Frog in a Well

Xi'an Walls

Posted on October 20, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

The city of Xi’an is in the process of re-building the city wall and adding four new museums, one each for the Zhou, Qin, Han and Tang dynasties. I was not surprised by the museums. Xi’an has a lot of history, and they have pretty obviously been trying to preserve/cash in on it for years. I did wonder a bit about the walls, since last time I was there they looked fine. What is going to happen with them? According to Xinhua

The rebuilding work will not damage any of the walls’ relics. “Experts will monitor the whole process of the rebuilding project,” said Yao Lijun, deputy director of the city’s ancient walls management committee.

This makes me wonder who this Yao Lijun is, and how much he knows about historic preservation. Anyone can slap on some new bricks, but are they re-building the Ming version of the wall? Might it not be better to leave parts of it as is? What will they do with the bomb shelters that were dug into the wall during the War of Resistance? Any physical object has changed a lot over time, and to “restore” it you need to figure out not only the technical details of restoration, but which of the several versions you want to restore.¹

A colleague recently asked me to suggest some names of public historians in China for a joint U.S.-China project. I was completely stumped, and I am pretty sure it is as much the state of history in China as my ignorance of what Chinese scholars are up to that is responsible.

First, for the benefit of our non-U.S. readers, what is Public History? A quick definition might be that it is a field that has grown up in the U.S. since the 1970’s and includes all the people who are professional historians but not teaching at a university. Archivists, museum people, historic preservationists, monument builders, oral history folk, they are all Public Historians, and increasingly they need a degree it Public History to do this.² I have blogged quite a bit about Public History in China, but I thought it might be worth thinking a bit more about it.

I think the rise of public history is an altogether good trend. Historians today (the teaching and monograph-writing tribe) are more and more interested in artifacts, visual images, how the public understands the past etc. but we are mostly winging it. How do you “read” a popular print, or restore a building to its ‘original’ form? What does it mean to declare someplace a historic site, and what should you do after you declare it? If the point of public history is to teach someone something, who is supposed be learning and how does that work? Most of us have no clue unless we have talked to and studied with some Public Historians.

This is particularly important for China, as so many Chinese places (mostly cities) are trying to ‘restore’ old sites and explain what they mean, both as a way of attracting tourists and as a way of establishing their importance in China’s 5000 years of history. (See here here and here.)

There are a few of major differences I can see between the U.S and Chinese traditions of public history.

-What to memorialize and who gets to do it? Both in China and in the U.S there are both public and private museums, although the governments (central and federal, state and provincial) dominate the action. Everywhere in the world what counts as a historic site is part of what a society (and a government) decide needs to be remembered. China has been less successful than some other places in historicizing some parts of the past. Thus there is a New York Tenement Museum but very little in China dealing with the Cultural Revolution. In part this is because the Chinese state feels the need to avoid certain topics. China’s central government seems to favor a public history that either connects to China’s glorious 5,000 years of history (ideally as sanctioned by a UNESCO world heritage site designation) or things that will lead to an appropriate form of patriotism. Things that don’t fit get left out, and you are not sure what to say about the rest. What sort of plaque do you put on the Great Wall once you decide that was built not to keep out evil foreigners but to divide some of China’s 57 harmonious nationalities from each other? This is the same sort of problem Americans face with sites like the Little Bighorn. American academic historians sometimes complain that they are marginalized in the process of making public history, but I think they have more influence than historians in China.

-A very different public face. One aspect of public history is that there are no captive audiences off campus. Thus if you build some sort of historic thing you have to find ways to attract people to it. In China a lot of these places seem more commercial than they would be in the U.S. This is not actually entirely bad. I don’t think that something that people like and enjoy is by definition non-scholarly, nor is there any harm in things that are just fun. Everywhere in the world historic sites have to struggle with how to put bums in seats without Disnifying too much. This is still in its infancy in China One example of this are the dressed up people. In the U.S they might be called interpreters or docents or living history. They dress up in costume and explain what the site would have meant to people at the time. The basic idea is to trick people into learning something about history. At times they can reach a pretty high level of both performance and commentary on the meaning of American History in the present. Ask A Slave is a interesting example, where a woman (with a performing arts degree) uses her experience as a living history slave at Mount Vernon to discuss America, race, and history. I can’t imagine any of the people who work at a site like this in China doing a website like Ask A Slave. In China you are more likely to get minimum wage workers dressed up in vaguely period costumes. At best you get drama. When I took my daughter to the historic city of Pingyao there was a dramatic performance that roamed through the city and you could watch various parts of the story of the magistrate investigating a wronged widow and …something.

It was plenty of fun, but I’m not sure what anyone learned from it. While we are at it, the general quality of guides and interpreters at Chinese sites is often pretty poor. Lots of dates, figures (the pagoda contains over 100.000 bricks!) and not much interpretation. Likewise the texts that go along with various sites and buildings are often pretty poor. Again my point here is not just to be an annoying foreigner but to point out that the face of public history has made enormous strides in the U.S and Europe over the last decades, and that China still has a ways to go.

-Ideas about re-construction. I have talked about this before, but basically in China there is much more of a tradition of totally re-building sites (sometimes with a few bits of old-timey stuff tacked on after) rather than what elsewhere would be called careful historical reconstruction.

Still there are many parts of what is called Public History in China that are well-established. There is a lot to work with here.

-Oral History This is well-established in China, going back to the Maoist period, although it seems less popular now.

