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Article In: International Journal of Language and Culture: Online-First Articles

Landscape and/in ethnonational concepts in Chinese

The cultural keywords héshān 河山 and jiānghú 江湖

 | Australian National University
 | Australian National University
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Abstract
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, J. Q. (2024). The ethnonational symbols of ‘mountain-river’ in contemporary Chinese discourse. Culture, Media and Film, 11(2), Article 2419144. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). 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, D. L. & Ames, R. T. (1987). Thinking through Confucius. New York: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), but also demonstrates how geographical terms in Chinese are simultaneously politically enriched.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Unpacking Chinese ethnonational concepts: The need for a culture-internal perspective
  • 3.Analytical framework
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Héshān 河山 (‘rivers and mountains’; ‘[our] beloved country’)
    • 4.2Jiānghú 江湖 (‘rivers and lakes’; ‘anti-establishment society’)
  • 5.From landscape concepts to ethnonational and ethno-societal concepts
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
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