icon known for her prolific output, as well as her unadorned, elegant prose, died today at age 104, state media said.
Yang was also noted for her marriage to an equally famous writer and scholar, who had figured in her writing.
A notable literary figure in modern China, she was a well-known playwright who wrote a couple of comedies in Shanghai.
The graduate of Tsinghua University published her only novel, Baptism, in 1988 and later published a sequel at age 103.
Yang died at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, according to The Paper, a state-owned news website. It said her death was confirmed by the People's Literature Publishing House.
Citing different sources, Hong Kong station Phoenix TV also confirmed Yang's death.
Born in 1911, Yang became a household name in China for her writing – plays, essays and translated works. She was the first to translate “Don Quixote'' into Chinese, and her version is still considered the definitive one by many.
(Pictured, Yang Jiang, seen with Jia Qinglin, the then chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in 2011. Jia retired in 2012.)
In a 1981 collection of essays, Yang wrote with a sense of poignancy on the daily lives of Chinese intellectuals during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when scholars and intellectuals were forced to perform hard labor.
Her 2003 essay collection “We Three,'' about her family life with her late husband and their daughter, was a best-seller. It was partly a memoir, chronicling death in her family.
Yang was married to Qian Zhongshu, best known for his novel “Fortress Besieged,'' and theirs was widely seen as a model union set against the background of China's turbulent 20th century.
After Qian's death in 1998, Yang embarked on the task of compiling and editing her husband's unpublished works and remained prolific herself.—AP/The Standard
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https://link-springer-com-443.webvpn.synu.edu.cn/article/10.1007/s40647-022-00361-x
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“Decadent” Aesthetics, Irony and Parody: Eileen Chang and Qian Zhongshu’s Fiction in Occupied Shanghai (1937–1945)
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https://media-springernature-com-443.webvpn.synu.edu.cn/full/springer-static/cover-hires/journal/40647
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This article provides the readers with vivid examples and detailed analysis of how “decadent” aesthetics find expressions in fiction written by
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Although the Aesthetic Movement and its relation to the modern Chinese literature have long been discussed by many Chinese scholars, the topic of decadent aesthetics in modern Chinese fiction has been largely neglected. For example, in his monograph The Extremity of Beauty: A Study of the Decadent Aesthetics in Modern China (1997), professor Xie Zhixi combed through decadent aestheticism in modern Chinese literature across many genres, ranging from “belle lettres”Footnote 1 (美文) to poetry. However, he did not mention fiction or plays in his book. Xiao Tongqing, in his monograph The fin-de-siècle Culture and Modern Chinese Literature (2000) paid great attention to how the fin-de-siècle culture was spread to China and found its expression in poems, plays and fiction in the modern Chinese literature. Nevertheless, his analysis of fiction merely emphasizes on the literary themes such as the decline of modern Chinese culture without much elaboration on literary form. Zhou Xiaoyi’s treatise Aestheticism and the Consumerist Culture (2002) demonstrates the introduction of aestheticism to China and its relation to the consumerist culture without focusing too much on modern Chinese fiction. Xue Jiabao, in his treatise Aestheticism and Modern Chinese Literature (2015), provided very detailed analysis of the influence of aestheticism on modern Chinese fiction, plays and poetry. However, since the relationship between aestheticism and modern Chinese literature is too broad a topic, he did not dwell too much on the decadent aesthetics in modern Chinese fiction.
This paper aims to provide the readers with vivid examples and detailed analysis of how “decadent” aesthetics find expressions in fiction by Eileen Chang and Qian Zhongshu in occupied Shanghai during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945). The main purpose of this article is to dig into the works of fiction by these two writers to examine the representations and variations of the aesthetics of “decadence.” Therefore, it is necessary to comb through the concepts of “decadence” and “style of decadence” before attempting to investigate into Chinese fiction in occupied Shanghai during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945).
Whether from the literary or philosophical perspective, the concept of “decadence” is as complex as that of “modernism” since it encompasses too many sub-concepts which have correlations to it. In a general sense, “decadence” refers to the very process of the declination of culture; at the same time, “decadence” is extremely complex and hard to accurately define because the word also signifies “artificiality, hypocrisy” or even “perversity.” (Reed 7) The decadent style, as a part of the Aesthetic Movement, had once become the most widely spread literary/cultural phenomenon that dominated the literary world after Romanticism. Moreover, the cultural impact of the “style of decadence” even reached to East Asia.
From an etymological perspective, the word “decadence” bears conspicuous resemblance to the Latin word “decadentia,”Footnote 2 which first appeared in the middle ages with the connotations of “fall,””sink,” and “decay,” as opposed to “ascent,””upswing,” and “rise.” The concept of “decadence” also originates from the Western philosophy, and even religion. According to Matei Calinescu, the primitive idea of “decadence” is prior to the “style of decadence” and “decadentism,” since it can be found in Plato’s philosophy. He reckons Plato to be the “first great Western philosopher to build up a whole complex ontology on the idea of decadence.”(Calinescu 151) Calinescu’s stand is thought-provoking since it distills the essence out of Plato’s entire philosophical system. The concept of “decadence,” according to the ancient Greeks, refers to the inevitable procedure of degeneration and disintegration of everything in the universe as a consequence of natural evolution. The philosophy of Plato is infused with a deep conscious of “decadence,” in accordance with the decaying process in a physical sense. Both Plato and the ancient Greeks believe that the development of the human civilization is a continuing procedure of degeneration. Plato holds that everything in the universe is falling from a lofty “Idea” into the “shadow” of “Idea” in reality.
The Platonic theory of Ideas entails a presumption that should not be neglected: Everything has “an ideal archetype” to which the counterpart in the material world can be related in a metaphysical sense. Being projected into the material world, “Ideas” have been reduced to something secondary and inferior, like “shadows” on the wall in a cave, as indicated in Plato’s famous metaphor. From a Platonic perspective, art, usually treated as the “actualization of Ideas,” is obviously inferior to pure “Ideas” themselves. The artistic production inevitably involves the procedure of degeneration, which is what “decadence” actually means. The very process of “Ideas” being degenerated into something inferior also explains why Plato holds animosity toward other artistic forms such as poetry and painting. Plato’s negative attitude toward art can also be discerned through his famous proclamation that “imitative art is an inferior uniting with an inferior and breeding inferior offspring,” (Plato 477) which is, to some extent, a sort of “decadent” aesthetics. Although Calinescu does not quote Plato’s The Republic (Book X) to further elaborate on Plato’s “decadent aesthetics,” he does point out that the core of “decadence” lies in the unalterable faith in the world of Ideas, compared to which the material world immediately becomes imperfect and even squalid:
For the Platonic theory of Ideas clearly implies a metaphysical concept of Decadence (or degeneration) when it describes the relationship between those archetypal, perfect, unchanging, real models of all things and their mere ‘shadows’ in the sensible world of perceived objects, where everything is subject to the corrupting influence of time and change. Closer to our concern with historical decadence, Plato’s view of history and society summarizes the widespread Greek belief that time was nothing but a continuous decline. (Calinescu 152).
There is no doubt that Plato’s take on the world of Ideas and his “decadent aesthetics” has provided a new perspective through which we evaluate the world of objects. As a matter of fact, the concept of “decadence” not only involves the perception that everything declines throughout the passage of time; meanwhile, “decadence” is also deeply rooted in religion. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the final Apocalypse also showcases the philosophy of “decadence.” Nevertheless, the concept of “decadence” can also be seen as a faithful ally to Marxism since it indicates that Communism could mean “the end of human alienation” by which the “dying culture of modern-day capitalism” (Calinescu 153) could be replaced and revitalized.
Calinsecu’s study of “decadence” in the literary sense is multifaceted. He has combed through the variations of the concept according to their respective historical contexts. For instance, the adjective cum noun “decadent” did not come into being until the mid-nineteenth century, whereas “decadentism” had maintained its influence in the literary sphere from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, and reached its climax in the 1930s (Calinescu 212–213). Meanwhile, the style of “decadence” remains a tricky notion intertwined with Romanticism, a controversial literary school that many scholars in the West have studied upon.Footnote 3
Calinescu’s detailed analysis on “decadence” and its relation to literary Modernism demonstrates the complexities and subtleties within the very concept. By combing through different interpretations of “decadence” that sometimes supplement or even contradict each other, a relatively comprehensive evaluation of the concept could be made, taking into account of its historical, social, and cultural contexts.
Despite the negative aspects of the concept, the style of “decadence” remains dialectical and sophisticated, under the influence of which, the literature and art thrived with the strong affirmation of the power of imagination and originality. The recalcitrant poets and artists, who despised dogmatism of any kind, proclaimed their advocacy of “art for art’s sake” through their iconoclastic literary experience. It is noteworthy that the concept of “decadence” is so complicated that it even leads to the cult toward “artificiality” or “hypocrisy,” which has been vehemently criticized by thinkers and philosophers such as Nisard and Nietzsche. Only through the frameworks of philosophy, religion, and other literary concepts such as Symbolism or Romanticism, can we carry out a relatively thorough investigation of the concepts of “decadence,” and “the style of decadence,” whose ambiguities and complexities shall be heeded.
As is above-mentioned, the style of “decadence” refers to a distinctive artistic style that involves the profusion of details, the delicacy of language, and the elevation of unbridled imagination, even to the detriment of reason. The decadent aesthetes who espoused the slogan “art for art’s sake” were infatuated with a flamboyant style of language and embraced the free expression of their unique temperaments. Moreover, the aesthetical principles of the decadent aesthetes also generated tremendous impact on their attitudes toward life. The lifestyles of Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire and Gabriele d’Annunzio were also immensely rooted in a sort of “decadent” aesthetics in which the artists craved for an extremely ego-centered, even degenerative way of living. Since the decadent aesthetes reckoned that life imitates art, they were often regarded as recalcitrant, narcissistic and even morbid. Nevertheless, their extraordinary power of imagination and stupendous artistic talents were also beyond doubt.
Now that we have a relatively comprehensive understanding of the evolution and variations of the concepts of “decadence,” these questions arise: How do studies on “decadence” boost people’s understanding on Modernism? Was the decadent style only found in literary works on the European continent, or was it an international literary event that had already spread its influence to East Asia? What is the relation between the style of “decadence” and the social background of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945)?
Actually, Chinese New Sensational School, which is reckoned as the first Modernist literary school throughout the history of the modern Chinese literature (Yan 125), is directly inspired by the literary style of “decadence.” When Sigmund Freud’s theories of psycho-analysis were quite popular among the literary sphere from the end of the 1920s to the early 1930s in Shanghai, writers that belonged to the Chinese New Sensational School (“中国新感觉派”) such as Shi Zhecun (施蛰存1905–2003), Liu Na’ou (刘纳鸥1905–1940), and Mu Shiying (穆时英1912–1940) also strived to reinvigorate fiction writing by depicting the enigmatic, even uncanny psychological experience of the protagonists. Their literary style was, to a large extent, inspired and influenced by the French decadent artists, which has already been pointed out by the Chinese scholar Li Jin (李今) in her studies of the “Haipai” culture.Footnote 4
Another Chinese scholar Xie Zhixi (解志熙) has also made a relatively thorough investigation of the Chinese decadent aesthetics in his treatise The Extremity of Beauty: A Study of the Decadent Aesthetics in Modern China in which he points out that, “The literary impact of the decadent aesthetics introduced from the West and Japan …had obtained an unprecedented immensity and profundity at the end of the 1920s to the early beginning of the 1930s in China.”(Xie 58) Xie has also noticed the introduction of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), and other decadent artists such as Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898), Arthur Symons (1865–1945), Ernest Dawson (1867–1900) and George Morre (1852–1933) to China by modern Chinese artists and writers.Footnote 5
Both of their studies showcase that the decadent aesthetics had already become an international rather than regional literary phenomenon from the 1920s to the 1930s in Mainland China. The wide circulation and frequent introduction of literary works by Western decadent aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde to the Chinese literary sphere testifies to the fact that the style of “decadence” had almost become the synonym of “Modernism,” which was the most influential literary trend then in China. The birth of the Chinese New Sensational School also reflects the adoption of the writing techniques of Western Modernism in Chinese fiction writing, which focuses on psychological realities based on Freud’s theories of psycho-analysis.
The distinctive cultural–political atmosphere in occupied Shanghai during the War of Resistance against Japan served as an ideal backdrop for the development of the style of “decadence” in works of fiction, in which there was a conspicuous and recurrent pattern implying that the conflict between the lofty ideals and the undesirable realities remained irreconcilable. Even worse than that, the ideals were doomed to eventually disintegrate and be trampled on when confronting with harsh realities in time of the war. This sort of inevitable ending permeates fiction in occupied Shanghai, in which the writers had mercilessly designed disillusionment big or small to descend upon the major characters, causing all their expectations to shatter, all their anticipations to evaporate in face of their irrevocably deteriorating circumstances. Meanwhile, by portraying the cruel procedure of disenchantment, the writers had enabled the protagonists to regain some sort of revelations in one way or another, thus adding a touch of didacticism to their works of fiction. Whether these crumbling ideals were related to the longing for love and affection toward other individuals, or to self-realization in a broader sense, they all ended up in bitter failures. Upon the background of the War of Resistance against Japan, any sort of spiritual pursuits turned out to be futile struggles. Therefore, works of fiction in occupied Shanghai were often tinged with sentimentalism and even nihilism.
Among the writers in occupied Shanghai, Eileen Chang was the most typical one who consciously infused a style of “decadence” into her fiction writing. The pervading sense of desolation and solitude mingled with anxieties looming in one’s subconscious that implicate the doomed tragic ending of the protagonists makes Chang’s fiction essentially in accordance with the aesthetical principles of the decadent artists. The author did not anticipate any savior to appear in her stories, nor did she reckon that the courses of her characters’ lives could be altered. The abundant allusions in Chang’s fiction imply that individual fate is, to a large extent, preordained before one has been born, which is inescapable, no matter how hard one struggles throughout his life. This kind of determinist attitude reveals the acceptance of the decadent aesthetics by the author. In most of Chang’s fiction written in occupied Shanghai, the decaying procedure of the spiritual life lurks behind the prosperity of the material life. The binary oppositions such as material-spirit, body-soul, convention-modernity, China-the West that usually contradicts one another lies at the center of Chang’s fiction. Although many scholars have pointed out that Chang was totally indifferent to grand historical narratives, and seldom weaved any historical sense into her works, which were closely related to mundane quotidian life, it is noteworthy that the trivial daily episodes and the abominable characters constitute a typical style of “decadence” due to the historical background of the War of Resistance against Japan. In other words, the decadent aesthetics in her fiction has been intensified by the war. Meanwhile, the acute perception and accurate depiction of human frailties has elevated Chang’s fiction to a higher level which transcends the historical background on which they were based, thus making them all-time classics in the history of modern Chinese literature.
The fiction of Eileen Chang manifests the disintegration of family values, the disenchantment with love as well as the deteriorating sense of morality within people. In this sense, Chang stands firmly with Plato in that she also holds an entirely pessimistic viewpoint with regard to human civilization. Besides, as pointed out by C.T. Hsia,Footnote 6 Chang’s works of fiction demonstrate a relatively high set of moral standards since she was an idealist deep down in her heart.
Many of Chang’s works represent the style of “decadence,” among which Love in a Fallen City (1943) stands as one of the most typical. The title of the novella is in itself ironic, since the author had revitalized the literary cliché of “earth-shattering beauty”(“倾国倾城”) in the classical Chinese literature, ascribing a brand-new connotation to the obsolete tales of love. In traditional Chinese fiction, attractive women were usually regarded as troublemakers whose beauty only brought misfortune and ordeal to their country. Since the beauty of the country would necessarily provoke the outbreak of wars, the futile sacrifice of millions of people’s lives lay behind the love story between the hero and his beauty. Quite interestingly, in Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City, the plot design had been reversed and rearranged. The war had strengthened the tenuous bond between the two protagonists and directly caused their marriage. There are tons of stories about love being the cause of war throughout the history of Chinese and Western literature, whereas Chang decided to write one in which the war is the very cause of love. Chang’s deliberate reversal of the conventional plot design can be interpreted as a sort of parody in which she projected all her bitter sarcasm toward human frailties. The novella recounts an unconventional love story in time of the war. The heroine, Bai Liusu, a 29-year-old fair lady from a declining upper class family in feudal society of old Shanghai, shares a rocky and dramatic relationship with Fan Liuyuan, the son of a Chinese expatriate who has just finished his studies from the UK. The male and female protagonists both distrust each other from the beginning of their encounters, but gradually open up their hearts through several rounds of tentative flirtation. The War of Resistance against Japan has unexpectedly catalyzed their dubious and unstable relationship into marriage. The novella is pervaded with a horrifying sense of the doomsday, in which the theme of love is overshadowed by the theme of death, threatened by which, everything turns out to be futile and worthless.
The image of the “wall” remains one of the most interesting details in the novella that relates to the theme of death. Once Bai Liusu and Fan Liuyuan stroll on the streets to the side of a wall, which is depicted in the following sentences:
The wall was cool and rough, the color of death. Pressed against the wall, her face bloomed with the opposite hues: red lips, shining eyes—a face of flesh and blood, alive with thought and feeling. (Chang 139)
Eileen Chang deliberately delineated the wall as something decadent, emanating the odor of death, only to serve as a sharp contrast to the everlasting vivacity and untainted beauty of Bai Liusu, who seems attractive to Fan Liuyuan from the very beginning. Therefore, Fan confesses to Bai his feelings (though immature) for her with the hint of the wall:
…but this wall makes me think of the old sayings about the end of the world. Someday, when human civilization has been completely destroyed, when everything is burned, burst, utterly collapsed and ruined, maybe this wall will still be here. If, at that time, we can meet at this wall, then maybe, Liusu, you will honestly care about me, and I will honestly care about you. (Chang, 139)
The tentative confession of Fan Liuyuan reflects his meticulous and sophisticated personality. Since even in the scheme of love, he does not allow himself to be tricked by Bai Liusu’s designs upon him (he later comments acerbically that Bai considers marriage to be “long-term prostitution.”) Fan’s love for Bai has always been conditional, restricted to certain premises. The character Fan Liuyuan in Love in a Fallen City is an ego-centered womanizer who never truly respects women. Eileen Chang adopted a sarcastic tone to depict his selfishness and ego-centrism through his words—“I don’t understand myself—but I want you to understand me!”(Chang 140) Fan Liuyuan’s arrogant attitude toward Bai Liusu indicates the impatience and reluctance to truly know her as a person. The image of the wall not only symbolizes the atmosphere of death lurking in the air, but also alludes to the cultural barrier and a deep sense of insecurity between the couple. However, there is an abrupt twist within the novella that turns everything upside down. Fan Liuyuan has been transformed to a responsible husband from a playful dandy as he usually is, thanks to the outbreak of the war, which is fairly ironic. There is plenty amount of sarcasm and irony in Eileen Chang’s fiction, among which Love in a Fallen City is one of the most peculiar.
Eileen Chang established a unique and dynamic relationship between love and war through the confession of Fan Liuyuan. Chang’s fiction illuminates the readers with the fact that love thrives when human civilization is under unprecedented threat during war-time, making people crave for intimacy and security at all costs. The incredible influence of war on love gradually manifests itself as the story unfolds, and the latter part of the novella attests to what Fan Liuyuan has declared earlier to Bai Liusu that he would genuinely care about her and sincerely fall in love with her, given that “human civilization has been completely destroyed.”(Chang 139) With the bombs landing in Hong Kong all of a sudden, the protagonists eventually realize that it’s time to wear their hearts on their sleeves and begin to trust each other since the war has destroyed the old familiar world they once belong to. The wall of distrust begins to crumble in face of the war, which intends to obliterate everything and turns love and marriage into a necessity, into something they should hold fast to no matter what happens. This kind of ironic depiction of love and marriage reflects the pervading aesthetics of “decadence” in Eileen Chang’s fiction, in which everything good comes to an end. What lies at the center of the concept of “decadence” is the strong belief that everything is prone to degradation and degeneration, and its eventual demise. At the end of the story, Bai Liusu is left alone at home. Feeling anxious and empty, she cannot fend off the mounting agitations that the war has imposed on her. Although there are many uncertainties about her future with Fan Liuyuan, Bai Liusu is still determined to hold on to this marriage despite anything, which is depicted in the following paragraph:
Here in this uncertain world, money, property, the permanent things—they’re all unreliable. The only thing she could rely on was the breath in her lungs, and this person who lay sleeping beside her. Suddenly, she crawled over to him, hugging him through his quilt. He reached out from the bedding and grasped her hand. They looked and saw each other, saw each other entirely. It was a mere moment of deep understanding, but it was enough to keep them happy together for a decade or so. (Chang 164)
Eileen Chang suggested in the novella with irony that the marriage between Bai Liusu and Fan Liuyuan is, to a large extent, absurd and groundless, doomed to collapse. The aesthetics of “decadence” collaborates with the psychological experience of Bai Liusu, for an epiphany suddenly dawns on her in the latter part of the novella: Since everything declines and ends up in decay, why not hold on to something simple and worldly such as marriage? The reversal of the stereotypical relationship between love and war is actually a kind of fortune bestowed upon Bai Liusu, who can only escape from her declining family full of abominable snobs and start her life afresh in somewhere far away. Eileen Chang deliberately put an end to the novella with a sarcastic remark:” Hong Kong’s defeat had brought Liusu victory. But in this unreasonable world, who can distinguish cause from effect? Who knows which is which? Did a great city fall so that she could be vindicated?”(Chang 167) The questions posed by Eileen Chang implicate that love does not necessarily leads to war, as is often conveyed in conventional tales of love. And contrary-wise, love thrives during war-time, when human existence is stripped to its barest essentials. The novella also infers a subtext that there is a paradox within the relationship between love and war, for the kind of love and marriage galvanized by war could turn out to be fragile and unreliable in a peaceful era, and is prone to disintegrate sooner or later.
Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City is a parody of conventional love stories in which the War of Resistance against Japan propels the marriage between Bai Liusu and Fan Liuyuan. The kind of love between the male and female protagonists also resembles a sort of game or a gender war. There is no true love in the story between Bai and Fan, since the couple’s marriage is merely based on their mutual loneliness and financial insecurity. Ironically, Eileen Chang deliberately designed a seemingly happy ending for them with a hint at the end of the story that their marriage is unstable and doomed to collapse sooner or later:
Those legendary beauties who felled cities and kingdoms were probably all like that. Legends exist everywhere, but they don’t necessarily have such happy endings. When the huqin wails on a night of ten thousand lamps, the bow slides back and forth, drawing forth a tale too desolate for words—oh! Why go into it? (Chang 167)
The depiction of the environment around the couple also manifests a kind of desolate atmosphere:”They walked into town together. Where the road took a sharp turn, the land suddenly fell away—in front of them was only empty space, a damp, pale gray sky.” (Chang 166) The feelings of loneliness and desolation actually permeate the story, which demonstrate the decadent aesthetics: everything in this world is prone to its eventual decline and disintegration, no matter how perfect it seems. Eileen Chang implies in the story that when marriage becomes a substitute for financial security without any spiritual connection between the couple, it is on the verge of failure and total collapse. The final sentence “…drawing forth a tale too desolate for words—oh! Why go into it?” reminds the readers of the fact that the story between Bai Liusu and Fan Liuyuan is only a parody of love, without real devotion, devoid of any deep meaning, and is full of crisis.
The aesthetics of “decadence” is not only manifested in Love in a Fallen City, but is also a pervading style in other fiction by Eileen Chang, such as The Golden Cangue, Aloeswood Incense: the First Brazier, Aloeswood Incense: the Second Brazier, Jasmine Tea, etc. Most of Eileen Chang’s fictional works written in occupied Shanghai vividly demonstrate the declination and disintegration of old feudal families in upper-class society, and the disillusionment and disenchantment with love between the family members. Cao Qiqiao, the protagonist in The Golden Cangue, suffers from chronic dissatisfaction both physically and mentally. Having destroyed the love of her daughter, she finally became an obnoxious, demented woman in the attic; Ni Xi, the anti-heroine in Serial Link (《连环套》), is also mentally damaged and morally corrupted although she gets richer as the story unfolds; Nie Chuanqing, whose seemingly happy family in Jasmine Tea is haunted by a distant and tragic love story that racks his brain and lures him into the abyss of hysteria and lunacy; Ge Weilong, the heroine in Aloeswood Incense: the First Brazier has been turned into a social butterfly after several triumphant encounters with men in upper-class society of Hong Kong and cannot resist her fate of becoming a plaything of a womanizer at the end of the story; Madame Michelle in Aloeswood Incense: the Second Brazier, with her extreme possessiveness, has successfully destroyed her daughter’s marriage and has driven Roger, the husband of Susie, to his suicide. These works are imbued with the aesthetics of “decadence” with the allusion that the mental development and spiritual growth of human beings can only deteriorate under certain circumstances. Eileen Chang had achieved her goal of criticizing the existing social structures and ethical principles through her faithful portrayal of morbid humanities in her characters. What distinguishes Eileen Chang from other writers in occupied Shanghai during the war is her harsh criticism toward and downright skepticism about the social norms that people had adhered to in major urban cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong. It is also interesting to notice that almost every character in her fiction written in occupied Shanghai is mentally distorted, snobbish and squalid, which reflects her immense pessimism and even despair toward Chinese society during social transition. Eileen Chang reveled in capturing the negative side of humanity, excelled at depicting the morbid psychological experience of her characters through her delicate portrayal of mundane urban life, with a hint that such kind of tragic daily episodes are prevalent in society and the misfortune thrust upon her characters would haunt them unceasingly.
Eileen Chang’s fiction also demonstrates a conspicuous predilection for irony and cynicism, in which there is no true love and fulfilled anticipations but an overwhelming sense of disappointment toward others and a heavy degree of self-loathing, suffused with a strong impulse for escape. The “decadent” style of Eileen Chang’s fiction indirectly explains her departure from her hometown Shanghai and her final settlement in the USA, where she expanded her life-long career as a writer but continued to rewrite the old “nightmares” that she had written in occupied Shanghai. Eileen Chang had never truly let go of her strong disapproval of her family and the social atmosphere in the prime of her writing career, through which she unconsciously projected her disappointment and hatred. The outburst of negative feelings in her fiction is also an external representation of the aesthetics of “decadence.” As is pointed out by Nietzsche, “decadence” is the psychological expression of a personal will which belongs to every nation and every time. (Nietzsche 25–26) By focusing on the recurrent theme of the gradual disintegration of a big family in upper-class society and the distortion of humanity within it, Eileen Chang had created a unique style of “decadence” that attests to Nietzsche’s definition of the concept.
Nevertheless, Eileen Chang’s expression of the aesthetics of “decadence” not only reveals the characteristics of literary Modernism, but also reflects a deep-rooted personal taste for the literature. Having been profoundly influenced by classical Chinese fiction like Dreams in a Red Chamber (红楼梦) and The Plum in a Golden Vase (金瓶梅), Eileen Chang knew too well how to blend the aesthetics of “decadence” into the historical background of the War of Resistance against Japan. Eileen Chang remains one of the few writers throughout the history of modern Chinese literature whose works serve as paradigm of literary Modernity in successful combination with literary Realism, thanks to her astute perception of modern Chinese families.
As to Eileen Chang, morbid humanity, along with passive gestures of resistance can be found in her fiction writing. Eileen Chang’s fiction depicts the lives of ordinary people in occupied Shanghai without focusing too much on grand political issues like her contemporaries, such as Mao Dun (1896–1981), Lu Xun (1881–1936) or Ba Jin (1904–2005). The detachment from politics is a kind of passive resistance, and further proves that Eileen Chang was more of a modernist writer whose works of fiction demonstrate decadent aesthetics rather than literary Realism.
Qian Zhongshu’s works of fiction manifest a decadent style in terms of literary themes about the degradation of humanity, the decline of idealism, and the deterioration of personal relationships, especially romance and marriage. As to Qian Zhongshu, the themes of the eventual demise of false hopes and the futility of struggles are more evident than in Eileen Chang’s fiction. Unlike Eileen Chang who spent a lot of effort on delineating the lives of ordinary people in big families during social transition, Qian Zhongshu’s works of fiction usually demonstrate the psychological status of the intellectuals in modern China. Qian was also uninterested in broad political narratives like Chang was, and he was renowned for his brilliant perception and delicate depiction of the deep-rooted weaknesses of human beings.
Moreover, Qian Zhongshu (1910–1998) adopted the rhetorical device of oxymoron to depict the ambivalence and conflicts within characters and events, aiming to demonstrate the dialectics of things that are seemingly at odds with each other. He frequently used irony to mock his characters or criticize the social system in occupied Shanghai. Qian Zhongshu excelled at providing a God-like vision to expose the tragic flaws on his characters.
The novella collection Humans, Beasts and Ghosts (1946)Footnote 7 contains four stories: “God’s Dream,” “Cat,” “Inspiration” and “Souvenir.” These four novellas were all written by Qian Zhongshu in occupied Shanghai. The four pieces share certain similarities despite their differences. Cruel sarcasm and caricatures of the flaws and frailties on Chinese intellectuals are almost everywhere in these stories. Actually Qian held no particular grudges against writers, intellectuals or socialites. He was simply more drawn to the psychological world of human beings than to broad social issues.
The personification of God in “God’s Dream” is a very successful attempt. The author had actually demoted and degraded God to expose his true colors. At the beginning of the story, Qian revealed the setting of “God’s Dream”:
When the power of evolution is great enough to create a God after thousands of years, human beings are already extinct, maybe this is because although they evolved together, they no longer slept together. Even the evolutionists couldn’t wait anymore. Therefore, the material world is very hollow and empty, just like a fool’s brain which has been magnified numerous times. (Qian 2002:2)
“God” in “God’s Dream” is a dictator who rules the world, quite different from the authentic God in the Bible who has mercy and affection toward people. To make it worse, he inherits all the flaws on human beings, such as the propensity to abuse their power, and a ridiculous amount of vanity. Qian adopted irony to briefly outline the personalities of “God”:
God has the temperaments of human beings, therefore he likes to abuse power. He’d like to dispel all the darkness away to see if it listens to his command. Alas! As is expected, the sun comes out, and turns from grey to white, then from white to red. God is very happy since he reckons the sun listens to his command. He closes his sun-shot eyes and thinks: ”The sun is so mighty that I don’t want it for the moment.” Quite strangely, everything before his eyes vanished in a second, leaving a darkness tinged in red. Now God is assured about his own powers and abilities, and no longer doubts himself anymore. Since he can dispel brightness by closing his eyes, then brightness must have come from his own eyes…(3)
The above quotation of the novella manifests that God is of a self-indulgent and self-righteous character. Qian’s depiction of “God” is apparently derogative, effusing deep contempt toward this God who wants so much to be adored and worshiped that he then creates a man and a woman to keep him company. The man and woman are soon tired of each other, therefore the woman comes to God and implores him to recreate a man who “does not look exactly the same as him, but is more subtle and more handsome.”(7) God is very angry since he has seen through the greed and infidelity of the woman and has refused her immediately. Meanwhile, God threatens that he might as well punish her by destroying the man he has created. Ironically, the man has made the same request as the woman, and God has also refused him in the same way. God considers himself to be greater and more powerful now:
God sighs and wonders why human beings are so weak, and then a second thought comes to his mind: these two people are so equally and symmetrically bad, just like two lines of rhythmical prose or a line of metrical poem. God is so proud of his delicacy of creating human beings. Therefore, God feels justified and contented. (12)
Qian Zhongshu mocked God’s refusal to admit his limitations as a Creator and scorned his cowardice of finding solace in deceiving himself. Gradually, God feels more and more estranged from his creatures because of his disapproval of their requests. Eventually, God has decided to send ordeals to them in order to make them eulogize his power and worship him again. It is a pity that God has disappointed himself this time since the man and woman cannot ask for his help again. Instead, they have died of illness due to the invasion of lice, flies and microinsects. Ironically, they have even died together like a martyred couple. God suddenly realizes how lonely he would be since he has just lost a lovely couple who used to compliment him every single day and keep him company. The ending of the story is quite sardonic and surprising at the same time, since God has finally woke up to find what he has seen to be nothing but a dream:
What happened before is nothing but a dream. I rule everything and always do whatever I like. However, dreams have extraterritorial jurisdiction and are not under my control, which make me so angry! Nevertheless, aren’t these dreams predictions about my future? The business of creating human beings to keep me company should be reconsidered. I am immortal, but what about the endless time to spare? How to dispel my loneliness? God thus stretches himself, giving a long sigh to the dying sunset and the listless world, then opens his mouth and yawns with boredom, as if to swallow the boundless and lingering time. (16)
God feels so frustrated since he has discovered that he cannot control his own dreams despite the fact that he is the omnipotent and omniscient ruler of everything in the world. The ending of the story alludes that God is actually not that almighty and great as he thinks he is, therefore, his vanity and stupidity has been mocked by the author throughout the story. Besides, the eventual demise of the couple suggests decadent aesthetics: since nothing gold can stay, the struggles of human beings turn out to be futile and meaningless, just like a dream that God has woken up from.
“God’s Dream” is full of situational irony, which usually creates a huge chasm between the characters’ expected outcomes and the real conditions they encounter. Lars Elleström has given a precise definition about “situational irony”: “Situational irony, sometimes called irony of events, is most broadly defined as a situation where the outcome is incongruous with what was expected, but it is also more generally understood as a situation that includes contradictions or sharp contrasts…An example would be a man who takes a step aside in order to avoid getting sprinkled by a wet dog, and falls into a swimming pool.”(Elleström 2002: 51) “God” in the story “God’s Dream” also encounters the same ironic situation: he longs to be adored and worshipped by his creatures, but finally ends up being alone. The tragic flaws on this God are his self-indulgence and pompous character, which make him unable either to face the reality, or to take sensible actions to meet his demands. Therefore, he cannot obtain what he has been craving for. Although he eventually realizes that everything that has happened is nothing but a dream, even his dream reflects his stupidity and incompetence.
“God’s Dream” is actually a parody of the Genesis in the Bible. Parody is often understood as an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect. As the critic Linda Hutcheon asserts–”Parody—often called ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or intertextuality—is usually considered central to postmodernism, both by its detractors and its defenders.”(Hutcheon 2000: 93) After reading “God’s Dream,” the readers cannot help but laugh at this self-indulgent, jealous and pompous God. Qian’s reinvention of the Genesis is very impressive since he questioned the legitimacy of authority by delving into the psychological reality of this seemingly almighty God.
In “God’s Dream,” the author recurrently mocked and scorned God to expose his human frailties, such as pride, vanity and narrow-mindedness. This “God” apparently does not have any divine virtues like self-sacrifice or mercy, instead, he is self-delusional and egoistic. In Qian’s story, God is the typical embodiment of human vices, which serves as an insinuation of those people inflated with ambitions to surpass all the sentient beings in the world. The author successfully captured the vanity and stupidity in hypocrites, as is shown in this narcissistic God in the story. Despite the frequent use of irony and parody, the author also adopted oxymoron to convey sarcasm and contempt toward this God:
He is not God but a despicable demon. God is a merciful demon who gives people something to eat; while a demon is also God with evil intentions, who kills people for beasts to eat. God and demon are not binary oppositions, but two sides of the same thing, two names for the same person, like bandits for heroes, lovers for rivals. (14)
In conclusion, “God’s Dream” is a modern allegory and a parody of the Genesis in the Bible. The theme of the story has been intensified by rhetorical devices such as irony and oxymoron. “God’s dream” is thought-provoking and hilarious at the same time, imbued with dark humor.
The novella “Cat” involves the female protagonist AmourFootnote 8 and her distinguished friends ranging from politicians to writers, from scientists to directors of academic institutions. They are all swept off their feet by the charm of Amour and enjoy ingratiating her at the house parties she throws regularly. Amour’s friends overtly flirt with her despite the fact that she is the wife of Li Jianhou, a college professor, who often gets on his nerves by Amour’s ego-centric behaviors. “Cat” is a satire that depicts the mindsets of modern Chinese intellectuals during the War of Resistance against Japan. The author constantly mocked Li Jianhou in the story by making him a henpecked and cowardly character. Besides, his fellow intellectuals, even his young lover are also fowls to his stupidity. Qian Zhongshu endeavored to capture a group image of the Chinese intellectual circles in the republican period. The author’s sarcasm was mainly targeted at Li Jianhou and Amour, whose vanity and foolishness greatly astonish the readers. All the intellectuals in the story are dilettantes who enjoy delivering strange and empty remarks about politics, art and life to flash their intelligence and insights. They are dying to be adored and respected, just like Amour and Li Jianhou. The author’s contempt toward Amour and her husband unfolds in the following paragraph:
Although she talks very often, her words are simple. She just nods her head, laughs and inserts a remark, then talks to another person. She is not good at showing off her talents, but loves to manipulate her friends, like a magician who is able to throw or pick up, and take care of seven or eight dishes in the air at the same time. Yi-gu privately wonders why all her friends are celebrities around forty years old. He does not know the only reason these people are coming to Mrs. Li’s parties is to seek an economic and safe romantic relationship that is free of charge and won’t be accused, just like having a spiritual vacation to avoid their families. (38)
Mrs. Li's nature of being sociable and vain was described by the author as a clown's trick of throwing dishes. This kind of humorous sarcasm is a common characteristic of Qian Zhongshu’s works of fiction. The above paragraph discloses that the real intention of these intellectuals is to obtain a safe romantic relationship with her without being accused by their wives. Since Mrs. Li is possessive, manipulative and insatiable, she also enjoys flirting with those people on these house parties. Qian Zhongshu scorned Amour and remarked, “A westernized wife not only disobeys her husband, but it's not enough for her husband to serve her alone. “(21) In fact, it is only a safe and effortless habit for Amour to hold parties at home to fill her boring and empty life. Li Jianhou is another main character the author mocked and despised. Being vain and superficial, Li Jianhou and Amour makes a perfect match. In order to brag about his erudition, Li Jianhou has hired a university student named Qi Yi-gu to write a travelogue about his living experience in the western countries for him:
After two and a half day’s work, Yi-gu no longer respects Jianhou anymore. The prejudice of a young man makes him deeply despises him. He has seen through the banality, vanity and insensibility on him, and has ignored his hospitality. He should have appreciated the generosity of Jianhou to hire him to engage in such petty business with so high salaries, however, now he only hates that he is so rich to waste a young man’s time and energy to write such meaningless nonsense for him. When he looks at the drafts with scratches by the cat, he can only hold his temper to write again. Maybe DarkieFootnote 9 is a bold and insightful critic whose behavior of destroying the relics in the house suggests his most effective and thorny criticism against this piece of crap? Yi-gu laughs bitterly when these thoughts come to his mind. (26–28)
The above paragraph is full of sarcasm, especially in the last sentence: Amour’s cat Darkie destroys the manuscripts written by Yi-gu. Darkie’s behavior implies Li Jianhou's superficial self-confidence and his vulgar nature that he tries so much to hide, which Qi Yi-gu really despises. At the end of the story, since Li Jianhou cannot lift his head in front of Amour, he has found a lover around 18 years old. A friend of Li Jianhou named Chen Xiajun tells Amour about his infidelity, which has tremendously irritated her. Therefore, she cultivates Qi Yi-gu to confess his love for her to restore her trampled self-esteem. Unexpectedly, Yi-gu has provoked her by his timidity, and her secret wish has finally failed. In the last two paragraphs of this lengthy novella, the author depicted the respective psychological activities of Li Jianhou and Amour, which intensified the pervading sarcasm in it.
At the end of the novella, Li Jianhou’s heart is filled with regrets but his young lover knows nothing about this at all. Nor does she know anything about the reason behind his infidelity. The author suggests that Amour’s vanity is the very cause of his betrayal. Quite ironically, the young lover is looking toward her future with great anticipations when she sits in the train with Li Jianhou. This anticlimactic ending implies that Amour’s superficially fancy life has been entirely ruined by Jianhou’s infidelity, which has greatly trampled her self-esteem, and hit her emotional needs. Generally speaking, the anticlimactic ending is often combined with the tone of irony, with a function to increase the absurd and dramatic atmosphere of the fiction. The author tirelessly captured and subtly delved into the psychological motivations behind their behaviors and paid great attention to the inevitable consequences of their actions. The ironic plot and the anticlimactic ending have strengthened the satirical effects of the novella. By mocking and making fun of his characters, Qian Zhongshu implicated the theme of the novella: people cannot always live in a false illusion. Self-righteous and petty shrewdness cannot defeat the mighty power of reality after all, and the greatest stupidity of man lies in deceiving himself and others. From this perspective, the real theme of the novella “Cat” is not to criticize the social reality during wartime, but to reveal the author’s own views about life and demonstrate his deep understanding and grasp on human nature by exposing his characters’ frailties, smugness and stupidity. The anticlimactic ending also contains decadent aesthetics: both Li Jianhou and Amour have to accept the cruel reality that their marriage is doomed to failure. Everything in the story is devoid of depth and meaning, prone to disintegrate, including the random remarks the guests make at the parties. The feelings of absurdity and desolation permeate the story, which manifests a decadent style.
In another short story entitled “Inspiration,” Qian Zhongshu delineated an awful novelist waiting for his inspirations to come. Unexpectedly, the novelist’s characters have suddenly resurrected to accuse him of his lame and awkward depictions. They no longer wish to live inside his works of fiction at all, and all they need now is to seek revenge against him by taking his life. The author once again adopted the rhetorical devices of irony and oxymoron. For instance, Qian asserted that “Chance is nothing but varnished or masked inevitability.”(80) At the end of the story, the novelist’s wretched soul gets into the ears of his landlord’s daughter, thus impregnating her. Although he could never write works of fiction again, he could instead write daily accounts of his father-in-law’s grocery store. The surrealistic ending contains the author’s deep sarcasm and contempt toward the novelist. “Inspiration” is by no means the best story in Humans, Beasts and Ghosts, since the author too frequently used irony,Footnote 10 and his emotions were too direct and emphatic, sometimes including personal attacks. Besides, the plot design is too dramatic that it impairs its artistic value. Despite its minor flaws, the bold and gothic surrealism at the end of the story is still very impressive. It is interesting to notice that the story also suggests the futility of the protagonist’s artistic endeavors: No matter how hard he tries, his characters are always dull and lifeless, ready to seek revenge upon the poor writer.
The last story entitled “Souvenir” in Humans, Beasts and Ghosts is the most mature and successful one. “Souvenir” is a tale about the deterioration of marriage and the degradation of moral sense. The author attempted to manifest the absurdity of life and the futility of hope. The literary style of “Souvenir” is quite lyrical and melancholic, but the underlying sarcasm still permeates the story. The novella is imbued with subtle and detailed psychological analysis with a gradually proceeding plot. The story is about an extramarital affair between the female protagonist Manqian and her lover Tianjian. The author successfully captured the subtle and ambivalent emotions of Manqian before and after the affair. The female protagonist Manqian is married to Caishu, the son of her father’s old friend. Caishu has attracted Manqian by his straightforward and simple character at the beginning, but later on the insipid family life has drained away all her passions. Therefore, she cannot resist the temptation of Caishu’s cousin Tianjian and involves in an affair with him. Quite ironically, Tianjian has died of an air crash in the end, but Manjian feels nothing about it and is even secretly glad that her husband hasn’t found out the affair between them, therefore they can live a normal life as before. The author’s depiction of “hope” is very noteworthy since it implies the insatiable desires in human nature.
Qian Zhongshu depicted the intricate changes of Manqian’s psychological world with precision and details and adopted oxymoron to imply her mood swings between hope and despair: “Her despair is hope which wears a mask.”(112) Qian Zhongshu acutely discerned the dialectics between hope and despair. The frequent use of oxymoron also suggests a dialectics between apparently contradictory things. The hope before the affair has finally turned into disappointment and despair in the end. In this way, this feeling of disillusionment turns into a great irony of her previous hope.
The ironic plot design in “Souvenir” suggests the absurdity of life. The death of Tianjian brings relief and comfort to Manqian rather than pure sorrow. She finally manages to pretend as if nothing has happened to get rid of the condemnation of her conscience. The title of the story “Souvenir” is also very ironic. Caishu is so pathetically foolish that he wants to name his child after “Tianjian” to memorize his deceased cousin. Manqian, of course, panics at her husband’s stupid idea and has refused the name, but Caishu still loves his wife dearly: “Caishu looks at his wife’s slim shape from behind, his eyes filled with infinite tenderness and affection.” (121) The ending of the story includes dramatic irony, a literary device used when the audience is more aware of what is happening than a character.
The critic Ted Huters points out the limitations of Qian Zhongshu’s literary creation in his doctoral dissertation: “Traditional Innovation: Qian Zhongshu and Modern Chinese Letters”:
In sum, while many of the purely discursive elements of Qian's critical essay style are successfully transformed into techniques that are fitted to fictional representation, they have not come all the way. He is not able to wholly immerse his thematic concerns into the actions and personalities of the characters he creates; theme always emerges superior to narrative movement and representation. His sins in this respect are, however, the common property of modern and, for that matter, traditional, Chinese writers. Considering the specific nature of his thematic and structural concerns, moreover, such a result would not have been difficult to predict. (Huters 1977: 270-271)
Despite these minor flaws, Qian Zhongshu’s works of fiction demonstrate the psychological landscape of the Chinese intellectuals during the War of Resistance against Japan. Qian’s erudition and training in the western literature, especially British literature, also reinvigorated modern Chinese fiction in a positive sense. The four stories in Humans, Beasts and Ghosts all contain decadent aesthetics which exposes the decay of moral and ethical values, the decline of idealism, and the disillusionment with love and marriage. The mental struggles of the characters turn out to be futile because they cannot hold on to any firm belief system in a turbulent time during social transition as well as the war. In his later longer fiction Fortress Besieged (1946), Qian Zhongshu explored the similar themes of the moral degradation of the intellectuals, and the gradual disintegration of idealism during wartime, which I would not elaborate on in this essay.
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21594
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yago
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0
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https://emmaluferguson.substack.com/p/we-two-are-old
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en
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Emma's stream of consciousness
|
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"Emma"
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2023-10-25T12:00:42+00:00
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Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang's story, told through my translations
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en
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https://substackcdn.com/icons/substack/favicon.ico
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https://emmaluferguson.substack.com/p/we-two-are-old
|
1.
This is the story of a Chinese intellectual ‘power couple’, Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998) and his wife Yang Jiang (1911-2016). Let me tell it as I usually do, alternating between reading and translation.
2.
Qian Zhongshu is rightly called ‘the most learned author of twentieth-century China’. Fluent in English and French, he also read widely in German, Italian, and Latin — all of which languages appear, alongside modern and classical Chinese, throughout his writings. Here is Yang’s recollection of her husband’s proficiency with languages:
The year we were in Paris, Zhongshu threw himself wholeheartedly into reading. In French, he began with the fifteenth-century poet Villon, and worked his way one by one through to the great authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In German he did the same. He read in Chinese and English every day, in French and German every other day, and later squeezed Italian into the roster.
This was a year of joy for Zhongshu, who fiercely loved reading. When we first arrived in France, we read Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary together, and many more of the words were new to him than to me. But by the end of the year, his French was miles ahead of my own.
