China/Classics/Culture/East vs West/English

Ungraded Love or Double Standards? Stanley Fish, Stephen Asma, and Confucius

Posted on by C. W. Hayford / 4 Comments

Stanley Fish, no stranger to controversy, has a piece on the New York Times online blog, Opinionator, Favoritism Is Good (January 9, 2013). Fish is known for such books as There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech: And a Good Thing Too,  He vigorously responds to the critics of his March 2012 Two Cheers for Double Standards, published during the early phases of the presidential campaign when Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher both made colorful and offensive remarks. Many said that we had to condemn both the right and the left in order to be fair.

“Enlightenment liberalism!”  cried Fish, and proceeded to explain why even-handed treatment of friend and foe was wrong.  The classic liberal stance was “the transposition into the political realm of the Golden Rule: do unto others what you would have them do unto you. Don’t give your friends a pass you wouldn’t give to your enemies.” That is, “fairness is the great liberal virtue.” Dangerous, says Fish: “Limbaugh is the bad guy… why should he get an even break?” If you treat the good guys and the bad guys the same way, you are withdrawing from moral judgment.

That argument outraged more readers than any column he had written. An avalanche of comments asserted that merit and a single standard should rule. Fish responds by defending the double standard: “it’s not only O.K. but positively good to favor those on your side, members of your tribe. These are the people who look out for you, who have your back, who share your history, who stand for the same things you do. Why would you not prefer them to strangers?”

Giving preference is not prejudice but morally grounded, he continued. The classic liberal sees the individual as “what remains after race, gender, ethnicity and filial relationships have been discounted.” This is wrong:  “personhood is the sum of all these, and it makes no sense to disregard everything that connects you to someone and to treat him or her as if the two of you had never met.”

Pop quiz: Does this remind you of anyone? Confucius called for “graded love.” You don’t treat your family the same way you treat a stranger.Continue reading →

China/China-Japan/Nationalism/War

Japanese Counter-Insurgency: Strategy or Tactic?

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

Robert Farley’s article on Japan’s WWII Counter-Insurgency planning and implementation begs the question of whether COIN, as it’s called now, was a strategy or a tactic. (Though it also illustrates something I’d like to see more of: blogging on journal articles and book chapters. Yes, I should do more of that, too.) Farley says

[retired Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) Lieutenant General Noboru] Yamaguchi suggests that elements of the Japanese Army and a variety of hybrid civil-military organizations took the problem of COIN quite seriously from a strategic point of view, appreciating that the only way to victory in China was the establishment of a self-sustaining, pro-Japanese Chinese government.

Farley goes on to cite some examples, but he also notes some of the atrocities associated with the Japanese military in China (and elsewhere), and also that resources for “hearts and minds” operations were decidedly lacking. Comfort Women are notably missing, which is too bad: it’s a fantastic example of an attempt to solve the “hearts and minds” problem that goes horribly wrong.

But what struck me about the discussion is the use of the term “strategy”, which suggests a substantial goal, guiding tactics and training. I don’t doubt that there were Japanese who saw the necessity of developing real ties with China, building relationships, any more than I doubt that some Japanese authentically believed the pan-Asianism which underlay the rhetoric of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. What I don’t believe is that Japanese military, political or economic leaders were at all serious about the GEACPS, or that pan-Asianism was more than a theoretical and rhetorical fig leaf for aggressive imperialism. And I don’t believe that “hearts and minds” COIN really rose to the level of “strategy”: military training and tactics routinely ignored priorities beyond raw domination and control. Farley’s right that resource issues and circumstances mitigated against long-term relationship-building, and our colleague Konrad Lawson has been doing fascinating work on Chinese who did develop strategic alliances with Japanese occupiers. But just as Manchukuo illustrates the hollowness of Japanese claims to support Chinese autonomy, the realities of the battlefield and occupation make it clear that winning over Chinese support was far from a serious strategic consideration.

That said, I was also struck by a comment on the article from one “John Chan”

Japan is an unapologetic war criminal; Yamaguchi’s quote is the tip of iceberg of how Japanese systematically white wash their war crimes and gloss over their atrocities.

Thru history Japanese are pirates; barbarism, deceitfulness, and brutality are their way of life. Using atrocity to overcome any resistance is their default choice of action; the conformity nature of the Japanese makes them particular wicked, they will compete in cruelty as an honour, it makes Yamaguchi’s quote about Japanese COIN theory an outright shameless lie and evidence of Japanese has no remorse about its war crimes.

This is not, as I understand it, an uncommon view of Japan from a Chinese mainland perspective. The historiographical accusation is a familiar one — Japan has a long history of denying, downplaying, ignoring, and justifying modern atrocities which is rivaled only by a few other countries1 — but the idea of wartime Japan as an authentic representation of Japan’s essential historical character is something I hadn’t seen before.2 Connecting the wako pirates (I assume that’s what he means) to WWII is an historical and cultural stretch that boggles the historical imagination. But if you’re looking at Japan solely through the lens of Chinese victimization, perhaps it’s not as much of a leap as all that.

  1. China’s official amnesia regarding the Great Leap Forward Famine and Cultural Revolution purges; America’s denial that westward expansion was imperialist and effectively genocidal; the rehabilitation of Stalin in Russian historical memory; etc.  ↩

  2. and obviously, not something I think is historically or culturally supportable as a thesis  ↩

China-Japan/Japan/Memory/War/昭和

Japanese Counter-Insurgency: Strategy or Tactic?

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

Robert Farley’s article on Japan’s WWII Counter-Insurgency planning and implementation begs the question of whether COIN, as it’s called now, was a strategy or a tactic. (Though it also illustrates something I’d like to see more of: blogging on journal articles and book chapters. Yes, I should do more of that, too.) Farley says

[retired Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) Lieutenant General Noboru] Yamaguchi suggests that elements of the Japanese Army and a variety of hybrid civil-military organizations took the problem of COIN quite seriously from a strategic point of view, appreciating that the only way to victory in China was the establishment of a self-sustaining, pro-Japanese Chinese government.

Farley goes on to cite some examples, but he also notes some of the atrocities associated with the Japanese military in China (and elsewhere), and also that resources for “hearts and minds” operations were decidedly lacking. Comfort Women are notably missing, which is too bad: it’s a fantastic example of an attempt to solve the “hearts and minds” problem that goes horribly wrong.

