Over at my own blog Muninn I have posted an entry talking a bit about the portray of Japan and Korea in the “Hall of Asian Peoples” in New York’s Museum of natural history.
Korea: The Uniqueness
Over at my own blog Muninn I have posted an entry talking a bit about the portray of Japan and Korea in the “Hall of Asian Peoples” in New York’s Museum of natural history.
The Chairman is pleased
How is the cult of Mao doing? Well, this is a statue of the Great Helmsman at Yuhuashan in Nanjing. It is part of a rather temporary-looking exhibit on his life under the revolutionary memorial. The exhibit itself is not much of a plug for his continued importance. There is a barker outside urging you to come in, and the signs all emphasize that it’s free, unlike special areas at a lot of Chinese monuments. There are a bunch of pictures and text and stuff like that and this statue. As you can see, the Chairman is smoking, as he often was. He has a real cigarette in his hand and on the table in front of him are a bunch more, which I think are offerings. They are all different brands, and there is a break in the chain that surrounds that statue so you can go up and offer him one, not that I saw anyone do that. So, Chinese people may no longer be willing to offer their red, red hearts to Chairman Mao, but some of them will at least bum him a smoke.
… and then they came for Taekwondo
Another sign of Korea’s increasing sense of insecurity in the face of rapidly growing Chinese economic and political power, or another sign of China’s aggressive attitude toward Korean cultural heritage, designed to assert cultural hegemony and keep its ethnic minorities in check? This time the Chinese have apparently got their sights on Taekwondo:
Concern is rising among Korean officials that China might try to assert taekwondo as its own homegrown sport.
Ko Eui-min, chairman of the World Taekwondo Federation Technical Committee, said, “China is doubted to have been adopting its Northeast Asia Project in taekwondo.”
Northeast Asia Project is an attempt to distort ancient Korean history in the northeastern territory of what is now China, including the Koguryo Kingdom (37 B.C.-A.D. 668) and the Palhae Kingdom (698-926).
“I was really upset to hear that the broadcaster at Changping Stadium in Beijing said taekwondo is a Chinese martial art, during the 2007 World Taekwondo Federation (WTF) Championships,” he said.
On the first day of the biennial competition, he introduced taekwondo, saying, “Taekwondo originated from Korea, combining Japanese and Chinese martial arts.”
The paradox is that Taekwondo is both a highly nationalistic subject in South Korea and perhaps Korea’s most well-recognised international cultural export. Can something like this be globalised and at the same time so firmly embedded in nationalistic discourse? The next paragraph in the above-linked article actually brought a wry smile to my face (my emphasis):
“I feel really sorry that we have not tried to protect taekwondo while China is preparing for the event. Although many renovations have been under way inside the taekwondo governing body after new leaders like the president and general secretary took office, we still have a lot of things to do,” said the 68-year-old taekwondo master, who resides in Germany.
It is a bit unfortunate that this blog hasn’t covered the whole Koguryŏ history controversy in much greater detail. Fortunately though, the subject has produced plenty of good English-language commentary over the last six months or so. The stand out examples are Andrei Lankov’s piece at Japan Focus; Yonson Ahn’s article at History News Network; Andrew Leonard’s introduction at Salon.com; and Choe Sang-hun in the International Herald Tribune. If you still want some more, I’ve managed to collect a variety of related internet resources in my del.icio.us links tagged Koguryŏ.
Guards! Guards!
Security guard at Shanghai Public library (a very nice lady)
One thing I’ve been noticing a lot (I’m in Shanghai) is that China may be the best-guarded society in the world. There are guards everywhere. By guards I mean people in uniform who don’t seem to have much to do. At the top you have people who guard Chairman Mao, i.e. real military types. Then regular cops. Then those traffic police in grubby yellow vests whose work seems to be mostly harassing bike riders. Then you have huge, unending masses of security guards.1 Guards at libraries and archives. Guards at the gate to any sort of courtyard or parking area who sit in a little glass box and wave at you as you go by. Guards at stores and shopping centers and hotels. People who are wearing guard-type uniforms, but it is not really clear what they are guarding. The lower down you go the more ill-fitting the uniform seems to be, and the less likely it seems that the person is going to stop anybody from doing anything.
