For those who would like to read about new research in Chinese history without having to drudge through proquest, please check out a new website, Chinese History Dissertation Reviews. It’s a series of reviews of recently defended doctoral dissertations in Chinese history, offering a summary of the main arguments, the historiographical genealogy to which the author responds, and a list of the major archives/sources used in the dissertation. We would love to hear all of your feedback!
Data Visualization and Data Quality
The inestimable Rob MacDougall is running a course on Digital History, and even better, he’s running it more or less publicly! I’m getting all kinds of ideas here. On the other hand, it sometimes raises surprising problems. The unit on Data Visualization includes an assigned reading that looked like something I might use for historiography, David Staley, Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past (M.E. Sharpe, 2003). But when I started looking through it, the first ‘data visualization’ presented was an illustration of Japanese history from William McNeill’s 1963 The Rise of the West that made my teeth clench. Rob asked me to explain what’s wrong with it, which is fair.
The caption reads
In addition to information about costume, architecture, and other forms of material culture, the figures in the diagram convey meaningful information through gesture and body language, the shading of figures, their relative sizes, and their location in the diagram
That’s all true, as far as it goes. The problem, of course, is whether the diagram is conveying accurate and clear information, and on both accounts it fails. I realize that I’m being a little unfair: the McNeill book was a survey text written almost a half-century ago, and the diagram is being used as an example of potential; it’s not being cited as an up-to-date description of Japanese history that would be acceptable today. Still, it’s worth talking about.
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Delicious spam
I got an e-mail from Online Colleges. It seems to be a semi-scam site that offers to connect you to on-line colleges without actually, from what I can tell, providing any real service. Needless to say, it would probably help them if they could give the site some veneer of academic content, and thus they have a list of 101 lectures on China. The page just links to lectures (academic and popular) already available on I-tunes and elsewhere, but some of them look pretty interesting. So if you are looking for something to listen too this is a good place to start.
http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2010/10/13/101-lectures-to-learn-all-about-china/
China, the Hobgoblin of Small Minds
I had a student ask me in class, recently, about whether China, among other countries, was planning to take advantage of our coming collapse to move into a position of world domination, that they had operational plans and expected the collapse to come momentarily. I responded by pointing out that most advanced nations develop contingency plans for a wide variety of possible future scenarios, so that the existence of a plan is no guarantee of it’s probability.
Then, today, I read about this 2006 Delaware Senate debate:
Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell of Delaware said in a 2006 debate that China was plotting to take over America and claimed to have classified information about the country that she couldn’t divulge.
O’Donnell’s comments came as she and two other Republican candidates debated U.S. policy on China during Delaware’s 2006 Senate primary, which O’Donnell ultimately lost.
She said China had a “carefully thought out and strategic plan to take over America” and accused one opponent of appeasement for suggesting that the two countries were economically dependent and should find a way to be allies.
“There’s much I want to say,” she said at the time. “I wish I wasn’t privy to some of the classified information that I am privy to.”
This is four years old, now: have we seen considerable progress in the takeover of the US by China? Seems to me that we’ve been holding steady, mostly. My immediate thought is that a US economic/political collapse would leave China in a strong short-term position, but an extremely weak long-term one, given the interdependence of our economies and technology sectors. But I’m not privy to classified information.
Hoping for charity, without getting faith involved
The New Republic has an article by Gordon Chang on the lack of philanthropy among China’s rich. As he points out, one of the things blocking the emergence of charity organizations is China is the Party, which is very reluctant to approve the creation of any sort of organization outside itself, so it is hard even for the ideologically approved very rich to get permission to do so. Of course they could just donate to organizations they don’t control, but Chinese rich people (like all people everywhere) are at least partially motivated to do good by the praise they can win for doing so publicly.1
This is too bad, in part because lots of people who could use help are not getting it, and in part because China could really use an active civil society that would feed the hungry, cloth the naked and heal the sick. The problem with that is that that sort of thing can shade off into comforting the afflicted, and that is getting into political criticism. The Chang article was a response to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett visiting China to try and encourage more charitable giving. Gates and Buffett come from a society where it is unthinkable that the state would prevent the very rich from doing whatever they want, but also from a society where the state has long since made its peace with charity. Actually, Western states did relatively little charity, leaving most of it to the church for a long time, and of course this has led to conflict, possibly most noticeably over control of education in a lot of Catholic countries.
