In Chapter 3 we discuss the pitfall of following an ethnocentric view in the study of politically relevant data. We argue that it is not fruitful either to associate a particular positive or negative value with a particular country or area, or to attribute a political notion or an actor with a positive or negative value. Here we critically consider the universal validity of notions such as ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘nationalism’, which may appear at first as clearly positive or negative and as such non-controversial from a Western viewpoint. We will refer to cases in which members of non-Western linguacultures conventionally interpret these notions differently from how they are conventionally seen in the West and how they are often used in academic inquiries in a seemingly ‘neutral’ way. We argue that it is ethnocentric to dismiss linguaculturally embedded standard interpretations of such notions as ‘undemocratic’, ‘unenlightened’ and ‘autocratic’ because through such a dismissive attitude one is led to automatically associating a particular positive or negative value with a particular country or area.

This chapter traces the cultural history of lotus in the Chinese tradition: from its appearance in The Classic of Poetry and Han dynasty rhapsodies to the exuberant wordplay on ‘lotus’/’love” in the popular songs of the Southern Dynasties, from the flower of carnal desires to a symbol of enlightenment in Buddhism, from the neo-Confucian appropriation of the lotus as a sign of moral purity to the name of the most notorious female character in Chinese fiction, lotus is inscribed with various literary, cultural, social, and religious significance. Focusing on the changing and expanding story of the lotus, this chapter suggests that the lotus is a plant of hybridity, a site of contested meanings, and that its botanical and literary lives are intricately intertwined with the social and cultural histories of China.

The striking image of three local Chinese women spectators at the Bandung Conference of 1955 was taken by Lisa Larsen, who was a photographer commissioned by LIFE magazine to cover the conference. What does this photograph tell us about international diplomacy? Was it a coincidence that the female photographer happened to take one of the most visually arresting photographs of women as diplomatic spectators? This chapter proposes to probe further the significance of gender in constructing images of international diplomacy. In general, visual sources of international diplomacy tend to portray women in multiple capacities as actors on the international stage. However, this stands in stark contrast to textual sources, which reveal very little female agency, mostly due to the narrowly defined notions of who constitutes a diplomatic actor in traditional approaches to studying diplomacy. Elsewhere, the author has argued that the invisibility of women in diplomacy can in itself be seen as a performative stance. In this chapter, she explores how we can ‘recover’ the lost female presence in diplomacy by privileging the female gaze, through the iconic female photographer.

Hong Kong’s Handover from British to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 could have brought about rapid and momentous changes to Hong Kong’s language regime. Change, however, has for the most part been incremental, and much of the British-era’s language regime remains largely intact today, including the salience of English in many domains. At the same time, language policy changes did occur, mainly through the educational policy of biliteracy and trilingualism, which added Mandarin to the de facto English-Cantonese bilingual regime. However, nearly half-way through the transition period, Mandarin use has made few notable inroads in Hong Kong society, though there are signs that this may be about to change - perhaps drastically so. This paper analyzes the evolution of Hong Kong’s language regime from its unique perspective as a city connected to the global community like few others, and located between two state traditions - one marked by pluralist, laissez-faire capitalism, and the other by Communism and totalitarian state nationalism. Overall, this case study of Hong Kong contributes to our understanding of colonial legacies, competing mobilizations, incremental change, and multilevel governance as it helps to expand the STLR framework.

The Chinese are one of the longest established and largest immigrant groups in Britain. There are a number of mutually unintelligible regional languages that are spoken amongst the Chinese. A complex pattern of multilingualism is emerging in the community. Intergenerational language maintenance and language shift are key sociolinguistic issues that the communites are collectively addressing. Contacts between the different languages have resulted in structural innovation and change that impact on all the languages concerned.

Chapters 10 and 11 provide a solution for the study of interactionally complex ritual phenomena, by systematically breaking them down into replicable pragmatic units of analysis. The complexity of a ritual phenomenon can either mean that a phenomenon is too broad to be discussed as a single ritual, i.e., it represents a form of ritual behaviour which spans across many different ritual contexts, or it represents a particular context and related ritual frame which triggers ritual behaviour but cannot be subsumed under a single ritual heading from the pragmatician’s point of view. Chapter 11 focuses on the second type of difficulty: it proposes a discourse-analytic approach through which seemingly ad hoc and erratic interactional ritual behaviour in a single complex ritual frame can be studied in a replicable way. As a case study, the chapter will examine ritual bargaining in Chinese markets. While bargaining is a ritual in the popular sense of the word, it is problematic from the pragmatician’s point of view to refer to bargaining as a ritual, without considering whether and how it manifests itself in recurrent patterns of ritual language use.

