When you post your reading responses, make sure to have read all the assignments; (develop a habit of keeping marginalia as you read). You receive full scores for answering all the open-ended questions to the best of your ability; no point is taken off for fragments, syntactical errors or poor diction. Avoid plot summaries or perfunctory remarks such as “yes” or “no”. Feel free to comment on others’s ideas that come from the same train of thoughts as yours.
First forum for assignments for January-11
- Sinking (1921) shows how cultural identity mattered to ordinary people over 100 years ago; identify one fictional detail that is also characteristic of how you experience your cultural/national identity.
- To Zhou Zuoren, what renders Chinese literature “non-human”?
- To Chen Duxiu, why is a literary revolution in China necessary?
- To Wang Hui arguing that the idea of Asia is an European invention, what does Asia have to do with Europe and world history?
Second forum for assignments for January-16
- Give examples of A Madman’s Diary as Lu Xun’s way to negotiate cultural differences as he understood them.
- If The True Story of Ah Q is a national allegory, what cultural and social problems are brought to light by this average Chinese person?
- To Zhang Xudong, what are the historical circumstances and social conditions responsible for Lu Xun’s stories as national allegories?
- To Lydia Liu, “Chinese national characteristics,” as ridiculed in Lu Xun’s True Story of Ah Q, are Arthur Smith’s invention; An example of Ah Q representing bad national characteristics?
Third forum for assignments for January-18
- With which dramatic detail (fictional character or conversation) in Family, do you feel you resonate and/or dis-identify? Which values do you feel more important, equality for all or loyalty / ties of kindred?
- To what degree do you agree with Han Yi’s rationale for destruction of the traditional family, shown in Ba Jin’s family drama where the young and women are less free than elders? Social status or social contract?
- To what degree do you (dis)agree with Shi-zeng Li’s call for ancestor revolution to combat tyranny? How is his anarchist view (dis)proven in Ba Jin’s novel?
Fourth forum for assignments for January-23
- How do you make sense of the dramatic twist in Xiaoxiao where she survives her scandal unscathed? What is Shen Cong-wen’s point?
- What causes Dragon Sha’s withdrawal from the world of martial arts? What is being referred to by “the time has come for Asia to wake up from its dream” at the beginning of Lao She’s Soul-Slaying Spear?
- In both novellas by Shen Congwen and by Lao She, how is China being impacted or not impacted on by the “the universal”?
Fifth forum for assignments for January-25
- How do you understand the differences between Black Li and White Li in the context of the May Fourth movement?
- Chad Hansen argues (p.362) that the distinction between a “morality proper and conventional mores” does not exist for Confucians; is this distinction recognized in Lao She’s story?
- How is “Western imagination of the universal human” (p.5) introduced to the Chinese through Lao She’s character Wang Five, a rickshaw puller, who thinks of himself “inhuman or subhuman”?
Sixth forum for assignments for January-30
- Family Shop of Mr. Lin was written three years after the Wall Street Stock crash in 1929. How are the financial failures of Mr. Lin as a merchant in a Chinese village related to global markets?
- What do you think the message is from Mao Dun’s Spring Silkworms with the protagonist Old Tongbao failing as a silkworm farmer?
- How do you understand imperialism in the contexts of the two novellas written in 1931 after Japan invaded Manchuria, China?
Seventh forum for assignments for February-1
- Wei Ming in The New Woman and Zijun in Regret for the past represent the educated women in China. What seem to be the limits of Chinese feminism in the 1920s and 30s according to the two story plots?
- To Stephen Chan, why is the aesthetics of despair that the May Fourth writers adopted did not serve Chinese women well; Why do the two female protagonists fail to achieve a sense of agency?
Eighth forum for assignments for February-6
- Why do Chingching in Ding Ling’s When I Was in Hsia Village and Wu Qionghua in Red Brigade become “the agent of history and her chosen oracle” while Wei Ming and Zijun do not?
- For Hegel, world history is driven by the idea of freedom; how do the two soldier heroines dramatize that idea? (Teshale Tibebu, p.140)
- Marx and Engels believed that world history is first of all “history of class struggles”; how is this belief elaborated in stories such as Red Brigade, Family, or Spring Silkworms?
Ninth forum for assignments for February-8
- To what degree is Wang Bin and Shui Hua’s film White Haired Girl a positive elaboration of Chinese communism? As shown in the film, is communist land reform democratic and comparable to American Civil War to abolish slavery?