In Late Imperial China, at least, providing benevolence to the people was always one of the duties of the state, and even when it was provided by the local elite (and they did a lot of it) they did so a surrogates of the state, not as representatives of a rival organization.2 This actually changed some in the Late Qing. Katheryn Edgerton-Tarpley discusses this in her book about the response to the great famine in Shanxi in the 1870s. Chinese charity, from orphanages and soup kitchens to providing education and sponsoring public improvements was always localized and particular. In response to the famine, however, elites in Shanghai began to take action on a national level, despite the fact that Shanxi was a long way away. Tarpley discusses how the newspaper Shenbao and its writers both organized charity on a new level and were implicitly critical of the government’s unwillingness to adopt new, Western methods to deal with this and other crises. For a government that accepts nurturing the people as one of its duties almost any form of organized charity outside the structure of the state is an implicit criticism. I’m not sure that the CCP really accepts nurturing the people as one of its duties at present, but I am not surprised that they are reluctant to see organizations doing this job for them and thus criticizing either their ability or their will. I’m not sure how this contradiction could be resolved, but it is depressing that the state can’t even work out some sort of arrangement with Jet Li, who I would not really call an oppositional figure.
Even when you give money anonymously you are motivated in part by the warm glow you feel and only in part by the desire to do good for others. Since you can’t entirely untangle these motives in yourself I don’t find it all that helpful to try and do so when looking at others. ↩
I’m leaving out the Buddhists here, who were separate organizations and did charity but were not oppositional to the state. ↩
Some stuff
Proper prayer technique
China in Africa
Victor Mair has a great post at Language log on the question of “Is Q a Chinese character”
Or, if you want to learn Beijing Huar you can go to Beijing Sounds
Did you know that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy now as an entry for Neo-Daoism? Manyul Im does
The Use of Collective Responsibility
It is a famous fact that the Government-General in Taiwan adopted the baojia (保甲) system in 1898 in reaction to a series of attacks against the Japanese. It is a method of mutual policing at the village level for the purpose of maintaining local order and preventing tax evasion. Although GGT officials explained that it was a system that they were adopting from the old Chinese dynasties, it had already been a familiar style of policing for the Japanese too since Toyotomi Hideyoshi and others adopted it to police hidden Christians and so on.
I never encountered a mentioning of a similar system in the history of colonial police in Korea. For example, Matsuda Toshihiko’s recent publication, 日本の朝鮮植民地支配と警察 1905-1945 (Japan’s Colonial Rule of Korea and the Police. 2009), discusses how the police tried to propagate its authority to the masses (民衆化) and how they tried to co-opt local leaders into their networks (警察化）. But it does not look like there was a rule or a law about mutual policing like the baojia (保甲) system.
It turned out that the collective responsibility system was used in tenant contracts between Japanese agricultural companies (landlords) and Korean peasants, instead. One example was the Chosen kōgyō gaisha, run by the Shibusawa zaibatsu family. A scholar Asada Kyōji describes how the Chosen kōgyō gaisha established the gonin gumi (5-person groups) system and used it as a basic unit of Korean tenant farmers. (Asada Kyōji. 日本帝国主義と旧植民地地主制. 1992. 161). Apparently this was a common custom among the Japanese landholders as the half-governmental Oriental Developmental Company also required five tenant farmers to register together. In Ham Hanhee’s oral interview with a farmer in Cholla Namdo, he said that the most difficult part in getting a contract with the ODC is that “he needed four sponsors who were willing to take on a collective liability for his wrongdoings.” (Hahm Hanhee, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University 1990. 82)
I wonder if the difference in where this collective liability system belonged somehow reflects the difference in the nature of rule in Taiwan and Korea… just a thought. Another thought is that, if it is possible that the infamous tonarigumi system in Japan during WWII was a product of the experiences of organizing local units in the Japanese colonies… maybe?
The Lead Poisoning Thesis
Some research is startling, and some research confirms what we already guessed or assumed, but there’s some research which falls between these categories: research which reveals things that should have been obvious, if we’d been thinking about it clearly, or asked the right questions earlier. Siniawer’s argument about the consistency of violence in Imperial Japanese politics falls into that category, as does the new transnational migration scholarship that sees migration as a multi-directional, multi-generational process. I’m sure you have other examples
In the same vein, there’s new archaelogical research from Kitakyushu, announced on LiveScience with the headline “Lead Poisoning in Samurai Kids Linked to Mom’s Makeup.” A study of 70 sets of samurai class remains included several of children:
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Goto Shimpei’s Meta Theory on Modern Empire
I feel that, from what I have read so far, Goto Shimpei is everyone’s favorite colonial policy-maker. He learned ‘scientific’ colonial governance from Western examples; his management of colonial affairs made the Japanese rule in Taiwan self-sustainable; he made a basis for Japan’s rule of Manchuria. Compared to Hara Kei, another ‘everyone’s favorite’ in the history of Japanese colonialism, who believed in the extension of home rule (内地延長主義), Goto was much closer to contemporary Western colonizers in that he regarded colonies as completely separate entities from the home country. The fact that these two figures who had almost opposite ruling philosophies are praised in the same way shows the difficulty of determining what exactly “good governance” means in colonial rule.
