[
    {
        "id": 210980,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1987",
        "page_number": 42,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "17\n\nOne must always take into account this French addiction to performing and making an impact on their public, whether dealing with the intellectual fireworks in honour of China in the eighteenth century, or on the occasion of more recent and far less pleasant pyrotechnics, somewhere in Polynesia.\n\nSo the Philosophes' encounter with China had, at its own level, contributed to the fall of the French monarchy. And for more than a century, French intellectuals were to be concerned with a completely different range of issues: political revolutions and counter-revolutions, France's position in Europe, industrial development and its social fall-out, freedom of speech and of thought, as well as colonial expansion. China had very little to do with these French-centred debates of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It had by then become a target for Western imperialism including France, and its cultural prestige was accordingly declining. China only mattered for a few isolated if not eccentric French intellectuals. China in this period was a very marginal feature in French intellectual life.\n\nSome of these marginal Sinophiles of the nineteenth century were belated admirers of an ideal and abstract China in the grand philosophical tradition. In a little-known novel by Balzac, L'Interdiction — a legal measure depriving a spendthrift of control over his estate — a Marquis d'Espard spends all his fortune on reprinting old Jesuit memoirs on China. He is a devoted right-wing monarchist; he admires the Chinese imperial monarchy for allegedly maintaining a social order the French kings had been unable to maintain. His wife, a typical Balzacian marquise, has a legal interdiction passed on him.\n\nThe Marquis d'Espard is a lonely figure in Balzac's little world — the Human Comedy — and equally solitary was the young Baudelaire, who was at college when Balzac was flourishing. In one of his strongest poems, Le Voyage (or 'the trip', also with the colloquial connotations of this word), his concern for China is expressed through brief but extremely challenging verses — a concern he must have developed in his college years:\n\nDe même qu'autrefois nous partions pour la Chine",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 210981,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1987",
        "page_number": 43,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "18\n\nLes yeux fixés au large et les cheveux au vent Nous nous embarquerons pour la Mer des Ténèbres Avec le coeur joyeux d'un jeune passager.\n\nLL\n\nJust as in the old days we would leave for China Our eyes looking out to sea and our hair streaming in the wind We shall sail henceforward for the Sea of Darkness Cheerful and lighthearted as a young traveller.\n\nThis is a major reversal, from the China ‘trip' into the Sea of Darkness. This is a remarkable and prophetic insight on the part of Baudelaire, a poetic formulation which is most relevant to our present-day intellectual crisis. We shall refer to it again a little later.\n\n—\n\n12\n\nAs the nineteenth century went on, as French political involvement in China and Vietnam became more effective, it was not unusual for French intellectuals to visit China and to empathize with her but always as isolated individuals. Such a one was Father Huc,1 a Catholic missionary whose minority voice, uncertain as it was, insisted on the specific values of Chinese culture and habits. China was a source of inspiration for diplomats posted there, such as Eugene Simon, whose book La Cité chinoise is a minor classic modelled on Fustel de Coulanges's standard essay La Cité grecque, and later Paul Claudel, a young consul in Tianjin, expressing his emotions in Connaissance de l'Est, a collection of poems in the Symbolist manner. French visitors to China included naval officers such as Pierre Loti, who had witnessed approvingly another sack of Peking by Western Allied forces after the Boxer Rebellion, or Victor Segalen, poet and archaeologist. Later still, intellectuals turned into revolutionaries, such as the young André Malraux who was involved in the 1926-27 Communist revolution in Canton, and who drew on this experience for his two major novels, Les Conquérants and La Condition humaine. Huc, Simon, Claudel, Segalen, Loti and Malraux had indeed very little in common except that they were somehow marginal figures on the French intellectual scene of their time. Even for those who were later to achieve international fame, such as Claudel and Malraux, China had not been much more than an",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 210989,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1987",
        "page_number": 51,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "26\n\ngiant dams, expressways, large-scale forestry felling, with 'appropriate technologies' better adjusted to the natural and social environment? How to check the power and influence of foreign technicians indifferent to local problems? How to control the abysmal growth of destitute shanty towns? These basic problems of China have become the problems of Amazonia, South Asia, Black Africa, Melanesia. The interests of some Parisian intellectuals may have shifted elsewhere, but other intellectuals have remained deeply concerned with the relevance, or the irrelevance, of our Western model of development for less affluent countries. In a recent book dealing with the problems of development, Edgard Pisani, a French intellectual who is also a former French High Commissioner in New Caledonia, has compared the energy gains offered by a large-scale modern dam with the energy savings of 5,000 peasant earthenware stoves. His point is this: these 5,000 stoves are very cheaply produced and they save the heat otherwise wasted when the kettle was just put on stones; these stoves compare very favourably in terms of energy gains with the expensive dam built by transnational corporations under the supervision of highly-paid foreign experts. Pisani is a moderate social democrat. He never indulged in radical Maoism. Yet his argument clearly amounts to a posthumous and quite unexpected validation of some basic themes of the Great Leap Forward thirty years ago.\n\nFrom Watteau paintings and the Pompadour festivities to peasant stoves in Black Africa, from the Confucian mirage of the eighteenth century to the Maoist mirage of the twentieth century, from Victor Hugo's maledictions against Anglo-French vandalism in Peking to the Gaullian joint celebration of France de toujours and Chine de toujours, from the Philosophes' appeal to China against the tyranny of the old monarchy to the New Radicals' appeal to China against the tyranny of the Western model of development, the story of Sino-French intellectual relations for the last three centuries has been extraordinarily rich and diversified.\n\nFrom this kaleidoscopic sequence, possibly the most sensitive, the most radical and the most disruptive image is that of Baudelaire:\n\nJust as in the old days we would leave for China",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 210990,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1987",