-Archives Very well established. There are lots of archivist, they have their own publications and everything. Admittedly they do not always function the way they do elsewhere. I remember going to one Chinese archive and being greeted with huge calligraphy scroll that urged the archivists to 保护档案(Protect the Archives) Protect them from what? It turned out to be protecting them from having anyone look at the documents. Still there is an archival community

-Collectors, connoisseurs and physical culture types. While academic historians may sometimes make fun of antiquarians, public historians can get a lot from building restorers, antique collectors and such. Antique collecting was one of the proper obsessions for a gentleman in the Late Imperial period, and there was an one time quite a culture of connoisseurship in China. More modern events, especially the Cultural Revolution, did not help this culture, but it is certainly back now. The Wuhan museum of the 1911 revolution collected a lot of artifacts from this type of people. In Jiangsu Qin Tongqian is trying to build an entire hotel out of architectural elements he has saved from buildings all over China. China does not yet have the hordes of Taiping Rebellion reenactors, military history buffs and blue-haired county historical society ladies it deserves, but one would guess they are coming.

-Popular interest and state support Here I am a bit at sea. While Americans and their governments and their rich people are interested in history it is mostly U.S. History. I assume that some of this influence is good, and some bad, but I can’t really assess how much of each, as there is a pretty minimal interest in Chinese history in the U.S. Regardless, the Chinese public and state are really into Chinese history. If you want state funding or public attention for Chinese history China is the place to go, so there is a real potential to create something here.

Well, this post keeps growing, and at this point I think I need to either delete it, put another month of thinking into it, or just post it as is.

Update

Apparently some people in China are unhappy with a temple restoration that turned this

into this

When Troy was dug up they actually dug through the Trojan War Troy because they were not interested in the history of the site, just finding the one “real” Troy and they got it wrong. (not sure where I remember this from) ↩
Popular history really should be linked to this too, but I am going to leave it out for now. ↩

1911/China/Public History/Taiwan

1911 in 2013

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

I was going to do a post on how the Chinese world is remembering 1911, the overthrow of the Qing, and founding of the Chinese Republic. The answer seems to be that there is not much up. A couple years ago, for the 100th anniversary there were quite a few publications. This year the big story seems to be that very few people are visiting the museum of the revolution in Canton, although private collectors are donating artifacts to the museum of the Revolution in Wuhan Taipei does not seem to be up to much, although Ma Ying-jeou did use the occasion to call for closer cross-straits ties, but the general coverage is pretty downbeat. The mainland seems to be continuing its tradition of not paying much attention to the occasion. The Santa Fe Opera is doing an opera on Sun’s life which, from the description, sounds like it is not very historical.

China/English/Teaching

Syllabus blogging for Spring 2014-1

Posted on October 10, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 7 Comments

Today is October 10, which is both an important day in Chinese history and also means that I am late in getting in my book orders for Spring. In the past I have always been way too late with syllabus blogging, so that while I get some useful suggestions it is too late to act on them. So while it may be too late to get my book orders in on time, I am going to ask if anyone has some advice on

1. Using (or replacing) these books

2. Things to go with them

This class is ASIA 200, Introduction to Asian Studies a class required for all of our 50-odd Asian Studies majors and one of our recruiting tools. The class is built around a series of readings that expose students to different disciplinary traditions and parts of Asia. The point is not to teach them the entire History, Anthropology,Literature etc. of China, Japan, Iran, Indonesia etc.¹ but to expose them to a lot of stuff they they would enjoy reading² and I would like teaching.

My current ideas are

Journalism/India

Boo, Katherine. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press, 2013.

I always do a journalism book to start with, in part because they are supposed to be approachable and easy to get into, but also because as budding Asianists the students need to learn why they should be sceptical of books written by people who parachute into a society AND how much they can learn from a good journalist/travel book. I will probably pair this with some stuff from Luyendijk, Joris. People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2009. Or maybe dump this and go back to Speed Tribes?

Novel/Indonesia

Toer, Pramoedya Ananta, and Max Lane. This Earth of Mankind. New York: Penguin, 1996.

I always include a least one novel, as they are easy for students to get into, and this one (a classic colonialism novel) seems to fit.

History/Taiwan/China

Andrade, Tonio. Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011.

China is always the easiest for me, since I can always think of lots of thing that would fit in History/Anthro, etc. As a(n) historian I always insist on including at least one book that deals with the pre-modern world. This one is both a Ripping Yarn and something were there is enough other stuff to give them -including Andrade’s other work and also primary stuff- that you can do a lot with it. Still, China is a place where I can think of lots of other things. Maybe instead use

Harrison, Henrietta. The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village University of California Press, 2013? Mann, Susan. The Talented Women of the Zhang Family. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. was a hit in this slot last time.

Anthropology/Korea

Oppenheim, Robert. Kyǒngju Things: Assembling Place. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.

This worries me a bit. I always include one really hard-core academic monograph, and this certainly counts, although I am a bit scared about leading them through it. Not sure at all what to do along with it. The book itself deals with creating a city of historic culture in Korea, and I would need some stuff on, I guess, modern Korean cultural politics to go with it.

Film

We always do some films, and the students each do a presentation on an Asian film of their choosing. We usually do two as a group and I am thinking of Abu-Assad, Hany. Paradise Now, 2005, since it deals with Islamic radicalism, which they are always interested in (especially the vets.) and… a comedy. I always include one, since they all come in with the idea that Asia films are all about suffering peasants and star Gong Li. Last time I used Jiang, Wen. Let the Bullets Fly, 2010, which worked well, but I think ideally I would like a funny yet insightful film on being middle class in… I guess Thailand?

Manga/Japan

Barefoot Gen? It works, and there is a lot to go with it, (Maybe I will put Grave of the Fireflies in the movie section. It’s animated, it must be funny!) but I would like something more pre-modern, although I can’t think of anything.

The last book out was Suleri, Sara. Meatless Days. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. which is a good memoir on Pakistan that includes gender more explicitly than anything else on the list, (which is the most important gap at present) and I guess would replace the Toer.

