Frog in a Well

Red Chapel Ironies

Posted on February 25, 2013 by K. M. Lawson / 2 Comments

I recently got around to watching the Red Chapel, the unusual guerrilla documentary by the Danish journalist Mads Brügger.¹ The basic premise is a visit to North Korea by Mads Brügger and two Danish-Korean comedians for the purpose of cultural exchange. Brügger’s main ploy is the use of the speaking disability of one of the two, Jacob Nossell, as a way to create embarrassment, conceal criticism, and attempt to expose the heartless evil of the DPRK.

The movie fails at its task. We learn nothing about North Korea that any number of other documentaries, journalistic accounts, or other limited looks into the bubble of elite life in Pyongyang have not already shown us. Brügger seems to completely unable to understand the psychological universe that North Koreans live in. Instead of coming to terms with the victory the Stalinist state has had in transforming the worldview of its people, he sees everyone around him acting always and only out of fear, and engaged constantly in a kind of performance that helps him justify his own deceit. Of course, it isn’t either of these. We are seeing a people who have carved out a livable fiction, parts of which they know is a lie, and parts they grasp tightly in order to function in their society. In terms of basic technique, it is no different than the ability we develop to ignore injustice around us and participate enthusiastically in social games we know are built on fantasies. Fear and falsehood, of course, play a part, but I suspect many of the emotions he sees are as powerful and genuine as any we see these three Danes offer the camera.

Nor is there much in the way of new evils exposed. While Brügger seems almost delighted to be able to show the North Korean treatment of Jacob and his disabilities, especially when he is silenced and almost written out of the reworked comic sketch that is the product of the entire affair, this clashes awkwardly with the deep warmth Jacob is shown by their handler, and Jacob’s own complex emotions over what he sees and his own role in the deceptive game that Mads has invited him to join. For those of us who have seen or read of the treatment of some disabled elsewhere in the world, including South Korea, this documentary fails to shock.

While Brügger makes ominous references to the horrible conditions of the camps in remote places, the starvation of the multitude, and at one point reminds himself that having a picnic in the woods is like enjoying a trip to the Black Forest during Nazi rule, the only two real forms of oppression we see in the movie is the complete editing license assumed by the North Koreans over the performances of their Danish guests, and by Mads himself as he cajoles and pressures his two companions to go along with the North Korean demands and the deception they are carrying out.

But this is why the documentary is a most interesting failure. It shows how Brügger is so different from someone like Sacha Baron Cohen or the interviewers of the Daily Show. The Red Chapel makes a good pair with The Ambassador, Brügger’s adventure in the Central African Republic with credentials as a Liberian consul purchased through a Dutch supplier of diplomatic titles. As with the Red Chapel, we don’t really learn anything new. Most of us recognize North Korea as a Stalinist hell and none of us are surprised when Brügger discovers corruption in central Africa. However, these two documentaries reveal a genuinely interesting approach that Brügger takes: On the one hand he reveals his own willingness to carry his deceit to extreme limits, and his willingness to drag vulnerable individuals into the heart of his game (Jacob in Red Chapel, and two Pygmies he hires for his match factory in Africa). On the other, the both documentaries use extensive footage and commentary to the end of exposing his own failures. The result is that characters come alive in his documentaries in a way that they are merely reduced to stand-ins for stereotypes in other similar projects.

Brügger also includes footage where others criticize him directly, especially from own collaborators. Mads Brügger, the director, despite the authoritative narrative voice he offers over the action, does not spare Mads, the participant, from his own strange interrogation. This is seen throughout the Red Chapel, where the tension and interaction between Jacob and Mads nearly steals us away from the core drama of the interaction between the Danes and the North Koreans. The result is, for example, that instead of Jacob getting used as a tool of propaganda by Mads (something that Brügger admits doing), and subjected to abuse by the North Koreans, the young man’s agency comes through strong throughout the documentary. The climax of both documentaries happens at the decisive moment when Brügger’s collaborators take a stand against him and refuse to participate any more. Jacob will not join Brügger in pumping his fist in a state organized street march against American imperialism and, during a blood diamond negotiation, Brügger’s Danish assistant and French interpreter is heard yelling that the game has reached its limit, and he must proceed no further.

At the close of the Red Chapel Brügger graciously hands Jacob complete victory, a victory of compassion over the strike against totalitarianism that Brügger was aiming for. When he persuades Jacob to hand their North Korean handler a letter in which he asks why he never saw or met other disabled people in North Korea, instead of waiting for the awkward silence or some propagandistic reply, Jacob immediately lets her off the hook by telling her that perhaps next time he will get the chance to meet them.

