Some interviews with those involved here.
樂學書局: The Lexis Book Co.
Thanks to a tip shared by a fellow graduate student I met here yesterday, I learnt about another excellent academic bookstore here in Taipei which is, I’m told, a favorite among those “in the know.” Its owner, a legendary Ms. Huang (who was out when I visited today) is apparently well-loved among scholars all over East Asia as well as sinologists in the United States. This was confirmed by two elderly Korean philosophy professors I had a chat with, from two separate Korean universities, who said that they had been visiting and ordering books from the place for many years. One of these professors yelled the owner’s name affectionately as he disembarked the elevator and seemed very disappointed to see she wasn’t around.
樂學書局, or the “Lexis Book Co.” as it is known in English has one of the most unusual locations of any bookstore I have had the chance to visit. Whereas the 學生書局 is conveniently located on 和平東路 near the entrance of the Shida night market and 唐山書店 is just out of view in a basement locale near Taiwan National University, this book store is found in what looks like a converted residence on the 10th floor of an apartment complex on 金山南路 （Chin-shan S. Road), perhaps 10 minutes walk from Guting station.
There are no signs at the street level suggesting that this residential high rise houses a bookstore with one of the greatest collections of academic Chinese language works in Taipei. However, as I passed the security guard at the entrance to the grounds, he stopped me and immediately asked with a knowing smile, “樂學書局?” When I responded in the affirmative he told me to go to the apartment complex to the right and take the elevator to the 10th floor. The whole experience felt like that scene in the movie “The Matrix” where the band of adventurers go to visit the mystical “Oracle” in her hidden home.
Inside the apartment/bookstore every room is filled with books, including the shelves above the kitchen sink. History books can be found in its own room in the back corner. There is a great selection of both pre-modern and modern history but look through all the shelves since their semi-sorted nature can be deceiving. While almost all the books are in Chinese, there was a series of shelves with dictionaries and publications in everything from Manchu to the various languages of Central Asia. Another one of the rooms also has a good collection of the English language publications of SMC Publishing.
If you are in Taipei and have an interest in history or literature, especially, this bookstore is definitely worth the visit:
樂學書局
臺北市金山南路二段138號10樓之1
(02) 23219033
lexis at ms6.hinet.net
Between Nanjing and Chongqing
I posted a piece on Asia Media (July 10 2008) which reviews Steve MacKinnon’s new book, Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (University of California Press, 2008). Steve is a friend, but I think anyone would find this book not only a good read but also quite informative on a neglected turning point in modern China. It’s also a good introduction to the work in military history which has quietly transformed our understandings of China before 1949.
Steve makes the point that in this period the United Front worked and that the staggering losses were part of a heroic and in some ways quite successful military strategy. Chiang Kai-shek presided over an energetic coalition and had widespread support. The move upriver to Chongqing was heroic in much the same way as the Long March. It’s a page turning story, though quite horrifying in the descriptions of refugee life and battlefield realities. There’s also a section of photographs which do not merely illustrate but actually develop the themes of the text.
Asia Media, by the way, is run out of the UCLA Asia Institute, and is one of the useful sites for keeping up with breaking news in Asia. Every day they post links to dozens of stories in newspapers around Asia, but also the occasional commentary or review such as mine.
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Asian History Carnival #20
The Asian History Carnival #20 is now up at Jottings from the Granite Studio! It comes in three parts:
Asian History Carnival #20 Part I
Asian History Carnival #20 Part II
Asian History Carnival #20 Part III
We are looking for volunteers to host the September and November installments. Read more on the carnival homepage.
Asian History Carnival #20
The Asian History Carnival #20 is now up at Jottings from the Granite Studio! It comes in three parts:
Asian History Carnival #20 Part I
Asian History Carnival #20 Part II
Asian History Carnival #20 Part III
We are looking for volunteers to host the September and November installments. Read more on the carnival homepage.
