From Novel to Film: How The Good Earth and Pavilion of Women Show American Orientalism

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From Novel to Film: The Good Earth and Pavilion of Women
Abstract
Pearl S. Buck’s novels about China earn acclaim for revealing
real Chinese society and
people to Americans and disapproving of orientalism, whereas
the Hollywood films based on
two of her most representative writings – namely, The Good
Earth (1937) and Pavilion of
Women (2001) – distort her original intentions to some extent
and perhaps instead show
American orientalism and ethnocentrism. In both films, Chinese
characters are still depicted
as somewhat inferior and thus needed to be saved by the
Western world, or to be more
specific, by America. This project aims to specifically explore
how American orientalism and

ethnocentrism become manifest in these two films, and also
analyze why such changes are
made. For these purposes, relevant literature was reviewed and
the differences between both
films and their original scripts were analyzed. It is thus
demonstrated that by making several
important changes in the narratives in adapting the novels to the
screen, these two Hollywood
films implicitly show American orientalist and ethnocentric
ideas. Moreover, the historical
background and America’s attitude towards China are found to
be most influential factors
that could result in those changes made by the filmmakers.
Word Count: 2736
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Introduction
Portraying China and Chinese in an objective and authentic
way, Pearl S. Buck’s writing
about China reveals her “distaste for orientalism” (Leong, 2005,
p25). Chinese in her novels
thus are no more stereotypically inferior “faceless mass”, but
rather people with various
virtues who are able to progress by themselves (Yao, 2008,
p79). Regardless of such distaste
for orientalism, however, The Good Earth (1937) and Pavilion
of Women (2001), which are
two Hollywood adaptations of Buck’s representative novels,
may still depict Chinese as
somewhat inferior and passive. In this case, the Western world
in these films becomes a
“necessary and sufficient factor” in the transformation of China
and the improvement of
Chinese people (Martinez-Robles, 2008, p10). That is to say,
while the original literature of
Buck’s earns acclaim for “introducing Americans to real China
and the Chinese”, these two
Hollywood adaptations instead inaccurately portray Chinese
culture and people, engaging
“American orientalism and ethnocentrism in unexpected ways”

(Leong, 2005, p26). This
article, therefore, aims to mainly analyze how American
orientalism and ethnocentrism have
become manifest in the films The Good Earth and Pavilion of
Women. It will also
respectively explore the reasons of why these two Hollywood
adaptations make such
changes.
Literature Review
To answer the major research question, firstly, it is necessary to
explore what is
American orientalism and ethnocentrism. According to Said,
orientalism could be defined as
“a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having
authority over the Orient” (1978,
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p3). For Americans, the Orient here is much more likely to “be
associated with the Far East”,

including Asian countries such as China and Japan (Said, 1978,
p1). In this sense, American
orientalism draws on orientalism more generally to “affirm the
political, social, and cultural
superiority of the United States and European Americans
relative to Asia and Asia
Americans”, taking a form specific to and supportive of “the
United States’ emerging role as
a worldwide moral and political force” (Leong, 2005, p2, 7).
Orientalist perceptions as such
were widespread in America especially from the late nineteenth
century to twentieth century,
embedded in “many levels of cultural expression and carried
through a variety of media
channels” (Leong, 2005, p7). As a result, the American
ethnocentric idea was also shown in
many cultural productions at that time. That is, while American
society was regarded as
“developed, rational, flexible, and superior” (Mahmood, 2004,
p32), the Oriental societies
such as China embodied the opposite values and displayed “a
lack of religious and economic
development and the need for conversion to Christianity and
capitalism as well as for

salvation by America” (Leong, 2005, p7). Americans’ views on
China, therefore, were
largely influenced and shaped by such widespread American
orientalism and ethnocentrism.
Those American orientalist and ethnocentric perceptions on
China and Chinese, however,
have been shifted by Pearl S. Buck and her works to some
extent. Buck, as a witness of
“dramatic changes in China over thirty years” and an authority
on China, facilitated
“American’s embrace of the China mystique” via reorienting
Americans toward “a more
positive assessment of China” (Leong, 2005, p12). In other
words, Buck portrays Chinese as
“flesh-and-blood people” rather than exotic freak or swine in
her novels, attempting to
introduce real China and Chinese and thus destroy “the
stereotypes bearing on Genghis Khan
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and his faceless hordes of heathens” (Greene, 2014, p78-79).

For example, in one of her most
famous best sellers The Good Earth, Buck creates a “stoic,
resourceful, hardworking Chinese
peasant farmer” named Wang Lung, who marries a faithful and
patient young woman, O-lan
(Greene, 2014, p76). Similarly, in Buck’s another fiction The
Pavilion of Women, the heroine
Madame Wu is depicted as an admirably independent,
courageous and intelligent Chinese
woman. Some scholars may argue that these novels erase “not
only the concrete realities of
Chinese life but also the essential otherness of Chinese
protagonists”, embedding American
cultural values in Chinese characters and thus still “helping
sustain an unfortunate
ethnocentrism” (Greene, 2014, p80). Nevertheless, such critique
could be too biased and
unfair. Although Buck provides mostly positive portraits of
China and Chinese in her works,
the vices of Chinese social realities, such as polygamy and high
economic inequality at the
time, are objectively revealed. Chinese in her novels are also
not completely attractive people,
but instead those with both virtues and negative qualities.

Therefore, rather than ignoring
“what makes China complex and the Chinese different from
Americans”, Buck’s novels do
reveal the real China and Chinese to American audience and
contribute to reject American
orientalism or ethnocentrism.
Analysis
The Good Earth
Although the filmmakers of The Good Earth (1937) insist on
their fidelity to the original
novel, the two are actually very different. Brownlow (1989,
p80) states that “respect,
affection and a lack of condescension towards people of another
race” are actually all brought
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to The Good Earth by its director. Indeed, rather than
misrepresenting Chinese as
stereotypically inferior and ignorant mass, the film portrays

Chinese characters as positive as
Buck’s work does. For example, the protagonist Wang Lung is
“courageous and indomitable”
both in the film and the book, devoting himself to the land and
thus finally makes a
prosperous life for his family (Greene, 2014, p86).
Nevertheless, it could be argued that the
film still engages American ethnocentrism and orientalism in
two main aspects. To be
specific, firstly, wiping away “any trace of Buck’s Chinese
self”, the film instead shows “the
constellation of American beliefs and values” (Greene, 2014,
p83). That is to say, for instance,
this film centers on a Chinese farmer and his family’s life but
completely casts Western
performers on-screen, which possibly makes it difficult for
American viewers to imagine
individual Chinese characters with their own features and
mannerisms (Greene, 2014, p86).
This kind of “ethnographic bias” actually pervades the film
(Greene, 2014, p86). For example,
unlike Buck’s novel, the film repeatedly underscores the special
place of the land in
characters’ minds and hearts. In the film, Wang Lung and his

wife treasure their lands very
much, even refusing to sell the lands when they are suffering
from serious famine and are
implored by their family members and friends. While Chinese
people may regard the land
more as only “a source of livelihood”, those plots are actually
infused with the American
belief and value – that is, the land is “part of a long-lived
American mythology that pits the
virtues of a simple life, which lived close to the land, against
the perceived dangers and
decadence of the city” (Greene, 2014, p87). In addition to the
above respect, The Good Earth
also subtly shows American orientalism through adding a
sequence about the locust plague at
the end of the film. In this sequence, the locust plague, which
has troubled Chinese people for
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a long time, is finally solved by Wang Lung’s son. By virtue of
the modern Western

agricultural knowledge learned from a Western-style university,
this young Chinese man
succeeds to lead the villagers to cope with the severe locust
plague. Through designing such a
plot that is absent in the original book, therefore, the film is
able to transfer an idea that the
Western culture and power are necessarily essential for the
transformation and development
of China.
These two aspects of changes, according to Yao (2008, p81),
might be made by the
filmmakers of The Good Earth for two main reasons. On the one
hand, firstly, this
Hollywood film fully characterizes Chinese farmers as tough
and hard-working people who
love their lands to show sympathy for the Chinese and arouse
“America’s fondness” for
China (Leong, 2005, p10). To be specific, in 1937, when this
film was produced and first
released, Chinese people were suffering from Japan’s war of
aggression against China.
Japan’s invasion and atrocities in China largely heightened
“American sympathies for Buck’s

beleaguered and stoic peasants”, therefore, the positive qualities
of these fictional characters
are especially magnified in the film to embody such sympathies
for “millions of suffering
Chinese” (Greene, 2014, p77). Moreover, by creating a tale of
“suffering, endurance, and
eventual triumph” and stressing the centrality of the land in
characters’ life, this 1937 film
also attempted to resonate with those Americans who were still
influenced by “the harsh
realities of the Depression” and thus further arouse their
admiration and fondness for Chinese
people (Greene, 2014, p77). On the other hand, however, this
Hollywood adaptation makes
these changes meanwhile to derive ethnocentrism. That is to
say, through depicting Chinese
people as stoic and hard-working but still impoverished and
needed to be saved by Western
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power from the locust plague, the film provided a sense of

national superiority for the
Americans who had just been through the Depression but lived a
relatively comfortable and
progressive life (Yao, 2008, p81).
Pavilion of Women
Similarly adapted from Buck’s bestseller of the same title,
Pavilion of Women (2001)
also distorts the original novel, showing the white savior myth
under the surface of
anti-orientalism. Although the film is directed by a Hong Kong
director and casts a “Los
Angeles-based Chinese actress” as well as several other Chinese
performers, it reinvents
“Hollywood’s classic white savior tale” and thus manifests the
American orientalism to some
extent (Yang, 2014, p247, 249). The white savior tale here is
originated from Hollywood’s
classic “white savior film”, which, according to Ash, creates a
model White lead character
“who is portrayed as powerful, brave, cordial, kind, firm, and
generous, and who takes on a
mission to save people of color from their plight” (Ash, 2015,
p89). Such a white savior

actually is also portrayed in the film Pavilion of Women, that
is, the male protagonist Father
Andre. He is actually a missionary from Italy in Buck’s original
novel but is transformed into
a missionary-doctor from America by the filmmakers. In this
case, Andre in the film
functions similarly as many other Western heroes in Hollywood
cinema, commanding the
narrative by “converting the Chinese population, saving lives
and combating evils” (Yang,
2014, p252). In contrast to the feudal Chinese lords “who
indulge in wine, opium and sex”,
this film’s white hero is instead bestowed with “uncontested
authority to influence events in a
changing Chinese society” (Yang, 2014, p252). That is to say,
for example, the heroine
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Madame Wu is depicted by both the novel and the film as a
beautiful, intelligent and

