Frog in a Well

Confucianism Today

Posted on April 25, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

Taisu Zhang has an interesting piece on China File analyzing the recent Jennifer Pan and Yiqing Xu paper on ideology in China. Zhang is trying to figure out why Chinese leftists are embracing Confucius. By leftists in a Chinese context he is referring, as Pan and Xu do, to those Chinese who are in favor of

National unity
Party-state
Socialist state/statism
National security
Maoism
Chinese characteristics
State sovereignty
Patriotism
Anti-West
Welfare state*
More intervention
Public interest
Legitimacy of labor gains

The cultural set of ideas that go along with this are

Traditional values
Collectivism
Confucianism
Traditional wisdom
Thriftiness

Their opponents, the Liberals, are more likely to favor things like Western Values, Constitutional Democracy, and Free Markets.

Zhang finds the Leftist interest in Confucianism to be curious. Zhang points out that the Late Imperial Confucians who are the most obvious antecedents for the modern “Leftist” traditionalists were in favor of a strongly decentralized economic and political system, which does not seem to go along with their preferences. This is of course true, and he is quite correct in pointing out the weakness of the “old argument that Confucianism is inherently “pro-government” or “pro-authority,” and therefore naturally inclined to lean “left,” rather than “right,” on the current Chinese political spectrum.” This is true enough in a general sense. Late Imperial Confucians favored a decentralized system, but unlike modern internationalist neo-liberals / libertarians in China or elsewhere they certainly did not do so because they saw market relations as morally superior to everything else (or anything else.) I could be wrong about that of course, since it is not really my field, but I think the whole idea of trying to link Chinese poll respondents to a historically accurate and unitary idea of “Confucianism” is not the right way to go.

As an example, I can imagine a Western country with a political grouping that calls itself “Christian” on the grounds that they favor

-Massive public spending to improve the lot of the poor.
or
-National disarmament and pacifism.
or
-Strict regulation of the sexual behavior of citizens.
or
-Purging those of deviant beliefs from society.

Needless to say these don’t go together very well, but they can all call themselves “Christian.”

So what does “Confucianism” mean in China today, if we assume it is not always because of a strong attachment to the actual structures of historic Confucian states? What sort of Confucianism is Ah Q. Public, poll respondent, getting out of historical dramas on TV and that boxed set of the works of Zeng Guofan? I have no idea of course, but I do have at least one data point. I have been reviewing Jing Liu’s Understanding China Through Comics on this site, and having read that and seen every single historical drama ever aired in China (well, one or two of them anyway) I can tell you what type of person a Confucian is. They are the ones who speak truth to power. In Jing Liu’s books the heroes are usually “scholar-officials.” Hai Rui. Wang Anshi. Zeng Guofan. When China is controlled by the corrupt and the self-serving (which seems to be pretty often) they are the ones who stand up for the common people. Jing Liu is not a scholar, of course, but he is trying to write a series of books that explain the lessons of Chinese history to his kids and everyone else. That type of history is best done through heroes and villains (or praise and blame) and I suspect that if you were to do a thorough and open survey of every person in China about what “Confucianism” meant to them you would get more stories about heroic rebels, virtuous remonstrators and brave patriots than you would detailed analysis of Late Qing ideas about decentralized power. In other words, Confucianism may be more of a cultural term than a political one.

Sadly, we can’t do any follow up questions and find out what Chinese might mean by agreeing that “The Eight Diagrams in the Book of Changes explain many things well” since the Political Compass site that generated the data was blocked by the Great Firewall in March of 2015

Historiography/Literature/Tang

Wang Wei and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Posted on April 11, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

I have been reading Sarah M. Allen’s Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China. One of the main texts she is looking at is the Taiping Guangji (太平广记), a massive collection of …stuff… that was compiled in the Song Dynasty. I call it stuff because both Allen and Lu Xun saw this type of writing (小说) as, sort of, the beginning of Chinese fiction. The full collection, which has never been translated, consists of thousands of short bits of prose writing, some of which can be called gossip, some hagiography some tales of the weird, some historical anecdotes or, maybe, fiction. I liked the chapter on history “Filling the Gaps: Tales On and Against History.” Allen has some stuff on the “gossipy” stories that give a somewhat different take than you get in the Standard Histories. I call them “gossipy” because they really can’t be understood unless you already know who they are talking about and what the context is, which made even more difficult by the fact that it is impossible to date most of these.

