井底之蛙

Migration and identity are tough issues, particularly as our tendency towards literalism (you thought we were all postmodernists? Not even close.) with regard to concepts like nation and ethnicity continues to grow. Using Nationmaster, Sun Bin produced some lovely maps of the Chinese Diaspora. My only big quibble is the lack of data for the Russian Federation, given the thousands of Chinese in the Russian East before the PRC and particularly in the present. Still, it’s a fantastic example of the ease with which data and imaging tools can produce fantastic graphics.

A while back, I ran across this critique of media coverage of Taiwan [via] from Michael Turton (a fantastic Taiwan-based blogger, with lots of links and interesting things to say, including a regular roundup of Taiwan blogs that looks like a great resource) which actually illustrated for me this tendency to literalism quite strongly. In this particular post he actually argues that “China has never owned Taiwan” largely because Taiwan was “never the possession of any ethnic Chinese emperor.” In other words, the Qing dynasty which conquered Taiwan and which was the acknowledged possessor of it in international law (up to 1895, when the Japanese got it as part of the Sino-Japanese war indemnity), doesn’t count as Chinese.

From a strictly literal ethnic point of view, and based on thoroughly modern concepts of international law, there’s some grounding to that: the Qing dynasty was Manchurian in origin, ethnically distinct and based on conquest. Though Qing emperors lived very typical Chinese Imperial lives, throughout the Qing, the government was deeply concerned that non-Manchu Chinese would discover some ethnic solidarity or identity (Kuhn’s Soulstealers is a good example, from mid-dynasty) and there’s no question that part of the fall of the Qing was related to irredentist Han nationalism. But that’s a very late development; there’s about two centuries of the Qing dynasty in which nobody seriously questions the legitimacy of Manchu rule. If the Qing isn’t legitimately Chinese, then the modern borders of China — based on Qing conquests — need serious reconsideration, particularly in the west.

But the “strictly literal ethnic” and “thoroughly modern concepts of international law” are absurdities when applied that far back or that literally. While I’m sympathetic to Turton’s position on Taiwanese independence, applying the same principles would delegitimize its current government — based on ethnic migration and conquest — and probably (since Turton seems to acknowledge Japanese colonization) result in US control of the island. More to the point, it presumes an historical purity which runs counter to all experience.

Non Sequitur: a bibliography of Chinese popular religion scholarship

(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.

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.