In the late 1980s, as a decade of China's Reform and Open Door Policies proffered a transformation of the country, anxieties over social change, economic inequalities, environmental degradation, weakness on the global stage and a sclerotic political system generated a national 'crisis consciousness' (youhuan yishi 忧患意识). To use Gloria Davies' expression, 'worrying about China' was widespread. As events would prove, people had good reason to be worried, and they still do...

General wisdom, or common sense, would suggest that to declare a particular period or an era to be a Golden or Prosperous Age before it is over may be ill advised. It is often a fraught proposition to determine whether a renaissance is underway in the midst of a period of rapid socio-cultural change. And that begs the question whether frenetic economic activity is the ne plus ultra of human endeavor...

On 4 July 1945, Mao Zedong asked the educator and progressive political activist Huang Yanpei 黄炎培 (1878-1965) what he had made of his visit to the wartime Communist base at Yan'an 延安 in Shaanxi province. In response Huang lauded the collective, hard-working spirit evident among the Communists and their supporters but wondered whether this wartime solidarity could last. He said that the revolutionary ardour of the Communists might wane if they ended up in control of China and pondered whether the political limitations and blemishes of earlier regimes might surface once again, even among the most committed of idealists. Huang said he could see no way out of the 'vicious cycle' of dynastic rise and collapse but expressed the hope that Mao and his followers would be able to break free of history...

Geremie Barmé's introduction to this forum in China Heritage Quarterly sets many questions about the idea of shengshi 盛世 or Prosperous Age in Chinese public discussions, past and present. The question I would like to follow is: does the consideration of earlier uses of shengshi change the way we understand today's instantiation, and in turn, does the contemporary version change what we would like to ask of the past? This is a typical question for New Sinology: taking an active interest in the historical themes that come up in contemporary Chinese events and discourse, following them back to their specific contexts of time and place (that usually do not correspond to today's usage of those themes), and juxtaposing the two images to see if some useful perspectives emerge...

In 1893, when Zheng Guanying 鄭觀應 (1842-1922) published Words of Warning to a Prosperous Age (Shengshi weiyan 盛世危言, hereafter Words of Warning), he was a successful Shanghai-based comprador who also held the official title of Circuit Intendant (daotai 道臺). Like many wealthy merchants of his day, Zheng's aspirations to officialdom were realized through the purchase of official titles. He bought his earlier titles but later ones (including that of daotai) were awarded in recognition of his contributions to disaster relief work and to various public causes. He was first promoted to expectant daotai in 1879 and later rose to higher positions within this rank. In 1893, he was described as holding an 'alternate fourth rank' in the imperial nine-rank hierarchy (or jiu pin 九品). Even though Zheng's titles were only ever nominal (hence his alternate rank), they nonetheless enhanced his social stature. Within the statist Confucian social order despite their wealth merchants were traditionally disdained by the ruling elite for being profit-driven people of low moral caliber. Official recognition was thus vitally important to a merchant who had a clear passion for writing on contemporary issues, and for a man who saw himself as a visionary and reformer...

I should like to thank Geremie Barmé for convening this stimulating roundtable. The concept of a 'prosperous age' has great historical, intellectual and cultural power. I should like here to address it in a more material sense: how did the China we know today come to 'flourish'?

While the notion of a rising China appeared on the global stage with great fanfare in the last decade of the twentieth century, the rise of China and the goal of flourishing had been the dominant meta-narrative within China long before the recent past. Indeed the teleology of rising and flourishing has laced the rhetoric of China's intellectuals and leaders since the late nineteenth century, whether Communist or Nationalist, radical or moderate...

Shengshi, which connotes China's glorious past and its new prosperity, has become a pet phrase for the state media, patriotic thugs (aiguoze 爱国贼) and advertisers who want to cash in on people's nationalist pride. Critics however dismiss the idea as a false effort to burnish the government's image. Below is a representative selection of uses of the term. Each article is summarized in English together with a link to the source and the original text...

Daniel Sanderson: Can you tell us about your childhood and teenage years? Where were you born? Where did you grow up? What kind of family life did you have as a child?

Pierre Ryckmans: I was born and grew up in Brussels; I had a happy childhood. To paraphrase Tolstoy: all happy childhoods are alike—(warm affection and much laughter—the recipe seems simple enough.) The main benefit of this is that later on in life, one feels no compulsion to waste time in 'The Pursuit of Happiness'—a rather foolish enterprise: as if happiness was something you could chase after...

As China is becoming an economic and political power, thinkers and writers are debating the theoretical implications of the traditional Chinese vision of world order. The notion of tianxia embodies a worldwide public perspective rooted in Confucian moral and political thinking. This vision anchors a universal authority in the moral, ritualistic, and aesthetic framework of a secular high culture. Varied discourses indebted to tianxia have resurfaced in modern China in quest of moral and cultural ways of relating to and articulating an international society. These attempts to be part of the international community and to enter world history ran counter to the Western temperament steeped in the conflict of nation-states, in geopolitical rivalry, and in economic theory based on possessive individualism and imperialist expansion. These elements of capitalist modernity have fostered a divisive sense of mystified cultural difference and geographical inequality...

The following review first appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Volume 7, Number 1 (2009), pp.169-170.

Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context. By Daniel A. Bell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 408p. $67.50 cloth, $25.95 paper.

Multiculturalism in Asia. Edited by Will Kymlicka and Baogang He. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 376p. $125.00 cloth, $55.50 paper.

