China/General

Self-introduction

Posted on by Matthew Mosca / 5 Comments

Hi, Everyone,
To belatedly introduce myself, I’m Matthew Mosca, currently a doctoral candidate in the program in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. My dissertation is on the subject of Qing-era views of India, and my research looks at geographic scholarship and Qing foreign relations. On a personal note, I was born and raised in Vancouver, BC, where I received my BA from UBC, and I will be going to Beijing in September (and Taiwan in February) to conduct archival research for a year.

I’ll take this opportunity to recommend warmly “The Man Awakened from Dreams,” by Henrietta Harrison, which I have just finished reading. It chronicles the life of one Liu Dapeng (1857-1942), a juren and self-consciously strict Confucian, who lived near Taiyuan in Shanxi and has left a lengthy diary. I found the subject quite interesting: Liu was thoroughly acquainted with life under the Qing and under the Republic, and his professions included scholarship, commerce and agriculture; his sphere of activity and thought was quite broad, and some part of the book is certain to be of interest to a student of Chinese history. His attitude to newspapers, democracy, coal mining, familial relations and the like are examined, and they do not always conform to what one might expect of a rural Confucian. Konrad might be interested by his contact with the Japanese (pp. 159-65). My unscientific opinion is that detailed, scholarly biographies of ‘ordinary’ people are fairly rare in the field of Chinese history, so this work is a valuable addition.

I was impressed by Harrison’s restraint: there are only 170 pages of text, and those well-written. The book is organized according to different spheres of activity, and is roughly chronological. Given the scope of the diary she was working with, and the myriad opportunities for detailed Sinological digression, it could have been a much longer work, but on balance I think her treatment captures the essential topics and moments succinctly – and after all, I imagine it’s much harder to write a good short book than a long one. This would probably be a useful book for teaching undergraduates, especially those prone to making simple judgments about China. It would probably also appeal to the non-specialist (perhaps for this reason it’s immediately available in an affordable and rather attractive paperback – see amazon if you’d like to read a few pages online). I will add the caveat that this book is outside of my normal sphere of ‘High Qing’ research, so I have probably missed points in the work (and its arguments) that would arouse immediate interest or disagreement in a student of Republican China.

International Affairs/Japan/Okinawa/Politics

Sex, Lies, and Okinawa

Posted on by tak / 0 Comment

For anyone interested in Okinawa and the history of journalism in Japan, David Jacobson over at Japan Media Review has recently reported on a new lawsuit by a journalist who 30 years ago was slammed for uncovering a “secret pact” between the U.S. and Japan.

Disgraced Journalist Seeks to Revisit 30-year-old Scandal
More than 30 years later, a Japanese court is reconsidering an epoch-making media scandal that raised the question of whether unethical conduct by a reporter in obtaining the news should outweigh the significance of the facts he uncovered, no matter how earthshaking they might be.

The first oral hearing took place Tuesday in a suit brought by disgraced Mainichi Shimbun political reporter Takichi Nishiyama. Nishiyama, now 73, sued the government in April, claiming that it had destroyed his reputation. He seeks a government apology and 33 million yen (roughly $300,000) in damages.

The case concerns Nishiyama’s reporting on the negotiations between the United States and Japan over the reversion of the southernmost islands in the Japanese archipelago, Okinawa, to Japanese sovereignty (For a detailed chronology, see Wikipedia’s entry). Nishiyama uncovered documents in 1971 that revealed that Japan had secretly made a pact with the U.S. to absorb $4 million of the cost of returning Okinawa – which had been a U.S. protectorate since World War II – to Japan.

However, it was later learned that Nishiyama had obtained the documents through an affair with a married Foreign Ministry secretary. Both the secretary and Nishiyama were arrested, she for revealing state secrets and he for abetting her efforts. Each was convicted, though he appealed his case as far as the Supreme Court, which upheld his conviction.

Academia/Books and Articles/English/Japan/Korea-Japan/War

Summer Reading Notes: Turnbull

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

After our discussion of the 1590s wars, I did pick up Stephen Turnbull’s Samurai Invasion: Japan’s Korean War, 1592-1598. The book is a great read, and there’s some fantastic detail in it. Like so much military history, there’s a sense in which it’s a story in search of a thesis, but the detailed research, sources and strong (and pretty balanced) background make it worth the time. I was particularly struck by the way in which the Chinese-Japanese negotiations between the major phases of the war excluded Korean representatives, foreshadowing the 19-20c “New Imperialism.” In both the earlier and later instances, Korea was not really a passive subject or empty space, but it’s remarkable how consistently it is treated as such. I was pleased to know that most of what I’ve been teaching about the wars was correct (Talmud says that an error in teaching [Torah, of course] is tantamount to an intentional sin), and next time I go over this in class I have a whole wealth of new material to work with. One of my long-term aims, as I think I’ve mentioned before, is developing a curriculum of balanced and integrated Korea-Japan history, and this is an excellent and accessible example of pretty good work in that vein. Yeah, I’ve got some concerns, and people who know the period better than I might have others, but I think this’ll stand up for a while.

