U.S.-China Cooperation

I have no idea where the U.S. China relationship is going, but I have usually thought that whatever rhetoric was coming from either side of the Pacific there were lots of common interests (making money, borrowing money, thinking North Korea is nuts, etc.) to avoid the more lurid scenarios of Sino-American conflict

I had assumed that there was some cooperation in dealing with Muslim terrorists, but was not clear on the details. According to ABC it has gone as far as the U.S. and China co-operating in torturing Uighers at Guantanamo. This is apparently not as full-scale a cooperation as some might wish. The Americans will still not hand over innocent Uighers to China for fear they may be tortured (some more.) One can hope that this is just a once-off and that the Americans and Chinese are not working up a more systematic cooperation, but I’m not entirely sure about that. I was quite surprised to see that the U.S. was willing to let honest to god Chi-coms into a top secret U.S. base to participate in the most super-secret things going on there. At some levels we are getting along great.

Needling Needham

The Needham Question is hot, hot, hot! Thanks to Simon Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom1, everyone who’s everyone is talking about China’s “failure” in the face of Western intellectual and technological revolutions.

While it’s kind of nice to see a China scholar like Needham getting the pop culture treatment, and the questions he raised are still worth pursuing, the reviews suggest that the emphasis on “Eccentric” is pretty severe. They also suggest that Winchester’s biographical emphasis has left him with the wrong impression about the body of work which Needham’s intellectual descendants still do. Andrew Leonard writes:

In the epilogue, Winchester asserts that the consensus opinion of current Sinologists is that “China, basically, stopped trying.” That’s too facile a summation when one is writing a biography of a man who devoted his entire life to understanding why China failed to capitalize on thousands of years of scientific and technological innovation. Winchester then skips through the main contending theories that attempt to explain China’s failure: China’s bureaucracy siphoned talent away from a potentially entrepreneurial merchant class, China did not have the spur to competition that Europe’s many warring states inflicted on each other, China’s totalitarian government quashed initiative.

In fact, as I wrote in response to Winchester’s NYT op-ed2:

This is a rehashing of old views of China that inspired the great “Needham Question”3: “Why didn’t China have a Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolution”? Half a century of scholarship has produced a massive aggregation of knowledge about science and technology in China which shows, among other things, that scientific and technical progress continued throughout the early modern period (which, started a half millenium earlier in China than in the West) but that China’s population obviated the need for the kind of massive “labor saving” capital equipment, so industrial production moved in other directions.

China was also experiencing a scientific flourishing in the Qing era, featuring fields from philology to botany.4

China doesn’t “fall behind” until around 1800, when the steam power revolution put England a quantum leap ahead of the pack. It then went through about 150 years of political turmoil in which economic and technical development often took a back seat to other issues, including imperialism, uprisings, revolutions, warlords…. [ellipsis in original; it’s a bad habit]

The assumption that the Western model is “natural” or somehow inevitable unless someone “fails” to achieve it is patently absurd. Europe spent centuries in the shadow of the rest of the world before catching up in their Early Modern age (with the aid of a lot of imported Chinese technology), and finally, as Paul Kennedy (among others) argued, pulling ahead due to competitive pressures and (in the case of the British steam revolution) a certain amount of luck.

The upshot of the Needham tradition scholarship, as I understand it, is that it was more macroeconomic and political problems than technological skills which resulted in China’s “lost ground” in the modern age, but a significant component of it was historical contingency (or “dumb luck,” as we used to say). Nothing inevitable about it, and nothing fundamental. China wasn’t the only great Early Modern empire to flounder in the modern age — in fact, it was more the norm than the exception, as the Ottomans, Russians, Mughals, Iberians and Hapsburgs show. “The West” wasn’t a terribly coherent entity — especially not organizationally! — and contrasting “it” with China without a little consciousness of the internal tensions, backwards regions, and failures contained within the Western tradition makes no sense, intellectually, historically or politically.


