As we are at mid-semester I thought it would be a nice time to think about Education, with a little help from Feng Zikai, Republican China’s best-known cartoonist.


As we are at mid-semester I thought it would be a nice time to think about Education, with a little help from Feng Zikai, Republican China’s best-known cartoonist.
Yuyu Chen, Ginger Zhe Jin and Yang Yue are all economists and they are doing interesting work on rural-urban migration in China. Given that China has better registration of its rural population than places like Mexico it is a good place to look at migration patterns. They find that people from the same village tend to go to the same places, and even congregate in the same jobs. They attribute this to social networks, which make it easier and easier for people to go someplace once more and more of their compatriots are there.
This is of course not surprising to anyone familiar with Chinese migration in the past. Honig and Goodman, among many others, have written about how native-place ties structured migration and sojourning. Chen et. al., don’t compare this migration to earlier ones, which for a historian would seem to point to lots of interesting questions. I was also very surprised that they keep calling their area of study “China.” Their stats come from 8 counties. Are they all in the same region (or macro-region)? From different regions and they are assuming you can draw conclusions about “China” from them? Its an interesting paper, but in addition to proving some important stuff it also shows that economists are not like you and me.1
Via Brad DeLong
see
Goodman, Bryna. Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853-1937. University of California Press, 1995.
Honig, Emily. Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850-1980. Yale University Press, 1992.
Yes, I know, they have more money. ↩
As a follow-up to Konrad’s post below I came across something on dogs in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, where he is lamenting the passing of the old city, but at least the dogs are holding out as modernization sweeps things away. I’m not sure wartime dog-killing quite fits with this, but some of the other aspects of Communist and Nationalist animal control certainly do.
What grievance I feel when I read western travelers on Istanbul is above all that of hindsight: Many of the local features these observers, some of them brilliant writers, noted and exaggerated were to vanish from the city soon after having been remarked. It was a brutal symbiosis: Western observers love to identify the things that make Istanbul exotic, nonwestern, whereas the westernizers among us register all the same things as obstacles to be erased from me face of the city as fast as possible.
Here’s a short list:
The Janissaries, those elite troops of great interest to western travelers until the nineteenth century, were the first to be dissolved. The slave market, another focus of western curiosity, vanished soon after they began writing about it. The Rufai dervishes with their waving skewers and the Mevlevi dervish lodges closed with the founding of the Republic. The Ottoman clothing that so many western artists painted was abolished soon after Andre Gide complained about it. The harem, another favorite, also gone. Seventy-five years after Flaubert told his beloved friend that he was going to the market to have his name written, in calligraphy, all of Turkey moved from the Arabic to the Latin alphabet, and this exotic joy ended too. Of all these losses, I think the hardest for Istanbullus has been the removal of graves and cemeteries from the gardens and squares of our everyday lives to terrifying high-walled lots, bereft of cypress or view. The hamals and their burdens, noted by so many travelers of the republican period—like the old American cars that Brodsky noted—were no sooner described by foreigners than they vanished.
Only one of the city’s idiosyncrasies has refused to melt away under the western gaze: the packs of dogs that still roam the streets. After he abolished the janissaries for not complying with western military discipline, Mahmut II turned his attention to the city’s dogs. In this ambition, however, he failed. After the Constitutional Monarchy, there was another “reform” drive, this one aided by the Gypsies, but the dogs they removed one by one to Sivriada managed to find their way triumphantly back home. The French, who thought the dog packs exotic, found the cramming of all the dogs into Sivriada even more so; Sartre would joke about this years later
in his novel The Age of Reason.
Max Fruchtermann, the postcard artist, seems to have recognized the exoticism of the dogs’ survival: In a series of Istanbul views he produced around the turn of the twentieth century, he was careful to include as many street dogs as he did dervishes, cemeteries, and mosques. p.242
Lots of bits of Chinese prose would make great blog entries. (A blog is basically a biji, more or less) Plus, they make great things to teach from. So, if any of you are teaching about the Song dynasty elite and their attitudes towards the mundane world you might find this from our guest-blogger Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 to be helpful or informative. (tips on working with it here)
A Record of the Pavilion of an Intoxicated Old Man
Ou-yang Hsiu
All around Ch’u there are mountains, but the forests and valleys of that assemblage of peaks to the southwest are the finest. There is one that appears from afar most luxuriant and deepest in verdure—that is Lang-ya. After you have walked six or seven tricents into the mountains, there you will gradually notice the sound of water gurgling. Where it drains out between the two peaks, this is Brewer’s Spring. Rounding the peak the road winds; there a pavilion hangs, like a wing, out over the spring. This is the Intoxicated Old Man’s pavilion. Who was it that built this pavilion? A monk of these mountains, Chih-hsien. And who named it? The prefect, who called it after himself. When prefect and guests come to drink here, because he becomes intoxicated after only drinking a little and because he is the oldest in years, that is why he nicknamed himself the Intoxicated Old Man. But what he means by Intoxicated Old Man has nothing to do with the wine; it has to do instead with being in the mountains by the water. This joy from the mountains and the water he feels within his mind; he merely ascribes it to the wine.