Asian History Carnival #20
The Asian History Carnival #20 is now up at Jottings from the Granite Studio! It comes in three parts:
Asian History Carnival #20 Part I
Asian History Carnival #20 Part II
Asian History Carnival #20 Part III
We are looking for volunteers to host the September and November installments. Read more on the carnival homepage.
Taiwan 1946: Asking, "What is Democracy?" – in Japanese
Over on Frog in a Well – Japan I wrote a posting about a 1946 Taiwanese pamphlet written in Japanese put out by 臺灣新生報 that may be of interest to readers of this weblog.
Like so many things I find interesting and worth posting about, I’m never quite sure which Frog blog to put it on! I do try to keep my postings to one blog though, just to keep the comment stream in one place. I wish, however, a few years ago when I started the Frog in a Well project, that I had set up this project so that it would be possible for people to view everything as one channel or feed of postings about East Asian history – not broken up into China, Korea, and Japan weblogs. Since the original goal was to have each weblog bilingual, however, with roughly half postings in each language, with categories for language to filter out languages a reader didn’t want to be exposed to, it seemed to make sense to split it. Now, with transnational and international history really taking off, I sometimes doubt the wisdom of that choice. It makes me wonder how many readers are only reading the feeds of one out of the three weblogs?
Taiwan 1946: Asking, “What is Democracy?” – in Japanese
I’m sitting in the Taiwanese National Library here in Taipei and just finished looking through an unusual publication put out in December, 1946 by 臺灣新生報社, the publisher of an important newspaper going by that name. It is entitled, 『民主とは何ぞや』(What is Democracy?)
What is immediately striking about the pamphlet is the fact that it is published in the Japanese language over a year after the end of the Japanese colonial period in August 1945. The general editor of the 臺灣新生報, Wu Jinlian (吳金煉) discusses the reason for this choice of language in a special explanatory preface:
本省は光復滿一週年を契機として新聞雜誌から日文版を撤廢した、日治五十年の必然結果として日語日文が本省の文化面に淺からぬ根を下していることは否定出來ない事實であるが、しかし光復と共に一日も早く速かにこの日本的殘滓を洗除すべきことは一般省民なかんづく青年層の國語國文の習熟度に鑑みる時，日文版の廢止は全く時期尚早の感なきを得ない。從つてここに當然何らかの過渡期的辦法が講究されなければならない。本叢書は實に如上の社會的要求に應じて生れたものである。
It says that Japanese versions of newspapers and magazines were banned1 a year after the 1945 liberation of Taiwan but that no one can deny the depth of penetration of the Japanese language during the fifty years of Japanese colonial rule. While most people want to get rid of this “Japanese remnant,” it was simply not seen as realistic to completely abandon the use of Japanese in publications so soon, given the weak abilities of the youth in the “national language” (Mandarin Chinese). The pamphlet was thus published in Japanese in “response to this demand of society.”
While this is the only “issue” of what seems to be part of multiple similar publications that I could find in Taiwan’s National Library here, it was interesting to note that, in addition to some thirty pages dedicated to the main topic of defining and discussing what democracy is, some dozen or so pages of recent “Science News” were included in the back, including a list of nobel prize winners, all nicely summarized in Japanese for an audience that, presumably, prefers to or can only read it in that language.
The piece opens with a short history of fascism, along with an outline of Sun Yatsen’s (國父) approach to democracy, a detailed explanation of its relationship to ethnicity or race (民族) and a description of how Japan took advantage of cries for “self-determination” (民族自決) to peel away parts of the Chinese nation (8).
Another chapter talks about the social foundation for realizing democracy, including a section that opens with a sentence that shows the target for the readership: “We are what are known as intellectuals.” (我らはいはゆる知識分子である。21) Intellectuals are further described as the “leaders of society.” (社會のリーダである） Oh, those where the days, eh? Perhaps not.
