China and the West

Aufführung von Huan = Xiao wang zi = Le petit prince von Antoine de Saint-Exupéry durch das Hong Kong Repertory Theatre = Xianggang hua ju tuan unter der Regie von Lin Shangwu.
環

Aufführung einer Adaptation von Nora von Henrik Ibsen durch die Xianggang qing nian ju tuan (Hong Kong Youth Theatre Company) in Hong Kong unter der Regie von Huang Haoyi = Wong Ho-i.
All the characters are given Chinese names and the actors wear Chinese costumes.

Zhang, Fakun. "Chuan tong jiao yu" yu "xian dai jiao yu" de yi zhi xing chu yi [ID D28689].
"The Chinese educators will not totally abandon their established educational system, but they now see the necessity of incorporating the useful elements from Western education, including Dewey's ideas, into the Chinese system. They will avoid going to either extreme - 'traditional education', as represented by Confucian and Herbart's educational theories, or 'modern education', as represented by Dewey and his advocates in China."

Zhongguo da bai ke quan shu : tian wen xue. Hu Qiaomu [et al]. [Education]. [ID D28690].
Knowledge for John Dewey was the result of inquiry utilizing the scientific method. The individual attainment of this knowledge, then, is contingent upon that person's 'active' and methodological search for it. Dewey faced a child-centered, activity-oriented process of education and considered it essential that school and society become one. In order to analyze the position of pragmatism and Dewey's education thought in the Chinese educational debate during the 1980s, several types of sources have been examined. Chinese educational journals, and monographs dealing specifically with Western educational theories. Much of what is written about pragmatism and Dewey was heavily influenced by Dewey's prominent historical role in China, and as such subject to ideological colorations that Chinese accounts of other educational theories did not suffer from.
Under the entry of 'Pragmatism' in the encyclopedia, we find it described as an 'important school in Western modern capitalist educational thought'. Its central ideas are equated with those of Dewey, and most of the entry concentrates on his work. He is termed an 'idealistic empiricist' because he considered experience to be the basic unit of the world, though it remains unclear precisely why he is labeled an idealist ; his pragmatic emphasis on experience as the product of interaction between an organism and its environment and as the central criteria for knowledge make it difficult to understand this categorization. One author attempted to explain why Dewey's thought was labeled idealistic : he stated that it is because Dewey 'brings the mind into the natural system, attaching great importance to the role of knowledge and regards the result as natural evolution.
The entry goes on to cite some of Dewey's most prominent contributions to educational theory, namely his criticism of Herbart's formalistic, 'teacher-centered' educational thought and consequent emphasis on developing educational techniques and materials appropriate and relevant to a child's age and experience, his re-thinking of teacher-student relations with stress being placed on cooperation rather than confrontation, and finally his radically new conception of education's role in society. The entry concludes with a brief criticism of Dewey's attack on Marx's class-struggle theory and his advocacy of the use of the 'intelligent method' to solve social problems as well.
A common point made by all the authors was Dewey's close attachment not only to the United States as his homeland but also to the period of great economic and social change in which he wrote. They pointed out the importance of the immense progress made in industrialization and capital accumulation during this period as opposed to the continuing stagnancy of the educational sector. They considered Dewey's thought to be the logical reaction to this state of affairs. The schools were no longer fulfilling the needs of society (the capitalists), ergo reform was needs. Dewey's educational theories were seen as serving the interests of the ruling bourgeoisie. His emphasis on developing individuality in the child was regarded as antithetical to the nurturing of communist morality, but a necessary ingredient of a capitalist system based on mutual competition. Dewey was attacked by several of the writers for attempting to conceal class differences and thus prevent class contradictions from becoming visible through a drowning diffusion of his concept of 'democracy'. By pitting individuals against each other on the economic market, and by giving them a false sense of political power, Dewey was accused of perpetuating the capitalist system and serving the interests of the oppressing class.
Another related criticism shared by the majority of the Chinese writers was that Dewey disregarded the importance of the productive forces in determining social and economic relations which in turn delimit social consciousness. Norms, values and even ideals of the people are, according to the Chinese Marxists, inescapably tied to the fundamental economic production forms of a given society. Dewey was accused of ignoring the existing socio-economic context in which education takes place, making his 'social reform' in effect unattainable. In addition his learning theories themselves were criticized for not taking into account social relations within the classroom ; these relations were called in Deweyan terms by the Chinese 'indirect experience' and were considered an important part of a child's intellectual baggage.