Qian’s most famous work, 《围城》(Fortress Besieged), is a satirical modernist novel set in wartime China. Fortress Besieged bears strong imprints of the French existentialist, Sartre. The novel’s protagonist, Fang Hongjian, enters into a contentious marriage with Sun Roujia. Though both are well-meaning and good-intentioned, the couple spends much of the novel ribbing each other intentionally, insulting each other unintentionally, and eventually growing physically violent towards one another. The novel ends with Fang Hongjian realising that he is trapped in an unhappy spiral of inescapable conflict.
Reflecting on his failing marriage, Fang Hongjian thinks,
By nature, man was meant to be alone […] When we all get close together, it’s either I offend you or you insult me. People are after all like so many hedgehogs. We’ve got to keep a safe distance away from each other — that’s all there is to it. If we all clump up, I’m sure to prick your flesh, and you’re sure to tear my skin.
Knowing next to nothing about Sartre, I hand over commentary to the Chinese critics Gao Xudong and Dai Bo in this brief translation from their essay on the novel:
The existence of others is a constant threat to one’s subjectivity – I can transform others into the objects of my subjectivity, but they are capable of doing the same to me. Thus, “Hell is other people”, and marriage becomes a pitched battle in which each party involved seeks to dominate the other’s subjectivity – an inescapable fortress besieged.
And indeed, the title of Qian Zhongshu’s novel, Fortress Besieged, comes from a French proverb: ‘Marriage is like a fortress besieged; those outside want to get in, and those inside want to get out’.
3.
From this gloomy view of interpersonal interaction and marriage, one would never guess that Qian Zhongshu himself was happily married. While he was studying at Tsinghua University, he met his life partner Yang Jiang, and they wed in 1935. The couple studied abroad in Oxford and Paris together, and per Yang’s recollection:
Zhongshu and I fought once, on the ship out from China. We had a spat over the pronunciation of the French word bon. I accused him of speaking it with an imperfect accent. He disagreed, and said some really cutting things in reply. I also tried my best to hurt him.
Later I brought the matter to a French woman on the ship who spoke English. She said I was right, and Zhongshu wrong. I had won, but I felt no satisfaction; and of course Zhongshu felt none either, for he had lost.
There is a proverb that goes: “When newlyweds fight on the bow of a ship, they make up on the stern.” We soon grew bored of being on bad terms, and agreed to disagree.
But in the years following this, we never had another fight. Whenever anything important came up, it never took more than a few moments to agree on a course of action. If our opinions differed, we’d compromise — neither of us could be said to have the upper hand.
Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu’s marriage, as you see, could not have been further from Fang Hongjian and Sun Roujia’s in Fortress Besieged. I have been speaking of Yang Jiang as ‘Qian Zhongshu’s wife’, but she was a formidable intellectual in her own right. Already confident in French, English, and German, she taught herself Spanish so that she could translate Don Quixote into Chinese, and her Chinese translation is still considered the definitive one. (Don Quixote is one of the most well-known and -loved works of Western literature in Chinese.) And the couple’s daughter, Qian Yuan, born in 1937, became a professor of English literature at Beijing Normal University.
I am studying Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged for my thesis, and recently, I have been needing some light reading that is still (nominally) related to my research. So I picked up Yang Jiang’s autobiographical essay collection, 《我们仨》(We Three).
I thought We Three would be happy recollections of a family who not only loved and respected one another, but shared an intellectual common ground. What I did not know, and what I very quickly learnt within the first few pages of We Three, was that both Qian Yuan and Qian Zhongshu died within months of each other in 1997 and 1998 respectively, the daughter of spinal cancer and the father of old age. Left behind was the mother, Yang Jiang, who wrote this memoir of family life from the perspective of her new solitude.
What those last years of Qian Zhongshu and Qian Yuan’s lives must have been like for Yang Jiang — running back and forth from hospital to hospital, carrying news of an ailing father to a dying daughter, first by letter and then by word of mouth as both father and daughter grew too weak to write.
Perhaps Yang Jiang would agree with her husband, Qian Zhongshu, that ‘Hell is other people’. But only in the sense that to grow close to others leads to love, and to love leads to grief. The pages of We Three are so filled with pain that I could only take them in short doses.
But what is so poignant to me is that, despite this, We Three evinces an exactly opposite view on subjectivity as Fang Hongjian does in Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged. Yang Jiang construes herself in relation to her husband and daughter. Unlike the protagonists of Fortress Besieged, there is no erosion of subjectivity in her relationship with her family. She exists because she is part of ‘we three’, as does the rest of her family. Her subjectivity is often constructed in terms of ‘we’, not ‘I’.
Yang Jiang’s book is structured thus.
Section One: We Two Are Old.
Section Two: We Three Are Parted.
Section Three: We Three, Remembered Alone.
Section Two, ‘We Three Are Parted’, is the best of the book — a long, surrealist chapter in which Yang Jiang describes the years of her daughter’s and husband’s deaths, 1997 and 1998, as a dream sequence in which she cannot tell the truth from her nightmares, and from which she cannot wake. This sequence was agonising to read and impossible even to attempt to translate. I can only hope that someday I will have the courage, empathy, and strength to do it justice.
So I have only translated the book’s opening essay, ‘We Two Are Old’, which introduces the dream sequence in the second chapter. I have also translated the opening of Section Three: ‘We Three, Remembered Alone’.
4.
One night I had a dream. Zhongshu and I were walking together, talking and laughing, forgetful of time and distance. The sun had set and in the opaque twilight, I turned and Zhongshu was gone.
I searched high and low, but there was no trace of him. I called him, and there was no answer. I, alone, standing in the midst of the deserted fields, not knowing where he had gone. I shouted at the top of my voice: his name, his full name — and my cries fell and were swallowed by the emptiness, which returned not even an echo.
The night grew thicker; the utter silence deepened my loneliness. I strained my eyes through the layers upon layers of darkness. Beneath my feet was a dirt path; beside me there was a wood and running water, but I could not see how wide the stream was, nor a way across it. I turned and through the darkness saw a village, houses and barns, as if there had once been people living there, but very long ago, for there was no sign of light or life.
Had Zhongshu gone on home first? Well, then I had to go home to find him. As I was pondering how best to return, an old man pulling a rickshaw appeared – and I actually managed to hail him. But when I opened my mouth to tell him to take me home, no sound would come.
And then my fear woke me, and Zhongshu was by my side, sleeping soundly.
I tossed and turned half the night till Zhongshu woke and asked me what the matter was. I told him I had had a dream — and I told him what had happened in the dream. I accused him of leaving me, of going off on his own without a word or sound. And, thus awoken, he made no excuses for himself. He said, comfortingly, that it was a dream old people often had. He had had it himself, many times.
That is true, for I have had the same dream since, many times. The same dream — though it happens in different places. We two, walking together, till Zhongshu vanishes in the blink of an eye. I ask everyone around me — ‘Have you seen my husband?’ — and no one replies. Or I seek him, high and low, and every path I find leads nowhere; or I am waiting at the bus stop for a late bus home that never comes. In these dreams, through my fear, I have one blurred impression: If I can find Zhongshu, we can go home.
Perhaps Zhongshu still remembers how I woke him that first night with my complaints. For he has left me to dream a journey of ten thousand miles.
5.
In the following translation from the final section of We Three, ‘We Three, Remembered Alone’, I have paid special attention to Yang Jiang’s use of pronouns. I have made a special distinction between her use of ‘我们仨’ (which I have translated as ‘we three’) and her use of ‘我们三个’ (which I have translated as ‘the three of us’). I believe there is a crucial difference between the two that I have tried my best to preserve in translation.
The apartment at Sanlihe was once my home, because we three lived there. We three are parted, and it is home no more. I am the only one left, and I am old; I am a weary traveller at sunset, with nowhere to go. Meandering at the end of time, what can I do but exclaim: “Life is like a dream”?
And yet though I speak so now, I do not say that my life has been an empty one. I have lived a full life, a life of meaning, because we three lived life together. Or to put it another way, because we three were we three, not one of us lived in vain.
‘We three’ — how ordinary a phrase. Which family has not a husband, a wife, and children? A husband and wife, and children — that makes ‘the three of us’, or ‘the four of us’, or even ‘the five of us’, depending on the family.
This particular ‘three of us’, our particular family, was the simplest of all. We asked nothing of the world and had no quarrel with anyone. All we wanted was to be together and to stay together, each doing what they could to the best of their ability. Zhongshu and I faced all our troubles together and so every burden was lightened. And with our helpmate and companion, Ah Yuan, each sorrow was transformed into a joy, and the smallest of happinesses grew exquisite.
So we were no ordinary ‘we three’.
Now the three of us are parted. The past is past and the dead are gone. What is left — that is, I — can never find them again. All I can do is to revisit the years we spent together — and seek, in this way, a kind of reunion.
|
|||||
21594
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yago
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0
| 61
|
https://www.stillnorthbooks.com/book/9789004299962
|
en
|
China's Literary Cosmopolitans: Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the World of Letters (Sinica Leidensia #125)
|
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China's Literary Cosmopolitans offers a comprehensive introduction to the literary oeuvres of Qian Zhongshu (1910-98) and Yang Jiang (b. 1911). It assesses their novels, essays, stories, poetry, plays, translations, and criticism, and discusses their reception as two of the most important Chinese scholar-writers of the twentieth century. In addition to re-evaluating this married couple's intertwined literary careers, the book also explains why they have come to represent such influential models of Chinese literary cosmopolitanism. Uncommonly well-versed in Western languages and literatures, Qian and Yang chose to live in China and write in Chinese. China's Literary Cosmopolitans argues for their artistic importance while analyzing their works againstthe modern cultural imperative that Chinese literature be worldly. Christopher Rea (Ph.D., Columbia) is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (California, 2015), co-editor of The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900-65 (ubc Press, 2015), and editor of Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays by Qian Zhongshu(Columbia, 2011).
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https://stillnorthbooks.com/book/9789004299962
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Description
China's Literary Cosmopolitans offers a comprehensive introduction to the literary oeuvres of Qian Zhongshu (1910-98) and Yang Jiang (b. 1911). It assesses their novels, essays, stories, poetry, plays, translations, and criticism, and discusses their reception as two of the most important Chinese scholar-writers of the twentieth century.
In addition to re-evaluating this married couple's intertwined literary careers, the book also explains why they have come to represent such influential models of Chinese literary cosmopolitanism. Uncommonly well-versed in Western languages and literatures, Qian and Yang chose to live in China and write in Chinese. China's Literary Cosmopolitans argues for their artistic importance while analyzing their works against
the modern cultural imperative that Chinese literature be worldly.
Christopher Rea (Ph.D., Columbia) is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (California, 2015), co-editor of The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900-65 (ubc Press, 2015), and editor of Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays by Qian Zhongshu(Columbia, 2011).
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https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/636
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Interviews with Yang Jiang
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2006-06-01T00:00:00+02:00
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Yang Jiang was born, under her real name of Yang Jikang, in 1911. She is the author of a novel, several plays, and a large number of sanwen. Her first writing dates back to 1933, and her latest work, Women sa (We Three), in which she recalls family memories, appeared in July 2003, and has been highly successful, with 180,000 copies sold within two months. However, for thirty years, from 1949 to 1981, for obvious reasons, Yang Jiang preferred to devote herself entirely to teaching, research—she is also an expert on Chinese and foreign literature—, and translation: she is the translator, most notably, of the Chinese version of Don Quixote. She is now devoting herself to the publication of the work of her husband, the scholar Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998). In France she is best known for her narratives of the Cultural Revolution, published by Christian Bourgois.The two interviews that follow were carried out in 2005. Yang Jiang gave written answers to the questions I had sent her, which explains the slightly abrupt nature of our exchanges, given that it was not possible for me, by the nature of the interviews, to respond spontaneously to her words. If we seem to jump from one subject to another, it is because I had asked her to clarify certain details that I planned to use in my research into her work (« La Figure de l’intellectuel chez Yang Jiang » [“The Intellectual in The Work of Yang Jiang”], which became my doctoral thesis in Chinese Studies, under the direction of Isabelle Rabut, Inalco, Paris, December 2005, 404 pp.). Yet, to me, these words of Yang Jiang are of interest just as they are, since she uses words so sparingly and generally refuses to do interviews. In any case, and I am grateful to her for this, she only allowed these words to be published precisely because she had written them herself.
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http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/636
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“Adversity makes you strong” (written on January 1st 2005)
1Apart from Recovering Footsteps, The Shadow and The Art of Listening, were your other sanwen [prose texts that are not fictional, and not really essays] published at the time, in the 1930s and 1940s?
2Yang Jiang – All my sanwen were first published individually, and then brought together in collections. The publisher Renmin wenxue has just brought out a Collected Works of Yang Jiang in eight volumes: the first four are devoted to my own works, and the other four to my translations. There is also a preface and some biographical information, which I wrote, and to which you can refer.
3Li Jianwu [(1906-1982), a well-known literary critic, playwright and translator, who made available to Chinese readers the works of Flaubert, Stendhal and Molière], in an article written in 1944, referred to your comedy Truth Becomes Falsehood. Do you know where this article was published?
4If I remember correctly Li Jianwu said that Truth Becomes Falsehood would “be a milestone in the history of comedy”. It was probably in some sort of publicity, but I don't remember in which article it appeared.
5The script of your third comedy, Having Fun In This World, seems to have been lost. Did you ever find it again?
6It was the famous Yao Ke who directed it, but the script was unsatisfactory, so I destroyed it myself. I did not want it to survive.
7What is your favourite among all your works?
8I do not have a favourite.
9Is there anything that you regret in your life?
10Not having been able to study literature at Qinghua University, and having instead studied politics at Dongwu University.
11Do you have any religious beliefs?
12I do not practise any religion, but I am not wholly an atheist. I believe in God and in Man, in his ability to do good.
13I have the impression that in your work you are mainly concerned with Man and human morality, rather than criticising society, politics or the system. Is that so?
14Yes.
15You do not take delight in heroism, or in idealism, but at the same time you believe in the power of Man. And that power does not lie in convincing others, or in changing the world, but rather in adapting oneself to people and to situations (in particular unfavourable situations), in order to live better and to serve society as best one can. Am I right?
16Yes. But the most important thing is not to adapt to the demands of society, but to excel oneself. Difficulties are revelatory [of one's true character]; “adversity” makes one strong.
17In at least two of your essays, one comes across the expression “Western humanism”. What in your opinion most distinguishes “Western humanism” from “Eastern humanism”?
18They are identical.
19It is said that the writers whose style is closest to yours are, among foreign writers, Jane Austen, and among Chinese writers, Ling Shuhua. Do you agree?
20No.
21You have mastered several foreign languages and you have extensive knowledge of foreign literatures and cultures. But despite this, you seem to have remained a pure traditional Chinese scholar, of whom very few are to be found nowadays. Am I right?
22Yes, that's true.
23Your philosophy of life is closer to that of the traditional scholars, like Chen Yinge, Lin Yutang—and of course Qian Zhongshu—, and even to that of the scholars of ancient times: Su Dongpo and Tao Yuanming.
24I love Su Dongpo, he is the most humane of all. I also admire Tao Yuanming for his great strength of spirit. I am not sufficiently familiar with the other scholars you mention.
25We know that it was a private tutor, and then his uncle, who taught classical Chinese to Qian Zhongshu. Where did you study the classic texts, and in what circumstances?
26I studied them by myself, which is why I do not feel very qualified on the subject.
27In We Three, you recall that you were registered at the Sorbonne in the 1930s. Do you remember what was to be the subject of your thesis?
28The French novel.
29If at some point in your life, you had had to choose between your work and your family, would you have sacrificed everything to follow your career?
30Fortunately, I was born into a harmonious household, and later the little family that I formed with my husband and daughter was a happy one. I never had any thought of abandoning it. I have never had to choose between my professional activities and my family life.
31What do you see as the meaning of existence?
32To try to be someone of value, not to waste one's life.
33What kind of people do you like best?
34All people, whatever their age or social position. All people are kind.
35And which do you hate the most?
36Those who hate me. I hate them too.
“My way of living is also a product of Confucianism” (written on July 28th 2005)
37I am wondering at present about the things which have influenced your personality: your innate intelligence, the upbringing your parents gave you, the education you received at school, your knowledge of Chinese and Western cultures (in particular those classical), the influence that your teachers and friends have had on you, as well as Qian Zhongshu, and also the experiences you have lived through. My conclusion is that the most important thing has been your innate intelligence.
38Yang Jiang – I do not think that I was a child prodigy, I was just a little better than average. I was lucky enough to be born into a family that did not consider men to be superior to women. As a child I was educated by my father with great care. What he wanted, even if he never expressed it in these words, was for me to know how to think independently and to show iron determination.
39Several well-known personalities in modern Chinese history, who also have extensive knowledge of Western and Chinese cultures, have said that the time they spent living abroad allowed them better to appreciate classical Chinese culture. Do you share this feeling?
40My studies abroad were only a continuation of the studies I had done in China. In the suitcases we took with us [she and Qian Zhongshu], there were above all the Chinese classics. We read them conscientiously every day, without exception. When I was in secondary school, the school accorded more importance to mathematics, physics or English classes, and our Chinese teacher was often badly treated by the pupils. My grounding in classical Chinese is not very solid, and I have always, right up to this day, sought to improve it. I find that those who have no knowledge of any foreign language are often extremists, either on the far Left or ultra conservative.
41You say that you believe in God. When did you begin to believe, and in what circumstances? Is this in some way related to the Qiming school, which you attended, and which was run by foreign missionaries?
42My primary school was run by Catholics, and my university by Christians. But the schools had no influence on my beliefs, and I am not a believer [in the strict sense of the word]. My faith has not been influenced by anybody, it arose and strengthened itself by experience, through reading and rereading, and by long and mature reflection.
43In the thesis I am writing about you, I describe you as a traditional Chinese intellectual, steeped in humanism. This is because I see that in your individual way of being you behave like a Confucian, and like a Taoist where society is concerned. And you have a marked propensity to advocate humanism. Do you agree?
44I almost agree with you. Except that I think my way of living, as well my individual behaviour is Confucian. The book I most admire is the Analects of Confucius. Confucius, to me, is the greatest of the humanists.
45Translated from the French original by Michael Black
46Works of Yang Jiang translated into English:
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https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/inhyehan/
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China’s Literary Cosmopolitans: Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the World of Letters
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Edited by Christopher Rea Reviewed by Inhye Han MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2016) In May 2016, writers, critics, and lay readers in China and the world mourned the passin…
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MCLC Resource Center
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https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/inhyehan/
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Edited by Christopher Rea
Reviewed by Inhye Han
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2016)
In May 2016, writers, critics, and lay readers in China and the world mourned the passing of the literary master Yang Jiang (1911-2016), a playwright, novelist, and translator who had gained significant fame and popularity in China and other countries. Her husband, Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998), whose depth and breadth of knowledge of literature, philosophy, and history were matched by few scholars, achieved a critical reputation earlier than Yang for his fiction, essays, and monumental works of literary criticism. China’s Literary Cosmopolitans is a timely volume illuminating previously under-examined critical dimensions of Yang’s and Qian’s works. Editor Christopher Rea skillfully reveals the modern and Eurocentric roots of the provincial/cosmopolitan divide, demonstrating the ways in which the Chinese and the cosmopolitan intersect. Rea argues that, while there were multiple forms of cosmopolitan practices in post WWII China—for example, 1950s’ internationalist cosmopolitanism and the Mao period’s prescriptive cosmopolitanism—Yang and Qian introduced yet another type, lifestyle cosmopolitanism. Where literati are concerned, lifestyle cosmopolitanism is characterized by the unity of a person’s texts and character (morals, ethics, etc.). Postcolonial studies scholars have sought to theorize a cosmopolitanism that is not based on the concept of a “citizen of the world,” arguing that cosmopolitanism should be conceptualized not as an idea but as infinite ways of being (Bhabha et al. 2002, 12). This volume is a testament to Yang’s and Qian’s lifestyle cosmopolitanism as the best possible lived embodiment of such infinite ways of being.
Theodore Huters’ chapter on Qian’s Fortress Besieged discerns a cosmopolitan quality of his work with extraordinary acumen. He first surveys the landscape of contemporary debates on cosmopolitanism, which center on the rift between cosmopolitanism as a new ethic following the failure of Enlightenment humanism and cosmopolitanism as rhetoric masking “the depravities of global capitalism and universalism, and the elitism of aesthetic distance” (212). A critical question Huters raises is whether any cosmopolitan pursuit in literary practice could transcend the opposing ends of elitist aloofness and capitalist-colonial drives. Fortress Besieged, Huters argues, offers an answer to that question. The novel’s foremost concern is the issue of taste and aesthetic judgment; yet unlike the British novel of manners, it refuses to provide its readers with solid moral or intellectual grounds for appraising taste. In a somewhat Kantian approach that brackets cognitive concerns (true versus false) and ethical ones (good versus bad) to tackle matters of taste (pleasant versus unpleasant),[1] Huters argues that Qian likewise separates the pleasant from the good, satirizing any attempt to associate better taste with superior morality. Fortress Besieged’s aesthetic stance nevertheless overcomes elitist aloofness, because its story later unbrackets the ethical domain in a radical manner. The text grapples with ethical concerns only to blur the boundary between good and bad and dispel the idea of an unchanging, stable world. Qian thus consciously brackets and unbrackets the aesthetic and ethical domains, creating a literary model that overcomes pitfalls of contemporary cosmopolitan practices.
Carlos Rojas’ “How to Do Things with Words” brilliantly and powerfully probes Yang Jiang’s translations to reveal an extraordinary quality that realizes the best sense of cosmopolitanism. Rojas’ mastery of Spanish and Chinese enables him to identify a critical dimension of Yang Jiang’s rendition of Don Quixote. Yang approaches translation as a practice of transformation that produces meanings not inherent in an original text. Rather than obscuring the inevitable “errors” of translation, Rojas points out, Yang makes use of the error or gap between source and target text as “a space of creative articulation and critical intervention” (91). From this standpoint, a translation practice parallels a perlocutionary act that not only conveys information but also affects listeners. Whereas classic perlocutionary theory proposes a felicity of speech and an actual situation as a condition of words’ real effect on listeners, in Don Quixote “it is precisely infelicity of the speech act that grants it its (imaginary) perlocutionary force” (100). Both “errors” emerging from Yang’s translation and Don Quixote’s own misreading engender unintended yet creative consequences for Yang’s audience and the people whom Don Quixote encounters, respectively. Since this kind of translation and creative misreading focus on difference between how a text is written and read, I would add that Yang’s practice also resonates with Ackbar Abbas’s concept of cosmopolitanism as cultural arbitrage with difference (Abbas 2002: 226). Abbas argues that cosmopolitanism should be reckoned a cultural arbitrageur, as opposed to a universalist arbiter of value. Yang’s translations illustrate this arbitrating role, using meta-textual pun, allusion, and strategic transliteration to produce creative differences between original text and translation. In this chapter, Rojas also highlights a political dimension of translating under an authoritarian party-state regime, pointing to Yang’s choice of genre (picaresque), theme (counter-hegemonic ethos), and philosophy of translation.
Amy Dooling’s “Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies” investigates plays Yang wrote in the 1940s, when Shanghai was occupied by Japan and circumstances were grim and abject. Despite the political urgency of her time, Yang’s works are conspicuously removed from political references, engaging exclusively with the psychology of characters, who are the “new women” of China. Unlike the May Fourth–era literature, Yang’s plays attend to predicaments of new women who fail to attain self-fulfillment despite their defiant assertion of autonomy. All of Yang’s plays whose scripts are extant—Heart’s Desire (1942), Forging the Truth (1943), and Sporting with the World (1944)—fall into the comedy genre centering on the mischievous actions or selfish delusion of new women characters. The plays comically portray the demise of new women in China due to their self-absorbed idealism. Dooling stresses that Yang’s wartime plays are highly critical of individual ambition built on romantic idealism. By examining the intersections of the new woman issue, wartime literature, comic stage plays, and politics, Dooling masterfully illuminates the ingenious literary achievements of Yang’s dramas, although it is unclear how her chapter fits into the overarching cosmopolitan theme of this book.
Jesse Field’s chapter concerns Yang Jiang’s memoir We Three (2003) and her translation of Phaedo (2000), casting light on a distinctive quality of Yang’s cosmopolitanism by drawing on Berlant’s celebrated concept of an intimate public that emerges through shared political experiences. Literature based on those experiences expresses a specific history and simultaneously shapes its audience’s sense of belonging to that history. Despite the centrality of national political events in the emergence of an intimate public, Field boldly argues that an intimate public identity in China’s post-1999 period hinges on a contra-national, cosmopolitan sensibility. Yang’s writings not only recount but also recalibrate thoughts and feelings about the semicolonial Republican period, the Mao era, and the subsequent authoritarian regimes, dispelling [false] dichotomies between the political and the apolitical, the national and the cosmopolitan. Field skillfully demonstrates that Yang’s literary practice has the quality of engaging with the nation and the world simultaneously, thus enabling the constitution of a new intimate public.
Christopher Rea’s chapter, “The Institutional Mindset,” demonstrates that Qian and Yang set an example by using the institutions of marriage and the academy to practice the values of authenticity, independence, and devotion throughout politically tumultuous periods. Qian and Yang frequently tackled problematic issues in the concepts and praxis of marriage and the academy in their writings as well, examining the institutions’ ambivalent nature as both refuge and bondage. Their work and their lifestyle, Rea argues, exemplify how the two writers distanced themselves from social institutions, including the nation, and circumvented the “obsession with China.” However, owing to their belonging to those same institutions, both writers were unable to entirely free themselves from the related state-imposed ideology and cultural practices, and their ambivalence toward this conundrum conditioned their vision of cosmopolitanism and its limits. Despite a few instances in which they acquiesced to nationalist practices, Qian and Yang demonstrated the ways in which powerless individuals can deflect institutional power without leaving institutions and how one can escape the nation without leaving it. That is to say, within their institutional belonging and mindset, they managed to manipulate nationalist state apparatuses to their own ends, rather than being subjected to them, opening up a new dimension of cosmopolitanism. Rea’s chapter constitutes a convincing argument for his coining of the term “lifestyle cosmopolitanism” to categorize the through-line of Qian’s and Yang’s marriage, scholarship, and writings.
Ronald Egan’s “Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution,” highlights the striking depth and breadth of Qian’s 1979 Guanzhui bian.[2] Guanzhui bian, a five-volume compendium for which Qian consulted and quoted sources in six different languages, glosses nearly the entire corpus of “classic” Chinese literature and philosophy and their counterparts in the Western tradition. Although the compendium’s exegetical practice may appear to be apolitical, Egan’s analysis uncovers Qian’s hidden criticism of literary modes prescribed by the CCP; Qian’s groundbreaking engagements with the classics went against the Mao era’s condemnation of virtually everything traditional. Qian’s Guanzhui bian, Egan argues, epitomizes a cosmopolitan practice of “striking a connection” (datong) between Chinese and Western writing, a feat that only a few scholars thoroughly versed in both cultures could do. This kind of China-West trans-critique is radical in that it refutes the hegemonic idea of Qian’s time that China was feudal, backward, and incommensurable with the West.
In “Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction,” Judith Armory argues that Yang Jiang’s Taking a Bath (1987) is thematically intertwined with eighteenth-century British novels, especially the works of Jane Austen and Henry Fielding. She bases her comparison on three pieces of evidence. First, Yang Jiang herself wrote criticism on Fielding and Austen in 1957 and 1982, respectively. Second, Fielding viewed the novel genre as a comic epic, which, in Amory’s view, is an apt classification for Taking a Bath as well. Third, Fielding and Austen wrote novels not only to provide cathartic experiences for their readers but also to urge them to seek more virtuous lives, as seen in their shared recurring theme of the self-refinement of an honorable individual. In the same vein, Taking a Bath grapples with the intricate dynamics between falsehood and honesty, self-deception and self-knowledge, and state-coerced reformation versus self-reformation. One question that arises from Amory’s analysis is whether Yang’s meditation on the subject of self-reformation in Taking a Bath is solely due to her appreciation of eighteenth-century British novels. In his later chapter, Huters casts doubt on criticism that asserts a strong affinity between the British novel of manners and Qian’s Fortress Besieged. I would likewise contend that perceived thematic and generic similarities between Austen/Fielding and Yang provide a weak basis on which to claim that the former decisively influences the latter. After all, the eighteenth-century British novel of manners is only one of many genres that satirizes the absurdities of a given society and motivates readers to live a more ethical life. I believe that Taking a Bath is cosmopolitan not because of British writers’ impact on Yang, but, in part, because the theme of self-refinement toward a more virtuous life is prevalent around the world long before the eighteenth century (most notably in Yang’s case, self refinement/self cultivation is a key concept from the Confucian tradition).
Wendy Larson’s chapter “Pleasures of Lying Low” examines Yang Jiang’s novels Taking a Bath and Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School (1981), which depict life under the authoritarian CCP regime. Larson contends that Chinese intellectuals, including Yang, neither resisted nor collaborated with the Mao regime, but mostly accommodated to its regulations. Comparable to Amory’s argument, Larson points to similarities between the Western comedy of manners and Yang’s two novels and argues that “[Yang’s] insistence on using the comedy of manners betrays her unquestioned embrace of the detached and objective literary cosmopolitan ideal” (156). In her other literary and critical works, however, Yang hardly seems to assume that any literary cosmopolitan ideal could be objective. More important, even similarities in terms of tone, style, and theme fail to prove what Larson avers to be Yang’s “insistence on using the comedy of manners.” In the absence of significant examples of intertextual references or allusions, such affinities are likely to be coincidental. Furthermore, the kind of cosmopolitanism that Yang (and Qian) created does not stem simply from their firsthand experiences abroad and command of foreign languages and Western forms and styles of literature. Larson further claims, “They [Chinese critics favorable to Yang Jiang] admire her move away from a narrow ethnic focus on Chinese qualities and toward a universal emphasis on humanity in general, and away from politics toward art” (154). Whereas Larson conflates the cosmopolitan and the universal, I believe that the two should be distinguished, because the cosmopolitan represents a middle ground for holding a critical tension between the universal and the particular. Furthermore, I would argue that Yang’s work is a powerful counterexample to the Eurocentric and false notion that ethnic concerns are parochial. Yang instead reconfigures the dichotomy between the provincial and the cosmopolitan, demonstrating that literature and politics are not two contending poles a writer and intellectual must choose between. Larson’s chapter provides much food for thought, although her somewhat narrow view of the “the detached and objective literary cosmopolitan ideal” sits uneasily with the volume’s stance toward the Eurocentric roots of the provincial/cosmopolitan divide and stress on the multiple forms of cosmopolitan practices in post WWII China.
Yugen Wang’s chapter differs from the others in its focus on Qian’s relationship to the classical Chinese literary tradition, rather than his intertextual engagement with foreign texts and traditions. Although the author superbly explicates the ingenious qualities of Qian’s exegeses, he does not consider, except briefly in his conclusion, how a Chinese writer-scholar’s glossing of Chinese classics could be a cosmopolitan practice. Wang misses (or perhaps only gestures towards) an opportunity here, for one could indeed claim that the exegesis of classical Chinese texts during the Mao era was a way of being abroad at home, i.e., a cosmopolitan practice. As most of the contributors to this volume show, cosmopolitanism is more a way of being, a lifestyle, or a socio-cultural intervention than a fixed idea, more of a practice than a proposition or static position. Under Mao’s authoritarian regime, in which virtually everything associated with “traditional” values was deprecated, to embrace premodern poetry and delve into its unarticulated meanings was a gesture countering a prescriptive way of being an intellectual-scholar and a pioneering way “of being different beings simultaneously” (Bhabha et al. 2002: 11).
To conclude, this edited volume makes a crucial contribution to the fields of Chinese studies and literary studies by offering a new model for theorizing cosmopolitanism outside a Eurocentric paradigm, built on meticulous analyses of Qian’s and Yang’s works. As Ackbar Abbas has argued, cosmopolitan practice should no longer be “simply a matter of behaving well or even of an openness to otherness. … not … a universalist arbiter of value, but … an arbitrageur/ arbitrageuse. This is arbitrage with a difference” (2002: 226). Rather than striving to emulate putative universals, Qian and Yang made use of them to engender productive differences and incorporate them into their society under authoritarian restrictions. As readers or critics this should inspire us to articulate the kinds of differences Qian’s and Yang’s cultural arbitrage brings about, rather than assessing their degree of openness toward foreign ideas and discourses. Most chapters from this volume indeed identify what those differences are, demonstrating how Yang’s and Qian’s literary and critical practices produced a new cultural dimension of cosmopolitan. China’s Literary Cosmopolitanism will be an indispensable text for scholars seeking to investigate the relationship between the provincial and the cosmopolitan, the particular and the universal, literature and politics, and the nation and the world.
Inhye Han ifinahan@ewha.ac.kr
Humanities Korea Research Professor
Ewha Womans University
References
Abbas, Ackbar. 2002. “Cosmopolitan de-scriptions: Shanghai and Hong Kong.” In Carol Breckenridge, ed., Cosmopolitanism. Durham: Duke University Press, 209-228.
Karatani Kojin. 1998. “Uses of Aesthetics: After Orientalism.” Boundary 2 25 (2): 145-160.
Bhabha, Homi, Carol Breckenridge, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sheldon Pollock. 2002. “Cosmopolitanisms.” In Cosmopolitanism, edited by Carol Breckenridge, 1-14. Durham: Duke University Press.
Breckenridge, Carol, ed. 2002. Cosmopolitanism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Notes:
[1] Karatani 1998, 148—149
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淘！我喜欢
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Yang Jiang Dies at 104; Revered Writer Witnessed China’s Cultural Revolution
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[
"https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/05/27/arts/27yang-obit/27yang-obit-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale"
] |
[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[
"Amy Qin"
] |
2016-05-27T00:00:00
|
Ms. Yang’s popular memoir told of the forced rural labor she and her novelist husband endured. Her translation of “Don Quixote” is regarded as the definitive one in Chinese.
|
en
|
/vi-assets/static-assets/favicon-d2483f10ef688e6f89e23806b9700298.ico
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/books/yang-jiang-chinese-author-and-translator-dies-at-104.html
|
BEIJING — Yang Jiang, a Chinese author, playwright and translator whose stoically restrained memoir of the Cultural Revolution remains one of the most revered works about that period, died on Wednesday in Beijing. She was 104.
Her death was announced by state-run news media, including People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, a sign of the esteem with which Ms. Yang was held.
She and her husband, Qian Zhongshu, the author of the novel “Fortress Besieged,” were already acclaimed writers when Mao Zedong inaugurated the Cultural Revolution to root out ideological foes in 1966. At the time, Ms. Yang was working on a translation of “Don Quixote,” a formidable undertaking.
After deeming several English and French translations unsuitable, she taught herself Spanish.
“If I wanted to be faithful to the original, I had to translate directly from the original,” she wrote in 2002.
Ms. Yang had completed almost seven out of eight volumes of the translation when Red Guard student militants confiscated the manuscript from her home in Beijing. Like other foreign-trained academics and artists, Ms. Yang and Mr. Qian, both nearly 60 years old at the time, were consigned to “reform through labor” and sent to the countryside in Henan Province, in central China, where they remained for several years.
“I worked with every ounce of energy I could muster, gouging at the earth with a spade, but the only result was a solitary scratch on the surface,” Ms. Yang wrote. “The youngsters around me had quite a laugh over that.”
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|
|||||
21594
|
yago
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0
| 77
|
http://www.ecns.cn/visual/hd/2016/05-25/95125.shtml
|
en
|
Well-respected translator and writer Yang Jiang dies at 105(4/12)
|
http://www.ecns.cn/hd/2016/05/25/490da89f60714858b6ba82514aa10ae5.jpg
|
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[
"china news",
"art",
"visual",
"Beijing",
"ecns",
"cns"
] | null |
[] |
2016-05-25T00:00:00
|
Ecns.cn is the official English-language website of China News Service (CNS), a state-level news agency sponsored and established by Chinese journalists and renowned overseas Chinese experts on October 1, 1952.As an English-language website, Ecns.cn aims to provide all aspects of online news, including in-depth coverage, feature stories and visual content, with topics such as current events, art, lifestyle, people and travel.
|
en
| null |
File photo of Yang Jiang. Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to famous author Qian Zhongshu, passed away on Wednesday at age 105. (Photo/Xinhua)
|
|||||
21594
|
yago
|
1
| 40
|
https://paper-republic.org/links/letters-from-qian-zhongshu-to-be-auctioned-yang-jiang-threatens-lawsuit/
|
en
|
Paper Republic Link: Letters from Qian Zhongshu to be auctioned, Yang Jiang Threatens Lawsuit
|
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[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[
"Eric Abrahamsen"
] | null |
en
|
Paper Republic
| null |
A Beijing auction house says it has no plans to withdraw an acclaimed scholar's letters and manuscripts from sale despite protests from his 102-year-old widow and legal experts.
On June 21, the Sungari International Auction Co Ltd is selling 66 letters Qian Zhongshu wrote to a family friend.
The sale also includes the original copy of "Six Chapters from My Life 'Downunder,'" featuring his wife's memoir of their life in Henan Province during the "cultural revolution (1966-1976)," and letters from his daughter, Qian Yuan, to the friend.
Yang Jiang, the writer's widow, said her husband made some controversial remarks in the letters that it would be inappropriate to publish. He insinuates that two famous literary figures, Lu Xun and Mao Dun, were unfaithful to their wives and that a couple, both famous translators, had not interpreted a Chinese classic well.
|
||||||
21594
|
yago
|
2
| 15
|
https://emmaluferguson.substack.com/p/we-two-are-old
|
en
|
Emma's stream of consciousness
|
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] |
[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[
"Emma"
] |
2023-10-25T12:00:42+00:00
|
Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang's story, told through my translations
|
en
|
https://substackcdn.com/icons/substack/favicon.ico
|
https://emmaluferguson.substack.com/p/we-two-are-old
|
1.
This is the story of a Chinese intellectual ‘power couple’, Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998) and his wife Yang Jiang (1911-2016). Let me tell it as I usually do, alternating between reading and translation.
2.
Qian Zhongshu is rightly called ‘the most learned author of twentieth-century China’. Fluent in English and French, he also read widely in German, Italian, and Latin — all of which languages appear, alongside modern and classical Chinese, throughout his writings. Here is Yang’s recollection of her husband’s proficiency with languages:
The year we were in Paris, Zhongshu threw himself wholeheartedly into reading. In French, he began with the fifteenth-century poet Villon, and worked his way one by one through to the great authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In German he did the same. He read in Chinese and English every day, in French and German every other day, and later squeezed Italian into the roster.
This was a year of joy for Zhongshu, who fiercely loved reading. When we first arrived in France, we read Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary together, and many more of the words were new to him than to me. But by the end of the year, his French was miles ahead of my own.
Qian’s most famous work, 《围城》(Fortress Besieged), is a satirical modernist novel set in wartime China. Fortress Besieged bears strong imprints of the French existentialist, Sartre. The novel’s protagonist, Fang Hongjian, enters into a contentious marriage with Sun Roujia. Though both are well-meaning and good-intentioned, the couple spends much of the novel ribbing each other intentionally, insulting each other unintentionally, and eventually growing physically violent towards one another. The novel ends with Fang Hongjian realising that he is trapped in an unhappy spiral of inescapable conflict.
Reflecting on his failing marriage, Fang Hongjian thinks,
By nature, man was meant to be alone […] When we all get close together, it’s either I offend you or you insult me. People are after all like so many hedgehogs. We’ve got to keep a safe distance away from each other — that’s all there is to it. If we all clump up, I’m sure to prick your flesh, and you’re sure to tear my skin.
Knowing next to nothing about Sartre, I hand over commentary to the Chinese critics Gao Xudong and Dai Bo in this brief translation from their essay on the novel:
The existence of others is a constant threat to one’s subjectivity – I can transform others into the objects of my subjectivity, but they are capable of doing the same to me. Thus, “Hell is other people”, and marriage becomes a pitched battle in which each party involved seeks to dominate the other’s subjectivity – an inescapable fortress besieged.
And indeed, the title of Qian Zhongshu’s novel, Fortress Besieged, comes from a French proverb: ‘Marriage is like a fortress besieged; those outside want to get in, and those inside want to get out’.
3.
From this gloomy view of interpersonal interaction and marriage, one would never guess that Qian Zhongshu himself was happily married. While he was studying at Tsinghua University, he met his life partner Yang Jiang, and they wed in 1935. The couple studied abroad in Oxford and Paris together, and per Yang’s recollection:
Zhongshu and I fought once, on the ship out from China. We had a spat over the pronunciation of the French word bon. I accused him of speaking it with an imperfect accent. He disagreed, and said some really cutting things in reply. I also tried my best to hurt him.
Later I brought the matter to a French woman on the ship who spoke English. She said I was right, and Zhongshu wrong. I had won, but I felt no satisfaction; and of course Zhongshu felt none either, for he had lost.
There is a proverb that goes: “When newlyweds fight on the bow of a ship, they make up on the stern.” We soon grew bored of being on bad terms, and agreed to disagree.
But in the years following this, we never had another fight. Whenever anything important came up, it never took more than a few moments to agree on a course of action. If our opinions differed, we’d compromise — neither of us could be said to have the upper hand.
Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu’s marriage, as you see, could not have been further from Fang Hongjian and Sun Roujia’s in Fortress Besieged. I have been speaking of Yang Jiang as ‘Qian Zhongshu’s wife’, but she was a formidable intellectual in her own right. Already confident in French, English, and German, she taught herself Spanish so that she could translate Don Quixote into Chinese, and her Chinese translation is still considered the definitive one. (Don Quixote is one of the most well-known and -loved works of Western literature in Chinese.) And the couple’s daughter, Qian Yuan, born in 1937, became a professor of English literature at Beijing Normal University.
I am studying Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged for my thesis, and recently, I have been needing some light reading that is still (nominally) related to my research. So I picked up Yang Jiang’s autobiographical essay collection, 《我们仨》(We Three).
I thought We Three would be happy recollections of a family who not only loved and respected one another, but shared an intellectual common ground. What I did not know, and what I very quickly learnt within the first few pages of We Three, was that both Qian Yuan and Qian Zhongshu died within months of each other in 1997 and 1998 respectively, the daughter of spinal cancer and the father of old age. Left behind was the mother, Yang Jiang, who wrote this memoir of family life from the perspective of her new solitude.
What those last years of Qian Zhongshu and Qian Yuan’s lives must have been like for Yang Jiang — running back and forth from hospital to hospital, carrying news of an ailing father to a dying daughter, first by letter and then by word of mouth as both father and daughter grew too weak to write.
Perhaps Yang Jiang would agree with her husband, Qian Zhongshu, that ‘Hell is other people’. But only in the sense that to grow close to others leads to love, and to love leads to grief. The pages of We Three are so filled with pain that I could only take them in short doses.
But what is so poignant to me is that, despite this, We Three evinces an exactly opposite view on subjectivity as Fang Hongjian does in Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged. Yang Jiang construes herself in relation to her husband and daughter. Unlike the protagonists of Fortress Besieged, there is no erosion of subjectivity in her relationship with her family. She exists because she is part of ‘we three’, as does the rest of her family. Her subjectivity is often constructed in terms of ‘we’, not ‘I’.
Yang Jiang’s book is structured thus.
Section One: We Two Are Old.
Section Two: We Three Are Parted.
Section Three: We Three, Remembered Alone.
Section Two, ‘We Three Are Parted’, is the best of the book — a long, surrealist chapter in which Yang Jiang describes the years of her daughter’s and husband’s deaths, 1997 and 1998, as a dream sequence in which she cannot tell the truth from her nightmares, and from which she cannot wake. This sequence was agonising to read and impossible even to attempt to translate. I can only hope that someday I will have the courage, empathy, and strength to do it justice.
So I have only translated the book’s opening essay, ‘We Two Are Old’, which introduces the dream sequence in the second chapter. I have also translated the opening of Section Three: ‘We Three, Remembered Alone’.
4.
One night I had a dream. Zhongshu and I were walking together, talking and laughing, forgetful of time and distance. The sun had set and in the opaque twilight, I turned and Zhongshu was gone.
I searched high and low, but there was no trace of him. I called him, and there was no answer. I, alone, standing in the midst of the deserted fields, not knowing where he had gone. I shouted at the top of my voice: his name, his full name — and my cries fell and were swallowed by the emptiness, which returned not even an echo.
The night grew thicker; the utter silence deepened my loneliness. I strained my eyes through the layers upon layers of darkness. Beneath my feet was a dirt path; beside me there was a wood and running water, but I could not see how wide the stream was, nor a way across it. I turned and through the darkness saw a village, houses and barns, as if there had once been people living there, but very long ago, for there was no sign of light or life.
Had Zhongshu gone on home first? Well, then I had to go home to find him. As I was pondering how best to return, an old man pulling a rickshaw appeared – and I actually managed to hail him. But when I opened my mouth to tell him to take me home, no sound would come.
And then my fear woke me, and Zhongshu was by my side, sleeping soundly.
I tossed and turned half the night till Zhongshu woke and asked me what the matter was. I told him I had had a dream — and I told him what had happened in the dream. I accused him of leaving me, of going off on his own without a word or sound. And, thus awoken, he made no excuses for himself. He said, comfortingly, that it was a dream old people often had. He had had it himself, many times.
That is true, for I have had the same dream since, many times. The same dream — though it happens in different places. We two, walking together, till Zhongshu vanishes in the blink of an eye. I ask everyone around me — ‘Have you seen my husband?’ — and no one replies. Or I seek him, high and low, and every path I find leads nowhere; or I am waiting at the bus stop for a late bus home that never comes. In these dreams, through my fear, I have one blurred impression: If I can find Zhongshu, we can go home.
Perhaps Zhongshu still remembers how I woke him that first night with my complaints. For he has left me to dream a journey of ten thousand miles.
5.
In the following translation from the final section of We Three, ‘We Three, Remembered Alone’, I have paid special attention to Yang Jiang’s use of pronouns. I have made a special distinction between her use of ‘我们仨’ (which I have translated as ‘we three’) and her use of ‘我们三个’ (which I have translated as ‘the three of us’). I believe there is a crucial difference between the two that I have tried my best to preserve in translation.
The apartment at Sanlihe was once my home, because we three lived there. We three are parted, and it is home no more. I am the only one left, and I am old; I am a weary traveller at sunset, with nowhere to go. Meandering at the end of time, what can I do but exclaim: “Life is like a dream”?
And yet though I speak so now, I do not say that my life has been an empty one. I have lived a full life, a life of meaning, because we three lived life together. Or to put it another way, because we three were we three, not one of us lived in vain.
‘We three’ — how ordinary a phrase. Which family has not a husband, a wife, and children? A husband and wife, and children — that makes ‘the three of us’, or ‘the four of us’, or even ‘the five of us’, depending on the family.
This particular ‘three of us’, our particular family, was the simplest of all. We asked nothing of the world and had no quarrel with anyone. All we wanted was to be together and to stay together, each doing what they could to the best of their ability. Zhongshu and I faced all our troubles together and so every burden was lightened. And with our helpmate and companion, Ah Yuan, each sorrow was transformed into a joy, and the smallest of happinesses grew exquisite.
