LUCC Monthly, February-March 2021

4 March 2021 16:50

The January 2021 edition of LUCC's monthly newsletter is out, detailing our latest events, new research and initiatives. Please click here to read.

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LUCC Monthly

February-March, 2021, Vol.2, Issue 5. Edited by Zeng Jiru

LUCC's research fellows have started 2021 with a series of new publications on diverse topics ranging from the Belt and Road, to masculinity and fathering in Chinese societies, to China's artificial intelligence innovation, ASEAN cooperation in the South China Sea, and the religious ideology of Qing Dynasty aristocrats. See more details about the many new articles published in the new research section below.

On February 10, LUCC welcomed Dr. Eva Cheuk-Yin Li on February 10 for a seminar, Querying/Queering Gender? The lived experience of heterosexual zhongxing (middle gender/sex) women in China and Hong Kong, which explored the everyday practice of zhongxing (neutral gender) among heterosexual women in urban mainland China and Hong Kong, showing that heterosexual Chinese women engage in precarious boundary management by re-doing appearance and personality.

We also enjoyed the presentation by our PhD Rui Qian on 2 Feb, themed as Remapping Beijing: The Representation of City Spaces and Sensuous Geographies in Chinese Cinema, which discussed three questions: How can audiences read city spaces through "sensuous geographies" in films? How did these films remap and shape the specific city spaces through different cinematic languages? What are the relationships between space, body and memory in Chinese cinema? focusing on Chinese films, Beijing Bicycle (Wang Xiaoshuai, 2001), I Love Beijing (Ning Ying, 2000), and Get in and Go (Guan Hu, 2000).

In March, we will welcome Dr. Vittorio Tantucci to present his work along with Dr. Aiqing Wang about the formulating of opinions in Chinese on 18 March, please see the information below to join the discussion! Please see below for more details.

2月10日，研究中心李卓贤博士主讲了题为“疑性还是酷儿？中国内地和香港中性女异性恋者的体验”的研讨会，探究了中国城市“中性”女异性恋者的日常体验。研究结果表明，这些中国城市中的女异性恋者为了不被（误）认为同性恋或者“剩女”，通过重构自身的外表和性格，来对其摇摇欲坠的性别边界进行管理。

我们也在2月2日迎来了研究中心博士生钱芮的研究成果展示，主题为“重绘北京：中国电影艺术中对城市空间和感官地理的呈现”。这一研究就中国电影《十七岁的单车》，《夏日暖洋洋》和《上车，走吧！》讨论了三个问题：观众如何通过电影中的感官地理来解读城市空间？这些电影如何通过电影语言来重绘和重塑特定城市空间？中国电影中空间、主体和记忆的联结是什么？

3月18日，Vittorio Tantucci博士将会展示他和王艾青博士的作品，对汉语观点表达的文化特性进行探究。研究中心同事在本月发表了多项研究成果，本期月报将会对这些成果进行介绍，详情请见下文。

More LUCC news

UPCOMING EVENTS

活动预告

18 March: On the culture-specific aspects of formulating opinions in Chinese: A multidimensional and comparative approach

3月18日：从多维比较的视角观照汉语意见表达的文化特性

Speaker: Vittorio Tantucci, Department of Linguistics, Lancaster University and LUCC fellow
Place: online via Teams - jointly hosted by the Lancaster University Confucius Institute
Time: 15:00 - 17:00, GMT

How do we say what we think? Is the way we formulate evaluations and opinions culture-specific? In this paper we adopted a corpus-based approach to analyse pragmatic and textual mismatches that exist from Mandarin Chinese to American English Interaction. We fitted a conditional inference tree model (Hothorn et al., 2006; Tantucci & Wang 2018) that simulates large-scale interactional choices in the two languages, based on the two balanced corpora of spontaneous telephone conversation (CallHome). Our results indicate that while American English evaluations are distinctively subjective and markedly speaker-oriented, Chinese opinions are conventionally formulated as a joint project (cf. Clark 1996) and are pre-emptively aimed at intersubjective agreement among interlocutors (Tantucci 2020). This is pragmatically achieved via specific markers of epistemic cooperation and ad hoc strategies of harmonious rapport-maintenance (Goffman 1967; Spencer-Oatey 2008). Large-scale analysis of naturalistic interaction as such has the potential to inform research in intercultural communication and the study of interactional behaviour in social sciences in general. The culture-specific modality in which we state what we think is a fundamental area of research for advancing cross-cultural awareness and (im-)politeness research.

NEW PUBLICATIONS

最新发表

Chinese Discourses on Happiness reviewed in The China Journal

《中国的幸福话语体系》在《中国研究》上被评论

LUCC Directorate member Derek Hird's co-edited book, Chinese Discourses on Happiness received a highly positive review in the world's leading China studies journal, The China Journal. Reviewer Yuanxiang Yan of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) wrote that the book successfully "captures ... the turn to happiness in contemporary China in an engaging and inspiring way".

One Belt, One Road, One Story? Towards an EU-China Strategic Narrative

“一带一路”是否讲述了同一个故事？关于欧中战略叙事的研究

Written by LUCC fellow Jinghan Zeng along with his coleagues Alister Miskimmon and Ben O’Loughlin, this book explores the emerging EU-China relationship with a focus on the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative. It takes a narrative approach to understanding the EU-China relationship as a means to highlight how scholars in the EU and China interpret the narrativization of EU-China bilateral relations and to how this bilateral relationship is refracted through relations with third parties. The volume brings together scholars from China and Europe in the fields of Chinese foreign policy, EU studies, and strategic communication. The empirical focus cuts across policy, publics and media, and across history, political economy and diplomacy. The Belt and Road Initiative, alongside the other policy areas addressed in the chapters, offers ways for people in Europe and China to get to know one another in new ways, and for the EU and its member states and the Chinese state to forge new partnerships.