Now the sun rises and the forest mists dissipate, the clouds return and the caves in ravines grow gloomy—these alternations of dusk and light mark mornings and evenings amid the mountains. Wild flowers bloom with their hidden scents, beautiful trees leaf out with deepening shade, then winds rise and pure frost appears, the water level drops and the rocks protrude—such are the four seasons amid the mountains. In the morning he goes there, in the evening he returns; the scenery of the four seasons is never the same, hence his joy knows no bounds.
Those who carry loads on their backs sing along the path; sojourners rest beneath the trees. The ones in front call out and those behind respond. Some are bent over with age and others so young that they must be led by the hand. They come and go without cease—such are the travelers around Ch’u. One may lean over this stream and fish; the stream being deep, the fish are fat. Or one may brew wine with the spring water; the spring being fragrant, the wine is crystal clear. Sliced meats from the mountains and wild vegetables arrayed in profusion before the guests—such are the prefect’s banquets. The joys of the feast are not from strings or winds; they are from winning at pitch-pot, from victory in chess. Passing goblets and mugs back and forth, shouting with abandon, now sitting,, now on their feet—such is the happy abandon of the guests. And the one who, ruddy-faced and white of hair, lies sprawled in their midst—that is the prefect intoxicated.
When the merriment is over and the evening sun sets among the mountains, the prefect goes home with his guests in tow, their shadows jumbled together. The forest gloom deepens; birds call high and low. The revelers all gone, the birds are joyful. Yet, though birds may know the joy of mountain forests, they know not the joy of mankind; men may know the joy of revels with the prefect and yet never know the prefect’s enjoyment of their joy.
Intoxicated yet able to share their joy, able when sober to describe it in writing—such is the prefect. And what is this prefect’s name? Ou-yang Hsiu of Lu-ling. Translated by Robert E. Hegel
醉翁亭记
环滁皆山也。其西南诸峰,林壑尤美。望之蔚然而深秀者,琅琊也。山行六七里, 渐闻水声潺潺,而泄出于两峰之间者,酿泉也。峰回路转,有亭翼然临于泉上者, 醉翁亭也。作亭者谁?山之僧智仙也。名之者谁?太守自谓也。太守与客来饮于 此,饮少辄醉,而年又最高,故自号曰“醉翁”也。醉翁之意不在酒,在乎山水之间 也。山水之乐,得之心而寓之酒也。若夫日出而林霏开,云归而岩穴暝,晦明变化 者,山间之朝暮也。野芳发而幽香,佳木秀而繁阴,风霜高洁,水落而石出者,山 间之四时也。朝而往,暮而归,四时之景不同,而乐亦无穷也。至于负者歌于塗, 行者休于树,前者呼,后者应,伛偻提携,往来而不绝者,滁人游也。临溪而渔, 溪深而鱼肥;酿泉为酒,泉香而酒冽;山肴野蔌,杂然而前陈者,太守宴也。宴酣 之乐,非丝非竹,射者中,弈者胜,觥筹交错,坐起而喧哗者,众宾欢也。苍然白 发,颓乎其中者,太守醉也。已而夕阳在山,人影散乱,太守归而宾客从也。树林 阴翳,鸣声上下,游人去而禽鸟乐也。然而禽鸟知山林之乐,而不知人之乐;人知 从太守游而乐,而不知太守之乐其乐也。醉能同其乐,醒能述其文者,太守也。太 守谓谁?庐陵欧阳修也
For more discussion see
The Chinese Communist campaign against animals that is most talked about is the Four Pests campaign of the late 1950s launched against various pests and sparrows. However, the extermination of dogs in wartime seems to be another interesting example.
