Rutgers Center for Chinese Studies (RCCS) convened an in-person workshop on Chinese-English Keywords on Tuesday, October 23, 2023. Hosted by Louisa Schein (Anthropology, Rutgers University), in conjunction with the visit of Tim Oakes (Geography, University of Colorado, Boulder), the event brought together ten scholars from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania to discuss the political, historical, and cultural valences of energy concepts used in China and beyond. Conversation traversed disciplines from Anthropology, Chinese Studies, Comparative Literature, Geography, Media Studies, Philosophy and Religious Studies. The event marked the most recent event of the Chinese-English Keywords Project, a series of workshops and conference panels organized by Louisa Schein since the project’s founding in 2016.
Over the course of a two-hour intensive and minimally structured conversation, participants offered insights from their research expertise as well as from their incidental exposures during time spent in Chinese-language environments, including social media. Through this collaborative knowledge production, word associations proliferated and we collected them on index cards so as to see their relations and distinctions.
Attentive to the multiple meanings of “energy” in English, we asked how energy as resource, energy that flows, energy as psychic state, among others, might be differently glossed in Chinese.
Using keywords to illuminate social realities and ideologies relevant to the articulation of “energy” (能/能量neng/nengliang), we traced these notions across corporeal, machinic, medicinal, political and interpersonal realms. We queried what happens when we put these variants in juxtaposition and how they mean in the lives of various Chinese speakers?
Two main trajectories of interest became evident. On the one hand, the concept of energy provides a new avenue to explore China’s cultural/historical contexts. Participants mentioned the translation of Henry Bergson’s mind-energy into xinli (心力) in the late Qing era, the popularity of liliang (力量) and dongli (动力) during the socialist era, and the word neng (能) gaining traction in the 1980s with all the potentialities of reform. On the other hand, concerns about energy and ecology have loomed large in contemporary Chinese politics. China’s pursuit of xinnengyuan (新能源) and energy transition generates new social structures and modalities awaiting further investigation. We also found consonance between the two semantic domains. The metaphysics of “energy” as flow and force lent itself to the progress and promotion of communist ideology. For instance, the word shengtai (生态) or ecology morphs in popular parlance into the somewhat idiomatic yuanshengtai (原生态, original ecology) and later becomes a signifier in the PRC’s promotion of shengtai wenming (生态文明) which translates uneasily into ecological civilization.
This deep dive into “energies” - as resource, capacity, flow and more - highlights the fluidity of language serving different purposes. Encountering China’s conceptualizations of energy and their idiosyncratic valences reveals a convoluted node of political ecology. Energy as a keyword opens a window onto the shifting quality of Chinese policies and politics, while reminding us of the multitudinous variants of energy in indigenous epistemology, religious thinking, and technological innovation.
