Frog in a Well

China/Diplomacy/English/General/Japan/War

Chinese Expansionism v. Chinese Expansion

Posted on September 8, 2005 by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

Andrew Meyer takes an interview with Lee Kuan Yew and turns it into a short (considering the subject matter) but deep meditation on the history of China and “China,” the process of Chinese expansion and integration through trade and conquest. He concludes that “a ‘deep historical’ perspective makes Chinese aggression a less pressing long-term concern for global peace and stability than internicine strife within China itself.”

Though internal division and dissension are very important, I’m not sure whether I agree that, from an outsider perspective, they are more important than China’s rising nationalism and power. In fact, I think it’s entirely possible that internal dissension could drive external aggressiveness (Wag the Dog, anyone?), that nationalism could exacerbate internal tensions by narrowing the definition of full citizenship, and that external adventurism could exhaust the state’s ability to deliver benefits resulting in a loss of legitimacy. Possibly all at once.

China/General

For this you need an expert?

Posted on September 7, 2005 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

[via Simon World] An expert has outlined the six most significant problems facing China, which is to say, facing China’s government:

Demographics
Energy and Raw Resource Consumption
Ecological deterioration
Urbanization
Regional Gaps and Rural Economics
Sustainable Development and Power

This is an interesting, if entirely unsurprising, list, because it focuses on what the government can and should do for the Chinese people, but leaves out the three most significant challenges to the government itself:

Ethnic tensions and national identity
Political liberalization, aka democratization
Information access and control, aka censorship
Update: regarding the second and third above, see this

In answer to the above six problems, the government has offered, in rather stereotypical Chinese fashion, a 45-year plan with a slogan: “Three Zero Growths,” meaning stabilization of population, energy and resource use, and environmental decay. There’s some positive aspects, including education and tech sector growth, life expectancy increases, and “wealth creation” though all of those are processes that will occur pretty naturally, if the government doesn’t interfere with them, so that’s not the ambitious aspect of this plan. The continued committment of the Chinese government to mass social and economic engineering (and to retention of its near-absolute authority) is perhaps the most significant thing this tells us.

China/General

If you go down in the flood it's gonna be your fault*

Posted on September 3, 2005 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Watching the coverage of the New Orleans flood I was reminded of the 1998 Yangtze floods, and it occurred to me that this is yet another example of how China is becoming a liberal (or maybe Confucian) nation state. In the Yangtze floods the state made a big deal about the work done by the PLA to help people. Although I can’t find them now, there were pictures of PLA soldiers locking arms to hold back the floodwaters with their bodies. From this point of view, the flood was a godsend to the state, as it gave them yet another chance to show how deeply they were concerned with the well-being of the people. On top of that, the PLA got into the act, Maoist-style enthusiasm was in, and no matter what the state did the problem was sure to get better.

The New Orleans floods are an example of state incompetence, of course, but also of how deep the new libertarian, post-liberal state has gone in the U.S. Yes, there has been outrage from the likes of Kevin Drum about the new dispensation, but the people who think the U.S. government should leave things like disaster relief to private charities have won pretty much all the elections in my lifetime. (Yes, Dems win on occasion, but only those who look as conservative as possible.) 9/11 was an example of something that was able, for a while, to pull together an atomized society, but apparently the Big Easy is not. I suspect that this will become even more apparent as reconstruction starts. The current American administration would of course find any sort of technocratic, state-led role in reconstruction ideologically unpalatable, but most imaginable American governments would find it hard to win support (and money) for a visionary plan to rebuild a city full of music and black people.
I assume that were a historic Chinese city to be wiped out there would be a strong, state-led effort to rebuild it just like before only better, in part because (Suzhou, Xian, whatever) is a sacred symbol of the national culture and in part because the state has a strong desire to be seen as leading the nation into the future, and to be seen as competent technocrats. The U.S. is looking very post-national right now.

* Either a line from Bob Dylan’s Crash on the Levee, or advice to flood victims from the director of FEMA. Take your pick.

