Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 21, Issue 2, 2011

The discourse of Cultural China, formerly initiated by Tu Wei-ming two decades ago when China was at the crossroads, has played some major functions. First, it has affirmed the Chinese cultural identity. Furthermore, it offers an alternative lens for reading China in a non-ideological manner. Third, it has offered an alternative model of economic development which is sustainable. Finally, it has offered an alternative model for sustaining humanity. However, given the historic limitations of the concept of Cultural China such as stasis and homogeneity, the discourse of Cultural China should be transformed by a new concept such as Chiglobalization. Chiglobalization, an active global campaign of communication about Chinese culture, would hopefully integrate both the Eastern and the Western cultures into the cultural foundation and texture of the global village.

As advertising can be a social factor and cultural artifact, this study analyzes the images of “modern Chinese woman” via an investigation of their role portrayals, appearance/projection, and verbal characteristics represented in a total of 164 award-winning Chinese TV commercials from 2007 to 2009. Results show that a much larger percentage of females in the Chinese TV commercials embody modern rather than traditional representations. The commercials from Mainland China have also manifested modern representations of the women in more dimensions than their counterparts in Hong Kong. Furthermore, hybridization of both the traditional and modern features are most frequently found in the Chinese TV commercials. It is concluded that the modern forms of Chinese femininity is generated from a synthesis of both the traditional and modern values and that the dichotomous approach of globalization vs localization debate in advertising practice has oversimplified the intricate process as well as the product of image representation and transformation of women in Cultural China.

In this paper, I present a theoretical and empirical analysis as well as assessment of Chinese political discourse from a culture-interactive and culture-competitive perspective. Against the background of the common political-economic, and West-centric frame of Chinese communication, it is argued that Chinese political discourse is not in isolation from wider international culture and history and especially the intercultural context of power struggle, but should rather be seen as a dynamic, culturally responsive agent in both localized and globalizing interaction. Accordingly, this perspective is applied to the particular case of the Chinese discourse of human rights in the past two decades. Through this culturally-minded discourse analysis, it is shown that the Chinese discourse of human rights constitutes as a hegemony-resistant response through active participation, claiming conceptual and operational diversity, and direct confrontation in response to especially the American-Western subordinating discourse on the issue, achieving a significant advancement in the human discourse of human rights thereby.

The type of identity most salient in intercultural communication is probably cultural identity, also a major issue in intercultural communication studies. This study adopts a dialectical perspective and approaches cultural identity as a dynamic production in and through intercultural contact and interaction. Semi-structured interviews of educated young Hongkongers turned out accounts of cultural identity along with their language use in day-to-day activities. These provided indirect access to some lived experience of people in a culturally special society. The study identifies dialectics evident in the production of cultural identity and uncovers ways people deal with dialectic tension in the process.

This paper, through discourse analysis based on discursive social constructionism and ideological analysis inspired by Althusser, explores the changing discursive construction of women in Chinese popular discourse since 20th century. It identifies three related, overlapping, recurring yet distinct kinds of discourses by which women are represented or inteperllated in three different historical periods: (1) awareness and individualization discourse culturally constructed in the Chinese enlightenment period at the beginning of 20th century; (2) desexualized or masculinized discourse politically constructed from the foundation of China to the end of the “Cultural Revolution”; (3) consumerist and ideal discourse economically constructed since the Chinese economic reform. The paper aims to discuss and disclose what each of these discourses reveals or obscures from sight, especially, by examining the underlying and often unconscious assumptions about women that shape gender or reality so as to increase the self-reflexivity of women.

Most of current research seems to proceed from a homogeneous conception of the Chinese ethnic minority in the North America and Europe. The present paper focuses on ethnic Chinese migrant children living in Northern Ireland whose parents come from Mainland China and Hong Kong, respectively, and examines their intra-ethnic and inter-generational experiences based on in-depth interviews and participant observations. The purpose is to identify and explain both historical dynamics and intra-ethnic diversities within these Chinese children’s accounts. The research employs culturally grounded versions of explanations, argumentations, narratives, ‘habitus’, etc. as analytical tools. The research discovers the changes in and differences between these two Chinese sub-groups in views and values on self-concept, norms, country of origin, host society and life-style choices.