independent aristocratic woman, who pursues emancipation
from the traditional sexual role
of female and from the oppression of the feudal and patriarchy
Chinese society. However,
different from the novel, as “a transnational figure caught
between feudalism and modernity”
in the film, Madame Wu is finally led to “the so-called correct
track of freedom and
empowerment” entirely by virtue of the guidance and help of
Andre (Yang, 2014, p251).
Apart from this, moreover, while Buck mainly focuses on
depicting Madame Wu’s individual
pursuits and Chinese women’s positive transformation, the film
concentrates more on the
romantic relationship between Madame Wu and Andre, which is
even not mentioned by the
novel. In the film, Madame Wu not only draws “intellectual
nourishment from Andre’s
tutorial sessions”, but foremost comes to terms with her
sexuality via a sequence of having an
affair with Andre, which shows their “interracial romance”
(Yang, 2014, p251). In other
words, despite of her spiritual and sexual awakening, Madame
Wu is still put in a position

awaiting “the white hero’s enlightenment and redemption”
(Yang, 2012, p92) and
functioning as an exotic femme fatale for the white hero in the
film. Apart from enlightening
Madame Wu, Andre’s life-saving missions as a white savior
also contain such as saving
orphans and “supervising secondary Chinese characters’ growth
into Communist soldiers”
(Yao, 2001, p29).
As aforementioned, since Pavilion of Women portrays an almost
perfect white savior and
such white savior narrative is embedded in American
Orientalism framework, it could be
argued that American orientalism and ethnocentrism still do not
disappear in this 2001 film.
Although similarly showing these biased views as the 1937 film
The Good Earth, the
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filmmakers of this Hollywood adaptation makes changes in the
narrative in adapting the

novel to the screen for different reasons. Firstly, the film shifts
the focus of the narrative from
Chinese women’s transformation and empowerment into the
interracial romance between
main characters to attract more possible audiences. Such shift,
however, is not only resulted
from commercial interests. In other words, this film was
produced in 2001, when China had
registered remarkable economic progress and prepared to enter
into World Trade
Organization in the context of the Asian financial crisis. The
idea of China Threat, which
argues that “China’s rise poses serious threats to the United
States”, thus reappeared (Yang &
Liu, 2012, p696). In this case, rather than facilitating cultural
exchanges between America
and China as Buck’s original novel intended to, the film
Pavilion of Women may rather
attempt to maintain the supremacy of American culture and
power through narrating a story
with the motif of white redemption of Chinese characters.
Produced against “China’s rise as a
global power”, the filmmakers of this film transformed the
novel in the ways mentioned

above to implicitly condemn “China’s feudal past” and
acknowledge the positive Western
influences on building a modern China (Yang, 2014, p253).
Conclusion
To sum up, this essay mainly analyzed two Hollywood films
adapted from Buck’s books,
including The Good Earth (1937) and Pavilion of Women
(2001). Although the original
novels show Buck’s distaste for orientalism, both films make
some changes and instead
manifest American orientalism as well as Americans’ national
superiority complex towards
Chinese people. While The Good Earth show such orientalism
and ethnocentrism by adding
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elements that are roughly mentioned or even absent in Buck’s
novel, Pavilion of Women
manages to do so mainly through creating a Hollywood classic

white savior myth. In addition,
this project also further explores the reasons of why these two
adaptation films transform the
original novels and reflect the American orientalism and
ethnocentrism. It is demonstrated
that these reasons are closely related to the certain historical
background and America’s
attitude towards China at the time when the two films were
produced. Further research could
focus more specifically on both these films, or might explore
other Hollywood adaptation
films based on Buck’s novels.

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Bibliography
Ash, E. (2015) 'Racial Discourse in The Blind Side: The
Economics and Ideology Behind the
White Savior Format', Studies in Popular Culture, 38 (1), pp.
85-103.
Brownlow, K. (1989) 'Sidney Franklin and The Good Earth
(MGM, 1937)', Historical
Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 9 (1), September, pp. 79-
89.
Franklin, S. (1937) The Good Earth [Motion Picture, Online].
Available from:
http://f.hd.baofeng.com/play/358/play-164858.html
(Accessed: 5 May 2016).
Greene, N. (2014). From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images
of China in American Film.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Leong, K. J. (2005). The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna
May Wong, Mayling Soong,
and the transformation of American Orientalism. London:
University of California
Press.
Mahmood, M. (2004). Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the
Cold War, and the Roots of
Terrorism. New York: Pantheon.
Martinez-Robles, D. (2008) 'The Western Representation of
Modern China: Orientalism,
Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism', Journal of the
UOC's Humanities
Department and Languages and Cultures Department, 10, pp. 7-
16. Available from:
http://www.uoc.edu/digithum/10/dt/eng/martinez.pdf (Accessed:
19 May 2016).
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. London: Penguin Books.
Yang, J. (2012) 'Cong xiao shuo dao dian ying: Ting yuan li de
nv ren zhong de xing bie yu
yan he bai ren zheng jiu shen hua' [From Novel to Film:
Gender-nation Discourse and
the White Savior Myth in Pavilion of Women], Journal of
Guangdong University of

Foreign Studies, 23 (3), pp. 87-92 (own translation from the
Chinese text).
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Yang, J. (2014) 'The reinvention of Hollywood's classic white
saviour tale in contemporary
Chinese cinema: Pavilion of Women and The Flowers of War',
Critical Arts: A
South-North Journal of Cultural & Media Studies, 28 (2), pp.
247-263.
Yang, Y. E., & Liu, X. (2012) 'The China Threat through the
Lens of US Print Media: 1992–
2006', Journal of Contemporary China, 21 (76), July, pp. 695-
711.
Yao, B. (2008) 'Dian ying Da di yu zhong guo xing xiang' [The
Good Earth and the Image of
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Chinese text).

Yao, J. (2001) 'Qun fang ting: Cong xiao shuo dao dian ying'
[Pavilion of Women: from
Novel to Film], Journal of Zhenjiang Teachers College
(Philosophy & Social
Sciences Edition), 23 (3), pp. 28-35 (own translation from the
Chinese text).
Yim, H. (2001) Pavilion of Women [Motion Picture, Online].
Available from:
http://www.tudou.com/albumplay/5QYakLp8blM.html?union_id
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1_01 (Accessed: 5 May 2016).
COM304 Research Essay Outline Semester 2, 2019-20
1
COM304 Portrayal of China in Western Media
Semester 2, 2019/2020
Assessment 1: Research Essay
Deadline:

Submission method:
Word limit:
Weight:
Learning Outcomes:
5:00pm, 16 April 2020
2,000 words excluding bibliography.
50% of grade
A, B, C, D, E, F
Research Essay Assignment Overview
Students are encouraged to select a subject which greatly
interests them and which
addresses specifically the “Portrayal of China in Western
Media” in either the historical or
contemporary context.
Topics must satisfy two key criteria:
1. Topics must focus on a form of western media.
This may include, but is not limited to, any of the following
categories.
Fashion Fine Art Design Film
Television Documentary Fiction Non-Fiction
Music Advertising Journalism Academic Scholarship
Computer Games Print Media Online Media Social Media
2. Topics must focus on an aspect of China as portrayed in

western media.
Any aspect of Chinese society and/or culture and, specifically,
how it is portrayed
through a form of western media, may be selected.
This may include, but is not limited to, any of the following
categories.
Aesthetics Crafts Values Traditions
Religion/Beliefs Politics Society Trade
Events Sports Music Entertainment
Science Medicine Geography People
Discuss your chosen topic using key theories and concepts
taught in this module, for example:
Orientalism, Representation and/or Discourse, to critically
reflect on or analyse the cultural,
geographical or linguistic identity of China by the ways in
which China is portrayed.
2
Final Paper Structure
While the Final Paper should be structured according to the
needs of the project, it is
recommended that Main Text of the Final Paper contain the
following components:
1. Introduction
2. Main Content/Analysis
3. Conclusion

Final Paper Format
The Final Paper must use the format below:
1. Title Page with 200-word Abstract (not included in 2000-
word count). Stated word count
must be placed after the Abstract
2. Main Text: Introduction, Main Content/Analysis, Conclusion.
3. Bibliography
4. Submitted in word.doc or word.docx format (not PDF).
5. Times New Roman or Arial 12pt Font
6. Double Spaced
7. Justified Alignment, with page numbers
8. APA 6th Referencing System
3
Research Essay Grading Criteria
Categories below will be considered in the assessment of the
Research Essay.
Knowledge and
Understanding
Intellectual Skills Transferable Skills
90-100%
‘Outstanding’
Total coverage of the task set. Exceptional demonstration of
knowledge and
understanding appropriately grounded in theory and relevant

literature.
80-89%
‘Excellent’
As ‘Outstanding’ but with
some minor weaknesses or
gaps in knowledge and
understanding.
Extremely creative and
imaginative approach.
Comprehensive and
accurate analysis. Well-
argued conclusions.
Perceptive self-
assessment.
Extremely clear exposition.
Excellently structured and
logical answer. Excellent
presentation, only the
most insignificant errors
70-79%
‘Very Good’
Full coverage of the task
set. Generally very good
demonstration of
knowledge and
understanding but with
some modest gaps. Good
grounding in theory.
As ‘Outstanding’ but

slightly less imaginative and
with some minor gaps in
analysis and/or conclusions
As ‘Outstanding’ but with
some minor weaknesses in
structure, logic and/or
presentation.
60-69%
‘Comprehensive’
As ‘Very Good’ but with
more and/or more
significant gaps in
knowledge &
understanding and some
significant gaps in
grounding.
Some creative and
imaginative features. Very
good and generally
accurate analysis. Sound
conclusions. Some self-
assessment.
Generally clear exposition.
Satisfactory structure. Very
good presentation, largely
free of grammatical and
other errors.
50-59%
‘Competent’

Covers most of the task
set. Patchy knowledge
and understanding with
limited grounding in
literature.
As ‘Very Good’ but analysis
and conclusions contain
some minor weaknesses.
As ‘Very Good’ but with
some weaknesses in
exposition and/or
structure and a few more
grammatical and other
errors.
40-49%
‘Adequate’
As ‘Competent’ but
patchy coverage of the
task set and more
weaknesses and/or
omissions in knowledge
and understanding. Just
meets the threshold
level.
Rather limited creative and
imaginative features.
Patchy analysis containing
significant flaws. Rather
limited conclusions. No
self- assessment.

