China and the West

Chen Shixiang ist Dozent an der Beijing-Universität und der Hunan-Universität Changsha.

Feng Yuanjun promoviert in französischer Literatur an der Université de Paris.

Romain Rolland trifft Ge Baoquan in Moskau.

"Jahr der Nora" von Henrik Ibsen in China.

Aufführung von Nora von Henrik Ibsen durch die Guang hua ju she (Bright China Drama Society) in Shanghai.

Aufführung von Nora von Henrik Ibsen durch die Jinan min jiao guan (Jinan People's Education house) in Jinan.
The purpose of the performence was to promote women's rights and disseminate ideas of feminism.

Aufführung von Nora von Henrik Ibsen durch die Mo feng she (Windmill Society) im Tao Tao Theater in Nanjing unter der Regie von Zhang Min mit Wang Ping als Nora und Lu Fu als Helmer.

Aufführung von Nora von Henrik Ibsen durch die Shanghai ye yu shi yan ju tuan (Shanghai Amateur Experimental Drama Troupe) im Shanghai jin cheng da xi yuan (Jincheng Theater Shanghai) unter der Regie von Zhang Min mit Lan Ping (Jiang Qing) als Nora und Zhao Dan als Helmer.
Theater Historiker Ge Yihong who witnessed the performance, describes the production as "a great achievement in directing, acting and stage management, with fantastic scenery and spectacular lighting effects", and affirms that it was praised as "a world standard presentation".

Aufführung von Nora von Henrik Ibsen durch die Shanghai zhi ren yong ju she (Shanghai Wisdom-Benevolence-Bravery Drama Society) in Shanghai.
The performance celebrate the 'Year of Nora' in China, and promotes ideas of feminism and women's rights in China.

Mao, Dun. Han yi xi yang wen xue ming zhu [ID D26255].
Mao Dun schreibt : "Ibsen tries to use symbolical methods to make up for the inadequacies of his artistic imagery. It is in them that we see the bourgeois intellectual Ibsen, who falls into the trap of the ambiguities of thinking predetermined by his birth when his social problems extend to the future end of the industrialized bourgeois society."

Gao, Changnan. Shi jen Mi'erdun [ID D26337].
Er schreibt : "Many people feel that Milton's works are loaded with tehology ; these puritan ideas are too remote for us."

Film : Kong gu lan = 空谷兰 [Lonely orchid] unter der Regie von Zhang Shichuan nach der japanischen Übersetzung Yureito von Kuroiwa Ruikô, einer Adaptation von Williamson, Alice Muriel. A woman in grey. (London : G. Routledge & Sons, 1898).

Shi, Wei. Xiao Bona [ID D27956].
According to Shi, Shaw's greatness lay in four areas : 1) Shaw's struggle against capitalism and bourgeois society. 2) Shaw's struggle against militarism and imperialism. 3) Shaw's unwavering support of socialism, as evidenced in his endorsement of the Soviet Union. 4) Shaw's struggle against the exploitation and oppression of small, weak, colonial countries. What Shi emphasizes are Shaw's moral and social commitment, not Shaw's dramatic achievements. Shaw is admired as a defender of justice, a voice for the weak, and an upright moralist.

Aufführung von Arms and the man von George Bernard Shaw im Star Theatre Nanjing unter der Leitung der Chinese Drama Association.