The result is that Brügger has created—and given his personality, he may well be satisfied with the irony of it—a documentary that repeatedly declares itself to be a condemnation of North Korea as the world’s most evil country, and instead puts humanity on display with a far more positive message.

The title, Det røde kapel, is a Danish play on words from the German Rote Kapelle = The Red Orchestra communist resistance organization under Nazi rule ↩

China/English

Random China stuff

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

Ever thought about doing a blog post on the history of the Chinese wheelbarrow, drawing many of your facts from Needham, but illustrating it with lots of cool pictures? Don’t bother. It’s been done.¹

Via DeLong

Another entry in the wars over the origins of pasta.

Via LGM

Finally, to perhaps follow up on the Yellow Kid, Scott Seligman’s “The Night New York’s Chinese Went Out for Jews How a 1903 Chinatown fundraiser for pogrom victims united two persecuted peoples”

from China Heritage Quarterly

admittedly the piece does have the annoying habit of dating everything to a vague ‘Ancient China’, which for my undergrads includes everything from Peking Man to the death of Mao in 1976, but it is still a nice post ↩

China/English/Historiography/Intellectual

What Do Lin Yutang and Lin Biao Have in Common? They Were Both Memory Holed

Posted on February 2, 2013 by C. W. Hayford / 0 Comment

Global Voices, a quite useful and smart blog, on January 30 posted Two Versions of Mao’s China: History Retouched as Propaganda, which has an set of uncanny “before and after” photos of the sort we’ve become all too familiar with. It’s not surprising to see Lin Biao being airbrushed out of posters and photos after he went from being Mao’s “closest comrade in arms and successor” to falling (literally) from grace.

But a set of photos further down the page caught my eye. The original 1927 version (the one on the bottom) shows Lu Xun (front row right), his wife, brother, Sun Fuyuan, another friend, and Lin Yutang (back row center), but in the second version, dated 1977, Lin and the other friend have been artfully “disappeared.”

*Lu Xun With (1927) and Without (1977) Lin Yutang*

I’m afraid that for too long Lin Yutang was also airbrushed out of Western accounts of China before the 1949 Revolution. Until the work of Qian Suoqiao, now of Hong Kong City University, Lin couldn’t get much scholarly respect. Since Qian is a friend, I should write a little more about his heroic contributions at some point in the future, but for now, let’s just appreciate the irony of the two airbrushed Lins.Continue reading →

China/English

Yellow Kid

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

So, there I was, looking for pictures of Li Hongzhang, and I found this Apparently Li met the Yellow Kid.

For those of our readers who may be American, Li Hongzhang was perhaps the most important Chinese statesman of the 19th century, and did in fact visit the U.S. For those of our readers who may be Chinese, the Yellow Kid was America’s first comic strip character, and he and his street urchin buddies were very big in the 1890’s.

I found a few things interesting about this. The calligraphy in Li’s name is actually quite good, which surprises me a lot. Even much later Chinese writing might be gobbledegook or just badly written. This is pretty good. The Yellow Kid usually had humorous ads in the background, and in this case they are for Li Hongzhang corsets. Maybe a reference to footbinding and ways of controlling female bodies? Of course one should not think the artist R.F. Outcault was too modern in his thinking. The main gag is that the Kid and Li are both Yellow. Later he would describe the Kid as

this same infantile terror who falls of tenement roofs, plays with matches, chases Chinamen, gets nearly drowned twice a day, breaks windows, keeps his mother’s heart beating like a trip-hammer, and generally makes so much trouble and excitement that we wonder how there can be any left for us other mortals.¹

So maybe not a real modern view, but a pretty interesting view of the Chinese in American popular culture.

Outcault, Richard Felton. R.F. Outcault’s the Yellow Kid: A Centennial Celebration of the Kid Who Started the Comics. First Edition. Kitchen Sink Pr (Nrt), 1995. p.146 ↩

Blogs and Carnivals/China/English/Republican/Sino-Japanese Wars

Are Japanese people evil?

Posted on January 27, 2013 by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

There has been some commentary, both on well-known blogs and obscure ones on Robert Farley’s Diplomat article on Japan’s WWII Counter-Insurgency planning and implementation Farley discusses an article by retired Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) Lieutenant General Noboru Yamaguchi and Farley suggests that

Long story short, the history of Japanese operations in China was more complicated in process, if not in effect, than the “Kill All, Loot All, Destroy All” that has come to characterize the war*.