Anyway, I happened to read Goto’s 日本植民政策一班 (Japanese colonial policies), which was written based on his lecture given in 1914. I was curious of how he thought about the role of modern empire. He says;
19世紀において起こりました、国民主義なるものは… 強者には無上の好武器であるが、弱者には却って身を殺すの凶器であったと云ふことは明らかであります…この国民主義の興隆と共にその弱い国は無理往生的に同化を強いられるという形成に相成ったのが、欧羅巴列国生存競争の結果であります。その国民主義に加えるに帝国主義を以てすることになりました。
(rough translation) It is clear that nationalism, which arose in the nineteenth century,… was an excellent weapon for the strong, but for the weak, it was rather a self-destructive weapon… Together with this rise of nationalism, those weak countries were forced to assimilate. This is a result of the competition for survival among European powers. They added imperialism to this nationalism.
Assuming that the common narrative that today’s historians give that the era of nationalism took over the era of imperialism is somewhat right (at least chronologically), Goto’s reverse perception is quite fascinating. Partly this is because he was trying to analyze World War I, which manifested the coexistence of nationalism and imperialism. But I suspect this was a common mindset for the Japanese leaders. They, including Goto, probably felt that “first comes nation, and that becomes empire” from their experience. This was absolutely not the case for most of the European empires. But for Japan, with a strong orientation for “nation” building, “empire” was a powerful version of the “nation.” This might sound a little too banal as a point for Japan specialists, but from a comparative viewpoint, this is quite anomalous.
It's a man's life
From Gawker a set of military recruitment ads from around the world. Representing East Asia we have Taiwanese who gain skills while defending 20 million people from an unknown enemy, a Singaporean battleship that transforms into a giant robot, and an ad for the Japanese Navy that is quite remarkable.
(Japanese ad intercut with an American one)
Lots of American military recruitment ads (which turn up a lot on the type of shows my 15-year old son watches) emphasize how joining up connects you to a glorious history, not just the few, the proud, etc. but pictures of the G.I.s who defended freedom by beating Hitler. They tend to avoid pictures defenders of freedom in blue uniforms shooting defenders of slavery in gray, since that brings up some history that they don’t want brought up.
The British ad is maybe the best and most historical. The ad shows as screaming armed black guy (ohh a native) who is calmed by the sheer stiff upper lip and steely eyes of a British officer. Remember when Britain was an Empire? Well that was before your time, but IF you could be a real British officer that would be something. Beats sitting around Oldham getting pissed, anyway.
In East Asia military history is a very fraught subject. The PLA has killed lots of people, but many of them were Chinese. Even stirring up anti-Japanese feelings (or even bringing up the Revolution) may not be a good idea.
The Japanese Navy of course also has a glorious history, if one assumes that for a Navy a glorious history means sending lots of foreigners to watery graves. Needless to say they don’t want to emphasize that. Maybe a dance routine is best.
Here is a PRC version. Comparing ads you might think Taiwan and Chinese Beijing were the same country.
Via Tapped
Young Samurai: The Way of the Sword: Ancient Culture, Modern Politics
Reading The Way of the Sword while listening to the “Restoring Honor” event, I began to wonder if our current shift to discourses of honor and warriors is a side effect of the ubiquity of martial arts in the US over the last 35 years. The values of martial arts, even the most modern ones, include personal and collective honor in ways that were, for a long time, rather absent in most American rhetoric. Sarah Palin said “If you look for the virtues that have sustained our country, you will find them in those who wear the uniform, who take the oath, who pay the price for our freedom.” That’s as good a paraphrase of the Imperial Rescript for Soldiers and Sailors as I’ve ever heard from an American politician.
The cultural and historical problems which made Young Samurai: The Way of the Warrior such a weak hash of Harry Potter plotting and dojo delusions persist in the second book of the trilogy. Like the first volume, it’s a quick read, probably most suitable for middle school/junior high readers, though older readers with an interest in the martial arts won’t find it childish. Historians of Japan, however, will find this gaijin-boy-in-early-Edo tale a test of character not unlike the one the protagonist faces: to get through it, you must ignore exhaustion, overcome moments of sharp pain, focus on the goal, and achieve a state of no-mind…. [spoilers ahead, of course, though the fact that it’s the middle part of a trilogy probably tells you most of what you need to know.]
