Theory, Culture &

Society http://tcs.sagepub.com

The Body and Modernity in China

Li Shiqiao
Theory Culture Society 2006; 23; 472
DOI: 10.1177/026327640602300288

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://tcs.sagepub.com

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:
The TCS Centre, Nottingham Trent University

Additional services and information for Theory, Culture & Society can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Subscriptions: http://tcs.sagepub.com/subscriptions

Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007

2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
25_modernity_064829 10/5/06 10:25 am
472 Theory, Culture & Society 23(23)
The Body and Modernity in China
Li Shiqiao
Keywords China, modernity, the combatant
body
M
odernity in China seems to invoke an
endless set of questions about both
modernity as a meaningful cognitive
framework and the ways in which modernity
manifested in the Chinese cultural and political
context. This, on the other hand, probably
contributed to the fact that studies on modern
China have become one of the fastest growing
areas of scholarship in the past two decades. The
account of modernization in China, until recently,
had been relatively straightforward; encounters
with the modern West beginning with the mid-
19th century led to institutional tensions between
new ideas and traditions, leading to a series of
peaceful and violent revolutions marking the
conflicts the Opium War (183942), the Boxer
Rebellion (1900), the May Fourth Movement
(1919), etc. This account of the key moments of
rapture of modernization in China substantiated
both the revolutionary hegemonic views of stages
of revolution and the metanarratives of freedom
and progress mapped in a linear and universal
pattern. As Chinas archives opened up for
research, and as intellectual inquiries shift from
the Weberian interpretation of institutional
changes, more nuanced studies are now possible
from a multitude of spaces and views, generating
new research questions and reframing old ones. As
both a critique of modernity and a reconstitution
of the Chinese modern, the new research traces
shifting formations, always already hybridized and
eclectic, of fractured and contested grounds
between heterogeneous traditions and practices.
One useful point of entry into an understand-
ing of modernization in China is through the
reconstitutions of the body in the Chinese cultural
and political context. When, in 1793 during his
famous mission to China, Lord Macartney resisted
the bodily movement of kowtow to the dismay of
his Chinese hosts, he brought the cultural worlds
constructed around the body into sharp relief. At
the start of the first major violent encounter
between China and the West during the Opium
War, the Qing (16441911) court considered the
body of the imprisoned site of opium-induced
pleasures as undermining its normative functions
Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007
2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Page 472
as a site of moral rectitude in the Confucian
tradition, in which to establish your body (lishen)
commanded a central importance. On the other
hand, Chinas defeat in this war and a series of
other encounters with Western powers set forth a
rethinking of the body beyond the conventional
understanding of the body framed through the
duality of pleasure and moral conduct. Both
pleasure and morality were reconstituted to
include the combatant body the strong and
dexterous body sustained through sports and
competitions in the Hellenistic formulation, and
codified in the representations of the body since
the Renaissance in the West. In China, the combat-
ant body had been understood traditionally as
something to be gradually overcome through the
civilizing power of ritualized moral conduct or
spiritual enlightenment. Vestiges of the combatant
body remain through the metaphor of battle
frequently used in Chinese erotic literature. Major
reform thinkers and revolutionaries in China in the
early 20th century paid extraordinary attention to
the remaking of the body in a multiplicity of
discursive formations. The Renaissance ideal of
bringing together active life (vita activa) and
contemplative life (vita contemplativa) became a
new paradigm to be injected into the traditional
role of intellectuals focused on literary and artistic
activities. Education reforms in the early 20th
century emphasized physical exercises, as shown
by Wen-hsin Yeh in Alienated Academy (1990).
Liang Qichao (18731929) stressed the central
importance of the new Chinese person (the new
citizen or xinmin) to the renewal of Chinese
culture and society in the modern world. This
understanding influenced a generation of Chinese
reformers and revolutionaries: Mao Zedong, for
instance, named his student organization the New
Citizens Society (Xinmin xueshe), and he
engineered a high visibility for his rigorous exercise
regimes a central theme of revolutionary propa-
ganda in post-1949 China. Chinas first partici-