        "page_number": 52,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "27\n\nOur eyes looking out to sea and our hair streaming in the wind\n\nWe shall sail henceforth for the Sea of Darkness Cheerful and lighthearted as a young traveller.\n\nWe were departing for China with our hair streaming in the wind, and here is the Sea of Darkness. The worldwide ecological environment is in mortal danger in soil and sea, forests and atmosphere. The Third World is facing insoluble indebtedness, suburban youth is threatened with mass dereliction, our uncontrolled agricultural surpluses are unable to cope with hundreds of millions of famine-stricken people. Such is the Sea of Darkness before us. Some people, in Baudelaire's own words, may nevertheless be sailing for Darkness of Chaos with the light heart of a young traveller, fascinated by the achievements of computers, space technologies, high-tech communications and the like. I have met such people and they do exist, in China itself as well as in the West. But others are more careful, more demanding, more realistic in the long run, and not only among French intellectuals.\n\nLong ago, the French Catholic radical thinker Pascal was, just like so many of us, fascinated by the unique position of China in world history. He wrote in his sundry notes, his Pensées:\n\nHistorie de Chine quoi éclaircir\n\n- \n\n+ \n\n+ \n\n+ \n\nIl y a de quoi aveugler et de\n\nMais la Chine obscurcit, dites-vous. Et je réponds: la Chine obscurcit mais il y a clarté à trouver. Cherchez-la\n\n20\n\nThere is in China enough to blind us and enough to illuminate us.\n\nBut China makes things obscure, wouldn't you say! And I reply: China makes things obscure, but there is light to be found. Seek it out!\n\nYes, there is light beyond the Sea of Darkness. I thank you.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214801,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1999",
        "page_number": 216,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "181\n\nREFERENCES\n\nAbbas, M Akbar 1997 Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press.\n\nAgamben, Giorgio 1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford. Stanford University Press.\n\nAnderson, Benedict 1994 'Exodus' Critical Inquiry 20.2. 314-27 Winter\n\n1983 (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London. Verso Editions.\n\nBahloul, J 1996 The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937-1962. Cambridge and New York. Cambridge University Press.\n\nBaker, Hugh 1984 'Life in the Cities: the Emergence of Hong Kong Man'. The China Quarterly (467-79).\n\nBaudelaire, Charles 1863 (1981) Selected Writings on Art and Artists. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.\n\nBaudrillard, Jean 1994 Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan.\n\nBell, Daniel 1976 The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York. Basic Books.\n\nCampbell, Colin 1987 The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford and Cambridge (Mass). Basil Blackwell.\n\nChambers, Iain 1994 Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London, Routledge.\n\nChan Hoi-man 1994 'Culture and Identity' in The Other Hong Kong, ed. P. Choi and L.S. Ho. Hong Kong. The Chinese University of Hong Kong.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214810,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1999",
        "page_number": 225,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": ".... \n\n190 \n\nby unnatural ones, namely nations and states', an argument against the discourse of the authentic/inauthentic which raises some of the problems of real/virtual communities dealt with here in Conclusion. \n\n6 Baudelaire (1863) in Harvey (1989). \n\n7 \n\n8 \n\nAs Lowenthal (1985) noted of the whole industrial era, \"The great changes of the time...made nostalgia pervasive. By the turn of the century all Britain seemed bent on nostalgic quest'. \n\nCf. Evans and Tam (1997) on the expatriate interest in 'tradition' in Hong Kong. \n\nFor a detailed assessment of the works of some of these local scholars, see Law (1998). \n\nIt is not only the colonialist 'who becomes defender of the native style', as Fanon had it, but to some extent the colonial subject and the post-colonial. For a very general overview of Chinese globalisation, see Ong (1999). \n\nAbbas (1997) confuses the discussion of Hong Kong as a place with its people, and talks of the 'cult of the ephemeral' as if modernity had only happened in Hong Kong. This is poetry (and somewhat hysterical poetry), not analysis. It is easy to say that 'the difficulty with locality in Hong Kong is locating it', or to emphasise as Siu (1999; cf.1996) does that 'the Hong Kong identity is attached to a territory without clear boundaries', or to emphasise as Wong Siu-Lun (1999) does the skilled manipulation of multiple identities by migrants from the south China coast. But Wong emphasises that these identities are also ‘effective shields to deflect state domination', while Siu (1999) speaks of ‘a distinct Hong Kong ethos' which is unique and has emerged from a particular history; 'Hong Kong was not a barren rock when the British came'. \n\n12 Chan (1994) starts from an outmoded notion of culture which he thinks is anthropological'. He then finds it difficult to understand how Hong Kong can have contradictory or diverse cultural values. \n\n13. The notion of 'Chinese' here, though, would repay further examination. Is it zhongguoren which is meant (citizens of China), or tongren, the conventional term for the southern Chinese? \n\n14 Dirlik (1994) too, seeing the post-colonial as a critique of the ideology of global \n\nPage 225\n\nPage 226",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]