The new book Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008 (Harvard University Press) by Xu Guoqi 1 , is a good read but also a serious piece of research which uses sport to see new dimensions of nationalism. The Olympics, one of those “invented traditions” if there ever was one, and nationalism feed on each other. Xu has the story on everything from Chiang Kai-shek to Ping Pong Diplomacy to the politicization of the non-political ideal and all points in between.
Susan Brownell’s Beijing Olympic FAQ at China Beat has a slightly contrarian take on the recent flap over Olympic torch protests. She suggests that the comparison with the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany is not so useful as a comparison with the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis — remember the song, “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louey?” The United States was then the rising power, fresh from conquests in the Philippines and ready to take on the world. Brownell points out why Europeans could look down their noses at the newcomers and how Americans responded.
Meanwhile, two other recent posts also put the present moment into (drum roll, please) Historical Perspective.
The video accuses the West of hypocrisy. One of many examples: 1) “we tried Communism and you hated us for being Communist” and then 2) “when we embraced Capitalism you hate us for being Capitalist.” Robert Daly, Responding to Chinese Grievances posted at China Digital Times, comments on this long list. For instance, to 1) he replies: “True, more or less. And China hated America for being a capitalist liberal democracy. It was a hate- and fear-filled time all around” and 2) “Not exactly. But America does fear China, in part, because China is gaining wealth and power through following (with Chinese characteristics) prescriptions that were offered by the West.”
Antonia Finnane’s new book1 on modern Chinese fashion is very good in all sorts of ways, but I was struck by a couple of cartoons by Guo Jianying. The first is rather funny, and centers around the husband as a consumer good.
I’ve been reading Wolf Totem and having a lot of fun doing so. The book, based on Jiang Rong’s time as a sent-down youth in Inner Mongolia. was a huge best-seller in China. Why is this book a Thing Chinese People Like? Nicole Barnes says that the book is nostalgic drivel aimed at Chinese who long for a world with fewer skyscrapers and more manliness and seek it in Mongolia. A lot of the novel is also nostalgia for the past. If you want to recapture the ancient knowledge of the East, Mongolia is apparently the place to do it. Our Chinese heroes spend a lot of time trying to keep wolves from eating the sheep, and learning about the symbiotic relationship between the Mongols, the steppe, and the wolves, and thus the foundations of Asian society.
Chen felt himself to be standing at the mouth of a tunnel to five thousand years of Chinese history. Every day and every night, he thought, men have fought wolves on the Mongolian plateau, a minor skirmish here, a pitched battle there. The frequency of these clashes has even surpassed the frequency of battles among all the nomadic peoples of the West outside of wolf and man, plus the cruel, protracted wars between nomadic tribes, conflicts between nationalities, and wars of aggression; it is that frequency that has strengthened and advanced the mastery of the combatants in these battles. The grassland people are better and more knowledgeable fighters than any farming race of people or nomadic tribe in the world. In the history of China—from the Zhou dynasty, through the Warring States, and on to the Qin, Han, Tang, and Song dynasties—all those great agrarian societies, with their large populations and superior strength, were often crushed in combat with minor nomadic tribes, suffering catastrophic and humiliating defeat. At the end of the Song dynasty, the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan invaded the Central Plains and remained in power for nearly a century. China’s last feudal dynasty, the Qing, was itself founded by nomads. The Han race, with its ties to the land, has gone without the superior military teachings of a wolf drillmaster and has been deprived of constant rigorous training exercises. The ancient Chinese had their Sun-tzu and his military treatise, but that was on paper. Besides, even they were based in part on the lupine arts of war.
Millions of Chinese died at the hands of invasions by peoples of the North over thousands of years, and Chen felt as if he’d found the source of that sad history. Relationships among the creatures on earth have dictated the course of history and of fate, he thought. The military talents of a people in protecting their homes and their nation are essential to their founding and their survival. If there had been no wolves on the Mongolian grassland, would China and the world be different than they are today?
Jiang Rong p.99
Wolf Totem actually fits pretty well with the other book I am reading for fun at the moment, Rose’s Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Rose’s book was very well-received,which is not surprising as it is a very good look as what ordinary British folk read and what they got out of it in the couple of centuries before 1945. One book that was quite popular for a very long time was Robinson Crusoe. Like Wolf Totem it is a ripping yarn with extended didactic passages. Like Wolf Totem it is a story of civilized men outside the city. Rose suggests that Crusoe was popular in part because appealed to both members of the new middle class who were no longer able to provide what they needed with their own hands and to those who were still working with their hands and liked reading a book that represented what they did as important.
Wolf Totem has a lot of that as well. As a keyboard jockey I like books about places where everyone is doing something and it is clear exactly what benefit each thing provides. The is particularly clear in Wolf Totem, since Jiang goes through the workpoint value of each job a person can do and shows how each is perfectly calibrated to the exertion the work requires and its value to the group.1 Would you be willing to go without electricity to live in a world where every day you did things of real value and this was accepted by everyone around you, and sucking up and bullshit were totally impossible? Apparently some people in China would too.
More later (mabye) on ethnic politics in the book.
I’m guessing that many of his readers have no memory of how the workpoint system actually functioned [↩]
Some time ago Stefan Landsberger1 sent me some images of propaganda posters from the War with Japan. I have not blogged about them as yet due to laziness, but a couple are very appropriate as classes wind down.
