Gang of Four is Gone

Yao Wenyuan, the last surviving member of the Gang of Four — the others were Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, and Zhang Chunqiao — has died (Xinhua report here).

A former propaganda official and Shanghai journalist, Yao wrote the article in 1966 that signalled the start of the Cultural Revolution. During the revolution, hundreds of thousands of people died, many of them committing suicide after being harassed by Mao’s Red Guards, the shock troops of the revolution.

A month after Mao’s death in 1976, the Gang of Four was arrested, marking the end of the Cultural Revolution. Yao was convicted of trying to gain power by persecuting officials and members of the public and spent 20 years in prison.

As for the others, Jiang reportedly committed suicide in jail in 1991, Wang died in 1992 and Zhang died in May last year.

As usual, this raises the question of the interpretation of the Mao legacy. I have yet to finish Chang/Halliday (honestly, I haven’t gotten past chapter three, because I didn’t take it with me over break) but I’ve been struggling with the question of how to handle it in the next iteration of my 20c course. If I assign it, I’m going to be spending the entire semester arguing with it. If I don’t, it’s the elephant in the living room….

Katrina Gulliver: Self-introduction

I have just realised that despite posting a couple of times here, I have not actually introduced myself properly to the Frog in a Well community! So belatedly, here goes: I am a PhD student at Cambridge, doing research on China and Southeast Asia. My topic has drifted somewhat, suffering the slings and arrows of new publications altering the state of the literature. Broadly, I address Western perceptions of ‘the East’, specifically I am using women’s writing, c.1880-1930. I also keep a blog (http://www.katrinagulliver.com/commentary.html).

Right now I am at the AHA in Philadelphia, if any other Frog in a Well contributors are about!!

Japan’s Elites, Update

Last summer, I responded to a request for scholarly opinion on the “leaders” of Japan from 1840-1920. Ms. Kim has now completed compiling responses and doing her own research and reports back her list (roughly in chronological order):

  • Abe Masahiro (1819-1857)
  • Ii Naosuke (1815-1860)
  • Kujo Hisatada (1798-1871)
  • Okubo Toshimichi (1830-1878)
  • Saigo Takamori (1828-1877)
  • Tokugawa Nariaki (1800-1860)
  • Yoshida Shoin (1830-1859)
  • Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901)
  • Ito Hirobumi (1841-1909)
  • Iwakura Tomomi (1825-1883)
  • Kido Takayoshi, also known as Koin (1833-1877)
  • Okuma Shigenobu (1838-1922)
  • Sakamoto Ryoma (1835-1867)
  • Shibusawa Eiichi (1840-1931)
  • Inoue Kaoru (1835-1915)
  • Kuroda Kiyotaka (1840-1900)
  • Matsukata Masayoshi (1835-1924)
  • Yamagata Aritomo (1838-1922)
  • Hara Takashi (1856-1921)
  • Katsura Taro (1847-1913)
  • Matsukata Masayoshi (1835-1924)

There’s a few names on there that aren’t on my list: Kujo Hisatada is a pretty good addition for the early period, where I was pretty stumped; Sakamoto Ryoma was left off my list because I was paying too much attention to the chronological boundaries, I think; Kuroda Kiyotaka doesn’t seem more important to me than Saigo Tsugumichi, or Mori Arinori, who were on my list, and the Meiji Emperor seems like a pretty serious omission.

Let’s face it: if we got through a survey of Japanese history and our students knew who all these people were, we’d be doing OK, I think. Of course, there’s no cultural figures here, etc….

Berry on Early Modern Information

I admit that I’m a great admirer of Berry, but this is going to be fun. My own thoughts about Early modern Japan as an intellectual renaissance are going to have to be tested against this scholarship.

The University of California Press is pleased to announce the publication of:

Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period

Mary Elizabeth Berry is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of _The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto_ (California, 1994) and _Hideyoshi_ (1982).

“In _Japan in Print_, Mary Elizabeth Berry crisply condenses a remarkable amount of primary research on difficult and little-known materials, and it interprets those materials in a highly original framework.”-Karen E. Wigen, author of _The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920_

A quiet revolution in knowledge separated the early modern period in Japan from all previous time. After 1600, self-appointed investigators used the model of the land and cartographic surveys of the newly unified state to observe and order subjects such as agronomy, medicine, gastronomy, commerce, travel, and entertainment. They subsequently circulated their findings through a variety of commercially printed texts: maps, gazetteers, family encyclopedias, urban directories, travel guides, official personnel rosters, and instruction manuals for everything from farming to lovemaking. In this original and gracefully written book, Mary Elizabeth Berry considers the social processes that drove the information explosion of the 1600s. Inviting readers to examine the contours and
meanings of this transformation, Berry provides a fascinating account of the conversion of the public from an object of state surveillance into a subject of self-knowledge.

