Frog in a Well

Chinese Canon wars

Posted on September 28, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

From Xiaoqun Xu¹ we get a wonderful description of a battle over the Chinese canon between Liang Qichao and Hu Shi. This took place in the pages of pages of Qinghua Weekly and Chenbao Fukan in 1923 and, as far as I know ² Xu’s is the only account of this battle between the preeminent Late Qing intellectual and the preeminent May 4th intellectual over the foundation of a proper Chinese education.

Liang’s section on “moral cultivation and intellectual history” includes Analects and Mencius (which should be learned by heart) Changes, Rites, the classical philosophers Debates on Salt and Iron, Bao Bu zi and more. The list runs through Chinese history all the way to the present, where he recommends some of his own works and also some of Hu Shi’s.

The early part of the list shows a bit of a change in Liang’s thinking, since he had been harshly critical of much traditional historical work. At one point ( i.e. the 1902 Xin shixue ) he had wanted to get away from moralizing history and the history of elites and create a “people’s history” that would serve the needs of the nation.³ In 1923, however, he was critical of Hu Shi’s list of key texts⁴ which left out history entirely and was, apparently, far more technical and “modern.”

“In Liang’s view, Hu Shi’s error came from his doubt of ancient records (yigu). Having doubts was a good methodology, but an excessive doubt would also be problematic. If one would totally discard Book of Rites, Classic of Books, and Spring and Autumn Annals in discussing ancient Chinese history, it would amount to throwing away a larger part of Chinese heritage.”

While Liang may have been critical of traditional history as scholarship, he was very much in favor of the idea of classic texts as a means of self-cultivation and as a way of creating a patriotic spirit. He himself remembered listening to his grandfather tell him about the “wise words and noble deeds of heroes and philosophers from history” especially in times of national crisis at the end of the Song and Ming. ( (Luo Zhitian “the Marginalization of Classical Studies and the Rising Prominence of Historical Studies during the Late Qing and Early Republic: A Reappraisal” in Moloughney, Brian, and Peter Zarrow. Transforming History: The Making of A Modern Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2012. p.67 )) It is notable that he recalls studying with his grandfather during the day, but then hearing the stories at night. He is thus seems to be dividing scholarship (written, studied, in the daytime) from moral education/patriotism (oral, experienced, at night). This may help explain why he wants students to memorize (and presumably recite) Analects and Mencius. You can do scholarly work on those texts without memorizing them, but you can’t fully claim them as texts of self-cultivation if you have not memorized them.

Liang makes the distinction between scholarship and self-cultivation even more clear by providing a shorter list of books which everyone, even if they do not wish to be a scholar of National Studies, should learn. You have to study these, or you ” cannot truly be a learned Chinese (zhongguo xueren)” While it was fine for students to go abroad and learn Geology or whatever, they had to study (and memorize) the classics to remain Chinese.

“Being a member of a nation, one must have some understanding of his nation’s good literature. Only learning by heart, can [it] stay in our ‘sub-consciousness,’ take root, and gradually ferment without us realizing it. Sage’s sayings help cultivate our body and soul, and some of them have long since formed the common consciousness in our entire society. Since [we] are members of this society, we should grasp the common consciousness thoroughly so that we do not have a barrier separating us from it. … If you become the best American scholars in body and soul, I am afraid you will have no influence on Chinese culture. If you would have [such influence without any knowledge of national learning], we could have just invited [to China] one hundred and scores of blue-eyed American Ph.D.s, and why would we need you?”

I am somewhat surprised that nothing has yet been written in English about this debate between Liang and Hu. There are of course accounts of debates on how Chinese history should be researched and written, but not much on how and why it should be taught. I suspect that this little exchange caught my eye because I remember the American Canon Wars of the 80’s and 90’s where a great deal of ink was spilled over what books/authors should be considered canonical. Even at the time I thought it was a pretty pointless debate, since they were arguing over what books should be used if the process of American undergraduate education consisted of small groups of people deeply studying important books. As a T.A. at a big state university I knew full well how unrealistic that was. Such lists do, however, make a nice proxy for debating the Soul of Our Culture.

