My father, in his brief teaching career, used to say to his students “If you have a question, you have to ask it. Odds are good that other people have the same question, and they’ll be grateful to you for asking.” He also said that “There are no stupid questions. Only stupid answers.” So, I appeal to the wisdom of the collective….<\/p>\n
In a recent article, Tom Englehardt wrote<\/a><\/p>\n When a dynasty fell in ancient China, it was believed that part of the explanation for its demise lay in the increasing gap between words and reality. The emperor of whatever new dynasty had taken power would then perform a ceremony called “the rectification of names” to bring language and what it was meant to describe back into sync. We Americans need to lose the emperor part of the equation, but adopt such a ceremony. Never have our realities and our words for them been quite so out of whack.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The rectification of names is an old established Confucian principle, to be sure, and I can believe that it plays a role in the Chinese historiography (though I admit I haven’t spent a lot of time reading traditional Chinese histories of the ends of dynasties, so I can’t be sure), but I really wonder about the ceremonial aspect of this. Did the Imperial institution actually reify the principle into ritual?<\/p>\n It also came to my attention<\/a> recently that the famous Chinese Communist quip on the effects (or success) of the French Revolution — “It’s too soon to tell” — is variously attributed<\/a> to both Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai (a.k.a. Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai) (Ho Chi Minh gets mentioned sometimes, too). The Zhou stories seem to have a bit more detail to them (though he wasn’t alive on the Revolution’s bicentennial<\/a>, the sesquicentennial’s a possibility<\/a>), but both attributions range from the pre-’49 era to the 1970s, have various interlocutors (mostly “a journalist,” though Kissinger comes up a lot<\/a>, too) and I can’t find any specific citations. Does anyone have a specific citation which might pin this down?<\/p>\n