Political Keywords in 20th Century China
Words are powerful things, capable of moving people. In politics, the slogan that wins the hearts and minds of the majority may put a dictator in power; while the turn of phrase that alienates one too many may force the democratically elected leader to resign. To the consummate politician, these are self-evident truths. To social scientists, the definitive answer to questions such as what words move us in what direction, when, and why remains elusive.
Today the interdisciplinary turf of political language studies is a lively one where the
half-life of formal theories is short but the sophistication of intermediate explanations is
steadily increasing.
The study of China's political language is attracting a growing number of scholars from
different disciplines. Political scientists with a knowledge of Chinese are calling into
question some of the generalizations made by their colleagues operating exclusively in a
Western political and Indo-European linguistic context. Sociolinguists working in China
are discovering that unexpected things happen when the claims made by one J. L. Austin
or one Pierre Bourdieu are tested in the alien milieu of political agitation by Chinese, for
Chinese, and in Chinese. Historians are discovering that part of the supposedly
problematic nature of concepts like "democracy" and "human rights" in China today may
be rooted in what happened when these alien words were first imported and mapped onto
pre-existing structures of understanding a century ago.
The present conference will look at the uses and abuses of keywords in 20th century Chinese politics and bring together a number of outstanding European, Chinese, and American scholars in the fields of political science, history, philosophy, sinology and cultural studies. The papers to be presented will cover a broad range of topics--from the introduction of a Western political vocabulary in the late 19th century to the discourse of "struggle" and "liberation" during the Mao era; from the initial dissemination of new concepts in government literacy primers in the 1920s and 30s to the gradual demise of communist officialese in the liberal political climate of the 1990s. The conference is targeted at scholars and students concerned with modern China and Asia from all the humanistic and social science disciplines, but will also be of interest to journalists and non-academics involved in cross-cultural exchanges.
The conference is part of an ongoing (1991-) collaborative research project--launched with the support of the United States National Endowment for the Humanities and based in the East Asian Studies Center, Indiana University--that studies the ways in which the language of politics has shaped, and in turn been reshaped by, China's 20th century political transformation.
The Conference is sponsored by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Center Foundation for Scientific Research and its organizers are Michael Schoenhals (CPAS, Stockholm University); Torbjörn Lodén (Institute of Oriental Languages,. Stockholm University); and Jeffrey Wasserstrom (History Department, Indiana University).
For more information contact
Keywords Conference Secretariat
c/o CPAS, Stockholm University,
S-106 91 Stockholm
Sweden
Tel: +46-8-1628 97/99
Fax: +46-8-1688 10
Email: CPAS@orient.su.se