Competent exposition and
structure.
Competent presentation
but some significant
grammatical and other
errors.
35-39%
‘Compensatable fail’
Some parts of the set task
likely to have been omitted.
Major gaps in knowledge
and understanding. Some
significant confusion. Very
limited grounding. Falls just
short of the threshold level.
As ‘Competent’ but
probably without much
imagination. Shows barely
adequate ability to analyse
and draw conclusions. Just
meets the threshold level.
As ‘Competent’ but with
more weaknesses in
exposition, structure,
presentation and/or errors.
Just meets the threshold
level.
21-34%
‘Deficient’
As ‘Compensatable Fail’ but

with major omissions
and/or major gaps in
knowledge and
understanding. Falls
substantially below the
threshold level.
No creative or imaginative
features. Analysis and
conclusions rather limited.
Falls just short of the
threshold level.
Somewhat confused and
limited exposition.
Confused structure.
Some weaknesses in
presentation and some
serious grammatical and
other errors. Falls just short
of the threshold level.
4
20%
‘Extremely weak’
Substantial sections of the
task not covered.
Knowledge &
understanding very limited

and/or largely incorrect.
No grounding in theory.
As ‘Compensatable Fail’
but analysis and/or
conclusions may have
been omitted. Falls
threshold level.
As ‘Compensatable Fail’ but
with more serious
weaknesses in presentation
and/or grammar. Falls
threshold level.
COM304 Portrayal of
China in Western Media
Module leader: Dr. Zhen Troy Chen
Office hours: HS323, Fridays @2-4pm
Week 6
Agenda
• Week5: Historical review on Sinophilia
• Week6: Historical review on

Sinophobia (From Qing)
• Seminar preparation
Week 6: Overview
• The Catholic Century of contact, largely through the
Iberian naval powers of Spain and Portugal, had brought
exchanges of knowledge between China and Europe,
mainly through the work of the Catholic monasteries.
• This knowledge exchange gave rise to a fascination in
Europe with the philosophy, art, literature, politics and
science of China.
• Yet Europe was developing and also changing rapidly
through the advance of the Enlightenment and, later,
through revolution, both political and industrial.
Week 6: Overview
• Religion had also changed dramatically, especially in western
Europe,
with the new protestant powers of Holland and Great Britain
beginning to challenge the dominant Catholic powers of Spain
and
Portugal, and to exert their dominance through greater control
of the
seas and, consequently, of trade.
• These geopolitical jolts in Europe were also keenly felt in

shifting
attitudes towards China, with a general consensus amongst
historians
that the mid-18th century witnessed a transformation that would
have
significant consequences for China and Asia in the centuries to
follow.
Week 6:
Overview
This week we will explore the
beginning of this change, and
question the ideas about China
which began to emerge at this time.
Particular focus will be given to
understanding how Orientalism
emerged from fascination and how
this admiration of China turned so
quickly into a pretext for
colonisation and imperial
conquest.
A brief history of East-West Encounters
• 1. Religion & Trade
• 545-539 B.C.E: Persia campaigned in Central Asia and Bactria
(MD Afghanistan) 波斯居
鲁士远征大夏至俄罗斯新疆折回
• 330-328 B.C.E: Alexander the Great controlled the modern

Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and
Tajikistan. Alexander married a Bactrian woman, Roxanne, to
aid his effort of controlling
the region. 控制阿富汗、大夏
• Zhang Qian’s mission to the West: “Heavenly Horse”
Afghanistan Syria 张骞出使西域
• 220-589: Wei-Jin Dynasty: Zoroastrian religion: “the creator
of the world, the source of
light, and the embodiment of good”. 魏晋时期波斯拜火教入华
• 581-907: Sui-Tang Dynasty: Buddhism and Christianity:
Nestorian Tablet 隋唐时期佛教
景教入华
• The Silk Road - Trade
Trade: The Ancient Silk Road
A brief history of East-West
Encounters
• 2. Yuan and Ming – expansion
• “The Chan’s Great China”
• To the West: Europe, Middle East, Central Asia, East Asia
• To the East: Japan
• Catholic: Marco Polo
• Mongolian ambassadors’ visit to Rome
• Two centuries gap: L’empire Immobile (1995)
• 1405-1433: YongLe (Ming Dynasty) Zheng He’s 7

voyages (The maritime silk road)
A brief history of East-West
Encounters
• 2. Yuan and Ming – expansion
• “The Chan’s Great China”
• To the West: Europe, Middle East, Central Asia, East Asia
• To the East: Japan
• Catholic: Marco Polo
• Mongolian ambassadors’ visit to Rome
• Two centuries gap: L’empire Immobile (1995)
• 1405-1433: YongLe (Ming Dynasty) Zheng He’s 7
voyages (The maritime silk road)
A brief history of East-West Encounters
• 3. Western Expansion & Trade
• 15c, New Silk Road
• 16c, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Britain, France – East Asia
• 1557: Macau Portugal Residence
• Jesuits: missionaries, write about China and sent back to the
West
• This knowledge exchange gave rise to a fascination in Europe
with the
philosophy, art, literature, politics and science of China
(Sinophilia).

How China manages its relationship
with the rest of the world (Qing)
• 理藩院 (Li fan yuan – Ministry of foreign affairs) : Mongols,
Zunghars, and Russians; Later, Muslims and lamaist Buddhists
• 户部 Ministry of Hu (household): missionaries who work for
the
Qing court
• 礼部 Ministry of Li (Rituals) : Korea, south east Asia such as
Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Ryukyu Islands. Control
without excessive military expenditures through tributary
systems.
How China manages its relationship
with the rest of the world
• Sinophilia: pan-Chinese culture – In Qing dynasty, the
Manchurian emperor conquest the Middle Kingdom (Ming).
•
https://www.bilibili.com/video/av40961783?from=search&seid=
3243949953311269851 (advice on how to take China)
• Ruling Chinese with a Chinese approach:
• “These countries shared many of the basic values of Chinese
culture, a Chinese-style calendrical system, some form of
script adapted from Chinese models, similar types of food
and dress, the practice of Confucianism and Buddhism, and

the outlines of Chinese bureaucratic organization.” (Spence,
1990: 118).
Sinophilia to Sinophobia
• Japan: ceased its ‘tribute missions’ in late Ming
• 1788: Vietnam (Le and Nguyen)
• Ryukyu islands dispute: the tributary system continues
cautiously
• These three broad patterns of foreign management—with the
northwest, the missionaries, and the south—shared some
fundamental Chinese premises of great importance.
• At their root was the assumption that China was the "central"
kingdom and that other countries were, by definition,
peripheral,
removed from the cultural centre of the universe.
• 天朝上国的迷梦尚未开眼看世界
• Despite the rise of the West, the arrogant Qing did not see
any benefit from encounters with the West.
• “Canton System”: fourth type of “foreign management”
structure in costal cities.

• In the early Qing, Dutch and Portuguese had to be content
with the
status of "tributary nations” for trading privileges. Registered
with
the Ministry of Rituals and permitted to send trade missions
only at
stipulated intervals.
• 1635: British ships were permitted to trade with the Chinese in
Zhoushan (Chusan), Xiamen (Amoy), and Guangzhou (Canton).
• 1680s Qing dropped the system: greatly benefited the western
traders.
• 1720 Chinese merchants in Canton formed their own
monopolistic
guild called the Cohong (from gonghang, 公行).
• 1754 these “Hong” merchants were each ordered by the Qing
to
stand surety for the foreign crews‘ good behavior and for the
payment of transit dues.
Turn of the ‘peaceful’ trade scene
Turn of the ‘peaceful’ trade scene
• Anson, from The East India Company, assumed the Chinese,
following
the international laws of the sea now prevalent in the West,
would treat him

hospitably as a benevolent neutral.
• But the Canton bureaucracy erected dozens of administrative
hurdles,
refused to meet with him or acknowledge his messages for
weeks on end,
charged him what he considered outrageous prices for the
shoddy supplies
they provided, and refused to let him make many of the repairs
he wanted.
• Anson's published account of his alleged mistreatment was
widely
circulated and translated into several European languages,
helping to build a
ground swell of anti-Chinese feeling in Britain and elsewhere
in the West.
Historical background
• Canton – single port trade
• Import < Export (Trade imbalance and gap is increasing)
• Britain wanted to export more, as following the
industrial revolution, over-productive textile industry
(for example, Nottingham famous for its Lace Market,
1589)
• “We need to send someone to China and change this”
Britain’s Move

• George Macartney 1739-1806 Mission
• To establish “diplomatic relationship with China”,
permanent embassy in Beijing; independent Criminal
Ruling Power
• Set to wow China by showcasing technologies and
manufactures
• Same benefits with other European countries
• Reform CoHong system, expand the ports to Ningbo,
Zhoushan, Tianjin, etc
• Acquire information and techniques: textile, cotton,
ceramics, tea plant, geographical intelligence (maps)
• 1792: 26 Sep, Plymouth
• 1793, 3 July, Zhoushan
• 20 July, Dengzhou,
Shandong
• Sufficient Supply,
accepted only a little
• Several letter exchanges
Kowtow Myth
The Summer
Palace (Western

Architecture)
Wine made in
Peking
Qianlong’s response
• “天朝物产丰盈无所不有原不借外荑以通有无”——乾隆帝
• “We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the
slightest
need of your country’s manufactures” —— Qianlong Emperor
• https://blog.gale.com/the-george-macartney-mission-to-china-
1792-1794/
•
http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1750_macartney.ht
m
• Chinese source: http://collection.sina.com.cn/jczs/2017-10-
21/doc-
ifymzzpv8221753.shtml
Competing views and interpretations
• Diaries and letters: People involved documented in detail
about what happened and their own interpretation