In a report by the Japanese military giving an overview of Chinese Communist wartime economic measures taken in northern China, we find the following little detail:
犬の飼育を禁じ、殺犬隊を巡回させて撲滅に努めている。犬は食料を食べるだけでなく、その吠声が共産軍の夜間行動を暴露する害があるためである。
The raising of dogs was banned [by the Communist party] and Dog Killing Squads were sent out on patrol in an attempt to exterminate them. This was done not only because the dogs consume provisions, their barking could also potentially expose the nighttime maneuvers of Communist forces.1
Of course, the abandonment, killing, or eating of pets in wartime to prevent the waste of valuable provisions (or if they are consumed, to make up for a lack of nourishment) is nothing new, but I found the formal establishment of dog extermination patrols both for that reason and to end the problem of their barking interesting. It reminds me of the scene in Waltz with Bashir in which Israeli soldiers in the Lebanese war kill barking dogs in the night in a village raid.
Are there other historical examples of these kinds of formal dog extermination units?
Update: Thanks to a comment from RPC and Google Books, I found another reference in David Kidd’s Peking Story. It speaks of a surprise raid a section of the city by Communist troops, “after it had first been reconnoitred by the Night People (who, no doubt, had themselves been preceded by the dog exterminators)…” (p136)
防衛庁防衛研修所戦史室 『北支の治安戦』1968, Volume 1, p207. They use 殺犬隊 here in Japanese, but I’m guessing the Chinese called it 殺狗隊. ↩
I’m having great fun with this class, but I’m still discovering vast areas of ignorance as we move along:
In the Prefatory Remarks to Aizawa Yasushi‘s 1825 New Theses (新論) we find an interesting little gloss on the relationship of the “Divine Realm” of Japan and the Western world:
The earth lies amid the heavenly firmament, is round in shape, and has no edges. All things exist as nature dictates. Thus, our Divine Realm is at the top of the world. Though not a very large country, it reigns over the Four Quarters because its Imperial Line has never known dynastic change. The Western barbarians represent the thighs, legs, and feet of the universe. This is why they sail hither and yon, indifferent to the distances involved. Moreover, the country they call America is located at the rear end of the world, so its inhabitants are stupid and incompetent. All of this is as nature dictates.
The translation is by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi.
I was struck, preparing for class yesterday, that the Tonghak and Taiping faiths were surprisingly similar and arose nearly simultaneously: Syncretic monotheistic faiths drawing on Confucian, Christian and indigenous magical traditions, with anti-foreign reformist programs and a counter-cultural ethos of equality.1 There are obvious differences, too, in teachings and in the leadership, but the structural similarities raise some interesting possibilities for research and teaching.
I’m not the first person to have this insight apparently, though it doesn’t look (from what little I can tell from these links) like there’s any hint of direct connection between them. I’m a little surprised, frankly, that World History textbooks (which love those kinds of parallel moments) haven’t picked up on it. Of course, Korea’s place in World History textbooks overall is pretty pitiful at the moment and the Taiping movement rarely gets more than passing mention in an already busy and traumatic Chinese 19th century. With the rise of religious history, it seems likely that these issues might come closer to the forefront, though, and I’d be curious to know if anyone else out there does something with this confluence.
The Japanese “New Religions” of the 19th century are very heavily Shinto-influenced, with some Buddhism and almost no Christianity, nor did any of them become political movements. It’s not the same. ↩
I was struck, preparing for class yesterday, that the Tonghak and Taiping faiths were surprisingly similar and arose nearly simultaneously: Syncretic monotheistic faiths drawing on Confucian, Christian and indigenous magical traditions, with anti-foreign reformist programs and a counter-cultural ethos of equality.1 There are obvious differences, too, in teachings and in the leadership, but the structural similarities raise some interesting possibilities for research and teaching.
I’m not the first person to have this insight apparently, though it doesn’t look (from what little I can tell from these links) like there’s any hint of direct connection between them. I’m a little surprised, frankly, that World History textbooks (which love those kinds of parallel moments) haven’t picked up on it. Of course, Korea’s place in World History textbooks overall is pretty pitiful at the moment and the Taiping movement rarely gets more than passing mention in an already busy and traumatic Chinese 19th century. With the rise of religious history, it seems likely that these issues might come closer to the forefront, though, and I’d be curious to know if anyone else out there does something with this confluence.
