China and the West

Aufführung von Le mariage de Figaro = The marriage of Figaro = Fei jia luo de hun li von Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais durch das Hong Kong Repertory Theatre in der Adaptation von David Hammond ; in der Übersetzung und unter der Regie von Daniel S.P. Yang.
費加羅的婚禮

Aufführung von Antigone = Jin zang ling von Jean Anouilh durch das Hong Kong Repertory Theatre in der Übersetzung von Grace Liu = Liao Meiji und Julia Wan = Wen Liang Yongshang und unter der Regie von Chung King Fai = Zhong Jinghui.
禁葬令

Aufführung von Major Barbara von George Bernard Shaw im Beijing People's Art Theater in der Übersetzung und unter der Regie von Ying Ruocheng ; mit Zhu Lin als Lady Britomart, Song Dandan als Major Barbara, Zhu Xu als Andrew Undershaft und Ren Baoxian als Cusins.

Wang Zuoliang schreibt eine Review in der Ren min ri bao ; June 20 (1991) : "What Shaw is saying in the play is in Western society, the capitalist rule everything. In order to show this through characterization and setting, he makes use of all his linguistic powers. The Beijing People's Art Theatre Troupe has this ability. They are nurtured by the spoken scenes in traditional Chinese opera, and trained by the Beijing People's Art Theatre Troupe's habit of paying attention to tone. Even the Chinese old poems also nurtured them. The attempt to perform various kinds of foreign plays in these years has expanded their experience. Therefore when the play began, the refined and yet authoritative expressions of Lady Britomart, played by Zhu Lin, aroused our expectations. When Undershaft, played by Zhu Xu, enters, faced by his wife who is difficult to deal with and his children, he courteously and vigilantly wards off their criticism and refuses their demands."

Shen Huihui schreibt eine Review in der Guang ming ri bao ; June 15 (1991) : "Major Barbara was first performed in 1906. Bernard Shaw stepped out bravely, crying out to stop the imperialist war. He was not afraid of being misunderstood or ciricized. Using his deep thinking, he foresaw that imperialism and capitalism would make use of war to lead mankind into a darker abyss. In Major Barbara, he satirically reveals the real purposes of the conspiracy between politics and religion, and criticizes sharply the church and political authority at that time."

Sun, Jiaxiu. He Xiao Bona xi ju she ci shang yan : kan hua ju Babala shao xiao. In : Xi ju ; no 8 (1991).
Er schreibt über die Aufführung von Major Barbara : "Act two is an important act for Bernard Shaw. It thoroughly exposes the evils of poverty and ist irreparable effects on society under the capitalist system. Capitalism deprives people of their dignity. Capitalism turns people into rude, cruel, and inhuman creatures as in the case of Walker. Capitalism produces an extreme polarity between rich and poor, as well as the moral degradation seen in alcoholism and dishonesty. Shaw wrote this act to expose the capitalist system, but the production did not effectively accomplish that exposure, especially with the excision of some of the discussion in this act."

Wendi Chen : The production was peculiar because the political, social and cultural climate of the time was not in favor of staging such a play, and it was significant because the production was charched with a serious social and professional mission.
The following day the Da wan bao (Beijing evening news) reported that "many people in the drama profession as well as a large general audience attended the first night's performance. The play was received with great enthusiasm". Ke Wenhui, one of the literary critics wrote : "The first night's performance ended with laughter and extended applause. The dramatic effect was extraordinary. It was an event unlike any other during the last few years".
Major Barbara was a major dramatic event for the following reasons : the great reputation of Shaw in China, the reputation of Ying Ruocheng and his cast, the prominence of the location where the performance took place and possibly, the striking contrast between the production of this foreign play and local productions.
Ying confessed that his interest in Shaw dated back to his college days in the 1940s ; it was his 'long cherished wish' to be able to put Shaw on the Chinese stage : "If we don't include Bernard Shaw, we are not presenting a full picture of twentieth century drama. Shaw occupies a crucial position in the development of modern drama". Ying was fully aware of the scope of technical challenges in producing the play. He repeatedly cautioned his cast with respect to Shaw's language and characterization. He warned : "Shaw's plays are seldom staged in China mainly because of his language. His verbal skills consist of many tit-for-tat witty exchanges".