• Modernity framework: Traditional/Barbarian vs Modern;
Imperialism expansion
• Post-modern framework: James L. Hevia (何伟亚)
• Sovereign equality vs Hierarchical inclusion
• 主权平等 vs 差序包容
• Multitude of Lords 以满清皇室为最高统帅的多主制
• Imagination of Empire – exercise through rituals and
deference 宾礼：宾服
• “丰俭适中”, translated as “channelling along a central path”
Qianlong’s concern over this event (anticipated invasion)
• Deconstructing historical reconstructions – 解构史学重构
• Russell, in The Problem of China (1922), commented that
“no one understands China until this document (Qianlong’s
letter) has ceased to seem absurd.”
• THE MACARTNEY EMBASSY TO CHINA 1792-1794:
“Nothing could be more fallacious than to judge of China by
any European standard” Lord Macartney, 15 Jan 1794.
• L'empire Immobile, a book of history published in French
1989 by the French politician and writer Alain Peyrefitte and
translated into English in 1992. Macartney’s 1793 trip: talking

to themselves while China looks like a mute.
Opium War
Opium War
Crime and punishments
• The legal system
• The county magistrates acted essentially as detectives, judges,
and jury. They accumulated the evidence, then evaluated it,
and finally passed sentence.
• 满清十大酷刑 Ten Cruel Punishment of the Qing
• https://www.bilibili.com/video/av46954758?from=search&s
eid=15966888681827227101
Crime and punishments
• Several cases in which the crews of foreign ships accidentally
killed Chinese
show that the local Qing authorities were at first content to
accept cash
payments in restitution. In Kangxi's reign, Qing authorities
demanded 5,000
taels (sliver unit: 两) after the crew of a British ship killed a

Chinese near
Canton harbor in 1689. When the British counteroffer of 2,000
taels was
rejected, the ship abandoned its trading plans and sailed away.
At the end of
the reign, in 1722, the Chinese accepted 2,000 taels from the
captain of the
King George after his gunner's mate accidentally killed a
Chinese boy while out
hunting. In 1754, when an English sailor was killed by a
Frenchman in
Canton, Qing officials showed their determination to intervene
in cases
occurring within their jurisdiction even when no Chinese were
involved. All
trade with France was stopped until the French officers yielded
up the killer.
Ironically, the killer was shortly thereafter released because the
emperor
Qianlong, to celebrate the twentieth year of his reign and the
Qing victories in
the Zunghar wars, had ordered a general amnesty for all
convicted criminals.
Voltaire on China
• "The great misunderstanding over Chinese rites sprang from
our judging their practices in light of ours: for we carry the
prejudices that spring from our contentious nature to the
ends of the world."
• Unable to find a "philosopher-king" in Europe to exemplify
his views of religion and government, Voltaire believed
Emperor Qianlong would fill the gap, and he wrote poems in

the distant emperor's honor.
Changing views following Anson
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Baron de Montesquieu
worried that the Chinese did not seem to enjoy true liberty,
that their laws were based on fear rather than on reason, and
that their elaborate educational system might lead to the
corruption of Chinese morals rather than to their
improvement.
• Other writers declared that China did not seem to be
progressing, had indeed no notion of progress; from this it
was but a short step to see the Chinese as, in fact,
retrogressing.
• Nicolas Boulanger 1763
• “All the remains of her ancient institutions, which China now
possesses, will necessarily be lost; they will disappear in the
future revolutions; as what she hath already lost of them
vanished in former ones; and finally, as she acquires nothing
new, she will always be on the losing side”.
• Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, who wrote on China in
The Wealth of Nations (1776).

• China refused to consider change. By staying aloof from the
growth of the world economy, China was sealing its fate: "A
country which neglects or despises foreign commerce, and
which admits the vessels of foreign nations into one or two
of its ports only, cannot transact the same quantity of
business which it might do with different laws and
institutions."
• Hegel in the early 1820s, the various critical analyses
explored
by Boulanger, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Smith were
synthesized in such a way that "Oriental Civilizations"—
China preeminent among them—came to be seen as an early
and now by-passed stage of history.
• The view of "Asiatic Society" synthesized by Hegel was to
have a profound influence on the young Karl Marx and other
later nineteenth-century thinkers.
• History, to Hegel, was the development of what he called the
ideas and practices of freedom throughout the world.
Freedom was the expression of the self-realization of the
"World Spirit," and that spirit was reaching its fullest
manifestations in the Christian states of Europe and North
America.
• Optimistic about his own time, Hegel developed a theory that

downplayed China's past.
• He described China as dominated by its emperors or despots,
as typical of the "oriental nations" that saw only one man as
free. In the West, the Greeks and Romans had come to see
that some men were free; and, centuries later, Hegel's
generation had come to see that all humans were free.
• Lacking an understanding of the march of Spirit in the world,
even the Chinese emperor's "freedom" was "caprice,"
expressed as either "ferocity—brutal recklessness of
passion—or a mildness and tameness of the desires, which is
itself only an accident of Nature."
• In a powerfully worded passage, Hegel explained that China
had
lacked the great boldness of the Europeans in exploring the
seas
and instead had stayed tied to the agricultural rhythms of her
great
plains.
• The soil presented only "an infinite multitude of
dependencies,"
whereas the sea carried people "beyond these limited circles of
thought and action. . . . This stretching out of the sea beyond
the
limitations of the land, is wanting to the splendid political

edifices
of Asiatic States, although they themselves border on the sea—
as
for example, China, For them the sea is only the limit, the
ceasing
of the land; they have no positive relation to it."
• In a series of bleak conclusions, Hegel consigned the Chinese
permanently to their space outside the development of the
World Spirit. Although China had historians galore, they
studied their country within their own limited preconceptions,
not realizing that China itself lay "outside the World's History,
as the mere presupposition of elements whose combination
must be waited for to constitute their vital progress."
• Although Chinese emperors may speak words of "majesty
and paternal kindness and tenderness to the people," the
Chinese people "cherish the meanest opinion of themselves,
and believe that men are born only to drag the car of Imperial
Power."
• Hegel mourned for the Chinese people themselves: "The
burden which presses them to the ground, seems to them to
be their inevitable destiny: and it appears nothing terrible to
them to sell themselves as slaves, and to eat the bitter bread
of slavery."

• In one of his most ambiguous asides, Hegel added that "a
relation to the rest of History could only exist in their case,
through their being sought out, and their character
investigated by others.”
• The question of by whom or how that seeking out was to be
done was left open by Hegel, but the Western powers, with
their ships, their diplomatic missions, and their opium, were
rapidly beginning to provide an answer.
The reading guideline has been uploaded in ICE
See you at 3pm today in BBB!
Thank you!
Assignment for Week 6
COM304 Portrayal of
Housekeeping

• Assignment briefs uploaded
• Essay sample uploaded, distinction (70+)
• Assignment 2: Media project group allocation
• No zoom this week (according to Uni policy, I will try to
stick to BBB. Again, the video does not work for me in
BBB, I will reply on audio+text chat.)
Week 2
Agenda
• Part I: Key concepts
• Hegemony, power and discourse
• Orientalism
• Representation: encoding and decoding
• Methodology: Critical Discourse Analysis
(CDA)
• Part II: Historical review and critique
It all started with this chap
Dialectics 辩证法
The master–
slave dialectic is

the common
name for a
famous passage
of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of
Spirit.
For Hegel, human
reality condenses
into what we call
universal history.
What has marked
this history is the
unequal relationship
between human
beings.
Some are tyrants, while
others are tyrannized.
That is what the
master-slave dialectic
is based on. What has
moved history is the
conflicts between
humans, which has
resulted in inequality.

The young Marx
• Marx joined the Doctor’s Club as an undergrad and later
become known as the Young Hegelians.
• Critical of Hegel's metaphysical assumptions, but
adopted his dialectical method in order to criticise
established society, politics and religion from a leftist
perspective.
• 1843 unpublished manuscript: Critique of Hegel‘s
Philosophy of Right, gave birth to the concept of
alienation.
Conflict Theory
• Marx argues that the dominant
ideas and ideals of an age are reflections of the dominant
way of life, specifically of a society's mode of production.
• Base (economic) determines superstructure (ideology).
Misunderstanding: Marx and Engels warned against such
determinism.
• “经济基础决定上层建筑”
Gramsci: hegemony
and power
• 1891 – 1937
• an Italian Marxist philosopher

and communist politician.
• He wrote on political
theory, sociology and linguistics.
• He attempted to break from
the economic determinism and so is
considered a key neo-Marxist.
Gramsci: hegemony and power
• Gramsci greatly expanded this concept, developing an
analysis of how the ruling capitalist class – the
bourgeoisie – establishes and maintains its control.
• Orthodox Marxism had predicted that socialist
revolution was inevitable in capitalist societies. By the
early 20th century, no such revolution had occurred in
the most advanced nations.
• Capitalism, it seemed, was more entrenched than ever.
Gramsci: hegemony and power
• Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not
just through violence and political and economic
coercion, but also through ideology.
• The bourgeoisie developed a hegemonic culture, which
propagated its own values and norms so that they
became the "common sense" values of all.

• People in the working-class (and other classes) identified
their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and
helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.
Gramsci: cultural hegemony
The Frankfurt School – a Marxist approach
• Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1944 essay “The Culture
Industry”
12
Adorno and Horkheimer – the culture
industries
• Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay “The culture industries”
is critical of the commercialisation of culture
• They are critical of the mass reproduction of cultural
artefacts – nothing is unique, everything is standardized
• An attempt at uniqueness is made with the ‘star system’ –
the use of celebrities in various monetary exchanges
• These cultural artefacts are thus given a monetary value,
or exchange value - they have lost their intrinsic worth
13

Activity 1. Hegemony
• Discuss in small groups (3 or more) what are the central
“hegemonic” ideas in contemporary China in relation to
any or all of the following:
• Family, Morality
• Nation, Gender Roles
• Chinese Identity
Edward Said:
orientalism
• 1935-2003
• Palestinian American
academic, political activist,
and literary critic
• Orientalism, 1979
• postcolonial studies
Orientalism
Orientalist discourse is “a Western style for dominating,
restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”
by “making statements about it, authorizing views of it,
describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it”

Said (1979, p3).
Orientalism
“Orientalism was ultimately a
political vision of reality whose
structure promoted the
difference between the familiar
(Europe, West, ‘us’) and the
strange (the Orient, the East,
‘the other’).”
Representation and Orientalism
•Hall (1997) defines it as a process of constructing reality
- a process that is clearly different across cultures and
historical periods.
•He thinks that representation presents something that
has already been there. The meaning given in a
representation can sometimes distort its real meaning.
•Orientalism challenge representations and images of the
other imposed from the outside: they clash with
representations and images from inside.
•Said looks at orientalism as a multifaceted discourse
characterized by four major ideas, which he calls
“dogmas of Orientalism”:

•Binary opposites: West/Orient are rational/ irrational
developed/underdeveloped.
•Abstract language about the orient rather than direct
•The Orient cannot define itself
•It is something to be feared or controlled
Orientalism involved the feminization of the Orient:
• Weak, submissive
• Seductive, alluring
• Penetrated by the orientalist gaze: the veil conceals
oriental truth (a symbol of no-trespass), but in the
European gaze the ‘oriental truth’ is insignificant.
• The repressed women is in need of rescue
Orientalism is an “imaginative geography”.
Orientalism today
• A century of little change regarding the representation of the
Islamic world. The UK and France had a direct colonial
experience.
In the case of US, the presentation is closely linked to
terrorism.
• Said’s book “Covering the Islam” (1981): people waving their
fists
and black banners. Focusing on the negative and threatening
aspect
instead of reporting other Islamic realities.