  1. is that subtitle a 19th century classic, or what?  

  2. Which my colleague, Alan Baumler, aptly dismissed with “Don’t get me started.”  

  3. I did not, when I wrote this, realize that Winchester was the author of a Needham biography  

  4. The term kaozheng escaped me until later  

End of Semester Bits-n-pieces

You grade sixty tests, and what do you get?
Three months older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter don’t you call me, cause I can’t go!
I owe book orders to the campus bookstore….

***

Books that still need to be written about Meiji Japan1 :

  • A good comprehensive history of the Meiji era2
  • A good social history of the post-abolition samurai class. Aside from the Hirschmeier-Yamamura economic debate, there’s hardly anything.
  • a full-length biography of Kido Takayoshi (aka Kido Kōin). We’ve got Ito, and Yamagata, and Okubo and Meiji (now we need an abridged one) and Katsura Taro and Shibusawa Eiichi, and Saionji Kimmochi.
  • a history of the modernization of martial arts

***

Adamu at MutantfrogTravelogue did a nice survey of the Yasukuni Shrine’s Yushukan museum which ignited a 60-response comment thread. One of the subtler distortions in the Shrine is their history of Korea-Japan relations. Adamu writes

The arguments made did not seem particularly pernicious or dishonest, though certain claims (such as “Japan had repeatedly proposed national independence for Korea, but the West rejected the idea” prior to formal annexation in 1905) seemed kind of disingenuous.

My contribution to the comments was to clarify:

On the Korean issue, they are being blatantly disingenuous: the various calls for Korean independence were targetted at blunting the influence of other regional powers over the Korean court, on the grounds that—according to Japanese strategic calculations—the only natural and legitimate influence in Korea should be Japanese. They called for Korean independence from China before the Sino-Japanese war (after which China explicitly recognized Japanese interests in Korea), then independence from Russia before the Russo-Japanese war (after which Russia and the US explicitly recognized Japanese innterests in Korea). It’s still not a settled question as to when Korean annexation became Japanese policy, but there never was any question (after about 1876 or so) that control of Korea was critical to Japan’s strategic situation.


  1. inspired by the difficulties my Meiji class students had with their topics  

  2. this is the only one of this list which I would consider taking on myself  

The end of polygamy in China

As some of our American readers may know the California Supreme Court has recently ruled that men and men in California can get married. This has led a number of people (Krauthammer) to speculate that polygamy is right around the corner. (Volokh) Most of the arguments about the meaning of marriage make a lot of arguments (usually pretty bad ones) based on evidence from “marriage through history.” Very few people seem aware of how -very-different modern companionate, equal marriage is from the various forms of usually economic and always unequal relationships that have existed throughout human history. It is true that throughout most of history “Bill and Ted are in love so they should get married” was not considered a good argument, but the same can be said of “Susan and Ted.” This makes it tricky to get much useful ammunition for contemporary debates from historical evidence unless you twist the history quite a bit. Still, it is sort of interesting to thing about the disappearance of polygamy, which was pretty common in upper classes around the world before the modern era, and specifically about the end of polygamy in China.

Although an awful lot has been written about attacks on the traditional family in Republican China there has been relatively little on polygamy as a specific issue. I think this is true of Japan as well. Polygamy as such was not really singled out much as one might expect. Nevertheless it died out rapidly. Polygamy seems not to have been a major issue for early feminists like He Zhen although they did mention it. For them the big issue in marriage was equality, which of course does not mix with polygamy. If a husband in a modern marriage gives his wife “everything” (particularly emotionally) how can he do so for more than one woman? 1 That polygamy was out would seem to almost go without saying with modern ideas of marriage.2

It might also matter that most scholarship on Chinese feminism has wanted to focus on women. I would assume that the people making the decision to not have a second wife were men. Being a secondary wife was never regarded as a good thing, so for the educated women who read and wrote for the early radical journals becoming a secondary wife would not really be a threat. The poorer women who might have ended up secondary wives were not reading He Zhen in 1907 or making many other choices about their lives.3 Well-off men were presumably making the decision not to have secondary wives. One presumes that whatever pressure their families may have put on them to have a first wife that fit with traditional ideals (Lu Xun did it) there would be much less pressure to have a traditional secondary wife if they did not want to. Why and how secondary wives became unfashionable (or were replaced with mistresses) would be an interesting study.