But what struck me about the discussion is the use of the term “strategy”, which suggests a substantial goal, guiding tactics and training. I don’t doubt that there were Japanese who saw the necessity of developing real ties with China, building relationships, any more than I doubt that some Japanese authentically believed the pan-Asianism which underlay the rhetoric of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. What I don’t believe is that Japanese military, political or economic leaders were at all serious about the GEACPS, or that pan-Asianism was more than a theoretical and rhetorical fig leaf for aggressive imperialism. And I don’t believe that “hearts and minds” COIN really rose to the level of “strategy”: military training and tactics routinely ignored priorities beyond raw domination and control. Farley’s right that resource issues and circumstances mitigated against long-term relationship-building, and our colleague Konrad Lawson has been doing fascinating work on Chinese who did develop strategic alliances with Japanese occupiers. But just as Manchukuo illustrates the hollowness of Japanese claims to support Chinese autonomy, the realities of the battlefield and occupation make it clear that winning over Chinese support was far from a serious strategic consideration.

That said, I was also struck by a comment on the article from one “John Chan”

Japan is an unapologetic war criminal; Yamaguchi’s quote is the tip of iceberg of how Japanese systematically white wash their war crimes and gloss over their atrocities.

Thru history Japanese are pirates; barbarism, deceitfulness, and brutality are their way of life. Using atrocity to overcome any resistance is their default choice of action; the conformity nature of the Japanese makes them particular wicked, they will compete in cruelty as an honour, it makes Yamaguchi’s quote about Japanese COIN theory an outright shameless lie and evidence of Japanese has no remorse about its war crimes.

This is not, as I understand it, an uncommon view of Japan from a Chinese mainland perspective. The historiographical accusation is a familiar one — Japan has a long history of denying, downplaying, ignoring, and justifying modern atrocities which is rivaled only by a few other countries1 — but the idea of wartime Japan as an authentic representation of Japan’s essential historical character is something I hadn’t seen before.2 Connecting the wako pirates (I assume that’s what he means) to WWII is an historical and cultural stretch that boggles the historical imagination. But if you’re looking at Japan solely through the lens of Chinese victimization, perhaps it’s not as much of a leap as all that.

  1. China’s official amnesia regarding the Great Leap Forward Famine and Cultural Revolution purges; America’s denial that westward expansion was imperialist and effectively genocidal; the rehabilitation of Stalin in Russian historical memory; etc.  ↩

  2. and obviously, not something I think is historically or culturally supportable as a thesis  ↩

China/English

Teaching (about Japan)

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Update Here is the final version

As is the tradition here at the Frog, I am posting an early draft of a syllabus, in hopes of getting some suggestions. This is my Modern Japan class, and the way I have designed it reflects how I have been changing my teaching of late in response to changes in technology.

The idea behind this class is that studying history is mostly about reading. This is even more true about topics like Modern Japan where I am less well informed, but in any class getting students to read, think about and talk about interesting writings by all sorts of people is the central point of it. The lecture format, of course, does not encourage that.

When I was an undergrad reading meant books. Books were easy to find, assign, and buy. Yes, you could make a course reader, but that was a pain and an expense. For students today articles on JSTOR or wherever are easy to find, and through things like ebrary or a PDF scanner you can also give them book chapters. You don’t even need to print out a course reader. Just tell them that all the readings are on the computer in the classroom and anyone with a thumb drive can come up and get them.1 So I could give them a whole graduate seminar of readings, but that would not work, in part because undergraduates mostly need the ‘lecture’ part of lecture-discussion: someone leading them through the major themes of the period rather than assuming they already know them.

The way I have been approaching this is giving them a set of “optional” readings. Each week they need to do whatever common readings we have, and also at least one of the optional readings, usually an article or a book chapter. The idea here is that they can tailor the class to their own interest. More interested in economics, or women? Then pick the optional readings that fit your interests.

Needless to say, if you don’t make them write about the readings (i.e. give them points for reading) not as many students will do them, so I have asked them to turn in a brief summary of the optional reading they have done 10 times in the semester, and a longer analysis of the readings five times in the semester. This semester, for the first time, I am requiring them to turn in a contract listing what readings they will be writing an analysis on at the beginning of the semester, in hopes that they will actually look over the list of possible readings and pick things that interest them, rather than procrastinating.

How well does this work? Well, I have tried things like this for a few semesters now. When it works it works pretty well. If you know what they have read ahead of time you can adjust your lectures or what you do in class accordingly. You can get good discussions pretty regularly.

Of course there are trade-offs. No time for a research paper, or book reviews. Allowing students lots of freedom also means that things can turn into quite a mess if they don’t do the reading or if they all put it off till the end.

Note that this is a draft syllabus. Both the 1912-1937 and the postwar period need to be re-organized somehow, but I wanted to put this up and see if I got any suggestions before I went final. I would love any suggestions from Japan people about specific readings, periodization, etc., but also more general comments about how my approach might work.I am stuck with the books, as I have already ordered them.

So, without further ado, the current version is here

  1. I used to burn readings to a disk, but this seems pointless now ↩

Anecdotes/Books/China/China-Japan/Japan

A memory stirs..

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Reading Emily Whewell’s review of this new book on the Chinese and Japanese treaty port systems and extraterritoriality brought back a long-ago scholarly memory.

My first seminar paper in graduate school — that small snippet of scholarship which is supposed to prepare callow youth (intellectually speaking) for greater things, and scout a path through the existing forests of scholarship — was a comparison of the Chinese and Japanese treaty port systems. I remember very little about the paper, except embarassment.

I titled the paper something like “The Treaty Port Systems of Japan and China: A Fruitful Comparison” — and Cassell’s work, cited above, confirms my sense of topic, if not my other judgements — and in the end I came to the conclusion that the systems were, in fact, too different to be considered quite the same thing. In fact, I concluded, it was like “apples and oranges”….

It’s a wonder that I survived graduate school. I try to remember that when I’m evaluating my own students.

Academia/Anecdotes/China-Japan/Japan

A memory stirs…

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

Reading Emily Whewell’s review of this new book on the Chinese and Japanese treaty port systems and extraterritoriality brought back a long-ago scholarly memory.

My first seminar paper in graduate school — that small snippet of scholarship which is supposed to prepare callow youth (intellectually speaking) for greater things, and scout a path through the existing forests of scholarship — was a comparison of the Chinese and Japanese treaty port systems. I remember very little about the paper, except embarassment.