• After the 9/11, this picture of the Islam as “full of terrorists”
has
become worst: the idea of the “empire of good” incarnated by
America and the “empire of the evil” incarnated by Islamic
terrorism: it is what now prevails, a sombre vision of
globalization.
Said’s work articulates a persistent critique of power relations
between West and East, the USA and the Muslim countries,
and looks at the negative magnitude of these unequal power
relations from the eighteenth century until today.
Activity 2. Orientalism
• In your groups, select a film, TV show, newspaper report,
magazine article, novel, non-fiction book, social media event
(any example of media text) from the Europe/North
America.
• (i) What stereotypes of China and Chinese people are
presented in your selected media?
• (ii) Does your selected media text portray China in a positive
or negative light?
• (iii) Are these portrayals racist? Prejudiced? Discriminating?
What is “Methodology” and “Method”?

Methodology is like a home and knowledge about the
relationship among
family members, while methods are like the rooms and the
individual
family members, for a right purpose there is a right room, and
for a
right person there may be a right room too.
The big picture and why you are using a certain family of
methods is
methodology, the details are the methods.
Method is a technique for gathering evidence. For example,
social
diaries, photovoice, semi-structured interviews, questionnaire,
etc.
Methodology is a theory and analysis of how research does or
should
proceed.
What is
qualitative
research?
“The province of qualitative research ... Is the
world of lived experience, for this is where
individual belief and action intersect with culture”
Norman Denzin
More interested in studying behaviour, trends,
and developing theories and concepts and

practices, rather than attempting to ‘measure’ the
social world
Associated with the humanities and the social
sciences
Media technologies
Mass media & Media effects
Media effects
• Walter Lippmann: Public
Opinion, 1922
• We see the world as
“pictures in our heads”
• Media shape perception of
things we have not
experienced personally
The Audience
Is the audience merely made up of

passive receptors?
Hypodermic needle model or
Magic Bullet Theory
Source: Katz & Lazarsfeld (1955)
The mathematical Theory of
Communication
Shannon-Weaver, 1949
Useful during
conflict - war
Problems with the model
Audiences are active:
ideologies and
discourses and
bodies
01
Meaning lies between
the text & audience,
not in the text per se.
02

Encoding and Decoding
Stuart Hall (born 3 February 1932, Kingston,
Jamaica) is a cultural theorist and sociologist
who has lived and worked in the United
Kingdom since 1951.
Re-presentation
• Encoding: process by which signs are
organized into codes
• Decoding: process of reception; how readers
make sense of codes/ generate meaning
from them
Ten minutes later… …
Communication
Communication

Why do we call all of those material objects
'apples'? They each represent something slightly
different yet we all use one word, 'apple,’
to represent each.
Translation: This is not an Apple.
Re-presentation
• What is the point of Magritte adding to his illustrations the
statement, "This is not . . ."?
He is visually making a complex point: we live in a world of
representations which we talk about as if they were the 'real'
thing. His work increases your theoretical understanding of
art and language and the human mind.
See more in https://msu.edu/course/ams/280/represent.html
• We are not uncovering TRUTH in this class. From within
the discipline of cultural studies, media and communication
(sociology…etc), there is no objective truth humans can
identify.
• This does not mean there is no truth. Personally, I believe,
but be clear this is a belief, that truth exists out there;

however, humans do not have access to truth.
Constructed ‘Truth’
Constructed
‘Truth’
• This is why virtually all religious
traditions claim that it is not possible
to know the truth, that only
something we call god can know the
truth. Indeed, the injunction against
claiming absolute truth for human
beings is explicit in some religious
traditions.
• For ancient Judaism, Yaweh, was the
being whose name should not even
be spoken, so God's name was
written in the unpronounceable
letters YWH, a code for that which
should not be spoken. To speak
God's name was to take him in
vain. Men should not try to call out
to Him.
Constructed ‘Truth’
• The Tao Teh Ching begins with these words,
• "The Tao which can be named is not the Tao."
• You might imagine the Tao as The Force, a la "Star

Wars" for the time being.
• It is not possible to express the Tao, so the signifier
"Tao" itself is negated in the very first line of the
ancient text which is the founding text for Taoism.
Semiotics
• Semiotics is a science which studies the
role of signs as part of social life.
• A sign is quite simply a thing - whether
object, word, or picture - which has a
particular meaning to a person or group
of people. It is neither the thing nor the
meaning alone, but the two together.
• The sign consists of the signifier, the
material object, and the signified, which
it is meaning.
• Semioticians engage in a search for
'deep structures' underlying the 'surface
features' of phenomena. However, they
also explore the use of signs in specific
social situations. Modern semiotic
theory stresses the role of ideology
and discourse.
The 'value' of a sign depends on its relations with other signs
within the

system - a sign has no 'absolute' value independent of this
context.
Consider a game of chess, noting that the value of each piece
depends
on its position on the chessboard.
First level is denotation
Second level is connotation: ideologies and discourses fill out
the re-
presentation e.g. terrorist and freedom fighter
All texts are constructed with signs in social contexts
Discourse is a system of representation: what are the rules and
practices that produce
meaningful statements and regulated discourse in different
historical
periods?
Discourse constructs the topic. It defines and produces the
objects of our
knowledge. It governs the way that a topic can be meaningfully
talked about
and reasoned about.
The critical approach to discourse aims to challenge social
orders and practices
that we accept as ‘natural’, but which are, in fact, ‘naturalized’;

in other
words, when one way of seeing and interpreting the world
becomes so
common (and so frequently constructed in discourses) that it is
accepted as
the only way.
Example: immigration
Critical Discourse Analysis
Immigration
Part II
• Contact between West and East over 8 centuries
• Changing discourses around China
• In Orientalism (1978) Edward Said linked Western
discourse on the Orient to projects of domination,
arguing that for over two thousand years ‘the West’ had
constructed ‘the East’ as an inferior and essentially
unchanging ‘Other’.
Civilized Barbaric
Rational Irrational
Energetic Lethargic

Creative Lacking in creativity
Progressive Backward looking
Dynamic Static
Strong Weak
Superior Inferior
Binary oppositions
superior vs inferior
• Complementary stereotypes like these have pervaded academic
scholarship, high culture and popular culture.
• They have also been linked inextricably to projects of
domination.
• “From the time of the Ancient Greeks they have been used to
justify the West in struggles with the East; in the colonial era
they were used to legitimate Western conquest and rule; and in
the post-colonial era they are still invoked to support
continued Western hegemony. They have also remained
essentially unchanged, and they have maintained their
hegemonic status despite isolated efforts by individual scholars
to subvert them” (Ji, 2017: 325).
Construction of Western
identity: an other is needed
Said’s understanding of discourse

• A discourse is an interrelated and frequently repeated set
of statements, views or teachings, along with
accompanying expressions in practices and material
culture.
• In line with the Foucauldian discourse, it is always and
intrinsically social, it is propagated through claims to
authority and the exercise of power, and (in the hands
of ruling groups) it is an instrument of domination.
Discourse vs Opinion
• Said’s focus on discourse distinguishes his work from books
with titles
like ‘Western views of China’ or ‘Western Representations of
China’.
• These usually pay less attention to discourses, with their
constant
recurrence and their links to power, than to the colourful,
evanescent
and sometimes idiosyncratic observations of individual
travellers,
scholars, journalists or politicians.
• Most of these observations enjoyed only a fleeting currency
because
they were of no use to those with the organisational power to
ensure
that people heard them repeatedly and passed them on to others,
transforming them from individual expressions of opinion into
discourses (Ji, 2017: 326).

Discourse
vs
Opinion
• Power is central in producing
such discourses
• Ji identify and contextualize the
wide range of groups that used
their financial or organisational
power to promote discourses that
served their own (sometimes the
same, at times, different) agendas.
• In Said’s analysis ‘ the West’ appears, not just as a
geographical
term, but as a focus of collective identity with a continuous
existence since the time of the Ancient Greeks.
• This has been attacked widely in academia
• However, in a relevant book chapter, he coins the term
‘imaginative geography’, a shared ‘identity’.
• The East/Orient was focused on the Middle East and later
extended to ‘every known Asiatic and North African
civilization’, including India and China (countries had direct
colonization experience in history).
West and East, Who?

• 1300: Venetian traveller Marco Polo
• The China that he depicted was not static, weak or inferior,
but a
land of almost unimaginable grandeur, luxury and refinement.
It was
exotic, intriguing and in many ways admirable.
• Individual opinions: Sinophilia, not charged by imperialist
ambition
but fed the curiosity of literate Westerners who were beginning
to
look outward in an era of growing long distance trade and
exploration.
• Members of this literate elite admired China because its scale
and
exotic luxuries fired their imagination, and because they were
attracted to China’s social hierarchy, its stability, and its
reliance on a
set of pre-modern values that had a lot in common with their
own.
1. Early Western discourses on China
• Consolidated since 1582: Jesuit missionaries arrived
• The Jesuits aimed to convert China by winning over the
Emperor and the Confucian elite, so they learned Chinese,
translated the works of Confucius, treated local customs with
respect, played down aspects of Chinese culture that they did
not like and emphasised points of compatibility between

Confucianism and Christianity.
• We are almost the same, hence, easy to be converted.
• Critical discourse 1: Compromised ‘pagan practices’ such as
Confucianist rituals faced challenges from other Catholics.
• The writings of the Jesuits were turned to very different
purposes by
Enlightenment intellectuals like Voltaire, who were
campaigning against
the power of the church, working to end religious persecution
and
promoting themselves as advisors to rulers and architects of
reform – to
advance the modernity project
• Critical discourse 2: intellectuals like Rousseau concern the
attempts by
European monarchs to impose absolute rule might be defeated,
forcing
them to share power under a ‘balanced constitution’.
• These intellectuals transformed China into a warning of the
dangers of
absolutism, casting its ‘philosopher king’ in the role of an
Oriental
despot who used religion and intimidation to enforce his rule.
At first
the discourse gained only minority support, but in the second
half of
the eighteenth century it became increasingly important.