Charlotte Brontë in China allgemein.
Wu Qinghong ; Huang Lu : The reason that Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë becomes a masterpiece of world literature is closely related to the Gothic techniques of Charlotte Brontë. She uses Gothic tradition to make the novel enveloped in somber, horrible, misery and bitter color, which arouses the horror and compassion of readers and increases the effect of the work. Gothic techniques highlight the personality of characters, glamorize the horrible atmosphere, deepen the theme of the work, thereby, make the work show unusual and unfailing artistic charm.
Some of the critics just discuss the religious and cultural factors of the novel. Most critics like to reinterpret Jane Eyre from the feminist perspective. They assert that Jane Eyre embodies the ideal of feminism which proclaims that women are born to be equal with men and encourages women to achieve their independence and freedom by subverting the patriarchy and by establishing an equitable world.
It is believed that the first Chinese readers of Jane Eyre were those who studied in the schools sponsored by Christian missionaries or those who went to Western countries at the end of the 19th century.
Soon after the translated version of Jane Eyre aroused immediate attention from Chinese critics. They all agreed, that Charlotte Brontë had originality and uniqueness, a vivid realistic description of life. Brontë was deemed to 'have too many desires and romantic ideas' and 'was determined to describe the social reality'.
The Chinese translators' efforts are obviously of great significance, since most of the readers only read the translated Chinese versions.
Until the beginning of the 20th century, young people still could not base their marriage on love, but on parent's decision under the constraints of the feudal social system in China ; women had no say at home, let alone in society ; the Chinese cultural tradition advocates collectivism instead of individualism ; under the extreme leftist communalists' political control in 1950s and 1960s, people could hardly maintain their personalities. When they finally come across Jane Eyre's story of romantic love, personal struggle in life and unique development of personality, they cannot suppress their emotion any more. They admire Jane's courage for pursuit of love and happiness, and wish to follow her example. Though the heroine Jane Eyre is a British girl, she has virtues which are in accordance with traditional Chinese ethics. Chinese people cherish friendship and will risk their lives for the sake of their friends. They are told by Confucius, one should show their love, benevolence, sympathy, charity, humanity and kindness to every human being. Jane's clear love and hatred, her fight against John Reed's violent tyrannies, and her aversion straight to Aunt Reed all prove she is a benevolent person. Though she is poor, she has a noble soul of self-respect, self-confidence and self-reliance. She behaves just as Chinese people usually believe : one should sometimes restrain their love for some moral considerations. After she inherits a large sum of money, she shares with her cousins. She certainly reminds Chinese people of their true hero who 'neither riches nor honors can corrupt him ; neither poverty nor humbleness can make him swerve from principle ; and neither threats nor forces can subdue him'.

