In recent years, “fuhao” (sign) has become a buzz word in Chinese cultural life, which itself has been undergoing rapid transformation, from a more or less pre-modern society not long ago to a highly hybridized one with salient postmodernistic characteristics. To this rapid change, cultural studies is a natural academic response that has lead to the flourishing of semiotics. Though semiotics has not been new to China, the development of the discipline in the last decade is still highly impressive. What has emerged in China today could be called a fevor of semiotics. Zhuoyue Net (the Chinese branch of Amazon.com) lists more than 200 new books on “fuhao” or “fuhao xue” (semiotics), mostly published in the last five years. On the Baidu Search (the dominant search engine in China), one can find 2.75 million items for “semiotics” (whereas “narratology” which also had prospered in China reaches 0.6 million items, less than one fourth).
Semiotics could be regarded as the contemporary crystallization of more than a century of formalism. It was, nevertheless, a long and rocky road that formalism has taken to arrive in come into China. Traditional Chinese philosophy and literary criticism hardly favored the formal way of thinking. During the so-called Pre-Qin Period of Hundred Schools Contending (8th-3rd centuries BC), there was once a flourishing Mingxue (the Study of Naming), which was criticized by other schools as indulging in trivial argument. The School was soon marginalized and reduced to curious historical relics when Confucianist political ethics was canonized as the official philosophy in the 2nd century BC. During the many centuries during in which the various sets sects of Buddhism gradually infiltrated into China, the more Vijnaimarataiddhi Sect (Wei Shi Zong) with its origin in Hetuvidya the Indian school of logic failed to win a grip on Chinese imagination, even though the Sect was promoted by the greatest Chinese Buddhist scholar Xuanzhuang and supported by some emperors in the Tang Dynasty. During the early years of the 20th century, when modern formalist thoughts was mushrooming up in Europe and America, China was undergoing a drastic cultural modernization ----- the May Fourth Movement ----- during which Chinese intelligentsia embraced all kinds of Western ideas. Yet the reception of formalism was lukewarm compared with other more totalizing doctrines that looked more “useful”.
There was one factor, however, that sowed the seeds of formalism on the Chinese soil despite all the disadvantages. Two of the best-known “New Critics” I.A. Richards and William Empson who found traditional Chinese philosophy in tune with their doctrine (Richards et al 1922, Richards 1930). They stayed and taught in Chinese universities for many years, and their love of China enthused their Chinese colleagues and students, and their works began to be translated into Chinese as early as mid-1930s. Some of the English poets closely associated with them ----- notably T S Eliot, Ezra Pound (Zhao, Y 2006, 265-290), W H Auden (Zhao, Y 2006, 211-215) ----- exercised powerful influence on modern Chinese poetry. Those seeds would eventually be awakened when the cultural climate turned favorable.
2. The Rise of Semiotics in China
The Chinese interest in formalism in the early 20th century 1930s, not altogether discouraging, was soon to be interrupted. WWII started formerly in China as early as 1937, to be followed by a civil war. In the ensuing forty years, literature in China was dominated by Socialist Realism, and formalist thoughts were considered dangerously decadent and “Bourgeois” in nature. Students were totally cut off from any information. When Saussure and Peirce were being “discovered” in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, China failed to notice the noise at all.
The long period of freezing finally came to an end, and a thaw gradually set after the so-called Cultural Revolution had been ended. In 1978, when I joined the first batch of post-graduate students in China, my mentor Prof Bian Zhilin, who was once a colleague of William Empson during War II (Zhao, Y 2006, 170-177), encouraged me to study formalism systematically, and, first of all, tackle the New Criticism. It was no surprise that, among all the formalist schools, the New Criticism was first re-introduced into China and, therefore, exercised belated but disproportionally great impact on Chinese cultural life during the thaw of the early 1980s. Other schools ---- the Russian Formalists, the PragueSchool, and structuralist semiotics ---- soon followed its steps into China. In the year of 1985, the annus mirabilis of Chinese literature, there appeared a “fevor of methods”（fangfa re）and formalism received a warm welcome. Once art and literature was no longer considered a “mirror image of society reality”, a method beside mere content gazing is needed, and formalism was found as the most consistent and operative among all methods. Many scholars, especially those of the younger generations, subscribed to it with the excitement of staging a rebellion, which was made more exciting by the hot debate on “formalism or realism” whipped up by the old guards of literary theory.
The passion with which both camps threw themselves into the debate was, regrettably, short-lived, as they were both led by both burned into a political zeal. The paradox was that, despite the fact that it is often considered not sufficiently political in the West, formalism was all along considered as a clear political stance in China as it leads to the neutralization of the dogma of literature “educating the people”. After the disastrous clash of the old and the new by the end of 1980s and their mutual annihilation, China went into a frenzied economic take-off and the Chinese academia were rapidly de-politicized. The fortune of formalism/semiotics in China in the last 20 years has not been that sensational as it was in the 1980s, and its attraction has been limited within the university campuses, with its methodological side rather than its ideological side emphasized.