So we were no ordinary ‘we three’.
Now the three of us are parted. The past is past and the dead are gone. What is left — that is, I — can never find them again. All I can do is to revisit the years we spent together — and seek, in this way, a kind of reunion.
|
|||||
21594
|
yago
|
2
| 8
|
https://asia.ubc.ca/news/celebrating-100-years-of-qian-zhongshu-and-yang-jiang/
|
en
|
Celebrating 100 Years of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang
|
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Friday, December 10, 2010 UBC Asian Centre Auditorium 1871 West Mall, Vancouver, BC “Life, it’s been said, is one big book…” Come celebrate the centennial anniversary of two of modern China’s most outstanding cultural figures. As scholars and writers, husband and wife, Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998) and Yang Jiang (b. 1911) radically transformed what it meant […]
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Department of Asian Studies
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https://asia.ubc.ca/news/celebrating-100-years-of-qian-zhongshu-and-yang-jiang/
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Friday, December 10, 2010
UBC Asian Centre Auditorium
1871 West Mall, Vancouver, BC
“Life, it’s been said, is one big book…”
Come celebrate the centennial anniversary of two of modern China’s most outstanding cultural figures. As scholars and writers, husband and wife, Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998) and Yang Jiang (b. 1911) radically transformed what it meant to be a modern Chinese intellectual. And both their literary careers, it turns out, began with comedy! Join us for an evening of laughter and learning, featuring a reading from a new literary translation, a student performance, and an invited lecture by a distinguished scholar of modern Chinese literature. A catered reception will follow.
EVENING PROGRAM
4:30PM Welcome Remarks, Dr. Gage Averill, UBC Dean of Arts
4:35PM Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, stories and essays by Qian Zhongshu
A reading by Dr. Christopher Rea, UBC Dept. of Asian Studies
4:50PM Heart’s Desire, a comedy of manners by Yang Jiang (excerpts)
Performed by students from the UBC Chinese language program
5:10PM Keynote address: “The Cosmopolitan Imperative: Qian Zhongshu and ‘World Literature’” Dr. Theodore Huters, Professor Emeritus, UCLA Chief Editor, Renditions, Chinese University of Hong Kong
5:50PM Catered reception and book exhibition in the Asian Centre Foyer
See a brief essay on Qian Zhongshu by UBC assistant professor Dr. Christopher Rea:
http://www.thechinabeat.org/?tag=qian-zhongshu
Please RSVP for this free event via e-mail:UBCAsianStudies@gmail.comEvent poster
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https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7312/dent17008-030/pdf
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29. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Literary Marriage
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https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780231541145/product
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https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780231541145/product
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2016-04-05T00:00:00
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29. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Literary Marriage was published in The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature on page 231.
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/assets/images/ec7d7606b4e2f3f921b5e1700948efb6-favicon.ico
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De Gruyter
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https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7312/dent17008-030/pdf
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Rea, Christopher. "29. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Literary Marriage". The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, edited by Kirk A. Denton, New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2016, pp. 231-236. https://doi.org/10.7312/dent17008-030
Rea, C. (2016). 29. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Literary Marriage. In K. Denton (Ed.), The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (pp. 231-236). New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/dent17008-030
Rea, C. 2016. 29. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Literary Marriage. In: Denton, K. ed. The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, pp. 231-236. https://doi.org/10.7312/dent17008-030
Rea, Christopher. "29. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Literary Marriage" In The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature edited by Kirk A. Denton, 231-236. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.7312/dent17008-030
Rea C. 29. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Literary Marriage. In: Denton K (ed.) The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press; 2016. p.231-236. https://doi.org/10.7312/dent17008-030
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https://kids.kiddle.co/Qian_Zhongshu
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Qian Zhongshu facts for kids
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Learn Qian Zhongshu facts for kids
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In this Chinese name, the family name is Qian.
Qian Zhongshu (November 21, 1910 – December 19, 1998), also transliterated as Ch'ien Chung-shu or Dzien Tsoong-su, was a renowned 20th century Chinese literary scholar and writer, known for his wit and erudition.
He is best known for his satirical novel Fortress Besieged. His works of nonfiction are characterized by large amount of quotations in both Chinese and Western languages such as English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. He also played an important role in digitizing Chinese classics late in his life.
Qian created a profound theoretical meaning for the three features of motivational nature, empathetic nature, and rational nature of aesthetic emotion for literature by deeply studying questions such as the source of emotion motivation, the ways to express emotion, and the optimal comfort in emotion in writing. He believed that the source of emotion motivation is poems because poems can convey human's emotion. When people transfer their emotion to inanimate objects, they give these objects life, which is the ways to express emotion. Also, Qian insisted that humans cannot express their emotion as they want; instead, they should rationally control their emotion to a certain degree so that they can achieve an optimal appreciation status.
Names Traditional Chinese: 錢鍾書 Simplified Chinese: 钱锺书 Pinyin: Qián Zhōngshū Wade-Giles: Ch'ien Chung-shu Zi: Zheliang (哲良) Mocun (默存) Hao: Huaiju (槐聚)
Life
Most of what is known about Qian's early life relies on an essay written by his wife Yang Jiang. Born in Wuxi, Qian Zhongshu was the son of Qian Jibo (T: 錢基博, S: 钱基博), a conservative Confucian scholar, landed gentry, and Chinese language professor at Tsinghua, St. John's University, and National Central University (Nanking), respectively. By family tradition, Qian Zhongshu grew up under the care of his eldest uncle, who did not have a son. Qian was initially named Yangxian (仰先 ; "respect the ancients"), with the courtesy name Zheliang (哲良; "sagacious and upright"). However, when he was one year old, in accordance with a tradition of zhuazhou, practiced in many parts of China, he was given a few objects laid out in front of him for his "grabbing"; he grabbed a book. His uncle thusly renamed him Zhongshu, literally "fond of books," while Yangxian became his intimate name. Qian was a rather talkative child. His father later changed his courtesy name to Mocun (默存), literally "to keep silent," in the hope that he would talk less.
Both Qian's name and courtesy name forecasted his future life. While he remained talkative when talking about literature with friends, he kept silent most of the time on politics and social activities. Qian was indeed very fond of books. When he was young, his uncle often brought him along to teahouses during the day. There, Qian was left alone to read storybooks on folklore and historical events, which he would repeat to his cousins upon returning home.
At the age of 6, Qian went to Qinshi primary school and stayed home for less than half a year due to illness. At the age of 7, Qian studied in a private school of a relative's family. Due to inconvenience, he quit school a year later and was taught by his uncle. When Qian was 11, he entered the first grade at Donglin Elementary School, and his uncle died this year. He continued living with his widowed aunt, even though their living conditions drastically worsened as her family's fortunes dwindled. Under the strict tutelage of his father, Qian mastered classical Chinese. At the age of 14, Qian left home to attend Taowu middle school,an English-language missionary school in Suzhou, after being scolded by his father, he studied hard and improved his writing level. In 1927, Qian was admitted to Furen Middle School, an English-language Missionary School in Wuxi, where he manifested his talent in language. At the age of 20, Qian's aunt died.
Despite comparatively lower score in mathematics, Qian excelled in both Chinese and English languages. Thus, he was accepted into the Department of Foreign Languages of Tsinghua University in 1929, ranking 57 out of 174 male students. One of his few friends was the budding Sinologist and comparatist Achilles Fang. Qian also frequently cut classes, though he more than made up for this in Tsinghua's large library, which he boasted of having "read through." It was probably in his college days that Qian began his lifelong habit of collecting quotations and taking reading notes. At Tsinghua, Qian studied with professors, such as Wu Mi 吳宓, George T. Yeh (Yeh Kungchao 葉公超), and Wen Yuan-ning 溫源寧, Wen Yuan-ning, and others. In 1932, he met Yang Jiang, who became a successful playwright and translator. In 1933, Qian became engaged to Yang, and they married in 1935. For the biographical facts of Qian's following years, the two memoirs by his wife can be consulted. Yang Jiang wrote, "Zhongshu's 'foolishness' could not be contained in books, but just had to gush forth'". Two years after Qian graduated from Tsinghua University in 1933, Qian taught at Kwanghua University in Shanghai and contributed to English-language publications such as The China Critic.
In 1935, Qian received a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to further his studies abroad. Together with his wife, Qian headed for the University of Oxford in Britain. After spending two years at Exeter College, Oxford, he received a Baccalaureus Litterarum (Bachelor of Literature). Shortly after his daughter Qian Yuan (T: 錢瑗, S: 钱瑗) was born in England in 1937, he studied for one more year in the University of Paris in France. In 1938, he returned to China and was appointed as a full professor at Tsinghua University, which, due to the war, had relocated to Kunming, in Yunnan province and become part of Southwestern United University. In 1939, after Qian returned to Shanghai to visit his relatives, he directly went to Hunan to take care of his sick father and temporarily left Southwestern United University. In 1941, During the Pearl Harbor incident, Qian was temporarily trapped in Shanghai.
Owing to the unstable situation during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War, Qian did not hold any long-term jobs. However, it was during the late 1930s and 1940s that he wrote most of his Chinese-language fiction, including Fortress Besieged and the story collection Human, Beast, Ghost, as well as the essay collection Written in the Margins of Life. After Japan's defeat, in the late 1940s, he worked in the National Central Library in Nanjing, editing its English-language publication, Philobiblon.
In 1949, Qian was ranked on the list of National First-class Professors (T: 國家一級教授, S: 国家一级教授) and commenced his academic work in his alma mater. Four years later, an administrative adjustment saw Tsinghua changed into a science and technology-based institution, with its Arts departments merged into Peking University (PKU). Qian was relieved of teaching duties and worked entirely in the Institute of Literary Studies (T: 文學硏究所, S: 文学研究所) under PKU. Qian is a senior researcher at the institute, and his wife Yang Jiang is also a researcher. He also worked as part of a small team in charge of the translation of Mao Zedong's Selected Works and poetry.
During the Cultural Revolution, like many other prominent intellectuals of the time, Qian suffered persecution. Appointed to be a janitor, he was robbed of his favorite pastime, reading. Having no access to books, he had to read his reading notes. He began to form the plan to write Guan Zhui Bian (T: 管錐編, S: 管锥编) (which Qian himself gave the English title of Limited Views) during this period. Qian, his wife, along with their daughter survived the hardships of Cultural Revolution.
After the Cultural Revolution, Qian returned to research. From 1978 to 1980, he visited several universities in Italy, the United States and Japan, impressing his audience with his wit and erudition. In 1982, he was instated as the deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He then began working on Guan Zhui Bian, which occupied the next decade of his life.
While Guan Zhui Bian established his fame in the academic field, his novel Fortress Besieged introduced him to the public. Fortress Besieged was reprinted in 1980, and became a best-seller. Many illegal reproductions and "continuations" followed. Qian's fame rose to its height when the novel was adapted into a TV serial in 1990 which was acted by some famous Chinese actors, such as Daoming Chen and Da Ying.
Qian returned to research, but escaped from social activities. Most of his late life was confined to his reading room. He consciously kept a distance from the mass media and political figures. Readers kept visiting the secluded scholar, and an anecdote goes that Qian when approached by a British admirer, remarked: "Is it necessary for one to know the hen if one loves the eggs it lays?"
Qian entered a hospital in 1994, his daughter also became ill in 1995. On March 4, 1997, Qian's daughter died of cancer. On December 19, 1998, Qian died in Beijing.
Former Residence
Qian's former residence, covering 1,600 square meters, is located at Xinjiexiang #30 and #32 in Wuxi, Nanjing. It was built in 1923 by his grandfather Qian Fujiong. In 1926 his uncle Qian Sunqin built five buildings and several auxiliary rooms on the west side of the back of the house, covering an area of 667.6 square meters. The whole group of buildings are typical Jiangnan courtyard houses. Inside the residence, there are some unique separate buildings, such as Haixu Shulou and Meihua Shuwu. In 2018, it applied for China's significant cultural relics protection units. The former residence has related exhibitions and is open to the public without fees.
Pictures of Qian's former residence
Works
Qian lived in Shanghai from 1941 to 1945, which was then under Japanese occupation. Many of his works were written or published during this chaotic period of time. A collection of short essays, Written in the Margins of Life (Traditional: 寫在人生邊上, Simplified: 写在人生边上) was published in 1941. Human, Beast, Ghost (T: 人‧獸‧鬼, S: 人‧兽‧鬼), a collection of short stories, mostly satiric, was published in 1946. His most celebrated work Fortress Besieged (T: 圍城, S: 围城) appeared in 1947, but not until 1980s that it receives more attention. On the Art of Poetry (T: 談藝錄, S: 谈艺录), written in classical Chinese, was published in 1948.
Besides rendering Mao Zedong's selected works into English, Qian was appointed to produce an anthology of poetry of the Song dynasty when he was working in the Institute of Literary Studies. The Selected and Annotated Song Dynasty Poetry (T: 宋詩選注, S: 宋诗选注) was published in 1958. Despite Qian's quoting the chairman, and his selecting a considerable number of poems that reflect class struggle, the work was criticized for not being Marxist enough. The work was praised highly by the overseas critics, though, especially for its introduction and footnotes. In a new preface for the anthology written in 1988, Qian said that the work was an embarrassing compromise between his personal taste and the prevailing academic atmosphere.
Seven Pieces Patched Together (T: 七綴集, S: 七缀集), a collection of seven pieces of literary criticism written (and revised) over years in vernacular Chinese, was published in 1984, and has been translated by Duncan Campbell as Patchwork: Seven Essays on Art and Literature. This collection includes the famous essay "Lin Shu's Translation" (T: 林紓的翻譯, S: 林纾的翻译).
Qian's magnum opus is the five-volume Guan Zhui Bian (T: 管錐編, S: 管锥编), literally the Pipe-Awl Collection, translated into English as Limited Views. Begun in the 1980s and published in its current form in the mid-1990s, it is an extensive collection of notes and short essays on poetics, semiotics, literary history and related topics written in classical Chinese.
Qian's command of the cultural traditions of classical and modern Chinese, ancient Greek (in translations), Latin, English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish allowed him to construct a towering structure of polyglot and cross-cultural allusions. He took a range of Chinese classical texts as the basis of this work, including the I-Ching, Classic of Poetry, Verses of Chu, The Commentary of Tso, Records of the Grand Historian, Tao Te Ching, Lieh-tzu, Jiaoshi Yilin, Extensive Records of the T'ai-p'ing Era and the Complete Prose of the Pre-Tang Dynasties (T: 全上古三代秦漢三國六朝文, S: 全上古三代秦汉三国六朝文).
Broadly familiar with the Western history of ideas, Qian shed new lights on the Chinese classical texts by comparing them with Western works, showing their likeness, or more often their apparent likeness and essential differences.
Qian Zhongshu is one of the best-known Chinese authors in the Western world. Fortress Besieged has been translated into English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and Spanish. It represents an alternative strand of modernism, which has long remained hidden and unexamined in the history of modern Chinese literature. "Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts" has been translated into English, French, and Italian.
Besides being one of the great masters of written vernacular Chinese in the 20th century, Qian was also one of the last authors to produce substantial works in classical Chinese. Some regard his choice of writing Guan Zhui Bian (Limited Views) in classical Chinese as a challenge to the assertion that classical Chinese is incompatible with modern and Western ideas, an assertion often heard during the May Fourth Movement. Ronald Egan argues that the work contains an implicit negative commentary on the Cultural Revolution.
Posthumous publications
A 13-volume edition of Works of Qian Zhongshu (Traditional: 錢鍾書集, Simplified: 钱锺书集/钱钟书集) was published in 2001 by the Joint Publishing, a hard-covered deluxe edition, in contrast to all of Qian's works published during his lifetime which are cheap paperbacks. The publisher claimed that the edition had been proofread by many experts. One of the most valuable parts of the edition which demonstrating Qian's writing ability while blending humor and irony, titled Marginalias on the Marginalias of Life (T: 寫在人生邊上的邊上, S: 写在人生边上的边上), is a collection of Qian's writings previously scattered in periodicals, magazines and other books. The writings collected there are, however, arranged without any visible order.
Other posthumous publications of Qian's works have drawn harsh criticism. The official writing of Supplements to and Revisions of Songshi Jishi began in 1982. In the following ten years, Qian invested a lot of energy to make extensive and in-depth Supplements to and Revisions of Songshi Jishi. The 10-volume Supplements to and Revisions of Songshi Jishi (T: 宋詩紀事補正, S:宋诗纪事补正), published in 2003, was criticized as a shoddy publication. Liaoning People's Publishing House published Qian Zhongshu's ''Supplements to and Revisions of Songshi Jishi in 2003. A facsimile of Qian's holograph (known as 宋詩紀事補訂(手稿影印本) in Chinese) has been published in 2005, by another publisher. The facsimiles of parts of Qian's notebooks appeared in 2004, and have similarly drawn criticism on account of blatant inadvertency. In 2005, a collection of Qian's English works was published. Again, it was lashed for its editorial incompetence.
The Commercial Press (Shangwu yinshuguan) has, per an agreement with Yang Jiang, begun publishing photoreproductions of Qian Zhongshu's reading notes, totaling several score volumes in both Chinese and foreign languages.
See also
In Spanish: Qian Zhongshu para niños
List of Chinese authors
Yang Jiang
Portrait
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Fiction: Fortress besieged by Qian Zhongshu
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[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[
"REVIEWED JOHN SPURLING",
"JOHN SPURLING"
] |
2005-06-19T00:00:00+00:00
|
Allen Lane £18.99 pp426 This novel’s title has a double meaning, referring both to the Japanese invasion of China in the late 1930s and to a French proverb: “Marriage is like a fortress besieged
|
en
|
/store/favicon-32x32.png
|
https://www.thetimes.com/article/fiction-fortress-besieged-by-qian-zhongshu-btl7rz6qgn5
|
Allen Lane £18.99 pp426
This novel’s title has a double meaning, referring both to the Japanese invasion of China in the late 1930s and to a French proverb: “Marriage is like a fortress besieged; those who are outside want to get in and those who are inside want to get out.” The novel was originally published in 1947, when the Japanese had gone but civil war was raging between the Kuomintang and the communists. This American translation was published there in 1979 and is now published, “with revisions”, as a Penguin Classic. Its author, an academic with an Oxford BLitt, who died in 1998 at the age of 88, wrote a four-volume work on Chinese classical literature. This is his only novel — published in
|
|||||
21594
|
yago
|
3
| 23
|
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1243710/auction-chinese-literary-couples-letters-sparks-privacy-row
|
en
|
Auction of Chinese literary couple's letters sparks privacy row
|
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[] |
[] |
[
"South China Morning Post",
"News",
"Opinion",
"China",
"Hong Kong",
"World",
"US",
"Asia",
"Business",
"Economy",
"Technology",
"Lifestyle",
"Sport"
] | null |
[] |
2013-05-23T00:00:00+08:00
|
Around 100 letters and manuscripts by one of China's top literary couples are to be auctioned next month, amid reports of a row over privacy.
|
en
|
https://assets-v2.i-scmp.com/production/favicon.ico
|
South China Morning Post
|
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1243710/auction-chinese-literary-couples-letters-sparks-privacy-row
|
Around 100 letters and manuscripts by one of China's top literary couples are to be auctioned next month, amid reports of a row over privacy.
Many of the letters are between the pair, Qian Zhongshu and his widow, Yang Jiang, and a publisher in Hong Kong in the 1980s. Qian, who died in 1997, remains a household name in China for his novel , about late-1930s middle-class Chinese society. First published in 1947, it was made into a popular television drama in 1990.
The title is part of its most quoted line: "Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are outside want to get in, and those who are inside want to get out."
Yang, 102, an author in her own right, translated the Spanish epic into Chinese.
The correspondence includes private criticism of well-known contemporary academics, the newspaper said.
"Correspondence is a private matter. Why should it be made public?" it quoted Yang as saying.
An executive of Sungari International Auction confirmed the sale, but refused to disclose the identity of the seller.
"We will take into account the concerns," she said, without elaborating.
She said the items would first be exhibited in Beijing and Wuxi in the eastern province of Jiangsu , the home city of the couple's families. The company declined to disclose the letters' reserve price.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Privacy row as literary pair's letters auctioned
|
||||
21594
|
yago
|
0
| 21
|
https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1960947/death-yang-jiang-marks-end-era-chinese-literature
|
en
|
The death of Yang Jiang marks the end of an era in Chinese literature
|
[
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[] |
[] |
[
"chinese scholar",
"chinese literature"
] | null |
[
"SCMP Editorial"
] |
2016-05-31T23:00:03+08:00
|
Renowned scholar and her husband influenced generations with their works, which entertained and enlightened a nation
|
en
|
https://assets-v2.i-scmp.com/production/favicon.ico
|
South China Morning Post
|
https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1960947/death-yang-jiang-marks-end-era-chinese-literature
|
The death at the age of 104 of the great literary scholar Yang Jiang, widow of the equally brilliant Qian Zhongshu, marks the end of an era in modern Chinese literature. Her passing was announced by the state-run media, an indication of the prestige she was accorded in contemporary China. For foreigners, it may be difficult to appreciate the importance of this literary celebrity couple. For many Chinese, the pair were exemplary intellectuals in the Chinese tradition, an embodiment of public virtue, personal integrity and extreme erudition.
An offbeat sense of humour and understatement permeate most of their writings, in such works of hers as Baptism, We Three and Six Chapters from My Life ‘Downunder’. This is despite their dark subjects concerningthe suffering and persecution that intellectuals had to endure. Their literary and personal struggles have inspired three generations of Chinese readers.
Yang, a playwright, memoirist and translator, was not only well-versed in the Chinese canon, but fluent in several languages. She translated Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a formidable undertaking for which she taught herself Spanish. It is widely regarded as the definitive Chinese version.
The couple met when both were students at Tsinghua University. They married in 1935 and moved to Britain where Qian studied at Oxford University. After their daughter was born, they went to study in Paris before moving back to China in 1938, a year after the Japanese invasion. Their time overseas exposed them to European culture and literature.
During the tumultuous 1940s, Yang unexpectedly found success as a playwright of comedies. Qian also published Fortress Besieged, a satirical novel about Chinese marriages that has become an influential landmark of modern Chinese literature.
During the Cultural Revolution, the couple and their daughter suffered greatly. The experience inspired her later books, which became bestsellers and touched the heart of a nation. In death as in life, Yang again compels the Chinese people to confront their dark past.
|
||||
21594
|
yago
|
3
| 74
|
https://apnews.com/general-news-f328fbbe1c804b75bfdba89d7f16a656
|
en
|
Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at age 104
|
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[] |
[] |
[
"General news",
"Obituaries",
"Greater China",
"i",
"e",
"Nonfiction",
"Asia",
"Beijing",
"Entertainment",
"Books and literature",
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[] |
2016-05-25T07:39:39+00:00
|
Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to an equally famous author, has died at age 104.
|
en
|
/apple-touch-icon.png
|
AP News
|
https://apnews.com/general-news-f328fbbe1c804b75bfdba89d7f16a656
|
BEIJING (AP) — Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to an equally famous author, died Wednesday at age 104, state media said.
Yang died at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, according to The Paper, a state-owned news website. It said her death had been confirmed by her publisher, the People’s Literature Publishing House.
Citing different sources, Hong Kong station Phoenix TV also confirmed Yang’s death, the cause of which was not given.
Born in 1911, Yang became a household name in China for her novels, plays, essays and translated works. She was the first to translate “Don Quixote” into Chinese, and her version is still considered the definitive one by many.
Her death was the top search term on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo on Wednesday, a testimony to her fame and the public adoration she enjoyed.
In a 1981 collection of essays, Yang wrote with a sense of poignancy on the daily lives of Chinese intellectuals during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when scholars and intellectuals were forced to perform hard labor.
Her 2003 essay collection “We Three,” about her family life with her late husband and their daughter, was a best-seller.
Yang was married to Qian Zhongshu, best known for his novel “Fortress Besieged,” and theirs was widely seen as a model union set against the background of China’s turbulent 20th century.
After Qian’s death in 1998, Yang embarked on the task of compiling and editing her husband’s unpublished works and remained prolific herself.
In addition to “We Three,” she published a sequel to her novel “Baptism” at age 103.
|
||
21594
|
yago
|
1
| 82
|
https://doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888139231.003.0002
|
en
|
The phantom of the clock: Laughter and the time of life in the writings of Qian Zhongshu and his contemporaries
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[
""
] | null |
[
"Diran John Sohigian",
"Diran John"
] |
2013-06-01T00:00:00
|
Abstract. This chapter studies the impact of Henri Bergson's writings on the comic and the nature of time on two of China's greatest writers of the early t
|
en
|
//oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/img/v-638576256025047103/apple-touch-icon.png
|
OUP Academic
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https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/22007/chapter/182068993
| |||||
21594
|
yago
|
1
| 94
|
http://www.ecns.cn/visual/hd/2016/05-25/95125.shtml
|
en
|
Well-respected translator and writer Yang Jiang dies at 105(4/12)
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[] |
[] |
[
"china news",
"art",
"visual",
"Beijing",
"ecns",
"cns"
] | null |
[] |
2016-05-25T00:00:00
|
Ecns.cn is the official English-language website of China News Service (CNS), a state-level news agency sponsored and established by Chinese journalists and renowned overseas Chinese experts on October 1, 1952.As an English-language website, Ecns.cn aims to provide all aspects of online news, including in-depth coverage, feature stories and visual content, with topics such as current events, art, lifestyle, people and travel.
|
en
| null |
File photo of Yang Jiang. Renowned Chinese writer Yang Jiang, known for her prolific output and marriage to famous author Qian Zhongshu, passed away on Wednesday at age 105. (Photo/Xinhua)
|
|||||
21594
|
yago
|
2
| 96
|
https://medium.com/%40DaphneLaffer/the-best-way-for-couples-to-get-along-301383eec972
|
en
|
The Best Way for Couples to Get Along
|
https://miro.medium.com/v2/da:true/resize:fit:1200/0*gdBZDEWiwOCdSQoV
|
https://miro.medium.com/v2/da:true/resize:fit:1200/0*gdBZDEWiwOCdSQoV
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[
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2024-05-01T14:11:44.196000+00:00
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Many people believe that the best scenario for a marriage is mutual love and compatibility, allowing the couple to proceed smoothly together. However, in reality, love doesn’t care about who you are…
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https://miro.medium.com/v2/5d8de952517e8160e40ef9841c781cdc14a5db313057fa3c3de41c6f5b494b19
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Medium
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https://medium.com/@DaphneLaffer/the-best-way-for-couples-to-get-along-301383eec972
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Many people believe that the best scenario for a marriage is mutual love and compatibility, allowing the couple to proceed smoothly together.
However, in reality, love doesn’t care about who you are or where you come from. When love strikes, it strikes.
Young girls often dream of finding their prince charming, but in reality, happiness can still be found without a prince. After all, life is not a fairy tale.
Yang Jiang believes that the most important aspect of a marriage is the emotional connection and understanding between the couple. Mutual understanding allows for appreciation, attraction, support, and encouragement, fostering a harmonious relationship. Social status and background are not crucial.
She emphasizes the importance of cultivating a friendship between spouses, enabling them to support each other consciously and journey through life happily.
Why is it essential for a couple to become friends to achieve happiness?
Because being together is about being attracted to each other’s shining points. Friends don’t demand too much from each other, and even if they do, it’s within reasonable limits, maintaining a specific distance.
Many couples find that the sweetness in their relationship fades over time because they fail…
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https://kids.kiddle.co/Yang_Jiang
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Yang Jiang facts for kids
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Learn Yang Jiang facts for kids
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/images/wk/favicon-16x16.png
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https://kids.kiddle.co/Yang_Jiang
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In this Chinese name, the family name is Yang.
Yang Jiang Traditional Chinese 楊絳 Simplified Chinese 杨绛
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Yáng Jiàng Wade–Giles Yang Chiang
Yang Jikang Traditional Chinese 楊季康 Simplified Chinese 杨季康
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Yáng Jìkāng
Yang Jiang (Chinese: 杨绛; Wade–Giles: Yang Chiang; 17 July 1911 – 25 May 2016) was a Chinese playwright, author, and translator. She wrote several successful comedies, and was the first Chinese person to produce a complete Chinese version of Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote.
Biography
She was born in Beijing as Yang Jikang, and grew up in the Jiangnan region. After graduating from Soochow University in 1932, Yang Jiang enrolled in the graduate school of Tsinghua University. There she met Qian Zhongshu. They married in 1935. During 1935–1938, they went abroad to England for further study at Oxford University. In England, Yang gave birth to their daughter Qian Yuan (錢瑗) in 1937. They later studied at Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris, France. They often spoke French and English to each other throughout their lives in China.
They returned to China in 1938. Living in Shanghai, she wrote four stage plays: two comedies of manners, Heart's Desire (1943) and Forging the Truth (1944), one farce, Sporting with the World (1947), and the tragedy Windswept Blossoms (1947). After 1949, she taught at the Tsinghua University and made a scholarly study of western literature at Peking University and the Academy of Science. She published this work in 1979 in a compendium: Spring Mud. As authors, literary researchers, and translators, Yang and Qian both made important contributions to the development of Chinese literary culture.
Yang also translated into Chinese three major European works of picaresque fiction: Lazarillo de Tormes (1951), Gil Blas (1956) and Don Quixote (1978). Her Chinese translation of Don Quixote is, as of 2016, still considered the definitive version. After deeming several English and French translations unsuitable, she taught herself Spanish. “If I wanted to be faithful to the original, I had to translate directly from the original,” she wrote in 2002. Ms. Yang had completed almost seven out of eight volumes of the translation when Red Guard student militants confiscated the manuscript from her home in Beijing. “I worked with every ounce of energy I could muster, gouging at the earth with a spade, but the only result was a solitary scratch on the surface,” Ms. Yang wrote. “The youngsters around me had quite a laugh over that.” As the Cultural Revolution subsided, Ms. Yang returned to Beijing to work on “Don Quixote.” The nearly completed draft that had been confiscated by Red Guards is said to have been discovered in a pile of scrap paper and returned to Ms. Yang. Published in 1978, it remains widely regarded as the definitive translation of “Don Quixote” in China.
She was also awarded the Civil Order of Alfonso X, the Wise for this by King Juan Carlos in October 1986. Her sister Yang Bi (楊必) (1922–1968) was also a translator.
Her experience doing "reform through labor" in a "cadre school" in Henan from 1969 to 1972, where she was "sent down" with her husband during the Cultural Revolution, inspired her to write Six Chapters from My Life 'Downunder' (1981). This is the book that made her name as a writer in the post-Mao period. In connection with this memoir, she also wrote Soon to Have Tea (將飲茶) (aka Toward Oblivion), which was published in 1983.
In 1988, she published her only novel Baptism (洗澡), which was always connected with Fortress Besieged (圍城), a masterpiece of her husband. Her 2003 memoir We Three (我們仨), recalled memories of her husband and her daughter Qian Yuan, who died of cancer one year before her father's death in 1998. At the age of 96, she published Reaching the Brink of Life (走到人生邊上), a philosophic work whose title in Chinese clearly alludes to her late husband's collection of essays Marginalia to Life (寫在人生邊上).
She turned 100 in July 2011. The novella After the Baptism (洗澡之後), a coda to Baptism, appeared in 2014. On 25 May 2016, Yang died at the age of 104 at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing.
Contradicting a Chinese saying that it is impossible for a woman to be both a chaste wife and gifted scholar or talented artist, Qian once described Yang as “the most chaste wife and talented girl” in China.
Works
Plays
Heart's Desire (稱心如意) (1943).
Forging the Truth (弄真成假) (1944).
Sporting with the World (游戏人间) (1945).
Windswept Blossoms (风絮) (1947).
Novels
Baptism (洗澡)(1988)
After the Bath (洗澡之後)(2014)
Essays
Six Chapters from My Life 'Downunder' (幹校六記) (1981)
About to Drink Tea (將飲茶) (1987)
We Three (我們仨) (2003)
Her 2003 essay collection “We Three,” about her family life with her late husband and their daughter, was a national bestseller. Yang Jiang's daughter Qian Yuan gave the name of this book We Three. She has written the outline for it, but unfortunately died after five days in 1997. Yang withheld the news of their daughter's death from her husband Qian Zhongshu until his passing in 1998. After her husband's death, Yang compiled and edited his unpublished works, the most celebrated being We Three.
Reaching the Brink of Life (走到人生邊上) (2007)
At the age of 96, Yang surprised the world with Reaching the Brink of Life, a philosophic work whose title alludes to her husband's collection of essays Marginalia to Life. Reaching the Brink of Life is a self-reckoning that may well be Yang's most personal book. The first half of the book is structured as a self-dialogue about life, death, and the afterlife; the second part contains an assortment of family anecdotes and reading notes—the fragments of a life. What emerges from its pages is not merely the predictable inward turn toward self-consolation of a learned person facing death; in Yang's declaration of faith and her insistence that the afterlife be 'fair' is an affirmation of personal metaphysics in a nation that has long promoted collectivism while discouraging religion and ‘superstition'.
Translation work
Gil Blas
Don Quixote
Lazarillo de Tormes
Phaedo
See also
In Spanish: Yang Jiang para niños
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https://consensus.app/papers/mindset-qian-zhongshu-yang-jiang-marriage-academy-rea/f4889e471e225fd5bda8a4718e6776b6/
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7 The Institutional Mindset: Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang on Marriage and the Academy
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Key takeaway: 'Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang's marriage is a model for understanding marriage as a harmonious, affectionate, and even romantic intellectual partnership, reshaping public appreciation of them and their works.'
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https://consensus.app/papers/mindset-qian-zhongshu-yang-jiang-marriage-academy-rea/f4889e471e225fd5bda8a4718e6776b6/
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Abstract
If, for most of us, marriage is supposed to be a “fortress besieged”—a battle of conflicting impulses to conquer and to flee—the same is rarely said of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang, whose marriage lasted sixty-three years, from 1935 until Qian’s death in 1998. Since then, Yang has actively managed Qian’s literary estate and continued to write about their life together, and, to a lesser extent, with their daughter Qian Yuan, who died in 1997. Qian Zhongshu mostly let his writings speak for themselves; Yang Jiang, in contrast, has made extensive efforts to place her and her husband’s within a context different from solo creative and academic labor: quotidian family life. Yang’s story of her marriage with Qian is of a harmonious, affectionate, and even romantic intellectual partnership. Her biographical and autobiographical writings could be said to have retroactively domesticated the famous couple, making their private life public, and in doing so dramatically re-shaping public appreciation of them and their works.2
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https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/inhyehan/
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China’s Literary Cosmopolitans: Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the World of Letters
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2016-10-26T02:26:39+00:00
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Edited by Christopher Rea Reviewed by Inhye Han MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2016) In May 2016, writers, critics, and lay readers in China and the world mourned the passin…
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MCLC Resource Center
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https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/inhyehan/
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Edited by Christopher Rea
Reviewed by Inhye Han
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2016)
In May 2016, writers, critics, and lay readers in China and the world mourned the passing of the literary master Yang Jiang (1911-2016), a playwright, novelist, and translator who had gained significant fame and popularity in China and other countries. Her husband, Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998), whose depth and breadth of knowledge of literature, philosophy, and history were matched by few scholars, achieved a critical reputation earlier than Yang for his fiction, essays, and monumental works of literary criticism. China’s Literary Cosmopolitans is a timely volume illuminating previously under-examined critical dimensions of Yang’s and Qian’s works. Editor Christopher Rea skillfully reveals the modern and Eurocentric roots of the provincial/cosmopolitan divide, demonstrating the ways in which the Chinese and the cosmopolitan intersect. Rea argues that, while there were multiple forms of cosmopolitan practices in post WWII China—for example, 1950s’ internationalist cosmopolitanism and the Mao period’s prescriptive cosmopolitanism—Yang and Qian introduced yet another type, lifestyle cosmopolitanism. Where literati are concerned, lifestyle cosmopolitanism is characterized by the unity of a person’s texts and character (morals, ethics, etc.). Postcolonial studies scholars have sought to theorize a cosmopolitanism that is not based on the concept of a “citizen of the world,” arguing that cosmopolitanism should be conceptualized not as an idea but as infinite ways of being (Bhabha et al. 2002, 12). This volume is a testament to Yang’s and Qian’s lifestyle cosmopolitanism as the best possible lived embodiment of such infinite ways of being.
Theodore Huters’ chapter on Qian’s Fortress Besieged discerns a cosmopolitan quality of his work with extraordinary acumen. He first surveys the landscape of contemporary debates on cosmopolitanism, which center on the rift between cosmopolitanism as a new ethic following the failure of Enlightenment humanism and cosmopolitanism as rhetoric masking “the depravities of global capitalism and universalism, and the elitism of aesthetic distance” (212). A critical question Huters raises is whether any cosmopolitan pursuit in literary practice could transcend the opposing ends of elitist aloofness and capitalist-colonial drives. Fortress Besieged, Huters argues, offers an answer to that question. The novel’s foremost concern is the issue of taste and aesthetic judgment; yet unlike the British novel of manners, it refuses to provide its readers with solid moral or intellectual grounds for appraising taste. In a somewhat Kantian approach that brackets cognitive concerns (true versus false) and ethical ones (good versus bad) to tackle matters of taste (pleasant versus unpleasant),[1] Huters argues that Qian likewise separates the pleasant from the good, satirizing any attempt to associate better taste with superior morality. Fortress Besieged’s aesthetic stance nevertheless overcomes elitist aloofness, because its story later unbrackets the ethical domain in a radical manner. The text grapples with ethical concerns only to blur the boundary between good and bad and dispel the idea of an unchanging, stable world. Qian thus consciously brackets and unbrackets the aesthetic and ethical domains, creating a literary model that overcomes pitfalls of contemporary cosmopolitan practices.
Carlos Rojas’ “How to Do Things with Words” brilliantly and powerfully probes Yang Jiang’s translations to reveal an extraordinary quality that realizes the best sense of cosmopolitanism. Rojas’ mastery of Spanish and Chinese enables him to identify a critical dimension of Yang Jiang’s rendition of Don Quixote. Yang approaches translation as a practice of transformation that produces meanings not inherent in an original text. Rather than obscuring the inevitable “errors” of translation, Rojas points out, Yang makes use of the error or gap between source and target text as “a space of creative articulation and critical intervention” (91). From this standpoint, a translation practice parallels a perlocutionary act that not only conveys information but also affects listeners. Whereas classic perlocutionary theory proposes a felicity of speech and an actual situation as a condition of words’ real effect on listeners, in Don Quixote “it is precisely infelicity of the speech act that grants it its (imaginary) perlocutionary force” (100). Both “errors” emerging from Yang’s translation and Don Quixote’s own misreading engender unintended yet creative consequences for Yang’s audience and the people whom Don Quixote encounters, respectively. Since this kind of translation and creative misreading focus on difference between how a text is written and read, I would add that Yang’s practice also resonates with Ackbar Abbas’s concept of cosmopolitanism as cultural arbitrage with difference (Abbas 2002: 226). Abbas argues that cosmopolitanism should be reckoned a cultural arbitrageur, as opposed to a universalist arbiter of value. Yang’s translations illustrate this arbitrating role, using meta-textual pun, allusion, and strategic transliteration to produce creative differences between original text and translation. In this chapter, Rojas also highlights a political dimension of translating under an authoritarian party-state regime, pointing to Yang’s choice of genre (picaresque), theme (counter-hegemonic ethos), and philosophy of translation.
Amy Dooling’s “Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies” investigates plays Yang wrote in the 1940s, when Shanghai was occupied by Japan and circumstances were grim and abject. Despite the political urgency of her time, Yang’s works are conspicuously removed from political references, engaging exclusively with the psychology of characters, who are the “new women” of China. Unlike the May Fourth–era literature, Yang’s plays attend to predicaments of new women who fail to attain self-fulfillment despite their defiant assertion of autonomy. All of Yang’s plays whose scripts are extant—Heart’s Desire (1942), Forging the Truth (1943), and Sporting with the World (1944)—fall into the comedy genre centering on the mischievous actions or selfish delusion of new women characters. The plays comically portray the demise of new women in China due to their self-absorbed idealism. Dooling stresses that Yang’s wartime plays are highly critical of individual ambition built on romantic idealism. By examining the intersections of the new woman issue, wartime literature, comic stage plays, and politics, Dooling masterfully illuminates the ingenious literary achievements of Yang’s dramas, although it is unclear how her chapter fits into the overarching cosmopolitan theme of this book.
Jesse Field’s chapter concerns Yang Jiang’s memoir We Three (2003) and her translation of Phaedo (2000), casting light on a distinctive quality of Yang’s cosmopolitanism by drawing on Berlant’s celebrated concept of an intimate public that emerges through shared political experiences. Literature based on those experiences expresses a specific history and simultaneously shapes its audience’s sense of belonging to that history. Despite the centrality of national political events in the emergence of an intimate public, Field boldly argues that an intimate public identity in China’s post-1999 period hinges on a contra-national, cosmopolitan sensibility. Yang’s writings not only recount but also recalibrate thoughts and feelings about the semicolonial Republican period, the Mao era, and the subsequent authoritarian regimes, dispelling [false] dichotomies between the political and the apolitical, the national and the cosmopolitan. Field skillfully demonstrates that Yang’s literary practice has the quality of engaging with the nation and the world simultaneously, thus enabling the constitution of a new intimate public.
Christopher Rea’s chapter, “The Institutional Mindset,” demonstrates that Qian and Yang set an example by using the institutions of marriage and the academy to practice the values of authenticity, independence, and devotion throughout politically tumultuous periods. Qian and Yang frequently tackled problematic issues in the concepts and praxis of marriage and the academy in their writings as well, examining the institutions’ ambivalent nature as both refuge and bondage. Their work and their lifestyle, Rea argues, exemplify how the two writers distanced themselves from social institutions, including the nation, and circumvented the “obsession with China.” However, owing to their belonging to those same institutions, both writers were unable to entirely free themselves from the related state-imposed ideology and cultural practices, and their ambivalence toward this conundrum conditioned their vision of cosmopolitanism and its limits. Despite a few instances in which they acquiesced to nationalist practices, Qian and Yang demonstrated the ways in which powerless individuals can deflect institutional power without leaving institutions and how one can escape the nation without leaving it. That is to say, within their institutional belonging and mindset, they managed to manipulate nationalist state apparatuses to their own ends, rather than being subjected to them, opening up a new dimension of cosmopolitanism. Rea’s chapter constitutes a convincing argument for his coining of the term “lifestyle cosmopolitanism” to categorize the through-line of Qian’s and Yang’s marriage, scholarship, and writings.
Ronald Egan’s “Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution,” highlights the striking depth and breadth of Qian’s 1979 Guanzhui bian.[2] Guanzhui bian, a five-volume compendium for which Qian consulted and quoted sources in six different languages, glosses nearly the entire corpus of “classic” Chinese literature and philosophy and their counterparts in the Western tradition. Although the compendium’s exegetical practice may appear to be apolitical, Egan’s analysis uncovers Qian’s hidden criticism of literary modes prescribed by the CCP; Qian’s groundbreaking engagements with the classics went against the Mao era’s condemnation of virtually everything traditional. Qian’s Guanzhui bian, Egan argues, epitomizes a cosmopolitan practice of “striking a connection” (datong) between Chinese and Western writing, a feat that only a few scholars thoroughly versed in both cultures could do. This kind of China-West trans-critique is radical in that it refutes the hegemonic idea of Qian’s time that China was feudal, backward, and incommensurable with the West.
In “Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction,” Judith Armory argues that Yang Jiang’s Taking a Bath (1987) is thematically intertwined with eighteenth-century British novels, especially the works of Jane Austen and Henry Fielding. She bases her comparison on three pieces of evidence. First, Yang Jiang herself wrote criticism on Fielding and Austen in 1957 and 1982, respectively. Second, Fielding viewed the novel genre as a comic epic, which, in Amory’s view, is an apt classification for Taking a Bath as well. Third, Fielding and Austen wrote novels not only to provide cathartic experiences for their readers but also to urge them to seek more virtuous lives, as seen in their shared recurring theme of the self-refinement of an honorable individual. In the same vein, Taking a Bath grapples with the intricate dynamics between falsehood and honesty, self-deception and self-knowledge, and state-coerced reformation versus self-reformation. One question that arises from Amory’s analysis is whether Yang’s meditation on the subject of self-reformation in Taking a Bath is solely due to her appreciation of eighteenth-century British novels. In his later chapter, Huters casts doubt on criticism that asserts a strong affinity between the British novel of manners and Qian’s Fortress Besieged. I would likewise contend that perceived thematic and generic similarities between Austen/Fielding and Yang provide a weak basis on which to claim that the former decisively influences the latter. After all, the eighteenth-century British novel of manners is only one of many genres that satirizes the absurdities of a given society and motivates readers to live a more ethical life. I believe that Taking a Bath is cosmopolitan not because of British writers’ impact on Yang, but, in part, because the theme of self-refinement toward a more virtuous life is prevalent around the world long before the eighteenth century (most notably in Yang’s case, self refinement/self cultivation is a key concept from the Confucian tradition).
Wendy Larson’s chapter “Pleasures of Lying Low” examines Yang Jiang’s novels Taking a Bath and Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School (1981), which depict life under the authoritarian CCP regime. Larson contends that Chinese intellectuals, including Yang, neither resisted nor collaborated with the Mao regime, but mostly accommodated to its regulations. Comparable to Amory’s argument, Larson points to similarities between the Western comedy of manners and Yang’s two novels and argues that “[Yang’s] insistence on using the comedy of manners betrays her unquestioned embrace of the detached and objective literary cosmopolitan ideal” (156). In her other literary and critical works, however, Yang hardly seems to assume that any literary cosmopolitan ideal could be objective. More important, even similarities in terms of tone, style, and theme fail to prove what Larson avers to be Yang’s “insistence on using the comedy of manners.” In the absence of significant examples of intertextual references or allusions, such affinities are likely to be coincidental. Furthermore, the kind of cosmopolitanism that Yang (and Qian) created does not stem simply from their firsthand experiences abroad and command of foreign languages and Western forms and styles of literature. Larson further claims, “They [Chinese critics favorable to Yang Jiang] admire her move away from a narrow ethnic focus on Chinese qualities and toward a universal emphasis on humanity in general, and away from politics toward art” (154). Whereas Larson conflates the cosmopolitan and the universal, I believe that the two should be distinguished, because the cosmopolitan represents a middle ground for holding a critical tension between the universal and the particular. Furthermore, I would argue that Yang’s work is a powerful counterexample to the Eurocentric and false notion that ethnic concerns are parochial. Yang instead reconfigures the dichotomy between the provincial and the cosmopolitan, demonstrating that literature and politics are not two contending poles a writer and intellectual must choose between. Larson’s chapter provides much food for thought, although her somewhat narrow view of the “the detached and objective literary cosmopolitan ideal” sits uneasily with the volume’s stance toward the Eurocentric roots of the provincial/cosmopolitan divide and stress on the multiple forms of cosmopolitan practices in post WWII China.
