Despite the long history of Chinese-Arab interactions since the seventh century, modern Chinese s... more Despite the long history of Chinese-Arab interactions since the seventh century, modern Chinese scholarship on the Arab world has a much shorter story. The global historical context that led to such a situation is the Western dominance in knowledge production. Most Chinese scholars research on issues related to the West and/or China-Western interactions. Only a small proportion of researchers cast their eyes on the "other East"-the Arab world. Consequently, Arab/Arabic studies occupies a marginal space in Chinese academies. In addition, although Edward Said had Wercely argued more than forty years ago in Orientalism that subtle but persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arab-Islamic peoples and their culture perpetrates Western misunderstanding about the region, such biased representations were sometimes uncritically transferred by Chinese scholars when they were acquiring knowledge about the region via translations of Orientalist accounts written in English. Another major obstacle is the inherent linguistic and orthographic difWculties involved. Although some researchers have made great endeavors to overcome such challenges, most publish only in Chinese. As a result, their Wndings are not widely known. This article, therefore, scrutinizes and contextualizes modern Chinese scholarship on the Arab world in order to introduce it to a wider international audience, especially for those who are keenly observing the increasing Chinese-Arab engagements in the twenty-Wrst century. In addition to providing synoptic overviews of major institutions, scholars, and their representative works, the article also critically analyzes the historical contexts that led to the initial formation, subsequent divergent developments in Chinese-language academies on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, and the present challenges of the respective state of the Welds. I argue that due to bigger population, larger geographical size, and more government funding, Arab/Arabic studies in mainland China is more developed than that in Taiwan, though scholars based on the mainland are facing more pressure on censorship and self-censorship. Both Welds, however, were pioneered by the same group of Chinese Hui Muslim scholars who went to study at al-Azhar University in Egypt in the 1930s and the 1940s, not unlike cosmopolitan Muslims around the world at the time who traveled to Cairo for multiple and complex reasons. When they returned, institutionalizing Arab/ Arabic-Islamic studies in Chinese academies became one of their most visible and long-lasting legacies. Contingencies in their lives, mainly job opportunities upon graduation, played an important role in their later bifurcated career trajectories. The process during which these Hui Azharites ceased to be "cosmopolitan Muslims" and instead became "Chinese Arabists" reXects an important transformation in Chinese-Arab interactions during the Cold War politics. Later generations of scholars developed systematic pedagogies on teaching Arabic to native Chinese speakers by publishing Arabic-Chinese dictionaries as well as textbooks and grammar books. Their role as cross-cultural intermediaries is signiWcant and widely impactful. These little-known scholars deserve to be recognized for their intellectual pursuits.
Georgetown University-Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, 2015
This dissertation uncovers some little-known stories that linked Britain, China, Egypt, France, J... more This dissertation uncovers some little-known stories that linked Britain, China, Egypt, France, Japan, and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. They include the ways in which Chinese and Arab intellectuals regarded each other in response to the common challenge of western imperialism, how soybeans and their cultivation circulated from China to Egypt, the encounters of Arab and Chinese laborers working for the American Expeditionary Forces in WWI France, and the western missionary efforts to proselytize in Egypt and China. In narrating these stories, this project investigates the mediating role of western and Japanese powers in the intellectual, commercial, and interpersonal connections between Chinese and Arabic speaking societies during the high tide of global imperialism. Despite their great distance from each other, the Chinese and the Arabs occupied a similar position in the world order as colonized and semi-colonized peoples. As a result, in response to their comparable political and social situations, ideas, commodities, and people were transferred between them through transnational networks. Different modes of mediations-textual, material, and spatiotemporal-were involved in the processes of movements. This phenomenon of mediated mobility shows that the connections in an increasingly globalized modern world were not all about robust reticulation and
Asian journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, Apr 3, 2019
The collaboration between the Japanese and British empires in the first two decades of the 20th c... more The collaboration between the Japanese and British empires in the first two decades of the 20th century facilitated the soybean's migration out of Manchuria. When the two empires turned from collaborators to competitors prior to and during WWII however, the British Empire was forced to experiment with soybean cultivation in Egypt on its own in order to satisfy the demand of its vegetable oil crushing industry to make soap and detergent amongst other things. This article is not simply about the production and trade of soybean, but more importantly about the transformation of the commodity during the processes of trade, production and consumption outside its original zone of cultivation. Although soybeans provide significantly more protein per acre than most other uses of land, in Egypt the plant was classified as an inedible oilseed, such as cotton seeds, rather than an edible grain that can also produce oil, such as maize. As a result of such classification, the soybean was perceived as an industrial raw material, rather than a food item. Consequently, the simple food preparation technology that was intimately associated with the soybean as a human food in Manchuria did not embark on the journey to Egypt. During this process of global migration, the soybean was transformed from a human food item in Manchuria mainly consumed for its protein content to an industrial raw material in Egypt mainly utilized for its oil content.
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