Xu, Xiaoqun. Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Individualism in Modern China: The Chenbao Fukan and the New Culture Era, 1918-1928. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. ↩
which is not very far ↩
Wang, Q. Edward. Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. p. 45-48 ↩
Xu does not reproduce this, and a quick search has not found it for me. Does anyone know where to get a copy of the lists? ↩

Books/China/Historiography/Poetry/Translation

Early Medieval China

Posted on August 23, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

Just for fun I have been reading Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook.¹ It is a very good book, written by a collection of the superheros of the field. The advertising blurb from Columbia calls it “innovative” and it indeed is. Normally a sourcebook is a collection of primary sources aimed, mostly, at undergraduates. This book is rather more ambitious. There are probably a few places where undergraduates take courses specialized enough to merit assigning a book like this, but not many. Mostly it is aimed at scholars, being intended to summarize some of the most important recent work and suggest what might be done in the future. Thus we get Yang Lu explains and translates some of the wooden slips dealing with local administration found at Changsha in 1996, and we also get various tomb texts that have never been translated into English. The introductions to the volume and to the individual sections are the best short introductions to these topics² available in English. The introductions and notes matter a lot. In a more traditional sourcebook editors often look for readings that an undergraduate would be able to get something out of without too much of an introduction or too many footnotes. Sometimes this is not too hard. Confucius talking about being a good person and Xunzi talking about good government are things that most students should be able to pick up on without too much hand-holding. This period is different, however, and while the editors are at pains to point out that there was more going on in the culture of the period than “insect carving”, i.e. the incredibly recondite, allusive writing that the era is notorious for (although they do include Pei Ziye’s ‘Discourse on Insect Carving.’) they have put a lot of work into introducing the otherwise obscure readings and glossing everything that needs to be glossed.

There are, for instance, a whole set of texts that deal with topics that most people who teach the field talk about a lot. There is a nice reading from Ge Hong on the cultural differences between North and South, which is, of course one of the traditional themes of the period. The reading also gives something of the importance of Philology (and Phonology) in the scholarship of the time, as well as the importance of language, a theme that runs throughout the book.

Ge Hong
“ON PRONUNCIATION AND SPEECH”
(YINCI) (EXCERPT)
People of the Nine Provinces speak in different dialects. This has been the norm since the beginning of mankind. [ … ] The land and waters of the South are mild and gentle; [thus] the sound [of Southern speech] is bright and crisp. The shortcoming is its shallowness. Its expressions are mostly vulgar. The mountains and rivers in the North are solemn and deep; [thus] the sound (of Northern speech] is baritone and rotund, taking after the simplicity and ruggedness [of the landscape]. The expressions contain many ancient terms. However, Southern [speech] is finer when spoken by nobles and gentlemen; Northern [speech] is better when spoken by villagers and peasants. One could distinguish in a few words a Southern gentleman from a commoner, even if they exchanged clothes. One would have difficulty differentiating between a Northern courtier and a countryman even after listening [to them] all day from behind a wall. Moreover, Southern speech has been influenced by [the dialects of] Wu and Yue; Northern speech has [the languages of] barbarians and captives mixed into it. Both have deep flaws that cannot be discussed in detail here.[ … ] Since I arrived at Ye, I find only Cui Ziyue and his nephew Cui Zhan Li Zuren and his younger brother, Li Wei to be knowledgeable in speech and slightly more accurate [in pronunciation]. Resolving Doubts About Sounds and Rhymes composed by Li Jijie [lived during Northern Qi], contains many mistakes. The Classification of Rhymes, devised by Yang Xiuzhi is perfunctory. The [pronunciation of the] children of my house, since their childhood, has been watched and corrected. I take any mispronunciation of a character as my own fault. When determining what an object should be called, I dare not utter its name without first consulting books and records-this you know well.
[Yanshi jiaxun jijie, 529-45]

On the other hand they also have all sorts of things that don’t fit the traditional picture of the period as well. Shu Xi’s “Rhapsody on Pasta” is a good example.

…At the beginning of the three spring months
When yin and yang begin to converge,
And the chilly air has dispersed,
When it is warm but not sweltering,
At this time for feasts and banquets
It is best to serve mantou. 32

When Wu Hui governs the land,33
And the pure yang spreads and diffuses,
We dress in ramie and drink water,
Cool ourselves in the shade.
If in this season we make pasta,
There is nothing better than bozhuang. 34

When the autumn wind blows fierce, 35
And the great Fire Star moves west,36
When sleek down appears on birds and beasts,
And barren branches appear on trees,
Dainties and delicacies must be eaten warm.
Thus, leavened bread may be served.37

In dark winter’s savage cold,
At early-morning gatherings,
Snot freezes in the nose,
Frost forms around the mouth,
For filling empty stomachs and relieving chills,
Boiled noodles are best.

Thus, each kind is used in a particular season,
Depending on what is apt and suitable for the time.
If one errs in the proper sequence,
The result will not be good.

Ok, so just like in the ancient texts, you need to adopt your foods to the season. Obviously if one does not the results for your health and the balance of the universe will not be good. Is there anything that, like chicken soup with rice, is good all times of the year? Yes, there is.