Yugen Wang’s chapter differs from the others in its focus on Qian’s relationship to the classical Chinese literary tradition, rather than his intertextual engagement with foreign texts and traditions. Although the author superbly explicates the ingenious qualities of Qian’s exegeses, he does not consider, except briefly in his conclusion, how a Chinese writer-scholar’s glossing of Chinese classics could be a cosmopolitan practice. Wang misses (or perhaps only gestures towards) an opportunity here, for one could indeed claim that the exegesis of classical Chinese texts during the Mao era was a way of being abroad at home, i.e., a cosmopolitan practice. As most of the contributors to this volume show, cosmopolitanism is more a way of being, a lifestyle, or a socio-cultural intervention than a fixed idea, more of a practice than a proposition or static position. Under Mao’s authoritarian regime, in which virtually everything associated with “traditional” values was deprecated, to embrace premodern poetry and delve into its unarticulated meanings was a gesture countering a prescriptive way of being an intellectual-scholar and a pioneering way “of being different beings simultaneously” (Bhabha et al. 2002: 11).
To conclude, this edited volume makes a crucial contribution to the fields of Chinese studies and literary studies by offering a new model for theorizing cosmopolitanism outside a Eurocentric paradigm, built on meticulous analyses of Qian’s and Yang’s works. As Ackbar Abbas has argued, cosmopolitan practice should no longer be “simply a matter of behaving well or even of an openness to otherness. … not … a universalist arbiter of value, but … an arbitrageur/ arbitrageuse. This is arbitrage with a difference” (2002: 226). Rather than striving to emulate putative universals, Qian and Yang made use of them to engender productive differences and incorporate them into their society under authoritarian restrictions. As readers or critics this should inspire us to articulate the kinds of differences Qian’s and Yang’s cultural arbitrage brings about, rather than assessing their degree of openness toward foreign ideas and discourses. Most chapters from this volume indeed identify what those differences are, demonstrating how Yang’s and Qian’s literary and critical practices produced a new cultural dimension of cosmopolitan. China’s Literary Cosmopolitanism will be an indispensable text for scholars seeking to investigate the relationship between the provincial and the cosmopolitan, the particular and the universal, literature and politics, and the nation and the world.
Inhye Han ifinahan@ewha.ac.kr
Humanities Korea Research Professor
Ewha Womans University
References
Abbas, Ackbar. 2002. “Cosmopolitan de-scriptions: Shanghai and Hong Kong.” In Carol Breckenridge, ed., Cosmopolitanism. Durham: Duke University Press, 209-228.
Karatani Kojin. 1998. “Uses of Aesthetics: After Orientalism.” Boundary 2 25 (2): 145-160.
Bhabha, Homi, Carol Breckenridge, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sheldon Pollock. 2002. “Cosmopolitanisms.” In Cosmopolitanism, edited by Carol Breckenridge, 1-14. Durham: Duke University Press.
Breckenridge, Carol, ed. 2002. Cosmopolitanism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Notes:
[1] Karatani 1998, 148—149
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New Directions Publishing
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First published in China in 1947, Fortress Besieged is arguably the greatest Chinese novel of the twentieth century. Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, our hapless hero Fang Hung-chien, with no particular goal in life and with a bogus degree from a f...
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https://www.ndbooks.com/book/fortress-besieged/
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First published in China in 1947, Fortress Besieged is arguably the greatest Chinese novel of the twentieth century. Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, our hapless hero Fang Hung-chien, with no particular goal in life and with a bogus degree from a fake university in hand, returns home to Shanghai. On the French liner back, he meets two Chinese beauties, Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, “With Miss Pao it wasn’t a matter of heart or soul. She hadn’t any change of heart, since she didn’t have a heart.” Fang eventually obtains a teaching post at a newly established university in the interior where the effete pseudo-intellectuals he encounters in academia become the butt of Qian’s merciless satire. Soon Fang falls into a marriage of Nabokovian proportions of distress and absurdity. A magnificent litany of misadventures, Fortress Besieged draws from traditions of both China and the West to create its own unique feast of delights. The renowned scholar of Chinese history, Jonathan Spence, provides a new foreword to this exquisite translation.
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LibraryThing
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Jiang Yang, author of Six Chapters from My Life Downunder, on LibraryThing
|
en
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/favicon_lt_32.ico
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LibraryThing.com
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https://www.librarything.com/author/yangjiang
|
Yang Jiang was born in Beijing, China on July 17, 1911. She studied political science at Soochow University and later enrolled at Tsinghua University in Beijing. After marrying Qian Zhongshu in 1935, they moved to England and then Paris. They moved back to China in 1938. In the 1940s, Yang Jiang show more found success as a playwright in wartime Shanghai with a series of witty comedies. After the Communists took power in 1949, the couple moved to Beijing, where she taught and worked on translation projects. During the Cultural Revolution, she and her husband were sent to the countryside in Henan Province and consigned to reform through labor. They remained in Henan for several years. Her memoir about these years, Six Chapters from My Life "Downunder," was published in 1981. Her other works include Baptism and We Three. She translated Don Quixote and Plato's Phaedo. She died on May 25, 2016 at the age of 104. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Includes the names: 杨绛, 楊絳, 楊絳,, Yang Jiang
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21594
|
yago
|
2
| 34
|
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003167198-25/qian-zhongshu-cosmopolitan-ji-jin
|
en
|
Qian Zhongshu as a Cosmopolitan
|
http://images.tandf.co.uk/common/jackets/crclarge/978100316/9781003167198.jpg
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http://images.tandf.co.uk/common/jackets/crclarge/978100316/9781003167198.jpg
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[
""
] | null |
[
"Ji Jin"
] |
2023-07-25T00:00:00+00:00
|
Qian Zhongshu (Ch’ien Chung-shu 錢鍾書) has become a monument in the history of modern Chinese culture by his exquisite literary creations and the unique academic
|
en
|
favicon.ico
|
Taylor & Francis
|
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003167198-25/qian-zhongshu-cosmopolitan-ji-jin
|
Qian Zhongshu (Ch’ien Chung-shu 錢鍾書) has become a monument in the history of modern Chinese culture by his exquisite literary creations and the unique academic masterpieces. In the current complex globalization context, Qian Zhongshu’s vision, standpoint, broadmindedness, and magnanimity as a cosmopolitan are of great enlightenment for our thinking about Chinese literature and Chinese academics. As a writer, Qian Zhongshu’s literary creation is sparkling with wit and ease. He not only has merciless ridicule of the social world and the world of literati but also contains his deep thinking of life, especially the novel Fortress Besieged (围城). What it expresses, from marriage to life, is “besieged castle, people outside the city want to rush in, people inside the city want to escape.” It is a universal dilemma of human existence. His insight into the world and life is consistent with Western existentialism, showing his vision as a cosmopolitan, and also endows his works with unique modern characteristics. However, as a scholar, Qian Zhongshu’s contribution and influence are far more significant than those of Qian as a writer. His works, such as On the Art of Poetry (谈艺录) and Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters (管锥编), represent one of the highest academic achievements of China in the twentieth century. As a classic of comparative literature, On the Art of Poetry opens a dialogue between traditional Chinese poetics and Western poetics, seeking the common poetics and literary spirit of China and the West. Limited Views is developed around ten ancient books of China. Based on Chinese culture and integrating literary discourses and cultural discourses of different languages and disciplines, Limited Views represents the voice of Chinese academic participation in world cultural dialogue during the “Cultural Revolution.” Qian Zhongshu’s works, with a broad global vision and a robust, modern standpoint, strive to open up Chinese and Western literature and culture, open up various disciplines, and also open up literary creation and academic research, thereby deconstructing the theoretical domain and highlighting the universal aesthetic psychology and cultural laws. To a large extent, Qian Zhongshu’s works are examples of equal dialogue and exchanges between different cultures, which well embodies the dialogue principle of “harmony with diversity” (和而不同) and continually proves the rationality and inevitability of the coexistence of multiple cultures and multiple discourses. Qian Zhongshu has made a modern interpretation of Chinese and Western cultural discourses and literary concepts with all his works. Showing dialogue and integration between Chinese and Western culture and literature, Qian enlightens us with his works about what we urgently need to think about in the face of the challenges and crises in the world today, that is, how to seek the greatest common divisor through dialogue and how to seek common ground and intersubjectivity while
|
||
21594
|
yago
|
3
| 81
|
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/41c67ec8-4f54-4af3-870e-0d203f408227
|
en
|
The Three of Us (Hardcover) 我们仨(精) by Yang Jiang
|
https://cdn.thestorygraph.com/205ymaefzeh3mex1bicr53sqvwo5
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https://cdn.thestorygraph.com/205ymaefzeh3mex1bicr53sqvwo5
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"This book is the memoir of family life written by Yang Jiang, the wife of Qian Zhongshu. At the ...
|
https://assets.thestorygraph.com/assets/favicon-33f8684a82c2daf347f6a7f1666ee95e3051f78650eb5a9c175734396cb22c0d.ico
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https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/41c67ec8-4f54-4af3-870e-0d203f408227
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Description
"This book is the memoir of family life written by Yang Jiang, the wife of Qian Zhongshu. At the age of 92, Yang Jiang exquisitely records the dribs and drabs of her special family in 63 years with ups and downs, i.e. the memoir The Three of Us. 《...
|
||||
21594
|
yago
|
2
| 22
|
https://www.ndbooks.com/author/qian-zhongshu/
|
en
|
New Directions Publishing
|
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New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies.
|
en
|
/apple-touch-icon.png
|
https://www.ndbooks.com/author/qian-zhongshu/
|
First published in China in 1947, Fortress Besieged is arguably the greatest Chinese novel of the twentieth century. Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, our hapless hero Fang Hung-chien, with no particular goal in life and with a bogus degree from a fake university in hand, returns home to Shanghai. On the French liner back, he meets two Chinese beauties, Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, “With Miss Pao it wasn’t a matter of heart or soul. She hadn’t any change of heart, since she didn’t have a heart.” Fang eventually obtains a teaching post at a newly established university in the interior where the effete pseudo-intellectuals he encounters in academia become the butt of Qian’s merciless satire. Soon Fang falls into a marriage of Nabokovian proportions of distress and absurdity. A magnificent litany of misadventures, Fortress Besieged draws from traditions of both China and the West to create its own unique feast of delights. The renowned scholar of Chinese history, Jonathan Spence, provides a new foreword to this exquisite translation.
|
|||||
21594
|
yago
|
2
| 75
|
http://english.eastday.com/Culture/u1ai8547496.html
|
en
|
Celebrated Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at 105
|
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] | null |
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"ä¸å®å²"
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2016-05-25T00:00:00
|
Celebrated Chinese writer Yang Jiang dies at 105-Well-known Chinese writer, literary translator and foreign literature researcher Yang Jiang died atthe age of 105 in Beijing on Wednesday morning.
| null | ||||||||
3572
|
dbpedia
|
3
| 16
|
https://www.nationalguard.mil/News/Article-View/Article/576105/royal-netherlands-air-force-turns-to-iowa-air-guard-for-f-16-paint-job/
|
en
|
Royal Netherlands air force turns to Iowa Air Guard for F-16 paint-job
|
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2012-02-10T00:00:00
|
SIOUX CITY, Iowa - This week, painters from the Air National Guard Paint Facility in Sioux City, Iowa rolled out the first of six F-16 Fighting Falcons from the Royal Netherlands Air Force that will
|
en
|
/Portals/31/favicon.ico?ver=iXLtor0suvMbtiVsz6VzPA%3d%3d
|
National Guard
|
https://www.nationalguard.mil/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalguard.mil%2FNews%2FArticle-View%2FArticle%2F576105%2Froyal-netherlands-air-force-turns-to-iowa-air-guard-for-f-16-paint-job%2F
|
SIOUX CITY, Iowa - This week, painters from the Air National Guard Paint Facility in Sioux City, Iowa rolled out the first of six F-16 Fighting Falcons from the Royal Netherlands Air Force that will be receiving new paint jobs.
This order request marks the first opportunity the western Iowa based paint facility has had to service international aircraft.
Dutch Lt. Col. Maurice Schomk, the commander of the Dutch attachment at the 162nd Fighter Wing in Tucson, Ariz., met with members from the paint facility Tuesday, Feb. 7, to complete the final inspection of the aircraft, and was quite pleased with the results.
"I am impressed. I know what the jet looked like before, and I saw all the faces of the people who first inspected the jet. I knew it would be a challenge," Schomk said.
"My first impression walking in here is that I am standing here looking at a new jet."
When Schomk first took over the Dutch attachment, he said their jets' outside appearance did not match the avionics inside. "One of my first priorities was to get our jets painted. When we heard about the quality and value the people in Sioux City could provide, we decided to send our jets here."
Currently, the Royal Netherlands Air Force is only planning to paint six of their ten aircraft, but Schomk hopes to complete all of them within the next few years.
Air Force Command Chief. Master Sgt. Dave Miller, the facility manager and command chief of the 185th Air Refueling Wing in Sioux City, said this job symbolizes the international partnership between the U.S. and its allies. "This really saves the Netherlands a lot of money. Instead of sending the jets out to get completely stripped and painted, our methods cost about a third of the price and takes half the time."
Miller added that this job gives the members of the paint facility another opportunity to show the Air Force and its allies the type of work they are able to accomplish. "We have proven quality, proven expertise, and these guys go into great detail and great lengths to put out a perfect product."
The Air National Guard Paint Facility is located on the 185th Air Refueling Wing's airbase. It was established in 2000 to serve the Air National Guard's painting needs. Since it first opened its hangar doors, the facility has serviced over 500 aircraft including F-16s, A-10 Thunderbolt IIs, and F-15 Eagle and typically services about 40-50 aircraft per year.
While the paint facility employees were quite familiar with painting F-16s, the Dutch aircraft presented some unique challenges. "Probably the most difficult part of this process was sorting out the new paint schemes and figuring out where the stencils go," said James Seiler, a sheet metal mechanic for the facility.
The U.S. F-16 features a two-tone grey body with black markings. The Dutch F-16, on the other hand, features a three-tone grey with seven different colors for markings. The Dutch jets also have several more markings than its U.S. counterparts, including a bright red, white, blue, and orange Dutch emblem located near the exhaust and on the wings.
Seiler said the biggest challenge for the job was gathering the data to make sure everything was done accurately. "We had the people from Tucson send us the technical manuals so we were absolutely sure we had everything in its right place. We spent several days before the jet even came in sorting through the tech data and planning how we could do this job in the most effective and efficient way."
Miller said he was pleased with the performance of the facilities members and he looks forward to working with the Dutch and any other international communities that are interested in their services. "
While "painting" does make the aircraft look more attractive, the paint serves a much more important function.
One of the major enemies to the structure of aircraft is weather and corrosion. Miller said, "Today's fighter aircraft are exposed to diverse environments. In one week, they are flying through rain and snow, the next week they could be flying over deserts. That is why it is critical to make sure the paint on these jets properly protect the aircraft."
Instead of completely stripping the entire aircraft, the paint facility uses a cost effective method called "Scuff, Sand, and Paint." To start this two-week project, the painters carefully inspect the aircraft, looking for critical areas where corrosion could possibly develop.
Next, they scrape and sand these critical areas and prepare them for the painting. They also tape and cover areas on the aircraft that could be damaged throughout the painting process. The painters then paint the areas with an anti-corrosive paint which, ironically, is made by the Dutch company AkzoNobel.
Finally, the painters stencil in the appropriate markings around the jet and conduct final operational checkouts and inspections before sending it back to the unit.
|
||||
3572
|
dbpedia
|
0
| 43
|
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article%3Fid%3D10%252E1371%252Fjournal%252Epone%252E0296443
|
en
|
A contemporary class structure: Capital disparities in The Netherlands
|
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0296443.strk&size=inline
|
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0296443.strk&size=inline
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[
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"Labor markets",
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[
"Mérove Gijsberts",
"J. Cok Vrooman",
"Jeroen Boelhouwer"
] | null |
The academic and public debate on social inequality has recently been fuelled by large disparities in income and wealth, profound changes in the labour market, and other emerging cleavages in post-industrial societies. This article contributes to the discussion by arguing that class divisions are theoretically based on four types of capital: people’s economic means, their social capital, their cultural resources, and the combination of their health and attractiveness (‘person capital’). From this premise, the social structure of the Netherlands is examined. A dedicated survey was linked to microdata from the national population register, tax authorities and benefit agencies. Using latent class analysis, we assess contingencies in the distribution of the different resources, and identify a structure consisting of six capital groups. The established upper echelon (15.5% of the adult population) has the most capital, followed by the privileged younger people (12.7%), the employed middle echelon (26.9%) and the comfortable retirees (16.6%). Total capital is lowest among the insecure workers (13.5%) and the precariat (14.8%). Each social class has a distinctive mix of the four types of capital, highlighting the need to look beyond economic differences in order to comprehend structural inequality. The results of this study also indicate that resource disparities between classes coincide with other forms of social hierarchy and contrasts by age. Moreover, the contemporary class structure is associated with divergent views and experiences among the Dutch. Classes with little capital tend to rate politics, society, and their own social position more negatively. In addition, they value self-enhancement and hedonism less than today’s upper classes and report lower levels of well-being.
|
en
|
/resource/img/favicon.ico
|
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0296443
|
Figures
Abstract
The academic and public debate on social inequality has recently been fuelled by large disparities in income and wealth, profound changes in the labour market, and other emerging cleavages in post-industrial societies. This article contributes to the discussion by arguing that class divisions are theoretically based on four types of capital: people’s economic means, their social capital, their cultural resources, and the combination of their health and attractiveness (‘person capital’). From this premise, the social structure of the Netherlands is examined. A dedicated survey was linked to microdata from the national population register, tax authorities and benefit agencies. Using latent class analysis, we assess contingencies in the distribution of the different resources, and identify a structure consisting of six capital groups. The established upper echelon (15.5% of the adult population) has the most capital, followed by the privileged younger people (12.7%), the employed middle echelon (26.9%) and the comfortable retirees (16.6%). Total capital is lowest among the insecure workers (13.5%) and the precariat (14.8%). Each social class has a distinctive mix of the four types of capital, highlighting the need to look beyond economic differences in order to comprehend structural inequality. The results of this study also indicate that resource disparities between classes coincide with other forms of social hierarchy and contrasts by age. Moreover, the contemporary class structure is associated with divergent views and experiences among the Dutch. Classes with little capital tend to rate politics, society, and their own social position more negatively. In addition, they value self-enhancement and hedonism less than today’s upper classes and report lower levels of well-being.
Citation: Vrooman JC, Boelhouwer J, Gijsberts M (2024) A contemporary class structure: Capital disparities in The Netherlands. PLoS ONE 19(1): e0296443. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296443
Editor: Nik Ahmad Sufian Burhan, University Putra Malaysia: Universiti Putra Malaysia, MALAYSIA
Received: May 19, 2023; Accepted: December 13, 2023; Published: January 31, 2024
Copyright: © 2024 Vrooman et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: The survey data of 'Disparities in the Netherlands 2014' is available through the Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences/NWO (https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-xmm-xxb4). However, microdata on income and wealth were obtained from national registrations. According to Dutch privacy legislation, these can only be linked and analysed in the remote access environment of Statistics Netherlands, which requires permission by that organisation. To obtain permission from Statistics Netherlands, interested parties should contact the following e-mail address: microdata@cbs.nl.
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
1. Introduction
While economists often consider social disparities in terms of poverty, the distribution of income and wealth, and intergenerational income mobility [1–4], sociologists tend to attribute a pivotal role to the occupational structure [5: 15–25, 67–71]. In the economic perspective the emphasis on financial inequality is related to the discipline’s traditional focus on the maximisation of material welfare and the fulfillment of individual needs or preferences [6, 7], the role of incentives and rent-seeking in the rational behaviour of economic actors [8–10], the institutionalisation of property rights in capitalist society [11], and the importance of material consumption as a signal of economic success and power [12, 13]. In sociology, on the other hand, neo-Weberian theory assumed the existence of a social hierarchy, based on ‘a set of principles […which] allocates positions to classes so as to capture the major dimensions of differentiation in labour markets and production units that are consequential for the distribution of life chances’ [14: 39]. This approach resulted in the identification of distinct occupational ‘Big Classes’–skilled and unskilled workers, the petty bourgeoisie, the service class etc.–associated with the late industrial era [15]; and, alternatively, in ‘gradualism’, in which a large number of occupations are ranked according to their prestige and socio-economic status [16–19].
For various reasons, both disciplines have witnessed a revival of the debate on inequality and social structure in recent years. In many advanced societies, income differentials have widened over the past few decades. These have been exacerbated by the global economic recession that began in 2007; and while pandemics tend to reduce income inequality, the effects of the COVID-19 period may be atypical [20–22]. Wealth inequality in general has increased dramatically since the 1980s, partly due to rising house prices and class-specific within-family transfers [23–25]. The growing number of people with extremely high incomes and fortunes is unlikely to reflect exceptional talent or achievement among the business elite. Economic deregulation, market concentration and new information technologies probably evoked ‘winner takes all’-mechanisms–very high marginal returns at the top–that were amplified by rent-seeking and cronyism. Under these conditions, the acquisition of exceptionally large sums of money may have come to depend not on merit, but on luck, self-serving behaviour, and access to influential persons and organisations [26–28].
In the labour markets of most advanced economies, the share of total employment accounted for by industrial production, agriculture, fishing and mining has declined over time. The service sector has grown, with a large increase in the number of well-paid managers, financial and technical specialists, and urban creatives. These higher professionals often work in high-tech companies, banks, media, advertising, universities etc. [29, 30]. At the bottom of the labour market more people became employed in low-skilled jobs in fast food, hospitality, cleaning, transport, care etc. Such jobs partly cater to the needs of the new professionals (e.g. parcel and meal deliveries, tourism, childcare, hairdressing, dry cleaning, Uber taxis). They tend to be poorly paid, and offer little in terms of job security and other working conditions: psychological stress is high, autonomy is limited, and there are few opportunities for skills development, personal growth, and upward mobility. Some authors therefore equate their growth with the emergence of a post-industrial service proletariat or new ‘precariat’, in which migrant workers, youth and women are over-represented [31–34].
Moreover, in many societies, a significant proportion of the adult population is out of work nowadays, and dependent on various social security schemes that only partionally reflect their former occupational status [35, 36]. According to De Swaan the modern welfare state introduced new categories into the class structure, such as pensioners, welfare clients and other benefit recipients [37]. Since the 1980s, these groups have typically experienced a decline in social protection due to austerity measures and the marketisation of social security [38–40]. The inequality debate has also been fuelled by demographic transitions: migration processes, population ageing and declining fertility. Traditional breadwinner and three-generation households became less common, while the share of single persons, one-parent families and dual-earner households increased [41]. Finally, recent technological innovations–social media, internet-based platforms, artificial intelligence, robotics–may have changed labour demand and the occupational structure [42–45]. Emerging technologies can also alter the distribution of life chances by redefining how people should think, look and behave [46, 47], and by providing companies and governments with extensive opportunities to monitor workers, consumers and citizens [48, 49].
This contribution explores whether these developments have crystallised into a new post-industrial class structure. After an overview of potentially emergent forms of inequality, several empirical analyses are presented for the Netherlands, which is an interesting test case for several reasons (see section 3.3). First, we assess whether the Dutch population is divided into social classes based on individual resource disparities. We then consider whether such a class structure is connected with other forms of social distinction (such as a person’s age, occupational class, gender and ethnic background) and with differences in well-being, personal values and conceptions of society.
2. New forms of inequality
The developments discussed in the previous section may have affected the contemporary social hierarchy; and indeed the literature suggests various new forms of segmentation. Some of these relate to changes in the classic dimensions of inequality in economics and sociology: new disparities in wealth, income and the occupational structure. Other authors, however, argue that certain new dimensions have become crucial to the contemporary allocation of social positions. These concern cognitive stratification; individual life styles and identities; attractiveness; health inequalities; and multidimensional capital disparities.
2.1. Emerging disparities in wealth, income and the occupational structure
Some economists emphasise that since the 1980s financial assets have become increasingly important for the distribution of life chances. In their view, a path towards a polarised class structure based on wealth is materializing, with a sharp distinction between a small group of very rich people at the top and the rest of the population. Piketty regards the higher growth rate of financial capital (relative to economic output and wages) as the main factor driving this process, combined with a decline in fiscal redistribution and the opportunity to transfer private fortunes largely intact across generations [50]. Stiglitz attributes it to a lack of regulation of market imperfections: information asymmetry, the formation of cartels and oligopolies, and price fixing. In his view, this is driven by a preference among mainstream economists and policy makers for non-intervention by the state; a concentration of economic power in the hands of the wealthiest top-1%; and the interconnectedness of the economic and political elites, as evidenced by lobbying, party funding, and job-hopping between politics and the private sector [51, 52].
Others, largely for the same reasons, refer to growing income differentials in recent decades, with a burgeoning group of very high earners, middle incomes falling behind and the number of ‘working poor’ on the rise [53–55]. Mian et al. note that in the USA, more income inequality translated into higher savings at the top and lower interest rates. According to these authors, this implies that growing income and wealth disparities have become mutually reinforcing to a greater extent than before [56]. Wilkinson and Pickett suggest that high income inequality is at the root of a plethora of social issues [57]: health problems and low life expectancy, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, low social cohesion, violence and imprisonment. They attribute this to the increased status competition and the ensuing social anxiety resulting from large income differentials, and some empirical support for this mechanism has been found [58].
With regard to the labour market, recent economic literature suggests a trend towards job polarisation based on routine-biased technological change [59–63]. In this line of reasoning, jobs in the middle segment often consist of repetitive and standardised tasks (e.g. accounting), and their routine nature makes them susceptible to replacement by digital technology. Higher occupations, on the other hand, are typically non-routine and cognitive; and here ‘computerisation’ tends to increase productivity and rewards, leading to higher incomes. In non-routine jobs at the bottom of the labour market, such as cleaning, this type of technology presumably plays a limited role. The resulting occupational polarisation, reinforced by the trend towards offshore production [64], is seen as the main driver of growing income inequality. Fernández-Macías and Hurley, however, found that job polarisation is not a universal trend across European countries, attributing this to the complex interaction of technological change with diverging institutional and cultural contexts [65].
Sørensen emphasised the impact of institutional change on labour market positions and the distribution of earned incomes [66, 67]. He postulated that the decline in trade union membership and collective bargaining in liberalised economies [68] made wages more dependent on individual productivity and personal endowments. This would lead to greater inequality of earnings within occupational groups, and thereby erode traditional divisions between Big Classes; yet Williams found no evidence of this trend in the British case [69].
Grusky and his colleagues proposed an alternative approach of social stratification–in addition to Big Classes and gradualism–through ‘micro-classes’ [70–72]. These typically consist of more than 100 specific job categories (e.g. medical doctors, lawyers, actors, artists, politicians, carpenters, mechanics, truck drivers). Micro-classes are likely to be socially closed from one generation to the next because parents provide their offspring with job-related resources: occupation-specific skills (such as acting or carpentry), cultures and tastes (the aspiration to become a medical doctor), and networks that have been developed through parental interactions in the workplace. They may also pass on occupational assets to their children, such as the family business or farm. Processes of ‘occupational reproduction’ could therefore be the main mechanism underlying low intergenerational mobility [73]. However, occupational micro-classes predict people’s lifestyles and socio-political attitudes better than their educational attainment, income and wealth [71]. In addition, Erikson et al. found that ‘inheritance’ through micro-classes explained less intergenerational mobility than did Big Class distinctions, and was less common among women than among men [74].
2.2. From meritocratic narrative to cognitive stratification
Modernisation theory presumed that, in complex industrial societies, the allocation of social positions through ascribed characteristics (parental status, kinship ties, gender, ethnic background) was no longer efficient [75–77]. It therefore had to give way to selection based on personal qualities (intelligence, talent, effort, motivation) and achievements (educational attainment, skills, knowledge and experience). The shift towards such a meritocratic allocation process was facilitated by the expansion of the education system, the rise of objective assessment procedures–elaborate testing of pupils and students, human resource management–and, supposedly, by a decline in labour market discrimination, patronage and nepotism. As a result, intergenerational mobility should increase over time, and the direct link between people’s social origin and their educational and occupational position would necessarily become weaker [78]. Any remaining inequalities in educational attainment, occupational status, income, wealth and other social outcomes would ultimately reflect differences in talents and achievements, and could therefore be considered fair and legitimate [79].
While popular belief in meritocracy remains widespread, particularly in unequal societies [80], this meritocratic narrative has been challenged in the literature. Empirically, the ascription of social positions by ethnic background and gender has not been eradicated, especially in the labour market [81, 82]. Absolute intergenerational mobility has tended to evolve as expected: over time, children have generally attained higher levels of education and employment than their ancestors [83, 84]. However, the relative position of parents and children within their own cohorts–taking into account educational expansion and changes in labour supply and demand–appears to have remained fairly stable. In this sense, society has not become more open [85–87]. Over the life course, the occupational level of the father has become less relevant for children’s educational attainment and occupational careers, as predicted by modernisation theory. The overall effect of parental education, on the other hand, has changed little. There has been a general decline in its impact on their offspring’s primary school achievement, but an increase in its effects on secondary and tertiary education [88].
Sandel argues that educational grades nowadays determine labour market opportunities and life chances [89], and Murray points to their impact on people’s wealth and the values to which they subscribe, such as work ethic and honesty [90]. From their perspective, ‘cognitive stratification’–a social hierarchy based on cognitive ability and educational attainment–has over time become an inevitable consequence of meritocratic selection and educational expansion, as predicted by Young [91]. Cognitive stratification could be driven by various factors. These include the selection of a cognitive elite by the education system through high school fees, entrance tests, honours programmes and elite colleges; the pooling of resources and genetic (dis)advantages through educational homogamy; and the differential investment of highly and low-educated parents in the school career and cultural capital of their offspring, e.g. through private tutoring, studying abroad and distinctive leisure activities [92–96].
2.3. Liquidity and the decline of social class: individual life styles and identities
Postmodernist theory claims that social classes have become less recognisable in recent decades. This is thought to result from a condition of reflexive or liquid modernity in contemporary societies [97–102]. As economic, social and technological systems became interconnected on a global scale, new risks emerged that were difficult to predict or control: nuclear threats, climate change, pandemics, the outsourcing of economic production, the growth of transnational corporate power, etc. This created anxieties and reflexive doubts about the ability of states, institutions and experts to manage such risks, even in societies that by traditional standards offer a high degree of social protection [103, 104]. Under these circumstances people’s lives also became more liquid. On the labour market they experienced an increase in flexible, temporary and low-quality employment and greater income volatility. Social relations became more fragmented and unstable, as the classic heterosexual breadwinner family gave way to a variety of other household types that could fluctuate over the life course: being single, one-parent and combined families, co-residents, and same-sex cohabition and marriage. In conjunction with increasing spatial mobility, this brought about a decline in social cohesion at the community level. It has therefore become more important to construct individual life styles and identities, particularly through consumptive behaviour and, more recently, social media presence. In this line of reasoning, life chances no longer depend on one’s origins or merits, but on personal choices in liquid conditions. It is postulated that, as a result, traditional distinctions of social class–both in terms of structural positions and in the ideas that people hold–are gradually dissolving, and individual dynamics now prevail. Bauman takes the most radical position on the liquefaction of modern society [105]. In his view, social status has come to depend on consumption patterns, with the main social distinction being between those with affluent and cosmopolitan life styles, and those who aspire to the same but cannot afford it. Bauman’s approach, however, has been criticised for its wide-ranging theoretical assumptions and limited empirical substantiation. It neglects the possibility that traditional social structures may persist at a deeper level [106–108]. In addition, processes of ‘re-embedding’ may occur, where new distinctions emerge reflecting differences in socio-economic position, ethnic background and power relations under liquid societal conditions [109: 656–659].
2.4. Attractiveness and aestheticisation
Rubenstein noted that “in twentieth-century American society, physical beauty emerged as a resource, like wealth or talent” [110: 212]. A meta-analysis of more than 900 psychological studies found that attractiveness is related to children’s and adults’ treatment (e.g., attention and help received), behaviour (e.g. social skills, adjustment), and various social outcomes (e.g., popularity, health, sexual partners, occupational success) [111]. This is supported by the substantial economic literature demonstrating the existence of a ‘beauty premium’ in the labour market, and career and earnings penalties for plain-looking and unattractive persons [112–120]. This line of research tends to consider an individual’s height, weight and facial symmetry as the key beauty traits that influence their occupational and financial position.
Kanazawa and Still suggest three underlying mechanisms [121]: discrimination on the basis of appearance by employers, co-workers, or customers; self-selection of attractive people, who choose labour market sectors where they can marketise their beauty; and the use of individual variety in attractiveness as a proxy indicator of someone’s health and productivity. In sociology, Simmel already pointed out that different styles of dress reflect diverging class positions and serve the dual purpose of conforming to social standards and emphasising one’s individuality [122]. The more recent sociological literature views attractiveness as a status cue that affects patterns of interaction [123], and has introduced the notion of aesthetic capital: “traits of beauty that are perceived as assets capable of yielding privilege, opportunity and wealth” [124: 566]. The sociological approach points not only to labour market and income differences related to beauty. On top of that, aesthetic capital is relevant to friendship relations, partner selection and the willingness of others to offer help [125–133]. Moreover, here the demarcation of attractiveness goes beyond the face and body shape. It also refers to other physical characteristics (skin colour, muscularity, smell, tone of voice, the condition of one’s teeth, wrinkles, scars, disfigurement), various aspects of grooming (such as clothing, shoes, hairstyle, make-up, jewellery, piercings, tattoos), erotic appeal and psychological traits like charm, likeability and salesmanship [134–139].
Several authors have argued that a process of ‘aestheticisation’ is taking place in contemporary societies [140–142]. Following the postmodernist line of reasoning discussed above, this could be due to the liquefaction of traditional class criteria, making people’s appearance more important in signalling their identity, social position and aspirations. From an economic point of view, aestheticisation could be driven by the dominant consumer culture [143] and by the growing size and influence–partly through advertising–of aesthetic producers in capitalist societies: the multinational fashion and beauty industries, elective cosmetic surgery clinics, fitness schools, spas, massage parlours, hair and nail salons, diet, wellness and mindfulness course providers, etc. [144–146]. Furthermore, many professions now require ‘aesthetic labour’ [142, 147]. Public display of the ‘right’ looks, attitudes and behaviours is essential for employment in hospitality and retail, finance and law, television and social media, and politics [148–151]. Technological developments (mobile phones and other forms of digital connectivity) have made it important to be ‘camera-ready’ at all times, and may have contributed to a global standardisation of certain normative body types. Widdows suggests that a young, firm, smooth and thin physique has become an almost universal moral ideal [152]. A counter-movement challenging the objectification of the (female) physique and advocating ‘body positivity’ does not seem to have had much impact yet [153–155]. In aestheticised societies, attractiveness and ugliness are likely to be constitutive elements of the class structure.
2.5. Health and inequality
Over time and across nations, there is a consistent and well-documented link between socio-economic status and health: people with less education, lower jobs and limited income generally live shorter and have a higher prevalence of disease and disability [156, 157]. In the literature, this is often attributed to social causation [158–162]. Those at the bottom of society have less favourable circumstances: they are more exposed to environmental health risks (substandard housing, air pollution, hazardous working conditions), have less access to adequate health care, are less able to maintain a healthy life style and experience more chronic stress [163]. As a result, they end up with more medical problems than those in higher positions, and a socio-economic health gradient emerges. Others, however, argue that health differences generate social inequalities: people’s physical and mental condition can have a major impact on their life chances [164–168]. According to this selection hypothesis, individuals with serious medical issues will generally find it more difficult than healthy persons to achieve higher levels of education, to have successful careers, and to become high earners. This is because disabled men and women tend to need care and facilities that may not be available, and their impediments do not always allow them to study or work full-time. In addition, organisations can be less inclined to hire or promote unhealthy persons, and more likely to dismiss them. Employers may assume that they are less productive and more prone to sickness absenteeism than healthy workers; that they require a lot of counselling; that they increase the administrative burden; or that they do not fit into the work process or corporate culture [169–172]. From this perspective, people’s physical and mental state is a key determinant of their social position.
Empirical evidence on the mechanisms of social causation and health selection is mixed, but recent systematic reviews suggest that both processes play a role. Which one dominates depends on the life stages and aspects of socio-economic status being studied [173, 174]. Theoretically this calls for a reconceptualisation in which health is recognised as a distinct element in the generation of social disparities [157, 175]. This can build on the earlier work in health economics, where a person’s mental and physical condition is seen as a resource [176–179] linked to other forms of capital [180–183]. Health should then preferably be analysed from a life course perspective that assumes a “dynamic interplay between different social determinants and health statuses, where the relationship can be ‘causal’ during one phase and ‘selective’ during the next” [184: 619].
2.6. Multidimensional capital disparities
Recent sociological research suggests that a complex layered social structure has evolved, based on different types of resources [185–187]. It argues that analysing hierarchy in complex societies requires “a concept of class which does not reduce it to a technical measure of a single variable and which recognises how multiple axes of inequality can crystallise as social classes” [188: 1011]. Inspired by the work of Bourdieu [189–191], these studies start from the assumption that social classes are not merely economic phenomena, but are also subtly related to selection processes that operate through cultural distinctions and social networks. In theory, economic disparities need not coincide with cultural and social resources: differences in occupational status, income or wealth may even be inversely related to certain group-specific cultural practices and network characteristics [191: 21]. A multidimensional approach could therefore identify a finer-grained and more meaningful structure than schemes based purely on people’s income, wealth or occupational status. Classes would then be characterised by divergent combinations of economic, cultural and social capital stocks.
From a latent profile analysis of indicators of these three types of resources, Savage et al. conclude that there are currently seven social classes in the United Kingdom [185]: the elite (6% of the population), the established middle class (25%), the technical middle class (6%), the new affluent workers (15%), the traditional working class (14%), the emergent service workers (19%) and the precariat (15%). Sheppard and Biddle used the same methodology for Australia, which is often regarded as a more egalitarian society than the UK, with a more comprehensive ‘Antipodean’ welfare state [187, 192, 193]. Nevertheless, they found a similar class structure, albeit with slightly different group proportions, and the new affluent workers and the emergent service workers ending up in a single class. For Croatia, which offers a quite different historical and institutional context, Doolan & Tonković examined the distribution of economic, social and cultural capital through multiple correspondence analysis and identified six resource classes. The least resourceful group consists of older people (mostly women) with primary education and inadequate state pensions [194].
3. Materials and methods
3.1. Conceptualisation of four types of capital
Following Savage et al. and Friedman and Laurison [188, 195], we assume that current forms of social inequality reflect not only differences in economic resources, but also in people’s compatibility with certain contexts (cultural capital), and in the help they can obtain from others (social capital). To this we add person capital, which refers to an individual’s health and attractiveness. By including ‘how people fit in’, ‘who they know’ and ‘who they are’ in the theoretical framework, we aim to measure multidimensional social inequality in line with the debates outlined in the previous section.
Economic capital
The first type of resource we distinguish is economic capital. This theoretically consists of one’s educational attainment and professional skills, labour market position, and income and wealth. The distribution of these resources may reflect traditional forms of economic inequality (disparities in labour market positions and income, meritocratic allocation), but also more recent manifestations, such as growing wealth differences and cognitive stratification. It should be noted that we regard educational attainment primarily as an economic resource, because it signifies the knowledge, skills and labour market qualifications people have acquired. This is in line with Becker’s human capital theory [196]. Educational inequalities may subsequently translate into different levels of income, wealth, health, social relations and cultural capital. In our approach these resources should be measured directly, and their contingency with the level of education is an empirical matter. We therefore do not share Bourdieu’s assumption that educational attainment is by definition a form of ‘institutionalised cultural capital’. Formal education can theoretically reproduce the existing social order by installing class-specific forms of cultural capital in its students. But this is not inevitable: modern education systems often have explicit tasks relating to talent development and the provision of equal opportunities for all [197], and these can generate upward social mobility.
Cultural capital
A second type of resource is cultural capital, i.e. collective predispositions, expressive behaviours and attributes that mark social positions. It can take three forms: language and communication (a person’s accent, dialect or vocabulary; the ability to speak foreign languages; digital literacy); tastes, preferences and cultural knowledge (e.g. attending and appreciating classical concerts or theatre productions); and symbolic attributes (reputation and celebrity, formal titles and honours). This largely builds on the work of Bourdieu. Theoretically, however, this type of resource is not confined to the predispositions, behaviours and attributes of ‘high’ culture, but also includes emerging forms, such as preferences for alternative music styles, cultural omnivorism, and ecologically responsible life styles [198–204]. That tallies with Dressler’s notion of cultural consonance, which refers to people’s ability to live up to the valued aspects of a certain domain in their society [205]. Cultural capital can thus be context-specific: it may depend on the circles in which individuals move and the circumstances in which they find themselves. In particular, the possession of the right kind of cultural capital can be crucial for attaining higher social positions. Elites and the upper-middle classes may achieve social closure by using it as a screening device [206–208]. Newcomers, on the other hand, can eliminate themselves because their lack of cultural capital may lead them to stay out of the higher circles of society, to question the social mores prevailing there, or to avoid ‘risky’ career choices [195].
Social capital
Social capital consists of the resources that are embedded in the relationships individuals have with others. It refers to one’s position in social networks, and the size and quality of those networks. Network assets can relate to financial and material support: contacts who are able and willing to provide money, time, goods and services. They can also consist of the provision of information (e.g. about suitable marriage candidates or job openings), influence (e.g. a connection who has a say in hiring decisions), or social credentials (someone who can vouch for you). Further resources others can provide are emotional support–trusted friends and family who offer their sympathy, understanding and solidarity–and the recognition of a person’s identity and group membership [209, 210]. We take an ego-centred approach here: social capital is something that an individual can possess, rather than a characteristic of neighbourhoods, religious groups, the civil society, regions, or entire nations [211]. An extensive sociological literature indicates that this type of resource plays an important role in the social hierarchy [190, 212–221]. People at the top and at the bottom of society tend to differ in the size and quality of their networks. Those at the top may be well-connected from the outset because of the acquaintances that children gain from their families. Building on these and other resources, this may translate in later life into a greater ability to invest in their social relationships, to access and mobilise social capital when needed, and to generate returns on their contacts with others (e.g. in terms of educational attainment, occupational careers, income and well-being). Homophily and opportunity hoarding may also be responsible for structural differences in resources. People tend to associate with others who have similar backgrounds and life styles, and powerful networks may seek to monopolise resources and deny access to others [222–224].
Person capital
Person capital comprises the (dis)advantages of an individual’s bodily and mental state, and this concept may allow us to capture some of the more recent distinctions of post-industrial societies. Our conceptualisation builds in part on the work of Bourdieu, who saw ‘embodied’ capital as a specific cultural resource. He referred to physical or mental dispositions that people acquire and develop in response to their social background [190]. In health economics, this is sometimes referred to as psychophysical capital [225]. However, our notion of person capital also harks back to Pareto’s somewhat neglected proposition that life chances depend on social competition based on individual heterogeneity [226], and not exclusively on group characteristics: ‘Whether certain theorists like it or not, the fact is that human society is not a homogeneous thing, that individuals are physically, morally, and intellectually different’ [227: 1419]. This leads us to consider person capital as an independent theoretical dimension of social inequality: two young individuals with similar economic, cultural and social resources may end up quite differently in life if one is chronically ill or unattractive and the other is not. We divide it into three subtypes: physical capital (bodily health and abilities), mental capital (psychological health and abilities) and aesthetic capital (individual traits that are attractive to others, such as beauty; the right attitudes and behaviours). The distribution of such characteristics may reflect people’s past and present circumstances, but can also be rooted in genetic differences between individuals [228–230]. Person capital may be generic (a healthy person is usually in an advantageous position) or context-specific (e.g. different dress codes apply in nightlife and during a job interview for a managerial position). The inclusion of person capital as a separate dimension reflects the growing literature on health inequalities, attractiveness and the aestheticisation of society. It may also be informative in relation to postmodernist theory on the individualisation of life styles, e.g. through personal branding and digital identities. If the liquefaction hypothesis discussed earlier is correct, hyper-individualisation should occur and we would not expect to find a clear class structure.
Multidimensional correspondence of capital
Our starting point is that social classes can be thought of as groups with distinct mixes of the four types of capital. These theoretically determine the life chances of their members, are typically linked to the historical division of power and interests, and may be associated with different worldviews (ideologies, values, social norms, policy preferences). The multiple correspondence of the four types of resources implies that two classes can have similar stocks of total capital, but still be meaningfully different due to its composition. This would be the case, for example, if both have abundant social and cultural capital, but one social class has far more income and wealth, while the other is much healthier and more attractive. Whether or not ‘classical’ resource dimensions (income, wealth, education, occupation) dominate the multidimensional structure is an empirical issue. This may vary with the societal context (e.g. different welfare regimes and policy trends, the cycle of economic booms and busts). Rather than assuming a stable predetermination of social positions based on one’s initial educational achievements and subsequent place in the occupational hierarchy–with other resources mostly embedded in this socio-economic status–we regard the (sub)varieties of capital as dynamically interrelated. Resources can therefore (dis)accumulate over time–but not necessarily in a linear fashion, or in the same way for each type of capital or social class. In addition, the relative impact of the four types of capital on an individual’s opportunities can vary over the life course. It is conceivable that educational achievements, knowing the right persons and attractiveness are decisive for starting a career or finding a partner among younger adults, whereas physical health and the size and quality of networks offering informal care can become crucial as people grow old. This implies that individuals not necessarily belong to the same resource class throughout their lives. Finally, the notion of ‘capital’ implies that different types of resources are convertible into each other. This would for instance occur if affluent classes consistently spend more money on cultural activities, maintaining social networks, and the well-being and appearance of themselves and their children. The resulting advantage in non-economic resources may subsequently translate into higher earnings and wealth (or less financial depletion in bad times), thus perpetuating the economic privileges of these social classes [190, 231–236].
3.2. Research questions
Using data from the ‘Disparities in the Netherlands’ project, we attempt to assess the nature of the contemporary class structure and its associated characteristics in an affluent Western society. Our first research question is whether, on the basis of group differences in the four types of capital, contemporary Dutch society is divided into social classes.We consider class structuration to be more pervasive when the number of classes is small (low fragmentation); when their members consistently possess divergent and interpretable combinations of different types of capital (high multiple correspondence); and when the resource disparities between higher and lower classes are large (wide scope) and do not change over time (stability). A division into two groups, whose members are resourceful or not across the board, and where the resource differences between the upper and lower classes remain stable over the years and from one generation to the next, is therefore sharper than a volatile configuration of six groups with partly overlapping resources and limited capital differences between the two extremes.
If there are social classes based on resource disparities, they may be related to other forms of inequality. In general, we should a priori expect traditionally vulnerable groups to have fewer resources and the privileged to have more. Social divisions in terms of age, labour market characteristics, gender, ethnic background, household composition and religion may then turn out to be (partly) class issues. Drawing on the traditional materialist argument that objective social positions are an important determinant of political behaviour [237], the class structure and related forms of inequality might also translate into diverging voting patterns. On the other hand, it is conceivable that the multidimensional nature of our resource approach and the intersectionality of other forms of inequality [238, 239] will lead to rather complicated empirical links and subtle conclusions. Our second research question is therefore open and exploratory: To what extent do resource-based class differences coincide with other social distinctions (age, labour relations, ethnic background, gender, religion, household composition, voting intention)?
