Frog in a Well

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

Posted on October 30, 2012 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.

Kang, David C. East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute. Columbia University Press, 2010. ↩
O.k., yes he’s an academic heavy hitter, but not a historian, particularly not of this period ↩
p.55 ↩
I don’t have a cite for this, just old lore from grad school ↩
p.71 ↩
which my spell-czech does not recognize. ↩

China/English/Intellectual/Literature/Qing

Thurify yourself

Posted on October 18, 2012 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.

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. ↩
Google is your friend. ↩
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. ↩
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 October 15, 2012 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.

which is really good ↩

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

Fire and protest in China

Posted on October 11, 2012 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.

via Ryan Dunch ↩
via MIT ↩

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

Very superstitious

Posted on October 4, 2012 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

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

Books/China/Classics/English/Historiography/Mongols and Mongolia

Reconsidering Marco Polo

Posted on September 23, 2012 by Jonathan Dresner / 11 Comments

“Marco Polo’s reports of China, now judged mostly hearsay….” Perry Anderson, LRB

I got an email from a student who found my blog post in which I make a highly critical case regarding the historicity of Marco Polo’s adventures. They wanted to confirm (since some data was lost in the latest HNN transition) that it was mine for citation purposes. I’ve been considering revisiting it for a while now,¹ and this seems like a good time, because my views on the subject have evolved a bit since: I’m still highly skeptical of Polo, but more importantly, I think the very structure of the argument and nature of the sources makes it highly unlikely that the believers and skeptics will come to a consensus.

When I expressed my doubts, lo those many years ago, I was informed that there was still some life left in Polo’s tale. It turns out that there is so much scholarship on aspects of Polo’s text that there’s even a term for it — “Polan scholarship” and if there’s one thing Polan scholars can’t stand, it’s to have Polo’s work seriously questioned. All the errors are “honest”; all the omissions are “explicable”; all the unconfirmed and untranslated stuff are just waiting to be decoded if only we had better Chinese sources; and incomprehensible bits are the result of Polo listening to the wrong people. That’s the attitude going in, and it’s the same attitude coming out.² There seem to be lots of Euro-centric scholars with strong attachments to Polo, but a lot of Sino-centric scholars were very dubious.³

Foreigners were involved in Qin construction, and travel in China was common and widespread: the idea that China was closed or that people never migrated are both vestiges of simplistic thinking rather than historical verities. Even the harshest critics of Polo’s historicity admit that he got some thing right, and must have had some valid sources. The question is whether he was an eyewitness and participant in the history and culture he described, and, most importantly, whether he can be considered a credible independent source for the study of Chinese history and culture. I think the answer is still “no.” The story is great, but even if you take it seriously, it’s fantastical.⁴

Still, having entered this fray, I feel an intellectual obligation to stay informed. So when I ran across a catalog blurb for Stephen Haw’s Marco Polo’s China: a Venetian in the realm of Khubilai Khan (Routledge, 2006), it piqued my interest; thanks to inter-library loan, I finally got hold of it. Only for a week, unfortunately, but it was an interesting ride.
Continue reading →

You can tell by the dates on the articles linked here, this has been in draft for quite a while ↩
there’s a lot of emotion in Polan defenses, though if I’d made a life’s work on a complex source and found a lot of scholars who hadn’t attacking it as fraudulent, I might be emotional about it as well ↩
E.g. Obituary of John Larner, historian of Marco Polo. And “New archeological data highlights Polo errors.” ↩
WaPo review of new Polo bio ↩

China/China-Japan/Historiography/Nationalism/Qing

Daiyou Islands: New Sources, New Clarity?

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

NYT reporter Nick Kristof brought in a guest blogger, Han-Yi Shaw of Taiwan, to examine some new mid-Meiji documentation about Japan’s relationship with the contested Senkaku/Daiyou islands. The core of Shaw’s findings is

the Meiji government acknowledged Chinese ownership of the islands back in 1885.