- In what sense is communist (land) revolution “progressive” as understood by Henry S. Maine, the author of the ancient law? Is a society of “social contract” necessarily more advanced than one of “social status”? (p.21)
- 80 years have passed since the Dixie Mission to gather intelligence on the Chinese communists; knowing what you know now, would you wish the US-China relation had been different? How?
Tenth forum for assignments for February-13
- A paragon of virtues and a hero of high socialism the poster boy of Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958-61), Lei Feng is a typical hero and product of his time; how much of him are you willing to accept as human and not a myth?
- What does Lei Feng have in common with communist internationals such as Agnes Smedley, Norman Bethume, Isaeral Epstein, and Sydney Rittenburg?
- What are the flaws as well as strengths of international communism for which Mao Zedong and many revolutionaries gave their lives?
Eleventh forum for assignments for February-15
- What are some of the “old ideas” being called into question in this film as an elaboration of Mao’s idea of modern education in socialism?
- Dai Jinhua defines modern China as a rupture with pre-modern culture at the May Fourth movement and a tension between the state and revolution; how does this tension get dramatized in the film?
- As stated in Weng’s article (p.51), French thinker Badiou explains Maoism in the context of Platonism; what are the ideals being pushed for in Breaking with Old Ideas to effect social changes in China?
Twelfth forum for assignments for February-20
- In The Execution of Mayor Yin, Taiwanese writer Chen Ruoxi shares her opinion of the Cultural Revolution as a witness; what do you think of Maoist martyrdom?
- Lin Zhao was martyred for her blasphemy of Maoism. To what degree should personal liberty be protected so that revolutions do not end up devouring the revolutionaries?
- How do you like Maoism as a form of political correctness that gave Yu Luojin and Zhang Zhixin both hope and death?
Thirteenth forum for assignments for February-22
- Based on his talk with the castrated piebald (p.127), how do you understand Zhang Yonglin‘s personal crisis to stay human as a rightist?
- Old Man Xing and His Dog is about loneliness; why is he lonely in a people’s commune, unable to keep a woman and dog that he loves?
- To what degree are we shaped by our family background (出身) or social classes (阶级成分), products of our blood Lineage as “a form to assess one’s political subjectivity?
Fourteenth forum for assignments for February-27
- After Mao died, Lu Xinhua wrote The Scar to demythologize Mao and discredit Mao’s illiberalism; if you were Xiaohua, how would you prioritize family ties and political loyalty or affiliation?
- Considering how brutal and violent revolutions can get, as is well documented in the fictional (and film) texts, would you agree with critic Feng Shengping that revolution corrupts the revolutionaries?
- How do you like collective violence aestheticized in the ballet of Red Brigade of Women and White Haired Girl?
Fifteenth forum for assignments for February-29
- Blue Kite is subdivided into “Father”, “Uncle”, and “Step-father”; how do these three subplots reflect on (1) the AntiRightist movement in 1957, (2) the Great Leap Forward, and (3) the Cultural Revolution?
- In what way is Tian Zhuangzhuang’s film an “attempt to deconstruct the ‘grant narrative of social revolution’ as Zhang Xudong suggest?
- Granted that “Popular Propaganda” during the Cultural Revolution is a form of political advertisements (Barbara Mittler, p.470), give one equivalent of “popular propaganda” of capitalism.
Sixteenth forum for assignments for March-5
- The story by Gu Hua and Xie Jin exposes Maoism as a total disaster or dystopia, where hardworking people like Hu Yuyin and Qin Shutian are punished while the lazy (Wang Qiushe) and wicked (Li Guoxiang) are rewarded; Is there something in human nature that Mao as a communist leader failed to understand?
- Legalism and Machiavellianism are important political philosophies about humans as social beings. Give one example from Hibiscus to show what is (un)true about the views of Lord Shang Yang (390-338 B.C.) and Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527 A.D.) on social realities.
Seventeenth forum for assignments for March-7
- Among other things, Farewell lends expression to a sense of nostalgia for the past; what goes extinct for Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou as registries of Chinese history?
- Rebecca Karl calls for “restoring the times of history to China” (p.694). What is being revealed when Chen kaige doing that?
- Barbara Mittler argues that the “cultural revolution culture needs to be understood in terms of its own contradiction.” What contradictions are brought to light in this historical film? Does the film prove wrong Hegel’s negative view of non-European shapes of life, as Terry Pinkard summarized it?