General/Japan/Japanese

こんにちは！

Posted on August 30, 2005 by kosho / 2 Comments

みなさん、こんにちは。
興正（Kosho）といいます。
これからよろしくお願いします。
東京都立大学で文化人類学(cultural anthropology)を勉強しています。
今は、ソウル大学のLanguage Instituteで韓国語を勉強しています。
関心は、韓国現代史（特に70年代のパクチョンヒ政権）と在日朝鮮人の関係です。
オーラルヒストリーをもとに、dissertationを書きたいと思っています。
同時に、日本のナショナリズムや植民地研究にも興味がありますので、ぜひ皆さんの鋭い意見を聞きたいと思っています。
英語を使うときは、僕はnative speakerではないので、すこしおかしな表現になることがあるかもしれませんが、お許しください。
一週間前に、済州島４.３事件を勉強するキャンプに行ってきました。主催者のなかには、パクチョンヒ政権のときに逮捕され、19年間獄中にいた徐勝先生もいました。韓国民主化闘争の英雄だけに、いろいろと話を聞かせてもらいたいといつも思っているのですが、マイペースな方なのでなかなか難しいです（笑）。
とにかく、このようなすばらしいコミュニティーに参加できて幸せです。よろしくおねがいします。

China/General

What's Under Tiananmen?

Posted on August 28, 2005 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

A huge underground complex, according to this site which a student sent me (He’s working on an urban history project). Is this common knowledge among those who’ve been in Beijing, and what, if anything, does it mean?

China-Japan/Japan/Korea-Japan/Nationalism/Politics/Religion/Translation/US-Japan/War

Yasukuni and Japanese Flags

Posted on August 27, 2005 by Nick Kapur / 5 Comments

Rod Wilson and I visited Yasukuni on August 15 to check out the right-wing festivities, which was a pretty…interesting…experience. It was everything you’d expect with the ridiculously nationalistic speeches all day, right-wingers wearing all manner of Japanese military uniforms, jack-booted young wannabe fascists with shaved heads, and the black noise vans everywhere. There was even a choir of elementary school children singing gunka. Rod in particular got some nice photographs because he also went in the morning when the crowds were the largest. Unfortunately we both missed the speech by Ishihara Shintaro, but we did see a speech by an old woman who kept talking about the need to remember the sacrifices of Japanese soldiers and the “onshirazu” of Japanese today. At the climax of the speech, she dramatically revealed that that she wasn’t Japanese as we had thought all along but actually a native Taiwanese, and then wrapped up with an anecdote about how kind and gentlemanly the Japanese soldiers were to her as a young girl in wartime Taiwan, before concluding with a thundering declaration in English saying “Americans go home! Stay out of Japan! Not your Business!” to the roar of the enthralled crowd. Konrad would doubtlessly have enjoyed the chance to hear the speech – apparently some World War II collaborators are alive, well, and still collaborating.

On a related note, Rod and I were pondering how to refer in Japanese to the flag with the radiating rays of sun used by the Japanese navy during the war. We’d heard it referred to in English variously as the “naval ensign” or the more evocative “sunburst flag”, but we weren’t sure about what it’s called in Japanese. We both sort of half-remembered the term “Nisshouki” (日章旗), but it turns out that that is just the official name of the regular Japanese flag more commonly known as the “hinomaru” (日乃丸). Well, we did a little research and found out that the “sunburst” flag is called the “Kyojitsuki” (旭日旗) in Japanese, which makes sense. But the question still remains, what are the best terms to use to distinguish these two flags in English? The best translation for 旭日旗 would probably be “rising sun flag”, but that is problematic because the regular flag is commonly called the “rising sun flag” in English publications and even on EDICT, leaving only “naval ensign” or “sunburst flag” for the Kyojitsuki. Perhaps it would be better to come up with a more accurate translation of hinomaru/nisshouki? “Sun circle flag” perhaps? “Sun disc flag”? “Sun emblem flag”?

China/Diaspora/General/Identity

Viewing Africa from Asia

Posted on August 26, 2005 by Alan Baumler / 4 Comments

(This is a comment on Tim Burke’s syllabus on Images of Africa cross-posted from his blog. I am putting it up here to see if anyone has any suggestions on images of Africa in East Asia)

I’m not sure what literature there would be on Indian views of Africa, (Bend in the River comes to mind) because they were never articulated as part of a larger imperial project. You need an imperial state for archives and to encourage people to think of what they are doing as “changing Africa.” I’m pretty sure there were a lot of Indians in East Africa, and that they had at least an economic impact.