I picked up another of Turnbull’s books, because it was in the library catalog and because I get asked about this all the time: Ninja: the True Story of Japan’s Secret Warrior Cult. I have my doubts, which were not assuaged by the first page [italicized comments are mine, of course]:

For the purpose of definition I shall take the view that the study of ninja is the legitimate study of all aspects of unconventional Japanese warfare [this may be a legitimate object of study, but you have to demonstrate the equivalence of ninja to “unconventional,” as defined by normative and often ahistorical samurai texts, warfare before you assume it], from intelligence gathering to assassination, and from guerrilla warfare to night raiding, and in view of the large number of words used for the practitioners of such operations [which might be a clue to the need for a less overarching analysis], I shall use the term ‘ninja’ except where the context is inappropriate [as defined by the author himself].

Naturally, the rest of the book might relieve me of my skepticism, but the blatantly self-serving nature of these definitions is quite off-putting.

Part of what Turnbull is doing, and this is something I’ve seen others attempt, is trying to explain the factual origins of a myth at the same time that he is debunking [aspects of] it. This is a tough act: the two strains of argument really do strain at each other, and maintaining a credible balance and tension between the two requires that the sources for both be very strong (and be handled evenly and rigorously). That’s rarely the case, though the quality of Samurai Invasion gives me some glimmer of hope. Just a glimmer, though.

I’ve got to get through this soon, because I really want to get back to reading Young [whose concept of “Total Empire” dovetails quite nicely with my research on Japanese government involvement and monitoring of emigration] and Botsman [which came back from Library Reserves yesterday].

Japan/Law/Nationalism/Political/Politics

Akihito as the Sovereign of Japan?

Posted on by tak / 7 Comments

Asahi Shinbun reports that the LDP has accepted plans to push for changing the name “Self-Defense Force”(「自衛隊」) to “Self-Defense Military” (「自衛軍」). This is a bit alarming and I am sure that, if not already, there will be harsh criticism from Japan’s neighbors in the coming days.

But what made me shiver in reading this news was not so much Japan inching toward militarization, which had already been happening for a while now, but rather an effort by the LDP to (re)instate the emperor as the “sovereign” of the Japanese state. According to this Asahi article in Japanese, the commision almost approved a proposal to transform him into a mere symbolic figure to someone who would actually represent Japan in diplomatic settings.

自民党新憲法起草委員会（委員長・森前首相）は７日、改憲の「要綱案」を発表した。９条２項を改正し、自衛のための武力組織を「自衛軍」と名付け、軍隊であることを明確に位置づけた。また、象徴天皇制を維持することとし、天皇を「元首」とすることを見送った。委員会は今後、要綱案をもとに結党５０年の今年１１月に発表する党新憲法草案の条文化作業に入る。

When I read this, I could not believe my eyes. Is this really happening? What year is this?????

要綱案の内容は、たとえば天皇について、前文に「日本国民は国民統合の象徴たる天皇と共に歴史を刻んできた」との表現を加えて「自民党らしさ」を盛り込む一方、党内の一部に根強い支持があった「元首化」を断念するなど、今後の憲法改正作業を現実的に進めることを念頭に、公明党や野党の主張に配慮をみせたものとなっている。

The word that I translated as “sovereign” here is genshu (元首). (Wikipedia translates it as either “head of state” or “sovereign”). It is a word that comes from the pre-war constitution, The Great Japanese Imperial Constitution, which was promulgated in 1889 and revised during the Allied occupation (1945-51). [The image shows the first page of the original constitution, taken from here.]

In the old pre-war constitution, the fourth article stipulates that the emperor is the genshu of Japan. This comes right after an article that declares the emperor to be divine.

So it has really come to this? Can someone wake me up from this nightmare? Are they soon going to start hailing Akihito as, indeed, a god?

China/General

Should grad students blog?

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

There was a rather nasty piece on academic blogging in the Chronicle. Comments at Bitch Ph.D. The basic thrust of it is that grad students should not have blogs because hiring committees will look at them and not hire you because of the awful things you will reveal about yourself.

First, I would suggest that whoever did not get hired by the department that the Chronicle author worked for was a very lucky person. That the committee spent so much time looking into blogs and rejecting people for really trivial reasons makes it look like a truly awful department. My take on this is a tad different than some, since I have been a tenured faculty member for a long time now (almost a month.) I have also never really been without a job. The very first time I went on an interview I was ushered into the antechamber of the Human Resources person. As I was waiting I heard two secretaries discussing me, and one asked the other if I was not, in fact, the person they had already decided to hire. She was told that that was the case, but that they still had to go through with the interview. A nice tension-breaker, and as a result, every interview I have ever been on I have been asking myself if I would be happier here than at the job I already have, rather than the more normal question of “How do I have to debase myself in order to get this job and keep eating.” I have also never had to worry too much about being stuck at a place that was unworthy of a scholar of my caliber, since my modesty about my abilities (or my modest abilities, take your pick) keep my out of the status game to some extent.