*Standard caveat: I trust that readers are bright enough to understand that this does not constitute an apology for the Japanese Imperial Army.

As my co-blogger Jonathan Dresner points out, this caveat seems not to have worked, as the comments at the Diplomat are mostly from (presumably) Chinese who want to make it clear that the Japanese are eternally evil.

Having violated Internet protocol and actually read the article I can report that it is interesting in an odd way. Noboru calls what went on the China Incident, and points out, correctly enough, that this was not the a war Japan wanted or planned for. He is not defending Japanese aggression, however. He is mostly interested in laying out how the Japanese Army in North China tried to deal with Chinese insurgency in addition to all their other tasks it had. North China was considered to be a sideshow to the coming war with Russia and then a sideshow to the current war with the U.S., and so they were expected to defeat the Chinese Communists while also preparing troops for battle at Guadalcanal or maybe Siberia. The North China army was also expected to send resources (iron, coal, salt, and cotton) home, making it quite different from the situation of, say, the American army in Iraq, which is the main comparison of the volume.¹

That Japanese war aims were confused at best is not news, but Noboru is drawing from high-level Japanese documents and the Japanese scholarship that flows from them, things that have not been much used by Western or Chinese scholars. A lot of what he says will not be wildly shocking to anyone who has read Lincoln Li² or Tim Brook³ The article gives a nice Japanese Army-centric view of dealing with Chinese insurgents.

Farley is looking at the Japanese experience in China as an example of counter-insurgency, and I guess you can take lessons from it for that purpose. Heck, the Americans in Vietnam took lessons from the suppression of the Jiangxi Soviet in the 1930’s. It may seem odd to be taking lessons from Chiang Kai-shek on fighting Communists, but the suppression of the Jiangxi Soviet was actually a success. It helps to split things up in order to make sense of them. The Japanese Empire was a failure, but that does not mean that parts of it are not things people interested in counter-insurgency can learn from.

More to the point for this blog, the Japanese experience in China was not all of a piece. When I was in grad school⁴ the whole war period was pretty much a black hole. Communists and Nationalists were fighting in 1936. Then stuff happens and they are fighting in 1946. The last couple of decades have seen a lot of scholarship on what happened in China during the war. Our view of the Japanese is still pretty primitive, however. Unless you are Konrad Lawson or some type of hyper-smart person like that you still see the Japanese invaders as evil people who came to China for the chance to twirl their moustaches and cackle as they killed Chinese. There were plenty of those, but allowing the overall evil of the Japanese presence to dominate everything that happened obscures history. Lots of Japanese sincerely wanted to help China even while serving the Japanese war effort. The modern attempt to make a radical distinction between Japan and China just does not work. Are Lu Xun, Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek all collaborators? Were Japanese who thought they could get Chinese to contribute to their empire all idiots? They did it in Taiwan and to some extent in Manchuria. Wang Jing-wei may have been a traitor, but it is hard to say he was not also a figure in the history of Chinese nationalism. Bose’s Indian National Army contributed a lot of men to the Japanese war effort. ⁵ The radical anti-Japanese view ignores even Chinese wartime propaganda which could be quite solicitous of the sufferings of ordinary Japanese. While we can’t ignore the evil the Japanese people did in China, we also don’t want to oversimplify things, and the article helps with this.

The whole point of the volume, based on an 2010 conference at Ohio State, is to provide American policymakers with ideas about how to deal with Hybrid Warfare, situations where you are dealing with both a formal army and an insurgency, Thus, one would be dealing with a threat that would ‘blend the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular warfare. ↩
who he cites ↩
who he does not ↩
We spent a lot of time on the ‘Opposable Thumb — Fad or the Future’ question. (I was also the first history student to decide I needed an ‘electronic mail’ account despite not being a comp-sci student) ‘ ↩
One place where I disagree with Farley is when he cites Bayly and Harper to suggest that the Japanese occupation of S.E. Asia was completely infective. The Japanese made many errors, but Bayly and Harper seem, to me. to suggest that they got more buy-in than the standard popular interpretation would suggest ↩

Current/Recent Events/Japan/Memory/US-Japan/War

Leave WWII out of it, OK?