I titled the paper something like “The Treaty Port Systems of Japan and China: A Fruitful Comparison” — and Cassell’s work, cited above, confirms my sense of topic, if not my other judgements — and in the end I came to the conclusion that the systems were, in fact, too different to be considered quite the same thing. In fact, I concluded, it was like “apples and oranges”….

It’s a wonder that I survived graduate school. I try to remember that when I’m evaluating my own students.

Books/China/China-Japan/English/Sino-Japanese Wars/War

Japanese views of China

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

December 13 seems as good a day as any to talk about Japanese imperialism. One of the books I taught this semester was Ishikawa Tatsuzo Soldiers Alive.1 It’s a rather odd book, since Ishikawa wrote it after having been embedded with the Japanese Army in China. It was intended to be a propaganda piece, and he saw it as such. Unfortunately for him his descriptions of the suffering and sacrifices of the Japanese soldiers and how they dealt with them was not pleasing to the censors and the book was never released and he got a four month prison term for writing it. This was no doubt due to the rapes, murders and looting casually committed by his characters. For a good picture of the casual brutality of war this is a fine source.

The Chinese are presented as dirty, pathetic and passive. Below is a very good segment on Japanese attitudes towards China and Chinese culture. Our heroes are in newly-captured Nanjing.  They had participated in the battles at Zijinshan, but the book skips over the Rape of Nanjing.

FIRST CLASS Privates Kondo and Hirao were quartered in a residential street next to a large, quiet mansion surrounded by trees. “What a pompous house. It’s impudent. Let’s pay it a little visit. Kondo, come on.”

Kondo, who had been about to doze off, stood up, yawning.

“If there’s a ku-niang2 in there, she’s mine.”

“You ass, we’ll toss for her.”

Not bothering to take his rifle, Hirao set off first, a piece of bamboo for a cane. The old-fashioned gate had been broken in, giving way to a garden beginning to bloom with allspice flowers. A flagstone path curving among a thick growth of plants led to a western-style entrance. Its door, too, was open. Swinging his bamboo stick, Hirao strode into the parqueted vestibule.

“Hello. Anybody home?”

Naturally, no one answered. The retreating Chinese troops semed to have plundered the house. Curtains and dishes lay strewn along the corridors. The rooms had been mercilessly ransacked; drawers of the large rosewood wardrobes fitted with mirrors lay scattered across the floor. The tub in the western-style bathroom was filled with dirty water, and the tile floor was littered with excrement.

They walked everywhere but found no traces of ku-niang nor anything else likely to excite their interest. Finally, Hirao entered a spacious room on the second floor, apparently used for receiving guests. He turned toward Kondo, who was lagging behind, and folded both arms in front to greet him in the Chinese manner.

“Welcome, noble sir. So happy to see you, my dear Kondo of Kondo and Company. It has been a while since I’ve had the pleasure.”

The tranquil sumptuousness of the room inspired him to sudden levity. Kondo promptly responded.

“Ah, Hirao of Hirao and Company! Forgive me for interrupting you at such a busy time.”

“Well, do have a seat. Indulge in a moment of repose, please.”

As befitted men of stature, the two ensconced themselves in the large, comfortable armchairs and looked about. Made of delicately carved rosewood, the chairs resembled those of the priests in the main hall of a temple. A broad vermilion-lacquered table, a fireplace overlaid with marble, mirrors mounted atop shelves, an antique chandelier-signs of an opulent lifestyle abounded. A number of lightly colored landscape scrolls hung from the walls; two more lay spread out on the floor. Just outside the window a profusion of bamboo rustled in the wind, casting ceaselessly swaying shadows over the room.

“Now then, my dear Kondo, the world seems to be in quite an uproar these days. What do you think will come of it?”

“Indeed, even our old boy Chiang Kai-shek has been making a nuisance of himself. I finally went to see him again the other day and urged him to put a stop to his rowdyism, but I can’t be sure he will listen to me.”

“Oh, it is high time that fellow quit politics.”

Great man Hirao suddenly rose and walked over to the fireplace to discover a curious object on top of the stone mantelpiece. He took it in his hands. Two inches by five, made from wood, it had a round, flat surface inscribed with the twelve horary signs, and the four cardinal directions of the compass.

“It’s a sundial!” he exclaimed with a grave face. “Look, Kondo, a sundial.”

Although the sundial did not seem very old, the compass needle was coated with rust. Nevertheless it still tremblingly pointed north. Slanting rays of the evening sun bathed the room with a pale red glow. Hirao pulled up the vermilion-lacquered table and leaned over it. Using the compass to align the sundial properly, he flipped up the rusty vertical pin. Its shadow formed a slender, distinct line between the signs of Monkey and Bird. Hirao folded his arms and gazed at the sundial.

“This is a great find,” said Kondo, but Hirao remained speechless until asked about his silence. Then he broke into a histrionic murmur.

“Ah, the eternal China, in the present but not of the present. China is dreaming of its ancient culture; breathing the air of its ancient culture. Just think: Though surrounded by this much luxury, what the master of this house delighted in was sipping tea, folding his arms, and gazing at this sundial.”

Hirao’s romanticism was awake once more. At moments like this his grandiloquence burst forth without warning. He threw himself back in the chair, spread out his legs, and gesticulated with his arms.

“The four hundred million people of China are as serene and ancient as the Yangtze River. China hasn’t changed a bit since Huang-ti, Wen, Wu, T’ai-tsung, and Yang Kuei-fei lived and died. China will never perish. Chiang Kai-shek and his friends have had their try with the New Life Movement and the rest, but changing people like these is absolutely impossible. We, too, can do our damnedest to occupy China’s entire territory, but any notion of converting the Chinese to Japanese ways is a dream within a dream within a dream. China is what she is and will everlastingly be. It boggles the mind. Ah, it boggles the mind!”

Kondo grew bored and stood up. “What are you moaning about? Let’s go back.”

Reverently holding the sundial, Hirao rose and placed it gingerly into the inner pocket of his tunic. He felt as though he had managed for the first time to fathom this country named China. Century after century the masses of China had continued to lead lives free of any ties to politics. It did not interest them in the least whether they were governed by the Ch’ing dynasty or Sun Yat-sen. He began to feel a boundless love for these Chinese people and their millennia-old spirit. Japan was fighting Chiang Kai-shek, but the masses, remote from the Chiang regime, were neither anti-Japanese nor pro-Soviet nor anti-British nor pro-Communist. Hirao’s voice was like a wistful sigh as he followed Kondo down the staircase.

