China/Classics/English

Summer is here

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

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.

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  1. see Sellmann, James D. 2002. Timing and Rulership in Master Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals (Lüshi chunqiu). Albany: State University of New York Press. ↩

  2. from Knoblock, John and Jeffrey Riegel. 2000. The Annals of Lü Buwei: A Complete Translation and Study. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ↩

China/English

Celebrity endorsements

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

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).

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  1. from Mair, Victor H., Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, and Paul Rakita Goldin. Hawaii Reader In Traditional Chinese Culture. University of Hawaii Press, 2004. ↩

Blogs and Carnivals/China

Chinese history sucks

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 8 Comments

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.

  1. Blogposts also tend to get more attention if they are focused on the present. ↩

Books/China/Economics/Republican

It's the shoes

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 5 Comments

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.

Hui Li

  1. 郎淨 “近代體育在上海(1840-1937)” 上海社會 2006 p.361 ↩

  2. Golden Exactly? its hard to translate. It’s also the word used for King Kong ↩

Books/China/English/Republican/Revolution

Foreign influence on China's revolution

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

I found this picture on Southeast Asia Visions1

Troops in Peking

It is from Siam and China by Besso, Salvatore (1914) I was a bit confused about what it was showing. Surely March 5 is too late for a response to the declaration of the Republic? This turned out to be an interesting bit of political theater. By February of 1912 Yuan Shikai had accepted the idea of becoming the President of the new Republic, but he was still bickering with the revolutionaries in Nanjing over where the new capital would be. The revolutionaries of course wanted Yuan to come to Nanjing where their Provisional Senate was meeting. Yuan naturally wanted to stay in Beijing and the issue was a symbolic one over which of these two groups was going to be dominant in the new government. A group of southern representatives came to Beijing to negotiate with Yuan, but on Feb 29 a mutiny broke out among Cao Kun’s troops in Beijing and the Southerners were forced to flee their hotel. Mutinies broke out in Tianjin, Baoding and Shijiazhuang the next day, all among troops loyal to Yuan. According to Jerome Chen Cao Kun’s troops were yelling slogans against Yuan moving to the South as they rioted2

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  1. following a link from BibliOdyssey ↩

  2. Ch’en, Jerome. Yuan Shih-K’ai. Stanford University Press, 1972. p.107 ↩

China/English/Ethnic Minorities/Taiwan

If you prick Taiwanese savages, do they not bleed?

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 3 Comments

I want to share just one more short passage from Small Sea Travel Diaries, the English translation of Yu Yonghe’s journal and essays from his trip to Taiwan in the 17th century by Macabe Keliher. I find the following reflections by Yu on natives he met in Taiwan to be an interesting display of humanity and an overly confident universalism on the part of the author, though it’s tone is entirely inconsistent with the far more insulting, unsympathetic, and otherwise derogatory tone used elsewhere in Yu’s journals.

The worst off people in the world are not as bad off as the Taiwan savages. Because they are different they are discriminated against. When people see them without clothes, they say, “they don’t get cold.” When they see them walk in the rain and sleep in the two, they say, “they don’t get sick.” When they see them carry burdens over great distances, they say, “they can work without rest.”

Aye! They are also people! They have limbs and bodies and flesh and bone; in what way are they not human? How can one say such things of them? If horses run without rest, or oxen loaded with more than they can carry, will they not get sick? If oxen and horses are like this, then what of humans? If they had cloth, and they would wear layers of clothes when the weather turned cold – what would be the point of getting cold. If they had no responsibilities, they would settle peacefully and not run around naked – what is the point of being naked? If they did not have to work, they would rest and relax and not labor for these interpreters. Who does not enjoy eating well and staying warm, avoiding pain and hunger and cold? Who does not hate hard labor and enjoy leisure and comfort? This is human nature. There are different people, but the nature is all the same. The benevolent know this and do not need to repeat it. 1

As the mention they get in this quote suggests, Yu really did not like interpreters, and they appear as the most evil figures in his narrative. Perhaps his own dependence on them when he went hunting for sulphur in remote areas of Taiwan added to his dislike for their deceptive practices.

  1. Yu, Yonghe, trans. Macabe Keliher Small Sea Travel Diaries (2004) SMC publishing, Taipei, 2004, 119.  ↩

Books/China/English/Taiwan

Chinese Description of Dutch Suicide Tactics

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 1 Comment

Another quick quote from Small Sea Travel Diaries, the English translation of Yu Yonghe’s journal and essays from his trip to Taiwan in the 17th century by Macabe Keliher.