So, any suggestions?

although I did have one student walk out on the first day when I explained we would not be doing that ↩
Honestly, if you read and though about 4 good books in each undergraduate class, how well educated would you be? ↩

Articles/China/Education/Web Sites and Resources

Chinese philosophy: The wild goose gradually draws near the tree

Posted on October 9, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Update-The wild goose is getting closer to the tree

Apparently we are experiencing a Chinese Philosophy Fever. The Atlantic has an article up on Michael Puett’s Harvard class on Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory, as described at Warp, Weft, and Way.

In general I would agree with WWW commenter Bill Haines that “I think it makes sense that a course taught this way would be taught by a historian rather than a philosophy prof.” In part this is because I am a historian, but also because I think it fits better with reasons for kids to come to a class like this. A while back I read something (Chronicle?) about a Renaissance history guy who was ordered to come up with some sort of mass-market class that drew on his period. He came up with something like “How to be a corporate toady and suck-up: Kissing the asses of the rich and powerful in a profoundly unequal society” drawing primarily on Michel de Montaigne

Needless to say the class was a huge hit, and he was horrified by both how many students wanted to take it and how many sections of it the administration wanted him to teach and how useful the class was for student who wanted to find a place in our society.

I don’t think Puett created this class out of spite, but I do think a historian is in a good place to help students understand how philosophical or self-help texts¹ help those who are reading them figure out how they fit into society. The society of Warring States China is a good analogue for ours today, where we like to talk about how the old rules no longer apply, but are still worth thinking about.² Harvard students in particular are shi, members of the elite who can’t go wrong (in the sense of starving) whatever they do. Plus there are books like Finnegrete’s Secular as Sacred that may not be very strong as sinology or philosophy,³ but do help you make the connection.

So my point here is that if you want to teach a class like Puett’s, which uses examples from the past to explain how you should fit into society now (i.e. get a liberal education) then Warring States China is a good place to look, and a historian is an excellent guide.

Old post

I may eventually post more on this, but better than anything I might add, you should go read this article on Chinese Philosophy in the U.S. (from the Chronicle)

The thing that struck me is that the academic study of Philosophy seems to be broadening out in a way that Religious Studies (which they mention) did a long time ago, as did History. I don’t know of any nice short introductions to the struggle to get Chinese history accepted as history in American colleges, but maybe someone else does. The process seems somewhat different in Philosophy, but there are a lot of parallels.

Via Warp, Weft, and Way

Analects, Zhuangzi, and most of the classical texts are self-help books that really belong on the shelf with Dr. Phil ↩
I’m not sure how unique this really is, but undergrads like believing that we live in an unprecedented age of change. ↩
I am neither a philosopher or a ancient China person, so I can’t say for sure ↩

Anecdotes/China/Classics/Pre-Han/Teaching

Ancient Music in the Academy

Posted on October 5, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Confucius liked to talk about Rites and Music. Thus I have to spend a lot of time explaining to students why. Most Americans are more like Mozi

Mozi asked a Confucian, saying ‘What is the reason for music (樂)?’ The reply was: “Music is performed for the sake of joy (樂)”¹ Mozi said: ‘You have not answered me. Suppose I asked: Why build houses? And you answered: It is to keep off cold in winter, and the heat in summer, and to separate men from women. They you would have told me the reason for building houses. Now I am asking: Why perform music? And you answer: Music is performed for music’s sake. This is like saying : Why build houses? And answering Houses are built for houses’ sake.” Mozi 43

So Mozi can see no point in music, just like most most American parents can’t see the point in being a music major.

I won’t get into the whole modern defence of Music (and Art), but in early China music was magic. All my evidence here comes from the Lushi Chunqiu, which is basically a philosophical encyclopedia compiled at the very end of the Warring States period.

Music is a way to keep track of the state of the world

Thus, the tones of an orderly age are peaceful and joyous because its policies are stable. The tones of a chaotic age are resentful and angry because its policies are perverse. The tones of a doomed state are sad and mournful because its policies are dangerous. It is a general principle that music is influenced by government and affected by customs. When customs are fixed, music adjusts itself to them. Thus, in an age that possesses the Dao one has only to observe its music to know its customs, to observe its customs to know its government, and observe its government to know its ruler. The First Kings were, therefore, certain to rely on music as a means of professing their teachings. LSCQ 5/4.4B

O.k., this is not too hard to grasp. Just like “Rap Music is Black America’s CNN” you can learn about a society by listening to its music. I particularly like this quote because I remember reading something along the lines of “Thus, the tones of an orderly age are peaceful and joyous because its policies are stable. The tones of a chaotic age are resentful and angry because its policies are perverse.” on the liner notes of a Jefferson Airplane album²

Here is another

When Yu ascended the throne he toiled and laboured on behalf of the world. He rested neither day nor night, opening up the great streams, cutting through obstructions and blockages, boring out the Dragon Gate, and circulating the flowing waters by guiding them to the Yellow River. He dredged the Three Rivers and the Five Lakes and made their waters flow to the Eastern Sea, to benefit the black-headed people. At this, Yu commanded Gaoyao to compose all nine movements of the “Xia Flute” in order to celebrate his achievement. LSCQ 5/5.10

O.k., so you can use music as political propaganda, so that people will never forget Yu taming the flood or the bombs bursting in air. Also not too complex. The next two are a little harder.

In the past, at the inception of the Yinkang clan, the Yin had coagulated in great amounts and accumulated excessively. The watercourses were blocked and obstructed, and water could not flow out from springs. The ethers of the people became thick and clogged up, and their muscles and bones tight and constricted. They therefore invented a dance with which to spread and guide the Yin .LSCQ 5/ 5.4

In the past, when the ancient Zhuxiang clan ruled the world, there was an excess of wind that caused the Yang ether to gather and accumulate, the myriad things to disperse and scatter, and the fruits and nuts not to ripen. Knight Da therefore invented a five-string zither with which to attract the Yin ether and arrange the survival of the various living things. LSCQ 5/ 5.2

These two are a lot more magical. Music actually changes the world. In the first one we can see it changing people, which makes a bit of sense. Then in the second one it changes the universe. There are actually a bunch of passages in here about how inventing new instruments gave humans new ways to control the world. This is not our idea of music at all (unless you are a follower of the Church of Les Paul), but it does help a bit with Early China.

same word! ↩
not sure which album or if I am remembering this right. My memories of the 60’s are mostly a blur. Still, it fits pretty well. ↩

China/Education/Qing

Why go to college?

