Chinese Academia (Issue 18, Total)

Author: Liu Dong, Editor-in-Chief
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Features: The essays in this section focus on visible or invisible social network relationships. Pei Yili explores how the roles of social networks and collective identity changed during the period of urban protest (1919-1927) in China and in the most vibrant city, Shanghai. At this time, both the modern political organizations—the Communist Party and the Kuomintang—were eager to promote essentially malleable collective recognition, yet their efforts were inevitably constrained by pre-existing social networks. The author argues that this conflict between political aspirations and social realities makes the Chinese experience a starting point for theoretical innovation, supporting a critical examination of certain standard assumptions about social networks. Sun Jiang adopts a different perspective: by analyzing narratives about China's "secret societies" in contexts such as Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese, he reveals the polysemy and contradictions embedded in the discourse of secret societies. The author points out that Europeans coined the term "secret society" to encompass China's heterodox fraternal organizations and folk religious sects, while in the Chinese and Japanese linguistic spheres, the corresponding terms are "secret societies" and "secret societies," respectively. However, in both the West and Japan, this understanding of Chinese society was deeply influenced by their respective national contexts. Therefore, it is only by stripping away the knowledge/power imposed on secret societies, deconstructing the "capitalized" and "singular" narratives of secret societies, that one can grasp the diverse and pluralistic small, lowercase secret societies.