“It is genuine anarchism the Chinese are living, each practicing it in his very own way.”

Such simple-minded admiration was distasteful to Kondo.

“There are many kinds of anarchism, you know. If that’s anarchism, then beasts are all anarchists. Consider the pig, for instance: There’s a consummate anarchist for you.”

“Idiot, you’ve got no sensibility.”

“And you’re theorizing like a blind Indian groping to describe an elephant.”

“Say whatever you like.”

In theoretical dispute, Hirao was no match for Kondo. Gripping his bamboo stick, he leapt out the front door, shouting,

“Farewell! Many thanks for the gift!” (pp.139-143)

Not much to say about this, really, but it is a nice evocation of Japanese attitudes towards China.

  1. Ishikawa, Tatsuzo. Soldiers Alive. Translated by Zeljko Cipris. University of Hawaii Press, 2003. ↩

  2. a young Chinese woman to be raped and murdered. ↩

Books/China/Countryside/Culture/English/Literature/Poetry/Translation

Rustic poetry

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

The contrast between the center and the periphery is a common theme in Chinese literature. To be an official sent from the capital to the provinces, or a sent-down youth sent from Beijing to a village in the Northeast is a great inspiration for art. A very fine example of this comes from, Pricne Dan, as discussed by Andrew Chittick. 1 The Xiangyang garrison was an outpost of central power along the middle Yangzi, and thus the relationship between the local elite and central power (the capital in what is now Nanjing) was very important both for the central power (who needed local support to hold of the northern hordes) and for local elite (who were legitimated by connections to central power.)  First, the poem

At dawn depart from Xiangyang town, by evening  lodge at Big Dike inn.
All the girls of Big Dike bloom voluptuous, startling  young men’s eyes.
Going upstream one’s job is poling, downstream row a pair of oars;
Four-cornered dragon streamers encircle  the pole in the river’s midst.
Jiangling’s three thousand  three hundred  li, midpoint  of the west pass road,
But whether  it is clear or blocked-how can you figure how long it takes?
Men praise Xiangyang music, but the music made is not that of my country.
Guided by stars, braving the wind, I’ll sail back to my Yang province.
Lustrous unrestrained girls like creeping vines tangle around  the long-lived pine.
Though  their loveliness perseveres in spring, when the year is cold they are no use to me.
The  yellow goose joins heaven  to fly, anxiously pacing the middle way.
The cartwheels  turn  in my guts; whom must my love be with now?
Yang province rushes wrought in circles; a hundred cash buys two or three thickets’  worth.
If I cannot  buy then  I will return; empty hands will clutch  and embrace me.
Creeping  vines arise from baseness; they rely on the   surface of the long-lived pine.
Yet can one slight a death  by frost? The noble becomes entangled with another.
I hate to see so much lust and pleasure, stop me, don’t speak to me.
I won’t be a crow that flocks in the forest; suddenly I feel I am called to go.
Chittick points out that this poem seems to echo many elements of provincial culture. Xiangyang elite culture centered around violence, song, and dance, rather than the literary culture that dominated the center, and there are elements of this in here.2 More significantly for me it gives an almost timeless view of the Chinese elite’s view of the provinces. Voluptuous girls trying to entangle you genders the relationship between a properly ordered, patriarchal center and the more loose provinces. People in the provinces are poor, so your money (and status) go further there. The poet/prince is tempted by the idea of staying here and raising a rebellion, but of course he decides to go back to the center, just as so many sent-down youth did.

  1. Chittick, Andrew. Patronage and Community in Medieval China: The Xiangyang Garrison, 400-600 Ce. State Univ of New York Pr, 2010. ↩

  2. Chittick explains the provincial grammar and usage in the poem ↩

China/English

Elections

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

What if China had elections? Of course China has had elections in the past, but what brings the topic up for me are the recent Chinese reactions to the American elections. At least one Chinese web user has speculated that an election map for China, pitting the CCP against the GMD, would look like this.1

china map.jpg

 

I suppose that filling out a map like this might be fun for Chinese people, but what does it mean? First, what would the election be for? The U.S. actually has lots of elections, and the maps look different depending on what race you are looking at and what level of detail you look at. My state of Pennsylvania gave all  its electoral votes to Obama, but he only carried a handful of counties. Apparently there is something of an urban-rural split in the U.S.

PA vote for President, by county

More of us voted for Democrats for the U.S. House, but the Republicans actually got more seats. Apparently sheer number of votes does not matter as much as you might think.

PA House elections

The question that interests me is not “Should a democratic China borrow the American model of a federal government, electoral college, etc.”2 but rather if Chinese people were voting for something what would the data reveal about them? To some extent this is a silly question, since cool election maps require party identification. People like to complain that Americans are uninformed voters, but a party system makes a lot of information irrelevant. As someone pointed out, all you really need to do is stick your head up once a decade or so and make sure the parties have not had a major re-alignment and you know how to vote. If you tell me what issues matter most to you and what policies you favor I can tell you if you should be voting D or R in 2016 -right now-. Worried about global warming? Vote Democrat. Concerned about preserving marriage? Vote Republican. Tired of pointless bluster about China every four years? Sorry, the current party system is not responsive to your needs.3

If Chinese were to start having elections what would the issues be and who would line up where? The Weibo map at the top of the post assumes that the two parties would be the Communists and the Nationalists, and that they would essentially be re-fighting the civil war. This seems unlikely.

China does have elections right now. There are village elections all over, and the current events in Beijing are an election of sorts, with a very limited franchise and rather opaque rules.

from Shanghaiist

 

Ogden4 was favorably impressed with the Chinese reaction to local elections. Peasants were not overly impressed with the trappings of Democracy, generally ignoring elections if they thought there was nothing at stake, but they were quite capable of taking an interest if there was something at stake and using elections, petitions, and other methods to get what they wanted. (p.214) I would guess that things have been less free since 2002, but China still has local elections, petitions, and sometimes even political protests.

 

SO If China did have elections, what parties would emerge? Let’s assume a proportional representation parliament, with no bar to very small parties. So probably we would get something like the Israeli Knesset. In the long run parties might consolidate, or at least form semi-permanent alliances. Like in the current Party Congress, delegates would not always have to be chosen geographically. There might be

-Ethnic parties (if not banned)

-Maybe anti-ethnic parties, appealing to Han in minority areas

-Provincial parties or factions. Does a Chinese national ticket need someone from the Northeast to balance it?