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Tea Leaf Nation has a post up on a micro-trend of Chinese kids not going to college, or at least one parent not being willing to pay for it, on the grounds that “Today, even peddlers who collect garbage…make more money than many graduates.” This is also something of a trend in the U.S., where some rich people also think that college may be a waste of time.

College is of course not a universal of all human societies. Even in America lots of people have happy, productive lives without ever going there. Most of the Americans saying that you should not go to college seem to be among the 1% who are extremely wealthy, and for them there is a point in not going. Why beat your brains out getting a degree if all it gets you is a shot at a $100,000 a year job? Great, that will keep you in toilet paper, but as a child of privilege why bother?¹ College used to be one of the tickets to the middle class, but as the U.S. abandons the model of the universal middle class society college attainment may shrink. A lot. If the only life choices are Wal-mart greeter vs. Wal-mart greeter with college debt, OR idle rich vs. idle rich who used to write term papers and shared a bathroom why go to college?

China is trying to create a universal middle class society 小康,² but college there has, until recently, been something to mark out an elite, not define a middle class. As Tea Leaf Nation points out, Chinese colleges have been expanding exponentially in recent years, and there is no way that you can fully maintain standards which that much expansion. Nor does just going to college make you a member of an elite nowadays, as much as the hordes of entrance-exam takers may hope it will.

In the last years of the Qing, when Western-style education was expanding far more rapidly than you could find qualified teachers, everybody who could get it wanted a degree, since it marked you as a member of an elite, even if you had not learned much. By the 1920’s the figure of the semi-employed college grad became more common. Just having been to college no longer guaranteed a job or elite status.

I suspect China is going through a similar transition now. The Chengdu dad in the TLN story may well be right about college. If Dad has pulled in enough cash to be one of China’s new rich,and the kid did not get into Beida or Oxford, (which would give her elite status) what exactly does she need to go to college for? You can start your own business or get on the corporate ladder in China without a degree, so it is not an entry ticket for the middle class. It’s not as subsidized by the state as it used to be either. You can spend some serious money on college. If your career goal is to or schmooze your Daddy’s rich friends, China does not have a proper set of ‘playground for rich kids’ schools as of yet.

Jimmy Stewart, the famous actor, grew up in the town my college is in. He went to Princeton, which was a school for the wealthy, or like him the well-off. My school was here then, but it was called a Normal school because it was intended to educate teachers, one of the few classes of people besides rich kids who were felt to need to go to college. The vast middle range of modern American higher ed did not exist then, and I suspect the U.S. is moving back towards that model. In China the process of sorting out universities into different categories is a lot less advanced, but I suspect the trend will continue (it did in the 1930’s) They even have a bit of anti-intellectualism, Red in the Chinese case rather than Red, White and Blue, to push the trend along.

Yes, beer and sex, but what else? ↩
They apparently don’t realize that public education and free health care will lead to ..Socialism! ↩

China/English/visual culture

Vinegar Joe, cartoonist

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

I did not know that Stillwell’s diaries were transcribed and on-line at the Hoover. Vinegar Joe was the commander of U.S. forces in China during the first part of WWII who had a famously rocky relationship with Chiang Kai-shek. Stillwell got the command in China in part because he knew some Chinese and had spent more time learning about China and Asia that the vast bulk of American officers. The early diaries are a mix of observations about everything from the state of the Chinese military to the state of Stillwell’s digestive tract, with an interesting mix of sharp observations and orientalist cliches. He liked to draw, so if the words don’t get you the pictures may. In 1927 he was watching warlord troops try to decide if they were advancing or retreating in the face of the Northern Expedition.

as one might expect there are plenty “technical” drawings, like the armed train above. In addition to obvious military things he also did pictures of silk reeling machines, tobacco presses, etc. Like other foreign observers he was interested in Chinese technology and/or the lack of it. The diaries also make it clear that whatever other problems he may have had during the war, getting over a deep-seated Japanophilia was not going to be one of them.

Even this early you can see some of the the Vinegar Joe personality. You can see his contempt for staff officers above, and his empathy for the common solider looking for a non-existent First Aid station below.

Anecdotes/Books/China/English

The Chinese are topsy-turvy

Posted on September 21, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

One common theme that turns up a lot in older Western writings on China is the idea that China is the opposite of the West. Just take our, normal, rational way of doing things and flip it 180 degrees and you have China. Another common trope is that the Chinese are a paradox, rational yet superstitious, industrious yet improvident, civilized yet barbarous. Oh, and they are inscrutable too. If you are looking for a nice short quote to illustrate these sorts of attitudes here is one from Samuel Merwin in 1908

China is the land of paradox. If it is an absolute, despotic monarchy, it is also a very democratic country, with its self-made men, its powerful public opinion, and a “states’ rights” question of its own. It is one of the most corrupt of nations; on the other hand, the standard of personal and commercial honesty is probably higher in China than in any other country in the world. Woman, in China, is made to serve; her status is so low that it would be a discourtesy even to ask a man if he has a daughter: yet the ablest ruler China has had in many centuries is a woman. It is a land where the women wear socks and trousers, and the men wear stockings and robes; where a man shakes his own hand, not yours; where white, not black, is a sign of mourning; where the compass points south, not north; where books are read backward, not forward; where names and titles are put in reverse order, as in our directories—Theodore Roosevelt would be Roosevelt Theodore in China, Uncle Sam would be Sam Uncle; where fractions are written upside down, as ⁸⁄5, not ⁵⁄8; where a bride wails bitterly as she is carried to her wedding, and a man laughs when he tells you of his mother’s death.