The social classes of the late industrial era were closely linked to specific world views. These were partly socialised through group-based organisations (trade unions, political parties, religious pillars), which ensured, for example, that the working class was also a cultural community. According to Grusky and Hill such ‘ideological work’ has largely disappeared, as its traditional agents have become less powerful, and shifted their attention from class-based action to issue politics and the provision of tangible benefits to their members [79: 2]. This would lead us to expect that the relationship between class positions and people’s subjective experiences has become rather weak today. On the other hand, several recent developments may have counteracted this. The decline of economic security and industrial employment sometimes disrupted local communities (e.g. in the American ‘Rust Belt’), which possibly shows in varying degrees of societal pessimism and political discontent [90, 240–242]. In addition, the growth of social media has opened up new channels of communication and socialisation, and has been instrumental, for example, in the polarisation and culture wars between Democratic and Republican elites and partisan voters in the USA, and between Brexiteers and Remainers in the UK [243–249]. Similar issues are also raised in the Dutch public debate [250–253]. Through such recent trajectories class distinctions might still coincide with divergent perceptions. It is therefore worth exploring whether the contemporary class structure is linked to subjective ideas and experiences: how people view society and politics; their sense of belonging; their trust in others; their satisfaction with life and whether they feel able to make ends meet; and what they value and pursue. This leads to our third research question: To what extent do resource-based class differences correspond to divergent socio-political views, subjective well-being and personal values?
3.3. The Netherlands as a test case
The Netherlands is an interesting test case for investigating new forms of inequality for a number of reasons (see also S1 Text). Many of the drivers theoretically associated with postmodern social disparities are present. Over time, the service sector has grown and new labour market distinctions have emerged, partly as a result of the increasing number of people without full-time permanent contracts. The population shares of pensioners and benefit recipients are considerable. The country has a globalised and digitally advanced coordinated market economy that combines prosperity with large wealth inequalities and growing in-work poverty. Various demographic changes have occurred and are continuing (ageing and migration processes), and the degree of de-traditionalisation (educational expansion, secularisation, gender equality, progressive ethics) is high. In addition, the extensive institutional regime and the fragmented, yet ultimately collaborative, political system provide a different context than in Anglo-Saxon countries, which may also affect the social hierarchy: the contemporary class structure in the Netherlands, or the size of certain classes, may not be the same as in the United Kingdom, Australia or the USA.
3.4. Data
The survey ‘Disparities in the Netherlands’ (known by its Dutch acronym ViN’14) was conducted in 2014 among 2,952 Dutch citizens aged 18 and over. It was based on a new stratified random sample that was drawn by Statistics Netherlands (CBS) from the national population register. To ensure adequate representation of high and low income groups, members of the bottom and top deciles of the standardised disposable household income distribution (and within the latter, individuals from the top 1%) were oversampled. Potential respondents were personally invited by letter to participate in a survey on what Dutch society looks like (e.g. differences between young and old, healthy and unhealthy persons, and people with high and low levels of education). The online and written versions of the questionnaire were pre-tested for clarity and consistency through ten cognitive interviews with a test group that was heterogeneous in terms of gender, age, education level and income. A mixed mode data collection process was used, with 56% of respondents completing the questionnaire online (using a personal code) and the remainder opting for the written version. The fieldwork was conducted by I&O Research and, after using various incentives (gift vouchers, a prize draw for a number of iPads) and numerous written and telephone reminders, achieved a response rate of 43% [254]. Some population groups were by definition not represented in the survey, such as homeless persons without a postal address, and we do not have information on the participation of individuals with low literacy or who do not speak Dutch. Compared with the original sample, migrants and young people are slightly under-represented in the response group (a deviation of -0.2 to -0.6 percentage points). ViN’14 was weighted by CBS in terms of gender, age, ethnic origin, family composition, level of education and degree of urbanisation. The weights also correct for the oversampling of respondents at the top and bottom of the income distribution. Post hoc the survey data were anonymously linked to CBS microdata (2011–2014) covering all Dutch citizens, based on the population register and information from the tax and benefit authorities. This made it possible to add variables on income, wealth, age, gender, household type and ethnic origin. Data collection was carried out in accordance with the legal and ethical codes to which Statistics Netherlands, SCP and I&O Research are bound.
ViN’14 includes indicators for most aspects of the four variants of capital that are the subject of the first research question (see Table 1; detailed descriptions of the survey items are provided in S2 Text). For economic capital, these are educational attainment, current labour market position, disposable household income, liquid household assets and home equity. Regarding cultural capital, tastes and preferences are captured by a life style scale in the Bourdieusian tradition: did the respondent go on a holiday abroad in the past year, dined in a restaurant costing more than 100 euros per person, and visited forms of ‘high’ culture such as classical concerts, theatres, art galleries and museums? There are two indicators for ‘language and communication’. We consider proficiency in English as an indicator of the Dutch people’s familiarity with the hypercentral language of global business, science and culture [255, 256]. A self-assessment of English proficiency is available in the survey. This was based on the classification of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and condensed into five categories. Digital literacy is a nascent form of cultural resources; in his later work, Bourdieu saw it as an element of ‘technical capital’, a specific sub-type [257–259]. These skills were determined at a basic level using a scale derived from three questionnaire items: are respondents able to use a word processor, to install a computer program and set up security on their PC? ViN’14 does not contain information on the symbolic aspects of cultural capital (reputation, titles and awards).
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In terms of social capital, the survey measures the frequency of contact with the inner circle of family, friends and neighbours. This indicates a person’s strong ties: important others with whom one is emotionally connected through birth, affinity or physical proximity, and who are often considered to be more homogeneous in their resources than a person’s out-group [260]. In addition, the survey allows us to assess the size of the core discussion network [261–263], through a measure of the number of people with whom personal matters can be discussed.
Finally, respondents were asked whether they personally knew individuals with great influence or substantial resources in various domains, a simplified version of the ‘position generator’ [264–266]. We assessed their access to five higher positions: a mayor or member of parliament; a doctor or lawyer; a company director with at least ten employees; a high-ranking civil servant (e.g. municipal secretary or director of a ministry); and a professional musician, artist or writer.
The physical aspect of person capital was gauged by asking about the repondents’ ability to climb stairs and their subjective health. These are common indicators of impairment in performing basic activities of daily living (ADL) and of people’s general health status [267–269]. The survey measured mental capital using validated items on self-confidence, self-image and depression [270–272]. For aesthetic capital, respondents were asked to rate their own appearance and how they thought others would view them. These two generic questions were newly developed for the ‘Disparities in the Netherlands’ survey; they were phrased in a cautious and neutral way, avoiding words such as ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness’ [273]. The questionnaire also asked people about their height and weight. This was used to calculate their Body Mass Index, which is linked to physical and mental health as well as attractiveness [274–278]. BMI has therefore been treated as a separate hybrid indicator of person capital. We consider all capital indicators to be causal-formative measures: they do not reflect an underlying resource concept, but ‘produce’ the forms of capital. Respondents’ scores on the various measures may correspond, but it is also possible that the indicators capture different resource aspects and therefore show only weak or even negative correlations [279–281].
To examine our second research question, which concerns the relationship of resource disparities and other forms of inequality, we used administrative data from Statistics Netherlands on age, gender, household composition and ethnic background. Labour relations, religion and voting preferences were measured through the questionnaire.
With regard to the third research question, ViN’14 contains several indicators of how people perceive the world (how they view society, the groups they identify with, their trust in others), what they value and strive for, and their well-being (cf. S2 Text). The respondents’ subjective social location was assessed using a standard instrument in which they are asked to position themselves on a ladder running from the bottom to the top of society [282, 283]. The questionnaire recorded whether respondents perceived friction between eight pairs of antagonistic groups, such as rich vs. poor, young vs. old, etc. This was derived from similar questions posed earlier in the International Social Survey Programme [237, 282], and resulted in a reliable social friction scale. Societal optimism versus pessimism was measured through the question ‘Do you think things in the Netherlands are generally going in the right or wrong direction?’ [241]. A scale of contentment on social issues [284] was based on items relating to the deficiency of social protection; aversion to cultural differences between natives and migrants; feelings of political abandonment; appraisal of the Dutch power elite; and opposition to further EU integration. Social identification theoretically may occur because people are in similar circumstances, share certain convictions, or emotionally care about the social status of a group [285–287]. In the questionnaire ‘Disparities in the Netherlands’, respondents were asked to what extent they felt themselves to belong to groups that tend to have a great deal of certain types of capital. Exploratory analyses resulted in two scales. The first measures identification with rich, influential and highly educated people, the second identification with young, native Dutch and attractive people. The statement ‘Most people can be trusted’ was used to operationalise trust in others. With respect to personal values, ViN’14 included eight items from the Portrait Values Questionnaire [288–290]; these were condensed into three subscales. In terms of well-being, the survey contained a single-item measure of the respondent’s satisfaction with life and a common question about their ability to make ends meet [291, 292].
3.5. Statistical methods
Our first research question was investigated by conducting a latent class analysis (LCA) of the variables listed in Table 1, using the Mplus software package. This technique identifies a limited number of discrete latent classes from observed variables and has several advantages over traditional approaches, such as hierarchical or k-means clustering [293–296]. It is model-based and takes measurement error and missing values into account. In addition, the LCA approach is not deterministic: for each case the probability of belonging to the different latent classes is calculated, rather than assigning it to a particular latent class. Finally, LCA provides a formal statistical test of the optimal number of latent classes, based on empirical fit measures. Unlike Savage et al. in their analysis of the British class structure, we employ LCA rather than latent profile analysis because not all of our indicators are continuous (cf. Table 1). In the estimation procedure, the capital indicators were treated as ordered categorical variables [185, 297].
To answer our second and third research questions, we employ nonlinear principal components analysis (nPCA), as available in SPSS 29.0’s CatPCA procedure. The method can be regarded as a variant of multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and classical PCA [298–301]. It identifies the main underlying components of the multivariate association between variables and depicts their categories in low-dimensional space. This is achieved through a process of optimal quantification, in which categories are assigned numerical values in such a way as to maximise the variance accounted for by the transformed variables. The vaf-measure indicates the amount of information retained in the limited number of dimensions [302, 303]. Categories that frequently co-occur among respondents are positioned close together in low-dimensional space. If they rarely do, they are placed far apart. This is also the case within variables: if certain scaled categories of a given variable are close together, their members will have similar profiles on the remaining variables, whereas if they are far apart, these patterns will diverge considerably. In MCA, each category can be positioned anywhere in space (multiple nominal scaling); nPCA allows us to impose additional restrictions, e.g. that categories should be quantified on a straight line. When all the variables are treated as numerical (interval or ratio level), the results are the same as those obtained by classical PCA.
4. Results
The three research questions raised earlier are addressed in separate subsections below. First, we present our findings on the contemporary class structure in the Netherlands; then, its empirical links with other social distinctions; and finally, its relationship with socio-political views, subjective well-being, and personal values.
4.1. Capital groups in the Netherlands
In the LCA procedure, the Bayesian Information Criterion attains its lowest value when six latent classes are specified (see S1 Table). This model had a good entropy and allowed a sociologically meaningful interpretation. According to the Akaike Information Criterion, a specification with seven classes would also be possible. However, this measure is less suitable for large-N studies such as ours and is more susceptible to overfitting to a specific sample, which could make it harder to replicate outcomes [304]; and a seven-class analysis did not produce any additional substantive insights. Fig 1 shows the results of the LCA with six latent classes: their share in the population, the score of each latent class on the four types of capital, and their total capital. All capital scores were normalised with linear aggregation on scales running from zero to one [305, 306]. The multidimensional nature of the analysis implies that different groups may score quite similarly on a particular type of resource or on total capital. The fact that they end up in different latent classes reflects diverging combinations on the 15 underlying indicators (see the scores listed as S2A Table). The six groups are discussed in more detail below.
All capital scores are on a scale running from zero to one eco = economic capital; cul = cultural capital; soc = social capital; per = person capital.
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The established upper echelon
Those in latent class 1 have a lot of each of the capital variants and therefore the most total capital (0.71 on a scale from zero to one). Their level of education is high, and they are at the top in terms of disposable income and liquid assets. They generally own their homes and often have substantial equity in these houses. As a corollary, these people enjoy the most luxurious life styles and come second on the other aspects of cultural capital (digital literacy and English language skills). Their social and instrumental networks are large, they have the highest level of mental capital, and only one capital group scores better on physical health, attractiveness and body mass index. This latent class can be characterised as the established upper echelon; it comprises 15.5% of the adult population. Of the top 1% of the standardised income distribution, 91% belong to this group. On the other hand, this class also contains quite a number of persons with slightly lower incomes who score highly on other forms of economic and non-economic capital. The first latent class seems too large to regard the entire group as a ‘power elite’ [307]. The survey, however, does not allow us to assess how many members of the established upper echelon hold top positions in large corporations, politics and public administration.
The privileged younger people
A second group also has a high level of total capital (0.64), but turns out to be much younger on average. These privileged younger people have fewer economic resources than the established upper echelon: although they are highly educated and tend to be in work, their income and liquid assets are still limited. They often rent their homes; if they own it they have little or negative equity. On the other forms of capital, privileged younger people are well-off. In terms of person capital they score best on BMI, physical health and aesthetic resources, although they lag somewhat on mental health. They have the largest network to discuss personal matters with, but are less likely to know persons in influential professions than the established upper echelon, and they also have slightly fewer contacts with family, friends and neighbours. The cultural capital of this group includes the best ICT skills and command of English, and they rank second in life style indicators. Privileged younger people make up 12.7% of the adult population.
The employed middle echelon
The third latent class is by far the largest group (26.9%) and has a total capital score of 0.59. Its economic resources exceed those of the privileged younger people. Almost all members of this group are in waged employment and it ranks second in terms of disposable income, reflecting the very high share of dual earners (with children) among them. They are also well educated, but generally less so than the established upper echelon and privileged younger people. Their liquid assets, however, are limited, and they often live in owner-occupied housing with little or negative equity. Cultural and person capital is fairly average, although they score quite high on digital skills, and rather low on aesthetic capital. On social capital this ‘employed middle echelon’ lags behind, particularly because they know few individuals with influential occupations.
The comfortable retirees
The fourth latent class lies just above the middle of the total capital scale (0.51). They have less economic capital than the employed middle echelon, but more than privileged younger people. This group includes many pensioners and early retirees. On average, they have lower levels of education, but fairly good incomes, substantial liquid assets and high levels of equity in their homes (often bought at a good time and now largely mortgage-free). While these comfortable retirees have rather luxurious life styles, their cultural capital is reduced by their limited digital skills and poor command of English. Their core discussion network is smaller than that of the previous three groups and, like the employed middle echelon, their acquaintance with individuals in influential positions is limited. With regard to person capital there are deficits in physical health, but this group scores rather well in terms of mental and aesthetic resources.
The insecure workers
The fifth latent class is further down the scale of total capital (0.43). It has meagre economic resources, as a result of low income, indebtedness and scarce liquid assets. They have a weak position in the labour market: the employed have the highest share of temporary contracts, and many are jobless. The members of this group mostly live in rented accommodation; homeowners are few and often in negative equity. In terms of education, however, they do not rank particularly low. The same applies to their cultural capital: a less luxurious life style is partly compensated for by their digital skills and proficiency in English, which exceed those of the comfortable retirees. Their social capital is not extremely low either, but person capital lags behind the four higher-ranked groups, particularly on mental and aesthetic resources, where they occupy the lowest position. Given the combination of an uncertain labour market position, low self-confidence, poor self-image and high levels of depression, the term ‘insecure workers’ describes this class, which makes up 13.5% of the population over the age of eighteen.
The precariat
The final latent class is the mirror image of the established upper echelon. Its members have few resources of any kind, and their total capital is therefore very modest (0.30). They have a low level of education and limited income, living mainly on benefits or a modest pension. These people are generally in debt or have low levels of liquid assets, and it is rare for them to own their homes. Their life styles are the least luxurious of all the capital groups, they have very few digital skills and show the poorest command of English. They also come last in all forms of social capital, most notably so in their almost complete lack of access to persons in positions of influence. Physically, they are the least healthy and often overweight. Due to their general lack of recources, this group can be described as the precariat, in line with Savage et al. [185]. They account for 14.8% of the adult Dutch population.
A social class structure
In this analysis, we have identified six capital groups that can be ranked according to their total resources. Each group has a distinctive mix of the four types of capital. We have previously argued that class antagonisms are theoretically more pervasive when there is less fragmentation, more multiple correspondence, greater scope and more stability over time. Using these criteria, we may conclude that the nature of the resource disparities between the six groups indicates a clear social class structure. Although our results do not show a simple juxtaposition of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, the number of groups is smaller than in traditional class schemes, such as the widely used later version of the Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero typology or Wright’s neo-Marxist classification, which contain eleven and twelve classes respectively [308, 309]. It corresponds to the degree of fragmentation of the Gilbert-Kahl model, which divides modern US society into six social classes based on people’s education, occupation and income [310, 311]. The consistency in the positions on the four types of capital is also fairly high: the entropy of the latent class model is 0.76, indicating substantial multiple correspondence (cf. S1 Table). The difference in total capital between the established upper echelon and the precariat covers more than 40% of the underlying scale, so the scope between the top and bottom groups is considerable. Social distance is also evident in the patterns of residential separation of the capital groups (see S3 Text). As our data are cross-sectional, we do not know whether the respondents are in the same resource class as their parents or remain so over the life course, and we cannot assess the stability criterion in detail. However, the information we do possess suggests that the picture may be consistent over time. In the six classes we find limited educational and occupational mobility between generations, while educational homogamy is substantial. This is particularly evident in the two extreme classes, the established upper echelon and the precariat (cf. S4 Text).
4.2. Social classes and other distinctions
Nonlinear PCA was conducted in order to assess how the six social classes are related to other social distinctions. These pertain to a number of demographic variables (age, ethnic background, gender, household composition); and whether or not people are religious (including non-Christian faiths and non-practising believers). We also take into account their voting intentions, on the materialist assumption that these will be a function of their objective social position. For labour relations we consider two variables. The first indicates whether employees had a permanent or a temporary contract. The large number of missing observations, resulting from self-employed and inactive persons, have been scaled passively and do not affect the quantifications. Furthermore, we include the Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero typology in the analysis. This will allow us to explore the similarities and differences between our contemporary class structure and a common division into ‘Big Classes’, which reflect the authority and market position of occupational groups in late industrial society. To the eleven EGP classes we add a category for those who have never had paid work, such as certain housewives and early disabled persons. For pensioners and benefit recipients, the last known type of work was used to determine their EGP class. The occupational status of students could often not be established; these cases were handled as missing.
All variables were treated as active in nPCA, as we are interested in the multivariate contingency with the class structure in low-dimensional space. Single spline-nominal scaling was used for age, occupational class, ethnic origin, religiosity and gender; the remaining variables were treated as multiple-nominal. This specification of the analysis levels implies that if the scaled categories retain their original order, it is due to empirical associations in our dataset.
In a preliminary analysis with oblimin rotation, a very low correlation was found between the first two axes (r = 0.019). We therefore opted for orthogonal varimax rotation, which allows a more straightforward interpretation of the outcomes. Cronbach’s α is rather high (0.80); in nPCA this measure indicates the global fit of the solution [312: 56]. The two dimensions jointly account for 38.9% of the total variance, and are almost equally important (vaf DI = 2.8; DII = 2.2). Adding further dimensions does not lead to new substantive insights. Without the constraint that five variables should be scaled on a single vector through the origin, the total variance accounted for would not be much higher (3.6 instead of 3.5). This implies that the categories of these characteristics are already almost on a straight line when a more lenient multiple-nominal scaling level would be specified. Bootstrapping with 1000 random samples shows that the eigenvalues obtained are within the 95% confidence intervals, and that the variance accounted for by each of the variables differs very little from their bootstrap mean (maximum deviation = 0.009).
Interpretation of the dimensions
The first dimension of Fig 2 reflects in particular distinctions by age and capital group, with contributions to the variance accounted for of 0.87 and 0.73 respectively. These age/capital differences are related to the presence of minor children in the household (vaf = 0.40), voting intentions and the type of labour contract (vaf = 0.30–0.31), and being religious or not (vaf = 0.15). Distinctions by gender, occupational class and ethnic origin hardly matter here (vaf = 0.00–0.02). The dominant age variable shows contrasts between those over sixty-five (rather extreme positive scores on the horizontal axis), a middle-aged group (slightly above the mean score of zero), and those below fifty (negative scores that are closely scaled). The six classes are ranked according to their mean age. Privileged younger people, the employed middle echelon and the insecure workers are comparatively young (mean = 35–40 years) and therefore have negative scores, while the older precariat and the comfortable retirees (mean = 63–66 years) end up at the positive side. The established upper echelon (mean = 49 years) falls in the middle. Respondents in households without minor children are generally older, as are employees with a permanent labour contract and religious persons. By voting intention, there is a stark contrast between the older electorates of the Christian Democrats (CDA) and the Elderly Party (50+), and the on average younger supporters of the Green Left plus the Social Liberals (GL, D66).
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The substantial number of swing voters and non-voters were also comparatively young. The clustering on the positive side of the horizontal axis indicates that a comparatively large share of the comfortable retirees intended to vote for CDA or 50+ (combined with limited support for GL, and few non-voters and don’t knows). This dimension can be referred to as age-based capital disparities and related factors, including differences in voting patterns by age.
The vertical axis shows contrasts between more and less resourceful capital groups (vaf = 0.66), which partly coincide with different occupational classes (vaf = 0.47). These dominant variables are combined with class-related differences in voting intention and ethnic origin (vaf = 0.33–0.35); and to a lesser extent with contrasts in household type (having or not having a partner), type of contract, and gender (vaf = 0.11–0.18). Age and religion are of little importance (vaf = 0.00–0.01). The ordering of our six classes is rather similar to the group differences in total capital in Fig 1, although the privileged younger people are below the employed middle echelon and the comfortable retirees. It partly corresponds with the EGP occupational class ranking; and native Dutch, couples, employees on a permanent contract and men generally reach higher positions than their counterparts. These categories therefore tend to belong to the higher classes in terms of capital and occupation, to be relatively uncommon in the lower ones, or both. With regard to voting intentions, a positive score—indicating an overrepresentation of resourceful groups, higher EGP classes, native Dutch etc.—is obtained by supporters of the Conservative Liberals (VVD), followed at some distance by those backing the Christian Democrats, Green-Left and the Social Liberals (CDA/GL/D66). Non-voters scored lowest. Respondents who supported parties that focused on the economic interests of disadvantaged and non-working persons in 2014—the Labour, Socialist, Elderly and Freedom parties (PvdA/SP/50plus/PVV)—also ended up on the negative side, as did people who had not yet decided how to vote. A remarkably homogeneous cluster can be seen at the top of Fig 2. Membership of the established upper echelon often coincides with belonging to the occupational class of higher controllers and intending to vote for the Conservative Liberals. That particular combination comprises 13% of the most resourceful social class, and 2% of the entire sample. Three-quarters of these upper-class VVD supporters are men, and hardly any of them have a non-Western ethnic background. Altogether, this dimension may be regarded as a summary measure of the general social hierarchy, and its translation into voting preferences.
The age basis of resource disparities
On the first dimension there is a strong correlation between age and capital group (r = 0.66). This contingency is partly driven by the age distributions of the comfortable retirees and the precariat, who attain the highest scores (see S1 Fig). Individuals over sixty-five are strongly overrepresented in these capital groups, while young persons are rare. The precariat includes the largest share of people over seventy-five, but the comfortable retirees are on average the oldest. This is due to their larger contingent in the 65–74 age bracket and fewer people under fifty. Privileged younger people, the insecure workers and the employed middle echelon also contribute substantially to the high correlation. These classes contain hardly any members over sixty-five. In addition, the majority of the privileged younger people are under thirty-five, while the 50–64 age bracket is underrepresented among them, resulting in the lowest mean age. The most common age category of the employed middle echelon and the insecure workers (35–49) is higher, but here the younger age groups are also overrepresented. In the employed middle echelon, this reflects a strong presence of young adults who have not yet left the parental home: 14% of this capital group consists of co-residing children aged eighteen to twenty-four. Members of the established upper echelon are mostly in the two age categories in the middle. People below thirty-five are underrepresented in this class. While it includes a fair share of sixty-five- to seventy-four-years-olds, the highest age category is almost empty.
On the horizontal axis of Fig 2, the correlations of the social class structure with household composition, the type of labour contract, voting intention and religion (r = 0.03–0.30) are generally weaker than the correlations of age with these variables (r = 0.13–0.45); and all these contingencies are by no means perfect. The mean values of the six capital groups on the transformed variables (see S3 Table) show that their position on this dimension is mainly determined by their age composition. However, the negative score of the privileged younger people is amplified by the fact that they are often non-religious and intend to vote for parties with a young following. The same reinforcement applies to the employed middle echelon, but their position also reflects the large share of couples with minor children. Among the insecure workers, household composition likewise pushes the score down. The extreme position of the comfortable retirees and the precariat reflects, in addition to a large share of elderly persons, a higher level of religiosity and the absence of minor children. In the case of the comfortable retirees, their positive score is compounded by age-related voting intentions.
The strong link we find between age and the resources of the six capital groups may reflect the impact of historical events on various age groups (cohort effects) or processes of capital (dis)accumulation over individual life courses (ageing effects). Since we have only one point in time, by definition we will not find any period effects. Empirically, many resources show a rather steady downward trend: for nine indicators, capital decreases with age (see S5 Text). This is partly offset by the fact that other resources (liquid assets, housing wealth, mental health) tend to increase with age, or continue to do so until retirement age (household income, the life style score). On balance, total capital tends to decline somewhat as people get older. This suggests a complex relationship between resource levels, cohort membership and ageing over the life course.
Capital groups, occupational class and other forms of hierarchy
On the vertical axis of Fig 2, the correlation of capital groups with occupational class (0.50 for all respondents, 0.48 for those currently employed) is substantial, but weaker than their association with age on the horizontal one. Several occupational classes are not ranked as assumed in the EGP typology, and the concentrations in the six capital groups are not entirely consistent (see S6 Text). This suggests that the resource differences between the six capital groups cannot be reduced to the occupation-based Big Classes of the industrial era. In contemporary Dutch society, the EGP class scheme does not fully capture the impact of non-occupational forms of capital on the distribution of life chances.
The correlations of ethnic origin, presence of children, type of labour contract and voting intention with the capital group are not particularly strong (0.18–0.33), although they mostly exceed those with the EGP typology (0.08–0.28). For gender, however, the association with occupational class predominates (cf. S10). Thus, these hierarchical distinctions also partially coincide with the social class structure.
The ranking of the six capital groups on the vertical axis reflects their scoring pattern on all other variables (cf. S3 Table). The established upper echelon occupies the top position due to a comparatively large share of higher occupations, few persons of non-Western ethnic origin, often having a partner, and an inclination to vote for conservative or social-liberal parties. Insecure workers and the precariat end up on the other side owing to a large share of people with low jobs or no work experience, and an overrepresentation of non-Western migrants–although they are not a majority even in the two groups with the least capital. The low position of these capital groups is reinforced by the fact that a disproportionate number of people do not have a partner, do not intend to vote, and are on temporary contracts. The privileged younger people are second best in terms of occupational class, but their score on the vertical dimension of Fig 2 is depressed by a relatively high share of non-Western migrants, and by the fact that they often are single and on temporary contracts. The opposite occurs among the employed middle echelon and the comfortable retirees: their scores are boosted by the fact that they are mostly of native origin and relatively often have a partner, and because the employees among them tend to have a permanent contract. Consequently, despite their rather average scores on occupational class, these two capital groups end up higher than the privileged younger people.
Structural class disparities coincide with other forms of social hierarchy and age differences
In response to our second research question, we found that the structural class differences identified in the previous section go hand in hand with other distinctions that span two main dimensions. On one dimension, characteristics emerge that mirror the general social hierarchy in contemporary Dutch society. Resource disparities between higher and lower social classes coincide to some extent with differences by (former) occupation, ethnic origin, type of employment contract, and gender. This also translates into voting intentions that reflect the present social hierarchy. The other main dimension shows differences between age groups. These reflect a complicated relationship between resource levels, cohort membership, and ageing during the life course. Several other age-related differences (the presence of minor children in the household; working on a temporary contract; being religious; age-related voting) also appear on this axis.
4.3. Socio-political views, well-being and values in the class structure
To answer the third research question, we conducted yet another nonlinear PCA. This aimed to examine the extent to which social classes differ on seven aspects of socio-political views: the location people assign to themselves on the social ladder; the social frictions they perceive; two forms of self-identification with social groups; (lack of) optimism about Dutch society; (dis)contentment with specific social issues; and trust in others. We also included two indicators of well-being: people’s satisfaction with life and their ability to make ends meet. Finally, we examined the extent to which our respondents endorsed the personal values of self-enhancement and hedonism; two weaker Schwartz scales (cf. S2) were discarded. All these variables were already ranked in their original format and were therefore treated as spline-ordinal in nPCA. As in the previous section, the analysis level of the capital group variable was set to multiple-nominal. Missing values were passively scaled and therefore do not affect the outcomes.
We present a solution with two unrotated dimensions; the differences between the six classes are well interpretable on the original principal components. Cronbach’s alpha is high (0.88), and the two dimensions jointly account for 44.4% of the variance. The first dimension is much more important than the second (vaf DI = 3.7; DII = 1.6), and no insights are gained by adding a third dimension. The total variance accounted for is not much reduced (4.9 instead of 5.1) by the constraint that ten of the eleven variables must lie on a straight line through the origin, while maintaining the order of their categories. Bootstrapping (1000 random samples) shows that the eigenvalues are within the 95% confidence intervals. Moreover, for each individual variable, the vaf is hardly different from the bootstrap mean: the maximum deviation is 0.04.
Interpretation of the dimensions
For the sake of comparability with the graph in the previous section, the two axes of Fig 3 have been inverted. All variables contribute to the first dimension (shown vertically), with component loadings generally between 0.53 and 0.66, but lower for identification with young/attractive/Dutch people (0.43) and the self-enhancement/hedonism scale (0.29).
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296443.g003
The social class variable reaches the highest vaf on the vertical axis. The six capital groups are ranked according to their total resources, with a fairly large gap between the precariat plus precarious workers and the four higher social classes. This reflects the fact that many subjective variables were already ordered by resource levels before scaling. For subjective location on the social ladder, societal optimism, social friction, contentment on social issues and identification with rich/influential/highly educated people, the differences in the mean scores correspond to the ranking of classes by total capital in Fig 1. On the other variables, the maximum deviation is one position. A one-way ANOVA with post hoc contrasts shows that on most indicators, the precariat and the insecure workers form a homogeneous cluster with scores well below the mean. This accounts for the large distance between these two classes and the other four. All in all, the first principal component can be characterised as a general measure of the subjective class hierarchy relating to socio-political views, well-being and personal values.
The contrasts that remain on the second principal component (shown horizontally) are limited. These are mainly driven by differences in self-identification and personal values, with component loadings ranging from 0.47 to 0.61; and by social class, with the second highest vaf. On the horizontal axis of Fig 3 we see a contrast between privileged younger people and insecure workers on the one hand, and comfortable retirees on the other. This occurs because the two younger capital groups identify more strongly with the young/attractive/Dutch and value self-enhancement and hedonism more than their resources would suggest. In addition, comfortable retirees identify less with the rich, influential and powerful than their total capital may lead one to expect. The second dimension thus measures certain non-hierarchical differences in self-identification and personal values. It is worth noting that the six capital groups are not clearly ranked by their average age, as was the case on the horizontal dimension of Fig 2. The employed middle echelon is quite distant from the two other social classes that contain few over-50s; and the elderly precariat has a much lower score than the comfortable retirees.
Profiles and correlations by social class
On average, members of the established upper echelon place themselves highest in society, see the least social friction, are most contented on social issues, identify most strongly with the rich/influential/highly educated, and are most optimistic about society. They are also the happiest with their own lives, have the fewest problems making ends meet and trust others the most. The established upper echelon comes second in terms of identification with the young/attractive/Dutch and the values of self-enhancement and hedonism. On these variables, privileged younger people achieve the highest mean score. Otherwise this capital group are second—except for the ability to make ends meet, where they end up below the employed middle echelon. That social class is usually in third place. Their experience of doing well financially is partly offset by the fact that they trust other people less than the comfortable retirees. This older capital group typically ranks fourth on socio-political views and well-being, but fifth on the two identification variables and the personal values to which they adhere. Insecure workers often occupy fifth place, but not on identification with the young/attractive/Dutch and on the value they place on self-enhancement/hedonism (fourth)–although here too they score below the general mean. On the downside, insecure workers report the lowest ability to make ends meet, have the least trust in others, and the greatest dissatisfaction with their own lives. The pattern observed among the precariat is the mirror image of the established upper class: they score much lower than average in every respect. Members of this capital group position themselves at the bottom of society, experience the most social friction, identify least with advantaged groups, are the most pessimistic about the direction of Dutch society, and are the most discontented with social issues. They also place the least value on self-enhancement and hedonism. On the three remaining characteristics, the precariat comes fifth, slightly above the insecure workers.
These patterns yield substantial correlations with social class structure for five variables: subjective location, contentment on social issues, life satisfaction, making ends meet, and identification with the rich, influential and highly educated (r = 0.33–0.44). The associations with the four remaining characteristics are somewhat weaker (r = 0.19–0.28). An additional analysis examined the links with the objective disparities from the previous section (cf. S7 Text). This revealed, among other things, that subjective experiences are more strongly associated with the six capital groups than with the EGP occupational classes, age and the ‘age-based capital disparities’ dimension. Correlations with social class are higher or equal to those with the ‘general social hierarchy’ dimension, depending on the subjective characteristics considered.
Structural class disparities are linked to socio-political views, well-being and personal values
Regarding our third research question, we observed a consistent relationship between the contemporary class structure and the subjective ideas and experiences of the respondents. The ranking of the six social classes in terms of resources is clearly reflected in differences in socio-political views, well-being and certain value orientations. When classes have few resources, they hold more negative views about politics, society and their own position in it. Furthermore, they are less committed to the values of ‘self-enhancement’ and ‘hedonism’ than classes with a lot of resources, while their well-being is lower. These findings indicate that disparities in the four types of capital are connected to social cohesion problems. Views on the role of government and the common good may differ considerably between classes; and some capital groups are likely to seek social closure at the expense of others. It is also important to recognise that people’s subjective ideas and experiences are more closely related to the contemporary resource-based class structure than to traditional occupational distinctions or age.
5. Conclusions and discussion
The key findings of this study imply an affirmative answer to the three research questions posed in section 3.2. Through a dedicated survey on people’s economic, social, cultural and person capital, linked to national register data, we first examined the Dutch class structure in 2014. Using latent class analysis (LCA), we identified six groups. The established upper echelon (15.5% of the adult population) has the most capital, followed by the privileged younger people (12.7%), the employed middle echelon (26.9%) and the comfortable retirees (16.6%). Total capital is lowest among the insecure workers (13.5%) and the precariat (14.8%). Each group has a distinct mix of the four types of resources. We consider this to be a pervasive class structure because the division into capital groups fulfils certain theoretical conditions: limited fragmentation, substantial multiple correspondence, and a large scope between the top and bottom classes.
Secondly, we found that this structure is connected to other hierarchical distinctions in contemporary Dutch society, based on occupation, ethnic origin, type of employment contract and gender. In addition, each class has a specific age profile. The privileged younger people have the largest share of persons under the age of thirty-five. Insecure workers and the employed middle echelon are slightly older on average, but mostly under fifty. The established upper echelon has a large contingent of 50–64 year olds, while the comfortable retirees and the precariat are mainly made up of older persons. This class-age nexus reflects the importance of cohort membership and ageing processes in the evolution of resources. It is echoed in other age-related social class differences (having minor children or a permanent contract, being religious). The voting intentions of the six classes vary according to their position in the social hierarchy and their mean age.
Finally, we observed a consistent relationship between the contemporary class structure and people’s subjective ideas and experiences. The ranking of six social classes in terms of total resources clearly recurs in our respondents’ socio-political views, well-being and certain value orientations. Classes with little capital generally rate politics, society and their own social position more negatively. They also value self-enhancement and hedonism less than today’s upper classes, and report lower levels of well-being. This suggests that multidimensional resource differences between classes are intertwined with issues of social cohesion.
Theoretical considerations
From a theoretical point of view (cf. section 2), our findings demonstrate the added value of a multidimensional capital approach. As in a previous British study, it leads to the identification of a new and complex layered structure. Like these authors, we find two extreme groups where capital (dis)accumulates across the board, with in between ‘a patchwork of several other classes, all of which have their own distinctive mixes of capital’ [186:53]. Yet the number of classes in the Netherlands is smaller (six rather than seven), and the capital groups are not entirely comparable. This may reflect a real divergence between the Dutch and British class structures, possibly related to institutional differences (see S1 Text). It could also be due to our introduction of health and attractiveness as a fourth type of capital, and our more comprehensive measurement of economic, social and cultural resources. Finally, differences in data sampling and sources may have played a role. Our respondents were selected at random rather than by quota or convenience sampling; and the income and wealth indicators are based on reliable official registers instead of self-reports.
Through our analysis we still found distinct social classes, but these are different from the occupation-based Big Classes of the late industrial era (such as the Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero typology, cf. section 4.2). Our six-class hierarchy does not preclude the existence of micro-classes that are reproduced from one generation to the next; but to assess their relevance within the post-industrial class structure, the various generic and job-related resources of small occupational groups should be measured directly and comprehensively. More generally, it is of theoretical significance that the class disparities identified here are partly due to differences in economic resources; however, the divergent positions in the contemporary Dutch class structure cannot be reduced to financial inequality or traditional classifications of socio-economic status. For example, privileged younger people have a lot of capital in many respects, which gives them a relatively high position in society and favourable life chances; yet their income and wealth are limited for the time being. Economic resources are not irrelevant, but they are interconnected with the other three forms of capital–and these may be decisive for the emergence and evolution of post-industrial class divisions.
Our capital approach sheds some light on the emerging inequalities we discussed in chapter 2. The fact that 28% of the Dutch population has few resources is consistent with notions of the existence of a post-industrial service proletariat, and of benefit recipients and pensioners as constituent elements of the class structure. On the other hand, there is no clear evidence of a polarisation that has squeezed out middle class workers: the employed middle echelon is by far the largest capital group. It is also worth noting that we did not find a distinct class of ‘one-percenters’: individuals whose vast financial resources allow them to shape the organisation of society to their liking. Perhaps this phenomenon is less pronounced in the Netherlands than elsewhere, or perhaps the group is too small and diverse to be captured in our LCA: one per cent of the sample is only 30 respondents. However, it is also possible that this economic power elite is in fact a much smaller group (e.g. the five hundred wealthiest or politically most influential persons, representing merely 0.004% of the adult Dutch population), or that some of them reside elsewhere. Finally, the wealthy elite might not be very different from the slightly less affluent in terms of certain non-financial resources (such as educational attainment or health). Be that as it may, our study indicates that the class structure in the Netherlands encompasses more than a simple division between the top one per cent and the rest of the population.
As for cognitive stratification, we do not have data on our repondents’ intelligence and specific cognitive skills (such as information processing, perception, memory), but only on their level of education. The lower the social class, the lower this is, with one exception: insecure workers were on average slightly more educated than comfortable retirees (see S2A Table). The correlation between educational attainment and total capital is substantial but not perfect (r = 0.60), nor is it the only strong link with people’s combined resources (S2B Table). If there is cognitive stratification, one would expect a tight connection between education and all the other types of resources. Yet the correlations with personal and social capital are not pronounced (r = 0.24, 0.36), and at the indicator level, we only find strong links of educational attainment with digital and English skills (r = 0.47, 0.56). This leads us to conclude that there is an educational gradient in people’s resources, but that we cannot equate class dispari
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Confirmed Aircraft at The Royal International Air Tattoo
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At RIAT 2025 we will deliver an eclectic mix of aircraft on both flying and static displays, focusing on our various themes, details of which can be found on the 2025 Themes page.
This aircraft participation list will be updated each Thursday, once written confirmation has been received from the aircraft operator. All aircraft participation at the Royal International Air Tattoo is subject to operational commitments, technical issues, crew availability, weather conditions and other factors.
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The ultimate F
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Introduction
The Royal Netherlands Air Force purchased a total of 213 F-16A/B aircraft. The Netherlands were one of the four European Participating Air Forces, and one of 5 countries to build the F-16 locally. Force reductions saw the fleet reduced to 68 aircraft, all of them upgraded to MLU standard. Some surplus aircraft have been sold to Jordan and Chile.
Inventory
Initial Order
The Netherlands was one of the four initial European NATO customers for the F-16, along with Belgium, Denmark, and Norway. The initial Dutch order for F-16A/B aircraft was for 102 examples (80 single-seat F-16A's and 22 two-seat F-16B's), which were to be assembled at Fokker. This line first opened up for business in April of 1978, and was the second of the European F-16 final assembly lines to open, SABCA in Belgium being the first. The first Dutch built F-16 took off on its maiden flight on May 3rd, 1979, with test pilot Henk Temmen at the controls. Initial delivery of the F-16A/B to the KLu took place in June of 1979.
Follow-On Order
In March of 1980, the Netherlands announced plans (finally approved by the Dutch Parliament in December 1983) to buy an additional 111 aircraft (97 F-16A's and 14 F-16B's). This brought the total F-16 inventory to 213 aircraft, 177 A models and 36 B models. The last F-16 rolled off the line at Fokker's Schiphol plant on February 27th, 1992. It was #J-021 (#89-0021), and was the last of 213 examples delivered to the KLu.
Fleet Reduction
In 2003, the Dutch government decided to cut the F-16 force by 25%. From 2004 onwards, The Netherlands will provide 108 F-16s to NATO, with 90 being available for operational deployments. As many as 36 F-16s would be sold; however, increased attrition losses might reduce this number.
On November 21st, 2005 Jordan signed a LOI to buy three Dutch F-16s, all two-seaters. These aircraft #J-650, #J-653 and #J-654 will be delivered in 2009. All these F-16s have been modified with the MLU upgrade. ANother 3 two-seaters were added to the order in 2007.
In December of 2005 the Chilean government signed a contract with the Netherlands to supply it with up to 18 Dutch F-16s (11 Alpha models and 7 Bravo models). These will form a new squadron aside the newly delivered block 50 F-16s. Another lot was ordered in May of 2008 for delivery in 2010. These 18 F-16s are all A-models and will equip another Chilean squadron.
RNLAF Inventory Program Model Block Qty. Serials Delivered Initial Order F-16A block 1 12 J-212/J-223 1979-1980 F-16B Block 1 6 J-259/J-264 1979-1980 F-16A block 5 14 J-224/J-237 1980-1981 F-16B Block 5 2 J-265/J-266 1980-1981 F-16A block 10 20 J-238/J-257 1981-1982 F-16B Block 10 5 J-267/J-271 1981-1982 F-16A Block 15 34 J-258
J-616/J-648 1982-1984 F-16B Block 15 9 J-649/J-657 1982-1984 Follow-On Order F-16A Block 15 50 J-864/J-881
J-192/J-207
J-358/J-367
J-135/J-140 1984-1987 F-16B Block 15 9 J-882
J-884/J-885
J-208/J-211
J-368/J-369 1984-1987 F-16A block 15OCU 47 J-141/J-146
J-054/J-063
J-508/J-516
J-710
J-001/J-021 1987-1992 F-16B Block 15OCU 5 J-064/J-068 1988-1989
Modifications & Armament
Armament
In the interception role, KLu F-16s are equipped with AIM-9N, -9L, and -9M Sidewinder AAM's. AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles are used for longer-range interceptions. All F-16 units have Mk82/84 bombs and cluster weapons.
In 1997, the RNLAF awarded Hughes Missile Systems Company a contract for 36 AGM-65G missiles. During operations over former Yugoslavia, the RNLAF detachment in Italy leased AGM-65D missiles from the USAF, pending delivery of the AGM-65G.
312 squadron has a tactical nuclear commitment, carried out with US supplied nuclear weapons.
The RNlAF has also acquired LGBs (GBU-24, GBU-10, GBU-12, CBU-87), and will acquire AIM-9X and JDAM.
F-16(R) and Recce Pods
In 1983, F-16s from 306 sqn took over the Oldelft Orpheus camera pods which were previously carried by RF-104G Starfighters. The 306 sqn was selected since it was the RNlAF's designated recce unit. 18 F-16A's were modified to accomodate the Orpheus pod on the fuselage centerline station, and fitted with radar altimeter and a control box for the Oldelft Orpheus pod. Modified F-16s are designated F-16A(R). The F-16A(R) was first flown on January 27th, 1983. The Orpheus pod contains a camera and IR line-scanner equipment.
In 2002, 306 sqn lost its recce role, and replaced 313 sqn as the F-16 Theatre Operational Conversion unit. The recce role is now assigned to three frontline squadrons (311 sqn, 315 sqn, and 322 sqn). Since all MLUs are technically capable of carrying a recce pod, no modifications are required. The RNlAF now uses the Medium Altitude Reconnaissance System (MARS). MARS uses Reccon Optical cameras, mounted in a standard Per Udsen Modular Recconaissance pod. The first operational flight with the MARS pod was carried out on June 6th, 2000, by two F-16AMs of 315 Squadron (#J-136 and #J-145), although the pod was already inservice for testing purposes since 1997.
Mid-life Update
All operational F-16A/B's operated by the Netherlands went through the Mid-Life Update (MLU) by 2003. A Multinational Operational Test and Evaluation center for the F-16A/B Mid-Life Update was established at Leeuwarden air base during 1997. As part of continuing defense cuts, the number of KLu F-16s to undergo MLU was reduced from 170 to 138 in mid-1993.
Other
The Dutch Air Force has purchased a number of LANTIRN targeting systems, and has also agreed on the Joint Helmet-mounted Cueing System. The RNlAF has purchased 108 ALQ-131 pods for use on its F-16s. The ALQ-131 pods been upgrade to Block-2 configuration. In combination with the Lantirn targeting pod, 60 examples of the GEC/MARCONI navigation pods were acquired. However these are carried very rarely by Dutch F-16s. In 2006 an order was also placed for 8 Elbit Reccelite pods and Litening AT pods. These are to be delivered in 2008.
Operational Service
Units
Please refer to the F-16 Units section for an overview of units.
Deployments
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Post-1953
1950s
1953: Germany notified UNC Headquarters of its intent to set up a field hospital in South Korea to support UNC soldiers participating in the Korean War.
July 27, 1953: With the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement on July 27, 1953, UN Member States began a withdrawal of their combat and medical forces from the South Korea. By the end of 1956, military contingents from 17 nations had returned to their homelands. Sweden withdrew its medical support in May 1955, but had already sent military representatives to Korea to participate with Switzerland, Poland, and Czechoslovakia to form the Armistice-mandated Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission and its subordinate Neutral Nations Inspection Teams to supervise, observe, inspect, and investigate Armistice compliance.
October 1953: South Africa's air contingent departed South Korea.