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Tears and sincerity
A while back I was wondering why people in classical Chinese texts seemed to cry so much. Was being able to shed tears on demand something that people were supposed to be able to do? It turns out that Qian Zhongshu had already written about tears and their role in partings, which were an important ritual in elite society. Qian at least seem to support the idea of a gradual transition towards a more “”masculineist” view that tears are just for women. But really his piece is worth reading just for itself.
TEARS AT PARTINGS
That is why people about to part clasp each other’s arms affectionately, and urge the other to take care after they separate. When we parted, your display of love was like that of Zou Wen and Ji Jie, so that your eyelashes were soaked with tears. Yet I merely clasped my hands in a gesture and turned away, ashamed to act like a woman.
—Wang Sengru (465-522),
Letter to He Jiong
The reference here to HeJiong’s weeping is reminiscent of several lines in “Rhapsody on Partings,” byJiang Yan (444-505): “He pushes aside the jade-fretted lute, tears wet the carriage bars,” “When it is time to let go hands, they choke back tears,” “They weep as they say good-bye,” “Kin and companion are bathed in tears.”1
In his essay “On Wailing as a Ritual” Yu Zhengxie (1775-1840) examines the ritual use of “crying facilitators” in ancient funerals, and he observes, “According to the ritual prescriptions, one did not necessarily have to shed tears when crying.”2 I would venture to add that crying was a propriety required not only at funerals. It was also required at partings among the living, although as such it may not have been as universally observed or as ancient as crying at funerals. Furthermore, if a person’s crying at a parting did not include the shedding of tears, he was likely to be faulted for violating propriety. On this point the standards seem to
have been even stricter than those for crying at funerals.
The expectation that one must cry at partings seems to have become widespread only in Jin times (265-420). The narrative of an event that took place shortly earlier is revealing in this regard:
Once when the king of Wei (Cao Cao, 155-220) set off on a campaign, his two sons, the crown prince and Zhi, the lord of Linzi, saw him off at the side of the road. Zhi proclaimed the virtue and merit of the mission with words that were elegant and decorous. Everyone fixed their eyes upon him, and the king himself was pleased with him. The crown prince, by contrast, had a sorrowful expression and seemed not to know what to do. Wu Zhi whispered in his ear, “The king is about to depart. It is permissible to shed tears.” When he said his farewell, the crown prince wept as he bowed. The king and his attendants sighed audibly, so moved were they by this display. Later, everyone said that the lord of Linzi’s speech was excessively florid, while the genuine affection in his heart was insufficient.3
From this we may infer that at the end of the Han dynasty it was not yet customary to cry at partings. That is why Wu Zhi’s clever ploy was effective and caused the crown prince to outshine his younger brother. The Old Tang Dynasty History says, “When Emperor Tai (r. 62,7-649) decided to lead an attack upon the Korean kingdom of Koguryo, he ordered the crown prince to stay behind and guard Dingzhou, Once a date had been set for the emperor’s departure from Dingzhou, the crown prince cried sorrowfully for several days.”4 Was this crown prince also heeding Wu Zhi’s advice of long before?
The failure to produce tears with one’s crying has been variously criticized, explained, or even excused. Forest of Sayings (fourth c.) records the following: “A man went to take leave of Master Xie. Xie shed tears but the other man showed no sign of emotion. Once he left, the attendants said, ‘That guest only showed
gloomy clouds.'” Xie commented, ‘It was even less than “gloomy clouds.” It was “dry thunder.”‘ “5 “Gloomy clouds” is like what is recorded about Empress Lu in Records of the Grand Historian and The Han Dynasty History: “The empress cried but did not weep.”6 Yan Shigu explains in his commentary that “weep” means to produce tears.7 “Dry thunder” is like one of the “three kinds of crying” described in Chapter 25 of The Water Margin’. “To make noise without producing tears is called ‘howling’… ‘dry howling'” and what Monkey says in Chapter 39 of Journey to the West: “There are several types of crying. If the mouth makes noise but the eyes remain dry, that is called ‘howling.'”8
Family Instructions of the Yan Clan (sixth c.) says:
Separations occur frequently, whereas reunions are difficult to bring about. That is why the ancients assigned great importance to partings. At farewell banquets in the South, one weeps when speaking of the imminent departure. There was, for example, the case of a prince who was the younger cousin of Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty. When the prince was leaving to take charge of Dong Prefecture, he bid farewell to the emperor. The emperor … wept tears that covered his face, but the prince only showed “gloomy clouds”
and then left, blushing with embarrassment. For this reason he was punished (by winds that would not let his boat depart).. .. Northern customs, by contrast, pay no regard to this convention. Standing at a crossroads, friends say good-bye with a merry laugh.