Chinese life, or the phases of it that you see along the highroads of the northwest, would appear to be a very simple, honest life, industrious, methodical, patient in poverty. The men, even of the lowest classes, are courteous to a degree that would shame a Frenchman. I have seen my two soldiers, who earned ten or twenty cents, Mexican, a day, greet my cook with such grace and charm of manner that I felt like a crude barbarian as I watched them. The simplicity and industry of this life, as it presented itself to me, seemed directly opposed to any violence or outrage. Yet only seven years ago Shansi Province was the scene of one of the most atrocious massacres in history, modern or ancient. During a few weeks, in the summer of 1900, one hundred and fifty-nine white foreigners, men, women, and children, were killed within the province, forty-six of them in the city of T’ai Yuan-fu. The massacre completely wiped out the mission churches and schools and the opium refuges, the only missionaries who escaped being those who happened to be away on leave at the time. The attack was not directed at the missionaries as such, but at the foreigners in general. It was widely believed among the peasantry that the foreign devils made a practice of cutting out the eyes, tongues, and various other organs of children and women and shipping them, for some diabolical purpose, out of the country. The slaughter was directed, from beginning to end, by the rabid Manchu governor, Yü Hsien, and some of the butchering was done by soldiers under his personal command. But the interesting fact is that the docile, long-suffering people of Shansi did some butchering on their own account, as soon as the word was passed around that no questions would be asked by the officials.

Apparently, the Shansi peasant can be at one time simple, industrious, loyal, and at another time a slaying, ravishing maniac. The Chinaman himself is the greatest paradox of all. He is the product of a civilization which sprang from a germ and has developed in a soil and environment different from anything within our Western range of experience. Naturally he does not see human relations as we see them. His habits and customs are enough different from ours to appear bizarre to us; but they are no more than surface evidences of the difference between his mind and ours. Thanks to our strong racial instinct, we can be fairly certain of what an Anglo-Saxon, or even a European, will think in certain deeply human circumstances—in the presence of death, for instance. We cannot hope to understand the mental processes of a Chinaman. There is too great a difference in the shape of our heads, as there is in the texture of our traditions.

Samuel Merwin Drugging a Nation: The Story of China and the Opium Curse New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1908 p.70

China/English/Historiography/Teaching

Kids nowadays…

Posted on September 15, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Need to read more Marx.

Well, maybe they don’t, but it would make my job easier. I did a lot of Marx in my undergraduate days at Northern Illinois University. It was a pretty Marxist history department, which was great because you got a lot of deeply involved professors. It was quite an eye-opener for a kid from the suburbs of Chicago to meet people who were way more interesting than me, knew all sorts of cool stuff and also saw the world in a totally different way than I did. Plus Eric Hobsbawm came out to talk to us once. He was working on a new project on Nationalism. Kids nowadays don’t do much Marx, as I found out when I gave them the passage below (way below) from Jian Bozan, Shao Xunzheng and Hu Hua Zhongguo lishi gaiyao Beijing: Beijing daxue, 2009 on the Boxer event.

Continue reading →

Anecdotes/China/Intellectual/Pre-Han/Teaching

Mixing water with water

Posted on September 12, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Here is a dialogue (from the Zuozhuan) I used in class this week.

The Duke declares “It is Ju alone who is in harmony with me.”

Yanzi replied, “Ju is in fact the same [as you]. How can he attain to harmony?” The ruler said, “Are harmony and identity different?”

Yanzi said, ‘They are different. Harmony is like a stew. Water, fire, jerky, mincemeat, salt, and plum [vinegar] are used to cook fish and meat; they are cooked over firewood; the master chef harmonizes them, bringing them into equality with seasonings, compensating for what is insufficient and diminishing what is too strong. The gentleman eats it and thus calms his heart. With ruler and subject it is the same. When there is something unacceptable about what the ruler considers acceptable, the subject reports the unacceptable to perfect the acceptability. When there is something acceptable about what the ruler considers unacceptable, the subject reports the acceptable in order to eliminate the unacceptable. In this way administration is calm and without interference, and the people lack the desire to struggle. Thus the Shi says:

There is a harmonious stew.

We are careful and calm.

We advance silently;

There is no struggling.’

The former kings adjusting of the five flavors and harmonizing of the five tones was for the calming of hearts and the completion of administration. Sounds are just like flavors. The single breath, the two forms, the three genres, the four materials, the five tones, the six pitches, the seven notes, the eight airs, the nine songs: these are used to complete one another. The clear and the muddy, the small and the large, the short and the long, the presto and the adagio, the somber and the joyous, the hard and the soft, the delayed and the immediate, the high and the low, the going out and coming in, the united and separate: these are used complement one another. The gentleman listens to it and thus calms his heart. “When the heart is calm, the virtue is in harmony. Thus the Shi says:

The sound of his virtue is unblemished.’

“Now Ju is not like this. What you, the ruler, consider acceptable, Ju also says is acceptable. What you consider unacceptable, Ju also says is unacceptable. If you were to complement water with water, who could eat it? If the zithers and dulcimers were to hold to a single sound, who could listen to it? This is how identity is unacceptable¹)

I like this quote a lot, because it gives you a nice introduction to the world of classical Chinese thought. It is in the form of a dialogue between a ruler and a philosopher. The ostensible point is that a virtuous advisor, Yanzi, is putting down a toadying suck-up (Ju). More importantly it goes well with the common idea of resonance; that the patterns that govern the natural world are the same as those that govern the human world. Thus the sage is like a great cook or a great conductor, (or a doctor) harmonizing everything and thus bringing about tranquillity. Tranquillity of course being the goal. We have quotes from the Book of Songs, a contrast between the small man and the gentleman, the former kings, a list of examples with numbers This is one that I like well enough that I actually print it out and give it to them.