I was taken by the account of the young Wang Wei. Although he was later to become a famously serious Buddhist, poet and landscape painter, as a youngster he first came to the attention of Prince Qi, and of the “eldest Princess” as a pipa player. Although the dates don’t really work out, there is speculation that this “eldest Princess” may be the Taiping Princess. She was the daughter of Empress Wu (yes, that Empress Wu) and among other things recommended lovers to her mom. Why claim that it was, perhaps, the Taiping Princess who was Wang’s patron? Well, in part because it makes a strong contrast with his later image. In the story (I think it is this one ) Wang was running around in a rather outré brocade coat(锦绣衣服，鲜华奇异) and playing music that make everyone dance (非一人不舞也). So something like this

This does not fit well with his later image, (although to be fair he seems to have become more serious later in life) and making his patron the Taiping Princess makes it even worse. Any powerful female in a Chinese historical account is likely to be suspected of outrageous sexual behavior, and this is triply true for someone like the Taiping Princess. It seems sort of implicit to me that the story is suggesting that Wang Wei slept his way to the top, or at the very least came to the attention of an older woman with a colorful reputation.

Why does this matter? Is this just a bit of nasty (and false) gossip spread by his enemies? A valuable (and true) account of how political and artistic patronage worked? Allen is primarily interested in connecting these tales to fiction,and especially in how these narratives became more fixed and became something to collect and edit rather than re-write.

As she suggests in her conclusion, however, they can also be connected to historical writing. An angle for further research is.

a more thorough exploration of the world of gossip of the eighth and ninth centuries…and its relationship with the formal historical record. The writers and historians of middle period China evidently saw anecdotal sources and formal history as existing on a continuum. p.274

Leopold von Ranke, the father of modern scientific history recounts that he was enamoured with the books of Sir Walter Scott as a young man. It was only later that he found out that they were not “really” history, but fiction, and he dedicated his life to drawing a sharp line between the two. Allen’s chapter spends a lot of time on stories of the Tang founding where there is a clear distinction between the Standard Histories and accounts she is reading, specifically on the issue of whether Gaozu or Taizong was the “real” founder of the Tang. This is an interesting enough question, but it seems to be mostly based on the distinction between official and unofficial histories. They are both the same type of stories, only one has official sanction and the other does not. The strong point of the book is how it examines all the things that xiaoshuo could be in the Tang, both agreeing with and going beyond Lu Xun. Unfortunately for us historians there is not as much history in here there could be. I don’t think that saying that “anecdotal sources and formal history exist[ed] on a continuum” is the best way of putting it. Just by calling them ‘sources’ you are putting them in a different category than ‘formal history.’ What is a better way of explaining it? Stay tuned for her next book! While you are waiting for the next book, however, this one is well worth reading.

Books/visual culture

Understanding China

Posted on March 22, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

Understanding China through Comics Volume 4 is out! As I have reviewed the other volumes, I was sent a free copy of this one.

This volume deals with the Ming and Qing, and like earlier volumes it is both good and interesting.

The purpose of the volumes is to explain all the things that need to be explained in Chinese history. The series is explicitly aimed at the author’s kids (check out the cover) and it aims to tell the story of China, and give the reader some background on all the things they have or should have heard of. The overall theme is the rise of China and the creation of a middle-class society.

The Ming and Qing will clearly be a tricky period for a project like this. Somewhere in this period China is going to have to start to decline. How to deal with this? How also to deal with the foreigners? He does the latter better than the former.

When explaining history it is good to pick some representative figures and focus on them. The first is the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang. He is really China’s only peasant emperor, and thus he get a lot of play. We get a whole page on how he was born in Fengyang county, which years later would be where peasants spontaneously created the responsibility system making this the starting point of China’s drive to a market economy. So just as Zhu liberated China from the Mongols, so to the people of Fengyang liberated China from Maoism, (Not that he puts it that way.)

Zhu himself is presented as both a bold warrior and a man of the people.

This is somewhat odd, given that Volume Three was quite critical of rulers who ignored or oppressed scholar-officials, and lord knows Zhu Yuanzhang did that. Instead, his dislike for the traditional elite is portrayed as concern for the poor and he is praised for his willingness to stick it to the rich. Unfortunately this paragon died from the exhausting work of trying to keep China’s corrupt officials under control.

The problem with the Ming, ultimately, was that unlike the Song, it was a passive dynasty that was not “active at the forefront of development” thus “resulting in a natural economy dominated by small-scale agriculture.”

(Liu is getting to be more visual in his presentation, but there are still clunker panels like this.) This does not square well with a lot of recent work on the Ming, which sees it as a period of rapid commercial expansion. Liu talks a lot about the fiscal problems of the Late Ming. The chief problem is lack of an effective tax system and, again, inability to control the wealthy and corrupt. This seems to be a common theme of pretty much all Chinese history for him.