Eighteenth forum for assignments for March-26
- Thanks to her amnesia, Feng Wanyu does not remember well her past, along with the look of her husband; what is so painful and hurtful that the conscious mind has to suppress and block it?
- How painful are Bajin’s and Wen Jieruo’s memories of the past in which their loved ones were killed? Is Ba Jin right to propose that there be a CR museum to prevent another Nazi concentration camp?
- In the historical film, there is a scene in which Dan Dan dances in the ballet of Red Brigade of Women; Is Zhang Yimou affirming, in the words of Mark Selden (p.409), “China’s remarkable progress as a developing nation”?
Nineteenth forum for assignments for March 28
- In Zhang Jie’s novella, what seems to be the hurdle to romantic love in China in the 1970s? What individual freedom or right is denied when socialist values and ideals are institutionalized by the state?
- In Zhang Xian’s novella that reconstructs Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958-61), what is being attributed to as the cause of tragedy that befalls Cunni and Xiao Baozi?
- Dikotter’s reportage about the Great Leap reveals not only the effects of the movement but also its totality; what causes the great famine?
Twentieth forum for assignments for April-2
- What lessons can we draw about the progressive narrative of the West that underscores modern Chinese history, as reconstructed in Yu Hua’s novel and Zhang Yimou’s film?
- At the very beginning of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno state: “In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment ha always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.” How and how much is such dialectic also applicable to modern Chinese experience?
- In the historical film, the past events follow a chronological order, but we do not find a zeitgeist (spirit of the age). Do you see intellectual properties of Buddhism and Taoism?
Twenty-first forum for assignments for April-4
- To the heroine in Ermo (1994) struggling in the post-Mao China where the pre-modern, the modern, and the post-modern coexist, why is it hard to be happy in a market society and culture of commodities?
- In Wayne Wang’s film Chinese Box (1997), why is it problematic for Hong Kongers, Vivian, Jean and John, to live with the truths about themselves, each others, and their past?
- In the contexts of the two films, do you accept Lucien Goldmann’s sociology, namely, a strict homology between the demonic hero and the individualistic society created by market production?
Twenty-second forum for assignments for April-9
- Zhang Yimou’s film Happy Times seems a swan song for failed socialism in China, nostalgic of the “good old days” of Maoism; how do you like Old Zhao as a victim of the cutthroat competition in China?
- Goldmann argues that “the novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.” A character from the novel, would Old Zhao agree with Yi Zhongtian as a neoliberal saying that “market economy is the salvation of China” and that the capitalist revolution ensures the rights of private property and dignifies human existence?
- Interpret the film to answer the question by Richard Gilman-Opalsky: ‘What’s love got to do with communism?’.
Twenty-third forum for assignments for April-11
- Blind Shaft is a crime drama about moral degradation in post-Mao China. To what does Li Yang attribute as the cause of this moral crisis?
- As economic disparity becomes more pronounced in post-Mao and post-socialist China, Tang and Song feel social injustice. In what sense are their political and moral instincts different from the peasants killing the landed gentry during the communist land revolution?
- Does the moral struggle of the two con artists validate Michael Sandel’s points that, “some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities”? Would they be good people if China remained socialist and resisted capitalist consumerism?
Twenty-fourth forum for assignments for April-16
- Yet another critique of China’s market economy and global capitalism, Feng Xiaogang’s film calls for a return to ancient religions such as Tibetan Buddhism. As a modern person, how do you like the aesthetics of primitivism?
- Which side of the argument are you on as presented in this film? Use the film to substantiate your view.
- “The psychic life of civilized man is full of problems.” (Jung, p.95, Modern Man in Search of A Soul) What are some of these problems for the two thieves (Wang Bo and Wang Li) and the two con artists (Song and Tang in Blind Shaft)?
Twenty-fifth assignments for April-18
- To the extent that Lost in Beijin (2007) is about a “global moral crisis” (Wing Shan Ho), how does this crisis negatively impact on Liu Pingguo and working girls like her?
- In what sense is Li Yu the woman director a Chinese feminist whose take on women’s liberation is similar to or different from those who wrote about Zijun, Xiaoxiao, Chingching, The New Woman, Red Brigade of Women, Love Must Not Be Forgotten?
- Are Liu Pingguo’s conditions explained better by the New Left for social equality in wealth than by the Neoliberalism against restrictions of individual freedom?
- In the context of the film, how do you appreciate Bauman’s remark: “Since socialism and capitalism were children conceived in the cradle of the great project of modernity, they were both doomed to follow suit in this respect.” (p.69)