Research Blog

Persuasion and Propaganda Ancient China （chapter draft, part 1） by Keren Wang, kwang35@gsu.edu There are increasing calls to give rhetorics that are historically overlooked within Western academia their overdue consideration.[1] Despite growing interest in comparative and alternative rhetorics, insufficient attention has been paid to one category of crucial contribution to the intellectual history of persuasion and propaganda: the study of nonwestern ancient rhetorical traditions.[2] This chapter provides a sneak preview of the intellectual history of persuasion and propaganda in Ancient China, where a rich and distinct rhetorical tradition flourished for more than three millennia. We begin this chapter by addressing the question of why it is necessary to examine comparative perspectives, followed by looking briefly into the historical origin of Chinese characters – the oldest writing system still in use. Our discussion then proceeds to a high-altitude overview of the hundred schools of thought that emerged during a pivotal moment of Chinese intellectual history and profoundly shaped the arc of Sinic civilizational development. ...

Happy 端午節 Duanwu / Dragon Boat Festival! Duanwu is one of the four most important traditional holidays (the other three being Qingming, Mid Autumn Festival and the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year) celebrated by Chinese people throughout the world. It is celebrated on the 5th day of the 5th month of traditional Chinese calendar, which for 2021 falls on June 14th of the Gregorian calendar. The two calendars are not perfectly synched, so the Gregorian calendar date for Duanwu would change from year to year (FYI it will be on June 3rd for 2022, and June 22nd for 2023). The Duanwu festival is primarily for commemorating the tragic death of Warring States era poet and statesman Qu Yuan (c. 243-348 BC). Qu Yuan is one of the most celebrated literary figure in Chinese history, whose poems are known for their highly expressive lyrical style, imbibed with intoxicating mythos and broiling pathos. Qu Yuan is also among those historical figures became widely celebrated by the contemporary Chinese LGBTQ community, as Qu frequently (also quite explicitly) writes about his romantic passions towards his lover and patron King Huai of Chu, whom Qu Yuan refers to as “my beautiful one.”

Happy to announce the publication of my co-authored article with Dr. Tomonori Teraoka - “The Legitimation Crisis of the Japanese Constitution: Reflections on Japan’s Judicial Rhetoric and Its Post-WWII Constitutionalization Process” - on the latest issue of Communication Law Review. Our article presents an interdisciplinary, multilingual collaborative effort to critically examine Japanese constitutional discourse at both domestic and transnational levels. Abstract: Our article examines the issue of constitutional legitimacy in the post-WWII Japanese legal system. Our analysis proceeds from the judicial rhetoric of postwar Japan, focusing primarily on the state of judicial review and executive legislative practices throughout the Japanese postwar constitutionalization process. The aim of our rhetorical analysis is to identify the main points of discursive tensions as manifested in Japanese judiciary and legislative norms. Although the postwar Japanese constitution provides a judicial review process and separation of powers like its American counterpart, their implementation is constrained by the legislative usurpation of the executive branch and judicial passivity of the Japanese Supreme Court. Whereas the written language in the postwar Japanese constitution adheres to the prevailing transnational dóxa for a democratic rule-of-law society, we find many key constitutional elements are not internationalized within the operational modality of Japanese judicial rhetoric.

The ritual taking of things that are of human value, including the ritual killing of humans, has been continuously practiced for as long as human civilization itself has existed. In my presentation for the upcoming virtual 2020 National Communication Association's Annual Convention, I will highlight key findings from one of my ongoing historical archival projects, focusing on the rhetoric of human sacrifice as represented in Early Bronze Age China oracle bone scripts (c.1250 BC - 1046 BC). It will be delivered at the virtual paper session, "GPS: Changing Routes in Rhetoric's History" sponsored by the American Society for the History of Rhetoric on November 1st, 2020. ...

My recent interview for the "Coronavirus and International Affairs" Webinar, hosted by Penn State International Affairs and Penn State Law, Coalition for Peace & Ethics: (Originally posted by Larry Catá Backer at 4/14/2020 11:28:00 AM) Interview: Keren Wang on Comparing US and Chinese Responses to the Pandemic, for Upcoming Webinar "COVID-19 and International Affairs" (17 April 2020) In the run up to the Webinar Conference Roundtable, Coronavirus and International Relations, a number of participants and contributors agreed to give short interviews around the conference themes and their own interventions. All Zoom interviews will be posted to the Coalition for Peace and Ethics You Tube Channel COVID-19 Conference Playlist. For our first interview, Flora Sapio spoke to the issues of COVID-19 in Italy and its wider implication. For our second interview, Larry Catá Backer spoke of COVID-19 and meaning making. Yuri Gonzalez was interviewed about COVID-19 and the developing situation in Cuba, which has been able to project medical assistance outward even as it faces the challenges of a developing state. Alice Hong provided insight on COVID-19 from the perspective of a foreign student in the US. And GAO Shan spoke to the way that the COVID-19 pandemic from a comparative context of Wuhan (where his family lives) and the US Midwest (where he now resides). For our next interview Keren Wang speaks to the issues of the way that the Pandemic was framed and experienced in the US and China. He considers the ways in which each system framed the pandemic in ways that could be understood. He noted how differences in those understandings could produce very different responses. Dr. Wang also considered the ways in which the official and popular discourse about the pandemic sometimes aligned and sometimes deviated in some substantial respects. The effects on both the internal organization of national responses, and on their international relations of states, have been both profound and to some extent quite different. The interview may be accessed HERE: Keren Wang interview here. Conference Concept Note HERE ...

