Lost and Found in Transnation: Modern Conceptualization of Chinese Rhetoric

Abstract

Why do the Chinese relate rhetoric only to stylistic devices in writing? This question, which has puzzled scholars for decades, is finally answered. Modern Chinese rhetoric began to form in the late 1800s when Chinese students learned Western rhetoric from their Japanese professors, who translated it into “the study of beautiful prose,” subsequently severing it from oratory. In the early twentieth century, scholars returning from Japan and the US integrated Japanese theories and Anglo-American figures of speech into Chinese literary and literacy traditions despite nativists' protests and appropriated them into a canon of aesthetics only for writing studies.

Notes

¹I thank Professors C. Jan Swearingen, Marcy Tucker, and Xiaoye You, as well as RR reviewers LuMing Mao and Xing Lu, for their input at various stages of this article.

²I translated the titles literally from Japanese kanji to shed light on meaning transformation.

³My research in the Shanghai Library did not yield Tang's and Long's books, so I quote them from secondary sources.

⁴Zheng Ziyu and Zong Tinghu comment, “Who is Smingdon? We do not know. He [Tang] translated the English word ‘proper’ into ‘right’ in Chinese. But we can also interpret it as ‘appropriate,’ which further explains his definition of rhetoric—a discipline that teaches how to use proper words to express thoughts and emotions” (146–48).

⁵Classical Chinese, composed of single-syllable words and incomprehensible when spoken, was the written language until the New Culture Movement.

⁶Due to a limited scope, this study omits mission schools and many Americans who also taught in China during the early twentieth century, influencing Chinese pedagogy and thinking methods. For example, as a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in 1929–30 and as director of the Orthological Institute of China in 1936–38, I. A. Richards took to China his project of “Basic English,” a simplified English of 850 words and reduced rules necessary for the clear statement of ideas (Richards 23; Koeneke 2–9).

⁷Study of the Chinese reception of Monroe and Twiss is not available, though in recent years China is becoming interested in Twiss.

⁸Each of them led the New Culture Movement and held presidency of the National Peking University at different periods of time.

⁹The earliest Chinese history narrative covering 722 BCE to 468 BCE.

¹⁰One of the four classical novels in the vernacular.

¹¹For example, Yang Shuda's book has been adopted as a major textbook in Taiwan since the 1950s. Hu Huanshen's On Rhetorical Techniques () was published in 1930, two years before Chen's book, and reprinted three times by September 1932. Zhang Yiping's Lectures on Rhetoric () dominated secondary education in the 1940s. There were also Xu Gengsheng's The Course in Rhetoric ([] 1933), Jin Zhozi's Practical Rhetoric ([] 1934), and more. However, none of them gained the same dominance as Chen's book. In fact, Hu and Zhang have been virtually erased from the memory of the modern Chinese.

¹²See Walker ix, viii.