On the hiring committees I have been on I suppose I would have liked to have looked at blogs, since one of the questions I always asked was who this person was and how they would fit into what we do. This is not the dreaded “collegiality” question that K.C. Johnson talks about, or at least I don’t think it is. Our department, at least, takes teaching with some seriousness, and teaching the majors in particular is a group project, and people who don’t care about that are less attractive candidates. Of course people rarely say “I could care less about teaching” and never say they are bad at it. You have to guess at that from very little information, and anything you can learn about the person is interesting.

As a historian I am interested in people’s scholarly work in a different way than my colleagues in the sciences, since I am not going to collaborate with them directly. Like every other academic department, part of your success rubs off on us, so it would be good if you made a name in your field. Will you be a success in your field? That I can get, sort of from your letters and looking at your work. What I at least am more worried about is how you will fit into the intellectual life of the department. Are you an interesting person who will want to answer my questions about your field, ask me interesting questions about mine? Will you end up with a lot of undergrads who want to do an honors thesis with you? Will you do interesting topics classes? Did you come up with an interesting dissertation topic because your advisor handed it to you, or will you be able to do it again? Those things you get through conversation, and presumably, through reading someone’s blog.

Of course you may not be looking for a job at a place like this. Frankly, even if it’s Harvard or bust (and realistically it’s probably Boston College consumed with bitterness) I find it hard to imagine how having a blog would hurt you. People can be happy at places where the whole department lives in their little cubbyholes and the only shared intellectual life is figuring out how to unjam the copier. At a place like that I would assume that all they really care about is how much stuff you pump out, and your passion for mountain climbing or Shonen Knife is pretty much irrelevant. There are departments, like that of the Chronicle writer, where the faculty have trained their wills to the domination of others through years in the classroom, and look at junior faculty as a particularly tasty carcass to be dismembered, but do you really want that job?

Finally, in my opinion, talking about academic things, wherever you do it, is what we do, and if you don’t like doing it, you should find another line of work. Yes, you are sort of exposing yourself in a blog, and it is sort of an unequal relationship with a hiring committee, but that is how any hiring process works. You are trying to display things about yourself that will make people want to hire you. Being an academic is always sort of exposing yourself. You publish something and you are, to some extent, stuck with it. Say something in class and be assured that every major in the department will re-tell the story. The only way to avoid any danger is to never say anything worth repeating.

Intellectual/Japan/Politics/昭和

Post-Anpo Apostasy

Posted on by tak / 2 Comments

During my search for a short article on Anpo (the anti U.S.-Japan Security Treaty movement in 1960), Konrad mentioned that he would be interested in hearing about leftist intellectuals who recanted their radical politics after the defeat of the movement.

I was looking at a chapter in Yoshikuni Igarashi’s Bodies of Memory titled “From the Anti-Security Treaty Movement to the Tokyo Olympics: Transforming the Body, the Metropolis, and Memory,” as a possible article to use in class.

This article mentions Shimizu Ikutaro, whom Igarashi describes as “an intellectual who was deeply committed to the anti-treaty movement.” He was a loud voice in the movement for sure, and Igarashi explores the issues of memory and the body in Shimizu’s discussion of Zengakuren (the radical wing of the student movement) and the physical nature of their tactics during Anpo.

Shimizu is, I believe, known as an anpo intellectual who recanted. Here, on a website run by Professor Okubo Takaji of Waseda University, are some essays about Shimizu, in Japanese.

And here is what Harry Harootunian, in “Beyond Containment: The Postwar Genealogy of Fascism and TOSAKA Jun’s Prewar Critique of Liberalism” (printed online here), has to say about Shimizu and why he repudiated the left after Anpo:

SHIMIZU condemned [prewar leftist] intellectuals who later recalled their experience of conversion as testimonials of bad faith, since neither were their commitments as strong as they wished later witnesses to believe nor were the speculative modes of the Japanese people illuminated by conversion so intensely antimodern. Here, SHIMIZU was apparently speaking the from personal experience of his own conversion. His late writings, “Doubting the Postwar” and “Auguste COMTE” (published in the 1970s) rejected the category of the “postwar,” which he equated with all of those efforts to repeat the Enlightenment that common sense had already “denied.” What SHIMIZU meant by common sense might have conceivably revealed only an instance of his own bad faith and how he had successfully changed with the seasons. Yet, he explained that intellectuals in Japan were exceedingly short on common sense, that is, a knowledge common to a wide number of people […]

Here Harootunian draws our attention to the way Shimizu sees Enlightenment thought as fomenting a kind of political activism that is antithetical to the people. But focusing on the undifferentiated — what Harootunian calls a “classless” — image of “the people” led to Shimizu’s denunciation of Marxism and the Japanese left:

Intellectuals are blinded from the common sense of the masses and are not able to approach them. But he, SHIMIZU declared, had escaped this blindness, this Enlightenment contagion that had plunged Japan into darkness, because he had been able to manage an identity with the masses. When the conception of common sense was linked to his idea of presentism (the curse of shared values, political and public cultures, all those interpretative strategies confidently based upon a putative average), he had merely found a way to justify the way things are by appealing to a fixed fund of experience/knowledge which seemingly had remained the same since the beginning of the race.

