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Bliss Wiant went to China in 1923 with the lofty goal of some day introducing hymns to Chinese Christians that would not sound foreign to them. It was a goal that occupied much of his life. The locale of his work was Yenching University, which was arguably the premier institution of higher education in China. There he established a department of music, and enabled students to discover and develop their musical talents. There also he taught students who had never before seen a western musical score, to sing and to love Handel's Messiah and other great music of the west. In less than 10 years after its first performance, the reputation of the university chorus was such that it was invited by the government of China to present the Messiah in Nanking, the national capitol, as the finale to a two-week exposition of the arts. A major milestone in the pursuit of his life's goal was reached in that same year (1937), when a hymnal (English Title, "Hymns of Universal Praise") was published. This was the culmination of years of collaborative effort involving scores of individuals. Not only was the hymnal a uniquely inter-denominational achievement, it also included for the first time, a substantial number of original, indigenous hymns. Wiant's work in China produced in him a great love for the people as well as a deep admiration for their culture, which he saw both as misunderstood and unappreciated in the U.S. Consequently he devoted much of his energy in the years that followed to being a cultural ambassador, representing China to his own countrymen. An important manifestation of this was his work and that of his wife, Mildred, in translating into English a number of the Chinese hymns that first appeared in Hymns of Universal Praise. Several of these are now found in hymns used in the U.S., in effect closing a circle begun when Wiant went to China in 1923.
Published in celebration of the famous Yellow River Cantata’s 80th anniversary, this is the riveting history of how a young Chinese author and passionate militant fought using art to create a socially just China during the period of the struggle against the Japanese and during World War II. This is the fascinating story of how a young Chinese author, Guang Weiran, a passionate militant from the age of twelve, fought, using art, theater, poetry and song, especially the famous Yellow River Cantata — the anthem of Chinese national spirit — to create a socially just China. Set during the period of the struggle against the Japanese and the war against the Kuomintang in the 1920s and ’30s, this book, written and illustrated by Guang Weiran’s award-winning artist son, Ange Zhang, illuminates a key period in China’s history. The passion and commitment of the artists who were born under the repressive weight of the Japanese occupation, the remnants of the decaying imperial order and the times of colonial humiliation are inspiring. Zhang’s words and wood-block style of art tell us the story of his father’s extraordinary youth and very early rise to prominence due to his great talent with words. We see and hear the intensity of what it meant to be alive at such a significant moment in the history of China, a country that understands itself as the heir to one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known. The humiliations and social injustice the Chinese people had endured in the colonial period were no longer bearable. And yet there were major factional differences between those who wanted to create a modern China. Ange’s words and art paint the picture for us through his father’s story, accompanied by sidebars that explain the historical context. The book ends in a burst of glorious color and song, with the words of Yellow River Cantata in Mandarin, as well as newly translated into English. This great song turns eighty years old in 2019, and will be sung and performed by huge orchestras and choirs around the world, as the Chinese diaspora has embraced the cantata as its own. Key Text Features historical context sidebars illustrations lyrics Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.2 Determine a central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.6 Determine an author's point of view or purpose in a text and explain how it is conveyed in the text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.7 Integrate information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words to develop a coherent understanding of a topic or issue.