I can’t really speak to the legal issue in the U.S. (what legal arguments would the state have to prevent one woman from marrying two men at the same time or whatever) but as a social issue it seems to be a non-starter. Polygamy is tied to a class structure and view of marriage that just don’t exist any more and never will.


  1. A parent can give ‘all’ their love to more than one child, but of course women are not (any longer) children 

  2. To the extent polygamy exists at all today it is in places or subgroups without much of an idea of gender equality. The examples used in discussion are always one man with more than one woman, since while that would fit in with some traditional ideas the opposite would just be bizarre. 

  3. Class and consumption sort of fit here too. In a modern relationship both spouses should be equal in their use of the joint assets. How can you do that with too many of one type of spouse?  

Seismic politics

sichuan

There is not much I can say about the earthquake in Sichuan, although I am glad to hear that all the people I know in Sichuan are safe. One thing that is pretty interesting are the attempts of the Chinese government to manage the crisis. James Fallows has some interesting observations on Chinese media coverage of the quake, which still seems pretty primitive. I am not privy to conversations in Zhongnanhai, but I assume that the government is very interested in looking like the state is taking this seriously and is being effective in dealing with it. During the Yangzi floods a few years ago I remember seeing pictures of PLA troops trying to hold back the water with their bodies, which probably was not very effective as a flood control measure, but did result in pictures of the Army helping the people. Paratroopers are already landing in the quake area.

Proper management of a natural disaster is of course important for states, and people are already drawing comparisons to the Tangshan earthquake of 1976, the bungled handling of which was one factor in the political chaos of that year.

Qian Gang is putting out what I would call the official line, that the time is not right to ask questions.

Some of my friends in the media have already turned their attention to the question of responsibility (问责) and looking back (反思). I want to say to you — all of this you want to do should be done, but now is not the time. The behavior of some media, which have reported already within prescribed themes before information about the quake is even clear, or which have played the story from certain angles, is even more inappropriate. There is nothing more important than human beings. In these few days, as millions of lives hang in the balance, let us observe together this great war to save lives.

All I can say is good luck with that. Perhaps the Chinese government is learning the American trick of saying first that the event is too close for us to understand it and then switching to saying that this is old news and we should not live in the past. How well the quake is defused as a political issue depends on a number of things. How well the relief efforts go. How much of the damage was caused by shoddy buildings. (At least some people are already blaming corrupt officials for cutting corners on school construction) How much future damage will be caused by shoddy buildings? (Up to 200 dams were supposedly damaged by the quake. This could end up being a slow motion disaster.) Will the state be seen as insensitive in its handling of the crisis? (Already people are asking that the Olympic torch run/great national celebration of China Power be toned down a bit.) In the next year or so I expect that things will be pretty bleak in the quake areas in part because of the quake and in part because it was a pretty poor rural area to start with. Will this lead to more talk about rural poverty? In the West this will probably be a pretty short media cycle, which may clear up a few questions in our elite media such as “Is Sichuan where Szechuan food comes from” (yes) and “Why is China so stagnant and unchanging?” (Don’t get me started) I expect the Chinese press to be filled with stories of rescue and grief for at least a while, as Qian Gang suggested.

Japan Calendar Converter Dashboard Widget

Icon.png
After creating an OS X dashboard widget to converting Korean 檀紀 years into to western years, it was only a matter of time before another moment of distraction got me to playing with the idea of creating widgets for converting Japanese and Chinese calendars. After a long day of reading about US rice control policies in Korea 1945-1948, I treated myself to some more tinkering and managed to slap together a new widget for some Japanese dates:

Japan Calendar Converter Dashboard Widget v1.0

mockup.gif

It unfortunately appears that the widget will not work on OS X versions earlier than 10.4.3.