In an appendix entitled “Tales of the Sea” the author gives us some often amusing observations about the geography, culture, and customs of various countries. In the section on the “red barbarians,” (the Dutch), there is, for example, the following description of their tactics in battle.

When Zheng Chenggong invaded Taiwan, he fought the Red Hairs on land. [The Dutch] had good guns that would shoot when ignited and did not need the labor of lighting a fuse. They were small in their power could combat the biggest of cannons.

But beside this, their tactics were all absurd. They wore high shoes on their feet so that he couldn’t run fast and would get injured. After getting injured, the [Dutch troops] would lie down and not get up. When a [Zheng] soldier would go to collect the head, he would get hit by a bullet. But they soon learned not to approach the injured Dutch. Or the [Dutch soldier] would strap gunpowder to his shins and push his knees into the person, blowing them both up. Indeed, they would use their disabled body to take the enemy’s life; this can be called not giving up until the death.

Also, [the Dutch] kept a gunpowder store in the places they lived. If something happens, they could ignite the machine, and the room and the people would all fly like ash. They had sworn they would not be insulted by the enemy. The holes of their ships were such that in emergency they could set themselves ablaze, not allowing others to know the ingenuity of their sails and masts. It is such that other countries could not copy their construction.1

See also the interesting descriptions of the “cruel” Japanese punishment of criminals (190-1), and the bizarre description of inhumane policies of Western priests who, for example, do not let the dead be buried because, “they fear that the mountains will raise strong spirits and give birth to a hero that will fight their country.” (200)

  1. Yu, Yonghe, trans. Macabe Keliher Small Sea Travel Diaries (2004) SMC publishing, Taipei, 2004, 196.  ↩

Books/China/English/Taiwan

A Moment of Humility

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

I just finished reading Small Sea Travel Diaries which is an English translation of Yu Yonghe’s journal and essays from his trip to Taiwan in the 17th century by Macabe Keliher. It’s a quick read and different parts of the book will be interesting to different readers. Some of my favorite parts of the book were to be found in the appendixes following the main journal entries. At one point, for example, the author displays an interesting sense of humility about what is traditionally thought of as the Middle kingdom.

The place we all live we call the great Zhonghua Kingdom [中華大國]. But people have never seen big [大], still they just say “big.” We do not know if this “big” has any proof, and we are not really in the middle. The body of the sky is round, and people within the universe all wear the sky on their head while their feet walk on the land. How can we not be in the middle? If we insist on being in the middle of heaven and earth, then we can only be standing under the North Star. This point is like the axle of the wheel, like the navel of a grinding wheel, like the heart of a person; these points can just about serve [as the center]. The heavens pivot is to the north of the northern desert, far away from the prints of Yu.

China’s area is vast, but if considering it from the heavens pivot, it lies to the southeast, and everything further southeast is all ocean…1

  1. Yu, Yonghe, trans. Macabe Keliher Small Sea Travel Diaries (2004) SMC publishing, Taipei, 2004, 203.  ↩

China/English/Identity/Maoist era (1949-1976)/Nationalism/Public History/Republican/visual culture

Show me the money

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 10 Comments

From the Times via CDT an article about a group of Chinese intellectuals who are asking for some new people to be put on Chinese currency. This is actually a big issue, since who nations put on their money is a political statement of some importance.1 The list of suggested people is pretty interesting. They are suggesting Qu Yuan, Li Bai, Yue Fei, and Wen Tianxiang. The Times calls Qu Yuan a poet, which he was, but of course he was much better known as a protester against political corruption. Li Bai is the “pure” poet in the group, and Yue Fei and Wen Tianxiang are both straight nationalist figures who died resisting foreign interference in China’s internal affairs. It is a well-thought out list (Not all Mao, but nationalistic enough to pass muster) and I wish them luck, but I suspect not much will change. Chinese money has always been very focused on politicians.

Sun1

Sun Yat-sen got most of the face time under the Republic, appearing on all sorts of notes.

Mao1

Mao has taken pride of place since.

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  1. I’ve always thought that American money had remained stuck in the 19th century because of a lack of national confidence. If someone did suggest changing our money some Democrat would probably suggest putting MLK on there and Republicans would go nuts about political correctness. Easier to stick with Jackson. Plus, if we went with more modern designs and colors like most of the world has done in might turn us gay. ↩

Archaeology/China/English/Historiography/Identity/Qing

Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis*

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

How did the modern Chinese historians create a national history? One aspect of this is the creation of protohistory, explaining what was going on in a place before there was much of a recorded history. This was a big problem in Europe in the 19th century. Having cut loose from the biblical narrative there were a lot of years to fill up, very little archaeological evidence, some vague references in classical works and a host of stories about ancient heroes. (Did you know that Adam was actually buried in England? I think Aeneas visited too.) A lot of work went into creating a reasonably accurate narrative of European protohistory, much of it built around successive waves of invaders.