There are, however, also people who, by nature, are not given to shedding tears. Their heart may be breaking but their eyes remain perfectly clear. This type of person should not be blamed for failing to weep at a departure.9
A person who sheds no tears though the heart is afflicted is said to have “a soft heart and stiff eyes.” This is the terminology used in Zhu Shuzhen’s (fl..1095-1131) couplet, “Although a woman’s eyes are said to be soft, / Tears do not flow forth for no reason” and in the anonymous early Ming song, “I’ve always had stiff eyes, / Which don’t show sadness before lovely scenery.”10 Classified Sayings (1136) quotes an account of Liu Xiaochuo’s farewell to Wang Yuanjing, when Yuanjing was departing on an official mission: “Xiaochuo wept, but Yuanjing had no tears. He apologized for this, saying, ‘Please don’t hold it against me. After we separate, tears will stream down my face.'”11 He means that although at the moment he has no tears, later he is bound to weep, fulfilling the required response. When Wang Seng-u parted from He Jiong, as we have seen earlier, Jiong wept but Sengru had “stiff eyes” and thus was in violation of the Southern custom. Moreover, unlike Wang Yuanjing, Sengru neglected even to excuse himself by promising to cry subsequently. That is why he subsequently sought to justify his conduct in a letter.
Despite the social convention of crying at partings described above, there was also a tradition of viewing tears shed by men as being “womanly” or even disingenuous. Wang Sengru’s letter says, as we have seen, “your display of love was like that of Zou Wen and Ji Jie…. Yet I merely clasped my hands in a gesture and
turned away, ashamed to act like a woman.” The allusion is to The Kong Family Masters (third c. B.C.):12
Zigao traveled to Zhao, where among the retainers of the Lord of Pingyuan there were Zou Wen and Ji Jie, who befriended Zigao. When it was time for Zigao to return to Lu,… as he took his leave. Wen and Jie had tears all over their cheeks, but Zigao merely clasped his hands in a gesture…. Later, Zigao said, “At first I thought that these two were true men of stature. Today I see that they are just women.” … His attendant asked, “Is there no good to be found in weeping?” Zigao replied, “Weeping has two uses. Men of great treachery use it to persuade others of their sincerity. Women and cowards use it to make a show of their
affection.”
Similarly, A New Account of Tales of the World says, “When Zhou Shuzhi was appointed prefect of Jingling, his older brothers, Zhou Hou and Zhongzhi, went tobid him farewell. Zhou Shuzhi cried and wept without stopping. Zhongzhi said indisgust, ‘This man acts for all the world like a woman. When he parts from some-body, he does nothing but yammer and blubber.’ Whereupon he removed himselfand left.”14 Zhou Shuzhi knew that weeping was a propriety required at partings,but he did not realize that the same propriety, carried to extremes, could provokedisgust and enmity rather than affection. (Luo Yin’s [833-909] poem, “Tears,” says,”Ever since the realm of Lu disappeared / It has either been treacherous men orwomen [who shed tears]” clearly also drawing upon The Kong Family Masters pas-sage.15 Li Yu’s [937-978] farewell to his younger brother, the prince ofDeng, says”Sorrowful tears and sweet words are the habitual manner of women and girls, I willhave none of it.”16 The use of such language in a farewell composition is likewise a veiled allusion to The Kong Family Masters.)
Crying and weeping were frequently used as a shortcut up the mountain of officialdom, which is one reason they were so often viewed with suspicion. The earliest record of this occurs in the biography of Wang Mang in The Han Dynasty History. In the autumn of the fourth year of the Dihuang period (A.D. 23), Mang
led his assembled ministers to the southern suburb to lift their eyes toward Heaven and cry aloud in an effort to suppress the national calamity. “Students and commoners gathered in the morning and cried out until the evening…. Those who showed extreme grief and those who could recite his Announcement to Heaven from memory were promoted as court attendants. Over five thousand men earned appointment this way.”17 The Old Tan^Dynasty History says, “Erudite Wei Chifen requested that Li Jifu be given the posthumous epithet ‘Respectful of Regulations.’ Zhang Zhongfang objected and criticized Jifu’s character, saying, ‘Fawning tears hung upon his eyelids and flowed our at every convenience. Clever words served him like the reed mouthpiece of a musical instrument, which sings out soothingly whenever blown upon.'”18
Chen Jiru (1558-1639) comments, “Whenever I read this, I smile, thinking it should be posted on-the walls of pleasure quarters everywhere as a warning.”19 He is equating “treacherous men” with “women,” saying that their behavior in this respect is interchangeable: the treacherous man’s tears are like those of the courtesan, and the courtesan’s tears are themselves a form of treachery. Yuan Mei’s Remarks on Poetry quotes lines thatJiang Sunfu addressed to a courtesan, “I ask that you not wipe away those lovesick tears, / Save them to send off another man tomorrow morning.”20 This shows the reality of “crying at the time of parting” in the pleasure quarters!
