China/English/Teaching

Essays (with fewer than 8 legs)

Posted on 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

  1. Plus you probably looked up those Wade-Giles romanizations in Wikipedia. I’m sure they were not in the text. ↩

  2. 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. ↩

  3. although it sounds more like something that belongs in an essay on the GMD ↩

  4. This is an important lesson for students. If you write competently you can get away with a lot. ↩

  5. If this is an ideal essay that maybe computer essay grading is easier than I thought.  ↩

China/Teaching

Final Syllabus blogging

Posted on 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 Syllabustm 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

 

  1. Thanks Chuck ↩

China/English/Teaching

The Boxer Uprising and historical method -Syllabus blogging

Posted on 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.

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

Chinese youth defending their rights

Posted on 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

boxer-rebellion

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.

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

Boxers2Here 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.

  1. 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. ↩

  2. 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. ↩

  3. This picture is not in Elliot, but she does have a lot like it. ↩

China/English/Wikipedia

Wikipedia: Do Your Bit, Or, Mao Zedong Gets 100,000 Hits

Posted on by C. W. Hayford / 4 Comments

Catching up on my reading, I came across a Wilson Quarterly post about Wikipedia, “In Essence: The Wikipedia Way,” which reports on an article by Richard Jensen, “Military History on the Electronic Frontier: Wikipedia Fights the War of 1812” The Journal of Military History (Oct. 2012).

Richard Jensen is a hardworking historian who does his bit to urge us all to do our bit. Wilson Quarterly uses his article to talk about the Wikipedia article, “War of 1812.” They note that “more than 2,400 self-appointed editors contributed to the 14,000-word article. Some 627 people spilled 200,000 words’ worth of digital ink arguing over its exact content. In April 2012, it garnered 172,000 page views.”

You could see the same pattern in China articles. “Mao Zedong,” for instance,  has been viewed 120,0082 times between June 26 and July 23. That’s right: 120,0082, though it will have changed by the time you click this link. The article has had nearly 10,000 edits, more than 400 editors.

Part of the fascination of Wikipedia is going backstage by clicking the “Talk Page” tab. Lots of juicy nonsense mixed in with the occasional words of wisdom1.

The articles on the major events of modern Chinese history are numerous. Most are too long and filled with quirky trivia. Some are useful summaries of what readers should know, some are … well, let’s just say they are not quite so good. You decide:

  • Xinhai Revolution (how many Wikipedia readers will know that this is the “1911 Revolution”?)

We could go on.

Moral: Those 100,000 readers need you.

On the internet “nobody knows that you’re a dog,” so don’t let the editing go to them.

 

 

 

 

  1. in this case, you have to click on the “Archived” links to see the back discussions). You can look at the individual edits by going to the “View History” tab ↩

China/English/Gender

Manchu underwear

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

So, I was reading the 1911 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, specifically the entry on China. For those of you who don’t know it, the 1911 edition is considered to be a classic because it had a higher level of really well-known contributors than any before or since. Given the date it was published, it also give you a a great picture of the late-Victorian Anglo-American mindset. And it’s on-line.

The China entry is remarkably physical and geographic. There is a bit of history, but as late as this they were not prepared to say much about the history of China.1 They do have some stuff on more contemporary history, including this little bit on the Dowager Empress Cixi, who should have been handing power over to the Guangxu emperor as he attained his majority just before the 1898 reforms.

The dowager-empress, who, in spite of the emperor Kwang-su having nominally attained his majority, had retained practical control of the supreme power until the conflict with Japan, had been held, not unjustly, to blame for the disasters of the war, and even before its conclusion the young emperor was adjured by some of the most responsible among his own subjects to shake himself free from the baneful restraint of “petticoat government,” and himself take the helm.

I was struck by the phrase “petticoat government” (in quotes no less) Although the study of Manchu undergarments is still in swaddling clothes, I am pretty sure that Cixi did not wear petticoats. I have actually seen that phrase before, used in early 20th century anti woman’s suffrage  rhetoric, as here.