他山之石可以攻玉
• Early 19c, discourse against Oriental despotism became
hostile.
• Why? Transformed West after 1750’s Modernisation
• “We are better and we are different”: The scientific
revolution, technological breakthroughs, commercial
development and imperialist expansion all seemed to
show that Europe had surpassed not only ancient Greece
and Rome, but also contemporary empires like the
Ottoman Empire, India and China.
2. Critical discourses gain prominence
• In this context, the once-admired stability of the Chinese
empire was reinterpreted as evidence of stagnation,
inertia and resistance to change.
• The country was dismissed, in the words of J. G. Herder,
as ‘an embalmed mummy painted with hieroglyphics and
embalmed in silk’, as a society with an internal life ‘like
that of animals in hibernation’ (Martinez-Robles, 2008, p.
10).
• 裹着蚕丝布涂着象形文字的木乃伊+冬眠中的动物

• Progressive view of history
• Its past greatness was still acknowledged, but to most it
seemed increasingly obvious that the future belonged to
Europe and to those who followed in its footsteps.
• Even G Hegel states, ‘The History of the World travels from
East to West; for Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia
is the beginning’ (Martinez-Robles, 2008, p. 10).
• The unchanged, inflexible, isolated, indifferent – thus
backward China.
• ‘Chinese backwardness” focused on ‘culture’ – thus
‘culturalist’
until the mid-19c
• It was shared by imperialists or Chinese nationalists.
• It was not yet ‘racist’ as it did not assume that the Chinese
people
were unalterably inferior.
• Instead, it suggested that the Chinese could overcome their
backwardness and moral shortcomings by adopting Western
institutions and culture.
• From the 1850s, however, culturalist discourses were
challenged
by racist discourses that explained culture as the product of

race.
3. The rise of racist discourse
3. The rise of racist discourse
• The first significant Chinese immigration to North
America began with the California Gold Rush of 1848–
1855 and it continued with subsequent large labor
projects, such as the building of the First Transcontinental
Railroad.
• Racist discourses gained its earliest and greatest traction in
the white settler societies of the Pacific borderlands – the
United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia –
where the Chinese competed for jobs and profits with
gold miners, workers and small producers.
Political cartoon: Uncle
Sam kicks out the
Chinaman, referring to
the 1882 Chinese
Exclusion Act.
Published in 19c.
But why?
Connolly,

2013
• A rising political force sought to justify exclusion of
the Chinese by ‘racialising’ existing cultural
objections to them – linking those objections to
unalterable features of the Chinese as a race.
• They asserted that the moral failings of the Chinese
could never be overcome, and that the lack of
democracy in Chinese society showed that the
Chinese people were inherently servile 奴性的.
• Racist discourses enabled them to argue that if the
Chinese were allowed into Western societies they
would form a non-assimilable underclass whose
presence would not only be morally damaging,
but would also prevent the emergence of a society
based on the principles of equality, democracy and
fair rewards for labour.
• This line of argument transparently suited their
interests as representatives of society’s lower and
middle orders.
• However, it also gave them the moral high ground
because it enabled them to claim that they were not
just serving their own interests, but defending
morality, democracy, fairness and the common
good.
A political cartoon
from 1882, showing a
Chinese man being

barred entry to the
"Golden Gate of
Liberty".
The caption reads, "We
must draw the
line somewhere, you
know."
Domestic interest in democratizing
settlers of the Pacific Rim
• In the process of becoming democracies, the votes
of domestic miners, workers and small producers
carried a lot of weight.
• Anti-Chinese rallies, make racist speeches and pledge
support for legislation to exclude the Chinese –
worked very well. And few politicians and interest
groups would like or dare to challenge (becoming a
hegemonic discourse).
New Imperialism in
Africa 1880 and 1914
• As rival imperialist elites fought to bring non-
Europeans under their control, they found it
increasingly useful to justify their policies by
promoting discourses of racial competition and
white racial superiority.

• Gobineau: four-volume An essay on the inequality of
the human races 1853-1855
• Central argument “race was the driving force of
history” was not well received.
• 1882, after his death, become popular with finally a
second edition, followed by the 1884 Sino-French
War
• Imperialist ideologues worked them into discourses
that justified land grabs as an essential survival
strategy in a worldwide ‘struggle of the races’
(Think about Said’s theory)
Japan’s victory over China
1894–1895 甲午海战
• Gobineau had prophesied that China would
invade and conquer Europe via Russia, and
fears of an invasion spread in the decades after
his death.
• New fear: the ‘yellow race’ were capable of
modernising and carrying out a military
campaign as effectively as any Western country.
The modernised Japan + China’s vast scale
• In 1895, the German Kaiser, a rabid racist
heavily influenced by Gobineau, told his
cousin, the Russian Tsar, that it was his
responsibility ‘to cultivate the Asian continent
and to defend Europe from the inroads of the

Great Yellow Race’ (Blue, 1999b, p. 122).
Japan’s victory over China
1894–1895 甲午海战
• The Kaiser then presented all European
heads of state with a propaganda lithograph,
depicting Germany as the Archangel Michael
leading the nations of Europe into battle to
defend European women against the
Japanese Buddha and the Chinese dragon.
• Having thus installed Germany as leader of
the white race, the Kaiser is also reputed to
have coined the phrase die gelbe Gefahr (‘The
Yellow Peril’ 黄祸), which was translated into
the languages of other imperialist powers
and became a stock reference to the
threatening hordes of China and Japan.
Kaiser Wilhelm II used the allegorical lithograph Peoples of
Europe, Guard Your Most
Sacred Possessions (1895), by Hermann Knackfuss, to promote
Yellow Peril ideology
as geopolitical justification for European colonialism in China.
1898 China imperialism cartoon:
A Mandarin official helplessly looks
on as China, depicted as a pie, is about
to be carved up by Queen

Victoria (Britain), Wilhelm II
(Germany), Nicholas
II(Russia), Marianne (France), and
a samurai (Japan).
• Attempts to whip up racist hysteria got ignored, as
people interact tolerantly with the Chinese market
gardeners, traders, launderers, cooks and workers who
played a useful role in their communities.
• Groups avoid racist discourse:
• churchmen with missionary connections,
• radical socialists influenced by Karl Marx,
• people with personal, scholarly or professional links to China.
4. The survival of culturalist discourses
• Donations to fund mission stations that would convert
Chinese into virtuous Christians. “再试试吧中国人还能救
活”
• Marxian socialists were wedded to a very different sort of
culturalist analysis – one that linked the world’s evils to a
single
underlying cause: the inequalities and injustices of class
society.
• Westerners with deep personal, scholarly or professional links
to China often knew too much to be taken in by the crude
stereotypes of racist discourse. While they assumed that the
West was in the vanguard of progress and that China would
have to change, they often had great respect for aspects of

Chinese culture.
4. The survival of culturalist discourses
• ‘A dual function of representation’ (Martinez-Robles,
2008:11)
• ‘the authorised ambassadors in the West of Chinese
civilisation,
spokespersons and often defenders of the cultural principles that
they [took] …
Orientalism, Gender, Sexuality
(Trans Film M. Butterfly)
COM304
Week 3
Delivered by Dr. Zhen Troy CHEN
Prepared by Dr. Jamie J. ZHAO
19 March, 2020
Some updates
• Video links have been upload to compensate for
‘filmscreening”
• You could also try to download the whole
film online from legal outlets
• Changes in the order of delivery

• Fridays 2-4pm as office hour sincestudents
start to ask for consultations about essays
• Group allocation
Some updates
Orientalism vs. Occidentalism
• Orientalism:
Ø East vs. West: as two “absolutely different” social
systems “in which objects are what they are because
they are what they are, for once, for all time”
------Edward Said (1978)
Opera examples: The French adaptation of The
Orphan of the House of Zhao in the early 18th century
Ø in the opera, the Chinese emperor was “crowned
with a cluster of colorful feather and dressed in
pieces of cloth and beast fur … [bearing] an iron
sword one side on his waist and [holding] in the
other hand an impressively mighty bow”
Ø Contemporary media examples of
orientalism:
1. Western tourists in China:
https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzgxNDE5N

Tg3Mg==.html
2. Katy Perry’s 2013 AMA performance of the
song “Unconditionally:
https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjgwODM2
MTAyMA==.html
• The Orient was positioned “schematically on a
theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are
for Europe, and only for Europe” (Said 1978).
• Self-orientalism:
Ø “is not simply the autonomous creation of the West, but
rather
the Orient itself participates in its construction, reinforcement
and circulation”
Ø “essentially a reconfiguration and, in many ways, an
extension
of Orientalism”
------Yan and Santos (2009)
•Occidentalism
•Chinese-specific

forms:
Ø Official
Occidentalism
Ø Anti-official
Occidentalism
• Chinese official Occidentalism is a dominant
discourse in which “the Western other is construed by
a Chinese imagination, not for the purpose of
dominating it, but in order to discipline, and
ultimately to dominate, the Chinese self at home”
• Anti-official Occidentalism is a counter-discourse of
“dissenting intellectuals” who strategically assert that
“the Western other was in fact superior to the Chinese
self” in order to “strengthen their anti-official status”.
------Chen Xiaomei (2002)
• The creation of an anti-official Occidentalism … was
preconditioned by the parameters of Maoist political
discourse, which categorized anything opposed to its
political dominance as “Western” or “Westernized.”
… [T]he adoption of an Occidentalist discourse was a
strategic move by dissenting intellectuals. Accused of
being “Western” both by virtue of their cultural status
and their political sympathies, they had little choice
but to assert that the Western Other was in fact
superior to the Chinese Self. By thus accepting the
inevitable official critique raised against them,

whether or not it was “factually” always the case,
they strengthened their anti-official status.
------ Chen Xiaomei (1992)
The Adaptation of ‘Jasmine Flower’
in/across the East and the West
• Folk song in late Qing dynasty
• Puccini’s Turandot
• Zhang Yimou’s Turandot
Sinoglossia by Howard Chiang
• Heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1934)
• Heterotopia (Foucault 1970)
• Heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1934)
• The term heteroglossia describes the coexistence of
distinct varieties within a single "language"
(in Greek:
hetero- "different" and glōssa "tongue, language"). In
this way the term translates the Russian разноречие
[raznorechie] (literally "different-speech-ness"),

which was introduced by the Russian linguist
Mikhail
Bakhtin in his 1934 paper Слово в романе [Slovo v
romane], published in English as "Discourse in
the
Novel."Bakhtin argues that the power of the novel
originates in the coexistence of, and conflict
between, different types of speech: the speech of
characters, the speech of narrators, and even the
speech of the author. He defines heteroglossia as
"another's speech in another's language, serving to
express authorial intentions but in a refracted way."
Bakhtin identifies the direct narrative of the author,
rather than dialogue between characters, as the
primary location of this conflict.
• Heterotopia (Foucault 1970)
• Of other spaces
• Additional reading
• Chen, Zhen Troy (2018) Poetic prosumption of
animation, comic, game and novel in China:
A
case of a popular video-sharing social media
Bilibili as heterotopia. Journal of Consumer
Culture, OnlineFirst, pp. 1-21. Available at:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14695
40518787574

