Brill's Encyclopedia of China is an English-language translation of Das grosse China-Lexikon (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003), itself a revision of Wolfgang Franke's China Handbuch (Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann, 1974) and edited by Brunhild Staiger, one of Franke's students. Daniel Leese, editor-in-chief of the English version, has supervised the translation of the 441 articles of the German volume, allowing one new article (Economic Law) and the revision or updating of some 100 others. The English translation aspires to “semantic accuracy rather than stylistic elegance” (p. viib) but generally manages to achieve both, except for the occasional false or nonexistent cognate.
The result is certainly the most comprehensive, single-volume, European-language reference work on modern China, understood by the editors to cover the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth and to include developments in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Its 1,000 double-columned pages testify to the vitality of modern Chinese studies in Germany and bring certain “German characteristics”—an emphasis on economy, society, and law, as well as a healthy respect for scientific knowledge and the scientific disciplines (there are entries for each). The preface to the German edition identifies its audience as those interested in “politics, business, and the media” (p. viiia), but also those coming to a given subject for the first time. The latter will appreciate the maps, charts, and diagrams dispersed among various entries; the color photos of Chinese art; the indexes of people, subjects, places, and Chinese personal names (with characters); and especially the highly selective but generous bibliographies, which include some of the best recent work in Chinese as well as European languages, although unfortunately, these do not include work published since 2000.
A “Systematic Overview of Entries” allows for easy access to the entries by subject matter: geography; history; society; state, politics, and law; external relations; economy; education, science, and scholarship; language and script; literature; and art. This encyclopedia clearly emphasizes the base over the superstructure; with one exception, culture, broadly conceived, plays a minor role, consisting of less than 15 percent of the articles and even less than that in the number of pages. Long essays on religions, philosophies, art forms, and literary genres try to compensate for the relatively small number of entries, but these longer essays vary in quality.
The two historical essays on “Daoism” and “Popular Religion” by Kristofer Schipper are comprehensive and penetrating, as is Françoise Aubin's on “Islam,” although more impressionistic. Heiner Roetz provides a superb, original analysis of the structure of classical “Confucianism” and a sober assessment of its philosophical, historical, and contemporary limitations. The sole essay on “Buddhism,” however, is hackneyed and out of date, and leaves the reader with little understanding of the Buddhist contribution to the Chinese worldview. At least the entries for “Furniture” and “Architecture” mention the Buddhist role in getting the Chinese off the ground (chairs and pagodas, respectively), but there is no mention of Buddhism in “Cosmology,” which focuses instead, quite capably, on a technical description of the five versions of correlative cosmology, which apparently foundered on its own incoherence 400 ago. This gap is partially addressed by Roetz's article on “Ethics,” but only if one looks for it.
Similarly, the entry on “Aesthetics” is a model of concise explication but leaves the reader ignorant of how its “interplay of fullness and emptiness” (p. 11a) has fared since the Ming dynasty. Fortunately, Ursula Toyka-Fuong focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in her article on “Painting.” The editors must also be praised for innovative entries such as “Religious Literature” and “Erotic Literature,” which do not often appear in histories or reference works. Interestingly, several authors are not impressed by the fiction of the 1980s and 1990s, finding more commercialism and sensationalism than literary value.
The real strength of this encyclopedia lies precisely in its Weberian categories. Read together, these entries on economy, society, and law provide a superb introduction to the socioeconomic transition from socialist central planning to market-oriented reform during the second half of the twentieth century. All aspects of the economic, fiscal, monetary, industrial, agricultural, service, and trading systems are addressed. The highlight is the sorting out of the five basic forms of economic enterprises—state, stock, joint, township and village, and family—and their hybridized variants. The social and legal spheres are treated in similar detail, although towns and second-tier cities receive less attention than might be hoped for.
The best of this encyclopedia lies in entries that relate to “political culture.” Readers might begin with Lucien Pye's article under that name, proceed to Thomas Heberer's entry on “Associations and Federations” (a small gem), linger over the subtle distinctions made in the entries on “Guanxi,” “Networks,” and “Corruption,” compare the conclusions reached in the articles on “Elites,” “Bourgeoisie,” “Middle Classes,” and “Entrepreneurs,” and conclude with Karl-Heinz Pohl on “Intellectuals,” Rudolf Wagner on “Literature and Politics,” Martina Köppel-Yang on “Art and Politics,” and Wang Gungwu's disposal of the notion of “Greater China” (pp. 127ab–128ab) in his entry on the “Chinese Overseas.”