When you install the widget, just select the period you want (or leave it on whatever period you used last), type the number of the year you want, and press return. It will convert the date into western years. It currently supports conversion from 明治, 大正, 昭和, and 平成 years. If there are a lot of comments here expressing interest, I can add earlier periods easily enough, but I won’t bother unless there is some demand for it.

UPDATE: While looking around for an online version of a chart detailing the conversion of pre-Meiji Japanese dates, I found that there is no reason for me to upgrade this little widget to cover the premodern. There is already a great widget out there with full support for these older periods. Anyone studying pre-modern Japanese history who uses a Mac should definitely check out the fantastic NegoCalc application, which includes a dashboard widget! Read more and download the application here:

NengoCalc Download Page

Archival Incidents, or What is it with Pictures?

Sean Malloy has withdrawn the pictures once touted as “newly discovered” photographs of Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing. Over the last few days, after the pictures were reported by HNN, the Huffington Post, and Wired, among others, members of the Japanese studies community took a closer look and began to doubt. I saw it unfold at H-Japan: questions about the clothing worn by the people standing in the photos, injuries that didn’t match the atomic bombing, topography issues. Most of all, there were similarities to other known pictures from the Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and the anti-Korean/anti-leftist massacres which followed: the injuries, topography and clothing are more consistent with that disaster/atrocity. How the pictures acquired the Hiroshima story is still a mystery though, as one commenter pointed out, there’s a three day gap between the bombing and the first known pictures which we’d dearly love to fill.

By a curious coincidence, I (and a lot of other innocent scholars of Asia, I warrant) got an email from an ironically named Japanese group1 whose sole purpose is to deny the realities of Japanese WWII atrocities, and one of their highlight publications is an attempt to debunk as many Nanjing Massacre photographs as possible. Daqing Yang, one of the premier scholars on the Nanjing Massacre has written

Even photographic evidence, as many of them have come to realize, can be fraught with danger if its origins cannot be ascertained. When a conservative Japanese daily newspaper made a news story out of a wartime photograph used with the wrong caption in Kasahara’s book, he offered a swift public apology for his negligence and replaced the photograph.94 One of Kasahara’s historian colleagues has included a cautionary note about the use of photographic evidence in a college textbook on historical sources, using the Rape of Nanjing as an example.95

A few days back, peacay wrote me to get clarification on a satirical map found in the ‘Block Prints of the Chinese Revolution’ collection at Princeton. The problem with it, what was confusing peacay, is that the map seemed to be too broad and didn’t say much about the 1911 Revolution. The archival commentary wasn’t helpful, being a general statement about the whole collection. So, I got a good look at it and reported back that it was actually a Japanese-drawn (that much peacay already knew, which is why I got the call) WWI satire, dated late 1914, and the sum total of Chinese commentary was to depict China as a Mandarin pig, anxiously looking at a rain gauge. (peacay has a nice detail shot of it) The rest of the collection seems to actually be from Shanghai and relate to the 1911 revolution (at least, I assume Alan would have said something!). I don’t know that Princeton is going to withdraw the out-of-place image — they’ve already got a disclaimer on the collection saying that they don’t endorse any of the sentiments contained therein — but I expect that their in-house cataloging is more detailed and accurate. I hope so, but that’s no protection for researchers who aren’t in New Jersey.

This is going to come up more and more: as archives and collections become more public, the likelihood of discovering errors (or worse, propogating them in our research) is going to increase. As others have noted, I’m sure, historians are rarely trained specifically in the critical use of visual evidence, photographic or artistic. I’ve seen some grossly overinterpreted and casually thoughtless uses of visual materials.2 Nor are many archivists, though we rely heavily on their record-keeping and expertise. But it’s getting harder and harder to excuse this kind of carelessness, while our training is not at all keeping up with the materials we’re expected to use.