So why are they all there? Are they really afraid somebody is going to walk out of the library with a book? Some are universal and need little explanation. All modern states seem to want cops. And they all seem to want military guys at the appropriate places. The guy in the little box is a figurative (and possibly literal) descendant of the guards at the entrance to the compound of a work unit (单位). They used to be there to mark out the territory of the unit and to make you get off your bike as you came in the gate as a sign of respect. (Respect for what I’m not sure. Mostly the guards it seemed.) Today China does not have a system of space that is quite as delimited as that, but guards are still around. Why? Well part of it is no doubt that it is cheap to hire people to do stuff like this, and so you don’t need much of a reason. In more developed countries a human security guard is a pretty huge investment. In China it is cheap, especially if they have no special training, which seems to often be the case. They also do serve in a way to delimit space just like the old danwei guards did. There is an awful lot of disorder (乱) in China. If you are not careful street hawkers, homeless people and counter-revolutionary elements may set up shop in “your” space. So any government office or private entity that can afford it will hire some guards. It is sort of interesting to figure out what rules they are enforcing. As an American I am used to fairly distinct lines between public and private property, and clear rules about what I can and can’t do. Here of course things are different, and guards enforce whatever rules seem appropriate and in very different ways to different people. I can take a nap on a bench. A beggar can’t. This space that looks public actually belongs to us (look, we are guarding it.) All of them seem to be enforcing a certain amount of civility on the people who need it enforced on them. Best of all, from the state’s point of view most of them do it without being paid by the state. Zwia Lipkin wrote about some of these issues in the Nationalist period.
All of these security guards are completely unarmed. I don’t want to be all American and insist that you can’t be a guard without a gun, but at least a billy club would be something. ↩
Analogy Alert: Iraq/Korea
White House spokesman Tony Snow said Bush would like to see a U.S. role in Iraq ultimately similar to that in South Korea.
“The Korean model is one in which the United States provides a security presence, but you’ve had the development of a successful democracy in South Korea over a period of years, and, therefore, the United States is there as a force of stability,” Snow told reporters.
Missing from much of the current discussion is talk about the success of democracy in Iraq, officials say, or even of the passage of reconciliation measures that Mr. Bush said in January that the troop increase would allow to take place. In interviews, many senior administration and military officials said they now doubted that those political gains, even if achieved, would significantly reduce the violence.
The officials cautioned that no firm plans have emerged from the discussions. But they said the proposals being developed envision a far smaller but long-term American presence, centering on three or four large bases around Iraq. Mr. Bush has told recent visitors to the White House that he was seeking a model similar to the American presence in South Korea.
Discuss.
We get mail
Paul Chiasson’s contribution to Menzies’ thesis has been getting press again. Though it’s been pretty thoroughly rejected by knowledgable academics — that’s studied and debunked, for those of you who don’t understand the academic process —
What is hard to understand is why, if there are what look like grave mounds on Cape Dauphin, they haven’t been excavated, and any human remains subjected to mitochondrial DNA analysis. Results of this kind of scientific investigation would then take over from mud-slinging on the Internet, such as the accusation that Library and Archives Canada, in cataloguing this book as history rather than fiction, is merely advancing “a publisher’s plans to deceive the public” (maritimeasia.ws/topic/1421bunkum.html).
I got an email earlier today following up on this:
From: Andrew Sark
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2007 12:11 pm
To: Jonathan Dresner
Subject: Chinese in Cape BretonDear Mr. Dresner,
Greetings from the North. I am Andrew Sark of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. I have recently come across your response to an article on the Internet “http://www.froginawell.net/china/2006/05/satire-self-parody-and-court-jesters/” I would like to share information regarding this site and possibly contribute to your University and studies with a co-authored study on the area.
I am a Mi’kmaq man, father of one son, adventurer and explorer. The Cape Dauphin area has always offered inspiration and awe, mystery and a sense of quest. I have lead many groups of people into the cave area, known to the Mi’kmaq as Kluscap’s Caves.