Chapter 8 considers the relationship between expressions, the smallest unit of pragmatic analysis, and ritual. The chapter will provide a bottom–up, corpus-based and replicable approach through which expressions associated with structurally or functionally ritual speech acts are used to indicate awareness of the different ritual frame. Structurally ritual speech acts include speech acts like Greet and Leave-Take which occur in ritual parts of an interaction, while functionally ritual speech acts encompass speech acts like Request and Apologise which tend to be realised in a ritual way in many contexts. The chapter points out that the relationship between expressions and interaction ritual can be best captured through a contrastive pragmatic lens because the contrastive view allows the researcher to consider how strongly a pragmatically important expression tends to indicate a functionally or structurally ritual speech act when pitted against a comparable expression in another – preferably typologically distant – linguaculture. The chapter provides a case study of Chinese and English expressions associated with the ritually performed speech act Apologise as a case study.

Chapters 10 and 11 provide a solution for the study of interactionally complex ritual phenomena, by systematically breaking them down into replicable pragmatic units of analysis. The complexity of a ritual phenomenon can either mean that a phenomenon is too broad to be discussed as a single ritual, i.e., it represents a form of ritual behaviour which spans across many different ritual contexts, or it represents a particular context and related ritual frame which triggers ritual behaviour but cannot be subsumed under a single ritual heading from the pragmatician’s point of view. Chapter 10 focuses on the first of these cases: it explores the ritual phenomenon of self-denigration in Chinese. Self-denigration occurs in many different contexts of Chinese ritual practices and ceremonies, and if one attempts to describe its pragmatic features by relying on data drawn from a single context one unavoidably risks oversimplifying it. Rather, in the study of such a ritual phenomenon one should consider how it is used in different interpersonal scenarios with varying power and intimacy and in different phases of an interaction.

The seventeenth century shaped Dai Viet in major ways. Like their counterpart in Cochinchina, the Le-Trinh regime directly involved in the silk for sliver trade. Eight tons of silver flew into Tongking bringing the wealth of the nation to a new level. Commerce changed culture in many ways, from the introduction of Christianity to the emergence of Lieu Hanh, a new religious figure connected to women traders. It modernised Tongking’s firearms and financed the seven campaigns against Cochinchina. It stimulated the import of Chinese books and prints, which had become more accessible and affordable to the literati class. Add to this new wealth in circulation more broadly, a construction boom, and increased participation of women. Like the thirteenth century, the Red River delta saw another political integration, this time between the military group from Thanh Hoa and the literati from the Red River delta. It may not be a coincidence that both eras s saw the extensive and intensive maritime commerce both in the country and with overseas. The synergy brought in by the maritime wealth however created a more systematically Confucianist institution from the village up. The autonomous village now became the fixed image of Vietnam.

Chapter 4 discusses the transition from Ly to Tran dynasties in the early thirteenth century as a result of the rise of the Jiaozhi Sea. It marks a fundamental shift in political power from the upper-mid Red River valley to the coast. The Ly Dai Viet was a mid-river principality that ruled no more than half of the delta. By the middle of the twelfth century, Ly Dai Viet was looking increasingly seaward. Changing external factors played a major role in accelerating this transition. The main drive was Southern Song dynasty’s need for Yunnan horse that brought huge cash to the Guangxi border facing the Gulf of Tongking. Jiaozhi Sea networks flourished. Dai Viet’s main port shifted from the central Vietnam to Van Don, where merchants from Champa traded aromatics with the silk merchants from Sichuan. It was against this background that the Tran family from Fujian rose and replaced the Ly dynasty. The rise of the Jiaozhi Sea and resurgence of the Tongking Gulf accelerated the integration of the political forces of the upper, mid, and lower Red River delta and placed Tran-era Dai Viet in a strategic position to respond to greater macro-regional changes, not only on the agricultural and population but also the expansion of Islamic trade networks.