We do get a couple more heroes. Wang Yangming, the Confucian philosopher and inspirer of 3 of the 4 great classical novels. (Nice twofer there.) We also get Hai Rui, the famous honest official.

Hai

Hui Rui is worth mentioning partially because he throws Ming corruption into clear relief and also because he will become important later. In the 20th century when a play was made about him “politicians used it to attack each other. This was a prelude to the Cultural Revolution.”

The Qing is portrayed quite favorably. The Manchus adopted to Chinese culture (no multi-ethnic empire here) and China grew rapidly.

qing

A lot of the economic growth stuff that might have been better placed back in the Ming, like New World crops, ends up in the Qing.

America

He has a lot of cool technological and social change stuff in here, but he always seems to imply that the changes were driven by the policy choices of a developmental state. This of course was not true. While there was plenty of economic progress in the Ming and Qing they did not have modern governments trying to encourage such things any more than the Han or the Song did.

The foreigners are of course problematic, and he deals with them well.

Summer

We do of course get the opium trade and the unequal treaties, although I can imagine much more anti-foreign treatments of this. Liu has the problem of explaining what went wrong with China. It was certainly not that the Qing was hopelessly corrupt and backward. Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang are both treated positively.

Zeng

Nor is it that the foreigners are all evil creatures of great evil evilness. The Japanese are treated pretty respectfully, and the hero of modernization is Phillo Norton McGiffin, the American naval officer who worked for China and fought at the battle of the Yalu.

Here he is in the book

Philo

Here he is before and after the battle.

Philo2

Some comic artists like Art Speigelman will occasionally drop a photograph into the text, and this would be a good choice for that.

The real cause of China’s defeat, according the McGiffin was their lack of learning the modern knowledge he wanted to teach them and their outright cowardice in battle. The Battle of the Yalu has some of the most dramatic visuals of the whole series, and I wonder if Liu has been looking at the many Japanese prints of the battle.

Scanned-image-40-0

Liu is rather critical of the upper class Chinese who served as officers in the Navy but failed to defend China or to do anything but worry about themselves. The elite takes another beating in the Boxer uprising. The Boxers are an interesting case for Liu. You could use them to show how annoying missionaries are, but Liu treats missionaries pretty well in this book. (They are after all, spreading foreign knowledge, which is good.) You could emphasize the revolutionary potential of the aroused Chinese peasantry, or the suffering of ordinary Chinese at the hands of the foreign armies, but neither of those are really his style. Instead he blames the whole thing on members of the traditional elite who are trying to stir up trouble by riling up the naive peasants.

Boxers

It will be interesting to see what a volume 5 will be like, if there is one. Liu seems to see Chinese history as primarily a matter of the elite. When they are good, China is good. When their strong tendency to be greedy and self-serving takes over things go wrong. I’m not sure how well this will work for the Twentieth century, but it will be interesting to see.

Books/Ming/Qing/Teaching

Teaching Late Imperial Chinese cultural history

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

Update

So I think I have figured this one out, with a little help from my friends, both here and via e-mail. I will be using Tim Brook’s Troubled Empire to start with.

Tim Brook himself is teaching this class next semester. He is using his own book, and then the next book in the series (Rowe) and that’s it for books. I like starting with a textbook (or having a short textbook) since students are used to them and when done well they explain what needs to be explained. I don’t like building a class too much around textbooks, however, since I have never had a student have much of an intellectual experience from reading one. Maybe Troubled Empire will break the string.

I decided to use Sanyan Stories next.

This is a short version of the much larger three volume collection of Ming dynasty short stories collected by Feng Menglong. The whole massive three volumes of his collection have also been published, but that is a bit much for undergrads. Sanyan is a bit more than they will want to pay for a few stories, but it does have some good ones. It will also be the center of the research project. I like having them do some research, and I think it will work better if you give them a place to start with. There are more than enough stories in this short volume (and the larger three volumes in the library) to get a perfectly acceptable undergraduate paper on “The Ming exam system as seen by Feng Menglong” or “Commerce and Money in Ming China: The evidence from popular fiction”. Or, if they want, they can just use one of these stories as a jumping off point and do a more traditional research paper (with a fair number of other sources) on “Popular cults in Late Imperial Chinese Cities” or “Wives and Concubines in Chinese Law and Custom” Or whatever.

The final book is Empire and Identity in Guizhou

I kept this one because I want at least one monograph. When I teach the intro methods course I always stress that most upper-level history classes will have at least one monogram (young historians must learn the names for different types of books) for them to read, and so they need to learn how to read and analyze a monolith. This is a good monoplane for this class because it is Qing, it deals with the frontier and identity, it has a rebellion in it and it is a good book.