  1. I’ll tell you if you really want, but I don’t want to give them any more publicity than they deserve  

  2. I used a world history textbook once which both: a. presented a photograph of modern African folk dancers in a chapter on pre-1500 African history, the only instance in which a modern photo was used as evidence in a pre-modern context; b. and claimed that the solemn expressions on native Americans in a mid-19c picture were evidence of their social and cultural plight instead of the long exposures of contemporary technology  

1911 in pictures

Via BibliOdyssey an exhibition of the prints of the 1911 revolution from Princeton.

Xinhai

The prints are great, if a little small. One thing that struck me was the disclaimer at the bottom of the first page. “The Princeton East Asian Library in no way supports the rhetoric or depictions that are presented on the prints.”

What is that supposed to mean? I can think of two possibilites.

1. As a notoriously conservative institution1 Princeton is opposed to the overthrow  of the Qing dynasty and is still hoping for the return of the Manchus.

2. Something other reason. But what could it be?


  1. How many Princeton alums does it take to change a lightbulb?

    Four. One to change the bulb and three to point out how much better the old bulb was. 

Different understandings of history

Charles links below to an interesting piece from China Digital Times (original from Sina.com ) It is a piece by Xiong Peiyun (熊培云) defending (sort of) Chinese nationalism. Thomas Bartlett analyzes the use of the term “tianxia zhuyi” 天下主义 in the piece, but what struck me was its odd (meaning different from mine) understanding of world history.

That Chinese popular understanding of world history is different from that elsewhere is not surprising, nor is it surprising that most Chinese people don’t understand non-Chinese history all that well. It is not a subject that the Chinese historical profession has (until recently) invested much effort into. One of Xiong’s goals is to deny that the Beijing Olympics should be compared to the Berlin Olympics of 1936. A lot of people have been making that comparison, but what I find interesting is the end of the piece Xiong suggests that this comparison actually works pretty well.

Western politicians and Western media have not made a lot of progress in their political wisdom in nearly a century. The Nazis in Germany were a product of World War I victor nations, whose fear of a rising Germany led to an over-punishment of Germany, thus sowing the seeds of hatred and revenge and feeding the German nation’s nationalism, which were the best yeast to ferment Hitlerism. And all this, of course, is something nobody, from the Chinese government to all others, wants to see happening.

So, if the West continues to hypothesize China as their “enemy,” and stoke up the “China threat” theory, it will surely fan up the emergence of China’s extreme nationalism, and provide support for those who oppose opening up and want to backpedal history.西方政治家和西方舆论界在政治智慧上并没有太大长进。德国纳粹也是“一战”战胜国亲手制造的祸患,他们对德国崛起的恐惧导致他们对德国的过度惩罚,使得德国的民族主义情绪裂变为仇恨和报复,这正是酿造希特勒主义的最好酵母。而这一切,显然是今日中国政府以及所有外国政府都不愿意看到的。

如上所述,如果“西方世界”继续将中国设为假想敌,鼓吹“中国威胁论”,势必激起国内极端民族主义的高涨,同时也为那些反对开放、想着开历史倒车的人提供支持。

I find this a weird sort of historical analogy. For one thing, if I were going to pick an analogy for the possible rise of an ultra-nationalist China (which I don’t see as likely) the obvious comparison would be Showa Japan.1 Perhaps more to the point he is using the Nazi analogy in a way that it is hard to imagine a westerner of any sort doing. If there is one universal lesson that almost everybody in the West takes from the rise of the Nazis it is the Munich analogy. I actually think this is often a bad thing, since any time a suggestion is made that negotiating with a unsavory types might have good (or less bad) results people will start yelling “Munich!” I can’t imagine too many people using Xiong’s argument here, which I think can be summarized as “China’s feng qing 愤青youth are like nascent Nazis. You (we?) should appease them.”

