Panel 23: Qing China: Religion and Law

Chair: Michael Brose,  Indiana University Bloomington

Panelists

Yuhan Zhang, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, “Writing the Queue: The Entanglement of Nationalism, Sexuality, and Male Subjectivity in Late Imperial and Modern Chinese Literature”

In this paper, the queue, a hairstyle traditionally worn by Chinese men, symbolizes the intertwining of nationalism, sexuality, and male subjectivity in Chinese literature. The analysis spans from the Qing period through the contemporary era, highlighting how the queue manifests a violated body border and becomes a poignant literary motif used to navigate crises of personal and collective identity.

Bridging the significance of “hair” in Chinese culture with the queue narrative, the first chapter unveils the emotional narrative of being forced to have a queue in poetries composed by Ming loyalists during the late Ming era. The loss of hair in forming a queue bridges the feelings of lack of masculinity and the fading of nationalism.

Chapter 2 moves to the threefold narrative of keeping or cutting the queue at the beginning of the twentieth century. The depiction of the cherishment toward the queue showcases loyalty to the national identification of the Qing dynasty. On the contrary, the theme of cutting the queue is regarded as a part of the rebelling propaganda. The last layer is the resuscitation of the violation theme for ordinary people’s bodies, largely illustrated in Lu Xun’s work.

Based on the work of Mo Yan and Yan Geling, the final chapter analyzes the imagination of the queue in contemporary Chinese literature as the intertwined national recognition and sexual inversion, connecting a sense of obfuscation with the collective trauma in the second half of twentieth-century China.

Xinyi Fu, University of Wisconsin–Madison, “Calculating Qing 情: Karmic Bookkeeping in Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan”

My paper surrounds the interplay between bookkeeping and literary form, with a focus on the early Qing Chinese Dynasty fiction Xingshi yinyuan zhuan (Marriage Destines to Awaken the World). It extends the decadent theme of Jin ping Mei into a complex narrative of cosmic justice and karmic retribution, where protagonists reincarnate to settle past grievances through revenge within the framework of karmic calculation.

This literary bookkeeping may be critically analyzed alongside the ledgers of merits and demerits—a prevalent tool among Ming-Qing literati for daily behavioral accounting aimed at fostering self-reflection and moral improvement. Both these ledgers and the broader realm of popular literature encapsulate intricate social cultures and the belief complex, manifesting the distinctive intellectual milieu of the era.

This research addresses pivotal questions: How does calculation integrate into religious moral oversight? How are these religious concepts of reward and punishment transformed into everyday ethical frameworks? In what ways does the mechanism of calculation influence the narrative logic of stories about karmic retribution, and how does it shape their thematic and structural development? How does bookkeeping gradually become a significant metaphor for narrative? Specifically, through the lens of Xingshi yinyuan zhuan, the study delves into the portrayal of marriage as a relation of debts, offering insights into how the narrative utilizes the concept of debt to conceptualize qing (emotion/affection/desire) as a medium mediating the relationship between the individual and society.

Yujie Pu, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, “Competing Modernities: The Regulation of ‘Mental Illness’ in Late Qing Legal Reforms (1901–1909)”

Beginning in 1901, the Qing started to reevaluate and reform their justice system. In this period, the imperial government earnestly contemplated adopting Western and Japanese laws, including the stipulation that doctors must certify the insanity of a suspect. Legal reformers introduced the term jingshenbing (mental illness) from Japan and emphasized in their initial draft of the new Qing code that exempting the verified mentally ill from punishment was a common standard in all modern nations. Nevertheless, the reliance on medical authority was not a novel concept; this practice had a long history in the Qing judiciary during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The legal reformers, cognizant of this tradition, intentionally obscured this fact in their writings to advocate for legal reform. The introduction of this “new” rule ignited debate and criticism among provincial officials who had reviewed the first draft, leading to additional amendments in subsequent versions. This study contributes to the discussions about Chinese legal modernity, arguing for an understanding of it as an outgrowth of imperial institutions from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It posits that Chinese reformers drew inspirations not solely from Western and Meiji Japanese laws but also from their own indigenous legal traditions.