Frog in a Well

Literature/Qing/Teaching/Textbooks/Translation

Shen Fu vs. Zhang Daye

Posted on November 23, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 4 Comments

One thing I always have to do as a teacher is figure out what books to assign. Since I always find this hard to do, I thought I would think it out in terms of MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch. So, for this episode we have.

Shen Fu Six Records of a Floating Life

Zhang Daye’s World of a Tiny Insect

Which is the best book to assign?

Where they fit

Both of these are books for HIST 206 History of East Asia. I suppose they could go in something like a Late Imperial China class, but since so many of my students are replicants I try not to re-use books in different classes. For this type of class I want something short and in paperback that is readable yet deals with some important issues. There are usually lots of memoirs and such in the modern period, but in terms of spacing things out it is nice to have something early modern.

Other things that have more or less gone in this slot over the years are

-Keene trans. Chushingura

Katsu Kokichi Musui’s Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai

Spence, Death of Woman Wang

Schneewind Tale of Two Melons: Emperor and Subject in Ming China (well, I liked it)

Recently Shen Fu has had a long run and I have been pretty happy with it. This Fall, however I shifted to Zhang Daye, and I am not yet sure if I should stick with it.

Both of them are written by low-ranking members of the literate elite. Both of them are “hard to follow” because they “jump around.” Both of them, especially Zhang, require you to read a fair number of footnotes to get all the allusions and references in them.

In Shen Fu we get lots of stuff about his relationship with his family (mostly his father) and his not-very successful career as a government clerk and literatus His main advantage is probably that he is married, and his relationship with his wife is a major part of the book. (It is actually a pretty well-known book in China for that reason.) She, for instance, is not very happy with her restrictions as a woman, and a one point he helps her dress up as a man so she can see the sights

One year some friends of mine invited me to go and help to arrange their flowers, so I had a chance to see the festival myself. I went home and told Yun (his wife) how beautiful it was.

‘What a shame that I cannot go just because I am not a man,’ said Yun.

‘If you wore one of my hats and some of my clothes, you could look like a man.’

Yun thereupon braided her hair into a plait and made up her eyebrows. She put on my hat, and though her hair showed a little around her ears it was easy to conceal. When she put on my robe we found it was an inch and a half too long, but she took it up around the waist and put on a riding jacket over it.

‘What about my feet?’ Yun asked.

‘In the street they sell “butterfly shoes”,’ I said, ‘in all sizes. They’re easy to buy, and afterwards you can wear them around the house. Wouldn’t they do?’

Yun was delighted, and when she had put on my clothes after dinner she practised for a long time, putting her hands into her sleeves and taking large steps like a man.

But suddenly she changed her mind. ‘I am not going! It would be awful if someone found out. If your parents knew, they would never allow us to go.‘

I still encouraged her to go, however. ‘Everyone at the temple knows me. Even if they find out, they will only take it as a joke. Mother is at ninth sister’s house, so if we come and go secretly no one will ever know.’

Yun looked at herself in the mirror and laughed endlessly. I pulled her along, and we left quietly. We walked all around inside the temple, with no one realizing she was a woman. If someone asked who she was, I would tell them she was my cousin. They would only fold their hands and bow to her.

At the last place we came to, young women and girls were sitting behind the throne that had been erected there. They were the family of a Mr Yang, one of the organizers of the festival. Without thinking, Yun walked over and began to chat with them as a woman quite naturally might, and as she bent over to do so she inadvertently laid her hand on the shoulder of one of the young ladies.

One of the maids angrily jumped up and shouted, ‘What kind of a rogue are you, to behave like that!’ I went over to try to explain, but Yun, seeing how embarrassing the situation could become, quickly took off her hat and kicked up her foot, saying, ‘See, I am a woman too!’

At first they all stared at Yun in surprise, but then their anger turned to laughter. We stayed to have some tea and refreshments with them, and then called sedan chairs and went home.

A big part Shen Fu (like Zhang) is taken up with travel, and while I can’t do much in a class like this with how they fit into Chinese travel writing, he does sometimes take his wife with him.

When Chien Shih-chu of Wuchiang County fell ill and died, my father wrote and ordered me to represent him at the funeral. Hearing this, Yun took me aside. ‘If you are going to Wuchiang, you have to cross Lake Tai. I would love to go with you and see something more of the world.’