A lot of historical analogies are getting tossed around, by academics and others in China and elsewhere, and it seems to me that we are working not only from different sets of analogies (Who is Hai Rui?) but different understandings of the same events.


  1. Among other things while resentment of foreigners was part of the rise of Nazism, internal enemies, above all the Jews, were far more important. 

Olympics, China's Dreams, and the Fear of Nationalism

The new book Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008 (Harvard University Press) by Xu Guoqi 1 , is a good read but also a serious piece of research which uses sport to see new dimensions of nationalism. The Olympics, one of those “invented traditions” if there ever was one, and nationalism feed on each other. Xu has the story on everything from Chiang Kai-shek to Ping Pong Diplomacy to the politicization of the non-political ideal and all points in between.

Susan Brownell’s Beijing Olympic FAQ at China Beat has a slightly contrarian take on the recent flap over Olympic torch protests. She suggests that the comparison with the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany is not so useful as a comparison with the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis — remember the song, “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louey?” The United States was then the rising power, fresh from conquests in the Philippines and ready to take on the world. Brownell points out why Europeans could look down their noses at the newcomers and how Americans responded.

Meanwhile, two other recent posts also put the present moment into (drum roll, please) Historical Perspective.

China’s Nationalism and How Not to Deal With It” at China Digital Times translates a Chinese blog posting which also urges more patience, while the response from “angry young Chinese” to the torch protests is nicely illustrated in a YouTube video, “Chinese Nationalism is Westerners’ Fear.

The video accuses the West of hypocrisy. One of many examples: 1) “we tried Communism and you hated us for being Communist” and then 2) “when we embraced Capitalism you hate us for being Capitalist.” Robert Daly, Responding to Chinese Grievances posted at China Digital Times, comments on this long list. For instance, to 1) he replies: “True, more or less. And China hated America for being a capitalist liberal democracy. It was a hate- and fear-filled time all around” and 2) “Not exactly. But America does fear China, in part, because China is gaining wealth and power through following (with Chinese characteristics) prescriptions that were offered by the West.”


  1. Full disclosure, Guoqi is a good friend. 

School Strikes in Colonial Korea: 1937-1939

I had a chance to look into two primary sources on ‘school strikes (同盟休校)’ (mostly in common schools) in the colonial period of Korea (the Kominka period in particular), and translated some of the records from Japanese to English. The documents I looked at are: 高等外事月報 (朝鮮総督府警務局) and 朝鮮思想運動概況(朝鮮軍). It is quite interesting and I would like to share some of the anecdotes here.

<Students’ Complaints in 1937-1939>
The main complaints throughout these years were about the excessive amount of ‘practice (jisshū)’ classes at the expense of academic training. Many went on strike because they perceived that they were not receiving adequate education or were not provided with qualified teachers. In many of these cases, the quality of education mattered more than ethnicity. To give a few examples;

  • 69 male students out of the total of 80 fourth graders were discontent about the educational policy of the new Japanese principal who emphasized only ‘practice’ classes and disregarded academic courses. The class president and 5 other students gathered all the male students and decided to go on school strike during that week. They carried out the strike the next day. But after the local police and the school caught the six instigators, all the rest attended school the following day. (Kyŏnggi, Common School, May 1937)
  • 32 forth graders went on strike in the hope that the school would hire an additional teacher and reduce the number of self-study hours. The police detected the plan, and dissuaded them from carrying it out. (North Ch’ungch’ŏng, Common School, March 1937)
  • Students were discontent with a Korean teacher of Buddhism and the Korean language for his short temper and ineffective pedagogy. 32 students went on strike for two days. (South Kyŏngsang, Buddhist School, May 1937)
  • Civil engineering students were discontent with the Japanese principal’s decision to hire a new Japanese teacher to replace a resigning Korean teacher since the new teacher lacked adequate educational background. 101 students went for strike, but after the principal explained his intention to promote school reform and discipline by hiring a Japanese teacher, and promised to hire another Japanese teacher with higher technical knowledge, the students were satisfied and resumed attending school. (South Ch’ungch’ŏng, 1939)