There will be a bunch of other things as well, but this is the core of the class.

__________________

I will be teaching a class in the Fall that I have never done before.

HIST 433 Bandits and Poets: The Cultural and Social History of Late Imperial China

Prerequisites: Sophomore standing and 3 cr of college history

Examines the cultural and social history of Late Imperial China. Includes elite attempts at creating an orderly Confucian society and also how less powerful groups altered of challenged this vision. Discusses the role of commercialization and commercial culture and China as an Early Modern society.

That was the lame description I came up with when I split Modern China into two parts, with the first part (Late Imperial China, ending about 1830) being more social and cultural and the second part being more political and revolutionary.

So now I need to come up with some readings. There is no textbook. I will recommend Brook and Rowe from the History of Imperial China series to anyone who wants to read them. I tend to avoid textbooks as much as I can, since with our students if you want to read anything you need specific assignments that they will get credit for to encourage them. You can do this with quizzes and stuff, and sometimes I do, but if I am going to encourage them through 200+ pages of reading I want something more than a textbook.

Plus, I really like having them read real books. Dr. Rosen told me many years ago that he had forgotten the names of most of his teachers, and certainly all the essay questions he had answered, but he remembered all the real books he had actually read even 40 years later. The students are going to get bunch of articles and primary source stuff (see this for how I tend to structure these things) and do a research project, so I am thinking three books is about the limit, if not way, way, way over it. My current candidates are….

Yu, Li. The Carnal Prayer Mat. Translated by Patrick Hanan. 1st edition. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.

I think this has to be the first book. A nice modern translation of a book that gives you all sorts of things about commercial culture and family and gender. Also sex.

Songling, Pu, and John Minford. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. London; New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

Yes, like the above it is also an elite text. But it is easy to dip into and brings up all sorts of cool things. If I got rid of it what else would I use?

Weinstein, Jodi. Empire and Identity in Guizhou: Local Resistance to Qing Expansion. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013.

I want at least one historical monograph, and this one seems an obvious option. It deals with a lot more Qing and lower class issues. Plus all the cool stuff about frontiers and the Qing as a multi-ethnic empire. What would be better to replace it, especially if you took out Pu Songling?

As I look at this I am thinking of cutting it down to two books, with Carnal Prayer Mat and the Guizhou book staying. A nice bridge book between them would be good…

Any tips or random ruminations are welcome. If you had to teach Late Imperial history around three books, what would they be?

Teaching

How to teach classical Chinese thought?

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 9 Comments

This is more ruminations than anything important, but it is a topic I have been thinking about lately. I usually have to teach Waring States Chinese philosophy in two classes, HIST 206 History of East Asia and HIST 332 History of Early China. Obviously in one I spend more time on it than in the other. In both I usually start with Sima Qian’s story of Sunzi and the concubines, in part because it is a good story, and in part because it is a good way to introduce a lot of themes, like reducing being an aristocrat to a text that can be studied, the shi as wondering consultants, and the idea that with study and mentor-ship anyone can become anything. Even concubines can become warriors. I think I will keep this as the beginning. (Plus, I need Sunzi in there somewhere. Lot of them have heard of him. )

I have usually gone from there to the Confucians, then to the Daoists. In Early China I do more with Mo-zi, the context of all this and the nature of the Classics and the nature of texts and schools etc. etc.. Then I go on to the Legalists, who of course lead into Qin pretty well.

What I have started to wonder is if maybe I would be better off going from Sunzi right to the Legalists. This semester, and many semesters in the past, I find students grasping things better when I talk about ideas that make more sense in a modern context, and the Legalists definitely fit there. Han Fei is easier to grasp for someone from a Hobbseian tradition than the School of the Tillers. To the extent they do “naturally” grasp Confucius or Zhuangzi it is as wisdom literature that they can apply to their own life. That’s fine of course, but I am starting to think that if I want them to approach these texts in historical context (and they are history classes) the Legalists are the best school to start with after Sunzi. The political philosophy makes more sense, Han Fei writes in a less cryptic way that Confucius. (In Early China I can spend more time on the development of rhetoric, naturally.) What to you think? Ignore chronology and go from Sunzi to Han Fei? Or learn how to teach Analects better? I find Analects really hard to do with them, since they can’t do it on their own. Selections from Han Fei they can read outside class and come in with…something at least. Analects not so much.

P.S. I have had luck in the past using Sarah Allen’s The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue to get them into early philosophy. The problem I have with this is that it obviously would not work in History of East Asia and that tends to pull me into more philosophy than I might want in History of Early China.

