Books and Articles/Colonial/Korea/Korea-Japan

Thought Crime Arrests 1928-1944

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 4 Comments

I spent a beautiful Saturday hanging with the old folks in 효창공원 near my place. This small park is full of interesting things including an anti-Communist memorial, the graves of various nationalist heroes, and includes the grave, museum and library for the man himself, Kim Koo (백범기념관). I spent my time in the park reading the first volume of 『해방 전후사 사료 연구』and thought I would share a chart from a chapter on late colonial historical materials by 이완범.

After listing some of the available materials and lamenting the general lack of good historical sources for the late colonial period (1937-1945), most of the chapter is dedicated to using statistics to look at the period, or more specifically, independence movements during the period.1

I’m sharing two of his tables, merged together below2 which contain statistics on arrests for thought crimes in colonial Korea from 1928-1944.

Thought Crime Arrests 1928-1944
Year
Cases
Persons
Ave. Persons Per Case
1928 227 1592 7.0
1929 253 1743 6.9
1930 397 4025 10.1
1931 436 3659 8.4
1932 345 4989 14.4
1933 213 2641 12.4
1934 183 2389 13.1
1935 172 1740 10.1
1936 167 2762 16.5
1937 134 1637 12.2
1938 145 1344 7 (9.3)
1939 95 1042 6.9 (11)
1940 103 1193 10.1 (11.6)
1941 232 861 8.4 (3.7)
1942 183 1142 14.4 (6.2)
1943 322 1002 12.4 (3.1)
First half 1944 132 337 13.1 (2.6)
Total 3,739 34,098  
Average 225.43 2,110.06 12.2 (9.4)

Note: The averages in 이완범’s chart for people per case seemed off from 1938-1944 and I can’t find any note of a change in his method of calculation or source for his numbers (anyone have a guess for where he is getting the numbers from?). Thus I have put my own quick calculation in parentheses for these years.

Cases Per Year Peopleperyear-1

Note: Though I’m sure there is a better way, in these charts I have simply doubled numbers from first half of 1944 for the 1944 entries.

Numbers can be so much fun and feel so meaty (especially when accompanied by colorful charts), but what can these numbers tell us by themselves?
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  1. It is unfortunate that, with the exception of the first chapter on materials related to wartime mobilization, everything in the first volume of such a general title focuses on independence movements. Volume two discusses mostly the postwar period, with materials related to education, political history, North Korean publications and US archival materials on the North Korean economic policies.  ↩

  2. 『해방 전후사 사료 연구』p88 and p91. 이완범 takes the material from 朝鮮総督府警務局（編）『最近に於ける朝鮮治安状況』for materials up to 1939 and 近藤釖一（編）『太平洋戦争下終末期朝鮮の治政』 for the years therafter. The footnotes for the chart notes some discrepancies for the 1934 and 1945 numbers between the 1936 edition and his 1938 edition and an alternative lower case number of 74 for 1939 in a different source published in 1940, but it may not have been stats for the full year.  ↩

Blogs and Carnivals/China/English/Teaching

Some stuff

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

Just some random stuff that caught my eye.

Have any of our readers spent time teaching English in Asia? You blew it. You thought you were doing well just by making good money by not working, but actually you could have become a cult leader like Li Yang.

Li Yang

Also, something nice on teaching American history to Turks, which of course led me to think about teaching American History to Chinese. Black Sheep has links to some cool stuff on Chinese Astronomy Also a nice bit from Michael Turton about Chinese growth and the East Asian model. Granite Studio has a good post up on Chinese historical zombies

China/Current Events/English/Post-Mao

China on display

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Playfair

Historians have been very interested in World’s Fairs, international exhibitions and such for a while now. This is in part because of Gellner and Anderson’s ideas about nationalism, and above all the idea of a nation as an imagined community. Looking at a country’s exhibit at some sort of international do is a quick and easy way to figure out what their imagined community is, or at least what the people responsible would like to claim that it is to an audience of foreigners.
We are in the run-up to one of these events now, the Beijing Olympics. Lots of people (including lots of people in the Chinese government) are aware that this will be China’s big moment of exposure, and they are trying to spin how China will be seen long before the first shot is put. China Rights Forum has a whole issue out on it on this which can be found on-line here I liked Chen Kuide’s essay where he hopes that the Beijing Olympics will end up like the Seoul Olympics, where international attention may have helped the democracy movement, rather than like the Hitler Olympics where the Olympic movement served to validate the power of one of history’s greatest monsters. Even more interesting was Xu Jilin’s essay The Making of a True Athletic Superpower Xu contrasts the current Olympics with what he saw in Vancouver in 2004.

