Zong-qi Cai

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Faculty Member

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Zong-qi Cai is Wing-tat Lee Chair Professor of Chinese Literature, Lingnan University of Hong Kong and Professor Emeritus of Chinese and Comparative Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the general editor of the How to Read Chinese Literature book series by Columbia Univ. Press, the co-founding editor-in-chief of Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (JCLC) by Duke Univ. Press, editor of Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese literature, also by Duke University Press, editor of the Brill book series Chinese Texts in the Word, and the editor-in-chief of Lingnan Journal of Chinese Studies 嶺南學報, and the host of the Forum on Chinese Poetic Culture (FCPC). He is the 2020 recipient of the Distinguished Edior Award by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

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The Making of a Chinese Critical System: <scp>L</scp> iu <scp>X</scp> ie's <i>Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons</i> ( <i>Wenxin Diaolong</i> )

A Companion to World Literature, Dec 19, 2019

Good Things Come in Pairs: A Computational Study of Poetic Parallelism in the Six Dynasties

Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, 2025

This article outlines the computational methodology for a multipart study on poetic parallelism i... more This article outlines the computational methodology for a multipart study on poetic parallelism in the Six Dynasties (222-589), a formative era in the history of Chinese literature. As the first part of this project, the authors develop a quantitative-formalist definition of parallelism, synthesizing insights from modern linguistics, vector semantics, and traditional critics such as Liu Xie 劉勰 (ca. 465-522) and Zhong Rong 鍾嶸 (ca. 468-518), alongside key passages from Kūkai's 空海 (774-835) Discourse on the Secret Treasury of Literary Mirrors (Bunkyō hifuron 文鏡秘府論). They then evaluate several statistical methods for automatic detection of parallelism in classical Chinese verse, including BERT-based classifiers and few-shot prompting of generative models such as GPT-4o and DeepSeek R1. Applying these techniques to over twenty-five thousand pentasyllabic couplets from Lu Qinli's 逯欽立 (1910-1973) Poetry of the Pre-Qin, Han, Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties (Xian Qin Han Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi 先秦漢魏晉南北朝詩), the study traces the macroscopic evolution of parallelism across five periods: Jian'an (建安, 196-220), Zhengshi (正始, 240-249), Taikang (太康, 280-290), Yuanjia (元嘉, 424-453), and Yongming (永明, 483-493). The key finding is the demonstrable increase in the usage and sophistication of parallel structures over time, a rise in complexity that can be understood as a growing number of dimensions along which poets constructed and pursued comparison. This confirms the Six Dynasties as a pivotal era for this poetic technique and validates the quantitative approach for future studies of the five individual periods and their representative poets.

Zong-qi Cai

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