Military/Sino-Japanese Wars/War

Bombing makes China modern

Posted on February 26, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

One thing that made China truly modern in 1932 and then again in 1937 was that its cities were being bombed. Here is a cartoon by Sapajou, the White Russian cartoonist who was the face of Shanghai in the 1930’s, if you were a foreigner.

The guardian of the “Temple of 10,000 tortures” seems to be mystified by the threat of aerial bombardment, and well he should, since the bombings of European cities in World War One paled besides the bombings of Shanghai, the world’s first modern city. (Assuming that being bombed from the air makes you a modern city.)

Although foreigners were reluctant to take Shanghai bombings seriously, given that both the bombers and the bombed were Asians, the bombings of Shanghai in 1932 and 1937 fit in well with the developing international understanding of war. Inter-war thinkers believed that “the bomber would always get through” i.e. airplanes were the first version of nuclear missiles: they could not be defended against, and would inevitably destroy whichever target the authorities aimed them at. In fact bombing was far more risky and above all more random than they thought.

Paul Fussell discusses how even those subjected to bombing assumed that the targets were chosen rationally, since even assuming that one was being bombed by evil people was preferable to realizing that war was mostly random violence with only the most minimal connection to any possible goal.

Shanghai in 1937 was (or should have been) one of the last gasps of the old innocence where some could assume that the random violence of bombing was due to incompetence of the bombers rather than the nature of modern war. Here is Stillwell, a septic about the power of aviation, describing the early bombings.

“An imposing list of useless and stupid bombings by both sides on targets which by no stretch of the imagination could be said to have any military value. These targets include, for the Japanese, university buildings, a department store, a mission hospital, a railroad station crowded with refugees, and the car of the British Ambassador. About the only thing lacking is an orphan asylum. The Chinese have to their credit a hotel, and American merchant ship, and a street crowd in a densely populated section of the International Settlement; except for the ‘President Hoover’ these cases can probably be laid to the inexperience and nervousness of amateurs rather than to deliberate intention, and the case of the ‘Hoover’ the the unwarranted assumption that she was a Japanese troop transport. ”

Stillwell, report 9588 August 21-Sept 1 1937

In fact, the inability of the Chinese and Japanese pilots to hit what they aimed at was not due to their being Asians, but to the fact that everyone would end up finding that hard to do.

A nice quote if you are interested in the evolution of ideas about war and bombing, or Western ideas about Asians.

1945-1950/visual culture

Manhua Journey to the West

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

I have mentioned Nick Stember before, but now he is doing a full translation of Zhang Guangyu’s manhua version of Journey to the West. This is worth looking into in part because it influences the visual style of so many later versions and also because it was originally done in 1945 and is in part a parody of the corruption and incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime government. Chiang’s government was of course known for its hyperinflation, as if money grew on trees

And also for the brutal work that had to be done to defend the realm.

Nick is not done with the translation yet, but you should check it out.

Literature/Translation

Literary Detectives (SO-27) OR The Strange Affair of the Flesh of the Bosom

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

If you have not read David Lodge’s Small World you should. It is a fine comic academic novel. At one point our hero is in a bar with a bunch of drunken Japanese translators, who are regaling him with Japanese titles of Shakespeare translations, and he then has to guess which Shakespeare play is intended. I had always half wondered where Lodge got all these Japanese titles from, and now, thanks to Google, I know that they come from Shakespeare in Japan: An Historical Survey by Toyoda Minoru

It is a nice read if you are interested in how foreign ideas seep into a culture. Literature was obviously important to the Japanese, and Shakespeare was important to the English, so it is not surprising that they met up. It is interesting, however, how the two cultures manage to speak at cross purposes. Poetry has traditionally had a much higher status than drama in Japan, so it is not surprising that Shakespeare’s poetic output had a much higher profile that you might expect. The plays were at first translated with fairly…creative…titles that reflect what Japanese readers might find interesting in them. Think you can match them up? Some may be used more than once.

The Remains of the Sharpness of the Sword of Freedom

The Strange Affair of the Flesh of the Bosom

The Mirror of the Hero’s Life

Flowers in the Mirror and the Moon in the Water

A Lawsuit about a Pledge of Human Flesh

The Ghost

All for Money

A Tangled Love Story with a Happy Ending

Culture/Food/Pigs

History of Pigs

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

As we seem to be the internet center for Chinese history and pigs I thought I would call to your attention Pigs, Pork, and Ham: The Practice of Pig-Farming and the Consumption of Pork in Ming-Qing China, by Chung-Hao Kuo

Dissertation Reviews does a nice job of explaining how interesting this dissertation is. Pork of course has a history, and until the Tang lamb was much more common in China than pork. By the Ming production and connoisseurship started to evolve, with Jinhua ham as a key example. ” The trajectory of Jinhua ham thus mirrored that of pork in general: depreciation from an item of medicinal value to rare delicacy and, finally, to commonplace dish (for most varieties).”