Examples of Trans Chinese Media
Images
v trans performances and
representations:
1. Li Yugang’s 李玉刚 “The New Drunken
Concubine” 新贵妃醉酒:
https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzQ1Mj
g5Mjk2.html
2. Leslie Cheung 张国荣as Cheng Dieyi 程
蝶衣 in Farewell, My Concubine (1993)：
https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzM4NTE
4MDgwOA==.html
3. Zhou Shen 周深 in reality show 蒙面唱将
猜猜猜 Mask Singer
Swordsman II
• Adapted from Jin Yong’s 1963 novel, The
Smiling, Proud Wanderer
• Casting Brigitte Lin 林青霞 as the Invincible
East 东方不败
• “By intimately linking Dongfang Bubai’s
will to dominate the world with the
transformation of her body from male to
female, the film has displaced anxiety about

totalitarian rule onto the sex-changed body,
which it portrays to be both dangerously
seductive and violently destructive” (Leung,
2012, p. 188)
Adaptation of M. Butterfly
1. Madama Butterfly: An opera written
by Italian opera writer Puccini in the
early1900s.
2. M. Butterfly: A modern play by David
Henry Hwang in 1988.
3. The film M. Butterfly 蝴蝶君：a film
adapted from Hwang’s play, directed
by David Cronenberg in 1993.
Screening: M. Butterfly (dir.
David Cronenberg, 1993)
• https://www.miguvideo.com/wap/resourc
e/pc/detail/miguplay.jsp?cid=624311529
COM304 Portrayal of

Week 5
Agenda
• Week2: Historical review and critique
• A closer look at earlier encounters
between East and West
• Examples
Week2: Part II
• Contact between West and East over 8 centuries
• Changing discourses around China
• In Orientalism (1978) Edward Said linked Western
discourse on the Orient to projects of domination,
arguing that for over two thousand years ‘the West’ had
constructed ‘the East’ as an inferior and essentially
unchanging ‘Other’.
What is sinophilia?
• Sinophile: One who admires China, its people, or its culture.
• Sinophilia: a strong interest in the country, culture,
or people of China.

• “The rise of Sinophilia and Sinophobia will impact the
political,
geo-strategic, and cultural situation in the region, working
either to
speed up or to slow down Chinese expansion in it. The Central
Asian states are at once desirous of the growing Chinese
presence,
wanting to take advantage of its economic dynamism and geo-
strategic influence, but also fearful of its potential
demographic
and cultural clout” (Peyrose, 2015).
What is sinophilia?
• Sinophile/Chinophile defined by Wikipedia: a person who
demonstrates a strong interest and love for Chinese
culture or its people. It is also commonly used to describe
those knowledgeable of Chinese history and culture (such as
scholars and students), non-native Chinese language speakers,
pro-Chinese politicians, and people perceived as having a
strong interest in any of the above.
Interests
• Chinese cuisine
• Chinese architecture
• Varieties of Chinese language (typically Mandarin or
Cantonese)
• Chinese calligraphy and artwork
• Chinese astrology or horoscopes
• Ancient art of feng shui
• Daoism

• Chan Buddhism
• Chinese philosophy – Confucianism
Interests
• Martial arts, such as variants of kung fu
• Politics of China, the Communist Party of China, socialism
with
Chinese characteristics, Maoism, Dengism, one country, two
systems, the Mass Line, politics of Taiwan
• Traditional cultural Han Chinese clothing (Hanfu), and
Manchu-
influenced Chinese clothing (qipao)
• Chinese tea culture
• Chinese wine culture and baijiu
• The Chinese arts, encompassing poetry, literature, music, and
cinema, as well as Chinese traditional forms of theatrical
entertainment such as xiangsheng and operas
Jesuit Exploration
• The end of 16c: romantic tales and vague references
• Print: writings and journals sent to be the West
• The society of Jesus, 1540
• Historical background: Spanish and Portuguese expansion in
both Latin America and Asia

• Example: Macao, Fuzhou/quanzhou, and Ningbo
Jesuit Exploration
• Ningbo: 1628 (Ming dynasty)
• Cathedral: 1648 (Late Ming,
later destroyed by Qing)
• Consolidated since 1582: Jesuit missionaries arrived
• The Jesuits aimed to convert China by winning over the
Emperor and the Confucian elite, so they learned Chinese,
translated the works of Confucius, treated local customs with
respect, played down aspects of Chinese culture that they did
not like and emphasised points of compatibility between
Confucianism and Christianity.
• We are almost the same, hence, easy to be converted.
• Critical discourse 1: Compromised ‘pagan practices’ such as
Confucianist rituals faced challenges from other Catholics.
• The writings of the Jesuits were turned to very different
purposes by
Enlightenment intellectuals like Voltaire, who were
campaigning against
the power of the church, working to end religious persecution

and
promoting themselves as advisors to rulers and architects of
reform – to
advance the modernity project
• Critical discourse 2: intellectuals like Rousseau concern the
attempts by
European monarchs to impose absolute rule might be defeated,
forcing
them to share power under a ‘balanced constitution’.
• These intellectuals transformed China into a warning of the
dangers of
absolutism, casting its ‘philosopher king’ in the role of an
Oriental
despot who used religion and intimidation to enforce his rule.
At first
the discourse gained only minority support, but in the second
half of
the eighteenth century it became increasingly important.
他山之石可以攻玉
• Ricci served the Ming court (150 years of engagement)
• Introduce Chinese philosophy to Europe (1662, 1687
two books)
• In 1700, British captain from the East India Company
started to report to the British authorities
• China Illustrata (Kircher, 1667)

Examples
• The philosopher king – the mandate of Heaven 天命
• Montesquieu (born January 18, 1689; died February 10,
1755) with Voltaire and Rousseau, an intellectual pioneer
of the French bourgeois revolution (Hou, 2014).
• Did not know China at firsthand (The Chan’s Great
Continent, Spence, 1998: 33-35)
Examples
• “Like those that had come before, Ricci's portrait of China
was strongly
favorable. In contrast to the fragmented states Europe, China
offered a
picture of a vast, unified, well-ordered country, held together
by a central
controlling orthodoxy, that of Confucianism.
• Of Confucius himself, Ricci wrote that "if we critically
examine his actions
and sayings as they are recorded in history, we shall be forced
to admit that
he was the equal of the pagan philosophers and superior to
most of them.
• Though directed at a distance by reclusive emperors, the daily
administration
of the country was in the hands of a professional bureaucracy
selected by a

complex hierarchical examination based on merit.
• Social life was regulated by complex laws of ritual and
deportment that
induced social harmony.”
Examples
• The working classes knew their place, marriages were
harmoniously
arranged by the young people's parents, and the practice of
foot-
binding kept the women chastely at home.
• The classical Chinese language itself was so difficult that the
years
spent in mastering it curbed the "youthful licentiousness" to
which
China's young men might otherwise have been prone.
• China's patent distrust of foreigners could be easily explained
by
their worries over national security and the unsettling effect of
newcomers and merchants on their long-established ways.
• Even the Chinese mode of drinking alcohol was so well
controlled
that hangovers were virtually unknown.”
Examples
• Given this generally favorable depiction of Chinese moral and

social life, Ricci
was at some pains to point out why the Chinese were resistant
to the appeals of
Christianity.
• He explained this by a number of factors: one was the
dominant role of
Buddhism in China, which Ricci described harshly as a mass of
primitive
superstitions, fostered by uneducated and often immoral monks
and priests.
• Another was the deeply entrenched belief in astrology, which
had replaced
scientific astronomy as the primal mode for studying the
heavens, and had come
to dominate many levels of Chinese decisions over private and
public life.
• Overlapping in some ways with both these aspects, but also
raising new elements
and problems, was the system of Chinese ancestor worship.
Ricci spent many
years pondering these ceremonies, and their relationship to the
conversion
procedure. Since it became clear that most Chinese could not be
persuaded to
embrace Christianity if they were also told to give up the
homage they paid to
their ancestors, Ricci redefined ancestral worship.
Examples
• He concluded that the Chinese rites to ancestors were

acts of homage to the departed rather than religious
invocations designed to obtain favors or benefit. The
same in essence was true of Chinese ritual ceremonies in
the name of Confucius.
• Accordingly, Chinese might continue to observe such
ceremonies even after they had been converted to
Christianity. (They should, however, be persuaded to give
up their concubines before conversion.)
Examples
• In choosing the Chinese characters that should be used to
translate the Christian monotheistic concept of God, Ricci
took another characteristically ingenious yet compromising
stance.
• He decided that the two Chinese characters Shang-di 上帝,
connoting something approximating the "Lord-of-all" or
"Highest Ruler," could be retained for use in the new context.
This was partly because current Chinese use of Shang-di was
not religious in the Christian spiritual sense.
• Imposing western values to a strange and far China (Bailey,
2012)
Examples
Food and/or
medicine?
• Ren Shen

• Yan wo
• Etc….
Food and/or
medicine?
• Anti-malaria quinine cured Kangxi
• However, the Jesuits were
comparing and praising Chinese
medical practices on how ’small
pots’ were cured.
• Michael Wood
• born on July 23, 1948 in
Manchester. He is a writer
and actor, known for The
Great British Story.
• 2016: Six-part TV mini-
series documentary, The Story
of China by the BBC.