The association of tears with opportunistic men who are anxious to display their “loyalty,” and likened to insincere women eager to prove their “love,” continues in later periods. Shen Defu (1578-1612) observes:
Shamelessness among men of learning has never been more pronounced than during the Chenghua period (1465-1487). Since the Jiajing period (1522.-1566), it has manifested itself again. Wang Hong knocked his head on the floor and wept as he pleaded with Grand Secretary Zhang Fujing; Zhao Wenhua bowed a hundred times as he wept and beseeched Grand Secretary Yan Song; and Chen Sanmo knelt and wept on and on before Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng, Each of these men regained favor and salary because of a few streaks of glistening tears. The ancients said, “Women sell love by weeping, and vile men peddle treacherous schemes by weeping.” It is really so!
(The reference here to “the ancients” is also to the passage in The Kong Family Masters.) Wang Shizhen (1634-1711) says:
When Dong Na was leaving his post as censor to become governor-general of Zhejiang and jiangxi, one of his former colleagues in the Censorate went to say farewell and, sitting down close beside him, burst out crying and would not stop. Dong was very moved by this display and everyone present considered it most extraordinary. When he was done, the man went directly to visit Yu Guozhu, the minister from Daye, and as soon as he entered the room and bowed, he burst out laughing. Startled, Yu Guozhu asked him why he
laughed. The man replied, “Dong is gone. The nail has been extracted from my eye!
This may serve as a gloss upon Chen Jiru’s remark about the warning that should.
be posted on the walls of pleasure quarters.
In fact, the usefulness of “selling tears” is no less than that of the courtesan’s ploy of “selling smiles.” Moreover, the sheer volume of the “bribes by tears” and “proprieties of tears” that have been offered by men through the ages may exceed that of the “three pools of tears” mentioned by Tang Chuanying (1620-1644) as well as the celebrated “debt of tears” that must be repaid by Lin Daiyu in Tbe Story of the Stone.24 (As for the latter, it may be noted that such notions as the “repayment of tears” and the “owing of tears” mentioned in Chapters 1 and 5 of the novel may be traced to Meng Jiao’s [751-814] lines, “You owe me ten years of love/I must have a debt to you of a thousand streams of tears,” in a poem lamenting the death of his son, and Liu Yong’s [mid eleventh c.] lines, “You have tied my heart to you for a lifetime /1 must owe you a thousand streams of tears.” These are the first occurrences in literary works of the idea of a debt of tears.)23
Notes (not copyedited)
SOURCE: Guanzhui Uan 4:1435-38; cf. the addendum, ibid., 5:251-252.
EPIGRAPH; Wang Sengru, “Yu HeJiong shu,” Qyan Liang wen 5l.4a.
1. Jiang Yan, “Hen fu,” Wen xuan i6.27b, 28a, 28b, and 2gb; trans. Burton Watson,
Chinese Rhyme Prose, pp. 97-99, modified.
2. Yu Zhengxie, “Ku wei liyi shuo,” Gwisi leigao 13.504-505. Qian’s quotation is actu-
ally a paraphrase.
3. Pei Songzhi’s commentary on Sanyo zbi 21.609, quoting Shi yu.
4. JIM Tangs(iM4A.65-66.
5. Yiwen leiju 29.512.
6. Shi ji9.388andHansfow97A.3938.
7. Yan Shigu commentary on Han sbtt 97A.3939.
8. Shi Nai’an, Shuihu quanzfcuan 25,400; and Wu Cheng’en, Xiyouji 39.535.
9. Yan Zhitui, Yanshi jiaxun jijie 6,91; cf, trans. by Ssu-yii Teng, family Instructions for
the Yen Clan, p. 31.
^ 10. Zhu Shuzhen, “Qiuri shuhuai,” Zhu Shuzhen ji 6.103; and “Xiaoyao Ie,” quoted in Li
Kaixian, Ci nue, p. 938.
11. Zeng Zao, Lei shuo 53.2a.
12. Qian notes parenthetically that the quotation of Wang Sengru’s letter in Yiwen leiju
26.481 erroneously gives “Guo Li” for “Zou andJi” (my “Zou Wen andJiJie”), an error he
attributes to a copyist who did not recognize the KongFamily Masters.
