Landscape and/in ethnonational concepts in Chinese

What is it about?

Landscape terms feature prominently in Chinese national and social discourse. They not only refer to perceptually salient features in nature but also function as culturally imbued terms for talking about country, nation, and imagined worlds (e.g., Wang 2024). This study will illustrate this characteristic way of seeing and understanding the world in Chinese by focusing on two terms: héshān 河山 (lit. ‘river-mountain’; ‘[our] beloved homeland’) and jiānghú 江湖 (lit. ‘river-lake’; ‘anti-establishment society’). The former relates to official discourse centered on China’s experience during the Second World War, while the latter demarcates a constructed, ahistorical social space closely connected with martial arts fiction and film. The body of the paper will be devoted to a detailed, corpus-based semantic analysis of these terms, so as to allow a deep exploration of the cultural symbolism and historical sentiments conveyed through these expressions. This, in turn, will provide deeper insights into how Chinese speakers conceptualize the physical world and how landscape terms function as a conceptual vector that connects the individual to nation-state and to a larger socio-political space. Methodologically, this study not only illustrates how a nuanced semantic tool can unravel the intrinsic links between concrete and abstract concepts in a cultural tradition where the language does not strictly separate the physical and mental worlds (e.g., Hall and Ames 1987), but also demonstrates how geographical terms in Chinese are simultaneously politically enriched.

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Why is it important?

The contribution of this study lies primarily in the empirical evidence illuminating that geographic terms can be political as much as cultural. They can be conduits that connect the individual to the society they live in, whether actual or imagined. Thus, landscape terms in Chinese are not simply natural or cultural concepts. At their core, they are social-political concepts. Consequentially, the paper demon- strates that it is worth exploring the synergy between socio-political concepts and ethnophysiography (Turk 2011).