The Japanese “New Religions” of the 19th century are very heavily Shinto-influenced, with some Buddhism and almost no Christianity, nor did any of them become political movements. It’s not the same. ↩
I’m back once again to this question of electricity and power in its various forms, as I think the long-term story of generating power in NE Asia (1880’s-present), and specifically on the Korean peninsula, sheds some interesting light on the transnational history of the contested region, this in distinct contrast to the individual national histories of power industries. I would love to be able to link: (1) electrification (late 19th century), to (2) the colonial period (especially the hydroelectric power plants in the North along the Yalu and Tumen), to (3) the electrical showdown / cutoff of May 1948 (North stops providing access following UN elections), to (4) the period of the war and reconstruction (temporary barges, and later thermal stations), to the (5) decision to pursue atomic power (late 1950’s, with a commercial industry by the late 1970’s). For now, though, I’ll just briefly touch on the Bechtel project associated with the mid-1950’s, which covers #4.
I recently managed to get a copy of the Bechtel in-house report on the project, with three major thermal stations, completed between 1954 -1956, at Tangin-Ri, Samchok, and Masan (which was the image from my last post in August).
This map shows that the effort was an attempt to plug into the existing grid at various points in the country (roughly comprising a triangulation) in 1954. What I don’t know, and would love to know, is how much of this grid predates 1948, as I suspect much of it does.
And below is a letter of thanks from the Korean side, following completion of the project, although I have not had a chance to look this document over.
For now, this consists of little more than musing on the topic, but in the aftermath of the Recent awarding of the reactor project for the UAE (Korea and Hyundai won the bid as part of a consortium), and Lee Myung-Bak’s mobilization of the ROK domestic nuclear industry, I really want to put together something more substantive: that is, to take a long look at the history of power from the standpoint of a thorough transnational history (involving the U.S , Korea, Japan, Canada, at the very least). More on this later~
“Beware of China, for when the dragon wakes she will shake the world.”
Napoleon? Although there’s no evidence that he ever said it, the quote caught the essence of what westerners thought should be the case and has been endlessly recycled.
But over the last decade a lot of loose talk about “China Rising” has been going around, getting more intense in the last couple of years.
History News Network has a collection of recent posts gathered from the internet, “HNN Hot Topics: China Rising.”
China Beat, our second most favorite blog (after this one) has run a powerful set of pieces on “Big China” books, that is, books that loudly hail or bemoan China’s rise or menace. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, has roundup, “Six Takes on Martin Jacques,” a follow up to his piece in Time Magazine online blog (Feb 8, 2010), “Big China Books: Enough of the Big Picture.” Jeff skewers the Olympic scale conclusion jumping in a gaggle of these books, especially Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World : The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order.
The China Beat piece also points out another recent well informed and provocative piece, Richard Rigby’s “The Challenge of China” at East Asia Forum.
A nice photo essay from Financial Times on railways in Inner Mongolia. Lots of nice pics, but the thing that amazed me was that the author was traveling with a “coachload of well-dressed Chinese steam enthusiasts.” Needless to say they were there to ride one of China’s last working steam locomotives. For those of you who don’t know, train nuts are at least as fanatic as comic book collectors or stamp people or whatever. As far as I am aware China does not yet have a Myles na gCopaleen, but apparently they do have plenty of people who are nostalgic for the vanishing industrial past.
Another in our long series of teaching aids
from Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin via Brad DeLong
This week, our East Asia History Reading Group had the fortune of discussing Richard White’s The Middle Ground with Professor White himself. The purpose of this book was to write the history of Native Americans and Empire in the pays d’en haut, the area around the Great Lakes, from the years 1650-1815, a region Professor White has termed the Middle Ground. Professor White presents the Middle Ground both as a spatial and theoretical construct. It is both the area where Europeans and Indians coexisted and created a new cultural space, and also a theoretical term meant to point to the process with which Indians and Whites mutually accommodated each other, constructed together a mutually comprehensible world. He traces through 2 centuries the creation and destruction of this process, and the ways in which alliances, wars, trade and empire affected the ability of Indians and Whites to maintain a status quo. He also complicates the traditional narrative of empire. A narrative of the conquerer and the conquered obscures the complexities of the relationships between and among Indians and Whites, and while violence was present, the middle ground appeared and “depended on the inability of both sides to gain their ends through force.” The Middle Ground, he points out, is not a pretty place. He has often been called an apologist for colonialism because he pointed out the compromises and concessions each side had to make. This, however, is obviously not the case; the Middle Ground was created out of destruction and violence, the description of which in the book was nauseating.
