East Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

On The Fringe: China's Disability Laws Through The Lens Of The Traditional Culture, Brandon Christensen

BYU Asian Studies Student Journal

Explosive economic growth over the last two decades has dramatically increased China’s standard of living and given rise to a rapidly growing middle class. Political reform, however, has been slow to follow with decades-old legal restrictions on civil liberties still firmly in place. Among China’s underdeveloped civil protections is the right for people with disabilities to enjoy freedom from popular and institutional prejudice in language or action, especially when seeking employment. Recent revisions of China’s disability laws provide increased employment protections, but latent prejudicial language and traditional stereotypes in the law suggest these revisions may not reach the core objective …

Modified Motorcycles: Stories From Chiang Mai, Thailand, Erin Meyers

BYU Asian Studies Student Journal

Motorcycles in Southeast Asia

Over the last two decades, a revolution has taken place on the streets of Asia. The ubiquity of motorcycles as a primary form of transportation has increased substantially. Since 1990, motorcycle ownership rates in Indonesia and Vietnam have increased by over 300 and 1,000 percent respectively (Muir and Brown 2011). Similarly, the number of motorcycles registered in Thailand has grown by over 280 percent, from 4,778, 220 vehicles in 1990 to 18,451, 518 in 2012 (Number). Asia has the highest level of motorcycle ownership in the world now (Barter 1999).

China's Use Of Economic Hard Power In The 21st Century, Taylor Shippen

BYU Asian Studies Student Journal

China’s growing willingness to project military power may make the nightly news, but military power is not China’s greatest tool in achieving political ends. Since Deng Xiaoping began his reforms in 1978, economic influence has been the source of many of China’s diplomatic breakthroughs with the West. Although there is some dispute among scholars about what to call China’s growing influence (Klein 1994: 39; Huang 2013), for the purposes of this paper, China’s growing persuasiveness will be based on Joseph Nye’s definition of hard power, which he defines as “the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and …

Struktur Dan Makna Pariwara : Analisis Wacana Dalam Akhbar Bahasa Cina Di Malaysia, Yee Piyan Chang

Student Works (2010-2019)

Pariwara (Advertorial) ialah sejenis iklan yang terbentuk daripada gabungan “iklan” dan “rencana”. Kajian ini bertujuan untuk meninjau struktur dan pengolahan makna untuk menghasilkan wacana pariwara (advertorial). Kajian analisis wacana (Discourse Analysis) ini menggunakan metodologi kualitatif secara deskriptif. Kerangka konsepsi kajian ini didirikan daripada gabungan Teori Linguistik Sistemik-Fungsional (Systemic-Functional Linguistic Theory) dan Teori Genre (Genre Theory). Konteks kajian ditetapkan di Malaysia dan sampel merupakan pariwara (advertorial) dalam akhbar Bahasa Cina. Sebanyak 32 pariwara (advertorial) daripada empat akhbar Bahasa Cina antara 1 Oktober 2012 hingga 31 Januari 2013 dipilih sebagai sampel kajian. Kaedah pemilihan sampel bertujuan digunakan. Satu senarai semak penilaian dirangka …

Sexuality And Textuality (Fall 2014), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

"Sexuality and Textuality" serves as an introduction to gay and lesbian literary studies and queer theory. It looks at questions of sexuality and literature in ancient and early modern texts (from the Hebrew, Greek and English traditions), as well as in modern texts (from German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and English traditions). In addition to literary texts, students will work with a number of cinematic representations of queer sexuality. Besides these primary texts, students will work with important secondary literature about sexuality."

A photo of this Fall 2014 class was taken as part of Professor Bob Tobin's ongoing class photo tradition.

In A Senchimentaru Mood: Japanese Sentimentalism In Modern Poetry And Art, Jon P. Holt

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Sentimentalism (senchimentarizumu) for Meiji poet Takamura Kōtarō 高 村光太郎, and others of his generation, was not a practice to be cultivated—not in one’s personal life, where it connoted emotional weakness, and certainly not in one’s artistic creations, where the concept suggested a sycophantic appropriation of Western trends. By the Taishō period (1912–1926), however, the term senchimentarizumu appeared with greater and greater regularity in the works of such luminaries as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Hagiwara Sakutarō. What did they mean by it? And why had the term taken on such noticeable cachet? In the article that follows I trace the formation and …

Ticket To Salvation: Nichiren Buddhism In Miyazawa Kenji’S Ginga Tetsudō No Yoru, Jon P. Holt

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Miyazawa Kenji’s Ginga tetsudō no yoru is a children’s story that explores what heaven is like with very visible Christian themes and images, but the logic and vision underneath is more Buddhist than Christian. In Kenji’s prose masterpiece, the author ultimately subsumed Christianity and science into a greater spiritual cosmic vision—Nichiren’s all-encompassing principle of three-thousand-realms-in-a-single-thought (ichinen sanzen). Among the possible interpretations of Ginga tetsudō no yoru, one must consider that it is an expression of the author’s Nichiren Buddhist beliefs, which he long held and explicitly articulated elsewhere in other works and correspondence. Reframing both the scholarship on Kenji’s ties …

From Heresy To Policy: My Prescription For China's Population Policy 25 Years Ago, Shaomin Li

Management Faculty Publications

Recently scholars have been calling for the loosening up of China's one-child policy, and even the Chinese government has begun to show some willingness to do so. The call is not new. In my doctoral dissertation 25 years ago I first showed that China should allow couples to have two children and could still achieve the same population control goal as the one-child policy. I am glad to see that what I proposed 25 years ago is repeated by many scholars and even acceptable to the Chinese government.

The Inevitable And Difficult Transition From Relation-Based To Rule-Based Governance In China, Shaomin Li

Management Faculty Publications

China has benefited tremendously from replying on the relation-based way of doing business and governance, as evidenced in its rapid economic growth up to now. However, further relying on the relation-based governance may eventually hinder China's economic growth and exacerbate inequality, resulting in political instability. On the other hand, given China's cultural heritage and powerful vested interest groups, can China shed its relation-based way? This article argues from logical, theoretical, and empirical perspectives the inevitability and difficulty of China's transition from relations to rules, and discuss the implications of the transition or the lack of it for China.

China In Transition: Jesuit Encounters With The Dying Qing Empire, Anthony E. Clark

History Faculty Scholarship

When four French Jesuits first encountered China in the late 1800s, they were unexpectedly swept into the turbulence of a dying empire. In this lecture, Dr. Anthony Clark, considers what it was like to be a Jesuit missionary in China as the Qing empire erupted into the violent Boxer Uprising of 1900. Living in what is today called Hebei, these missionaries struggled to learn Chinese and adjust to Chinese culture, while also maintaining their relationships with their families back in Europe. Dr. Clark will also discuss his recent travels to where these Jesuits lived and died in 1900. When Sts. …

An Analysis Of The Impact Of Housing Policies On Housing Prices In South Korea, Daeil Kwon

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

The South Korean government has been intervening in the housing market for a long time to either activate or stabilize housing prices. However, there is a controversy about the effect of housing policy in South Korea. I analyzed the effect of housing policies as well as other factor s (interest rate, cost of renting, inflation, stock price, unemployment rate, exchange rate) on housing prices nationally as well as in northern Seoul and in southern Seoul, from January 2000 to January 2015 (181 months of data).

According to the results of my regression analysis to test the effect of housing policies, …

Science-Fictional North Korea: A Defective History, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Kafkaesque, Orwellian, eerie, surreal, bizarre, grotesque, alien, wacky, fascinating, dystopian, illusive, theatrical, antic, haunting, apocalyptic: these are just a few of the vaguely science-fictional adjectives that are now associated with North Korea. At the same time, North Korea has become an oddly convenient trope for a certain aesthetic – an uncanny opacity; an ominous mystique – that many writers and artists have exploited to generate striking science-fictional effects in texts with little or no connection to North Korean reality. (The 2002 Bond film Die another Day, for example, draws from North Korea’s science-fictional aura to animate North Korean super-villains who …

Incongruent Premodern And Modern Beauty Ideals: A Case Study Of South Korea And India's Reconciliation Of Current Beauty Trends With Foundational Religious Ideals, Minger Bropleh

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis is an in-depth analysis of beauty ideals in South Korea and India. These two countries have recently turned to skin lightening and cosmetic surgery in order to achieve their new beauty standards. Not only do these two countries share a propensity for those two trends, but they also have an overwhelming majority of the population that identifies with a specific religion; Hinduism in the case of India and Confucianism in the case of South Korea. However, it is not clear that the current beauty ideal in each country aligns with the beauty ideal set out in the respective …

The Living Torrents: Hokusai's "Journey Around The Waterfalls Of Various Provinces" (2014), Theory & History Of Art & Design Department, Elena Varshavskaya (H791 Instructor)

Ukiyo-e Prints Course | Exhibition Catalogs

"This book invites its readers to join RISD WS 2014 Japanese Prints class for an edifying expedition to Japan’s eight waterfalls portrayed by Katsushika Hokusai, an ukiyo-e preeminent artist, in his masterpiece print series “A Journey to the Waterfalls of Various Provinces.” In fact, this expedition is an academic endeavor undertaken by a collective of students who tried their hand at curating a museum exhibition as their art history course project. ..." -- Foreword, The Living Torrents: Hokusai's " Journey Around the Waterfalls of Various Provinces"

Contributing Authors

Jane Bak, Graham Bessellieu, Amy Chen, Julie Chon, Sofia Diaz de la …

Tang Junyi’S Comparative Philosophy And The Spiritual Value Of Chinese Culture, Sor-Hoon Tan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Tang Junyi (1909-1978) engaged in philosophical comparisons very early in his career. He always philosophized from a cultural perspective in his subsequent philosophical reflection on the development of the mind, the philosophy of life, the relation between culture and moral reason, and the spiritual value of Chinese culture.

Full Issue

BYU Asian Studies Student Journal

No abstract provided.

Bringing Anime To Academic Libraries: A Recommended Core Collection, Laura Pope Robbins

Publications

The author discusses Japanese anime and manga in the context of academic libraries. She notes that, while collections support the study of popular culture and give students access to materials that will engage them...they fail to include amime.

To rectify this, the author discusses a core list of anime titles for academic library collection development. This list was assembled based upon the author’s twenty-plus years of viewing anime and is the culmination of a sabbatical in which the author studied the history of Japanese animation and read extensively from acknowledged experts in the field. The films included here have stood …

Asia Pacific Perspectives Vol. 12 No. 1 Fall/Winter 2013-2014, University Of San Francisco

Asia Pacific Perspectives

Contents:

Editor's Introduction by Melissa Dale

Empress Meisho (1623-96) and Cultural Pursuits at the Japanese Imperial Court by Elizabeth Lillehoj

In 1629, a seven-year-old girl was selected as Japan’s Empress Regnant. Known as Empress Meishō, she was the daughter of the current emperor and, on her mother’s side, she was the great-granddaughter of the founder of the Tokugawa warrior government. Although scant scholarly attention has been paid to Meishō, surviving documents and artifacts reveal that she participated in a rich material culture at the Japanese imperial court. Extant sources tell of her engagement with art works, entertainments and diversions, particularly …

Asia Pacific Perspectives Vol. 12 No. 2, Spring/Summer 2014, University Of San Francisco

Asia Pacific Perspectives

Contents:

What's in a Game? Transmedia Storytelling and the Web-Game Genre of Online Chinese Popular Fiction by Heather Inwood

This paper uses a genre of online Chinese popular fiction known as Web-Game fiction as an entry point for exploring the influence of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) on linear narrative fiction. By offering a thick description of MMORPG gameplay and of gamers’ movements between online and offline worlds, Web-Game fiction narrates and “deinteractivates” the subjective experiences of players as they progress through the levels of online role-playing games. This essay proposes that the genre offers an alternative perspective …

Dance Of Anguish: Poetic Texts From 1920s Korea, Wayne De Fremery

Barowsky School of Business | Faculty Scholarship

As bibliographer D. F. McKenzie has suggested, the book is an expressive form. This means that “the fine details of typography and layout, the material signs which constitute a text” (McKenzie 1999, 25) signify. Therefore, the “human motives and interactions that texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission, and consumption” (McKenzie 1999, 15) are also implicitly part of what a text means. The objectives and relations McKenzie describes are those of authors, of course, but also those of the whole spectrum of people involved in a text’s creation and dissemination—what McKenzie has termed the sociology of a text. …

After The Split: An Analysis Of Sino-Soviet Military Poster Propaganda, Hannah C. Berman

Honors Theses

My research argues that commonalities in Soviet and Chinese military posters show that these communist superpowers shared deeply embedded cultural connections that persisted even after the Sino-Soviet Split, an acrimonious diplomatic breakdown between these states that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. I argue against other historians' interpretations of the Sino-Soviet Split period by comparing Soviet and Chinese Communist military poster propaganda within a historical context that explains their complicated and unexpected political and cultural interrelationship. I argue that the Soviet Union and Communist China, on a cultural level, continued their close interaction under the divisive rhetorical surface of the …

Framing Of Business In China: East Vs. West, Xueyi Li

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

China is one of the largest and most promising markets for new global business ventures. This exploratory research investigates the current news-related themes regarding business in China by comparing news originating from eastern countries to western countries. This study applied agenda-setting and framing theoretical frameworks. A mixed-method approach of both qualitative and quantitative content analyses was used to generate key themes and their related concepts. The results indicate some thematic similarities as well as differences in agenda and news framing between eastern and western news samples. This exploratory study contributes to agenda-setting and framing literature as well as by creating …

The Rent Collection Courtyard: Theme Park As Politics, Nian Zhang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