Shi, Weiping. Guan yu Duwei jiao yu mu di de hong guan fen xi [ID D28691].
Shi Weiping points out that the conclusion drawn in the 1950s of John Dewey's theory of educational purpose was too simplistic, subjective, and unfair. He cites different arguments from Dewey's own works to demonstrate that as a pragmatist, Dewey firmly believes in the role of education as a means of social reform for a democracy ; thus he has a very clear social goal for education.

Wu, Yuanxun. Shi ping duwei de "cong zuo zhong xue" [ID D28692].
"We do not want children to learn by doing, but we do not oppose children's participation in practice. We can experiment with different structures of curriculum to create conditions for children to apply what they learn in practice."

Liang, Shiqiu. Ying xiang wo de ji ben shu [ID D28850].
Liang writes : "Irving Babbitt does not sermonize, he does not have dogmas, but only sticks to one attitude – that of sanity and dignity".

Florence Wheelock Ayscough besucht Schulen in Amerika.

Gary Snyder is Professor of English at the University of California, David.

Hou, Weirui. Xian dai Yingguo xiao shuo shi [ID D27602].
Hou Weirui takes Henry James as the pioneer of the modern English novel. The chapter about James covers almost every aspect of Henry James : his life, his artistic theories, his early and late novels, his plays, his short stories and tales. He presented a lot of western James critics among whom he seemed to stand with H.G. Wells in believing James sacrificed life for his artistic experiments.

Wen, Jieruo. Chun jing shang xi [ID D30058].
"… Katherine Mansfield's work does not win readers with its plot, but with an intention to catch the fleeting changes in her characters' feelings and moods. Good at grasping the characteristics of human psychology, she depicted the inner world of her characters by showing the different layers of their consciousness. Her language is implicit, refined and elegant, charged with poetic emotions ; and her writing echoes the melody of lyric prose, leaving boundless room for one to think and rethink after reading. She broke from the tradition of simple narrative fiction, opening up a new way of writing short stories…"

Li, Wenjun. Yuan hua yu sao dong yi yu duan xiang [ID D30401].
Li Wenjun described the difficulty of translating The sound and the fury by William Faulkner. "The sound and the fury haunted me day and night for almost two years. I felt as if I were living in a dream, sometimes sweet, but more often nightmarish".
Tao Jie : In order to be prepared for the job, he had collected and studied a great many important critical works on Faulkner, reminiscences by Faulkner's friends and relatives, readers' guides, reference books and the dictionary about characters in Faulkner's works. He tried to find out about the characteristics and developments of stream-of-consciousness fiction. He read the novel so many times that he felt he knew the story inside out. He went to scholars and specialists for help and advice and asked American scholars visiting his Institute of Foreign Literature about American culture and customs and to confirm or correct his understanding of certain details in the novel.

[Orwell, George]. Yi jiu ba si. Dong Leshan yi. [ID D31725].
Dong remarks in his preface that the novel is a truthful warning to mankind. But the judging criteria vary from writer to writer, from critic to critic, and from translator to translator. Dong's version is a conservative one in that it adopts familiar expressions in Chinese, which can be found in a translating dictionary, to render those in the original. Dong's translation is in general a truthful representation of the original in terms of language and style. The need of extra localization may not a priority at all for Dong. He clearly states in the preface, that Orwell had written the novel to warn us of the unimaginably terrible outcome of totalitarianism if we were ever so ignorant as to let a tyrant ascend to such powers.