John Song

Research Assistant Professor of Mission Daryl R Ireland

Published: 2020-08-15

Total Pages: 270


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Western music reached China nearly four centuries ago, with the arrival of Christian missionaries, yet only within the last century has Chinese music absorbed its influence. As China and the West demonstrates, the emergence of “Westernized” music from China—concurrent with the technological advances that have made global culture widely accessible—has not established a prominent presence in the West. China and the West brings together essays on centuries of Sino-Western musical exchange by musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and music theorists from around the world. It opens with a look at theoretical approaches of prior studies of musical encounters and a comprehensive survey of the intercultural and cross-cultural theoretical frameworks—exoticism, orientalism, globalization, transculturation, and hybridization—that inform these essays. Part I focuses on the actual encounters between Chinese and European musicians, their instruments and institutions, and the compositions inspired by these encounters, while Part II examines theatricalized and mediated East-West cultural exchanges, which often drew on stereotypical tropes, resulting in performances more inventive than accurate. Part III looks at the musical language, sonority, and subject matters of “intercultural” compositions by Eastern and Western composers. Essays in Part IV address reception studies and consider the ways in which differences are articulated in musical discourse by actors serving different purposes, whether self-promotion, commercial marketing, or modes of nationalistic—even propagandistic—expression. The volume’s extensive bibliography of secondary sources will be invaluable to scholars of music, contemporary Chinese culture, and the globalization of culture.
Claimed by some to have been compiled by Confucius in the 5th century BCE, the Book of Songs is an ancient anthology of Chinese poetry. Produced using traditional Chinese bookbinding techniques, this newly-translated edition is a selected anthology of 25 classic poems presented in an exquisite dual-language edition.
Huizong was an exceptional emperor who lived through momentous times. A man of many talents, he wrote poetry and created his own distinctive calligraphy style; collected paintings, calligraphies, and antiquities on a large scale; promoted Daoism; and involved himself in the training of court artists, the layout of gardens, and reforms of music and medicine. The quarter century when Huizong ruled is just as fascinating. The greatly enlarged scholar-official class had come into its own but was deeply divided by factional strife. The long struggle between the Chinese state and its northern neighbors entered a new phase when Song proved unable to defend itself against the newly emergent Jurchen state of Jin. Huizong and thousands of members of his family and court were taken captive, and the Song dynasty had to recreate itself in the South.
Since the early 1980s, a prominent and consistent conclusion drawn from research on China's defense-industrial complex has been that China's defense-production capabilities are rife with weaknesses and limitations. This study argues for an alternative approach: From the vantage point of 2005, it is time to shift the focus of current research to the gradual improvements in and the future potential of China's defense-industrial complex. The study found that China's defense sectors are designing and producing a wide range of increasingly advanced weapons that, in the short term, are relevant to a possible conflict over Taiwan but also to China's long-term military presence in Asia. Part of a larger RAND Project AIR FORCE study on Chinese military modernization, this study examines the current and future capabilities of China's defense industry. The goals of this study are to 1.
Educated men in Song-dynasty China (960–1279) traveled frequently in search of scholarly and bureaucratic success. These extensive periods of physical mobility took them away from their families, homes, and native places for long periods of time, preventing them from fulfilling their most sacred domestic duty: filial piety to their parents. In this deeply grounded work, Cong Ellen Zhang locates the tension between worldly ambition and family duty at the heart of elite social and cultural life. Drawing on more than two thousand funerary biographies and other official and private writing, Zhang argues that the predicament in which Song literati found themselves diminished neither the importance of filial piety nor the appeal of participating in examinations and government service. On the contrary, the Northern Song witnessed unprecedented literati activity and state involvement in the bolstering of ancient forms of filial performances and the promotion of new ones. The result was the triumph of a new filial ideal: luyang. By labeling highly coveted honors and privileges attainable solely through scholarly and official accomplishments as the most celebrated filial acts, the luyang rhetoric elevated office-holding men to be the most filial of sons. Consequently, the proper performance of filiality became essential to scholar-official identity and self-representation. Zhang convincingly demonstrates that this reconfiguration of elite male filiality transformed filial piety into a status- and gender-based virtue, a change that had wide implications for elite family life and relationships in the Northern Song. The separation of elite men from their parents and homes also made the idea of “native place” increasingly fluid. This development in turn generated an interest in family preservation as filial performance. Individually initiated, kinship- and native place-based projects flourished and coalesced with the moral and cultural visions of leading scholar-intellectuals, providing the social and familial foundations for the ascendancy of Neo-Confucianism as well as new cultural norms that transformed Chinese society in the Song and beyond.
Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, “barbarism,” were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.
This book challenges the long-established structure of Chinese history around dynasties, adopting a more "organic" approach which emphasises cultural and economic trends that transcend arbitrary dynastic boundaries. It argues that with the collapse of the Tang court and northern control over the holistic empire in the last decades of the ninth century, the now-autonomous kingdoms that filled the political vacuum in the south responded with a burst of innovative energy that helped set the stage for the economic and cultural transformations of the following Song dynasty. Moreover, it argues that these transformations and this economic and cultural innovation deeply affected the subsequent model of holistic empire which continues right up to the present and that therefore the interregnum century of division left a critically important legacy.