That which Through winter, into summer,
Can be served all year round,

And in all four seasons freely used,
In no respect unsuitable,
Can only be the boiled dumpling. 38

And then, twice-sifted flour, 39
Flying like dust, white as snow,
Sticky as glue, stringy as tendons,
Becomes moist and glistening, soft and lustrous.

For meat There are mutton shoulders and pork ribs,
Half fat, half skin. It is chopped fine as fly heads,
And strung together like pearls, strewn like pebbles.
Ginger stalks and onion bulbs,
Into azure threads are sliced and split.
Pungent cinnamon is ground into powder,
Fagara and thoroughwort are sprinkled on.
Blending in salt, steeping black beans,
They stir and mix all into a gluey mash.

And then, when the fire is blazing and the hot water is bubbling,
Savage fumes rise as steam.
Pushing up his sleeves, dusting off his coat,
The cook grasps and presses, pats and pounds.
Flour is webbed to his finger tips,
And his hands whirl and twirl, crossing back and forth.
In a flurrying frenzy, in a motley mixture,
The dumplings scatter like stars, pelt like hail.
Meat does not burst into the steamer,
And there is no loose flour on the dumplings.
Lovely and pleasing, mouthwatering,
The wrapper is thin, but it does not burst.
Rich flavors are blended within,
A plump aspect appears without.
They are as tender as spring floss,
As white as autumn silk.
Steam, swirling and swelling, wafts upward,
The aroma swiftly spreads far and wide.

So now you have a recipe to try. Thoroughwort is, I think, Bone-set, and I would not use it in food, but the rest should be easy enough to find.
There are also readings on topics that have always been aspects of the Great Tradition, but have gotten less attention in the past. Thus we have a whole section on Auto-cremation. If you have been wondering how immolation fits into the Buddhist tradition there are readings here for you.

THE SONG MONK HUIYI (D. 463)
OF ZHULIN SI IN THE CAPITAL

Huiyi was from Guangling. When he was young, he left home and followed his master to Shouchun During the Xiaojian period of the Song [454-456] he arrived in the capital [Jiankang] and resided at Zhulin si. He diligently practiced austerities, and he vowed to burn his body. When his fellow monks heard of this, some castigated him while others praised him. In the fourth year of Daming [460], he began by abstaining from cereals and ate only sesame and wheat. In the sixth year, he stopped eating wheat and consumed only oil of thyme.17 Sometimes he also cut out the oil and ate only pills made of incense. Although the four gross elements [of his body] became feeble, his spirit was clear and his judgment was sound.

Emperor Xiaowu [r. 454-464] had a profound regard for Huiyi and respectfully inquired [as to his intentions]. He dispatched his Chief Minister Yigong, Prince of Jiangxia. [413-465], to the monastery to reason with him. But [Hui] yi would not go back on his vow. On the eighth day of the
fourth month of the seventh year of the Darning reign period [May 11, 463], he prepared to burn himself.

He set up a cauldron full of oil on the southern slope of Zhong shan That morning, he mounted an oxcart drawn by humans and was going from the monastery to the mountain. But then he realized that the emperor was not only the foundation of the people but also the patron of the three jewels
He wanted to enter the palace under his own strength, but when he reached the Yunlong gate he could no longer proceed on foot. He sent a messenger to say, “The man of the Way, Huiyi, who is about to abandon his body, is at the gate and presents his farewells. He profoundly hopes that the
Buddha dharma may be entrusted [to his majesty].” When the emperor heard his message, he was upset and immediately came out to meet him at the Yunlong gate. When [Hui]yi saw the emperor, he earnestly entrusted the Buddha dharma to his care, then he took his leave. The emperor followed him. Princes, concubines, empresses, religious, laity, and officials flooded into the valley. The robes that they offered and the treasures that they donated were incalculable.

Huiyi now entered the cauldron, lay down on a little bed within it, and wrapped himself in cloth. On his head he added a long cap, which he saturated with oil. As he was about to apply the flame to it, the emperor ordered his chief minister to approach the cauldron and to try to dissuade him. (Yigong pleaded], “There are many ways to practice the path; why must you end your life? I wish you would think again and try a different track.” But Huiyi’s resolve was unshakable and he showed no remorse. He replied, “This feeble body and this wretched life, how do they deserve to be retained? If the mind of Heaven and the compassion of the sage [i.e., the emperor] are infinite, then my wish is merely that twenty people [be allowed to] leave home.” An edict ordering these ordinations was immediately issued. [Hui]yi took up the torch in his own hand and ignited the cap. With the cap ablaze, he cast away the torch, put his palms together, and chanted the “Chapter on the Medicine King.” As the flames reached his eyebrows, the sound of his recitation could still be clearly discerned. Reaching his eyes, it became indistinct. The cries of pity from the rich and poor echoed in the dark valley. They all clicked their fingers [in approval]; they intoned the name of the Buddha and cried, full of sorrow.