The reason we decided to read the book is because the concept of the Middle Ground can be used in other contexts; it has been cited numerous times in books about border regions in China, specifically Yunnan, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Qinghai (Peter Perdue cites White in his bibliography, and a new great study by C. Patterson Giersch uses White’s work as theoretical construct). Reading this exhaustive account of American history, I also became confused as to the extent to which his theory could be applied. Were all colonies Middle Grounds? Does it work outside borderland situations? Does it even work outside of the pays d’en haut?
To clear up some of these questions, I will summarize some of White’s interesting insights. Despite the fact that he did not want to be the “judge in the court of the Middle Ground,” he did think that both the physical space and the process did have some distinguishing characteristics. First of all, it needs to be a situation in which the two opposing groups could not overwhelm one another by force. At the same time, it needed to be a situation in which both sides needed the other. Finally, there needed to be a set of institutions in place to sustain this balance of power. In the pays d’en haut, this included Jesuit priests, a system of posts, a gift giving system in place, etc. Professor White pointed out that it is these institutions which distinguished other parts of the Americas from the pays d’en haut; they were not a Middle Ground, simply areas of cross cultural contact.
Professor White stressed that the one way in which the Middle Ground did not work in later colonial situations is that if one side has the overwhelming power to dictate, there was not a Middle Ground. He stated that in the pays d’en haut before 1815, the French and British did not break local power and rule, in fact, the didn’t rule much of anything. This description rules out a lot of European empires. The Middle Ground is also not, as Professor White claimed, a place where everyone came together and loved each other. Nor is it another term for cultural compromise. Misunderstandings actually played a large role in the creation of the Middle Ground. What he meant by this was that each group tried to argue with one another based upon their understanding of the other sides’ cultural premises. As an example from his book, he shows how Indians tried to make arguments with the French based upon their understanding of Christianity, and at the same time, the French attempted to spread Christianity by using terms they extracted from local religious practice.
The Middle Ground is also historically contingent; it, like all things, has a starting point and an end point. There are many reasons the Middle Ground of the pays d’en haut came to an end, one of the most important of which was that the Americans of the frontier no longer needed Indians. He also brought stressed a point that he made near the end of his work: ethnography and anthropology helped to erase the Middle Ground. These studies, which for the first time introduced race, created a group of “others” that could not be dealt with in an equal level (this is not to say the French did not see the Indians as “others”; but the otherness came from the fact that they were not Christian, it had nothing to do with race). The example he gave to us was the issue of marriage. In the pays d’en haut, temporary marriages were quite common. Once the marriage came to an end, the father mattered little; the woman would simply take her child, half French and half Indian, back to her village. The issue of race, or difference, was not important. In fact, towards the end of the 18th century, identity was a matter of personal choice; no one could be said to be completely French or Indian. This changed in the 19th century, when these Indian women were told by their villagers to leave their husbands and their mixed children behind because they were not pure “Indian.” This was done in the name of tradition, when really it was a quite radical statement. In this way, as White claimed, when Middle Grounds disappear, they become black holes, sucking everything into themselves, including historical memory.
At this point we should ask, how applicable are these theories to China? Some of us in our group pointed out that these theories are very helpful in describing situations in borderlands, where neither the central Chinese government nor other bordering empires had any control over the local population (Giersch, who wrote of frontier politics in Yunnan, certainly thought so). The situation in China, however, was much more complicated. The 司土 system in areas such as Qinghai and Tibet created a system of local warlords which administered these regions. In some of these regions, the local imperial appointed warlords had much more power than others, so the use of Middle Ground is contingent on a case-by-case basis. There were some areas in which local leaders ruled in succession for generations, and others where power was determined by the ability to mediate and communicate, thus creating a Middle Ground.
Another issue that distinguishes the system in China from other contenders for the Middle Ground is the fact that there was no real clear starting or ending point like there was in the pays d’en haut. These groups on the frontiers of China had been interacting for centuries, and there was no clear starting point that would help us trace the creation of this Middle Ground (if there was, perhaps the Song or even the Han dynasty). Nevertheless, framing the trade and relations in these areas within a Middle Ground framework it seems would be useful for analysis.
For those interested, White will be releasing a 20 year anniversary of his book soon. He plans to write a new introduction that summarizes the way his work has been used (and sometimes misused) as a theoretical framework.
Now that I’m teaching my Korean History course I am, of course, running into questions I cannot answer. I’m going to post them here periodically: