My dissertation examines the post-1949 transformation of religious and organizational culture in rural Ruian County of the Wenzhou region, Zhejiang. It explores the diversified adaptation patterns adopted by rural religious organizations in order to preserve, reinvent and even expand themselves in the volatile sociopolitical environment of post-1949 China. Based on hitherto unexploited government documents collected from local state archives, memoirs, historical accounts of religious organizations, as well as extensive oral interviews with Ruian residents, I demonstrate that, rather than following a linear and uniform decline that conventional wisdom suggests, religious organizations took divergent paths in Ruian during the Maoist era. The level of religious activities in Ruian and many regions of Zhejiang exhibited fluctuations over time rather than a linear downward movement. The Maoist period, I argue, was both destructive and constructive for religion. By stripping religious organizations of their traditional leadership and economic foundation, Maoist campaigns inadvertently accelerated the organizational reinvention of Chinese religions. Even more far-reaching, the Cultural Revolution dramatically stimulated a quick rise of Protestantism vis-à-vis other religions and fundamentally reshaped the religious landscape in parts of China, making China no exception to the global trend of religious resurgence, despite its isolation at the time. Religion in today’s China and related phenomena, in particular the uneven distribution of religious revival, the development patterns of rural organizations, and state-religion relations, cannot be fully explained without reference to the Maoist legacy. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Based on empirical study of newly declassified sources from South Korea, the dissertation examines the Park Chung Hee regime’s (1961-1979) policies related to chaju kukpang, or “self-reliant national defense,” from the late-1960s through the 1970s. In response to North Korea’s provocations in 1968 and the US reduction of troops stationed in South Korea in 1971, the Park regime masterminded an independent military modernization program in which citizens and civilian industries, functioning as the de facto engine of domestic arms production, propelled the emergence of a military-industrial complex. The study examines how regime policies mobilized Korean citizens for the effort and how civilian actors eventually responded by personally investing to fulfill this national project. The author observes that the state transformed civilians through both super-structural and infrastructural processes, as Park’s policies steered both the industrial capacities and the consciousness of the Korean populace along a path toward security independence. The total mobilization effort proceeded through complex mergers, tensions, and negotiations of state goals with civilian ideological and material interests, ultimately forging chaju kukpang as a bona fide national movement. The story of ROK defense industry development offers a prism through which the interplay of polity and society in the course of Korea’s modernization can be reexamined, with an eye to refining prevalent theories and suggesting implications for future research on the Park era. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation investigates Chinese Muslim (Hui) intellectual currents from the late Qing dynasty to the early years of the Communist Republic, 1908–1957. By analyzing a vast number of Muslim reformist journals, Chinese translations of Islamic sources, and diaries/memoirs of intellectuals who were connected to other zones of the Islamic world, I examine the process by which reformists sought to redefine Chinese Muslim identity and revive “true principles of Islam”—both in negotiation with the Chinese state and in conversation with local and transnational intellectual currents. In particular, this dissertation considers the ways in which intellectuals struggled to “awaken” Chinese Muslims so as to transform their past identity as Muslim subjects of the Qing Empire into “politically conscious and active” citizens of the Chinese Republic. Chinese Muslims were defined either as a religious community or an ethnic group (minzu), and this debate occupied the minds of reformist intellectuals in this period, the topic of the first two chapters. How it was settled would determine the political, social, and religious status of the Muslim community in China, where definitions of nation and ethnicity/race were constantly reassigned. Debates concerning Muslim integration into China hinged on their connection to the global Muslim community (umma). Newly introduced technologies of travel and communication, such as the steamship and print, facilitated Chinese Muslims’ participation within transnational and cross-confessional networks. I argue that it was through the selection, appropriation, and adaptation of ideas from the prominent centers of the Islamic world that these intellectuals navigated a path of integration in the Chinese context that did not put their distinct Muslim identity at risk. From these diverse sources, they were determined to find solutions to the challenges they faced in China—whether posed by the hegemonic discourse of the Nationalist Party or the iconoclastic New Culture Movement. In successive chapters, I focus on the intellectual connection of Chinese Muslims to the Kemalist secularism of Turkey, the Ahmadi movement of India, and Egyptian reformist currents. Thus, I demonstrate how a seemingly “peripheral” Muslim community in the Far East participated in complex transnational networks at a critical moment of transformation. / Inner Asian and Altaic Studies

This dissertation is the first major study of a slave trade that captured up to one million slaves along the Russian and Iranian frontiers over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alone. Slaves served as farm-workers, herdsmen, craftsmen, soldiers, concubines, and even, in rare cases, as high-ranking officials in the region between the Caspian Sea and westernmost China. Most of these slaves were Shīʿites who were captured by Sunni Turkmens and sold in Central Asian cities and towns. Despite the Central Asian slave trade’s impressive dimensions, and the prominent role of slaves in the region’s history, the topic remains largely unstudied by historians of the region and of the broader Islamic world. Drawing on unpublished autobiographical sources and eyewitness accounts, I argue that slaves’ resistance and resourcefulness helped to define the contours of the slave labor system and played a key, unacknowledged role in their emancipation. While previous studies of slavery in the Muslim world have emphasized the role of colonial governments in fostering abolition, I argue that slaves in Central Asia, by fomenting the largest slave uprising in the region’s history, triggered the abolition of slavery in the region as a whole. / Inner Asian and Altaic Studies