pation in the modern Olympics in 1984 and its
hosting of the 2008 event can be seen as symbolic
manifestations of the reconstituted body advo-
cated by successive political regimes in the 20th
century, displayed in the international arena.
Despite all these changes, the traditional body,
seen in its speech (and the absence of it), memory,
movement essential to the ever-present power
hierarchy, has never ceased to be a significant layer
25_modernity_064829 10/5/06 10:25 am
in the process of its hybridization with the new
combatant body.
The debating mind as the counterpart of the
combatant body demanded remaking of knowl-
edge underlined with principles of precision and
conciseness; this formed the main modern reform
agenda for leading intellectuals such as Yan Fu and
Liang Qichao as they introduced Western scholar-
ship into China. The embodied knowledge of the
traditional hegemonic power hierarchy of Con-
fucianism was contested by the new hegemony of
logo-centric knowledge. The new mind must now
be sufficiently nimble to employ notions of global
space and time (geography and history in the
Hegelian sense), and to renew and recreate
Chinese scholarship in this new framework.
Developing this agenda, scholars such as Hu Shi
(18911962) and Lu Xun (18811936) experi-
mented with a new way of writing Chinese
(baihua) which moved away, in form and content,
from Chinese tradition symbolized by the dense
scholarly language fostered by the traditional
examination system. This distance between the
new language and the traditional language became
an important measure through which renewal and
recreation of the Chinese culture in the modern
context could be considered possible.
The prosthetic extension of the combatant
body through technology was particularly recep-
tive in the Chinese context. This may be
attributed to the ease with which the notion of
technology could be rephrased in the existing
vocabulary in the Chinese scholarly tradition,
albeit with technology now playing a reversed role.
The conceptual framework for technology was
traditionally framed as one side of the binary oppo-
sition of the dao and the qi. The dao (the contem-
plation of universal principles) and the qi (the
making of things) were understood as separate
endeavours, and the pursuit of the dao was seen
to be a superior form of intellectual life. This
concept can be found in early classics such as
Zhouyi (The Book of Changes), compiled in the
late Zhou dynasty (770256 BCE). As China
encountered the Baconian notion of use/power of
technology, it sought to rethink its tradition of
science and invention which, as Joseph Needham
demonstrated in his monumental Science and
Civilization in China, had always been a key
component in traditional Chinese society. From
the 1840s onwards, a number of capable Qing
officials such as Zeng Guofan (18111872), Zuo
Zongtang (18121885), and Li Hongzhang
(18231901), who rose to prominence as
commanders of armies suppressing various rebel-
lions (Taiping, Nian, and Muslim) which plagued
Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007
2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Page 473
Problematizing Global Knowledge Modernity 473
the Qing Empire in the late 19th century, built
shipyards, arsenals, and railways. They revived a
historical phrase of self-strengthening (ziqiang) to
underscore the Chineseness of their endeavor.
They wanted to overcome the shame of labor of
the Chinese literati, an effort which paralleled the
medieval exultation of manual labor in the Bene-
dictine monasteries described by Lewis Mumford
in The City in History (1961). While the techno-
logical modernization of the Qing court in the late
19th century was undermined by incessant foreign
hostility and conservative courtiers, Deng
Xiaopings pragmatic modernization program from
the 1980s has been much more effective in
restoring a modernizing agenda sidelined by politi-
cal and ideological demands in the early 20th
century.
The female body in the Chinese cultural and
political context presents a uniquely complex
question in Chinas modernization. The abolition
of the female bound feet, a central fetish at the
heart of the patriarchal pleasure/morality, became
the first indication of a process of reconstitution
of the female body. The May Fourth Movement
championed the ideal of the Chinese woman
through equality and freedom, an ideal that
continued to gain currency in post-1949 China.
Maos impassioned writings in 1919 on the tragedy
of Miss Zhao, a young woman who committed
suicide as she refused an arranged marriage,
reflected this ideal. The Norwegian dramatist
Henrik Ibsens A Dolls House, in which the
heroine Nora left her husband as she revolted
against bourgeois hypocrisy and oppression, was
translated and printed in the journal of the new
culture, New Youth, in 1918; it was received with
great enthusiasm by Chinas youth. As much as the
cultural iconoclasm in the 1910s demanded
the liberation of the female body, nationalism in
the 1920s and 1930s exerted a counter-claim on
it in the form of a return of the patriarchal author-
ity, as Prasenjit Duara demonstrates in Rescuing
History from the Nation (1995) and in Of
Authenticity and Woman (2000). The earlier
representation of anti-Confucian and anti-familial
women became a liability for nationalism, and was
replaced by one of traditional virtues bound by the
domestic space off limits to Western influences,
playing a central part in the construction of the
nationalist ideology. Within the 20th century, the
female body in the Chinese cultural and political
context was, and continues to be, the site of
violence, oppression, and liberation in the multi-
farious formations of patriarchal authority, cultural
iconoclasm, revolutionary hegemony, and national-
ism with heightened intensity.
25_modernity_064829 10/5/06 10:25 am
474 Theory, Culture & Society 23(23)
References
Duara, P. (1995) Rescuing History from the
Nation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Duara, P. (2000) Of Authenticity and Woman:
Personal Narratives of Middle-Class Women in
Modern China, in W. Yeh (ed.) Becoming
Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond,
pp. 34264. Berkeley, LA and London:
University of California Press.
Featherstone, M., M. Hepworth and B.S. Turner
(eds) (1991) The Body: Social Process and
Cultural Theory. London: Sage.
Li, S. (2003) Reconstituting Chinese Building
Tradition: The Yingzao Fashi in the Early
Twentieth Century, Journal of Society of
Architectural Historians 62(4): 47089.
Mumford, L. (1961) The City in History, its
Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects.
New York: Harcourt Brace.
Anthropology and Japanese Modernity
Kaori Sugishita
Keywords imperialism, modernity, postmod-
ernism, westernization
A
lthough the discipline of anthropology is
embedded in different socio-cultural
entities, the West remains the primary
we/here that produces knowledge about others/
there, thanks to its political, economic and
academic dominance. Hence it is worth investigat-
ing the development of anthropology in the non-
West with regard to different manifestations of
modernity, which was originally a self-image of
the West, a state of rationality and civilization that
the dominant entity attributed to itself. Japan, a
non-Western nation, has engaged with modernity
as such in relentless pursuit of Western power,
wealth and knowledge. The operation of anthro-
pology in this process is twofold; on the one hand,
Japan as others/there has been scrutinized by the
dominant West, while, on the other, it has joined
the West, as we/here, in subjecting others/there
to the same scrutiny. In fact, Japan has become a
locus of anthropology comparable to the West in
terms of ethnographic and theoretical range.
However, Japanese anthropology lacks critical
perspectives on itself, as illustrated by its constant
Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007
2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Page 474
Sennett, S. (1994) Flesh and Stone: The Body and
the City in Western Civilization. New York
and London: W. W. Norton & Company.
Tang, X. (1996) Global Space and the Nationalist
Discourse of Modernity: The Historical
Thinking of Liang Qichao. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Turner, B.S. (1996) The Body and Society,
Explorations in Social Theory, 2nd edn.
London: Sage.
Yeh, W. (1990) Alienated Academy: Culture and
Politics in Republican China, 19191937.
Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
University Asia Centre.
Li Shiqiao is Associate Professor in the Depart-
ment of Architecture, Chinese University of Hong
Kong. He has published on architecture and
modernity in China and England, and has won
architectural design awards.
failure to objectify Japanese modernity, the
particular conditions under which it has
developed.
Japans engagement with modernity traces
back to the restoration of imperial rule (1868);
with the feudalistic regime of shogunate and its
policy of national isolation abolished, Japan set out
to catch up with the West in the name of
enlightenment. Anthropology was introduced to
Japan in this course for modernization, mediated
by Western investigation into the origins of the
Japanese. Brought to a shocking realization that
they were observed by Westerners (Shimizu,
1998: 115), the Japanese vigorously produced
knowledge about their origins, differentiating
we/here from others/there in the North and the
South. Such scholarship contributed to the
modern attempt of Japan to forge its unity as a
nation-state, which unfolded against a backdrop
of the emergent world order centred on the West
(Askew, 2003: 138). In search of a national
identity with which to arm itself, Japan desired to
join the West as dominant entity, thereby keeping
distance from Asia, the subordinate entity of
which it hitherto formed a part. This led on to the
development of imperialism in Japan, affecting
anthropology therein; we/here increasingly
considered itself superior to others/there, even