Full information about the book, including the table of contents, is available online: http://go.ucpress.edu/Berry

The use of maps and visual materials in Culture of Civil War gives us some hints about the direction she’s likely going here. I love my job.

Why you could not be the Son of Heaven

Late last night I found myself watching TV, and there was the World’s Strongest Man competition, taped in Chengdu last October. Apparently the competition consists of very large men carrying very large things around and puffing a lot. As it was in China they added a special event, the “ding carry” I can’t find a picture of the one they used on the web, but they had a large bronze ding (the three-legged kind) and the contestants had to see how far they could carry it.

A man with no neck explained to the audience that a ding () is an ancient symbol of China. Actually, it is much more than that. It is one of the forms of bronze ritual vessels that were used to make sacrifices to the ancestors. Yu the Great made a set called the Nine Bronze Tripods which had the names of all the dangerous creatures in the world on them, and thus gave the owner, the Son of Heaven, the ability to control nature. They became a symbol of the authority of the Son of Heaven, and both the Shang and Zhou kings held on to them as symbols of their position. As the authority of the Zhou kings declined various feudal lords tried to get their mitts on them. On one occasion the Tripods ran away from an evil usurper (hey, they have legs.) When the First Emperor tried to drag them out of the Yellow River a dragon cut the rope and they fell back in, never to be recovered. Chiang Kai-shek put them on his currency.

One interesting aspect of this is that the weight of these ding were a topic of some importance in the Warring States period. There was a story (In the Zuo, I think. 20 minutes of searching did not find it) about one of the feudal rulers asking how much the Nine Tripods weighed and how hard it would be to move them. He was told they were too heavy for him to move. The answer, it turns out, is that a ding weighs 175 kg. And to be the Son of Heaven you need muscles like this.

Pudzoanow

This is Manusz Pudzoanow of Poland the eventual champion. He carried the ding 90 meters, and I think he could have gone further.

The other interesting thing, of course, was that the event was in China. Apparently the assimilation of China to the modern world of sport and spectacle is proceeding apace. If China had managed to get an event like this 15 years ago they would have held it in Beijing and lots of bigwigs would have turned up. Now it only rates Chengdu.

Wages

Just a nugget of information I thought I might throw out to our readers, all comments or reflections are welcome:

It seems that unskilled wage labourers in late Chosŏn Seoul were paid a real wage at a similar level to their contemporaries in London and Amsterdam (about 140-160kg of rice per month). The workers of Paris, Vienna and Istanbul, by contrast, were remunerated at about half of that level. Of course, if this (highly approximate) comparison of wages is at all accurate, the obvious question is why this was the case. Perhaps a shortage of labour in Chosŏn Seoul? Or a result of the fact that most labourers were employed by the state, where paternalistic, Confucian ideas of moral economy prevented it from squeezing workers too much?

This information comes from an article in the collection edited by Lee Young-hoon: 수량경제사로 다시 본 조선후기 [Re-examining Late Chosŏn through Quantitive Economic History]. The article, entitled 서울의 숙련 및 미수련 노동자의 임금, 1600-1909 [Wages of skilled and unskilled labourers in Seoul, 1600-1909], is by Pak I-t’aek. You can find the note on comparative wages on page 85.

Actually, this book as a whole is one that I cannot recommend highly enough for anyone who is interested in Korean economic history (although I suppose that you have to be the sort of historian – like me – who gets more excited by seeing lots of charts and tables than by reading about battles or revolutions). When it came out in autumn 2004 it seems to have generated quite a bit of interest in the Korean press. One article from Yonhap highlighted the fact that the book reveals that the Korean peninsula was already heavily deforested in the nineteenth century (“한반도 산림은 이미 19세기에 벌거숭이”). An interview with Lee Young-hoon in Chosun Ilbo, on the other hand, focused on his opinion that by the nineteenth century the Chosŏn dynasty was collapsing of its own accord (“19세기 朝鮮은 체력 다해 스스로 무너졌다”). All this attention probably shows just how important this book is to Korean historiography, but I think it’s just the beginning of a new wave of history writing of this sort.

새해 복 많이 받으세요!