After several abortive attempts to survey the islands, the Japanese government declared them incorporated Japanese territory during the Sino-Japanese war, despite recognizing that it should have been negotiated with China. As territory seized in 1895, it should have been reverted to China in 1945, but for a variety of reasons, including an administrative shift of the islands from Taiwan to Okinawa prefecture, it remained outside of negotiations until a few years later.

It’s a reasonably persuasive presentation, historically, though I don’t think that these details are going to shift Japanese nationalists, even mild or moderate ones, to support politicians who would abandon Japan’s claim to these useless rocks which sit in such valuable territory. And as long as there’s no particular cost to maintaining the claim — Chinese hostility to Japan is not predicated on this issue sufficiently that abandoning the claim would eliminate anti-Japanese sentiment as a nationalist motivational tool of the mainland regime — it seems unlikely that anything will change, except a few American lectures.

China-Japan/Colonial Taiwan/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/Nationalism/War/明治/昭和

Senkaku Islands: New Sources, New Clarity?

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Jonathan Dresner / 3 Comments

the Meiji government acknowledged Chinese ownership of the islands back in 1885.

Archives/China/English/Republican

National Library of China- A fine place to do research

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Most of our readers who might care already know this, but the National Library in Beijing is a fine place to do research on Republican China. It has it’s own subway stop, which means easy access. The computer system works well (nice search features), getting a card is easy, and the collection is good. Specifically, a lot (all?) of the published journals and reports that used to be in Nanjing are now in Beijing. Many years ago, Nanjing had the Tezangbu (Special Collections Department) which held all the journals and books that used to be in the pre-49 National Library. I spent some time talking to people and looking through the computer, and it seems that the books I read many years ago are still in Nanjing (or somewhere) but pretty much all of the journals and official publications are now in Beijing. This is a big deal, since local and provincial governments loved to publish stuff. If you find a monthly report in a provincial archive there is a good chance that at some point it was published in a monthly report in a nice typeface that does not look like the work of a budding master calligrapher.

They will photocopy stuff for you. Photography is not permitted. I saw some people who were obviously trying to photograph whole books get yelled at. On the other hand, I was in the reading room while some people discretely photographed a few individual articles and nobody noticed or cared.

1960s/1970s/1980s/Christianity/Contemporary/General/Historiography/Korea/Postwar/Religion/US-Korea

Things I don’t know about Korea, part 3

Posted on September 2, 2012 by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

One of the things that I noticed about the materials I used last time I taught Korean history¹ is that the texts I chose for my course did not mention, much less discuss in depth, the recently departed Moon Sun Myung‘s Unification Church. The global reach of this uniquely Korean Christian sect would seem to make it a natural topic for discussion, but even works that look in some detail at the religious changes of modern Korean history didn’t address this sect.

The absence was so striking, that I started to wonder if there was some sort of political minefield or cultural taboo at work, or if I had grossly misunderstood the scale and impact of the movement. I haven’t been looking all that hard for answers one way or the other in the two years since, but I certainly would like to have some better sense going in this time.

and I’m scheduled to teach it again in the Spring, in parallel with my Modern Japan course, so it’s on my mind. I’m thinking of adding some literature to the syllabus ↩

Books and Articles/English/Japan/Literature/Premodern/US-Japan/幕末/江戸

What do Samurai Have To Do With It?

Posted on August 10, 2012 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

I saw Margi Preus’s Heart of a Samurai (Amulet, 2010) and the title alone made me cringe: just what the world needs, another kid book touting the putative values of warrior aristocrats! But when I picked it up, I realized immediately that it was something else entirely (or almost entirely): a fictionalized retelling of John Manjiro‘s adventures as a castaway from Japan. Here’s a story that’s worth retelling — though it’s been done a few times already — and which presents a very different light on Japanese history. I borrowed it from my friend¹ and discovered that I was right. Both times.