It seems to have been a pretty standard phrase in the West at the time, referring to the baleful influence of women in politics. From Wikipedia it seems that the phrase goes back to at least the 1750’s, and thus long before votes for women was any sort of issue. That actually ties it in better with the Chinese case, where there was also a long tradition of fearing the influence of women on government, but for the most part not because women were likely to get access to the formal mechanisms of power (the ballot in this case) but because they could attain power outside of the official “Confucian” stream. There is a lot of stuff about this in Keith McMahon’s new Women Shall Not Rule: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Han to Liao

While the book has a short analysis of the issues involved with women and political power in the Chinese tradition, the heart of it are McMahon’s accounts of pretty much every story of women with court power in China down to the Liao. There were a number of ways for women to get power, from getting the emperor to fall in love with you, being the Empress Dowager, coming from a major aristocratic clan that the emperor had to respect, and just being smart and ruthless. Pretty much all of these women were condemned by those who wrote histories, in part out of unadulterated sexism, and in part because all of these methods of gaining power were not the formal one of getting an education and becoming a bureaucrat. Women were often lumped in with eunuchs, who were both not-male and represented a separate power stream.

Cixi would seem to not fit many of these models. The theme of emperors becoming infatuated with personal pleasure, in the form of concubines, rather than state duties is not really relevant, as she only became really powerful after her husband died. The old aristocratic politics was long dead by that point. She is one of the few really powerful court women of the Ming-Qing. She does have the ‘mother of the current emperor’ thing, but I would almost say she has more in common with Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, more of a successful freelance political entrepreneur that part of a standard system that often made it possible for women to get political power, as in the earlier dynasties. It will be interesting to see what MacMahon does with her in his second volume.

 

  1. I have seen at least one timeline from this period that marks all Chinese history down to the Tang as ‘legendary’ ↩

China/English/Japan/Pigs/Public History/Wikipedia

Pigs in the News and In Wikipedia: Or, Lipstick on a Frog

Posted on by C. W. Hayford / 0 Comment

Vladimir Putin is on a roll. He has been having a fine time poking the US in the eye over the Edward Snowden kerfuffle,  but at a news conference he declined to comment: “In any case, I’d rather not deal with such questions, because anyway it’s like shearing a pig – lots of screams but little wool.”

That reminded me that it’s been too long since we talked about pigs. Just because we’re Frog in a Well doesn’t mean that we can only talk about frogs – in fact, pigs are our, well… bread and butter. I will modestly call attention to my piece, “Pigs, Shit, and Chinese History, or, Happy Year of the Pig!” Frog In a Well  (January 27 2007). You can find several more by clicking the “Pigs” link on the right hand column of this page.

Putin seems to be using one of the many, many colorful pig sayings. My father, who grew up on a farm, had a bunch of them, mostly unprintable. Wikipedia is good at accumulating this sort of thing. A succession of people edited the article “Lipstick on a Pig,”  which gives examples of usage going back decades, but the Wikipedia article  “Pig in a Poke” is even better. Many languages have a rough equivalent. It turns out that in  Latvia you say “Buy a cat in a sack.” Who knew? Wikipedia “Pigs in Popular Culture” has an extensive section of pig-related idioms.

Right. But what about China?

Wikipedia has many faults. It is a great grab bag, not an encyclopedia. But, as the computer software people like to say, “that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” China and pigs is a good example. If you want to have some idiotic fun, go to Wikipedia, any page, and in the upper right hand corner you will find a “Search” box. Enter “~Pigs + China” (without the quotation marks). The tilde (~) means that you don’t want articles with this word in the title, but all  Wikipedia pages with the following words in it.

Amazing. I got 7,259 hits. Of course, this includes duplicates, off the wall irrelevances, rock songs, and pig iron, but also a fascinating variety of things you would not have thought to look up: “Coprophagia”, “Dutch Pacification Campaign on Formosa,” as well as straightforward finds such as “Science and technology of the Song Dynasty.“And that’s less than a dozen of the hits, leaving more than 7,000 to go.

This search, random though it may be, is a dramatic way to see the central role that pigs played in Chinese history.

And oh, young people today just don’t know the classics — the Muppets’ “Pigs in Space.” Vladimir Putin’s soft power sneers can’t compare. YouTube has tons of them: Pigs in Space at YouTube.

 

 

Books/China/Gender

The Birth of Chinese Feminism

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

Columbia University Press sent me a copy of a really good book, Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2013. The core of the book is a set of translations of essays by He-Yin Zhen, although we also get a lengthy introduction and translations of few other key texts.

The authors are interested in He-Yin Zhen because she was one of the the most interesting feminist theorists of the late Qing who has been ignored because her fundamental analytic category of nannu 男女 (literally man and woman or male/female) did not fit well with with either bourgeois or anarcho-feminist ideas about gender. The book includes translations of Liang Qichao’s On Women’s Education and Jin Tianhe’s The Woman’s Bell, but unlike these two (male-authored) texts, He-Yin Zhen did not subordinate woman’s issues to nationalism, modernization, or racial survival.

