“The Chinese as I Have Seen Them”: A Diachronic Analysis of Western Perception on the Chinese in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
Main Article Content
Abstract
It is estimated that around 12000 Westerners were living in the Chinese Empire at the end of the 19th century (Détrie 509); especially after the first Opium War (1839-1842), locals and Westerners learnt to co-habit, with the latter improving their quality of life. However, both groups maintained their lifestyles, criticizing those habits they thought objectionable, or downright barbaric (ibid.). Locals are Othered in travel literature, seen through a Western “power gaze” (Calzati); we can assume this opposition was stronger at a time of political tension.
This paper aims at looking at how Western perceptions of China and the Chinese changed over the course of the 19th and early 20th century, as emerging from war, travel and life accounts written by anglophone expatriates, travelers, and military men.
The analysis was carried out with a mixed quantitative-qualitative approach, drawing from corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The print books published between 1843 and 1919 were digitized using OCR software to make them readable by corpus analysis tools. Two subcorpora weree created, one including 2 2-volume books recounting the events of the first Opium War, and the second one including 6 books describing life and travel in China between 1897 and 1919. An analysis of selected keywords and their concordance lines, with the aid of Critical Discourse Analysis, attempts to shed light on how the perception of the Chinese on the part of Anglophone people has evolved between the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
References
Bertho Lavenir, Catherine. La Roue et le stylo. Comment nous sommes devenus touristiques. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999.
Calzati, Stefano. “Power and Representation in Anglo-American Travel Blogs and Travel Books about China.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 14, no. 5, 2012. http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol14/iss5/, last accessed 21.10.2022.
Clifford, Nicholas. “A Truthful Impression of the Country:” British and American travel writing in China, 1880-1949. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
Dawson, Raymond. The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967.
Détrie, Muriel. “La Chine Ouverte (du milieu du XIXe siècle au début du XXe siècle). Introduction.” Le voyage en Chine : Anthologie des voyageurs occidentaux du Moyen Age à la chute de l'Empire chinois, edited by Ninette Boothroyd and Muriel Détrie. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992, pp. 507-511.
Douglas Kerr, and Julia Kuehn. A Century of Travels in China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2010.
Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. London: Longman, 1989.
Fiske, Shanyn. “Orientalism Reconsidered: China and the Chinese in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Victorian Studies.” Literature Compass, vol. 8, no. 4, 2011, pp. 214-226.
Kilgarriff, Adam, et al. “The Sketch Engine: Ten Years on.” Lexicography, vol. 1, 2014, pp. 7-36.
Klein, Thoralf. “Rethinking the Origins of ‘Western’ Imperialism in China: Global Constellations and Imperial Policies, 1790-1860.” History Compass, vol. 10, no. 11, 2012, pp. 789-801.
Mill, John Stuart. Principles of Political Economy. 1848. Longmans, Green and Co., 1885.
Morgan, Marjorie. National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Phillips, Andrew. “Saving Civilization from Empire: Belligerency, Pacifism and the Two Faces of Civilization during the Second Opium War.” European Journal of International Relations, vol. 18, no. 1, 2001, pp. 5-27.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Quigley, Harold. “Concessions in Chinese Hands.” Foreign Affairs, vol 7, no. 1, 1928, pp. 150-155.
Sabattini, Mario, and Paolo Santangelo. Storia della Cina: dalle origini alla fondazione della Repubblica. Bari/Roma: Laterza, 1994.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1975. London: Penguin, 2003.
Samarani, Guido. La Cina del Novecento: dalla fine dell'impero a oggi. Torino: Einaudi, 2008.
Stockwell, Foster. Westerners in China. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, 2003.
Tsui, Chiann Karen, and Russell A. Berman. “Rediscovering China from Today’s Perspective: The Dialectic of Recognition and the Rediscovery of China: After Orientalism.” European Review, vol. 23, no. 2, 2015, pp. 180-192.
Wodak, Ruth. “What CDA is about—summary of its history, important concepts and its developments.” Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer. London: Sage, 2001, pp. 1-13.