Original text

十二月，齊侯田于沛，招虞人以弓，不進，公使執之，辭曰，昔我先君之田也，旃以招大夫，弓以招士，皮冠以招虞人，臣不見皮冠，故不敢進，乃舍之仲尼曰，守道不如守官，君子同之，齊侯至自田，晏子侍于遄臺，子猶馳而造焉，公曰，唯據與我和夫，晏子對曰，據亦同也，焉得為和，公曰，和與同異乎，對曰異，和如羹焉，水火醯醢鹽梅，以烹魚肉，燀之以薪，宰夫和之，齊之以味，濟其不及，以洩其過，君子食之，以平其心，君臣亦然，君所謂可，而有否焉，臣獻其否，以成其可，君所謂否，而有可焉，臣獻其可，以去其否，是以政平而不干民無爭心，故詩曰，亦有和羹，既戒既平，鬷假無言，時靡有爭，先王之濟五味，和五聲也，以平其心，成其政也，聲亦如味，一氣，二體，三類，四物，五聲，六律，七音，八風，九歌，以相成也，清濁大小，長短疾徐，哀樂剛柔，遲速高下，出入周疏，以相濟也，君子聽之，以平其心，心平德和，故詩曰，德音不瑕，今據不然，君所謂可，據亦曰可，君所謂否，據亦曰否，若以水濟水，誰能食之，若琴瑟之專壹，誰能聽之，同之不可也如是 Original here

Schaberg, David. A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Asia Center, 2001. p.231 (from Zuo ↩

Asian American/Books/China/English/Literature

Commander Bradshaw goes to China

Posted on September 8, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

Lately I have been going through Project Guttenberg and reading old books set in China. Late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch there is nothing to touch a ripping yarn like

You may not know the book,¹ but you may be familiar with some of the author’s other work like the “Mates Series” the “Pacific Coast Series” “Forward March” etc. It may not be deathless prose, but if the action lags you can always think about what it shows about the people who read this stuff.

Our story is a about Joseph Lee (Li Ching Cheng, usually referred to in the story as Jo, or Chinese Jo) son of a progressive mandarin, and his friend Rob Hinckley, son of an American missionary. These two end up seeing most of the Boxer Uprising. Our Lads get to steal a locomotive (which blows up at just the right time in a chapter entitled The Timely Explosion of a Boiler), witness the death of the German Ambassador to China, and die and get wounded at just the right points to be dramatic without messing up the story. It is fun to read a story where the author does not worry too much about things like plausibility and can beam his characters around as he wishes. We get all the things you might expect, including plot convenient language ability or inability, disguises (Rob passes himself off as a Chinese monk), mocking of Chinese superstition, and a bad guy who is defeated through pulling him down by his pigtail.

One thing I found interesting about the book is how pro-Chinese it is. Missionaries die, but always offstage, and most of the blame for the Uprising is placed on the poverty and desperation of the peasants of drought-stricken China and a handful of evil people like Cixi.The post-Boxer looting is not glossed over

So Pekin fell, almost without a struggle, and for a year afterwards the city was misruled and looted by foreign soldiers, who destroyed many of its most beautiful structures and carried away its most precious works of art. From it also they ravaged the surrounding country, sending out punishment expeditions to kill, burn, and destroy in every direction.

Jo is the most interesting character, and he

was not quite certain that he did not approve of the plan for driving all foreigners from China. Foreigners expelled Chinese from their countries, so why should not his people in turn expel foreigners from China? Still, he did not express any views on the subject at that time, but changed the topic of conversation

His antipathy towards foreigners is not surprising, as at the beginning of the book he was sent to Connecticut to study. Needless to say, he is assaulted by a mob on his first day, and while the mob are “Dageos” and “Imitation Americans” even the right sort, like his friend Rob and his missionary uncle point out that he was asking for it by going out in a skirt. Jo turns against the Boxers after they kill his father, of course, and dies before he might be called on to express an opinion on the outcome of the whole Uprising, but he is a remarkably sympathetic character for someone who never shows any interest in Christianity and is arguably anti-American.

Monroe did his homework pretty well, and there are surprisingly few howling errors for a book like this. Its a fun enough read, and worth every penny.

published in 1904 ↩

China/English/Teaching

Essays (with fewer than 8 legs)

Posted on September 5, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

One book that most people here who teach the methods course for majors use is Benjamin’s A Student’s Guide to History. It covers most of the stuff you want them to learn (basic research, working with primary sources, bibliographies etc.) and since we all use it you can always recommend that students in other classes “Go look at Benjamin.” There are two things I don’t like about it.

1. The publisher brings out a new edition every few years, with minimal changes. This makes it impossible to order enough cheap used copies for an entire class, so you have to use the overpriced new edition. Or you can do what I did and just tell them to pick any recent edition, and work around the fact that everyone’s copy is paginated differently. I realize that lots of publishers do this, but it still annoys me.

2. Obviously there are limits to how far you can get in explaining historical research in 10 pages. Still, some parts of it are really not that good. Witness for example, the model essays in How to Write an Essay. This is something we work on a lot, as the exam-type historical essay is the most common product of the undergraduate historian. Below is sort of a draft of what I want to give them on what is wrong with Benjamin’s section on essays.

Here are Benjamin’s sample exam essays. They appear on pp. 63-64 of the 2001 8th edition pp. 53-54 of the 2007 10th edition and pp. 28-29 in the 2013 11th edition

QUESTION Explain the origins of the Chinese civil war of 1945- 1949. How did the differing political programs of the two contenders affect the outcome of that conflict?

POOR ANSWER The Guo Mindang (Kuomintang) had a stronger army than the Communists, but the Communists won the civil war and took over the country. Their political program, communism, was liked by the peasants because they didn’t own any land and paid high taxes.