John Manjiro, also known as John Mung and Nakahama Manjiro, spent most of the 1840s on American ships and American soil, finally returning to Japan not long before Perry’s arrival marked the end of Japan’s relative isolation from foreign contact and trade. I haven’t read any of the other books on castaways, though I’ve heard a number of my friend Stephen Kohl’s panels at ASPAC. Manjiro’s tale is more extreme, both in the length of time he was away and the depth of his experiences, not to mention the timing of his return. When he returned he was interrogated thoroughly, then forced to remain in his hometown before being called to service. With his experience, he became a valuable source for policy-makers, starting with his native Tosa domain, passing to Shogunal service, and then as a promoter of Western learning. Manjiro’s journey was well-documented, and highlights some fascinating aspects of mid-19th century global life, including the whaling industry famously chronicled in Moby Dick, early education, and the tensions engendered by Japan’s isolation. Preus’s handling of the chronology and substantive topics is straightforward and sometimes quite good, including the racism Manjiro encountered both at sea and in New England.²

My reservations about this book stem from the samurai lens which is imposed on a commoner’s tale. The title refers to Manjiro, who is described early in the book as having ambitions to become a samurai, fulfilling the romantic and honorable role laid out in the classic tales. (pp. 13-14) Each section of the book has an epigram from Yamamoto’s Hagakure or something called “the Samurai’s Creed”³ and Manjiro’s elevation to sword-wearing Shogunal retainer is treated as the culmination of a long-held dream (as well as being entirely unprecedented). It’s possible that Manjiro really felt this way — I haven’t been able to find any reference to it in the materials I’ve seen — but it certainly seems odd for a tale about a fisherman who became a proponent of egalitarianism and Westernization to have more references to sources on samurai than on village life or Meiji transformations. There was one bit I liked, though: in New England, Manjiro is demonstrating sword fighting to an American friend, but confesses to himself that he has no idea what he’s doing, and that he and his friends in Japan made up their own moves to go along with the styles of fighting they’d heard about but never saw. (p. 133)

There were a few bothersome details — an anachronistic use of bata-kusai and the misuse of the word “sutra” for “prayer” on the same page (p. 31) was particularly troubling and I’d have been happier if Manjiro’s acknowledgement of Japanese whaling came before he expressed shock and horror at Western whaling (p. 45) — but the errors were not fundamentally damaging to the historical context. The fictionalized characters and conflicts (p. 280) seem a bit overdrawn to me, though the issues they raise were real. The length of the book is something of a problem: though it’s almost 300 pages, they are so sparse and there is so much illustration and blank space that the story felt quite rushed. Perhaps the fictionalized material stands out so much because it’s quite detailed, whereas large sections of equally dramatic real life read like paraphrases of the short histories cited above.⁴

On the whole, not a terrible book, though I think there’s still room for, say, an kid-oriented abridgement of Manjiro’s own testimony, with annotation by actual experts.

who had bought it as a donation to a youth library based on recommendations from other children ↩
A really excellent summary of Manjiro’s tale can be found here: Nakahama Manjirō’s Hyōsen Kiryaku: A Companion Book : Produced for the Exhibition “Drifting, Nakahama Manjirōs Tale of Discovery” : an Illustrated Manuscript Recounting Ten Years of Adventure at Sea. Aside from the great pictures and introduction, the book claims that Manjiro was used as a kind of spy, eavesdropping on American negotiators (21) ↩
that’s before part one. In the bibliography, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure is cited twice, both the 1979 and 2008 translations, his name is cited backwards, and once misspelled ↩
and the helpful material at the end really is fairly clearly paraphrased material. I understand not footnoting the story, but clear references in reference material seems reasonable, no? ↩

China/English/Humor/Religion

Zhong Kui comes to Sunnydale High

Posted on August 8, 2012 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Sigh…

I try to keep my posts to this blog to at least a minimal level of scholarly-ness. At the very least I try to avoid doing too many posts on weird Chinese English. Not that there is anything wrong with them, but there is a time and a place for everything. Plus if I start making fun of people’s English then the comments may fill up with odd quotes from things I have written in Chinese.

However…. When I was in Pingyao, Shanxi (which is worth visiting, by the way) I went to the city-god temple. They had a shrine to Zhong Kui, the demon queller, which was not much of a surprise.

The statue is undistinguished, and does not look very old. The sign, however, is great. In English it identifies him as

“Zhong Kui, the popular beliefs of the Han ethnic areas folk,¹ is one of the Taoist God solely primarily of Buffy the governance ghosts, evil spirits exorcism of God….”

The Chinese text does not mention Buffy, so I’m guessing this is a Google translate error of some sort.

It is interesting that the more recent signs at Chinese sites treat the Han just like any other ethnic group. ↩

Foreign Views/Japan/Memory/US-Japan/War/昭和

Atomic Bomb Symposium at Federation of American Scientists

Posted on August 8, 2012 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

There’s almost no new historical content here, aside from some biographical ruminations. Stanley Kutler’s, reprinted at HNN, is the most historically interesting, highlighting the “all or nothing” fallacy in many debates about the use of the bombs versus other tactical options.

Milton Leitenberg’s rejoinder (right after Kutler in the alphabet, by chance) recaps the “saved Japanese lives” argument, but misses something important, as this argument always does.¹ Given that the Japanese did surrender after 2 bombs and the Soviet entry into the war, on what grounds does he think that a successful conventional invasion wouldn’t have produced surrender?²

I liked this one, though.

Dr. Richard A. Frankel, government analyst for energy and the environment

My memory of the first use of atomic weapons goes back to my 7th year. At that time, I was a rather precociously educated student of science, so I was able to understand the workings of nuclear weapons and thus recognized the damage done by the Hiroshima bomb.

My political sense wasn’t as advanced, so I wasn’t, at the time, susceptible to the questioning raised then and subsequently by involved scientists and then, later, by writers like Gar Alperovits. But my sense of simple fairness was distressingly violated when, less than one week later, on my 8th birthday, another bomb was loosed on Nagasaki.

Even to a then 8-year-old child, it was clear that once was enough. There was no possible reason to justify doing it again. The arguments about having to show we had more, about convincing the Japanese military, about advancing peace negotiations simply made no sense to me then, any more than now.

There are some odd errors, which you’d think the editors would have caught. One participant says that “The Japanese barely had time to digest what happened at Alamogordo before the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.” But the Alamogordo test was secret: nobody outside of the scientists and military involved, and up the chain of command, knew about it.

All in all, not a bad collection of arguments if you want to engage students. But I’m mostly not impressed.

And calling this argument “a neglected consideration” is just absurd, given that I’ve seen variations of this argument going back to about 1947 ↩
For an interesting take on this kind of argument, see Chris Bertram on drone ethics. ↩

China/English

Winning Over the Puppets: Conclusion

Posted on June 23, 2012 by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

This posting is part of a series which comprise a draft dissertation chapter. Read more about it here. The first posting is found here. The post preceding this one is here.

There was a girl whose father was executed by shooting. She cried continuously as she faced the war criminal and accused him of the crime. Then she climbed up onto the stage and beat him to death with a stone.
Reaction: The masses were moved and began to cry.

-Example case from the “Oppose Treason and Voice Grievances” campaign in Rizhao county, Public Security Bureau Report, 1946.

The Communist Party in Shandong province understood just as well as the Nationalist regime that the tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers who helped maintain the Japanese occupation in the peninsula were as valuable for their manpower and their rifles as they were reviled for their treason and their violence. This value did not diminish with Japanese surrender and the approach of a devastating civil war. The Party’s wartime efforts to win over military collaborators, shield them from retribution, and redeploy them were renewed in the postwar period, but as we saw, this was punctuated by a short period in which tens of thousands of Chinese treated as prisoners of war found themselves caught up in twin processes of reform and retribution in the fall of 1945 and spring of 1946. Here too the Party pressed hard to limit the scope and severity of retribution through its policy of magnanimity, but found this impossible to achieve.