Here Harootunian depicts Shimizu as an intellectual lured by “presentism,” a kind of culturalist chauvinism that develops when a refusal of Western thinking (in this case Enlightenment) is projected to imagine “the people” as a “race” untouched by the evil ways of industrial capitalism. At least that is what Harootunian here is arguing.

I have never read Shimizu so I don’t know what to make of this passage, but I’m not 100% convinced of the argument that presentist thought is more likely to lead to an essentialist and transhistorical position. But in contrast to Tosaka Jun, I guess it sort of makes sense why Shimizu recanted.

Are there others who recanted after Anpo? Now I’m curious too.

Books/China/Chinese/Civil War/English/Language/Sino-Japanese Wars

7/7 and a Wartime Dictionary

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 2 Comments

While I’m spending the summer studying Korean in Seoul, one of the books I brought with me for some recreational reading is a Chinese wartime dictionary (“encyclopedia”) with mostly political and historical terms. It is often quite arbitrary with entries on everything from Lappland to one on Owen Lattimore. It is about 370 pages in length, with 10-20 entries per page, plus a timeline of events beginning with the Manchurian Incident in 1931 and up to July 1942, when it was published.

文化供應社《抗戰建國實用百科辭典》文化供應社, 1942.

Dictionaries like these, which have an almanac feel to them, give you a great look at what terms and events are viewed as important by contemporaries, and are thus great background reading for historians interested in getting a flavor for that particular period.

There are also other interesting things to note about some of the events it includes descriptions of. For example, some 68 years ago today fighting broke out between Japanese and Chinese forces at Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing and those historians who find such issues interesting still find great room for disagreement over exactly how and who bears greater responsibility for that particular skirmish. It has great symbolic importance, however, as it has traditionally come to date the beginning of the most open phase of prolonged conflict between the two countries and Japanese aggression throughout China. You can find a special article remembering the event in the People’s Daily. To use Allen S. Whiting’s term, this is also one of the “war recall” days in the Chinese media. Like other such symbolic days in August (end of the war), September (Manchurian incident), and December (Nanjing massacre) there are usually a great swelling of articles, publications, and protests related to Japan.

In this dictionary, however, there is no entry for 七七事變, which is probably the most common name by which the Marco Polo incident has come to be known among Chinese today. A small entry under 七七紀念 simply tells the reader to see 蘆溝橋事變. That second term, explicitly referring to the bridge, is the most common name today in Japan and in English, but is slightly less commonly used in China. 七七事變 must thus have become the standard Chinese term at some later point. Both terms are listed in the People’s Daily article today. The only reason I mention this minor point is that today is also a tragic one for London, as the city has been hit by a serious terrorist attack. If, like 9/11, it comes to be remembered as 7/7 or the 7/7 Incident, there will be something of a nomenclaturial clash in Chinese.

However, in addition to the amusement and information provided by reading the occasional entry, this particular copy of the dictionary is interesting in other ways. I snagged my copy from the Harvard-Yenching library, fairly confident that this particular volume would not be recalled over the summer while I was away since it hasn’t been checked out in over a decade. The copy is stamped “Rec’d thru Dr. Fairbank” on the cover. Although we shouldn’t judge a book’s history by its cover, perhaps the Fairbank picked up the copy while he was in the Nationalist stronghold of Chongqing during the war. Regardless, the book went through something of a mangling, mostly likely at the hands of Nationalist government censors (it was published in Guilin, Guangxi province). Some 63 of the entries, including the entry words themselves, are completely blacked out by a black brush or marker of some sort…

Continue reading →

English/Japan/Literature/Pedagogy/Religion

Oe and Millenarian Movements

Posted on by tak / 7 Comments

I have spent the last few days working on a syllabus for a course titled “Anthropology of Social Movements,” and I figure I could use some help from our regular visitors of the Well.

One section of the class will be devoted to a reading of Oe Kenzaburo‘s The Silent Cry (Mannen gannen futtoboru). This book will be read in conjunction with E.P. Thompson‘s essay “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteen Century”(Past and Present 50:76-136).

Here’s where I need help. I am looking for one or two short pieces that might help fill out the historical background to the novel. Basically I am looking for a piece on Anpo and another on Tokugawa period peasant insurrections (ikki and uchikowashi). The pieces have to be in English, and I’d rather have them make sweeping unprovable claims about the historical significance of these events rather than have them stuffed with historical details.

If there is something out there that discusses Anpo and ikki in one broad stroke, that would be most ideal. But Anglophone scholars have only begun to explore that sort of post-Anpo New Left sensibility, perhaps most famously articulated by Yoshimoto Takaaki. Or maybe works do exist, and I’m sure they do in research on literature, so it would be great if someone could refer works here.