November 1953: France's ground contingent departed South Korea. A small contingent of 50x personnel remained.
February 1954: Australia's troop contingent departed South Korea, but maintained a small accredited liaison group.
March 1954: New Zealand's naval contingent departed South Korea.
July 1954: Turkey's troop contingents departed South Korea; only a small accredited liaison group remained.
November 1954: New Zealand's ground contingent departed South Korea.
December 1954: Canada's ground troop contingent departed South Korea.
December 1954: Netherland's troop contingent departed South Korea.
1954-1959: The German medical support unit, consisting of 117 doctors, nurses, and technicians, operated as the West German Red Cross Hospital, treating 300,000 patients and assisting with over 6,000 births while stationed in Busan.
May 1955: Philippines' ground contingent departed South Korea; only a small accredited liaison group remained.
June 1955: BELUX Battalion (Belgium and Luxembourg) departed South Korea.
September 1955: Canada's naval contingent departed South Korea.
October 1955: Colombia's naval contingent departed South Korea.
December 1955: Greece's ground contingent departed South Korea.
June 1957: Canada's medical detachment departed South Korea; only a small accredited liaison group remained.
July 1, 1957: United States Forces Korea (USFK) was established with the mission of supporting UNC by providing trained and ready forces for the defense of South Korea.
July 1, 1957: Three bases were designated UN bases in Japan: Camp Zama, Yokosuka Naval Base, and Sasebo Naval Base.
1960s
June 1964: France's small contingent of 50 personnel departed South Korea.
January 1965: Ethiopia's troop contingent departed South Korea.
July 1966: Turkey's troop contingent departed South Korea.
October 28, 1969: Yokota Air Base, Japan was designated a UN base.
1970s
May 15, 1972: Three bases were designated UN bases: Kadena Air Base, Futenma Air Station, and White Beach Area (now White Beach Naval Base).
June 1972: Thailand's ground troops contingent departed South Korea.
1974: Thailand's air nursing teams departed South Korea.
June 1974: Thailand's air force contingent departed South Korea; only a small accredited liaison group remained.
November 15, 1974: On November 15, 1974, a United Nations Command Demilitarized Zone police patrol discovered a tunnel constructed by North Korea about 1,000 metres south-east of the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) marker number 0270. As the patrol started to investigate the tunnel, it was fired upon by a North Korean guard post across the MDL.
November 20, 1974: United Nations Command Demilitarized Zone police patrol re-investigated the discovered North Korean incursion tunnel. During the exploration of the tunnel, the North Korean People's Army (KPA) detonated an explosive device, killing U.S. Navy Commander Robert M. Ballinger and ROK Marine Corps Major Kim, Hah-chul. The explosion also wounded five Americans and one South Korean from United Nations Command.
Another and larger tunnel was detected at a depth "of about 50 metres and about 900 metres south of MDL marker number 0597" in late November 1974. (Source: Report on the Activities of The United Nations Command to The President of The United Nations Security Council, 31 October 1975, p.5.)
June 30, 1975: "As the 364th meeting of the Military Armistice Commission was coming to an end on 30 June 1975, North Korean press and North Korean military personnel committed an unprovoked attack on a United States military officer in the area adjacent to the Military Armistice Commission conference room. Even after he was rendered helpless and seriously injured, at least one North Korean soldier continued to kick him in an obvious attempt to kill or maim him." The officer was purportedly U.S. Army Major W. D. Henderson, and suffered a crushed larynx and was evacuated by helicopter. (Source: Report on the Activities of The United Nations Command to The President of The United Nations Security Council, 31 October 1975, p.6.)
August 18, 1976: Captain Arthur Bonifas and First Lieutenant Mark Barrett, who were part of a 15-man tree trimming team, were murdered by members of the Korean People’s Army in the Joint Security Area. North Korean leader, Kim Il Sung, delivered an apology.
September 22, 1976: A Korean War Monument in Busan was dedicated to the five countries (Denmark, India, Italy, Norway, and Sweden), who sent medical personnel and established medical centers to support UNC during the Korean War. A congratulatory speech was delivered by General Stillwell at the special event attended by Republic of Korea (ROK) Minister of Defense, Hon Suh and ambassadors from the five nations.
November 8, 1978: The Republic of Korea (ROK)-U.S. Combined Forces Command (CFC) was established as a bilateral warfighting command. Thus, CFC became responsible for the deterrence and preparations for the defense of South Korea. With the establishment of the CFC, UNC's role shifted to maintaining and enforcing the Armistice Agreement. As well as, serving as the coordinating headquarters for contributing and integrating multinational military forces in support of the combined forces of South Korea and the United States.
1980s
While the Philippines, Thailand and United Kingdom withdrew their combat forces, they retained small contingents to man the UNC Honor Guard, along with military contingents from South Korea and the U.S. In July 1993, United Kingdom fully withdrew its contingent. Today, the Philippines and Thailand join South Korea and the U.S. in continuing this important mission.
November 23, 1984: During a Korean People’s Army (KPA)/Chinese Volunteer Army (CPV) sponsored tour, a tourist from a KPA/CPV sponsored tour sprinted the length of the Military Armistice Commission (MAC) conference building crossing the Military Demarcation Line yelling to United Nations Commands (UNC) guards for help in English. A UNC guard ran with the tourist toward check point number four. In the ensuing melee, several KPA guards penetrated deep into UNC's portion of the Demilitarized Zone pursuing and shooting at the tourist and UNC security guard. Both sides exchanged gunfire, which resulted in the deaths of one UNC guard, ROK Army Corporal Jang, Myong-ki. and several KPA soldiers. One other UNC guard, U.S. Army Private Michael Burgoyne, was wounded. Approximately, 30 minutes later a cease fire was approved.
June 1985: American and Korean soldiers of United Nations Command Support Group-Joint Security Area (UNCSG-JSA), assisted farmers by transplanting rice shoots from nurseries to paddies in the village of Taeseong-dong located within the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Captain Epps, a native of Atlanta, Georgia, led a group of 80 ROK and U.S. officers and enlisted men planting rice in a 36,000 square foot paddy.
1986: France reestablished a small accredited liaison group in South Korea.
1987: Colombia reestablished a small accredited liaison group in South Korea.
February 1988: United Nations Command called the 441st Military Armistice Commission meeting on February 1988 to condemn a terrorist team from North Korea for the bombing of Korean Air Flight 858, which killed 115 passengers on November 29, 1987. The intent of the terrorist act was to undermine the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.
1990s
1991: UNC designated a ROK Military Officer as the Senior Member to the Military Armistice Commission (MAC); United Nations Command hands over primary responsibility for frontline Demilitarized Zone security to ROK military in all areas but the Joint Security Area; ROK and DPRK sign the Agreement on reconciliation, non-aggression, and exchanges and cooperation between South and North (known colloquially as the "Basic Agreement").
April 10, 1993: The Czech delegation departed the Korean Peninsula after the Korean People’s Army (KPA) and Chinese Volunteer Army (CPV) decided not to recognize the official successor of the Czechoslovakian delegation to the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC).
1993-1994: North Korean Nuclear Crisis.
May 6, 1994: Korean People’s Army (KPA) Military Armistice Commission (MAC) Secretary delivered a message to UNC stating the KPA had decided to recall all remaining KPA MAC members and staff personnel, would cease participation in MAC activities and would no longer recognize UNCMAC as a counterpart. The KPA also announced its intentions to withdraw the Polish Delegation to the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC).
September 1, 1994: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) announced it had decided to recall the Chinese Peoples Volunteer (CPV) Army delegation to the Military Armistice Commission following the example set earlier in the year by the Korean People’s Army (KPA) when it withdrew its delegation. The CPV delegation left the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) for PRC in September 1984.
July 8, 1994: Kim Jong Il becomes DPRK Head-of-State following Kim Il Sung's death.
April 1998: New Zealand reestablished a small accredited liaison group.
December 1998: Netherlands reestablished a small accredited liaison group.
June 1999: Belgium reestablished a small accredited liaison group in South Korea.
October 1999: Norway reestablished a small accredited liaison group in South Korea.
2000s
March 2000: Greece reestablished a small accredited liaison group in South Korea.
April 2000: Denmark reestablished a small accredited liaison group in South Korea.
July 2000: The North-South agreement to create transportation corridors between North and South Koreas was reached in July 2000. Transportation Corridor-West opened in 2003, followed by Transportation Corridor-East in 2004.
June 2003: Turkey reestablished a small accredited liaison group in South Korea.
2003-2007: Six-Party Talks (North Korea formally pulled out of the talks in 2009).
2010s
March 26, 2010: The South Korean corvette ship, Cheonan, of the 2nd Fleet, ROK Navy was sunk by a North Korean torpedo attack while conducting a normal mission in the vicinity of Baekryong Island. This attack resulted in the death of 46 out of 104 crew members, and 58 crew member survivors. Following the incident, the ROK Ministry of National Defense organized a civilian-military Joint Investigation Group (JIG) and commenced an investigation on the sinking of the Cheonan. The JIG consisted of 25 experts from 12 Korean civilian agencies, 22 military experts, 3 advisors recommended by the National Assembly, and 24 foreign experts from the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Sweden.
November 23, 2010: North Korea fired artillery at South Korea's Yeongpyeong Island in the West Sea. The artillery shelling destroyed dozens of homes and killed two South Korean marines, Staff Sergeant Seo, Jeong-wu and Lance Corporal Moon, Gwang-wuk. Two civilians, Kim, Chi-baek and Bae, Bok-chul were also killed and an additional 16 people were injured.
November 2010: South Africa reestablished a small accredited liaison group in South Korea.
December 17, 2011: Kim Jong Un becomes North Korea's Head-of-State following Kim Jong Il's death.
November 2013: Italy reestablished a small accredited liaison group in South Korea.
2015: United Nations Command Commander, General Curtis Scapparrotti, formally announced his vision for United Nations Command Revitalization (i.e. the continued internationalization of United Nations Command staff and separation of functions from CFC and USFK.
2016: North Korea conducted its fourth and fifth nuclear tests; U.S. & South Korea begin ramping up pressure via military shows-of-force and leading international community in imposition of new sanctions.
2017: Maximum Pressure Campaign begins in earnest; unprecedented levels of North Korea weapons testing (importantly, no provocations that result in loss of life from either side).
2018: South Korea designates Germany as one of the countries who provided medical aid in the aftermath of the Korean War.
2018: Series of summits contributed to diplomatic rapprochement, including the signing of the 2018 Panmunjom Declaration, the 2018 Singapore declaration, and the 2018 Comprehensive Military Agreement (CMA).
Canadian Lieutenant General Wayne Eyre becomes first-ever non-U.S. Deputy Commander of United Nations Command.
2019: North Korea withdraws from working-level initiatives after breakdown of talks at the Hanoi Summit; United Nations Command continues to support implementation of South Korea's Comprehensive Military Agreement (CMA) with North Korea through South Korea's Peace Zone Initiatives.
Evolution of UNC
United Nations Command carries on the legacy of the men and women of the twenty-two (22) countries who came to the aid of South Korea during the Korean War and in support of humanitarian efforts following the Armistice Agreement. The Command’s role evolved from a warfighting command to an international military organization charged with enforcing the Korean Armistice Agreement. Today, UNC consists of: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, the Republic of South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Republic of Korea, as the host nation.[1] UNC remains a visible reminder of the international community’s enduring commitment to preserving peace on the Korean Peninsula.
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https://www.transformationforums.com/in-conversation-with-commander-of-the-royal-netherlands-air-force-dennis-luyt-change-doesnt-happen-in-the-boardroom/
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en
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In conversation with Commander of the Royal Netherlands Air Force, Dennis Luyt: 'Change doesn't happen in the boardroom'
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2023-03-16T13:10:20+00:00
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This article is published in Dutch in the TF Magazine 2023-1, you can find it here. It has been translated using AI technology. ‘Change doesn’t happen in the boardroom’ In flight overalls, called “the pajamas” in the corridors, Dennis Luyt welcomes us to the Air Force tower in Breda. We speak to him in the […]
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https://www.transformationforums.com/wp-content/themes/transfor/public/favicon/favicon.ico
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Transformation Forums
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https://www.transformationforums.com/in-conversation-with-commander-of-the-royal-netherlands-air-force-dennis-luyt-change-doesnt-happen-in-the-boardroom/
|
This article is published in Dutch in the TF Magazine 2023-1, you can find it here. It has been translated using AI technology.
‘Change doesn’t happen in the boardroom’
In flight overalls, called “the pajamas” in the corridors, Dennis Luyt welcomes us to the Air Force tower in Breda. We speak to him in the middle of a period of conversion to state-of-the-art new equipment, but behind him, in a display case, the past is honored. For example, there is a bust of General Cornelis Jacobus Snijders, the booster of military aviation in the Netherlands at the beginning of the last century. Also hanging there is the Air Force banner with the cravats, a kind of pennants, on which the completed missions are listed. Luyt himself carried the banner during a ceremony on Veterans Day last summer. There, the king presented the cravate for deployment to Afghanistan. With Luyt having received functional age resignation as of April, this will now fall to his successor, André Steur.
The Air Force is in the midst of transformation. Almost all the equipment is being replaced. The F-16s are making way for F-35s, three of the four helicopter types are getting advanced successors, there will be new transport aircraft and the first unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, the Reaper, has been put into service. The organizational structure is also undergoing a shake-up. Not the ten air bases will soon form the hub of the organization, but four commands. ‘We are building a next-level air force based on fifth-generation weapon systems,’ Luyt summarizes the changes. ‘At the heart of it is that we no longer operate with a piece of iron with which to deliver a blow, but with smart digital equipment.’
‘A next-level air force is being built based on fifth-generation weapons’
These changes in equipment and organizational structure have profound implications for employees. For example, recruitment, selection and work in the Air Force are going to be done differently. That process is now in full swing.
How do you begin such a process?
‘By being clear. Telling what we are now, what we will be soon, and what the journey towards that looks like. We started doing that in 2017 by creating a roadmap together. We then defined thirteen building blocks, a nice lucky number. These include digitalization, a new HR policy and a different organizational model. When you’ve fixed all those building blocks, you’ve come from one side of the pond to the other.
How did people react to the plans internally?
‘At first, people found it exciting. The special thing about the Air Force is that we are a very traditional organization with clear command structures. At the same time, there is always the realization that what is good enough today is not good enough tomorrow. You already notice that at the level of missions. Before a mission we always ask the question: what do we set ourselves as goals, and what do we want to learn? Afterwards, we do a good debriefing to see if we succeeded. It is no different with such an organization-wide transformation. It is however noticeable that some need a push and others need space.’
Is there room for that space?
‘Yes. We in the Air Force are used to working autonomously in small teams. When you fly in formation, rank and file don’t matter. Then a lieutenant can tell me the unadulterated truth afterwards. During missions like that, we are not hierarchical. The same is true in this transformation. If you formulate the why and the what well, you can very well leave the interpretation to the people themselves. ‘
Can you give an example of this?
‘We wanted to enrich data, to increase our predictive capability. There was nothing here like that yet. We then put a club of employees together with experts from KPN in a building outside the organization. We gave them a bag of money and ten problem sets and said: we’ll come back in six months. All this time we didn’t interfere with anything. It was amazing how far they had come. Based on their work, we can now predict noise complaints, for example. From now on, we ring people’s doorbells in advance and say, “Madam, you don’t know yet, but then and there it gets a little noisier here.” Then you’re at the front end of the problem instead of the back end. We can also plan maintenance better now. We have much more insight into what breaks down when. This is typically something we knew was in there but needed space.
Has the transformation also affected your own performance?
‘Yes, it has been a nice journey of discovery for me as well. I’ve learned that you don’t have to be on top of everything or know everything best yourself. Above all, you have to create energy and encourage people.’
How did you master that?
‘By trial and error. It’s actually not in my nature, nor is it typical of the Air Force. As an organization with a force mandate, we benefit from a lot of control. You don’t want to leave anything to chance in our operational missions as fighter pilots, things have to be right down to the second. But both the new technology and the new generation of personnel require a different approach. I see it in my children: they like work when they are given leeway. Something doesn’t have to succeed right away, as long as they learn from it. The trick, I have learned, is to let things happen from trust.’
Is that also possible in the short term, for things that have to happen quickly and efficiently?
‘That always remains a struggle. This week, F-35s had to go to Poland to defend the airspace on NATO’s eastern flank. The day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we also immediately flew F-35s, F-16s and tanker aircraft in that direction. You then have to be able to deliver in one day. That remains our strength. But even with that, we say to the commanders: this is the intention, but it’s up to you how you do it. But it’s no easy job to keep the transformation going at the same time.’
Has the transformation been delayed by the war in Ukraine?
‘No, that’s the special thing. Especially since we were struggling with vacancies and Covid at the same time. We responded to the latter immediately, partly by strictly separating teams. I hardly interfered with that either. It’s amazing what such a club of people is capable of. Although it’s not a big pink cloud either. You do have to be clear in your intentions and keep talking to each other.’
Are they used to that in the Air Force?
‘Not everyone. So we deliberately made room for dialogue, so that even people who don’t talk easy could speak up. By being present a lot, I contributed to that. I still regularly visit squadrons and sometimes fly and tinker with them for a day. Then you hear a lot, including unvarnished opinions. The average airman has his heart on his sleeve. It’s still a balancing act though, because I can’t lead during that time. In the boardroom, you can easily spend a whole day doing important things. But that is not where the change takes place. By being visible in the workplace, I help the change more.’
‘I still regularly visit squadrons and fly and key with them’
Recently, the up-and-coming generation has its own voice in the Air Force. In 2021, Young Lumara was established, a shadow body that functions under the Air Force Council (Lumara), the highest body of the armed forces component. Solicited and unsolicited, Young Lumara members can offer advice. The fact that there is a long waiting list for it shows how strong the desire is among young people to participate. ‘We, older people, are still very much stuck in being a fighting force,’ Luyt says of it. ‘The young people emphasize that we need to take responsibility in other areas as well, such as around sustainability.’
Young Lumara’s suggestions include making air bases energy neutral and electrifying the vehicle fleet. Partly as a result, Eindhoven Air Base has been given a solar park. ‘That also provides power to the neighboring neighborhood, so we immediately create support in the area.’
As part of the transformation, a diversity plan was also created. The tight labor market and the new equipment demand it, says Luyt. In addition to fresh and varied inflow, more challenging career paths are needed. The problem is that the Air Force cannot operate autonomously in this area. ‘Defense’s personnel system dates back to year zero,’ Luyt says of it. ‘It’s very traditional, you can’t use it to respond to the customization that the current generation demands. For example, we would like to reward more on the basis of knowledge and development rather than on the basis of rank, but that is not possible now. We are talking about that now Defense-wide and with the unions. Fortunately, pilots are possible, because in these you have more leeway. For example, we have commanders experimenting with local recruiting, selection and training. That’s power to the edge, and that fits the transformation.’
In doing so, the Air Force is also seeking cooperation with the market. For example, Randstad and Manpower Group are now helping with recruitment. ‘We have to become more creative, and sometimes you need other parties to do that,’ says Luyt.
Will the collaboration with stakeholders be different because of the transformation?
‘We used to outsource things we couldn’t do ourselves. Now we address that more by partnering. The collaboration with KPN and with Randstad and Manpower are good examples of this. That is exciting, you accept that you are dependent, but it is also a way to learn. In partnerships we try to build new pieces of the air force, for example by starting joint start-ups. We then scale up such initiatives internally.’
We come to talk about his position, Commander of the Royal Netherlands Air Force. Can you call him the CEO of the Air Force, and is that comparable to being CEO of a large company? ‘Yes, it is. With 8,000 men, we may be a small armed forces component, but we are a versatile executive and learning company, with many different components and branches in all kinds of countries. We are on many bases abroad and have a large footprint in the US. So you can perfectly compare us to a multinational company.’
Could you run a multinational company?
‘I don’t know. I always tell my people: you can do more than you think. What I have learned here I can apply anyway in a transformation elsewhere. What I will do next I don’t know yet, but in any case I want to share my experiences in operationalizing a change strategy. Helping organizations move forward has always been my motivation. I am now working on a program for supervisors and commissioners at Erasmus University. As part of that, I’m walking around a hospital; that’s a great experience. But I want to catch my breath later, have quality time with Nicole, my wife, and with my first grandchild. With a smile: ‘Other than that, I’m growing my hair out, going to play guitar and buy a campervan. After that, we’ll see.’
What kind of leader are you?
‘I hope they see me as someone who has really taken the Air Force a step forward. Not from an ivory tower but as a booster and by bringing focus. After the cuts, there was a lot of negativity and noise. Experiments, such as the move into the space domain, we had to pay out of our own pockets. That was often rowing against the current, but we did it. I’ve brought more entrepreneurship into it, and I hope that with the wider budget that’s there now, they’ll continue with that.’
What is the fire that burns in Dennis Luyt?
‘I like helping people. And I like taking people and organizations across the pond. I was stuck with my nails on the edge of the cockpit until someone said, “Luyt, you can do other things, too. With slight reluctance, I was then put into a staff job. At one point I was responsible for all defense plans. I sometimes thought: I can’t do this at all, but then you notice that there is a whole team behind you that helps you to do it together. Gradually I discovered that I was capable of much more than I thought. Actually I am an operator pur sang, it is unique that I could step out of my comfort zone like that. Very few organizations can do that.’
What advice do you have for your successor?
‘I hope the foundation is solid enough to let him define the other side of the next pond. The future is fuzzy, but at least the Air Force is moving into space. There will also be an increasing combination of manned and unmanned flights. Furthermore, there is plenty to do to continue to attract talent to the Air Force. André really doesn’t have to be bored…’
The Royal Air Force and Dennis Luyt
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https://catalogue.jerseyheritage.org/collection/Keywords/archive/content.subject/1950s/%3Fpage%3D15
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Jersey Heritage
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The Jersey Heritage Archive & Online Collections section allows you to subscribe to view scanned copies of archives such as the German Occupation Registration Cards and important document transcriptions online.
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Jersey Heritage
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https://catalogue.jerseyheritage.org//collection/Keywords/archive/content.subject/1950s/%3Fpage%3D15
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BAR
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https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/history-of-the-armed-forces-in-canada
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History of the Armed Forces in Canada
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The armed forces are the land, naval and air forces commanded by the federal government for the purpose of defending Canada's security, protecting its citizens,...
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https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/history-of-the-armed-forces-in-canada
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Army
17th–18th Century: Early Colonial Militia
The first Canadian militias were local groups of part-time soldiers drawn from the adult male population. These were organized in New France in the 17th century to confront threats from enemy Indigenous peoples or from American colonial militias in New England. In 1669, King Louis XIV directed that the traditional French militia system should be adopted throughout the colony. Governor Frontenac appointed a capitaine de milice or capitaine de la côte in each parish, and required all males aged 16–60 to train for one or two months a year.
The honorary capitaines de milice were generally respected by the habitants and served in both military and civil leadership roles. The militia also provided corvée labour to build roads, bridges and fortifications. Younger members adopted the skills of allied Indigenous tribes and specialized in swift movement through the forests and surprise attacks on New England settlements. New France was also protected by the Troupes de la Marine — regular-colonial troops raised by France's minister of the navy and colonies. This changed in the Seven Year's War, however, when large numbers of professional regiments arrived from both England and France.
When British General James Wolfe landed near Québec in 1759, the militia of New France was called out. Several thousand militiamen were incorporated into the regular army that French General Louis Montcalm had brought from France. After the French surrendered Montréal in 1760, the British disarmed the miliciens of New France, but they used the militia captains to help administer the country.
The British also called up a few hundred miliciens for service during Pontiac's revolt in 1763, and again when the Americans invaded Québec in 1775 during the American Revolution.
In the Maritimes, French colonial authorities in Acadia (what would become Nova Scotia) appointed capitaines de la milice as early as 1710. In 1713, the colony was officially turned over to the British, who created a militia in Halifax in 1749. As in New France, all British colonies in North America had some type of universal compulsory militia system, which required the service of all adult males, usually between the ages of 16 and 60. However, these men rarely saw military action, and were later referred to as “sedentary” militia. During the American Revolution (1775–83), the chief source of support for the British regular forces in the Maritimes was not the sedentary militia, but semi-professional, full-time regiments called "fencibles." Fencible regiments were raised and paid for service in their colony of origin. They were intended for defence and could not be sent for overseas service.
After the American Revolution, entire American Loyalist regiments migrated to what would become Upper Canada and New Brunswick. Many of these men would provide leadership for the local militias. However, the value of fencible regiments continued into the late 18th and early 19th centuries, given the continued possibility of invasion from the newly formed United States. In 1791, Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe raised a corps of veterans, the Queen's Rangers, for military defence and public works in Upper Canada. The corps was disbanded in 1802 and replaced in 1811 by a fencible battalion. In 1793, the government of Lower Canada also raised fencible regiments in Montreal and Quebec.
Early 19th Century: War of 1812 to Confederation
During the War of 1812, as in the Seven Years' War, the militia were primarily assigned to transport and labour duties. Some also served alongside British professional regulars and fencible regiments. Well-trained regulars played the decisive role in saving Upper Canada from American invasion. However, local boosterism exaggerated the role of Canadian militia in repelling the invaders (see Voltigeurs of the War of 1812). Volunteers also helped suppress the 1837 rebellions in both Upper and Lower Canada.
Concerns about desertion and rebellion led to the establishment of a separate garrison force in the colonies. With the unification of the two Canadas in 1841, the British government raised the Royal Canadian Rifles from pensioned veterans of the regular forces to serve in frontier posts. Veterans had less temptation to desert to the United States than did either newly enlisted men or conscripted militiamen, many of whom were originally from the US.
In 1855, the Province of Canada adopted the Militia Acts. The Acts kept the principle of compulsory enrolment in the militia, but also introduced a volunteer force that would be armed and uniformed even in peacetime, and would receive annual (paid) training. The voluntary principle proved popular in Canada West (although not in Canada East) and the creation of many historic militia units dates from this period. Although compulsory militia enrolment survived in theory for two more decades, it effectively became a thing of the past after 1855.
When the American Civil War raised fears of another American attack on Canada, the government tried to introduce compulsory training. The attempt failed — this was a shock to the British, who were struggling to reinforce their endangered colonies. By 1863, the British Parliament provided funds for the training and payment of 10,000 volunteer Canadian militiamen, and the training — but not payment — of 35,000 more. In 1866, more than 13,000 Canadian volunteers faced Fenian raiders . Among them were two militia battalions that were defeated at the Battle of Ridgeway on 2 June 1863.
Late 19th Century: North-West Rebellion and South Africa
After Confederation, a Militia Act in 1868 established the Department of Militia and Defence. It also authorized the recruitment (on paper) of 40,000 volunteers, for cavalry, infantry, rifle and artillery units. These units would train for eight to 16 days a year at a cost of $1 million annually.
In 1870, two militia battalions from Ontario and Québec were sent with British regular soldiers to suppress the Red River Rebellion. The following year, as the last British garrisons left Canada, the government established two full-time artillery batteries to replace the British forces at Kingston, Ontario, and Québec City, and to train gunners and infantry. A British General Officer Commanding (GOC) was appointed to lead the Militia of Canada (comprising full and part time members) in 1874. The Military College was opened in 1876 at Kingston.
In 1883, the Militia Act was amended. The legislation authorized the creation of a small permanent force, including one cavalry troop, three artillery batteries and three infantry regiments. The same year, a third artillery school was opened at Esquimalt, British Columbia. A cavalry school was also opened at Quebec, along with infantry schools at Fredericton, St-Jean, Quebec, Toronto, and London, Ontario. These, plus a mounted-infantry school at Winnipeg, were the beginnings of a permanent force of 850–1,000 members. (This permanent force was known as the Permanent Active Militia, while the part-time militia was known as the Non-Permanent Active Militia).
In 1885, permanent force units under the command of British Major-General Frederick Middleton, were sent along with 6,000 volunteers on the Canadian Pacific Railway to suppress the Northwest Rebellion. Despite losing 26 men in battle, Middleton's success added to the militia's prestige and silenced critics of its training, equipment and organization. In 1890, Major-General Ivor Herbert replaced Middleton as Permanent Force commander. Herbert reformed the military by expanding headquarters staff, sending officers to England for training and seeking to enhance the military's popularity in Québec.
In 1898, the government of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier dispatched 200 volunteers of the permanent force as a Yukon Field Force. This force helped police and customs officers maintain order during the Klondike Gold Rush.
The following year, the Laurier government sent a first contingent of 1,000 men to assist Britain in the South African War (1899–1902). These volunteers formed a special service battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR) under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel William Otter. A second contingent included two battalions of Canadian Mounted Rifles, with its members recruited from the West. Donald Smith, Lord Strathcona, provided funds to raise another regiment. Lord Strathcona's Horse, a regiment of about 600 mounted riflemen, came mainly from western Canada. Altogether, more than 8,000 Canadians served in South Africa, and more than 220 died there, either in battle or from disease. The South African War marked the first time Canadians fought on foreign soil in the uniforms of Canadian forces.
Early 20th Century: Reform, Expansion
Compared to its British model, the Canadian military was riddled with political patronage. All but one of its British commanders had their Canadian careers curtailed by quarrels with the minister of militia. Sir Frederick Borden, Laurier's minister of militia and defence from 1896 to 1911 was no exception, but he was anxious for reform. In 1904, he replaced the British commander with a Militia council, and the way was cleared for a Canadian chief of the general staff. The first was William Otter in 1908. During the same period auxiliary corps were added including medical, ordnance, engineers, signals, Army Service Corps, and a Canadian Corps of Guides, since Canada lacked any systematic maps for its border regions. The military was also equipped with the Canadian-made Ross rifle.
In 1909, Canada and the British Empire's other dominions agreed at an imperial defence conference to standardize army organization, regulations and equipment on British models, and to accept imperial general staff officers. By 1914, Canada's permanent force numbered about 3,000, and there were more than 70,000 partially trained militia. All provinces except Saskatchewan enforced cadet training for boys and sometimes girls in high schools.
The Army in the First World War
At the outbreak of the First World War, Militia Minister Sir Sam Hughes recruited a 30,000 member Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) by appealing for volunteers. The resulting flow of recruits allowed Canada to contribute two infantry divisions on the Western Front by 1915 and two more the following year. The corps eventually boasted a strength of 70,000 men. By mid-1917, the Canadian Corps was commanded by a Canadian, Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Currie. While professional British staff officers provided valuable experience and service, the Corps was also staffed by Canadians in numerous key positions.
The capture of Vimy Ridge in April 1917 gave the Corps a proud achievement. Casualties were heavy, though, and in the Second Battle of Ypres, the Somme, and the Battle of Passchendaele. This forced the government of Prime Minister Robert Borden to conscript soldiers for overseas service. After winning a brutally divisive election on the conscription issue in December 1917, Borden's Union government found an additional 100,000 soldiers under the Military Service Act (MSA).
A series of Allied victories in 1918, spearheaded by the Canadian Corps fighting at Cambrai, Amiens and Mons, helped bring the First World War to an end on 11 November that year. More than 619,000 men and women served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force; 66,000 were killed and another 173,000 wounded.
After the war, the government increased the permanent force establishment (the total number of permanent troops allowed) to 10,000. However, actual strength remained around 4,000 troops in the following units: the Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR), the Royal 22e Régiment, the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI), the Royal Canadian Dragoons (RCD), and Lord Strathcona’s Horse. Ottawa saw no need to purchase tanks or other modern weapons, and part-time militia units were largely self-financed and self-equipped by generous officers. The exhaustion of the First World War, followed by the social and financial hardship of the Great Depression, took a toll on militia participation. At the Depression's height, only about 2,000 men went to militia training camps.
The Army in the Second World War
As Germany bullied its neighbours and ramped up for another conflict, Canada reorganized and refocused its militia in preparation for the possible recruitment of volunteers for war. In the Second World War, Canada fielded a combat force led by Lieutenant General Andrew McNaughton. The force consisted of three infantry and two armoured divisions, as well as two independent armoured brigades. More than 730,000 men and women served in what was collectively called the First Canadian Army. Nearly 23,000 were killed and more than 53,000 wounded in operations that included the raid on Dieppe in 1942, the Italian campaign in 1943, the Battle of Normandy in 1944, and the subsequent campaigns in northwest Europe that helped bring the final defeat of Nazi Germany (see also Liberation of the Netherlands, Battle of the Rhineland). Canadian soldiers also fought in more distant theatres of the war, including the Battle of Hong Kong.
In June 1940, the National Resources Mobilization Act had authorized the government to conscript Canadians for home defence. By November 1944, after heavy casualties in Europe, the Act was amended to permit conscription for overseas service. Ultimately, only about 2,500 conscripts actually served in operational units during the last months of the war in Europe.
1946–70: Cold War and Birth of Peacekeeping
In 1946, the Canadian Army permanent force was fixed at 25,000 members. In 1951, Canada authorized the formation of an infantry brigade to join United Nations (UN) forces in the Korean War. Nearly 22,000 Canadians served in the war. Canadian troops distinguished themselves in combat against Chinese forces, notably at the Battle of Kapyong. Canadian casualties in Korea between 1951 and 1953 totalled 312 men killed and more than 1,200 wounded, the vast majority of them army casualties.
During the 1950s, army numbers swelled to 52,000. This was necessary to meet Canada's new commitment to NATO of a brigade stationed in western Europe, to confront the threat presented by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Meanwhile, the militia's six divisions were renamed the reserve force, which was assigned at the end of the 1950s to domestic security duties and civil defence. This assignment, along with the disbandment of some long-established militia regiments, weakened morale among reservists.
In 1956, Canada's army found a new role. American condemnation of the British, French and Israeli invasion of Egypt during the Suez Crisis threatened to rip NATO apart, at a time when the Soviet Union had threatened London and Paris with a nuclear attack. To enforce a rapid armistice and terminate the conflict, Canadian foreign minister Lester Pearson proposed an international peacekeeping force to separate the opponents with minimum loss of face for either side. Ottawa contributed 1,000 signals and logistics troops to support the enterprise. Canadian Lieutenant-General E.L.M. Burns also took command of the entire United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF). Soon, Canadians would also provide troops to help control violence in Congo, to separate Greek and Turkish Cypriots, and to support UN peacekeeping wherever it seemed possible, and often when it was not.
Peacekeeping was popular with most Canadians. It was service with sufficient purpose and danger to sustain army morale without exhausting its strength. Meanwhile, the continuing NATO commitment in Europe allowed a brigade of soldiers to train and be equipped for the most technologically advanced forms of land warfare. During this time, the Canadian Army adopted American-pattern weapons, equipment and communications technology, replacing British patterns that had been the model since before Confederation.
The Army at Home: October and Oka Crises
After decades of deploying overseas in foreign conflicts, the Canadian Army responded in 1970 to a domestic security threat. The October Crisis that year prompted the government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act and deploy more than 10,000 battle-ready troops in Montreal, Quebec and Ottawa. The forces withdrew in November without suffering or inflicting any casualties. In the summer of 1990, the army responded again to domestic civil unrest, when most of the 5th Mechanized Brigade from Valcartier, Quebec, was dispatched to support Quebec police against Mohawk "warriors" and protestors during the Oka Crisis.
During the 1990s the army was also called on to help with civilian emergencies at home. In 1997, 8,600 troops were deployed to Manitoba to protect homes and farms from the flooding Red River. The following year, almost 20,000 regulars and reservists provided emergency support after an ice storm toppled power lines and left millions of people in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes without heat or light. In 2003, approximately 2,200 troops were sent to help fight forest fires in British Columbia.
The Army in Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda
The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s was followed by the eruption of ethnic civil war in the splintering republics of Yugoslavia. In 1992, Ottawa sent two battalions of 1,200 troops from its brigade in Germany as part of an international UN force to intervene between the warring sides. In the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, Canadian Major-General Lewis Mackenzie, the force's deputy commander, tried to limit the slaughter between Serbs and Bosnian Muslims. There was also no peace to keep in the neighboring republic of Croatia, where at the Medak Pocket, members of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry fought the first firefight experienced by Canadians since the Korean War.
At the end of 1992, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's government brought Canada's 30-year peacekeeping commitment in Cyprus to an end. However, another mission in Somalia promptly took its place. The government sent Canada's Airborne battalion to Somalia as part of an American-led peacemaking operation. The subsequent torture and murder of a young Somali intruder by Airborne troops in 1993 grew into a national scandal, exposing serious problems with leadership, discipline and morale in the army. The Somalia affair, and its subsequent cover-ups at military headquarters in Ottawa, besmirched the once-benign peacekeeping image of the Canadian Forces, cost two chiefs-of-defence-staff their jobs, and resulted in the disbanding of the Airborne regiment in 1995.
In 1994, Canadian Major-General Roméo Dallaire, commander of a small UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, was caught in the midst of an unfolding genocide that killed more than half-a-million people and also took the lives of 10 Belgian paratroopers under Dallaire's command. Canadian troops later participated in a UN mission to help Rwanda recover in the wake of the genocide. However, Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda exposed the shortcomings and deadly risks of peacekeeping or peacemaking in foreign conflicts and diminished Canadian enthusiasm for such missions.
2001–11: Afghanistan
The Al Qaeda terror attacks of 11 September 2001 prompted the invasion of Afghanistan by a US-led international coalition that included Canada. The first Canadian land units to take part were the special forces unit Joint Task Force 2, and a battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry to help guard the airfield at the city of Kandahar.
In 2005, with counter-insurgency operations continuing in Afghanistan against Taliban forces, the government of Prime Minister Paul Martin committed to sustaining a reinforced battalion of about 2,000 troops in Kandahar province for several years. By the close of 2011, when the Kandahar mission came to an end, 158 Canadians had been killed in the most serious fighting experienced by the Canadian Army since Korea. Many soldiers who returned suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, a consequence of their experience at war.
Navy
Early 20th century: Fledgling Navy
From early colonial times until the late 19th century, various local or provincial naval flotillas served on Canada's Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and on the Great Lakes. After Confederation, Canada had no formal navy until after the turn of the 20th century, when a growing British-German high seas rivalry led to British requests for naval contributions from Canada and the British Empire's other dominions. This led to the decision to place Canada's small fleet of fisheries-protection vessels under a separate organization. On 29 March 1909, Parliament approved the creation of a Canadian naval service, and on 4 May 1910 the Naval Service Act brought the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) into being. Two ageing British cruisers were purchased for training purposes, one for each coast. A naval training college was also established in Halifax.
The navy and its financial costs were a major political issue, and it suffered severe setbacks under the Conservative regime of Prime Minister Robert Borden between 1911 and 1914. Divided between Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Esquimalt, British Columbia, the navy was directed from a distant headquarters in Ottawa, where naval staff sometimes failed to appreciate the fleet's needs and often could not explain them to government.
The navy did not play a significant role in the First World War. The two second-hand cruisers performed some patrol duties at sea along with dozens of smaller coastal vessels — manned by a total of more than 9,000 sailors — but none engaged the powerful German navy or its U-boats on the North Atlantic.
After the war, Ottawa starved the navy of funding. Commodore Walter Hose, director of the naval service from 1921 to 1928 and chief of the naval staff from 1928 to 1934, had to resist efforts by the militia to subordinate and even disband the navy. Forced to close the Royal Naval College of Canada in 1922, Hose established the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1923. With rising international tensions in the late 1930s, Rear-Admiral Percy Nelles finally succeeded in waking up Ottawa to the need for an effective navy.
The Navy in the Second World War
In the Second World War, the navy was the first Canadian force into action — escorting merchant convoys across the Atlantic by 1940 and helping evacuate British soldiers from the European continent. In 1941, the worsening U-boat threat and the need to defend home waters, provided the impetus for Canada to build a major oceanic fleet through a massive program of naval shipbuilding and recruiting. Additional commitments in the Pacific compounded the need in 1943. Canada acquired cruisers and modern Tribal-class destroyers and built dozens of anti-submarine corvettes and other escorts. The Royal Canadian Navy grew from 13 warships and about 3,000 sailors in 1939, to 365 warships and 100,000 personnel (including 6,500 women) in 1945. At first, rapid expansion diluted efficiency, hampering the navy's main function of convoy escort duties, but such growing pains were eventually resolved.
Through the Battle of the Atlantic, Canada's navy provided skillful, shore-based control of shipping and radio-intercept and intelligence operations. It also provided half of all the naval escorts on the North Atlantic convoy routes. As a result, the Allies established a new theatre of operations called Canadian Northwest Atlantic. In May 1943, Rear-Admiral Leonard Murray became the theatre's commander in chief — the only Canadian to command an entire theatre during the war.
In addition, Canadian warships escorted convoys on the Murmansk Run to Russia. They also participated in the D-Day invasion of Normandy, and in other amphibious assaults on the Aleutian Islands, Sicily and Italy, and southern France. During the war, the RCN sank more than 70 enemy ships and submarines, while losing 31 of its own ships and also the lives of 1,990 Canadian sailors. By war's end, the RCN was the fourth-largest navy in the world.
1946–89: Postwar Change and the Cold War
Despite the navy's extraordinary contribution to the war effort, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King had always suspected that the RCN was a mere instrument of the British Admiralty. Nevertheless, his government approved a small permanent navy of two aircraft carriers, two cruisers and 12 destroyers in 1945. Tens of thousands of sailors departed the navy after their wartime service. Among the fewer than 6,500 who remained, relations between officers and men soured under the pressures of adjusting to peacetime and struggling with shrinking budgets. After three protests by ships' crews in 1949, Rear-Admiral E. Rollo Mainguy presided over a commission that urged the navy to modernize its customs as a way of improving relations between non-commissioned sailors and officers.
The RCN maintained a force of three destroyers in Korean waters during the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. After Korea, the growing tensions of the Cold War gave the navy renewed purpose, along with a rise in the defence budget. By the late 1950s, much of the RCN was dedicated to a growing anti-submarine role as part of Canada's contribution to NATO and to continental defence. New ships such as the St. Laurent class anti-submarine destroyer escorts were introduced at this time. The wartime aircraft carrier HMCS Magnificent was replaced by the more modern carrier HMCS Bonaventure in 1957. By 1964, the naval fleet also included 22 Canadian-designed-and-built destroyers, 17 ocean escorts of Second World War vintage, 10 coastal mine sweepers and 21,500 personnel. (Bonaventure would be scrapped in 1970 due to defence budget cuts.) In the early 1960s, the RCN also introduced the use of destroyer-based Sea King helicopters.
The navy had a limited role in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when Defence Minister Douglas Harkness, without approval from Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, ordered RCN destroyers to relieve and support coastal U.S. warships in the blockade of Cuba.
As the 1970s arrived, the navy continued its role in anti-submarine warfare, though it dwindled in size and was compromised by increasing maintenance and fuel costs for the aging fleet. On its golden anniversary in 1960, the RCN had boasted a fleet of some 50 warships crewed by 21,500 sailors. By the 1970s, other than the aging St. Laurents, the navy had only one operational support ship and three Oberon-class training submarines acquired in the mid-1960s, plus the expectation of four new gas-turbine-powered, helicopter-carrying destroyers (the Iroquois class) and two more operational support ships (the Protecteur class) for fewer than 10,000 sailors. These reduced forces constituted the fleet for the last two decades of the Cold War.
As both Soviet and American incursions into Arctic waters provoked concern about Canadian sovereignty, the navy proposed to create a nuclear powered submarine fleet to enhance its ability to assert power in the North. Public outcry dashed these plans in the 1980s.
1990s: New Ships and Persian Gulf
The end of the Cold War in 1989 coincided with a fleet renewal that included 12 Canadian-made, Halifax-class frigates in various stages of building, a mid-life upgrade for the four Iroquois-class destroyers, and 12 new maritime coastal-defence vessels planned to revive a mine-clearing capability for the naval reserve.
The end of Cold War tensions shifted the navy's focus from antisubmarine operations to other domestic and international tasks. In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. In response, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney sent three warships to the region as part of a US-led move to force Iraq out of Kuwait (see also Persian Gulf War). The ships and their crew of 1,000 were hurriedly prepared for the first serious naval engagement since 1953.
During this period, the navy also embarked on two domestic enforcement missions. From 1995 to 1997 it conducted enforcement patrols against Spanish ships accused of over-fishing in the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. And in July 2000, the American cargo vessel GTS Katie had been hired to ship Canadian military personnel and cargo back from the Balkans in the wake of the NATO victory against Serbia's invasion of the largely Albanian province of Kosovo in the spring of 1999 (Operation Allied Force). When the Katie sailed off its agreed course, the navy conducted Operation Megaphone, a boarding mission to secure Canadian interests.
The navy also took part in humanitarian relief efforts in East Timor, in escort missions for aid deliveries to Somalia, in peace enforcement operations in Haiti, and in UN sanction-enforcement missions against Iraq and Serbia.
2001–16: Anti-Terror and International Aid
The terrorist attacks on the US on 11 September 2001 triggered new missions for the navy on the world stage. From October 2001 to December 2003, nearly 4,000 sailors on various warships served in the Arabian Gulf region and elsewhere as part of Operation Apollo — boarding and inspecting vessels and providing logistics, support and reconnaissance for the unfolding war in Afghanistan. At its peak, the Canadian Naval Task Force contribution to Operation Apollo was 1,500 personnel and six warships. By the end of the operation, 18 of Canada's 20 ships had been deployed, and Canadian naval boarding party personnel had conducted more than 260 boardings — nearly 60 per cent of the entire coalition fleet's boardings.
In 2008, Canada also increased its naval role in NATO's anti-piracy effort off Somalia and the Horn of Africa. The navy also continued to help in relief efforts — to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and to post-earthquake relief efforts in Haiti in 2010.
Air Force
Aviation in the First World War
Before 1914, military aviation in Canada did not exist. Military and naval aviation underwent extraordinary development after the First World War began, but the reluctance of the Canadian government to develop a distinct air force persisted until late in the war. More than 20,000 Canadians served as pilots, observers and ground support staff in the British Royal Flying Corps, the Royal Naval Air Service, and after 1 April 1918, the Royal Air Force (RAF).
The publicity given to Canadian participation in the air war — especially to the exploits of such outstanding fighter pilots as William "Billy" Bishop, William "Billy" Barker, Raymond Collishaw and Donald MacLaren, helped build pressure for the establishment of a distinctly Canadian service. So did the fact that German long-range submarines were a threat to shipping on Canada's East Coast. The government of Prime Minister Robert Borden accordingly authorized the creation of two small forces: the Royal Canadian Naval Air Service (RCNAS) for coastal defence, and the Canadian Air Force (CAF), which was intended to work with the Canadian Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. Both organizations were short-lived. The RCNAS was disbanded in December 1918 and the CAF in mid-1919.
1920–39: RCAF Founded
Before the fledgling CAF was dissolved, steps had already been taken to create a national aviation policy. An Air Board was appointed in June 1919 and given the task of advising government on future aviation policy. This board laid the foundation for the development and regulation of civil aviation and, on the assumption that military aviation strength depended upon a strong commercial sector, envisaged the formation of only a small, temporary air force. The new Canadian Air Force was thus established in April 1920, but it was soon clear that something more permanent was required.