13. Kongcongzi, “Rufu,” 8.13.86-87.
14. Liu Yiqing, Shishuo xinyu, “Fangzheng,” 5.26.308 (following Liu’s text); trans. Rich-
ard B. Mather, A New Account of Tales of tile World, p. 164, modified.
15. Lo Yin, “Lei,” Qyan Tangshi 658.7561.
16. Li Yu (Houzhu), “Song Deng wang ershiliu di mu Xuancheng xu,” Qyan Tang wen
l28.l6b.
17. Han shu 990.4188.
18. Jro Tangshu 171.4443.
19. ChenJiru, Taiping qinghua 2.5b.
20. Jiang Sunfu, “Zeng zhi,” quoted in Yuan Mei, Suiyuan shihua 1.22.
21. Reading “Chenghua” instead of “Chengzheng” (in both Shen’s text and Qian’s
quotation), which must be a mistake. Cf. a similar reference to the Chenghua period earlier
in Shen’s work: Shen Defu, Wanliyehuo bian 21.541.
22. Shen Defu, ibid., 21.549. Qian abbreviates and paraphrases the original,
23. Wang Shizhen, Gufuyu ting zaiu 1.11, following Wang’s text.
24. For Tang Chuanying, see Xianyu bihua, p. 3a-b. For Lin Daiyu, see the citations to
Honglou meng below.
25. MengJiao, “Diao youzi,” Qyan Tang shi 381.4273; and Liu Yong, “Yi dying,” Qyan
Song ci 1:49. Cf. Cao Xueqin, Honglou meng 1.5 and 5.78.
Tears and sincerity
Young Samurai II: A Bad Start
I picked up the second installment of the Young Samurai at the library today. I was thinking about starting it, and looked at the back inside dust cover, where I read the following:
Chris Bradford is the author of Young Samurai: The Way of the Warrior. Aside from having a black belt, he is trained in judo, karate, kickboxing, and samurai swordsmanship. Before writing the Young Samurai series, he was a professional musician and songwriter. He lives in England.
I’ve read that a dozen times, and I read it to my wife, and the question remains: “Aside from having a black belt….” in what? Is there some default martial art whose black belts speak for themselves and which need not be named? Or is he just making a fashion statement?
No, a quick visit to his website reveals that the black belt is in “Kyo Shin Tai-jutsu, the secret fighting art of the ninja.”1
If only Disney/Hyperion had some black-belt copyeditors….
Restoring China's past glory
Via CDT a report on gated communities for the poor outside Beijing. In theory the purpose is to protect residents from crime, but of course the main goal is to keep migrant workers under control.
That road into Shoubaozhuang is guarded 24 hours a day by two uniformed guards and partially barred by an accordion gate that closes tight at 11 p.m. each night. Until 6 a.m. the next day, the residents are sealed in. Only those with passes are allowed to come and go, their movements recorded by a video camera stationed over the entrance.
Gated communities for the rich are of course nothing new in China. Dividing an entire city into walled wards to keep the population under control is also not new. Charles Benn describes the system in the Tang.1
The function of ward walls was to provide internal security by preventing the movement of people. The law clearly asserted the principle. Ninety blows with a thick rod was the punishment for climbing over ward walls. Each of a ward’s roads terminated in gates that a headman, who was in charge of affairs within the ward, barred at dusk. As the sun went down in Changan, a tattoo of 400 beats on a drum signaled the closing of palace gates and a second, of 600 beats, the closing of ward and city gates. The length of the tattoos gave people ample time to return to their dwellings before the ward gates closed. In the predawn hours drummers beat another tattoo of 3,000 beats that was the signal for opening the gates. Each of the avenues also had drums that sounded at curfew. The law forbade citizens to travel on the main thoroughfares of the cities outside the wards during curfew, but it did not restrict their nocturnal movements within the wards. The statute, however, permitted public commissioners bearing official documents, as well as marriage processions, to use the avenues and streets after curfew. In both cases they had to obtain a permit from the county government first. It also allowed private citizens who needed to find a doctor or procure medicine for the treatment of the ill to travel, as well as those who needed to leave their ward to announce a death. However, they had to have a certificate issued by the ward headman. Anyone else found wandering outside the wards during the night by the Gold Bird Guard was subject to twenty blows of the thin rod. In 808, however, the throne had a eunuch who got drunk and violated the curfew beaten to death. The emperor also demoted the officer in charge of the Gold Bird Guard and banished him from the capital.