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China/Maoist era (1949-1976)/visual culture

Non-commercial emotion

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

James Fallows recommends the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center. At least as a web museum it is not as good as Stefan Landsberger’s I did find the introduction (English only, apparently) interesting

Each poster exhibited here is a piece of art with history when all the people in China sacrificed for the greatness of one person. Mao Zedong ruled over China from 1949 to 1976. He turned around a quarter of the globe population in continuous political movements, especially in Culture Revolution, to fight with each other physically or mentally. The traditional Chinese philosophy and morality was abused. The sky and earth turned upside down. Nightmare came to its end at last as Mao died in 1976 and the civilization of China survived. The propaganda posters presented here tell you all these stories.

Today China is on the right track for prosperity again. Shame will it be to forget the recent past. Our purpose and responsibility is to help people understand the process of the rebirth. Long live the great Chinese people and its civilization. From art viewpoint, many of these pieces are great art works created by none commercial emotion. Time is changed and such kind of art could not be repeated. They are so limited and very hard to be found now. The value will be tremendous in the future.

We are very proud to have the best collection of this kind in the world and we are serious to prepare for a special museum in Shanghai for the education of the younger generation as well as being the destination of the foreign visitors.

The one thing that jumped out at me was the point that these were “created by none commercial emotion” but their “value will be tremendous in the future” In China as it lots of other places the relation between Art and Money has long been a complex topic. If for some reason you wanted to say something nice about the Mao period you could point out, as here, that it was less commercialized and money-grubbing than, say, the China of today.

Books/China/Teaching

Book stuff

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Once again it is time to ask questions about books. Order forms for the Spring are due, so I need to figure out what I want to order. Thus I am asking for suggestions.

The courses for spring

History of East Asia aka Rice Paddies

Ebrey for a textbook. For books I was thinking of using Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book (Has anyone looked at the new Penguin translation? Is it as good as Morris? Morris is expensive) The Shaddick translation of  Travels of Lao Ts’an and Katsuei Yuasa’s Kannani and Document of Flames: Two Japanese Colonial Novels (Has anyone taught this? How did it go?)
As you can see there are no monographs in here (not that I am opposed to them in a sophomore class, but I tend towards more literary stuff.) Any suggestions of substitutions that would fit the pattern are most welcome.

Modern China (Which goes back to the High Qing)
No text, I think, as much as I like Schoppa’s text and as much as notext makes me nervous. Instead Kuhn Soulstealers (Almost too early for this class, but it works so well.) Baumler Modern China and Opium (Sort of subs for a text, as it reprints a bunch of primary sources that cover a lot of the issues of the period. Plus the deathless prose of the introductions will cause all my students to go out and buy 300 copies for their friends.) Reed Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937 (This one makes me nervous. I loved it. Some labor history, some politics, some intellectual history. Will it work for undergrads? Maybe Schoppa’s Blood Road instead?) Finally Gilley Model Rebels: The Rise and Fall of China’s Richest Village (I suspect there are any number of reform-era books that would work, but this jumped out at me )

Bonus course
I also have two sections of Introduction to History, our methods course for undergraduate history majors. As always I will be leading them through a monograph, in this case Cohen History in Three Keys on the Boxers and we will of course watch 55 Days at Peking I think we will also do some social annotation work with Diggo, which allows you to do social annotation on any web page. Any suggestions on readings, or primary sources on the Boxers that are on-line or that I could put on-line are very welcome.

Blogs and Carnivals/China/Taiwan

The good helmsman

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 5 Comments

With double ten around the corner it seems a good time to discuss the vexed question of who was China’s greatest leader.1 Via ESNW we learn that at least in Taiwan the answer is Chiang Ching-Kuo.

Chiang

Almost half of respondents called him Taiwan’s greatest President, 77% said that his positives outweighed his negatives, and a mere 4% said the opposite. For all those who have spent many hours debating if Mao was 60% good and 40% bad or vice versa these are pretty impressive numbers. Double ten would be a great day to raise a glass of vodka in honor of one of the great heroes of democracy in Asia.

  1. In keeping with the spirit of the holiday only democratically elected leaders may apply ↩

Cultural/Education/Japan/大正

Controversy over the origins of the Japanese schoolgirl sailor uniform

Posted on by Nick Kapur / 3 Comments

fukuoka-jogakuin-1921.jpgFor years private girls academy Fukuoka Jogakuin in Kyushu has been credited with first introducing in 1921 the famous sailor-style uniform worn by so many middle-school Japanese girls. However a recent investigation by a uniform manufacturer preparing an exhibit on the history of Japanese school uniforms has unearthed photographic evidence that Heian Jogakuin in Kyoto introduced a uniform with a sailor-style flap one year earlier, in 1920.

heian-jogakuin-1920.jpg The debate has heated up, with both schools insisting that they were the first and that the other schools claim is invalid. At a time when declining numbers of Japanese children are forcing private schools to become increasingly cuthroat in their competition for students, having an awesome uniform with a storied past is seen as a way to attract students.

While it seems incontrovertable that the Kyoto school had the sailor flap first, their uniform was an unsightly, shapeless one-piece, where as the Fukuoka school’s uniform is clearly a precursor to the style still in use today, so maybe both schools have a reasonable claim.

Source: セーラー服：発祥論争　平安女学院ＶＳ福岡女学院　（毎日新聞）

Blogs and Carnivals/Korea

Asian History Carnival Coming October 10th

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

I just wanted to announce that we will be hosting an Asian History Carnival at the Frog in a Well: China weblog on October 10th. Read more about the Asian History Carnival and how you can nominate posts for inclusion here. The carnival will include excellent weblog postings on Asian History written since August 8th, along with some related online resources. You can also easily recommend nominations by tagging them on del.icio.us with the tag “ahcarnival” (http://del.icio.us/tag/ahcarnival/).

Blog Carnival

Asian History Carnival Coming October 10th

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

I just wanted to announce that we will be hosting an Asian History Carnival at the Frog in a Well: China weblog on October 10th. Read more about the Asian History Carnival and how you can nominate posts for inclusion here. The carnival will include excellent weblog postings on Asian History written since August 8th, along with some related online resources. You can also easily recommend nominations by tagging them on del.icio.us with the tag “ahcarnival” (http://del.icio.us/tag/ahcarnival/).

Blogs and Carnivals/China

Asian History Carnival Coming October 10th

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

I just wanted to announce that we will be hosting an Asian History Carnival at the Frog in a Well: China weblog on October 10th. Read more about the Asian History Carnival and how you can nominate posts for inclusion here. The carnival will include excellent weblog postings on Asian History written since August 8th, along with some related online resources. You can also easily recommend nominations by tagging them on del.icio.us with the tag “ahcarnival” (http://del.icio.us/tag/ahcarnival/).

China/English/Post-Mao/Qing

More on public history

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

I posted a while back on how the Chinese are more aggressive in re-building historical sites than one would expect in the West. Angela Zito explains some possible the reasons for this. Cities were architectural representations of the harmonious order the emperor was imposing on the cosmos, and thus re-building them was one of the things emperors did.

the building and rebuilding of the city also actuated again and again in the act of construction the cosmic principles of the city’s design. Thus a new dynasty inevitably signaled the emergence of order from chaos by building projects. Later, the continuous “restoration” (xiu) of the architecture of one’s fore bearers combined filial respect with sagely rescue of pattern from decay. (p.133)

In a footnote she claims that the government of the PRC thinks like this and their “notion of preservation ..emphasizes the metaphysical whole of a building rather than its material parts. As long as these are faithfully reproduced in situ, guidebooks and local people will inevitably report that the building is ‘original'” I think this is an interesting insight, but I’m not sure I entirely agree with it. I think she is right in saying that re-building was important traditionally because it displayed the ruler (or the local elite) as creators of cosmic order. To just leave things alone was to leave them in the past, and since these things are not yet museum-ized in China (to use Levenson’s term) you almost have to fiddle with them.

I’m not sure that something has to be in situ or all that faithfully reconstructed. To some extent this is true of any site anywhere. Mount Vernon has been painted any number of times since Washington died, and I suppose that other than the main timbers most of the wood has been replaced. If authority says this is it than this is it, for most purposes. This is the throne of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in Nanjing

Taiping throne

I know of no pictures of what the Taiping throne looked like, and I am sure that not a single ounce of wood in this thing is “authentic” and yet here(Nanjing) it is. I wonder if part of what encourages this manic reconstruction is, as Zito claims, a desire to make the state look like preservers of the patterns of the universe, or of this case the past. Given the Communists’ role in destroying so much of the fabric of China’s history they may feel that it is particularly important to reconstruct the past.

Authors/Books/China/English/Literature/Sino-Japanese Wars/Web Sites and Resources

Ding Mocun, Lung Ying-tai and Lust, Caution

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 3 Comments

200709242136 Ang Lee‘s (李安) new movie Lust, Caution (色，戒) is apparently being released later this week in the United States. The movie won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival (where it was labeled as coming from “USA/China/Taiwan, China“), received a full mix of reviews (1,2,3,4,RT), and may ultimately get an unusually limited showing due to its NC-17 rating. The version which eventually cleared censors in China supposedly had to cut some thirty minutes.

The movie is based on a novella by Eileen Chang (張愛玲）which in turn is inspired by an historical event: the attempted assassination of Ding Mocun (丁默邨 1903-1947) on December 21st, 1939 by the 22 year old half-Japanese spy Zheng Pingru (鄭苹如 1918-1940).

Ding Mocun was a leading figure in Chinese intelligence in the 1930s until his execution in 1947. He was a former Communist Party member who recanted and rose quickly to power in the Nationalist party with the support of the CC Clique and especially Chen Lifu (陳立夫). When he was squeezed out of power in a 1938 reorganization of the Nationalist intelligence services into the Zhongtong1 and Juntong2 and accused of corruption, he left unoccupied China and together with Li Shiqun (李士群 1905-1943) worked for the creation of a spy agency supporting Wang Jingwei‘s (汪精衛/汪兆銘 1883-1944) peace movement in Japanese occupied areas.3 The headquarters of the resulting organization, founded in April, 1939, was located on 76 Jessfield Road, Shanghai, and became a site of infamous torture and death often simply referred to in Chinese accounts as “#76” (七十六號). In its twenty or so holding cells Ding and Li’s operatives, along with Japanese officers, extracted what information they could from suspected Communists and supporters of the Nationalist government in Chongqing before dispatching them.

Ding is now usually listed among the dozen or so most famous Chinese traitors (hanjian 漢奸) for his collaboration with Wang’s government and the Japanese. He was arrested in September, 1945, convicted of treason in February 1947, and executed on July 5th.4 Like many of the leading collaborators put on trial after the war, however, Ding pleaded that he secretly cooperated with the Nationalist spymaster Dai Li (戴笠). Many of the other leaders in the Wang government, most famously Zhou Fohai (周佛海 1897-1948) also claimed be working closely with the Nationalists in great secret. This came to be referred as the argument of “saving the country through twisted means” (曲線救國, more on this at my personal blog, Muninn). With the arrival of a movie which is inspired by the story of Ding and the attempt on his life by Zheng Pingru, there has been renewed interest in his case.

Roland Soong, who runs the world’s best weblog covering the Chinese media, ESWN, recently posted a translation of an article by the famous writer and critic Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) discussing the new movie and the historical figure Ding Mocun: Lung Ying-tai on Lust, Caution

You can find the original Chinese version of her article here: 贪看湖上清风──侧写《色，戒》

In her essay Lung responds to criticism that Eileen Chang did not portray the character of Mr. Yi (who is inspired by Ding Mocun) as a sufficiently evil person. I certainly commend her for this, as I really don’t think Chang’s fictional character Yi needs to be everything that Ding Mocun was. However, many writers who try to counter efforts to portray the wartime collaborators as one-dimensional evil-dooers and malicious traitors, in my view, take the completely wrong approach: the reversal. Instead of restoring nuance, or at least moving beyond simple nationalist critiques to evaluate the legacy of these figures in terms of their acts while in positions of power (under whatever regime), Lung embraces a strategy I find frustrating, to say the least: the evil-dooer wasn’t evil at all, he was, in fact, a patriot.

小说和电影之外，民国史里头的“易先生”，其实也不见得是个多“坏”的“坏人”

“the novella and the film aside, the Mr. Yi in the history of the Republic of China was really not a very “bad” person.”5

Lung writes that she read through the archival materials related to Ding’s various positions in the regimes of occupied China and his trial records along with the memoirs of Chen Lifu.6 Lung argues that we should reevaluate the historical figure Ding because beginning in 1941 he 1) began to secretly work with Chiang Kai-shek’s government, 2) helped rescue some secret agents, 3) continued to serve the Nationalist government to repress bandits (read Communists) in the chaos of the immediate aftermath of the war and his work was highly valued both by Dai Li and Chen Lifu.
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  1. 中國國民黨中央執行委員會調查統計局  ↩

  2. 國民政府軍事委員會調查統計局  ↩

  3. Brian Martin, “Shield of collaboration: The Wang Jingwei regime’s security service, 1939-1945” Intelligence and National Security 20, No. 4 (2001): 100. 劉傑 『漢奸裁判』 (The Hanjian trials)　(東京：中公新書、2000), 176  ↩

  4. 劉傑 ibid.  ↩

  5. All translations from the article are Soong’s  ↩

  6. Though she doesn’t use it, I think the full title of his memoirs is 成敗之鑑：陳立夫回憶錄  ↩

China/English

20th Century Chinese Women's History for Undergraduates…..

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 8 Comments

A blatant request for help1:

I’m teaching my 20th century China course in the Spring, and book order season is upon us already! Last time I taught it, I used Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, with some success. But I’m not sure if I want to use it again. The discussion of her biography of Mao raised questions about the reliability of her earlier work — some implicit, some explicit — and I haven’t seen much to sway me one way or the other since then.

I am going to have to think about how I’m going to address the Mao question, too, but first and foremost I’d like to know if there’s anything out there which I could use with my students to address the basic questions of family, women, gender and life experience over the course of the 20th century?

I’ve read through this bibliography of Chinese womens’ history, and done some other looking around, but I really can’t find anything remotely comparable. I’m OK with using monographs or edited collections — it wouldn’t kill my students to wrestle with a little scholarship now and then — but I’m not finding anything that looks right.

Any thoughts?

  1. a bit more subtle than this, but perhaps not  ↩

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