China's contemporary large group sculpture Rent Collection Courtyard and Cai Guoqiang's Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard were created in a different time, and the relationship between the original and Cai’s work is an issue not merely of cultural industry but more of the symbolic production of history. The original group sculpture is an example of proletarian literature and art, and the tragic derailment of fate is that the object of contestation in the work has now turned into the condition for the exhibition of the work. That is, without the capital invested into the art work, there would not have been …

Theory's Estrangement From Literature And Literature's Control Of Theory: A Survey Of The Relationship Between Theory And Literature In The Last Hundred Years, Liang Xu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The capitalized "Theory" emerged from literary theories, but Theory's progress showed a gradual estrangement from literature. The "Theory" has entered almost every field from cultural semiotics to Foucault's school, but it apparently ignores the field of traditional literature. Some scholars of post- theories try to turn back to the pre-Theory period to change the trend while some scholars maintain that literature has controlled academics. The paper argues that the concept of "literature" and the relations between literature and theory should be reconsidered. The linguistic turn highlights the intransitivity of language, which leads to the ubiquity of literariness, and as a …

On The Artistic Origin Of Wen Tingyun's Music Bureau Style And Its Influence On Ci-Poetry, Qinghai Liu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Wen Tingyun's poetry of Music Bureau style inherits mostly from Li He but also from Li Bai and the Music Bureau poetry of the Southern Dynasties. The artistic character of Wen's Music Bureau style comprises of a suggestive way of representation and a flowery language, and the style exerts an obvious influence on Wen's ci-poetry. Wen Tingyun introduced a pompous style into the literati's ci-poetry of late ages, but the influence of Wen's style on ci-poetry can be traced back even to Han Hong in the Dali period in the Tang Dynasty.

Power, Representation And The Advocating Of Modern Chinese Literature: With A Study On Totalistic Anti-Tradition In The May Fourth Era, Qinghua Cao

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The paper maintains that the slogan of "Literature Revolution" in the May Fourth Era calls actually for a revolution of representation, and at the foremost of the revolution is the transformation of the means and manner of representation. The discursive construction in the content of "new literature" focuses on the discipline and description of the represented objects, the position of the representation and the relationship between representation and the represented objects, but the essential concern is on how to empower the representation. The totalistic anti-tradition in the May Fourth Era can then be understood as the totalistic anti-representation which opposes …

The Aesthetic Ideas In The Taichi Diagram And Chinese Calligraphy Art, Lei Wei

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

As the fruit of Chinese ancient philosophy and the vivid expression of Chinese culture, Taichi diagram is a concrete and intuitive summarization of The Book of Change. The endless flowing curve of the S-shape in the Taichi diagram represents the ideal of harmony in the binary opposition of "Yin and Yang," implying the coexistence of Emptiness and Fullness, as well as the combination of the hard and the soft. This supreme realm of harmonious integration becomes the fundamental basis of the art of Chinese calligraphy. The expression of meaning through imagery in Taichi diagram conveys ancient Chinese philosophy and aesthetic …

The Body Prescribed, The Subject Of Desire, And The Discourse Of Body In Literary Criticism, Xuezhi Niu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Literary criticism as an intellectual act about literature has caused quite some contradiction, and the most direct reason may be related to the pan-axiology of criticism. The discourse of body is a value choice of criticism focusing on the body narrative in literature. It concerns how body is conditioned by culture, how it is restrained as object of desire, and where the discourse of body as a mode of criticism functions when the body narrative goes out of control, etc. only by avoiding the contradiction of pan-axiology can this mode of criticism be so examined as to activate the dormant …

The Art Form, National Image And Culture Discount In Korean Movies: An Empirical Study Based On The North American Market, Linxia Chen, Ying Du

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Korean movie industry's quick rise in the late 1990s becomes an example of successful economic transformation among Asian countries in the global industrial upgrading. Korean movie industry tried to promote its commercial success through extreme narrative, which entails a kind of culture discount in the intercultural communication, leading to an overseas market share far less than Korean TV drama, music and other popular cultural products. In the North American market, the largest market with the most intense competition, Korean movies' box office is just passable, because the movies generally have strong political and nationalistic agendas, trying to create a favorable …

The Dao Shown In Skills Or Integrated Into Skills: An Examination Of Zhuangzi's Aesthetics On Skills, Huoqing Chen

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

In Zhuangzi's relationship between Dao and skill, the prevailing understanding is that Dao can be shown in skills. This understanding, the paper argues, may not be internal to Zhuangzi's thought but derivative from later theorists and scholars on the basis of their understanding of artistic and aesthetic practice. The later theorization may also result from the integration of Confucian and Daoist thoughts. The within-heart epiphany and the experience of "sitting and forgetting" do not correspond to the spirit of arts or aesthetics but to the spirit of morality. The pursuit of the fantastic skills instead of the practical skills in …