Haffenden, John. Novelists in interview. (London : Methuen, 1985).
Iris Murdoch : "It seems to me that some kind of Christian Buddhism would make a satisfactory religion because of course I can't get away from Christ, who travels with me."

Wang Zuoliang : Sean O'Casey.
I found O'Casey's early Dublin tragi-comedies fascinating. I was also attracted by his later work, particularly The star turns red and Red roses for me. It was clear that from Within the gates on, O'Casey , the restless spirit that he was, was looking for a new, fresh way of writing significant drama. He didn't want to repeat his early successes, nor could he reconcile himself to the sort of fashionable, 'realistic' drama then being turned out by men like Noel Coward. Inevitably, he landed on poetic drama. He wanted to see in it all the richness, all the glitter and colour, of life, including man's noble fight for a better society. Also, he would write this kind of poetic drama in a resonant, sinewy prose, though he would not rule out – indeed he often resorted to – bursts of poetry at the critical moments. He did not always succeed in putting his idea to work, but when he did, as in Red roses for me, he did magnificently.

Ginsberg, Allen. China trip [ID D32503].
I went through China asking everybody I met what they really thought—- and found the general atmosphere is one of an opening up, of reform and new breath. In individual conversations, the Chinese are completely clear and Mozartean-minded, very friendly, and tell you everything they can about themselves. But you can only have a subtle, real, frank conversation on a one-to-one level.
If you talk with three people, they'll be somewhat inhibited because it is considered anti-state activity to criticize Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader, or the socialist basis of the state, or to say anything funny about China's occupation of Tibet. When people talk about the Gang of Four, for example, they lift up their hand with five fingers as they say 'Gang of Four', meaning Mao Tse-tung was actually behind the four leaders blamed for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, although that is still not officially said.
In class, students ask very few questions except technical ones. They told me that anybody who asked too much, or too curious a question, would stand out as too individualistic and it might be noted in his dossier. They are also inhibited by a cultural timidity and traditional Confucian respect for authority. Sometimes they surprised me. One student near Shanghai borrowed a book and translated a large number of my erotic poems. When I asked him who he would show it to, he said, 'My girlfriend'. I asked him, 'What's your pleasure in that? ' He said, 'I'm young and I enjoy love. I'm interested in love.' But he said he couldn't show it to very many people; maybe one or two friends.
The Chinese I met were thirsty for some kind of real emotion and frankness and feeling. They denied there is any sex life until people get married at 28. One guy told me, 'Well, people go to the park and rub elbows for hours. If a student is caught just making out, it could mean a mark in his dossier. If he is an English speaker, instead of being sent to the United States or Oxford, he might be sent to teach high school in the Gobi Desert or assigned to a provincial town and stuck there for the rest of his life because he didn't measure up to the moral standards of the community.
So mostly they take showers or do Boy Scout exercises. Every morning they're up at 5:30, running around the soccer field, doing tai chi exercises. It's like the Moral Majority is running China.
I was in China with a literary delegation sponsored by the University of California at Los Angeles and the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and invited by the Peking Writers Association to meet leading writers in China at a four-day conference. The subject of the conference was 'The Source of Inspiration,' a tricky title designed to dodge the doctrine of art as revolutionary propaganda and give Chinese and American writers a chance to talk about individual sources of inspiration and for them to air their ideas of liberty of expression.
The best conversations were in private, on the side, and we Americans, being polite, didn't probe too deeply into Chinese censorship but made speeches about freedom of expression as a basis of art, hinting by example rather than criticism.
The excesses of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) are still very much a part of their lives. Some Chinese are worried that the 'open door' and the new free market might close down again, worried about whether the recent reforms are permanent, worried about what effect they will have on Chinese culture. Some intellectuals fear that the new technology China is buying might lead to a high-tech computer control system over the population, more efficient than the paper-shuffling bureaucracy. 
I spent a lot of my time among the intellectuals at the foreign languages departments of universities, so everybody had a story about the Cultural Revolution, about how they were sent out to the country as a Red Guard, or how their parents were fired from their jobs as translators or physicists, or their mothers sent off to the countryside, or how they themselves were exiled to clean latrines. Elderly physicists were forced to stand bowed over wearing dunce caps, answering questions from a bowed position day and night. Intellectuals were humiliated by such job assignments as cleaning night soil out of the 'streetside water coffin'.