The fire did not die down until the next morning. At that moment, the emperor heard the sound of pipes in the air and smelled a strange perfume that was remarkably fragrant. He did not return to the palace until the end of that day. In the night he dreamed that he saw Huiyi, who came striking a bell. Again [the monk] entrusted to him the Buddha dharma. The next day, the emperor held an ordination ceremony. He ordered the Master of Ceremonies to give a eulogy for the funeral service. At the place of the autocremation was built Yaowang si in an allusion to [Huiyi’s recitation of] the “Original Acts.”

As I said above, I can’t imagine teaching a class where I would be able to assign this to students, but it is a great beach read.

Swartz, Wendy, Robert Ford Campany, Yang Lu, and Jessey J. C. Choo. Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook. Columbia University Press, 2013. ↩
“Relations with the Unseen World, Everyday Life, Imaging Self and Other, Cultural Capital, Governing Mechanisms and Social Reality, The North and the South” ↩

Books/China/English/Song/visual culture

Understanding China Through Comics

Posted on August 22, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

The third volume of Understanding China Through Comics is out, and it is good. In my previous reviews I talked about how well the books explained Chinese history and how well they worked visually. As before, the answer to both is pretty well, and they are getting better.

This volume goes from 907-1368, so we get the Song and the Yuan. This is a tricky period to deal with visually. There are a lot of foreigners around, and it is hard to distinguish them. Different hats will help.

Unlike western writers, Liu is committed to explaining all the political ins and outs of this period, and he does a pretty good job of sorting out the constant political shifts, although reading this also helps explain why so may other authors don’t bother with all this.

As in the earlier volumes there is a lot of stuff explaining the past in terms of the present, so Song commercialization/technical advances is done through by having Malcom Gladwell drop by to discuss rice paddies.

The Song is actually a pretty interesting test case for Liu’s central thesis, that Chinese history is a 5,000 year quest to create a middle-class society, given that this is the time of the birth of an early modern commercial society and a time of great technological advance. Most importantly, this was the time of Wang Anshi. Wang’s reforms have garnered a lot of attention in the 20th century, since he is the Chinese official who’s policies can be most easily linked to the present. If you want to find signs of modern administration, the welfare state, democracy, or incipient Communists totalitarianism in traditional China, Wang’s reforms are where you look. Liu is clearly a member of Team Wang, presenting him as an upright technocrat who should have been listened to. The Song is also portrayed as the age when the “scholar-officials” came fully into power, and the idea that these upright technocrats were admirable and sacrosanct came from here. No more executing those who speak truth to power!While all the above is both pretty good history and also clearly has modern resonances, Liu does point out that you can’t read Chinese nationalism back into the past. Here we have peasants telling each other that it does not much matter who they are paying taxes to. This makes the books quite different from a lot of the Chinese history you see in China, where all of China’s 56 ethnic groups have always been modern nationalists. Unfortunately, Liu does gloss over some of the more bothersome aspects of China’s past. Footbinding is a good example. In this book it is presented as a way of protecting Chinese women from being carried off by barbarians.

Nobody has a really good explanation for why footbinding spread, but needless to say this is not one of the possible explanations. More importantly, this page reconciles me to the fact that Liu is not planning to go past 1911 in his history. If you won’t look at the uglier part of your history, what can you do with those who rebel against it? If you leave out what footbinding really was you can’t do Joe Hill or MLK, or Lu Xun or Liang Qichao. I guess they are just nagging troublemakers, rather than the best of what you are.

ALSO

At the same time the new, re-drawn and expanded revised edition of Volume One is out.
¹ Liu seems to be warming to his task, and in this new world of publish on demand he can re-work his stuff as much as he wants. Here is China surrounded by foes in the introduction to the old Volume 1

And here it is on p.13 of the new version

Not only are the drawings more detailed, they are better in that they convey more. You can loose yourself in the second one in a way you can’t in the first version.

Here is the old version of Confucianism as a means of social mobility

Here is the new.

He has also expanded some parts. In the last version I mentioned that this was about as well as you could explain Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism in one page,

but also pointed out that it might be o.k to use more than one page. Here is (part of) the new version.

We also get a bit more history of technology, and also a tendency to have characters leap out of the page to explain things to us.

It is still pretty much the same book, only better.

