Frog in a Well

An advertisement from the 20’s or 30’s, reprinted in上海广告. 上海：上海画报出版社, 1995.

This ad is for Golden Arrow cigarettes, and it announces a special contest. If you collect 72 of the trading cards in the packs you can trade them in for one of the cool modern commodities on the lower left: a cigarette case, a “stylish” raincoat, a watch, or a suitcase (perfect for your next train trip.) For 72 regular cards and one special card you can get a gold cigarette case, a radio, a pair of gold rings, or your own rickshaw. One assumes the smoker is going to hire someone to pull the thing for them, rather than going into business themselves.

The thing that really surprises me is that the cards all have pictures of Confucians. I realize that Confucius and co. had a much more varied history in the 20th century than one would think from reading May 4th polemics, but still the juxtaposition between the Big C and this cornucopia of commercial modernity is a little jarring for me. The students found it that way too, which is good, I guess, in that they have reached the point of not being able to explain the same things I can’t explain. Plus they are very forgiving of my being able to point things out but not explain them.

I seem to be blogging a lot about teaching of late, and this is something I used in class last night. Both I and the textbook (Schoppa) talk a lot about creating modernity and modern identities and such. Most of this focuses on state attempts to reform people, or at least the attempts of intellectuals. Like a lot of other people I also like to get away, when I can, from the political/revolutionary narrative, which is always hard to do in part because everything in 20th century China ends up getting reflected through the revolution. Unfortunately we (meaning I) are still at the stage of pointing at things that are outside the revolutionary narrative but not being able to name them.

Another neat thing from Tales of Old China. They have a whole section of French Images, which mostly seem to be postcards and newspaper clippings from somewhere that they have scanned in. These can be quite frustrating, since they are undated and unless there is a caption it is often not at all clear what they are. It is doubly annoying since so many of them are good pictures. The standard Chinese method of photography at this point seems to have been collect a bunch of people (The Whampoa cadets, for example) line them up in front of a building and then move the camera back far enough to get the entire building in and reduce the people to dots. The French had a very different aesthetic that led to better pictures.

Here is one of them. It shows Yuan Shikai in what the caption says is a peasant’s outfit, although to me he looks more like a Daoist recluse. I think the caption is saying that the picture was taken while he was in disgrace, which would make it just before 1911. It’s a nice shot because while there are lots of pictures out there of Yuan as a general, there are very few that use him to show the changing ways the elite (and emperors) could present themselves. When I show this one to students they (well, some of them) immediately think of all the pictures I had shown them from Hal Kahn’s Monarchy in the Emperor’s Eyes, which showed Qianlong as a Manchu warrior, poet, Buddhist, Daoist, and martial arts-master.

Simon World’s HK Dave has a nice discussion of recent Chinese suicide statistics.

The Independent of Britain ran a story on the high suicide rate in China – 250,000 people killed themselves last year; according to the article they were victims of the country’s fast changing society. Unfortunately, numbers on that scale look shocking to anyone not from China, including the article’s author. You would need to look at the rate per 100,000, which is the measure adopted by most countries globally. There you discover that China is slightly lower than the global norm of 25 per 100,000 as provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2000. However, that rate is certainly increasing if you compare it to the rate of China in 1999 of 13.0 for men and 14.8 for women, a worrying trend.

The first chart here suggests that 1999 might have been something of a trough, in statistical terms, so that the long-term rates are still open to question, but the second one suggests that suicide is the leading cause of death for all Chinese, which is astounding.

For homework, here’s the detailed country reports (PDFs, but small) for the US (surprisingly stable over the last half century), Japan (huge peak in older males since the Bubble burst), and China mainland, 1987-99 (almost zero gender differential) and HK.