The entire course is designed as a long argument against analyses of social movements by economistic Marxism (or in the case of Japan, koza-ha Marxists) and modernization theory. The Silent Cry section will help students understand the “human consciousness” aspects of social movements and will come right after a section on millenarian movements around the world such as the cargo cults of Melanesia and the Ghost Dance movement of North America.

Cultural/Education/English/General/Intellectual/Japan/Nationalism/大正

Dewey In Japan

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

Naoko Saito takes John Dewey’s visits to Japan as a starting place for questions about “Education for Global Understanding” [registration required; I do like the way TCR seems to be branching more towards Higher Ed and international education lately, but it might just be a summer blip] and finds challenging material.

In his visit to Japan, from February 9 until April 28, 1919, Dewey was confronted with a severe challenge to his hope of attaining mutual understanding and universal democracy beyond national and cultural boundaries. Japan at that time was between two world wars and had undergone a democratization movement called Taisho Democracy – a movement that was soon to give way to looming nationalism and militarism. Dewey saw a flickering hope for liberalism in Japan, but he left the country in disappointment. He tried to approach Japan through his principle of mutual national understanding. During the short period of his stay, he struggled to penetrate below the surface of the culture. As a philosopher who was thrown into an abyss that existed between two cultures, Dewey acknowledged that “Japan is a unique country, one whose aims and methods are baffling to any foreigner.” He communicated with Japanese liberal intellectuals, gave a lecture at the University of Tokyo, and was exposed to the left-wing democratic movements among college youth. But he learned that “such higher criticism is confined to the confidence of the classroom” (JL, p. 174). Dewey realized that the “popular mind,” to which he wished to communicate his idea of democracy as a personal way of living, was dominated by “nationalistic sentiment.” He observed that “the growth of democratic ideas” and “the growth of liberalism” were hampered by the inculcation of “the emperor cult” (LJ, pp. 170–173). Especially in contrast to China, where “[e]very articulate conscious influence [was] liberal,” Dewey noticed the obstacles to “the development of an enlightened liberal public opinion in Japan” – “the conspiracy of silence,” patriotism, and the institutional religion that prevented “critical thought and free discussion.” Dewey was troubled by the authoritarian, nationalistic ethics indoctrinated in primary education (LJ, pp. 167–168). He could not find democracy in Japanese people’s way of living.

Furthermore, Dewey was confused by an inconsistency involved in Japanese modernization – a combination of the “feudal” and “barbarian” ethos of the warrior with the worship of western industrialization (LJ, pp. 160–161). As he put it, “There is some quality in the Japanese inscrutable to a foreigner which makes them at once the most rigid and the most pliable people on earth, the most self-satisfied and the most eager to learn” (LJ, p. 168). In the country’s “opportunism,” Dewey found it “difficult in the present condition of Japan to construct even in imagination a coherent and unswerving working policy for a truly liberal political party” (POJ, p. 259).
…
This experience of Dewey leaves us with a philosophical question: what happens if one’s democratic faith is not totally accepted in a different culture? [footnotes removed]

Actually, that last sentence should be, based on her description of Dewey’s responses, “what happens if one’s democratic faith is entirely rejected in a different culture?” A bit later, Saito notes that “In the series of lectures that Dewey gave at the University of Tokyo, the number of participants decreased from around a thousand to less than forty towards the end.” And, of course, there’s little evidence of Dewey’s influence in Japan’s educational or political systems to date. Clearly his visit failed to transform Japan, unrealistic as that standard of judgement might be. Clearly Japan as a society is not fully accepting of differences and others (are any societies?) and has a civil discourse which is more limited than many of us would consider ideal, or even healthy.

I’m mostly struck by the tension between the idea of Taisho Democracy, which was indeed in full swing when Dewey dropped in, and what Dewey observed as rigidity, obscurantism, chauvinism and authoritarianism. Given what we know of the course of history, Dewey’s observations ring true, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t miss something important. The 1920s were a heyday of internationalism in Japan, not just in the sense of the Shidehara Diplomacy but also in terms of translated literature and scholarship, travel overseas, international visitors to Japan, and the penetration of commodity culture carrying both domestic and international products and modes. Dewey should have seen some of that potential; instead he (and his followers in the present) deny that the eclectic and dynamic 1920s were more than epiphenomal. There’s a consistency to this narrative that I find troubling, possible evidence of a cultural determinism which is untenable, historically.

China/General

Frog in a Well

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 5 Comments

I’ve noticed that while we call this blog Frog in a Well, we have never actually posted the story. This is from Burton Watson’s translation of Zhuangzi.

Kung-sun Lung said to Prince Mou of Wei, “When I was young I studied the Way of the former kings, and when I grew older I came to understand the conduct of benevolence and righteousness. I reconciled difference and sameness, distinguished hardness and whiteness, and proved that not so the wisdom of the hundred schools and demolished the arguments of a host of speakers. I believed that I had attained the highest degree of accomplishment. But now I have heard the words of Chuang Tzu and I am bewildered by their strangeness. I don’t know whether my arguments are not as good as his, or whether I am no match for him in understanding. I find now that I can’t even open my beak. May I ask what you advise?”