One of the most interesting sections, however, is on the relationship between those in the military and democratic politics (軍人と民主政治 30-39). We can see this pre-2/28 incident publication as an example of the considerable freedom of press in Taiwan during the time not only in the fact that it was published in Japanese but in this section which offers a sustained critique of Chinese politics by blaming the failure of democracy in China on the close connections between military and political power. It is unlikely that the same critique would made it into print only a few months or a year later.
Since I need to focus on other things, I didn’t get a chance to read the whole thing thoroughly but 『民主とは何ぞや』 is an interesting look at a critique of Chinese politics and the promotion of democracy from the perspective of Japanese speaking Taiwanese intellectuals in late 1946. Check it out in a library (perhaps not so) close to you.2
I found a reference to this ban on Japanese which actually happens a bit later than this quote might suggest, not on August 15th but on October 25th, the first anniversary of Chen Yi’s official staging of the Taiwan handover: 「撤除本省境內所有新聞紙，雜誌附刊之日文版，並令各縣市政府遵照…」in 《臺灣光復和光復後五年省情》（上）p391. ↩
You can request the work on the 6th floor Japanese/Korean materials room (日韓文室) of the Taiwanese National Library. Submit a request sheet there with the title and the call number 571.6 8444. ↩
Are the Chinese fascists?
Jed Perl has a piece up attacking Chinese art at TNR. As any number of people have pointed out Contemporary Chinese ArtTM is booming. For Perl, however, it’s all totalitarian crap. I would actually agree with Perl that a lot of the stuff being produced by Chinese artists and purchased by China’s new ultra-rich (and their foreign buddies) is kinda questionable, and I certainly think that a lot of Chinese young people seem to be buying into a pretty sanitized view of Mao and the Communist period. The nostalgia for communist-period idealism you sometimes hear I always find hard to figure out.
For Perl, however, the only possible reason to think about China is to denounce Mao and the Cultural Revolution (which are of course the same thing.) Thus it becomes impossible for Chinese to be anything other than toadies unless they are in jail. The theme of “Revolution” comes up a lot in the art Perl is talking about, in part I think because he is talking about western collectors, who probably don’t know much about China but do know there was a revolution and in part because lots of Chinese artists do use Communist iconography and themes from the past. Some of them are probably toeing the official line, some are subverting the official line, some are doing both, some think they are doing both but actually are not.1 For Perl though it is pretty easy. If you see anything that looks “China-y” it’s crap.
I have studied the catalogue of this collection, The Revolution Continues: New Art from China, and I am pretty confident that it is the most hateful art book published in my lifetime. For the revolution that is continuing is none other than the Cultural Revolution.
Really? The modern smiley-face authoritarianism of China is the same as the Cultural Revolution? One begins to suspect he does not know much about the CR, which is pretty rapidly confirmed as he scoffs as a curator for suggesting that
“reprising the Red Guards’ antiauthoritarian stance to art, sought to bring down the institution of art itself through Dadaist strategies”?
Perl asks
In what sense, pray tell, was the Red Guard anti-authoritarian?
“Pray tell” suggests that he has no clue what the Red Guards were. The first thing a youth was supposed to do after strapping on the red armband was to “bombard the headquarters” and attack the authorities that actually controlled their lives, teachers, party bosses, etc. Everyone in China over a certain age knows this, which is why it is always so hard to figure out what Chinese artists might be doing with Mao images or CR images or whatever. Not everybody in the world needs to know (or can know) all the things Maoist references can mean in China, but if you are going to write about Chinese art it helps to have some idea what you are talking about. One can imagine touring the Louvre with Perl and having him be stumped by why there were all those pictures of a lady holding a baby. The only tool Perl has for understanding Chinese art is “Radical Chic” which may be useful for understanding why Westerners are buying this stuff but does not help much for understanding the art. After all, the main market for Chinese art is China. Why are wealthy Chinese (many of whom did not have much fun in the Maoist period) buying this stuff?
At the top of this post is a painting by Zhang Xiaogang. Perl..
