井底之蛙

People who have been following the Three Dynasties chronology debate have already seen this article by Li Liu and Hong Xu “Rethinking Erlitou: legend, history and Chinese archaeology” For those who are even more behind on this controversy than I am, the basic issue is over attempts (described here) to create a solid chronology of early Chinese history. It originates out of  bluntly nationalistic desires to make early Chinese history as solidly grounded as early Egyptian history. There is nothing wrong with that motivation, of course, but Li and Hong are claiming that the attempt to tie archeological finds to historical texts (and a single narrative of Chinese development) are no longer helpful. Specifically, attempts to fit the Erlitou site (1900 B.C. to maybe 1500 B.C.) into the Xia-Shang chronology are doing more harm than good. The article has the a nice short description of the Eritou site, which is a very important palace and workshop complex that clearly has an important role in understanding Chinese protohistory. However…

“For more than 40 years of excavation at Erlitou, much attention was placed on its ethnic and dynastic affiliations, but little progress has been made. This approach has overshadowed other research orientations, such as craft production, agricultural practic, urban population parameter, and urban-rural interactions. As a result, we know little about the political economy of this first urban center in China.”

I’m not sure how much overall effect this will have, but it is nice to see a firm call to move away from the centralized narrative that has dominated Chinese protohistory for so long.

via aardvarchaeology

The first of two parts of the 21st Asian History Carnival will be coming soon on August 23rd to the Tang Dynasty Times!

Read more and submit your nominations for the carnival here:

21st Asian History Carnival.

Strange Maps (quite possibly the coolest blog in the universe) has this map of more-or-less Han China.

The map comes from here, and is part of a summary of a “rise of China” article from Stratfor which is apparently some shop selling (very expensive) geopolitical analysis. Unless the Stratfor article is way better than the summary the people paying money for it are getting ripped off.

The main point of the article is that to understand China you need to know that only part of China is inhabited by “Han” the ethnic group “the world regards as the Chinese”. So far so good, but what insights can we get from this? Well we can get a lot of factual errors, like the suggestion that the dominant language in South China is Cantonese (which is true if the only province in South China is Guangdong), that China’s ports were not sites of international trade before the Opium Wars (which would be news to the entire Chinese diaspora) and that the only successful invaders of China were the Mongols (which is quite an insult to the Manchus, among others). Mostly though, we get timeless China, isolation division. Apparently China has always been an isolated country both because of geography and proclivity, and that is why it has always been so poor. (?) Chinese governments have always been worried about the dangerous prosperity that trade can bring (those backwards mandarins!) but in the  20th century they have been forced to allow it, and this creates all sorts of problems, most notably that some parts of China get rich quicker than others,  leading to civil war. That’s what happened in the early 20th century, when Chinese coastal elites allied with foreigners against Beijing and the interior. One of the common features of this sort of analysis is that its so bad its not even wrong. Nobody who knew anything about Chinese nationalism or history could try to use this model to explain the first half of the 20th century.¹ Even people who knew almost nothing about China’s history would not keep using the term “Beijing” to refer to the central government since for much of the period they are talking about the capitol was in Nanjing.   We then learn that “China” has always had three geopolitical imperatives, which apparently apply to every China from the Qin dynasty to today, and which which would fit almost any country in the world about as well as they do as timeless truths about China.

1. Maintain internal unity in the Han Chinese regions. (True of every country and unless defined much more clearly not much help )
2. Maintain control of the buffer regions. (Also not very China-specific.)
3. Protect the coast from foreign encroachment. (True of most countries other than Switzerland and Chad.)

This sort of glib analysis seems to be easier to get published about China, which as we all know is changeless, and thus once you have found the secret key you can unlock the whole puzzle of the China market. Yes, history matters, and possibly more in China than elsewhere, but China actually does change, and trying to draw conclusions based on the timeless nature of “China” is a fools game. I assume Stratfor does not publish articles that claim that American politics today is best understood in terms of the Slave Power and its opponents, or warning that the last 300 years of peace between Catholic and Protestant Europe can’t last, since religious hostility is one of the touchstones of European history.

The map itself is also pretty weird. Is this supposed to be a map of areas where today there are few Han? In that case all of Manchuria should be dried out. Is it a map of places that historically have not been Han? Then why are Liaodong and Gansu underwater?  Xian is not part of the Han core?

