EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 21 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 227 According to a fourth century BCE sixteen-strip bamboo text, titled Residences of Chu (Chu Ju 楚 居 ) by modern scholars, the word chu first identified a people as a result of a tragic magical birth event. The father was descended from a god and a Shang princess. This tale of origins is generally at odds with those preserved in later Han accounts of the Chu royal genealogy, but all preserve mythological fragments associated with tragic births and pre-historical sage-kings that are in general disagreement with the Zhou mythology of an auspicious smooth birth and Zhou founder kings. The Chu account, preserved in the Tsinghua University collection, includes records of rulers and their movements from one capital to another from their divine origin up to King Dao 悼 (384–381 BCE). Unlike later genealogical histories, the Chu Ju focuses on divine origins and the geomantic significance of places occupied by rulers with particular names. One aspect of the divine beginning includes descent from a daughter of the legendary peripatetic Shang king, Pan Geng, who finally settled the Shang people in Yinxu. The Chu Ju completely and perhaps purposely ignores the Chu polity’s cultural and political debt to the Western Zhou. This paper will discuss the influence of fourth century BCE political reali- ties on the Chu origin myth. De Marchi Serena (Stockholm University) Cosmopolitan Dissidence? Reading Liao Yiwu’s Prison Narrative Key words: Liao Yiwu; prison memoir; global human community; translation; Chineseness In a 2011 interview, when speaking about his prison memoir “For a Song and a Hundred Songs” Chinese poet Liao Yiwu (b. 1958) explained it tells the story of “how I turned from a poet into a witness of history”. In a twist of fate his poetry became the cause of his imprisonment: “Slaughter” ( 屠杀 ) was recorded right after the Tian’anmen crackdown in 1989 and cost him his freedom. Years after his release, he flew to Berlin in 2011, where he currently resides, and where his accounts of jail experience started to gain him international notoriety. Liao’s prison memoirs are the embodiment of his willingness to testify to the PRC’s atrocities as well as to the ontologically unjust system perpetrated by the regime. In this sense his works are very much cosmopolitan: they present a concept of justice and of human rights that transcends the borders of China and appeals to a global human community. Liao refuses to be part of a society that seems to have forgotten the values his generation was fighting for in 1989, and it comes as a shock to him that his former fellow poets who used to challenge the regime during the demonstrations meanwhile have embraced the new assignment the party has prescribed for them: “to get rich is glorious”. After his release, Liao found himself completely lost in the new world, incapable of keeping up with the new demands that society was asking from him. Notably, after his escape from China, Liao never learned German or English, and finds himself completely dependent on his translators and interpreters: language (being his the very vehicle for testifying) is a prison he feels he doesn’t need to escape from. He explicitly states his “Chineseness” in systematically failing to be an integral (and integrated) part of the German (and international) society inasmuch he refuses to learn the language of adoption. How can we interpret this clash of intentions? How can Liao's cosmopolitan claims be related to his very personal ontological assertions? Dorofeeva-Lichtmann Vera (UMR 8173 Chine-Corée-Japon, CNRS-EHESS) The Crucial Role of the Han River in the Chu Conception of Space (according to the Rong Cheng shi) Key words: concepts of space, early terrestrial descriptions, history of cartography, Han River, ‘Nine Provinces’ A representation of the “civilised world” known as the “Nine Provinces” (Jiu zhou 九州 ) appears in the Rong Cheng shi 容成氏 manuscript (late 4th century BC) from the Shanghai Museum Bamboo Slips corpus and is presumed to originate from a Chu tomb. There is nothing especially “Chu” about this representation.