While I was there, there was a big self-examination within the party. Each party group had to check out the validity of the rumors about members' activities during the Cultural Revolution, rumors that somebody had used undue violence or zealotry in persecution of so-called 'bourgeois stinkers' – their neighbors.
I went to a meeting of freshman English faculty. It was all discussion of the latest purification of the party, of all the miscreants and how to deal with the fact that half the faculty was not at the meeting and can't teach anyway because they don't speak English, having gotten their jobs for the 'correctness' of their Maoist views during the Cultural Revolution when Red Guards reigned. New they are dead wood but still occupy positions, so the faculty is only limping along on half the number of proper instructors and having to feed and house obsolete political hysterics.
Almost every city in China was involved in the Cultural Revolution, so it's like a giant family problem as well as a political problem. In conversation, the Chinese express different emotions about the decade of upheaval. They feel bewilderment that China, which was the greatest civilization in the world, went through this period of self-degradation. Many people I spoke to remarked that the people who made the Cultural Revolution – the Red Guards, the professors who were informers – are now working side by side with their 'rehabilitated' victims.
A typical comment was, 'The man who led the investigation of me and interrogated me for months on end in 1967 now has a lesser post than me : he's clerk in the English faculty. I see him every day in the office'. I asked him how he accepted that, and he told me, 'What should I do ? Where is he going to go ? Where am I going to go ? I can't ask that he be sent to jail; there'd be too many. We don't want to start another reign of violence. We're trying to get on with the future'.
A lot of the Chinese knew my work from a translation of 'Howl' in the foreign language magazine. And they knew about the Beats—there was an essay on the Beat Generation by Fan Yi Zhao, a former Red Guard who had been burning dictionaries in the '60s and who is now taking his Ph.D. on Edmund Wilson at Harvard.
The Chinese think of the Beat Generation very differently from Americans. They see it as a literary movement in rebellion against capitalism, or American imperialism, and partly in rebellion against simple government repression and censorship. They don't understand all of it, but they got a whiff of liberation, of Bohemian openness and freedom of speech, and that fits in with their current phase of getting rid of the heavy bureaucracy that controls literature.
The Chinese are heartbreakingly in love with Americans. At a literary conference in Shanghai, Chen Nai-Sun, a very good young lady poet, was asked by the elder writers to be the first speaker. Talking about her ideal, she said that as a young girl she always dreamed of Gregory Peck and his movie adventures. 'I had colorful dreams of youth about him', she said.
There's an ambiguousness among the Chinese. The people are trying to sort out how much of the sexual repression, how much of the travel limitations, how much of the hyper-organization is really a support system for keeping the whole society together, and how much is a control system to keep power at the top. But they rely on some kind of basic socialism to keep the country from falling back into the dog-eat-dog time when the European nations' free market—including Western nations peddling opium—dominated Chinese politics.
In Shanghai, I supped with the president of Fudan University, a specialist in molecular physics. She had been locked in her office during the Cultural Revolution, given a menial job, kicked and left slightly crippled. Now she is a member of the ruling Central Committee. I told her, 'I have heard students everywhere and they all tell me they don't believe in communism, they're disillusioned'. She said, 'Not all think that way. It is a difficult problem. It's true many of the students are disillusioned with socialism. We have all suffered a great deal. We have to work together, we have to find solutions. I think things will change for the better'.
I spent three weeks teaching at Baoding University in the provinces. It's not an open city, so there is no facade created for tourists, no international hotel, no marble-floored bathrooms, no heat in any of the houses—even in the teachers' houses—and soft-coal dust everywhere. There's soft-coal smog throughout China; it is the industrial energy source and used for cooking.
Chinese students laughed or tittered whenever I said something outrageous. American teachers in China are allowed to say anything they want—presumably you wouldn't go so far as to denounce Deng or the Communist Party, but you can make jokes at their expense.
I read students a William Carlos Williams poem, 'Danse Russe', that goes,
If I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself
I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,
who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household.
I explained that, despite the notion the Chinese have of American conformity, despite their view of the American businessman, this is what people are like at heart.
After I finished teaching at Baoding, they held a farewell banquet for me and another teacher. An old cadre member at the dinner—whom I'd thought was a spy bureaucrat—turned out to have managed a Chinese opera company on tour in the mid-'50s. He sang to us, and then sentimentally recited a famous heroic poem by Mao that goes in part:
The mountains are dancing silver serpents,
The hills on the plain are shining elephants
I desire to compare our height with the skies.
We were Americans, we were going away and he wanted to manifest his great feeling for China. Our farewell was warm with tipsy embraces.

Ginsberg. Allen. Allen Ginsberg on China today : poet's impression of country, people. In : The Boston globe ; Febr. 20 (1985). = Ginsberg, Allen. Allen Ginsberg takes a poetic look at China. In : San Francisco examiner ; Feb. 26 (1985).
I went through China asking everybody I met what they really thought – and found the general atmosphere is one of an opening up, of reform and new breath. In individual conversations, the Chinese are completely clear and very friendly, and tell you everything they can about themselves. Buc you can only have a sublte, real, frank conversation on a one-to-one level. If you talk with three people, they'll be somewhat inhibited because it is considered antistate activity to criticize Deng Xiaoping. China's paramount leader, or the socialist basis of the state, or to say anything funny about China's occupation of Tibet. When people talk about the Gang of Four, for example, they lift up their hand with five fingers as they say 'Gang of Four', meaning Mao Tse-tung was actually behind the four leaders blamed for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, although that is still not officially said. In class, students ask very few questions except technical ones. They told me that anybody who asked too much, or too curious a question, would stand out as too individualistic and it might be noted in his dossier. They are also inhibited by a cultural timidity and traditional Confucian respect for authority. Sometimes they surprised me. One student near Shanghai borrowed a book and translated a large number of my erotic poems. When I asked him who he would show it to, he said "My girlfriend." I asked him, "What's your pleasure in that?" He said, "I’m young and I enjoy love. I'm interested in love." But he said he couldn't show it to very many people: maybe one or two friends. The Chinese I met were thirsty for some kind of real emotion and frankness and feeling. They denied there is any sex life until people get married at 28. One guy told me, "Well, people go to the park and rub elbows for hours." If a student is caught just making out, tt could mean a mark in his dossier. If he is an English speaker, instead of being sent to the United States or Oxford he might be sent to teach high school In the Gobi Desert or assigned to a provincial town and stuck there for the rest of his life because he didn't measure up to the moral standards of the community. So mostly they take showers or do Boy Scout exercises. Every morning they're up at 5:30, running around the, soccer field, doing tai chi exercises. It's like the Moral Majority is running China. I was in China with a literary delegation sponsored by UCLA and the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and invited by the Peking Writers Assn. to meet leading writers in China at a four- day conference. The subject of the conference was "The Source of Inspiration," a tricky title designed to dodge the doctrine of art as revolutionary propaganda and give Chinese and American writers a chance to talk about the real reasons they write. In a sense, we were an excuse to allow, the Chinese writers to talk about Individ-ual sources of Inspiration and for them to air their ideas of liberty of expression. The best conversations were in private, on the side, and we Americans, being polite, didn't probe too deeply Into Chinese censorship but made speeches about freedom of expression as a basis of art, hinting by example rather than criticism. The excesses of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) are still very much a part of their lives. Some Chinese are worried that the "open door" and the new free market might close down again, worried about whether the recent reforms are permanent, worried about what effect they will have on Chinese culture. Some Intellectuals fear that the new technology China Is buying might lead to a hi-tech computer control system over the population, more efficient than the paper-shuffling bureaucracy. I spent a lot of my time among the in-tellectuals at the foreign languages departments of universities, so everybody had a story about the Cultural Revolution, about how they were sent out to the country as a Red Guard, or how their parents were fired from their Jobs as translators or physicists, or their mothers sent off to the countryside or how they themselves were exiled to clean latrines.