‘I had just been thinking how lonely it would be going by myself,’ I said, ‘and that if you could come with me it would be lovely. But there is no excuse for you to go.’

‘I could say I wanted to go home for a visit. You could go to the boat first, and I would meet you there.’ ‘Then on the way back we could stop the boat under Ten Thousand-Years Bridge,’ I said. ‘We could relax in the moonlight, the way we used to at the Pavilion of the Waves.’

It was then the 18th day of the sixth month. In the cool of the morning I took a servant and went ahead to the Hsu River Dock, where we boarded a boat and waited. Yun arrived in a sedan chair shortly afterwards. The boat cast off and left the Tiger’s Roar Bridge, and after a while we began to see other sails in the wind, and birds on the sandy shore. The sky and the water became the same colour.

‘Is this the Lake Tai that everyone speaks of?’ asked Yun. ‘Now that I see how grand the world is, I have not lived in vain! There are women who have lived their entire lives without seeing a vista like this.’

It seemed we had only chatted for a little while before we arrived at Wuchiang, where the wind was rustling the willows along the bank. I went ashore, only to return after the funeral to find the boat empty. I anxiously questioned the boatman, who pointed along the bank and said, ‘Don’t you see them in the shadow of the willows by the bridge watching the cormorants catch fish?’ To my surprise, Yiin had gone ashore with the boatman’s daughter. When I came up behind her she was still covered with perspiration, leaning against the other girl and lost in watching the birds. I patted her shoulder and said, ‘Your clothes are soaked through!’

Yiin turned her head to look at me. ‘I was afraid someone from the Chien family would come to the boat with you,’ she said, ‘so I came here for a while to keep them from seeing me if they did. Why did you come back so quickly?” I laughed. ‘So I could recapture you.’

We walked to the boat hand in hand, and sailed back to TenThousand-Years Bridge. The sun had not yet set by the time we reached the bridge, so we let down the windows of the boat to admit a breeze, then changed into silk clothes and, fanning ourselves, ate some. melon to cool off. Before long the setting sun turned the bridge red, and the twilight mist enveloped the willows in darkness. The silver moon was just rising and the river quickly filled up with the lights of night fishermen. We sent our servant to the stern to drink with the boatman.

The boatman’s daughter was named Su-yiin, and she had had several cups of wine with me once before. She was quite nice, so I called her over and asked her to sit with Yiin. There was no light in the bow of the boat, so we were able to enjoy the moon and drink happily. We began to play a literary drinking game, at which Suyiin could only blink her eyes. She listened to us for quite a while, then said, ‘I know a lot about drinking games, but I have never heard of this one. Will you teach it to me?’ Yiin thought up several examples to try to explain it to her, but after some time the boat girl still did not understand. I laughed and said, ‘Stop it, lady teacher. I have a comparison that will explain the problem.’

‘What kind of an example are you going to give?’ Yiin asked. ‘A crane can dance but cannot plough, while an ox can plough but cannot dance. That is just the nature of things. Wouldn’t it be a waste of time if you tried to teach each of them to play the other’s game?’

Su-yin laughed playfully, hit me on the shoulder, and said, ‘Are you making fun of me?’

At this Yun ordered us to stop. ‘From now on we allow only talking. No more hitting! Whoever breaks the rule has to drink a big cup of wine.’

Su-yun had quite a capacity for wine, so she poured a big cup and downed it at one gulp.

‘No hitting,’ I then said, ‘but surely it’s all right if we caress one another.’

If you want to understand literati society, the relationships between men and women and something about Chinese elite ideas about family, Shen Fu is your man.

Zhang gives us much less of this social history stuff. We don’t find out much about his family there is nothing about his career and for much of the story he is a small child, who is pretty unclear on what is going on.

I think the big advantage of Zhang is that he is living through the aftermath of the Taiping rebellion. He may be a member of the elite, but this is about as close as you are going to get to a text that gives you a feel for the miseries suffered by the common people in the chaos of the 19^th century.

Shortly afterward, we again ran out of provisions. It so happened that we received an invitation from Diankou, so we went to Diankou.