Jing Liu claimed he “fixed some of the problems you pointed out.”, and while I doubt I had much influence on what he did, it is nice to think that this is a blog that Gets Results. ↩

Books/China/Science and Technology/Sino-Japanese Wars/War

So that's why..

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

I’ve been reading Peter Harmsen’s Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze. I like it a lot. Part of the reason I like it is that he is a journalist who has worked in China for years and now and has written quite a good book, based on both Chinese and western sources. As I have discussed before, I am really envious of my Americanist colleagues who can give students all sorts of academic stuff, popular stuff written by academics, stuff written by non-academics that is quite good, etc. Until recently all we had for the China field was academic stuff, a small amount of non-academic crud, and very little in between. This is starting to change, and this book is a good example of it.

One thing that it helped clear up for me is why the Chinese. bombed the Great World Amusement Center in 1937. This is a pretty famous incident from early in the battle where Chinese planes aiming for the Japanese cruiser Izumo, which was anchored in the Huangpu river, instead bombed the Great World and killed hundreds of civilians. This was actually a pretty important historical event, not only for those killed but because China was trying to convince the world that they were a major power worthy of help for reasons beyond pity. The poor performance of the Chinese bombers was not helping the cause.

Chinese bombers hit a number of targets near the river, but the Great World is miles away. Apparently, the best explanation for how they managed to miss so badly was that the Chinese pilots were expecting to bomb from 7,000 feet but had to drop down to 1,000 due to weather.¹ Unfortunately they did not adjust their bombsites. Not a huge historical issue, to be sure, but something that has always bugged me.

More on the book here. Harmson blogs here

p.63 ↩

China/Public History/Qing

Something new at the Old Summer Palace?

Posted on July 22, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

I was at the Old Summer Palace in Beijing (Yuanmingyuan) There was something there I did not remember seeing before.¹ They have replicas of the zodiac heads out for you to look at! Seen up close they look like a rather scary trial scene.

The heads were once in one of the main fountains, and were looted by the British and French in 1860. The return of the zodiac heads was big news a while back. Lillian Li gives a nice overview of the story of the burning of the Summer Palace and the subsequent history of the site. Particularly under the Communists it became a go-to site to explain the evils of foreign imperialism, and I can still remember listening to schoolkids get lectures about the evils of foreigners there. The site has been changing some of late though. Part of it is that the Qing emperors are starting to look better and better. They used to be feudal oppressors, now they are great Chinese rulers who happen to have come from a minority nationality. This makes it easier to play up the site a little more. Part of it also is the zodiac heads. As they came from the Summer Palace, are easily identified, and show up in the collections of rich foreigners and foreign museums they are a great symbol of China’s stolen cultural patrimony. They make an even better symbol because the Chinese care about them more than foreigners do. They are really not very important as works of art, so foreigners are willing to give them up. The Elgin Marbles may be precious to Greece, but they are also among the crown jewels of the British Museum, so they are not going anywhere for now. With a bit of pressure, and cash, China can get the heads back. Also, China is not Greece. The two heads that China got back in 2013 were donated back by the head of Christie’s, a luxury brand that of course sells a lot in China.

I have not kept track of the exhibits at the Summer Palace and how and when they have changed, but my impression is that they are getting better. Better in the sense that the site is a place where China was despoiled by foreign imperialism, but also a site of cultural mixing of all sorts. There has been a lot of scholarship on this sort of thing, (see Lillian Li) and some of it is trickling into the exhibits. There is a lot more there than I remember on the Jesuits, and they have a series of before and after pictures showing the site in 1873, 13 years after the looting, and now, subtly making the point that a lot of what happened there happened after the looters left. A surprising number of things that have been restored to the site were found “on the campus of Beijing University.” You really could make a marvellous museum out of all the things the site has been over the years, and it is nice to see that they are at least making baby steps in that direction.

I think I was last there in 2010? In any case they may have been there already and I just missed them ↩

Books and Articles/Food/Japan/Nationalism

Science, Social Science, and Pseudoscience of Diet/Culture Thesis

Posted on July 7, 2014 by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

Eminent food historian Rachel Laudan alerted me recently to the existence of new scholarship, cultural psychology, giving support to the idea that different basic grains gave rise to different cultures which have measurable effects at the individual level: “Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture.” The research is intriguing for its attempted rigor: From a quantitative social science perspective, they did everything right.

Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East Asia with the West. However, this study shows that there are major psychological differences within China. We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, whereas farming wheat makes cultures more independent, and these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world. We tested 1162 Han Chinese participants in six sites and found that rice-growing southern China is more interdependent and holistic-thinking than the wheat-growing north. To control for confounds like climate, we tested people from neighboring counties along the rice-wheat border and found differences that were just as large. We also find that modernization and pathogen prevalence theories do not fit the data.