-Many varieties of rural parties

-A Buddhist party? (Japan used to have a Buddhist Clean Government Party. Think that would get votes in China?)

-An urban elite party

–An anti-urban elite party

-A Green party?

-An even more anti-Japanese party?

-Maybe some sort of party to represent factory workers. (But what would you call such a party?)

-Would a women’s party make sense?

-Libertarians (seem to be everywhere)

(feel free to suggest your own.)

How these groups might coalesce into larger parties would depend on the issues or events. Are those without Shanghai registration allowed to vote in Shanghai? If not that might be an issue that would bring together lots of rural groups against city groups. If they were it might force municipal governments into policies that benefited everyone in town. Rural voters in Shaanxi and Guangdong might both agree on the importance of supporting rural schools, but disagree on what type of agricultural policies China should have. Would China end up with two big parties, one generally supporting the interests of the urban well-off, and one of the rural poor and migrant workers? I guess that would make someplace like Hubei a real swing province. Or maybe like in Japan, have parties but always elect the LDP?  I can’t see the old North/South split mattering the way it did in the early Republic, but Jiangnan vs. the rest might work. How would the young and the old or the male and the female split out?

If you imagine a pan-Red group building around the CCP core, who would be in a pan-Yellow group opposing them?

I like fun with maps, but I also like to know what I think I am mapping.

 

 

  1. originally from Tea Leaf Nation, which seems to be having trouble right now. ↩

  2. Answer:  No, and it seems like a pretty irrelevant question right now ↩

  3. More significantly, there is no-anti war party ↩

  4. Ogden, Suzanne. Inklings of Democracy in China. Harvard University Asia Center, 2002. A very good book. I assume there is a lot of more recent stuff, but since I blog for Frog rather than JAS I don’t have to look it all up to post this ↩

Blogs and Carnivals/China/Education/English

When the internet gives you bad historical analogies…..

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

From Washington Monthly using the Chinese exam system as an analogy for the S.A.T., referring to an essay from n+1.

The anecdote that began the n + 1 piece discussed the exam system in ancient China. That system, which looks disturbingly similar to our own standardized test-based admissions process for entrance into institutions of higher learning, was designed to ensure merit and talent in the Chinese bureaucracy. It resulted, in the long run, in exorbitant debt and vast corruption. It ended, ultimately, with the Chinese Revolution.

As a historian I am supposed to like people using historical analogies. As a historian of Asia I am supposed to like them using Asian ones even more. And I am willing to cut people quite a bit of slack in these things. This, however, is pretty bad. Like most undergrads this writer seems to think “Ancient China” refers to everything up till the Communist take-over in 1972. I’m not aware of anyone who suggests that high interest rates on government bonds (“exorbitant debt”) were major problems for the Ming and Qing dynasties, but if history is just a place to look to find confirmation of your ideas about the present I suppose you could do it in China as well as anywhere. Suggesting that the exam system ended, “ultimately, with the Chinese Revolution” suggests either that  the author thinks that the fall of the Qing and establishment of a Republic in 1911 were a mistake, or is unaware that anything happened in China between the last metropolitan exams in 1904  and 1949. Or, more likely, he just does not care. Still, the author is apparently not taking the analogy too seriously, so I don’t see why I should, and there is not much reason to post just about this.

The N+1 piece is also pretty bad, but in a much more interesting sort of way.

In 605 CE, a year after murdering his father and seizing the throne, the Chinese emperor Yang Guang established the world’s first meritocracy. Weary of making bureaucratic appointments solely on the basis of letters of recommendation, Yang set aside a number of posts for applicants who performed well on a new system of imperial examinations. In theory, any peasant who took the trouble to memorize 400,000 characters — which is to say, anyone who conducted six years of study with an expensive tutor — could join the country’s political elite.

Over the centuries, as China’s scholar–bureaucrats grew more powerful, their metrics of assessment became increasingly intricate. Those who passed were stratified into nine grades, and each grade was further divided into two degrees. Exam performance corresponded exactly to salary, denominated in piculs of rice; the top brass received more than seventeen times as much rice as the lowest tier. But the true rewards of exam success were considerably higher: besides the steady salary, bribe collection made it very good to be a bureaucrat.

As time went on, more and more people took — and passed — the exam’s first round. Test prep academies proliferated. Imperial officials started to worry: there were now more degree-holders than there were positions, which threatened to create an underclass of young men with thwarted ambitions. When the Ming dynasty fell in 1644, their successors, the Qing, resolved to make the test more difficult. By the middle of the 19th century, 2 million people sat the exam, but just over 1 percent passed its first round; only 300 candidates — .016 percent — passed all three.

This is a lot better. The system is started at a particular time, by a person with a name. The wrong person, since if you were going to assign responsibility for the early exam system to one person it would probably be Empress Wu, but, baby steps. The system changes over time. And the disaster it causes is not problems with the bond market but the Taiping Rebellion. Admittedly the size and destructiveness of the Taiping does not have much to do with whatever drove Hong Xiuchuan nuts, and the exams were never a matter of memorizing 400,000 characters, and they did not grant you an automatic position in the bureaucracy and salaries were in cash rather than rice, and the exams were never intended nor expected to provide social mobility to the poor. Still, there is some connection to history here.

Specifically, the references to letters of recommendation, test prep academies and metrics of assessment. They had an educational elite, we have an educational elite. Maybe a comparison would be helpful.  The n+1 piece is arguing that Real Americans are just as right to resent our educational elite as they are to resent our financial elite.

Over the last thirty years, the university has replaced the labor union as the most important institution, after the corporation, in American political and economic life. As union jobs have disappeared, participation in the labor force, the political system, and cultural affairs is increasingly regulated by professional guilds that require their members to spend the best years of life paying exorbitant tolls and kissing patrician rings…..Our elaborate, expensive system of higher education is first and foremost a system of stratification, and only secondly — and very dimly — a system for imparting knowledge….as long as access to the workforce is controlled by the bachelor’s degree, students will pay more and more.

I don’t buy a lot of this, but the idea that the university has replaced the labor union as a crucial institution is an interesting one. And, with a bit of help, you can get a nice analogy to the Late Qing exam system out of this. The n+1 piece does not do that, as they are analogizing the entire American post-secondary educational system to both the Chinese civil service exams and the type of 1% cultural elite school that you need a test prep tutor to get into. Like a -lot- of people who write about higher ed in America the n+1 writers are aware that there are some people who can’t get into a good school and are thus forced to die in a ditch, drive a truck or go to the University of Minnesota or something, but they are not really talking about those people. Can lack of a four year degree keep you out of parts of the labor force? Yes. Can lack of an Ivy League degree keep you out of “cultural affairs”? Yes. Does it make any sense to lump these two things together? No.