Diankou belonged to the county of Zhuji, where my legal mother had come from. With mountains in the back and a river in the front, it was but a hundred leagues from Hangzhou. Yiqiao and Linpu were located upstream, and Fuchun was next to it. My maternal uncle and cousin had both passed away at a young age; my cousin’s widowed wife nee Feng lived alone with her ten-year-old son, Youqiao. When she learned of our whereabouts, she invited us to join her. We were both sad and happy upon seeing each other. She had a place in a remote, isolated mountain village called Pig’s Jaw, where she had stored up all her valuables. We all moved there.

By that time, Bao Village’s resistance force had been formed, and the bandits who went to attack them at different times numbered tens of thousands altogether. ¹ After each lost battle the bandits would vent their anger and frustration on the neighboring villages, burning and pillaging to their heart’s content. Feng said, “We cannot afford to be careless about this.” So she hired a dozen strong clansmen who earned their living by physical labor. One of the clansmen was named Wenjing; another was named Xiaofu. She placed me in their care.

We sought refuge at Ding’s Port. But Ding’s Port had too many petty thieves, so we came back to Diankou. Then I fell sick. I had come down with malaria at Ding’s Port, which now turned into dysentery. Soon my head and face were swelling up, and my ten fingers were as thick as hammers. The elders were all shocked upon seeing me like this; they thought I had white jaundice, and nine out of ten with white jaundice would die.

The bandit alarm was raised from time to time, and the cost of rice shot up. My cousin’s wife was becoming destitute, for we had gone into the mountains to hide from the bandits and, upon coming home, discovered that the house had been robbed clean. We had bran and wild greens for food. My mother wept all day; even I myself thought I was dying. Fortunately, Xiaofu found a rare remedy and cured me. I was, however, exceedingly weak and fragile, and was often half starving. In the hills there was a spring as clear as a mirror. I would follow my mother to pick wild greens there. When we rested by the spring, I saw my reflection in it: I was emaciated and haggard like a ghost. When a chilly wind shook the trees, the cold would penetrate our very flesh and bones. At sunset, we would hold on to each other and walk home, and never failed to burst into tears.

As Bao Village’s militia was growing increasingly powerful, many members of the Chen clan went to join them. My cousin’s wife also wanted to go, but Wenjing convinced her not to. Soon afterward, Bao Village indeed fell. There was rumor that the bandits would kill everyone in Zhuji to vent their anger, so we again fled to Ding‘s Port, and Wenjing took me to Houbao. Wenjing was a relative of my maternal grandfather’s generation. My illness was most grave during the high summer, and every day Wenjing would carry me on his back, traveling back and forth in the mountains. As I was suffering from dysentery, stools mixed with blood would soil his back, which became festered. One of his associates regarded me as a burden, and urged him to dispose of me. Wenjing would not listen. He left after he took me to Houbao, and soon afterward died of illness. How painful! Though he was an elder, Wenjing had become a hired hand out of poverty, and had never assumed the authoritative attitude of a senior toward me. Instead, he loved me dearly and sincerely. My cousin’s wife and her son thought that even they could not care about me more than he did. He died without a son, and, in the midst of the chaos, no one knew where he was buried, so I cannot even offer a cup of wine as a sacrifice to his spirit. As for me, I have been down-and-out all my useless life, and would probably have been better off dying early in childhood-but then, how could Wenjing have foreseen this? We parted hastily in war and turmoil, little knowing that the farewell would be our last. It is so very sad!

This is a somewhat grimmer book. If you want to understand smoke, Zhang Daye is your man

There were five sorts of “flames of war.” The sort that had a sharp tip and flared up straight was a beacon fire. The sort that had a diffused purplish light was the fire that burned possessions. The sort that was black in its upper part and red at the base was the fire that burned houses. The sort that gave off a white smoke like clouds and drifted about was the fire that burned grain. As for the sort with a congealed smoke and of a light green hue, that was the fire that burned corpses. I had tested this theory from the pinnacle of Snow Shadow Peak, and had never erred.

