From a recent Trib article reproduced in the Times, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “Letter from China: In Search of a Modern Humanism in China,” NYT, May 13, 2010:
“A healthy society needs truthful voices,” he said. “And truthful voices come from truthful people.”
China, he said, sorely lacks that. To solve its problems, it needs more open discussion and more self-critical thinking. “A lot of people say a lot of things, but they don’t believe these things, they are just echoing other people. China is full of noise, but it’s silent. You don’t hear real voices.”
I don't know enough about it to be able to tell if there's irony here or not. For those of you who read Chinese, here's a writeup of the controversy.
In English, discussed here.
Afterthought: If you think that merely to talk about the controversy is unseemly, you must have already made up your mind. I haven't. I observe the cultural relativists charging into the arena, claiming that “Chinese custom” legitimates unacknowledged use of others' work, and the decade relativists too, saying that everything was different in the 80s. Both arguments do more harm than good to the reputation of Chinese academia. I wish people wouldn't do that.
I thought no one outside China actually cared about his plagiarism... Thank you.
I wrote to that NYT, but since it's published as 'letter', they didn't tell me anything useful. Didi lives in Beijing and is normally familiar with all the craps in Chinese academia, not sure why she seems to know nothing about Wang Hui this time.
Wang Binbin who made the accusation of plagarism uses a great idiom to describe Wang Hui, “Yan er dao ling” (ring the bell while covering one’s ears), that means you think because you pretend you cannot hear something that everyone else cannot. He writes that Wang will lift a passage without quotation marks and then footnote it saying “can jian” (see also). There is something that seems precisely Modernist about this and not--in the Arnold/Burkean tradition of Irving Babbit--“humanist.” Humanism wants the citation—it gets its value as scholarship from belonging to an ancient tradition, by standing on the shoulders of giants. But then the Trib/Times article (let's stick with the doubling theme) says that Chinese “humanism” is not really humanism but critique. All of this gets subsumed under the trinitarian Harvard conference: “Humanistic International: Humanism, China, Globalism,” which is witnessed by Jonathan Spence. In the conference, Wang tries to find the “true” voice or the “real” voice or the “new” voice (more trinities) by returning to a forgotten text by Lu Xun, which shows that the great Chinese Modernist was actually a humanist (can jian Irving Babbit). The double problem sends one off down the paths of the Modernist International: “Yan er dao ling” in Joyce’s Dublin, Conrad’s Congo or Rizal’s Manila; Babbittization as critiqued by Sinclair Lewis and T.S. Elliot (left and right); and I suppose in a different way the translation strategies of Pound and Brecht. Cultural relativism frames the debate in terms of true Chinese custom (or historical circumstances), but in fact there is a kind of “Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst” (Alienation Effects in the Art of Chinese Play Acting, Brecht 1936) that is desired by a modernism that must call itself humanistic to get seats at the tea parties held in Beijing and Boston. It is indeed difficult to tell whether there is irony here…
Wang Hui's spiel bothered me, quite apart from the plagiarism controversy, for its call for “truthful voices” and “truthful people.” What's truthful, or not, is propositions, not people; let's pop a Popper, please, and be reminded that all truths are provisional. If you demand a “truthful person,” either you are seeking someone infallible or you are looking for Forrest Gump. US history, 2000-2008, should have discredited the stereotype of the dumb but honest ordinary guy whose instincts are always right. Do they need more of that in China?
That's at some level what makes the plagarism controversy resonant--for plagarism like theft in general is sometimes about laziness/need/immorality but in general it is a kind of mockery of institutions and exchange processes--an unwillingness or inability to put time and effort into something. At stake in the debate over Chinese humanism (and in the more circumscribed questions of economists like “Can the Chinese consume like Americans,” or “Can the Chinese banking system be trusted”) is the provisional proposition of the Almighty dollar. Especially after 2008 the demand for truth/honesty/humanism seems to be a way of avoiding the need to rethink/rework the major post-WWII provisional proposition (or to speak in an antiquated language the central signifier).
http://book.ifeng.com/cultu...
The previous url isn't functioning. I'm just posting it again. It's an open letter said to be organised by Lydia Liu in support of Wang Hui denying the yet-to-be-investigated allegation of his plagiarism. The signatoris include Zizek and Spivak...
Ok, the problem is that the url conflicts with the coding system of this blog and the '_2010_' was automatically turned into '<em>_2010_</em>'. Now I'll post it again and pls replace the two '-' with '_' to visit the page... Tech fails...
http://book.ifeng.com/cultu...
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