There have been number of recent works on food in Chinese history, and it is sort of odd that there was not more sooner, given how important food is to Chinese ideas about regional identity. I would guess that gathering sources would be a trick, but it is glad to see people getting beyond that.

English/Foreign Views/Military/Science / Technology/US-Japan/War/昭和

Dastardly, Diabolic, Secret, Silent and Deadly Saboteurs

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

It’s almost like he’s kidding, but surely a professional writer would know that sarcasm doesn’t translate to the page, right? NPR’s Linton Weeks wrote:

Just a few months ago a couple of forestry workers in Lumby, British Columbia — about 250 miles north of the U.S. border — happened upon a 70-year-old Japanese balloon bomb.

The dastardly contraption was one of thousands of balloon bombs launched toward North America in the 1940s as part of a secret plot by Japanese saboteurs. To date, only a few hundred of the devices have been found — and most are still unaccounted for.

The plan was diabolic. At some point during World War II, scientists in Japan figured out a way to harness a brisk air stream that sweeps eastward across the Pacific Ocean — to dispatch silent and deadly devices to the American mainland.

The article goes on from there to describe, in oddly positive language, some of the technical details of this project: “ingenious” and “amazing” and “a piece of art” are invoked, presumably because nobody today has any idea how to make anything other than by ordering kits from Amazon, and no appreciation for the creativity humanity has always displayed when trying to kill other humans.

General/Qing/World/明治

Lagging

Posted on January 10, 2015 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Mohammad Fadel, in Islamic Monthly (h/t Naheed Mustafa) chides critics of Islam who take contemporary Western ideals of egalitarianism and personal freedom as their measure, saying:

In this respect, Maher and Harris reflect the all too common historical amnesia common among liberals, who are too quick to forget the recentness of the egalitarian achievements of the liberal West — many of which only came into existence as part of the post-World War II settlement and have yet to become settled social realities, even among the relatively privileged — and too slow to acknowledge the radical changes that have taken place in most Muslim countries and even Islamic discourse regarding issues such as gender equality over the last one hundred years.

I’m struck by the similarity to something that I emphasize in my Japan and China classes, drawing on something I’m pretty sure Al Craig said to me in a seminar: in the 19th century, discourses on Asia and Africa as ‘lagging’ or ‘uncivilized’ depended a great deal on technological and attitudinal differences with “The West” (very broadly understood) that were actually very recent changes. When Japan reformed its educational and political systems in the late 19th century, it drew on ideas like constitutionalism and public education which were very recent developments. The legal systems studied by Ito Hirobumi in Europe were, for the most part, a few decades old in their present form. The public educational systems studied by Tanaka Fujimaro in the US and Europe were a few decades old, if that. (Only the French system really had any kind of historical depth; the others were newcomers or not yet fully formed national public systems)

William Gibson famously said “The future is here; it’s just not evenly distributed.” This is a problem only when people forget it and begin assigning value to people and social systems based on this distribution. One of the most interesting things about history, I’m starting to realize, is the uneven distribution and adoption of ideas, the creative way in which people ‘remix’ cultures and technologies to suit their own purposes.

(Yes, I should be working on my syllabi and LMS set-up. But if I’m going to get back to blogging, I have to strike while the iron’s hot!)

Posts

The cult of Madame Chiang

Posted on January 4, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Chiang Kai-shek used his wife Soong Mei-ling, as an important part of his attempts to reach out to the Americans and encourage them to see China as a modern nation worthy of their aid in the war with the Japanese.

One excellent example of her image comes from the New York Times. Sept 2, 1937. A un-named Western scribe was brought into the office of Madame Chiang “the chief of China’s air force” (which she was not, although she was the head of one of the aviation committees). Needless to say, her office reflected “both her American college education and her Chinese military training.” She had not only a portable typewriter and two machine guns taken from a Japanese plane, but also a portrait of Jesus and a box of American chocolates.

“Heedless of danger, she watches every Japanese air raid on the capital from an observation post in the open air. Frequently she directs the city’s anti-aircraft defense. Her orders send fleet pursuit ships aloft to harry Japanese bombers.” Of course, in the evening she retires for a half-hour of prayer with her husband.

It’s not a tremendously important article, but it is a nice little example of Chinese propaganda’s presentation of Madame as a Christian Action Girl

Anecdotes/China-U.S.

Modern media culture was born in China. In 1931.