Chinese historians took to this problem surprisingly well. Before the Qing there was not much on the origins of China, as distinct from the origins of civilization, although they did have a longer timeline and plenty of stories to fit in there. Liu Shipei and Zhang Binglin were both believers in the “Western origins” theory which held that the Chinese had originally been called the Baks and came from Mesopotamia. They roamed around Central Asia for a while then, under the leadership of Huangdi, they moved into the Yellow River valley, displaced the Miao and started calling themselves Han.

I get this from Peter Zarrow1 who says that it was a popular theory in the late Qing, especially with anti-Manchu revolutionaries (trying to draw a more clear divide between the Manchus and the Han?) but he does not know much about it.2  It strikes me as possibly having been influenced  by missionary writings, given that 19th century people seem (to my limited knowledge) very wrapped up in  tying their protohistory to the Bible and the Middle East (The first Irish person, for instance, was Cessair, the granddaughter of Noah). It certainly does not seem to have had much influence in the present, when popular understanding of Chinese history is pretty anti-diffusionist.

*and the rise of the sons of Aryas, obviously

  1. “The New Schools and National Identity: Chinese History Textbooks in the Late Qing” in Hon, Tze-Ki, and Robert J. Culp. The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China. BRILL, 2007. ↩

  2. he cites a couple of Taiwan articles I will try to get hold of ↩

Archaeology/China/English

Breaking news

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

The top 10 Chinese archaeological finds for 2007 have been announced (Chinese descriptions are a bit longer).1 The winner is the Lingjing Paleolithic Site in Henan. As always some cool stuff. It is interesting to see that the Yellow River valley and, by extension, the “origins of China” seem to be getting the lion’s share of the attention.

Still, the sites identified seem a lot more “scholarly” in the sense that they seem to be more sites that help us to explain things about the past than “Indiana Jones-y” focusing on spectacular artifacts that anyone would find cool.

  1. They were actually announced in April. I apologize to all the artifacts that have waited thousands of years to be discovered and then had to wait another month for me to get this post up.  ↩

Blogs and Carnivals/China/Current Events/English

More public sphere

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Lots of stuff out there on how response to the earthquake is leading to a more robust public sphere in China. People are self-organizing, money is being collected and spent and news is being disseminated.1 In part this is happening because of genuine public interest and in part because the state is allowing a lot more freedom. Two aspects of the public sphere that have only just started to show up are direct criticisms of the state sphere and taking on state power.

Public sphere organizations sometimes take on state power, and this is something that the CCP has been partiularly reluctant to allow in the past. The “human flesh search engine” (人肉引擎) i.e. the habit Chinese netizens have of hunting down and terrorizing traitors like that Chinese student who talked to a Tibetan is an example of non state “organizations” taking on some state power. This is obviously to some extent encouraged by the state (supposedly some Chinese netizens are paid 50 cents for each properly nationalist post they put up) but I suspect that it would never be tolerated if it really did become organized and systematic vigilantism.

More interesting to me is public criticism of the state. The best example of this is recent criticism of the China Red Cross The Red Cross has a long history of trying to function as an autonomous organization, and at least since 1993 it has become somewhat independent of the state. This makes it almost the perfect target for criticism. It is not a direct state organization, which limits the amount of trouble you can get into for attacking it. On the other hand it is state enough that there probably is a lot of corruption and back door-ism in it. (Maybe all these criticisms will turn out to be wrong, but I doubt it) What I find most interesting about the criticism is that it is real public sphere stuff. Angry “human flesh search engine” types may threated to rape “traitors” and murder their families (see link above) but that is not a substitute for the state. Critics of the Red Cross are going after them for paying too much for tents, not being transparent enough and for cheating on their taxes. In other words the public is not just complaining, they are explaining how this (semi-state) organization should be run. They also have some power over it, since they are encouraging people not to donate money unless their demands are dealt with. Not surprisingly, the Red Cross is taking this seriously and responding to public criticism. None of this is entirely new of course, but this seemed a bit different that what has come before.

MINOR RANT I like CDT a lot, and find them to be one of the best RSS feeds for getting China news. Unfortunately a lot of the stuff they link to is in English, and a big chunk of the English language writing on China does not cite sources very well. We are on-line now folks. Including some links to your sources is just good practice. Electrons are cheap, and saying quotes come from “various BBS forums” or “an official statement” (From who? When?) is not sufficient. Or if you like I suppose you could go back to the old China coast paper’s habit of saying things came from “the native press” and assuming nobody cares who exactly said what and when they said it.

