EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

East-West Contacts & Perceptions 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 144 Dijkstra Trude (University of Amsterdam) Periodicals’ Purview. China in French and Dutch Newspapers Printed in the Dutch Republic, 1645–1721 Key words: The Dutch GoldenAge, Newspapers, Bookhistory, The Chinese Rites Controversy, Louis Le Comte This talk will focus on a case study related to the Chinese Rites Controversy, namely the Theology Fac- ulty of the University of Paris’s condemnation of Jesuit missionary Louis Le Comte’s book on China. The case will serve to show that different Dutch newspapers gave very diverse accounts of events in China, even though available information was presumably the same to all. The main difference lay in the language—and therefore intended audience—of the newspaper in question. While newspapers printed in Dutch were mostly concerned with events that would have an economic, political or military impact on their own commercial activity in China and Asia, those printed in French focussed more on the Catholic interests of their readers. This case study thus shows the multi-variate nature of how China was presented in the context of ‘news’, and how the producers of said news influenced the image of the subjects they reported on. The earliest newspapers date to seventeenth-century Europe, when printed papers and periodicals began to rapidly replace the practice of handwritten news sheets. Newspapers came to the Dutch Republic in 1618, first to Amsterdam which, as a centre of trade and travellers, was an obvious nucleus for publication. China was heavily present in newspapers of the seventeenth- and early eighteenth centuries. News from the Middle Kingdom came to Europe through newspaper articles in great quantity and with a relatively large depth of information. This culminated in the reports on the Chinese Rites Controversy, around the turn of the eighteenth century. The newspapers show that consumers in the Dutch Republic (and beyond) were not only interested in commodities from China, but in information from the Middle Kingdom as well — especially when the reported events had the possibility of impacting contact and exchange between Europe and Asia. Gamsa Mark (Tel Aviv University) Intermediaries between the Chinese and Russian Societies in Northeast China Key words: intermediaries, Russian-Chinese cultural relations, Manchuria This paper aims to uncover the lives of some of the individuals who, through their occupational and per- sonal choices, moved between the Chinese and Russian societies of Northeast China (Manchuria) in the first half of the twentieth century. The Chinese Eastern Railway that passed through the region and was central to its economic life provided the main framework for Chinese-Russian contact. Headquartered in Harbin, the CER generated a need for interpreters and translators, while it also offered opportunities for commercial go-betweens, and for fifteen years it even hired journalists for work in a newspaper it published in Chinese. Russian schools affiliated with the railway employed Chinese teachers for instruction in elementary Chinese to their Russian-speaking pupils. The paper I propose to present is part of a research project drawing on the new methods of transnational and global history, which have most recently demonstrated the productivity of studying individual lives in colonial and imperial encounters. The project, supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 407/15), uses a comparative approach to the functions of intermediaries in Northeast China and the better-known examples of Shanghai, Canton and Hong Kong. While research on “compra- dores” has more often been conducted in these geographical settings, and still more has been written on intermediaries in British India, the cultural roles of brokers and agents in late colonial Asia remain relatively underexplored. This study of the Manchurian scene therefore both profits from the above comparisons and may contribute in turn to a better understanding of “lives in between” in modern China and in wider contexts. Gentz Joachim (University of Edinburgh) China and its European Harmony Key words: Chinese culture, harmony, philosophy, religion, discourse