As for East Asia (the place I know best) there is some stuff that probably would not matter. Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter has a character who obsesses about Africa, but that is just using Africa as a conveniently blank Other. There is a lot of that. I can’t see why it would matter much to African history. I assume you know Phillip Snow’s The Star Raft, which has some stuff on Chinese attitudes towards Africa in the context of development aid, where it would actually matter. I would have to think that some of the Africans who studied in China or Russia must have written memoirs or something by now.

Another topic you might want to consider is the relationship between the imperial and popular and post ’45 aid-organization discourses and the academic discourse you are asking them to join. Donald Lopez did a very interesting book called Prisoners of Shangri-la on basically that topic but dealing with Tibet. I liked the book a lot because he traced the development of the popular discourse very well (Tibet has a much more unitary image than Africa) but also because he was pretty clear that this popular discourse and the academic one were closely related. Of course there is a lot of stuff on how modern Asian studies is connected to the imperial projects.

China/General

Eat and run

Posted on August 25, 2005 by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

Chinese food culture

There is a current series on Amsterdam on Slate where Seth Stevenson suggests that the Dutch are almost never seen walking and eating. Americans, of course do it all the time, and of course we also drive and eat. This got me to thinking about Chinese food culture and wondering if I had been behaving badly. In China and especially in Taiwan there is of course a lot of street food, and I of course have eaten a lot of it. One of the things I don’t remember seeing very often is someone eating and walking. People buying 生煎包子 and taking them home in plastic bags I remember. I can recall at least a few people getting 包子 for breakfast and parking themselves on the street right near the place and eating, but that was rare. (I did it all the time, so I am pretty sure on this one.) Lots of places seemed to have little tables for quick eating, whereas for Americans they might not be needed. Eating breakfast at your desk at work seemed more common, or at least more obvious.

None of this is all that surprising, of course. Watson’s Golden Arches East had some stuff on how the all-powerful arches had failed to change the cultures of eating food in East Asia. I am not surprised to see that American food culture is not universal. What I would like to know is.

1. Is my impression that Chinese don’t eat on the move correct? I was not really paying attention. I’m not really talking about things like lunchboxes, but the American style of eating a hotdog while walking down the street. (Is ice cream an exception? I eat a lot of ice cream while walking, but don’t remember others doing it.)
2. If it is less common, where does it happen? Is this culture changing, and if so how?

Academia/English/Japan/明治/江戸

Early Modern Japan On-Line

Posted on August 24, 2005 by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

Philip Brown has announced that Early Modern Japan, the journal of the Early Modern Japan Network will become an on-line publication. Back issues are already available as PDFs through the EMJ webpage, and the prospect of reaching a larger audience with lower costs is too good to pass up.

In other Early Modern News, most of us in the field have probably already heard about the death of Edo scholar extraordinaire Donald Shively. [thanks to my translator friend for the NYTimes obit; it’s good that he’s getting wider notice] My library is replete with his work, and yours should be, too. Our sympathies to his family.

China/Economics/General/Post-Mao/Republican

Nourish the people with cheap diesel

Posted on August 19, 2005 by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

In the post below Jonathan asked how a Confucian China could really be in the future. One possible bit of data comes from this article (From Brad DeLong). NYT reports that there are gas shortages in Southeast China because refineries are not willing to process crude at current low (state-set) prices. I suspect that things are actually more complex than that, but what I find interesting is that people are apparently hording gas in expectation that prices will go up. In other words they think that the state will adopt a market solution. If China had a more “Confucian” government they might take a more corporatist approach, and keep prices low for the benefit of consumers and farmers or whatever. (I’m an American, so the idea of cheap gas as a civil right is familiar to me.) For Confucian economic policy think of MITI in Japan and how it developed a whole range of ways to encourage firms to behave in a way that was for the good of Japan, as MITI saw it, rather than always for profits. I don’t see China heading in that direction. In part I just don’t see it, it is not happening. In part I can’t see where that would come from. China seems to have some pretty sophisticated economic policy makers, and they seem to look more to the US than Japan for models, which makes sense in 2005.