Snyder, Gary. Introduction. In : Beneath a single moon : Buddhism in contemporary American poetry. Ed. by Kent Johnson and Craig Paulenich. (Boston : Shambhala, 1991).
"My interest in writing brought me to the twentieth-century modernists and Chinese poetry ; and my thoughts on nature and wilderness brought me to Taoism and then to Zen. This growing awareness of Zen was also interwoven with the discovery of Chinese landscape painting."

Conferene and exhibition commemorating Katherine Mansfield by the New Zealand Research Centre at Shanghai International Studies University in Shanghai.

[Mansfield, Katherine]. Wei fa xian de guo tu : Kaiselin Mansifei'erde xin xi lan duan pian xiao shuo ji [ID D29995].
Gordon, Ian A. Qian yan = Introduction. Nie Zhenxiong yi.
"Murry, till he arranged her papers after her death, did not know that, increasingly, Katherine Mansfield had come to regard herself as an exile - 'a stranger – an alien' - 'allowed to look, perhaps, but not to linger'. It was obvious enough in the stories : more and more, in spite of the brilliance of stories with an English or a European setting, her themes came to 'linger' on New Zealand. Into that area of her mind and heart, Murry had no entry. Unity there was, and this present collection, by reprinting in a rearranged order Katherine's 'New Zealand' stories and sketches, is an attempt to underline those themes that dominated her life as a mature artist."
Lin, Xiangzhou. Yi zhe xu. [Preface by the translators].
"Katherine Mansfield died in 1923, at the age of thirty-four. The Chinese translations of The garden party, Bliss, and some of her other stories had existed even when she was still alive. Those were done by Xu Zhimo and some other well-known writers of the time…
She has long been regarded as an English writer in China. Few have ever referred to the fact that she was born in New Zealand, and even when it was reported, her New Zealand background has hardly been related to her work. Those who have read her journal all know that she thought it fortunate to have been born in New Zealand, that she discovered herself to be a New Zealander at heart, and that all her life she was devoted to making her 'undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World'…
The most difficult point in the appreciation of Mansfield's work by way of translations is probably her artistic technique. It is precisely because of her new and unique writing techniques that she became one of the masters of the short story, exerting a far-reaching influence. The structure of modern short stories does not necessarily depend on plot, their internal ideas often seemingly incoherent… Mansfield always wrote in a style called by herself 'a special prose', which has increased the challenges for the Chinese reader. Her language looks simple, but, as a matter of fact, it is not. She wrote in the manner of a poet, her words and expressions often producing surprising effects. It is indeed very difficult to convey the above-mentioned artistic uniqueness of her work in translation, and such translations can often be mistakenly judges 'inferior'. However, if an 'elegant' Chinese was adopted and what is ambiguous and implicit in her stories was made explicit, her stylistic quality would surely be blemished…"

Wang, Yiqun. Lun Bai jing zhong di ren dao zhu yi si xiang [ID D30238].
"Herman Melville is one of the greatest American literary naturalists, who was born in a rich family in New York in 1819. After his father died in debt, 11-year-old Melville had to begin to work early. He once worked as a bank clerk, a salesman, a schoolteacher, but all these failed to offer him a decent livelihood. Then he went to sea at twenty, which provided him rich experiences, especially his sailing experiences that furnished him with abundant material for fiction. For a period of some eight years after his return from the sea, he was at most prolific. Melville composes lots of works, such as Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849), White Jacket (1850), Moby-Dick (1851) etc. Among his works, Moby-Dick is one of the greatest masterpieces of the world. Moby-Dick is a very famous novel showing that Ahab, the captain of the Pequod, leads the crew to pursue and kill the white whale. It is also the story of the struggle and harmony of nature and human beings, reflecting the complex relationship between humanity and nature."

Aufführung von Deng dai Geduo = Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett an der Central Academy of Drama, unter der Regie von Meng Jinghui.
Meng Jinghui : Is there anyone in the audience truly willing to go on an adventure with us to shatter this illusory mirage, to rebuild a remembered homeland, and to capture, as far as our eyes can reach, the landscape that surrounds us ? This is what we want to know. To kindle the embers of our passion, safeguard our abode of existence, and look back with more intense candour, wakefulness and vigilance – this is what we can do. It is a pity that for various reasons we have not been able to materialize our dreams on the stage, when the mere throught of these dreams has left us quivering with thrills.
Cao Xueping : The audience sat on the stage and watched the two 'angry young tramps', Hu Jun as Vladimir and Guo Tao as Estragon, waiting for Godot, and displaying the irrational rebellion and depression of youth. The presententeion, in the words of Meng, was 'suppressed, unstilted, marked by its cruelty, poetry and violence – the violence of language and the violence of violence'. As the violence mounted, Vladimir smashed the window panes with his sizeable black umbrella and brought the performance to an end.