His paintings are said to reflect the tensions of the Cultural Revolution, when children were known to turn their parents in to the authorities. In the Louisiana catalogue, this schlock is described as showing people “isolated in their own emotional universes” or shaped by, “mysterious, unknowable forces.” The only mysterious force from which Zhang is isolated is the art of painting.
I actually find it an interesting piece, in part because the isolation from family and others is a theme that always comes up in Cultural Revolution memoirs. Maybe Zhang is a hack, but I’m pretty sure I am not going to take Jed Perl’s word on that without something to back it up. Perl again
By aestheticizing historic catastrophe, the art world’s unholy synthesis of Maoism and kitsch enables people to blur their own memories.
That’s pretty bold for an American. What should Chinese people do? Commit mass suicide to prove they are free of the Maoist taint? Abandon art for a few centuries? There are lots of ways for Chinese artists and people to deal with the past, including ignoring it, but lumping every Chinese artist from Wang Guangyi to Cai Guoqiang in with the Red Detachment of Women is just sloppy.
I suppose what is particularly depressing is that with a minimal amount of effort Perl could have found lots of Chinese artists denouncing the people he talks about as talentless hacks and sell-outs. Had he been writing about British art or French art or maybe ever Japanese art he probably would have done so, or his editor would have sent him back to do it. He then could have written something interesting and informative.2
I think things like this have happened in other authoritarian societies. Maybe someone who knows art can give Perl some references ↩
Perl is also dismissive of the originality of Chinese art, claiming that pretty much all of this has been done before. Some of this I buy (lots of hacks out there) and some I don’t. The dividing line between being influenced by someone and copying them is always a tricky thing, but apparently for Perl any vague link to a western work of art renders anything a Chinese does completely derivative. I remember being struck by the “defiance in the sunset” scene in Red Sorghum and realizing that at least in 1987 the visual world of Zhang Yimou was different than mine. He could use a scene like that and not be referring to Gone With The Wind in any meta-critical way. He was, as I took it, just pinching a visual from a foreign film only artsy types would have seen. ↩
Pigs Again: Li Shizhen's Ming Dynasty Map
After my posting last year of “Pigs. Shit, and Chinese History,” Sigrid Schmalzer was kind enough to share this map which she drew based on the works of the Ming dynasty scholar Li Shizhen (李時珍; 1518-1593) mostly widely known for his Bencao Gangmu (本草綱目).
It looks to me as if Li was as much concerned with how the meat would taste as with other qualities!
Gregory Henderson Reporting on a Massacre
I’ve recently been looking through 한국전쟁과 집단학살 (Organized Massacres and the Korean War) by 김기진. The work focuses primarily on crimes against civilians carried out by United States forces or Korean forces and has a large section which reproduces, in a regretfully somewhat badly edited form, a lot of US archival documents found at the National Archives.
My impression, and that is all this is since this is not my area of expertise, is that the documents themselves don’t really reveal anything earth-shatteringly new. A lot of the documents included reproduce contemporary media reports of atrocities and consist of internal debates about investigations into whether the accusations are true, or are responses to letters by the UN or the International Committee of the Red Cross.
I was interested in these conveniently collected documents for a number of reasons, but one of the documents in the collection that may be of interest to readers here was responding to a report submitted by Gregory Henderson on an alleged atrocity against forty captured “Communists” many months before the opening of the most violent stage of the Korean War in June of 1950.
Taiwan Bookstores EALA Page Updated
I have updated the Taiwan Bookstores page on the EALA wiki, adding two books and updating the link for SMC Publishing. If you are in Taipei and are looking for a larger selection of academic related works, especially in Chinese, you might want to look at some of the stores listed here:
If you know of other stores that are worth adding, considering editing wiki page and adding your own recommendations.
Changeless China (post 3,743 in a series)
Strange Maps (quite possibly the coolest blog in the universe) has this map of more-or-less Han China.
The map comes from here, and is part of a summary of a “rise of China” article from Stratfor which is apparently some shop selling (very expensive) geopolitical analysis. Unless the Stratfor article is way better than the summary the people paying money for it are getting ripped off.