There’s a problem here, though, that scientists and statisticians refer to as “prior plausibility”: it’s not enough that you can create an experiment to test for a difference, but there has to be a good reason to create the experiment in the first place. If there isn’t, then the concept of “statistically significant correlation” becomes meaningless. This is Bayesian statistics, as I understand it.

As Rachel Laudan and her commenters point out, there are good historical reasons to believe that many wheat-cultivating cultures were at least as collective-minded as rice-growing cultures are presumed to be; similarly, there’s plenty of research pointing out the individualistic and profit-oriented elements of early modern Japanese and Chinese peasant societies.

The upside of this is that it finally spurred me to pick up Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self: Japanese Identities Through Time which is often cited in these discussions. As I said on twitter, I’ve been reluctant largely because citations to it seemed mostly to be used to bolster arguments like those above: that something fundamental about rice cultivation — usually the collectivist village, as imagined in modernity — is the heart or essence of Japanese Civilization since forever, etc. What I found, as most of you know, is a fairly satisfying and subtle discussion of the way in which symbols work in cultures, with a “side dish” of historical skepticism about the actual role of rice and of agriculture. The way in which the discourse of Japan as made up of rice cultivating rural communities has obscured many elements of change over time, including the diversity of rural production, hunter-gatherer traditions, non-agricultural commoners, and the value of mobility and urbanization in modernity.¹

In fact, it seems like most of the citations to Rice as Self that I’ve seen over the last ten years have been very weak ones: Ohnuki-Tierney doesn’t support the “rice creates culture” argument (at least not here; this is 20-year old scholarship, and she’s been busy since then) and I strongly suspect that the evidence doesn’t, either.

I’ll admit, anthropological semiotics still feels very circular to me: the chicken-egg problem of cultural re/production, activity/agency never feels quite resolved or quite grounded. ↩

anniversaries/Authors/China/Literature/Maoist era (1949-1976)

Orwell and China

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

I have been meaning to blog about Ibisbill’s post on George Orwell and China, but as I have not come up with anything to say, I suppose I should just toss the link out. As he points out, Orwell, talked a bit about China. This seems mostly (to me) to have been in reference to India. Orwell spent the war years broadcasting propaganda to India, trying to convince Indians that siding with the Japanese was a bad idea. He eventually became disgusted with what he was doing and quit, His final transmission to India ended with

Perhaps the best answer to the propaganda which the Japanese put out to India and other places is simple the three words LOOK AT CHINA. And since I am now bringing these weekly commentaries to an end I believe those three words LOOK AT CHINA are the best final message I can deliver to India. ¹

The post also talks a bit about Orwell’s enlightened ideas about the colonized as people. It is one of my regrets as a teacher that I can’t really ask students to read “Not Counting Niggers” since they always give me a funny look when I suggest they read it. Ibisbill goes on to talk about Chinese translations of 1984, Despite what he says, I struggle to think about how this book might be relevant to China today.

W.J. West ed. Orwell: The War Commentaries New York: Pantheon, 1985 p.219 ↩

China/Nationalism/visual culture/Web Sites and Resources

I would totally buy this, and so would you.

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 4 Comments

Chinese Posters sells copies of some of its stuff, but not of this.

“To love the country one must first know its history”¹

This would look perfect in the hallway of every History Department in the world. We may think that historical study is more than just training in patriotism, but we know that a -lot- of the funding for historical stuff comes from just that. For a reminder of how important history is, and some of its implications you can’t beat this. Would you buy a copy?

Ok.a better translation of would be “To love the country one must first know the country” History as such is only mentioned in the book title. ↩

China/English/Public History/Qing/visual culture

China's first statue?

Posted on May 22, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

I found this in 圖書日報, I think from 1910. It is a statue of Lin Zexu that may be China’s first public statue. It is of course not the first statue to exist in China, but it may be the first time China had a proper Western-style Public Statue made of bronze. There was never much of a Chinese tradition of statuary and certainly none of public commemorative statues.

Continue reading →

Anecdotes/China/Classics

Confucius say….

Posted on May 13, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 4 Comments

For many years I have wanted to find a fortune cookie that actually had a piece of paper with “Confucius Say:…” followed by an actual quote from Confucius. I am not betting on it, one because the ‘Confucius Say’ thing is dead in U.S. fortune cookies¹ and, more importantly, because Confucius has still not become a historical figure in the West. By this I mean that quotes from the big C are usually the standard “You wantee eggwoll with that?” Eastern Wisdom stuff. Just like there are lots of people who think that the main take away from Socrates is “Like sands of the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.” and that the central message of Buddhism is “Every man for himself.” there are lots of people who are happy to quote Confucius without making any effort to find out what the text actually says, in a way they would never do with Emerson or Henry Kissinger.

This came to mind while reading about the Confucius Institute in the Times Higher Education supplement. Here I learned that “The wheel of fortune turns round incessantly, the Chinese philosopher Confucius said.” I didn’t remember that from Analects, or anywhere else, and while it turns up on Google lists of quotes from Confucius the locus classicus seems to be Oliver Goldsmith who cites Confucius as saying “The wheel of fortune turns incessantly round; and who can say within himself I shall to-day be uppermost”. I was actually pretty happy to find this, as it is an actual classical source for this quote² I assume the author was using the quote to make some sort of subtle point about the differences between Confucius and foreign understandings of his ideas, but I am not quite sure what that point was.

So, what are your favourite bits of Eastern Wisdom, and have you been able to figure out where they come from?

Was it ever common? I don’t remember ever seeing it. ↩
Goldsmith counts ↩

China/English/Teaching/visual culture/Web Sites and Resources

The internet is awesome-Chinese history in film version

Posted on April 22, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

British Pathé has put some 80,000 of their old newsreels on YouTube. This is a massive treasure trove of cool stuff, and the many hours I will spend looking at them are fully justified as “work”. A lot the commentary is bland, foreigner-centered and uninformed, but the pictures are great.

Civil War in China. (1922) Not much analysis, but a a nice funeral.

Some of these are listed as unknown material with no date. such as. World Faces Crisis As Japan And China Clash In Far East (1938) I suppose I should comment and tell them what this is.

Some of it might be quite useful for research. Would you like to see a film of the official parade at the inauguration of the Japanese puppet government of Canton? With street drama and everything?

Maybe Village Children Of South China (1951) is more your style?

Or Nationalist troops in Nankin in 1927?

China Fish People (1930)?

An opium burning which I think is the one in 1919?

Not only is all this great content searchable, it is also free! This is the type of thing that convinces me that inventing the internet may not have been a mistake after all.

What are your favorites? You can go to the Pathe channel here https://www.youtube.com/user/britishpathe and click on the magnifying glass to search.

China/English/Maoist era (1949-1976)/Media

Socialism is good

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

Finally. Just in time for the end of the semester.

I managed to find an on-line version of Socialism Is Good.

Well, not just a version. There are lots of fairly standard ones out there.

but the first one is, I think, one that was recorded back in the 90’s by the Beijing Modern Art Band or something like that.¹ It is a bit more….peppy that you might expect. I remember having a long argument with a Chinese friend over whether is was a bunch of cadre kids trying to make the CCP cool, or a bunch of anti-party types mocking one of the great red anthems. I took the later position, but I will have to see what the kids say about it.

I found it, by the way, from an American right-wing site that suggests that thanks to Obama we may all be singing this pretty soon. Maybe you should learn the lyrics now, while it’s still optional.

I swear that cassette is in one of my boxes downstairs. I really need to dig it out. ↩

China/Public History/Web Sites and Resources

Digital History and teaching

Posted on April 19, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Yoni Applebaum has apparently taken a break from filming The Matrix 4 to record a clip on The Historian in The Digital Age. For those of you don’t know him, Yoni is a grad student in history who managed to parlay some blog comments into a gig at the Atlantic. In the clip he talks about Digital History as being able to work with the various digital sources that now exist, will exist in the future, and which will become obsolete. He talks more, however, about finding new places to put your stuff, and finding new audiences to talk about the past with. He stresses that most of what he he does for the Atlantic is the same type of thing he does in his academic work. “synthesize the existing scholarly literature, blend it with new primary research and come to a conclusion.” On the other hand with his Atlantic audience he does not have to do a full-blown scholarly treatment of something. He also does not have to be a real expert in the sense you would need to be to publish academic stuff on these topics. I assume he is a fine academic historian, but pretty much anyone who knows the literature can add a lot to most American/internet discussions of…anything.

Listening to this makes me think about a couple things.

-Feedback. He mentions that you get quicker feedback doing digital history. That is true, but not really the most interesting point. How does an academic historian get feedback? Some of it is book reviews and snide footnotes and lack of job interviews, but all of that is very slow. I think it helps a bit to think of Digital History (which to me is mostly blogging) as a form of teaching. Thus feedback is reading the comment section, checking your website traffic, etc. Or, of course, grading papers. Neither of these are normally listed among the joys of the job, but they really are important. Grading can be unpleasant, but it is far, far, far, more useful in helping you think about what you are doing than student evaluations or peer observations. Grading is better than a comment section because you have a captive audience that you have power over.¹ If students are not answering questions the way you would like maybe you are asking the wrong questions, giving them the wrong sources, or not teaching them how to think about the sources the way you would like. Everyone who teaches had gotten halfway though a pile of student writing and asked themselves what went wrong.