To make a historical analogy you need not only to have some knowledge about history but also know what comparison you are making. The modern American college system is like the Chinese civil service exams in that it has grown far beyond its original purpose. While the civil service exams were originally intended to create bureaucrats by the Qing only a tiny fraction got any sort of government job and even fewer had a government career. Passing or at least studying for the exams marked you out as a member of the cultural elite. American higher ed. has, despite what n+1 thinks, a much larger base in actual education, but it has grown far beyond its job of certifying a small elite and a bunch of teachers into certifying a big chunk of the population, although it is not clear what they are being certified for or why it should matter.

By about 1900 the exams had lost a lot of their old cachet, and there were several attempts to reform them. As Elman points out, however,  almost as soon as the exams were abolished the state began creating new examinations for government officials.1 That part stuck around, but the larger task of defining China’s elite fell to a mass of new institutions including Western-style schools and universities and military academies. Is the American academic enterprise due for a rapid decline down to those few places where there is definite technical knowledge to be gained or a real desire for certification? There are lots of majors where students seem to learn nothing. Why not get rid of them and let people take those jobs without four years of college? Maybe the most interesting bit of data is the campaign against law school and especially the third year of law school. Law school has for many years been the place for bright kids who were not sure what they wanted to do with their lives. Now that it is a lot more expensive it seems silly to go there if your goal is to do anything but work at a big money law firm. Will law school (and pre-law) enrolments shrink down to just those who really want to be lawyers? More importantly, will someone be able to offer a 2-year law degree? That would save students a bundle of money and supposedly have little effect on their ability to pass the bar or practice law. Guild rules, however, forbid it.

The law school example is what I think of when people suggest that MOOCs might replace college. I don’t think they are anywhere near being able to replace what you can actually learn in college, but to the extent that you are just going through the motions to get a certificate they could work fine. If you were going to sleepwalk thorough Astronomy 170 anyway why not do an on-line class and not have to get out of bed? Is a University of Phoenix degree as good as a real one? If you are just getting it for the piece of paper of course it is. If all you want is to have your future employees make it through the 18-20 years without achieving much other than learning to drink a collection of MOOCs might work as well as a degree in Business Administration. I think the real issue is not what can we learn outside school (lots)2 but to what extent are the formal and informal rules about the bits of paper you need to do things going to change? I would guess a lot less than in China. The Qing court could surprise everyone and just abolish the exams in 1905, but how, in a formal, legal, sense,  could a President Paul Ryan abolish all the gatekeeper roles that college education plays in the U.S.? I suspect that the Chinese 1900-1911 example (the death of the exam system) might be a useful analogy for the changes in American post-secondary education, but it is going to take a lot more work than has been done so far.

 

 

  1. Elman, Benjamin A. A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. 1st ed. University of California Press, 2000. p.617 Your best bet for a light beach read about the exam system  ↩

  2. As Holbo points out, the original killer ap for taking learning outside school is not the internet but the book ↩

Books/China/Diplomacy/English

If we want to revere China, there is no greater reverence than to put the Chinese ways into practice

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Thanks to Columbia University Press I just got a copy of David Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute1 This is  a very fine book, and it is great that it has been published. The reason it is great that it has been published is that it is cheap, readable, and based on secondary sources. While the book is about the East Asian international system in the early modern period, Kang is not a historian. He is a “professor of international relations and business.” His only real qualifications2 for writing this book are that he has read the relevant secondary literature, writes well and is smart. As I have lamented before, writings on Asian history in English tend to be either the obviously academic or really bad. The type of serious stuff that is halfway in between, that my Americanist colleagues get to read and use in class all the time, is very thin on the ground.

If you want a book that will give you a nice clear understanding of the current literature on East Asian foreign relations in the 1368-1840 period this is it. He does not take the tribute system all the way back to the Han (although he does cite Barfield and Mote), and I am sure that scholar-squirrels who deal with this stuff could find fault with his summaries, but he does a nice job. One thing that struck me is his attempt to deal with the tribute system. His chapter on the system deals mostly with China’s relations with Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. He makes a distinction between “legitimate acceptance and rational calculation ”  to explain Korean and Vietnamese willingness to “lend their submission to China.”3 For anyone raised to accept the European Westphalian tradition it should seem bizarre that states would accept their ritual and diplomatic subordination to another state, but Kang shows that Korea and Vietnam both accepted this, it was not just a matter of lying to humor the Chinese (rational calculation.) The effort he puts into showing Korean and Vietnamese acceptance of the system demonstrates how powerful the Westphalia model is. For modern people it is really hard to accept the idea of one nation being superior to another.  I actually find this less surprising than he does, since there are lots of models of relations between groups and individuals that allow for this. Even in the West, to be a Catholic meant acknowledging the Bishop of Rome as superior to all other bishops. The Treaty of Westphalia itself was negotiated in two cities, Munster and Osnabruck, in part because of issues of precedence.4 Everyone agreed that some Dukes were better than other Dukes, and some Counts better than other Counts. Rather than trying to sort out all these issues of precedence it was easier just to just split the conference in two rather than trying to resolve who should sit above and below the salt.

Of course if, like Kang, you are writing after the model of universal equality of states has become a crucial part of East Asian nationalism—even for those who are not aware that they are hard-core Westphalians– it might be good to be cautious as you advance an argument for the historical inequality of states.  Plus, like a good scholar, he is not wildly concerned with providing historical ammunition for modern arguments. So he argues that East Asian states created a system where “Far from being autarkic, the early modern East Asian system developed rules and norms governing trade, diplomacy, and international migration.”5 So he is arguing against the common idea that East Asia consisted of a collection of Hermit Kingdoms until they were brought to life by contact with the West, but he also uses words like autarkic6 He is bringing you up to date on the literature without talking down to you. This is the type of book that not only makes you think you should use it in class, but also makes you wonder what classes you could create that would use it if you don’t have one already.