One thing that students always want is a book they can relate to. Neither of these works very well for that. You never really get a feel for what Zhang Daye is like as a person. While there is always at least one person in the classroom who can identify with Shen Fu’s problems as a middle-aged guy watching his life slip away, most students can’t. The love story with his wife also tends to leave them cold even if they realize it is there. To the extent they get a voice they don’t like either one. They usually have a mini-writing assignment on each book before the discussion, and then have to choose to write a longer paper on either this one or the next book. These ones always do poorly. This semester Zhang Daye lost to A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Laborer 29-1. This may be due to a preference for Japan over China, for modern over pre-modern history² or more likely, for a deep intellectual preference for procrastination. So I am guessing the choice can’t be driven by student interest.

I think next time I may go back to Shen Fu, if only because he gives me so many chances to talk about things like family and the nature of the shi elite that I would like to talk about and that are specifically Chinese. How much war are disorder suck are pretty universal. With Zhang I had a bit less luck then I sometimes do in getting people to say anything about the book. Shen Fu at least has drinking games. What do you think?

The resistance force at Bao Village was led by a man named Bao Lishen (1838- 1862). As the force repeatedly fended off the advances of the Taiping army, numerous wealthy families from various places in Zhejiang sought refuge in the village. After more than eight months of fighting, the village was eventually captured, and butchered, on July 27, 1862. ↩
modern is easier to identify with ↩

Teaching

Teaching Asia, Fall 2014

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

Wow, I forgot to write a syllabus post!

There is something of a tradition here at the Frog of posting our syllabai and asking for advice about how to teach a particular class. Although it is too late to get any help for Fall 2014, I figured I would post these and see if anyone had anything to say.

This Fall I am teaching History of East Asia, Modern Japan, and, for what it is worth, a couple sections of the intro methods course for History majors.

As in the past, History of East Asia is sort of a history class and sort of a culture class. These ultra-broad surveys are always hard to teach, since students come in expecting to learn about the timeless culture of Asia, while I am trying to teach them about change over time. I try to fix this by talking about both the period I am looking at and placing it in a broader East Asian context. Thus the Shang is both a dynasty and ancestor worship and ideas about family. Fukuzawa Yukichi and Liang Qichao both need to be stuffed into “The world of the reformers.”

As always, a big part of the class for me is the books. When I was an undergrad Dr. Rosen explained to me that he assumed that all his students would forget his name, the name of the building the classes were in, all the essay topics they wrote on, but that they would remember every real book they actually read for the rest of their lives. This is still how I approach picking out books and designing classes.

This time I used Exemplary Women of Early China ¹ as the first real book they read. I have really struggled to find an early text that they can deal with, and have usually tried Zhuangzi (too weird) Songs (poems, yuck!) I will do a post in a bit on how this worked out. Tale of the Heike is sort of a standard for me (Japan, fits right in the middle, cheap). Tiny Insect is new, and I will do a post about this…when I get around to it.

Once thing that has changed both classes is that I am no longer giving exams, as such. This is a change that has been coming for a while. I have always hated multiple choice exams, and only gave in to the dark side in the Freshman survey classes a few years ago. I have usually given take-home exams for the essays, since their handwriting is much better when they print things out rather than write in a blue-book. More importantly, they write better essays when they can actually look at sources, and I at least hope they learn more. This time rather than doing a take-home mid-term in 206 I am going to have them try their hands at some take-home essays at various points in the semester. We will see how this goes.

I am also not assigning a textbook for either of these.² This was a harder decision, but I have generally found that the only way to get our students to read a textbook is to give frequent quizzes on it. If you don’t, the signs of textbook reading (which I would define as a student mentioning something that was in the text that I did not specifically reference in class) drop to almost nothing. So I figured that if I was going to use written assignments/ class discussions to get people to read, it should be something better than a textbook.

The Japan class follows my recent pattern of trying to push classes away from the lecture-exam model as much as I can. The plan was that the class would end up being centred around discussing various articles and book chapters they had read. I am not sure how well this worked out, but at least for the immediate future I plan to keep plugging on this model.

Any suggestions/comments?

Kinney, Anne Behnke. Exemplary Women of Early China: The Lienü Zhuan of Liu Xiang. Columbia University Press, 2014. ↩
Well, the Japan class has Goto-Jones, Christopher S. Modern Japan a Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. I wish there were more Asia books in this series. ↩

Japan

Teaching in Japan

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

So, we are getting into the late middle of the Fall semester here in North America. If you are finding the whole teaching thing is getting you down, here is something from Sugawara No Michizane, who eventually became the Japanese God of Literature, which is sort of like making tenure only even better. As a mortal, however, he had to teach, and he sometimes found it trying.¹

Professorial Difficulties
We are not a family of generals.
As Confucian scholars we earn our living.
My revered grandfather held the third rank.
My compassionate father served as a high court noble.
Well they knew the power of learning
And wished to pass it on for their descendants’ glory.
The day I was promoted to graduate student,
I determined to follow the ways of my ancestors.
The year I became a professor,
Happily, the lecture hall was rebuilt.
When everyone rushed to be first to congratulate me,
My father alone expressed concern.
Over what did he express concern?
“Alas that you are an only child,” he said;
“The office of professor is not mean,
The salary of a professor is not small.
Once I too held this post
And lived in fear of people’s criticism.”
Having heard this kind admonition,
I proceeded uneasily as if treading on ice.
In the fourth year of Gangyo [ 880], the Council of State ordered that I begin my lectures.
But after teaching only three days,
Slanderous voices reached my ears.
When preparing recommendations for graduate study,
It was perfectly clear who did or did not deserve to advance.
But the first student to be failed for lack of ability
Denounced me and begged for an undeserved grade.
I have not failed as a teacher;
My recommendations were made fairly!
How true was my father’s advice
When he warned me before all this occurred.

Obviously this has little to do with modern teachers, but I pass it along any way. He was also bothered by the antics of his more unruly pupils. In particular, teaching seems to have interfered with his scholarship.

A brush is an implement for writing, and a scraper a tool for
scratching out mistakes. But some of that flock of crows who descend on me, apparently unaware of the proper use for such implements, pick up the scraper and immediately start hacking at the desks, or fiddle with the brush until they’ve spattered and soiled my books. On top of this, in scholarship the most important thing is to gather data, and to gather data one has first of all to take notes. But since I am not a person of very proper or methodical nature, I often find I have to lay down my brush in the midst of my researches, and at such times I leave a lot of little slips of paper lying about with
notes on them concerning the data I have collected. At such times people come wandering into my library without permission; though what they’re thinking about I can’t imagine, the clever ones, when they spy my notes, fold them up and stuff them into the breast of their robe, and the stupid ones pick them up, tear them in two, and throw them away! Occurrences like this distress me intensely, …
I am particularly ashamed to think that I have been unable to
establish the kind of unofficial academy that would attract real men of worth, but instead am reduced to laying down regulations to keep uninvited intruders out of my library. Such remarks are intended only for those who do not really understand me, though those who do understand me number only about three. I hope in spreading a small net to keep out swallows and sparrows I won’t be driving any
phoenixes away.

I find the final bit, where he is lamenting the fact that his silly rules to keep students out of his library is making it harder for him to teach other students, particularly poignant.

PS. I am just posting this because I find it interesting and generally applicable. There is nothing going on in my life that makes this particularly relevant.

from Borgen, Robert. Sugawara No Michizane and the Early Heian Court. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. ↩

Academia/Historiography

Its hard out there for a party historian

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

Xie Chuntao, the chief historian at the Central Party School has recently expressed an opinion that some parts of China’s history are closed, and likely to remain so. “Some involve the state’s core interests and some are not convenient to be released,”

My comments on this are partially superseded, as it is coals to Anyuan to be snarky about Chinese history on the English-language internet as long as Jeremiah Jenne is still at large.

One thing I do find encouraging is that at the very end Xie says “From a historical research [viewpoint] it is to be hoped that it would be best if they are all opened. But I fear this cannot happen and may never happen.” (I wish SCMP would link to the Chinese version) So he regrets the situation. That is good. He wants to reveal this stuff, supposedly, but can’t. How does one balance one’s obligations to China and the Party-state against one’s duties to history and scholarship? Xie Chuntao may not be Fang Xiaoru, but this is an old topic in Chinese culture.

Is Xie (who I have never met) a hack? And if so, what sort of hack is he? Or is he just a scholar doing the best he can in a certain situation? Well, here is the blurb for his book. Why and How the CPC Works in China. 1 edition. New World Press, Beijing, China, 2011.