On top of that, I don’t think you can call a pure lassie faire policy like in Hong Kong in the old days Confucian. I can think of few things less Confucian than saying that the state does not matter, and should not have a role in regulating society. Nor do I see the CCP saying something like that any time soon. Without going too far into the “is it Confucianism” thing, it sounds a lot like the Republican era, or Taiwan, with a powerful state sector with at least some corporatist urges trying to control a fairly anarchic economic system but without the willingness to develop the methods of economic control you saw in Japan.

China/China-Japan/Civil War/Diplomacy/English/Japan/Taiwan/War

51st State?

Posted on August 15, 2005 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

From a formal legal standpoint, the United States never ceded possession of Taiwan [via Simon World], which it took from Japan in 1945, to the Nationalist government. It’s still ours!

This raises all kinds of interesting issues, if you take these sorts of things seriously (with international law, it’s hard, because nobody really pays that much attention to the paperwork, do they?). The last time we gave away something we took from the Japanese, instead of making it an independent state (as most of its inhabitants wanted) we gave it back: Okinawa. Of course, we have a different relationship with China….

bibliography/Economic/Japan/Literature/昭和

The Price of Historical Accuracy

Posted on August 11, 2005 by tak / 3 Comments

Recently I received an email from a novelist out on the West Coast who is working on a historical novel set in 1946 Japan. She wanted to know how much things cost at that time. Being an anthropologist and not a historian, I really had no idea where to look, other than to say that in 1946 prices must have been really unstable because of inflation, SCAP’s attempt to engineer the market while at the same time implement labor-friendly policies, and the proliferation of the black market. A great description of the social landscape at that time is in John Dower’s superb Embracing Defeat, especially the first section where he takes you right to the streets of postwar Tokyo so that you can smell the cheap kasutori liquor and see the pan-pan girls hanging onto U.S. servicemen. (Another book I have read that deals with this same time period is Chalmers Johnson’s gripping Conspiracy at Matsukawa).

But I asked around to see if there are easier ways of finding out other than combing through long passages, and sure enough our ever resourceful Jonathan Dresner recommended two reference books: Estimates of Long Term Economic Statistics of Japan since 1868 (bilingual) and the Historical Statistics of Japan.

He also had a brilliant suggestion of looking at microfilms of newspapers at that time and picking off prices of products through ads. I would never have thought of that!

(For those wishing to have questions answered, a more helpful place to ask might be over at H-Japan, a resourceful user group that focuses on Japanese history. They cast a much wider net of scholars there, so you might get more in-depth responses.)

I have to say, its nice to see fiction writers taking the time to do some historical research for their writing. When films like The Last Samurai mutilate history, it really is a travesty because a little veracity would have made the film truly powerful (my opinion). Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is also that much more convincing to the reader. So perhaps it’s worth paying the price of meticulous research to push for historical accuracy.

But then, I also think that if you’re writing a novel like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Pale View of Hills, then accuracy doesn’t really matter because it is all about how memories from one moment of your life become all confused with things that happened in other moments. (This is not to say that Ishiguro’s novel contained historical inaccuracies.)

Japan/Korea-Japan/Memory/Nationalism/Politics/Web Sites

Kotaji on Korea (& Japan)

Posted on August 10, 2005 by tak / 1 Comment

I wanted to quickly mention two fascinating posts by Kotaji in the last two weeks that may be of interest to readers here.

First, he refers to an article in OhMyNews about a village near Kyoto composed of those of Korean descent who are resisting the destruction of their neighborhood. Kotaji picks up on the dissonance between the way the South Korean media has covered this story and the villagers who are squatting in defiance.

Second, he reports on a talk at Yonsei University given by Pak Noja . A part of the lecture (transcript here in Korean) focuses on the links between North Korea and the legacy left by Japanese imperialism, and Kotaji has graciously translated a few paragraphs into English. Here is Pak’s main point:

So, when General Kim Il-sung was constructing a nation state, he brought in considerable parts of the apparatus of state control and repression that were taken from the mechanisms of administration of the Japanese imperialists, the very people he had been struggling against up until then. In other words, it is hard to get rid of the sense that the state created by the nationalists in some way inherited a great deal from the imperialist state.