  1. Kang, David C. East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute. Columbia University Press, 2010. ↩

  2. O.k., yes he’s an academic heavy hitter, but not a historian, particularly not of this period ↩

  3. p.55 ↩

  4. I don’t have a cite for this, just old lore from grad school ↩

  5. p.71 ↩

  6. which my spell-czech does not recognize. ↩

China/English/Intellectual/Literature/Qing

Thurify yourself

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

One of the things we have read for the May Fourth class I am teaching is Liang Qichao’s On the Relationship between Fiction and the Government of the People (論小說與羣治的關係)1  It is a good reading if you want to explain to students why May 4thers cared so much about literature, and also why everyone should care about literature.

As a good Confucian Liang of course sees no need to explain that literature can have a transformative effect on someone’s mind and morals, or that this can be connected to the stability of the state. Claiming that fiction (rather than, say, poetry) can do this will take more proving for his audience.

He claims that people enjoy fiction, of course, and it is easy to get them to read it. Besides being enjoyable, it lets us experience things outside our own lives.

..human nature is such that it is often discontented with the world. The world with which we are in physical contact is spatially limited. Thus, apart from direct physical or perceptual contact with reality, we also often desire to touch and perceive things indirectly; this is the life beyond one’s life, the world beyond one’s world. This sort of vision is inherent in both the sharp and the dullwitted. And nothing can transcend the power of fiction in molding the human into more intelligent or duller beings.  Thus, fiction often leads us to a different world and transforms the atmosphere with which we are in constant contact.

It was through fiction that the May Fourthers met Nora Helmer, and Young Werther and it is nice to have Liang make this point for me. Fiction goes beyond this to have various powers to transform the individual.

The first power is called thurification. It is like entering a cloud of smoke and being thurified by it, or like touching ink or vermillion and being tinted by it. As mentioned in the Lanikavatara Sutra, the transformation of deluded knowledge to relative consciousness and of relative consciousness to absolute knowledge relies on this kind of power. When reading a novel, one’s perception, thinking, and sensitivity are unconsciously affected and conditioned by it. Gradually, changing day by day, it makes its effect felt. And although the effect is momentary, alternating interruptions and continuations, over the course of a long period of time the world of the novel enters the mind of the reader and takes root there like a seedling with a special quality. Later, this seedling, being daily thurified by further contact with fiction, will become more vigorous, and its influence will in turn spread to others and to the entire world. This is the cause of the cyclical transformation of all living and non-living things in the world. Thus, fiction reigns supreme because of its power to influence the masses.

My students did not know what thurification (熏) meant, so I had to explain it.2 This point fits in with a lot of stuff on the impact exposure to fiction  has on one’s world-view, a point that goes back, for me, to Orwell’s Boy’s Weeklies. The stuff you read creates your world-view in ways that you are not always consciously aware of. Thus if you read lots of British Boys Weeklies of the 1930’s you soak up a lot of old imperialist attitudes without realizing it.3  If you were a regular reader of the satirical and irreverent Mad Magazine of the late 70’s then…..Obviously the May 4th crowd wanted to transform the people, and reforming fiction was able to transform not only the masses, but non-living things as well!

While fiction can transform you without you knowing it, it can also do so more consciously.

The second power is known as immersion. Whereas thurification is spatial and hence its effect is proportional to the space in which it acts, immersion is temporal, and its effect varies according to the length of time it operates. Immersion refers to the process in which a reader is so engrossed in a novel that it causes him to assimilate himself with its content. When one reads a novel, very often one is unable to free oneself from its effect even long after having finished reading it. For instance, feelings of love and grief remain in the minds of those who have finished reading The Dream of the Red Chamber, and feelings of joy and anger in those who have finished reading The Water Margin. Why is it so? It is because of the power of immersion. It follows that if two works are equally appealing, the one that is longer and deals with more facts will have the greater power to influence the reader. This is just like drinking wine. If one drinks for ten days, one will remain drunk for a hundred days. It was precisely because of this power of immersion that the Buddha expounded on the voluminous Avatamsaka Sutra after he had risen from under the Bodhi Tree.

I have not yet experimented with drinking for ten days and seeing if it keeps me drunk for 100. Perhaps the undergrads can try that one. I have, however, lived in novels and been influenced by them. So have my students. They are selling IUP Quiddich t-shirts at the bookstore, I assume because some of our students wish they were going to to Hogwarts instead of here. Nor has fiction done for me what the Bodhi Tree did for Gautama, and transformed me into the God of Gods, Unsurpassed doctor or surgeon, or Conqueror of beasts, although I suppose I could lay some claim to Teacher, if not Teacher of the World.  So the idea that one’s reading turns one into a new person makes sense to us as well, and is in fact the foundation of Liberal Education.

Of course in some respects Liang is not a modern Liberal.  While he does not quite call for banning books he is not one of those (like almost all American teachers) who sees reading as either good or a waste of time, but certainly not something that could hurt you. There is a long tradition of condemnations of bad literature in China, and Liang is part of it

Nowadays our people are frivolous and immoral. They indulge in, and are obsessed with, sensual pleasures. Caught up in their emotions, they
sing and weep over the spring flowers and the autumn moon, frittering away their youthful and lively spirits. Young men between fifteen and thirty
years of age concern themselves only with overwhelming emotions of love, sorrow, or sickness. They are amply endowed with romantic sentiment
but lack heroic spirit. In some extreme cases, they even engage in immoral acts and so poison the entire society. This is all because of fiction. ……One or two books by frivolous scholars and marketplace merchants4 are more than enough to destroy our entire society. The more fiction is discounted by elegant gentlemen as not worth mentioning, the more fully it w ill be controlled by frivolous scholars and marketplace merchants. As the nature and position of fiction in society are comparable to the air and food and indispensable to life, frivolous scholars and marketplace  merchants in fact possess the power to control the entire nation! Alas! If this situation is allowed to continue, there is no question that the future of our nation is doomed! Therefore, the reformation of the government of the people must begin with a revolution in fiction, and the renovation of the people must begin with the renovation of fiction.

If you want a clear analysis of the role of literature in human society, some Buddhist references, a denunciation of pop culture that might come from Big Hollywood, with a bit of the Great Learning at the end Liang Qichao is your man.

 

  1. published in 1902. Translation by Gek Nai Cheng from Denton, Kirk, ed. Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945. 1st ed. Stanford University Press, 1996. ↩

  2. Google is your friend. ↩

  3. For instance, simplistic and outdated stereotypes. From Orwell ” In papers of this kind it occasionally happens that when the setting of a story is in a foreign country some attempt is made to describe the natives as individual human beings, but as a rule it is assumed that foreigners of any one race are all alike and will conform more or less exactly to the following patterns:….