"Reexamining Ritual Sacrifice in Late-Capitalism" Presentation at the 48th Annual Conference of the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists (SASP) at the University of New South Wales, Sydney Building on my doctoral dissertation, I have been exploring the rhetorical inventions of "sacrifice" in the construction and ordering of societal institutions. The rhetoric of sacrifice, and its public rituals, form a core practice of all social orders. Though the practices have become substantially more subtle and even more deeply embedded in everyday social practices and expectations, this research project explores the underlying local and trans-cultural reflexes inherent in the performance of social, political, and economic sacrifices, and their connections to the organization of public institutions. Indeed, the fundamental presumption of sacrifice - the bargaining between unequal powers for the purchase of objectives by the offering of items precious to the giver - has often become so embedded to tacit social norms as to become effectively invisible. Though this project focuses on its connection to the organization of what is termed "late capitalism," its insinuation in all social orderings is hard to ignore. "Civilized" societies and economic relations are ordered through the rituals of sacrifice - propitiation for whatever totems and taboos are set above the governance orders around which collectives coalesce. ...

(December 2nd, 2019) I am very pleased to announce that my academic monograph with Routledge | Taylor & Francis Group has now been published: Keren Wang, Legal and Rhetorical Foundations of Economic Globalization: An Atlas of Ritual Sacrifice in Late-Capitalism. It is available in both hardback and digital formats. This book was developed from my doctoral dissertation, “Three Studies of Ritual Sacrifice in Late Capitalism.” I would like to extend my special thanks to Stephen H. Browne, my dissertation supervisor, and to members of my dissertation advising committee: Larry Catá Backer, Kirt H. Wilson, and Jeremy David Engels. This project would not have been possible without their guidance and mentorship. I would also like to express my gratitude to members of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University for their generous, ongoing support of my Ph.D. study and related postdoctoral research. ...

I am happy to report that my recent article, “The Rhetorical Invention of Laws of Sacrifice: Kelo v. New London,” has just been published and appears in Communication Law Review, Volume 18, Issue 2 (2018): 58-94. My thanks to Dr. Pat Arneson (Chief Editor) for her valuable editorial contribution towards this publication. The article continues my broader work exploring the concept of sacrifice as a useful concept for thinking about how violent transactions are rhetorically justified. The abstract follows. An online version of the article may be accessed HERE. ...

This presentation highlights a few key excerpts from my doctoral dissertation research: “The ritual taking of things that are of human value, including the ritual killing of humans, has been continuously practiced for as long as human civilization itself has existed. Sacrifices in the form of state-organized rituals have been observed in many societies throughout history. Existing scholarship also observed an interdependent relationship between ritual sacrifice and the maintenance of political power in a broad set of historical cases, ranging from Shang dynasty China in 10th century BCE to the witch-hunts in early modern Europe. Sacrificial rituals of the past should not be considered fundamentally divorced from our modern world: whereas the formal elements of sacrifice of the past may no longer be recognizable, their substantive political functions do remain, with rhetorical overtones that carry into the politics of the present time. The goal for this project is to give due consideration to the politics of sacrificial rites across a broad set of political-theological traditions, hopefully paving the way to a new unifying understanding of sacrificial rhetorics. This research goal revolves around two primary research tasks that are intimately connected. The first is to provide a working interpretative framework for understanding the politics of ritual sacrifice – one that not only accommodates multidisciplinary, intersectional knowledge of ritual practices, but that can also be usefully employed in the integrated analysis of sacrificial rituals as political rhetoric under divergent historical and societal contexts. The second conducts a series of case studies that cuts across the wide variability of ritual public takings in late-capitalism.” ...

by Keren Wang This essay was originally featured on the Penn State Civic & Community Engagement (CIVCOM) website, responding to this year's Constitution Day theme: "The U.S. Constitution & 'The Dangerous Thirteenth Amendment'." Please visit and share with your students this link http://civcm.psu.edu/constitution-day/, where you'll also find essays by Lauren Camacci, Jeremy Cox, Michele Kennerly, Veena Raman, John Rountree, Mary Stuckey, and Kirt Wilson. Last year's resources on "The Spaces Between the First and Second Amendments" can still be found here: http://civcm.psu.edu/constitution-day/past-constitution-days/2016-2/ The Constitution of the United States – Article XIII (Amendment 13 – Slavery and Involuntary Servitude) Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. ...