Prince Mou leaned on his armrest and gave a great sigh, and then he looked up at the sky and laughed, saying, “Haven’t you ever heard about the frog in the caved-in well? He said to the great turtle of the Eastern Sea, ‘What fun I have! I come out and hop around the railing of the well, or I go back in and take a rest in the wall where a tile has fallen out. When I dive in the water, I let it hold me up under the armpits and support my chin, and when I slip about in the mud, I bury my feet in it and let it come up over my ankles. I look around at the mosquito larvae and the crabs and polliwogs and I see that none of them can match me. To have complete command of the water of one whole valley and to monopolize all the joys of a caved-in well—this is the best there is! Why don’t you come some time and see for yourself?’

“But before the great turtle of the Eastern Sea had even gotten his left foot in the well his right knee was already wedged fast. He backed out and withdrew a little, and then began to describe the sea. ‘A distance of a thousand li cannot indicate its greatness; a depth of a thousand fathoms cannot express how deep it is. In the time of Yu there were floods for nine years out of ten, and yet its waters never rose. In the time of T’ang there were droughts for seven years out of eight and yet its shores never receded. Never to alter or shift, whether for and instant or an eternity; never to advance or recede, whether the quantity of water flowing in is great or small—this is the great delight of the Eastern Sea!

“When the frog in the caved-in well heard this, he was dumfounded with surprise, crestfallen, and completely at a loss. Now your knowledge cannot even define the borders of right and wrong, and still you try to see through the words of Chuang Tzu—this is like trying to make a mosquito carry a mountain on its back or a pill bug race across the Yellow River. You will never be up to the task!

He whose understanding cannot grasp these minute and subtle words, but is only fit to win some temporary gain—is he not like the frog in the caved-in well? Chuang Tzu, now—at this very moment he is treading the Yellow Springs or leaping up to the vast blue. To him there is no north or south—in utter freedom he dissolves himself in the four directions and drowns himself in the unfathomable. To him there is no east or west—he begins in the Dark Obscurity and returns to the Great Thoroughfare. Now you come niggling along and try to spy him out or fix some name to him, but this is like using a tube to scan the sky or an awl to measure the depth of the earth—the instrument is too small, never heard about the young boy of Shou-ling who went to learn the Han-tan Walk. He hadn’t mastered what the Hantan people had to teach him when he forgot his old way of walking, so that he had to crawl all the way back home. Now if you don’t get on your way, you’re likely to forget what you knew before and be out of a job!”

Kung-sun Lung’s mouth fell open and wouldn’t stay closed. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and wouldn’t come down. In the end he broke into a run and fled.

Books/China/Diplomacy/Economics/General

Grain supply and military logistics in 18th century China.

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

Reading Perdue’s China Marches West I was struck by how much historians are constrained by our sources and how we strain against them. The book itself (which is very good) is about the expansion of the Qing empire into Central Asia. This is a hot topic at present, and this book is pretty much the center of the trend towards taking China’s relationship with the non-Chinese Asia more seriously.

One of the things that Perdue spends a lot of time on, obviously, are the Qing military campaigns that ended in the conquest of Central Asia, specifically the campaigns against the Zunghars (1690-1697) The thing I found most interesting was Perdue’s emphasis on logistics and grain supply. He spends a lot of time talking about ways that the Qing tried to encourage private merchants to bring grain to the frontier. Supplies for remote regions were a long-standing problem in Chinese statecraft. From military colonies, where the soldiers were supposed to rise their own grain, to Ming experiments with encouraging private merchants to bring grain to the frontier in exchange for the right to participate in the salt monopoly to Qing distribution of cash (rather than grain) there was a long history of attempts to support big armies as cheaply as possible.

One of the things I like about this section is that Perdue can go into incredible detail about price levels, debates over grain policy, and local market conditions. Besides fulfilling my dreams of being a Qing dynasty grain-policy wonk, I like reading about topics of governance that might have turned up on the civil service exams. As historians we often bring very different interests to our sources than their creators do, which is fine, but in this case, and in a few others I can think of we are really peering into a debate which is to some extent still the same one that was defined by Qing officials and to some extent it is still debated in the same way.

On the other hand, Perdue also brings a very different set of concerns to his material. He is pretty obviously interested in the extent to which the Qing were able to harness market forces to do their work for them, and thus the extent they were a really modern government. He is not a sprouts of capitalism reductionist, but he is clearly interested in questions that would not have occurred to the people he is studying. This is true of other people who study grain as well, (Wong and Will come to mind.) If you want to analyze the Qing economy or Qing economic policy making, the best data is in grain, but the data was generated by a bureaucracy that was concerned with issues like “nurturing the people” rather than encouraging economic growth. Perdue says that “As the commercial economy expanded on the frontier, the Qing sought to tap the new flow of resources for the benefit of local stability. Shifting away from their primary dependence on the land tax, officials looked for new sources of support from trade.”(p.369) The goal, promoting local stability, is one that Qing officials would embrace, the method of embracing the market is a modern idea. (Not that there is anything wrong with that.)

Perdue is a very good historian, and he does not let his interest in the magic of markets run away with him. (An important point when writing on the interweb, where the opposite is usually true.) He is writing about a time and place where markets were limited and did not work “right.” Gansu suffered from “bumper crop famines” where good harvests one year would lead to famines the next as farmers lacked the capital, and probably the market savvy, to store their cheap grain. The state eventually stepped in to establish a state granary system to prevent this problem, and eventually the province was commercialized enough that these famines disappeared. I would think that lots of good old-fashioned Qing officials would not be surprised that commercialization could lead to famine. Lots of modern economists would not be surprised that pushing on to a commercial economy would eliminate the problem. Perdue is a historian, however, and he is interested in the place in the middle.

China/Diplomacy/Economics/Ethnic Minorities/General/Identity

Mickey Mouse in China

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

There are some interesting articles in the current Modern China, and the one I would like to comment on at present is “Wang Luobin: Folk Song King of the Northwest or Song Thief?” by Rachel Harris of SOAS. The paper is mostly about the posthumous reputation of Wang Luobin, a (Han) collector and disseminator of “Uyghur folksongs” many of which have turned out to be quite popular, and thus profitable.

Picture of Wang Luobin

This has led to predictable debates about who owns these songs, bringing up all sorts of “questions of authenticity, ownership, and value.” (p.394) This is of course part of a debate on who speaks for Uyghurs that takes place in other contexts than music, and a debate on who owns music that is familiar to ethnomusicologists in places other than Xinjiang. Folk music is a particularly interesting place to bring up issues of copyright because folk music is validated in part by –not- being creative. In 1993 the Taiwanese singer Luo Dayou recorded versions of Wang Luobin’s songs and at first refused to pay copyright because the songs were the “property of the peoples of Xinjiang” and if anyone should get money it should be the Xinjiang government.(p.388) Wang Luobin then took out copyrights on the songs, thus admitting that he was not simply transmitting existing songs, but doing something to existing material that could be considered creative and thus could be owned. Harris cites Arjun Appadurai on what makes a thing a thing, and in general it is a very well-informed essay.

The thing that interested me most was that the things being owned were songs. One of the commonplaces of the reform era is that China needs to establish “modern” legal and property systems, in order to make itself more legible to international capital or as the necessary infrastructure for modernization, depending on your point of view. The one aspect of this process that foreign states pay most attention to is intellectual property rights, as this is the thing that is most likely to impinge on the profits of foreign companies. (China may need a more transparent real estate market, but this is not a concern for Disney.) The canonical Chinese response is to pay lip service to American demands for enforcement of IP, pretty much the same response as most developing countries. Enforcement of foreign copyrights is not at the forefront of most Chinese people’s minds. I’m sure many of us are familiar with the disconnect between reading U.S. accounts of China where the most important person in China is the guy with the pirated DVDs and, well, being in China.

This is what makes the Wang Luobin case so interesting. When the dispute broke out between Luo Dayou and Wang Luobin Wang copyrighted the songs and sold the rights to Luo. What interests me, although Harris does not discuss it, is why Luo would pay for the rights. I don’t think that there was any chance that a mainland copyright was going to be enforced on Taiwan, so I assume that he paid cash for Wang’s authenticity, as represented by the copyrights, even though by the act of copyrighting, and asserting creativity, Wang was “un-folking” the songs.

I find this interesting because it shows a new, and domesticated reason for people to adopt the form of copyright. Although American newspapers like to present copyrights and patents as transcendent goods they are of course socially constructed, and the construction is currently changing. When the last American copyright extension act was passed some people called it the Mickey Mouse law, because one of the things driving it was Disney’s fear that Mickey would go out of copyright. For modern post-industrial capitalism the idea that there are things that can’t be owned is not good. Well, there are some things that can’t be owned, and there is not much of a push to corporatize and commodify love or sex, it is not acceptable for something which has been commodified to go out of the commodity sphere.

Who will push for this type of commodification inside China? Disney will push from outside, and this will have some effect, but not a whole lot. To some extent it is in the self-interest of Chinese business community to push for commodification of ideas as they change their position in the international economy. When I was teaching English in Taiwan in the 80’s a number of my businessmen/students insisted that Taiwan was going to really crack down on IP violations because Taiwanese companies were finding it harder and harder to license really cool technology from overseas because of IP concerns.

Wang Luobin’s case seems to show a domestic, or at least inter-Asian reason to adopt the form of copyright. As China is deluged in ‘cheap,’ ‘fake,’ ‘copies’ a copyright is a way of assuring consumers that this is real. In the case of folksongs authenticity is more important than it might be elsewhere, but it might matter in lots of contexts. I’m not sure its a good thing, of course, but it does seem that we are moving towards “copyright with Chinese characteristics.”

