Jin Liu

This study explores long-range correlations in terms of sentence or segment length variation in Chinese narrative texts and nonfiction prose. (Dro _ zd _ z et al. 2016, Quantifying origin and character of long-range correlations in narrative texts. Information Sciences, 331 32-44) analyzed Western novels and found fractal patterns, defined as self-similar, wavelet recurrence, and alternation. Inspired by this study, our research tries to determine whether similar patterns commonly exist in Chinese literature and compares the similarities and differences with Western literature. We calculated the Hurst exponent, b-values, and Da values for ninety-five Chinese novels, ranging historically from late Qing to contemporary Internet novels, covering the geopolitical regions from Mainland China to Taiwan and Hong Kong. We also made comparisons with pre-modern vernacular novels, historical texts in classical Chinese, contemporary nonfiction and expository writings, as well as randomly generated texts. We found that Chinese novels exhibit fractal patterns as well. In particular, the texts exhibit a better fractal quality if the sentence lengths are measured by Chinese characters, instead of words. There is no clear correlation between fractality and cultural-political contexts and individual authors, but historically speaking, modern Chinese texts show stronger long-range correlations than pre-modern texts. Moreover, long-range correlations in Chinese literature are weaker than in Western literature, and there is a lower percentage of novels with multifractal structures. Our data also show that the fractality not only exists in literary texts, but also in nonliterary, non-narrative, and expository writings; yet, there is no long-range correlation in randomly generated texts. We further conclude that fractality is a fundamental feature of prose writing and human writing.

The Chengdu-based quartet Higher Brothers recently became the first China-born hip hop group to gain global fame. As rap music-originally a local, ethnic African American culture in the United States-has been continually relocal-ized all over the world and thus globalized, the Higher Brothers have undergone another process of glocalization. This presents a new case study to further examine the dynamics between the global and the local. Because rap is an intensely verbal art, this article explores how the Higher Brothers construct and negotiate their complicated and multiple (local, national and global) identities from the perspective of language. It analyses the language used in their songs-Sichuan Chengdu Mandarin, Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) and English-before and after they signed with 88rising, the media company that brought the group to the West. Due to the rappers' distinctive ways of vocal production, many of their trap-style songs prove hard to understand not only for global audiences but also for most Chinese national audiences and even for the quartet's local audiences. Drawing on recent studies of mumble rap, this article explores the politics and sonic aesthetics of unintelligibility of the Chinese trap music.

This essay uses the concepts of place and space to analyze Wang Jiuliang’s environmental documentary film Plastic China (2016) by examining three kinds of dislocation and displacement: the importation of Western trash to China, Yijie’s migration from Sichuan to Shandong, and Kun’s transformation from an agricultural peasant to an industrial worker in post-socialist China. Building on previous scholarship on dirt, rubbish, and ruins, the essay explores how the film’s focus on trash—“matter out of place”—sustains a critique of global consumerism, capitalism, and eco-colonialism. Cinematic features, such as the spatial imbalance the film constructs between its human subjects and the plastics processing plant where they work, are discussed. Yijie’s longing for home, a preindustrial place untouched by modernization and globalization, is evoked by the use of nondiegetic music. Her desire to go to school, a major narrative theme, is interpreted to indicate her spatialized alienation and non-locatable subjectivity as a migrant child. Although Kun is a native of the town where the processing plant stands, he experiences displacement without moving, as his hometown has been ecologically degraded and thus rendered inhabitable by the intrusion of toxic trash. Both Yijie and Kun, representing millions of Chinese peasants uprooted from the soil, are trapped in a one-way, no-return journey from place to space.

This paper examines the emerging phenomenon of creating new Chinese characters on the internet with a case study of the artist Li Xiaoguai's work. First, it analyzes the aesthetics and sociopolitical significance of Li's new characters and neologisms. It explores how the new characters, as an alternative translation, achieve their Austinian performative force through an iteration of the original official language, which is thus displaced and subverted; how the puns become double-voiced and double-signified utterances in the Bakhtinian sense of folk humor; and how the vulgarities are pervasively used as interjections and intensifiers to vent strong emotions in the struggle against the state's anti-vulgarity and internet censorship campaigns. Second, it studies how Li's characters are integrated into his artistic creations via comic blogging. It explores how his comic strips evoke carnivalesque laughter by satirizing social ills, officialdom, and the increasing gap between the Communist Party (CCP) and the people, the state and the family, and the privileged and the underprivileged.

This article reviews debates over the nature of fangyan (local language or dialect) vis-à-vis a unified national language and explores the discourse of the local in China's quest for modernity in the early twentieth century. It examines four major literary movements and intellectual debates: the romanized script reform and the national language movement that began in the late Qing period; the vernacular movement, including the folk song collection movement in the May Fourth era; the discussion on mass language and the Latinized New Writing movement in the 1930s; and the debate on “national forms” in the late 1930s and early 1940s during the Second Sino-Japanese War. This paper explores how Chinese intellectuals conceived the role of fangyan in the construction of national language, national literature, and the modern nation-state. It demonstrates that Chinese intellectuals’ primary concern in language debates and movements, for all their differences, lay in building a unified modern national language.

This study examines the dialect writing in Chinese characters on the Internet in contemporary China. Deviating from the standard writing of Chinese, the Internet-¬savvy youth transcribe their native dialects on an ad hoc basis, which celebrates multiplicity, creativity, individuality and resists uniformity, standardization, and institutionalization. In particular, the study investigates how written dialectal words are explored to mark a distinct visual style and to articulate a distinct local youth identity. Furthermore, this study examines the dominant strategy of phonetic borrowing in dialect transcription. It is argued that diachronically, the youth's phonocentric obsession tapped into the May Fourth tradition of the baihua movement; and synchronically, the celebration of dialect sound on the Internet echoes the contemporary soundscape of local dialects formed in the mass media in recent years.

In the years since China Central Television (CCTV)’s Spring Festival Eve Gala Performance began in 1983, it has gradually evolved as part of China’s ritual celebration of its biggest folk festival, the Spring Festival (Lunar New Year). As one of the best-received shows in the Gala, Xiaopin (comic sketches) evokes laughter among the largest national audience. Approximately since the early 1990s, xiaopin has evolved from a training exercise in urban academic drama schools to a dialogue-based comic genre infused with the spirit of folk culture. Correspondingly, xiaopin performers, drawn largely from the “lower,” local, rural folk art troupes, tend to speak various local languages or Mandarin with distinct accents. My research on language-based and intensely verbal cultural forms has been greatly inspired by Bakhtin’s theory of folk humor and his focus on socio-ideologically charged language. This paper applies his theory of grotesque realism, with its essential principle of degradation and debasement, to interpret the ambiguous laughter summoned up by these comic sketches. By analyzing Zhao Benshan’s Northeast Mandarin comic sketches, which are rooted in the local traditional errenzhuan performing art, this paper explores the dynamic dialogue between the central, official discourse from above, represented by the Standard Mandarin, and the peripheral, folkloric discourse from below, articulated in local languages and dialects. Whereas the central, official discourse attempts to manipulate the peripheral, folkloric discourse for ideological reasons, the latter ends up simultaneously conforming to, and subverting, the former; both involve ambiguity, nuance, and indeterminacy.