With blogging, or any other forms of digital/public² history the feedback loop is a lot…loopier. Anyone can show up and say anything, and their agendas may not be yours. Heck, some of them may not even have done the reading! Some of them are telling you that you are the cat’s pyjamas, which is nice, but does not help much. The ones who have engaged with what you are teaching but are not entirely satisfied are the ones you think the most about. Who is your audience? What do you want them to come away with? Sadly, in order to get enough feedback to really think about, you have to ramp things up to the point where you are also getting a lot of crud. You could deploy some sort of moderation system (run by avid readers/TA’s) but that turns it into a whole different sort of thing.

Applebaum talks about all the places you can put things, but it might help to think more about who the audience is, and why were are doing this, and how we assess (that word!) how well we have done it. Is it just hit count? I know it is for the Atlantic, but I suspect Yoni cares about more than that. Getting some citations in paper? Kind e-mails? I would like to think that digital history, like teaching, is a craft that we practice in part because it satisfies us personally, besides pleasing the powers that be, but a blog needs to go beyond a personal intellectual diary if you want to claim that you are really doing history. I am really not sure to think about all the digital stuff people are doing. It it just the old model, only not on paper? Or something else? Why bother having a site like Frog In A Well?³

-It’s really sad how little historical awareness the historical profession has. Applebaum is, like all the digital history people, filled with the spirit and trying to convert people. But writing about the past actually goes farther back than the birth of the modern research university and the modern Great Wall dividing academic and popular history.⁴ In China, to choose just one place, there were all sorts of ways of writing and talking about the past (or other things) and even in the West and the gatekeeper role of modern academic credentialing/publishing is pretty recent. Obviously lots of people are aware of this, but I would like to imagine that historians would be -more- aware. Not happening, from what I can see. A historical change is happening, and historians as a group are less aware than others about how to deal with it.

Via Coates

Be as fun-loving and interesting as you want, but when you teach you are The Man. ↩
no, they are not the same ↩
One nice thing about the new model is that if this were an article a nasty editor would tell me I have not yet figured out what to say about this. In the new digital world I can just hit post, and either people will help me figure this out, or it will just vanish ↩
I call it a Great Wall because it is supposed to be a sharp line, visible from space, that clearly divides the two, but in reality nobody is sure why it is there, it is often not there, and the people on each side are obsessed with what those on the other side are up to. ↩

Academia/Film/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/Memory/Pedagogy/US-Japan

ASPAC 2014 Abstract: Japanese Historical Process in Anglophone Cinema

Posted on April 13, 2014 by Jonathan Dresner / 8 Comments

It’s that time of year again, when procrastinators do their taxes, spring cleaning, and summer abstract writing in one weekend!

My proposed paper for ASPAC this year (at Western Washington in Bellingham) is a variation on something I’ve been working on for a while now, no surprise to longtime readers of this blog, or of HNN, or to my students who have heard me rant and rail about the tragedies of historical fiction and historical movies for a decade or more. I’m going to try to focus on a kind of historiographical reading of the movies, and to talk about how we as public experts, teachers and writers, might productively respond to or use these works.

Here’s the abstract itself, which was limited to 100 words:

Japanese Historical Process in Anglophone Cinema
History is a rich vein of stories and settings, and popular historical movies can have immense effects on the historical understanding of general publics. This is especially true in Japanese history in English-speaking societies, where knowledge is often limited to one-sided understandings of unique episodes and orientalist mythologies of unchanging culture. This paper will examine a number of English-language movies, recent and older, not to catalog historical errors, but to understand how historical memory and Japanese historical processes are understood and portrayed. Finally, this paper will consider how that might affect the work of Japan specialists addressing these audiences.

I have a preliminary list of movies to address, most of which I’ve seen. I’d be interested to know if anyone out there has ideas about other films to consider?

The Last Samurai
47 Ronin (see also)
Letters from Iwo Jima
The Barbarian and the Geisha
Memoirs of a Geisha
Shogun
Karate Kid 2
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III

Obviously, some of these are more important than others, in terms of audience range and likely effect on people’s ability to think about history in a coherent fashion: KK2 is probably more important than TMNT3, and the John Wayne, whatever its flaws or virtues, isn’t going to be more than a faint echo in the historical consciousness of contemporary audiences. The more recent films, including the wretched mess from Christmas, are going to weigh more heavily.