EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

East-West Contacts & Perceptions 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 146 published abundant caricatures dealing with all the major issues of the day. The testimony of these visual representations not only corroborates (or disproves) the evidence of official sources, but can also be an insight into how the turmoil of events was seen and shown. This paper aims to juxtapose the images of ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet’ depicted in Modern Sketch. The magazine often took interest in stories concerning either Soviet citizens and government or Russian émigrés living in China, and while showing sympathy for the stateless refugees and admiring Communist-run modernization in the USSR, the editors did not avoid discussing former Russian nobility’s lowly occupations in Shanghai and harshly criticizing Stalin’s politics. At the same time, Russia was largely viewed by Modern Sketch reporters as part of the West, its cultural heritage frequently mentioned in line with the European traditions and cartoon art described and quoted together with other Western congeners. This multifaceted picture reflects two big story lines. One is about the way Soviet Russia was viewed by a part of Chinese society which mostly pondered over the problems of Chinese state itself and China’s international standing. The other story, that of White Russians living in Shanghai, looks far more mundane since it speaks of ex-generals working as janitors in public parks and ex-ladies “flirting” in the streets. These two plots help to recreate a larger panorama of Chinese perceptions of Russia. Hoefle Arnhilt Johanna (University of Hamburg) Intermediaries of Cultural Transfer: German-Chinese Literary Encounters in the Republican Era Key words: literature, translation, reception, New Culture Movement, censorship In the first decades of the twentieth century foreign literature was received in China on an unprecedented scale. Apart from Goethe and Schiller, the works by the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) were among the most popular works of German-language literature. This paper looks at the first introduction of Zweig’s works in Republican China during a period of transition, re-orientation, and civil war, focusing on two case studies. In 1927 Geng Jizhi (1899–1947), a diplomat of the Nationalist government serving at Chinese consulates in the Soviet Union, was the first to translate a novella by Zweig into Chinese. In the spirit of the New Culture Movement, Geng became one of the most important translators of classical Russian literature. Eager to introduce European romanticist ideas as well as Freud’s psychoanalysis to a Chinese readership, he translated Zweig’s novella The Governess from a Russian source. Sun Hanbing (1902–1940), a professor of economics who had extensively studied in the United States, based his translation of the novella Letter from an UnknownWoman of 1934 on an English edition. Despite the Nationalist government’s censorship, he published Zweig’s work as a negative example of decadent bourgeois literature in a left-wing journal that was banned shortly after. The case of Stefan Zweig therefore sheds light on the transnational motion of ideas and texts that were inextricably bound up with multiple interweaving linguistic, cultural, and intellectual contexts as well as diametrically opposed political agendas. Proposing an urgently needed interdisciplinary model that redefines cultural transfer as a complex global network in which individual intermediaries play a decisive role, this paper also aspires to deepen our understanding of Sino-German relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Klein Thoralf (Loughborough University) Embedding Sino-German Relations in a Transnational Context: Karl Gützlaff's Activities on the China Coast, 1831–1851 Key words: imperialism, transnational history, multilateralism, early German-Chinese relations The study of bilateral relations often suffers from a major drawback: such interactions do not take place in a vacuum; rather, they are embedded within other sets of relationships. In other words, there exists an international and transnational context that needs to be taken into account. In this paper, I intend to expand and complicate the conventional perspective on German-Chinese relations by examining the life history of the German missionary Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff (1803–1851), who in the 1830s and 1840s acted as a cultural broker of considerable importance on the China coast. As a traveller and writer, spymaster, inter- preter and colonial official, Gützlaff mediated between China and the ‘West’ in a number of different ways.