Under the National Defence Act of 1922 the Air Board was absorbed by the new Department of National Defence. Its civil and military air arms were united under the director of the CAF, who reported to the chief of the general staff. The CAF was now a permanent force. In 1923 the CAF was designated "Royal," and on 1 April 1924, the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) came into effect, adopting the RAF ensign, motto, uniforms and rank structure.
Despite these colonial trappings, the RCAF was a Canadian service. Until the early 1930s about half the RCAF's manpower performed civil air operations. The bulk of its duties included forest spraying and fire patrol, fisheries and customs surveillance on both coasts, air ambulance flights and aerial photography (which contributed greatly to the mapping and geological survey of remote areas). Aircraft such as the Canadian Vickers Vedette flying boat were designed for such missions.
Only in 1928 did the force purchase a few Siskin fighters and Atlas army co-operation aircraft from Britain to replace its long-retired military aircraft. No further important purchases were made during the Great Depression. For the first half of the interwar period, therefore, Canada had a military flying service in name only, although connections with the RAF through exchanges, a liaison staff and the posting of Canadian officers to British staff schools, ensured a degree of professionalism and some acquaintance with air doctrine.
The RCAF in the Second World War
When the Second World War began in 1939, the RCAF had no first-class aircraft or other equipment, with the exception of some Hawker Hurricane fighters. Western and Eastern Air Commands were responsible for coastal air defence, and Training Command was centred at Trenton, Ontario. Eight permanent active air force squadrons and 12 auxiliary active air force squadrons had been organized.
The key to wartime expansion was the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP). The program graduated 131,000 aircrew in Canada, of whom almost 73,000 were Canadian. Despite the Canadian government's commitment to training Commonwealth aircrew, the program did not accord the RCAF an independent status equal to that of the Canadian Army during the war. Although the BCATP Agreement contained a British undertaking that Commonwealth aircrew "shall... be identified with their respective Dominions," the Canadian government failed to provide financially for the ground crew needed to support Canadian aircrew overseas, or for full financing of Canadian aircrew serving abroad, or even for the support of Canadian air units overseas. As a result, Canadian pilots, navigators, air gunners and other aircrew found themselves dispersed throughout the RAF, rather than being concentrated in RCAF groupings.
Of the 250,000 men and women in the wartime RCAF, 94,000 served overseas. Most Canadian airmen flew with the RAF, but 48 separate Canadian squadrons also took part in operations around the globe, from No. 1 (later 401) Squadron's participation in the Battle of Britain to 435 and 436 (Transport) Squadrons' missions in India and Burma during the final days of the conflict with Japan. 417 Squadron and 331 Wing fought in North Africa, and the former continued into Italy. Canadian squadrons played a part in all RAF operational home commands. Airmen such as Clifford "Black Mike" McEwen, G.E. Brookes, and George "Buzz" Beurling, carried on the tradition of Bishop, Barker, Collishaw and MacLaren.
The RCAF was deeply involved in the Battle of the Atlantic, with squadrons from East Coast bases carrying out convoy duties and antisubmarine patrols. RCAF squadrons also participated with American forces in the defence of Alaska against Japanese incursions and flew on antisubmarine duties in the Far East.
Bomber Command was the largest RAF operational command. Thousands of Canadian BCATP graduates took part in the massive area-bombing campaign. Wing Commander J.E. Fauquier was the leading Canadian bomber pilot. Casualties were heavy; of the more than 16,000 fatalities suffered by the RCAF during the war, nearly 10,000 were sustained in Bomber Command.
1946–60: RCAF Golden Age
At the end of the Second World War, the RCAF was the fourth-largest Allied air force, with more than 215,000 personnel in uniform. By late 1946, numbers had dwindled to 13,000. The permanent force resumed such duties as transport, search and rescue, and survey patrols. Jet flight did not enter the service until 1948, when some British Vampire aircraft were purchased. In the Korean War, Canada's official air contribution was limited to the transport duties of 426 Squadron, although some RCAF fighter pilots flew with the US Air Force.
The Cold War threat reversed the downsizing trend for the RCAF. In 1951 the Canadian government committed an air division of 12 front-line fighter squadrons to Europe as part of its NATO involvement. In 1958, Canada and the US joined in the formation of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), with a Canadian as deputy commander. Under NORAD, the RCAF established numerous interceptor squadrons and operated early warning radar sites across Canada. Fleets of Canadian-built F-86 Sabre and CF-100 Canuck fighters symbolized the "Golden Age" of the RCAF in the 1950s.
1960–2000: Lean Times, New Commitments
In the early 1960s the air force adopted US-controlled nuclear weapons, arming CF-104 Starfighter squadrons based in Europe as well as CF-101 Voodoo squadrons and two Bomarc missile sites in Canada. The nuclear capability was controversial, and the weapons were retired from the air force in 1983.
The 1960s were also the beginning of several decades of financial restraint for the air force. Canadian aircraft programs such as the Avro Arrow were cancelled, and for the next several decades numerous Canadian air bases at home and in Europe were closed. In the 1990s, the end of the Cold War and the perceived "peace dividend" reduced budgets further. Over the course of that decade the number of regular air force personnel shrank from more than 20,000 to fewer than 14,000.
Despite the reductions, the air force faced new demands overseas throughout the 1990s. Canadian fighter crews were in combat for the first time since the Korean War, as part of the Allied coalition fighting the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91, and later, in support of NATO operations over Kosovo in 1999. The air force also continued to assist with transport missions for the UN in Africa and Asia, and with domestic relief work during floods and storms, and with ongoing search-and-rescue duties across Canada.
The RCAF and Anti-Terrorism in the 21st Century
The 9/11 terrorist attacks put the air force's CF-18s into action over North America, patrolling domestic skies as Canadian airports offered emergency refuge to diverted passenger airliners. By 2002, the air force's Maritime patrol and transport aircraft were supporting counter-terrorism operations in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan. From 2008 to 2011 the RCAF operated helicopters and fixed-wing transports out of Kandahar, Afghanistan, in support of the international military mission there.
In 2011, the RCAF (which regained its "Royal" designation that year, after losing it in 1968) supported NATO operations in Libya, and in 2014 began flying combat missions alongside the international coalition fighting Islamic extremists in Iraq. It continued to conduct offshore fisheries and security patrols in Canada, as well as provide search-and-rescue services throughout the country, including the far North.
Unification and Reorganization
In February 1968, the Canadian Army, RCN and RCAF were abolished and reorganized into a single service, the Canadian Armed Forces, with regular and reserve components. The experiment of unification was unique to Canada and was not imitated by other countries.
Integration had been a recurring policy since the establishment of a single National Defence Headquarters (NDHQ) in 1922. Under Brooke Claxton, Minister of National Defence from 1946 to 1954, Canada's military colleges and systems of military law had been unified, as had other aspects of military administration. During Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's Conservative government from 1957 to 1963, medical, legal and chaplains' services were also integrated.
The Armed Forces expected major changes when the Liberals returned to power in 1963. The Glassco Royal Commission earlier that year had been highly critical of inefficiency and triplication of military administration. Toronto businessman Paul Hellyer had been defence critic in Opposition, and as the new Liberal minister of defence he undertook a promised policy review. Unification had not been Hellyer's policy initially, but the idea grew on him as he tried to deal with three service chiefs, each struggling for his own service.
On 7 June 1965, the navy, army and air force commands were replaced by six functional commands, most of them with regional responsibilities. Maritime Command took over the RCN's ships and the RCAF's anti-submarine squadrons on both coasts. Mobile Command at St-Hubert, Quebec, was to control the army's brigade groups and militia and the RCAF's ground-support squadrons. Training Command and Material Command integrated tri-service functions, while Air Defence and Air Transport commands passed unaltered from the RCAF. Communications Command was added later. Canada's ground and air forces in Europe reported directly to Ottawa. On 1 May 1966, all military camps, stations and the navy's land-based "ships" became 39 Canadian Forces Bases.
When senior officers protested, Hellyer regarded their opposition as verging on a challenge to civil supremacy over the military. Politicians, editors and cartoonists often ridiculed the officers' objections. The public was reminded that several who resigned in protest enjoyed generous pensions. By appointing General Jean-Victor Allard as chief of defence staff, Hellyer secured an enthusiast for unification and for eliminating many British features of the forces, including ranks and uniform insignia. Within a year, members of the Canadian Forces began to appear in new green uniforms modelled on those of the US Air Force, with rank badges recognizable to American as well as Canadian personnel.
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Royal Netherlands Air Force
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Netherlands_Air_Force
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Air warfare branch of the Netherlands' armed forces
Royal Netherlands Air ForceKoninklijke LuchtmachtFounded27 March 1953; 71 years ago ( )[a]CountryNetherlandsTypeAir force
Space forceRoleAerial warfare
Space warfareSize6,540 active military personnel (2021) [1]Part ofDutch Armed ForcesMotto(s)
Latin: Parvus numero, magnus merito
"Small in numbers, great in deeds"
MarchParade March of the Royal Netherlands Air ForceWebsitedefensie.nlCommandersCommander of the Royal Netherlands Air ForceLieutenant-general André Steur[2]InsigniaRoundelFlagAircraft flownFighterF-35AAttack helicopterAH-64ECargo helicopterCH-47F, AS532U2Multirole helicopterNH90 NFHReconnaissanceMQ-9 Block 5TrainerPC-7TransportC-130H, G650ERTankerA330 MRTT
Military unit
The Royal Netherlands Air Force (RNLAF; Dutch: Koninklijke Luchtmacht (KLu), "Royal Air Force") is the military aviation branch of the Netherlands Armed Forces. It was created in 1953 to succeed its predecessor, the Luchtvaartafdeling (English: aviation department) of the Dutch Army, which was founded in 1913. The aerobatic display team of the Royal Netherlands Air Force, active from 1979 until 2019, was the Solo Display Team.
History
[edit]
The Royal Netherlands Air Force was preceded by the Army Aviation Group (Luchtvaartafdeling, abbreviation LVA), founded in 1913 and renamed Army Aviation Brigade (Luchtvaartbrigade) in 1939. In 1953, it was raised to the level of independent operational part of the Dutch Armed Forces and renamed Royal Netherlands Air Force (Koninklijke Luchtmacht).
Army Aviation Group
[edit]
Dutch air power started on 1 July 1913 with the founding of the Army Aviation Group at Soesterberg airfield (vliegbasis Soesterberg) with four pilots. When founded, the Army Aviation Group operated one aircraft, the Brik, which was supplemented with three French Farman HF.20 aircraft a few months later. These aircraft were soon outdated and the Dutch government ordered several fighter/reconnaissance Nieuport and Caudron aircraft to replace them.
World War I (1914–1918)
[edit]
The Netherlands maintained a neutral position during World War I and the Army Aviation Group did not take part in any action, instead developing the force's capabilities.
Pilot training was opened for ranks below officer, and technical, aerial photography, meteorological and navigation flights were established.
New airfields were established at Arnhem, Gilze-Rijen air base, Venlo and Vlissingen.
Because of the war it was difficult to procure suitable aircraft.[3] In 1917 this changed and 1918 personnel numbered 650.[3]
Interbellum
[edit]
After the end of World War I the Dutch government cut the defence budget and the Army Aviation Group was almost dissolved. As political tensions in Europe increased during the late 1930s the government tried to rebuild the armed forces again in 1938 but there were many problems, not least the shortage of pilot instructors, navigators and pilots to fly the new multiple engine aircraft. Lack of standardisation and resulting maintenance issues added to the complexity of the rebuilding task.
Army Aviation Brigade
[edit]
World War II
[edit]
See also: Netherlands Naval Aviation Service
As war loomed, in July 1939 the Army Aviation Group was renamed the Army Aviation Brigade (Luchtvaartbrigade).
In August 1939, the Netherlands government mobilised its armed forces, but due to limited budgets the Army Aviation Brigade operated only 176 combat aircraft of the following types:
16 Fokker T.V type bombers
36 Fokker D.XXI single-engine fighters
35 Fokker G.I twin-engine fighters
7 Fokker D.XVII single-engine fighters
17 Douglas DB-8A-3N light bombers
20 Fokker C.X light bombers
33 Fokker C.V reconnaissance aircraft
20 Koolhoven FK-51 artillery observer aircraft
In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands. Within five days the Dutch Army Aviation Brigade was defeated by the Luftwaffe. All of the Brigade's bombers, along with 30 D.XXI and 17 G.I fighters were shot down; two D.XXI and eight G.I were destroyed on the ground. Two G.I were captured by German forces, one of which was later flown to England by a Fokker pilot. The Douglas bombers were used as fighters because no suitable bombs were available; these aircraft were poorly suited for this role and eight were shot down and three destroyed on the ground in the first hours of the conflict.
In spite of their numerical superiority the Luftwaffe lost 350 aircraft in the conquest of the Netherlands, many to anti-aircraft fire and crashes at improvised landing fields in the Netherlands rather than due to action by Dutch fighter aircraft. The cost was high – almost 95% of the Dutch pilots were lost. In recognition of their actions Queen Wilhelmina granted the highest Dutch military decoration, the Militaire Willemsorde (MWO), to the Army Aviation Brigade collectively.
Some aircrews escaped to England and on 1 June 1940, 320 Squadron and 321 Squadron were established there under RAF operational command. Due to a shortage of personnel, 321 Squadron was absorbed by 320 Sqn in January 1941. Although their personnel were predominantly from the Navy Air Service, Army Aviation aircrew also served with 320 Sqn until the end of the war.
In 1941, the Royal Netherlands Military Flying School was re-established, in the United States at Jackson Field (also known as Hawkins Field), Jackson, Mississippi, operating lend-lease aircraft and training all military aircrew for the Netherlands.
The separate Militaire Luchtvaart van het Koninklijk Nederlands-Indisch Leger (ML-KNIL; Royal Netherlands East Indies Army Military Air Service) continued in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), until its occupation by Japan in 1942.[4][5] Some personnel escaped to Australia and Ceylon. 321 Squadron was re-formed in Ceylon, in March 1942, from Dutch aviators.
In 1942, 18 (NEI) Squadron, a joint Dutch-Australian unit was established, in Canberra, equipped with B-25 Mitchell bombers. It saw action in the South West Pacific Area (SWPA), which included the Dutch East Indies. In 1943, 120 (NEI) Squadron was established. Equipped with Kittyhawk fighters, it flew many missions under Australian command, including the recapturing of Dutch New Guinea. In 1944, transport aircraft operated by the KNIL in the SWPA were integrated into another joint unit, 19 (NEI) Squadron.
In June 1943, a Dutch fighter squadron was established in England. 322 (Dutch) Squadron, equipped with the Supermarine Spitfire, saw action as part of the RAF. 322 Sqn aircraft featured the British RAF roundels as well as the Dutch orange triangle. 322 Sqn was successfully deployed against incoming V-1 flying bombs. From mid-1944, during the invasion of Normandy, it executed ground attack missions over France and Belgium.
In July 1944, the Directorate of Netherlands Airpower was established in London.
Late 1940s and early 1950s
[edit]
In 1947, its Chief of Air Force Staff was appointed.
During the Indonesian War of Independence, the air force committed ground attacks and transported material and personnel. In 1948, transportation aircraft were used in support of the first Dutch airborne raid in southern Sumatra and Djokjakarta.
In 1951 several non-combat functions in the Army Aviation were opened to women.
Royal Netherlands Air Force
[edit]
On 27 March 1953 the Royal Netherlands Air Force officially became an independent part of the Dutch armed forces, rather than part of the Army.[6]
The Air Defense Command, (Commando Lucht Verdediging, abbreviated CLV) consisting of a command unit, five radar stations and six fighter squadrons, had been established. Its radar equipment as well as its air defense fighters all came from obsolete RAF stocks.
The Spitfire Mk.IX was used by 322 Squadron RNLAF until 1954 but was replaced as new squadrons were established.
The Gloster Meteor F Mk.IV was used by 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327 and 328 Squadrons from 1948 to 1957. Bases included Soesterberg and Leeuwarden.
The Gloster Meteor F Mk.VIII was used by 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327 and 328 sqn from 1951 to 1958.
After the Netherlands joined NATO another new command: Tactical Air Command (Commando Tactische Luchtstrijdkrachten, abbreviated ""CTL) was established.
CTL consisted of seven new strike squadrons (306, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315 and 316 sqn), all equipped with Republic F-84G Thunderjets. These aircraft were supplied by the United States under the Mutual Defense Aid Program from 1952 to 1956. 311 was the first flying squadron to be stood up at Volkel on 1 May 1951.[7]
322, 323, 324, 325, 326 and 327 Sqn operated the Hawker Hunter F Mk.4 between 1955 and 1964, and 322, 324, 325 and 326 Sqn operated the Hawker Hunter F Mk.6 between 1957 and 1968.
700, 701 and 702 Sqn operated the North American F-86K Sabre all-weather fighter between 1955 and 1964.
306, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315 and 316 Sqn changed aircraft configuration from 1955 to 1970 as the Republic F-84F Thunderstreak and RF-84F Thunderflash became available.
Western New Guinea conflict
[edit]
The Indonesian government claimed Western New Guinea following the end of the Second World War. The Dutch government considered the area Dutch territory. Negotiations over the country were conducted for years, but tensions grew until Indonesia broke diplomatic relations with the Netherlands at the end of the 1950s.
In response, in 1958, the Netherlands deployed military reinforcements to New Guinea, including an Air Force detachment for the air defense of the island Biak as there was evidence that Indonesia was infiltrating the island in advance of a military operation.
The first Air Force contribution was the installation of two MkIV early warning radars on Biak and Woendi islands.
The political situation between the Netherlands and Indonesia continued to deteriorate and in 1960 the Dutch government deployed reinforcements. The operations were known by name as Plan Fidelio. For the Dutch Air Force this meant the establishment of an Air Defense Command for New Guinea (Commando Luchtverdediging Nederlands Nieuw-Guinea - CLV NNG) consisting of:
One Hawker Hunter Mk.4 air defence squadron.
A radar navigation system at Biak.
A reserve airstrip at Noemfoer.
The Dutch government deployed a squadron consisting of 12 Hawker Hunter Mk.4 AD fighters and two Alouette II SAR helicopters. They were transported to Southeast Asia by the Karel Doorman. One year later the Dutch government deployed another 12 Hawker Hunter Mk6 AD fighters; these aircraft carried more fuel and had a larger combat radius.
In August 1962 Indonesia was ready to attack New Guinea. Despite reinforcements the Dutch defences would be insufficient to withstand the coming attack. Therefore, and because of international political pressure the Dutch government was forced to agree to the peaceful surrender of New Guinea. Dutch forces were withdrawn from the territory.
The establishment of 336 transport squadron is closely connected to New Guinea. Soon after activation this unit was deployed to New Guinea to take over air transport from the Dutch Navy. 336 Sqn deployed and took over three Navy Dakotas and three US supplied aircraft. 336 Sqn operated from Mokmer airstrip and transported more than 5,400 passengers between September 1961 and September 1962.
Cold War era, 1960s, 1970s and later
[edit]
During the Cold War Dutch Air Force flying units were integrated in NATO's Second Allied Tactical Air Force tasked with defending northern West Germany against Warsaw Pact forces. Additionally, the Dutch Air Force manned five fully operational self-supporting Missile Groups in West Germany (1 and 2 MslGrp were initially equipped with NIKE batteries, while 3,4 and 5 MslGrp were equipped with Hawk) and replaced by the MIM-104 Patriot Air Defence Missile System:
306, 311, 312, 322 and 323 Sqn changed configuration again from 1962 to 1984 after the dual role F-104 Starfighter was introduced.
313, 314, 315 and 316 Sqn switched over to the NF-5 Freedom Fighter from 1969 to 1991. The NF-5 was a development of the Canadair CF-5 fighter. Northrop incorporated some NF-5 features into the F-5E/F Tiger II.
Since 1979 all RNLAF fast-jet squadrons (originally 306, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 322 and 323) have operated the multi role F-16 Fighting Falcon.
The Dutch Air Force played a key role in ending the 1977 Dutch train hostage crisis when six F-104 Starfighters flew low over the train to distract the hijackers while Dutch anti-terrorist forces stormed the train.
Former Yugoslavia
[edit]
In 1992 Ypenburg Air Base closed. After the USAF handed over their section of Soesterberg in September 1994, Soesterberg then became a RNLAF transport helicopter base with 298 Squadron (CH-47D Chinook) and 300 Squadron (AS 532U2 Cougar Mk2 and SA 316 Alouette III) stationed at the base.
RNLAF F-16s participated in all operations over Yugoslavia from 1993: Deny Flight, including Deliberate Force in 1995 and ending with Operation Allied Force in 1999 from two bases in Italy. Initially from Villafranca AB in the north of Italy, later moving south to Amendola AB. During the operations over FRY RNLAF F-16s flew reconnaissance (306 Sqn detachments from Volkel AB were in theatre throughout the operations), enforced the Bosnian no-fly zone, dropped bombs on Udbina AB (1994), successfully dropped an unguided bomb on a moving Serb tank during the fall of Srebrenica (1995), and took part in Deliberate Force later in the summer of 1995.
Between 1994 and 1997 Dutch GCI personnel, along with Canadian GCI controllers, provided many hundreds of hours of fighter control and surveillance as integrated members of USAF/ANG Air Control Squadrons. In May 1999 during the Kosovo crisis a RNLAF F-16AM pilot Major Peter Tankink shot down[8] a Yugoslavian MiG-29 with an AMRAAM, but the force was more recognized for its high bombing accuracy. Allied Force was also the operational debut for the upgraded F-16AM. Besides the CAP missions, offensive bombing and photo reconnaissance missions were flown. KDC-10 tankers refuelled allied aircraft over the Adriatic Sea, and C-130 Hercules transports flew daily sorties from Eindhoven AB to logistically support the operation. Dutch F-16s also dropped cluster bombs on Niš. In total, RNLAF aircraft flew 1,194 sorties during operation Allied Force, which is about 7.5% of the total 37,000 sorties flown.
Operation Enduring Freedom and NATO in Afghanistan
[edit]
On 2 October 2002 a tri-national detachment of 18 Dutch, Danish and Norwegian F-16 ground attack aircraft and one Dutch KDC-10 tanker deployed to Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan in support of ground forces in Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. The KDC-10 returned to the Netherlands on 1 April 2003, and the Dutch F-16 detachment on 1 October 2003. The RNLAF returned to Manas AB on 8 September 2004 with five F-16 and one KDC-10 in support of the presidential elections of Afghanistan. This time the aircraft flew under the NATO ISAF flag. On 24 March 2005 the Dutch detachment transferred from Manas AB to Kabul International Airport. A detachment of six AH-64D Apache helicopters were already stationed at Kabul International Airport from April 2004 until March 2005.[citation needed]
In February 2006 four Dutch F-16s were joined by four Royal Norwegian Air Force F-16s in a detachment known as the 1st Netherlands-Norwegian European Participating Forces Expeditionary Air Wing (1 NLD/NOR EEAW). This was a follow-up of the participation with the Belgian Air Force.[11]
As part of the expanded NATO ISAF mission in southern Afghanistan in August 2006, the Royal Netherlands Air Force had three CH-47D Chinook of 298 Sq stationed at Kandahar Airfield. On 12 November 2006 eight F-16s transferred from Kabul International Airport to Kandahar Airfield, Additionally, a detachment of six (later four) AH-64D Apache helicopters had been stationed of Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan province. The CH-47D Chinooks of 298 sq rotated with Cougars from 300 sq. All helicopters together with a few F-16s returned to the Netherlands in November 2010. The other four F-16s transferred from Kandahar Airfield to Mazar-e-Sharif International Airport in November 2011. The F-16 flight, providing Close Air Support for ground forces and Recce Flights (specialised in counter-ied's), ended their mission officially on 1 July 2014.[12]
On 31 August 2006 a Royal Netherlands Air Force (Michael "Sofac" Donkervoort) pilot was killed when his plane crashed during a mission to support British ground troops in Helmand province.[13]
On 7 December 2007 military use of Twente Air Base ceased. The aerodrome is now known as Enschede Airport Twente. Flying officially ended at Soesterberg Air Base on 12 November 2008. The last jet ever to take off was a Hellenic AF F-4E. The base closed on 31 December 2008. The 298th and 300th squadron moved to Gilze-Rijen Air Base. A part of the base remains in use as a glider field. The former USAFE side will be in use by ground units relocated from Kamp van Zeist and will be called "Camp New Amsterdam". The AF museum (Royal Netherlands Military Aviation Museum) returned to the base and will use most of the existing hangars.
2010s and 2020s
[edit]
In 2013 the Royal Netherlands Air Force provided Strategic Airlift Support with a KDC-10 in support of French operations in Mali.
The RNLAF was hit hard by the Dutch defence cuts after the 2008 financial crisis. 311 Squadron was disbanded in September 2012, leaving four squadrons of F-16s, and one DC-10 transport aircraft was disposed of.[7]
In October 2014 the Netherlands Air Force joined the US and its Allies fighting ISIL, deploying eight F-16s (of which two are in reserve) to Jordan.
On 31 October 2014 323 Tactess squadron (F-16) disbanded and its aircraft and personnel were merged into 322 Squadron. The following Wednesday (5 November) the squadron reformed in the US as the RNLAF's first Joint Strike Fighter unit.[14]
303 Squadron (Agusta Bell AB 412SP) provided search and rescue within Dutch Flight Information Region) until 1 January 2015 when the unit was disbanded.[15]
In 2015 Airbus A330 - MRTT were ordered to replace two Dutch KDC-10 Tanker/Transport aircraft. The Netherlands is the lead nation in NATO initiative to replace and pool existing Tanker/Transport, including Luxembourg, Belgium (1), Germany (4), Norway (1) within EATC, in 2014 it was announced that the Airbus Military A330 MRTT has been selected and two are ordered for the Royal Netherlands Air Force with options to eight aircraft based in adjoining countries. In 2017 the German Air Force, Norwegian Air Force and Belgian Air Force confirmed orders by joining the MMF program to a total of 9 aircraft of which 5 will be based at Eindhoven Airbase and 4 at Cologne Air Base. They will carry Royal Netherlands Air Force roundels and be registered as Dutch aircraft. In November 2019 it was announced that the Dutch KDC-10 tankers were sold to Omega Aerial Refueling Services.[16] The last Dutch KDC-10 was taken out of service in October 2021.[17]
As per 2017 the Air Defence – Quick Reaction Force of two F-16 fighters are integrated for Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourg airspace and rotated between Dutch and Belgian ADF squadrons.
In 2021 a Brik-II satellite was launched to provide the Royal Netherlands Air Force with intelligence regarding navigation, communication and observation of the earth.[18]
Operation Inherent Resolve – Iraq & Syria
[edit]
From 2014 The Royal Netherlands Air Force provided eight F-16s in support of the coalition fighting IS. The aircraft were initially deployed in Iraq and later Syria. The mission was handed over to the Belgian Air Force in July 2016 after more than 2100 missions were flown, with weapons used over 1800 times. The Royal Netherlands Air Force contributed extensively to the missions flown by the coalition forces and were in high demand.
Since 2017 RNLAF KDC-10 and C-130 Hercules are deployed to an airfield in the Middle East to assist the United States led coalition in Operation Inherent Resolve.
In January 2018 the Dutch F-16s returned to the Middle East for a year-long deployment.
Structure of the Royal Netherlands Air Force
[edit]
Commander of the Royal Netherlands Air Force[19]
Air Force Command Staff
Volkel Air Base
Leeuwarden Air Base
Eindhoven Air Base
Defense Helicopter Command
Air Operations Control Station Nieuw-Milligen
Royal Netherlands Air Force Military School-Woensdrecht Air Base
Woensdrecht Logistic Centre
People and Aviation Centre
The RNLAF is in the process of restructuring into four major commands:[20]
Air Combat Command (ACC),[21] bringing together Leeuwarden and Volkel air bases and the Air Operations Control Station Nieuw Milligen through the restructuring of the Air Force Staff Department for Fighter Operations (Afdeling Jachtvlieg Operaties (AJO))
Air Mobility Command (AMC) on the basis of Eindhoven air base through the restructuring of Air Force Staff Department for Air Transport Operations (Afdelingen Luchttransport Operaties (ALTO)). Eindhoven air base has been officially transformed and designated as Vliegbasis Eindhoven - Air Mobility Command.[22]
Defence Helicopter Command (DHC) - the previously joint command of tactical helicopters of the Royal Netherlands Air Force and the naval helicopters of the Royal Netherlands Navy has been fully integrated into the RNLAF.
Air Support Command (ASC) - ground operational support to the flying units.
Another command related to air warfare is the Joint Ground-based Air Defence Command. The RNLAF's Patriot and Stinger missile air defence batteries are part of the air force, but come operationally under the JGADC, together with the 61st Missile Air Defence Group of the German Air Force. The JGADC is subordinated to the Royal Netherlands Army.
The force structure reform is done in line with the concept called Fifth Generation Air Force (5e generatie luchtmacht) and in addition to the reshuffling of the RNLAF in four major commands the concept plans for:[23]
Replacement of the F-16 by the F-35A in three squadrons
Replacement of the KDC-10 by the A330 MRTT
Replacement of the C-130H Hercules by 5 Embraer C-390 Millenium
Introduction of additional- & armed MQ-9 Reapers[24][25]
Upgrade of the Chinook fleet to the CH-47F MYII CAAS standard
Upgrading the AH-64D Apache to the AH-64E Guardian standard, incl. Joint Air to Ground Missile
Forming a Joint Target Support Cell
Forming an Air Command and Control capacity
Forming a Fighter Center of Excellence
Forming a dedicated SOF Rotary Wing Air by upgrading and re-tasking the existing Cougar fleet and acquisition of 14 H225M Caracals from 2028 onwards
Forming a National Air and Space Operations Center (NASOC)
Combining Helicopter Training with German Army at Bückeburg Air Base
Acquiring strategic air to ground weapons for F-35A such as AGM-158 JASSM-ER & AGM-88G[26]
Replacing PC-7 Basic Training Aircraft
Rank structure
[edit]
Commissioned officer ranks
[edit]
The rank insignia of commissioned officers.
NATO code OF-10 OF-9 OF-8 OF-7 OF-6 OF-5 OF-4 OF-3 OF-2 OF-1 OF(D) Student officer Royal Netherlands Air Force[27]
Generaal Luitenant-generaal Generaal-majoor Commodore Kolonel Luitenant-kolonel Majoor Kapitein Eerste luitenant Tweede luitenant
Other ranks
[edit]
The rank insignia of non-commissioned officers and enlisted personnel.
NATO code OR-9 OR-8 OR-7 OR-6 OR-5 OR-4 OR-3 OR-2 OR-1 Royal Netherlands Air Force[27]
Adjudant-onderofficier Sergeant-majoor Sergeant der 1e klasse Sergeant Korporaal der 1e klasse Korporaal Soldaat der 1ste klasse Soldaat der 2de klasse Soldaat der 3de klasse
Aircraft
[edit]
Current inventory
[edit]
Aircraft Origin Type Variant In service Notes Combat aircraft F-35 Lightning II United States Multirole fighter F-35A 31[28] 13 on order Tanker Airbus A330 MRTT Europe Tanker / Transport MRTT 8 2 on order[29]
Used for the NATO MMR fleet Transport C-130 Hercules United States Tactical airlift C-130H 4[30] 2 are C-130H-30 variants[31] C-390 Millennium Brazil Tactical airlift C-390 5 on order[30] Gulfstream G650 United States VIP transport G650ER 1[32] Helicopters AH-64 Apache United States Attack AH-64E 28[33] All being upgraded to AH-64E CH-47 Chinook United States Transport CH-47F 20[32][34] H225M Caracal Europe CSAR / Transport H225M 14 on order[35] H215M Cougar France CSAR / Transport AS532U2 12[30] To be replaced by H225M's NHIndustries NH90 Europe ASW / Transport NFH 19[30] Flown for the Royal Netherlands Navy Trainer aircraft F-35 Lightning II United States Conversion trainer F-35A 8[30] Based at Luke AFB[36] Pilatus PC-7 Switzerland Trainer PC-7 13[30] UAV MQ-9 Reaper United States Surveillance / Strike Block 5 4 4 on order[37][32]
The F-16 inventory of the Netherlands Air Force stood at 42 before the announcement was made that these would be transferred to Ukraine as part of the Dutch assistance package. The first 10 are transferred as per December 2023, with over 20 as per June 2024.[citation needed]
F-35A
[edit]
To replace its F-16 fleet the RNLAF considered the Dassault Rafale, the Lockheed Martin F-16 Block 52/60, the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Saab Gripen, the F/A-18 Super Hornet and the Lockheed Martin F-35. In 2002 the Netherlands signed a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) to co-develop the F-35 as a 'Tier 2' Partner. Two test aircraft were ordered between 2009 and 2011. Two F-35A have been delivered for the testing program and for training pilots and maintenance crew. This first aircraft is stationed at a base in Florida, US.[38]
On 17 September 2013 the F-35A was officially selected as the replacement for the Royal Netherlands Air Force F-16 MLU, the Ministry of Defense announced that it will buy 35 additional F-35As between 2014 and 2023, bringing the total to 37, the maximum number fitting the original budget for F-16 replacement.[39] In February 2014 Parliament approved the purchase of the first batch of eight F-35A aircraft, to be delivered from 2019.[40] The purchase of fifteen additional aircraft was announced by the Dutch government in December 2018 for a third squadron to NATO, totalling 52 jets, the first batch of nine additional aircraft was ordered in 2019. In 2022 the acquisition of six additional F-35As was announced to set up a third squadron as requested by NATO.[41]
See also
[edit]
Netherlands Naval Aviation Service
Solo Display Team
Notes
[edit]
References
[edit]
Bibliography
[edit]
Anrig, Christian F. (2011). The quest for relevant air power : continental European responses to the air power challenges of the post–Cold War era (PDF). Maxwell AFB: Air University Press. ISBN 978-1249030447.
Bernstein, J (2005). AH-64 Apache Units of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. UK: Osprey Publishing Ltd. ISBN 1-84176-848-0.
L, Klemen (2000). "Forgotten Campaign: The Dutch East Indies Campaign 1941–1942". Archived from the original on 26 July 2011 .
Klaauw, Bart van der (March–April 1999). "Unexpected Windfalls: Accidentally or Deliberately, More than 100 Aircraft 'arrived' in Dutch Territory During the Great War". Air Enthusiast (80): 54–59. ISSN 0143-5450.
Owers, Colin (Spring 1994). "Fokker's Fifth: The C.V Multi-role Biplane". Air Enthusiast. No. 53. pp. 60–68. ISSN 0143-5450.
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Marshall celebrates 20 years of supporting the Royal Netherlands Air Force
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Marshall Aerospace and Defence Group is celebrating the 20th anniversary of supporting the Royal Netherlands Air Force C-130 fleet. In 1996 Marshall was …
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https://marshallgroup.com/en-us/news-stories/marshall-celebrates-20-years-supporting-royal-netherlands-air-force
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Marshall Aerospace and Defence Group is celebrating the 20th anniversary of supporting the Royal Netherlands Air Force C-130 fleet.
In 1996 Marshall was awarded the contract to support the Royal Netherlands Air Force fleet of C-130H’s and throughout the development of the C-130 fleet Marshall has continued to support the Royal Netherlands Air Force.
Marshall completed the CUP (Cockpit Upgrade Programme) in 2005 which was followed by the groundbreaking TACAMO contract where two ex-US Navy EC-130Qs were converted to C-130Hs which included the CUP configuration. 2006 also marked the establishment of the engineering office in Leiden, the Netherlands.
Further capability insertion, scheduled and unscheduled maintenance and technical support agreements were put in place to sustain and increase the availability and capability of the fleet of four aircraft.
Rupert Dix, Managing Director of Military Aerospace at Marshall Aerospace and Defence Group commented: “We are incredibly proud to support the Royal Netherlands Air Force fleet of C-130 aircraft and over the last twenty years, we have jointly focussed upon improving availability and affordability through innovation.”
Major General Sotthewes, Deputy Commander of the Royal Netherlands Air Force, commented: "Throughout the years we have transformed the relationship into one of cooperation and partnering. The Royal Netherlands Air Force provides the operational input, while Marshall delivers the engineering solutions. A proven and rock solid combination. If technical problems arise, Marshall is immediately around to support the Royal Netherlands Air Force. This focus on customer's true needs really distinguishes Marshall in the aerospace industry."
Steve Fitz-Gerald, CEO of Marshall Aerospace and Defence Group commented: “I am immensely proud of this milestone; it is testament to the spirit and partnership of everyone involved over the last two decades and I look forward to what we can achieve in the future”.
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This is an age of air power, and the military strength of a country depends in great part upon the effectiveness of its air force. All the major countries of the world…
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https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/air-force/272762
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History of Air Power
Air power has been used for military purposes since the late 18th century. Although the Chinese may have used huge kites some 2,000 years ago to lift men into the skies for military reconnaissance, the first practical aircraft was the hot-air balloon invented by the brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier of France in 1783. This balloon was capable of rising to 6,000 feet (1,800 meters) and carried baskets to hold crews. This and other balloons were controlled by reheating air, releasing hydrogen gas, or eliminating ballast (weight). In 1793 the French government formed what may have been the world’s first air force when it set up a corps of Aérostiers (Aeronauts) for the purpose of military observation from tethered balloons.
Balloons were first used as offensive weapons in 1849 when the Austrians unsuccessfully attempted to bombard Venice with bombs connected to time fuses. Hot-air balloons proved most useful as reconnaissance craft. This was demonstrated by their employment by both sides in the American Civil War (1861–65), by the British in Africa during the South African War (1899–1902), and by the Russians in Japan during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05).
In 1852 air power took a new direction with the first successful demonstration of the dirigible (steerable) balloon airship. Designed by the Frenchman Henri Giffard, the first dirigible was a nonrigid cylindrical-shaped airship composed of a gasbag, 144 feet (44 meters) long, propelled by a steam engine. This dirigible was the prototype of increasingly sophisticated craft, which promised more navigational control than that offered by wind-borne balloons.
True military aviation began with the perfection of the navigable airship and the airplane. In 1897 the Austrian David Schwartz designed the world’s first rigid airship. It had an aluminum framework and was covered with aluminum sheeting. Although this craft was wrecked on a test flight, the rigid airship was subsequently improved by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin of Germany. In 1900 Zeppelin built a huge cigar-shaped, metal-framed ship covered by a smooth cotton cloth, which he named the LZ-1. This ship, 420 feet (128 meters) long and driven by two 16-horsepower engines, was the forerunner of the more powerful zeppelin craft that the Germans used with some success in World War I.
In 1903 the American brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright took the first controlled and sustained flight in a heavier-than-air craft, an airplane capable of flying at 30 miles (48 kilometers) per hour. Airplane experimentation soon flourished in other countries. Early models were distinguished by the number of wing levels. Monoplanes were designed with a single set of wings, biplanes had two sets of wings, and triplanes had three. Among the other early airplane pioneers was Louis Blériot of France. In 1907 he designed an airplane and flew more than 0.25 mile (400 meters), and in 1909 he demonstrated his type XI monoplane with the first flight across the English Channel, a distance of about 25 miles (40 kilometers).
The Wright brothers had foreseen that the airplane would be a most useful machine for military reconnaissance. This prediction was first fulfilled on October 23, 1911, during the Italo-Turkish War, when an Italian pilot made a one-hour reconnaissance flight over North Africa in a Blériot XI monoplane. Nine days later the Italians demonstrated another, deadlier use of the airplane, when they tossed heavy hand-grenade bombs from a plane flying over Libya. In 1912 the use of aircraft for psychological warfare was first demonstrated, when propaganda leaflets were showered over Libya from Italian planes.
Bombing techniques subsequently improved. In 1910 Glenn Curtiss of the United States dropped dummy bombs on a sea target, and soon thereafter engineers developed bomb carriers and bombsights. The first bomb carrier consisted of a small rack, placed behind the observer’s cockpit, in which small bombs were retained by a pin. The pin was removed over the target by pulling a string.
Soon airplanes were armed with other weapons. By 1910 work had begun on the installation of machine guns. In 1913 Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis of the United States went to Belgium to manufacture the Lewis gun, which was a low-recoil weapon. It came into widespread use in fighter planes that flew during World War I.
By 1911 deteriorating international relations led many countries to build up military capacity, including air fleets. In this period the first air forces were organized. They were established as subordinate divisions within existing armies.
World War I
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Germany led the world in air power with 260 airplanes and a fleet of 14 zeppelins. Other allies of Germany, including Italy, also had newly formed air arms. The British had about 100 aircraft at this time; the French, backed by the world’s leading aviation industry, had 156. Some 100,000 aircraft flew in the war, primarily in support of ground and sea troops.
During the war rapid advances were made in both air power strategy and technology. In 1914 the airplanes mobilized for war were flimsy, kitelike structures powered by engines of uncertain power. At best, they could climb 2,000 to 3,000 feet (600 to 900 meters) and fly at speeds of 60 to 70 miles (95 to 110 kilometers) per hour. At worst, they could barely get off the ground. Only four years later single-seat airplane fighters with 150- to 200-horsepower engines were outfitted with machine guns to do battle at 15,000 feet (4,600 meters) in the air.
The aircraft that were developed during World War I were of three main types, each with its own specific purpose. These airplanes were reconnaissance craft, fighter planes, and bombers.
The use of aircraft for reconnaissance was probably the most important contribution of air power to the war effort. In the first weeks of hostilities French aircraft spotted the movements of the German First Army, and this led to the First Battle of the Marne. The Germans, in turn, successfully used zeppelin airships to monitor their opponents’—the Allies’—shipping movements. By 1917 these craft could stay in the air for more than 95 hours at a time.
The British revived interest in nonrigid airships with their design of the blimp (from “British” Class B Airship and “limp”—that is, nonrigid). Hundreds of blimps were built during the war for antisubmarine convoy and coastal patrol work.
Reconnaissance techniques were greatly improved during World War I. The British added photography to visual observation in 1914, when they took pictures of German troop positions during the First Battle of the Aisne. Radio came into use at this time as a means of passing messages between reconnaissance aircraft and ground personnel.
At the start of the war reconnaissance craft were usually unarmed, except for the rifles and pistols carried by fliers. Soon the realization that these craft were vulnerable to attack led to the widespread adoption of the fighter plane—an aircraft designed to attack enemy reconnaissance and bombing aircraft.
Fighter planes were pioneered by Britain, which in 1913 had developed the Vickers Destroyer, a fighting biplane. In 1915 the French adapted the interrupter to a Morane-Saulnier monoplane. This gun synchronizer allowed machine gun bullets to pass between the blades of a spinning propeller.
When the Germans shot down a French fighter plane in 1915, the Dutch designer Anthony Fokker used the captured French craft as a model for his Fokker Eindecker, a single-seat fighter that was to give the German Luftwaffe (air force) temporary air superiority on the Western Front. From October 1915 until May 1916, Fokker Eindeckers blasted the French and British from the skies, a mastery that was ended only when the Allied forces improved their own fighter craft in 1916. That year the British developed D.H.2 and F.E.2b “pusher” fighters. These airplanes were fitted with one or more nose-fixed guns that fired forward, and the pilot could aim his aircraft as a firing weapon.
The aerial warfare made possible by these fighting airplanes led to individual combat in dogfights, one-on-one battles between pilots who used machine guns against enemy fliers. The war produced hundreds of flying aces, pilots who were credited with shooting down five or more enemy aircraft. Among the most famous were Captain Edward (“Eddie”) Rickenbacker of the United States, Baron Manfred von Richthofen of Germany, René Fonck of France, and Edward Mannock of Great Britain. These pilots also introduced the strategy of flying planes in a “circus” formation, or an air armada. The flying circus led to enormous air battles involving more than 100 fighter planes at a time.
A related development was the building of aircraft carriers to launch fighter planes from platforms built over battleship gun turrets. Some aircraft carriers were merely barges that were towed behind high-speed destroyers.
A third type of aircraft developed during the war was the bomber. After 1915 both sides used bombers to attack enemy targets, such as railway stations and weapons storehouses. These targets were deep behind enemy lines and out of the range of conventional ground troops.
The Germans used their zeppelin aircraft as strategic bombers during the war, launching raids against London, England, and other European cities. But zeppelins proved to be too vulnerable, and by 1916 the Germans were building bomber airplanes.
The German Gotha biplanes of 1916 had a wingspan of nearly 90 feet (27 meters) and two engines of 260 horsepower each. The Gothas could carry a 2,000-pound (900-kilogram) bombload and fly 300 miles (480 kilometers) without refueling. Even larger was the Siemens-Schuckert R-VIII, a bomber with a wingspread of more than 150 feet (45 meters) and powered by six 300-horsepower engines.
The Russians, British, and French also developed bomber airplanes. In 1915 Igor Sikorsky of Russia designed the first successful four-engined airplane. The British contributed the twin-engined Handley Page, the first heavy bomber used by British and American forces. The Voisin bomber of France was also in service in World War I. Known as the “chicken coop” because of its profusion of struts and wires, the Voisin type L had an 80-horsepower engine and could carry 130 pounds (58 kilograms) of bombs that the flier could hand drop overboard.
While large numbers of aircraft were used in World War I, they exercised little direct influence on the outcome of the conflict. The importance of air power in this war was rather in the development of increasingly sophisticated types of aircraft and of new strategic policies, which would be significant for military use in the later wars of the 20th century. (See also World War I Chronology.)
The Interwar Years
During the years between World Wars I and II, national air forces emerged around the world. There were also a number of tremendous advances in aircraft technology and strategy.
Immediately after World War I progress was slow. This was because there was a surplus of airplanes during peacetime, and governments were reluctant to spend money on the development of new military aircraft. Moreover, the Treaty of Versailles—the peace document signed at the end of the war—forbade the Germans to arm for military purposes, and what had been one of the world’s most powerful air forces was disbanded. Two important strategic concepts were shaped in this period. The first was the doctrine of strategic bombing. The Italian brigadier general Giulio Douhet argued in “The Command of the Air”, an influential essay that was first published in 1921, that future wars would be won by huge formations of bomber planes striking deep into enemy territory against industrial targets and civilian population centers. This would, Douhet stated, disrupt production and destroy national morale. The need for this kind of air power meant that countries should concentrate their military resources to build up powerful independent air forces with which to defeat their enemies without the aid of land or sea power.
This idea of the independent air force was the second important air power concept of the interwar era. Supporters included the British general Hugh Montague Trenchard and the American general William (Billy) Mitchell. Mitchell claimed that the airplane was the most important instrument of war, and that the failure of United States military leaders to expand the air force amounted to no less than “criminal negligence.” Mitchell’s outspoken views led to his court-martial in 1925. But his vision of the future of air power proved to be correct.
In Britain the Royal Air Force was firmly established as an independent power by 1923, when the government began an air defense program. The Italians established the Regia Aeronautica (Royal Air Force; now the Aeronautica Militare, or Italian Air Force) in 1923. The French followed in 1928 with an air ministry and later with the creation of the Armée de l’Air (now the Armée de l’Air et de l’Espace, or the Air and Space Army). In 1935 restrictions against German rearmament ended, and dictator Adolf Hitler established the Luftwaffe as an independent military service. In the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan, air arms remained under the control of previously established military branches.