The progress, however, has been quite but more speedy, due largely to the following two factors:
Since the mid-1990s, China has been the world’s leading book-printing country publishing more than 200 thousand titles every year, which means that everyday there are more than five hundreds new titles published. Almost all the important works by noted Western theorists have been translated. With such a huge literature built up in Chinese, young scholars in China are generally well-read and their knowledge quite update.
Meanwhile, Chinese higher education has been hurriedly expanding. In mid-1990s, one million new students could be admitted into universities and colleges each year, whereas in 2009, 5 million youngsters can be admitted, the Gross Enrolment Ratio reaching 23%. Considering China’s huge population, the GER that might not be so surprising in itself actually means a staggering number of university students. Both the numbers of the students and of the higher education institutions are now among the highest in the world. In fact higher education in China has become an additional mass education. That creates a gigantic demand for academic books and teachers. The quality of the translations as well as the teacher-training courses offered in Chinese universities presently is not might not be that satisfactory, as could be imagined. But what counts more is the practical need for training teachers in literary and cultural theories, and, therefore, semiotics is now urgently needed.
This pedagogical demand, along with the increasing self-confidence China has gained through its economic success, finally gave semiotics the opportunity to rise in China. It is against this background that both the shortcomings and the hope of semiotics in China should be understood.
3. The Success of Narratology
Within the whole trend, narratology, the more developed branch of modern formalism/semiotics, has been making vigorous progress. International conferences, crowded with eager young scholars, have been repeatedly held in China in the last decades. The Chinese narratologists soon began to shake off “classical narratology”, in order to meet the popular demand in an age when, more drastically than the rest of the world, China has been turned into a nation of film and TV drama watchers. The enthusiasm on part of Chinese scholars to catch up with the “new narratology” or “narratologies beyond literary criticism” has helped the Chinese literary circle making the “visual turn”. Prof Shen Dan of PekingUniversity has exercised a great influence in joining Chinese efforts with those of the West in promoting new narratology (Shen, D 2004). Prof Fu Xiuyan of JiangxiNormalUniversity is among those who have made the greatest contributions to the trend new discipline (Fu 1999).
Another ostensible feature in the development of narratology in China is the emergence of the “Chinese narratology”. Refusing to follow the Western terminology, some scholars endeavor to resurrect and systematize traditional Chinese criticism of the novel, the so-called “marginalia criticism”. There are some technical stimuli for this drive: the linguistic particularities in the Chinese language make the discussion of time, subjectivity, reported speech etc., in Euro-American narratology less relevant to Chinese fiction. The guiding principle behind the movement is, however, somewhat “post-colonialist”, as it attempts to conduct an “equal East-West academic dialogue” after de-eurocentralizing narratology. Prof Yang Yi of the ChineseAcademy of Social Sciences has led the pursuit (Yang 1997).
The efforts so far have been only partially successful since a radically nationalized “Chinese narratology” can hardly be translated or transmitted to the rest of the world. But if not, it remains a modern reiteration of traditional Chinese scholarship. Only some Western sinologists showing interest in finding a path through the labyrinth of the purely Chinese studies of narratives. A more productive dialogue, it seems to me, can only be realized among Chinese scholars who are well-versed in both traditions. Despite that, narratology has been the most tangible result of the progress of formalism/semiotics in China in the last twenty years, and has been formally established as a discipline eagerly studied in most Chinese universities.
4. Linguistics as the Usher of Semiotics
Semiotics, as the summary of more than a century of formalist movement, took a bypath to come into China ----- linguistics. In the long years of highly-politicized atmosphere in modern China, linguistics has always enjoyed an advantage of staying a step away from political storms, thanks to no one else but Joseph Stalin who, to conclude a debate in the Soviet Union, wrote a pamphlet in 1950, declaring “the formula on ‘the class nature of language’ is wrong and non-Marxist”. That gave linguistics an unexpected freedom that virtually no other disciplines in human sciences in China ever enjoyed. Nevertheless, the fact that most major linguists of the 20th century are from “capitalist countries” did not make the situation less still made the situation complicated, and a serious study of Saussurian and Chomskian schools of linguistics did not start until the thaw close to the end of the 1970s. The Chinese edition of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale was published in 1983, a new translation in 1996, and, after the Troisième courshad surfaced in the West, its Chinese translation appeared in 2001 which aroused renewed interest in him. Even today, linguistic semiotics is still the mainstay of the semiotics in China. The recognized leaders in this field are Prof Hu Zhuanglin of PekingUniversity (Hu 2004), Prof Wang Mingyu of HeilongjiangUniversity in Harbin (Wang 2004), and Prof Ding Ersu of LingnanUniversity in Hong Kong (Ding 2004, 2000). Prof Cai Shushan of TsinghuaUniversity, on the other hand, has devoted his academic career to logic and cognitive linguistics, with impressive achievements (Cai, 2007).
On the other hand, the complicated evolution of Chinese language and its unique written characters have been a magnet that draws constant scholarly attention in two thousand years. There are nowadays in China a group of scholars dedicated to a semiotic interpretation of the history of the Chinese writing system, notably Prof Shen Xiaolong of FudanUniversity in Shanghai (Shen, X 1995) and Prof Meng Hua of the OceanUniversity in Qingdao (Meng 2008).
