Frog in a Well

This is a Japan/Manchukuo propaganda poster showing the harmony between the Chinese, Japanese, and Manchurians. I found it on the Hoover website and am using on my East Asian History syllabus for the Spring. (You need a nice Pan-Asian image for that.) I like the image because it is kids, which neatly sidesteps the question of why the Chinese and the Manchurian have abandoned their native loyalties. It’s also hard to envision trying a 6-year old as a war criminal.

The thing that struck me is that Chinese (the one on the right) is holding the old 5-Color flag. This was declared the flag of the Republic after the 1911 revolution. Sun Yat-sen was never happy about this, since he preferred the Shining Sun flag (the current flag of the R.O.C. on Taiwan.) He was turned down on the grounds that Shining Sun was too closely tied to his party and gave the impression that the Republic was a party-state (which is of course why Sun liked it.) In 1921 Sun’s Guangzhou government declared the Shining Sun flag the official flag of the Republic, and after the Northern Expedition this was accepted by everyone.¹

Or was it? The Japanese apparently did not. Did they never accept the Shining Sun flag as the symbol of China? Or did they drop this recognition after 1931 or something? Or was the 5-Color flag just a symbol of the Chinese race to them, and they still recognized the Shining Sun as the symbol of the Nanjing state? The imagery is actually sort of odd, since the 5 colors in the Five Color flag were originally held to represent the 5 nationalities of China (Han, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan and Hui.) Not many Tibetans in Manchukuo, so were the colors in the Manchukuo flag supposed to stand for something other than ethnicity? This site suggests that the four colors on the Manchuguo flag stood for red (bravery), blue (justice), white (purity) and black (determination), but it gives no references.

¹Above from Harrison The Making of the Republican Citizen

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!!

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 (鼎) 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.

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.

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.”