Chinese people can be found in most continents and history has shown that they migrate in the early days to seek better livelihoods. Of the many places they have set foot on, Malaya was one country which not only saw the marriage of Princess Hang Li Po of the Ming Dynasty to the sultan of Malacca in the 16th century but also the birth of mixed marriages between local Malays and Chinese who had come with the marriage entourage. Subsequently, others came to work as miners, actors, writers, bankers and various occupations. Malaysian Chinese are the descendants of these migrants. For some reason, literature often associate migrant Chinese with Confucian values like filial piety, respect for elders, benevolence and humility. To some extent this is probably true because Chinese children are taught these virtues through the way they should talk and behave with others. Nevertheless, times have changed. Young people today are exposed to more challenges, new cultures, new experiences and new opportunities. Directly or indirectly, these have an impact on their behaviour and how they talk. Yang Kuo-Shu (1986), Michael Harris Bond and Hwang Kwang-kuo (1986) look at various studies and models of Chinese Social Behaviour. Their findings indicate that the social behaviours of the Chinese have evolved over the years. Adding on to this is the contribution of this paper which discusses the behaviour of young male Malaysian Chinese speakers as shown through their speech. Using participant observation as an approach, spontaneous data of male children interacting with their elders were manually recorded and transcribed. Focussing on politeness, their utterances were then analysed based on the intended functions and the linguistic forms used. Analysis of data suggests that the speakers are direct and less reserved in their speech norms.

Only since the 1960s has the Asian Diaspora been studied as a historical movement greatly impacting the United States — affecting not only socio-historical cultural trends and geographic ethnography, but also culturally redefining major areas of Western history and culture. This paper explores the reverse impact of the Asian America Diaspora on Mainland China or the Chinese Motherland. Mainland Chinese writers Ha Jin and Yiyun Li have left China and today teach in major American universities and reside in America. However, the fiction of both authors explores themes and landscapes that remain immersed in Mainland Chinese culture, traditions and environment. Both authors explore the themes of “cultural collisions” between East and West, choosing to write in their adopted English language instead of their mother Putonghua tongue. Central to this paper is the idea that ethnicity and race are socially and historically constructed as well as contested, reclaimed and redefined

, also known as classical Chinese opera or sung drama, had been the major entertainment in the traditional Chinese society. In Taiwan, Beijing opera as ‘National Drama’ had long enjoyed resources far more than other xiqu genres. However, with the rapid transformation of socioeconomic structure, xiqu experienced drastic decline in audience in the face of Western culture. The call for a “modernized” xiqu became imperative. Under such circumstances, the Contemporary Legend Theater company (CLT) came to the fore. It was founded by a Beijing opera practitioner Wu and his wife Lin, a modern dancer. The debut Kingdom of Desire in 1986, adapted from Macbeth, stirred great excitement in Taipei, and later the play toured around the world. While displaying the legacy of xiqu performance, the couple aimed to go beyond the boundary of Beijing opera and search for a new genre that can reach a wider audience. Their subsequent productions are also adaptations of Western canonical plays, such as Medea, the Oresteia and King Lear. While the marketing strategy of the CLT often stresses jingles such as “When the East meets the West,” intercultural performance as such reveals a double consciousness of the performers, who see themselves through the eyes of the (Western) others. The paper attempts to discuss the meaning of Shakespeare in the CLT’s intercultural adaptations and further examine the politics hidden behind this phenomenon of intercultural adaptation in Taiwan. I explore if such seemingly self-orientalizing adaptation contains resistance to globalization.

The scientific breakthroughs of important theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, etc., engendered a new concept of subject. Instead of the centered and integrated Cartesian subject, the postmodern individual is fragmented and multiple, affected by ideology and by his/her unconscious. This makes it necessary to analyze the historical and psychological dimensions to apprehend his/her complexity. In Maxine Hong Kingston’s The woman warrior — memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts, first published in 1976, it is possible to identify the multiple subject positionings of the main character, who is also the narrator. As a North American of Chinese descent, she portrays Chinese legends, myths, and family stories of her ethnic community through an American frame of mind. Growing up in the intersection of cultures, a position of in-between cultures, and having to deal with different customs and values, the narrator faces conflicts and paradoxes. Her contradictory and fragmentary identity reveals the hybrid and diasporic character of the Chinese American author. Kingston constantly brings together the discourses of her Chinese cultural heritage and the American ones presented in her environment. With this constant dialogue between different cultural elements, the narrator tries to forge a sense of wholeness, a unified cultural identity, of her various subjective positions. The result of this effort, however, is a culturally unstable identity: The woman warrior reflects the heterogeneous nature of the main character and the author, revealing to the reader the Chinese American “country” and culture in all its singularity and uniqueness. The theoretical framework used to analyze the different expressions of subjectivity in the main character of this fictional autobiography is based on critics of Postmodernism and on cultural studies about diasporas.