The main point of the article is that to understand China you need to know that only part of China is inhabited by “Han” the ethnic group “the world regards as the Chinese”. So far so good, but what insights can we get from this? Well we can get a lot of factual errors, like the suggestion that the dominant language in South China is Cantonese (which is true if the only province in South China is Guangdong), that China’s ports were not sites of international trade before the Opium Wars (which would be news to the entire Chinese diaspora) and that the only successful invaders of China were the Mongols (which is quite an insult to the Manchus, among others). Mostly though, we get timeless China, isolation division. Apparently China has always been an isolated country both because of geography and proclivity, and that is why it has always been so poor. (?) Chinese governments have always been worried about the dangerous prosperity that trade can bring (those backwards mandarins!) but in the 20th century they have been forced to allow it, and this creates all sorts of problems, most notably that some parts of China get rich quicker than others, leading to civil war. That’s what happened in the early 20th century, when Chinese coastal elites allied with foreigners against Beijing and the interior. One of the common features of this sort of analysis is that its so bad its not even wrong. Nobody who knew anything about Chinese nationalism or history could try to use this model to explain the first half of the 20th century.1 Even people who knew almost nothing about China’s history would not keep using the term “Beijing” to refer to the central government since for much of the period they are talking about the capitol was in Nanjing. We then learn that “China” has always had three geopolitical imperatives, which apparently apply to every China from the Qin dynasty to today, and which which would fit almost any country in the world about as well as they do as timeless truths about China.
- Maintain internal unity in the Han Chinese regions. (True of every country and unless defined much more clearly not much help )
- Maintain control of the buffer regions. (Also not very China-specific.)
- Protect the coast from foreign encroachment. (True of most countries other than Switzerland and Chad.)
This sort of glib analysis seems to be easier to get published about China, which as we all know is changeless, and thus once you have found the secret key you can unlock the whole puzzle of the China market. Yes, history matters, and possibly more in China than elsewhere, but China actually does change, and trying to draw conclusions based on the timeless nature of “China” is a fools game. I assume Stratfor does not publish articles that claim that American politics today is best understood in terms of the Slave Power and its opponents, or warning that the last 300 years of peace between Catholic and Protestant Europe can’t last, since religious hostility is one of the touchstones of European history.
The map itself is also pretty weird. Is this supposed to be a map of areas where today there are few Han? In that case all of Manchuria should be dried out. Is it a map of places that historically have not been Han? Then why are Liaodong and Gansu underwater? Xian is not part of the Han core?
It does work a bit better today. I suspect they are reading backwards ↩
You lost to a girl?
Reading through 中华民国文化史 (Cultural History of the Chinese Republic)1 I found something interesting in the section on 国术. 国术 is a term for what today would be called 武术, i.e. martial arts. Although there was a lot of interest in physical education in China in the 20s and 30s traditional martial arts were not part of this, as they were often seen as backwards peasant stuff. The Guomindang did make some efforts to encourage the modernization of the martial arts, however, setting up the 中央国术馆 (Central Martial Arts Academy) in Nanjing in 1927. Eventually there would be provincial-level organizations as well. At first the Academy seems to have been organized like a traditional martial arts school with masters and disciples but in 1929 it was reorganized as a more modern type of school. The top rated teachers were 王子平，吴图南，姜容燕，胡容华 (女), 陈志和 (女) the younger teachers included 张文广， 李锡恩，傅淑云 (女) As the (女) indicates two of the top five teachers and three of eight were women.
This actually surprised me a lot. In movies and fiction there may be a lot of female martial arts experts, and there were certainly some in reality as well. Still, this ratio strikes me as a little high. In 1933 there was a national martial arts exam and of the 427 competitors only 9 were women. Was this part of an attempt to modernize the martial arts? Was it a regional thing, since the academy drew heavily from the Northwest and followers of 张之江? Has anybody written anything on this?
编 史全生，吉林文史 ↩