China-Japan/English/General/Japan/Korea-Japan/Medieval/Memory/War

1590s Military Technology Gaps

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 20 Comments

I recently ran across two separate references to the Hideyoshi invasions of Korea, both of which credited Hideyoshi’s initial success to firearms. That didn’t ring true for a few reasons, the first of which is that I’m a professional Japanese historian and didn’t remember ever seeing that sort of assertion before. My impression was that the initial Japanese success was a result of having a large number of battle-hardened veterans against a nation which hadn’t seen large-scale combat in over a century. The ability of the Ming to throw the Japanese back when they committed enough troops (and really, not that many, though the Koreans were committing a great deal more) seemed to me to argue against a significant technological differential.

I’ve sent a query to H-Japan, and the first reply I got back deepened my confusion. Andrew Dyche of UBC reminded me of the “Turtle Boats” which Korea used to such great effect against Japan’s military and supply ships. In that respect, at least, the technological advantage was in the wrong direction. I’m not a military historian by trade, but this doesn’t look good.

A bit of google work (all my relevant books are at the office, and it’s summer, so I don’t get in much) led me to this article about why Europe colonized the world. It has some interesting details about the reported effectiveness of both firearms and turtle boats, but also relies heavily on pretty old sources (which explains why, for example, Japan after 1636 supposedly only traded with the Portuguese instead of the Dutch, Chinese and Koreans). Interesting, but not dispositive, and certainly not the original source of the idea. Nor are these sites, though they are typical of the genre. All of them seem to indicate that Ming military technology balanced the war (and the Turtle boats tipped it in the other direction).

I suppose I’m going to need to go in and look this up, but if anyone knows of a good monograph on the subject of the 1590s wars I’d be grateful.

China/China-Russia/Diaspora/Economics/English/General/Labor/Post-Mao/Social History

ASPAC Notes: Demographics and States

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

Historian of Empires Niall Ferguson [via Ralph Luker] recently wrote:

Since 1989, the Russian mortality rate has risen from below 11 per 1,000 to more than 15 per 1,000 – nearly double the American rate. For adult males, the mortality rate is three times higher. Average male life expectancy at birth is below 60, roughly the same as in Bangladesh. A 20-year-old Russian man has a less than 50/50 chance of reaching the age of 65.
…
Exacerbating the demographic effects of increased mortality has been a steep decline in the fertility rate, from 2.19 births per woman in the mid-1980s to a nadir of 1.17 in 1999. Because of these trends, the United Nations projects that Russia’s population will decline from 146 million in 2000 to 101 million in 2050. By that time the population of Egypt will be larger.

This echoes what Kyle Hatcher told us in his ASPAC paper (panel 1) on Chinese migrants to the Russian Far East (RFE). Like so many nations with declining populations (and the RFE is declining faster, I suspect, than the rest of Russia), immigration could be a key component of economic and social revitalization. But Russia, like so many of the nations struggling with this issue, is unaccustomed to integrating immigrants. Mr. Hatcher’s work involved surveying Russians about their attitudes towards Chinese immigrants, and what he found is not good news.

Russian attitudes towards Chinese immigrants are terrible. They are viewed as untrustworthy, insular and territorially aggressive. They are considered a drain on the economy, taking jobs away from locals and putting very little back into local businesses. Russian immigration laws have been steadily tightening over the last few years, making casual labor migration across the border more difficult (and likely expanding illegal migration). This is fueled in large part, Hatcher found, by a vicious and shameless press, which plays up stories of Chinese crimes, overestimates the numbers of legal and illegal Chinese immigrants, and regularly cites anti-Chinese nationalistic scholars and politicians.

In fact, Chinese work at jobs in the RFE that Russians won’t do, even tough unemployment among ethnic Russians is very high. And Chinese buy most of their goods from Russian-owned businesses who make no effort to cater specifically to Chinese tastes. China has shown little interest in the RFE territory, and even if it had, the numbers of immigrants (at best guess) is well below the levels at which rational observers would consider it a threat of separtism, etc. Chinese immigration offers the RFE’s primary extraction industries (logging, fishing, furs, mining) and decaying mercantile economy their best chance of revitalization, but Chinese are not welcome.

For obvious economic reasons, many Chinese have gone to the RFE (the numbers are in the tens of thousands, at least), but legal and social restrictions make it impossible for the numbers to be large enough to make up Russia’s demographic and economic and institutional weaknesses. The starkly different social and economic conditions on either side of the Russia-China border call the concept of this as a “region” into question; I’ve never entirely bought the argument that Russia was an “Asian Power” just because it had some Pacific Rim beachfront. Interestingly, Chinese labor in the RFE had a “heyday” in the early 20th century, but was pushed out by increasingly nationalistic positions, culminating in the almost total removal of Chinese from the RFE at the time of the Sino-Soviet split in the late ’50s.

Needless to say, Russia’s post-Soviet collapse is of great concern to China (and, as Niall Ferguson points out in the essay cited above, the Chinese model of economic development without political liberalization is very intriguing, if unreachable, to many Russians) and the continuing decline and instability of the northern Pacific region has to be counted as a problem that will have to be addressed at some point in the future.

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