The notion that Chinese were here is usually disputed by local Mi’kmaq but with no academic proof. I would like to explore the ruins, investigate from every angle and offer a more precise and non-bias interpretation of the area.
If you are interested in helping me, please forward any information to my email including pictures of the area.
Thanks,
Andrew Sark
Cape Breton, NS-C
Mr. Sark appears to be an educator with the Cape Breton University Integrative Science Program, “which bring[s] together conventional western science knowledge and understandings from the holistic world views of Aboriginal peoples, especially the Mi’kmaq First Nations of Atlantic Canada,” particularly the Sunflower project. Mr. Sark seems to be supportive of the Chiasson/Menzies thesis, at least in the abstract, which is kind of interesting: he’s a Mi’kmaq himself, and part of a project trying to integrate conventional and indigenous ideas about ecology and investigative science, but he seems to be very doubtful about the Mi’kmaq rejection of the thesis. Mr. Sark also doesn’t seem to have read my post too closely, because what it contains is David Goodman’s viciously funny and effective review of Chiasson’s book from a full year ago.
It seems odd that there’s been nothing new in a whole year. Maybe this Menzies thing is dying down after all? Would excavations and DNA testing actually put this to rest, or would the absence of evidence be explained away by its partisans? Should we be wasting energy actually studying this stuff? (No comment on whether blogging it is also a waste of time: as long as newspapers keep printing it, we’ll have to keep reminding people of how ill-founded the whole discussion is).
Well, it’s not my field, but anyone who really, really wants to “contribute to your University and studies with a co-authored study” is welcome to contact Mr. Sark.
A rose by any other name
As many of our readers already know, the Taiwanese government has re-named the Chiang Kai-shek memorial in Taibei, now known as the Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall. This is actually sort of interesting, as lots of states have to deal with the “problem” of old historical monuments. This is a particularly big problem for the CKS memorial, as it is HUGE and right in the middle of town. I used to walk across it every day to change buses and stopped in to see the movie about his life about 50 times. The movie was unimpressive, but the AC in the place would lower your core temperature to the point you could walk a mile in the Taibei summer without breaking a sweat. Although there have been some protests about the renaming, the bigger problem is the symbolism. The tiles are all blue, as a symbol of the Nationalist Chinese flag. Will they be painted green? Also, the dimensions of the building are symbolic.
The square shape of the building represents the spirit of the mean and of rectitude (chung-cheng which is also Chiang Kai-shek’s name); the three-tiered staircase symbolizes the Three Principles of the People; the two-tiered eight-cornered roof eaves, built in the shape of the character jen (man) and coming together at the pao-ting converge with the sky, symbolizing revered Mr. Chang’s belief that “Heaven and Man are One”1)
Of course one could come up with Taiwanese justifications for these dimensions, which is probably what was done in the first place. It seems, however, that this will be yet another chapter in the fight over the past. Chiang actually did quite well for himself. Unlike Sun Yat-sen, Chiang’s actually called attention to his Christianity, which was not allowed in the case of Sun. Mao had to suffer the indignity of having other revolutionaries honored in what was orginally his space. Chiang’s statue is still all by itself, and its hard to see what they can do with it.
Of course Chiang has had to suffer the ultimate indignity. The museum of his life has been replaced by an exibit on the Taiwanese democracy movement, whose chief enemy was of course Chiang. If they keep changing memorials like this Taibei will become St. Petersburg.
Frederic Wakeman “Funerary Rites: The Remains of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung” Representations 10 (Spring 1985 ↩
Reflecting on a semester
We’ve been talking about our syllabi for a while here at the Frogs, but we haven’t done a lot of post-semester commentary. I had two Asia courses this semester: Early Japan and Problems and Issues of Contemporary China.
The China course went like gangbusters, and the books worked surprisingly well as a set. The Hessler was a solid starter, and I think I’m going to use it as my closer next time I teach the 20c China course. I followed it up with Cohen’s historiography, which was risky: only one of the five students in the class had anything like a serious historical background. Still, the theoretical perspectives he was describing are still very much alive, and it gave us a structure to talk about a lot of what came after. Qian Qichen’s diplomatic memoir was a nice corrective — focusing on strengths, and the Chinese perspective on the world — and the pre/post-9/11 talks transcribed in the appendices are great texts in themselves: I highly recommend them for anyone teaching a world politics or recent China course. My only concern is that it felt a little light. But if there had been more students, then the student-led reading/discussion section would have been denser. Anyway, aside from one supplemental reference which got underused, if I get to teach this course again, I’m keeping everything. I think it would work pretty well for undergrads, too.
The Early Japan course was a bit more mixed. I’m still trying to do too much, it seems: I need to spend more time on skills in the surveys, especially when I don’t have a core text. Berry’s Culture of Civil War in Kyoto was a great “slice of life” text, and actually sparked some discussion at a point in the semester when interest has often flagged. I can’t in good conscience give up the Genji and Heike readings, but I think I’m going to have to be more selective about the rest of the readings. I really want to add at least one good monograph on an earlier period, to parallel Berry. I’m thinking about Farris or Friday, and about adding student research and presentations to the document-based analysis assignments.
I need to look ahead now. I’ll be teaching my Qing course in the Fall, and so far it’s looking like a small crowd: perfect for the kind of scholarship I’m assigning. I want to work in a stronger research component than I had last time, though, to give students more of a chance to stretch their legs, so to speak.
Two talks this week
A couple of very interesting talks coming up at short notice for anyone who happens to be around in LA or Seoul in the next couple of days (or perhaps both if you’re the jetsetting type).
Tomorrow fellow frog blogger Pak Noja (Vladimir Tikhonov) will be giving a lecture at the Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch:
Politics of Conscription: Militarized Statehood in Postcolonial Korea – Dr. Vladimir Tikhonov
Tuesday May 22, 2007, 7:30 pm
2nd Floor, Somerset Palace, Seoul
Meanwhile, on Wednesday afternoon, Jeong-il Lee will be giving a talk about Kija in late Chosŏn Korea along with another talk about Korean memories of Ming China at the UCLA Asia Institute:
“Kija with Qizi: Re-packing Antiquity and Civilization in Late Choson Korea” – Jeong-Il Lee
Wednesday May 23, 3:30-5:30 pm
10367 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles
US Consular Report on Events in Taiwan after 2.28
Though I haven’t read much on the events surrounding the 2.28 violence in Taiwan in 1947, it generated a lot of paperwork for the state department which I am coming across as I look through the microfilms of their documents from that year.
For those who might be interested in reading about the event, from the perspective of a US diplomat at the time, I have uploaded a memorandum from April, 1947 written by Vice Consul George H. Kerr summarizing the events before, during and in the weeks after 2.28. Kerr later published a book about the event, called Formosa Betrayed, but this shorter background report was written much closer to the events at hand.
You can download a copy of the report “Memorandum for the Ambassador on the Situation in Taiwan” in the Frog in a Well Library.
Leni Riefenstahl meets Busby Berkeley
Eugenia Lean’s new book is very interesting. It is a study of Shi Jianqiao’s 1935 assassination of Sun Chuanfang, the former warlord who had killed her father (also a warlord). The case became a sensation and makes a fine study because it pushed so many Chinese buttons at the time and pushes so many scholarly ones now. Shi was carrying out an act of filial vengeance despite the fact that she was female. (She was also quite media-savvy and fully aware of her own agency and how the press would shape it.) Was she doing this out of a traditional sense of filiality? Out of a desire to rid China of (ex) warlords? Out of desire for fame? Was Sun really all that bad a person? Was Shi seeking justice or publicity? Lean looks at all these questions as a way of getting at the rise of “public sympathy” in what she calls the High Republic.
After the assassination Shi became a media celebrity, and all sorts of versions of her story came out. Most interesting to me is the spoken-language play. As Lean points out, spoken-language drama, basically western-style plays, were very much a minority taste.. Intellectuals went to them, the masses were inclined to films or Chinese opera. This case seems to have been different, and a number of stage plays were produced, including All About Sun Chuanfang, which ran in Shanghai in 1935.
One of the problems with doing history of theater is that it is hard to find data on what actually happened onstage. Here there are large newspaper ads, and we can get at least some idea what the production was like. Apparently spoken-word drama was most popular when it could be tied to current events, and in this case it was tied the popularity of militarism in the Republic. The ad emphasizes that the play dispenses with the boring first act and instead opens with a “grand military spectacle, with more than 100 martial actors on stage at the same time.” The play also has “absolutely new and complete military attire, never before seen Russian-style troop movements, heart-stopping cannons, live horses that ascend the stage, and magnificent dance productions, both glamorous and sexy.”1 Lean makes all sorts of interesting points about this, but I was struck by the reportage element. People in Shanghai seem to have been eager to see what the warlord era had been like for those who had not been living in Shanghai. Given that the city had not really seen much fighting it must have been disconcerting to realize that one had just live through the era of “warlordism” and had no idea what a warlord army was or what it was like to see one in action. Less one end up feeling like a rootless cosmopolitan, one should hie themselves to the theater and see what was happening in the real China.
Lean, p. 68 ↩
United States Wartime Propaganda in China
While looking through 1945-50 US State Department documents—the same collection where I came accross Zhu De’s request for a $20 million US loan to buy off puppet soldiers-I came across over 150 pages of China Regional Directives from the Office of War Information (OWI) from early December, 1944 through mid-September 1945.
As far as I can make out these were roughly weekly sets of guidelines sent out to the various relevant agencies (these were in the possession of the US State Department) on what propaganda approach was to be taken. I don’t know much about the OWI but I think these guidelines might have been primarily for US radio broadcasts.
I was personally interested in some of these because of the many references to and warnings against Chinese collaboration. However, it struck me that this little collection would make a wonderful little primary source packet for undergraduates or even high school students studying history. There is lots of fun and interesting material in here and a lot of interesting questions that one might ask as you analyze the contents and the documents themselves.
I scanned-to-PDF the whole collection I found and uploaded it to the Frog in a Well Library where you can download the whole 37MB PDF file.
Many of the documents seem to be coming from or addressed to “Lilienthal, SX” which I think is probably Philip E. Lilienthal (1914-1984) who was the Chief of the Chinese Division for the US OWI. According to his obituary, Lilienthal also served as editor of Pacific Affairs and the Far Eastern Survey and was also important in building the Asia book selection of the University of California Press.1
The other name commonly seen in these documents is “Fairbank, WA” who I misidentified as John K. Fairbank. C. W. Hayford identifies this as Wilma Fairbank (see comments below).
Some of the guidelines suggested are quite revealing, many of them just great strategic sense while others were a mix of good sense and the bizarre. A few selections below the fold:
Continue reading →
Irwin Scheiner “Obituary: Philip E. Lilienthal (1914-1984) The Journal of Asian Studies 43:3 (May, 1984) 616-617. ↩
Married couples
2 married couples, from China Digital Times
As both Mother’s Day and her birthday are coming up, I thought I would post something romantic for my wife. GTF.
In honor of finals
I was going through some old papers last month and came across a collection of student exam bloopers and exclamations (you’ll see) from what was — I’m pretty sure — a 20th century Japan course I taught back in the 90s. Since the statute of limitations on embarassment must have run out by now, I present them to you for pure entertainment.
- ALL IS HAZE! (in the corner of the first page)
- Pretty intense exam (on cover)
- AAARGH!! MUST GRADUATE! AND FAST! (at the end of a very short essay)
- (And now a new party, perhaps, will rise from the Underbelly of Satan)
- They were protected during the Cold War from nuclear invasion.
- Japan after WWII was in rubles
- I hope these are enough … if I discuss all of these it will take forever.
- In a 1984 public opinion poll, Yoshida Shoin was overwhelmingly declared the greatest Japanese figure of the 20th century
- Argh (at the end of an essay apparently cut short by time)
- (title of essay): Chia Economy
- The period following the war was a time of double-digit growth in the Japanese economy. As I am uncertain of which war exactly, I will discuss factors common to the period after WWI and WWII. I believe WWI was the period of double-digit growth.
- Why couldn’t you have put on some of the 75 IDs I knew?