Chinese Philology Meets Canadian Politics

This is not history-related per se, nor indeed more than a triviality, but I am spending a few weeks in Vancouver (now in the midst of the Canadian election) and was interested to see that the proper interpretation of a Chinese expression has become a minor election issue. To summarize, a candidate for the governing Liberal Party described the leader of the New Democratic Party as having a “boiled dog’s head smile” (煮熟狗頭般齜牙咧嘴). What exactly this means, and the degree to which it should be construed as offensive, have both become points of debate (see English-language coverage in the Globe & Mail [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051230/ELXNLAYT30/TPNational/Canada] and Chinese language coverage in the World Journal, a Taiwanese newspaper chain with a local BC branch [http://www.worldjournal.com/wj-va-news.php?nt_seq_id=1289053; http://www.worldjournal.com/wj-va-news.php?nt_seq_id=1289054]). It is interesting to note that neither the man who proferred this expression nor his target are Chinese, and so both had to invoke different (conflicting) Chinese authorities to defend their positions. As an additional tie-in, this comment was first reported on a blog, a fact that has not escaped Canadian election-related bloggers (http://bdoskoch.electionblog.ctv.ca/default.asp?item=123729). The larger issues – if there are any – can be debated by the readers of this blog, but I dare say this is one of the few times an expert could pontificate about the subtleties of Cantonese folk-sayings on a current events show. I will leave you with the thought of politico concerned, David Emerson:
“I really value many Chinese expressions because they’re very creative ways of articulating things.”

It’s not an institution if it doesn’t have rules….

Via World Press Review, an interesting account of undercurrents of opposition to changing the Imperial Household Law to allow female emperors or emperors descended through females. The great-grandson of Emperor Meiji wants to reconstitute several lines of descent that were separated from the Imperial House after WWII, instead of allowing women to occupy the throne.

民族日報事件と在日

先日12月17日、民族日報事件によって死刑に処せられたチョ・ヨンス氏の追悼に行ってきました。民族日報事件を簡単に説明しますと、この事件は韓国の5・16軍事クーデター直後の革新勢力に対する一斉検挙のなかで、民族日報社の幹部が軍事政権の「革命裁判部」により重刑に処せられた事件です。民族日報は1961年1月に創設され、進歩的な論調で人気を博していましたが、軍事政権によって「特殊犯罪処罰に関する特別法」を適用され、幹部三人が死刑判決を受け、そのうちチョ・ヨンス一人に死刑が執行されました。
この事件がなぜ在日に関係あるかと私が考えたかといえば、チョ・ヨンスは日本に長期間滞在しており、その際に私の知り合いと生活をともにしていたということがあります。そこで現在、日本の韓学同出身の人々が中心となり「民族日報連帯フォーラム」という組織が活動しております。私もそこに参加しているのですが、在日朝鮮人が韓国史の真相究明と民主化にどのように関わっているのか、それを具体的な活動を通して見ることができます。最近、在日朝鮮人史と朝鮮半島の歴史とのかかわりを掘り出す作業が以前よりも盛んになっていると思われますが、それもその一環として見ることができます。そして在日による主体的な現在進行形の活動としても非常に興味深いことだと思います。
現在、私自身、この事件と在日のかかわりについて整理ができていないため詳しいことはお伝えできませんが、このような歴史的な局面があり、それを知ることができた体験として重要だと考え、報告させていただきました。

Seasonal treat for Koreanists

It has been brought to my attention that historians of premodern Korea have a very special Christmas treat in the form of the annals of the Chosŏn Dynasty (Chosŏn Wangjo Sillok / 朝鮮王朝實錄) now available on the internet, in its entirety. This must be one of the largest ‘books’ in human history and it is now available online in both original hanmun and modern Korean translation. And it’s keyword searchable too.

What good is ritual?

Rites (li禮) are something that you talk about a lot when you teach Chinese history. Usually the word is translated as “ritual,” which is a pretty accurate translation but not one likely to inflame American students. For any right-thinking American “ritual” is always proceeded by the prefixes “dead” and “meaningless.” For most educated people in traditional China, especially the ru (Confucians, if you must) it was a tremendously important thing. Ritual was what the ancient kings used to bring order to the world, and it was what fathers used to mold their sons into good sons. Rulers used it to mold their ministers into proper officials, and officials used it to mold rulers into good rulers. Finagrette Confucius-The Secular as Sacred (p.9) uses the example of handshaking as a modern example. Handshaking and small talk are actually a fairly complex ritual performances that force others to behave in a civil fashion. Someone can refuse to shake your hand, but only at the expense of completely rejecting civility. Ritual properly performed gives you the power to make people behave themselves. A proper system of rituals is a social technology that creates and orderly society. (Law does the same thing, but it is less effective.)

Of course you need a good story to illustrate this, so here is one, from Nylan The Five “Confucian” Classics p.176 It is a story from Sima Qian about Liu Bang, the first Han emperor. He had been a village policeman, but in the chaos at then end of Qin he did well for himself and founded one of China’s best-known dynasties. At this point he is trying to turn his rabble of followers into an imperial court.

