EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 13 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 147 But although he was German-born, he spent most of his career in British service. It was only after the First Opium War of 1840–1842 that he began to promote German interests in China, advocating the expansion of commercial activity, supplying information on the China trade as well as supporting the establishment of the first German consulates in Guangzhou. As an important figure in the emergence of early imperialism in China, Gützlaff belongs into the history of both British-Chinese and German-Chinese relations. Transcend- ing a narrow sense of national belonging, his career thus allows a glimpse into the transnational character of the imperialistic project in China. In my paper, I will use his biography as a case study to map out future directions of research on the history of German-Chinese interactions. Leung Kai Chun (University of Macau) KiangWu Hospital and Its Role in Macao’s Health Care System in Late Nineteenth Century to Early Twentieth Century Key words: Chinese medicine, Macao, plague 1895, colonial policy, Chinese traditional charity As one of the primary places in the world where East met West, the wheel of history had turned to make Macao the open window of China. Although the Holy House of Mercy had established its first Western hospital, St. Rafael Hospital in 1569, missionaries and the colonial government had also been setting up hospitals in Macao since the early nineteenth century, such as Colledge’s Ophthalmic Hospital (1827) and São Januário Hospital (1874). The Chinese in Macao still did not trust Western medicine and they resisted receiving their treatment. Kiang Wu Hospital was the first comprehensive Chinese style hospital in Macao which was established in 1871, in addition to serve as the local power hub, it also played a very important role in providing health care services to the local Chinese though it had been criticized for its poor medical standards for years. In this article, the author will briefly introduce people’s general impressions on Macao KiangWu Hospi- tal’s medical services in its early age, its role in handling the plague of 1895, and the tension and cooperation between the colonial government and the hospital. Furthermore, there was a certain long-time contradiction between Chinese and Western medicine in Macao which was mainly reflected in three aspects: 1) Chinese disbelief in Western medicine; 2) distrust by Western doctors of Chinese medicine; 3) oppression by Portuguese doctors against Chinese doctors. On the surface, this seems to have been a dispute over the right to interpret medicine. However, despite the obviously different ways that East and West understood medicine, the conflict somehow related to the authoritative and executive power of the colonial government. The author will also reveal the above- mentioned contradiction by scrutinizing the medical development history of Kiang Wu hospital from late nineteenth century to early twentieth century. Li Yan (Oakland University) OneWorld, One Language, One Alphabet: Soviet Influence and the Chinese Language Reform, 1949–1958 Key words: Chinese language reform, Soviet influence, script reform, Cyrillic, alphabetization This paper examines the linguistic encounter between Chinese and Russian in the 1950s when a socialist alliance was forged between China and the Soviet Union. Delving into a series of critical changes in the Chinese language policy contingent upon Soviet influence, the paper reveals that the spread of Russian and the alliance with the Soviet Union, in direct and indirect ways, facilitated the Chinese script reform which was in the foreground of the Chinese language reform in the 1950s. During this time, Soviet linguistic advis- ers systematically introduced Soviet experience in designing alphabetic scripts for the ethnic minorities of the USSR, thereby offering the Chinese script experiment a frame of reference. As a result, proposals were made to adapt the Russian Cyrillic for the new Chinese alphabet, and it was believed that this new alphabet would allow learning Russian easier for the Chinese and further enhance the friendship and cooperation between the two countries. But not all agreed with that, despite the professed political legitimacy and