Introduction: Political Rhetoric in Early China

Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident, 2012

The text is a facsimile of the print edition.

Journal of Literature and Art Studies, 2018

The article explores some of the important features of pre-Qin Chinese rhetoric and challenges it poses to traditional Western rhetoric, with the former being seen as harmonic or self-effacing for its purpose and paradoxical for its epistemological underpinning. The author does not intend to suggest that the Chinese tradition is the right path to rhetoric, but at least it points to an alternative to approaching this language art as defined by Aristotle.

2008

Why do the rulers listen to the wild theories of the speech-makers, and bring destruction to the state and ruin to themselves? Because they do not distinguish clearly between public and private interests, do not examine the aptness of the words they hear, and do not make certain that punishments are meted out when they are deserved. ("The Five Vermin," 11) -Han Fei (?289-2 B.C.E.)

In the thirty years since the publication of Robert T. Oliver’s Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China, Chinese rhetoric has slowly gained recognition as a legitimate area of research in communication studies. This study has begun, however, with characterizations of Chinese discourse in terms of what it is said to lack in comparison to the West. Oliver’s book, for instance, begins by stressing India and China’s lack of political, legal, religious, or educational platforms for oratory. It famously continues that for these countries “rhetoric has been considered so important that it could not be separated from the remainder of human knowledge” (10). George Kennedy, in his 1998 book Comparative Rhetoric, even implies that Chinese rhetoric as a scholarly discipline was invented by French Jesuits. This paper argues that if Chinese rhetoric was, as Oliver and Kennedy suggest, first theorized by the West, then it was also theorized for the West. Furthermore, European theories of rhetoric were changing even as Jesuit descriptions of Chinese rhetoric were circulating around Europe. Whether Chinese rhetoric as a discipline was invented by the Jesuits or not, contemporary Western studies of Chinese rhetoric have failed to examine the complex relations between “our” notions of Chinese rhetoric and the particular seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European contexts in which those notions were rooted. Absent this examination, Chinese rhetorical theory is inevitably cast as being in some sense outside of time and “behind” that of the West. Works Cited Kennedy, George A. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Oliver, Robert T. Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1971.

Global Journal of Human-Social Science, 2021

The essay explores the notion of collective ethos by looking closely at some of the key aspects of rhetorical and discourse practices in early Chinese society, such as ethos-as-spirit, the oneness of ethos/logos, and wei-yi (威仪; authority and deportment) among others, with a conclusion about the ethocentric nature of the traditional Chinese discourse system, rhetoric and philosophy included. To put things in perspective, it also discusses Western theories on ethos, including those by noted postmodernist theorists such as Bourdieu and Foucault. However, it does not argue that the Chinese tradition is the right path to rhetoric in general and ethos in particular but, rather, points out that rhetoric varies across cultures for an array of reasons, hence the necessity of approaching and understanding ethos differently from the model formulated by Aristotle.

Christopher Harbsmeier, Review "Chinese Rhetoric", T'oung Pao 85 (1999) pp. 114-127

bibliographic survey on Chinese works on Rhetoric

《中國神學研究院期刊》[CGST Journal]第30期，2001年1月，頁91–107。, 2001

DAO: A JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY, 2018

We are, in both East and West, long overdue for some far-reaching comparative analyses of our respective intellectual and literary heritages. The inherent difficultythrown into high relief by the volume under review-is that such an enterprise requires multiple competences, each of which is dauntingly difficult to achieve. In the case of Mengzi 孟子 (or, to use the Latinized version of his name coined by 17th-century Jesuit scholars, "Mencius") and Aristotle, this entails a reading knowledge of two ancient languages-classical Chinese and classical Greek-each of them written in a different non-roman character set-and, further, a working understanding of both the Greek and the Chinese philosophical traditions. In order to undertake the work that Douglas Robinson is doing in this book, one also needs a fourth competence, and that is a working understanding of the history and theory of rhetoric-which has been extensively disciplinized outside the realms both of academic philosophy and of classics. Such a prospect would be enough to make many doughty scholars quail. Thankfully, Robinson did not quail, and the result is The Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle.