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.
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.
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?
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. ↩
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. ↩
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 ↩
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 ↩
Today is the first day of summer here in Pennsylvania, which must mean it is time for a reading from 呂氏春秋 Lüshi Chunqiu LSCQ is best described as a philosophical encyclopedia of the Qin period, probably composed around 239 B.C.E. In part the book is a guide to rulers, and of course Chinese rulers were very interested in the seasons and the changes in the universe since activities in the human world correlated with the patterns of nature and a big part of being ruler was understanding this and taking advantage of this. 1 Apparently our Summer is a bit later than theirs, as the sow-thistle has already blossomed here and the Chinese did not get to the longest day of the year until the second month of summer. Still a good reading if you want to understand Chinese cosmology and rulership.
CHAPTER 1 ALMANAC FOR THE FIRST MONTH OF SUMMER2
4/1.1
A. During the first month of summer the sun is located in Net, At dusk the constellation Wings culminates, and at dawn the constellation Serving Maid culminates.
B. The correlates of this month are the days bing and ding, the Sovereign Yan, his assisting spirit Zhurong, creatures that are feathered, the musical notczhi, the pitch-standard Regulator of the Mean, the number seven (the element of human nature ritual propriety, the faculty vision), acrid tastes, burning smells, and the offering at the furnace. At sacrifice, the lungs are given the preeminent position.C. The small green frogs croak, the earthworms come out, the royal vine develops, and the sow-thistle flowers.D. The Son of Heaven resides in the left apartment of the Hall of Light. He rides in a chariot of cinnabar-red, pulled by vermilion horses with black tails and bearing vermilion streamers. He is clothed in vermilion robes and wears vermilion jade ornaments. He eats beans accompanied by fowl. His vessels are tall and large.
For those of you who missed it, Al Gore endorsed Barack Obama. I’m not sure how much this matters. Very few Gore supporters were going to vote for McCain. Still, Americans tend to take these celebrity endorsements pretty seriously, or at least campaigns like to talk about them. Chinese emperors were also fond of celebrity endorsements, specifically from recluses. These were not quite celebrities in the modern sense as they would have avoided being on TV like the plague, but they were highly regarded. The most famous category of recluses were those who moved into the mountains or swamps to avoid polluting themselves with corrupt politics. Needless to say these were exactly the types emperors wanted to win the endorsement of. Fan Ye (398-446) wrote about this.1
The [Book of] Changes proclaims “Great indeed is the significance of the timeliness of (the hexagram) Dun (Withdrawal).” It also says (in the hexagram Gu [Bane]), “He does not serve a king or lord; he elevates in priority his [own] affairs.” For this reason, although Yao was praised as “modeling Heaven,” he could not humble the lofty integrity of [Xu You from] north of the Ying (who lived unencumbered in the mountains). And while King Wu was “utterly praiseworthy,” still the purity of the [Lords of] Guzhu forever remains intact (referring to Bo Yi and Shu Qi, who starved to death in the mountains rather than compromise their principles).
from Mair, Victor H., Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, and Paul Rakita Goldin. Hawaii Reader In Traditional Chinese Culture. University of Hawaii Press, 2004. ↩
As a profession anyway. Historians are notorious for thinking that the past matters a lot, and most of us even think the past matters even if it has nothing to do with the present. (We’re weird that way) If you are a China historian, however there are always peoplewho are only interested in the contemporary rise of China. Whenever I ask my Modern China students why they are taking my class I usually get a lot of them who are interested in “how China got where it is now” by which they usually mean (even if they don’t yet know it) events since 1983. 1 To some extent I don’t mind this. At most small schools China historians will be the only China person there, and talking about contemporary China is part of the job. Part I like too. I find China today fascinating, and giving half-baked opinions on it is a lot of fun. Plus I’m told by colleagues in less trendy fields that this public interest is why people are always shoveling money at me. (Using very small shovels, I might point out)
All that said, I’m glad I’m not Jonathan Spence. He is currently giving the Reith Lectures in England, and apparently the format is 20 minutes of Spence talking about Chinese history followed by 40 minutes of questions about contemporary China. Given that “the value of history is in its relevance to the present” this is not that surprising, and Spence’s choice of topics probably did not help. It would be refreshing to me, however, if Chinese history in the West could draw at least some audience of people who thought that Confucius, like Socrates, was worth knowing about even if it had nothing to do with your stock portfolio, and who thought that the White Lotus was just as interesting/important/cool as the Wars of the Roses even if neither of them has much to do with Darfur.
Blogposts also tend to get more attention if they are focused on the present. ↩
For people who have read Sherman Cochran it is not news that Chinese merchants developed brand names and consumers developed brand loyalty. Cochran mostly focuses on an earlier period (and the medicine business) but Lang Jing looks at the athletic shoe industry.1 Lang is looking at the development of modern athletics in Shanghai. One issue he looks at is how widespread interest in modern athletics was outside of schools and national competitions and such. This is always a hard thing to find out about, but he does show that there must have been some market for Western-style sports in China, as Shanghai had a number of manufacturers of ping-pong equipment, basketballs (basketball assimilated quickly in China) and of course athletic shoes. It was in the shoe industry of course that you see advertising wars. 金刚 (jin gang)2 brand shoes ran ads in the 1940s urging consumers ”勿相信牌子，相信你自己的眼睛“ (don’t trust brand names trust your own eyes) Presumably meaning they should not be taken in by advertising hype. The target of these adds was of course 回力 (Hui Li, Returning Strength), the kingpin of the Chinese shoe industry. The campaign seems to have worked, as 金刚 became a major player in athletic shoes. Perhaps it did not work well enough, however, since 回力 is still around and they are not. 回力has an interesting logo, as you can see below. I don’t think Nike can sue them however, since 回力 has been fighting sneaker wars far longer than Nike has even existed.