Almost every city In China was ivvolved In the Cultural Revolution, so it's like a giant family problem as well as a political problem. In conversation, the Chinese express different emotions about the decade of upheaval. They feel bewilderment that China, which was the greatest civilization in the world, went through this period of self-degradation. A lot of the Chinese knew my work from a translation of 'Howl' in the Foreign Language Magazine. And they knew about the Beats - there was an essay on the Beat Generation by Fan Yl Zhao, a former Red Guard who had been burning dictionaries in the '60s and who is now taking his PhD on Edmund Wilson at Harvard. The Chinese think of the Beat Generation very differently from Americans. They see it as a literary movement In rebellion against capitalism, or American imperialism, and partly in rebellion against simple government repression and censorship. They don't understand all of it, but they got a whiff of liberation, of Bohemian openness and freedom of speech, and that fits in with their current phase of getting rid of the heavy bureaucracy that controls literature. The Chinese are heartbreakingly in love with Americans. At a literary conference in Shanghai, Chen Nal-Sun, a very good young lady poet, was asked by the elder writers to be the first speaker. Talking about her ideal, she said that as a young girl she always dreamed of Gregory Peck and his movie adventures. 'I had colorful dreams of youth about him', she said. At these conferences, the elders often call on the younger people to speak, and refer to them as being fresher and less intimidated by the painful memories of the Cultural Revolution. The older writers tell you they are more wary because of their disillusionment with the past. The Chinese writers said they admired poets Walt Whitman, Gary Snyder – who was at the conference with me – Gregory Corso, and asked about Robert Creeley and T.S. Eliot. There's an ambiguousness among the Chinese. The people are trying to sort out how much of the sexual repression, how much of the travel limitations, how much of the hyper-organization is really a support system for keeping the whole society together, and how much is a control system to keep power at the top. But they rely on some kind of basic socialism to keep the country from falling back into the dog-eat-dog time when the European nations' free market – including Western nations peddling opium – dominated Chinese politics. I spent three weeks teaching at Baoding University in the provinces. It's not an open city, so there is no façade created for tourists, no international hotel, no marble-floored bathrooms, no heat in any of the houses – even in the teachers's houses – and soft-coal dust everywhere. There's soft-coal smog throughout in China ; it is the industrial energy source and used for cooking. After I finished teaching at Baoding, they held a farewell banquet for me and another teacher. An old cadre member at the dinner – whom I'd thought was a spy bureaucrat – turned out to have managed a Chinese opera company on tour in the mid-50s. He sang to us, and then sentimentally recited a famous herois poem by Mao that goes in part : 'The mountains are dancing silver serpents, The hills on the plain are shining elephants I desire to compare our height with the skies'. We were Americans, we were geoing away and the wanted to manifest his great feeling for China. Our farewell was warm with tipsy embraces.

Göran Malmqvist wird Mitglied der Swedish Academy.

Aufführung von Ci shen de er nü = Children of a lesser god = 次神的兒女 von Mark Medoff, unter der Regie von Daniel S.P. Yang, Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, 1985.

Aufführung von Xiao hu li = The little foxes = 小狐狸 von Lillian Hellman, unter der Regie von Daniel S.P. Yang, Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, 1985.