“As regards the erection of such a monument as is contemplated, my conviction is, that, however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt, in the present condition of the country, would have the effect of retarding instead of accelerating its accomplishment, and of continuing if not adding to the difficulties under which the Southern people labor.” (R. E. Lee, 1866) Source: Jones, J. William 1836-1909. Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee. United States: 1875, p.257 ...

“Ritualism and the Ethos of Chinese Legal Order,” presented at International Conference: New International Trade and Investment Rules between Globalization and Anti-­Globalization, Penn State University, University Park, PA (April 22, 2017) 倬彼雲漢 昭回于天 王曰於乎 何辜今之人 天降喪亂 饑饉薦臻 靡神不舉 靡愛斯牲 圭璧既卒 寧莫我聽 Majestic is that Milky Way, brightly afloat in the firmament of the heaven. The King said, O! What crime is chargeable on us now? That Heaven thus sends down death and disorder, unrelenting famine and hunger grapple us! ...

The Harvard East Asia Society (HEAS) recently concluded its 20th Annual Conference: Roads through Asia, held this year in Harvard Center for Government and International Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The conference program may be accessed HERE. For the conference, I presented a paper, along with my co-author Tomonori Teraoka, titled: Legitimation Crisis of the Japanese Constitution: Reflections on Japan’s post-WWII Constitutionalization Process. Below are Powerpoint slides and working abstract for our HEAS presentation: ...

(Posted by Keren Wang | Feb. 3, 2017) Per Dr. Alan Sica’s request, this post is written as a follow-up to a peculiar topic brought up during our Social Thought seminar yesterday – it concerns the “Elephant (象)” glyph in the Chinese term for “Phenomenology (现象学)”. Long story short… During our regular seminar discussion on the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (French phenomenologist) yesterday, Dr. Sica asked what is the Chinese term for “phenomenology”. Luckily, there is an official Chinese translation available for this particular philosophical term – 現象學 (pronounced “hsien-hsiang hsueh”). For easier viewing, please see the enlarged picture-file below, which also includes the standard phonetic notation for each character: The facile explanation of phrase “現象學” is that it combines 现象 (hsien-hsiang, lit. “phenomenon, materialization”) + 學 (hsueh, lit. “study, learning”). By “facile explanation”, I am referring to the fact that the Chinese writing system doesn’t follow an alphabet-word system, so any direct “word-to-word” translation between Chinese and English would be at best a “metaphorical approximation”. Unwilling to settle for the easy explanation, Alan of course pressed for more precise meaning of each individual character in 現象學, and thus going further down the impossible linguistic rabbit hole… So here’s when the “elephant” came in… The Chinese term for phenomenology, 現象學, consists three characters (or more accurately, three logograms). Here is a detailed break-down of the characters in 現象學: Indeed, for a Chinese reader, the term 現象學 does not appear as a singular, self-contained “word” per se. Rather, like most Chinese vocabularies, the nomenclature would appear as a loosely-grouped logographic cluster that reads something like “(the) study (of) manifest shape(s) and symbol(s).” Those parenthetical parts are grammatical features absent in the Chinese writing system. Indeed, concepts such as definitive articles, plurals and grammatical tense may not apply to written Chinese…at all! Chinese characters group together in ways that’s very different from English vocabularies. When used together, they do not form a new “word” in ways English alphabets would. Thus, unlike English “words”, meanings are not “encoded” into Chinese phrases and characters. Each logograph in a phrase or sentence merely defers and refers its signification in terms of its relation with those other characters in the sentence, and the final “meaning” of a phrase or sentence is obtained as the sum aggregate of signification of all the characters in the phrase. This might sound confusing, but it is worthwhile to keep in mind that even the most basic grammatical and syntactical principles in English do not apply in written Chinese. And now I regress… Most notably, the second character of the phrase, 象 (pronounced “hsiang”) , indeed means “elephant” in Chinese. Yes, when used with other characters, 象 can be used broadly to signify ideas relating to “shape”, “symbol” and “representation”. However, those are derivatives or its “ordinary” meaning of “elephant” Indeed, when the character “象” is used alone, it almost always refers to non other than those massive land mammals with long trunk and pillar-like legs. In fact, the “elephant“ in 現象學 is among the oldest Chinese characters still in common use. As shown in the figure below, the glyph “象” first appeared in Oracle bone script (c. 1,200 BCE) as an elephant pictogram. The basic shape and composition of “象” remained surprisingly consistent across its three-thousand-plus years of continuous usage: So what does “elephant” has anything to do with symbol and elephant? While it is impossible to get into the heads of Shang dynasty kings (who first used this letter during sacrificial rites), I did found a compelling explanation by searching around Chinese Classical texts. Han Fei (韓非, c. 280 – 233 BC), an influential political philosopher from the Warring States period (475BC - 221BC), wrote the following in his Han Fei Tzu: ...