    Spaniard, Mexican, etc.: Sinister, treacherous.

    Arab, Afghan, etc.: Sinister, treacherous.

    Chinese: Sinister, treacherous. Wears pigtail. ↩

  4. 華士坊賈 I might translate that as ‘alleyway merchants’ or something like that ↩

1911/China/English/Movies

Blood of the martyrs

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

The Chinese student group asked me to come out and talk at their showing of Jackie Chan’s 1911. As it was competing with the Stillers game attendance was not great, but we did have a nice chat afterwards.

The movie was… less than ideal. It was a nice time, however, to think about drama and history. How to make a movie about 1911? This was an interesting topic for me in part because my adviser was a consultant for the PBS series China in Revolution1 They were given 7 seconds to sum up the 1911 Revolution. Film and history don’t always play nice together. I’m not always a history snob. If you warp history and make a good film  out of it I’m fine with that. This one did not work either way however. Part of the problem was that Jackie Chan is apparently continuing his campaign to become a Chinese icon acceptable to Beijing. He’s great for that in some respects. Being from HK and having trained in a Beijing Opera school he has the connections to both China’s 5000 years of history and Greater China. Unfortunately his skills as an actor rotate around his Gongfu and the fact that he has the chops to do comedy. As Huang Xing he does not do any comedy,and he is too old to do much Gongfu. There is a hint of a romance in here, but it does not save the film.

O.K. so if they are not going to make a good film that abandons history, what about one that follows it? 1911 is a good story, yes? For obvious reasons they have to abandon some of the narratives of the Revolution. Although the actual revolution was intensely anti-Manchu, the Manchus are no longer evil exploiters of the Chinese people. Now they are one of the 56 nationalities that make up the Chinese people, and so Manchu Evil is not a possible bad guy. Pu Yi is presented as a brat, which deals with the problem of making a little kid manipulated by his elders a source of pity. The villain here is Yuan Shikai. This is not a big surprise, and he is the best character in the film. I really liked the scene where he is dismissed from his post serving the Qing (because he is already betraying them), tosses away his staff and does a little dance. Is he dancing because he is a Han finally free from the Manchu yoke? Because he is an opportunist finally free to act on his own? You could build a nice movie around him, especially if, unlike this movie, you acknowledge his history as a reformer.

If Yuan is the bad guy, who is the good guy? Sun Yat-sen, as always, is wooden. His inspiring leadership or clever plans will not make a revolution, although his fundraising powers are praised. Huang Xing, Chan’s character, is a loyal servant rather than a revolutionary rival, as he actually was. The movie  does acknowledge the current interpretation of the revolution. While the Wuhan uprising may have started things, it was the provincial assemblies declaring for the Revolution that really made it happen. Provincial assemblies passing motions do not make for  great drama, They represent this by a scene where people launch rafts with the names of the different provinces. Not much better, unfortunately.

So what did make the revolution? Sacrifice. The movie opens with Qiu Jin embracing death for China and her children, and it ends with the child of one of the (dead) revolutionaries grasping a letter from his father. There is a lot of blood, and a lot of suffering, and while the suffering is not linked to anything, there is a lot of it. It is the blood of the martyrs that led to the new China and then in an odd little finale, to the Communist revolution. It is is some respects a very faithful movie. Homer Lea is in here, for no good reason, as is Wang Jing-wei (downplayed, for some reason) but it did not really work for me either as a film or as history.

 

 

 

 

  1. which is really good ↩

China/Nationalism/Post-Mao/Public History/Teaching

Fire and protest in China

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

The Atlantic has a nice set of pictures of the Great Wall up, for your teaching pleasure. The one I found most interesting is this.

Is the Great Wall on fire? Well, the caption says “Smoke rises from a watchtower of the Great Wall during an activity to mark the International Anti-Drug Day in Beijing, on June 26, 2006” There is an old tradition of burning stuff in China, but mostly as a form of worship. In the late Qing, however, missionaries and Chinese reformers began to make burning opium and opium paraphernalia a regular part of their rituals. Here is one from Fujian1

Opium and drug burnings became a regular part of Chinese anti-opium events, but as far as I know the whole burning things in protest meme never caught on as a general method of protest in China. Eventually this form of anti-opium protest became engrained enough in Chinese political culture that it traveled back in time.  Lin Zexu had -destroyed- opium in 1839, and by 1909 he was credited with burning it, as in this image2 This mistake is now pretty common.

I’m not really a 19th century person, so I never put much effort in to figuring out when this form of protest emerged. It does not seem to link up well with the Chinese tradition of burning things as an offering, since you burned things you thought the ancestors would want. Admittedly, by 1909 some of your ancestors probably would have liked some opium, but that does not fit in with the protest aspect of things. Maybe a legacy of Guy Fawkes day in England? In any case, if you want to burn something in the name of China, the Great Wall would seem a great place for it.

 

  1. via Ryan Dunch ↩

  2. via MIT  ↩

China/English/Religion/Sino-Japanese Wars/visual culture

Very superstitious

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

Above is a charm carried by a Chinese soldier in 1938, re-printed in the journal Youth Front in 1938. It seems to be a Communist publication, although this being the period of the United Front it is pretty mild in its communism, calling for the unity of all groups and parties in opposing the Japanese. In any case, both the Nationalists and the Communists were, as good children of May 4th, opposed to superstition. The article praises both freedom of religion and the contributions religious groups had made to the war effort.1 Still, given China’s long history of corrupt government and uneven education superstition (presumably meaning religious views that did not count as proper religion) was quite common. Even the Japanese ridiculed these charms.

“It is laughable that they carry these charms, showing not only that they fear death, but how badly they need to die. These charms also show why our brave soldiers kill them so easily.”

Always good to be able to cite an (unnamed) enemy source on topics like this. Of course the charms don’t work and may actually do harm. This one, like most, was to be written on paper, then burned and drunk with water. Charms like this were an old part of Chinese popular religion. The Boxers had ones that would make you immune to bullets. This one reveals something about the anti-Japanese resistance of Chinese soldiers/militia/whoever, as it will make it possible for you to go without eating for ten days. The article says that this is laughable. but I might go with tragic instead.

 

from 青年战线 No 1, 1938, p.20

 

  1. Gregor Benton has a lot of nice stuff on the Communists and religious groups in New Fourth Army ↩

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