BY ALEX HO

In print | March 20, 2008

As China, after a century of political misdirection, finally begins to emerge as a full-fledged superpower, and the forthcoming Beijing Olympics promises to give the Middle Kingdom the most worldwide attention it’s had since Tiananmen, it’s a more exciting time than ever for scholarship on China. From March 7th to 9th, while most Swatties fled the campus for break, 36 undergraduate Chinese scholars from 24 schools around the world, including Swarthmore itself, converged upon the College to present their research in the 7th Annual Junior Scholars’ Conference on Sinology.

Presentation topics over the two days of panels ran the gamut from analyses of literature, old (“Outlaws of the Marsh”) and new (“The Old Capital”), to popular music to Chinese copyright laws. But the theme unifying the presentations was an emphasis on “Self and Society,” with the two often standing in opposition to one another. With the Tibet protests being a recent reminder, China has a long history of conflict between individuals and ideology.

Tedmund Leung from the University of Hawaii at Manoa took the co-opting of advertising into state ideology in his presentation “Olympic Sponsors and the Chinese Government.” Leung argued that various sponsors for the summer events, from Coca-Cola to Samsung, have become the unwitting advertisers of state doctrine. In contrast to the culture of superstardom in American sporting, Leung observed how McDonald’s ads feature international icon Yao Ming alongside various athletes from other sports to impress the sense of a collective effort at the upcoming Olympics.

Leung noted how the capitalism and commercialism he observes is distinctly Chinese, that sponsorship by Western companies hardly means that modern China is under threat of westernization and if anything China will be sino-fying the rest of the world a little. “The Chinese want to be modern but remain fundamentally Chinese,” Leung said. History professor Lillian Li, who moderated Leung’s panel, noted that “Perhaps few realize how long it has taken Chinese people to come to this point where modernization and westernization can be conceptually separate and when modernization does not pose a threat because it is not necessarily [in the form of a] stronger Western imperialist influence.”

The relation between art and political ideology was explored in the presentation “The Politics of Censorship and Cultural Expression: Zhang Yimou’s Films in Translation” by Vanessa Hongsathavi from the University of Southern California. Hongsathavi compared Zhang Yimou’s filmography from their sources in literature, so as to explore how Zhang negotiates the stories with the political and cultural climate of his time.

Leung’s presentation was drawn heavily from firsthand research from his experiences in Beijing with him and his Chinese professors looking through various clips from CCTV, China’s most prominent television channel. Field research directed many of the students’ presentations, including Christopher Green ’09, who interviewed many from the massive population of undocumented migrant workers in Beijing. Green found that, in spite of hardships or dangers that these workers face, the majority of his interviewees did not feel that globalization was unfavorably affecting them.

These were among the various topics on sinology that were discussed during the conference, which shed light on everything from exploring the origins of the Chinese Cinderella story to Fletcher Coleman’s ’09 unveiling of the tattoo he got in Beijing to describe the new tattoo culture in modern China.

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