Political Rhetoric in Early China and in Imperial Rome

2013

International Workshop "Masters of Disguise? Conceptions and Misconceptions of 'Rhetoric' in Chinese Antiquity": Conference Outline, program and general information

Journal of World History 23.4 (December 2012), pp. 841-882., 2012

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.)

2009

Contrastive studies of Chinese rhetoric have been haunted by several myths. First, there has been an overemphasis upon the eight-legged essay, tested in the imperial civil service exam for centuries, as virtually the sole representative of expository and persuasive writing in ancient China. Robert Kaplan, Carolyn Matalene, and Guanjun Cai, for example, have concurred on the centrality of the essay in traditional expository and persuasive writings.

The political context of a throng of courtiers engaged in keen competition to be heard by a lord whose power was not limited by any institutional mechanism, accounts for the highly risky and often deadly game of political persuasion in the pre-imperial period. In this article I examine how early Chinese speeches of persuasion hover between reason and treason, salvation and suicide. Without seeking to exhaust the wealth and ambiguities of each text drawn on, I aim to identify and evaluate contrasting attitudes, ranging from cognitive optimism to moral pessimism, regarding the capacity of language to convince and influence the listener or improve his behavior. After analyzing in the Han Feizi and in the Intrigues of the Warring States a type of deliberative rhetoric that disregards moral ends, I turn to situations where, for once, rhetoric does not serve the purpose of winning a case, obtaining something specific or defeating an opponent, but seeks to accomplish the highest task of the educated man (shi) : that of changing the ruler, reforming his mind, triggering a process of transformation that may have an impact on the political body at large.

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

2010

Xiaoye You is assistant professor of English and Asian Studies at Penn State University, University Park, where he teaches courses in rhetoric, writing, and the teaching of writing. He is the author of Writing in the Devil's Tongue: A History of English Composition in China (Southern Illinois, 2010). He is currently working on a monograph on rhetoric in early imperial China. Research for this essay was sponsored by the Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China.

Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 2021

Based on a collaboration between historians of Chinese and European politics, Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600 offers a first comprehensive overview of current research on political communication in middle-period European and Chinese history. The chapters present new work on the sources and processes of political communication in European and Chinese history partly through juxtaposing and combining formerly separate historiographies and partly through direct comparison. Contrary to earlier comparative work on empires and state formation, which aimed to explain similarities and differences with encompassing models and new theories of divergence, the goal is to further conversations between historians by engaging regional historiographies from the bottom up.

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 9/3 (November 1999), 460–61., 1999

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.