The international community now views China and the Communist Party of China (CPC) with increasing respect because of a series of important and symbolic events—from the truly exceptional Beijing Olympic Games and the 2010 Shanghai World Exposition that attracted world attention to the fast economic growth obtained even against the backdrop of the international financial crisis. The “China Model,” “China Road” and “China Experience” have become hot topics of discussion both at home and abroad. Insightful people are pondering how the CPC could score such brilliant achievements, and how such a party can still be full of vigor and vitality 90 years after it was founded and 60 years after it gained power.

O.k. so far he sounds like George Will. On the other hand, he works at Central Party School the which is the subject of this very revealing expose, which shows some of the constraints he is laboring under.

This is an older piece, so we get some pictures of the old head of the party school, some guy named Xi. What we also get is a nice picture of ideological control over scholars. Many American scholars are grumpy about the role of student evaluations in assessing teaching, but at the Party School we find a proper modern assessment system

According to the current appraisal system, the full mark for a lecture is 10 points. Any lecture scored under nine is deemed a major malfunction of the teacher. If such an event occurs, proper administrative departments in the school will hold a meeting with all the teachers to resolve the problem.

The appraisal system was introduced into the school not long ago. Currently the school publishes each teacher’s score at the end of each term. Xie Chuantao said in his department, if a teacher has a score lower than department’s average, he or she would be suspended from teaching for a while.

The Central Party School, where all the teachers are above average. Obviously this type of system will have US assessment gurus polishing up their C.V.s for a new job in China. It is not very surprising that students have so much power, however, given that the Central Party School is the place where cadres punch their tickets for the trip from promising local person to national figure. ( see Liu, Alan P. L. “Rebirth and Secularization of the Central Party School in China.” The China Journal, 2009. )

Xie is highly aware that his students are quite different from ordinary school students. In past years, Xie Chuntao has seen many students promoted to higher positions or even to the Central Committee of the CPC, while at the same time, he is also sorry for a few that have been put into prison for discipline violations.

Obviously the elite have changed some. Instead of cadres with high school education many of them now have Master’s degrees.

Great changes have taken place regarding the school’s curriculum. More than a decade ago, given the educational background of students, the school prepared classes on history and geography in addition to classics of Marxism and Leninism. Nowadays, such courses are replaced by opera appreciation and diplomatic etiquette.

The school is also a lot more liberal than in was in the old days

Openness and frankness are long-cherished traditions in the school. In the late 1970s, students at the school held a discussion covering the criterion for testing truth, which subsequently led to a nationwide liberation of thoughts. Hu Yaobang, the then vice president of the school, set up four rules to encourage free discussion among students. Here, no one would be discriminated against or punished for speaking out his real mind. When former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited the school the liberal classroom environment surprised him greatly.

If you have both Hu Yaobang and Donald Rumsfeld you have both the Chinese and the foreign spokesmen for liberalism and free thought on your side.

What I suspect is happening is that, yet again, the bounds of acceptable discourse are shifting, and a tiny set of issues are being defined as nei bu (internal circulation) They do talk about the Great Leap at CPS, but they also don’t publish anything that contradicts the official line. While ruling things out of bounds is clearly not a progressive step, it may help at least a little in opening up sources on things which are not considered sensitive. On the one hand the Xie quotes about “closed files” make it sound like Chinese historical study is slipping back towards the Maoist period. On the other, CPS article makes China sound a bit like any other normal country where scholarship has to contend with state power and the security state. Of course it is pretty different as well.

Posts

Frog in a Well enters the Five Dynasties phase

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

This blog is currently going through a Tang-Song transition sort of thing: a somewhat confusing period of change from which it emerges better than ever…maybe.

The long-term transition is from three separate East Asia blogs one unified blog, from one layout to another, and from one site to another.

Old Version here

New Version here

At present we are stuck in the confusing 5 Dynasties that come between the Tang and the Song, so at least for a bit you can find identical posts at both places. If you have us on an RSS feed or something like that this would be a time to switch.

ALSO

The Song was a period Open to Talent, and we are looking for new members. So if you want to join, contribute a post, or otherwise contribute, send an 8-legged essay describing your interest.

Books/Classics/Historiography

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.

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