This dissertation argues for the importance of knowledge production for understanding the relationship between the Russian Empire, the Qing Dynasty, and European actors, from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. It focuses specifically on intelligence-gathering, including espionage, as a genre of intellectual work situated in state institutions, oriented toward pragmatic goals, and produced by and for an audience of largely anonymous bureaucrats. It relies on archival sources from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Rome, as well as published materials. The dissertation begins by investigating how seventeenth-century Siberians compiled information about China, and how maps and documents were transmitted first to Moscow and then to Western Europe to be republished for wider audiences. It then examines the post-Petrine shift to more specialized forms of intelligence-gathering, focusing on industrial espionage in the Moscow-Beijing trade caravan. As the dissertation shows, the changing priorities of the Russian intelligence gathering apparatus shaped and often crippled the ability of Russian Qing experts to address wider audiences. On the mid-eighteenth-century Russo-Qing border, the dissertation follows the building of a robust Russian intelligence network in Qing Mongolia amid unprecedented inter-imperial tension, and its ultimate failure to achieve desired geopolitical ends. These intelligence failures are then shown to provide a compelling new explanation for the collapse of European imperial attempts at diplomacy in East Asia in the last third of the eighteenth century. Finally, the dissertation concludes by showing how, by means of strategic forgetting, intelligence was reconstructed into academic sinology during the reign of Alexander I. / History

Historians have long recognized the symbiotic relationship between learned culture, urban life and Iberian expansion in the creation of “Latin” America out of the ruins of pre-Columbian polities, a process described most famously by Ángel Rama in his account of the “lettered city” (ciudad letrada). This dissertation argues that this was part of a larger global process in Latin America, Iberian Asia, Spanish North Africa, British North America and Europe. It is thus a study of the “global lettered city,” known to contemporaries as the “republic of letters,” from its rapid expansion in the sixteenth century to its reordering in the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions with a particular focus on the function of its key scholarly-literary practice, classicizing rhetoric and oratory as revived by renaissance humanists. This dissertation is divided into five chapters. In Chapter 1, I argue that renaissance humanism and classical rhetoric played a pivotal role in shaping and diffusing the political ideology of the global Spanish Monarchy. As the centerpieces of multisensory Baroque rituals regularly celebrated in urban centers, such as Mexico City, Lima, and Manila, classicizing orations and sermons bolstered the Spanish Monarchy through appeals to Greco-Roman imperial models and Christian humanist ideas of virtue. In the same vein, in Chapter Two, I argue that classical rhetoric was an instrument of global spiritual conquest on the Jesuit route from Rome to Japan. This dissertation then treats some less well-known applications of humanism and the classical rhetorical tradition, cultural practices that also served to undermine or even directly oppose European imperial ambitions. In Chapter 3, I examine the role of late-humanist eloquence and erudition in the expression of a local “Mexican” identity. In Chapter 4, I show that late-humanism served to build community in Benjamin Franklin’s quarter of the “global lettered city.” Finally, in Chapter 5, I examine the role of post-humanist classicizing rhetoric in the articulation of radical political and social ideas in Age of Revolutions. In preparing this global history, I have examined primary sources in thirteen countries. / History

This thesis joins a series of semantics and historical pragmatics studies about the changing nature of language. It adopts a pragma-historical linguistic perspective in describing and comparing the semantic and functional developments of Vietnamese terms of address and person-references (hereafter, ToA/Rs) that experienced dramatic changes. It theoretically charts their changing discourse functions and meanings, anchoring such developments to the “triggering” mechanisms caused by the oft-neglected dimensions of ideology and interactants’ ideological stance-takings. The change processes could be escalated, impeded and reversed by ideologies and stances which interacted with the broader political and social contexts. This approach of study is “diachronic form-to-function mapping” in diachronic pragmatics, taking a ToA/R as a starting point and tracing its development (Jacobs & Jucker, 1995: 13). Because contextual aspects such as addresser-addressee relationships, communication “rules”, and the physical and social environments of the literature shape ideology, operationalising the micro-level discourses in the text, the approach may fall under pragmaphilology (ibid.:11)(Chapter 2, this thesis). In reality, approaches may overlap because forms undergoing diachronic form-to-function may change or lose their forms, or may be replaced because of functional changes, thus realising the diachronic function-to-form approach (ibid.: 13). Examples of such changes are the other-condescending and self-deprecating ToA/Rs (e.g., §4.7, 4.8, 5.6). Collectively, the ToA/Rs articulate both stable and unstable meanings and functions, contradicting the current model of the linearity of change (Objectivity>Subjectivity>Intersubjectivity)(Traugott & Dasher, 2002)(§2.6, this thesis). This thesis defies the preponderant view that advocates the study of meanings and stances in the gradual construal of utterances. It argues that collocations and co-occurring contextual features such as the relative ages and relationships of the User and Addressee/Audience /referent are significant for grasping meanings and stances. In the applications of ToA/Rs, the projections of identities and persona can become apparent (Chapter 5 and 6, this thesis). Unlike in English, the Vietnamese ToA/Rs function differently, and have overlapping boundaries between person referential functions and membership categories (Chapter 4). This thesis crosses disciplinary boundaries to clarify the meanings of currently misunderstood ToA/Rs, illuminates certain communicative practices (Chapter 6) and sheds light on the evolution and appropriation of ToA/Rs, illustrated non-exclusively with historical episodes in Sino-Vietnamese interaction (Chapter 6). Its arguments are further strengthened with examples from rarely exploited vernacular resources written in the ancient demotic script, Nôm (§2.3). Overall, this study illuminates the perpetuating metaphysical value that respects traditional social hierarchies and authorities blended with affection. Under egalitarian pressures over time, the disregard for self-denigration, direct other-condescension, or other-elevation in informal contexts, together with the regard for indirect displays of negative stances facilitate the construction of a complementary framework for predicting change in ToA/Rs (Table 5-1).