Posted on January 19, 2013 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

There are good reasons to bring Japan into the gun control debate in the United States: the relative success of firearms regulation in Japan, the recent rise of gun violence connected to organized crime, the history of weapons-carrying elites, etc. But WWII had nothing whatsoever to do with gun rights, gun control, or the 2nd amendment.

Why bring this up? Because of Ed Emery, Republican representative to the Missouri state legislature from Lamar, MO. In a video produced last April, Rep. Emery said:

We know in a historical context that Japan was considering an invasion on the land mass of the United States of America, but they were afraid to, and the reason they were afraid to [is] because they knew that every american is armed. and although they were not afraid of our armies, they were afraid of our citizens.

Randy Turner, who posted the video recently, says that “That ridiculous story has been circulating for decades”, but this is the first I’ve heard of it. As Turner says, “No reputable historian takes it seriously.”¹

I’m not a specialist on Japanese military history, but there are a few points that are worth making. Japan did attack American territory directly, both in Hawaii and in the Aleutians, and had substantial plans for occupying Hawaii if a second opportunity for assault presented itself. Japan also attacked the US mainland, or “land mass,” with sea-based and balloon bomb attacks.

More importantly, attacking the US mainland wouldn’t have advanced the primary, or even secondary, strategic aims of the Japanese military in WWII, and wouldn’t have been seriously considered until after more important goals were met. Japan’s primary goal in WWII, remember, was defeating Chinese resistance to Japanese control so as to establish a stable, secure colonial foothold on the Asian continent. In order to maintain military production, Japan needed reliable sources of metals, minerals, oil, and rubber, materials that the United States had stopped selling Japan as part of the attempt to get Japan to back away from China. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the Aleutian island chain was a bit of a feint, to damage US military capacity in the Pacific and to blunt any response to Japanese seizure of the Philipines, Dutch East Indies, and other territories in the South Pacific. Those territories were valuable to Japan for their mineral wealth, oil and rubber: exploiting those resources would allow Japan to continue fighting the war in China.

Needless to say, any greater ambitions Japan had about Pacific domination were cut down by the loss of carrier groups at Midway and Coral Sea, which meant that Japan’s ability to project military might across the ocean was drastically reduced. At no time after that was there any serious discussion of “taking the fight to America.”

As far as fearing the well-armed American populace, instead of the American military, it’s hard to believe that the Japanese military would have treated them differently than the Chinese, who waged both large-force and guerilla-style operations against Japanese forces with great vigor and frequency. I don’t know what the distribution of guns was like in China before and during the Japanese invasion, but remember that China had been through 20 years of warlordism and civil war before the 1937 outbreak of hostilities, so there were certainly plenty of modern weapons and military veterans in the population. I’d also question the idea that guns were as common in the US as Emery describes them, but I’ll leave that bit of fun for my American historian colleagues to discuss.

Emery also said, right before the clip linked, “There are two things that stand between Americans and tyranny: Our constitution and our 2nd amendment rights.” I’m pretty sure that the 2nd amendment is, actually, part of the constitution. He may just mean “the fact that we have a lot of guns” but that raises the question of how other societies in the world with fewer guns have avoided falling into tyrannical oppression. Or maybe he means that American culture is so likely to become politically oppressive that special protections are necessary…. never mind. ↩

China/Classics/Culture/East vs West/English

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

Posted on January 13, 2013 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 January 12, 2013 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.

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. ↩
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 January 12, 2013 by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

[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.

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.

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

China/English

Teaching (about Japan)

Posted on January 9, 2013 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

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

Anecdotes/Books/China/China-Japan/Japan

A memory stirs..

Posted on December 24, 2012 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 December 24, 2012 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.

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 December 13, 2012 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.

Ishikawa, Tatsuzo. Soldiers Alive. Translated by Zeljko Cipris. University of Hawaii Press, 2003. ↩
a young Chinese woman to be raped and murdered. ↩

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

Rustic poetry

Posted on November 26, 2012 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.

Chittick, Andrew. Patronage and Community in Medieval China: The Xiangyang Garrison, 400-600 Ce. State Univ of New York Pr, 2010. ↩
Chittick explains the provincial grammar and usage in the poem ↩

China/English

Elections

Posted on November 13, 2012 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.

Pennsylvania Overview 2012 Election Center Elections Politics from CNN.com — 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.

Pennsylvania2012-House — 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.

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.

originally from Tea Leaf Nation, which seems to be having trouble right now. ↩
Answer: No, and it seems like a pretty irrelevant question right now ↩
More significantly, there is no-anti war party ↩
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 ↩