5. Particularities of Semiotics in China Today
Recent development of semiotics has been widening its spectrum to cope with the drastic changes in Chinese culture in the last twenty years. The unexpected sudden economic boom has posed a great challenge to academia in China where, not long ago, even the name of cultural studies was hardly heard of. When literary critics turned their attention to culture in general, semiotics is a natural channel, and scholars in cultural studies and communication studies have resorted to semiotics en masse, making cultural studies a huge discipline in China today.
One characteristic of Chinese semiotics today is its wide range of practical applications. There have appeared in the last few years hundreds of monographs taking a semiotic approach to tackle such cultural issues as architecture, brand design, advertising, youth culture, tourism policy, urban planning, etc., in order to find a methodology to tidy up their otherwise scattered observations and discussions. Shifting from linguistics to a broader frontier of cultural studies, Chinese semiotics has been greatly helped by going practical. It is never too early, though, to warn that practicality, if not restrained, might dampen Chinese scholars’ theoretical ambitions.
Interdisciplinarity is also a salient feature in Chinese semiotics, as many serious scholars whose interest has been in other schools of cultural criticism such as Marxism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, environmentalism, anthropology, feminism, etc., have moved closer to semiotics, finding it an important tool to re-focalize their research, since semiotics has now been widely regarded as the common denominator of human sciences.
Marxism is still the pillar in human sciences in China as it has all along been encouraged by the Government though re-interpreted more or less along the traditional Chinese thinking. Naturally the models set up by Western Marxists with a powerful inclination toward semiotics, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Louis Althussser, Fredrick Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Henri Lefevre, and others have become extremely popular in Chinese academia. Replacing economism with culturalism, and adding the discursive formation to the social formation, Marxian Semiotics has laid its foundation with cultural critique its cornerstone, thus opening up a great opportunity for Chinese scholars. Prof Zhao Xianzhang of NanjingUniversity is a leading scholar in that trend (Zhao 2004). It can be expected that Chinese semiotics could make an important contribution to world semiotics in that respect.
6. Semiotics in China Poised to Leap
Thus semiotics has greeted its new flourishing in China. Courses in semiotics are now offered in many universities, and research centers established, with a great number of monographs published every year on related topics.
Chinese scholars in semiotics have been trying to establish societies and research centers found academic organizations ever since 1988 when a small-scale forum on semiotics was chaired by Prof Li Youzheng of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, on which some scholars from Beijing and Tianjin discussed the possibility of coordinating their efforts. The timing of the proposed forum, however, was far from optimal. In 1994, a few years later, the China Language and Semiotics Association was founded which has been active all these years with six biennial conferences. The Association has a strong inclination towards linguistics, having a close link with China Cognitive Linguistics Association. Among the topics most studied in the field is translatology, since the scale of translation activities and teaching education in China is simply massive.
However, recently there has appeared a shift from linguistic semiotics to philosophical and cultural semiotics, for which Prof Li Youzheng has made persistent efforts during the last thirty years. His voluminous Introduction to Theoretical Semiotics has been a must-read among concerned Chinese scholars and students (Li 2006).
Till not long ago, there had been in China neither a center not a journal solely dedicated to semiotics. But nowadays there are a number of such centers and ambitious plans. One of them is based in NanjingNormalUniversity where there has been a strong interest in semiotics. In April 2007 the University established an International Institute of Semiotic Studies headed by Prof Zhang Jie, who specialized in Bakhtin-Lotman school of Russian semiotics (Zhang and Kang 2004). In November 2008, the Institute held a large-scale international conference attended by a number of noted scholars from Europe and America. A new journal in English, Chinese Semiotic Studies, with Prof Gu Jiazu as its editor, is being launched to promote semiotics in China.
Another of such centers is the Center of Semiotics and Communication Studies founded at the SichuanUniversity in Chengdu, West China. The Center is publishing a journal Signs & Media in Chinese, and a long-run translation project Contemporary Semiotics that publishes four books every year, with books by Eero Tarasti, John Deely, Marcel Danesi, and many others being prepared. The Centre’s postgraduate program has also attracted a good number of students each year. The works by today’s leading scholars in related fields such as Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco, Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Bourdieu, Michael Riffaterre and others have been systematically studied at the University, as a substantial number of young teachers and Ph. D. students, both on the side of cultural criticism and of communication theory, participating with tremendous zeal in the activities of the Center.
The acceleration with which semiotics has been growing in China is encouraging. Yet more could be expected from its future. It is hoped that postmodern semiotics meeting the world’s longest sustained civilization could provide a great impetus to the advance of both. Some scholars insist that Chinese “semiotic thinking” could date back as early as the 7th century AD for Buddhist epistemology, or as early as the 3rd century BC for the Study of Naming, ancient Chinese, philosophy, or even much earlier if, according to their argument, The Book of Changes (Yi Jing, dated 3000-5000 BC) could be read as the world’s first system of semiotic comprehension of human experience. With such a glorious history and with so many enthusiastic students and scholars, it should not be a surprise if there appears a Chinese school of semioticians with their unique contributions that are understood and appreciated by the rest of the world.