1. It does work a bit better today. I suspect they are reading backwards [↩]

As a profession anyway. Historians are notorious for thinking that the past matters a lot, and most of us even think the past matters even if it has nothing to do with the present. (We’re weird that way) If you are a China historian, however there are always peoplewho are only interested in the contemporary rise of China. Whenever I ask my Modern China students why they are taking my class I usually get a lot of them who are interested in “how China got where it is now” by which they usually mean (even if they don’t yet know it) events since 1983. ¹ To some extent I don’t mind this. At most small schools China historians will be the only China person there, and talking about contemporary China is part of the job. Part I like too. I find China today fascinating, and giving half-baked opinions on it is a lot of fun. Plus I’m told by colleagues in less trendy fields that this public interest is why people are always shoveling money at me. (Using very small shovels, I might point out)

All that said, I’m glad I’m not Jonathan Spence. He is currently giving the Reith Lectures in England, and apparently the format is 20 minutes of Spence talking about Chinese history followed by 40 minutes of questions about contemporary China. Given that “the value of history is in its relevance to the present” this is not that surprising, and Spence’s choice of topics probably did not help. It would be refreshing to me, however, if Chinese history in the West could draw at least some audience of people who thought that Confucius, like Socrates, was worth knowing about even if it had nothing to do with your stock portfolio, and who thought that the White Lotus was just as interesting/important/cool as the Wars of the Roses even if neither of them has much to do with Darfur.

1. Blogposts also tend to get more attention if they are focused on the present. [↩]

Lots of stuff out there on how response to the earthquake is leading to a more robust public sphere in China. People are self-organizing, money is being collected and spent and news is being disseminated.¹ In part this is happening because of genuine public interest and in part because the state is allowing a lot more freedom. Two aspects of the public sphere that have only just started to show up are direct criticisms of the state sphere and taking on state power.

Public sphere organizations sometimes take on state power, and this is something that the CCP has been partiularly reluctant to allow in the past. The “human flesh search engine” (人肉引擎) i.e. the habit Chinese netizens have of hunting down and terrorizing traitors like that Chinese student who talked to a Tibetan is an example of non state “organizations” taking on some state power. This is obviously to some extent encouraged by the state (supposedly some Chinese netizens are paid 50 cents for each properly nationalist post they put up) but I suspect that it would never be tolerated if it really did become organized and systematic vigilantism.

More interesting to me is public criticism of the state. The best example of this is recent criticism of the China Red Cross The Red Cross has a long history of trying to function as an autonomous organization, and at least since 1993 it has become somewhat independent of the state. This makes it almost the perfect target for criticism. It is not a direct state organization, which limits the amount of trouble you can get into for attacking it. On the other hand it is state enough that there probably is a lot of corruption and back door-ism in it. (Maybe all these criticisms will turn out to be wrong, but I doubt it) What I find most interesting about the criticism is that it is real public sphere stuff. Angry “human flesh search engine” types may threated to rape “traitors” and murder their families (see link above) but that is not a substitute for the state. Critics of the Red Cross are going after them for paying too much for tents, not being transparent enough and for cheating on their taxes. In other words the public is not just complaining, they are explaining how this (semi-state) organization should be run. They also have some power over it, since they are encouraging people not to donate money unless their demands are dealt with. Not surprisingly, the Red Cross is taking this seriously and responding to public criticism. None of this is entirely new of course, but this seemed a bit different that what has come before.

MINOR RANT I like CDT a lot, and find them to be one of the best RSS feeds for getting China news. Unfortunately a lot of the stuff they link to is in English, and a big chunk of the English language writing on China does not cite sources very well. We are on-line now folks. Including some links to your sources is just good practice. Electrons are cheap, and saying quotes come from “various BBS forums” or “an official statement” (From who? When?) is not sufficient. Or if you like I suppose you could go back to the old China coast paper’s habit of saying things came from “the native press” and assuming nobody cares who exactly said what and when they said it.

1. Check the CDT for most of these [↩]

As some of our American readers may know the California Supreme Court has recently ruled that men and men in California can get married. This has led a number of people (Krauthammer) to speculate that polygamy is right around the corner. (Volokh) Most of the arguments about the meaning of marriage make a lot of arguments (usually pretty bad ones) based on evidence from “marriage through history.” Very few people seem aware of how -very-different modern companionate, equal marriage is from the various forms of usually economic and always unequal relationships that have existed throughout human history. It is true that throughout most of history “Bill and Ted are in love so they should get married” was not considered a good argument, but the same can be said of “Susan and Ted.” This makes it tricky to get much useful ammunition for contemporary debates from historical evidence unless you twist the history quite a bit. Still, it is sort of interesting to thing about the disappearance of polygamy, which was pretty common in upper classes around the world before the modern era, and specifically about the end of polygamy in China.

Although an awful lot has been written about attacks on the traditional family in Republican China there has been relatively little on polygamy as a specific issue. I think this is true of Japan as well. Polygamy as such was not really singled out much as one might expect. Nevertheless it died out rapidly. Polygamy seems not to have been a major issue for early feminists like He Zhen although they did mention it. For them the big issue in marriage was equality, which of course does not mix with polygamy. If a husband in a modern marriage gives his wife “everything” (particularly emotionally) how can he do so for more than one woman? ¹ That polygamy was out would seem to almost go without saying with modern ideas of marriage.²

It might also matter that most scholarship on Chinese feminism has wanted to focus on women. I would assume that the people making the decision to not have a second wife were men. Being a secondary wife was never regarded as a good thing, so for the educated women who read and wrote for the early radical journals becoming a secondary wife would not really be a threat. The poorer women who might have ended up secondary wives were not reading He Zhen in 1907 or making many other choices about their lives.³ Well-off men were presumably making the decision not to have secondary wives. One presumes that whatever pressure their families may have put on them to have a first wife that fit with traditional ideals (Lu Xun did it) there would be much less pressure to have a traditional secondary wife if they did not want to. Why and how secondary wives became unfashionable (or were replaced with mistresses) would be an interesting study.