China’s Artificial Intelligence Innovation: A Top-Down National Command Approach?

中国人工智能创新：一种由上而下的国家命令式路径?

LUCC fellow Prof. Jinghan Zeng published an article discussing China's AI innovation on Global Policy, which argues that China’s AI plans are primarily driven by contestation and the struggle for resources among domestic stakeholders who are economically motivated and have little awareness of the bigger geopolitical picture. Instead of a top‐down command approach, China’s national AI plan is an upgrade of existing local AI initiatives to the national level, reflecting a bottom‐up development, suggesting that the existing analyses vastly exaggerate: (1) Beijing’s capacity to coordinate domestic capital and actors towards a unified, specific strategic objective; and (2) the extent of China’s AI advancement and its geopolitical threat, triggering unnecessary anxiety among China’s near competitors.

ASEAN Cooperation in the South China Sea amid Great Power Rivalry: Vietnam as a Middle Power?

大国竞争中的东南亚东盟合作：越南是作为中间力量存在吗？

How do the changes in the two superpowers’ domestic and international politics affect the prospects for ASEAN-led cooperation over the South China Sea issue? Andrew Chubb contributed a chapter in Ha Anh Tuan's edited book, Ocean Governance in the South China Sea, arguing that the new great power competition increases the importance of crisis management. Stepped-up US and Chinese deployments will increase the risk of clashes, while decreased US-China economic interdependence will increase the danger of escalation where clashes do occur. Increased superpower competition also presages greater challenges to ASEAN unity and centrality in the handling of the South China Sea issue.

Unraveling Religious Ideology of Chinese Aristocracy in Imperial Qing from a Literary Perspective

从文学角度解读清王朝贵族的宗教意识形态

On an article of Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, LUCC fellowAiqing Wang explores theodiversity and polytheism epotimised by harmonious contemporaneousness of (sub-)religions, and propound that such phenomena are owing to lack of an overwhelmingly predominant religion, which can be accounted for by external and internal factors – the former pertains to centralisation of authority in feudal China and orthodox Confucian thinking it advocates that promulgates atheism and agnosticism as well as ancestor and Heaven worship, while the latter entails the liberalism, i.e. non-sanctimoniousness and non-expansionism of indigenous and Sinicised religions. She also proposes the overarching rationale accounting for the contemporaneousness of religious theologies among the aristocracy, viz. the practicality and pragmatism of the Chinese nation.

Diachronic change of rapport orientation and sentence-periphery in Mandarin

普通话中和谐取向与句子外围成分的历时变化

This study by Aiqing Wang and Vittorio Tantucci on Discourse Studies starts with a fundamental question underpinning pragmatics and social behaviour: How do we say what we think? In particular, our paper focuses on how evaluative expressions changed historically in Mandarin Chinese. We are interested in how the linguistic act of ‘one saying what s/he thinks’ underwent cultural and social transformations after the end of Qing Dynasty in 1911 and the so-called ‘May the 4th’ cultural Movement. This dramatic change is shown via large-scale corpus-based machine learning techniques, which reveal how Chinese evaluations shifted from a prevalently rapport-maintaining orientation to utterances more overtly marked for (im-)politeness.

READ MORE HERE:

https://philpapers.org/rec/WANDCO

Beyond WEIRD-centric Theories and Perspectives: Masculinity and Fathering in Chinese Societies

超越以WEIRD（西方的，受教育的，工业的，富有的，民主的）为中心的理论和视角：中国社会中的阳性气质和父亲身份

Published by Yang Hu on Journal of Family Theory & Review, this review uses demographically sizeable, culturally significant, yet understudied and under-theorized Chinese fathers as an example to reveal the limitations of applying WEIRD-centric perspectives in studying fathering and fatherhood. Specifically, existing models and concepts of fathering and fatherhood, with anemphasis on father involvement, especially in rough-and-tumble play, are predicatedon the assumptionsof nuclear family and western hegemonic masculinity. The Chinese cultural tradition, in contrast, endorses a literatus masculinity and emphasizes the family lineage, therebyencouraging fathers’ educational involvement and inviting grandparental care. These cultural traditions intersect with unfolding social developments in contemporaryChinese societies to shape fathering ideals and practices. A full, routine inclusion of non-WEIRD fathers, such as Chinese fathers, promises tobenefit the scholarship on fathering and fatherhood as a whole.

MEDIA ENGAGEMENT

媒体参与

LUCC member Jinghan Zeng and Andrew Chubb had their media engagements during this month:

Jinghan Zeng is interviewed by Chatham House on 12 Jan: Can China Become the AI Superpower? https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/01/can-china-become-ai-superpower
Andrew Chubb discussed issues of quantifying state behaviour in maritime disputes on 2 Feb at the online magazine site 9DASHLINE. Read his article here: https://www.9dashline.com/article/what-the-numbers-can-and-cant-tell-us-about-the-south-china-sea-dispute

ALUMI RELATIONS HUB

校友中心

INTRODUCTION

Alumni Relations Hub at the Lancaster University China Centre (LUCC) provides support for research, teaching and public engagement for members of staff across the University. The Hub now offers an In-depth and Breadth Database for Research through cooperation with Lancaster Alumni Centre, where data of 148,000 graduates in more than 180 countries is stored. The Hub nurtures a personal touch for engagement, which is particularly important in China, and supports efforts at pedagogic development by learning from our Chinese alumni’s experience.

For any inquiry, please contactrebecca.liu@lancaster.ac.uk.

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