Lisa Rofel ist Assistant Professor of Anthropology der University of California, Santa Cruz.

Kirk A. Denton ist Guest editor des Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association ; vol. 26, no 2 (1991).

Cook, Robin. Vital signs. (London : Macmillan, 1991).
It's about a successful epidemiologist and married woman Marissa Blumenthal. When she discovers that she cannot conceive, her obsession with getting pregnant leads her to investigate the baby-making business. Dr. Blumenthal finds out that she cannot conceive as her fallopian tubes are blocked due to a case of TB, which she feels is extremely rare in current times. She tries to conceive through a modern technique called in vitro fertilization from a very well known fertility clinic, but after four unsuccessful cycles she and her husband start to have differing opinions about continuing their quest for child. This starts to take a toll on their relationship, as Marissa is adamant to go on for the next cycle and her husband thinks that it would be another $10,000 down the drain. Marissa joins a counseling group for such in vitro couples, and meets up with her medical school friend Wendy, who also shares that same medical condition as her. Soon the two women discover that the specific condition is found in numerous women being treated in the clinic where they are getting treated. A suicide (suggested to be a murder) of fellow woman patient in the clinic also add to their curiosity. They break into the clinic and try to read their medical records, which are kept in a highly confidential status in the clinic.
They find out that a pathologist, Dr. Tristan Williams, from a clinic with similar name in Australia, has written a paper about a condition similar to theirs. On the spur of moment, they decide to go to Australia to visit the author. When they inquire about him at the facility, they get negative responses and are made to believe that they have made a wasted trip. When Wendy is killed in an unexpected accident involving shark, Marissa feel that her death is more than an unfortunate accident. After few fruitless efforts to find Dr. Williams, Marissa meets him in his current assignment. From him she learns about a practice where pairs of Chinese citizens who were smuggled into Australia work in the clinic regularly. Tristan tells Marissa that due to the paper he wrote, the FCA has taken retaliatory steps against him, like branding him with drugs and killing his wife two years ago. He has had to be constantly on the run, which made him send his only son to live with his in-laws to keep him safe. Marissa and Tristan team up together to get to the bottom of the mystery.
Tristan suggests that there had to be a drug trafficking involved since the illegal Chinese workers were transported from the Republic of China and moved into Australia through Hong Kong. They decide to visit Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, as they try to get information on how they are able to transport people from China to Hong Kong, there are two more attempts to kill them. Both the attempts fail. During one attempt, Marissa's husband, who comes to Hong Kong to take Marissa back home, is killed by mistake. Finally, they get to meet one such pair who is to be transported from China to Hong Kong in a boat for the FCA. Marissa discovers that one of the pair was a martial arts expert, and his sole duty was to protect the other. The other person was a rural doctor from China. Marissa and Tristan question the pair about the drug business, but all their answers are negative. Soon, Marissa, Tristan and the Chinese doctor get stranded due to border patrol force.
Marissa discovers that the rural doctors are trained to sterilize women as mitigation by the government to control the population. This sterilization is a simple remedy that can be done without making the patient unconscious. This comes as a shocking revelation, and helps Marissa put together all the things she has gone through. She finds out that the clinic is sterilizing its women patients who are coming in for regular check up. They also fail their initial in vitro cycles by making the fertilization medium more acidic. After 5 or 6 cycles, they let the couple have children. After this discovery, the CDC and FBI get involved to close up these clinics and take legal action. In the end, Marissa marries Tristan and the couple plan to adopt a Chinese baby from Hong Kong.

Giorgio Casacchia ist Berater der italienischen Botschaft in Beijing.

Ellen B. Widmer ist Mitglied des Program Committee der National Association for Asian Studies.

Ellen B. Widmer ist Mitglied des China and Inner Asia Council der Association for Asian Studies.

Robin J.T. McLaren ist Botschafter der britischen Botschaft in Beijing.

Philip Alexander McLean ist Botschafter der britischen Botschaft in Beijing.

Helmut Arndt ist Konsul des deutschen Generalkonsulats in Shanghai.

Gründung und Bestehen des französischen Generalkonsulats in Guangzhou.

J. Stapleton Roy ist Botschafter der amerikanischen Botschaft in Beijing.

Ma Yuzhen ist chinesischer Botschafter des Court of St. James's in London.