If puppet soldiers feared retribution in the mass trials carried out throughout Shandong in 1945 and 1946, their alternative was to be a part of Chiang Kai-shek’s “conspiracy” to merge his troops with the puppets. Just as the major puppet army commanders who were won over to Communist control in Shandong, including Mo Zhengmin, Zhang Xixian, Han Shouchen and later Wu Huawen, retained command of their forces and went on to successful postwar careers in the People’s Republic, many puppet commanders in the province were able to rejoin the Nationalist army, and some estimated 100,000 puppet soldiers joined them. These include Zhang Tianzuo, Ning Chunling, Wang Jimei, and Wang Jinyang. Some, such as Cao Keming survived the civil war in Shandong and joined the Nationalist retreat to Taiwan.

The fate of puppet commanders who stayed in the few Nationalist controlled areas was not guaranteed, however. Two of the most important wartime puppet army generals, Zhang Buyun and the former Japanese citizen Zhang Zongyuan were both executed after being tried by the courts of the Nationalist administration. Zhang, tried for “pillage, murder, and treason,” was executed in Qingdao, January 1948.

Zhang Zongyuan’s origins made his case more complicated. Even though the Nationalist government’s law for the punishment of treason did not stipulate that those charged have Chinese citizenship and, in fact, tried number of foreigners for the crime, Japanese prisoners of war were to come under the laws for prosecution as war criminals. Though born in Japan, Zhang Zongyuan claimed ties to a Chinese ancestor that had joined the crew of a Japanese pirate ship during the Ming dynasty. Zhang’s convoluted case resembled the challenge faced by the Nationalist government in prosecuting the last Chinese and later Manchurian emperor Puyi’s cousin Kawashima Yoshiko, as well as a small number of accused Taiwanese traitors who could claim they were Japanese citizens during the time they committed their alleged treason. Like Kawashima Yoshiko, who at various times described herself as Chinese, Manchurian or Japanese, after his arrest Zhang Zongyuan could not seem to make up his mind whether he wanted to be treated as Chinese or as Japanese. A military investigation looking into the problem was equally confused and ruled he had two native places. It claimed this merely made the severity of his crime, which was to include “war crimes and treason” (戰犯漢奸) among others, all the more serious. He was executed in Shanghai, in June, 1948.

On the Communist side, those puppet soldiers who were subjected to mass trials in the Oppose Treason campaign of 1945 and 1946 were sentenced in a legal process which was not terribly concerned with particular crime its convictions were filed under, even if its campaign was ostensibly organized to target those guilty of collaboration. On the contrary, from the Party’s perspective, the key was to tie this process to its preparations for full scale land reform by linking it with the Rent and Interest Reduction campaign. As a report from northern Binhai put it, “The Oppose Treason campaign is a movement with two sides. One is the national struggle (民族鬥爭). It is a struggle of all the classes against the small time traitors. Secondly it is a class struggle, a way to attack landlords who maintained their wealth through their treasonous acts.” Of these, the second was by far the most important. Puppet soldiers were thus largely peripheral to this process, all the more so because they often came from relatively humble origins and were needed in the fight against the Nationalists.

From the perspective of the population, however, the military collaborators who were briefly subjected to mass justice were as reviled as the Japanese occupier. Indeed, for those who lived in areas without regular Japanese patrols, these Chinese military collaborators were the only face of the long occupation. Having stood by during the war while dozens of small groups of military collaborators transformed overnight by the Enemy and Puppet Work teams into units of the army of resistance, it is not terribly surprising that many had little patience for the Party’s “policy of magnanimity” when their opportunity finally came for retribution.

Note: If you have any interesting information about 伊達麟之介 / 伊達順之介 / 伊達順之助 / 張宗援 / 张宗援 I’d love to hear from you. I’ve been collecting information about him and his fate for a separate article.