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Did you know that Charles Lindbergh, the biggest media star of the 1930’s, went to China? Well, I didn’t. He was there in 1931, after he had become the Lone Eagle, and thus famous, and before the kidnapping and his more public decent into crypto-fascism. He never seems to have liked fame much, and this is right at the point where he was perhaps finding out how unpleasant it could be, although it was about to get a lot worse.

He was in China because he was pioneering the Great Circle route to Asia in his floatplane. Unlike the people who become famous and then sit around at banquets talking about it, he remaied an aviation pioneer.

I have not yet read his wife’s book on the trip, but I suspect that one of the reasons he used a floatplane was that he was flying into places where you could not count on such mod cons as a working airfield, and might have to make do with an open body of water. In fact, when he arrived in Nanjing there were so many boats waiting to greet him on the river that he was forced to divert into the “Lotus Lake” which might be Xunwu Lake. Once in China he continued he pioneering work, offering to conduct an aerial survey of the areas hit by the Yangzi flood of 1931. You can see some of his pictures here. Here is more on the flood, from an excellent site on the floods and the rebuilding.

The thing that brought this to my attention was his crash in China. Here he is after tipping his plane in the Yangzi river.

I love this picture. I suppose the Colonel could have just let someone else dive in and attach cables to his plane, but looking at him I suspect he was happy to be doing it. When he arrived in China he skipped the welcoming banquet that had been planned for him to get right back in the air and begin surveying flood damage. I have not been to a lot of banquets held in my honor, but I can imagine they would get old pretty quick. Getting back to flying and fixing airplanes must have been nice. Sadly, even barefoot and in a t-shirt his fame followed him. When he was taking off, every crew member of HMS Hermes who owned a camera was waiting to take a picture of him, and there were plenty of shots of the recovery, if not the crash. This, of course, was media gold. Hallett Abend, one of the Old China Hand reporters, relates that the commander of the Hermes confiscated the pictures and offered to sell them to the press, with the proceeds supposedly going to fund a hospital bed, although that seems not to have happened. Abend ended up paying $US 5,000 for the pictures, which is about $78,000 in today’s money. Not a lot compared to what you could get today for pics of Tiger Woods wrecking his car, but still a good example of how modern media culture can track you anywhere. Assuming, of course, that you are worth tracking. Nowadays global media culture is a bit quicker – Abend sent his negatives both by air across the Pacific and by train through Siberia. The event happened on Oct. 2, and the pictures did not make the Times until Oct 29, but the basic idea is the same.

Getting up in the air and getting away from it all must have seemed nice, but the trip also showed Lindy how limited that could be. He could fly over the floods, and was actually helpful in showing that they were bigger than anyone thought, but he wanted to actually help, i.e. return to earth and actually do something. He landed a few times, but at least once, the result was almost disastrous. He and J. Heng Liu, head of China’s public health administration landed at “Hinghwa” in Jiangbei and were besieged and almost sunk by refugees in need not of their cargo of medicine, (which an airplane might carry in useful amounts) but of food. His wife related the story in a radio address carried by the New York Times Feb. 22, 1932. If you want a nice quote on the limits of technology and the inability of the First World to fix the Third, this is it.

“We’re going to start the engine,” shouted out the doctor in Chinese. “If you don’t get back, you’ll all be killed.”

An old woman sat immovable in the front row of boats. “What does it matter?” she asked sullenly, “we have nothing.”

But with the first few explosions of the engine the crowd backed away. the big plane pushed out slowly, trailing a tail of boats until at last it took off straight ahead, regardless of wind-direction-straight ahead over fences and tree-tops and collapsed roofs, anything to get away. Now they were free, high above the black swarm of sampans.

I do not know how those people felt when they saw a last hope disappear into the sky or what those other millions felt who saw us fly over their desolate country. I know, though, that I had a kind of horror that I should be so near to them and have the power of escaping so easily from their misery.

China-Japan/Japan/martial arts/Military/Propaganda

Heroes and big swords in Shanghai

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

The 1932 Shanghai War produced its share of heroes, since any war needs heroes, both for domestic and foreign consumption. I just found two stories of a Chinese hero known to his foreign admirers as “Charlie Chan.” Rhodes Farmer, an Australian reporter, mentioned him in his Shanghai Harvest: Three Years in the China War. He was “Shanghai’s most famous rooftop guerrilla, and the first Chinese hero produced by the foreign Press. This tatterdemalion soldier in a faded blue tunic and shorts that flapped far below his knees became the mascot of the British Tommies.” Charlie and his compatriots were not terribly articulate, since all he seemed to be able to say was “hello” and hun hun hao (very very good) when allowed to inspect a British Lee-Enfield rifle. He was, however, a master of urban guerrilla warfare, and supposedly ranged far beyond enemy lines, ambushing Japanese with his potato-masher grenades.¹ In this version he killed over a hundred Japanese before they adopted the tactic of burning down entire blocks of buildings to get him.