This is one of the advantages of having a blog. Cool people with all sorts of interesting stuff send it to you. If you have not been to Stefan’s Chinese Propaganda Poster site you really should [↩]
Jeremiah Jenne over at Jottings from the Granite Studio1 will be hosting an Asian history carnival sometime during the week of May 5th. If you have postings you would like to nominate for the carnival, please send them directly to Jeremiah. You can reach him at jgjenne at ucdavis.edu. Another way to submit nominations is to tag it on del.icio.us with the tags ahcarnival for regular blog postings or ahresources for Asian history related online resources.
The site is currently down, but Jeremiah will work to get it back up for next week [↩]
CDT has a list of the keywords that Chinese internet censors are looking for and banning. This is an old list from 2004,1 but some new words have been added lately, like 家乐福 (Carrefour) Most of it is stuff you would expect, anything about Mao or the party or Tiananmen or TI or the other TI. Lots and lots of words having to do with sex. I found a few of them puzzling. 东北独立|东 (northeastern independence)? 四川独立|四 (sichuan independence)? Were they just looking ahead, or are there actual SI and DI movements to worry about?
Shanghaist among others reports on Asia’s growing rice crisis. Well, actually it’s only a crisis if you are trying to live on less than a dollar a day. Much of the world is trying to do this of course, which has led to riceriots. For historians rice riots call up lots of associations. Although the modern neo-liberal state does not much concern itself with guaranteeing the food security of its people lots of pre-modern states did, and the Chinese Late Imperial state in particular was obsessed with stabilizing the price of grain, hence the ever-normal granaries. A lot of Asian states are currently trying to find ways to up grain production for next year, banning exports of grain, fixing prices and scrounging around for extra supplies. There has been a fair amount of popular violence, in the long tradition of food riots, which are usually focused on forcing sales at a “fair” price or preventing exports of local supplies. In America Sam’s Club is limiting rice purchases. No doubt this will make the W.T.O. grumpy, since we should be entering the glorious era of the universal free market.
Free markets vs. paternalism/meddling is often presented as one of the big traditional/modern dichotomies. Actually, even in China officials have a long history of relying on market mechanisms to deal with food problems. Although Confucian officials have long had a reputation in the West for being anti-commercial this not very accurate. According to Rowe1
Qing provisioning policy might be divided into the following five strategies (listed
in roughly ascending order of controversiality): (1) attacking extravagance and encouraging frugality, on the part of both government and society; (2) encouraging increased food production; (3) promoting maximum commercial circulation of grain;(4) attempting to meet sporadic and localized food crises through administrative means; and (5) maintaining large permanent stocks of grain in government hands as leverage to control local availability of grain on a routine basis. …
Chen Hongmu did not see encouraging commerce as betraying the classical tradition as he showed in his letter to Fang Bao
“The pervasive dilemma today is that the price of rice is high and the people are too
poor to afford it. But if those who seek to deal with this lack an overall conception of
the problem, they will never be able to come up with a comprehensive policy approach
to resolve it. This overall concept is none other than the Way of Producing Wealth
[shengcai], identified in the Great Learning and repeated by Mencius: “Open the well-
spring and restrict its flow [kaiyuan jieliu}" [i.e., produce more and consume less].”
Chen Hongmu was Qing China’s chief provincial-level troubleshooter felt that the most important method of dealing with famine was “relief through commercial circulation”. One of his main concerns was avoiding any state or private action that would cut off the flow of grain. Rowe emphasizes his reliance on market forces. For instance in 1743 when dearth occurred in Jiangxi he dealt with the situation by loaning a large sum of state money to pawnshops, in other words pumping more liquidity into the commercial economy, much as the American Federal Reserve would do today. As Rowe points out “however ‘liberal’ such promarket policies might appear, there were by no means laissez-faire. The objective was less one of letting the market accomplish its task than of making it do so” (p.162) He was certainly a moralizer and willing to nag (or force) people to stop wasting land on tobacco or grain on alcohol. He was also very big on encouraging increased production and such. Chen did not share the modern world’s market idolatry, nor was he willing to question the Confucian imperative to care for the poor.
So how would Asia’s current responses to the rice crisis rate with Chen Hongmu? Any comments from readers would be welcome as I am not following this as closely as some, but it seems that China is taking a pretty free-market approach, not doing anything radical2 and assuming that they have enough cash on hand to maintain a low price on rice. China, at least, seems to have moved a bit beyond the historical phase where states worried about grain supplies.
UPDATE
Here is an angle I had not thought of. Sexy Beijing has been interviewing Chinese consumers about increasing prices. They also talk to some shopkeepers who are finding business off. One woman then interviewed at the end of the clip below said that if the dofu-selling business keeps getting worse she may go back home and return to farming. Chen Hongmu was alway worried about famine causing peasants to flee the land, but this price increase may have the opposite effect.
Rowe, William. Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China. Stanford University Press, 2001. [↩]
China has not restricted rice exports, but they were not a top exporter anyway [↩]
China Beat has a nice post up linking to some teaching resources. Although they list some really good resources that you should all go look at they leave out the the best part of the Asia Society page, which is AsiaFood. Besides being a good on-line cookbook it lets you search based on what ingredients you happen to have on hand and recommends things.
Yang Liu , a Beijing artist trained in Germany, comments in a series of banners on the differences between Chinese and German culture. Ms. Yang’s Website is here: http://www.yangliudesign.com/
The German is in blue, on the left, the Chinese in red, on the right, continued beyond the “more” marker!