China was based on the Confucian system, which was very rigid and led to the Manchu dynasty being overthrown. The Chinese didn’t like being dominated by foreigners, and Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) founded the Guo Mindang to unite China. He believed in the Three People’s Principles. At first he cooperated with the Chinese Communists, but later Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) tried to destroy communism because he was against it. Communism was not in favor of the wealthy people.
The Communists wanted a revolution of the peasants and gave them land. They also killed the landlords. Jiang Jieshi worried more about the Communists than about the Japanese invasion. The Japanese looked to conquer China and make it a part of their empire. Jiang Jieshi wantcd to fight the Communists first. After World War II the Chinese Communists attacked Manchuria and took over a lot of weapons. They fought the Guo Mindang army. The Guo Mindang army lost the battles. and .Jiang Jieshi was chased to Taiwan, where he made a new government. The Communists set up their own country and their capital was Beijing ( Peking). That way the Communists won the Chinese civil war.

I think we can agree that this is not a very good answer. In fact, it is so awful it is a bad example, since to me the point of an exercise like this would be to show students the difference between a C answer and an A answer, and this is more of an F- answer.

It is also probably not a very good question. The text suggests that this is an essay for a take-home exam, but for what class? The question seems to imply that you are looking for an answer that focuses on the 1945-49 period and thus deals with the Marshall mission and Communist expansion into Manchuria and the problems the GMD (Guo Mindang) had with re-occupying Eastern China. Maybe you gave them Westad to read, or Pepper. If you are going to ask that focused a question you need to give them the tools to answer it. I sometimes ask students to come up with exam questions. They usually point out that they have no idea what the questions should be. I point out that they should be able to come up with some questions about whatever the major problems we have been dealing with are, and which topics they have read enough on to be able to answer something well. This sounds like it might be a question from some sort of general survey class, asking about the long-term struggle between the CCP and the GMD but then why point people at 1945-49? It strikes me as exactly the type of question that will get you a lot of bad answers, and you will realize that it is mostly because you asked a bad question.

GOOD ANSWER The origins of the 1945-1949 civil war can be traced back to the rise of Chinese nationalism in the late nineteenth century. Out of the confusion of the Warlord period that followed the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 , two powerful nationalist movements arose- one reformist and the other revolutionary. The reformist movement was the Guo Mindang ( Kuomintang) , founded by Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen). It was based on a mixture of republican, Christian , and moderate socialist ideals and inspired by opposition to foreign domination. The revolutionary movement was that of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in 1921, whose goal was a communist society but whose immediate program was to organize the working class to protect its interests and to work for the removal of foreign ”imperialist” control.

Although these two movements shared certain immediate goals (suppression of the Warlords and resistance to foreign influence). they eventually fell out over such questions as land reform, relations with the Soviet Union. the role of the working class and the internal structure of the Guo Mindang. (The CCP operated within the framework of the more powerful Guo Mindang during the 1920’s.)

By the 1930’s, when Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) succeeded Sun the CCP was forced out of the Guo Mindang. By that time the CCP had turned to a program of peasant revolution inspired by Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) A four year military struggle (1930- 1934) between the two movements for control of the peasantry of Jiangxi (Kiangsi) Province ended in the defeat but not destruction of thc CCP.

The Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931) and central China (1936- 1938) helped salvage the fortunes of the CCP. By carrying out an active guerrilla resistance against the Japanese, in contrast to the more passive role of the Guo Mindang, which was saving its army for a future battle with the Communists. the CCP gained the leading position in the nationalist cause.

In the post-World War II period, the CCP’s land reform program won strong peasant support, whereas the landlord-backed Guo Mindang was faced with runaway corruption and inflation, which eroded its middle-class following. The military struggle between 1945 and 1949 led to the defeat of the demoralized Guo Mindang army and the coming to power of the Communists.

Well, this is better, but not much better. First romanization and dates. I try not to be too snotty about romanization, especially in the intro classes, but Guo Mindang? Did you not see the term Guomindang repeatedly in your reading? Was it not on the lecture outlines? Making a mistake like that is really not good gamesmanship. I usually just circle it and move on, but it does make me wonder. Likewise with the Japanese invasion of Central China in 1936-38. Well, the right year is in the middle there. I would probably not care too much about that either if the rest of the essay was any good, just figuring it was a minor mistake. (It does not help that this is supposed to be a take-home exam. Even Wikipedia gets these things right.)¹

What really hurts are the serious factual and interpretive errors. The GMD was not a Christian party in any meaningful sense.² The GMD were not reformist either, they were revolutionaries and they said so constantly. True, some have claimed that what they led was an Abortive Revolution, but still.

There is some stuff in here. We do get a vague reference to the CCP shift to a peasant strategy (although little on what that means), and something on how important the Japanese invasion was. Maybe I had them read Chalmers Johnson? Obviously the field has moved on a bit since then, and I probably talked about Chen Yung-fa in class, but maybe they were absent that day? Maybe I gave them a textbook old enough that it called the GMD a party of landlords? Or maybe they got that from some Mao stuff I gave them?

As you search for reasons to like this ‘essay’ you notice all the things that are not there at all. Terms like United Front or Third Revolutionary Civil War, Gold Yuan reform, places like Yennan and Canton, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R for 1945-49, any people other than Chiang and Mao. I realize that these are not grad students, but there are very few specific events in here. Grading an essay is always somewhat subjective. It’s not just checking off what is there and what is not, it’s looking at the thing and trying to figure out how well the student understands the history they are trying to explain. Mentioning things that should be in there, even if you can’t explain them well, is good, unless you do it so badly it is obvious you don’t know what you are talking about. Saying that Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling’s Christianity probably helped their relations with the U.S. is good³ Calling the GMD a Christian party is bad.