I can’t really speak to the legal issue in the U.S. (what legal arguments would the state have to prevent one woman from marrying two men at the same time or whatever) but as a social issue it seems to be a non-starter. Polygamy is tied to a class structure and view of marriage that just don’t exist any more and never will.

1. A parent can give ‘all’ their love to more than one child, but of course women are not (any longer) children [↩]
2. To the extent polygamy exists at all today it is in places or subgroups without much of an idea of gender equality. The examples used in discussion are always one man with more than one woman, since while that would fit in with some traditional ideas the opposite would just be bizarre. [↩]
3. Class and consumption sort of fit here too. In a modern relationship both spouses should be equal in their use of the joint assets. How can you do that with too many of one type of spouse? [↩]

Via BibliOdyssey an exhibition of the prints of the 1911 revolution from Princeton.

The prints are great, if a little small. One thing that struck me was the disclaimer at the bottom of the first page. “The Princeton East Asian Library in no way supports the rhetoric or depictions that are presented on the prints.”

What is that supposed to mean? I can think of two possibilites.

1. As a notoriously conservative institution¹ Princeton is opposed to the overthrow  of the Qing dynasty and is still hoping for the return of the Manchus.

2. Something other reason. But what could it be?

1. How many Princeton alums does it take to change a lightbulb?

   Four. One to change the bulb and three to point out how much better the old bulb was. [↩]

Charles links below to an interesting piece from China Digital Times (original from Sina.com ) It is a piece by Xiong Peiyun (熊培云) defending (sort of) Chinese nationalism. Thomas Bartlett analyzes the use of the term “tianxia zhuyi” 天下主义 in the piece, but what struck me was its odd (meaning different from mine) understanding of world history.

That Chinese popular understanding of world history is different from that elsewhere is not surprising, nor is it surprising that most Chinese people don’t understand non-Chinese history all that well. It is not a subject that the Chinese historical profession has (until recently) invested much effort into. One of Xiong’s goals is to deny that the Beijing Olympics should be compared to the Berlin Olympics of 1936. A lot of people have been making that comparison, but what I find interesting is the end of the piece Xiong suggests that this comparison actually works pretty well.

Western politicians and Western media have not made a lot of progress in their political wisdom in nearly a century. The Nazis in Germany were a product of World War I victor nations, whose fear of a rising Germany led to an over-punishment of Germany, thus sowing the seeds of hatred and revenge and feeding the German nation’s nationalism, which were the best yeast to ferment Hitlerism. And all this, of course, is something nobody, from the Chinese government to all others, wants to see happening.

So, if the West continues to hypothesize China as their “enemy,” and stoke up the “China threat” theory, it will surely fan up the emergence of China’s extreme nationalism, and provide support for those who oppose opening up and want to backpedal history.西方政治家和西方舆论界在政治智慧上并没有太大长进。德国纳粹也是“一战”战胜国亲手制造的祸患，他们对德国崛起的恐惧导致他们对德国的过度惩罚，使得德国的民族主义情绪裂变为仇恨和报复，这正是酿造希特勒主义的最好酵母。而这一切，显然是今日中国政府以及所有外国政府都不愿意看到的。

如上所述，如果“西方世界”继续将中国设为假想敌，鼓吹“中国威胁论”，势必激起国内极端民族主义的高涨，同时也为那些反对开放、想着开历史倒车的人提供支持。

I find this a weird sort of historical analogy. For one thing, if I were going to pick an analogy for the possible rise of an ultra-nationalist China (which I don’t see as likely) the obvious comparison would be Showa Japan.¹ Perhaps more to the point he is using the Nazi analogy in a way that it is hard to imagine a westerner of any sort doing. If there is one universal lesson that almost everybody in the West takes from the rise of the Nazis it is the Munich analogy. I actually think this is often a bad thing, since any time a suggestion is made that negotiating with a unsavory types might have good (or less bad) results people will start yelling “Munich!” I can’t imagine too many people using Xiong’s argument here, which I think can be summarized as “China’s feng qing 愤青youth are like nascent Nazis. You (we?) should appease them.”

A lot of historical analogies are getting tossed around, by academics and others in China and elsewhere, and it seems to me that we are working not only from different sets of analogies (Who is Hai Rui?) but different understandings of the same events.

1. Among other things while resentment of foreigners was part of the rise of Nazism, internal enemies, above all the Jews, were far more important. [↩]

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.

1. I’m guessing that many of his readers have no memory of how the workpoint system actually functioned [↩]

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.

1. The site is currently down, but Jeremiah will work to get it back up for next week [↩]