Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Former Chinese Health Minister Zhang Wenkang’s delivered four rounds of discourse on SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in attempt to repair the image of the Chinese government. However, since his discourse is replete with internal inconsistency and external invalidation, his efforts that failed to convince audiences impaired Chinese government’s image during the specific period. This critical analysis sketches the image-repair theory, identifies the accusations against the Chinese government or its health ministry, analyzes Zhang’s discourse on SARS, and evaluates the effectiveness of his image-repair discourse. This study has found Zhang’s image-repair discourse was ineffectual. Based on this finding, this study emphasizes that a rhetor’s lies or inaccurate information may ruin the internal consistency of his or her discourse, which may also cause the discourse’s external invalidation. The combination of these two factors may affect the persuasiveness of an image-repair discourse.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: How useful are these categories of “public” and “private” in determining what is “political” and what is not? Do these categories clarify or confuse how we can take action to change human-created environments like communities and cultures? In this paper, I critically examine the thought of the early 20th century intellectual Zhang Shizhao, whose work exploits a longstanding tension in Chinese thought between "inner" cultivation and "outer" world-ordering to draw attention to the wide range of transformative individual actions that are taken neither in deliberate concert with others nor completely independently of them. Zhang’s model ultimately suggests that certain practices central to democracy, including egalitarian participation, can be instituted without reference to public-private divides at all. In the process, he alerts us to further locations for political action that the categories of public and private obscure, and to the activities they categorically constrain by deeming them too limited in effect.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper is a working draft of the first substantive chapter of my book project, which examines the political theory of the early twentieth century thinker Zhang Shizhao (1881-1973). In the manuscript, I argue that Zhang’s theorization of political action under conditions of political collapse draws attention to an often overlooked problem in political theory: namely, how individuals may act efficaciously and non-coercively before collective action with others on however minimal a shared goal is even possible. A member of a key transitional generation in China, Zhang received a traditional Confucian education in his youth, but by adulthood had turned to learning Western political theory as a means of uncovering the secrets of European and American “wealth and power.” Long regarded by historians as a British-style “classical liberal,” Zhang in fact engages a far greater range of thinkers and concerns—including traditional Chinese ones—that belie any particular political agenda.

In this chapter, I explore how Zhang confronts the problems in founding a self-ruling regime without presuming the emergence either of a benevolent Lawgiver or of spontaneous consensus. Contemporary Euro-American political theorists, themselves usually citizens of mature democracies, often theorize the paradox of founding as a motif of the circularity of politics or of the ongoing, daily contestation of legitimacy in already-established regimes. Because founding is an actual historical event for Zhang, however, he cannot disavow its paradoxes by pretending that they can be resolved in the process of everyday political action. Seeking to realize an architectonic vision of political life that encompassed not only himself, but also an entire community who had not spontaneously converged on that vision, Zhang re-thinks the possibility of transformative founding action using a variety of resources culled from Chinese political experience and theory. These possibilities inform his advocacy of those specific practices—including self-awareness, the use of one’s talent, and accommodation of difference—that in later chapters I develop as part of Zhang’s theory of individual political action.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The early films of Chinese directors Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige have a recurring motif – the Chinese peasant girl. Feminist critics have asserted that Edward Said’s Orientalism theories have completely excluded gender from the equation. While Said has fluently articulated race and ethnic divides, he has neglected the intersections of gender and class within society. In the absence of an occidental or Western influence, the female is almost always considered to be of lesser social standing than a male of the same culture. And if that female hails from rural roots, she is on the bottom rungs of the cultural ladder. This article examines and analyzes, in an already Oriental context, the role and symbolism of the Chinese peasant girl in Zhang and Chen’s films and how it illustrates contemporary Chinese society today.