Sadly for the Tang rulers weakening government power after the An Lushan rebellion and then the greater commercialization and fluidity of society made it impossible to keep up the system. In the Song and after the system of gated wards could not be re-imposed. The current Chinese government, however, is at least making an effort at restoring the glory of the Tang.
the system of urban wards goes back at least to the Han. ↩
"China and Christianity": Hu Shi's 1927 View of Nationalism and Rationalism
Over at the invaluable Danwei, Julian Smisek’s “Hu Shi, missionaries, and women’s rights” (July 15, 2010) does a valuable service in translating Hu’s 1930 essay, “Congratulations to the YWCA,” which pays tribute to Christian missionaries for helping Chinese women.
Hu, a Columbia University PhD, won a poll in the early 1920s as the most admired “returned student” in China. But his surprising words of praise for the YWCA need to be balanced against his views on Christianity’s future in China. He elsewhere disdained the run of Christian missionaries as uneducated and narrow. They came to China because they could live well for little money, he said, and mission boards were far less careful in selecting China missionaries than Standard Oil was in selecting China salesmen and executives.
Hu’s “China and Christianity” was the lead piece in the July 1927 issue of the North American journal, The Forum. That year saw Chiang Kai-shek purge the Communists and Mao Zedong take to the countryside, setting off a generation of civil war, but the editor introduces Hu as “the leader of an intellectual movement that is permeating the youth of China and is interested chiefly in the things of the mind.” Like the “ancient sages of the East,” Hu “stands outside the current political conflict.”
Here’s the editorial in its entirety:
The future of Christianity in China is a question which should be considered apart from the question of the past services rendered to China by the Christian missionaries. The part played by the missionaries in the modernization of China will long be remembered by the Chinese, even though no Christian church may be left there. They were the pioneers of the new China. They helped the Chinese to fight for the suppression of opium which the pirate-traders brought to us. They agitated against footbinding, which eight centuries of esoteric philosophizing in native China failed to recognize as an inhuman institution. And they brought to us the first rudiments of European science. The early Jesuits gave us the pre-Newtonian astronomy, and the later Protestant missionaries introduced modern hospitals and schools. They taught us to know that there was a new world and a new civilization behind the pirate-traders and gunboats.
Many of the Protestant missionaries worked hard to awaken China and bring about a modern nation. China is now awakened and determined to modernize herself. There is not the slightest doubt that a new and modem China is emerging out of chaos. But this new China does not seem to promise much bright future to the propagation of the Christian faith. On the contrary, Christianity is facing opposition everywhere. The dream of a “Christian occupation of China” seems to be fast vanishing, – probably forever. And the explanation is not far to seek.
It is true that there is much cheap argument in the narrow nationalistic attack which sees in the Christian missionary an agent of imperialist aggression. But we must realize that it is nationalism, – the self-consciousness of a nation with no mean cultural past,– that once killed Nestorian Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Manicheism in China. It is the same nationalism which four times persecuted Buddhism and finally killed it after over a thousand years of complete Buddhistic conquest of China. And it is the same national consciousness which is now resisting the essentially alien religion of Christianity.
And more formidable than nationalism, there is the rise of rationalism. We must not forget that Chinese philosophy began two thousand five hundred years ago with Lao Tse who taught a naturalistic conception of the universe end a Confucius who was frankly an agnostic. This rationalistic and humanistic tradition has always played the part of a liberator in every age when the nation seemed to be under the influence of a superstitious or fanatic religion. This cultural background of indigenous China is now revived with the new reinforcement of the methods and conclusions of modern science and becomes a truly formidable safeguard of the intellectual class against the imposition of any religious system whose fundamental dogmas, despite all efforts of its apologists, do not always stand the test of reason and science.
And after all, Christianity itself is fighting its last battle, even in the so-called Christendoms. To us born heathens, it is a strange sight indeed to see Billy Sunday and Aimée McPherson hailed and patronized in an age whose acknowledge prophets are Darwin and Pasteur. The religion of Elmer Gantry and Sharon Falconer must sooner or later make all thinking people feel ashamed to call themselves “Christians”. And then they will realize that Young China was not far wrong in offering some opposition to a religion which in its glorious days fought religious wars and persecuted science, and which, in the broad daylight of the twentieth century prayed for the victory of the belligerent nations in the World War and is still persecuting the teaching of science in certain quarters of Christendom.
It’s impressive both that The Forum published a critical piece from an intellectual in China and that Hu kept up with the latest stateside scandals and the novels of Sinclair Lewis. At a time when anti-imperialist tempers ran high, Hu coolly uses cosmopolitan liberal standards which stand above particular nations. His criteria apply to China and the US as well. But perhaps Hu should have known better than to think that rationality could combine with nationalism to save China.