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Hero or Villain? The evolving legacy of Shi Lang in China and Taiwan
Abstract
For over two centuries, prominent officials, literary figures, and intellectuals in China have paid special attention to the legacy of Shi Lang. Compared to many other historical figures, Shi Lang remains essential to our understanding of the cross-strait tension and the murky outlook for its future. Although the image of Shi Lang continues to mean different things to different individuals, to some degree, his significance to one particular community is also communicated to other communities. By analysing most of the previous appraisals and examinations of Shi Lang, we can reveal the historical narratives of this man as being continually under construction in a shifting and mutually reinforcing process. This article aims to examine the ways in which the legacy of Shi Lang has percolated throughout Chinese history, since the Qing dynasty, and also how it continues to function in the present day. It is fascinating to not only delineate how the story of Shi Lang has evolved as a legacy, but also to explore the rich variety of ways in which an individual or a community has adapted the narratives that make up the story of Shi Lang to suit the demands of different historical settings and perspectives.
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“There is only ‘One China,’ and Taiwan”—or Tibet, or Xinjiang, or some other territory—“has always been part of that China.”1 This at least is the official position of the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), repeated again and again by spokespersons who remain relentlessly on this message. The message is well suited to the PRC’s contemporary political needs, and it permits the PRC to deny the legitimacy of any aspirations to independence on the part of Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongols, or any other minority ethnic group. Since their territories have “always” been part of “China,” their histories are, in some sense, part of Chinese history, even if the peoples in question are not native speakers of Chinese and do not identify with the dominant Han nationality.2 If Taiwan has always been part of China, then surely the PRC government has the right to “reunify” the island with the mainland, even though the PRC has never exercised any authority over Taiwan. The “One China” doctrine thus underlies a powerful claim to Taiwan that is widely, if not universally, recognized by the international community.
China’s Taiwan policy has faced a strategic dilemma in the recent decades. On the one hand, Beijing cannot allow Taiwan to declare independence because this would threaten not only national security interest of China but also nationalist credential of the communist regime. To deter Taiwan drifting toward independence, Beijing has never given up its threat of using military force to achieve national reunification. On the other hand, since China started reform and opened up in the late 1970s, pragmatic Chinese leaders have set peace and development as China’s overriding goals. For this purpose, they have attempted to prevent military conflict across the Taiwan Strait because they would not want to sacrifice China’s modernization efforts as long as Taiwan does not constitutionally declare independence. To find a solution to this dilemma, China has developed a liangshou celue (literally “two hands”) strategy. It is a two-pronged stick and carrot approach, involving an oscillating pattern of military coercion and peaceful offence. Coercive strategy relies primarily upon the use or the threat of force. It could be military actions aiming at the conquest of Taiwan or brinkmanship using military force in an exemplary and demonstrative manner. Peaceful offense appeals to cross-Strait political negotiations, and economic, and cultural exchanges to bind Taiwan’s hands of seeking independence and to build goodwill and momentum for eventual national reunification.
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The four generations of the Zheng family — Zheng Zhilong, Zheng Chenggong, Zheng Jing, and Zheng Keshuang — controlled maritime trade in East Asia during the seventeenth century, and opened up the island of Taiwan for Chinese settlement. This paper traces the evolving interpretations of their legacy in the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to the present day. It argues that every new interpretation brings with it fresh disagreements and negotiations among the official government view, older historical narratives based on the Confucian value system, and the regional sentiments of the Zhengs’native southern Fujian, or Minnan.
Prasenjit Duara presents the Chinese myth of Guandi as it was "superscribed" by different groups, including the imperial state, over a period of more than a thousand years. Superscription refers to the way groups "write" their version of a myth or symbol over extant versions but do not eliminate the other versions. For this reason, even the powerful Qing state could never fully dominate the myth of Guandi; in fact, the myth's significance emerged from its role in creating a cultural arena in which worldviews could be contested and negotiated.
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The developmental trajectories of North China and the Southeast Coast during the middle and late imperial periods are surveyed to illustrate the recurrence of regional macrocycles of development and decline and to show that such cycles may be unsynchronized as between regions. These cases provide a basis for arguing that economic macrocycles are a systemic property—not of provinces or of the empire as a whole but of regional economies viewed as internally differentiated and interdependent systems of human interaction. An exploration of the relation between regional developmental cycles and the Chinese dynastic cycle concludes that the latter was mediated by the former. It is suggested that regional developmental cycles are cycles not only of economic prosperity and depression but also of population growth and decline, of social development and devolution, and of peace and disorder. China's historical structure, then, is seen as an internested hierarchy of local and regional histories whose scope in each case is grounded in the spatial patterning of human interaction, and whose critical temporal structures are successive cyclical episodes. The uses of such an historiographic model are briefly explored.
This paper examines the sexual composition of the hero ( yingxiong ) in traditional China and how this sexuality is projected onto the political plane. Existing scholarship on the Chinese hero has provided Sinology with excellent material on a number of issues, from those which link the hero with Chinese concepts of chivalry, to those which discuss the hero as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘mass-based’. One of the major lacunae in all of these studies, however, has been an analysis of the importance of sexuality to the successful construction of a ‘hero’. Before Chinese studies drew on more recent methodologies, such as those developed by feminist criticism, the yingxiong's sexuality was often casually dismissed. It was asserted that, in contrast to Western chivalric romances, where love is often the most important inspiration for heroic deeds, love (and by implication sex) in traditional Chinese chivalric tales ‘plays no such important part’.
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Taiwan yi; citation_author=Dengshun, Lin; citation_publication_date=2004; citation_journal_title=Quoli Tainan shifan xueyuan xuebao; citation_volume=38; citation_firstpage=43
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