Continue reading →

China's Robinson Crusoe

I’ve been reading Wolf Totem and having a lot of fun doing so. The book, based on Jiang Rong’s time as a sent-down youth in Inner Mongolia. was a huge best-seller in China. Why is this book a Thing Chinese People Like? Nicole Barnes says that the book is nostalgic drivel aimed at Chinese who long for a world with fewer skyscrapers and more manliness and seek it in Mongolia. A lot of the novel is also nostalgia for the past. If you want to recapture the ancient knowledge of the East, Mongolia is apparently the place to do it. Our Chinese heroes spend a lot of time trying to keep wolves from eating the sheep, and learning about the symbiotic relationship between the Mongols, the steppe, and the wolves, and thus the foundations of Asian society.

Chen felt himself to be standing at the mouth of a tunnel to five thousand years of Chinese history. Every day and every night, he thought, men have fought wolves on the Mongolian plateau, a minor skirmish here, a pitched battle there. The frequency of these clashes has even surpassed the frequency of battles among all the nomadic peoples of the West outside of wolf and man, plus the cruel, protracted wars between nomadic tribes, conflicts between nationalities, and wars of aggression; it is that frequency that has strengthened and advanced the mastery of the combatants in these battles. The grassland people are better and more knowledgeable fighters than any farming race of people or nomadic tribe in the world. In the history of China—from the Zhou dynasty, through the Warring States, and on to the Qin, Han, Tang, and Song dynasties—all those great agrarian societies, with their large populations and superior strength, were often crushed in combat with minor nomadic tribes, suffering catastrophic and humiliating defeat. At the end of the Song dynasty, the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan invaded the Central Plains and remained in power for nearly a century. China’s last feudal dynasty, the Qing, was itself founded by nomads. The Han race, with its ties to the land, has gone without the superior military teachings of a wolf drillmaster and has been deprived of constant rigorous training exercises. The ancient Chinese had their Sun-tzu and his military treatise, but that was on paper. Besides, even they were based in part on the lupine arts of war.

Millions of Chinese died at the hands of invasions by peoples of the North over thousands of years, and Chen felt as if he’d found the source of that sad history. Relationships among the creatures on earth have dictated the course of history and of fate, he thought. The military talents of a people in protecting their homes and their nation are essential to their founding and their survival. If there had been no wolves on the Mongolian grassland, would China and the world be different than they are today?
Jiang Rong p.99

Wolf Totem actually fits pretty well with the other book I am reading for fun at the moment, Rose’s Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Rose’s book was very well-received,which is not surprising as it is a very good look as what ordinary British folk read and what they got out of it in the couple of centuries before 1945. One book that was quite popular for a very long time was Robinson Crusoe. Like Wolf Totem it is a ripping yarn with extended didactic passages. Like Wolf Totem it is a story of civilized men outside the city. Rose suggests that Crusoe was popular in part because appealed to both members of the new middle class who were no longer able to provide what they needed with their own hands and to those who were still working with their hands and liked reading a book that represented what they did as important.

Wolf Totem has a lot of that as well. As a keyboard jockey I like books about places where everyone is doing something and it is clear exactly what benefit each thing provides. The is particularly clear in Wolf Totem, since Jiang goes through the workpoint value of each job a person can do and shows how each is perfectly calibrated to the exertion the work requires and its value to the group.1 Would you be willing to go without electricity to live in a world where every day you did things of real value and this was accepted by everyone around you, and sucking up and bullshit were totally impossible? Apparently some people in China would too.

More later (mabye) on ethnic politics in the book.


  1. I’m guessing that many of his readers have no memory of how the workpoint system actually functioned 

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