Lin, Yutang. On Bertrand Russell's divorce [ID D28025].
Bertrand Russell's divorce is none of my business. On the other hand, my thoughts on Bertrand Russell's divorce are none of his business. The short item of news that appeared in The China Press about two months ago made me think a great deal. In fact, it made me think furiously. To those acquainted with the liberal views of marriage taken both by Bertrand and Dora Russell, which to my mind, would make marriage considerably easier, the news must have come as a surprise. In fact, the situation is a little invested with humour, as the personal distresses of all great men are invested with humour. This sort of humour is of the best, for it comes from the Defeat of Theories. The cosmic enginge grinds on, taking its toll form among prince and pauper, and from the shop-keeper to the modern sage, and shows us up as a couple of human mortals that must eternally flounder along. For life is victorious over human philosophy.
Perhaps, if the news is true, the divorce mustn't be taken as a defeat of Bertrand Russell, but only as a defeat of marriage. Perhaps Bertrand Russell is greater than the institution of marriage. For if Russell's marriage was a failure, he was, and is, in good company. All great men's marriage are failures. You say, what about Tolstoy and Goethe ? That is very well ; but I was thinking of the great sages of the past – Buddha, Confucius, Jesus and Mohammed. Jesus never married, so that proves nothing, unless it be taken as a practical comment on marriage on his part. Buddha, as we are told in The light of Asia, literally walked over the graceful sleeping body of his beautiful wife and became the first monk. It makes me wonder what he must have gone through. It seems to me that all these great men and sages are half crazy people : the common feelings of pain and suffering, of pity for the beggar, of the little annoyances in marriage and the great 'ennui' of life, which to the common man are no sooner felt than forgotten, must have struck their more highly sensitized souls with the power of an exaggerated illusion. From this exaggerated illusion, usually a religion was created. In fact, all founders of a special favorite theory, like Freud, Karl Marx and D.H. Lawrence, must have suffered from a type of mental myopia or astigmatism, which enables them to 'carry it through to its logical conclusion' and beyond all limits of reasonableness. To come back – Confucius and Mencius divorced their wives, and Mohammed took to concubines. All their marriages were failures. Only Socrates, that old Greek with a large measure of common sense, stood his marriage as well as any middle-class John Smith. We are told that, after being scolded by his wife and when he was leaving his house, his wife poured a pail of cold water over his head, he merely muttered, 'After the storm, the rain !' In other words, he had very robust, healthy nerves ; he stood marriage with the same physical courage as he stood cold, hardship and physical fatigue, for which he had extraordinary powers, and he faced his wife with the same moral courage with which he faced the cup of hemlock at the end of his seventy years. Socrates had that secret of happiness which is the essences of Chinese culture: Endure and conquer.
Why didn't Russell do it, and why didn't Confucius do it ? Confucius had the same humour and the same common sense as Socrates. But we have no sufficient evidence to determine whether Confucius divorced his wife or his wife divorced him. My conviction is that his wife merely ran away. Turn up Chapter Ten of The Analects, and you will understand why it must be so. Any woman who could stand Confucius as husband could stand the Spanish Inquisitions. 'He did not talk at dinner table, and did not talk in bed'. Many wives who face the back of their husband's morning paper every breakfast must know what that first part means ; for he second part, they can only imagine. Then he was extremely fastidious about the matching of colours in his dress. 'A fur gown of black sheep should be matched with a black material, a fur gown of white deer should be matched with a black material, a fur gown of white deer should be matched with white material, and a fur gown of fox should be matched with chocolate material'. Like all great men, he had original personal habits. 'He must have the right sleeve of his working gown made shorter' than the left sleeve, and he 'insisted on changing into a sleeping gown, which was longer by half than his body'. All these were practical hygienic innovations, but to the wife of Confucius, who was just a conventional woman, they might have just seemed like sheer nonsense. Equally fastidious was he with his food. 'Rice could never be too white, and mince meat could never be too fine', and who bore the burden except the wife in the kitchen ? The ten conditions under which Confucius refused to eat must have hanged over the mind of his wife at the kitchen like the sword of Damocles, and eventually caused her to make up her mind one fine morning. It was quite within reason, for instance, that 'when fish was not fresh, and meat was bad-smelling, he would not eat ; when the colour was bad, he would not eat ; when the flavor was bad, he would not eat'. But when 'he would not eat because a dish was overdone or underdone', was the wife of Confucius to stand over the boiling pot like a guard over a nationally well-known gangster, at the risk of seeing her man starve for another fine half day ? The article that he would not eat 'when a thing was not in season' meant extra time and caution at buying in the market. But when 'he would not eat, when the meat was not cut into perfect squares, and he would not ear, when it was not served with its proper sauce', the idea of running away must have already dawned in her mind. The worm was turning. And when, for one reason or another, she could not get up a proper meal, but could ask her son, Li, to run across and get some bacon and some wine to humour him and be through with the darned meal, she might still consent to stay. As it happened, she learned that 'he would not take wine that was not home-brewed or pickled meat that was bought from the streets', so what could the wife do except pack up and go away ? That last scene with Confucius, in which she delivered her mind of Confucius, is waiting for some great playwright to write up as the climax of a modern feminist drama. Greater, infinitely greater, than Dora's speech in leaving the Doll's House.
This instance of Confucius is given to illustrate the kind of problems that lie back of marriage and its failures. Two beings, biologically dissimilar, and actually leading two lives, are constrained to lead one. The response to surroundings must necessarily be dissimilar, and only an old couple, with a fundamental respect and liking for each other, and willing to give and take, can, with the exercise of vigilant common sense, toleration and subtle understanding, ever make a go of it. When this condition fails, the marriage breaks, and for it there is no remedy. The East, which regard the family as a social affair and the basis of society, take to concubinage, keeping the family as a social unit intact, while the West, which regard marriage as an individual, sentimental and romantic affair (sic !) go for divorce. Now the East are copying the West, but whoever believes that divorce is a true solution ? It is merely as we say in Chinese, 'a solution of no solution', like concubinage itself. There is no such thing as fairness or equality, for it is invariably the woman who suffers. The question is under which system she suffers more. Under the old system, when the man gets tired of his wife and takes his favorite home as concubine, the wife still retains her high position in the family, surrounded by her children, and holding at least a theoretic supremacy over the concubine. Above all, her personal position in the family is kept, and her home is not broken up. In the West, the woman sues for divorce, gets her alimony and goes away to live alone, or re-marry, or become a social lioness. In China, where women have not the spirit of independence of their western sisters, the situation is quite different. It has sometimes seemed to me that the old wife who is cast away to live a solitary life, with her home broken and her position as matriarch lost, is an infinitely pathetic spectacle. In olden days, when a maiden was, by the force of circumstances, involved with a married man, she was, if she was really in love with him, willing to go to his home as his concubine and serve the wife with respect and honour. Now driving one another out in the name of monogamy seems to be the modern fashionable was. It is the so-called emancipated, civilized way. In this battle against their own sex, the young must win out against the old. But if the women prefer it that way, let them have it, since it is they who are primarily affected by it. In any case, there is a happy and an unhappy woman in it. The problem is so new and yet so old. There is no such thing as fairness and equality. I hear Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks are estranged. I am interested not in what Doug thinks, but in what Mary thinks about this internecine war of the fair sex. If Mary were a good Chinese girl, she would let Doug take his concubine, watch how his passion cools after a time, and retain her lordship over Doug. Doug would then have plenty of time to learn what is love and some day come to his senses. Again, this is their own business, but again my thoughts are my own.