Liu Bang’s followers were given to drinking and brawling over their respective achievements. When in their cups, some would shout wildly and others would draw their swords and hack at the pillars [of the palace], causing the High Ancestor [that is, Liu Bang] distress over their behavior.

Shusun Tong, realizing that the emperor was becoming increasingly disgusted with the situation, persuaded the emperor [to take action]: ..”I beg to summon scholars from Lu, who can join with my disciples in drawing up court rituals.”
“Can you make them not to difficult?”
“The Five Emperors of antiquity all had different types of court music and dance: the Three Kings [of Xia, Shang, and Zhou] did not follow the same ritual….They did not merely copy their predecessors. I intend to pick a number of ancient rituals and some Qin ceremonies, to make a combination of these.”
“See what you can do,” replied the emperor. “But make it easy to learn! Keep in mind it must be the sort of thing I can perform.”

Shusun Tong then summoned some thirty-odd scholars from Lu [the home state of Confucius]…. With the more learned imperial advisors and his own disciples, numbering over a hundred men, he worked out the rituals. When they had practiced for more than a month, Shusun Tong felt that it was time for the emperor to come take a look…”I can do that all right!” exclaimed the emperor when he had watched them carry out the rituals, so he ordered all his officials to practice them so that they could be used in the New Year festivities.

In the seventh year of Han, at the completion of the Eternal Joy Palace, all the nobles and officials attended the New Year’s formal audience…During the ceremony, every single person, from the assembled nobles on down, trembled with awe and reverence. During the drinking which followed the formal audience,…no one dared to quarrel or misbehave in the least. At this, the High Ancestor announced, “Today, for the first time, I know how exalted a thing it is be an emperor. “

Drop the book and step away from the scholarship

Apparently Homeland Security is monitoring Interlibrary Loan. A UMass student was questioned for having ordered a copy of the Little Red Book. According to the story the fact that he had traveled overseas was also a tip-off. I sort of wonder where he went. Does any foreign travel count? Or do you have to go someplace specific?

I wish I could say that this type of thing surprised me, but given all the stuff that has happened in the last few years I am not. I -am- a bit surprised by the level of incompetence this shows. The Little Red Book? Not exactly how to build a dirty bomb or even single spark to start a prairie fire. Are they running computer checks on everyone who orders books by Mao, Marx, Clinton etc?

Via a Crooked Timber post on how Chinese people are using web sites to comment on Lu Xun’s In Memory of Ms. Liu Hezhen to comment on Dongzhou

danger + opportunity

This entry on pinyin.info looks at the misunderstanding of the construction of characters. This tendency – particularly among the writers of motivational/new age books it seems! – to interpret every hanzi character as imparting some kind of philosophical lesson is fascinating. I suppose it is part and parcel of the ‘Eastern Wisdom’ fetish, which also includes sanskrit tattoos.

History Carnival #22

History Carnival Button

Welcome to History Carnival #22, the final edition of 2005. I’m deeply grateful to Sharon Howard for starting this whole thing off eleven months ago, and take some pride in the only other person (besides herself, for the time being) to host this carnival twice. (oops. see comments)

In the past I’ve inflicted some odd arrangements on carnivals which I’ve hosted. This time I’ll try to be reasonably clear and straightforward, not least because I, like so many of you, am still in the middle of grading final exams and papers. Since we can all use some comic relief and light reading at this point…

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Hikokumin in Fukuoka

Asahi and Yomiuri newspapers both have reports on an October incident in a Fukuoka junior high school in which a teacher passed out copies of wartime “Red cards,” which called men up for the military draft, to students. Students had to mark the paper to indicate whether they would go or not go.

The teacher returned the card, and apparently left comments on those cards belonging to the nay-sayers to the effect that those students were 非国民 or that “Those who refuse on personal grounds are 非国民.” The word, hikokumin, is sometimes translated as “unpatriotic individual” but in fact was a much stronger term which implied that the person was a traitor. The 広辞苑 dictionary defines it as, “Someone who has not performed their duties as a citizen. A person who does actions which betrays the nation.”

It is a bit unclear what the point of the exercise was. Asahi says simply that the school was aiming to teach something about human rights (学校によると、教諭は人権学習に熱心という), while Yomiuri reports the school as saying that they simply wanted to point out that people would be called that at the time and was not intended as an insult to the students. (教諭は、戦争に行かなかったら、『非国民』と呼ばれた当時の状況を説明して令状を配った。生徒の人格を否定するつもりはなかったようだ)
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