  1. Check the CDT for most of these ↩

China/English/Teaching/Tibet

Comparative religion

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

Teaching about religions is always tricky in part because I and most of my students are heavily influenced by the Christian (especially Protestant) idea that the essence of religion is what you believe. Of course there are things besides orthodoxy (common belief) that religions promote such as common practice or common ritual behavior. The standard way of teaching about religion is to talk a lot about belief, but as this 1870 piece from the Atlantic (via Andrew Sullivan) shows there are other ways to do it.

Those who strive to establish a monopoly of labor are accustomed to sneer at the Chinese as “Pagans.” They urge that citizenship ought not to be granted to them, because their religion is different from ours. Yet those who talk in this way make no objection to receiving Irish emigrants and intrusting them with the elective franchise. But is the Buddhist religion, which prevails in China, much more foreign to our customs and our modes of thinking and believing than the Roman Catholic religion is?

The essay is trying to show that the Chinese in America should not be discriminated against because their religion is not in fact barbaric and they are presumably capable of civilization. Well, at least as capable as the Irish. The author, Lydia Maria Child was not a sinologist and I suspect that much of what she wrote would not have been accepted by scholars even at the time. She comes up with a long list of similarities between Catholicism and Buddhism: pilgrimage, buying your way out of purgatory, cults of the saints, relics, monasticism, a pope/dali lama, art that is mostly “grotesque”, an educated class who scoff at the peasant form of the religion, etc. It is actually sort of tricky to figure out what she is doing here. Part of it may be that as a 19th century Protestant she really is blind to how universal a lot of this is and that what really needs to be explained is not that Catholics and Buddhists go on pilgrimages, but that Protestants do not, given that it is one of the most common forms of religious observance around the world. Child was a great campaigner for abolition and woman’s and Native American rights, so I suppose what she is doing here is trying to make the Chinese seem more like “us” and by focusing on practice rather than belief she actually does a pretty good job of it. I could imagine a number of classes where this would be a good thing to assign.

China/Current Events/English/Taiwan

Whither Taiwan?

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 6 Comments

Ma

If you were wondering how different the new Ma government in Taiwan would be from the DPP government it is replacing you should go read Michael Turton’s analysis of Ma’s inauguration speech. (Given in Chinese (I assume Mandarin) with an English translation displayed at the same time)

Ma spends a good deal of time taking digs at his predecessors and promising vague but wonderful things for the future, as is typical is speeches like this. He also refers to the people of Taiwan as part of the 中華民族, rather than 国民 or citizens. How to translate 中華民族? I suppose the most literal way would be “Chinese race” although “Chinese ethnicity” probably sounds better. Both in Taiwan (at least under the KMT) and on the Mainland governments would claim that this “Chinese race” includes ethnic minorities. And, as some of Michael’s commenters point out there are more explicitly Han chauvinist terms he could have used, like 漢族. Still, it is hard to disagree with Michael or with the KMT aboriginal legislator who walked out of of the speech that this term is a lot less welcoming to non-Chinese that the 国民 that the DPP preferred. I also found it sort of interesting that he explicitly outed himself as a mainlander. “Taiwan is not my birthplace, but it is where I was raised and the resting place of my family. I am forever grateful to society for accepting and nurturing this post-war immigrant.” 英九雖然不是在台灣出生，但台灣是我成長的故鄉，是我親人埋骨的所在。我尤其感念台灣社會對我這樣一個戰後新移民的包容之義、栽培之恩與擁抱之情 I thought this was sort of weird. Yes, he is a mainlander, but it seems odd to bring it up,1 unless he is trying to tie himself more firmly to China. If he pisses off the aborigines that might create trouble. If he goes so far as to piss off the non-mainlanders (whom I guess I would define as people who speak Tai-yu first) he could have real trouble.2

He clearly -is- trying to butter up ‘China’, although it is not clear how much this will involve throwing ‘Taiwan’ under the bus. Maybe a lot. “In resolving cross-strait issues, what matters is not sovereignty but core values and way of life” This is actually pretty scary, in that the Taiwan government seems to be at least downplaying and perhaps abandoning entirely the ROC’s claims to sovereignty, and looking to a common ‘Confucian’ culture. At least for Ma Taiwan seems much more part of Greater China than it was before.

  1. even though he does say he was an immigrant, thus sort of implying that Taiwan is not the same as China. Maybe this is an olive branch to the less China-y types out there ↩

  2. I studied in Taiwan ages ago when the old Taiwanese-Mainlander split was fading rapidly, and I find it hard to imagine he is trying to revive it ↩

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