..instead, in He Yin Zhen’s theoretical idiom, history is formed by a continuously reproduced injustice in the manner of what the Annales school of French historians would come to call the longue duree, whose generalized contours of uneven wealth and property as well as it specificities of embodied affect could be made visible through the figure of “woman”.

For He-Yin, nannu 男女 was the fundamental analytical category, more important that Chinese vs. Western, modern vs. premodern, or Marxist ideas about class. In “On the question of Women’s Labor” she discusses labor and the subordination of women throughout Chinese and modern history, claiming that while modern factory labor has special characteristics, in the end it grows out of the unequal distribution of wealth, the same cause as the subordination of women in traditional society. In “Economic Revolution and Women’s Revolution” He-Yin is in favor of love marriage, but sees every type of existing marriage, both for men and for women, as a form of prostitution. In “On Feminist Antimilitarism” she claims that antimilitarism would be good for “weak nations (literally “races or kind”, zhong 種), the common people, and women.” It’s practically subaltern studies.

It’s a very good book, with some very good readings. It’s pretty obvious why a lot of these have not been translated before, since it is hard to see how you could take a class from some of these readings to other stuff that was going on in 1907.

China/English

On academic publishing

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

Above is a post on Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2013. Another thing this book makes me think of is the inadequacy of our current publishing model. This is a very good book to have your students read if you are teaching a high-level course on Chinese feminism. A number of these readings would be good for any sort of Modern China class or a lot of classes on women’s history or feminist theory. Unfortunately, there is no way to assign just Liang Qichao’s On Women’s Education or just He-Yin Zhen’s On the Question of Woman’s Labor and not have your students spend too much money and have the press get some cash out of the whole thing. Roll-your-own textbooks and course readers have been part of the landscape for a while, but at present they are cumbersome, paper-bound, and expensive. Wouldn’t it be great if individual translations/articles/chapters were available as something like Kindle singles for 99 cents (or 50 cents, let’s not be greedy) and instructors could put together a list and students could download a bunch of readings with one click and $20? Given that most of the content is created by scholars and given to presses for free this would seem like a profitable arrangement for both producers and consumers of knowledge. Obviously this is not going to happen any time soon, but I suspect that just as the model of music being sold as ‘albums’ by a publisher is being replaced by the model of individual songs being sold by some sort of clearinghouse, the same thing will happen with scholarship. The tyranny of the binding has not always existed, and it will not last forever. Texts used to be much more amorphous, and I guess they will be again. Will Columbia University Press be the academic I-tunes?

 

 

Anecdotes/China/Diplomacy/English/Imperialism

A clash of symbols

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

In the introduction of Julia Lovell’s The Opium War she discusses an incident from November, 2010. David Cameron had gone to China, and it being November he and his team were all wearing poppies. For the British the poppy is a symbol of the war dead of the Great War. It is not really a symbol in China, although of course a British PM with a poppy on did bring up memories of the Opium Wars. Cameron was asked to take his poppy of, and of course refused. Despite the possible hurt feelings of the Chinese people the Chinese government allowed him to keep his poppy.

Poppies

As the link above shows, even Daily Mail readers were sometimes understanding of the Chinese position, and the Chinese were willing to let Cameron run around with a poppy, so everyone behaved very well. I’m actually glad to see that when there is a deal to be made the ancient hatreds of the past can be set aside.

For those of our readers who are Chinese, the association of poppies with wartime sacrifice is more important in Britain, but is also known elsewhere.

 

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Cultural/English/Film/Foreign Views/General/Japan/Memory/US-Japan/大正/幕末/明治/昭和

Modern Japan in Anglophone Historical Fiction

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

ASPAC 2013
Jonathan Dresner
Pittsburg State University

“But writers of fiction do not stumble onto locales or times: they choose them and they use them to serve their narrative and aesthetic ends.” — Jonathan Dresner

“…flaws typical of the genre: a carefully set but very selective milieu; characters cobbled together from cultural and psychosocial fragments; wildly unlikely encounters and inappropriate behavior. … I don’t ever use historical fiction in my teaching, and I rarely read it (especially in my own field!).” — Jonathan Dresner

Roughly Chronologically:

  • Gai-jin (James Clavell, 1993): 1862-1863
  • The Apprentice (Lewis Libby, 1996): 1903
  • The Teahouse Fire (Ellis Avery, 2006): Bakumatsu and Meiji.
  • Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden, 1997): subject born in 1920, lived until after WWII.