The Americans also referred to a Chinese soldier who they called Charlie Chan, who manage to hold off a Japanese armored car with a machine gun and a collection of grenades. In this version he is a little more modern (he has a machine gun) and a tad more defined. The Americans thought he was a Communist, which I presume means he was from the 19^th Route Army. He handles his machine-gun well, but does not actually kill anyone.

A much more interesting and articulate version of the same man turned up in the China Weekly Review. This is a much more sophisticated piece of propaganda. Here Charlie gets to speak for himself, (he gets a by-line) and explains that he is neither a Chan nor a Charlie, although he does not give his real name. He explains that

I am not a regular army man, but a plain citizen of Shanghai, employed in peaceful times by a local concern.

He was a member of the Shanghai Merchant Volunteer Corps, which had been founded after the Mukden Incident of 1931. In this version, as at the start of the Farmer story, he is in a strongpoint on the edge of the International Settlement. He and his comrades manage to drive off an assault by several Japanese armored cars. Much of the story makes him sound like a modern citizen-soldier, motivated by love of country and willing, like his comrades, to die for it. This Charlie does discuss his habit of exchanging greetings, with Farmer’s Tommies (who become Scots, Lincolnshires, and S.V.C. men in this version) and also with the U.S. 31^st Division. Like Farmer he relates that they (starting with the Americans) tossed “Chesterfields, chocolates and candies” to him. He responded by tossing back some Japanese helmets, souvenirs of the battle in which the foreigners were not fighting. He also tossed them a tin of preserved bamboo shoots once, which caused quite a panic, as it might have been a bomb.

This Charlie is a much more modern Chinese. He is a skilled machine-gunner, far more aware of what is going on around him than in the other versions, and almost looks down at the foreign soldiers who are not fighting and who can’t tell harmless bamboo shoots from a grenade.

On the other hand, Charlie praises the Chinese Big Sword Corps. These were the Chinese soldiers armed with Big Swords 大刀 who first came to prominence in the Shanghai war

Here is how “Charlie” describes them.

I must explain about our Big Sword Corps, because it is not found in the modern army. It is a medieval force, employing primitive swords, such as you find in Roman history. Stripped to the waist, barefooted, these naked envoys of death swear never to return whenever they are sent forth. Armed with a huge sword, a pistol, and many hand grenades that hang around his waist, the Big Sword is a combination of modern and primitive soldier. His face is smeared with black grease, his hair is in disorder, and whenever he kills and enemy he puts his blood on his own face and body. His very sight is frightful even to his own men.

So we have a modern Chinese defending a modern nation, and a nation being defended by ancient and primitive techniques at the same time. I found this story because I am working on a paper on Chinese pilots and their role as symbols of a modern nation, but I may eventually see if I can dig up some more stuff on Charlie. For now, however, here is the story for your amusement. Actually, if you are teaching a Modern China class Charlie’s article might make a good primary source reading. You can find it on Pro-quest Fighting against Japan: From the China Weekly Review Shanghai American-Owned Weekly Chan, Charlie The Living Age (1897-1941); Jun 1932; 342, 4389; American Periodicals pg. 333

Update

Here are a couple of Big Sword pictures from the first months of the war. Both from Five Months of War Shanghai: North China Daily News, 1938. Both pictures suggest that the foreigners, at least, did not take Big Swords seriously as weapons.

p.68 ↩

China/Economics

Salt, China, and Wikipedia

Posted on December 2, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Slate has a post up on the abolition of the Chinese salt monopoly, and they are amazed that something that has existed for 2,600 years is now being abolished. It’s just a short little piece and there is no harm to it, but there is a “China changes after thousands of years of not changing” vibe to it. I was thinking of doing a short post on how complex the history of salt in China actually is. I quickly found out that. Wikipedia has a very nice entry on Salt in Chinese History . If you look at the Talk page you will see that

???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project’s quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project’s importance scale.

in other words, it is not a typical Wikipedia entry and they could not figure out what to do with it. In fact it is rather well-done, and summarizes most of the existing English-language literature. A lot of this has been done by a Canadian named Madalibi and someone named CWH, who I assume is Constance Wilhelmina Haversack . CWH has over 10,000 edits, and if you look at a lot of them they have no rating, as if Wikipedia’s hive mind has no idea what to make of them. It’s a nice example of how on-line China resources are evolving.