Situated at the crossroads of Translation Studies, Semiotics and Chinese Studies, this thesis examines the non-localisation (NL henceforth) strategy adopted by Apple for its official website. Website layouts, multi-media information, textual information, such as names of products, services and technological solutions are kept unchanged on the Chinese target-language website. Focusing on the non-localised features, this thesis has three major aims. First of all, it seeks to verify a foreignising impact of the NL strategy on the Chinese translation tradition and Sino-centric values. Secondly, it tries to reconcile translation studies with merits of the localisation industry, namely digital technology and industrial management. Thirdly, regarding global power struggles, this thesis aims to verify that the foreignness of currently ‘dominant’ Anglo-American cultures, NL, is still mediated by the ‘dominated’ Chinese system that has long been a culture centre itself. However, the Chinese system cannot keep its own culture untouched by foreignness either. In order to achieve these three aims, a framework built on semiotics, digital-media, socioeconomics was established, giving birth to the following critical findings. First, NL has a foreignising impact on the Chinese translation traditions. In terms of how this impact is achieved and its efficacy, NL is fundamentally different from Lawrence Venuti’s paradigmatic model in translation studies. Venuti’ suggests translators in target cultures should take the initiative to achieve a foreignising impact by only using target language codes, in the literary domain. On the contrary, NL’s foreignising impact is achieved through:1) Apple’s technological and linguistic control over the development and dissemination of NL items, (such as iPhone and iPad) into the Chinese target culture through digital media, which minimise interference from Chinese publishers and editors who are mainly powerful in print media; 2) In Charles Peirce’s terms, NL items, being source language codes, are signs signifying Apple products that function as objects ubiquitously available in both source and target cultures (e.g. iPhone, a verbal sign, signifies Apple smartphone, an object popular in both U.S. and China); thus, no target code is needed for NL items to be understood in China, highlighting immediate foreignness, with substantially reduced target semiotic mediations; 3) Consumerism which is a foreign-oriented dimension of the Chinese society, conflicts with China’s domestic-oriented translation traditions. Due to China’s booming consumerism, a large and continuous consumption of Apple products in China socially consolidates the foreignising impact, and this cultural impact becomes measurable. The second key finding is the relationship between localisation and translation, and the implication on translation studies. Addressing existing attempts to explore the relationship between localisation and translation, (i.e. ‘localisation is just specialised translation’ vs ‘localisation includes translation’) this thesis discovers that localisation and translation are merely two different text production methods. In other words, both have equal status. Text production method refers to the entire information creation and dissemination process between source and target cultures. The difference between the localisation and translation is the historical, media, and technological context in which both are developed. Drawing on a review of media history, the thesis reveals that translation, as a text production method, includes source text composition, source text selection, translator selection, translation, translation editing and publishing. As print media matured, translation publishers and editors in the target cultures took and continue to take control over almost everything of translation apart from source text composition. The domesticating power of the publishers in the Anglo-American world, pointed out by Venuti, is actually a natural result of the industrial development; accordingly, it’s not difficult to understand why translators’ initiative to challenge the domestication tradition has been difficult. Localisation, as another text production method, includes, source content development and internationalisation, source content rendition, finalisation, and target content release. Multinational high-tech companies like Apple takes control over the entire process of localisation, witnessing a major shift of power from target to the source. This power shift is one of the major propelling forces for NL’s foreignising impact on the Chinese context. The macro-structural differences between localisation and translation pointed out in this thesis have significant implications on the current understanding of how translation creates cultural impacts in academia i.e. what translators do textually, such as a change of language style for instance, is only a part of the entire text production process. Overall this thesis argues that the study of translation impact should include much more than texts per se; instead social-economic and industrial circumstances under which texts are produced and disseminated must be factored in too.

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