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Books/China/Religion

Why are the Chinese atheists?

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 4 Comments

Sam Crane, at Useless Tree, comments on the recent study that shows that China has a higher percentage of atheists than anyplace else in the world. Sam suggests that part of the reason for this is that atheism is not really the thing to be asking about. There is a long tradition in China, going way back, of believing in things like Confucianism, which is maybe not a religion. He’s right that asking Chinese if they are ‘confirmed atheists’ is probably the wrong question. The original WaPo piece is probably also correct in saying that the Taiping rebellion and the Communists have something to do with it, which is true enough but misses a lot.

Possibly the most important reason that so many Chinese identify as ‘atheists’ is not the history of ‘Confucianism’ throughout the 5000 years of Chinese history, but the complex history of Chinese religion in the 20th century. By far the best introduction to this is Goossaert and Palmer’s The Religious Question in Modern China. It’s a really good book, that contains far more than I could ever put in this blog post, but one of its themes is how the Chinese state, and especially the party-state (KMT or CCP) tried to harness, improve, or eliminate religion as part of creating a new China. One aspect of this was the idea that traditional Chinese forms of religion were an embarrassment in the eyes of foreigners. G and P….

A particularly telling case of such sensitivity is Kang Youwei’s utterance: “Foreigners come in our temples, take photographs of the idols, show these photographs to each other and laugh.” This sentence was later copied verbatim in the introduction to the most important and famous antisuperstition law of the Nationalist government, the 1928 “Standards to determine the temples to be destroyed and those to be maintained.

So if you want to understand the problems that Chinese had in fitting their ideas about religion into a context where the word atheism would make sense, you should read the book. If all you need is a good quote on the importance of impressing foreigners with China’s religious ideas this blog post should do.

 

 

China/English/Public History/Qing

Nationalism sucks

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 4 Comments

A very sad post from the Economist on the problem of the zodiac heads. Basically, a wealthy Frenchman has agreed to donate two of the bronze heads stolen from the Summer Palace in 1860 back to ‘China’. What I find most depressing is the use of the Summer Palace as a symbol of foreign oppression of the Chinese. Yes, the torching of the Summer Palace was a crime against China, History, and Art, but the place itself is one of the greatest symbols of cultural borrowing and fusion you could imagine. Built by Qing emperors (who were not Han), designed by Jesuits (who by definition identified with no nation), it is also the  perfect place to be all Chinese and write poems about the ruins of the old capital, like Chinese poets used to write about Loyang.  The piece points out that  the site is being used to teach Chinese schoolchildren to hate the Other, which is really very depressing.

 

P.S. Don’t read the comments.

Anecdotes/Books/China/English/Historiography/Imperialism

History and hats

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 5 Comments

One book that I use in my classes is Bickers’ Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai. The book is the story of William Tinkler, an Englishman who served in the Shanghai Municipal Police. Students sometimes find it hard to warm up to the book because Tinkler is not easy to identify with.1 Bickers is interested in him because he is a good example of the lower parts of Empire and how they were experienced and also, I would guess, because Tinkler manages to go down the tubes at about the same pace as the Empire.  I like the book because it is a ripping yarn and Bickers talks a good deal about historical method and how historians go about figuring things out. One thing that struck them last time was the discussion of Tinkler’s headgear. In a chapter called “What We Can’t Know”, where Bickers discusses the ways historians deal with a lack of evidence he  mentions that when Tinkler died2 he was the owner of five berets. Bickers suggests that he had a taste for wearing them. This seems really hard to believe. Could you see  Tinkler the dashing SMP detective

Tinkler1

Or Tinkler the Empire hobo

Tinkler2

in a beret? There is a really good story here, but Ranke only knows what it is.  He was sort of out at elbow after leaving the SMC, maybe he got hold of a shipment of berets and these were the final ones he had not sold? Maybe he was an anti-Obelix, going around beating up Frenchmen and taking their hats to keep score? Maybe my understanding of the history of treaty port fashion its too limited for me to make sense of Tinkler’s hats?   Anyone who has ever done historical research remembers finding facts that were amazing and obviously could be used to make some important point. Bickers describes the process of finding a lot of things like this and slowly finding a context for them. Most authors don’t clue you in to the the bits that they could never find anything to do with, but Bickers does. It’s a nice book for China, but also for historical method.

 

 

 

 

  1. And, of course, the book is soooo boooring ↩

  2. Stabbed by a Japanese Marine in 1939 ↩

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