The idea of an essay in a history class is that the student should synthesize the readings, the lectures and the discussions. In a take-home exam they have even more time and resources to do a good job with that. I would like to think that a student who did none of the other readings and never come to class could do better than this just by summarizing the textbook. Yes, the prose is better in answer two, but the content is not much improved.⁴ But, I guess it’s an A, since it is a model essay. What do you think of it, and if you don’t think it is a good essay how would you explain that? Or is it a good essay and I am just expecting too much?⁵

Plus you probably looked up those Wade-Giles romanizations in Wikipedia. I’m sure they were not in the text. ↩
Where is that coming from? This is the type of thing makes me start flipping through the other papers, wondering if maybe somebody slipped me some acid before class the day I talked about this and I rambled incoherently and they took it all down. ↩
although it sounds more like something that belongs in an essay on the GMD ↩
This is an important lesson for students. If you write competently you can get away with a lot. ↩
If this is an ideal essay that maybe computer essay grading is easier than I thought. ↩

China/Teaching

Final Syllabus blogging

Posted on August 25, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 4 Comments

Well, as I predicted I got my syllabai done too late to post them and get helpful suggestions, other than HIST 200, where I did get (and use) some good ideas.¹

Still if anyone has any ideas that might help for next time I would be glad to hear them. Here are the classes.

HIST 200 Introduction to History -The methods class for majors. Focusing on the Boxers this time, I have high hopes for this.

HIST 206 History of East Asia -One I always like teaching (especially since I got more thematic about it) and that students like to take, at least judging by how fast it always fills. I have still not solved the problem of outside readings with this one. I usually like to use three books they can write papers on. One of them should really be a Pre-Han Chinese text, and this time I went with Zhuangzi. The other option is Book of Songs, but both of these are problematic. For the other two I went with Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Autobiography and Liang Heng’s Son of the Revolution. I like both of these, and I like autobiographies with classes at this level, but I wish there were more books that worked like these that would go earlier in the semester.

HIST 332 Early China -This is starting to become my standard model for upper-level courses. Not much for required reading, but lots of optional readings that students can pick from. The idea is that they can Choose Your Own Syllabus^tm by picking out the stuff that interests them. This worked well last semester in Modern Japan, as there were students who had read and were willing talk about interesting readings they had done almost every week. We will see how well it works with a class that is always farther from other things students have done that stuff like Modern China or Modern Japan

Thanks Chuck ↩

China/English/Teaching

The Boxer Uprising and historical method -Syllabus blogging

Posted on August 17, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 6 Comments

There is something of a tradition here at the Frog of posting our syllabai for upcoming courses and asking for suggestions. This summer I promised myself that I would get a post up by June and and be able to actually use the suggestions rather than just thinking ‘good idea for next time’. I am pretty proud that I actually have this up a week before classes start. Regardless of my procrastination any comments that could be used now or major things that will have to be put in next time are welcome.

The class is HIST 200, Introduction to History, our methods course for majors. This is actually the last time it will be taught, as starting next semester it will be split into two classes. I like using Cohen, Paul A. History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997 as the main text and organizing principle for the class because

1. It is a really good book, and having students read good books is the point of history classes

2. Cohen talks a lot about what history is and how to do it.

3. It is a China topic with a lot of non-China implications, which is good given that this is a class for all History majors

So, here it is. The formatting will be different, as in the draft I have the guidelines for assignments mixed in with the weekly summaries. I still have some work to do on this, but I would really be interested in suggestions on new readings and assignments.

History 200 Introduction to History

The point of this class is to help you learn how to think, read and write like a historian. To that end we will be looking at how various different people have interpreted one event, the Boxer Uprising/Rebellion/Movement of 1899-1900. We will also be looking at all sorts of different historical products, from monographs and textbooks to films and graphic novels, and producing all sorts of different things from essays to the outline of a research paper, to a Digital history project. We will also talk some careers and your future as a historian.

Continue reading →

China/East vs West/English/Public History/Qing/Teaching

Chinese youth defending their rights

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

My historical methods course for the Fall will be looking at the Boxers, and I have been reading Jane Elliott’s book on the Boxers.¹ It’s a really interesting book, which among other things collects a lot of pictures and cartoons of the Boxers that I had never seen before.

The standard Western image of the Boxers eventually became that they were a gang of colourful, superstitious primitives (just like all non-White people) who had to be put down by the civilized, orderly forces of the West for the good of Civilization and China itself. ² You can see this narrative in the picture below, which is identified as U.S. Marine Corps art, and which I remember from my High School history textbook.³

One of the things that makes Elliot’s book so interesting is that she shows how a less stereotyped narrative was present right from the beginning. She argues that the Qing imperial troops actually did quite well against the foreigners. This makes the Late Qing reforms look better, which fits in with a lot of recent scholarship. She also shows a number of contemporary images, produced for commercial sale in the West, that make the Chinese look more modern, manly, and soldier-like than the standard narrative would suggest.

This is Ben W. Killburn “Chinese Boys Defending Their Rights”, sold to the American public in 1900

Here is “Firing a Volley from the Shelter of a Bank — Chinese Soldiers at Tien-tsin, China” These guys could almost be the Marines in the first picture.

All these photos of Chinese soldiers as modern people were taken by Americans, or are in American collections, and she argues that the Americans had a much more developed tradition of war photography at this point than anyone else, and that they were less likely to want to see Chinese as something out of The Mikkado than the British. This is something I think I will try to do something with in class, as I am often amazed at how totally dead the old American Anti-imperialist tradition is.

Elliott, Jane E. Some Did It for Civilisation, Some Did It for Their Country: a Revised View of the Boxer War. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2002. ↩
The main book in the class in Cohen’s History in Three Keys, which deals with some of this myth-making and above all how Chinese dealt with this relationship between “Boxerism” Chinese-ness and Anti-foreignism. ↩
This picture is not in Elliot, but she does have a lot like it. ↩