Lin, Yutang. My country and my people [ID D13801].
Lin Yutang turned Irving Babbitt's name into an adjective 'Babbittian' to describe his intellectual system, an early and perhaps first usage of the word. In doing so, he once again compared Babbitt with Confucius. He observed the common sense of Confucius 'dismisses supernaturalism as the realm of the unknowable and expends extremely little time on it' and that Confucianism is 'equally emphatic in the assertion of the superiority of the human mind over nature and in the denial of nature's way of life, or naturalism, as the human way'. The Confjucian conception that 'heaven, earth and man' comprise 'the three geniuses of the univers' Lin then compares to 'the Babbittian threefold distinction of supernaturalism, humanism and naturalism'.

Zhou, Libo. Zhanmusi Qiaoyisi [ID D28972].
"Ulysses is a notoriously obscene novel, as well as a notoriously abstruse book, and it was at first banned in Britain. It was completed in 1921 and published in 1922 ; the only person who first appreciated it and promoted it was a very wealthy aesthete. Few other people have been interested in this book, where the reader, cutting through a boundless forest of words, would find nothing but worthless trifles and erratic images. Who but persons with an excess of fat would need such a book ?
The bizarre formal features of Joyce's work are closely linked to its empty content. They have nothing to do with literature. The same is true of his microscopic method, his method of the 'realization of the subconscious' and the 'internal monologue'. Even the naturalistic technique he employs in describing the outside world is not beneficial to literature. For all this, being static and artificial in character, is incompatible with literature, which ought to have fresh content and noble aims."
Jin Di : There was never a formal ban on Ulysses in China. The Chinese leftist voice of authority branded Ulysses as 'a notoriously obscene novel', conspicuously and unequivocally. And the authorities were able to stand unchallenged, because the general readership was in no position to protest, having no access to the work in a version they could read.

Florence Wheelock Ayscough lebt in Chicago, Ill.

Pound, Ezra. Social credit : an impact. (London : Stanley Nott, 1935).
Fenollosa accented the western need of ideogramic thinking. Get your 'red' down to rose, rust, cherry, if you want to know what you are talking about. We have too much of this talks about infinities. There is a common element with the Confucian method of getting into one's own 'intentions.