Political theory has only recently begun to reflect on its own ethnocentrism, contributing to existing debates over the extent to which 'culture' plays a role in shaping how we or others think about political life. East Asia has occupied an especially strategic place in that debate, as 'Asian values' arguments continue to articulate a compelling Confucian alternative to the liberal individualism so long held to be an essential foundation of political and economic development. The two books under review here both examine the tenability of 'Western' liberal values in Asian societies, one suggesting that historical and political contingencies in the Asian region often hinder the practice of liberal multiculturalism, and the other arguing that the culture of East Asia in particular determines a set of political practices often in tension with liberal democracy...

Penang Hokkien is a creolised version of Southern Min spoken in Amoy (Xiamen), Taiwan, and the Philippines. It differs from other varieties of Hokkien mainly in its borrowing of Malay function words such as tapi (but), pun (also), and baru (just now), as well as Malay and English loanwords such as jali (finger), kahwin (to get married), start, and try, all of which have become an ingrained part of the language. At present there is still no comprehensive dictionary of this language, but I have been working on one myself for several years now...

On 11 February 2010, in response to a question from a foreign journalist the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu observed: 'There are no dissidents in China.' This came only hours after a Beijing court had quashed an appeal by Liu Xiaobo, the democracy advocate who had been jailed for eleven-years on charges of 'subverting the state.' The charges related to his involvement in the Charter 08 petition movement.[7] Asked to elaborate, Ma said: 'In China, you can judge yourself whether such a group exists. But I believe this term is questionable...'

Mencius 孟子 believed that people were essentially good, but that goodness needed to be nurtured by good governance and financial security. In bad times, he warned, people were likely to turn bad. Reading The Corpse Walker, a translated and annotated collection of interviews by Liao Yiwu with social outcasts, targets of political campaigns, criminals and others living on the margins of Chinese society, one hears of difficult times and finds much badness...

In late April 2011, a ten-metre high statue of Confucius was quietly removed from its prominent position outside the refurbished National Museum of China on the eastern flank of Tiananmen Square. Its appearance in January 2011 in a space associated since 1949 with the trenchant anti-Confucian politics of the Chinese Communist Party occassioned no small amount of comment. Although in form the ancient sage has been plucked from the heart of the People's Republic, the institutes that bear his name show no sign of emulating the mysterious disappearing act. Indeed, now over three hundred Chinese government-sponsored Confucius Institutes are operating worldwide. Educational institutions in numerous countries have had the carrot of a Confucius Institute and the funding opportunities that come with them temptingly dangled in front of them and numbers indicate that many have taken succumbed...

On the crowded streets of Luoyang 洛阳 during the Lantern Festival, Li Shimin 李世民, the emperor Taizong 太宗 of the Tang dynasty, meets Yue Rong 月容, the former princess of the Sui dynasty that he had recently overthrown. Lanterns and fireworks fill the background. He asks her: 'You seem to think the dynasty is not prosperous enough; my people are not rich enough. Isn't that so?' She answers: 'Do you remember the Lantern Festival sixteen years ago?' 'I do', he replies. 'The lanterns were bright and covered in silk. Music and drums resounded and hundreds of acrobats performed. It was magnificent! Today, although the wealth on display is no comparison, I see smiles everywhere. These smiles make me feel relieved'. She acknowledges that splendor and wealth are not as meaningful as people's happiness and he solemnly adds: 'Sixteen years from now, my people will still be smiling and the country will be wealthy and prosperous'. And so ends the costume drama Initiating Prosperity (Kaichuang Shengshi 开创盛世)...

'Felice Beato—A Photographer on the Eastern Road' is a stunning, and long overdue retrospective exhibition of this great nineteenth-century photographer. It focuses on his work from the Near and Far East, where he photographed extensively for over fifty years. It was marred only by the visual oddness of the 'reproductions' of most of the China images. Upon returning to Britain in 1861, Beato sold a group of photographs to another photographer, Henry Hering, who subsequently re-photographed the set and made his own glass plates for reproduction, although he did retain Beato's credit as the photographer of the originals. The subsequent mass reproduced prints—sold widely in England and elsewhere—suffer from a considerable loss of detail in the highlights, and are much flatter in tone (they lack the typical deep inky purple shadows of the originals). Beato was a superb technician, a consummate artist, going to extremes, and inventing his own path along the way. Some of the reproductions then do not reflect well on this, for the time, rare talent.

Translated by Duncan M. Campbell

As a reading of the essay translated below reminds us, anxieties about the deleterious impact on reading habits of easy access to ever-increasing amounts of reading matter are hardly new. In this essay Su Shi bemoans the effects both of commercial publishing and of the imperial examination system. Responding in part to what Su Shi had to say, the great Neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200) was later famously to complain about such 'faults' as skim reading and jumping from one section of a book to another and so on. 'Yet when he [Su Shi] wrote', Zhu Xi observed, 'books were still very difficult to get hold of!'

The session 'Chinese Garden Research in the 21st Century: Ways and Field of Research' was held at the University of Warwick, UK, on 1 April 2011, as part of the 37th Association of Art Historians Annual Conference. The conference with thirty-three sessions featuring over 270 speakers was organized by the Association of Art Historians and Louise Bourdua of the Department of History of Art, University of Warwick. The panel on Chinese garden research was convened by Winnie Y.L. Chan (University of Oxford) and the three papers presented at this session were given by scholars from institutions in China and Europe who are working in the fields of art history, architecture and landscape studies of China...

The three-day conference, 'Representing China: From the Jesuits to Zhang Yimou', was convened to discuss the various ways that China has been presented to foreign publics since the sixteenth century and the political and cultural implications of such representations. Bringing together an eclectic range of scholars from universities in Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Europe, the United States and the UK, the conference provided an intense and stimulating forum for the discussion of this seemingly unwieldy subject. The conference was organised and supported by The University of Manchester's Centre for Chinese Studies and its Confucius Institute, as well as the University's Jean Monnet Centre for Excellence.