Perhaps the most important technical improvement in this era was the development of jet propulsion. In 1930 Frank Whittle of Great Britain patented the first jet engine. On August 27, 1939, a Heinkel He-178 airplane in Germany made the first flight of a jet-powered aircraft.
Rocket research also began in the interwar years. Both the Germans and the Soviets were experimenting with rocket-powered aircraft by 1930, and in the United States inventor Robert Goddard was researching liquid-fueled rockets in New Mexico.
The military airplane was completely transformed between the world wars. Wood construction gave way to metal. Typical of the new fighter craft was the British Supermarine Spitfire, first flown in 1936. Its metal structure and a new type of machine armament on the wings to eliminate the need for bulky interrupter gear made it an advanced craft for its time.
In 1931 the Boeing Airplane Company (now the Boeing Company) of the United States built the B-9 bomber. Also of all-metal design, it was a great improvement over all previous bombers. In 1932 the Martin B-10 added enclosed cockpits and an internal weapons bay for further structural improvement.
In 1935 the Boeing B-17 was flight-tested. This was the prototype for the Flying Fortress, the bombardment mainstay of World War II. By the late 1930s bombers and fighter planes were equipped with bulletproof windshields, armor plating, gun turrets, and radar attachments.
As airplane technology advanced in these ways, the airship received a blow from which it never recovered. In May 1937 the German passenger dirigible Hindenburg exploded at the Lakehurst (New Jersey) Naval Air Station, killing 36 people. With its destruction, the era of the great dirigible balloons passed.
During the 1930s air power was increasingly a factor in wars throughout the world. The British used air power in colonial conflicts in Iraq, Aden (now in Yemen), and India. The Italians used a tactical air force against Ethiopia in 1935. In the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) the air forces of Italy and Germany supported Spanish general Francisco Franco with the bombing of Spanish cities, including Barcelona, Madrid, and Guernica. Japan mounted an air attack against China in a 1931 dispute over the control of Manchuria. By the time the Germans used air power in their invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1938 and 1939, it was evident that air power had come into its own.
World War II
Air power was a decisive factor in the outcome of World War II. An early German lead in air power was overcome by Allied advances in both radar technology and the use of strategic weapons.
At the start of the war in September 1939 the German Luftwaffe was the best equipped air force in the world, with some 500,000 air force personnel and about 5,000 aircraft. In contrast, the British Royal Air Force (RAF) was composed of some 100,000 men and some 2,000 aircraft.
Strategic bombing became an early part of the war effort. The Germans successfully used intensive bombing raids to assault Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Luftwaffe bombers destroyed Allied cities and transportation networks and flew in support of advancing German ground troops.
In the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, British RAF forces of about 600 aircraft, mostly Hawker Hurricanes and Supermarine Spitfires, faced some 2,500 Luftwaffe planes, including the powerful Junkers JU-87 Stuka dive-bomber. But this imbalance was overcome by pioneering developments in British radar, which allowed the RAF to manage its aircraft efficiently by using an early-warning system. As a result, the RAF was largely responsible for preventing a German invasion of England.
The German air raids on London and other British cities in 1940 and 1941, called the Blitz, further demonstrated the potential of strategic bombing. For over a month in the fall of 1940, German bombers dropped nearly 14,000 tons (12,700 metric tons) of high explosives and more than 12,000 incendiary canisters. These attacks subsided as Germany became engaged on other fronts, particularly with the Soviet Union.
At the same time Allied forces were developing improved aircraft able to match those of the Luftwaffe. The Americans produced the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress day bomber and the four-engine B-24 Liberator. By 1942 the British had added the Bristol Beaufighter long-range fighter and the Avro Lancaster, a four-engined heavy bomber.
By 1943 the Allied bombing offensive led to the round-the-clock bombing of Germany, shifting the balance of air power away from the Luftwaffe. The United States bombed German cities by day, and the RAF continued the assault at night. By 1945 this bombing strategy had caused some 600,000 casualties and inflicted great damage on German cities, including Dresden, Hamburg, Essen, and Berlin. On March 11, 1945, 1,079 United States Eighth Air Force planes released 4,738 tons (4,298 metric tons) of explosives on Essen. This was the greatest weight of bombs dropped on a single target in Europe.
On the Pacific Front the Japanese launched a surprise air attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. They crippled or destroyed 19 Navy ships, including 8 battleships, and more than 300 aircraft and killed or wounded more than 3,400 troops. By 1944 the Allies had countered with systematic bombing raids over Japan. These raids utilized the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, a long-range bomber operating from bases in China and later from islands in the central Pacific.
In 1945 United States Major General Curtis E. LeMay of the 21st Bomber Command ordered his Superfortresses to attack Japanese industrial centers with firebombs. Seventeen strikes totaling 6,960 flights dropped 41,600 tons (37,700 metric tons) of incendiaries and set afire 102 square miles (264 square kilometers) of Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, and Yokohama.
In 1944 and 1945 the Japanese tried a new tactic. Kamikaze (“divine wind”) pilots, believing in the Shinto philosophy of honorable death in battle, committed suicide by diving bomb-laden Mitsubishi A6M planes into sea targets. These kamikaze attacks sank 34 ships and damaged hundreds of others.
Air power was decisive in battles on other fronts, including the Mediterranean, where British air forces supported General Bernard Montgomery’s pursuit of the fleeing German army in Egypt and Libya. Allied air forces also contributed to the German collapse in North Africa in 1943.
In the Soviet Union inferior equipment and training allowed German air supremacy on the Eastern Front until 1944. By then the Soviet air force was able to dominate in clashes with the Luftwaffe. In the spring of 1945 the Soviet air force devastated Berlin with more than 7,500 bombers.
While bombers were used extensively in World War II, other aircraft also had a great impact. Planes used for tactical support contributed to the Allied landing at Normandy on June 6, 1944, when United States forces flew more than 8,000 sorties in support of the operation. By that time Allied forces had won air superiority over most of Europe.
Fighter planes, used to battle enemy fighters and attack enemy bombers, increased in speed during the war. Among the first small high-speed strike aircraft was the heavily armored Soviet Ilyushin IL-2 Stormovik. In 1943 and 1944 American P-47 and P-51 fighters, equipped with external fuel tanks, flew long-range cover for heavy bombers. These fighters were in great part responsible for gaining Allied air superiority over Europe. Jet and rocket-powered planes in use by 1944 boosted fighter speeds from about 350 miles (565 kilometers) per hour to 600 miles (965 kilometers) per hour. The RAF put the first jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor, into operation in 1944. The Germans soon followed with the Messerschmitt ME-262 twin jet fighter.
In 1944 the Germans used V-1 flying bombs and, later, V-2 rockets carrying high explosives to threaten British cities. These bombs caused considerable damage for a short period but were developed too late to play a major role in the war. Allied forces bombed the launch sites in northern Europe and overran them soon after the Allied invasion of Europe in June 1944. These early rockets were prototypes for the guided missiles of the postwar era.
Reconnaissance developments included the use of streamlined high-speed fighter planes that sped low over enemy targets to take photographs and then escaped homeward at maximum speed. High-altitude craft took photographs on motion-picture film that was later processed into mosaic large-scale maps, foreshadowing developments in aerial mapmaking.
Air transport advances during the war included the use of airborne parachute troops dropped by plane into combat areas. The German air force first tried this technique during the Battle of Crete in May 1941, using the Junkers JU-52 transport plane and troop-carrying gliders.
World War II ended in 1945. The war in Europe came to an end in May, when the German forces surrendered to the Allies. The war in the Pacific ended in August with the bombing of two Japanese cities. On August 6 a B-29, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and three days later another B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The next day the Japanese agreed to accept the terms of surrender. (See also World War II Chronology.)
The Korean War
The conflict over the control of Korea, fought from 1950 to 1953, was between North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), supported by the Soviet Union and China, and South Korea (Republic of Korea), supported by United Nations (UN) forces dominated by the United States. Both sides suppressed the use of all-out air power strategies in an effort to avoid a world war. (See also Korean War Chronology.)
Air power during the Korean War was used only against precise targets in a limited area of conflict. Bombers attacked bridges, roads, and industrial centers, while planes such as the B-26 flew in support of ground armies. The UN forces limited the air power capacity of the North Koreans by destroying their air bases as they neared completion.
The first jet fighter battles were fought in this war, as Republic F-84 Thunderjets, Lockheed P-80C Shooting Stars, and North American F-86 Sabres faced Mikoyan MiG-15’s in the skies over Korea. The first heavy jet bomber, the Boeing B-47 Stratofortress, was in use by 1951. Another important development in Korea was the use of the helicopter in warfare. Helicopters were used to transport men, supplies, and guns to otherwise inaccessible places. They were also used to fire rockets and other missiles. They could evacuate casualties quickly, resulting in a reduction of the death rate to the lowest figure in modern military history.
The Indochinese War
United States military involvement in Indochina began in 1961, when American troops entered Vietnam as advisers in a conflict between the South Vietnamese government and communist rebels. By 1965 United States military forces were heavily engaged in attacks on the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese targets (see Vietnam War).
The use of air power in this war, as in Korea, was primarily for tactical support. Air Force pilots used fighter and bomber planes to destroy enemy supplies, support ground troops, and deliver both supplies and personnel. American pilots also dropped defoliants—chemical substances that destroy plant life—over the countryside. They hoped in this way to deny the cover of trees to guerrilla fighters. Uncrewed aerial vehicles (drones) were used to penetrate bombed areas at high speeds and photograph earlier strikes.
The high cost and complex operation requirements of jet planes made the use of less powerful aircraft more expedient. In Vietnam the A-4 Skyhawk, with a maximum speed of 685 miles (1,102 kilometers) per hour, proved most effective for tactical support.
The Boeing B-52 jet bomber was also used during this conflict. First used in 1955, the B-52 was a huge jet airplane with a range greater than 12,000 miles (19,300 kilometers), a wingspan of 185 feet (56 meters), and speeds of up to 630 miles (1,015 kilometers) per hour. Among the high-technology weapons it carried were precision guided munitions, including the “smart bomb”—an explosive directed to its target by the use of a laser beam.
Air power advances were made in the development of short-takeoff-and-landing (STOL) craft, which reduced the need for long concrete runways, and in counterinsurgency aircraft (COIN), designed to operate from rough terrain. Helicopters were used in an air patrol system that also employed transport planes. The air patrol system brought mobility to ground troops by transporting men, guns, ammunition, and supplies to remote locations. In October 1965 the relief of an outpost was accomplished by the arrival of a whole division in helicopters.
The main use of strategic bombing occurred in December 1971 and in April 1972. United States Air Force (USAF) Strategic Air Command pilots blanketed Hanoi and Haiphong in North Vietnam with bombs dropped from B-52’s in an intensive series of raids. As in Korea, the lesson in Indochina was that conventional bombing and fighter strategies would not by themselves win a guerrilla war.
Middle Eastern Wars
Several conflicts in the Middle East between Israel and its Arab neighbors have been shaped by the use of air power. The Suez Crisis of 1956—over control of the Suez Canal—began when British, French, and Israeli forces dominated Egyptian airspace by using fighter and bomber aircraft as a tactical support force for advancing ground troops. Within two days the Egyptian air force was destroyed. In 1967 the Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel was won by the superior air strategy of Israel. Both Egypt and Israel had equal air forces, though Egypt could call upon the military resources of other Arab countries. But in three hours, on June 5, 1967, the Israeli air force completed a preemptive strike against Egyptian airfields. This attack, along with raids on the airfields of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, led to Israel’s eventual victory.
At the start of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, a surprise strike by Arab forces killed more than 2,500 Israelis and destroyed a fifth of their air fleet. While Israel countered with the use of paratroopers, ground tank forces, and conventional air power to end the war, the Egyptian use of missiles reduced the effectiveness of Israeli air efforts.
Air Power in the Missile Age
One of the most important developments after World War II was the achievement of supersonic flight. On October 14, 1947, Major Chuck Yeager of the USAF became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound. He made his historic flight in a Bell X-1 rocket-powered airplane. The Soviets also broke the sound barrier in 1947, using the MiG-15 fighter. By the time of the Korean War, fighters could fly at supersonic speeds of Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound. By 1959 planes such as the Mirage III and the Lockheed F-104 could fly as fast as 1,650 miles (2,655 kilometers) per hour. In the 1950s and ’60s the USAF teamed with the U.S. Navy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to develop the supersonic North American X-15 rocket plane, which could reach a speed of Mach 6.7 (4,520 miles, or 7,275 kilometers, per hour).
Although missiles have to some degree made the heavy bomber obsolete, the United States and a few other countries retain long-range supersonic bombers equipped with automatic navigation and electronic countermeasure (ECM) systems. These automated systems arose because supersonic speeds in aircraft made the human navigation and control of the planes extremely difficult. Aircraft control was made easier with the development of avionics, the use of electronic aids in aviation.
Avionics relies on the use of miniature electronic components and computer and radar technology to automate navigation and weapons systems. For example, avionic-equipped jets can be flown on preset courses, while radar searches for and “locks onto” enemy aircraft. After firing at the most favorable moment, the electronic fighter can break away to return to base. The devices used for this kind of detection, pursuit, and destruction of enemy aircraft also are used for ECM devices, which attempt to disable enemy countermeasures and jam radar.
The external design of aircraft has changed as flying speeds have increased. Swept-back wings and delta plane forms replaced the straight or tapered wings of World War II. By the early 1990s, variable-geometry arrangements—to allow wing flexibility—had been developed.
Long-range capabilities of postwar aircraft were further extended with the growth of aerial refueling. In 1949 the Boeing B-50 Lucky Lady II flew nonstop around the world in 94 hours, proving the feasibility of aerial refueling for long-range missions. In another demonstration of in-flight refueling, two Republic F-84-E Thunderjet fighters flew across the Atlantic in 1950 in just over 10 hours, completing the first nonstop, transoceanic jet flight.
Missile development began in earnest in the early 1950s, when both the Soviets and the Americans introduced their first missiles. For decades these two countries continued to seek equality in military strength by balancing and counterbalancing various types of offensive and defensive missile forces. In air defense, where missiles have an irreplaceable role, fighter-interceptor aircraft also play a part. Airborne for long periods, they can meet attacking aircraft or missiles far from the target. In strategic warfare bombers and missiles complement one another.
The crewed bomber is flexible. It can be recalled or directed to switch targets. Its crew can take radar-map pictures of the area it has destroyed and use them to plan subsequent missions. Jet bombers can carry far heavier and more varied loads of explosives than can earlier types of bombers. The crewed plane is essential in search and rescue, transport, evacuation of wounded troops, antisubmarine patrol, and other missions where the human factor is decisive.
In the 1970s both the Soviet Union and the United States developed high-performance, complex airplanes for crewed flight. The Soviet MiG-25 Foxbat attack and fighter plane could fly up to Mach 3 in short bursts and was capable of firing the air-to-air Acrid missile. The United States developed the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle, an effective long-range flier that carried Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles. The fighter-bomber version, known as the Strike Eagle, carried out much of the nighttime precision bombing of Iraqi installations during the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91.
Among other specialized crewed planes designed in the postwar era have been the short-takeoff-and-landing (STOL) and vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) crafts. The Korean and Vietnam wars proved the need for planes able to take off and land in remote jungles, in forested areas, and on ships. The STOL and VTOL craft provided some independence from long permanent runways. The Hawker Harrier was a fighter plane with this capability. It became operational with the Royal Air Force in 1967 and over the following decades was fitted with avionics of growing capabilities. The Royal Navy’s Sea Harrier version distinguished itself in the Falkland Islands War in 1982.
The high production cost of specialized aircraft has led to the growing use by many smaller countries of the multirole combat aircraft (MRCA). The MRCA is an airplane that can be adapted to a variety of functions—bomber, fighter, and reconnaissance. An example is the European-made Panavia Tornado, commissioned by Britain, West Germany, and Italy, and made operational in 1976. The Tornado carries up to 18,000 pounds (8,200 kilograms) of bombs, missiles, and a mix of laser, radar, and electronic aids. Multirole aircraft developed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries included the Eurofighter Typhoon and the F-35 Lightning II.
The MRCA and other low-cost strike aircraft are more widely used by countries looking for cost-effectiveness in their military spending. These aircraft were developed from such trainers as the Cessna A-37 and are relatively inexpensive, small, and highly maneuverable.
Air Forces in Outer Space
The countries of the world have been reaching into outer space since the development of jet and rocket propulsion in the late 1940s. In 1956 the USAF launched the Bell X-2, a rocket-powered research craft, to an altitude of nearly 24 miles (39 kilometers). On October 4, 1957, the Space Age began in earnest as the Soviet Union used an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to launch the 184-pound (83-kilogram) Sputnik satellite into orbit.
By the early 1980s, in both the Soviet Union and the United States, satellites that could use laser beams and particle beams to destroy ground-based targets and spacecraft were under study. Orbital bombardment weapons were also under study. The Soviets researched the SS-9 Scarp, a satellite armed with a nuclear warhead, which would remain in orbit until needed.
The ability of space vehicles to gather intelligence has grown. Some reconnaissance satellites furnish detailed pictures of military installations. Others eavesdrop on electronic conversations. Reconnaissance satellites carrying infrared sensors can also detect missile launches or heat-producing craft.
The Soviet Union first launched a military observation satellite, the Kosmos 112, in 1969 to provide coverage of Norway, Alaska, and Greenland. Vela satellites, launched between 1963 and 1970, orbited some 60,000 miles (96,500 kilometers) from Earth to monitor nuclear explosions in space. More advanced satellites capture cell phone conversations and search hidden Internet sites (the dark web) for terrorist activity.
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Developing an Adequate Internal Compliance Program for the Royal Netherlands Air Force Command
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This chapter examines how an adequate Internal Compliance Program (ICP) for the Royal Netherlands Airforce (RNLAF) was developed. In order to create an adequate ICP, it is essential to determine which legal and other aspects should be incorporated in the ICP...
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In order to provide the reader with a historical context and to understand the types of relevant environmental influences affecting compliance on export control of the RNLAF, we present a brief historical analysis of the RNLAF with regard to the importance of developing an adequate ICP, as well as a Political, Economic, Social, Technological and Legal (PESTL) analysis.
15.2.1 Historical Context
With a so-called Voluntary DisclosureFootnote 1 the RNLAF, in June 2015, started a path to improve on the compliance on export control laws and regulations. The Voluntary Disclosure was answered in January 2017 by the US government and the RNLAF was strongly advised to become in control. And although the it concerned one specific regulatory regime, the activities in the compliance domain thereafter covered all export control activities that the RNLAF is conducting. The ratio behind this is simple; throughout the world there is a great variety of export control laws and regulations and the RNLAF, an organization that operates internationally (e.g., contractual, on mission, training), is confronted with all these types of legal constraints. Therefore, the ICP must cover all these compliance aspects.
Becoming and remaining compliant with all these export control laws and regulations can only be achieved by setting up an adequate ICP that embeds control measures in the RNLAF daily business. Therefore, the RNLAF tasked itself to build an ICP. On 24 December 2019, the first version of the RNLAF’s ICP was posted on the intranet of the RNLAF.Footnote 2 It seems a little bit late for the RNLAF to finish its ICP. However, from the start of the Voluntary Disclosure, the RNLAF took all corrective actions to resolve all the past violations, but also took measures to prevent future violations. Thus, on an operational level, both corrective and preventive actions were taken, such as conducting risk assessments on the numerous Air Bases the RNLAF operates, building an export control database, creating management commitment (which resulted in embedding a Unit Export Control Compliance in the RNLAF’s organization structure), starting a licensing process and writing policies and procedures. In fact, the RNLAF already started with designing the pillars of an ICP at an early stage, although it was not written in a formal document.
At the start of the operational process, the RNLAF swiftly had to make personnel available to start doing the export control tasks. However, very logically there was a lack of personnel with knowledge about these specific laws and regulations. Until August 2019, the operational course of action took place. The positive effect thereof that was realized: while conducting three years of operational export control compliance corrective and preventive actions, the RNLAF to a certain degree became an export control compliant organization. Now, it was time however to become export control compliant on a strategic level. Only by designing an adequate ICP and maintaining it with dedicated capacity, the RNLAF would become fully aware how all relevant export control laws and regulations affect its operations and enable it to implement measures to make sure that it remains export control compliant, this time on a strategic level.
15.2.2 PESTL Analysis
As stated before, it is important to understand the RNLAF’s relevant environmental influences affecting compliance in general. Every single day, the RNLAF sends all kinds of military and dual use items and technical data and delivers services to external parties (e.g., Northrop Grumman International Trading Inc., Meggitt Inc. and Teledyne Defense Electronics LLC) for testing, repair and maintenance, and overhaul. These items are most of the time classified on either the United States Commerce Control List (US CCL)Footnote 3 or the United States Munitions List (USML).Footnote 4 However, sometimes the items do not have a US classification, but are classified on European or national control lists. The fact, however, that they are classified, means that compliance aspects are at stake. The type of classification determines the level and type of export controls that apply.
US defense companies have two main avenues for selling on the international market: Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and Direct Commercial Sales (DCS). Under FMS, the US government procures defense articles and services with defense industry on behalf of the foreign customers. DCS allows US defense companies (in possession of a commercial export license) to negotiate directly with foreign customers. Most of the RNLAF’s items have been acquired from the US through several FMS cases (i.e., F-16, AH-64 Apache, MQ-9 Reaper), some through DCS (i.e., C-130, NH-90) and some through a combination thereof (i.e., CH-47 Chinook). Therefore, in order to effectuate the envisaged re-exports, the RNLAF needs prior US Department of State, Office of Regional Security and Arms Transfers (RSAT) authorization or authorization of other offices (US, EU or other). Understanding the importance of strict adherence to US export controls and other regulatory regimes, the RNLAF all the time requests authorizations for these envisaged re-exports. Furthermore, the RNLAF urges the regulating offices of these re-exports to swiftly process these requests on their part, as it is crucial for maintaining the operational readiness of the RNLAF.
In order to fulfill all export control compliance conditions (legal, regulatory or other), the RNLAF needs to have an adequate ICP. Only then, the RNLAF is able to strictly adhere to US export controls and other regulatory regimes, while requesting for authorizations for these envisaged re-exports. The ICP is the core instrument to be in control and compliant.
The RNLAF is a military organization, and therefore has specific requirements and needs, to stay in control and compliant. These specific requirements and needs are highly dependent on trade laws and regulations that affect its re-exports of the items, services and technologies. In this business case, an ICP Framework was build, based on the existing ICP Frameworks, that fulfills all the needs of the RNLAF in its daily business (see Sect. 15.3).
The PESTL analysis considers five dimensions that should be taken in consideration in the business case: the Political, Economic, Social, Technological and Legal dimension. Below, we will elaborate on how these dimensions affect the RNLAF, and more specifically an ICP.
15.2.2.1 Political and Legal Environment Analysis
The reason we describe the political and legal environment together is because they are highly intertwined. Politics to a large extent shapes the legal environment, since politics in most Western countries have the authority under constitution to make laws and to alter or repeal them. Most of the weapon systems the RNLAF has, are bought through FMS cases or DCS contracts from the US. Only a small percentage of all the RNLAF weaponry is bought from the EU market. Therefore, the RNLAF has to comply with various US laws and regulations (see Chap. 11 of this volume), but also sometimes with EU or the various national laws and regulations. Furthermore, because of the fact that most weaponry is bought from the US Department of Defense and the US defense industry, the RNLAF is highly dependent on the US defense industry complex as a whole: US government, Army, Air Force and industry. Therefore, the scope in building an adequate ICP should consider all US political and legal aspects (which are subject to frequent change). Nonetheless, EU and various national politics and legal aspects should likewise be taken into account. And these aspects affect not only the domain of export controls. As national and supranational political fora tend to intervene in more and more areas of procurement, trade, labor market, environment, and so on, compliance becomes a chief priority for doing and staying in business. The impact of the legal aspects, as can be expected, is large and affects the daily business of the RNLAF. Its importance reflects in the legal framework of an ICP (see Sect. 15.3).
15.2.2.2 Economic Environment Analysis
The RNLAF is a defense organization and therefore depends on the economic environment, national as well as international. The RNLAF is doing its business in an environment of mostly government to government deals (FMS Cases) and industry to government deals (DCS and other commercial contracts). Its funding is provided by taxpayers’ money. The RNLAF is a governmental organization, which makes it an economically atypical organization, compared with the defense industry. On the other hand, the RNLAF is highly dependent on the economical maturity of the various defense industries it deals with (e.g., Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Raytheon). Furthermore, the RNLAF is highly dependent on the relationship between the defense industry and its governments abroad. In short, the economic environment can at best be described as imperfect markets of goods and services. Investment selection in these markets cannot be made under competitive conditions (e.g., by public tender) because there are only one or a few suppliers (monopolies or near monopolies) for specific products or services. In addition, the number of buyers in these markets is often limited, especially in cases of government procurement.Footnote 5 All this makes contractual relations of the utmost importance. All these considerations should be envisaged when designing an adequate ICP for the RNLAF.
15.2.2.3 Social Environment Analysis
Monitoring the public opinion, both nationally and abroad is essential for the RNLAF for maintaining the operational readiness. Especially a change of the public opinion in the US concerning the defense industry or spending can harm its operations, but also enable the RNLAF to import new weaponry and re-export it. Again, most of the RNLAF’s weaponry is bought and repaired in the US, thus, an adequate ICP should consider the most relevant actual and future social factors in the US as well as its national and EU social changes. Of special interest is also the effect of public opinion on topics as accountability and corporate governance.
15.2.2.4 Technological Factors
The RNLAF is highly dependent on US military and dual use items, technical data, technology, software and defense services. If the RNLAF complies with all US export control laws and regulations and does not commit violations like re-exporting items or technology to 126.1 International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR)Footnote 6 embargoed countries, there will be no reason to negatively affect the RNLAF in, for instance, receiving less than the state-of-the-art technology. With this technology, the RNLAF is able to maintain its older weaponry (e.g., repair, overhaul), but also able to constantly improve newly bought weaponry such as the MQ-9 Reaper and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to US Standards of Technology. Not surprisingly, specifically for the project F-35 a complete ICP Framework was built in order to entirely comply with all relevant US Laws and regulations.Footnote 7 Therefore, the focus of an adequate ICP for the RNLAF should be on building walls around US technology; thus: prohibiting re-exports to embargoed countries. Screening of RNLAF personnel and embedded contractors and physical and IT security should be considered to prevent the leaking of technology to unauthorized persons/countries. In short, technology is of the utmost importance for the RNLAF and everything must be done in the field of compliance, to secure its future use.
In this section we examine how an adequate ICP for the RNLAF was developed. After a short introduction (Sect. 15.3.1) of the method used, we first describe the legal framework. This contains the main legal regimes the RNLAF has to comply with in its operations. With this legal framework (Sect. 15.3.2), by using relevant ICP guidelines, frameworks and standards (Sect. 15.3.3), an adequate ICP for the RNLAF is put in place (as described in Sect. 15.3.4).
15.3.1 The Need for an Internal Compliance Program
According to Tamada and Achilleas, export control regimes are developed and implemented by a method combining an international approach and a national approach.Footnote 8 The development and implementation of an export control regime consists of a two step-method. This comprises the establishment of a legal framework on the basis of national law and applicable international law. Thereafter the other elements of the regime are defined and modified to the organizational needs.
The above-mentioned concept for developing and implementing export control regimes, can apply to designing an ICP for any organization, thus also for the RNLAF. In fact, the first step the RNLAF should take to become export control compliant is to understand the export control laws and regulations that affect its daily operations. Thus, the first question the RNLAF has to answer is: With which parties from which countries do we do business with?
Thereafter comes the question: What kind of ICP Framework or combination of ICP frameworks available do we need to apply for building our own ICP Framework? Over the years, many ICP Frameworks were developed by different organizations. One should examine which ICP Frameworks are the most relevant for the RNLAF’s operational environment. By comparing, combining and applying these ICP Frameworks, the RNLAF is able to design a tailor-made and adequate ICP.
15.3.2 Legal Framework
Since the RNLAF is mostly US-orientated, the RNLAF should gain a thorough understanding of at least the US ITAR,Footnote 9 the Export Administrations Regulations (EAR)Footnote 10 and the Security Assistance Management Manual (SAMM)Footnote 11 (for the FMS cases the RNLAF is party to). The most important section of the latter document is SAMM, C8.7, third party transfers, as it describes the licensing process for third party transfers. Since the RNLAF is involved in many FMS cases, every time re-exports take place, the RNLAF has to apply for a third-party transfer authorization before the re-exports actually happen. Therefore, the ICP of the RNLAF should incorporate these US laws and regulations.
Furthermore, the RNLAF is part of the Kingdom of The Netherlands, which is member of the United Nations, the European Union, and the RNLAF also does business with several EU member states. Therefore, the UN, EU and the Dutch export controls, and other import, anti-bribery and anti-corruption laws and regulations should be incorporated in the ICP. In fact, it is to be expected that all these export control laws and regulations be applied in the daily operations of the RNLAF. Finally we mention sanctions law, as the RNLAF needs to secure that every time re-exports take place they comply with sanctions law, for example by checking that no companies are involved that violated UN, EU and US sanctions law earlier.
Further, an interesting aspect one should understand is that the EU Export Controls and the Dutch Laws and regulations are civil law systems, which means that these regulatory regimes are driven by codified standards. Wernaart defines a civil law system as, “The idea behind a civil law system is that a society can be organized in a coherent way by adopting written codified standards”.Footnote 12 However, as mentioned before, the RNLAF is mostly involved in deals with the US government or the US defense industry. US Laws and regulations are based on a common-law system, which is a case law driven system. With regard to the essence of a common-law system, Wernaart describes it as, “A common law system is case law driven. The law is therefore predominantly developed by judges, rather than a legislator or academics”.Footnote 13
The impact of the difference between the civil and common law-based origins is however not as big as one would expect at first sight, because U.S. Export Controls are codified in federal laws and regulations (such as ITAR and EAR). The majority of the changes in the US thus find its origins in changes of these laws and regulations and not so much in new jurisprudence. In general however, one can observe that U.S. Export Controls, take the ITAR for example, tend to change more frequently than the EU and Dutch Export Controls, which is important to keep in mind.
Also, between the EU and Dutch regimes, a specific relation must be mentioned. One has to understand that the laws of the EU have a supranational character, which means that to become in force, these laws need to become part of the national legal system of the EU Member States.Footnote 14 Another legal aspect that needs to be addressed is that some export control regimes have an extraterritorial character. This is the case with the US export control regime. In practice, this means that the US Laws and regulations follow the goods. Thus when, for example, the RNLAF buys F-16 aircraft through FMS-cases, every time the RNLAF wants to re-export, re-transfer or import these defense articles, US Laws and regulations need to be applied on these transactions, which results in the application for authorizations (such as a third-party transfer) with the US Department of State. Thus, in order to design an adequate ICP for the RNLAF not only all the above-mentioned laws and regulations must be incorporated into the different pillars of the ICP, but also the relationships between them must be embedded.
15.3.3 Internal Compliance Program Frameworks and Guidelines
As has been said, there are many models available for designing ICPs. However, for US oriented businesses and organizations, such as the RNLAF, the most applied models are the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission Internal Control—Integrated Framework (COSO Model),Footnote 15 the US Department of Commerce/Bureau of Industry and Security Compliance Program Guidelines (BIS Guidelines)Footnote 16 and the US Department of State/Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, Compliance Program Guidelines (DDTC Guidelines).Footnote 17 Furthermore, there are lots of additional frameworks and guidelines for developing an adequate ICP: the Coalition for Excellence in Export Compliance Best Practices for Export Controls (CEEC Best Practices),Footnote 18 the Common Industry Standards for European Aerospace and Defense (CIS Standards),Footnote 19 the Framework for IT Governance and Control (COBIT Framework)Footnote 20 and many more. In addition, the EU recently presented a recommendation on ICPsFootnote 21 as did the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Footnote 22
All the aforementioned ICP guidelines, frameworks and standards (hereinafter together summarized as ‘ICP frameworks’) consist of a combination of pillars that need to be elaborated on in the ‘perfect ICP’. Furthermore, most ICP Frameworks take the five COSO Model components as a starting point: (1) control environment; (2) risk assessment; (3) control activities; (4) information and communication; and (5) monitoring. The COSO Model is a very flexible ICP framework that can be used for businesses as government organizations and non-governmental organizations. In fact, the COSO Model is just a starting point and not a ready to use ICP. It is literally a framework that should be supplemented with other pillars specially designed for an organization such as the RNLAF. Since most of the time the RNLAF deals with DDTC and BIS, it is understandable that their ICP Frameworks will be examined as a surplus to the COSO Model and an opportunity to achieve best practice. The guidance on ICPs provided by the EU and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs have not been taken into consideration when developing an ICP for the RNLAF, first, because the RNLAF focused primarily on ICPs for US-oriented businesses and organizations, second, because they have only become available recently. They will be considered in the near future however.
Examining the above-mentioned ICP Frameworks, results in a combination of a maximum of ten separate components that are considered relevant to be incorporated in an ICP:
(1)
Management commitment (CEEC, BIS, COSO, COBIT, CIS and DDTC);
(2)
Compliance organization (CEEC, COSO, CIS and DDTC);
(3)
Risk assessment (BIS, COSO and COBIT);
(4)
Policies and procedures (CEEC, BIS, COSO, COBIT, CIS and DDTC);
(5)
Contract management and authorization applications (CEEC, BIS and DDTC);
(6)
Screening (CEEC, BIS and DDTC);
(7)
Training and communication (CEEC, BIS, COSO, CIS and DDTC);
(8)
Physical/IT security (BIS, COSO, COBIT and DDTC);
(9)
Compliance reviews/audits (BIS, COSO, COBIT, CIS and DDTC);
(10)
Handling violations and voluntary (self-) disclosures (CEEC, BIS and DDTC).
The DDTC and BIS Frameworks both combine 9 pillars together, which make them the most detailed and complete ICP Frameworks. The difference between them is that DDTC includes the pillar Compliance Organization and lacks the pillar Risk Assessment, while for BIS the opposite counts.
The COSO Model defines internal control as a process effected by an entity’s board of directors, management and other personnel designed to provide reasonable assurance of the achievement of objectives in the following categories: (1) operational effectiveness and efficiency; (2) financial reporting Reliability; and (3) applicable laws and regulations compliance. Obviously, the last category is most relevant when designing an ICP. Bearing in mind the original five COSO Model components, we consider the longlist of 10 separate components a natural refinement logically following the needs of the specific application in export control compliance. And although in different organizations the names and number of ICP components might be slightly different, in general they will not be essentially different from our ten components’ longlist.
15.3.4 The Internal Compliance Program of the Royal Netherlands Air Force Command
Now that the ICP frameworks that are most relevant, as well as the laws and regulations the RNLAF is obliged to comply with, have been elaborated on, these elements are combined in order to design the most adequate ICP for the RNLAF. The RNLAF’s ICP consists of 11 pillars, which are distilled from the COSO-, BIS-, and DDTC-frameworks:
(1)
Introduction and management commitment;
(2)
Legal and regulating framework;
(3)
Compliance organization;
(4)
Policies and procedures;
(5)
Contract management and authorizations and authorization applications;
(6)
Screening;
(7)
Training and communication;
(8)
Physical and IT security;
(9)
Recordkeeping;
(10)
Compliance audits;
(11)
Violations and voluntary (self-)disclosures.
Most ICP frameworks contain a maximum of nine pillars. The RNLAF added two extra pillars (i.e., (2) legal and regulating framework and (9) recordkeeping). Also, we see that risk assessment is not a pillar, as conducting risk assessments is considered inherent to evaluating all pillars of the ICP and is a continuous process. Below, we will shortly explain the relevance and content of each pillar.
15.3.4.1 Introduction and Management Commitment
The most essential pillar that provides the fundament of an ICP is that the senior management of the RNLAF commits itself to all the other pillars of the ICP. Therefore, a management commitment letter from the Commander of the RNLAF is included. This letter contains a strong and durable commitment to exercise control compliance for the RNLAF, and all its approximately 6000 employees. In the COSO Model commitment is an essential part of the control environment, which is defined as “set of standards, processes and structures that provide the basis for carrying out internal control across the organization”.Footnote 23 This component comprises the tone at the top, communication about ethical behavior and internal control within all levels of staff, and the overall integrity and values of the organization. These elements provide the overall basis for a successful system of internal control. Not directly in the ICP, but in the control environment as a whole, resources to develop and implement the ICP are provided and assigned.
15.3.4.2 Legal and Regulating Framework
As important as the first pillar is the component of all the export control laws and regulations the RNLAF has to comply with while conducting its operations. This pillar incorporates the legal framework. The primary focus in this pillar is on the US laws and regulations (ITAR and EAR, as well as the SAMM for FMS Cases). The EU export control regime and the Dutch strategic goods regulation,Footnote 24 and other import, anti-bribery and anti-corruption laws and regulations are also included. Furthermore, the difference between the legal essence and implications of FMS and DCS bought articles is explained. This pillar affects all other pillars of the ICP, as it constitutes the core of compliance. Therefore, the RNLAF explicitly chose to include the legal framework as the second chapter of the ICP.
15.3.4.3 Compliance Organization
In this pillar the compliance function is set up and the staff is assigned to the compliance function to ensure there is capacity, so the ICP can do its work to achieve the organization’s strategic goal of compliance. Furthermore, the staff compliance officers and the compliance officers at the Air Bases are cited. Thus, all the RNLAF personnel is able to reach out to their specific point of contact, when they have export control compliance questions. As such, the senior management of the RNLAF has ensured that there is a sufficient number of personnel dedicated to the export control compliance functions. Furthermore, back-up personnel is assigned that can maintain the compliance function in the absence of the key compliance officers.
15.3.4.4 Policies and Procedures
Policies and procedures are the operational elements of an adequate ICP. In fact, the policies and procedures of the RNLAF translate the strategic ICP goals into operational control measures. Here, the policies go into processes, which relate to procedures on such a detailed level that work instructions are touched upon, that contain the specific internal controls. These work instructions are vital considering the fact that the 6,000 employees of the RNLAF need to understand and apply these work instructions in their daily business.
15.3.4.5 Contract Management and Authorizations and Authorization Applications
Contract management deals with the processes and requirements applicable when the RNLAF deals with external parties. For being (and staying) export control compliant, it is essential to incorporate the applicable laws and regulations into all contracts in the whole supply chain. Furthermore, this pillar contains all the agreements the RNLAF is involved in with external parties, such as the Technical Assistance Agreement (TAA), the Warehouse Distribution Agreement (WDA) and the Manufacturing License Agreement (MLA) and the implications thereof.Footnote 25 Moreover, this pillar covers the licensing processes for the application for third party transfers and general correspondences. Because of the complexity of these export control contracts, agreements and authorizations, guidance by the Unit Export Control Compliance is given to the RNLAF personnel on all the above-mentioned procedures.
15.3.4.6 Screening
The RNLAF personnel, suppliers, customers and embedded contractors the RNLAF does business with must be screened on the proper security level, to make sure they are of proper conduct and good standing. In this pillar, all the RNLAF’s requirements for an adequate screening are elaborated on, to make it a sufficiently preventive control.
15.3.4.7 Training and Communication
Without proper communication and training on export control compliance, the RNLAF’s ICP would be ineffective. Therefore, to ensure that the RNLAF personnel complies with all the export control laws and regulations in its daily business, the RNLAF developed communication strategies and several training programs, such as e-learning modules export control compliance designed to create awareness at all levels of the RNLAF, as well as export control training provided to focal points, who are appointed to answer export control related questions of the RNLAF personnel on the ground. These strategies and programs are elaborated on under this pillar.
15.3.4.8 Physical and IT Security
The RNLAF took measures to ensure that export control compliance is incorporated in the security environment. It covers for example controlled access to certain RNLAF locations (physical security) and IT procedures that need to be applied (IT controls incorporated), such as the (semi-)automated SEC database that controls all re-exports of items and technical data. The SEC database is continuously developed and upgraded according to the latest export control regulations. Without an approval of the requested re-exports of transfers in the SEC database, the items cannot be shipped or technical data not transferred to third parties. Regarding the latter, the focus is laid on the re-exports of technical data.
15.3.4.9 Recordkeeping
A properly functioning documentation and recordkeeping system is essential for an adequate ICP. In case of, for example, an external audit by DDTC, the RNLAF must be able to show the records of the past transactions, to establish an audit trail. The RNLAF has different systems for recordkeeping, such as the X-Post system. The different legal requirements for periods of recordkeeping are also covered in this pillar.
15.3.4.10 Compliance Audits
An inclusive audit system is an indispensable element for the RNLAF’s ICP. In fact, this audit system allows the RNLAF to evaluate if its ICP is designed properly, is actually implemented and is working effectively to achieve its strategic goal. Therefore, operational and compliance audits need to be performed. These audits help the RNLAF to improve its ICP when gaps are found. This pillar focuses on internal and external audits and the audit tools the RNLAF uses as part of the Three Lines of Defense model.Footnote 26
15.3.4.11 Violations and Voluntary (Self-)disclosures
All companies and organizations, including the RNLAF, sometimes commit violations. The US authorities consider a clear procedure of how to handle violations—a procedure in which is explained how the RNLAF handles voluntary (self-)disclosures—a mitigating factor. Therefore, a clear procedure of the handling of violations and voluntary (self-)disclosures is designed and presented. Furthermore, examples of non-conformities and violations are elaborated on, this in order to instruct and educate the RNLAF personnel.
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Funding Boosts Speed Netherlands Air Force Technology Transformation
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2022-08-29T08:00:00+00:00
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A Cold War-level Dutch defense increase, prompted by Ukraine crisis, will pay for additional aircraft.
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https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/funding-boosts-speed-netherlands-air-force-technology
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Funding Boosts Speed Netherlands Air Force Technology Transformation is part of our Aviation Week & Space Technology - Inside MRO and AWIN subscriptions.
Subscribe now to read this content, plus receive full coverage of what's next in technology from the experts trusted by the commercial aircraft MRO community.
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en
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Royal Netherlands Air Force created — European Airshows
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Royal Netherlands Air Force
The Royal Netherlands Air Force was preceded by the Army Aviation Group (Luchtvaartafdeling, abbreviation LVA), founded in 1913 and renamed Army Aviation Brigade (Luchtvaartbrigade) in 1939. In 1953, it was raised to the level of independent operational part of the Dutch Armed Forces and renamed Royal Netherlands Air Force (Koninklijke Luchtmacht).
Dutch air power started on 1 July 1913 with the founding of the Army Aviation Group at Soesterberg airfield (vliegbasis Soesterberg) with four pilots. When founded, the Army Aviation Group operated one aircraft, the Brik, which was supplemented with three French Farman HF.20 aircraft a few months later. These aircraft were soon outdated and the Dutch government ordered several fighter/reconnaissance Nieuport and Caudron aircraft to replace them.
The Netherlands maintained a neutral position during World War I and the Army Aviation Group did not take part in any action, instead developing the force's capabilities.
Pilot training was opened for ranks below officer, and technical, aerial photography, meteorological and navigation flights were established.
New airfields were established at Arnhem, Gilze-Rijen air base, Venlo and Vlissingen.
Because of the war, it was difficult to procure suitable aircraft. In 1917 this changed and 1918 personnel numbered 650.
After the end of World War I, the Dutch government cut the defence budget and the Army Aviation Group was almost dissolved. As political tensions in Europe increased during the late 1930s the government tried to rebuild the armed forces again in 1938 but there were many problems, not least the shortage of pilot instructors, navigators and pilots to fly the new multiple-engine aircraft. Lack of standardisation and resulting maintenance issues added to the complexity of the rebuilding task.
As war loomed, in July 1939 the Army Aviation Group was renamed the Army Aviation Brigade (Luchtvaartbrigade).
In August 1939, the Netherlands government mobilised its armed forces, but due to limited budgets the Army Aviation Brigade operated only 176 combat aircraft
In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands. Within five days the Dutch Army Aviation Brigade was defeated by the Luftwaffe. All of the Brigade's bombers, along with 30 D.XXI and 17 G.I fighters were shot down; two D.XXI and eight G.I were destroyed on the ground. Two G.I were captured by German forces, one of which was later flown to England by a Fokker pilot. The Douglas bombers were used as fighters because no suitable bombs were available; these aircraft were poorly suited for this role and eight were shot down and three destroyed on the ground in the first hours of the conflict.
Despite their numerical superiority, the Luftwaffe lost 350 aircraft in the conquest of the Netherlands, many to anti-aircraft fire and crashes at improvised landing fields in the Netherlands rather than due to action by Dutch fighter aircraft. The cost was high – almost 95% of the Dutch pilots were lost. In recognition of their actions Queen Wilhelmina granted the highest Dutch military decoration, the Militaire Willemsorde (MWO), to the Army Aviation Brigade collectively.
Some aircrews escaped to England and on 1 June 1940, 320 Squadron and 321 Squadron were established there under RAF operational command. Due to a shortage of personnel, 321 Squadron was absorbed by 320 Sqn in January 1941. Although their personnel were predominantly from the Navy Air Service, Army Aviation aircrew also served with 320 Sqn until the end of the war.
In 1941, the Royal Netherlands Military Flying School was re-established, in the United States at Jackson Field (also known as Hawkins Field), Jackson, Mississippi, operating lend-lease aircraft and training all military aircrew for the Netherlands.
The separate Militaire Luchtvaart van het Koninklijk Nederlands-Indisch Leger (ML-KNIL; Royal Netherlands East Indies Army Military Air Service) continued in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), until its occupation by Japan in 1942. Some personnel escaped to Australia and Ceylon. 321 Squadron was re-formed in Ceylon, in March 1942, from Dutch aviators.
In 1942, 18 (NEI) Squadron, a joint Dutch-Australian unit was established, in Canberra, equipped with B-25 Mitchell bombers. It saw action in the New Guinea campaign and over the Dutch East Indies. In 1943, 120 (NEI) Squadron was established. Equipped with Kittyhawk fighters, it flew many missions under Australian command, including the recapturing of Dutch New Guinea.
In June 1943, a Dutch fighter squadron was established in England. 322 (Dutch) Squadron, equipped with the Supermarine Spitfire, saw action as part of the RAF. 322 Sqn aircraft featured the British RAF roundels as well as the Dutch orange triangle. 322 Sqn was successfully deployed against incoming V-1 flying bombs. From mid-1944, during the invasion of Normandy, it executed ground attack missions over France and Belgium.
In July 1944, the Directorate of Netherlands Airpower was established in London.
In 1947, its Chief of Air Force Staff was appointed.
During the Indonesian War of Independence, the air force committed ground attacks and transported material and personnel. In 1948, transportation aircraft were used in support of the first Dutch airborne raid in southern Sumatra and Djokjakarta.
In 1951 several non-combat functions in the Army Aviation were opened to women.
On 27 March 1953, the Royal Netherlands Air Force officially became an independent part of the Dutch armed forces, rather than part of the Army.
The Air Defense Command, (Commando Lucht Verdediging, abbreviated CLV) consisting of a command unit, five radar stations and six fighter squadrons, had been established. Its radar equipment as well as its air defense fighters all came from obsolete RAF stocks.
After the Netherlands joined NATO another new command: Tactical Air Command (Commando Tactische Luchtstrijdkrachten) was established.
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