Trade: Silk, spice, and many more
• A case study: https://www.scmglobe.com/the-silk-
road-first-global-supply-chain/
• Economic, social, political and cultural reasons
• BBC: The Story of China EP2: Silk Roads & China
Ships 2016 (Michael Wood 1-6)
• https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1rs411g7UY?fro
m=search&seid=11829866932887811405

BRI – Belt and Road Initiative
• President Xi Jinping launched his ”New Silk
Road” initiative in 2013
• https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/
05/03/401980467/china-promises-46-billion-to-
pave-the-way-for-a-brand-new-silk-road
• https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pax-mongolica-
china-silk-road_b_7633700
BRI – Belt and Road Initiative
• https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/
05/03/401980467/china-promises-46-billion-to-
pave-the-way-for-a-brand-new-silk-road
• https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pax-mongolica-
china-silk-road_b_7633700
• BBC: The Story of China ep2: The Silk Road 2016 (Michael
Wood 1-6)
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Ct41117Yv?from=search&s
eid=139464407970259945
81
• NHK & CCTV: Silk Road (1-12) 1983
https://www.bilibili.com/video/av8834658/?spm_id_from=333.7

88.videocard.0
• *BBC: The Silk Road 2016 (China, Central Asia and The
Middle East)
https://www.bilibili.com/bangumi/play/ep255343?from=search&
seid=1027903929348189
0900
• BBC: China’s New Silk Road 2017
• CCTV: Maritime Silk Road (1-7)
https://www.bilibili.com/bangumi/play/ep199366?from=search&
seid=1027903929348189
0900
• Doing Business With The World by CCTV (1-7)
https://www.bilibili.com/video/av39086161/?p=3
Relevant documentaries
• China Story by CCTV
https://www.bilibili.com/bangumi/play/ep207082/
• LeTV: Fengshui
https://www.bilibili.com/video/av3660285
• China UK co-production: Secret China
https://www.bilibili.com/bangumi/play/ep244420/
• BBC: China in six easy pieces, 2013
https://www.bilibili.com/video/av22856958
Relevant documentaries

• The reading guideline has been uploaded in ICE
• 2 short chapters
• See you at 3pm for the BBB session!
• Thank you!
Assignment for Week 5
Portrayal of China in Western Media
1. Media formats: many to cover
2. East vs. West; China and West
3. Portrayals, representations, depictions
Media and Communication Studies
• Explore the ways that the various
media of communication have an
impact on individuals and
societies.
• One of the key aspects to explore
is media representation.
There are several approaches to the
study of media in this way

• For instance, given that the media foster
the creation of communities (by
enabling belonging through a shared
cultural background) we may as well
ask how the media sustain these
communities.
Ways in which the Media foster Community
(Silverstone)
The Media Allow As in
Expression Community building & reflecting, as in cinema,
offering a cultural framework for collective
identification
Refraction The media also allow a definition of social
limits, by showing some transgression of these.
Examples: Some rituals, talk shows. These
depend on local associations for their meaning.
Compensation The way diasporas use the media to continue
living their cultures abroad
And yet…
• We might as well also ask: do the media have an
impact on the kind of community that is created in
the first place?
• And if so, how?

• Deterministic:
• Technological improvement determines social
change
• Mutually Constitutive:
• The technical apparatus of the mass media are
considered to be constitutive rather than merely
incidental to the shaping of contemporary social
relations
Social Formations & Media
In the West:
Past Capitalist Post-industrial
Political Power Theocratic state Secular state Supranational
state
Economic power Feudal economy Capitalist economy Service
sector,
exchange of info.
Main media of
communication
Church,
ecclesiastical law,
clerical education
Institutions and the
rule of law; public
schools and
newspapers

Satellite TV,
international
agencies,
computarised
learning; electronic
media
Ideology Religion Nationalism Globalisation
Coercion Holy wars Patriotic Wars Ideological wars?
However, media representation is
not always about reality…
• Media produces texts which contain certain
meaning and are open for interpretation.
• Power
• Hegemony (conflict theory)
• Colonialism, post-colonialism and Orientalism
• See some video clips
Videos – China in the News
Is western-centric media theory
applicable in China?
• How China is portrayed in Western media?
• Does this tell us something about the power

relationship between the East and the West?
• Which China is ‘real’ – again, is it an ontological
question?
• Are portrayal of China true or fair?
• What are their purposes?
• How to respond to such portrayal and
representation?
question?
representation?
Video: Stuart Hall on Media Representation

question?
representation?
theory features strongly as…
• Theory is necessary to
• understand (identifying concepts or variables)
• and explain phenomena (identifying causes and
effects)
• It guides our actions
• As a sort of ‘map’
Example:
Some theories about the Audience
• The audience is a mass of a-critical dupes (the Frankfurt
School)
• ‘Effects’ study
• The audience consists of empowered, extremely intelligent
and

discerning individuals, who use the media for their own creative
purposes (neo-liberal theories)
• Creative consumer, prosumer, participatory culture
• How to respond comes under this – subjectivity and
agency
How we’ll approach an audience will depend on which
theory we believe is right (or closer)
Example:
Some theories about Representation
• Encoding and decoding (Stuart Hall)
• Accept, negotiate and reject
• https://www.bilibili.com/video/av10646135?from=searc
h&seid=16648466427499077831
• A short video on Stuart Hall’s key thoughts
• (Social) Semiotics
• Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
Media can be studied
Media to Write on
Audio-Visual Media
Digital and Interactive Media
Throughout the Media: Advertising

Media To Write On
• From stone and clay tablets…
…to manuscripts, newspapers and
magazines
Audio-visual Media
• From Film to Television
Fu Manchu; New Amsterdam EP8
Throughout the Media: Advertising
Digital and Interactive Media
• The Internet, new (social) media
And the kinds of societies?
From empires And nations
From global To local networks

Date Topic Focus
27 Feb 0. Orientation & testing systems Test Big blue button
(BBB), ICE, Platform
5 Mar 1. Introduction Course structure, learning outcomes, etc
12 Mar 2. History: Eight Centuries: A
Timeline of Western Contact
with China
Scholarship on China; paradigm(s) in China
Studies/Sinology
19 Mar 3. Orientalism in Trans Film,
M. Butterfly
Cinema; gender and queer theory
Sino-philia and Sino-phobia
26 Mar 4. Eastern Approaches to
Media and Communication
Theory, media and communication, cultural
difference, Cherishing people from afar
2 April 5. Analysing representation
through Journalism and
Framing
Beijing Olympics in British mass media
theory and methodology
9 April 6. Western reception of

Chinese cinema
Cinema; reception study; theory and methodology
16 April 7. Reading week Essay writing
First assignment –Essay due 5 pm, 16th April, 2020
Date Topic Focus
23 April 8. The Age of Sinophilia History continues
30 April 9. European Imperialism and the
Rise of Sinophobia
Academia and European expansion
US and China Trade War
7 May 10. Guest lecture By Dr Hui Miao
on Detective Chinatown 唐人街探案
(to be confirmed)
Film studies, formal analysis, etc
14 May 11. Orientalism in Fiction and Non-
fiction (to be confirmed)
Novel and academia; Film: The Painted Veil
21 May 12. Chinoiserie and European
appropriation of Chinese visual
style
Aesthetics, fashion (clothing) and design

Ceramics documentary
28 May 13. Orientalism through Cinema –
other Asian images
Film: The Last Samurai
4 June 14. Conclusion Media project due in Week 15
Second assignment – Media Project
due
5pm, 4 June, 2020
6 The West and the Rest: Discourse
and Power
Stuart Hall
Contents
1 Introduction
1.1 Where and what is "the West"?
2 Europe Breaks Out
2.1 When and how did expansion begin?
2.2 Five main phases
2.3 The Age of Exploration

2.4 Breaking the frame
2.5 The consequences of expansion for the idea of "the West"
3 Discourse and Power
3.1 What is a "discourse"?
3.2 Discourse and ideology
3.3 Can a discourse be "innocent"?
4 Representing "the Other"
4.1 Orientalism
4.2 The "archive"
4.3 A "regime of truth"
4.4 Idealization
4.5 Sexual fantasy
4.6 Mis-recognizing difference
4.7 Rituals of degradation
4.8 Summary: stereotypes, dualism, and "splitting"
5 "In the Beginning Allthe World was America"
5.1 Are they "true men"?
5.2 "Noble" vs "ignoble savages"

5.3 The history of "rude" and "refined" nations
6 From "the West and the Rest" to Modem Sociology
7 Conclusion
References
THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 185
1 Introduction
The first five chapters of this book examine the long historical
processes through which a new type of society - advanced,
developed,
and industrial - emerged. They chart in broad outline the paths
by
which this society reached what is now called "modernity." This
chapter explores the role which societies outside Europe played
in this
process. It examines how an idea of "the West and the Rest"
was
constituted; how relations between western and non-western
societies
came to be represented. We refer to this as the formation of the
"discourse" of "the West and the Rest."
185

185
189
189
190
191
195
197
201
201
202
203
205
205
206
208
209
210
211

213
215
216
216
217
219
221
224
225
1.1 Where and what is ''the West"?
This question puzzled Christopher Columbus and remains
puzzling
today. Nowadays, many societies aspire to become "western" -
at least
in terms of achieving western standards of living. But in
Columbus's
day (the end of the fifteenth century), going West was important
mainly
because it was believed to be the quickest route to the fabulous
wealth

of the East. Indeed, even though it should have become clear to
Columbus that the New World he had found was not the East, he
never
ceased to believe that it was, and even spiced his reports with
outlandish claims: on his fourth voyage, he still insisted that he
was
close to Quinsay (the Chinese city now called Hangchow),
where the
Great Khan lived, and probably approaching the source of the
Four
Rivers of Paradise! Our ideas of "East" and "West" have never
been free
of myth and fantasy, and even to this day they are not primarily
ideas
about place and geography.
We have to use short-hand generalizations, like "West" and
"western," but we need to remember that they represent very
complex
ideas and have no simple or single meaning. At first sight, these
words
may seem to be about matters of geography and location. But
even this,
on inspection, is not straightforward since we also use the same

From Novel to Film: How The Good Earth and Pavilion of Women Show American Orientalism

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